Praying for Sleep

frantically for his shirt or shorts. As the girl’s eyes remained fixed on him, Portia watched the young blonde. This curious à trois voyeurism aroused her all the more. Robert grabbed his shirt and wrapped the knit garment about his waist, abashed and grinning. Portia didn’t move. Then Claire choked a sob and turned, running past the cave and back up the path.
    “Oh, shit,” Robert muttered.
    “Don’t worry.”
    “What?”
    “Oh, don’t take it so seriously. Every teenager gets a shock at some point. I’ll talk to her.”
    “She’s just a kid.”
    “Forget her,” Portia said offhandedly, then whispered, “Come on over here.”
    “She’s going—”
    “She’s not going to say anything. Hmm, what’s that? You’re still interested. I can tell.”
    “Jesus, what if she tells Lis?”
    “Come on,” she urged breathlessly. “Don’t stop now. Fuck me!”
    “I think we ought to get back.”
    Portia dropped to her knees and pulled his shirt away, taking him deep into her mouth.
    “No,” Robert whispered.
    He was standing, head back, eyes closed, shuddering uncontrollably and gasping when Lis stepped into the clearing.
    Claire must have run into her almost immediately and Lis had either learned, or deduced, what had happened. She stood above the half-naked couple and stared down at them. “Portia!” she raged. “How could you?” Her expression of horror matched Robert’s perfectly.
    The young woman stood and wiped her face with her bra. She turned to face her sister and with detachment watched Lis’s throat grow remarkably red as the tendons rose and her jaw quivered. Robert pulled up his running shorts, looking around again for his shirt. He seemed incapable of speaking. Portia refused to act like a caught schoolgirl. “How could you?” Lis gripped her arm but Portia stepped away abruptly. Meeting her sister’s furious gaze she dressed slowly then, saying nothing, left Lis and Robert in the clearing.
    Portia walked back to the beach, where Dorothy was starting to pack up; the temperature had dropped and it was clearly going to rain. She looked at Portia and seemed to sense something was wrong but said nothing. The wind picked up and the two women hurried to gather up the picnic baskets and blankets, carting them to the truck. They made one more trip back to the beach, looking for their companions. Then the downpour began.
    Moments later sirens filled the park and police and medics arrived. It was in a rain-drenched intersection of two canyons that Portia met her sister, red-eyed and muddy and disheveled, looking like a madwoman, being led by two tall rangers out of a flooded arroyo.
    Portia had stepped toward her. “Lis! What—?”
    The slap was oddly quiet but so powerful it brought Portia down on one knee. She cried out in pain and shock. Neither woman moved, and Lis’s hand remained frozen in the air as they stared at each other for a long moment. A shocked ranger helped Portia to her feet and explained about the deaths.
    “Oh, no!” Portia cried.
    “Oh, no!” Lis mimicked with bitter scorn then stepped forward, pushed the ranger aside and put her mouth close to her sister’s ear. In a rasping whisper she said, “ You killed that girl, you fucking whore.”
    Portia faced her sister. Her eyes grew as cold as the wet rocks around them. “Goodbye, Lis.”
    And goodbye it had been. Apart from a few brief, stilted phone conversations, those words had been virtually the last communication between the sisters until tonight.
    Indian Leap. It was the first thing in Portia’s mind when Lis had invited her here this evening—just as it had reared in her thoughts when the subject of the nursery was raised, and, for that matter, every time Portia had thought of moving back to Ridgeton, which—though she’d never confess it to Lis—she’d considered frequently in the past few years.
    Indian Leap . . .
    Oh, Lis, Portia thought, don’t you see? That’s what dooms the L’Auberget sisters, and always will. Not the tragedy, not the deaths, not the bitter words or the months of silence afterwards, but the past that led us to that pine bed, the past that’s certain to keep leading us to places just as terrible again and again and again.
    The past, with all its spirits of the dead.
    Portia now looked at her sister, ten feet away, as Lis put aside the shovel and waded toward the front seat of the car.
    The sisters’ eyes met.
    Lis frowned, troubled by Portia’s expression. “What is