"It's his birthday today, you know."
"I don't know," says Violet, looking up the book in her lap to see her brother offering her a glass of lemonade. She takes it gratefully. "Thank you. Whose birthday?"
"Olaf's. I saw the date a few weeks ago while I was looking through Mother's logs. Honestly, I wanted to forget it."
"But you couldn't?"
"But I couldn't." Klaus kneels beside Violet in the sand and sighs. "Like so many things in our life."
Violet closes her book and holds up her glass. When Klaus looks to her face, he sees she is smiling bittersweetly. "Well?" she says. "Cheers to him, right?" Her eyes are still trained on the horizon where sky meets sea.
"Salud," murmurs Klaus, and clinks his own glass against hers.
He takes a solemn first sip. Beside him, Violet downs the entire glass.
He watches her sadly. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."
"No," she says. "It's good you told me."
The waves are beginning to lap imperceptibly closer; blink and you miss it, but it's obvious as the minutes pass that the tide is coming in.
"It's only right," Violet adds after a moment. "He made us who we are, after all."
Klaus begins a half-hearted protest. "He didn't…"
"He did," says Violet firmly. "I hate that he did, but it couldn't be helped."
She has not yet met his gaze. He wishes she would. He knows the look in her dark eyes will make his heart ache, but he doesn't want her to be alone in her sadness, her anger. It's strange, that these days he sometimes seems to be the calmer one—time and misfortune have changed her, made her blood churn and roil and crash the tide.
"It's been years since that night," she says, "and I feel like I'll be trying to tug my wrist away from his grip forever."
Klaus thinks of Olaf tilting Violet's chin up with his dry, dry fingers as he told her she would make a lovely bride—the glint of the knife he once rubbed against her knee—the tautness of her hair in his grip—and he shudders. His sister's relationship with Olaf was always different to his: scarier, more sickening. It changed with time as she began to prove herself troublesome, too much of a hassle to prey upon, but he knows those early months stained everything. He hurt her in ways Klaus had never been hurt, and for this the boy feels both fortunate and guilty.
He wants to touch her, comfort her with a hug or a hand on her shoulder, but he isn't sure if he should.
"What are you reading?" he asks instead, gently.
"Yevtushenko," she says.
"Read to me?"
"Sure," she says. This time, her smile is genuine. She opens the book to the page she'd been on before he arrived, and reads: "I have been wounded so often and so painfully, dragging my way home at the merest crawl, impaled not only by malicious tongues—one can be wounded even by a petal.
"And I myself have wounded—quite unwittingly—with casual tenderness while passing by, and later someone felt the pain, it was like walking barefoot over the ice.
"So why do I step upon the ruins of those most near and dear to me, I, who can be so simply and so sharply wounded and can wound others with such deadly ease?"
Her voice does not shake for a moment, but when Klaus opens his eyes—hardly realizing he'd closed them—he sees hers are wet with tears.
"Violet," he says, and this time he does hug her, tightly. There's nothing else for it. She lets him, curls her fingers around one of the arms he's thrown around her.
His words are tight and stuffy against the collar of her dress. "If I could kill him again myself…"
"Don't say things like that," says Violet, shifting in his embrace, and Klaus looks up just in time to see her wipe the tears from her cheeks with a trembling hand. "He's already made murderers out of us."
Klaus's stomach sinks. "We couldn't have known—"
"Don't," says Violet, and Klaus shuts his mouth, presses her closer to him.
"You're a good person, Violet," he says quietly. "Please don't think otherwise just because a terrible man filled our lives with terrible things."
"You're right," she says. "I know you're right."
It sounds as if she's trying to convince herself. Like she wants to believe him, but it's hard. The fury in his heart is boundless: He wishes he could take her pain from her, take it those few steps down to the water and drown it along with his own, and with Sunny's, and—he thinks of Kit breathless and bleeding in the sand—the baby's too.
"You know what's absurd?" says Violet. "I miss him, sometimes."
Klaus pulls back to hear her more clearly, taking her hands into his as he does so.
"In the end," she says, staring down as she entwines their fingers, "he knew us better than anyone."
Klaus blinks, his chest seizing with sudden pain. He hadn't thought of it that way before.
"He was awful," Violet continues, "but he was there. He was always there. It was a nightmare at the time, and mostly I'm relieved he's gone—but now—he watched us grow up, didn't he? After our parents died, he was the only one… And now it really does feel like we're all alone."
Finally, she looks him in the eye. Her grief is almost unbearable.
"We have each other," he tries, helplessly.
"I know," she says. "I know."
She closes her book once more, and after a minute rests her head upon his shoulder with a sigh.
"What do you think happens after we die?" she asks.
Now this, Klaus has thought about. "I don't know about everyone," he says, "but I think he's burning in a fire he set himself."
"That's horrible," says Violet, but unlike before, it doesn't sound like she means it.
"That's justice," says Klaus.
For a while they just sit there, staring at the ocean. Soon, the tide is almost to their toes.
"We should go inside," says Violet, "It's nearly time to feed Bea."
Klaus helps his sister up, dusts the sand from his clothes, picks up the empty lemonade glasses by their rims between his fingers. Violet takes care to shake out the pages of her Yevtushenko.
And then, clutching the book to her chest, making sure she's a safe distance from Klaus, Violet does something she hasn't done since she was a very small child—she kicks at the sand.
She uses as much force as she can muster, and it sprays upward and across the beach in a gritty, glittering arc spanning at least fifteen feet. She watches it fly with grim satisfaction.
"Happy birthday, you miserable old man," she says.
Klaus laughs, in spite of everything.
"Happy birthday!" Violet shouts to the sea. "We're sorry you were ever born!"
She turns sharply, grabbing Klaus's hand as they make their way home. He's still chuckling, and by the time they reach the front door, she's dissolved into breathless laughter herself.
"I don't know why I did that," she says, grinning as she rests her hand on the knob. "I suppose it was as close as I'll ever get to giving him a good last kick in the shins."
"It looked glorious," says Klaus.
"It felt glorious," says Violet. She shakes her head, and with it the last of her giddiness, as she opens the door. "Sunny, Bea? We're home."
"Where have you two been?" asks Sunny. She's standing on a stool on top of a chair, already at the stove. Whatever she's cooking smells delicious. Bea is in the high chair behind her, greeting them with a happy shriek.
"We've been detoxifying," says Violet, shedding her sweater. "What are you making?"
"Smells like cumin," notes Klaus. "Or coriander?"
"Both," says Sunny. "It's moong dal. Sit down. I don't know why you were out there if you needed a detox."
"What do you mean?" says Violet. She and Klaus move Bea's high chair to the table, which has already been set for three.
Sunny jumps down from the chair and turns off the stove. Violet spoons rice into each of their bowls from the pot on the table.
Carefully, Sunny takes the pressure cooker off the stove and walks to the table. "Food heals," she says simply, and pours the dal over first Bea's rice, then Klaus's, then Violet's, and finally her own.
The smell alone is enough to make her siblings agree. "Thank you, Sunny," says Klaus.
"Thank you," echoes Violet. She's smiling again, and it's as close to her old self as she's ever looked.
"Tak!" shrieks Bea.
"You're welcome," says Sunny. And as they eat, her previous words ring true: For that short while, at least, everything feels whole again.