HE HAD FORCED the others to leave the attic. Downstairs, he heard Don talking to the movers, footsteps crossing the kitchen, the slam of the door. Alone now, he sat on the floor, the drink still in his hand, the paintings leaning in a row against the wall. So you beat me, he thought; it was true all along, David Reynolds, I was competing with you, and you beat me.
One by one, he looked at the paintings lined up in front of him: Jennie sitting surrounded by the folds of her dress on a blanket bearing wine bottles and a picnic basket, on a beach somewhere with a line of blue ocean and a boardwalk and the blurred forms of bathers in the background; Jennie walking along a boardwalk, under a parasol, the wind off the sea whipping at her dress and sending the thin clouds racing across the blue of the sky; Jennie in a dimly shuttered room, holding a baby to her breast; Jennie growing older, surrounded by children. His eyes came to rest on a portrait of Jennie in middle age, her eyes looking somewhere over his left shoulder, beyond him, her face with a mature, peaceful expression he had never seen, the face of a serene, middle-aged Jennie he would never know; and with a swell of pain about his heart he heard her voice in his mind: a theory that people who die naturally, of old age, pass on to a higher level of existence, but people who die young pass on to a world just like this one so they can fulfill the purpose of this incarnation.
He picked up that first painting, looked with wonder at Jennie poised against what he now recognized as a ship-railing, somewhere in mid-ocean. So you did it, he thought. You did what you had to do—you died so that you could go and join him, wherever he’d been taken. And somehow you sent me these paintings so that I would know. I’m glad, Jennie. I’m glad it’s true, I’m glad you joined him, I’m glad you were happy; feeling the emotion—sadness, happiness, he wasn’t sure—breaking in his throat. But where did you live, Jennie? Your David actually died in 1899. It’s been less than a week since I buried you. And yet you were together and you both lived. Where did you live, Jennie? On what level of existence did you live, and how much else is there about this life, this world, that we don’t know, that we don’t understand?