2
Loom: A device to hold warp threads taut so that the weft threads can be woven under or over them.
Margot tiptoed down to the kitchen on Thanksgiving morning. She wanted to make a cup of tea to bring up to bed. The guest room, a small space under the eaves, was on the third floor, across the hall from Lacey’s studio. Margot had had a second sleepless night and her body was sore, as if holding back this news from her twin nieces was some kind of physical endeavor. She had spent the day with them yesterday, taking them shopping and out to lunch in Portsmouth, their annual day-before-Thanksgiving tradition. Lacey and Alex had gone off somewhere together for the afternoon. They had not said where.
The stairs creaked in the old house. Margot paused and looked out the window on the landing. The sky had begun to lighten; the garden behind the house was cloaked in silvery shadow. All the leaves had fallen and the flower beds had been heavily mulched, awaiting the full impact of winter. One lone bench was set in the curve of the lawn with two empty pots on either side. Lacey called it her tea place, where she would pause, drink a glass of iced tea, and decide what she would tackle next.
Lacey had designed and planted this garden by herself. Margot had helped her drag a hose around to determine the curve of the beds the first summer she and Alex had owned the property. Lacey loved her flowers, particularly the richly colored blooms—the deep blues of her delphiniums early in the season, and later the hot pinks of the cosmos and zinnias, and the dahlias, whose jewellike shades didn’t fade until frost. She never tired of the relentless daily tasks that a garden required: weeding, deadheading, dividing, pruning, staking a tall top-heavy bloom, or coddling a rare rose more suited to an English cottage garden than the uncertain climate of the New Hampshire seacoast. Margot admired her dedication.
“The best part about gardening is that you always have another chance,” Lacey had explained to Margot. “If it’s not perfect now, there’s always next year.” She had wiped a smear of soil off her cheek before picking up the shovel. That was Lacey—positive, always looking ahead, certain that she could make it right. Now she was facing a future she could not fix. What would next year bring?
Margot wasn’t used to thinking of her sister as vulnerable. Lacey’s life had always been like her garden, well tended, orderly, predictable, the perennial flowers reappearing every year. Always beautiful. Now, with this illness, it was as if Lacey’s life had become a garden infested with deadly insects, or an unstoppable blight. Margot shivered. Alex and Lacey kept the house cool at night.
She reached for the railing and continued down the stairs. A light was on in the kitchen. A cupboard door clicked shut. She had lost her opportunity to fix her tea and slip unnoticed back to her room, but she went into the kitchen anyway.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Alex said. “I wanted to get the turkey out of the fridge.” The large bird sat in the roasting pan on the counter, its flesh a ghostly white in the dimly lit kitchen.
“No,” Margot said, pulling her robe around her and tying the sash. “I was going to make a cup of tea.”
“Let me do that for you.” He reached for the kettle next to the sink. He wore sweatpants and a shapeless blue sweater. His hair, once a reddish blond, was now flecked with gray. He was a tall man. His face was angular, and with age he had grown into his beaklike nose. He no longer had the freckles she remembered from their childhood summers on Bow Lake. His family had had a cottage just down the lake from Grandmother Winkler’s camp. To Margot, he had always been the fabulous older boy in baggy boxer swim trunks diving off the float into the icy blue lake.
“Is Lacey still asleep?”
“The doctor put her on a prescription sleeping pill. She takes it every night now. As you can imagine, we haven’t been sleeping too well lately.”
“Alex, I’m so sorry.” This was the first time they had been alone. Margot knew that the girls would sleep for hours.
“She’s going to get better.” He opened a cupboard and took out two mugs, then reached in a canister for a tea bag. He shook his head. “There’s quite an assortment. You choose.” He handed Margot the canister. She took the one on top, country peach, not wanting to search any further.
Alex turned his back to her and began to make coffee in the machine on the far counter. He filled the carafe with water, shoveled out scoops of coffee from a different canister, and pressed a switch. His movements were quick and jerky, as if he were uneasy being alone with her. The teakettle started to whistle.
Margot grabbed it before the noise could wake the rest of the family. She poured water into her mug and stared into the liquid, watching it steep. The amber liquid slowly darkened. “Lacey said the doctors told her the aphasia would grow worse.” Margot hesitated. She didn’t want to upset Alex, but she wanted to understand everything that was going on. “She said they had taken brain scans.”
“Yes, but nothing might happen for years. We saw another doctor yesterday. He said they couldn’t say for sure.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Shit, Margot. Why can’t these guys give us a straight answer?”
Margot looked away from him. Alex, always so calm, so thoughtful, looked shaken.
He said, his voice pleading, “It doesn’t make sense. Lacey’s the picture of health. She runs. She does yoga. She’s smarter than any of us. So what if she has a little trouble remembering the right word? We all do.”
“Can’t they give her anything to stop the progression? She seems convinced there’s no way out of this. I just wondered.”
“They say there’s nothing.” He rested his elbows on the counter and covered his eyes with his hands. “I’m sure it’s because she’s overtired. As usual, she’s doing too much. She’s going to take the sleeping pills, get her rest, and she’s not going to get worse. We’re going to take it one step at a time.”
“Of course,” Margot said, trying to conceal her doubt. “Lacey’s always been strong.” Margot blinked back tears and swirled the tea bag in her mug.
Lacey was the capable one, wise and practical even as a young woman. After their mother died Lacey had been the one to travel home on weekends to check on their father. When his health had deteriorated a few years later, Lacey helped him find doctors, visited him in the hospital, and was with him when he died. She even arranged for the funeral. By then, she was married to Alex and living in New Hampshire. Margot thought of Lacey and Alex as the adults, while she, four years younger, was still floundering and trying to figure out her life.
The kitchen filled with the aroma of coffee. Margot swished her tea bag once more before removing it and putting it on a saucer next to the sink. She sat on a stool at the far side of the counter. She couldn’t leave Alex now that they had started to talk.
“Lacey said she’d tell the girls once they had decided about college,” she said.
“There’s nothing to tell them.” He pulled himself up and away from the counter. “Lacey will come through this. I just know it.” He had dark circles beneath his eyes.
“But what if she gets worse?”
“You can’t say that,” he said, his voice sharp. “Okay. She has a problem, a big one—I grant you that, but problems can be solved.”
“Lacey said the scans showed deterioration.”
“Damn the scans. She’s managing fine now.” Alex looked down at Margot. She thought he might reach over and shake her, insisting that she listen to him and trust that he was going to find a solution.
“Please, Alex,” Margot said. “I want to believe you. You know how I love Lacey. I love both of you. I don’t want any of this to be happening.”
“I know that,” he said more kindly.
Margot wanted to tell him that it would be fine, that maybe he was right. Lacey might not get worse. She wished she could comfort him, but she felt so inadequate. Lacey was always the one who calmed, who soothed, who made the world better for all of them.
Alex’s face went slack. He lowered himself onto the stool opposite her. “You can’t imagine what we’ve been through. What she’s been through.” He spoke more softly. “They’ve found some deterioration in her left frontal lobe. It could have been there for years.” His eyes met hers. “I haven’t heard any definitive reason to believe that it might get worse.”
Margot took in a big breath and nodded. The final sputtering of the coffee machine ended and Alex got up and busied himself filling his cup and pouring in milk. And why shouldn’t she believe him? Alex was smart, good at his work. Years before, he had reorganized and sold his family’s manufacturing business. Now he worked as a consultant to other family-run corporations. He fixed things. He was used to grappling with problems—making things turn out right.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you,” he said. “We’ve got a lot going on right now.”
“It’s okay.” Maybe Lacey hadn’t really understood what the doctors had said.
Alex put down his coffee and took an orange from a bowl on the counter. “Lacey says that Oliver is working on paintings for a dealer out in California.” He tore into the skin of the orange and peeled it off in big chunks.
“He wants to get better known there.” Margot could tell that the topic of Lacey’s illness was closed. “He’s worried that the New York market is fading for him.”
“He’s still selling for big bucks, according to Toni.” He held some of the orange toward her, an offering of sorts. Margot accepted the sections of fruit.
Her niece Toni was curious about Oliver and was always plying him with questions. “His paintings sell for a lot,” Margot said, “but the art world is fickle. Oliver is the first to admit that.” She didn’t want to talk about Oliver’s frustration with his work. Any job had its rough periods. Oliver hadn’t sold a major painting in over a year, but Alex didn’t need to know that. Oliver’s problems hardly mattered in light of all that Alex and Lacey were going through.
Alex sat back down. His face had brightened now that they were talking of other things. He had finished the orange and reached for his coffee. He cocked his head and stared at her.
“What?” she said.
“It’s funny,” he said. “You’re looking more and more like Lacey.”
“You mean now that I’m older?” Margot said. “You know how to make a woman feel good.”
“You know what I mean. You’ve changed, that’s all.” He shifted on the stool.
Margot pushed her hair behind her ears. Her hair was longer now, and like Lacey, she often pulled it into a clip at the base of her neck. But her hair was dark, whereas Lacey’s was light brown, flecked with gold. Margot apparently took after her great-grandmother Suzanne, who was born in New Orleans, the odd French strain in the family. She was the smaller, darker, more intense version of her older sibling. Margot thought their resemblance had more to do with their outlook, as if the expressions on their faces reflected the way they both saw the world. Friends said they sounded similar too, particularly on the telephone.
Alex stood and started to move about the kitchen, as if he needed to be busy. He opened a cupboard and pulled out a box of salt. “We’re going to take the girls on a trip this summer, a graduation celebration for the whole family. Lacey wants to go to Italy, show the girls some art, eat pasta. She talks about wanting to give them as many memories as possible. I think the change of scene would be good for her.”
“That’s a great idea.” Margot noticed the turkey again. “Do you think we should get this in the oven?”
He turned and nodded. “Do we need to put anything on it besides salt and pepper? Lacey said something about rubbing it with olive oil. Or was it butter?” He stared down at the bird.
“Why don’t we do both?”
As long as she accepted Alex’s optimistic prognosis, he would go back to being her sweet, caring brother-in-law.
Margot went to the refrigerator to look for the butter. Every shelf was packed, but in an orderly fashion. She found the butter in the door next to the sour cream, pints of whipping cream, packets of cream cheese, and other dairy products of a similar size. Margot always marveled at Lacey’s organization and thought of the contents of her fridge in New York, a jumbled assortment of takeout containers, aging condiments, and hunks of poorly wrapped cheese that would crack with age. In periodic attempts to avoid wasting food, she would wrap leftovers in foil for the freezer. Oliver called them the UFOs, unidentified frozen objects, and now and then rounded them up for the trash bin.
Margot put a stick of butter in the microwave to soften before spreading some on the turkey. Alex found a short brush for the olive oil and further anointed the bird after Margot’s ministrations. They were sprinkling on the salt and pepper when Lacey came into the kitchen.
“You’re both up early,” she said.
Margot thought she heard a slur in Lacey’s speech. Maybe she was imagining it, or maybe it was the effect of the sleeping pill. Sun streamed through the kitchen windows. Margot hadn’t noticed that it had become light.
Lacey smiled at Margot and came up behind Alex, wrapping her arms around his waist. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said. She pressed her face into Alex’s back and held on as if for dear life.
The Georges’ house smelled more and more like Thanksgiving as the day wore on: the roasting turkey, crushed sage, buttery pastry, and the nutmeg and cinnamon for the pumpkin pie. These reassuring scents reminded Margot of the comfort and ease she experienced each time she came to her sister’s home. Being with Lacey, sharing in this particular annual ritual, had always made Margot feel secure, part of a family, safe from the troubles of the rest of the world. Even when they were little girls, Lacey had provided that same sense of security. The sound of Lacey’s book bag hitting the kitchen table, her footsteps coming up the stairs, or the light seeping from under her bedroom door onto the hall floor made Margot feel more relaxed, almost as if a worry she hadn’t known existed had disappeared.
Now, with the knowledge of Lacey’s illness, it was as if someone had left a window open and a cold draft was blowing in. That lovely, safe feeling of home had been spoiled.
Kate and Hugh Martin, Alex and Lacey’s friends, were coming at four, and Lacey was planning to serve dinner at five. Hugh was running in a 10K race during the day, so they had decided on an early-evening meal. During the academic year, the Martins lived at Warner Academy, a prestigious boarding school where they both worked. They spent summers and school holidays in New Castle, in a white-shingled house a few blocks away from the Georges’ home.
In the course of the morning, nothing more had been said about Lacey’s condition. Wink had come into the kitchen around eleven, and she had made the cranberry sauce. Toni appeared an hour later while Wink and Margot sat at the kitchen table sipping tea and enjoying the apple spice muffins that Lacey had made two weeks earlier and frozen to have on hand for the holiday weekend.
“I thought you were never going to get off the phone last night,” Wink said, giving her sister a cool glance.
“If you needed the phone you could have said something.” Toni glared at her twin. Her long hair, wet from the shower, had darkened the back of her shirt. “Couldn’t you have used your cell?”
“Yeah, right.” Wink didn’t bother to say that cell phone coverage was lousy in their area. They all knew that.
Margot was used to the girls squabbling from time to time. They had the normal adolescent arguments, but now, with the knowledge of Lacey’s illness, she was uncomfortable with their behavior. She wanted Lacey’s day to be as smooth as possible.
“Why were you on the phone so late?” Lacey asked.
“It wasn’t a school night,” Toni said. She took a container of yogurt out of the refrigerator. “Ryan is coming to Portsmouth tonight to see some friends. He wants me to go out.”
“No,” Lacey said. “Kate and Hugh . . . are coming.”
“After they leave, Mom. I won’t go out till later.” She pulled herself up straight; she was not as tall as her mother or Wink.
Lacey shook her head and continued to roll out piecrust. “Aunt Margot’s here too.”
“I don’t mind,” Margot blurted out before she had a chance to think.
“See,” Toni said.
“But I understand how your mom feels,” Margot added, regretting how she’d unwittingly become involved in their discussion.
“I know what this is really about,” Toni said. “You don’t like Ryan.”
“I”—again Lacey paused—“never said that.”
“You don’t like that he’s older.”
“That’s not it.”
“Mom, I’m not running off with him. I just want to go out for coffee. Kate and Hugh will be gone by ten. They’re like you and Dad. They never stay late.”
Lacey had opened her mouth as if to say something more. Her face was flushed and she shook her head, running her teeth across her lower lip. Margot was saddened to see Lacey upset and wished her daughters knew what their mother was going through.
Toni took a spoon from the silverware drawer and slammed it closed. She walked out of the kitchen, nearly colliding with Alex.
“Hey, what’s with you?” he asked.
“Mom is being a jerk,” she muttered.
“Toni, watch it.”
“Sorry,” she said in a perfunctory way, and continued on into the hallway and up the stairs.
“What was that all about, Chief?” Alex asked, calling Lacey by the nickname he had given her soon after the twins were born.
“She wants to go out . . . with Ryan tonight. After dinner.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It’s Thanksgiving. It’s a family holiday.”
“Yeah, but if they went out later?”
“You always take her side.”
Wink shot Margot a raised-eyebrow glance, as if this argument was nothing new.
Margot knew to keep her thoughts to herself this time. She gathered the dishes on the table and carried them to the sink. Lacey rolled the pastry onto the rolling pin and lowered it into the waiting pie dish. The dough was a perfectly smooth disk, without a tear. After easing it to the center she crimped the edges, her head bent to the task, her mouth resolutely closed. Despite her apparent agitation, her hands moved smoothly and adeptly, capable of creating the perfect crust even though her mind was most likely elsewhere.
Alex took a bottle of water from the refrigerator. “I’m going for a bike ride.” He paused and zipped his jacket.
“Now?” Lacey asked.
“Do you need me here?” He glanced at her quickly, moving toward the door.
“Please put me to work,” Margot said. She grabbed one of Lacey’s aprons off the hook. Alex looked over at Margot as if suddenly remembering she was there.
“You’re sure?” he asked, his expression already relieved. Before she could answer, he hurried out.
Not long after, Lacey put the pies in the oven and began to peel the potatoes. She looked furious, peeling fast, the blade glinting in the light as if she wanted to kill them. Margot cut them into quarters, and added them to the pot.
“Are you okay, Mom?” Wink carried her juice glass to the sink. She looked over at her mother, whose lips were still pursed in concentration. “I can help Aunt Margot with that.”
“Please, Lacey. Go have a rest,” Margot said. “You’ve been cooking all morning. Wink and I will finish this.”
Lacey blinked quickly, an odd mannerism that Margot hadn’t noticed before, and let out her breath. “Thanks,” she said. “Maybe I am tired.” She wiped her hands on a towel, gave them a quick smile, and left the kitchen. Wink shrugged and shook her head.
Margot reached for another potato and began to draw the peeler across the uneven brown skin. Unlike Lacey, who accomplished this task with a masterful competence even when angry, Margot struggled along, some peels coming away long and thin and others falling into the sink in jagged, thick chunks. She couldn’t remember Lacey ever admitting to being tired, but everything was different now.
Wink finished cutting up the potatoes, covered them with water, and set them on the stove to cook. They chatted idly about how long to boil them and Margot told Wink she would take over and keep an eye on the stove. Margot was glad to be with her niece and helping Lacey even though preparing mashed potatoes was such an insignificant contribution, ultimately forgettable, merely a side dish at the Thanksgiving feast. Margot took the dishcloth and wiped the counter to clean up the last bits of potato skins, resolving that from now on she would do more.
At the end of the afternoon, when Margot was alone, she reached for the phone in her room, thankful that it was not in use. With everything that had happened she had completely forgotten to call Oliver. First she tried his cell, knowing it was unlikely he had turned it on. Oliver was not a phone person. He claimed he loved a good conversation, but face-to-face, or in the company of good friends. He considered his cell phone a useful tool for small emergencies, such as letting her know if he might be late. At his studio, he checked e-mail but didn’t answer the phone, preferring to spend his days in his own silent, uninterrupted world.
Margot tried Jenna’s apartment next. The answering machine came on and she left a message wishing them all a happy Thanksgiving and then hurriedly adding that she sent her love to all. There was so much to tell Oliver, but she would wait until they were both home in New York. He needed to have these two days away without such unsettling news.
Margot had looked forward to this visit with her sister and a few days away from the city. Oliver had been in one of his moods. It was as if a shadow had fallen over him, and as much as he wanted to come out from under it at the end of the day, it seemed to follow him home every night from the studio. He had been hoping that the Croft Gallery in San Francisco would give him a one-man show in the spring.
The Van Engen Gallery, where Margot worked, represented Oliver, and he was included in a group show that would remain up throughout the holiday season. Margot and Mario, her assistant, had just hung Patio at Twilight, a painting Oliver had finished earlier in the fall. The huge canvas, six by nine feet, depicted a group of people standing around drinking cocktails in a suburban-looking backyard against a yellow sky. A naked man sat slumped in the foreground on the grass. The others in the painting paid him no notice at all.
“You don’t like it, do you?” Oliver had said.
He had stopped by the gallery the morning of the opening. Mario was coming in later to help adjust the lighting. Margot needed to unpack the catalogs and oversee the caterers later that afternoon.
“It’s a wonderful painting, Oliver.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It raises questions. It’s haunting.”
“You think it’s shit.” He put his hands on his hips.
“I would never think that.”
“I see it in your face.”
She looked away from him and back at the painting. “Carl says it’s the key piece in this show.” Carl Van Engen, the director and owner, always gave Oliver the plum spots.
“He’s not showing my triptych.”
“It’s too big. He has to have enough room for the other artists’ work too.”
Oliver shifted his weight, sighed, and stepped back. “None of it feels right anymore. I spent months on this, but it’s not what I’m after.”
“It’s a brilliant painting. You know it.”
She looked away from the canvas and back at him. His deeply set eyes focused on his own work as if he were trying to see it for the first time. He smoothed his hair back, revealing the worry lines across his high forehead, then looked nervously down at his feet. His paintings were powerful, provocative, and she could understand their attraction. She moved close to him and laced her arms around him under his jacket. “You’ll be fine,” she said.
He bent and kissed the top of her head. “Forgive me. It never gets easier. I’m being my nasty bastard self.”
“I love you,” she said. “Why don’t you get some air? I’ll see you here at seven.”
“You’re right,” he had said abruptly, and moved off toward the door.
Margot opened her eyes. She must have slept. A streak of late-afternoon sun fell across the dresser on the opposite wall. Lacey had set a vase of bittersweet there, and the curving branches and berries made a lovely shadow on the wall. She sat up and reached for the small tablet of paper that Lacey had thoughtfully left on the bedside table along with a freshly sharpened pencil in case her guests needed to jot down a note in the middle of the night or make a list. Lacey always thought of such details, like the guest bathrobe Margot had worn earlier. She studied the shadow and began to draw.
She remembered her first art teacher at college telling her that an artist must draw every day, and that drawing, like breathing, is something you must never stop. When she was little she had spent rainy summer afternoons drawing at Bow Lake, moving her colored pencils on the paper to the sound of pattering drops on the roof. She did a drawing once of their rowboat, Pigtail, floating at the end of the dock. Even then, she had known not to draw a round yellow sun with straight lines shooting out at the top of the paper. Instead, she had made the sky three bright shades of blue with the fancy pencils that Granny Winkler said came from France. One knew from that sky that it was a beautiful day. Lacey had told Margot how good her picture was and that none of the girls in her class could draw as well as Margot. To Margot, Lacey’s praise meant everything. She didn’t care what anyone else thought.
Margot looked again at the bittersweet. For the next few minutes her pencil flew across the page. The lines were pale and broken. She examined the result. Her hand had been unsure, as if she was wary of what would end up on the paper. The drawing was all wrong.
Margot’s ex-husband, Teddy, had liked the idea of Margot becoming an artist, but he had taken no interest in her actual paintings, particularly after they were married. When she had moved in with Oliver, she had started painting again. Initially, he was encouraging, telling her the work was good, though he never understood why her canvases were so small and he kept insisting that she might try to open them up. He suggested she set up and work in a corner of his studio. When he advised her to try deeper colors, she did. The more she loosened her brushwork, the more uneasy she became, as if she might lose control. His criticism hadn’t bothered her at first, but gradually every new technique she tried made her feel more and more uncertain. Her life was stressful enough with trying to placate temperamental artists at her job, as well as coping with some of Oliver’s fragile moods. Most of all, she feared that Oliver would see her lack of talent and think her an impostor.
Eventually she put her work aside. And now she saw that she no longer had the confidence to draw.
The sound of voices rose up the stairwell. Kate and Hugh must have arrived. Margot put down her pencil and crumpled up the paper. Thanksgiving dinner was about to begin. Glancing at the clock on the dresser, she hurriedly changed from her turtleneck into a black cashmere sweater, something that Lacey would say was “very New York.” Margot’s throat constricted. She closed her eyes, not wanting to cry at the unbidden thought that one day, maybe one day soon, her sister would not be able to say anything at all.