Chapter 20

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Colleen

I wake up early and do what I need to do, what I need to remember that I must always do: pull on my sneakers, wrap up in layers, and set my feet to pounding. I’m ready for it, and I crave it; I hate the fact that I let everything get out of control. Time to rein things back in.

Suddenly, a text comes in from Maddie.

Mom, we’re worried about you being on the island. Come here before the storm starts.

Is that okay with Dad?

It was his idea!

She adds a zany-faced emoji.

It’s nice to hear they’re thinking about me. It cheers me up.

Okay, thanks. What snacks do we need?

We have everything! Just come.

Then, an emoji face with tears of joy.

I send a thumbs up.

Afternoon.

Okay, Eric. You get points for trying to be a good guy.

I take the road instead of the beach; behind houses, I am protected from the late-winter wind, slicing off the hard waves. When I think about my life during a run, there’s a clarity I can’t access at other times. From here, the wind burning cold and dry on my face, and I realize that my job is to take care of myself. I cannot wallow in hopelessness. I have to remember that I have children who need me. I owe it to them to be strong.

After my run I make coffee and sit down at the table. Looking out at the ocean, the low waves breaking, I decide. The storm will come this afternoon, but this morning, I will talk to my father.

But my cell phone rings before I am out the door. It’s Alex. “Colleen?” she says. “I hope it’s not too early.”

“No, it’s good timing,” I say. Her voice sounds urgent. “What’s up?”

“I found the pearls, Mom’s pearls,” she says. “I don’t know anything about jewelry. They . . . might be real, I guess.”

“Wow,” I say. “So, take them to a jewelry appraiser and . . .”

“Colleen, was Mom married before Dad?” she asks.

It’s a surprising thing to hear, and I laugh awkwardly and fumble with my words before I can respond. “What? Why?”

“I found a wedding announcement,” she says. “The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Montgomery engaged to marry Jacob Gregory O’Dowd of Santa Cruz. Do you know anything about that?”

“Uh,” I say. “I never heard that she was. How funny. What was his name again?”

“O’Dowd,” she says. “Jacob O’Dowd of Santa Cruz. In April of ’77, I guess.”

“I never heard about it,” I say. “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Well, I’m heading over to Dad’s today; I’ll ask him. Are you working? I can visit you at the library.”

“No,” she says. “I’m trying to squeeze in a trip to the paint store before the storm sets in, so just call me.”

“Where did you find the announcement?”

“It was in the pouch with the pearls,” she says. “Along with what I suppose is her senior portrait, where she’s wearing the pearls. I guess I never looked inside when I got the necklace. Now I’m thinking, it’s like she was two different people. Split right down the middle.”

“Yes,” I say, my gaze out at the rolling, crashing waves, the tide pulling back from the shore. “I’ll let you know if I find anything out. What colors are you considering?”

“For paint? No idea,” she says. “I thought I’d see what grabs me. Any suggestions?”

“Well,” I suggest, “think neutral, at least on the first floor. People want to look at your house and imagine the colors they would pick and whatever décor they have in mind. So, it has to look finished, but it also needs to be a blank canvas. Nothing too distracting.”

“Blank canvas,” she says. “Okay, thanks.” She sounds distracted, distant. “Colleen? Why did our mother have so many secrets?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe she thought she could leave something that didn’t feel right behind her. Maybe all she ever wanted was a clean start . . . like, a blank canvas.”

“Why didn’t it work?” she asks.

I shrug. “Maybe the things you try to leave behind have a way of catching up to you.”

We say goodbye, and I stand by the sliding door window and stare out at the water, the wind stirring it into frothy whitecaps in the distance. Starting over is never easy.

I put on my jacket and get in the car. I decide not to call ahead to let Dad know I’m coming. I’ll surprise him. If he’s not home when I get there, he won’t be far. But then I stop and turn back. I want to bring the painting. I go back in for it and set it carefully on the floor of the back seat of the car. A simple frame of wood that my mother probably built, and a simple piece of canvas stretched across it. Hers were the hands that stretched it; her hands nailed it in place.

I look at it before I let go. For the first time I notice, the girls are in primary colors—tones straight out of the tubes, highlighted only in touches of white. Clean yellow, red, blue, crayon colors for three little girls in their hats and scarves. So simple. The sand, the sky, the ocean, those are more complex mixtures of pigment, blues swirled with white, with gray, flashes of ochre and crimson reflecting in the water, the sand in browns and pale yellows, like butter on toast. The girls and the sunshine upon them. A perfect winter’s day. This is all she wanted to paint on her blank canvas. But in her heart, there were dusky shades underneath. A darker sky was always hovering.

I drive to Amesbury, pull up in front of the old house on Greenwood Street. Dad’s old Buick sedan with the rusted hubcaps is in the driveway. With the painting in my hand, I walk up the porch and open the door, knocking at the same time. “Hello?” I call. “Anybody home?”

I expect him to come hobbling out of the kitchen or down the stairs, but he doesn’t. “Hello?” I call again. “Dad? Daddy? It’s Colleen.” Nothing happens. “Anybody home?”

He must be out for a walk. I could drive around and look for him, but instead I stay and wait. I squeeze past the piles of newspapers and books and magazines in the living room. I imagine that there are creatures living among the piles and stacks, but I don’t look for them and I don’t see them and everything is better that way. The kitchen is somewhat tidy: two plates and a glass are drying in the old rack, and the yellow linoleum counter is wiped and the cracked, warped panels on the floor have been swept. He tries to keep house; it’s just the throwing away he can’t do.

I look around the house, mostly to make sure that my father is not living under a half-collapsed roof. I can just imagine that happening and him saying, “Well, I just put an extra sweater on, and I don’t notice it.” I set the painting on the floor, lean it carefully against the wall, then climb the stairs to the second-floor bedrooms. Then I see it in the hallway, a little trap door in the ceiling. I haven’t thought about that door in a long time. A rope dangles, beckoning. I reach the handle and pull down a ladder that unfolds with some arthritic creaking and, after one more strong yank, sets on the floor.

My heart beats fast. Her studio; as far as I know, Dad has never cleaned it out. I look at the ladder rungs. It’s sacred ground up there, and I’m not sure I should do this. I look and look some more, then I climb the rungs. A few steps and there it is; there she is. Not Mom, but the art that was her life. It’s like a museum here, a long narrow room covered in cobwebs, and cold, for there is no heat here under the roof. Dad had set up half of the attic for just her, right next to one of two attic windows. He put up dry wall on one side and installed a neon light that snapped on with a metal ball chain, which I pull now. I hate the brash glow it casts, not to mention that maddening buzz; she must have too, because there are two other lamps fitted with incandescent bulbs.

The rest of the attic is behind where I stand, and she would not have seen it if she had been looking at the easel or out the window. The space still radiates fumes of turpentine and oil paint, mixed with attic dust. I love the smell of her art supplies. Her transistor radio! I could switch it on now and, unless the station has changed its programming in the last twenty-five years, I would hear saxophones, clarinets, and a snare drum beating in time through the crackling soundwaves. Mom’s wooden easel stands right where it used to, stained with drips of paint; a pile of canvases is stacked on the floor, some blank, some marked with the beginnings of projects left unfinished. In the corner a small cobbled-together table, stained with paint drippings of all colors, holds her tools: brushes, paint tubes now filled with pigmented concrete, and glass jars, large and small, some with crumbs of dried paint in the bottom, others clean and shining in the morning light.

The light and how it changes the shape of everything, shifts color, forms mood. My mother studied light.

Against the wall, there is a stack of sketches; are any of those from the days leading up to her death? I consider lifting them to see, but still, it feels intrusive. And I don’t really want to know what she was thinking or feeling in those last days.

“Strange car out front,” Dad calls from the bottom of the stairs. I jolt, so surprised I need to grab the back of the chair so I don’t fall. I look down the ladder, and there he stands, a rolled-up newspaper in his hands. “Morning.”

“Hello,” I say. Once my breath recovers, I carefully come down. “Where have you been?”

He helps me push the ladder back up into the ceiling. “Just to the diner for breakfast. Thought I’d get out of the house one more time before this . . . monster storm. Didn’t know you were coming or I would’ve waited.”

“It was sort of a last-minute thing,” I say. “How’re you feeling, Dad?”

“Pretty good and not too bad. Yourself?”

“I’m all right,” I say, and I am trying to smile, but I feel like he sees through me.

“Colleen,” he says. “I’m sorry for everything you’re going through. It’s a lot.”

I nod slightly. “Thanks.”

He starts to walk down the stairs, and I follow. We reach the kitchen, and Dad pulls out a chair for me. “What’s the last time someone made you a cup of coffee? Sit down, put your feet up, make yourself at home.”

My father can be sweet; sometimes I forget that. Actually, nobody has made me coffee in a long time. A few minutes later, the old plastic Mr. Coffee that I got him years ago for Christmas is percolating away, and we are sitting at the little kitchen table. The skin of his face is ruddy and prickly, and hair that used to be dark is thin now, wispy and white, some strands defying gravity. A year and some months before seventy, and he looks like an old man. But then, he looked like an old man when we were kids, or maybe he just felt old then, always grumbling that these girls were too much for him. And probably we were. Maybe we still are.

He pours us each a cup. “Thanks,” I say. “Oh, it’s good.”

“Mrs. Moschella gets these beans at a place in Salisbury,” he says. He tosses a teaspoon toward me. “She tells me they roast them right there. I don’t know if that’s a big deal, but she seems impressed.”

“Mrs. Moschella always knows where to get the good stuff,” I say. “How is she? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“She’s fine. Loves to tell me what great things her grandkids are up to.” He gestures dismissively. “I don’t talk as much about my amazing grandchildren. I hate to make her feel bad.”

I laugh. “Oh, they are amazing,” I say. “Those two are my heroes, they’ve been so great with all the madness. Hey, Dad, be careful with that attic ladder. I noticed a couple of loose boards.”

“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to fix those. Probably need to replace the whole thing or build a real staircase.”

I nod and stir my coffee. “And you still haven’t—” I point at the mess in the next room.

“Nah,” he says, shrugging. “One of these days. I’ll have to if I want to sell this place. Hey, you need milk?”

“No, thanks,” I say. “Are you thinking about selling, Dad?”

“Just something to consider,” he says. “I’ve been in this house a long time.”

“When did you move here? Was it after Alex was born?”

“She was a baby, I think,” he says. “And she’s, what, now, thirty-six? Yup, thirty-five years sounds about right.”

I stare into the dark well of my coffee. Mom must have been young then, I think, maybe just twenty-two. A baby herself, with a husband eight years older. They had their summer fling on a small scenic Maine cove, complete with a rocky coastline and lush pine trees. The story he always told us was that when he asked her to marry him, he never expected her to say yes. Alex thinks she must have been pregnant, but Mom was gone by the time we were old enough to even have that idea. And Dad never told us.

“Dad, how did you and Mom meet?”

He shrugs and looks at the ceiling for a moment, like he’s trying to remember. Finally, he twists up his face and speaks. “It was a small town. Everybody knew everybody.” He sighs. “I was about to join the army.”

“The army? I had no idea.”

“Yup, I was going to sign up in the fall, so I spent the summer helping out on my uncle’s fishing boat. I saw your mom all around South Williston, sitting by the cove with her easel; or biking around with her painting supplies strapped to a milk carton; or sitting on the beach, laughing with friends. She painted landscapes for tourists to buy in gift shops. Made decent money doing it too.”

“Why didn’t you stay? If people loved her paintings, she could have kept selling them.”

“Life is rough in small Maine towns,” he says. “Summers are beautiful, but they don’t last. And winters can be . . . long and lonely. I thought she’d be happier in Massachusetts.”

“Dad,” I start. “I have a weird question for you. Was Mom married before you?”

He looks surprised. “What?”

“Alex found an engagement announcement,” I say. “Someone O’Dowd.”

He smiles and looks out the window and far away. “She never told me the whole story. Just that he was the son of someone her dad worked with. There was a big wedding and a fancy honeymoon. But a month later, she filed for annulment.”

“And she didn’t tell you why or what happened?”

He shakes his head. “Nope.”

My gaze falls on the table. “Is that when she quit college? Did she . . . quit college and then move to Maine?”

“I don’t exactly know. All she told me is that she left under unhappy circumstances.”

“That’s all she told you? Her own husband? She never spoke to her family again, and she never mentioned why?” He shakes his head. “But did you ask?”

He grimaces slightly and shrugs slowly. “If she didn’t want to tell me, who was I to hound her? It was painful for her. I didn’t want to make her dredge that up if she didn’t want to.”

I try to line things up in my mind, and I drum my fingers on the table. Her marriage to her father’s business partner’s son didn’t work out, so she quit college—right before she graduated—and broke things off with her family and headed east alone.

Or maybe that was the punishment. If you can’t make this marriage work, then you are hereby cut off from the family and from all the family money, including college tuition payments.

“Okay,” I continue, feeling bold now. “Was Mom . . . was she pregnant before you got married?”

He frowns and wraps his hands around his mug. “All these things I never talked to you kids about. She was supposed to tell you, you know?”

“I know,” I say. “But she didn’t.”

He smiles. “She was a golden girl from out of town, she could have had anybody, and plenty of guys tried, believe me. Local kids like me and the prep school boys on their fathers’ yachts. Frankly, I was amazed she wanted anything to do with me. But she’d look at me and smile, and my day got good.” His face looks far away, like he’s watching her move through the house doing something wonderful like carrying a birthday cake covered in lit candles.

I blurt out my thought, because I never really understood before this moment. “You adored her.”

He glances at me sheepishly, a little embarrassed. “Sure.”

“All these years, I never thought about it . . . how much you must have missed her,” I say.

He sighs. “I missed her a lot. Still do. I never thought we wouldn’t grow old together. To answer your other question,” he says, tapping one thick finger on the table. “Your mom was expecting Alex before we got married.”

“She was?” I say. “But you’re Alex’s—”

He laughs. “Oh, yes, certainly. I always knew I was, but seeing her grow up, your sister has habits that I can trace back to every branch of the Emery family tree.”

I laugh, but then my father’s face becomes thoughtful.

“Sometimes, I wonder if we were ready for marriage. We tried to pretend, at least to ourselves, that her being pregnant wasn’t the only reason we were getting hitched. But the truth is, it probably was.”

“Daddy,” I say, because I’m going the distance now. “Do you know why she did it?”

He considers this raw, awful question. He grimaces again; he’s right to think carefully, because whatever he says next will be added to the montage in my head that plays over and over. These next words go down in indelible ink.

Finally, he takes in breath and speaks. “Your mom had an illness. She did what she did because she was sick.”

Okay, this we’ve heard before. Suddenly I feel desperate. “No, Dad,” I say. “There must be more to it. She was alive one day, and the next day she wasn’t. Something happened. Someone said or did something. If it’s something I did, or one of us, you can tell me. Don’t think I can’t hear it. I can. I would rather know.”

He stands then and lumbers across the room to lean against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed in front of him. “Sweetie, you must never think that what your mother did was because of you. She loved her girls. All of you.” He looks down and sighs. “Susie and me, we got married in the town hall with a couple of friends as witnesses. It was late September, but a heat wave made it feel like the height of summer.”

“Sounds romantic,” I say.

“Well, it was simple. Not like her first wedding, but that’s how she wanted it,” he says. “And we didn’t have any money. After that, we went on what we called a honeymoon, just one night because I was due to take the civil service exam two days later. We packed a few things, got some bread and cheese, a bottle of wine, and headed off in my pickup truck to a small lake. We had the place to ourselves, and we pulled out sleeping bags and lay under the stars and talked about the future. You know, the kids we’d have, the life we were planning. All that.”

As he talks, the memory registers on his face like he is there, drinking in the Milky Way, gasping at every shooting star.

His face shifts then, a gravity darkens his eyes. “She was so small in my arms, like a child, and I kept thinking what a miracle it was that I’d been entrusted with not just one beautiful life, but two. And for a while that night, she was happy, but then something in her changed. She became quiet. Then she started to cry. ‘I’m going to ruin your life,’ she said. Over and over, ‘I’m so sorry; I’m going to ruin your life.’ ”

Then, my father, who I don’t remember ever seeing cry, begins to weep, but so quietly someone else might almost not realize it was happening. He rubs his forehead, like the very remembering of this is making his temple throb. “I told her, ‘No, it isn’t true. I love you, Suzanne. You are my life. You and this little being. It’s going to be a whole new world for us.’ But she kept crying. Nothing I said could calm her down.”

He is silent then, his gaze away from me, and I do not speak. “I wanted to protect her from what was hurting her. But when I couldn’t . . . when she . . . I’m the one that failed her.”

I realize that I have forgotten about my coffee. I put my hands around the mug, but it has become cold. “You didn’t fail her,” I whisper.

He grins, like he appreciates my effort. “That day, I mean, the day it happened, someone chased me down on my route to tell me to go home, but they didn’t know what the emergency was. I got home and saw the ambulance parked in the driveway, and Alex standing in the front yard, her face blank with shock. They were bringing the stretcher out of the house, and I convinced myself that the person under the sheet was someone else, someone I didn’t know. But it only lasted a moment.”

I pull a pack of tissues from my purse and offer him one, but he wipes his face against his sleeve. “I wish I could have saved her. She seemed so helpless against it . . .”

“Against what, Dad?” I say.

“Sadness, I guess, or depression, that might be the technical name these days,” he says. “When the sun was shining for her, everything was A-OK. But when it wasn’t, the pain she carried was deep. It destroyed her from the inside.”

I don’t know what to say. To that or any of this. “Did she ever see a doctor?” I ask.

He shrugs. “She wanted the sickness to go away, and she thought the best way to do that was to live as though it wasn’t happening.”

“Oh, Dad,” I say.

“She talked to her regular doc, but he . . .” He stops and stares at the floor for a moment, then sighs. “He gave her Valium for anxiety. I told her pills never fixed anything. They sure didn’t this time.”

“The pills she took that knocked her out . . .” I say slowly, because I’m forming the thought as the words come out. “Were those the . . .Valium, the ones that she . . . ?”

Daddy nods and looks down. “She’d saved them up, then she took them all at once with vodka. The coroner told me later. It made it easier for her to not resist drowning.”

“Oh, Dad,” I say. And suddenly I have heard all that I can hear for today. I stand up. “Daddy, I’m so sorry.”

He nods. “This family has been through a lot,” he says. “And I wish it hadn’t turned out this way. But I loved your mother. I’m still proud that she picked me. And I took care of you three the best I could, although I think I didn’t do a very good job.”

“No, Dad,” I say. I hug him. “You did a great job.”

Then I pull away. “I should go,” I say, and I go to the painting and lift it up like it is the hand of a child I need to take home with me. I grab my coat and my purse and my jingling keys. “Thanks for telling me the truth, Dad. I mean it. It’s better to know the truth than not know.”

“Take it easy with the storm,” he says.

“You too,” I say.

Then with my painting in hand, I walk out into the temperate winter’s day under a sky that turned slate gray while I was inside. I want to go home, I think, and I walk away from the house of my childhood toward a borrowed cottage on the beach.

I drive away from Dad’s house and into Amesbury Center, where I park in a bank parking lot and dial Alex’s cell phone. “Are you in the car or at the paint store?” I say.

“I am counting shades of white,” she says. “There’s pinkish-white and purple-white and brownish-white and creamy-white and light-bright white and muted white and a few dozen more, and that’s not even including ivory or beige. It’s making me seasick. How was your talk with Dad?”

“Good,” I say. “I have news. Do you want to meet for lunch?”

“No, let’s talk now; this storm is making me nervous,” she says.

“All right, well, find someplace where you can sit down,” I say. “This is interesting.”