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One Year Earlier.
“She’s over seventy now, and, from the sounds of it, her symptoms started years ago. So, no. It’s not early onset,” the doctor replied. Clara watched Kate nod in response. She watched her keep it together, her eyes dry, her gaze steady.
Then, Clara looked at her mom, whose face was blank.
“So,” Clara inserted herself through trembled speech, “what does the prognosis look like?”
The doctor cleared his throat and laced his fingers on his desk. Glimmering windows of other high-rise buildings shone like the broad sides of diamonds behind him.
Clara hated the city. Even more now. Big cities meant bad news.
“It varies,” he answered Clara, then turned to speak directly to her mom. “Mrs. Hannigan—”
“It’s Miz,” Nora corrected, her voice a sheet of ice.
He flushed, Clara was certain. She couldn’t help but smile. It was the exact sort of thing to level the tension. Clara glanced at Kate and they shared the sentiment, silently. Some relief.
“Excuse me. Miz Hannigan. To answer your question, this disease looks different for different people. For all we know, you could live a normal life for another twenty years.”
Clara could have sworn Kate sucked in a sharp breath.
The doctor went on. “Or, it could progress quickly. The best we can do is schedule regular appointments. Keep up with the meds. Eat well. Stay active. The whole bit.” He raised his palms and smiled. White teeth glowed back at them. Clara’s own smile fell away. Doctors liked to use “we” as though they had any control over the diseases they diagnosed or the patients they treated.
Little did this one know, Nora Hannigan would not be controlled. By his treatment plan, the medications, good nutrition, or anything else.
But, again, their mom didn’t seem to react at all. The only moment that perked her up was when the doctor accused her of being married.
“What’s next?” Kate asked, poising her pen above a notepad trimmed in a floral pattern.
“Truthfully?” he asked, now frowning and pulling his rimless glasses down his nose and folding them neatly. Kate and Clara nodded together on either side of their mother. He went on. “Make the most of your time together. Keep her healthy,” he pointed his forehead toward the older woman, speaking—once again—about her rather than to her. “And,” he added, his voice dropping an octave, “start making preparations.”
***
“Mom, you said hardly a word in there,” Clara pointed out as they ushered her into Kate’s Navigator.
Nora clicked her tongue. “Do you believe even one word that man said?” she hissed, pulling herself into the front seat with Clara’s help.
“What’s not to believe, Mom?” Kate asked. “And also, are we still going to Fiorillo’s for lunch?”
Clara frowned at her older sister. “How can you think about eating right now?”
“I’ll tell you how,” Kate answered, bristling as she launched into a classic Kate lecture. “Nothing has changed. Absolutely nothing has changed. People go to the doctor and learn something new then let that news disrupt their lives. We won’t. Right, Mom?”
Nora came to life. She spoke lucidly and with focus. “I agree with Kate. Just because he confirmed what you two suspected doesn’t mean I’m going to walk into Lake Huron with rocks in my coat pockets. Fiorillo’s is perfect. We need wine. If you want to know my mind, well, I think doctors see people like me and haven’t a clue what to think. What they ought to do is put in a prescription for a bottle of wine. The good stuff. It’d save us all money and time and headaches.”
Clara smiled in the backseat and shook her head, catching Kate’s amused face in the rearview mirror. “Well, wine won’t save you a headache, but I do see your point.”
Their mom twisted to face Clara, her hand gripping the console to keep her body in its awkward position. Clara’s eyes hung on the baubles clacking between Nora’s knobby knuckles. Glinting silvers and golds that made the woman who she was. A glamour girl. A Titaness.
A small-town queen crashing into her golden years like she was late to her own party.
But beneath the gems lay paper-thin, age-spotted skin. Prematurely bruised. Arthritic. The product of a life built on hard work rather than precious jewels and luxury. The latter two were the result of a cutthroat attitude and decades of ruthless business building. The spoils of war, their mom often sang out as she swung a glimmering fist across her chest.
“A wine headache is different than a bad news headache,” the woman murmured with a wink before turning back around and directing Kate where to go, unnecessarily.
***
Lunch was a fast affair. Salad all around. Basket of garlic bread untouched.
“Doggy-bag these,” Nora directed the waiter.
Clara offered a smile after her mother and thanked him discreetly. “Mom,” she began, only to think better of reprimanding the poor woman for her typically absent manners. It wouldn’t be productive.
“What? Trudy loves scraps.”
“You shouldn’t feed Trudy people food, Mom. You know that,” Kate replied, slipping her card out of the check holder and tucking it back into her leather wallet. “She’s already overweight.”
Nora ignored Kate and took the box from the waiter, adding a syrupy thank you, after all.
Clara wondered about that. Not the boxed garlic bread destined for a cruel, fat-bellied Chihuahua, but about her mom’s insincerity, swinging from overweening demands to gushing supplication in the blink of an eye.
Had the woman always been disingenuous? Or was it a recent development? Clara couldn’t tell anymore. It was as if her own memory had turned fuzzy, too.
“Where to next, ladies?” Clara asked with a yawn, checking her wristwatch. She had papers to grade and a kitchen to clean. Both responsibilities she’d no doubt put off when she actually arrived back home.
She’d once read somewhere that true perfectionists were also procrastinators. They hated to tackle a chore for fear of, well, imperfect execution. Maybe Clara ought to lower her personal standards.
It might pay off in more ways than she knew.
“Home. Right, Mom?” Kate asked once they were situated in the SUV.
Nora pointed up the hill toward Main Street. “No, take me to see Michael.”
Clara flashed a glance to the rearview, locking eyes with Kate. They frowned at each other. “Michael? As in, Michael Matuszewski?” Kate replied.
Their mom nodded. “Yes. He’s my lawyer.”
“I know that, Mom. Why do you want to see him?”
“I have to fix something. Sign something. He called the other day and wanted to go over a document. Just stop complaining and take me there, goldarn it, Kate.”
Kate’s eyes grew wide in the mirror and Clara let out a sigh.
They arrived at the attorney’s office, and Nora let herself out of the SUV. Kate and Clara opened their doors too, but the old woman held up a hand and stopped them. “I’ll be five minutes. Just stay there,” she commanded.
Again, the sisters exchanged a look. Clara shook her head. “We have to go with her, right?”
Kate nodded. “Mom, we’re coming with you.”
“Five minutes!” Nora screeched as she tugged the door open and waddled inside before they could stop her.
True to her word, Nora emerged at the door again in just five minutes. This time, with a plump, cheery-looking woman gabbing away at her side who waved boisterously at Kate and Clara.
She walked Nora to the Navigator and said hello and nice day out and all the things chatty types couldn’t help but eject despite the circumstances.
“Everything go okay in there, Mom?” Kate helped Nora buckle her seatbelt then waited for an answer. The air conditioning hummed softly around them.
“It went well.” Nora stared straight ahead. Her jaw slack, her breathing heavy for such a short excursion. “I just had to drop something off.”
Clara’s skin prickled. “You said you were signing a document.”
“Did I?”
“Yes, Mom,” Kate answered.
“Well, no. I had to drop something off. I don’t want to talk about it. I need to rest now.” Nora’s flame had started to flicker. It was the emerging normal. A full day of high energy and feisty bossiness that eventually, come early afternoon, waned into a sludge.
As they crested the hill back down Harbor Avenue, Nora lifted a wobbly finger out toward Heirloom Cove. “Have you watered the flowers lately, Kate?” she asked quietly.
Kate glanced at Clara before replying. “Clara does that now, Mom. Remember? She’s the one who takes care of the old house.”
Nora lifted a painted eyebrow then lowered it. “Oh, right. Well, Clara?” she twisted in her seat part of the way and dropped her chin. “Have you?”
“Yep. I was there Tuesday. Speaking of which,” Clara took a risk. It was something she and Kate and even Amelia and Megan had been arguing about for ages. It was something they’d better settle sooner rather than later. “What are we doing with the house, Mom?”
“What do you mean?”
Kate looked over at Nora.
Clara forged ahead. “I mean, when are we going to start clearing it out?”
The old house on the harbor had all but turned into a museum by that point.
“You can handle it after I’m dead,” their mom replied, flatly.
Clara’s pulse quickened and she unbuckled from the middle seat in the back, feeling suddenly like a little girl all over again. An eavesdropper on a conversation that didn’t belong to her.
But it did.
“Mom. Not okay,” Clara reprimanded.
The woman batted her hand weakly. “You can sort through everything then. Right, Kate?”
Both Kate and Clara drew back at the question. Clara waited for Kate to say something—anything—to diminish the morbid thought and also take back the reins.
Kate blew out a sigh. “Oh, Mom. Do you have any idea how much work that will be? And how difficult? We will already be sad, then we have to face all of your things? Your belongings? We really should start now while—”
“While I’m alive and you’re still irritated with me instead of when I’m dead and you feel guilty about pestering me.” Nora coughed into her fist, a dry, phony cough.
Clara rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
Kate let out a short laugh. “Something like that,” she answered, laying her hand over their mother’s on the console.
They rolled past the old place, and Nora leaned forward in her seat, craning her neck around Kate to get a better view.
“Do you want to go there now, Mom?” Clara asked from between the two front seats, her voice soft.
The SUV heaved forward as Kate took her foot off the brake and checked her rearview mirror, this time looking beyond Clara.
Nora fell back into her seat and crossed her arms like a petulant child. “No. Keep driving, Katherine. I will never step a foot in that haunted place again.”
“Mom, whoa. Haunted?” Clara asked, confused by the woman’s sudden shift.
“I don’t want to talk about it. With either one of you. Don’t take me there. Don’t bury me there. Don’t even drag my casket into the front parlor there.”
Clara and Kate fell quiet. All of their lives, Nora loved the old house on Heirloom Cove. As far as they knew, that’s why Nora kept it instead of selling or renting.
But, her words stuck. As addled as Nora’s mind may have been, Clara and Kate solemnly and silently vowed to fulfill her wish.
Nora Hannigan would never go back to the house on the harbor.
And Clara began to wonder why.