“He doesn’t know me,” Kate said, leaning back. “I don’t want to scare him.”
“He’s not scared,” Nicola said. “Look, he’s watching you.”
Tyler’s brown eyes were enormous, unblinking as he regarded Kate. He unclenched tiny fists. His fingernails were perfect half moons. Kate pictured Beth as a baby. Even though Kate had been only two, she had signed on for a lifetime of loving and protecting her sister. Her mother used to let her help give Beth a bath, stick the tabs to close her diapers. Kate would lay her finger against the baby’s open hand, Beth would squeeze, and Kate would wish she’d never let go.
She had done the same with Sam, and now Tyler, letting him grab her index finger with a hard grip. She glanced up at Nicola, who was smiling. Nicola had brown eyes. Pete’s were bright blue. She was glad Tyler’s were brown.
Tyler began to fuss, and Nicola picked him up. A thousand birds called from the trees, and the flutter of leaves got louder. It was hurricane season, and Hilda, the latest threat, had skirted the leeward islands, on track to hit the Carolinas and spin out to sea before hitting the northeast coast. Even from so far away, there was an atmospheric disturbance right here on the Connecticut shore. Wild weather excited Kate, as it had Mathilda. The wind helped blow out the cobwebs of trauma.
“I came to ask you something,” Kate said.
“Of course, anything,” Nicola said, but she sounded apprehensive, as if afraid of what it would be.
“When you worked at the gallery, how often did Beth go down into the basement?”
“The basement?” Nicola asked. “Never. She wouldn’t. Because of what happened to her—to you—down there. Even my first month working—while I was cataloging all the sculptures on the shelves—I did it alone. She didn’t come down to supervise. I thought she would.”
“She must have sometimes,” Kate said. “Maybe when you didn’t see her.”
“I don’t think so. Only I did. And Pete, to do the framing.”
Kate flinched, picturing Nicola and Pete getting together in the basement while Beth worked upstairs.
Nicola chewed her lower lip, seemed to be thinking something over. She watched Kate for a minute.
“Kate, after Beth was killed, I saw Pete with baby clothes,” she said finally.
“Well, you two do have a son.”
“They weren’t Tyler’s. He threw them away. Or at least hid them.”
“Where?”
“The dumbwaiter. Kate, I think they were for Matthew.”
Kate couldn’t stand to hear Matthew’s name come out of Nicola’s lips. “My sister bought clothes for him. So did I. Beth was ready for him to be born. He was her son. She loved him as much as you love Tyler.”
“I took them out of the dumbwaiter. They’re in the yellow room upstairs.”
“Excuse me,” Kate said quietly, barely able to contain her emotions. Her head was spinning with the idea of Pete hiding Matthew’s clothes. Beth had bought them, so lovingly. She should be holding her baby now. He should be wearing the outfits she’d found for him.
Kate left Nicola standing there and walked into the house. She went upstairs, into the yellow room. Beth had stayed here when they were young. Had Nicola somehow known that? The buttery light was soft and welcoming.
Baby clothes were folded on the bed. Kate sat beside them. She looked without touching for a long time. Three onesies, striped in different bright colors. A sun hat printed with sailboats. Two blue soft terry cloth towels. A package of bibs with Winnie-the-Pooh characters on them. A blue baby blanket monogrammedMLthat she had given Beth to hold her nephew. That had been the week before they’d died.
Seeing Matthew’s things made him even more real. Kate lifted the sun hat, each onesie, the towels, the blanket, and held them to her chest, just as if she were hugging him. She thought of how she would have liked to take him flying. They would take off, bank over the Sound, and see where they lived from the air. She would teach him to fly, just as Mathilda had done for her.
After a while, she took a deep breath. Instead of leaving Matthew’s things on the bed, she placed them in the top two drawers of the cherrywood bureau. It made her feel good to think that Beth had kept her clothes in the same drawers.
It felt like a secret, just for herself: keeping Matthew’s things in this room where Beth had stayed. Kate was glad she would always know where to find them, the baby clothes her nephew never got to wear.
She went downstairs, into her favorite room of the house: the library. It was warm and ordered, as it had been during her grandmother’s life. Tall windows admitted hazy white light that fell in patches on the wide-board pine floors, the antique Sarouk rug. The fireplace smelled faintly of smoke, hinting of fires from chilly days and cold nights when Mathilda was alive.
The bookshelves were perfectly arranged, not alphabetically or according to size, but by color. Although not an artist herself, Mathilda had appreciated the palette, and the books’ spines ranged through the spectrum from scarlet to violet.
Kate went to the dark greens. She removed a book—not a first edition; the girls had been careful about that—Vasari’sThe Lives of the Artists. Kate turned to the last page, flipped it over, looked at the yellowed endpaper.
She saw the initials:K,B,L,S, written in blood.
