Then Scotty:
Did you know Beth had a friend named Jed?
Kate pulled the envelope from her shoulder bag and looked at the drawing again. It was undeniably a fine piece of work, but she didn’t care about that. Now that she knew the name of the artist, she looked for signs of what Beth had been feeling. Had it been a romantic relationship? She stared at Beth’s pregnant belly—could everyone be wrong about Pete being the baby’s father? No, it wasn’t possible. Her sister would never have cheated. She would have talked to Kate if she even had feelings for someone else.
She needed to feel close to Beth, so she took a cab to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Imposing and graceful, presiding over the Wade Oval, the neoclassical white marble building soothed her upon sight. She had been here before, on past trips with David, and although she usually liked to visit the current exhibitions, today she went straight to an old favorite in the permanent collection.
A painting from Claude Monet’sWater Liliesseries occupied an entire wall of the East Wing’s Impressionism gallery. She took a seat on the wide bench and stared at it. It had been painted at Giverny, during the last years of Monet’s life, when he’d stayed home creating massive paintings, triptychs of his beloved lily pond. Viewing this panel brought back the trip to France.
It brought back Beth. Her breathing slowed as she stared at the painting.
The October before the gallery incident, their parents had taken the girls to New York. They stayed at the Stanhope Hotel, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park. While their parents met with a collector on Park Avenue, Kate and Beth went to the park. Kate skateboarded from the Obelisk down to Conservatory Water and around Bethesda Fountain while Beth ran along with her.
“Let’s go to the Met,” Beth said after an hour. “I’m cold.”
Kate was wearing a red wool hat and a navy-blue down jacket. Beth wore a camel-hair coat, but even so, Kate took off her jacket to put around her sister’s shoulders.
“Nowyou’llbe cold,” Beth said.
“Let’s head down to Poet’s Walk. You love the statues.”
“No, the museum,” Beth said.
“Aren’t you tired of art?” Kate said. “We have that at home. We’re in New York—do you really want to look at more paintings?”
Beth smiled.
Orange and yellow leaves carpeted the ground. The graceful statueAngel of the Watersrose from a pedestal in the circular pool, above the park benches and lake. Kate wanted to stay outside, watch people, and get a hot pretzel, but she couldn’t say no to her little sister.
Half an hour later, they were standing in front of a Renoir, a mother with two daughters in blue dresses. Kate had had to check her skateboard at the front door.
Kate shook her head, staring at the Renoir. “Impressionism is too pretty. It’s too easy. Let’s go look at Kandinsky.”
Beth had given her a look as if she had felt sorry for her. “Haven’t you ever listened to Mathilda? The Impressionists changed everything. The way they created light out of paint. One brushstroke, and it’s a red hat. Just like yours.”
“Yeah, well,” Kate had said.
Now, looking at the large canvas of Monet’sWater Lilies, Kate thought of how much Beth had loved this series—and Kate had to admit she did too. Their feelings about art had changed after their mother’s death. Kate had almost instantly needed the comfort and familiarity, warmth and light of Impressionism—not French but American, the work her family had collected. Beth, in contrast, had decided that art had caused their mother’s death, and she never wanted to think about it again.
That hadn’t lasted long. Soon after their mother’s death, the two sisters had switched paths. Beth had become devoted to the idea of working at the gallery. She had lost herself in scholarship and paintings. To Kate, art was a pleasure to be abandoned, like everything else.
Had Beth met Jed Hilliard at the Academy or in New London? His talent was unmistakable. Kate ached, wondering why Beth had never said a word about him, at least to her. Had she talked about him to Lulu? Was that why Lulu had acted so strange when Kate had shown her the drawing? She checked her phone—neither Lulu nor Scotty had texted back.
Kate stared atWater Lilies, getting lost in the wash of subtle color and shadows, passing the time until David’s meeting was finished, till they could fly home to Connecticut, until she could learn more about what Jed Hilliard had meant to her sister.
26
Sam had never thought of a house as being alive, as having a soul. She had lived at 45 Church Street since the day her parents had brought her home from the hospital. She had never much thought about it. She had taken for granted the walls, the windows, the floors, the rooms, the way her mother had decorated, the way the kitchen was bright in the morning, the bird feeders just outside the bay window. Plaster and paint and wood and a chimney. That was a house.
Now that she’d returned from her aunt’s loft, she realized that she’d been wrong all along. Her house had been alive. It had hummed with life. It had been singing and dancing. It had been cooking meals and planning for holidays, and when holidays came, it had been full of the season. At Thanksgiving it had crackled with roasting turkey, and for Christmas, it had smelled of evergreen, cookies, and wood fires, and it had sounded likeThe Nutcracker Suite.
Sitting in the kitchen, Sam realized that the life in her house was gone. It wasn’t a dead thing, exactly. It still had electricity and running water, the stove worked, the coffee maker could still brew, the refrigerator kept food cold. But the house had become a phantom. It was no longer living and breathing, surrounding the family and making them feel safe. It wafted along, an untethered spirit, drained of everything it once had been.
Even Popcorn felt the lifelessness. Instead of romping around, wanting to play, he lay in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor, looking out the sliding glass door at a squirrel chattering and hiding acorns in the yard. He wasn’t even barking at it.
The sun caught a glinting something in the door’s track. Sam went over to see what it was—a small sliver of glass. She held it in her palm. No one had told her the actual details, the moment by moment of that day when they’d found her mother, but she had watched the TV news showing clips of the house from every possible exterior angle. She knew that her aunt and the police had smashed the door to get inside. Her father must have gotten the pane replaced at some point, but this little piece of glass from the old one remained.
Sitting at the kitchen table, she held the sliver of glass as if it were as precious as a diamond. She angled it into a shaft of sunlight, tilted it back and forth, refracting rainbows onto the ceiling. She touched it to the inside of her arm. Oh, it was so tempting. She burned to writeI miss my momin her skin, to watch dark red bubbles of blood quiver and spill. Cutting had worked in the past, purged the pain like nothing else.
