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I remember the way he had coached me that morning, reciting those same words over and over again. The way my mother had looked at me, head tilted to the side, her eyes cloudy with a waxy shine like she thought I was a ghost.
“But I feel like I was there. Iremember—”
“Don’t do this,” he says, the exact same words Ben had said to me this morning now echoing up my father’s throat. “Isabelle, don’t do this to yourself.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I forgot how the sun sets here. Slowly, at first, the turquoise gradually morphing into a slathering of peaches and yellows and tangerines bleeding together like watercolors—and then, quick as a blink, it’s like someone lit a match and set fire to the sky, the blaze traveling across the canvas as if it were drenched in kerosene and left to burn. I’m on the dock now, watching as the sun dips below the horizon. With dusk reflecting off the water, it almost feels like I’m sitting in it, right in the middle: a room on fire with flames above and below me, swallowing me whole.
“Stay for dinner,” Dad had said, changing the subject as quick as a whip crack. I didn’t want to, but at the same time, I did, so I glanced at my mother, looking for a hint of permission in her gaze.
She gave me a twitch of a smile, a small nod, and so I agreed.
The kitchen looked different, our old cobalt backsplash replaced with subway tile, simple and white. Some of it had to be renovated after that summer fire, of course, but the rest, I knew, was an attempt to erase the memories, the past. There were tiny pots of herbs set against the windowsill: basil and rosemary and parsley and sage, giving the air a woody smell, like freshly mown grass. I watched asMom clipped at the leaves with little silver scissors, collecting a heap in her palm. I don’t remember her cooking much, but she seemed to know what she was doing.
I had been chopping lettuce for dinner, a cleaver in my grip and my eyes somewhere distant, when Mom placed a hand on my shoulder, startling me back to the present.
“You know I love you,” she said, her voice shaking. It seemed like an attempt at reconciliation; a moment of forgiveness I never felt I deserved. “You know that, right?”
I stand up from the dock now, brushing the pollen from my jeans. Despite their attempts at redecorating, at erasing the memories of Margaret, I can still see her everywhere here: In the kitchen table where she used to sit, singing to her doll in that high-pitched voice. In the copper skillets hanging above the stove, the same ones I used to make her omelets in, sliding the eggs onto a plate and placing it in front of her. Watching her eat. In the backyard where we use to sit with those statues, sweet tea in hand, and here on the dock, especially, water lapping against the pilings like a soft, ceaseless nudge.
It’s getting dark outside, the moon fingernail thin, and I start the long walk back up the dock. I agreed to stay the night after shooting my neighbor a text to check on Roscoe. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to go home, feel the restored emptiness of my house without Waylon in it, or think about how all those people at the conference had been right all along. How they had somehow seen me more clearly than I’ve ever been able to see myself.
Or maybe it’s because, after all these years, it finally feels like the icy wall my parents have erected between us since Margaret’s death is slowly starting to melt. That in coming here, I had extended an olive branch. That I was apologizing, for the very first time, for what I did—and in return, they were apologizing for leaving me so alone.
For seeming to forget that I’m their daughter, too.
I walk through the backyard, past the statues and the rose bushes and the giant stone birdbath with a dead palmetto bug floating on itsback. Then I step through the back door, the house quiet and still. My parents retreated to their bedroom an hour ago—partly, I think, because we ran out of things to say—and I walk into the kitchen again, emptying the bottle of wine we opened earlier into a fresh glass. Then I walk up the stairs, down the hallway, and into my old bedroom.
They’ve redecorated here, too, a new queen in place of the childhood bed I took with me to Savannah. It looks like a proper guest room now, though I know they don’t have any guests. I resist the urge to peek into Margaret’s room—to see if they’ve erased that, too—and instead place my wine on the bedside table, stripping off my clothes and changing into the pair of pajamas Mom laid out for me on the mattress.
Then I sit on the floor, cradling the wine against my chest, and wonder how I’ll spend the next ten hours alone in the dark.
Just like when I was a child, the house seems to come alive at night. I can hear it breathing—the draft in the hallway like a long exhale; the pop of the floorboards a cracking neck. Margaret’s voice:You ever feel like we’re not alone?I creep out of my bedroom and glance at the stairs: the third floor. Where we used to paint, Margaret and I, the French doors swung open and a warm breeze like breath on our necks.
I start to climb, remembering the way we used to huddle on the balcony, mugs of hot chocolate cupped in our hands anytime the temperature dropped below fifty. Margaret making wishes on shooting stars or pointing hungrily at the water anytime we saw the breach of a fin or the skid of shrimp dimpling the glassy surface.
I reach the landing and look around, the giant open room now housing old furniture covered in sheets like banished ghosts. Mom’s easel is still in the corner, facing the floor-to-ceiling windows like she was just mid-paint, and I can picture her eyes flicking back and forth between the canvas and the backyard, swirling her brush against the various colors of her palette, its own abstract work of art. That thin slabof wood tells the stories of paintings past: the pink she used to color Margaret’s flushed cheeks, the green of my father’s armchair, the blue of the rising tide.
I walk the perimeter of the room, holding the glass below my chin like a security blanket, trying to make out the shapes in the dark.
In the back corner, I come across a pile of paintings perched against the wall, so I sit on the hardwood floor, legs crossed, and start thumbing through them. Some of them are finished—a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter, the creeping jasmine swallowing the bricks of our front gate—while some she abandoned midway through: the rough outline of a face, lines disjointed. Eyes lifeless and blank.
I flip through a couple more, smiling at the ones I recognize, when suddenly, I stop.
There, in the back, is the one I had seen that summer: me in my white nightgown, standing at the edge of the marsh—only now I realize what I had seen before wasn’t finished. Now that girl is flanked by two other bodies: one with brown hair cascading over her shoulders and the other, so small, with locks the color of caramel candy. The three of them are holding hands, walking into the water together, that spring tide moon lighting the way.
And that’s when it hits me.
The girl I had seen in the painting—the girl Margaret had pointed to and assumed to be me—wasn’t actually me at all.
And she isn’t wearing a nightgown. The one in the middle: She’s wearing a robe.
“Isabelle.”
I jump at the voice behind me, knocking my wineglass over with my knee. Then I spin around, the red liquid spilling across the floorboards like blood, and register a body in the dark before me. It’s my mother, the glow of the moon illuminating her face; tears streaming down her cheeks like rain on a window.
“Isabelle, honey, let me explain.”
