“Oh, God. Sounds like something I would do.”
“Yes, but something you would do and remember doing.”
Colleen walked to a stool and ran her hands over the smooth leather. “They sure fancy up the place.”
“No one here likes fancy; they want things to stay the same. They want to feel that when they’re here time doesn’t pass.”
Colleen nodded. “I get that.” She glanced around the room. The pub was empty of patrons—it wasn’t open yet, and only memories lingered in the corners, having their private life. “I need a beer,” she said and walked behind the bar, grabbed a tall mug and expertly poured herself a Guinness, tipping the glass so that the white froth would rise to the top, evenly skimmed. It was a task that took both patience and skill—a true Guinness, her dad had taught her as a child, took exactly 119 seconds to pour from a tap.
“You still got it,” her brother said.
“Whoa, miss, can I help you?” A tall guy in a baseball cap, muscles bulging like a fake costume under a too-tight T-shirt, entered from the back room and approached Colleen.
“Oh, Hank, this is Lena, my sister,” Shane said with a laugh. “Don’t tackle her.” Shane looked at Colleen. “This is Hank, our bouncer, bartender, manager and all-around do-anything-I-need guy.”
Hank gave a bow and salute. “Mighty fine to meet you. You’re a legend around here.” He pointed to the slow draw of the beer against her glass.
“A legend?” Colleen didn’t look away from the glass until it was full and then she tilted it to allow the foam to settle. She hadn’t tasted Guinness since the day she’d left—avoiding it as the memory spark it could be. She took a long sip and then instantly regretted every day she’d ordered anything else.
“Yes, indeed,” Hank said. “A woman who could outbartend and outwit every man in the place.”
“False,” she said with a laugh, but enjoying the compliment. “It’s just talk. I spilled more beer than I served.”
“That, too,” Hank said. “I heard that, too.” And then came a holler from the back for someone to check on a delivery. “A pleasure,” he said and was off.
Colleen then turned to see a woman slouched at a corner booth, someone she hadn’t noticed when they’d arrived. Only the woman’s back was visible. Scattered over the round tabletop were notebooks, a calendar and stacks of paper. Her head was bent over the papers, the long stretch of her neck hidden beneath a cascade of blond hair. A thick dark Guinness sat untouched beside her, the white foam atop it not yet dented by the first and best sip.
Hallie.
A quiver of both anxiety and expectation ran underneath Colleen’s ribs. She had no idea what to do or say—the ingrained habit of turning away, of slighting her sister, was rising. But she had to find a new way of being with her if they were going to help their dad.
Colleen came from behind the bar just as Hallie turned around. They stared at each other for a moment, a still point in the room. It was the first time their eyes had found each other since that moment in the church ten years ago. Colleen didn’t budge, her mug of beer wavering in the air halfway between her lips and her elbow. Her sister looked older, but of course she would. Her eyes were puffy; she’d been crying. But still she was pretty in the way she’d always been: small mouth, small nose and round brown eyes just like their mother’s. She wore glasses now—tortoiseshell.
Colleen walked the few steps toward her sister. “Hi, sis.” Colleen spoke first and didn’t break her gaze.
Hallie’s brows drew together in a question. “Hello, Lena.” Her greeting was tepid at best.
“How’s it going?” Colleen exhaled the question.
“Huh?”
Colleen shrugged. “Okay, that was dumb. I just don’t know what to say . . .” She didn’t even try to fake a smile.
Hallie shook her head and motioned for them all to sit. “I have some stuff for us to go over for Dad’s party.”
“Already? Can’t we take a second to . . .” Colleen didn’t know what exactly they needed to take a second to do.
“Not really,” Hallie said and glanced at their brother. “The party’s only two weeks away. And on top of that we must figure out Dad’s health care and his finances because any second now you’ll bolt, and Shane and I will be left holding the bag.”
“I’ll bolt?” Colleen exhaled the words with a cough of disgust. “Are you kidding me? That’s how you want to start this, when I’m here to help?” Hallie’s comment was a preemptive strike and Colleen knew that—she was being told she’d ignored her sister for far too long.
Hallie waved away Colleen’s retort. “There’s a lot to do.”
She was right—there was a lot to do. The table was littered with calendars and lists and pages highlighted with various colored markers. Hallie, the organized one; she always had been. Even her college degree was in hospitality management—event planning her specialty. One calendar was labeled “Family” and the other “Dad’s Party.” On one were slots for ballet and art camp and babysitters, and on the other were slots for caterer, band and guest list. Then there was the large blue folder labeled “Medical.”
“Let’s get started,” Shane said. “Now that the happy reunion is over.”
Neither sister laughed or addressed his, once again, terrible joke. He tried again. “As the Irish say, be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.”
“Shane!”
“Shane!”
The sisters said his name in unison.
An awkward silence passed and Shane spoke up. “Okay, well, we can’t let someone else make decisions for Dad. This is up to us. We have a lot to talk about, to unravel. And listen, this is going to be a great party. We haven’t given a big bash in a long while. I think the last time the town saw something like this was when that movie from Hollywood filmed and opened here. We want to make it special. Aunt Rosie and Fred are coming in. Old friends of Dad’s from Virginia. Probably half the town. I don’t know how the hell we’re going to keep it a secret, but there’s a lot to do.”
Colleen nodded. “We’ve got this. We’re all here together. This is ours to figure out. This is our family.”
Hallie set her glasses carefully on the table. “Our family? Now you want to call it yours?”
Colleen opened her mouth for a quick retort, but was silent. For years, Hallie had begged for reconciliation, and Colleen had ignored her, shunned her. Sure, in the privacy of Colleen’s room or in the middle of a dark night, she’d thought of the terrible things she wanted to say to her sister, but she’d never uttered any of them. Now she felt those withheld words rising and she did her best to swallow them.
There was a reason she’d avoided even a single discussion with her sister: the way she felt at that moment, dislocated and free-falling. She couldn’t bear it. This exact feeling was what she’d avoided for a full decade. “Don’t do this.” Colleen spoke in a whisper.
“Lena?” Shane said and placed his hand on her arm.
Colleen turned her head slowly to her brother. “Take me home to see Dad. I want to see him now.”
Hallie brushed her hand through her hair and began to gather her papers. “Of course you’re going to run. That’s all you’ve ever done.”
“Are you kidding me?” Colleen stood and stepped back, emotions swamping her. “You didn’t give me any choice. What, you wanted me to hang around to watch the never-ending betrayal?”
Hallie didn’t answer, but she didn’t back down either, staring at her sister.
“Hallie, you forced me to leave; you betrayed me; you broke my heart—and now you point the finger at me?” Colleen shook her head. “I’m here to help Dad, not fight with you.”
“I forced you to leave?” Hallie’s voice broke, a crack in the hard facade of anger. “I begged you to come back; to talk to me; to let me explain. I tried to . . . apologize. Do
you realize this is the first time you’ve even said my name?”
Colleen leaned forward and placed her hands on the back of the chair. “Do you realize I had to leave behind everything and everyone I loved?” Colleen pushed at the chair, making a harsh scraping sound.
“You obviously have things you want to say to me.” Hallie glanced away. “No matter how sorry I am, it won’t matter to you so go ahead. Get it over with. I’ve waited a long, long time.”
“I do, but not now.”
“Yep, you’ll leave now, saying you love us but never coming back, never meeting your nieces or seeing your family.”
“I do love . . .” Colleen’s words were choked; she was losing grip on her tightly held control.
“If you’d loved us, you wouldn’t have run. You would have stayed, listened. Maybe you’d always wanted to leave.”
“Hallie.” Colleen felt dizzy. “That’s not true. You . . . you betrayed me. You were the only person in all the world I believed would never, but you did.” She held up her hand. For ten years she’d slammed her mouth shut against her emotions. “Not now.” She began to walk away, slowly, carefully, as if she might trip on the very words that had spilled from her mouth.
Shane piped up. “Whoa. You’re not going anywhere, sis. It’s time for me to tell you my idea,” he said as Colleen made for the back door, her heart hammering.
“Can’t wait to hear it,” Colleen called over her shoulder, “as most of your ideas are good ol’ trouble. But right now all I want is to go home.”
“All right, but I can’t leave right now.” Shane dug out his car keys from his back pocket. “Here.” He tossed them to her and she grabbed them in midair. And then he let out a noise that sounded like a grunt their old dog used to emit when he fell from the bed to the hardwood floor. “God help me get through this with the likes of you two.”
Chapter Six
Every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
Gerald M. Edelman and Guilio Tonini, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
Dad still lived in the family home and as Colleen drove Shane’s rattling Jeep toward it she intuitively knew every bend in the road. Long leaf pine, magnolia and live oak lining the street reached up and over, forming a canopy. She passed a wooden stand where peaches were piled in pyramids, golden and ripe, as an engine revved in her chest, mimicking the Jeep. She had no time to stop. Something must be done.
Something.
Anything.
She pressed harder on the gas pedal and the car lurched around the first corner. The siren was annoying, but Colleen drove to the right to allow the police car to pass. Instead the blaring lights flared in the rearview mirror and Colleen parked on the soft sand shoulder under a tree and dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. She did not need this.
The knock was quick on the driver’s-side window and she rolled it down to stare into the face of a high school friend, Brad Young. “Oh, Brad!”
“Driver’s license and insurance,” he said so sternly that she laughed.
“Seriously?” she asked and tucked her hair behind her ear. Maybe he didn’t recognize her.
He nodded, his blue hat bobbing. He straightened the billed cap and stared at her.
“Brad. It’s Lena Donohue.”
“I know, Ms. Donohue.”
“Stop with the formality,” she said, aiming for a flirty, fun grin. “I know I was going too fast; I was trying to get to my dad.”
“You were going sixty in a thirty.”
“Oh . . .” She cringed. “I’m sorry; I didn’t realize. It’s been a hell of a day, and I was rushing.” She paused. “I just flew in and I think my driver’s license is in my suitcase. I don’t drive much in New York and . . .”
“I know where you live, Lena.”
“So I guess you can take me to the Watersend pokey. I was going thirty over, and I have no license with me. This is Shane’s car and I have no idea where the insurance is.” Colleen opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out to stand next to Brad. She put her hands behind her back. “Get it over with.”
He tried not to laugh but she saw the curl of his smile as he shook his head. Together they walked to the back of the Jeep and leaned against the bumper. Cars eased past, slowly, the occupants craning their necks to see what was happening. Perfect fodder for gossip at the Bible study group or book club, for the neighborhood lawn party or bridge club.
“How’s your mama?” Colleen asked.
“She passed last year.” He placed his hand on his chest and patted over his heart. “It was a tough good-bye.”
Brad, a friend since second grade, had been a small kid who excelled at the violin, who’d kissed Hallie in truth or dare in seventh grade and beat Colleen at the archery contest at Summer Fun Day in the town square. And she hadn’t known his mama had passed.
“I am so sorry. I never heard.” She touched his blue-uniformed arm and squeezed.
“How could you know?” he asked. “You left a long time ago.”
“I come home sometimes,” she said. “And I wish someone would have told me.”
He took off his dark sunglasses and gazed at her directly. “If you come home, no one knows about it.”
“I scoot in and out.”
“We sure do miss you around here.”
“Thanks, Brad. But . . .” Colleen shifted her feet, dry dirt scattering like bugs, and she looked down the road, focused on anything but the reason she hadn’t returned: cars passing, a buzzard swooping down toward prey she couldn’t see, the sound of the palmetto leaves swaying against each other in the breeze in music like rain on a tin roof.
“I know. We all know. But still . . .”
“How’s Cindy?” Colleen asked after his wife, a woman he’d met in college, a woman Colleen had never met. She wanted to change the subject, avoid references, however indirect, to Hallie.
“She’s great. We have two kids now. Did you know that? Two boys.”
“That’s really sweet. I’m so glad.”
“You know, you were always such a good friend. So much fun.”
“I still am.” She smiled but felt the edges of it slide toward falseness. Was she still a good friend? Was she still fun? Some people might disagree.
A squawking noise emanated from a radio in his car and he nudged off the bumper. “Need to go.”
“No ticket? No arrest?”
He laughed. “Slow down. Remember where you are now.”
The flaring police lights came back on, the siren emitted a quick squeal and Brad drove away, leaving Colleen at the roadside. Remember where you are. But in his deep southern accent, which seemed to have become pronounced in her absence, he might just as well have said, Remember who you are.
Colleen leaned against the bumper of the Jeep, closed her eyes and raised her face to the naked South Carolina sun. She and Hallie had always believed that it was their sun, made for them, shining on them.
I know who I am, don’t you worry, mister, she wanted to holler at Brad’s fading taillights. I’m a New Yorker. A travel writer, and a damn good one.
* * *
• • •
After a dismal job hunt spent traipsing up and down the streets of New York that first spring, from one interview to another, the spent cherry blossoms dusting the sidewalks like pink snow, Colleen had refused to give up and go home. She’d been relentless, undeterred, returning again and again to those who’d told her no, as if the intimate rejection of her sister and Walter had padded and softened other rejections, rendering them inconsequential in comparison. Eventually, she’d landed her first job, writing for the Daily News about local getaways for New Yorkers. She’d sold her engagement ring at a pawn shop and got by on small jobs until, one by one, in what felt like agonizingly slow succession, she’d been hired for better jobs, and big
ger publications, able to leave Maggie’s basement.
In the decade since then she’d compiled a record of every locale she’d visited and every article she’d written. For a long while she’d collected bumper stickers, not to put on a car, but as a reminder of where she’d been. Now she carried in her mind a watercolor montage of travel. She couldn’t tell someone if she’d gone to Poland before or after London, but she could describe the emotional impression of each city, each landscape imprinted in her personal geography.
If she wanted the longitude and latitude, the name and coordinates, of every place she’d been, she could dig through piles of papers and notes and final published articles. But what she actually remembered was visceral and palpable. The window of her hotel room in Zermatt had framed the Matterhorn as it thrust from the earth in a pinnacle of glory, its snowy crown white and glistening. At a Navajo dance around a campfire in Arizona the flames had seemed to lick the stars, wanting to eat them alive. At the observatory at Mauna Kea in Hawaii the earth had faded away, overtaken by the sky with its multitude of stars and bringing to life the ancient belief that gods were hidden within the constellations.
What she’d wanted from those travels was to become someone else altogether, not to crawl out of her body but to claw her way out of the memories that threatened to define her. Somehow she believed that if she constructed a rich, full present and an even more exciting future, she could bury the past.
But it hadn’t worked that way.
No excursion or new setting had soothed her heartache; no first-class flight or five-star hotel had defined what “home” meant to her. Her job had blessed her with adventure and purpose, but it had never done what she’d intended—sew up the torn places where her family’s absence was felt.
Without her express permission, her heart continued to seek what she’d lost, what she couldn’t stop loving.
Her family didn’t know this side of her—the professional, voyage-trekking woman who’d experienced people and places they’d be hard-pressed to imagine. But didn’t they still know her better than anyone else? Who cared what her eyes had seen or her body had sensed if those experiences had no connection to what really mattered?
The Favorite Daughter Page 5