by Lian Dolan
Maggie had barely left her makeshift studio in seventy-two hours, finishing up the pieces she had promised Liza and then starting on another of a view across the harbor of a house on the hill with glowing windows. Maggie was calling it Panes of Gold and Liza knew it could be a highlight of her sunflower show with its striking golden tones, so she’d backed off criticizing her sister for creating more chaos than order at Willow Lane. Maggie was working at a new level, so Liza let her be and took up her duties in the manuscript search.
But here was Serena, at Maggie’s request, presumably now demanding a tour of the property. Well, not demanding exactly, but still. Now, Liza supposed, she would have to spend an hour escorting Serena through the house. At least she had brought coffee.
“Come on in. Thank you for these. We have a lifetime supply of Entenmann’s in the kitchen. Why don’t you follow me? I’ll let Maggie and Tricia know you’re here.”
Serena followed her from the front hall past the living room, down the wide hallway, and toward the library. There hadn’t been any updating of Willow Lane, no tearing down of walls to create the open plan that was now de rigueur for any home renovation these days. Even the homes on the historic registry managed to keep their street views intact, as per the regulations, yet blew up the interior to create one big twenty-first-century entertaining room from many small nineteenth-century rooms. That wouldn’t have suited Bill Sweeney, who liked to have his own space when he wanted his own space.
At Willow Lane, each well-proportioned room was separated by doors and entryways. Despite Maggie’s warning to get there before Liza gave everything away, Serena had waited a few days to follow up. She didn’t want to seem too eager for information. As a result, the rooms did have a “just about to move” look with tagged furniture and boxes in the corners.
As they moved past the library, Liza stopped, reversed course, and opened the pocket doors, and went in, offering up the first insight into the house as a home. This handsome room featured three walls of built-in bookshelves painted a striking dark blue that Serena suspected Liza had chosen. The fourth wall was all windows facing out to the sea. There was no desk; instead, there was a faded red velvet couch and two wingback chairs upholstered in a handsome striped fabric. There was a ragged Oriental rug on the floor and the room was lit by brass floor lamps. Prints of what looked to be hand-drawn quotes from writers hung on the few feet of wall not covered in shelves.
“I love this room,” Liza said. “My father’s work papers are going to Yale, but all of these books from his personal library are going to the Pequot Library. I’m not sure they need more copies of John Updike and Robert Ludlum; you’d think they already have enough. But Pierce Crane was insistent that they get the complete library, even the airport paperbacks.”
Serena noticed that Liza didn’t say “our father” like Maggie had in her note. She tried not to let it bother her and took a lighter tone. “Maybe they plan on re-creating this room there, like Julia Child’s kitchen at the Smithsonian. You should give them the couch and the chairs for the reading room. That would add a mystique to the library.” As soon as she said it, she regretted it. She didn’t have enough of a relationship with Liza to suggest such a thing. Plus, she wanted the wingback chairs for herself, if offered.
But Liza surprised her. “That’s a fantastic idea, Serena. None of us want these things, but I bet Pequot would. They could attach small plaques that say, ‘William Sweeney Sat Here.’ Actually, it wasn’t until after my mother died that my father spent much time in here at all. He preferred reading out in the boathouse when we were little. It was quieter.” There was a pause, and the two women, the two sisters, took in the moment.
“It’s a lovely room,” Serena said, still holding the tray of coffees.
“Kitchen’s this way.”
Tricia looked down at her phone. Liza’s text said that Serena was in the kitchen and wanted a tour. Oh, and she had brought lattes for all. Then she had added several emojis of the panicked cat face imitating The Scream, presumably to indicate her personal panic, but Tricia knew that she would welcome Serena graciously. Liza had grown into politeness, any rebelliousness worn down after years of Jones family training and her own position in town as a business owner and arbiter of taste. Liza could no more be unwelcoming to Serena than she could to those tourists who wandered into the gallery, more interested in the whereabouts of a public bathroom than a watercolor.
Tricia felt the need to oversee any touring about the property. Though the pressure was mounting to find that memoir, she was more worried about what Serena might write than what her father did write. She’d successfully pushed thoughts of Serena out of her head for a few days, but now she was back, standing in the kitchen and demanding a tour.
She looked over at Raj, who was carefully flipping through Dispatches, a book on the Vietnam War that her father had used to research Bitter Fruit. Even as a writer, her father had never felt like the physical books were sacred items, meant to be kept pristine and perfect. Bill Sweeney commandeered books, underlining, writing in the margins, tearing out pages if necessary. “I own it,” he used to say by way of explanation. “It’s mine.” Dispatches was one of those books and Raj was taking photos of certain pages that looked particularly hard-worn. Someday, a doctoral student in literature would use the notes William Sweeney wrote in the margins as the basis of a doctoral thesis about major novels on the Vietnam War, including Bitter Fruit. Raj had told Tricia that his job was to make sure all the pieces were in place for that to happen.
“I’m headed to the house for a bit. Do you need anything?” Raj had settled into the boathouse with a few belongings, his computers and gear and his bike. In a few short days, Raj and Tricia had established an easy working rhythm. Like two diligent high school students working together on a research project, they were shy with each other, trying to keep the focus on the work at hand and ignoring the obvious mutual attraction. They worked side by side for about five or six hours a day, mainly Raj asking questions and Tricia guiding him through the contents of the office. Then she’d go for a long run and spend the evening wondering what Raj was doing in the boathouse loft and if he was only laughing at her jokes or catching her eye at various times throughout the day because she was Bill Sweeney’s daughter. Or was it because he felt like she felt? Like something was happening between them.
Tricia felt foolish; there were so many other pressing issues at hand and she was distracted by some guy. She knew in a few days she’d be done searching every possible nook and cranny for the thumb drive and would have to move her efforts into the house—the attic, her father’s bedroom, the library. But she wasn’t ready to leave Raj yet. His presence was something she couldn’t describe, at once familiar and exotic. She wasn’t used to being off-kilter around a man.
In fact, in the previous relationships she’d had—including the college boyfriend, the guy in law school, and the ill-advised fling with the client—the major draw was that she was exactly on kilter, comfortable to a fault. “Wow, that sounds sexy,” Maggie had once said when Tricia described her relationship with Steve, the guy from law school, “like dating a good fleece jacket.”
Even with Blair Wynan, her client and a man she should not have been seeing, the tenor of the relationship hadn’t been the frantic forbidden love portrayed on TV dramas where the female lawyers wore lace bras under their silk blouses, ready for action in the middle of a depo. Despite the twenty-year age difference, she and Blair shared similar academic credentials, athletic backgrounds, even lived on the same Upper East Side block. Had he not been a client, had Tricia not gotten pregnant, the two of them might have moved toward marriage. The second for him, of course. But when she discovered she was pregnant, thanks to his vasectomy failure, a gulf opened up between them.
Tricia, who was meticulous about birth control, was furious at his cavalier attitude about the pregnancy and equally disappointed in his lack of compassion over the miscarriage. Even though she was terrified of the pr
ofessional repercussions of a child so early in her career, a fact she was later ashamed of, she expected some sort of understanding from Blair. He was relieved, thrilled actually, when she lost the baby at nine weeks. (“Phew. Dodged a bullet!” were his exact words when she called him from the gynecologist’s office.) When Tricia ended the relationship, he thanked her for her sacrifice with a straight face.
Tricia hadn’t been involved with anyone in the years since or even mentioned the miscarriage, except to her doctor. She wanted to power through on her own and she thought she’d handled it well, having no idea that Liza and Maggie’s back-channel communications often revolved around Tricia’s verbal shortness and exasperated tone of voice.
But now, in the wake of tremendous loss and upheaval, Tricia found herself attracted to this accidental officemate and she was thrown.
“Hey, Raj . . .” Tricia said again because she loved saying his name. “Did you hear me?”
“I didn’t.”
“I’m headed up to the house to talk to a . . . journalist.” That seemed like the safest description. As she had learned from the hundreds of hours listening to true crime podcasts while walking to work, when you’re lying, it’s best to stick as close to the truth as you can. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you. I’ll make some tea here in a bit. Where’s he from?”
“The journalist? It’s a she,” Tricia corrected. “She’s from nowhere. Freelance, fishing around for a story.”
“Ah, my mistake. Is there one?”
“One what?”
“A story to tell. Beyond the missing memoir.”
“I think there might be. But I’m not sure who the protagonist is yet.”
Immediately, Tricia was struck by the familiarity of the scene: two sisters, sitting across the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating Entenmann’s while the sun streamed through the big picture windows. The Sweeney sisters had spent hundreds of hours at the old butcher block table tucked in the cozy corner of the kitchen playing games, doing homework, drinking coffee, drinking tea, and eventually drinking wine. Talking, laughing, crying, complaining about their parents, their boyfriends, their schoolwork, and their bosses. The night their mother died, Julia fixed them all hot chocolate while they sat, dazed and devasted. Maggie even fell asleep at the table that night, simply putting her head down and closing her eyes. It felt like their whole life had unfolded at that kitchen table and now, Serena sat with Liza, sharing a moment.
“Welcome to Willow Lane.” Tricia had decided to emulate her big sisters and be as warm to Serena as she could muster. Kill with kindness was her new motto, and by kill, she meant kill any possible tell-all that Serena might be planning. As Tricia had discussed with Cap, she was frustrated about splitting the estate with another person mainly because there wasn’t much of an estate to cash in on. But, in truth, Not Much Left divided by four Sweeney sisters wasn’t significantly less money than Not Much Left divided by three Sweeney sisters. Still, it wasn’t easy for her to be warm. “Oh, that’s right, you were here at the wake. And Halloween. Well, welcome back. And technically, you do own a quarter of it now, so you should have a look at the place.”
“You know, I don’t think about my piece of the estate like that. This is your home, not mine.” Serena was determined not to let the Sweeneys get the upper hand as they had at Cap’s office. She was going to stand her ground. She wanted them to know she wasn’t as taken with them as she had appeared. “This always was a very special house. I remember your mother hosting those May Day celebrations. Didn’t she have all the neighbor girls over and we danced around the maypole in crowns made of flowers? She taught us some Irish songs, too. I recall being here for several of those. Not that many people celebrate May Day. It was memorable.”
With only a few words, Liza was taken back to her childhood. Maeve had celebrated the day with a nod toward her Celtic heritage, and Serena was right. There was dancing, singing, lots of little girls in party dresses with flowers in their hair. Her mother would dress as the May Queen with all sorts of hippie-inspired flourishes and recite poetry with great flair while the other mothers in town, clutching their wine spritzers and Nantucket straw bags, looked on in bemused confusion. Liza imagined that Birdie Tucker had plenty to say at the next Ladies’ Day at the club about “that crazy pagan poet Maeve Sweeney.” The celebrations had only gone on for a few years, while Tricia was still very young. Then their mother was diagnosed with cancer and the May Day parties stopped. Liza hadn’t thought about them in years. They had been wonderful. “Do you remember those, Tricia?”
“I don’t remember the parties, but I remember that photo of Mom. She looked like a character out of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with some sort of bird’s nest in her hair and she was wearing a toga. She was not really Southport material.”
“We should find that one. It must be here somewhere.”
After Maeve died, the photos of her that had been all over the house slowly disappeared. Every time the girls came back from school or a trip, one or two more had been tucked away, as if their father couldn’t bear to witness her image. There was one photo left in the boathouse and the sisters each had photos in their own homes, but here at Willow Lane, Maeve was a memory. Liza turned to Serena. “What did your mother make of those parties, Serena?”
“My mother stood in harsh judgment of most events that involved genuine joy and spontaneity. Frivolity wasn’t her thing.”
“Huh,” Tricia said. “Then how did your mother end up sleeping with my father?”
Liza snapped, “Tricia!”
“I’m sorry. It’s the obvious question. We all want to know, so let’s not pretend we don’t.” So much for killing with kindness, but Serena had opened the door by characterizing Birdie Tucker as a woman who was neither passionate nor spontaneous, two essential elements for a one-night stand or any sort of illicit affair between married coconspirators. “You’re a journalist, you must have asked her. What happened between the two of them? When? Where?” Tricia wanted to ask why, but that seemed over the top.
Serena was about to answer when Maggie burst through the swinging door into the kitchen. She was wearing a white utility jumpsuit covered in paint splatter and her magnificent red hair was tied up in a scarf. She was glowing in the way a person might after they’d encountered a secret crush. Her work was going well and her spirit reflected it. Seeing Serena seated at the kitchen table with Liza and Tricia was a shocking sort of throwback to the best and worst days in the Sweeney family history. Maggie made a beeline to hug Serena. “Hey, you’re here. I’m so happy!” Then Maggie took a breath and noticed the cool temperature of the room. “So, what’d I miss?”
There was dead silence. Then Tricia spoke up. “I asked how her mother and our father happened to sleep together.”
“I can’t believe you,” Maggie said, always comfortable taking the underdog’s side as a sign of her superior empathy. In this room, Serena was definitely the underdog. “I’m so sorry. My invitation was not an ambush. Jesus, Tricia.”
“Please, I feel like the least we should be with each other is honest. This isn’t an ideal situation. And we’re here because the adults in our lives were less than honorable. So, everybody should hop off those high horses.”
“I didn’t ask,” Serena insisted. “I never asked my mother how or why.”
“How is that possible?” Tricia wouldn’t let it go.
Serena didn’t back down. “I need more information before I seek an explanation. That’s how I work, Tricia. I research first, ask questions later, if possible. I would rather go to my mother with a folder full of facts for her to confirm than sit in front of her with a blank notebook and have her tell me a story that may or may not be true. This is my training.” The four of them sat at the table drinking the lattes and feeling each other out. Liza, uncomfortable with the content of the conversation, organized a plate of lemon cookies to go with the marble loaf cake. Nobody ate anything, but at least the exercise of plat
ing the cookies gave her an excuse to avoid eye contact with Serena. Maggie, on the other hand, was completely engaged, nodding along to indicate her solidarity with Serena.
“I understand that you all want to know about their relationship before you can move on with our relationship . . .” Serena waved her hand around, indicating the four of them. “So do I. But my mother isn’t like I imagine your mother was, open and articulate about life and emotions. My mother and I don’t hold each other in confidence. Someday soon, my mother and I will sit down and have a conversation about this. But first, I need to understand more about William Sweeney and what’s at stake.”
“I don’t get that at all. It’s the first question I’d ask,” Tricia said.
“Me, too,” Maggie agreed. “I’d want the details.”
“Not me,” Liza said.
For a moment, there was a communal understanding of the strangeness of the situation. How did they all get here? And, really, what questions did they want answered?
Maggie saw an opportunity to be the great defender. “Are you satisfied, Tricia? This isn’t a trial. Can we give Serena a tour now?”
“Yes, of course. I apologize, Serena. The last few weeks have been filled with change and information, some of which, frankly, has been startling. You’ve had a chance to sit with these . . . revelations for several months. For us, it’s been a lot to take in. I ask questions first, put it all together later. That’s my training.” Tricia’s phone rang and she popped up to answer it. “It’s work. So much for my sabbatical. This could take a couple of hours. Excuse me.”
Liza was relieved that Tricia had left the kitchen. “Why don’t we show you the boathouse first?”