“It’s actually good news, in a way,” he said, pulling away a little and looking down at me. “She’s waking up. And now they can see where the problem is. They can relieve the pressure and then she should…she should be okay. I’ve done dozens of these operations myself, Annie. She’ll be okay.”
I know he was trying to sound reassuring but he wasn’t totally successful. I could feel him trembling.
“Can I see her?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, standing up. “There’s just time before they prep her for the operation. I think it will do her good. She’s been calling your name.”
Mom looked paler than ever. The tube was gone from her mouth. The bank of small screens behind her hummed, casting a ghostly green light on her face.
“You’ve just got a few minutes,” said Dad. “I’ll leave you with her. I need to talk to Dr. Minto before the operation.” He left.
I picked up her hand. It was cool.
“Mom,” I said. “It’s Annie. I’m here.”
She didn’t move. I leaned in closer. “Claire,” I said. “It’s Annie. I’m here.”
Her eyelids flickered. Ever so slightly.
“Claire,” I said. “I’m coming back as soon as I can. Hang on.”
She opened her eyes and looked into mine. But she didn’t look like Mom. She was Claire, twelve years old and frightened. She gripped my hand.
“Annie,” she whispered. “I have to tell you about the accident. It was my fault. When you got hit. Maisie never found out.” Then she gave a low moan and closed her eyes.
“Claire?” I said, “Claire?”
“Did she speak?” came my father’s voice from over my shoulder. He pushed past me and picked up her wrist, taking her pulse, his eyes scanning the screens above the bed. Dr. Minto came in behind him.
“Yes,” I said.
“Her heartbeat is erratic,” he said to Dr. Minto.
“We need to go in right now,” she replied.
I shrank back against the wall as a couple of nurses came hurrying in and they started doing things to Mom. I stumbled out of the room. Magda was standing outside the door, wringing her hands.
“Come,” she said to me. “Let’s get you home. We need to let the doctors look after your mom now.”
Dad came out and had a quick word with Magda and then they were wheeling Mom down the hall on a stretcher. Dad leaned over and took me by the shoulders.
“She’ll be okay, Annie,” he said. “Go home with Magda. I’ll call you as soon as there’s any news.”
I let Magda lead me to the elevators and then down the long white hall to the exit. She hailed a taxi and we sped home. Cars, traffic lights and houses streamed by, but I was blind to them. All I could see was Claire looking out of my mother’s face.
CLAIRE
MAISIE GLARED at me.
“I’m taking this,” she said, holding Annie’s sketchbook. “And I’m going to go through it and I’m going to discover exactly what you’ve been keeping secret from me all these years.”
“No!” I cried out. “You can’t! It’s private.”
“I thought my work was private until I found out that you’d been spying on me and taking things out of my studio!”
“No, Maisie, this is different. You can’t. You can’t read it. No!” I grabbed at the book and we struggled over it for a minute then I gave her a big push, and while she was off balance, I wrenched the book away from her and took off.
I tore down the stairs and burst out of the front door and ran. Ran as fast as I could, as fast as Annie, over the rocks and the tufts of grass and down the path, running. I could hear her calling me, but I kept running.
I got to the edge of the cliff, where I’d seen Annie in her red shorts a couple of days before.
I looked back toward the lighthouse. It rose up, a red tower against the bright-blue sky. My head throbbed. The pain was almost unbearable now.
Maisie came crashing out of the woods.
I took the sketchbook and threw it as far as I could, out over the ocean.
“NO! Claire, NO!” screamed Maisie. We watched as the book bounced off some rocks at the bottom of the cliff and into the water.
I turned to my mother. Her face was crumpling into tears.
“Claire—” she said. “Claire—Why would you do that? Annie’s last drawing?”
“I didn’t want you reading it,” I said. “It was mine.”
We stood on the edge of the cliff, staring at each other. I felt the world spinning, like we were locked in a moment in time that would never end.
ANNIE
WHEN WE GOT home I went straight up to my room, once I convinced Magda that I couldn’t eat supper and needed to be alone. I sat on my bed and looked at the painting of Newfoundland on my wall.
It was just as beautiful as ever. The road was so inviting—as if Maisie was saying come in, come here, come into this world and walk along the road to the lighthouse, and you will find something you have always wanted. I realized that that was what it always said to me. It was the promise of a different world, a world of heartbreaking beauty where everything was right and seabirds flew against the sky and the wind blew patterns in the tall grass.
But it wasn’t really that wonderful world. Now I knew how unhappy Claire had been there.
No wonder she hid it away in the attic. She didn’t want to be reminded of those sad years after Annie died, and her break with her mother. But I had hauled the painting down out of the attic and forced her to look at it again. Forced her to remember. I’d found her in my room a few times, sitting on the bed, staring at the painting with a lost look on her face.
Now that I thought about it, Mom had never been quite the same since I brought that painting down and put it up on my wall. She’d been more distant, more forgetful. The past was eating away at her.
CLAIRE
EVEN AS THE book hit the water I felt its loss. I could never look at Annie’s sketch again and get back to that afternoon before she died, before everything went so dark. I could never look at those sketches I stole from Maisie, those sketches of Annie’s sweet face. I could never turn the pages and look at the catalogue cutouts and read all the little fantasies I wrote about what it would be like if Annie had never died.
But I had to let it go. Maisie could never read it. Because I had written down exactly what happened the day Annie left us, and I never wanted Maisie to know the truth.
ANNIE
I OPENED THE BOOK of Maisie’s paintings to the index at the back. Of course it was there. Right under A. The Accident.
The painting was framed by a window, with white curtains billowing at each side. It was the second floor of a house, overlooking a bright, sunny street with a row of jellybean-colored houses opposite. A big black car with a shiny silver grille across the front was stopped on an angle in the street below, and there was a bright-red pool of blood on the road in front of it. A little girl with light-brown hair and blue shorts stood on the curb, looking toward the pool of blood. Across the street was the black Scottie dog with his whirling eyes. The blood was running down the road into a huge deep crack, where the road was split, as if there had been an earthquake. On this side everything was bright and shiny, and on the other the houses were gray.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to go into that painting.
“Annie!”
Someone was calling me. I opened my eyes.
“Annie, come!” It was Claire, calling me the way she did that first night when I fell into the lighthouse painting. I had to go.
I looked at the painting. The Scottie dog started to bark. I fell.
CLAIRE
I HAD A FIGHT with Annie that day. And a fight with Maisie. I wanted to stay home and keep reading The Secret Garden. I was just at the part where Mary had found Colin crying in the middle of the night. I wanted to find out who he was. Maisie had promised to take us swimming that afternoon, but she kept putting it off. She was working on some painting and didn’t want
to stop.
Annie was bugging me, jumping up and down, talking about going swimming. She wouldn’t leave me alone and let me read. I yelled at her and then Maisie came down and yelled at me and told me to take Annie to get Popsicles and we’d go swimming later. I didn’t want to go, but Maisie said I had to and that she couldn’t work with Annie making so much noise and, “Just do what I ask, Claire, and don’t always argue with me.” Then she went stomping back upstairs to her studio.
So I put my book down and told Annie to come on and crashed out the door and down the steps and started walking really fast and Annie was calling out behind me to wait up.
ANNIE
I WAS STANDING AT an open window with white curtains billowing out in a summer breeze. Maisie was standing beside me, a paintbrush in her hand, looking down into the street.
A girl in blue shorts and a white T-shirt went running down the front steps and started walking quickly down the street. Claire.
“Claire, wait for me!” called a little girl, and Annie came jumping down the steps, brown curls flying.
Claire kept on going. Annie caught up with her and grabbed her arm and gave it a little shake.
“You’re supposed to hold my hand, Claire. Maisie says. ALWAYS hold my hand.”
Claire shook her off and kept walking.
“Leave me alone, you little brat,” she said over her shoulder.
“You’re not supposed to call me that,” sang out Annie. “I’ll tell Maisie.”
A dog barked. A black Scottie appeared on the other side of the street. I opened my mouth to warn them but no sound came out.
“Sammy!” yelled Annie, and ran.
Right into the path of a big black car.
Claire lunged after her, yelling, “Annie, stop!”
The brakes squealed, and there was an awful thump. Then it seemed like everything just stopped.
I looked at Maisie. Her hands were over her mouth, and her eyes were full of so much terror and pain that I had to look away. Below us on the sidewalk Claire stood frozen, as if she’d been turned to stone.
The dog kept barking.
CLAIRE
I COULD NEVER TELL anyone what really happened. Never. Not Nan. Not Maisie. Not the police, or the psychiatrist. Nobody. I had killed my sister, as sure as if I’d pushed her in front of that car. If I had been holding her hand, she wouldn’t have gotten away from me. She would still be alive.
I had to keep it a secret. From everyone except Annie. Those first few days when she came back to haunt me, I thought I would break down and tell Nan. Annie looked so sad. Every time I saw her it was like she was reproaching me. But once I yelled at her to leave she went away. And then I prayed that she would forgive me and come back.
And she did. That night when she came into my room, when I was cold and the moon was making a silver path across the sea. She wasn’t mad. She was different: quiet and sad. But she had forgiven me. I know that’s why she came back. To let me know she still loved me and to help me get away from Maisie.
ANNIE
I CLOSED MY EYES. And then the noise started. Outside someone was screaming and beside me Maisie started to make a horrible, strangled noise. I covered my ears with my hands. Then I felt dizzy and the familiar falling feeling started, and I felt like I would never hit the bottom of the endless darkness.
“Annie! Annie, can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes. Magda was leaning over my bed, looking very worried.
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said. “You must have been having a terrible nightmare. Screaming your head off. You scared me clean out of my wits.”
I sat up. My room was dark. The light from the hall cut a bright oblong across the floor. Magda sat down beside me and put her arms around me.
I clung to her. I couldn’t get the image of that street in St. John’s out of my head. The car.
The dog. Claire. Annie jumping down the steps. Claire.
When Claire first told me about the accident, she said she was holding Annie’s hand, and that Annie had got away from her. But she wasn’t holding her hand. And Maisie saw it happen. Claire kept it secret all these years, but Maisie knew all along. And she never said anything.
I pulled away from Magda.
“Is there any news about Mom?” I asked. Her eyes skittered away from mine.
“Your dad phoned. The operation went well but she…well, she had a little trouble with her heart.”
“Is she—? Is she—?”
“She’s okay; they got her stabilized. All they can do now is wait. Your dad is with her but he didn’t want me to wake you up.”
“Oh.” I lay back on the bed. The world was still spinning around me.
“Could you eat something now?” asked Magda.
I shook my head. “No.” She was kind, and she was doing her best to make me feel better—but I needed to be alone. “I’ll be okay. I’ll probably go back to sleep.”
Magda took a little more persuading, but she finally left.
I reached for the book and turned the page. I never wanted to look at the painting of the accident again. The next page showed the painting of Claire’s room, the one with the red blanket hanging over the chair. The one called Empty, dated 1978. I wondered if Maisie painted it just after Claire went away to live with her Nan.
I turned the page.
It was a painting of Claire. She was my age, sitting on her bed, on my quilt, with a plate of oatmeal cookies beside her, a mug of what looked like hot chocolate on the bedside table. She was reading a book. I could even see the title, The Eternal Shadow by Philomena Faraday.
I’d seen the same book on her table the day we met on the causeway in the fog. The day we ate the oatmeal cookies on her bed.
Maisie had caught my mother’s expression perfectly. I’d seen that tiny frown on her face so many times when she was deep in a book. A wisp of her hair fell over her cheek. I half expected her to reach out her hand and take a cookie.
But nothing moved in the painting. It was just Maisie’s skill that made her seem so alive. The painting was called Reading and there was no mention of Claire in the caption.
I turned the page. There was Claire again, about nine years old, walking down the road with the lighthouse in the background. It was a lot like my lighthouse painting, but Claire was in the foreground, looking angry and sad, her face pinched. The painting was called Banishment, and again, there was no mention of Claire in the caption.
On the next page was a painting of Claire in front of a little trailer that had the word Bookmobile painted across the top. Her arms were full of books and she had a tiny smile on her face. It was called Anticipation. No mention of Claire.
Maisie had really seen her. She had painted her dissatisfaction, her loneliness, the way she could be totally absorbed in a book, the way she stood back from the world. Claire thought Maisie didn’t love her and couldn’t see her. But Maisie did. She couldn’t help painting her, but she’d kept her name out of it. She’d given Claire her privacy.
Suddenly I understood everything. I knew why I had been going into the paintings, why I was inside my mother’s dreams. I knew what I had to do.
“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE
CLAIRE
THE MORNING AFTER I threw Annie’s sketchbook away, Nan came and drove me to St. John’s. I turned my back on Crooked Head and Maisie and made a new life with Nan. It was hard to keep Maisie shut out of my life, but I did my best. The first few times she came to visit I refused to speak to her. She went ahead with the show in New York of the Annie paintings. I never told her about the one I had hidden under the stairs.
After a while I started talking to Maisie again. It took too much energy to be silent around her. But I said as little as possible and kept my business to myself. Nan kept her updated about what I was doing. St. Brigid’s was go
od for me. I reconnected with some of my old friends and made some new ones. I didn’t do a lot of socializing—mostly I just worked. I had my eye on an English scholarship to the University of Toronto and I never wavered. I wanted to get as far away from Crooked Head and Newfoundland as I could and never go back.
Nan died my first year away at university. It was a heart attack: very sudden. I went home for the funeral. Maisie hugged me, weeping, but I didn’t hug her back. I felt frozen inside.
Nan hated it that Maisie and I never made up. She split her money between us, and made Maisie the executor of her will. She set it up so I would get some money every year and Maisie had to be the one to send it to me. Nan knew that I would never be in touch with Maisie otherwise. I had to keep Maisie informed about what was happening to me with a letter every year before I could get the money.
I could have let it go. I mean, I needed the money in university, but after that, when I got my teaching job, I could have done without it. But by that time I had Annie, and I thought she should have Nan’s inheritance, for her future. And maybe I didn’t want to let go of that last thread that connected me to Maisie.
So every year I wrote a letter and told Maisie what was happening. She knew when I got my Ph.D., knew when I got married, knew when I had Annie. She sent me the painting of the lighthouse for a wedding present. And when Annie was born, she started sending presents for her birthday and Christmas, every year.
I couldn’t give them to her. I hadn’t even told Ron that my mother was alive. I had to keep Maisie secret. She sent the presents to a private post office box I kept for our correspondence, and I smuggled them home and hid them away in my old trunk from Crooked Head. I could have just thrown them away. But I didn’t.
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