by T. Greenwood
“No,” I said. Gus. He was going to be so pissed.
He lifted the plastic lid from the plate, revealing pale eggs, limp toast, and three slivers of anemic cantaloupe.
“Thanks,” I said, grimacing.
“It tastes better than it looks,” he offered.
* * *
After breakfast I fell asleep again; whatever painkillers they had me on made it impossible to stay conscious for very long.
“Knock, knock,” Seamus said, leaning into the room. He was holding a bouquet of flowers. He seemed tentative. As if I might not remember who he was, what had happened.
“Hi,” I said. “Thank you for bringing me here last night.”
He shrugged and sat down in the chair next to the bed, setting the bouquet of flowers on the radiator.
“You okay?” he asked. “I didn’t realize how hard you’d hit your head.”
I nodded.
“Can I call somebody for you? Pilar? Your family?”
I shook my head. Of course, I’d need to let them know. But not now.
“My phone?” I asked.
“Right here,” he said. “I went back to the island this morning and grabbed it. I was going to try to find Pilar’s number, but it was dead. I used my charger in the car, but you have it locked.”
“You went in the house?” I asked.
“I hope you don’t mind. I figured you’d need this.”
“No, of course not.” I thought of what sort of mess I had left behind. Pomegranate puke and a bunch of empty wine bottles. Who knew what else.
“I saw the photos,” he said.
The photos. That odd little exhibit I’d curated.
His eyes looked sad. I imagined him in my makeshift studio, studying the woman’s face. The hide-and-go-seek photo of himself and the little girl.
“Who was she?” I asked, the question that had been plaguing me since I’d printed that first picture.
He looked past me to the window. I waited as he seemed to gather his thoughts.
“Her name was Sybil Reid. I met her when she was in Skowhegan, at the art school there, for the summer program.”
I’d heard of the program before. It had been around since the forties. An artist colony of sorts on a farm in Maine.
“When?” I asked.
“Nineteen seventy-seven.”
“What were you doing at an artist colony?”
He laughed. “Oh, no, I wasn’t at the school,” he said. “I had a friend from the island, from growing up, whose parents moved to Skowhegan when he went away to college. He was home for the summer and invited me to come stay. His dad put us to work on the farm. It was such a nice break to be back in the country after all those years in Boston. I was studying for the bar. It was peaceful. No distractions.”
“Fiona?”
“Fiona had just graduated college and wanted to get married, start a family.” He took a deep breath. “We were so young.”
“So it was a summer fling?” I said. “With Sybil?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. He turned away from the window and looked at me. His face was sorrowful. “I loved her. I wanted to leave Fiona and be with her. But Sybil broke up with me right before I went back to Boston. She didn’t want to be tied down to some stuffy lawyer. Stuck as some sort of housewife in the suburbs. I didn’t blame her. It sounded awful to me too.”
“But the baby?”
His eyes grew glassy.
“I didn’t know she was pregnant,” he said. “I went back to Boston, passed the bar, and started working at Fiona’s father’s firm. We got married. Fiona knew how attached I was to the island, and so her father gave us the house as a wedding gift.”
“Wow,” I said, thinking of the palatial estate next door.
“Money was nothing to him. And real estate on the island was cheap.”
I shook my head in disbelief. I thought of our own inheritance, the shitty duplex in Queens. An inheritance that wasn’t even really mine at all.
“Fiona promised we would bring our children there in the summers, on holidays.”
“And then?”
“And then I got a letter from my friend in Skowhegan. Sybil had asked him to contact me, said she needed to see me.”
I scowled.
“The property came with a guest house,” he said.
“Pilar’s house?”
He nodded.
“So you moved her into the guest house,” I said, thinking about that photo. The one of her standing in the mirror, the bed behind her. I thought of the baby, the newborn about to scream. “And you left her there?”
He shook his head. “She needed a place to stay. To work. It was supposed to be temporary.”
“But . . .”
“It wasn’t. Time passed. A year, two years. I was working in Boston, trying to establish myself. Make a career. I came to see her whenever I could. Weekends. Holidays. Fiona hated it here. Said it made her feel claustrophobic. I told her I was visiting my parents.”
“What happened? Why didn’t you just leave her?”
“She got pregnant,” he said.
“Sybil?”
“Fiona.”
Boy, this guy was busy.
“But you told me you don’t have any children,” I said. If I was counting right, this meant he had at least two.
He shook his head. “The baby was stillborn. At eight months. It devastated her. I couldn’t leave her. I couldn’t abandon her.”
“But Sybil. Her little girl?”
“I ended it. Told her she could keep the house; I even deeded it to her. If she sold it, she could have bought something somewhere else. I would have taken care of them. I wanted to be a part of Rachel’s life.”
Rachel? My head was pounding, my arm throbbing. The lovely haze of the painkillers was lifting.
It was just as Pilar had thought; he’d kept her there. And she was trapped. An artist with a small child to care for. No resources, no money. No choice.
“What happened to Sybil?” I asked. Demanded.
Seamus stared out the window. It was twilight, the city lights twinkling like stars.
“Seamus? What happened to her?”
He looked at me, his face red, his expression strained. “She fell,” he said, shaking his head.
“Fell?” I recalled my tumbling, end over end, Alice down the rabbit hole. “What do you mean? Down those stairs? What happened to the little girl? Rachel?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I really shouldn’t have said anything. Ancient history. And you need to get some sleep. The doctors said they want to keep you one more night, because of the concussion, but you can go home tomorrow. Let me know if you need anything? Here’s my number.”
Falling
“I’m such an asshole,” Pilar said.
“No.” I shook my head.
Mascara was running down her cheeks now, and I felt like the asshole. As soon as I called her from the hospital, she drove straight back to Maine, took me with her on the ferry back to the island.
“I promised I’d get those stupid stairs fixed. Oh my God, what if it had been Avery?”
I didn’t tell her the same thing had gone through my mind. I shook my head. “I had too much wine. It was stupid. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“And I shouldn’t have taken off. You’re going through so much shit, and I just abandoned you. What if Seamus hadn’t been next door? I am so sorry. For everything.”
She sat on the edge of the couch where I was lying. She was wearing a sunny yellow housedress I didn’t recognize with a fuzzy argyle cardigan. Motorcycle boots and leg warmers. She had draped the cashmere robe over me and covered me with a cozy blanket. My pain pills were within reach, the iPad, a stack of books, and a mug of tea.
“And I’m sorry about the photos. The film. We don’t have to do anything with them,” she said. “I totally get it. We can just pretend like we never even found the box.”
“No,” I said. “I want to underst
and what happened to her.”
“What do you mean, what happened to her?”
“There was an accident, I think,” I said. “Seamus said she fell. But he wouldn’t say anything else.”
“Oh my God, do you think he pushed her?” Her eyes widened.
I almost laughed. “No,” I said. I’d seen the sorrow in his eyes when he was talking about her. He would never have harmed her.
“Did Fiona push her?”
Now, that I could see. Again, I recalled my own fall down the stairs, the way the world spun, kaleidoscoping around me. Fragments and blur.
“Who knows,” I said.
“Can I see the other photos?” she asked tentatively, and I felt my heart snag a little. Distrust lingering like a rusty barb.
She was right. The photos were amazing, beautiful. What if Pilar changed her mind? They didn’t belong to me. They belonged to her. If she wanted, she could bring the collection to her manager. They could be culled through and curated, blown up and displayed. Sibyl’s entire life could be exposed.
“Okay,” I said. “The newest ones are in that manila envelope in the kitchen.”
* * *
“What do you suppose it means?” Pilar asked later, after she had gone through the photos. “Epitaphs and Prophecies?”
“I think the Epitaphs photos are little monuments to her life before.”
“Before what?”
“Before Maine. Before her baby. She was really trapped here. She came here to work, to be with Seamus. But he left her here. Look at how sad she looks in these photos,” I said.
Pilar studied the images of her, the self-portraits. And strangely, viewing them with Pilar made me look at them differently, as if I were seeing them through Pilar’s eyes. I had identified with Sybil as a mother. After Avery was born, there were several weeks when I felt like my world had somehow collapsed. It was like one of those plastic folding cups you use for camping. It had once been wide open, waiting to be filled, and after Avery was born, it felt like it had folded in on itself, my days that had been so broad and filled with possibility, now suddenly trapped inside the walls of the duplex, into a routine so dull and domestic I worried it might never open up again. I could understand the ennui, the exhaustion, the boredom of motherhood. I felt the despair of blistered nipples and a body taken over by a child’s needs. But Pilar had no children. What did she see? A woman. An infant. A house. Her house.
“She’s beautiful,” Pilar said.
I hadn’t thought about Sybil’s beauty. I’d only considered the beauty of the photos. Of the images themselves.
“Why call these Prophecies?” she asked. “Isn’t a prophecy a prediction for the future?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think these are clues.”
“Clues about what?”
“About whatever happened to her.”
Pilar peered at the photo of the little girl playing hide-and-go-seek. She touched her finger to the man standing in the background, young Seamus, with his finger pressed against his lips.
* * *
We Googled her.
Hunched over the iPad, we typed her name, Sybil Reid, into the search box. Looked for her on Facebook, as if she might just appear, a sixty-year-old woman posting photos of her cat. People searches, ancestry.com, divorce records. Finally, I clicked on a link to public death records. There were four Sybil Reids. But the last one on the list, Sybil R. Reid, born January 4, 1953, died November 25, 1981. It said she had died at the age of 28 on Bluffs Island, Maine. It was her.
Of course it didn’t say how she’d died, didn’t offer a photo. And the fact she had been reduced to this, to a couple of dates and her place of death, made me feel sad. There was no obituary, no epitaph at all.
“What do you think happened to her daughter? If her mother died, wouldn’t he have taken her in? He clearly had the money.”
“Well, I highly doubt Fiona would have let him bring his illegitimate daughter into that house,” I said.
“How long did you say this house was in probate?” I asked.
“Well, it’s been empty since the eighties. But it didn’t go up for auction until I bought it.”
“Who set that into motion?” I asked.
“I have no idea. It was apparently abandoned. Maybe the city?”
“What city?” I laughed, thinking of the little cluster of shops and restaurants in “downtown” Bluffs Island.
“Maybe Seamus can tell you.”
“I doubt it,” I said. He’d been so elusive. Withholding. And I, if anyone, could understand this reticence.
“We really need to find her,” I said.
“Who?”
“His daughter,” I said. “She’s the one who deserves to have these photos.”
“Look her up,” Pilar said softly. “She would probably be our age, right?”
Rachel Reid, I typed. There were a zillion Rachel Reids. The profile photos on Facebook showed a hundred different Rachels. Black, white, Asian, Native American. Children, teenagers, young women, middle-aged women. There were death notices and LinkedIn profiles and Twitter handles. There was a Rachel Reid who wrote children’s books and a Rachel Reid who’d been arrested for drunk driving in Kentucky. Rachel Reid had Pinterest boards with knitting patterns and recipes for Christmas cookies. Searching for her was like searching for a grain of sand on a beach.
* * *
I couldn’t paint. It would be at least six weeks, up to twelve, for my elbow to heal. As late as the beginning of April. I had to call Ginger and let her know what had happened. That there was no way the painting would be ready by the end of January. So much for Ikea. So much for Bjorkar.
I also wouldn’t be able to take care of Avery. Not like this. Pilar would be here to help me, to take care of her after Gus brought her back to the island, but I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to be here anymore.
Pilar had set up shop in one of the guest rooms upstairs. I could hear her above me every now and then, the creaking of the wooden floors. Once, I heard the swing in Avery’s room and pictured Pilar swinging.
When I looked out the window toward the ocean, there was a heavy marine layer that obscured the view. It was quiet in the house, so quiet I could hear the distant lowing of a foghorn. Had I actually thought I’d come here and be inspired to paint? If so, what? I’d been painting trees for other people for so long now, I wasn’t even sure if I had any idea who I was as an artist anymore. That wild spark that used to ignite in my chest whenever I hung a new canvas, when I opened a tube of paint, was nothing more than a barely burning ember.
Had I thought coming here, getting away from the duplex, from that horrible, divided life, might somehow help make things better for Avery? Clearly, that wasn’t working either. Instead, she was wetting the bed every night. Not knowing where she belonged anymore. What kind of selfish person was I?
And had I thought coming here would somehow protect me from the day in my life that changed everything? That I could somehow flee from Robby and Rick Rousseau? Forget them? Rick Rousseau wasn’t going to let me forget.
I knew the DNA evidence would show Robby was not the one who raped me. Despite his confession and my silence, there could be no physical evidence linking Robby to the woods that afternoon. To me. Rick seemed to think I still had the power to keep his secret, but was that true? I had no idea if his DNA would resemble Robby’s. I didn’t even know if they had the same mother and father. And he’d used a condom. My head spun with what this all meant.
Robby had been a model prisoner. He’d found Jesus. Been saved. And Jan Bromberg and the Innocence Project were hellbent on proving me a liar. If I refused to testify, would the evidence speak for itself? And what would that look like? Rick would go to prison, but would Robby be released? They’d never recovered the knife he’d used to cut my throat. And Robby had cut my throat. He’d been the one to stab my shoulder, my neck. He wasn’t innocent. He’d tried to rape me. He’d tried to kill me.
But there was every po
ssibility in the world that if I kept my silence, this insistent silence, he would be set free. If I didn’t speak up, if I didn’t tell the truth, then they would open the doors and send him out into the world. As a mother of a little girl, how could I allow someone like Robby Rousseau to walk free?
But if I told what he did and he still got out, he might come after me.
My mind was buzzing, connecting to one thought then shorting out. But when I squeezed my eyes shut, all I could see were the images, the photos Sybil had taken. The epitaphs to a life she gave up. To a life that was stolen from her. Those images, the truth obscured for thirty-five years.
* * *
I gathered the stack of prints I’d made before the accident, spilled them across my lap. I realized I hadn’t finished going through them. I’d been so caught up in the hide-and-go-seek photos I hadn’t gone through the rest.
I knew exactly where these photos were taken: on the bluff at the edge of this property. They were dizzying. Because rather than focusing on the panoramic view of the ocean, instead, she was fixated on the earth below. I felt dizzy as I looked at them, at the rocks and sand. It was like the series of boardwalk pictures, a study. But what sort of study was this? What was she waiting for this time?
“You don’t think, maybe she . . .” Pilar said.
I startled. Pilar was standing behind me. I felt like she was looking over my shoulder, reading my diary.
She fell, he’d said. “I need to talk to Seamus.”
I reached for my cell phone but then realized I needed to ask him in person. I’d be too easy to dismiss over the phone.
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
I shook my head. “No. It’s okay. But can you help me?”
She helped me slip on my Ugg boots and put my parka halfway on, one empty sleeve draped over my damaged arm. She opened the back door for me, and I made my way across the small backyard toward the woods. I could feel her eyes on me as I stood at the tree line. I stared at the path that cut through the woods. This would have been the path Seamus took to see her, in the middle of the night, perhaps. The dark woods between their two lives.