by Kelly Rimmer
“Maybe this is where his savings went,” Ruth says suddenly. “I don’t know how expensive art supplies are, but surely this junk represents a lot of wasted money.”
“Maybe that’s part of the puzzle,” I sigh. “But Tim said there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars missing—pretty much all of Dad’s retirement savings. There’s not that much paint up here.”
Ruth shakes her head slowly.
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t bear to watch Dad fade away. It’s almost too much to bear, but at the same time there’s just no way to escape it, because the signs of his illness are everywhere now.” She suddenly, furiously kicks an empty soda bottle. It flies across the room and hits an exposed beam, then drops and disappears into the mess below. “Even in the damned attic.”
I disentangle my arms so that I can link my elbow through hers, and rest my head on her shoulder.
“I know, Ruthie. I know exactly what you mean.”
In this pain, I can connect with her. This is our family’s tragedy, and we each play a part in the suffering. By sharing it, we can survive it, because we subconsciously remind one another that one day soon, this will end, and we’ll still be standing side by side. Dad will be at peace, and Ruth and I—and Jeremy and Tim—will all still have each other. We are his legacy, and despite the tragedy of his current circumstances, that’s actually a pretty spectacular thing to have in common.
But just like Dad’s locked attic, there’s a whole other world inside my mind that I have to keep separate from Ruth at the moment. I can’t bear to talk about what’s going on in the quiet moments when I’m alone, or worse, when I’m alone with my son. I don’t have the language because I haven’t made sense of it myself.
If Ruth wants to support me through that world of pain, she’ll have to be patient with me...just as I’m trying to be.
Grace
December 15, 1957
I used to think every woman was born to be a mother. I thought the first time I held my child would be a moment of perfect clarity and purpose. This wasn’t a one-off moment of romanticism from a girl too young to know better—no, I was expecting that swell of meaning and beauty right up until they lifted my bloody, screaming son from between my legs and rested him on my breast. After twenty-eight hours of back labor, a roughshod episiotomy and a less-than-sympathetic obstetrician who was irritated to miss a golf date, I was ready to stare down at my baby’s little face to be reassured that it had all been worth it.
So you can imagine my surprise when I looked down at Timothy’s perfect features and felt nothing but relief that it was all over.
Labor seems like an ending, the full stop on the sentence of nine long months of anticipation. In reality, labor is the beginning of an endless journey. Even when I am gone, my children will still walk the earth, and the journey will continue.
I was fine for the first few days after the birth, even if bewildered by the disparity between my physical reality and my inner world. I was still in a great deal of physical pain, although I felt strangely numb on the inside, and was dreadfully confused about why the rush of love I was supposed to feel still hadn’t arrived. The “baby blues” landed with full force on day three, the same day that Mother came to the hospital to meet Tim for the first time. She handed me her carefully embroidered handkerchief and assured me that the blues were a normal part of having a child, and that the tears would pass within a day—just a sign that my milk was coming in. She was right about that at least: by midnight that night, my breasts were painfully engorged. She was wrong about everything else.
I wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital bed for ten days after the birth and other than a brief shower each day, I was expected to remain on bed rest. Between the agony of learning to breastfeed, the agony of my stitches and the indignity of trying to use the bedpan, I felt like my whole life had become suffering, and I was stunned by how blasé everyone was about my situation. I was in constant pain and my body seemed to have been damaged beyond recognition, and no one at all seemed concerned about any of that. I felt like shaking the doctor when he’d assure me in that condescending tone that “this is difficult for all young mothers.” Patrick came to visit during the allotted hour each day, but he spent a lot of time staring at the baby with a confused mix of pride and terror, and seemed to have little energy to inquire about my welfare. Most of the nurses were brisk and unsympathetic—run off their feet, and I suppose they become hardened after a while. That entire week was so draining, but I clung to the hope that I’d feel better after some sleep, and once I was home and back to my own bed.
When they finally discharged us, I remember walking down the steps from the hospital ward with Timmy in my arms, looking back at the doors cautiously. I was certain someone was about to tell us they’d made a terrible mistake and we needed to come back inside. Even as I slid into the car, I was confused. Were they really going to let us just walk out of there with a baby? I had no idea what I was doing. How was I ever going to keep him alive? There seemed to be some great assumption that I had some experience with babies or even maternal instincts that would kick in to help him thrive, but that just wasn’t the case. I was the same clueless woman who’d walked through those doors in labor eleven days earlier, just slightly thinner, significantly sorer, and now holding another life in my hands. I cried all the way home, and Patrick just kept shooting me bewildered stares. I’m sure he thought I was being overly emotional, and maybe I was. But it wasn’t his responsibility to care for that baby. He’d be going to work for ten hours a day, leaving me at home with his son, and overnight my work had become a job I’d never been trained to do.
No one at the hospital had mentioned anything to me about Timmy waking up through the night, and I felt sure that they would have, because I was certain that behavior wasn’t normal. Still, now that we were home, Tim was crying every few hours, demanding milk. This worried Patrick, too, and we were both convinced that something was wrong. We scraped together the money to take the baby to the doctor, who told us that my milk was too thin. He said that formula was better for the baby, scientifically developed to help him grow and sleep. So we switched to the bottle, and it made no difference. If anything, things got worse, because now I was up fumbling with bottles in the middle of the night and Timmy was constantly constipated.
It was several weeks before Patrick’s aunt Nina came to visit, and when I mentioned how worried I was about Timmy’s inability to sleep through the night, she laughed and laughed. Aunt Nina found it hysterically amusing that Patrick and I didn’t even know enough to recognize typical newborn behavior, but how could we know? This was like the shock of labor all over again. I had been so caught off guard by the pain of those first few contractions I actually felt cheated—because someone should have warned me. Childbirth and the early days of childrearing are a shameful business, spoken about only in hushed whispers when the men aren’t around. The scant knowledge I did have came courtesy of Maryanne. Our cat had kittens when we were younger, and she’d whispered to me quite scandalously about what had happened.
So there I was, in our ramshackle apartment, miles away from my parents, alone for sixty hours a week while Patrick built houses, with a baby who cried all day and night, and gradually, I began to lose my mind. People can use those words so flippantly, but I mean them in their truest, darkest sense: I felt like I had lost the essence of myself, and the new creature I had become instead was worthless and useless. Motherhood changed me—it had sucked the very life from my bones, and now I was an exhausted, empty shell. It was the strangest thing—the way my thoughts about myself evolved, until I held nothing but disdain for the person I’d become. I cried from morning until night, and sometimes, Timmy did, too. Sadness drenched me to my core, and I was so lost in my confused thoughts, I couldn’t stop to wonder if this was the way it was supposed to be.
Somewhere during the blur of this, I realized that Patrick was staying out longer aft
er work. In hindsight, I can see that our domestic reality didn’t match the picture he’d had in his mind for our life together, and so instead of trying to fix it, he ran from it.
I can’t say I blame him. If I’d had the option, I’d have run, too.
SIX
Beth
1996
Once Ruth goes back to work, I fetch heavy gloves and some trash bags from downstairs, then pick my way cautiously across the carpet of junk. First order of business is to remove anything that looks like it was once food, and to air the place out. I climb over the trash, gingerly at first in case I disturb any rodents, and open the windows. It’s windy outside and it’s going to be cold up here, but that’s still better than dealing with the smell.
I do one pass of the room, scooping up plates and bowls and packets of what once contained junk food. I’m becoming less anxious about disturbing critters, and a little bolder as I move about the place, trying to formulate a plan. My gaze lands on one of the canvases, and I’m suddenly drawn to it, almost on autopilot.
This one falls somewhere in the middle of the color spectrum that Dad used—neither dark nor bright. It’s composed of muted shades of blue and green—the colors of the ocean on a cloudy day. I lift the painting, revealing the surface of a table beneath it. Ruth’s crack earlier isn’t far off the mark—I wouldn’t make much of an art critic and I don’t have an eye for visual aesthetics. Even so, I stare at the image for a while, trying to figure out what it means.
I can see part of a capital B in this painting, but I’m not convinced that’s what he was trying to represent. It could be almost anything—it could be nothing. I gaze around the room, taking in the other artworks, finding that same mysterious shape in all but one. I’m suddenly struck by the way this collection is different from the other pieces Dad produced over the past few years. Even when he painted a series, each piece was unique. Most of these canvases seem to represent a manifestation of an idea that captured my father’s imagination and refused to let go.
What on Earth am I going to do with them? Even before I start digging through the piles of trash, I can see at least half a dozen canvases scattered around the attic. I decide to clear a space and pile them up out of the way. I don’t want to damage them, so I go downstairs and retrieve some towels and sheets from the linen closet. Then I sit that first painting down on a table, facedown, resting on a towel.
That’s when I notice the date.
It’s written on the back of the frame, right at the top in the center. It’s been scrawled with a blue ballpoint pen, but my father obviously pressed too hard, and he’s etched the numbers into the wood. I recognize Dad’s awful handwriting. It’s a running joke in our family that Tim might be the doctor, but Dad has the doctor’s handwriting, because Tim writes with a beautiful, almost feminine, script and Dad’s handwriting is consistently close to illegible.
December 5, 1957.
I turn the painting over again, even more intrigued. I set it on the table and walk to pick up one of the other canvases. When I turn the second one over, there’s another date. This one is later, December 28, 1957. It’s noticeably darker. But now that I really think about it, if I were to line these paintings up in just the right order, the colors might shift gradually, like frames from an animation, or a series of time lapse images. And maybe that movement starts with the bright image mounted on the wall near the door, gradually shifting through to this calm blue/green, and working its way through to the darkest, angriest color—the black, white and gray visible on the canvas resting on an easel at the other end of the room. The colors are just so bleak.
After that I climb around the room like a madwoman, picking up every canvas and ferrying them back to the table. The dates are in the same location on every painting. On all but one, the motif is identical—two mismatched, slightly offset semicircles.
The one exception is a canvas I find behind a basket at the back of the attic. It’s less skilled than the others—perhaps it’s unfinished. On a silver background, he’s painted a white circle, with a burst of light blue at the top—like a blue sunrise over a hollow earth. This canvas has a date on the back, too—but it’s much later than the others.
January 1961.
Over the period when Dad painted these paintings, his handwriting changed, but I’m sure he painted them in order. I can track the deterioration in his mind, not just through the darkening colors in the images, but by the way the numbers on the back on the frame become more slanted, etched deeper into the wood, harder to read.
There’s another particularly dark painting, and as I approach it, something gives me pause. As I step closer to pick it up, I notice a note pinned to a clipboard on the table beside the image. The handwriting is beautiful—at first, I think Tim probably wrote it. But this couldn’t have been Tim; the date at the top of the page is March 24, 1958—Tim was only four years old. I pick up the clipboard and scan the words.
I’ve spent the past few weeks considering my options. Grieving, never once celebrating. I’ve realized that there is only one thing left to do but it is the worst, most drastic option. I just need to escape—I simply can’t face this again. The fear looms big and bold, and I cannot even convince myself to live in its shadow.
There is only one way to outrun it. There is only one way to peace. It’s bad enough that I’ve come back to this place—my children deserve for me to choose not to stay here. Even Patrick deserves better than this.
I know it is a mortal sin, and I have no idea how I’m ever going to convince myself to go through with it when I can’t even bring myself to write the word, but I have run out of options, haven’t I? It’s death, one way or another, and at least this way I have control.
May God forgive me for what I have to do.
I drop the clipboard. It clatters against the tabletop then falls with a thump to the floor, but it lands right side up and I can’t take my eyes off the page. Even so, I take a panicked step back.
Who the hell wrote that note?
It mentions Dad.
It mentions Dad.
My foreboding grows as I step toward the dark canvas. I turn it over, and there’s a whooshing sensation in my gut as I confirm that the date on the top of the frame matches the date on the note.
My mother wrote this note. My mother wrote this note and this looks like a suicide note.
My father always marked my mother’s death every April 14. At first, he took us kids to the Lake View Cemetery to leave her flowers, but as the years passed and we all started to grow up, it became more and more difficult to convince us to join him. By the time I was a preteen, he’d changed tactics; instead of dragging us all to her grave, he’d bring out a framed picture of her and we’d say a little prayer for her soul before a special dinner at home. So I’ve always known the date, but over time, I’ve forgotten the year it happened. But I do know she can’t have died in 1958, because I was only eighteen months old then—far too young to retain memories, and I can remember Grace Walsh. Besides, Dad, understandably, didn’t like to talk about her death, but he did tell us that she died in a car accident.
Maybe she was contemplating taking her own life, but she didn’t go through with it. I try to draw some comfort from this realization, but I can’t, because the broader implications of this discovery are just starting to sink in.
I cover my mouth with my hand as I spin back to the pile of canvases. Twelve other canvases so far, and each one has a date on the back. Do they all represent notes from Grace Walsh? I can barely remember where the canvases were originally. Are there other clipboards...other notes? I didn’t see them if there were, and now I don’t know where to look.
What if there are notes buried in all of this chaos? I’m going to have to sort through every single article of trash individually and with extreme care. What was already a mammoth job has now become utterly overwhelming.
I exhale then inhale, b
reathing in the scent of paint and dust. I could drown in panic right now—the task seems impossible, and I feel completely alone with it.
Ruth will freak out if I tell her about the note. So would Tim, and Jeremy, too, most likely. They’d insist on getting involved, or maybe even try to take over the task completely. If that happens I’m right back where I started, at home with Noah alone every single day, wishing away the hours and struggling to figure out how to manage.
No, I’ll keep the note to myself, at least until I know if there are others. It’s the smartest approach, for sure.
* * *
I’m lost in my own world as the afternoon passes. I set a goal of sorting through one particular section of mess before I go home for the day, and I dig into the task with gusto. It takes longer than I thought it would—mostly because I’m now sorting past each item as if there might be a precious, fragile note lost among the clutter. Sometimes I throw pieces of trash into the bin, then panic and fish them out to double-check. I’m so focused on the work that when I hear the front door downstairs slam, I almost jump out of my skin.
“Hello? Who’s there?”
“Jesus Christ, Beth!” Ruth calls back, frustration and anger ripe in her voice. I scramble to my feet, glancing at the windows in the attic as I rise. The sun is surprisingly low in the sky, and just like that, I remember that I was supposed to be back at Chiara’s place by two-thirty. I look down at my watch.