My mom is right about both my so-called memory and the house: there’s no wraparound porch, no lanterns at the entry. Still, though, there is a sweeping expanse of lawn, and it seems entirely feasible that while parts of my recollection were indeed conjured up, parts of it could certainly be plausible. The late summer night on the grass with my sister. Well, why not?
Jamie is staying in the guesthouse behind the main house, while I’m in my childhood room and Peter is in Rory’s. My mom twirls around like a holistic whirlybird: she knows better than to be swirling around in a fit of nervous energy, but she can’t help herself. Just calm the fuck down! I want to yell at her, like she shouldn’t know about energy transference and Zen postures and blah, blah, blah—how she’s making the rest of us tense—but I clamp down and shut it. Maybe there is something to be learned from her kindness, her generous spirit, even if that same spirit irritates the hell out of me. I tell myself to force a smile whenever I feel like snapping. Eventually, she turns on the living room stereo and seems to decompress, almost visibly, at the lilt of the classical music. I stand in the door frame and watch her, until she catches me and says, “I’m sorry. I know that I’m a nut. This helps.”
She walks over to me and kisses the top of my head. “You got that from me, you know. People said that you got it from your dad, your love of music, but it was from me. He couldn’t sing to save his life.
“You’ll have to forgive the guesthouse,” she says to Jamie, after we’ve made our way out back, as he drops his duffel onto the creaking farmhouse floors. “I had it cleaned but it’s still a little musty, I’m afraid. It hasn’t been used for guests in years. But with all the company we’re having this weekend, it’s the only way to make it work.”
Rory and Hugh are taking the train up this afternoon, and since Peter and I aren’t currently sharing beds, the two of them were now deposed to the extra bedroom on the third floor. The house itself is huge—too big for my mom alone—but she’d long ago tossed out the ancillary family rooms and bedrooms to make way for her yoga room, her sewing room, her “quiet” room where Tate could write poetry and nary a word could be spoken, though sometimes, she whispered, as she gave me a tour, “we like to make love in here without any sound.”
My old room, much like my apartment with Peter, is nothing like I would have pictured for myself. Where are the teenage heartthrob posters? Where are the old record albums and drawers full of letters to camp friends? Instead, there is a collection of tennis trophies on a bureau, a ceiling-high bookshelf stuffed with fraying guitar sheet music and old high school textbooks—physics, biology, French, European art—a barren white desk, and a wicker rocking chair adorned with faded flowery pillows better suited for an old-age home. If you were to look around here—a detective in search of whom I would grow up to be—there’d be no signs: my teenage self is a generic whiteboard, a canvas with no color. I feel a pang of sadness for her, for me.
I ease down onto the bed and breathe through the ache in my ribs. Seven weeks now after the crash, my pain has mostly dissipated. It pops up now and again when I’ve stretched myself too thin—a reminder that I’m not who I used to be: I’m less strong, more breakable. Though it could be worse—it could be like Anderson’s: ever-present, constant, unwilling to be tamed.
Peter knocks on the door.
“Going to jump in the pool. Want to join?”
“In a minute,” I answer.
I lie back on the bed, with its Holly Hobbit–esque comforter that feels too childish for the woman I grew into in this room, and listen to the noises of the house, hoping they will bring something back. A floor below, in the kitchen, I can hear my mother working the blender, making god knows what—a spinach smoothie? a tofu shake?—and out the open window, a lawn mower in the distance. Then, a splash as Peter catapults himself into the pool. I close my eyes. What did I used to hear when I was drifting off to sleep at night? Nothing comes, so I try to envision it anyway. My parents—while my dad was still around—playing Dylan or the Smiths in the living room, or in later years, my sister’s thumping hip-hop from her closed door across the hall. Crickets on the lawn? Neighbors pulling into their driveways? A ringing phone from a boy on whom I had a crush?
All of that seems right but none of it is confirmation of anything, so I thrust myself to my elbows and make my way toward the pool.
Outside, Jamie is dipping his feet in, while Peter is moored on a raft. They’ve uncovered an old beat box from Rory’s room, the radio making conversation between them. “It’s eighties weekend!” the DJ says. “Call in and share your favorite hit from the decade.”
The late August air is surprisingly devoid of humidity—just one of those crystalline days that you wish could go on forever—filling your lungs and your being with a type of unmatched lightness. I squint at the two of them, my farm-boy journalist and my repentant husband, staring for a beat until Peter notices me and offers me a wave.
“Hey.” Jamie jumps to his feet. “Before you sit, come here for a sec.”
He steers me toward the guesthouse, holding my waist steady with a comforting familiarity.
“Are you okay in here? Is everything settled and cleaned up?” I ask.
“Yes, perfect,” he answers. “I’m glad you invited me. I can’t imagine a better place to start.”
The guesthouse used to be my father’s studio, as evidenced by the occasional paint spatter that my mother had never quite erased, and the ceiling mural of jewel-toned waves that—my mom explained to Jamie—my father concocted during a particularly bad spate of insomnia. A queen-size bed is pushed against the back wall, a set of drawers with an old TV atop it sits to the side, and a faded rug, so much like the one found in my apartment, conceals the rest of the scars of my father’s work. Every few feet, you encounter a giant splotch of oil paint or acrylic that hadn’t come up. Though my mom redid the main house, she didn’t have it in her, I suppose, to gut this one, too.
The scent inside is familiar—part paint, part paint thinner, part coffee, part lemon cleaner—and it hits me with both purpose and electricity—that still after all of these years, it can smell like what? What is that smell? Who is that smell? Jamie unhinges a window, and I can hear Peter on his raft, singing freely along to the Police on the radio.
The floor spins for a moment, and I lose my way. “Every smile you fake, every claim you stake, I’ll be watching you.”
“You okay?” Jamie asks.
“The smell in here…and with the music…it’s just…” I inhale and try to imagine. Yes, that’s it. “It’s exactly like my father.” I fall still and wait for something else to come.
“You remember something?”
I shake my head. “Only that this reminds me of him.” I don’t say that the pulse in my neck feels like it might detonate inside of me, and that something about this smell is both exhilarating and terrifying. I make a mental note to raise it with Liv. That’s my new favorite line. Anderson had said, Or so my therapist says.
Jamie steps over to a closet on the right side of the bed. “And what about this?” The door creaks as he opens it, a small tuft of grime kicking up. No one has sniffed around here in years.
I shuffle closer and peer inside. Even in the half-darkness, I can make out canvases leaning atop one another like dominoes.
“Are these my dad’s?”
“Yours,” he says. “I went to hang up my shirts and here they were.” He kneels down. “Look, you signed the bottom.”
I can’t comfortably squat to join him, so he lifts the front painting and raises it to me.
“I’ve never seen my own stuff.” I wrinkle my brow. “Not great, but not bad. Not my father by a long shot.”
“Who says you have to be your father? I mean, I’m no expert or anything, but for a kid—look, it’s dated—you weren’t more than thirteen. I’d say this is pretty good.”
He’s right: the way I’d blended the colors, the flare I placed on the horizon, the shadow of the far-off rolling hill
s, and the jagged lines to create an illusion of pine trees. You can tell that I’ve been taught by the best, even in the cliché of the landscape.
Jamie starts to place it back on the floor when we both—together, at once—notice the painting behind it.
I’m breathless, stunned, feel my chest closing in.
“Jesus Christ,” we say simultaneously. He tugs it up, closer.
“It’s the house I remembered!”
I feel like I’m hovering outside myself, having an out-of-body experience. But it’s there—put down on the canvas years back. The white wooden front, the enormous porch with a picture-perfect bench, the lanterns aglow, the green landscape behind it.
“It’s exactly like what you described,” he confirms, and then his face morphs into a wide grin. “This is something, this is really something!”
“But my mom. She didn’t remember it. Said I couldn’t have remembered it.”
“Well, that’s one of the first rules of journalism,” he says, as we both step closer, peering at the painting once again. “Unreliable narrators: you can never trust someone else when it’s your story to tell.”
11
I ndira is fussing around in the kitchen, slicing up tomatoes from the farmers’ market and laying them out on a platter with mozzarella and basil, when she hears Nell’s footsteps on the back porch and then the screen door slamming and then her daughter—looking so much like the put-upon teenager she used to be—in front of her. Jamie trails behind her, resting a canvas against the dining table, and then exits quietly, lingering on the porch to overhear, but not place himself in the line of fire directly.
“Well, hello to you,” Indira says, trying to maintain the air of composure, but the knife rattling down on the tile counter betrays her. She wipes her hands slowly on a dish towel, the only slow movement she’s made since the company arrived, and Nell, if she were of clear mind, would see that she’s buying some time. But Nell is too angry to see this.
“What’s this?” Indira says finally, her hands still slightly sticky from the residue of the tomatoes. She steps closer to the painting, though she knows perfectly well what it depicts. “Is this one of yours?”
“Yes, Mother, it’s one of mine,” Nell manages. There is a watermelon-colored splotch across her chest—a rush of angry blood, just above the V-neck of her T-shirt. “It’s one of fucking mine, and I’m pretty sure it’s exactly the memory I had, the one I told to you, and of which you denied its existence.”
Indira slides out a chair and sits, and for the first time since the hospital room back in Iowa, looks—just for a fleeing moment—defeated, exhausted, frayed around all the edges. She can feel Nell bearing down on her, but after that flicker of self-doubt, she straightens her spine and tries not to buckle.
It’s not like she hasn’t seen this behavior before, not like she hasn’t beaten it back with a figurative stick for the better half of Nell’s teenage years after Francis left and Nell embraced stoicism, meticulousness, and such tightly controlled anger that you’d never know she was angry in the first place. But let’s not forget about the anger. The endless hours beating the tennis ball against the backboard, her headphones blaring so loudly, you could hear them the next court over. Her abandonment of making her own music, which she had reveled in since she was no more than three, and her abandonment, also, of making her own art, which her father had pushed for her since about that age, too. Yes, Indira had seen all of this before, and she eyes Nell now, and sniffs her nose higher. She won’t cave—she knows her daughter too well, even though she thought that after the crash, well, maybe she was different. That if Nell were to forget all of the scars and the sins, maybe that would change everything, change her.
“Sit down,” Indira says, pointing to a chair.
“I don’t want to fucking sit down,” Nell says.
“Nell, darling, please calm down. And the language. There’s no need for that language.”
Nell chews on her bottom lip, debating whether to listen to her mother or indulge her own rage.
“Well, if I’m being honest,” Indira continues, when Nell still refuses a seat, “I’d completely forgotten about that painting. And furthermore”—her voice elevates just a tinge here, and if Nell remembered her mom as she should, she’d know that this was her tell, her giveaway—“I didn’t even remember that house when you told me your dream.”
“It wasn’t a dream, Mother. It was a memory,” Nell barks. “And given my circumstances, that’s a pretty big goddamn distinction.”
“Please stop talking to me that way. I hate it when you’re angry—this is the you of your past! We moved beyond that. You told me! You told yourself: the new you!” But Nell’s face is metal, unrelenting, and Indira realizes this distinction is of no consequence to her right now. That there have been moments that were, but this isn’t one of them. “I really didn’t remember, and when I finally did, it was only a day or so ago, and I was thinking of your best interest in not bringing it up.”
Nell snorts at this, and Indira sips her tea and mentally counts to ten. Of course she isn’t telling her the full truth, though it’s not just in Nell’s best interest—it’s in all of their best interest. Of course she remembered going down to that piece of shit house and retrieving the kids in a flurry of panic. Of course she hadn’t forgotten Nell’s choice, and how it was always about Francis and not about her—her own goddamn mother!
Indira says none of this, and instead offers: “Has your therapist suggested yoga for you? I very much think it could help.”
“Shut up, Mother, and tell me about the house!”
Indira stares at her for a second, debating. Nell is slipping back—here’s the proof—already being tucked behind old habits. The anger! The distrust! Telling her the truth would push her farther down the rabbit hole, and Indira’s been there, tried to rescue her before. When she woke up that morning to Francis’s note that he was leaving—this time for good—she considered telling the girls that he had died suddenly but instead sat them on the couch and prepared a plate of shortbread and 7-Up, and bore witness to the axis in Nell’s world grinding to a halt. In the months, many, many months that followed, she tried to introduce her to meditation and suggested family therapy, but there was no budging on her end. There wasn’t space for forgiveness of her father’s faults or of the fact that he couldn’t control himself, that his brain and his wiring and his chemistry forced him to choose a more solitary path. No, Nell just zipped herself up, and soon enough she was defined by her hard edges, her backbone made of steel. Nell was his muse, and he was her life. There was no forgiving that.
Finally, Indira blinks and inhales. She will tell her, she thinks, in bits and pieces, dribble out enough to inform her, not enough to snap that rigid backbone upright all over again. But before she can say anything, the front door squeaks open and Rory and Hugh shout, “Hello!”
“What are we interrupting?” Rory says, her enormous black sunglasses perched atop her head, her legs skinny and lean in denim cutoffs. Indira feels a wave of pity for Nell, at her younger sister’s beauty and how, though she was smarter and certainly pretty in her own way, she would never live up to it. And never live up to her father’s projected expectations, either. Is it any wonder she grew so far removed?
“Mom is telling me about the house.”
“The house? Oh, that’s a good idea,” Rory says, moving to the fridge to get a beer while Hugh juts his head in for a quick hello, then hauls their bags upstairs. “There’s probably a lot here that might help with your memory.”
“Not this house,” Nell says. “I found this painting.”
Rory pops the top of her bottle and swigs, moving toward the table and eyeing the canvas. “I’ve never seen this.” She steps back and assesses. “It’s not bad. I mean, I wouldn’t buy it for the gallery or anything, but still, it’s not total shit.”
“Rory!” Indira snaps. “Please.”
“What? It’s true. And by the way, you’re welcome fo
r saving you from Peter the other night.”
“What are you talking about?” Nell says, and Indira feels herself relax, thinking she might just dodge the bullet. Yes, let’s talk about anything other than this goddamn house.
“The other night. At the gallery. I made him stay so you wouldn’t have to spend more time with him.”
“I don’t mind spending time with him,” Nell says, to which Rory rolls her eyes.
“Just trying to, you know, do you a favor,” she says.
“Rory,” Indira says in her most meditative of voices, “you really need to stop holding this grudge. If your sister doesn’t, then you shouldn’t, either. He is a man who made a mistake and who has apologized for that mistake. We’re all human, and we all have our desires and temptations.”
“We’re not talking about Dad here,” Rory says, gulping her beer deeply now. She’s heard this before. She flicks her hand, already tired of the conversation, and heads up to find Hugh.
“Want to explain that?” Nell says after the footsteps up the stairs have subsided.
Not really, Indira thinks, then wonders which she’d rather talk about less: the house or Francis and his complications in that very house. She rises to get more tea while Nell eyes her, waiting, looking just like she used to as a toddler, always waiting for someone—usually Francis—to tell her what to do.
Indira pours the tea slowly into the mug, watching the steam rise, wishing—just like Peter had a few weeks back—that Nell would never have to remember any of it. Would it all just be so much easier if she couldn’t remember any of it?
But she knows that isn’t possible, so she puts out a morsel, hoping it will satisfy her for the time being.
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