There were stones, piled behind the garage. She dragged these out, one by one, and arranged them in a wide circle. She dumped the first box, the glossy black and white images startling in the sunlight, all the unfamiliar faces of young women gazing up at her from the grass. Squatting in the harsh noon sun, she held a lighter to the edge of a glossy 8 by 10. When a flame licked and rose, she slid the burning photo into the shallow pile inside the ring of stones. At first the flame seemed not to catch. But soon a wavering heat rose up, a curl of smoke.
Norah went inside for another glass of water. She sat on the back step sipping, watching the flames. A recent city ordinance prohibited any sort of burning, and she worried that the neighbors might call the police. But the air remained quiet; even the flames were silent, reaching into the hot air, sending up a thin smoke the bluish color of mist. Wisps of blackened paper floated across the backyard, wafted on the shimmering waves of heat, like butterflies. As the fire in the circle of stones took hold and began to roar, Norah fed it more photos. She burned light, she burned shadow, she burned these memories of David’s, so carefully captured and preserved. You bastard, she whispered, watching the photographs flame high before they blackened and curled and disappeared.
Light to light, she thought, moving back from the heat, the roar, the powdery residue swirling in the air.
Ashes to ashes.
Dust, at last, to dust.
July 2–4, 1989
LOOK, IT’S FINE FOR YOU TO SAY THAT NOW, PAUL.” MICHELLE was standing by the window with her arms folded, and when she turned her eyes were dark with emotion, veiled, too, by her anger. “You can say anything you want in the abstract, but the fact is, a baby would change everything—and mostly for me.”
Paul sat on the dark-red sofa, warm and uncomfortable on this summer morning. He and Michelle had found it on the street when they first started living together here in Cincinnati, in those giddy days when it meant nothing to haul it up three flights of stairs. Or it meant exhaustion and wine and laughter and slow lovemaking later on its rough velvet surface. Now she turned away to look out the window, her dark hair swinging. An airy emptiness, a rushing, filled his heart. Lately, the world felt fragile, like a blown egg, as if it might shatter beneath a careless touch. Their conversation had begun amicably enough, a simple discussion of who would take care of the cat while they were both out of town: she in Indianapolis for a concert, he in Lexington to help his mother. And now, suddenly, they were here in this bleak territory of the heart, the place to which, lately, they both seemed constantly drawn.
Paul knew he should change the subject.
“Getting married doesn’t translate directly into babies,” he said instead, stubborn.
“Oh, Paul. Be honest. Having a child is your heart’s desire. It’s not me you want, even. It’s this mythical baby.”
“Our mythical baby,” he said. “Someday, Michelle. Not right away. Look, I just wanted to raise the subject of getting married. It’s not a big deal.”
She gave a sound of exasperation. The loft had a pine floor and white walls and splashes of primary colors in the bottles, the pillows, the cushions. Michelle was wearing white too, her skin and hair as warm as the floors. Paul ached, looking at her, knowing she had, in some important sense, already made up her mind. She would leave him very soon, taking her wild beauty and her music with her.
“It’s interesting,” she said. “I find it very interesting, anyway. That all this is coming up just as my career is about to take off. Not before, but now. In a weird way, I think you’re trying to break us up.”
“That’s ridiculous. Timing has nothing to do with it.”
“No?”
“No!”
They didn’t speak for several minutes and the silence grew in the white room, filled the space and pressed against the walls. Paul was afraid to speak and more afraid not to, but at last he could not hold back any longer.
“We’ve been together for two years. Either things grow and change or they die. I want us to keep growing.”
Michelle sighed. “Everything changes anyway, with or without a piece of paper. That’s what you’re not factoring in. And no matter what you say, it is a big deal. No matter what you say, marriage changes everything, and it’s always women who make the sacrifices, no matter what anyone says.”
“That’s theory. That’s not real life.”
“Oh! You’re infuriating, Paul—so damned sure of everything.”
The sun was up, touching the river and filling the room with a silvery light, casting wavering patterns on the ceiling. Michelle went into the bathroom and shut the door. A rummaging in drawers, the running of water. Paul crossed the room to where she had stood, taking in the view as if this might help him understand her. Then, quietly, he tapped on the door.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
A silence. Then she called back. “You’ll be back tomorrow night?”
“Your concert’s at six, right?”
“Right.” She opened the bathroom door and stood, wrapped in a plush white towel, rubbing lotion into her face.
“Okay, then,” he said, and kissed her, taking in her scent, the smoothness of her skin. “I love you,” he said, as he stepped back.
She looked at him for a moment. “I know,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I know. He brooded on her words all the way to Lexington. The drive took two hours: across the Ohio River, through the dense traffic near the airport, and finally into the beautiful rolling hills. Then he was traveling through the quiet downtown streets, past empty buildings, remembering how it had been when Main Street still was the center of life, the place where people went to shop and eat and mingle. He remembered going into the drugstore, sitting at the ice cream fountain in the back. Scoops of chocolate in a metal cup frosted with ice, the whir of the blender; mingled scents of grilled meat and antiseptic. His parents had met downtown. His mother had ridden on an escalator and risen above the crowd like the sun, and his father had followed her.
He drove past the new bank building and the old courthouse, the empty place where the theater once stood. A thin woman was walking down the sidewalk, her head bent, her arms folded, her dark hair moving in the wind. For the first time in years Paul thought of Lauren Lobeglio, the silent determined way she had walked across the empty garage to him week after week. He had reached for her, again and then again; he had woken in the middle of so many dark nights, fearing with Lauren all he now so desired with Michelle: marriage, children, an interweaving of lives.
He drove, humming his newest song to himself. “A Tree in the Heart” it was called—maybe he would play this one tonight, at Ly-nagh’s pub. Michelle would be shocked by that, but Paul didn’t care. Lately, since his father died, he had been playing more at informal venues as well as concert halls: he’d pick up a guitar and play in bars or restaurants, classical pieces but also more popular works that he had always, in the past, disdained. He couldn’t explain his change of heart, but it had something to do with the intimacy in those places, the connection he felt to the audience, close enough to reach out and touch. Michelle didn’t approve; she believed it was a consequence of grief, and she wanted him to get over it. But Paul couldn’t give it up. All the years of his adolescence, he had played out of anger and longing for connection, as if through music he could bring some order, some invisible beauty, into his family. Now his father was gone, and there was no one to play against. So he had this new freedom.
He drove to the old neighborhood, past the stately houses and deep front yards, the sidewalks and eternal quiet. The front door of his mother’s house was closed. He turned off the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the birds and the distant sound of lawn mowers.
A tree in the heart. His father had been dead for a year and his mother was marrying Frederic and moving to France for a while, and he was here not as a child or as a visitor but as caretaker of the past. His to choose, what to keep and what to discard. He’d tried to tal
k with Michelle about this, his deep sense of responsibility, how what he kept from this house of his childhood would become, in turn, what he passed down to his own children someday—all they would ever know, in a tangible way, of what had shaped him. He’d been thinking of his father, whose past was still a mystery, but Michelle misunderstood; she stiffened at this casual mention of children. That’s not what I meant, he protested, angry, and she was angry too. Whether or not you knew it, that’s what you meant.
He leaned back, searching in his pocket for the house key. Once his mother understood that his father’s work was valuable, she’d started keeping the doors locked, though the boxes sat unopened in the studio.
Well, he didn’t want to look at that stuff either.
When Paul finally got out of the car he stood for a moment on the curb, looking around the neighborhood. It was hot; a high faint breeze moved through the tops of the trees. Pin oak leaves dug into the light, creating a play of shadows on the ground. Strangely, too, the air seemed to be full of snow, a feathery gray-white substance drifting down through the blue sky. Paul reached out into the hot, humid air, feeling as if he were standing in one of his father’s photographs, where trees bloomed up in the pulse of a heart, where the world was suddenly not what it seemed. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black. Ashes were drifting down like snow in the dense July heat.
He left footprints on the sidewalk as he walked up the steps. The front door was unlocked, but the house was empty. Hello? Paul called, walking through the rooms, the furniture pushed into the middle of the floor and covered with tarps, the walls bare, ready for painting. He hadn’t lived here for years but he found himself pausing in the living room, stripped of everything that had made it meaningful. How many times had his mother decorated this room? And yet it was just a room, finally. Mom? he called, but got no answer. Upstairs, he stood in the doorway of his own room. Boxes were piled here too, full of old things he had to sort. She hadn’t thrown anything away; even his posters were rolled neatly and secured with rubber bands. There were faint rectangles on the walls where they’d once hung.
“Mom?” he called again. He went downstairs and onto the back porch.
She was there, sitting on the steps, wearing old blue shorts and a limp white T-shirt. He stopped, wordless, taking in the strange scene. A fire still smoldered in a circle of stones, and the ashes and wisps of burned paper that had fallen around him in the front yard were here too, caught in the bushes and in his mother’s hair. Papers were scattered all over the lawn, pressed against the bases of trees, against the rusting metal legs of the ancient swing set. Paul realized with shock that his mother had been burning his father’s photographs. She looked up, her face streaked with ashes and with tears.
“It’s all right,” she said, in an even voice. “I’ve stopped burning them. I was so angry with your father, Paul, but then it struck me: This is your inheritance too. I only burned one box. It was the box with all the girls, so I don’t imagine it was very valuable.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, sitting down beside her.
She handed him a photo of himself, one he’d never seen. He was about fourteen, sitting in the porch swing, bent over his guitar, playing intently, oblivious to everything around him, caught up in the music. It startled him that his father had captured this moment—a private moment, completely unself-conscious, one of the moments of his life when Paul felt most alive.
“Okay. But I don’t understand. Why are you so mad?”
His mother pressed her hands to her face, briefly, and sighed. “Do you remember the story of the night you were born, Paul? The blizzard, how we barely got to the clinic in time?”
“Sure.” He waited for her to go on, not knowing what to say, yet understanding at some instinctive level that this had to do with his twin sister, who had died.
“Do you remember the nurse, Caroline Gill? Did we tell you about her?”
“Yes. Not her name. You said she had blue eyes.”
“She does. Very blue. She came here yesterday, Paul. Caroline Gill. I haven’t seen her since that night. She brought news, shocking news. I’m just going to tell you, since I don’t know what else to do.”
She took his hand. He didn’t pull away. His sister, she told him calmly, had not died at birth after all. She’d been born with Down syndrome, and his father had asked Caroline Gill to take her to a home in Louisville.
“To spare us,” his mother said, and her voice caught. “That’s what she said. But she couldn’t go through with it, Caroline Gill. She took your sister, Paul. She took Phoebe. All these years your twin has been alive and well, growing up in Pittsburgh.”
“My sister?” Paul said. “In Pittsburgh? I was just in Pittsburgh last week.” It was not an appropriate response, but he did not know what else to say; he was filled with a strange emptiness, a kind of stunned detachment. He had a living sister: that was news enough. She was retarded, not perfect, so his father had sent her away. It wasn’t anger, strangely, but fear that rose up next, some old apprehension born of the pressure his father had focused on him as the only child. Born, too, of Paul’s need to make his own way, even if his father might disapprove enough to leave. A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.
“Caroline went to Pittsburgh and started a new life,” his mother said. “She raised your sister. I guess it was a struggle; it would have been, especially in those days. I keep trying to be thankful that she was good to Phoebe, but there’s a part of me that’s just raging.”
Paul closed his eyes for a moment, trying to hold all these ideas together. The world felt flat, strange, and unfamiliar. All these years he’d tried to imagine his sister, what she would be like, but now he couldn’t bring a single idea of her to mind.
“How could he?” he asked finally. “How could he keep this a secret?”
“I don’t know,” his mother said. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing for hours. How could he? And how dare he die and leave us to discover this alone?”
They sat there silently. Paul remembered an afternoon of developing photos with his father on the day after he’d trashed the darkroom, when he was full of guilt and his father was too, when the very air was charged with what they said and what they left unspoken. Camera, his father told him, came from the French chambre, room. To be in camera was to operate in secret. This was what his father had believed: that each person was an isolated universe. Dark trees in the heart, a fistful of bones: that was his father’s world, and it had never made him more bitter than at this moment.
“I’m surprised he didn’t give me away,” he said, thinking of how hard he’d always fought against his father’s vision of the world. He had gone out and played his guitar, music rising straight up through him and entering the world, and people turned, put down their drinks, and listened, and a room full of strangers was connected, each to each. “I’m sure he wanted to.”
“Paul!” His mother frowned. “No. If anything, he wanted even more for you because of all this. Expected even more. Demanded perfection of himself. That’s one of the things that’s become clear to me. That’s the terrible part, actually. Now that I know about Phoebe, so many mysteries about your father make sense. That wall I always felt—it was real.”
She got up, went inside, and came back with two Polaroids. “Here she is,” she said. “This is your sister: Phoebe.”
Paul took them and stared from one to the other: a posed picture of a girl, smiling, and then a candid shot of her shooting a basket. He was still trying to take in what his mother had told him: that this stranger with the almond eyes and sturdy legs was his twin.
“You have the same hair,” Norah said softly, sitting down next to him again. “She likes to sing, Paul. Isn’t that something?” She laughed. “And guess what—she’s a basketball fan.”
Paul’s laugh was sharp and full of pain. r />
“Well,” he said, “I guess Dad chose the wrong kid.”
His mother took the photos in her ash-stained hands.
“Don’t be bitter, Paul. Phoebe has Down’s syndrome. I don’t know much about it, but Caroline Gill had a lot to say. So much I could hardly take it all in, really.”
Paul had been running his thumb along the concrete edge of the step and now he stopped, watching blood seep up where he’d scraped it raw.
“Don’t be bitter? We visited her grave,” he said, remembering his mother walking through the cast-iron gate with her arms full of flowers, telling him to wait in the car. Remembering her kneeling in the dirt, planting morning glory seeds. “What about that?”
“I don’t know. It was Dr. Bentley’s land, so he must have known too. Your father never wanted to take me there. I had to fight so hard. At the time I thought he was afraid I’d have a nervous breakdown. Oh, it made me so mad—the way he always knew best.”
Paul started at the vehemence in her voice, remembering his conversation that morning with Michelle. He pressed the edge of his thumb to his lips and sucked away the little beads of blood, glad for the sharp copper taste. They sat in silence for a time, looking at the backyard with its wisps of ash, its scattered photos and damp boxes.
“What does it mean,” he asked at last, “that she’s retarded? I mean, day to day.”
His mother looked at the photographs again. “I don’t know. Caroline said she’s quite high-functioning, whatever that means. She has a job. A boyfriend. She went to school. But apparently she can’t really live on her own.”
“This nurse—Caroline Gill—why did she come here now, after all these years? What did she want?”
“She just wanted to tell me,” his mother said softly. “That’s all. She didn’t ask for anything. She was opening a door, Paul. I really do believe that. It was an invitation. But whatever happens next is up to us.”