“What about your room?”
“It’s done.”
“All of it?”
“I don’t have that much stuff.”
Her mother considered. “You don’t. That’s true.”
What possessions Quinn had, she kept faithfully. She’d been the same size since she was fourteen, so that made it easy with clothes and shoes. She didn’t judge Lila—Quinn didn’t like to throw things away either. Not when they were still good to use.
Mattie loved shopping in stores, but Quinn did not. That was another reason she had few things. Indoor malls and big-box stores made her feel overlit and strangely dried out. Mattie dragged her to the Target in Patchogue, but Quinn knew herself well enough to wait outside.
There was a lot of grumbling about the cleanup project, but Quinn understood something the others didn’t know yet. Emma, oldest and bossiest, was pushing it because Emma was falling in love. Emma saw through new and different eyes now, Quinn suspected, startled out of the regular blur of habit. Emma wanted everything to look better.
Emma hadn’t confessed it yet. Quinn didn’t know who it was, but she knew it was someone important.
“Why don’t you tackle the den?” Lila suggested.
“Okay. I could do that.”
Grandpa Harrison’s mark was everywhere in the house, nowhere more than the den. It was all knotty pine walls and hunting decoys and pieces of driftwood attached to the wall by lengths of twisted wire. There was the wet bar in the corner with the 1970s ice maker, long broken. Most of the shelves bowed under hardbound books with titles like Who’s Who in America and The Social Register.
Quinn never felt the living presence of Grandpa Harrison in this house. Because he was dead, for one thing, but that wasn’t the main reason. He was repudiated, bankrupt, outmoded. It was just his stuff they contended with, and as stuff it was docile and easily ignored, holding out for a better time.
She turned to the cardboard file boxes piled in the corner behind the desk. Here were pictures, almost all negatives and prints. She took out the various envelopes and sat cross-legged with them on the ground.
The first box was mostly packed with photos of her grandparents at the country club with their friends. It was clear that what they loved was golf and cocktails. A few of them were heavily posed family pictures, where tiny Lila and her tinier brother Malcolm stood in stiff clothes looking uncomfortable.
Now Uncle Malcolm lived in the desert in New Mexico with his Vietnamese wife and their two-year-old son, Milo. Malcolm said he hated the East Coast and came back as little as possible. You could see in the picture, from the tight top button of his shirt to the thick wool romper and dark boxy shoes, how that might have happened.
The next box had pictures of Quinn’s own parents, the brief moment their life longings intersected. One photo taken on the lawn of this very house showed Lila with her straight blond hair down to her belly button and dark Robert, young as a boy, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. But they were heading in opposite directions, wanted different things. You could see it in the picture if you looked carefully—she is strident, he is eager. She wanted to use him—his Indian-ness—to shock her parents’ system. He wanted to be part of the system he was supposed to shock.
A few months later Lila was pregnant and they got married, swooping into the next phase of life, where the big choices were made before they even meant to make them. Grandpa Harrison was predictably shocked and horrified that his daughter got pregnant by a brown-skinned young man with a presumably brown-skinned child when they weren’t even married.
Years later, when Robert “saved his bacon,” Grandpa Harrison came around to him. In fact, Grandpa came to treat Robert like a hero. Even after the divorce. Robert was the success in business Grandpa could never manage to be. “Robert thinks he can buy anyone” was what Lila said. Lila liked Robert better when her father hated him.
Once the shock wore off, the marriage faltered. Quinn had the feeling of it more than the facts. She was the wide-eyed, oddly patient kid who hung around beneath tables and in corners, taking the information back to her room or under her tree and sorting it out when she could. For a time there were accusations between them, cursing and shouting, three police officers at the house after dark, a custody war. There were no pictures in the box of any of that. Her sisters didn’t seem to know or remember those parts, and she didn’t want them to.
Then came remarriages, two new babies born in the same month, happiness on either side of the divide. The long, bitter silence set in between her parents. The fight raged on, but crooked and quiet.
There was one photo in the bottom of the box that seized Quinn’s attention. It was small and square with a scalloped white border, of a different quality than the others.
The face was young, slightly turned away, almost too shy to smile. Quinn’s hand began to shake as she held it. She’d never seen this before and yet it was something she had always imagined. The girl’s dark hair was held back in a bun; her eyes were large and dark and deeply expressive. A dot glinted in the side of her nose; a bindi was pressed between her dark, strong eyebrows. She wore intricate earrings of worked gold.
Quinn ran upstairs as fast as she could. “Hey, Mom. Who is this?”
Lila studied it carefully. Turned it over looking for a date. “You found this in the den?”
“In the bottom of one of the photo boxes.”
“Wow. I don’t know what it was doing in there.” Lila studied it closely. “That, as I understand it, is a picture of your biological grandmother. It came with your father’s adoption papers.”
“I knew it was. It had to be. Look at her face.”
“God, she looks like you a bit, doesn’t she? Those eyes?”
“A little Emma, too, in the proud mouth?” She was beautiful. She looked eerily like Sasha, but Quinn didn’t say so.
“I see it. I really do.”
“I’ve wished so many times I could see her. What a strange piece of luck. Do you know her name? Do you know anything about her?”
Lila’s expression turned careful. “Of course you should be asking your father. He must have the papers from the agency in Canada that handled the babies from Bangladesh after the war. There wasn’t much, but I do remember a few documents and that picture.” She studied it again. “I haven’t seen it since you girls were tiny. I didn’t realize the resemblance. God, it almost makes me cry thinking of her.”
Quinn was moved by the clutter of feelings she saw in her mother’s face. It was hard keeping the love and hate separate in their family. Lila’s love for her daughters and their origins, her desire for their happiness, could never quite be washed free of their father, whom Lila resented and avoided. For all the boundaries Quinn’s parents had constructed between their lives, the really important ones couldn’t always be held.
“I’ll ask Dad,” she said.
Lila had a warning look. “Well, it’s not something your father likes to talk about. He didn’t used to, at least.”
“I know.” Quinn held the picture protectively. “But I need to anyway.”
There were times when Sasha felt particularly strange in this house. The place was beautiful—sea light and giant climbing trees, lush lawns, and the jewel of a pond pilfered from the ocean. She loved it beyond reason, waited impatiently through the long alternating weeks the other family had it, yearned for the first sight of the arched trees over the driveway when it was their turn again. But because it was a divided house, the faintest things could make her feel like an imposter, put her on the wrong side of family alliances.
Her father liked to remind her it was her and Evie’s house as much as it was anyone’s. She felt bad that he needed to say that, but he did. It was built by his ex-wife Lila Harrison’s grandfather on land bought by Lila’s great-grandfather. Lila’s father rebuilt in the sixties to include lots of knotty pine paneling, decorative driftwood, and a bar in practically every room.
Lila was her father’s first wife, before
he met her mom, Evie. Lila was the mother of Sasha’s sisters (fine, half sisters) and also the mother of Ray, who wasn’t Sasha’s half anything, but who was her agemate, her roommate, and (she might as well admit) her most deeply considered stranger. Lila was nothing to Sasha, besides descendent of the Harrisons and maker of weird craft projects.
When Sasha was old enough to begin wondering about these things, she’d asked her father why the house hadn’t simply gone to Lila in the divorce, why she and her dad and her mom got it every other week.
“Because by the time we got divorced, Lila’s father didn’t own it anymore,” her dad answered in his no-nonsense way. “Grandpa Harrison was an ass and a drunk, and if I hadn’t paid off his debts and bought this place from him, he would have had to declare bankruptcy and move to a flophouse.”
Sasha remembered wondering if he’d given that same account to her sisters.
Even though the property was still known as the Harrison place in town, her dad always made it sound like he was doing Lila a favor letting her have it even half the time. But Sasha also knew there were no favors, never favors, between her dad and Lila.
Grandpa Harrison might have been an ass and a drunk, but Sasha’s dad had made no effort to take down the portraits of Lila’s more respectable ancestors that hung in the stairwell. Sasha considered this as she walked past the old men in suits and robes who signed things and judged things and founded things, and who reflected Sasha back to herself without comment. They belonged to Lila and Lila’s daughters. They also belonged to Ray.
“Does it ever bug you to be judged by the men of the Harrison family every time you go down the stairs?” she asked her dad once.
Robert shrugged as though he’d never thought of it. “I like those pictures. They connect us with our history.” He said it without any apparent irony.
She’d been too dumbfounded to respond. Had he actually convinced himself Lila’s relations were also his? Even though they would have sooner cursed his brown face than shaken his hand? Robert took what he wanted from the world and left the rest. That was a gift of some sort. It had to be.
Sasha found her mother in the kitchen poking around gingerly in the cabinet under the sink, surrounded by contractor’s bags. They were doing their part in “the Great Declutter,” masterminded by her oldest sister, Emma, and begun by the other family the week before. Evie pulled out an object made of bent chicken wire, barely recognizable as a soap dish. “Do you think it’s okay to throw this out?”
“Yes,” Sasha said. She hated her mother’s timidity sometimes. She hated her own timidity. The wrong side of family alliances mainly included her mother.
“What if Lila made it?”
Sasha laughed. She wasn’t sure if her mom was trying to be funny. You could never be sure what odd crafty thing Lila had or hadn’t made. “If she did, she should be especially eager for somebody to get rid of it.”
“I don’t know….”
Sasha made a show of boldness, taking the thing from her mother’s hand and throwing it into the nearest garbage bag.
Her mother went over to fish it out. “I think we should make a pile of stuff we aren’t sure of and ask Emma.”
“We are sure,” Sasha said testily.
Sasha felt bad for the distinctions that made Emma and Quinn and Mattie—and even Ray—legitimate arbiters of bent chicken wire soap dishes and not her. That wasn’t because she resented her sisters, but because she loved them. She didn’t want to be on a different side than they were.
She spent a lot of time thinking about not belonging. She wondered if they spent any time thinking about belonging. She strongly suspected not. It was one of those negative identities—you imagined yourself in relation to what you didn’t have.
Her father said to her once that Americans in the North didn’t think much about the Civil War, barely identified themselves as Northerners because they had won it and moved past it. Sasha felt she was the South in this analogy.
That seemed a sad thing about human nature—how much more time we spend thinking about what we don’t have, or have lost, than about what we have. Clearly Sasha had not inherited the peculiar gift of her father’s.
She looked through the sliding-glass doors of the living room over the path down to the pond, shaded by enormous old linden trees. These were the days she would later be sorry not to have appreciated. She tried to induce appreciation, mentally get it firing like an outboard motor. It was a hard thing to will.
Was it even possible to see beauty in the present as it came at you? Or did it require a dose of time and loss and maybe a little pain?
“Have you finished in your room?” her mom asked.
Sasha poured herself a glass of water and drank it. “Ray did a surprisingly okay job. I just need to finish in the bathroom. I’m going back up. I’ve got nail polish in there from fifth grade.”
“Not the lime-green.”
“That and the Lip Smacker collection, including Cheetos and bacon.”
Her mother shook her head.
In the bathroom she cleared out most of the medicine cabinet. She hesitated over the bacon lip gloss, but not for long. She almost wished she could take these and a lot of the other stuff they were getting rid of and have a yard sale. She remembered a really long time ago Emma setting up a table and selling her old stuff for a few bucks at their driveway entrance on Eel Cove Road. But it had barely been the kind of neighborhood where you could do that then, and it really wasn’t now.
Standing there, she knew it wasn’t the bad lip balm flavors that made her feel nostalgic. The stuff that wasn’t hers evoked the deeper feelings: the capless, dried-out tube of athlete’s foot cream, the crud on the shelves, the dots of whiskers in the white sink bowl.
Ray was not an ideal roommate. He was a famous vomiter. That was what they all said, anyway, and she’d slept in the evidence more than once. Later it was peeing on the toilet seat, a caked tube of toothpaste long-term missing its cap (why couldn’t he ever screw a cap onto anything?), seaweed in the shower drain, and starting in the last year or so, the whiskers in the sink.
“It’s weird to share a room with a boy,” her friend Willa had said disapprovingly, standing at that sink when she’d slept over.
“I don’t share my room with him. I’ve never even met him,” Sasha explained in a canned way. Because though true, it wasn’t quite honest. She did share a room with him. And a bathroom, for better and mostly worse. She did more than that. She shared a life with him, at least in her mind. Books and toys and sand in the sheets. A jointly collected menagerie of miniature plastic animals. Seashells, sisters, a view of the moon. She didn’t know him, maybe, but how often did she think of him? How often did she live her life in this room, in this house, for both of them?
She used to want to meet him, fantasized about playing with him, made up games they might enjoy together. She was physically jealous that her sisters got to have him for their brother and she didn’t.
But later, she began to think it was easier that she never did meet him. He had the best qualities of an imaginary friend. He was patient, sympathetic, and understanding, silently sharing her things and spaces. He was never selfish or loud or bullying. He never even disagreed with her. He was just what she wanted, sometimes needed, him to be.
So in that way, he was an ideal roommate.
Emma was not the kind of person to have a secret. She liked to think it was because of her fine moral character, but it was also because she was kind of boring. She was an abider, an upholder, and a law-and-order kind of girl. The things she enjoyed doing were more or less the things she was supposed to be doing. She just wanted to make sure she was getting an A in the process.
“I’ll meet you on the corner of MacDougal and Prince,” she whispered into her phone. “If you leave the office in ten minutes, we should get there at the same time.”
“Love you,” Jamie said.
“Love you too.”
“Em?” Her mother was standing
in the dark hall of the Brooklyn house. Honestly, you could hear every word said in this place. Whispering hardly helped.
“Yeah?”
“Who was that?”
“Nobody. A friend.” Emma grabbed her bag.
“Are you going out again?”
“Yeah. And then I’m going to stay over at Dad’s.” She started down the creaky stairs and her mom followed.
“Again? Why?” Her mom looked hurt.
“Because I’m going out in Manhattan and it’s just easier.”
“You never used to like to stay in the new house.”
“Well, I’ve got a room there. And Dad really appreciates it.”
Lila’s face was getting complicated. “And you don’t have your own room here anymore.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Emma wasn’t really staying at her dad’s, but her mother would never know that. Lila would sooner call Donald Trump than her ex-husband. Emma hated to take advantage of her parents’ hostility like Mattie was always doing, but sometimes it did come in handy.
“You’re going back to Wainscott in the morning?”
“Yeah. I’ve got work starting at noon.”
Her mom followed her all the way to the front door. It was kind of disconcerting.
“How come you keep coming back into the city?” Lila asked plaintively. “In the last few summers you never came back unless you had to.”
“I’m an adult, Mom.” She knew the way she said it undermined her point. “I’m a college graduate. I’ve got stuff to take care of.” She reached out and gave her mom a hug. “I love you. See you out there on Monday, if not before.”
Her mother held on to the hug for longer than usual. “Okay, okay.” She stood at the door and kept watching Emma as she walked down the stoop and turned east toward the subway.
Emma looked back. “Mom, what?”
“Nothing. It’s just…you’re the child I count on NOT to be mysterious.”