Home Fires (28 page)

Now, walking toward the herb garden, Gabrielle faced the best: her beautiful daughter and godsend of a sister. Would Maggie have survived in that water, so seriously injured, in shock, and trapped with the horror of death, without Anne at her side? Gabrielle doubted it.

“Thirsty, girls?” Gabrielle asked, balancing the tray on the herb garden's uneven old stone wall.

“Wonderful,” Anne said, reaching for a glass. She took one for Maggie also, and Gabrielle slid a plastic straw into the lemonade.

Maggie held the glass in her good left hand. She stared into it for a moment before taking a small sip. Gabrielle waited for a comment, a compliment or the opposite, one of the signature Maggie-isms.

But nothing. Maggie just gazed thoughtfully at the herb garden, her right arm in its cast resting on the baby-seal toy bought on that long-ago shopping trip.

“This is the best,” Anne said. “All three of us back on the island, sitting in Karen's garden.”

But without Karen, Gabrielle thought, her heart flipping as she smiled at Anne. Hadn't Anne come a long way? She seemed so happy with Thomas, so strong. Having nearly lost Maggie, Gabrielle had a different insight into what Anne had endured the last year.

“It's good to be home,” Maggie said quietly. “Do you know what time it is?”

“Four o'clock,” Anne said, checking her watch. “Why? Are you expecting a certain Ned Devlin?”

“Yes,” Maggie said, smiling. The scars on her face were raw still, dramatic testimony to her ordeal. If anything, Gabrielle thought they gave her delicate features even more appeal and distinction, along the lines of a Cindy Crawford mole or a Lauren Hutton tooth gap.

“Are you going out?” Gabrielle asked.

“No. His dad has the truck. We're just going to hang around. Maybe he'll push me down to the beach.”

“These roads are too rutty,” Gabrielle said. “Potholes and frost heaves all over. That wheelchair will be bouncing every which way, and your muscles will ball right up.”

“Mom . . .” Maggie said just as Anne said, “Gabrielle . . .”

“He did save her life,” Anne said.

“Mmmm,” Gabrielle said, savoring the deliciousness of a family scuffle.

The three women sipped their lemonade for a few minutes, lazily enjoying the herb garden. Gabrielle listened to the thunder, wondering when the sky would open up and break the heat wave that had held the island captive for the last twenty-four hours. The rumbles were definitely louder, the storm closer, and Gabrielle was just about to ask her sister and daughter to bet on exactly when the first drops would fall, when Anne spoke.

“I miss Karen,” she said.

All eyes were on her. Anne never discussed Karen, at least not with Gabrielle, and Gabrielle hardly dared to breathe.

“Don't you?” Anne asked, her eyes wide, searching from Gabrielle to Maggie.

“Yes, sweetheart,” Gabrielle said.

“So much,” Maggie whispered.

“She would be so happy, to know that you're okay, Maggie,” Anne said, holding Maggie's good hand, stroking it with her thumb.

Gabrielle watched the gaze pass between them, her sister and daughter, and she felt nothing but joy. What more could she ask than a family who loved each other? What an idiot she had been to let the jealousy get to her before.

She didn't want to analyze too deeply the role she might have played that moment when Maggie decided to get into the car. You make a lot of mistakes as a mother, and most of them slip by. But what about the ones that don't?

“I bought this seal for Karen,” Maggie said, handing it to Anne.

Anne accepted it, nodding. As if it didn't seem strange to her that Maggie would be buying a present for Karen months after her death. “She'd have loved it,” Anne said, handing it back to Maggie.

Maggie frowned, trying to wiggle a finger down the cast on her right leg. Distracted, as if she wanted to scratch an itch, suddenly she focused on Anne.

“You know that picture?” she asked. “Karen's picture?”

“Paradise?”
Anne asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sure. Of course.”

Gabrielle felt her spine start to stiffen. After so recently, like ten seconds earlier, vowing to renounce jealousy, here it came again. What picture, what paradise?

“What are you talking about?” Gabrielle asked, with exaggerated pleasantness.

“Karen drew a picture,” Anne said, staring at the canvas bag by her feet.

“Her last drawing,” Maggie said, now stroking Anne's hand. “The one Anne went into the fire after.”

“You went in after a picture?” Gabrielle asked, incredulous. Anne had risked her life for a piece of paper?

“Show her,” Maggie said.

“I'm surprised I haven't before,” Anne said, withdrawing a manila folder from her bag. She carefully removed the drawing, examined it, and handed it to Gabrielle.

“It's beautiful,” Gabrielle said, stunned.

“Karen told me it's a picture of paradise,” Anne said. “It's of all the things she loved.”

As Gabrielle examined the scene Karen had drawn tears filled her eyes. How many drawings of Maggie's had Gabrielle thrown away? What if one of them had been all she had left to remember her only child? Gabrielle recognized every person, every object in Karen's picture, and she tried to keep her shoulders from heaving.

“Anne,” Maggie was saying. “There's something I have to tell you. About the picture.”

“Is it the white boxes?” Anne asked tremulously, reaching across to point at the funny squares in the middle of the drawing. “It's the only part I don't understand.”

“Yes,” Maggie said. The tone of her voice, the way her eyes flickered from Anne to Gabrielle to the picture, was mournful, laden with regret.

Anne sensed it. She stopped like a doe frozen in headlights. “What?” she asked.

“See, I don't think Karen meant that the picture was of paradise,” Maggie said, reaching for one of her ears. With difficulty, using one hand, she unhooked one of her earrings and closed it in her palm.

“What, then . . . ?” Anne asked.

“Last summer Karen told me she wanted to grow up. She wanted to be a big girl. Is this too awful for you to hear?”

“Of course she wanted to grow up,” Anne said, her gaze locked on the drawing, but her voice eager for details. “Tell me.”

“These earrings,” Maggie said, handing one to Anne. “Karen said she wanted some like these. She wanted to be pretty, with earrings, earrings like mine. I think they sort of symbolized growing up to her.”

Anne turned the earring over in her hand, and then Maggie unhooked the one in her other ear and passed it over.

“A pair of dice,” Anne said. “Paradise.” She stared at Karen's drawing, her mouth taut. She looked from the two spotted white squares on the page to the earrings in her hand. “Pair of dice.”

“She just wanted to grow up,” Maggie said fiercely, wiping her cheeks. “That would have been her paradise.”

“Oh, God,” Anne said.

“It's so sad,” Maggie said, crying freely now. Gabrielle slid her arm around Maggie's shoulders, feeling them shudder with sobs. “It must kill you, Anne. I think of how you feel, and I want to go crazy. I was in the car, holding Vanessa's hand, and she just . . . went. I think of you and Karen, and I'm so sorry.”

Anne couldn't speak, staring at the picture. But she reached over to comfort Maggie.

“I wish I could,” Anne said, “I wish I could have it back, that last day.” She sounded like a zombie. “If I can't have Karen, I wish I didn't know the secret. Earrings that she'll never wear!”

Anne wept hard for half a minute, then stopped as if she would never cry again. She stared blankly at the green spiky leaves of a rosemary plant in Karen's garden.

“I'm sorry,” Maggie said, sniffling. “I know what you wanted to think. The feeling was true—she loved everything she put in her picture. I wasn't going to tell you. But then I thought, wouldn't you want to know the truth? No matter what?”

“Anything about Karen, I want to know,” Anne said. “It's just a letdown. I wanted to think . . . never mind.”

“Honey,” Gabrielle said to Maggie, a grin starting in her throat, spreading to her mouth and ears. “Did Karen know that your earrings were called ‘dice'? Did she ever say that word?”

“No,” Maggie said, frowning. “I never thought of that.”

“We never had dice at home,” Anne said. “Matt and I didn't exactly spend a lot of time playing board games.”

Her face crinkling with possibly the largest smile she had ever encountered, Gabrielle shook her head.

“Maggie, sweetheart,” Gabrielle said. “I'm afraid you're wrong. About the earrings.”

Maggie shook her head, but here came the sound of Ned. Still out of sight, he was whistling some tune Gabrielle couldn't recognize, coming down the path. At the sight of Maggie, he stopped in his tracks. He looked at her for a long moment, growing pinker by the second, then cleared his throat.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Maggie said.

“Hi, Anne. Hi, Mrs. Vincent,” he said. “Big storm coming.”

“Sure sounds that way,” Gabrielle said, making up in friendliness for Anne, who was still rapt in Karen's picture: Anne's face a mask of confusion, as if Maggie's words had been an earthquake toppling Anne's world. Gabrielle couldn't wait to get Anne alone.

“Maybe we shouldn't head for the beach,” Ned said to Maggie.

“Inside would be okay,” Maggie said, her eyes darting to Anne. “My dad rented me some movies.”

“Popcorn in the kitchen,” Anne said to Ned. “Don't scrimp on the salt, and use real butter.”

“Sounds good,” Ned said.

Maggie stared at Anne, but Anne didn't look up. Her attention seemed riveted to the white patches in the midst of Karen's last drawing. Paradise. Again, Gabrielle's lips twitched in a smile. Maggie glanced at her quizzically, and Gabrielle nodded. Go off with Ned, she gestured. Anne will be okay.

When Ned had pushed Maggie, still frowning with concern over her shoulder at Anne, into the big house, Gabrielle cleared her throat.

“What?” Anne asked dully, as if significant hope had been lost.

“Upstairs,” Gabrielle said. “Into the attic. I'll show you paradise.”

W
HY
did it matter so much? Anne asked herself. This one drawing. There were twenty not unlike it in the second top right kitchen drawer in the apartment on Gramercy Park. All with similar depictions of Anne and Matt, the island, the park, the familiars of their life.

That afternoon had felt so ordinary, like all those other pictures in the drawer. Pages ripped from a calendar, sheets of drawing paper torn off a tablet. One would follow the other, day into night.

Into night.

Following Gabrielle up the attic stairs in the house where they had been raised, Anne had the impulse to stop short, pull Gabrielle into a hug, refuse to go farther. Gabrielle was just trying to make her feel better.

What did Gabrielle know about Karen's drawing? Perhaps it was Anne's worst attribute as a younger sister, keeping so much back from Gabrielle. So often Anne would feel sad, or desolate, or worse, and she would think of calling Gabrielle. But would she?
No
.

Gabrielle made it too easy. Gabrielle was always there.

No matter what Anne did, no matter how terrible, Gabrielle still loved her. Gabrielle wanted to make everything right, to
make
Anne's life “normal.” Normal! And how could Anne accept that kind of love when she sometimes hated her own self, despised what she had allowed to happen to Karen?

“Here it is,” Gabrielle was saying.

“Here what is?” Anne asked, looking everywhere but at Gabrielle. How long would Anne be able to keep herself together? It was obvious that Gabrielle was just trying to “cover up” for Maggie, to make up for Maggie's revelation about the dice earrings by pointing Anne in a different direction. And while Anne appreciated the gesture, she no longer had the graciousness simply to weather it politely.

Cobwebs draped from the rafters, and the smell of smoke was surprisingly strong. Where Steve had replaced floorboards and roofing, there was an alarmingly bright section of golden pine. But Gabrielle led Anne to the opposite end of the attic, the part that they had played in as children.

The first raindrops grazed the fanlight window. Then more, and then they were pelting the roof. The drops rattled the uninsulated eaves like machine-gun fire. The tension in Anne's chest built until she thought she would explode.

“Gabrielle,” Anne said. “You don't have to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Try to make me feel better. I don't know what you have in mind, but just let it be. I love Karen. Maggie was just telling the truth. It doesn't change the way I feel about the picture.”

“Anne, sweetheart,” Gabrielle said, holding Anne's hand and gazing into her eyes with a crinkled, bittersweet smile. “Sit down.” With the heel of her hand, she gently pushed her sister down onto an ancient crate containing strips of fabric their mother had saved to weave into braided rugs.

“Gabrielle,” Anne said, passing a hand across her eyes, as if she didn't think she could stand more of this.

“Anne?” Gabrielle said in a strong, steady voice. “Remember when you went back to New York last summer, to see Matt? And left Karen with us?”

“Of course!”

“Well, one morning when Maggie was off with her friends, Karen and I were alone together. We went to the beach, and then we came up to the house for lunch. She was a little excited, because you were coming back to the island that afternoon.”

“I remember,” Anne said, spinning her memories back one year.

“Somehow I got the idea to come up here, to the attic, and let her poke around our old toys and things. To calm her down.”

“Didn't we love to play up here?” Anne asked. “It was one regret I had, living in an apartment—no attic for Karen to play in.”

“We sure did,” Gabrielle said, her smile widening. “So did Karen. I showed her these.”

Anne watched as Gabrielle reached into an old armoire and withdrew two small dress boxes. While the cardboard had once been glossy and white, it had mottled with age. The corners had broken down, and gray dots of age and mildew speckled the boxes' surfaces. Anne hadn't seen these boxes in many years, but recognizing them from Karen's drawing; she felt her heart start to pound.