The Four Seasons (14 page)

“Okay, that's enough for me,” she burst out when Birdie and Rose giggled over another photograph. “I'm exhausted, dirty,
and I want a glass of wine and a hot bath. Let's just toss this junk and finish up.”

“Rose was right,” Birdie said with a lazy smile. “There are treasures in here. Look at this one,” she said with a light laugh. She lifted a photograph of the three of them in their Easter dresses. “Your hair is in a flip with one of those little bows pinned in front. And Rose, you've lost your front teeth!”

Resting her chin on Birdie's shoulder, Rose chuckled and said, “Look who's talking. You're scowling again! In every picture!”

“What a motley crew we were,” Birdie replied, but her voice was filled with affection. “I'd like Hannah to see these. They're her heritage.”

“Fine,” Jilly snapped. “Then keep them. All of them. Toss them in the box and take them home. But can we just keep moving on? This is taking forever.”

“Jilly, don't you want any pictures?” Rose asked.

“No. You keep them.”

“Or your old school papers at least?”

She shook her head. “No. I don't want anything. There's no value in any of it.”

Birdie's brows shot up.

“How can you say that?” Rose asked with unflagging patience. “These are records of our past.”

Jilly took a deep breath and brought her fingertips to her temples. All these old family photographs, compounded by the memories of the previous night, had brought so much of her past whirling back to mind. And none of
those
incidents were included in this collection of their mother's selected memories.

“They're not the records of our past, that's the point. Look at the two of you, hovering over those photographs, laughing, as if there was something wonderful to remember. Treasures, you call them. It's all in your heads. There are no happy
memories buried in that dust, only dear darling Mother's orchestrated memories.”

“Oh, Jilly…” Birdie muttered with a wave of her hand, dismissing her.

“Don't do that,” she snapped. Jilly was exhausted and Birdie had pushed the wrong emotional button. “Don't dismiss me. I'm the eldest, not you. I was there. And all I see when I look at those photographs are smiling faces because Dad told us to say cheese when he clicked the camera. It's all a facade. Mom loved to pretend downstairs every bit as much as we did up here. It was a game. A real and dangerous game of self-preservation and desperation. I covered for her drinking every day, pretending everything was normal. We all did, Dad included, and it makes me so goddamn angry to see all those photographs of the perfect American family. Here comes Judge Season and the four little Seasons!”

“Jilly, stop it!” said Rose.

“You dug up all the dirty little secrets yesterday, Rose. You can't go back now. Let's be honest. Where are the pictures that show what it was really like?”

Her sisters looked back at her, anxious and hesitant.

“Come on, don't shrink back now.” She pointed to the box of photographs. “I'll bet you won't find a single snapshot in there of Mom toting a gin bottle around the house, or one of us sitting in front of the TV stuffing peanut butter sandwiches in our mouth after school because she didn't bother to pack us a lunch. Or one of Dad escaping out the back door to go to the office. Or of me sneaking out the bedroom window, or of Birdie swimming her heart out to win another prize for them, or of Rose knocking herself out around the house trying to please them. Aren't you angry?”

When they didn't respond she cried out, “Well, I am! I'm
so damn angry, even after all these years. The hurt is still so fresh. What kind of a mother was she? She neglected her duties. She wasn't present, Birdie. She abandoned us. She—”

Jilly stopped abruptly, her own words sinking in with bruising intensity.
Not present…abandoned
…God help me, she thought as her face drained of color. I'm just like my mother. Looking at Birdie and Rose, she saw in their eyes that they understood she was thinking of her own child.

“I can't go into this,” she said in a choked voice. “I just can't.”

Rose's face crumpled. “It wasn't all like that and you know it.”

“How do you know? Rose, look at the pictures!” Jilly went to grab a handful of photos from the box. She held them out to her. “You were so little. In this one you look about four years old, and in this one, what—two? Do you know why you think these photographs are your heritage? Because you don't remember what really happened. These pictures
are
your memories! And you know what? They're not real!”

Rose looked up, her hazel eyes full of hurt and reproach.

Jilly dropped the photographs into the box and walked to the corner of the room to lean against a tall box. “I'm sorry,” she said, more calmly than she felt. What she felt was that the ceiling was falling down on her. “I didn't want to dredge all this muck back up. I've deliberately avoided thinking about any of this stuff for years, and believe me, it's the last thing I'd intended to get into when I came home. But you forced open Pandora's box, Rose. With Merry's letter. Now all the demons are released and I can't keep them from pouring out. I don't mean to hurt you, or you, Birdie. I don't want to hurt anyone. But it's obviously not settled in my mind, because it still hurts me.”

“I didn't mean to hurt you, either,” Rose said, her eyes filling.

Birdie opened her mouth, but shut it again. Her face looked older, tired. In the resulting thick silence, she picked up a
handful of photographs and idly flipped through them. Then, intrigued, she grabbed another handful, and more quickly sorted through these. “Wait a minute,” she said with a ring in her voice. Rising to her knees she began digging into the box. She scanned a dozen photographs, then went to the clothes boxes and sorted through them while her sisters watched. “I think there's a pattern here.”

Jilly and Rose didn't reply, lost in their own thoughts.

“Yes, there's no question about it,” Birdie continued. “Take a look, Rose. Jilly's right. All the photographs are of us when we were very young. All these things that Mom collected were from the early years back when Merry was still a baby.”

“So what?” Jilly raked her hair from her face. She was dying for a cigarette.

“Jilly, don't you see?” Birdie straightened to face her. “Mom wasn't drinking then.”

Jilly took a deep breath and put her hands on her hips. She didn't want to go where Birdie was leading.

“Look,” Birdie urged, and held some photographs out. “These pictures…they
were
happy times.”

Jilly didn't take them. “You're saying that she stopped saving and collecting all this stuff after she started drinking.”

“Right.” Birdie paused, letting the photos in her hand slip back into the box. “And she started drinking
after
Merry's accident.”

There was a moment's pause as the words sunk in.

“I don't remember when exactly she started drinking,” said Rose. “I just remember there was a happy period of time when I was little, then there's this blank when I don't remember hardly anything, and then I remember being older and her being drunk a lot. But it makes sense that she'd start drinking after Merry's accident.”

“Makes sense that it's a blank period in your memory, too.”

“That's so sad. Poor Mom. That explains it.”

Jilly turned to look at Rose carefully. There was something in the way she moved, or maybe it was the dim light, but with her tiny frame and pale strawberry-blond hair, she looked so much like their mother just then. “Rose, we don't need to make excuses for her. Mom was an alcoholic.”

“No she wasn't.”

“Oh, no, here we go….”

“Jilly,” said Birdie, her voice demanding, halting Jilly from walking off.

Jilly stopped and turned her head. Her face was impassive.

“I really don't want to go into another of one of our ‘mom was an alcoholic' debates. We all know she drank like a fish and if some of you can't bear to give it a name—” she looked at Rose “—well, we each have to deal with it in our own way.”

“Can we just drop it?” asked Birdie with urgency. “That's not the point, anyway. What I'm trying to show you is that you're wrong about
us
. We had a wonderful childhood. The best. Mom was there, fully present for us every day while we were young. You and I were the lucky ones, Jilly. We were in junior high when it happened. Rose was only six. I'm old enough to remember, and while I'm not denying it was hell when Mom started drinking, when I think of my childhood, I think of the early days. Come on, Jilly, when we came up here you remembered the make-believe we use to play here. You can't deny those weren't some of the best days of our lives.”

“And you're wrong, Jilly. I
do
remember,” Rose declared, her eyes flashing. “Like they happened yesterday. I remember all the games.”

“Like this one?” Birdie held out a photograph for them to see. In it, smiling, tanned Jilly, Birdie and Rose were shoulder-deep in the pool, all wearing dime-store tiaras and bright red
lipstick. They were posing dramatically, clinging to the metal ladder, their legs held out like fins. Above them on the terrace stood two-year-old Merry, also wearing a tiara in her soft red ringlets. She was arching on tiptoe, her chubby fingers grasping either side of the pool's ladder and smiling with red lips as bright as the summer sun overhead.

Jilly stared at the photograph. “Mermaids,” she murmured, immediately sucked in.

“That was my favorite game,” said Rose with a bittersweet smile, reaching up to take the picture. She studied the photograph as though imprinting it into her brain.

“It was everyone's favorite,” replied Birdie.

“Merry sure was cute,” Jilly said, lowering herself to her haunches to look over Rose's shoulder. She gave a short laugh. “A real show-stealer. When was this taken?” she asked, but in her heart, she knew.

“She's got to be two years old,” Birdie replied. “So it would be the summer of the accident.”

Before the accident
. The thought floated in the air. Jilly rose to stand and walked to the window, wrapping her arms tight around her. The glass was grimy and cracked, fitting for this view of the outline of the swimming pool. In her mind she saw a macabre collage: floating white limbs, streaming red hair, wavy blue water. In her ears she heard birdcalls that changed to a high, young girl's voice calling her name.
Jilly! Jilly! Help!

“Look at her eyes,” Birdie said with a thick voice. “You can just tell she's excited to be playing with us.”

“Her greatest thrill was being one of the Four Seasons,” Rose said. “She always referred to us as that. I think it made her feel connected to us.” She shrugged her shoulders. “You heard her say it on the video.”

“Do you think Mom packed away the tiaras?” Jilly turned
from the window to face them again. “
That
I'd like to have.” Her eyes rolled upward and she spread out her arms and said with a slight, dramatic bow, “A final tribute to my youth.”

“Most likely she buried them when she had the pool filled in with dirt,” said Birdie.

Jilly felt a quick stab in her gut at the image of the big truck dumping load after load of soil into the pit of the pool, burying the memory of the accident. After a few breaths the pain subsided. Rubbing her stomach, she joined them again on the floor. She reached for the photograph of the mermaids with a sigh of resignation and looked at it again.

“This was the end, you know,” she said after a while.

“The end of what?”

“The end of our childhood. The last game.” She looked at Birdie, then at Rose, her eyes narrowed under one raised brow. They didn't reply but she could tell that they understood her meaning.

“I never think of it,” Rose said in a soft voice.

After a short silence Birdie said, “Me, neither, but maybe we should. Maybe we should talk about it. Don't you think it's time?”

“No,” Jilly replied curtly. “There's nothing to be gained. The past is past. Let it lie.”

“But it isn't past,” Rose argued. “That's the problem.”

“A minute ago you told us that we were afraid to look at the way things really were, and now you're telling us to let the past lie. So which is it?” asked Birdie.

Jilly shook her head and raised her hands. “I don't know. I don't know and I don't care! I mean, shit! How much guilt do you expect me to deal with in one weekend?” She dropped her hands in a machete-like sweep. “I'm out of here.” She tossed the photograph at Rose, swooped to her feet and almost ran out of the small room.

“Jilly!” Rose scrambled to her feet. “Wait! It's not just
your
guilt,” she called after her. “Do you think you're the only one who feels responsible for what happened to Merry?” She stood at the top of the stairs, calling after Jilly who was pounding down them. “This happened to all of us. Look at the photograph. We were all in the pool. All four of us!”