The Secrets She Carried (18 page)

“I’m just trying to understand.”

His eyes were shuttered when they met hers, hard and unreadable. “Maybe you shouldn’t ask questions you’re not willing to answer yourself.”

A
t high noon the attic was stifling, the air thick with dust and discarded memories. Leslie groaned at the sight of so much junk, abandoned furniture stacked with bric-a-brac, a dizzying maze of boxes littered with papery moth corpses. It was the last place on earth she wanted to be, but Jay’s words had stayed with her, awakening her at three a.m., and then again at four.

When was the last time you used your gifts?

It had been a while; years, in fact. She was only seven when she snapped her first picture, her mother beside her, her first teacher. She wasn’t very good back then, but she had gotten good. Good enough to earn her way through Parsons, land a wall full of prestigious awards, and hold more than a dozen successful shows. Her mother would have been proud. But she had given it all up for
Edge
, for a title and a corner office, where she helped peddle sports cars to men with dwindling testosterone levels and hawked two-hundred-dollar cigars to big shots who probably couldn’t tell the difference.

The questions were still unanswered when the alarm went off the next morning, but as she had sipped her morning coffee, her thoughts drifted to her mother’s work, carefully preserved at one time in a series of leather-bound albums. What had become of them after she
died? Was it possible, after all these years, that they might still be here somewhere?

And so, after an unsuccessful search of Maggie’s room, she had climbed the narrow stairs to the attic. She tried not to dwell on the stacks and piles that would eventually have to be sorted through, the broken picture frames and shadeless lamp, the cartons brimming with glasses and dishes wrapped in sheets of yellowed newsprint, the pots and pans and chafing dishes, battered suitcases and disjointed umbrellas. By the look of things, most of it had been here for at least a half century. Another day or two wasn’t going to make much difference.

After a cursory look through the cartons near the stairs, Leslie moved deeper into the gloomy chaos, where the castoffs were more randomly stacked and it became more difficult to navigate. She had nearly cleared a precarious jumble of old tables and chairs when she tripped over a sheet of canvas and nearly broke her neck. Dust clouded the air as she pulled back the sheet. When it settled she found herself eye to eye with the portrait of an unfamiliar bride.

The strand of pearls at the woman’s throat was familiar, though, distinctive thanks to its ornate garnet clasp. They were the pearls Maggie had worn for her own bridal portrait, the pearls she had promised would one day belong to Leslie. So this was Susanne Gavin, Henry’s wife, and the matriarch of three generations of Gavin woman.

Leslie tilted her head and closed one eye, searching for some scrap of recognition, but the woman might as well have been a stranger. She fell rather short of pretty, despite her lace veil and lapful of lilies, pale and sharp, with a bottomless gaze that was too chilly for comfort. It seemed the Gavin women got their dark looks from Henry’s side of the family.

Finding a portrait of Maggie’s mother stashed in the attic, rather than mounted in a place of honor, felt odd. But then she was in no position to judge. She’d been wondering for days what to do with
some of Maggie’s relics, and now here was one more. She’d deal with it later. Right now, she was here to look for her mother’s albums, and she wasn’t letting herself get sidetracked.

After two hours of gritty, backbreaking excavation, Leslie finally found what she was looking for, a pair of boxes tucked away in the northeast dormer, each bearing the name
AMANDA LYNNE
in heavy black marker. The packing tape made a sound like ripping cloth as Leslie peeled it away. Her hands trembled as she turned back the flaps and peered in at the tenderly packed bits of her mother’s childhood: a once-pink tutu with sequins along the bottom, a tarnished gymnastics trophy, a faded Harvest Queen sash.

Ballerina. Gymnast. Harvest Queen.

It was hard for Leslie to imagine her mother as any of those things, let alone all of them. Since her death, Amanda Nichols had lived in her memory as the woman who read bedtime stories and made smiley faces with pancakes and bacon. But this was another Amanda, the girl she’d been before she grew up and married Jimmy, all carefully packed away in a corner of the attic.

Leslie closed up the carton of memorabilia and moved on to the next, holding her breath as she yanked back the tape and peered into the box. There they were, eight leather volumes with the year stamped in faded gold along the spine, and in surprisingly good shape from what she could see as she lifted them out, the pages brittle and brown but intact for the most part.

Laying the most recent album in her lap, she began paging through. Most were nature shots, startlingly good for someone with no formal training. Her mother definitely had an eye. They were arranged chronologically, as they’d been shot. One particular series caught her attention. It began at the mouth of a wooded track, then continued to move deeper along the sun-dappled path.

There was something uncannily pleasant about following the progress of the shots, as if she were actually walking at her mother’s
side as each frame was captured. But there was something else too, a niggling familiarity as she studied the play of light and shadow in each shot, a nudge toward something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. And then it came, the rush of recognition so startling it set her pulse thrumming. As she turned the page, she already knew what she would find—an empty space. It would be empty because the photo that used to be there was now on her bureau, the same photo Brendan Goddard had given her in his office. And her mother had taken it.

Leslie stared at the blank space on the page, wondering what it might mean. Maggie had handed the photo over to her attorney to ensure that it found its way into her hands—her hands, not Jay’s. But why? Yes, the shot was amazing, but if Maggie’s intent had been to make sure she never forgot her mother, why not leave a letter instead of a mysterious photograph whose origins she had only stumbled on by accident?

Groaning, she stood and brushed the dust from the seat of her jeans. She was sticky and tired, her head swimming with questions that seemed to have no answers. She wasn’t finished with this mystery by a long shot, but she needed something to drink and a little soap and water. Hoisting the carton of albums up onto her hip, she headed downstairs.

After a shower, she poured herself another glass of sweet tea and dragged the box of albums out onto the back porch. She had planned to bring
A Letter Home
down with her, to lose herself in a few chapters of mindless fiction, but she had changed her mind, deciding instead to go through the rest of her mother’s albums.

Settled in a rocker at the shady end of the porch, she lifted out each volume, laying them open in her lap one at a time, leafing through page after page of her mother’s work, stirring long-dead bits of memory—her mother’s voice, clear and quiet, as fresh to her as yesterday.

In her lap, the photo Brendan Goddard had given her was waiting to be returned to its rightful place. But the longer she stared at the
lonely grave with its nameless stone, the less she wanted to part with it. Maybe because she wanted to understand why Maggie had removed it in the first place. Or because she longed to know how her mother had stumbled onto such an amazing shot. She would never know the answer to either, of course, but she wasn’t ready to put the picture away just yet.

Swatting at whatever was buzzing near her left ear, Leslie stood. While she’d been tripping down memory lane, the afternoon had slipped away and the mosquitoes had marshaled their forces. Stacking the albums in chronological order, she dragged the empty carton over with one foot, then went still as she saw the flat brown envelope lying at the bottom.

Surprised that she hadn’t seen it earlier, she lifted it out. There were no markings of any kind, the back flap tucked rather than sealed. Curious, and perhaps a little wary, she was about to drop back into her rocker when another mosquito whined by and changed her mind. Tucking the envelope between her teeth, she went back to repacking the albums. Whatever it was would have to wait until she was inside, where the light was better and the mosquitoes weren’t invited.

While her Lean Cuisine heated, Leslie spilled the envelope’s contents onto the kitchen table. She had expected more photos, but it was only a few bits of paper: an old magazine article, a dog-eared photocopy, and a small envelope of washed-out gray paper that might once have been blue.

She frowned at the magazine article’s title as she picked it up—“The Tortured Genius: Exploring the Myth of the Creative Martyr.” It had been torn from the March ’81 issue of the
American Journal of Visual Arts
and seemed to explore the links between creativity, addiction, and mental illness. There were plenty of examples—writers, sculptors, and painters who had struggled for their art against schizophrenia, addiction, and depression, only to die in poverty, obscurity, or both.

Some of the names were familiar: Toulouse-Lautrec, who suffered from both alcoholism and depression; van Gogh, whose epilepsy medications were now credited, at least partly, with his unique artistic style; and Sylvia Plath, who wrote brilliantly, and put her head in an oven one day while her children slept. There were other names too, names she didn’t recognize, Henry Darger, Karin Boye, Jeremiah Tanner—brilliant failures, all.

Shrugging off a head full of dark images, she folded the article back in half and deposited it in the envelope, baffled as to why her mother might have been interested in such an article. Was she depressed like Lautrec? Suicidal like Plath? The question lingered as she moved on to the single photocopied page and once again found herself reading about the art world, this time in Paris’s dark underbelly near the turn of the century.

Leslie ignored the microwave timer when she noticed two names that had also appeared in the journal article: Toulouse-Lautrec and Jeremiah Tanner, whose opium demon eventually leeched him of funds and friends until even his common-law wife had been forced to abandon him for the States, along with their unborn child.

Delightful.

By the time Leslie finished reading, her Swedish meatballs were cold and her head was swimming. Why her mother would have been interested in Toulouse-Lautrec and the opium dens of Montmartre, she couldn’t imagine. One more thing she’d never know. The thought made her sad. So many ghosts, past lives to be sorted and disposed of—lives she was beginning to realize she knew very little about.

Hoping for something less morbid, she reached for the small gray envelope. She couldn’t make out the postmark, and the address was in even worse shape, the ink strokes splotched and badly faded. The letter crackled like parchment as she teased it free. In the late-afternoon sun, the page was nearly translucent, its scratchy script a challenge to decipher.

Leslie blinked at the signature, a single, illegible letter scratched at the bottom of the page. No help there. They weren’t Maggie’s words, though; of that she was sure. The tone was wrong, the phrasing outdated—and something else it took a moment to put her finger on. The words felt…careful. As if the author was afraid she might reveal too much. But to whom?

It was possible that Susanne had written it to Maggie, but then why mail it? Maggie had never lived anywhere but Peak. Besides, it felt older than that. It was more likely that Susanne’s mother had written it after Maggie was born. But why would she have doubted that Henry would stand by Susanne?

Sighing, Leslie carefully folded the letter along its creases and slid it back into the small gray envelope, then eyed the carton of albums at the end of the table. It was a strange place to find an old letter. Almost as strange as finding Susanne’s portrait in the attic, hidden under a sheet of dusty canvas. But then it had been a strange sort of a day.