The Angry Woman Suite (43 page)

“Aidan, I’m curious. The night of the fire … you moved The Angry Woman Suite from the mill house to Washington’s Headquarters, with Lear Grayson. But you never told anybody. And then you kept the suite secret for years, until recently.”

Aidan’s eyes were twin bores of steel. “We’ve talked about this.”

“Not all of it.” I kept my voice even. “Aidan, you let the world think the Angry Women went up in smoke. Then shortly after the fire, Lear Grayson blew his brains out. But why did Lear Grayson kill himself?”

“I told you, we’ve talked about this.”

“Not
this.
Aidan, I don’t want to believe you planned all along on cutting Lear out of the paintings once you had them at Washington’s Headquarters, once Lear put the blame on Stella …”

“Hush,” Aidan said, pulling his shoulders back. “Not now.”

But I didn’t hush. Instead everything loosened up inside me, and I shuddered as the ache in my gut freed itself, but not before I’d yelled—or at least I’d
wanted
to yell it, but I may actually have only thought it, because Aidan did
not
recoil—

“Lear Grayson was your hell, Aidan! You threatened him with the truth, didn’t you? About what
he’d
done to the Waterstons, and to Stella. You even told him you were turning yourself in! That you didn’t care if you went down, too, as long as justice was done. And that, Aidan, was when Lear killed himself, when you told him the show was over—only you did the same thing Sahar had tried with Matthew Waterston when she wanted him to push her down the stairs: you set the stage. You handed Lear the gun. But, unlike Sahar with Matthew, you
were
able to make Lear do what you wanted.
You
killed Lear Grayson, didn’t you, Aidan?”

My breath came in hard, shallow gulps, as if I’d been embattled. But Aidan looked worse. He looked
destroyed.
And seeing him like that sucked everything back out of me, just like that—gone. Because I loved Aidan, and loving him the way I did made me understand, in one of those strange flashes of insight, what it’s like to want to kill yourself over the sheer sadness of loving someone lost.

Aidan murmured, “We create in our heads what we want to be.” The overhead light glinted off his glasses. “Just like we make up what we need others to be.”

I knew he was talking about himself and Lear, and I knew exactly what he meant because I’d felt that same thing about me and Daddy.

He said wearily, “You should rest.”

But I was nowhere near tired.

“I’ll tell you what I’m ready for, Aidan. I’m ready for the top floor.” His eyebrows shot up.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The third floor of Grayson House. I’m ready for it. I’m really ready.”

“I don’t think I understand—”

“Please, Aidan.” I emphasized each word:
“I’m ready to meet Jamie.”

I turned and walked out of that parlor then, and into the foyer and up the ten steps to the landing where the grand staircase turned direction. I ran up the first flight, then paused at the second landing, waiting for Aidan. When I glimpsed him behind me, I turned and ran up the next flight, to the third floor, straight for the door at the end of the hallway, next to the door that opened onto the outside stairs. I’d been able to pinpoint this door as the one by the soft thumps I’d heard when I’d sneaked into Papa’s room on the second floor—things nobody thought I’d hear—and by watching from my spot across the road: the quick deliveries and arrivals, the things and people nobody thought I’d see.

I hesitated, not feeling anything, I was now so empty. No more anger. Instead I was in tune with
senses
: the steady tick-tock of the clock at the end of the otherwise soundless hallway, the wallpaper’s perfectly vertical stripe, even an aromatic odor reminiscent of the appendectomy I’d had when I was six—was it ether? And then, finally, Aidan’s ragged breathing when he caught up with me. We were ready, in position—and it was understood I’d assumed leadership: I’d go first.

I turned the doorknob. My opponent had just run through his resources.

The other side of the door, Magdalene put out a steadying hand, grasping the top of a chair: I’d startled her. But we didn’t speak, and neither did I speak to the others. One thing at a time.

I took in the dim, oblong room: the bed at the far end of it, its headboard a slow rise out of the semi-darkness. A shadowy figure sat on the edge of the bed: a woman. She turned toward me, silent. I counted the other silhouettes lining the wall like chess pieces, set up just so and recently too: stiff and uneasy in their body language. Mother was not among them. Which meant Aunt Rose was still in San Diego trying to coax Mother back out of her fairytale land, and that neither Mother nor Aunt Rose had been in on
it.

I went straight to my first beloved. So tall even for a man his age, Papa had been the easiest to identify. His arms went around me, and I looked over his shoulder. The woman on the edge of the bed shook—or, rather, the
whole
bed shook, because what was
in
the bed shook. The woman fumbled with something on the bedside table.

“You had to find out for yourself,” Papa said. “On your own.” And then he asked in a voice bent with longing,
“Geht’s dir gut?”
And just like that, I knew Papa would one day soon slip away from me again, just as he had when my grandmother died. I knew it by his voice, by the thinness of it. It was a
fading,
like the outlines of the cabbage roses on the walls of our house in Sacramento had faded into the butter-soft background of paper.

Paper thin. Nothing lasts. Everybody and everything is paper thin.

Aidan was the one to reassure Papa. “It
is
okay,” he said, putting a hand on Papa’s arm.

Papa gave me a gentle nudge and I stepped forward, toward the biggest chess piece against the wall. “Hey, Uncle Buster,” I said.

Uncle Buster shuffled out of the gloom, and even in the bad light I could see his simple face was dappled with sadness. He hugged me awkwardly and mumbled something about Bean, and then made a U-turn and receded back into darkness, between two figures that stood out in white, a nurse named Honey Fitzgerald, and a doctor. I knew the nurse from when I’d been hospitalized in San Diego, and more recently from eavesdropping and watching Grayson House from across the road.

I looked back at Papa. Suddenly, I couldn’t help trembling.

“Papa.”

“Mein Liebes,”
he said softly, his certainty evident again, like my childhood memories of him. “You must be brave.” The first words he’d said when Daddy had taken me to Biloxi, making me leave Papa behind. And the first words he’d said when Daddy had returned me home.

“You must be like the mourning bird, do you remember? That it’s in the process of striving for her perfect song that she conquers fear and triumphs. Being brave can’t always put things in black and white, but it can be a pretty good beginning, Elyse—a fresh start.”

I nodded, my heart like flapping wings, but brave like the mourning bird I started for the bed.

“When the masks come off,” Papa said, right behind me, “that’s when we see the suffering, and that’s when kindness is called for.”

I began seeing the complete and perfect pattern.

“But the wisest game player,” Papa said, “never
completely
trusts in what he or she sees when looking through things.”

I began seeing my freedom.

“The wisest game player,” Papa coached, lips at my ear, “knows that when she
does
see through something, it’s usually only her perception of a truth that’s in constant movement. Truth is
always
moving,
Liebling.
”

Truth was, in order to be free I needed to separate myself from what lay
on that bed. But first I had to see him for what he
really
was. I had to see the truth of
just
Jamie, and then I had to let him go. I had to be the last piece standing.

Six more paces, that’s all, but it seemed six miles. The woman on the edge of the bed stood up. I had to do what Mother had refused to do: I had to acknowledge her position.

“Elena,” I said politely. She handed me a scroll of heavy paper and then stepped back, next to her aunt, Honey Fitzgerald, and allowed me past. Two more steps to the head of the bed—and then I looked down.

The mask was completely off, and he shook everywhere, from his eyelids to his fingertips to feet that twitched beneath the blanket—but I saw straight through him. I saw that these tremors weren’t tremors of anger, and furthermore they’d
never
been tremors of anger. They were tremors fed by fear. His eyes opened, so I know he saw me. But he didn’t recognize me, sickened as he was by fear of the disease that struck Waterston men down. A disease often meaning dementia. Perhaps allowing him to become who Lothian told him he was when she’d taken him from the hospital Uncle Buster had checked him into on Aidan’s instructions?

Because this
was
Lothian’s Jamie, the one who’d gotten away from the women, found by Lothian in the Portsmith hospital and brought back to Grayson House to be reunited with her.

So of course he couldn’t recognize me. This Jamie had never met me.

Still, I wasn’t completely taken in. Having already been around the block so many times, I
had
to at least consider the possibility he’d
gamed Lothian and her delusion in order to get himself out of the Portsmith facility. Which meant I had to consider he was gaming
me,
and that he was no more sick with Huntington’s than I was. And that he damn well knew who was standing over his bed, looking down at him.

Which was the truth?

Despite all my previous attempts to control my life by categorizing him and Mother; putting them in boxes, visualizing him as a thing from another planet and my mother from a fairytale land, the truth—as Aidan once said—is that even the most benevolent person has a monstrous side—it really
is
just that simple.

And I’d seen both his: the benevolent
and
the monstrous.

The truth, as Papa said, is always moving.

In the end, then, it didn’t matter
if
he was still trying to play with my head, or
if
he’d ever really meant to, because for the first time in a long while I wasn’t going where he was going. I wasn’t going where
any
of my old family was going. So much of what I’d known and believed had been wiped out.

I was starting a new life. Tumbling into uncharted territory. Maybe even sunshine. Someday. And with Lothian out of the picture once and for all, this Jamie was also being liberated, because Aidan, even if he hadn’t planned for it to go this way, had seen to it. I would go on to college, but this musician rode with Elena and Buster in the band, in the land of music where he was king—and it was time.

I looked at him for the longest moment, and I wept, knowing he of all people understood the piercing sadness of the win. And then I cut my second beloved completely loose, sending him back to the wilderness he’d come from, where he knew every twist in the road and every ford crossing a river that had been the reason for a battle lost before it began. I sent him back to his terrain, a terrain I’d made it my business to also learn, in order to keep a step ahead of my opponent. And when I spoke to him for that last time, declaring myself free in the process, my voice echoed in that tube of a room:

“Goodbye, Daddy,” I said. “Checkmate.”

AIDAN

Magdalene was the one who told me Francis had vanished.

“What do you mean,
vanished?”

She dropped into the chair nearest mine in the breakfast room. “I went to look in on him—the bed’s made. The wardrobe’s empty. No clothes, no suitcase.
He’s gone, Aidan.”

I ran. Through the kitchen to the foyer, throwing the front door open, counting, matching drivers to cars in the driveway. “How many cars? How many? Goddamn it, whose is missing?” And then I knew. “Elena and goddamn Buster! Dammit, they took Francis!”

“Aidan—look!”

I turned around. Magdalene stood just inside the big parlor. The wall behind her was huge, different-looking—and then I knew why. Magdalene’s portrait was gone.
Gone!
A square of paper had been tacked inside the rectangular outline where it had hung.

Magdalene said, “Aidan, it’s Sahar’s watercolor. The one you gave Francis when he was fifteen, before he left for New York the first time.”

I removed the watercolor from the wall, examining the old mill house rendered in muted grays and greens, the angles of the house feathered into the surrounding meadow grass, resulting in overall softness, almost illusion. I noted Sahar’s initials at the bottom, and then turned the paper over. There was handwriting. I adjusted my spectacles and read aloud, “‘Moonlight Serenade and you, forever.’”

“But, Aidan, I don’t understand … why would Francis take my portrait? And why leave Sahar’s watercolor in its place? More to the point, why was Francis
taken,
Aidan? I told you it was
not
a good idea moving Francis out of California—”

“But he wasn’t taken,” I heard Elyse say, sidling in-between us, surprising me further. “I was reading in bed and heard something, so I cracked my door a bit and saw them coming down the stairs: Daddy, Uncle Buster, and Elena. And Daddy walked out of Grayson House on his own two good legs, Aidan. No shaking at all. Not one quiver. He walked like a regular person. He
did
take Magdalene’s portrait before he left, but he didn’t tack Sahar’s watercolor up.”

Magdalene looked even more stunned. “No shaking? You’re saying he
doesn’t
have—? But why did—?”

“Daddy take your portrait? To remember you by is my best guess.”

“You didn’t confront him,” I interjected. I didn’t dare look at Magdalene.

“No, Aidan,” Elyse said. “There didn’t seem to be a point. I’d already said everything that needed to be said. But I was the one who tacked the watercolor up after Daddy left. I did it so the tacks wouldn’t leave marks, see? Elena gave it to me last night in Daddy’s room. I’m guessing Sahar’s watercolor is something Elena and Daddy passed back and forth through the years—like a message in a bottle. But now they don’t need it. They’ve got the real thing; they’ve got each other again.” She looked at me closely, and I’d have sworn she could see straight through my skin, onto the fiery red ball of guilt eating at my gut.