Chapter Twelve
I folded my cardigan and tucked it beside my dress in the suitcase. My kitten heels I slipped in beside Mr. Bubbles, who was staring with glassy stuffed animal eyes of reproach.
”What?” I said — to myself as much as a random stuffed animal, as if his look was convicting me of some inner hesitation. ”This is the right thing to do. We have to go back and do it.”
I didn”t sigh despite the urge, because I had made my choice. My noble attempts at mediation and at battle truces had left me with tattered flags. The wise thing to do was to tell Arnold I could make both the interviews he wanted me to do — promote my books, feed the dogs, and think about my neglected notebook of the future story in motion, which was lying underneath my packed clothing, along with a couple of novels.
I tucked the valuable necklace into the little hidden compartment. Maybe Mr. Trelawney would loan me some room in the hotel”s safe for old times” sake, until I could arrange for a safety deposit box of my own. It was valuable to me, not for the diamonds, but the reluctant acceptance of me and Sidney she offered with it, the only one I would probably ever receive from her.
Downstairs, I paused to make certain Hollis wasn”t going to appear to claim my suitcase and carry it out to the cab. Adele was finalizing the dinner menu with Erin in the living room, her midmorning cup of tea already cold.
”I”m going now,” I said, pausing in the doorway. Erin slipped past me, discreetly, as Adele surveyed me with an impassive gaze.
”I see.” She glanced away. ”Give my regards to my son when you see him. Which I”m quite certain will be before I do.”
I accepted this zinger, and stepped away, before hesitating. ”He misses you, you know,” I said. ”He never stopped regretting the way he left the first time. That”s why he”s tried so hard the second time to keep it from ending the same way. If you can find the forgiveness ... help him keep it from happening again.”
In Adele”s eyes, a brief flicker between softness and pain when she looked at me. She turned away again, but I decided to let this be her reply rather than wait for words that were far too hard for her to say. I lifted my suitcase by its handle.
Outside the house, with my suitcase loaded in the cab, I turned back to watch Hollis close the front door. Somehow I did not feel on equal footing with its imposing environment, but I didn”t feel invisible, awkward, or inferior. It was as if I was separate from its world, and that was perfectly fine with me. Trying to fit in had been my mistake, instead of embracing the times I stood out for the right reasons.
I inhaled deeply, then turned and climbed into the cab.
Too early for the train to Newquay, I watched a couple trying to read a folding map and aLondon A-Zguide, and a young man with his hair in tight little braids, texting someone on his phone. I shifted my weight, wrapping my hand around the suitcase handle more securely.
Kip would be happy to see one of us come home, and maybe Ewan McGregor hadn”t dug too many holes in the garden that I would need to refill. Yo-Yo missed having company in the house — probably by now she had emptied one of the lower bookshelves of the novels Dean meant for me.
The departure times appeared on the digital board. A southboundtrain was next, departing to a station I recognized as the switch for the stop at Twinnan-on-Hamble. Home of Lewiston and, more particularly, Lewiston manor house.
Why rush? I glanced to the board, then down the tracks where the train would soon be arriving at its platform. I flexed my fingers, glancing back towards the ticket kiosk, then at the rails again. Be serious, I told myself. Then again, I was only going home to wash my clothes and arrange details with Arnold, so keen on promoting the book — the newest green-lit movie project that might be next summer”s blockbuster, if he had his way. The perfect time to debut a new novel, if I had the time and inspiration to turn my latest idea into one.
Then again, a detour wouldn”t hurt. If I went home by the late train, I could sleep until I was home, and be in time to feed the dogs their breakfast.
On the train, I read one of the novels from the bottom of my suitcase, ignoring the notebook I was supposed to be using to jot down inspiration. I gazed out the windows, seeing a view less familiar than many rail journeys I had taken in the past. My destination was not one I had visited many times, despite its pivotal role in the life of someone I loved.
I had visited it more than the times I set foot there, however, without ever knowing it, in travels by fiction to a place I once believed wholly his imagination until an eerie feeling of deja vu had crept over me the first time I came to his childhood home. That had been the first time to see it in the flesh, instead of through the novel I still proclaimed was my favorite, but in a deeper, wiser sense than when I was seventeen.
The only cab at the station took me to the gates at the foot of the house”s long drive.
”I can take you all the way,” said the driver. ”House is at the top, I reckon.”
”No thanks,” I said. ”Could you come back for me in a couple of hours? I may not be staying.” This ”may” was a precaution, for I didn”t think I was in danger of staying in reality. I left the options open in my mind, however, for the present time.
”All right,” he said. ”I”ll come up to the house and ring for you.”
”Thanks.” I snapped my suitcase handle”s extender to its full length as I began walking up the driveway, hearing the cab pull away again. I went on by myself.
The formal hedges and gates blended into wooded property along the house”s private lane before I turned the curve that exposed the view of the garden and main grounds surrounding the manor house. It had been a shock to me the first time I had seen it, this intimidating hall of grandeur.
Misselthwaite. Brideshead. Manderley. Again, all the great imposing houses loomed in my mind, along with their specters of misfortune.
This is part of Sidney”s world.Part of mine, now. I had not really thought of that truth until this moment. The new Mrs. de Winter surveying the mansion in the new light of reality. I tightened my grip on the suitcase handle
Crossing the gravel in front of the house, I glanced up at the high windows, feeling as if dozens of eyes were fixed on me. Sad ones, veiled by closed drapes against the coming cold months — this was the time of year when the staff laid the house to rest and took their holidays. Someone had been down recently to close up the house, because the cleaning staff and gardener had still been here a few weeks ago. Nora had been readying all the spare rooms for a long winter”s sleep beneath dust cloths and heavy drapes.
I remembered Sidney”s vow to sell the estate in the future, and use the money for another purpose in life, living off his own talents from now on. That promise seemed like part of the past, with so many things having changed since that moment of hypothetical discussion about our future.
That was before the fourth novel lost one of its greatest champions, and I understood that the contract”s ramifications could dash our dreams like porcelain on stone. It spelled the end, possibly, of all those plans.
I saw my reflection in the glass conservatory”s long windows, and remembered when my breath fogged its glass years ago in a delicate face to face with Sidney. A ghost from long ago.
Sandstone gargoyles and the spires of chimneys, towering overhead. I remembered that the number of chimneys, like windows, was a distinction of wealth. This house had them in abundance, in those walls blanketed with ivy along the kitchen”s end, with the perfect ornate shrubbery and topiaries trimmed along the foundation. But I had been here more recently than the time I polished silver for Adele”s birthday party — for the magazine interview between Sidney and the book critic.
That last time, I had made coffee in the kitchen, watching through the windows as Sidney and the reporter stood in the garden. Through the window”s open pane, I could hear the questions.
”... and whose idea was it to ask someone else to step into the breach and claim that identity, when the moment called for it?”
”Mine,”Sidney had answered. ”It was my idea to save anyone else in my life from the sort of expectations the editor had for the book ...”
”... in which you were willing to give up the critical acclaim, still, when it began coming forward, and let Margaret Holcombe lay claim to it? That seems remarkably strange to me, given you had nothing to hide, really.”
”Sometimes what you hide is difficult for someone else to understand. It”s more about preserving a fragile bridge than keeping a secret in a cupboard.”
I had rinsed a cup from that morning”s breakfast as I watched them through the glass, one of the perfect set of glass Scandinavian cups rising in my hand from the basin”s soap suds. Sidney had broken a branch off the hedge, wrapped it around his fingers like weaving basket canes.
The garden”s roses were beginning to shed their leaves now, leaving thick canes on the arbor. All the green was fading to winter grey, nestled in beds of mulch and leaf raked carefully around delicate plants. Perennials and delicate shrubbery trimmed to pencil branches; feathery evergreen plants that resembled a landbound version of seaweed to me. Some of the branches needed trimmed, brushing against the crown of my felt bucket hat.
”Did you feel regret, giving it up? Public recognition can be euphoric for most people.”
”Not really.”Sidney had shrugged.”Why regret something that can be so fickle in life?”
”That”s a somewhat novel attitude, if you”ll pardon the pun behind it.”
They had laughed, the polite laughter of people who are too focused on their respective words to be really amused by anything except an extremely clever remark. I had dug the toes of my shoes in the lawn beneath the bench, trying to concentrate on reading instead of listening, failing woefully. Beside me, Kip had chewed on a bone stolen from the refuse ash the gardener had been sifting into the compost heap for feeding the flower beds.
Today, I took the long path to the river, through the garden with the little statue and garden pool, the high walls, a tangled mass of dried stems over the ground where the annual vines had been nipped by the cooler temperatures, shedding leaves and seed pods.
The familiarity of this place had struck me intensely when first I visited it, but I didn”t recognize it as the source for one of the scenes in his book until after I knew the truth. It had seemed obvious then that both were the same.
The path split into two directions, one leading to the riverbank and the place where the tree had been struck by lightning; the other, rounding gradually back to the house through the grounds. I shut my eyes, picturing the waters with that dullness of color at this time of year, lapping against dried chaff from the reeds, the cattails thick in the mired edges. I chose the path to the house, turning away from the crossroads.
”Why did you choose to write about the same characters? Granted, in differing roles of importance in each book, but it”s rare for literary authors to do so. Exceptions being John Galsworthy, Harper Lee, etcetera.”
”I felt the characters all had stories of significance to share. Once the world existed, I didn”t feel I could leave it so abruptly, nor that I should. The familiarity of it held me there, I suppose.”
The real reasons he didn”t leave it were only touched upon: the barest surface of them disturbed like fingers skimming along water. He still held apart the mention of his pain and Adele”s, and of the devastation and separation it caused, protecting the delicate chain between them. He held back the story of losing the person who may have helped him find that talent. It was the heart of the story — he wrote it with the intention of sharing its impact and its revelations — yet he could not bring himself to say the words, as I had stood watching him and the writer standing by the river”s edge, the wind riffling the unmown grass.
He hadn”t wanted to do this interview at all. His reluctance bled through, even when he was so careful to keep it hidden, but I knew him too well not to see.
”What did you want to accomplish when you wrote those novels, since fame and financial success seemed to be neither of the goals you pursued?”
Beneath the thick ivy of the kitchen garden”s wall, I located the loose brick, behind which Sidney had kept his treasures. I inched it out along its edges, drawing it free. The space behind it would be empty, because the treasures had long ago been removed when he was still a child who bartered for candy with buttons and foreign coins.
Like Mary Lennox, I crouched down and looked into its darkness as I sighed, remembering the simpler times in which I had envied him this hiding place with naivete for the fact it was one of the few things he loved about being here.
I put my hand into the space, as if expecting to find the phantom of a garden key. Instead, I touched something hard and irregular, small beneath the tip of one finger. I drew it out slowly, letting it fall into the palm of my hand.
”I don”t think any writer writes to accomplish either of those things, not if they mean it. Not if they told the story the way they wanted to tell it.”
It was a coin of sorts: the top of one, fashioned into a peculiar shape, with a ring slipped through a hole drilled at the top. A kind of saint”s medallion, I realized, after looking at it closely, meant for lost travelers, or lost causes. The words printed around its edges were foreign. Italian, possibly. I now recognized it as the object I mistook for a coin in his palm when he was paying the gelato vendor this past week.
My breath inhaled, sharply. The only way it could have come here was if he, too, had been here mere days ago, in a pilgrimage to the place that had been part of his work, maybe. He had passed this way, knelt in this spot in the earth for this ritual from his past, before all the toy soldiers and buttons had faded out of his life.
My fingers closed tightly around it. I slid the brick into place again.
________________________
”The three-thirty from London to Reading now boarding from Platform Seven.... Attention all passengers awaiting the four fifteen from Windsor....”
The public announcements were half audible, half gaps filled in creatively by my mind as I exited the train car along with the other passengers, making my way to the exit, and the Tube station entrance a short distance from it. My little suitcase bumped clumsily along the pavement, its wheels skipping to keep up with my rapid progress.
I paused only once, to look in the window of a little book and magazine shop I was passing, where tourists and travelers bought light reading material for the journey. Like some of the shops in the city, it had bought a limited run of my indie-published novel”s print edition to resell, and posed them with others.
”Made in Hollywood” said the sign above. ”Blockbuster reads in the making.” These words above that unmistakable cover of a misty, celestial human figure through which the vastness of the star-filled universe shone.
It was in good company, with copies ofWater for ElephantsandTuesdays with Morrie.It made me think of Arnold”s latest interview — the to-do list critical for sustained success in my career”s future.
I sucked in a deep breath, and hurried past, having no time and no idle curiosity to encourage me to linger.
The Tube”s shuttle sped on, to a borough on the city”s far end where I had never been, a suburbia akin to Surbiton in old British television shows. I only knew it as an address texted to me by Hester when I messaged her during my cab ride from Lewiston.
”Did you know that Dean left a piece of property in Ireland to Sidney?”
The answer popped up.”I do.”
I hesitated.”May I ask you about it?”A gift like that — was it an awkward subject? What Dean left to him was the kind of gift that other members of the family might have wanted instead.
”Of course you can. What do you want to know?”
Was it too much to ask?”Do you know if Sidney is there?”I hesitated.”Or can you send me an address for it?”
A few minutes passed before Hester texted me again.”If you”re in London, come meet me and I”ll help.”
The address she sent me wasn”t hers, but that of Irene, Dean”s older sister. I remembered he spoke of taking the train outside the city to meet her, and the house to which the cab brought me was far from any bustling city avenue, home only to a few quiet shops and homes with bigger gardens and garages. English suburbs, home to happy families, houses with children”s toys in the yard and manicured gardens for retirees.
It was here that Dean”s things had been sent: all the ephemera from the cottage that was significant enough for his family to save, but not sentimental enough for him to will individually to those closest to him.
Irene was the sister who answered the door. Her long blond hair was pulled back, an old shirt with light stains from baby formula covering a decorative top worn beneath it. ”Maisie,” she said, recognizing me, undoubtedly because she expected me. ”I remember you from the funeral. Please, come in.”
She ushered me in and closed the door. ”Forgive the mess. My baby has a cold, and we”re at sixes and sevens since losing Dean, so I”m only now beginning to catch up. Go on through to the living room, if you like.”
”I don”t mean to impose,” I said. I set my suitcase in the hall, near a pile of children”s wellies and garden hand tools drying on a coconut-fiber rug. ”I only thought maybe you could send me the address of the place, in case he”s there. His phone has lost its mobile signal, and I haven”t received a message from him since he left Italy.”
My heart was in my throat, trying not to sound as if I was as deeply concerned as I was, or that I was upset at him, even if I was in part. Having been left without a word about his final destination for almost twenty-four hours, and hearing the jokes of dinner guests — and the more realistic cutting remarks of Adele — about his wanderer”s past, I had the right to be.
”It”s no trouble,” said Irene. ”A friend of my brother”s is quite welcome in my house.” She took my coat from me and hung it on the empty peg next to a raincoat and a little child”s windcheater.
”Maisie, you found us. Come through.” Hester was in the doorway to the living room. ”Would you like some tea? We were just having a cuppa.”
”My son Timothy drifted off to his nap,” said Irene. ”We were stealing a much-needed moment of quiet.” She gathered up a few toys on the rug, a multicolored plastic caterpillar and a plush dinosaur.
”I”d love some,” I answered, trying to sound as if I meant it as I followed them through.
”Hester came by today to help with the sort. We”re trying to decide if there is anything sentimental among waistcoats and shirts with bits of paint on the sleeve.” Irene managed a smile after a second”s hesitation.
I stopped short as soon as I entered the room, because above the mantel hung a painting that I recognized instantly. It was Dean”s favorite, the canvas of his sister and two children on a blanket in a garden. It was a younger version of Irene, on a perfect day of late spring or early summer, in a place that I had seen otherwise in photos from his albums which commemorated the time he had spent there in the canvas”s initial stages.
Irene caught the point of my gaze. ”Do you remember it?” she asked. ”It was the one he was most proud of. He left it to me in a special bequest. He said no one else could or should have it.”
”No one should,” I answered. ”I think it”s true that this was his favorite canvas, ever.” My words did not come out gracefully, not beautifully, although I wished them to. Delicate memories triggered, wishing to express themselves in ways I was afraid would make others cry if I began, so I pushed them away. I hoped they did not show in the seconds before I had them under control.
”I always rather hoped that honor of pride would go to one of me,” said Hester, with sisterly chagrin. ”He took a lovely photo, then perversely, never painted it. He decided to do a canvas of some train station instead. I was ever so disappointed.”
”He would be happy to see this one has a place already,” I said, as I accepted the chair Irene cleared off for me, removing some plastic toy dishes and a doll. ”I only hope someone gives his last few canvases pride of place despite his many complaints about them.”
”The coffee girls? They”re going to Nathan,” said Irene. ”He”ll hang them in his office with ceremony. I rather think our younger brother would be somewhat embarrassed by that, but only in pretend.”
”Speaking of bequests, that”s why you”re here,” said Hester. ”You told me you wanted to know about the castle.” She poured a cup of tea for me, in a cup decorated with aster blossoms. ”Dean”s castle,” she added to Irene.
”He left it to Sidney, didn”t he?” Irene replied.
”You knew already?” I said, with a little bit of surprise.
”I always supposed it was something of a joke that he was going to give it to him, although earnest reasons abounded, I”m sure.” She sat down on the sofa”s cushion.
”Was Dean supposed to give something that — important — to him?” I asked, my brow furrowed.
Both of the sisters laughed. ”I”m afraid you have something of a mistaken impression of the place,” said Irene. ”It”s not a castle like Windsor or Fyvie.”
”It”s quite small, really. Just two stories of proper rooms and an open storage one at top — a few cracker tin rooms behind stone walls, to put it bluntly,” said Hester. ”Very primitive and in very poor repair, and there”s no electricity or gas unless someone prods that pokey little generator to life.”
”Where did Dean get it?” I asked. ”I thought all of Dean”s property was part of a family trust.” The solicitor had mentioned this a few weeks ago. All of the Gresham wealth was jointly owned, with more of an implied ownership of things beyond monetary wealth, like the family”s townhouse. Allowances were drawn for each member of the family on a monthly basis, at least those were the customary rules.
”Not the castle, though,” explained Hester. ”Dean inherited it outside the trust, almost fifteen years ago now. It was our uncle”s.”
”Who inherited it from a cousin, I think, in some sort of entailment clause. Dean probably spoke about him to you — he was a don at one of the universities.” Irene reached for a chocolate biscuit. ”Dean absolutely adored him — we all did, although not quite as strongly as our brother, who was practically a son in spirit.”
”He mentioned him,” I said. I knew the story of Dean”s nickname as well as I knew the back of my hand, having been imprinted by the day of confession at his cottage.
”We used to make endless jokes about the place,” said Hester. ”I thought it was very romantic as a child.I Capture the Castlewas my favorite book in my teens.”
”Why Sidney then?” I asked, softly. ”Why didn”t he leave it to you?”
She laughed. ”What would I do with it?” she asked. ”I have a flat in London. There”s no internet whatsoever on the island, so I could never work from there. It”s completely impractical.” She reached for a biscuit on the plate. ”As to why he thought of Sidney, I have no idea, except that Dean believed it would suit him. It was the romantic in Dean, recognizing its kinship with the same in another.”
”Sidney was eccentric enough that he would own a castle, at any rate,” Irene chimed in. ”He probably thinks it”s a grand joke.”
”He probably did, back then,” I said, putting on a smile, although Sidney had not laughed when the bequest was given to him. It had lost the joke by becoming reality.
”Perhaps it”s just me,” said Hester, speaking slowly, ”but I always thought Dean wished Sidney had a spot to call his own outright, far from Lewiston.” She looked thoughtful, a seriousness which was sad in its aura enveloping her words. ”This was his way of giving him one, possibly.”
”A spot just as drafty?” I ventured, hesitantly. Both of them evidently knew this description also, for I heard laughter in reply.
”It was really an old joke,” said Hester. ”Part Sidney”s private nature, part silliness behind it. But as I said, the only good point it has is being in a very remote place if you want to get away.”
”Where is it, exactly?” I pretended to take a sip of tea, but found that my mind was far too busy to note whether it was dandelion or Earl Grey, as if whirring with excitement. I hadn”t been wrong in thinking that Sidney came back to England for a specific place — a specific purpose.
”It”s an island a short distance off the Irish coast — you knew that already,” said Irene. ”Don”t ask me to pronounce its name in Irish, because I”ll botch it dreadfully. In English, locally, it was always known as Sheep”s Isle.”
”Not very romantic-sounding, is it?” added Hester, with a joking smile.
I sipped my tea again, watching the golden brown pool form ripples as I gently tipped it to watch the milk on the surface form a pattern. ”Do you think he would go there?” I asked. ”He wanted to get away from the outside world, even though he was coming back to the part of the world he knows best.”
”I suppose he might,” Hester replied. ”He would have a key to the door by now, I should imagine. Dean”s, probably.”
”Is it very far to the island from the mainland? I mean, could I reach it somehow if I was in Ireland,” I continued. ”I was thinking I might go there. I suppose it”s a long journey to take without knowing for certain, but ....” I trailed off, suddenly, as if my bravado faltered, if only for a moment. ”I really believe that”s where he”s gone, so that”s where I”d like to be at present.”
”He certainly couldn”t call you or text you from there,” said Irene. ”He would have to wait for the boat, and that can mean days sometimes.”
”The boat?”
”The postman”s boat, usually. It only stops if it sees the flag at the dock, and it only comes twice a week if the waters are rough. Sometimes a fishing boat will stop if you fly the signal flag. There”s no way on or off the island except by boat, and the nearest village is just a distant dot on the main shore. We don”t keep a boat at harbor there, and generally none are for hire except for the odd ferrying trip.”
If he was there, there would be only one way I could know, short of waiting for Sidney to hail a ride. ”Can you tell me how to get there?” I asked. This question I knew my lips were forming before it came out.
Irene rose and went to the table by the window, opening a drawer. She searched inside, then withdrew a key on a heavy Celtic knot keychain. ”I can offer one better,” she said. ”In case Sidney is away when you arrive.” She handed it to me.
”You have a key also,” I said, with surprise.
”We all did. Although I suppose we should give them to Sidney, who probably doesn”t care who comes or goes,” said Hester. ”I”m only amazed that Irene knew where hers was. I haven”t seen mine in donkey”s years.”
”I had a clear out only a month ago,” said Irene. ”I actually put things where they should go, for once.”
She showed me some recent photos of her children that were in a scrapbook she was compiling on the same table, as the sun broke through the clouds. Opening the French windows, she showed me outside to the newly-completed patio she and Marsdenhad finished having installed only last weekend, soon to be lined with big terrace pots for next spring”s bulbs.
When the sound of a baby fussing came over the monitor, Hester stepped inside. ”I”ll go,” she said. ”Time to be a doting auntie.” She smiled, and motioned for Irene to stay.
Irene turned back to me. ”Will you feel safe going all the way to the island on your own?” she asked. ”If you decide to go. It is rather far. From the ferry, you have to take the train, then the bus to the nearest town, the one in the directions we gave you.”
”I”ll be fine,” I said. ”I”m not the seasoned traveler your brother and Sidney have been, but I”ve seen my fair share of the world.” I was counting Los Angeles and New York in my tally, which expanded it considerably.
Irene”s smile softened. ”Dean would have liked to hear you say that.”
”I suppose he would,” I answered. ”He told me never to discount the value of any experience, at any rate. I thought that was just his way of being kind.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, hugging her chest as the cool wind nipped around us. ”He was such a romantic,” she said. ”I never knew anyone who worked harder to hide it than he did.”
I laughed. ”I don”t think he was very good at it,” I answered. ”He thought he was, but not really.” I tucked back a lock of my hair against the wind, thinking of all the times Dean betrayed his softer side.
”A part of me wishes that he had found someone to love in life,” she said, quietly. ”It”s silly, I know, because it would have fallen into absolute disaster with the accident, given how he was. But he had such a wonderful heart it seems a pity.” She smiled. ”Of course, he probably did fancy someone and kept it secret. Or several — he was the sort who could fall a hundred times in his lifetime.”
I laughed. ”That”s probably the best sort of person to be, since love can be difficult to manage even with the best intentions,” I said.
”At one time, I thought — without any real proof — that he loved someone whom he couldn”t have,” said Irene. ”I almost hoped it was so, although that”s hardly fair to either of them, is it?”
I lowered my gaze, my eyes misting with the threat of tears. ”I would have hated for him to miss an opportunity to find the right one,” I answered. Being very careful here. ”I would never want him to pine for someone who loved another person. Not if it cost him a chance to love someone who could return that kind of passion.”
My fingers twisted the ring on my hand. Neither of them had noticed I was wearing it, not yet.
Irene laughed. ”That wasn”t something to fear from my brother,” she said. ”He was capable of balancing hopeless romance and the hope of future love simultaneously, believe me.”
”He was a portrait in contrast. Like so much of what he painted.” He would never have admitted to liking the coffee advertisement girls as much as the impressionist pieces of curtains and rooms from his last stage of painting.
My words brought back her smile, momentarily. ”I wish more people could have appreciated him the same way,” she said. ”You were among the lucky few to meet him after the accident took his health, and his will to live.”
She sighed. ”If only he had let more people like you into his life — to my mind, that”s what gave him the desire to try again, the way Sidney kept him from giving up altogether.”
”That feels like too much of a compliment for me to accept,” I said.
Irene laughed. ”It wasn”t meant to make you feel as if you were quite the only thing that kept him alive, second only to Sidney and to us,” she answered, making a joke. ”But I wouldn”t sound grateful if I didn”t give some credit to his friends. He certainly would.” She paused, and her smile dimmed again. ”Some protective force must have kept him from falling apart completely when he was broken. Gifted him with reasons to go on.”
I plucked up the courage to say what I had been hesitating to ask. ”I hope that this isn”t the last time I see you,” I said. ”In the future, if there was any fear of those memories fading, it would be nice to know someone is out there who would share theirs with me. All of you make me feel as if he isn”t quite gone. ”
I wasn”t really in danger of forgetting anyone so significant, in the midst of a pain that still touched my heart fresh each day when I awoke. Something hopeful entered my voice as I asked, for those little fragments of him shared with the world kept alive the person, not the pain of losing him. Wanting to know they were still out there did not seem wrong at all in this moment.
”He isn”t,” she said. ”Not with all of us to remember him.” She squeezed my hand.