The Story She Left Behind

Chapter 2 Clara Harrington

November 1952

She disappeared twenty-five years ago when I was eight years old, and still my mother appeared to me every day. It might be in a turn of phrase I used, or in the song of the rising tide behind our house, in my daughter’s creative energy as she gathered moss for a fairy house, or in the clues and messages my mother taught me to look for in the natural world. She seemed to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. She was absence, she was presence, and she was mystery.

Because of that pervasive energy, I created something in my life that was mine alone. My art was just that—my private place, my passion, my refuge from the larger world that no one else could touch.

Or so I believed.

In our blue cedar shake house on the spartina-edged waters of the May River, I disappeared into the world of a hedgehog named Harriet. I was painting her for a children’s book. I held my sable-hair brush over the canvas, readying for the whiskers’ fine lines. The lush and immersive landscape in the story made me look forward to entering the author’s imaginary world every day, despite never having met her. I was her illustrator.

I loved this little hedgehog with one ear who struggled to find her place in a land of lakes and mountains, of magical talking animals and wide spaces overflowing with wildflowers and willow trees. For me, Harriet’s spirit was an echo of my eight-year-old daughter, Wynnie, an allegory of Wynnie’s own struggle to fit in with her third-grade class, with her thick glasses and her fragile lungs.

Now, in the sunroom I used as an art studio, Harriet’s whiskers quivered under my brush when the broken ring of the doorbell’s song startled me. I dropped the paintbrush onto the tarp cloth and nearly knocked a watercolor palette from the side table.

There often was a charge of change when I moved from one world to the next, from the imaginary to the real. I always needed a moment to return. The clock on the far wall told me that four hours had passed while I worked. I’d missed lunch completely, and now Margo was here for the newspaper interview we’d arranged.

I’d planned to clean up first, to present as the professional artist who had just won a major award, but that time was gone, and Margo knew me better than that anyway. I rushed to the front door, wiping my hands along Nat’s old button-down I used as an art apron, a mosaic of paint blotches and bleach.

On my front steps, beneath the shade of a live oak spreading its gnarled arms in every direction as if searching for something it hadn’t found for the past two hundred years, Margo stood in a flowered cotton-print dress, her hair styled in the newest curly bob. I couldn’t help smiling at her obvious attempt to be polished, at how she needed me to see her as a real reporter, just as I wanted her to see me as a professional artist, even though we’d survived braces together and all those bad haircuts and the dateless high school homecoming dances in smelly gyms.

I hugged her. “Come in, come in. I’m sorry I lost time. I do that sometimes.” Always , I didn’t say.

She followed me into the house I’d grown up in and now lived in with my dad, where she’d been more times than could be counted, her high heels clicking on the hardwood floors.

“Thanks for doing this,” she said. “Mr. Farnam is so impressed that I nabbed this interview.” In her nervousness, her laugh erupted in a snort that made us both burst out as if we were thirteen again.

“It’s just me, Margo.”

“I know, but this is such a big deal, Clara. Winning a Caldecott is huge.”

“Thank you. I’m really excited.” Afternoon sunlight sifted through the east window, leaving daffodil-yellow stripes on the counters and hardwood floors, the oak kitchen table, and the far wall painted spring green. I motioned for Margo to follow me. “Let’s sit out on the back porch; it’s so warm for November. Do you want some lemonade?”

“Have anything stronger?”

“Seriously? It’s two in the afternoon.”

“Kidding. I’m kidding.” She seemed embarrassed. “Lemonade is great.”

Our house was perched on an oyster-shell outcropping at the end of a rutted road in Bluffton, South Carolina, a small coastal village curled around an estuary, a moody body of water. When the waters rippled over the shoreline, the oyster shells sang what my mother always called “their tidal song.” Margo and I sat down at the old iron table with the rusted edges with the garden stretched before us, its autumn colors bright before the silver-gray river. The pink and white camellia bushes were in late bloom; goldenrod scattered about the yard was bright against autumn’s heather-colored grasses.

I’d spent all morning in Harriet’s world, but this was mine, complete with creaky floors and old hinges, the tilted decks and briny aromas, the peeling white trim and cracked porcelain sink beneath the kitchen window. It was all perfect. It was my home.

Margo used her napkin to wipe a damp spot off the table, opened her blue notebook, and set it down.

“Looks like you’re ready,” I told her.

She smiled at me, took in a deep breath, and exhaled her first question. “Clara, did you start illustrating books because your mother wrote a famous children’s book?”

I shook my head because although I’d felt this question waiting for me from the moment she rang me requesting an interview, I’d hoped, for friendship’s sake, that she would try to protect me. “Margo,” I said, “come on. You know I don’t like to talk about her.” I took a sip of my lemonade and wished for the something stronger that she’d joked about.

She fiddled with her blue spiral notebook, bit the end of her well-chewed pencil eraser, and tried again. “I’m just asking what people will want to know. That’s not an unreasonable question. It’s my job.”

I looked away from her to the marsh grasses fading from green to brown now. It wasn’t Margo’s fault she had to steer us into uncomfortable waters. Even the Caldecott committee had summed me up this way in their recent press release: my famously lost mother and her book, my job teaching art in elementary school, and my daughter. These were the things that defined me. At least they hadn’t mentioned my divorce.

Here in Bluffton, there were very few secrets. That’s the deal you make with yourself when you marry, live, and work in the same town where you grew up. Assumptions are made that become difficult to shift. As claustrophobic as a town this size could be, there was also great comfort in the deep familiarity of place and friends like Margo.

“It’s the Caldecott,” Margo said, trying to get me to focus again. “Clara, this is a really big deal. You’re going to be famous. No one in our town has ever been famous unless they’re a war hero.”

I leaned toward Margo. “Who here even knows what a Caldecott Award is? I’m not going to be famous. I’m an elementary school art teacher. I am mostly a working stiff splattered in paint and globs of paste.”

“When the awards ceremony happens in Chicago, don’t think they won’t ask you these same questions.”

“Listen,” I said, “even in my best dreams, I didn’t dream this. When they called me last week to tell me I’d won, I couldn’t absorb the words. I don’t know what my illustrations are about—there isn’t some psychological underpinning, near as I can tell. I have just always needed to capture what I see around me. Been obsessed with art and drawing since I can remember.”

“How did the author, Eliza Walker, find you?” she asked, scribbling. “She’s such a well-known author, and you’re just getting started as an illustrator—respectively, I mean. And doesn’t she live in Maine?”

“She saw my work in some Little Golden Books I did and asked her publisher to contact me. I sent my illustrations to New York, and that was that.”

“Have you met her?”

I shook my head. “I’ve never even spoken to her. We’ve corresponded. She’s complimentary and kind, and very formal. I love bringing her Maine landscape to life as beautifully as possible,” I added, trying my best to give Margo quotes for the article. “And yet this award? I am floored. Over the moon. Honestly, I can’t really believe it. But famous? No.”

She laughed, and with that, her voice returned to normal, to the woman I knew. “Famous in this town, though, right? I’ll bet your dad is so proud. Does he still work at the same hospital in Beaufort?”

“He does, and he’s so proud of me.” He’d cried when the call came and hugged me so hard it hurt. “Wynnie, too,” I said. “She thinks I’m going to bring home a trophy. I had to explain that the prize is a coin.”

“How about…?” Margo bit her lower lip.

“Nat,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m fine talking about him. He’s very happy for me.”

This was true. He was. My ex-husband wasn’t an evil man, just one who loved gambling more than he loved us. And even that notion had some falsity built into it, because honestly, I did believe he loved us more. But his compulsions or addictions led him to other places. And that led to losing our house, and that led me to the divorce attorney who really didn’t have much work in a conservative small town like this, and then that path took me back to my childhood home.

One thing always leads to another, as they say.

Margo clicked her nails together in a nervous habit that chipped her pink polish. “I remember you drawing little pictures in the margins of all your notebooks. You were always so talented, and you deserve this award.” On the river, a shrimp boat was passing, its nets hanging like curtains on either side, while laughing gulls and terns followed in dancing loops, hoping for scraps. Suddenly her mood changed. “Clara, do you think there are things we are meant to do? That there’s such a thing as fate?”

“Fate. It’s such a big word, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” She met my gaze.

“Fate. Destiny,” I said. “They’re ours to make.” A briny breeze floated off the bay and lifted my hair, and I had the strangest sensation that this was something my mother had once said. That this voice was her voice speaking through me, an idea that both warmed and chilled me. “I believe there are many things we’re put here to do. Don’t ask me by whom, because I don’t have that answer. But I think we come with many fates built into us and we can’t fulfill all of them. We choose.”

“Many fates,” she said. “We choose. I like that.”

“And yes, maybe my art is one of mine.”

She scribbled on while I read her notebook upside down, making out the words: many fates.

“Do you need anything else? Wynnie will be home any second.” My ears were already attuned for the rumble of the school bus, for the clatter of my daughter running through the house, calling, “Mama.”

Margo closed her notebook and relaxed, leaning back in her chair. “I am so proud of you, Clara. Really.”

“Thank you. That means a lot to me. You know where to find me if you need anything else.”

“Thank you. And congratulations.”

After she left, I stayed outside waiting for Wynnie. I’d already made her a peanut butter and honey sandwich and cut off the crusts, a snack that we’d take out on Dad’s old trawler. It was part of our routine, whenever the weather held. Before Dad came home, we’d cast the net for tiny silver fish and watch the sun move lower in the sky.

Still, just below my thoughts of Wynnie, Margo’s question itched. Did you start illustrating books because your mother wrote a famous children’s book?

I hated that idea. Hated it. And yet, had I?