Winnie #2
“Was Dad found with his head on a desk?” I asked, wondering for the first time if the bad trip hadn’t been just a figment of my imagination, but an unlocked memory. How could this not have occurred to me before?
“Why do you ask?” Her voice was completely strangled, and I could see her chin quiver.
“Because I think…I remember. Was I there?”
For years, the story had just been “he was found.” I’d been six, and never asked for more. But found by whom?
I watched Miranda grind her teeth and blink back tears.
“Yes,” she rasped.
“Were you there, too?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god. We found him?”
She nodded and a tear rolled down her tightened cheek.
“Was anyone with us?”
This time she shook her head.
“Then what happened?”
She cleared her throat, then swallowed, but it still took her a bit to reply. “He was in the barn that used to be behind where Mom’s garden is now. Do you remember it?”
“A barn? No.” I searched my memory, and had no recollection of a barn on the property, ever.
“Mom had it torn down the day after the funeral.” Miranda drew in a deep breath. “I can’t remember anymore why we went in there. Maybe Mom sent us to bring him in for breakfast?”
I covered my mouth at the horror of this.
“After we found him,” Miranda went on, “we went and got Mom, and she brought us to her sister’s place while she…cleaned up, I guess. I don’t remember the rest that well. I do know all the newspaper reports said that Mom found him. Only Mom knows what really happened. And Emilio, I assume.”
“Why does it matter who knows?”
“Because…it’s so terrible. Can you imagine the headline? Visionary winemaker found dead by his six- and nine-year-old daughters? Hartley would never have recovered.” With these statements my sister’s voice steadied. These were obviously more familiar ideas.
“Why are we talking about headlines? Why haven’t we ever talked about this ourselves?”
“I tried. But it was clear you’d forgotten, and that seemed to be for the best.”
“For the best?” I shrieked. “The best? So it could come out as a bad trip?” The worst trip. At the time, it felt like it had set the breakup with Lincoln in motion.
My whole body felt hot, like dry tinder ignited by a falling match.
Miranda held my eyes in her glistening gaze, and said, “I can’t talk more about this, Win. I’m sorry.”
Looking back at the two young women having that wretched conversation, I have so much compassion for both of them.
Neither of them could see outside their own pain.
Neither of them could reach out, and instead curled protectively inward.
We were so much more alike than either of us possibly could have realized.
What a tragedy that this alikeness was what ultimately drove us apart.
Once the fire in my body had died down, I felt frozen in place. I wondered about returning to San Francisco, but the thought of running into Lincoln paralyzed me.
For a few months, I did my work for the vineyard, took long walks and sat on rocks and wrote poetry.
I stopped making dinners with Mom, and she never questioned me about that, which felt like proof that she didn’t care about me and never had.
It didn’t occur to me that she might have felt just as strangled by the past as Miranda, who never brought up our conversation.
We each gave the other a wide berth. I wish I had pushed both of them to talk to me before it was too late.
I kept bringing bottles to my room at night.
On one of the first summer days of 1971, I was going through a pile of mail in the kitchen and saw a fat envelope addressed to me in Lincoln’s handwriting.
My body flooded with hope and desire. I slipped the letter under a catalogue for cover and rushed off to my room to read it.
Sitting on my bed, I tore the letter open and unfolded its many pages with shaking hands.
Dearest Winnie,
I’ve started and stopped a thousand letters to you since you left, and I’ve thrown out every one because they were all entirely inadequate to express how much I miss you and how sorry I am for how I treated you.
I felt more out of breath than if I’d run straight up Lombard Street.
I needed something to settle my nerves, so I took the bottle of wine I always kept stashed in my closet, locked my door, took a few swigs, and read on.
The letter was everything I’d ever wanted and more.
I read it hundreds of times. He said he was done with the acid because coming down from it was killing his music, plus it was getting cut with speed more and more, and it was getting harder to find the pure stuff we all used to love.
And the weed was making me fat and lazy, he wrote, so I’ve cut back on that, too.
But worst of all was the ways in which those things made me treat you.
I am so sorry for the nights I turned away from you.
I’d like to make them up to you a thousand times over, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me.
As further proof that he was serious about change, he’d gone to Sea Ranch for a transcendental meditation retreat.
I actually studied with the Maharishi! The same guy Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney studied with.
He now meditated twice a day. It’s seriously better than acid, Winnie, and no comedown.
In meditation, I feel entirely at peace.
Everything around me falls away, but when I open my eyes everything is just a little more vibrant—plants, foods, music.
I’ve written more songs in the last four months after Sea Ranch than I wrote in all of 1969, plus it gave me the strength to put aside my ego and finally write to you.
Two days after I received the letter, once I had it memorized and the paper was getting to be a handkerchief-textured rectangle in the pocket of my jeans, I knocked on the frame of Miranda’s lab door.
She looked up from a microscope and said warily, “Hi, Winnie.” All the unspoken words hung between us like fog.
“So…” I said, my shoulders up around my ears. “Listen, this is hard to say.”
I saw my sister stiffen at my words, but I recalled the conversation about our father, and my heart hardened just the little bit I needed to get the words out: “I got a letter from Lincoln.”
“Okay.” I could see her trying not to say more, her nostrils flaring as she took air in, like a dragon.
“I’ve loved working with you, and Mom,” I said. “And you have been so amazing helping me get over Lincoln.”
“Again,” Miranda said pointedly. She could obviously see where this was going.
“I think the fact that we keep coming back to each other means something.”
“What do you think it means, Winnie?” She had never taken such a hostile tone with me before. I knew, even then, that this conversation was about so much more than just Lincoln.
Still, I escalated because anger felt better than the grief I carried about me and my sister. “Please don’t get patronizing with me. That’s Mom’s job. I can’t take it from both of you.”
Miranda folded both arms over her chest and breathed aggressively again. She didn’t have to say all the words I knew she was thinking, that he was a cheater, that tigers don’t change their stripes, that I was a fool.
“I’m sorry. I love him,” I said, as if that refuted everything Miranda was thinking.
“I want to give it one more chance. He says he’s given up the drugs so he can be a successful musician.
He’s meditating. And…I need to be on my own again.
I’m a poet, Sis. Not a salesman.” And I need to get away from this place where Dad killed himself.
“Your poetry is why you’re so good at selling. And besides, you’re hardly hocking shoes or Tupperware. Your press releases are brilliant, and no one is stopping you from writing poetry. I gave you the time off that you asked for.”
“I’ll help you find someone to replace me,” I offered.
“Don’t bother.”
“Come on, don’t be like that.”
“Lincoln isn’t going to be any different this time.”
“I love him. I miss him terribly. I need to give it another chance.” This place is overflowing with loss and longing. I have to get away.
We stared each other down, arms folded and lips pressed hard together against saying even more hurtful things.
“Tell me this is the last time. If things don’t work out now, you won’t go back again.”
“This is the last time.” I meant it.
“I’m going to hold you to that,” she said.
“You better,” I said, though I had no idea in that moment what it actually meant to ask my sister to be my keeper.