Epilogue
Which one of them was Constance?
Carrington had narrowed it down to two. Both were orange with a black smudge at the base of the tail, and both ducked behind the plant whenever she leaned toward the glass.
The tank stood under the north window of the study on a stand she and Grace had put together wrong the first time.
Grace had picked the gravel. It was teal.
Carrington thought it belonged in a gas station and had never said so.
"Pick one," Grace said.
She sat in the doorway with her shoulder against the frame and her knees pulled up to her chin. She was twelve, and her feet were bigger than Carrington's now.
Carrington pointed at the one nearest the heater. "Constance."
"That's Edwin."
"You told me Edwin was the pale one."
"Barnaby's the pale one. Edwin's the fat one." Grace said it without looking at the tank. "Constance has a notch out of her tail. You can see it when she turns around."
Both fish swung around. Carrington couldn't find a notch on either tail.
"Try again," Grace said.
"I'd rather not."
"Mom did this to you."
"She did. She sat in the doorway and waited, same as you."
"Did you ever get it right?"
"No," Carrington said. "Not once."
Grace picked at the rubber on the toe of her sneaker. Carrington went back to the desk. Lucy had the twins until five, and Devika needed the Hollis report by Monday. She read the same paragraph she'd been reading since Grace started quizzing her.
"Is the fish thing in the letter?" Grace said.
Carrington set the pen down.
Grace kept her eyes on her shoe. The rubber had peeled off the toe in a strip, and she worked at it with her thumbnail.
"Yes," Carrington said.
Grace didn't say anything. Carrington turned her wedding ring with her thumb and waited.
"I'm not asking you to read it to me or anything.
" Grace pulled the strip of rubber off and rolled it between her fingers.
"You said she used to make you name them.
So I thought maybe she put that in. Kayla at school, her grandma wrote her a whole letter before she died, and it was mostly about money. So I just wondered."
"Do you want to read it?"
Grace looked up.
"You can," Carrington said.
"Now?"
"If you want."
Carrington opened the drawer. The cream envelope was on top, with her own name across it in Clara's handwriting. Under it lay the letter from Family Services that had closed Grace's file, with Melinda Alvarez's name typed below the signature. The drawer had nothing else.
She slid the two sheets out of the envelope. The part about Grace's birthday was on the second page. She started to pull that page out so Grace wouldn't see it, and then she stopped. She adjusted the two pages on the desk.
"Parts of it are about me," she said. "You can read those too."
Grace got up and took the letter in both hands. She read the name on the front of it twice, standing there. Then she folded back into the doorway and bent her head over it.
Carrington didn't go back to the desk. She lowered herself onto the floor beside the tank stand, the empty envelope in her lap. She kept her eyes on the fish so she wouldn't stare at Grace.
The filter hummed. One of the orange fish nosed out from behind the plant and slid back. Grace turned the page. Partway down the second one, she snorted, just once, through her nose. That would be the part about the fish. Grace looked up at the tank. Carrington didn't look back at her.
After that, Grace didn't make a sound for a long time. Then she swallowed, and Carrington didn't turn her head.
"What did she say at my birthday?" Grace said.
"You were turning four. She had a private room at a hotel and she'd invited everybody." Carrington made herself finish it. "She told me you didn't need my money, that you needed an aunt. She said it in front of all the other mothers, and I walked out before the cake."
"Is that the one in Deborah's picture? With the crown?"
Carrington nodded.
"You're not in it."
"I'd already gone."
Grace found her place again on the page. "She says she shouldn't have said it in front of everybody."
"She was right to say it," Carrington said. "I'd stopped coming to see you."
Grace flipped the second page over to its blank back, then face up again.
"She knew she was dying when she wrote this?”
"Yes."
"She sounds normal." Grace smoothed the page on her knee. "I thought it would sound different. It sounds like her."
"You'd know. You heard her a lot more than I did."
Grace pressed the heel of her hand to one eye and held it there. Her shoulders came up around her ears.
Carrington got off the floor. The doorway wasn't wide enough for two.
She wedged in facing Grace, sliding back down to the ground, her back to the other side of the frame, and their knees touched in the middle.
Grace kept the letter out to one side, away from her face, so nothing would drip on it.
Carrington took hold of the cuff of Grace's jeans at the ankle and said nothing.
Grace cried. Carrington's throat hurt too.
Then Grace wiped her nose on the back of her wrist and let her breath out.
"Is that why you got them?" she said. "Because of what she said about your tank?"
"No," Carrington said. "I wanted them."
Grace tipped her head toward the tank. "You can't even tell them apart."
"No."
Grace folded the pages along the old creases. Carrington opened the envelope for her and Grace slid them in, and then she didn't let go of it.
"Can I keep it?"
"I'll have a copy made for you. Nadia can make it Monday."
"I don't want a copy."
Carrington hadn't let go of her end.
"It's her writing," Grace said. Then, faster, "I know it's got your name on it, so you can say no. I wouldn't lose it. I'd keep it in my whale book, in the Marguerite part. Nobody opens that but me."
It was the last thing Clara had ever said to her. Carrington had left it sealed through a whole spring and had reread it most weeks since. She wanted it back in the drawer. She opened her hand and let go of it.
"Yes," she said.
Grace got up with it flat against her chest and stepped over Carrington's legs. She got out to the hall before she leaned back in.
"Aunt Carrie."
"What is it?"
"Constance is the one behind the plant," Grace said. "She's always behind the plant." Then she took the stairs two at a time.
Carrington didn't get up. She couldn't tell them apart, but she could count them. Nine fish, the same as always.
At four, Carrington called Lucy.
It rang four times and she almost hung up. When Lucy answered, the wind hit the phone first, then gulls, then a child shrieking somewhere close.
"Hang on," Lucy said. Then, away from the phone, "Put it down. I mean it. Back in the bucket." The wind cut out, like Lucy had turned her back to it. "Sorry. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong."
"You're calling me in the middle of a Saturday."
Carrington hadn't moved off the study floor. "Grace asked for Clara's letter. I gave it to her."
Lucy didn't answer. Out on the beach, the child shrieked again, and another one joined in.
Lucy's voice dropped. "Yeah? How'd she do?"
"She's keeping the letter."
"And how are you?"
Carrington opened her mouth to say she was fine. Her throat wouldn't shape it. "I wanted to hear you," she said.
Lucy didn't answer that. Just the wind again, and the gulls.
"Okay," Lucy said. "I'm here." Then, sharp and away from the phone, "No. No, we do not lick it. Because I said so." She came back breathing hard, like she'd run a few steps. "I'm still here."
"You're busy."
"I'm always busy. Talk anyway."
Carrington didn't have anything else to say. She listened to the gulls and to Lucy breathing. One of the twins asked whether jellyfish had faces. Carrington didn't hang up, and Lucy didn't either, for almost a minute.
"I have to go before somebody gets stung," Lucy said. "I'll be home before six."
"All right."
"Save me some corn."
The line went dead. Carrington put the phone down on the envelope. She didn't move until her leg went dead under her. Then she got up and started the Hollis report over from the top.
Deborah came at five with a paper sack of green beans from her yard and her reading glasses pushed up on her head.
By half past, she had dumped the beans into Lucy's bowl on the island and was breaking the ends off into her palm.
Lucy had bought that bowl in town with her first paycheck from the agency.
It was yellow and too big for any cupboard in the house, so it stayed on the counter.
Carrington shucked the corn badly. Silk stuck to her sleeves and clogged the sink, and some of it was in her hair.
"Grace read Clara's letter this afternoon," she said.
Deborah snapped a bean. "All of it?"
"Both pages."
"Good." Deborah dropped the ends in the sack. Then, without looking up, she said, "Did Clara say anything about me?"
Carrington knew that letter line by line. "No."
Deborah nodded and kept breaking beans. She got through a handful before she stopped with one in her fingers.
"Nothing at all?"
"It's written to me. Everything else in it is about Grace."
"I sat in that room with her every day for three weeks." Deborah tossed the bean in whole. "She'd have thought I already knew."
"It's Grace's letter now," Carrington said. "If you want to read it, you can ask her."
"No. Leave it with her."
Carrington pulled the last of the husk off an ear and waited.
Deborah broke four or five more beans. The corners of her mouth had pulled in tight, and she didn't look up.
Carrington wiped the silk off her hands and walked around the island.
She put a hand on Deborah's shoulder and left it there. Deborah let her.
"She told me about those fish," Deborah said finally. "Years ago, before Grace. She said you cried over one of them and couldn't tell anybody which one it was."
"Constance."
"That's the one."