Pig mewed, looking up at me as if to say,What did you expect?
There was a pencil sketch of the doorknob on the table. I set down the knob and stepped toward the wall, where sketches and watercolors were tacked up: the silver fork, the faucet handle, flowers, a view of the garden, a sketch Lexie had done of her own left hand.
I reached up and lightly touched the fingers, tried to imagine it was actually her hand I was touching, not charcoal lines that my fingers left smudges in.
I pulled my fingers away, realizing I was ruining her drawing.
Maybe I shouldn’t have come up here at all.
It felt invasive, like I’d found a private corner of Lexie’s that I wasn’t meant to look at. If she’d wanted me to know about her painting, she would have told me.
I would have told you if you’d picked up the phone.
To the right, an easel was set up with a half-finished painting of a peacock, his body a vivid, almost iridescent blue, his tail feathers spread,the green spots on them terrifying eyes, his beak open in a scream. It was unsettling.
I reached for a beat-up-looking sketchbook and flipped through it. Though my father always said she had the soul of an artist, I never thought of her as one. When had she started drawing and painting? Had she mentioned it to me? Had I forgotten? Or worse, wasn’t really listening? How many things were there that had slipped through the cracks because she talked a mile a minute sometimes, while I drifted off, saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh”?
What else had I missed?
The trouble with you, Jax,is you don’t know how to live in the moment. You don’t appreciate the here and now.
My sister was right. She lived inside each moment, sucking all she could from it, while I was only half-present, preoccupied with how annoyed I was to be listening to her share some crazy theory when I had other things,important things, I needed to be doing. And it was too late to promise to do better.
Her sketchbook was nearly full of pencil and charcoal sketches, some dated, most not. Most seemed to be from earlier in the summer. A drawing of the kitchen sink with a china teacup in it, a used Lipton tea bag wadded up inside. Random scenes from around the house: the dining room chairs, the circle window in the attic, the old claw-foot tub, a dress hanging on the back of a door. Then the flower pictures began, some labeled with dates and the names of the flowers:forget-me-nots, bearded iris, sweet william.
I turned the page again and came to a drawing of a woman I didn’t recognize. She was in the pool, Sparrow Crest in the background. Her dark hair was cut in a bob, her large dark eyes had a mischievous light. She had a small scar under her left eye. It felt like she’d been teasing my sister, an inside joke that the two of them got, that seconds after thedrawing was done, they’d both broken down in fits of giggles. In the lower right corner, my sister had penciled the date:June 10.
Who was this woman? I was sure she hadn’t come to the memorial service—I would have remembered such a striking face. I flipped ahead. Nasturtiums. Lilacs. Phlox. Roses. Page after page of roses. And another sketch of the dark-haired woman, this time reclining by the pool, naked. It was nighttime—the patio cast in dark shadows, the pool pure darkness behind her. Her skin seemed to glow, to radiate. Lexie had scribbled in the corner:A nap after night swimming.I stared at this drawing, at the woman’s closed eyes, the dark areolas around her nipples, the soft triangle of pubic hair. It felt voyeuristic. There was a certain intimacy in the drawing, and a sense of longing. Were Lexie and this woman lovers? Had Lexie shown her the drawing? Or had she kept it to herself?
I turned the page again. Here were close-up sketches of the front door and some of the windows on the house. The gate to the pool. The entire house as viewed from the bottom of the driveway. Lord’s Hill and Devil’s Hill looming behind it. The thick woods where we’d found our treasures from the old hotel and where Lex had insisted she’d seen the peacock.
When we showed Gram what we’d found, she warned us to stay out of the woods.
I turned the page to an odd drawing: There was Sparrow Crest, but underneath it (or perhaps over it?) was a lighter pencil sketch of a much larger building, three stories tall with a wraparound porch. The Brandenburg Springs Hotel. The two buildings seemed intertwined, tangled together—one more solid, the other, a ghost.
At the bottom of the page, she’d written:The key to understanding the present is to look at the past.Then, some words she’d scribbled out beyond recognition, followed by a name she’d circled:Eliza Harding.
The rest of the book was drawings of the pool, my sister’s obsession laid out on paper.
It reminded me of Declan’s drawing of the dark swirling water, the monster fish. The swimmer being pulled under. Not just any swimmer, but me.
I closed my eyes, tasted the mineral tang of black water, felt it fill my mouth as I sank.
“Shit!” I said, coming up for air, back to reality. Declan!
I had to deal with his mother, check in with Karen. I’d call as soon as I went back downstairs.
I hurriedly flipped through the rest of Lexie’s drawings. She’d captured the pool so well that I could feel the cold water, smell the sharp mineral scent of it. In some of the drawings, I thought I could make out a face in the water, the flash of a pale arm or leg. The dark-haired woman again? Or someone else? In one, I was sure I saw my own face looking up.
I shut the sketchbook, shoved it to the back of the table, rummaged through the stacks of papers on the floor, photocopies and journal entries.
May 17
Gram didn’t leave Sparrow Crest, because she COULDN’T.
She knew it would kill her.
She knew and she went anyway.
