I recognized the symbol right away.
I had the same thing carved into the middle of my back, right between my shoulder blades.
THIRTY
MY HANDS WERE TREMBLINGas I tucked the boxes—mine and Ben’s—into the backseat beside the quilt. I’d opened Ben’s box and discovered it nearly identical to mine: a nest of hair and fabric, baby teeth, a carved bit of wax with the X and four dots.
What the hell were they, and why did my mother have them hidden on her closet shelf?
The scars on my back tingled.
I checked my watch. I’d only been in the house for half an hour but it had felt like forever. I looked at the carriage house, deciding that the sooner I got it over with, the sooner I could get in my car and get out of there.
The air in the carriage house smelled sweet, floral, and I soon saw why: there was a pot of flowering hyacinths on the table. It was a uniquely painful sight—a pot of purple flowers, surely bought by Paul himself, that had now outlived him. They made the air too sweet, almost cloying. They were nearly dried out, wilted from lack of water. I wasn’t sure whether to try to revive them or throw them away.
The place looked nothing like my memories of my father’s chaotic studio. Back then, it was dark and jumbled and felt claustrophobic with his giant paintings leaning against the walls, the stepladder he worked from opened up in the center of the room, the large pieces of wood he used as palettes lying around the floor. He worked on the lower floor and kept his supplies—large canvases, stretchers, extra tubes of paint—upstairs. His once-upon-a-time art studio was now a tidy little apartment with a highcathedral ceiling that followed the roofline. I glanced up at the exposed heavy wooden rafters and couldn’t stop myself from wondering which one my father had looped his rope around.
Don’t think about that, I told myself.Be here in the present. This is Paul’s house.
But Paul was dead now too.
He went off half-cocked and lost his head.
I closed my eyes, focused on my breath as Penny had taught me to do, then opened them again.
I had work to do. I needed to focus.
Downstairs was one large space. The kitchen with a breakfast bar stood along one wall next to a small living area. There was a bathroom in the back corner. Steps led up to a bedroom loft. It was a bright and cheerful place with the low winter sun streaming through the south-facing windows. I glanced out and had a perfect view of the main house. More importantly, I realized, my mother must have had a great view of Paul—easy to keep an eye on you.
I examined the shelves, found books of poetry, books on art and art history, objects from nature: the skull of a bird, a piece of quartz, a paper wasp nest. There was an old manual typewriter and a pair of opera glasses. It was all very aesthetically pleasing. I saw no photographs, though, nothing that felt personal or gave me any sense of who Paul might have been outside my mother’s orbit.
Maybe, I thought, he truly didn’t have a life outside my mother’s orbit. Maybe she was the sun he revolved around. Maybe that was enough: dedicating his own life to making sure hers ran smoothly, this woman who had seen something in him no one else had, who had believed in him and encouraged him to be more, to live larger. And he’d clearly cared for her. Spoke of her with admiration, gratitude, even reverence.
I closed my eyes, heard his last words to me:That’s not Mavis.
There was a desk along one wall and it was heaped with chaotic stacks of paperwork—mostly sketchbooks and notebooks but a few art books andstray papers as well. I stepped up for a closer look and saw it was mostly my mother’s papers and old sketchbooks and diaries. He’d been going through them, marking pages with colored sticky notes—no doubt this was while he’d been deciding what to include in the shipment to the Toronto gallery for my mother’s retrospective. There was a legal pad covered in Paul’s neat writing that listed some of the things he’d sent them so far: a watercolor she’d painted back in college, sketches of Bobbi made around the time she’d painted the stone-heart portrait, a self-portrait my mother had done just after my father’s suicide, assorted notes and photocopied journal entries.
At the bottom of the page was one word, circled:Pyxis.
Odd.
Was it an art piece of my mother’s?
At the front of the jumbled piles, just to the left of Paul’s legal pad, was a red hardcover sketchbook. Paul had inserted sticky notes to bookmark certain pages. There were papers and sketchbooks on the floor as if they’d fallen or even been thrown there.
I looked at the mess on and around the desk and thought that such chaos was uncharacteristic of Paul, whom I’d always known to be neat and organized. This looked like he’d been rifling through things in a frenzy and throwing them around. There was no order at all. Leaving a mess like this seemed very un-Paul-like.
I turned away from the disarray of the desk and went up the little steps to the sleeping loft. It was an open space with a wrought-iron railing that looked down on the rest of the apartment. There was a bed, a nightstand, a low dresser against one wall. Against the other wall stood a rack made from what looked like antique copper pipes, which Paul used as a closet. His dress shirts and pants hung there. A couple of suits. A denim shirt and a black leather jacket. At the bottom was a neat row of shoes and boots. There was something terrible about it, all the expensive shoes lined up, their polished leather formed perfectly to Paul’s feet, the carefully selected and cared-for clothes hanging like strange ghosts.
The bedside table held a lamp but nothing else. I opened the drawer. There was a blank notepad, a pen, and a printout from an online travel company confirming Paul’s one-way flight to Belize. I looked at the date. It was booked for the day before yesterday.
“Belize?” I said out loud.
He hadn’t mentioned anything about an upcoming trip.
I looked at it again, saw that he’d booked the flight the night before he’d come to see us. He’d made the reservation Thursday evening and had planned to catch a plane out of JFK Saturday morning.
Had he told my mother he was leaving? Was that what had upset her?
