None of us three ever returned. Margo met Dan during her last year at U Chicago, and since Mom was nearby, she stayed out there. I graduated, moved to Manhattan, and took a job with a commercial photographer. One of our clients, the editor of a food magazine, was putting her condo on the market and wanted photos as appealing as the ones we’d made of a chocolate ganache cake with raspberry drizzle. Her broker became my first recurring client.
There was no point in coming home. I had Anne down to visitme, often to meet up with Mom, though she would never breathe a word of that in Bay Bluff. Dad being Dad, divided loyalties weren’t allowed. His truth was the whole truth. If we couldn’t live with it, well, that was that. No, I didn’t take sides—I assiduously did not. But Mom needed me more than he ever had. She loved me more than he ever had. Did I really have a choice?
Mom blossomed once she was free of Dad. Though we didn’t see each other often—she was busy, I was busy—we grew closer. Her death was a blow.
“Yup. The family scattered,” I tell Joy as we continue up the stairs.
My parents’ bedroom is—was—down the hall to the left. Margo’s bedroom was near theirs. They had initially planned it as a nursery with the intention of moving out one child when another came along. I remember hearing Mom say that, but when I repeated it once to Margo, her vehemence taught me to never say it again. It was what it was. Margo’s room stayed Margo’s room, evolving in style from infancy to childhood to adolescence. Anne and I, arriving within a year of each other, had rooms down the hall to the right.
I lead Joy toward mine. The door is slightly ajar and seeming to breathe. When I push it wide, I see that Anne has opened both windows to air out the place. There is still a mustiness, but the ocean breeze is doing its thing.
“Your. Room,” Joy declares with a mega-smile. Having dropped her bag on the double bed, she wraps an elbow around one of its tall pine posts and slowly swivels.
Little has changed here either. The same plaid quilt covers the bed, the same corduroy covers the armchair. The desk where I did homework has the same brass lamp arching over a collection of papers and books. For a split second, I think the latter are a spillover from downstairs—but no, this room hasn’t been touched since I left, other than by the breeze that is currently etching striations in the dust.
Nope. The mess here is all mine. These books are from my freshman year in college, deposited when I came home that horridsummer and never removed. Now they seem like fragments of a different era, relics not to be disturbed—and still, feeling a kind of morbid curiosity, I touch a cover, a spine.
Joy distracts me with a reverential whisper. “This place is agallery.”
Looking around, I have to agree. Photographs are my wallpaper, covering most every inch of space. I had come to take them for granted, like the family photos in the turret—just more of those things in life that we see so often we don’t see at all.
But Joy’s eye is fresh. Definitely, a gallery. Unlike the formal family shots climbing the stairs, these are candids of Margo and Anne, Mom and Margo, Dad and Mom. There is a shot of two high school friends taken from behind, hung here not because of my closeness to them but the beauty of the composition as they sit in the dunes.
“Well,heis cool,” Joy remarks. It is Jack in profile as he looks out to sea. His hair is longer, his features less marked. He might have been sixteen at the time, but his gaze seems prophetic.
“I told you,” I remind her, lest she start imagining, “we were good friends.”
“When you get past the hair, he kind of looks the same.”
But I move on. “Tennis,” I say, pointing at a grouping of shots in which I’m running, arching into a serve, leaping sideways for a volley, executing a doublehanded backhand with a ferocious look on my face. “I was pretty good.”
“You never play now.”
“No time, no place.”
“Who took these?”
She is probably wondering if it was Elizabeth again, but it definitely was not. “My mother.”
“You never said she was into photography?”
“She was into lots of things—y’know, trying out bridge, then photography, even conversationalItalianuntil she found what she liked.”
“Accounting,” Joy says, having heard this part of the story before.
“She was actually an old hand at it. Bills, taxes, you name it, she did it in the shadow of the toughest critic of all.”
“Papa?” Joy asks with interest.
“Definitely Papa.”
“Why didn’t he just do it himself?”
“Go ask.”
“I will.”
“Don’t!” I quickly cry. Mygo askhad been a throwaway expression, but I should have known better. As much of a role model as Jack Sab was about how not to raise an only child, my daughter is still a work in progress. “Those are the kind of memories we don’t need to dredge up. Besides, it worked to Mom’s advantage. Once she was back in Chicago after the divorce, she went to school, which she would never have done here. She became a CPA, and she was good at it. She knew how to handle difficult men,” I add, because this is on the short list of the things my sisters and I do agree on.
