But mostly that morning I helped the children iron leaves under wax paper. I recalled doing it myself years ago with my mother, just the two of us working one afternoon on the counter of the kitchen island. I was terrified the kids were going to burn themselves because at any given moment I and the teacher—a woman in her late twenties who insisted the kids call her Hailey—had six hot irons going. She may have been no more than seven or eight years older than me, but she knew what she was doing: she had brought in a heavy-duty, six-outlet power strip with a fifteen-foot cord precisely for this project. She had lined up the irons on one long table—the pressing station, she called it—and the night before had shorn hundreds of sheets of wax paper from once-thick rolls. No one got hurt. We were an assembly line.
At one point a tiny girl named Dakota was showing me the fan of neon-yellow ash she had brought in from home, the seven leaves still attached to the thin branch. Most of the other students had maples—so many maples, some sugar, some red, all phosphorescent—so her ash was a lovely change of pace. Together we carefully snipped the leaves where their stems met the branch, dried them, and sealed them in the wax paper. As we were surveying the last one, I sat down. The final step would be trimming the wax paper, shaping it with scissors. Suddenly Dakota climbed into my lap, wrapping one arm around my neck and just plopping her head against my chest.
“I don’t know what I’d do if my mommy died,” she said.
I saw Hailey watching us—watching me—her eyes a little wide with worry. I nodded at her. I was okay. I was grateful for the child’s warmth.
“You would do just what you’re doing this second,” I told the girl. “You’d hug people. And you’d be really happy when people hugged you.”
The sky was perfectly clear that night, a Friday, and so after dinner Gavin and I walked from the restaurant to the Burlington waterfront. I buttoned up my jean jacket and tightened the scarf around my neck, and was comfortably warm. He took my hand as we walked and only released it when we stood by the railing not far from where the ferries docked. We looked at the sickle moon over the Adirondacks.
“I wish I had understood my parents’ marriage better,” I told him.
He shrugged. “I know your mom loved your dad and I know your dad is an amazing person. Really loving. And really patient.”
“But you guys were looking at him again as a suspect.”
“You have to be thorough.”
“How did he do it if he was in Iowa?”
“Strangers on a train. Paid hit man. Who knows? It’s why we nose around. But he was never a serious suspect in my mind. He’s not now.”
“Is he a serious suspect in anyone’s mind?”
“Maybe.”
“Some days, I think he’s just so clueless. Such a total basket case. And then other days, I wonder if he’s sleeping with one of his students. Some wannabe poet my age. And then I’m furious with him.”
“Cut him some slack.”
“I do. I guess mostly I just worry about him.”
“I heard him speak in the church. He’ll be okay.”
I watched the way Gavin laced his fingers together on the railing. “If my mom’s death had something to do with sleep sex, was she out looking for someone? Someone in particular?”
“You mean, she wasn’t just sleepwalking? It’s possible. Obviously I’ve gotten out of bed any number of times and looked for…someone. But never someone in particular.”
“Did it scare her?”
“The sleep sex? A little. She knew what she was capable of. But mostly it embarrassed her. It shamed her. It shames us all.”
We gazed for a long moment at the lights from a passenger jet as the plane began its final descent over the water and toward the Burlington airport.
“So who killed her?” I asked.
“If she was murdered,” he corrected me.
I acquiesced. “If.”
“I don’t know.”
“Broadly speaking. What sort of person?”
“Use that cultural implant of yours,” he said. “Why do people ever kill people? Anger. Jealousy. Money. Love. And then, of course, there are the psychopaths: the serial killers.”
“And in Vermont?”
“Domestic violence. That’s our dark and dirty little secret. The majority of our homicides are women in very bad relationships. The rest? Drugs.”
“So, my mom was the exception.”
“Yes.”
“No one seems to think my dad or Paige or I are in danger.”
“Why would you be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone has something against my family.”
He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into him. “No one has a vendetta against your family.”
“Okay…”
“You don’t sound convinced. You should be.”
“I guess I am.”
“Good.”
“Can I ask you one more thing about my dad? I don’t know where it fits in, but I keep thinking it does…somewhere.”
“You can ask me anything you like. No guarantees I can or will answer it.”
“Okay. What do you make of my dad e-mailing my mom articles about miscarriages as recently as this past summer?”
“Are you wondering if the miscarriages are somehow connected to her death?”
“I’m honestly not sure what I mean.”
He sighed. “It’s an ongoing investigation, Lianna.”
“So you’re not going to tell me.”
He shook his head. But I wondered if in my unfiltered questions, my random associations, I had tugged at a thread of some consequence for Gavin. It felt as if I had hit a nerve.
Was it the reality that I had, finally, been forced to say good-bye to my mother? Perhaps. But it may also have been the way his fingers had felt against the small of my back, the welcome pressure, or the way the sides of his face had felt against my fingers when we kissed. So warm. I felt the color rising up along the nape of my neck and the most exquisite tingling just below my waist. We fell upon each other the moment he had shut the door to his apartment, undressing on his living room couch, that sickle moon still agleam in the sky beyond his window. He knelt before me on the floor and I spread my legs, opening myself to him, losing myself to the wondrous, wet recklessness of the moment. His mouth. His tongue. Later, when he was inside me in his bed, he whispered how he had never been with a woman as beautiful as I was, and how he had never been happier than he was that moment. The whole world went away. It really was just the two of us.
And yet later, when I was lying with my head against his chest, warm beneath his sheets and listening to the waves of his heart, he urged me to leave. He said that was safest. I told him no; I told him I wasn’t going home. And when I refused, he said he would sleep once more on his living room couch, locking me safely in his bedroom. I said he would do no such thing. I insisted he remain in his bedroom with me because I could not bear to have him leave me that moment. It took us both a long time to fall asleep, though Gavin was more worried than me. I was twenty-one, and mostly I was curious. I watched him. I watched him so much, I made him uncomfortable, and so we made love again. But eventually we did fall asleep. Both of us.
And he slept through the night. As did I. It was lovely.
I had called my father and told him that I was spending the night with Heather Prescott at her apartment just off the UVM campus. By then my grandparents had left. My aunt and uncle and my cousins had returned to Manhattan, as well.
On my way home Saturday morning, I drove past Heather’s place and considered dropping by. I was looking for a reason not to return to the strange, sad emptiness of the red Victorian. I could explain to Heather that I had used her as an alibi if it ever came up. She’d like to be complicit in a lie about a lover. But if she were home—and awake—she’d want to know who I had been with the night before. She’d ask who this new man was in my life. And I wasn’t prepared to discuss Gavin. Moreover, she’d probably want to
smoke a bowl, and I would have to defend my resistance, my rather sudden aversion to dope.
And so I returned to Bartlett, but I did make one stop there before going home. I dropped by Marilyn Bryce’s and found the woman in her studio. She was standing before a canvas the size of a queen mattress in a pair of jeans and a well-worn and impressively stained sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was listening to late Beatles on a boom box and staring at the kaleidoscopic waves of neon that rippled across the painting. I had expected the room to reek of weed—and wondered briefly what it said about me that I had passed on one stoner and wound up with another—but there was only the tiniest hint of skunk. She seemed so focused on her work that I considered whether I needed to take her more seriously.
She suggested that we go inside the house for a cup of tea, but I said I only had a couple of minutes, so she motioned for me to take one of the two wobbly, paint-splattered ladder-back chairs in the corner, and she took the other. We discussed the funeral and I reiterated how much I appreciated what she had said about my mother—which was true. But then I asked her the question that was on my mind, the reason why I had come here: “Did you and my mom ever talk about her miscarriages?”
“Oh, of course. How could we not?”
“Did she ever, I don’t know, speculate why?”
“Why they happened? As in a meaning of life, spiritual thing? Or why they happened biologically?”
“The latter.”
“Well, she knew, didn’t she? They did all those tests. Wasn’t it something to do with your dad?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, curious where this was leading.
“It was,” she said. “Your mom was quite sure.”
“And my dad?”
“Well, he had to know, too, didn’t he? If it wasn’t her, it had to be him. Right?”
I thought of the e-mail from him I had discovered. I recalled what he had said to me in his office. “I would think if my father knew, he would have felt horrible. He would have felt pretty bad.”
“I’m sure he did. But after Paige was born, none of that mattered now, did it?”
“But all the years in between?”
“What about them?”
“How did it affect their marriage?”
“It added stress, I guess. How could it not? But I don’t know what you’re driving at. I have no idea where you’re going with this, sweetie.”
“I’m not sure, either.”
She scrunched up her face and looked at me intently. She sat forward on her chair and leaned into me. “Are you worried that Paige is, I don’t know, just your half sister? Because that’s insane. That is seriously kooky talk.”
I was stunned, and yet at the same time I understood this was precisely what, on some level, had been dogging me. Marilyn had verbalized what had been gnawing at me for weeks, but had not yet been exhumed from deep inside me. “Yes, that is what I’m thinking,” I admitted, and I could hear the utter tonelessness in my voice. “Do other people think that?”
“No!”
“Do you?”
“Of course not! It’s just…”
“It’s just what?” I pressed.
“Fine. You and your mom and dad all have light hair. I mean, your mother? Good Lord, she looked like a Swedish model. And the three of you have blue eyes. But Paige? Black hair. And those magnificent dark eyes. And she’s such an…athlete. She is just so different from the rest of you.”
I nodded to myself. She was actually corroborating the notion. “And yet in your opinion, she is”—and I had to think for a moment to phrase this question properly—“my father’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re positive this isn’t a rumor around here?”
“Completely. People don’t know about the miscarriages. Only I do.”
“Katherine Edwards does.”
“Okay, some people know. But rumor is too strong a word. So is gossip. Maybe joke is better. I mean, your mom used to make them, too.”
“Jokes that Paige isn’t my father’s daughter?”
“Yes! She was kidding, of course—and always just because Paige is so unlike you. She is so unlike your father.”
“Then who is she like?”
“Are you asking who people speculate is her father?”
“I guess.”
“No one! It was just a joke. Paige is your sister. Warren Ahlberg is her father, just like he’s your father.”
I recalled what she had said a moment ago about my father being the cause of the miscarriages and the idea that the reason might have been his chromosomal abnormalities. If other people questioned the paternity of my younger sister, then certainly my father did.
“Look, twice everything worked just fine,” Marilyn continued. “Two times. What more could you ask for?”
“So when you and my mother talked about the miscarriages, she never mentioned a lover?”
“Never.”
“Or, I don’t know, a sperm bank?”
“Of course not!”
“Does Paige suspect anything?”
“There’s nothing to suspect, Lianna. And even if she did, wouldn’t you know better than me?”
“Probably,” I agreed.
She tilted her head sympathetically and smiled. “I know you want answers to what happened to your mom. We all do. But I just don’t see us ever getting them. I’m sorry, sweetie. I really am.”
When I left, I was unmoored, as baffled by the world as I had been at any moment since my mother had died.
That afternoon, I spent hours with our collection of photo albums and searched for old pictures of my aunts and uncles and grandparents. I had never really thought about what they had looked like when they were young. My cousins’ hair was light and my aunt—my mother’s sister—was a strawberry blonde. But what had my grandparents looked like before their hair had gone gray? What had my father’s aunts and uncles looked like forty years ago? I found some images from a family reunion in one of our oldest albums; I was a toddler. I was always, it seemed, in either my father’s or my mother’s arms. I was wearing a floral pink smock dress with ruffles and clutching a small stuffed bunny in a similar outfit. Her name was Bunny Jo; I still had her. She was in the unmade piles of sheets and blankets on my bed that very moment.
Most of the people in the photos had Scandinavian hair and Scandinavian cheekbones. But not everyone. The reunion had been held at my mother’s parents’ house in Concord, Massachusetts—the reunion was for her side of the family—and there in the group photo was the man I was confident was her uncle Arvid. Uncle Arvid had cocoa-colored hair. Yes, he had blue eyes, but I took a Mendel-like satisfaction in the proof that deep in the recessive genes on my mother’s side of the family existed the DNA for Paige’s dark hair.
Next I pulled out my parents’ wedding album so I could look at the Ahlberg side. Again, there were individuals with brown and black hair, though how many were guests and how many were Ahlbergs I couldn’t say. But there were people with dark eyes. There were yet more people who could have been the genetic precursors to my kid sister.
Nevertheless, that afternoon as I practiced for a magic show I had the next day for one of the kids in the Sunday school, I found myself hugging Paige the two occasions when, bored, she put her head into my bedroom to see what I was doing. I think she found me more maddening than usual.
My father suggested that the three of us go see a movie that Saturday night, and the two choices at the theater in Middlebury were a film about aging astronauts and a tale of competitive cheerleading. We went with the astronauts. But we had dinner at an Italian restaurant beforehand, where our father could get a scotch and Paige could have pizza. We had a booth, and after we’d ordered, I asked my father about his parents. My grandmother had only died two years earlier, and so I had known her well. I had loved her Swedish meatballs and Swedish pancakes with lingonberries and maple syrup. She had been a lawyer for an insurance company in Manhattan before she
retired; over the years, she had taken me to wonderful, glamorous lunches in restaurants on Park Avenue South. At least twice she had taken both my mom and me out after we had been shopping for magic tricks on lower Broadway.
My grandfather, however, had died suddenly when I was in kindergarten, and so I had never really gotten to know the man who had raised my father. He had been an advertising executive, though precisely what he did was beyond me.
“Oh, my parents are a very broad topic,” my father said in response to my question. He was sitting across from Paige and me, leaning back against the wall of the settee with his arms folded across his chest. “What would you like to know about them?”
“I don’t know: tell me about the time you introduced Mom to them. What was that like for you? For them? How did they respond?”
“Well, there’s probably what actually occurred and then there’s the way I massaged my recollections over time. That’s how it is with everything, isn’t it?” my father answered.
“Lianna’s clearly about to bring someone home for you to meet, Dad,” Paige said. “It’s why she didn’t come home a couple of nights the last few weeks.”
I glared at her. “Nope. I was just crashing at friends’ houses in Burlington and Montpelier.”
My father didn’t seem to acknowledge Paige’s supposition. “Your grandmother had her mouth filled with an indecent-sized scoop of chopped chicken livers on a cracker when I brought your mother home to meet her. She had just gotten home from work and was starving. She was hoping to snack quickly before we arrived. She didn’t hear us come in and we surprised her in the kitchen. She was standing in a blue suede gaucho skirt, with one hand on the counter above the dishwasher. Your grandmother’s bite was so big—so marvelously and uncharacteristically gluttonous—that she couldn’t speak for easily thirty seconds while she chewed. She gave your mother a half wave.”