I feel the press of stone against the bare soles of my feet, surprisingly cold. My hiking boots, sitting beside me now, have nearly as many eyelets as Bea’s old-fashioned shoes.
—You aren’t even speaking, I tell her. I’m the one who’s been doing all the speaking on this journey of ours.
—You are taking some of my lines word for word, she says. From my private letters, no less.
She smiles knowingly.
—That I am, Bea, I admit. That I am.
I resist pointing out that her private letters are now public, that even her coded journals have been deciphered. I stand, the stone warming underfoot, thinking she must have wanted them to be public. She was famous long before she died. If she hadn’t wanted her personal thoughts made public, she could have destroyed them or arranged for them to be.
I make a mental note to have the Wednesday Sisters swear again that they’ll burn my journals the minute I die.
—I’d like to have Hope come here with me sometime, Bea, I say.
—I’m sure she would come if you asked her to, she says.
She stands and takes my hand in hers.
—Careful on this slate, it’s slippery, she says.
—The water is going to be freezing, I say.
—Getting in will not be half as horrid as getting back out, she says.
At the water’s edge, we look across to Graham, bracing ourselves. His gaze remains fixed on his brush and his palette, his canvas.
—I would ask Hope to come, Bea, I say, but she and Kevin are having such a hard time finding space for each other that I hesitate to separate them for even a few days. Someday I’ll share all this with her, though.
—Yes, Bea says. Someday you will.
The visitors are perfect terrors … and they are least in the way on the fells—if they would shut gates when they come down again … I have seen a pretty good [automatic gate] in Wales, worked with a log, but it won’t stay open for a cart unfortunately.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN AN AUGUST 27, 1913, LETTER TO HARDWICKE DRUMMOND RAWNSLEY
I LEFT A NOTE IN MOM’S COTTAGE SAYING I WAS WALKING UP TO BEATRIX Potter’s tarn so if the others came looking for me they wouldn’t worry, and I set off over the hill. It was almost crisp, but not quite that cold, and by the time I reached the look-back over the lake, patches of blue had opened up the wide swaths of cloud. Smoke rose from the Ainsley’s End chimney, from the fireplace in the library where I’d found Julie reading Robbie’s poetry earlier, before I’d called Kevin. I stuck my hands in the raincoat pockets for warmth as I caught my breath, and found a handful of my mother’s ashes there. “Heavens to Betsy, Mom,” I whispered to the morning quiet, “did I forget to put you away the last time I wore this coat?”
I was perspiring from the hike—happy not to have lost my way—when I arrived at the tarn’s edge. I’d met no one on the path from Ainsley’s End, but hikers coming up from the Near Sawrey direction carried picnic baskets and blankets, walking sticks, cameras. From the outcropping of boulders at the south end, the hard sunlight sharpened the gentle summits across the tarn, the shadows deepening the valleys, the water in the foreground reflecting everything so that the mountains stretched from reflected peak to real, with not a cloud in sight.
“I wore the raincoat for you, Mom,” I whispered as I fingered the ashes, recalling how often she’d made me schlep an unneeded raincoat on overcast mornings that would turn into perfect days. “But don’t think I’m any happier about it than I was in high school.”
What would I do about the things of her life here: the cottage and the bed, the love seat, the box of coal fire tools? “You’ll have the desk, of course,” Graham had said, meaning the bookcase with its hidden desk. It had been his father’s, he’d told me. My biological grandfather’s. Graham had made a gift of it to Mom.
I said aloud, “And the pictures, too.”
The only responses to my words were the wing-flutter of a bird taking flight at the tarn’s edge, the gentle splash of a duck, the crunch of footsteps on the dirt path behind me.
I turned to see Aunt Kath making her careful way across the bank of boulders. “Lordy, someone has stolen your puppy, haven’t they, Miss Asha Tantry?” she said. When she reached me, she rested a hand on my head for a minute, as if I were still a child. “Even coming the short way, this hike will put me in my …”
Put me in my grave, she’d been about to say, one of her favorite expressions. Put me in my little puzzle box, after the bone fragments that are all that’s left of me have been ground by machine into dust that everyone calls ash.
Aunt Kath and Graham had gone to Hawkshead for breakfast, then come around to Near Sawrey and walked up from there. “He’s brought his paints,” she said. He was across the tarn, setting up an easel. And the pictures, too.
She didn’t think he’d seen me yet. She’d noticed me herself only when she’d looked out across the tarn, and even then she wasn’t sure. “I don’t know why you girls insist on hiding your pretty faces under those ball caps your Aunt Linda favors when you might wear proper ladies’ hats,” she said as she settled on the hard granite beside me, touching the brim of a University of Michigan ball cap that had been my father’s, that shaded me from the glare of the sun. “This tarn would make a lovely book jacket, wouldn’t it? Perhaps with a small wooden boat. An empty boat with just an open journal in it. We could Photoshop that in.”
A rowboat like Beatrix Potter and her husband used to take out in the evenings, when he was done with his legal work for the day and she’d written herself out, or finished her farm work, or put away her paints.
“Why did Mom spend the last days of her life here writing a biography about a dead woman, Aunt Kath?” I asked.
The up-tip of her not insubstantial chin almost left me regretting the question, but there was understanding in her plain brown eyes. “Your mama wasn’t fixing to die, Hope, so it’s a bit unfair to tag her with ignoring you and Sammy on her deathbed.”
I stretched my legs out on the cold stone and tilted my face to the sunshine, letting it slip under my hat.
“Would it raise your biscuits to know it wasn’t a biography she was working on?” Aunt Kath asked. “If it was something more personal?”
I glanced behind me as though the answer might be found in the lone cow grazing the emerald grass in the valley, which was sectioned with long stretches of stone wall as if anything at all in life might be parceled and contained.
Aunt Kath tossed a pebble into the water, her throw surprisingly easy. The tiny stone landed with a cheerful plonk, stirring up circles of ripples that grew and grew.
“She meant to collect material for a Beatrix Potter biography here, but she found something else,” she said.
We looked across the tarn to where Graham stood before an easel, what must be a paintbrush poised in his hand, although it was hard to tell from where we sat.
“Graham is part of it,” Aunt Kath said, “but not the hind roast, or more than but a slice of the meat.”
I tossed a pebble beyond the ripples echoing out from the stone Aunt Kath had thrown. We watched as the wake of mine washed over the fading edges of hers.
“Your mama … She gave me a pretty fine draft, Hope—to get my thoughts on it, that’s what she said—a few days before she died. She didn’t know she was dying, although your mama, if our seats were changed and she were sitting here telling this to Anna Page, she might say it was preordained.”
“A sign,” I said, feeling a smile edge onto my face.
“She could be two sandwiches shy of a picnic sometimes, your mama could. She could give your Ama a run for her money when it came to that mystical crap.”
“Mystical crap?” I said.
“Heavens to Betsy, did I say that?” Aunt Kath said in mock horror, and we both laughed a little. “You laugh exactly like your mama did,” she said.
She looked out over the water, where I imagined my mother with her imaginary Beatrix Potter companion, perhaps rowing together.
“The manuscript, it’s a lovely piece of business,” she said. “I’m sorry I hadn’t looked at it before she passed, that she isn’t here for me to tell her so. ‘Searching for Beatrix Potter.’ Your mama’s journey here, with Beatrix Potter at her side, the two of them laughing together about how odd and inflexible their own mamas were.” She tossed another pebble, and I followed suit, the stones plinking closer together this time, the wakes lapping into each other. Across the tarn, a bird called out a hopeful caw. Graham looked up to see it, and kept looking.
“It’s a memoir of sorts, I suppose, but maybe that’s my needing a place to put it on bookstore shelves,” Aunt Kath said. “It’s really just your mama trying to get comfortable with who she is.”
“But she was just Mom.”
Aunt Kath smiled a little. “We’re all difficult in our own ways, honey. Don’t imagine any of us isn’t. And don’t imagine becoming a mama yourself would make life any easier to understand.”
Graham offered a tentative wave. Aunt Kath didn’t notice, but I offered a small return wave. He kept looking, trying to make out who I was.
“The little books for Sam and me,” I said, “do you think Mom would like them to be published?”
Kath’s big eyes and her big chin and her gray hair so familiar. I’d known her all my life.
“Writing those books wasn’t like that for your mama,” she said. “Having you, Hope, that was her dream.”
“But she was always telling me I could do anything, like I had to, when she didn’t do anything herself. Career-wise, I mean.”
“Your mama and I, we weren’t raised with those expectations, honey.”
“But you became a swanky editor.”
She frowned at my bright yellow and gray plastic raincoat. It didn’t add to the red-turtleneck-blue-sweater-purple-vest look, her expression said. She reached over to me and zipped the jacket up a few more inches, never mind that I was nearly forty years old.
“I needed a job,” she said, “and then I was fair to middling at what I did for a lot of reasons, but most of all because I’d failed so miserably at my marriage and I was sorely in need of a success. One door closes but another one opens. The good Lord watches over fools who can’t care for themselves.”
She looked across the water to Graham. She smiled and waved enthusiastically, and he waved back, although his puzzled expression suggested that he hadn’t determined who I might be.
“How it would have mortified me when I was young to imagine that I would need to support myself,” she said. “It’s funny, isn’t it? So often it’s the things that mortify us in our youth that become indispensable.”
The things that mortify us in our youth. Yes, but what are you?
As we set off around the water’s edge toward Graham, I pulled off my cap, ran a hand through my hair, and surreptitiously unzipped my jacket the bit that Aunt Kath had zipped it up. Graham, recognizing me, waved brightly, and stood watching us before returning to his painting. Aunt Kath smiled slightly, at him or me or both of us. She put a hand at the back of my neck, fingering my hair where it rested against the plastic of my raincoat hood. “All of you Wednesday Daughters have great big ol’ hearts,” she said. “Even my Anna Page. Maybe the five of us Wednesday Sisters can take some solace in that, never mind that we do get so many things as wrong as wrong can be.”
I glanced at Aunt Kath’s lined face, her silver hair. “I think Mom meant for you and Graham to meet,” I said, the words coming as if in a whisper over my shoulder, Mom and Beatrix Potter urging me on. “Maybe she wanted her ashes brought here so you two could meet.”
“Bless his lecture-prone little heart,” Aunt Kath said. “If your mama had him in mind for me, she was perfectly able to make some wacky request to drag me here. And she’d have missed the mark by a generation, if that was the mischief she meant to make.” She sighed. “Of course, when it comes to men, my oldest daughter doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose.”
As though on cue, one of the geese feeding on the tarn honked at another, a short squabble ensuing. Graham looked up and smiled.
“What’s that thing Anna Page likes to say? ‘A heart at rest is death’?” she asked, something in her tone leaving me with the idea that she wanted me to share whatever Anna Page had told me about Uncle Lee. But Anna Page had told me nothing; if she was burdened by worries about her father, she wasn’t laying them on my shoulders while my pockets were filled with Mom.
“ ‘A heart at rest is death,’ ” I said. “ ‘To save it, we have to take it there and bring it back.’ ”
The first time I’d heard Anna Page say that, she had been trying to convince me to go to medical school. But my father had wanted me to become a lawyer, like him, or I’d thought he did, and I’d wanted to be like him even more than I’d wanted to be like Anna Page. I’d loved to write stories, but I’d assumed about Mom the way people assume about Kevin. I’d categorized and dismissed: unpublished failure. I decided I would be like my successful lawyer dad.
“Fortunately for Anna Page, she has you for a fusionist,” Aunt Kath said, “keeping her alive while her own heart is repaired.”
“She doesn’t, though,” I said. “Anna Page doesn’t let me anywhere near her heart.”
Aunt Kath pulled a dying leaf off a tree as we passed it, and rolled it between her fingers. “My Anna Page is too busy being mad at her daddy and me to allow that there might be something worth loving anywhere in this whole world,” she said, “but she fell in love with you the day your mama and daddy brought you home from the hospital, when even Mr. Pajamas made you look like a puny runt.”
She cocked her head and studied me. “Lordy, she was matchmaking even then, wasn’t she? We tried to talk her into choosing something smaller than Mr. Pajamas, but a body never could find any peace until you went along with that girl. Yes, I do believe she fell in love with you the moment she saw you in that Polaroid photo, with your baby face turned toward the bear she’d picked out for you.”
“She loved Jamie, too,” I said.
“Lordy, she did,” Aunt Kath said. “Lordy, she surely did.”
We walked quietly, watching the two bickering geese settle again into feeding on the underwater grasses.
“I didn’t want you to come up here,” I confessed, “but Kevin told me I had to let you because Uncle Lee had a stroke and you needed to tell Anna Page.”
She looked past the reflected-water mountains to the real ones, perhaps considering the unkind words I ought not to have said. “Lee acts like he thinks the sun comes up to hear him crow, but he doesn’t believe that,” she said. “Perhaps you had to have known him as a boy to see that, but he never has. And no one ought to be left old and sick and alone.” She looked down the water’s edge to Graham, his canvas much bigger than the illustrations in the Labradoodle book. “Anna Page is such a fine, responsible woman,” she said. “She deserves—” She stopped speaking so abruptly that it made me look more closely at the weariness in her lined face. I tried to connect the dots between what she’d said about Uncle Lee and Anna Page, but they made no picture.
“I suppose the truth is, I love Lee, Ally,” Aunt Kath said.
Ally. I blinked against the sound of my mother’s name instead of my own, but I didn’t correct her.
“Lordy, how I cried when he told me we were going to Stanford for his medical school. I couldn’t imagine raising my babies all that long way from home for even those few years. But I’ve had a good life. I suppose I’ve enjoyed my career more than I would have enjoyed any life I might have had if I’d married a better man than Lee. It’s allowed me to define my own sense of who I am, rather than have it folded and put away for me.”
Clouds edged over the mountain behind Graham and reflected in the water, storms gathering from nowhere to drench us again before scurrying off to find other victims out for sunny-day walks.
“And Lee was a good father. When I’d start thinking that raising children was like being pecked to death by chickens, he wo
uld get away from the hospital long enough to scoop them up and cover them with love. I’m not excusing him. But there’s a lot of goodness in Lee.”
“A good father,” I repeated, the conversation dots connecting from Lee to what Anna Page did and didn’t deserve. If Aunt Kath didn’t take care of Lee, the burden would fall to Anna Page and her brother and sister—that had been what she’d almost said earlier. Taking care of Lee would fall to Anna Page alone, really, because her sister, at forty-five, probably never would move from a world that revolved around her into one where others had needs, and her brother was a man who left all the taking care of to his wife.
Someone would have to carry Lee through his dying, and Aunt Kath didn’t want that someone to be Anna Page.
Aunt Kath would have told me, if she’d said anything, that taking Lee back was a last act of selfishness, a way she could, by preserving her children’s happiness, preserve her own. She didn’t say anything, though. I suppose she didn’t want any truth she might have admitted there at Beatrix Potter’s tarn to travel from my lips to her daughter’s still-fragile heart. I suppose she must have figured her own heart was tough enough to carry it alone, or to carry it long enough to deliver to the feet of the Wednesday Sisters, who had always accepted her choices the way that, I can see now, Anna Page and Julie and I accepted one another’s, even when we didn’t agree with them.
Mr. Heelis & I fished (at least I rowed!) till darkness.… It was lovely on the tarn, not a breath of wind and no midges.
—BEATRIX POTTER, IN A JUNE 17, 1924, LETTER TO LOUIE CHOICE
ACROSS THE TARN WHERE GRAHAM WAS PAINTING, THE VIEW WAS DIFFERENT than it had been from the rocky outcropping: not toward the hard-water reflection of mountain and sky and the bleak gray of the growing cloud bank, but to the long stretch of green valley, the ancient-walled geometry, the winding dirt path to Near Sawrey. That was what Graham was painting, this softer view, but with a boat on the tarn that wasn’t there in reality, a blow-up raft that looked surprisingly inviting in watercolor yellow. It was what Mom and Graham used to paddle around in, a whitewater raft complete with D-rings and grab lines (which you didn’t need on this tarn, but it was what Graham had). “Can you imagine portaging anything heavier all this way, even motoring around and hiking up the shorter track?” he said.