The Clairvoyants(100)

She was thinner. She’d let her hair go gray, though it was still long to her shoulders and styled. She wore no makeup. “You made it,” she called.

The driver went to the trunk for my bag, and then the cab drove away. I stood below my mother on the pebbled drive. “What really happened to it?”

She put her hand up to shade her eyes. “Lightning,” she said. Then she did something astonishing. She tipped her head back and laughed.

“Are you my mother?” I asked.

“Oh, Martha,” she said. “Still the same.”

I followed her inside the house, where the sea breeze came through the windows into the kitchen. The Spiritualists by the Sea camp had opened—I could smell the scent of oil paint. And then Owen came into the room with a little white cane, tapping it in the doorway. He held his two hands out and my mother told me to kneel down onto the kitchen’s worn wood floor. I smelled his breath, cloying and sweet. He placed his small hands on my face.

“This is how he knows you,” my mother said.

His little fingers were nimble, searching me out.

“Girl,” he said, quietly, his hands on my hair.

“Auntie Martha,” my mother told him. “Run along and play while we visit.”

He put his small arms around my neck and squeezed. His cane tap-tapped along the wood floor into the living room.

My mother set out two cups of coffee and poured a shot of Baileys Original Irish Cream into each. Though Del had claimed she and I would raise Owen, we both knew that would prove impossible. I’d stayed in Ithaca to finish school, and my mother had taken on the care of Owen. As we drank our coffee, the breeze through the screen door riffled the linen tablecloth, and I wondered if she forgave me for never visiting, even on holidays, for never offering to help with Owen. I’d come for my grandmother’s funeral last year but left immediately after. My sporadic phone calls and texts relayed only basic information about my own life—a new apartment in the city, a small show at a gallery—and never inquired into hers except to ask about Del.

My mother had put swatches of fabric on the door frames, on Owen’s chair at the table, until he’d learned which was his. His toys lined the shelves in the old den, where my grandfather once watched his documentaries—Braille lettered blocks, stacking cups, puzzles with little knob handles, textured books. Owen’s artwork hung on the walls—brilliant and full of colorful dabs and smears. I put my finger out and felt the dried paint on the paper. I closed my eyes and listened to the tapping of the little cane.

That afternoon, Leanne and Sarah arrived—Leanne with her baby, and Sarah with her two, a boy and a girl. We chatted, sitting at the old iron table in the iron mesh chairs, and watched the children play on the steps of the pool. They each, grudgingly, acknowledged my birthday.

“Mother says you don’t want to celebrate,” Sarah said. “Here’s this, anyway.”

She handed me a small wrapped box. Inside was a silver cuff bracelet of my grandmother’s that Sarah had owned for years.

“You always wanted it,” she said.

Leanne gave me a silk scarf that reminded me of Anne.

Neither of my older sisters mentioned Del. We managed not to argue about anything, but they both ended their visit by claiming they had to get going—Leanne to the grocery store, Sarah to get ready for a dinner party. Even in my apartment in the city, I had nowhere pressing to go. I’d abandoned any friends I’d made in Ithaca; they’d served their purpose in that part of my life, and felt temporary, as if I were supposed to let go of them. I had made a few new friends in the city. I had a job at a gallery. I had my photographs. But I was often alone.

Before Sarah left, after the children were buckled into their car seats and she had gotten into the driver’s seat, she called me over.

“Remember that birthday you were banished from the house?” she said. She wore a small smile I couldn’t quite read.

“No,” I said, though she must have meant the time I’d spent the night.

“You had gotten into it with Del,” she said. “And one of you threw something that shattered that framed picture in the living room? Glass was everywhere. Mother went crazy.”

The heat from the car fanned my face, and I took a step back. “I don’t really remember.”

Sarah snapped on her seat belt, reprimanded her younger child in the backseat. “Well, we all knew you’d broken it. Del never got angry, if you think about it.” She gave me that odd smile again, a little sorry for me. “I guess you put that memory aside.”

I watched her drive away. Aside, I thought. As if that could be accomplished with pieces of the past.

Later, I sat in the living room wing chair with a book, not reading, just thinking. Owen came tapping into the room where I sat, and I remained quiet, believing he wouldn’t know I was there. After a moment, he left, and the tapping moved down the front hallway, up the front staircase, and down the back kitchen stairs, a circuit of the house. My mother called him for his bath, and I went out onto the porch.

The site of the leveled barn was shaggy with weeds, the remains of the cement and stone foundation like a ruined mouth. The golf course, its stands of weeping willows, was visible now from the porch. Near the debris of the barn, the hammer rusted in the cistern. Would I ever see David Pinney’s ghost peering at me from beneath the willow? I had hidden my crime and gotten away with it. I had continued on as if it had never happened, but I was wrong. I would always carry my blame. I’d thought my mother believed that she and I were covering for Del, but she’d known from the first it had been me.