The Dutch House(91)

“Norma got my room,” Maeve said to our mother.

Norma blinked. She was wearing dark slacks, a pink blouse. No embellishment or frill, nothing to make herself noticeable, an outfit that said she was not her mother’s daughter. “I didn’t mean the room.”

“The room with the window seat?” our mother asked, suddenly able to picture that place her daughter had slept all those years ago.

Maeve looked up at the ceiling, at the crown molding called egg-and-dart. “Actually, she got the whole house. I mean, her mother got the house.”

That was when I saw Norma, eight again, the weight of that bedroom still crushing her. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.

Did she sleep there all these years later? Did she live in this house and sleep in Maeve’s bed?

Maeve looked right at her. “I’m kidding,” she whispered.

Norma shook her head. “I missed you so much after you left.”

“After your mother threw us out?” Maeve couldn’t help herself, even if she didn’t mean to say it to Norma. She had waited for such a long time.

“Then,” Norma said, “and all the way up until a few minutes ago.”

“How’s your mother doing?” Elna asked her, as if we didn’t know. Maybe she wanted to change the subject. The current that ran between Norma and Maeve was something our mother couldn’t have understood. She hadn’t been there.

A Kleenex box sat on the coffee table. There would never have been Kleenex in the drawing room had Andrea been in her right mind. Norma came closer in order to take a tissue. “It’s primary progressive aphasia or it’s plain old Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure, and it doesn’t really matter since there’s nothing you can do about it either way.” Norma’s mother was, at least for that minute, the last thing on Norma’s mind.

“Do you take care of her?” Maeve asked. I really thought she might spit on the carpet.

Norma held out her hand to the woman with the braid. “Inez does most of it. I only moved back a few months ago.”

Inez smiled. It wasn’t her mother.

Elna came and kneeled before Andrea, slipping her shoes back on her feet, then she sat on the couch so that my father’s tiny widow was sandwiched between the two of us. “How wonderful that your daughter’s come home,” she said to my stepmother.

And Andrea, still smacking, looked at my mother for the first time, then she pointed to the painting that hung on the wall across from the VanHoebeeks. “My daughter,” she said.

We turned to look, all of us, and there was the portrait of my sister, hanging exactly where it always had been. Maeve was ten years old, her shining black hair down past the shoulders of her red coat, the wallpaper from the observatory behind her, graceful imaginary swallows flying past pink roses, Maeve’s blue eyes dark and bright. Anyone looking at that painting would have wondered what had become of her. She was a magnificent child, and the whole world was laid out in front of her, covered in stars.

Maeve cut a wide path around the sofa where we were sitting and walked across the room to stand in front of the girl she had been. “I was sure she would have thrown that away,” she said.

“She loves the painting,” Norma said.

Andrea gave a deep nod and pointed at the painting. “My daughter.”

“No,” Maeve said.

“My daughter,” Andrea said again, and then she turned and looked at the VanHoebeeks. “My parents.”

Maeve stood there as if she were trying to get used to the idea. We were spellbound as we watched her put a firm hand on either side of the frame to lift the painting off the wall. The frame was wide and lacquered black, no doubt to match her hair, but the painting itself was only the size of a ten-year-old child from the waist up. She struggled for moment to free the wire from the nail and Norma reached up behind the canvas to help her. The painting came away from the wall.

“It’s heavy,” Norma said, and put out her hands to help.

“I’ve got it,” Maeve said. There was a slightly darker rectangle left behind on the wallpaper, outlining the place where it had been.

“I’m going to give this to May,” Maeve said to me. “It looks like May.”

Andrea smoothed my handkerchief out across her lap. Then she started folding it again, each of the four corners in towards the middle.

Maeve stopped and looked at Norma. With her hands full, she leaned over and kissed her. “I should have come back for you,” she said. “You and Bright.”

Then she left the house.

I would have expected Andrea to panic when I got up to follow my sister, or to mark the painting’s departure with some level of violence, but she was consumed by the pleasures of my handkerchief. When I stood she was unbalanced for a moment, then tilted over to rest against my mother like a plant in need of staking. My mother put an arm around her, and why not? Maeve was already gone.

I gave Norma a small embrace at the door. I had never known that Maeve thought about the girls again, but it made sense. Our childhood was a fire. There had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out.

“I’m going to stay a minute,” my mother said to me. It was funny to see the two Mrs. Conroys sitting there together—though funny wasn’t the word—the little one dressed like a doll, the tall one still reminiscent of Death.