Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  “Beth loved doing that.”

  “She cared about the people so much. Lainie always said so. It didn’t matter who they were, where they came from. Drug addict or the artist down on his luck—she treated them the same way.”

  “Well, she was known for helping artists,” Kate said.

  “Yes, a true philanthropist. We really appreciated her recommending one fellow to teach art to our grandkids.”

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “Very talented young man. Beth introduced him to Lainie, knowing that we love art and that we’d enjoy helping him out—but it turns out, he’s done so much more for us than we have for him. As a matter of fact, he’s heading out to the island again today. Third time now. The kids love Jed.”

  “Jed?” Kate asked. “I don’t think I know him.”

  “Oh, I thought you might. Beth told Lainie she was considering a show for him at the gallery. He was at the soup kitchen too.”

  “A volunteer?”

  “No, a client. He takes his meals there. Lainie says he’s a brilliant artist, graduated from the Black Hall Art Academy, but is rather down on his luck. Literally a starving artist. She says he’s a master at line drawings. She’s already bought two of his drawings, to help him out.”

  Drawings. Kate’s heart skittered. She pictured the nude, the signature, first initial J.

  “David, do you know Jed’s last name?” Kate asked.

  “Hilliard, I believe. Yes, that’s it. Jed Hilliard.”

  Kate was rocked by a full-body tremor. JH.

  David took his seat, and Kate entered the cockpit. She heard Jenny offer him coffee. She and Charlie ran through the rest of their preflight checks. Kate had to pull herself together. Had the mystery of the drawing been solved?

  Her hands were shaking. She knew she shouldn’t fly.

  “Charlie, you want to take the controls today?”

  “Sure,” he said, sounding happy. She rarely gave him the chance.

  He called the tower, and they were cleared for takeoff. Charlie began to taxi to the runway. He released the brake, but Kate barely noticed. Her thoughts raced: Beth at the soup kitchen, JH drawing her nude. The plane accelerated at roughly the same rate as her heart, gaining speed along five thousand feet of asphalt into liftoff. Charlie banked left over Fishers Island Sound, giving David a good look at the island, then turned west.

  The Citation X was a fast jet, powered by large Rolls-Royce engines, flying a mile in six seconds. They landed in Cleveland less than two hours after takeoff. The crew had four free hours before David would be ready to fly home. Sometimes they hung out together, but Kate left them in the airport; all she could think about was Jed Hilliard.

  She texted Lulu:

  I figured out who JH is. CALL ME.

  Then Scotty:

  Did you know Beth had a friend named Jed?

  Kate pulled the envelope from her shoulder bag and looked at the drawing again. It was undeniably a fine piece of work, but she didn’t care about that. Now that she knew the name of the artist, she looked for signs of what Beth had been feeling. Had it been a romantic relationship? She stared at Beth’s pregnant belly—could everyone be wrong about Pete being the baby’s father? No, it wasn’t possible. Her sister would never have cheated. She would have talked to Kate if she even had feelings for someone else.

  She needed to feel close to Beth, so she took a cab to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Imposing and graceful, presiding over the Wade Oval, the neoclassical white marble building soothed her upon sight. She had been here before, on past trips with David, and although she usually liked to visit the current exhibitions, today she went straight to an old favorite in the permanent collection.

  A painting from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series occupied an entire wall of the East Wing’s Impressionism gallery. She took a seat on the wide bench and stared at it. It had been painted at Giverny, during the last years of Monet’s life, when he’d stayed home creating massive paintings, triptychs of his beloved lily pond. Viewing this panel brought back the trip to France.

  It brought back Beth. Her breathing slowed as she stared at the painting.

  The October before the gallery incident, their parents had taken the girls to New York. They stayed at the Stanhope Hotel, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park. While their parents met with a collector on Park Avenue, Kate and Beth went to the park. Kate skateboarded from the Obelisk down to Conservatory Water and around Bethesda Fountain while Beth ran along with her.

  “Let’s go to the Met,” Beth said after an hour. “I’m cold.”

  Kate was wearing a red wool hat and a navy-blue down jacket. Beth wore a camel-hair coat, but even so, Kate took off her jacket to put around her sister’s shoulders.

  “Now you’ll be cold,” Beth said.

  “Let’s head down to Poet’s Walk. You love the statues.”

  “No, the museum,” Beth said.

  “Aren’t you tired of art?” Kate said. “We have that at home. We’re in New York—do you really want to look at more paintings?”

  Beth smiled.

  Orange and yellow leaves carpeted the ground. The graceful statue Angel of the Waters rose from a pedestal in the circular pool, above the park benches and lake. Kate wanted to stay outside, watch people, and get a hot pretzel, but she couldn’t say no to her little sister.

  Half an hour later, they were standing in front of a Renoir, a mother with two daughters in blue dresses. Kate had had to check her skateboard at the front door.

  Kate shook her head, staring at the Renoir. “Impressionism is too pretty. It’s too easy. Let’s go look at Kandinsky.”

  Beth had given her a look as if she had felt sorry for her. “Haven’t you ever listened to Mathilda? The Impressionists changed everything. The way they created light out of paint. One brushstroke, and it’s a red hat. Just like yours.”

  “Yeah, well,” Kate had said.

  Now, looking at the large canvas of Monet’s Water Lilies, Kate thought of how much Beth had loved this series—and Kate had to admit she did too. Their feelings about art had changed after their mother’s death. Kate had almost instantly needed the comfort and familiarity, warmth and light of Impressionism—not French but American, the work her family had collected. Beth, in contrast, had decided that art had caused their mother’s death, and she never wanted to think about it again.

  That hadn’t lasted long. Soon after their mother’s death, the two sisters had switched paths. Beth had become devoted to the idea of working at the gallery. She had lost herself in scholarship and paintings. To Kate, art was a pleasure to be abandoned, like everything else.

  Had Beth met Jed Hilliard at the Academy or in New London? His talent was unmistakable. Kate ached, wondering why Beth had never said a word about him, at least to her. Had she talked about him to Lulu? Was that why Lulu had acted so strange when Kate had shown her the drawing? She checked her phone—neither Lulu nor Scotty had texted back.

  Kate stared at Water Lilies, getting lost in the wash of subtle color and shadows, passing the time until David’s meeting was finished, till they could fly home to Connecticut, until she could learn more about what Jed Hilliard had meant to her sister.

  26

  Sam had never thought of a house as being alive, as having a soul. She had lived at 45 Church Street since the day her parents had brought her home from the hospital. She had never much thought about it. She had taken for granted the walls, the windows, the floors, the rooms, the way her mother had decorated, the way the kitchen was bright in the morning, the bird feeders just outside the bay window. Plaster and paint and wood and a chimney. That was a house.

  Now that she’d returned from her aunt’s loft, she realized that she’d been wrong all along. Her house had been alive. It had hummed with life. It had been singing and dancing. It had been cooking meals and planning for holidays, and when holidays came, it had been full of the season. At Thanksgiving it had crackled with roasting t
urkey, and for Christmas, it had smelled of evergreen, cookies, and wood fires, and it had sounded like The Nutcracker Suite.

  Sitting in the kitchen, Sam realized that the life in her house was gone. It wasn’t a dead thing, exactly. It still had electricity and running water, the stove worked, the coffee maker could still brew, the refrigerator kept food cold. But the house had become a phantom. It was no longer living and breathing, surrounding the family and making them feel safe. It wafted along, an untethered spirit, drained of everything it once had been.

  Even Popcorn felt the lifelessness. Instead of romping around, wanting to play, he lay in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen floor, looking out the sliding glass door at a squirrel chattering and hiding acorns in the yard. He wasn’t even barking at it.

  The sun caught a glinting something in the door’s track. Sam went over to see what it was—a small sliver of glass. She held it in her palm. No one had told her the actual details, the moment by moment of that day when they’d found her mother, but she had watched the TV news showing clips of the house from every possible exterior angle. She knew that her aunt and the police had smashed the door to get inside. Her father must have gotten the pane replaced at some point, but this little piece of glass from the old one remained.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, she held the sliver of glass as if it were as precious as a diamond. She angled it into a shaft of sunlight, tilted it back and forth, refracting rainbows onto the ceiling. She touched it to the inside of her arm. Oh, it was so tempting. She burned to write I miss my mom in her skin, to watch dark red bubbles of blood quiver and spill. Cutting had worked in the past, purged the pain like nothing else.

  She had smoked weed that morning, after her father had left the house. Getting stoned had seemed like a good idea, but it had messed her up, made her feel as if she was on the outside looking in. Her mind kept flashing little nuggets of self-pity: You are the daughter of a murdered mother. You will never see your mother again. Your father would rather be with his mistress and kid than with you.

  Leaving Kate’s, she had intended to come here and hang the mobile. She had made it for Matthew in June. She and her mom had gone to the Whaling City Shelter in New London. There were a lot of women and kids there, and Sam’s volunteer job was to do art projects with the kids.

  Her mom’s friend Jed helped out too—he was the real deal, an itinerant artist who’d never had a day job, who was willing to do grunt work and eat at the soup kitchen to keep his freedom, to paint and live the creative life. He’d helped her and some of the younger kids do a whole series of watercolors of birds—the kind that came to the feeders her mom always filled, backyard birds that might have seemed ordinary but were incredibly beautiful.

  The day Sam made Matthew’s mobile, she painted downy woodpeckers, goldfinches, cardinals, starlings, and white-breasted nuthatches on both sides of the thick watercolor paper her mom had donated to the shelter. Then she cut out the birds, glued two narrow slats of wood together at the center so they formed a cross, and strung the watercolor birds from the cross in a way that allowed them to balance and twirl.

  It wasn’t exactly Alexander Calder, but she was proud of her mobile.

  “Your brother is going to love this,” Jed said, holding it overhead and watching the birds move on air currents, almost as if they were flying.

  “I’ll be in college by the time he’s old enough to know who I am,” Sam said.

  “That’s not true. He already knows who you are,” her mother said. “He can hear your voice right now. You’re already teaching him.”

  “Teaching him what?” Sam asked. Her grades had slid since the whole thing with her dad and Nicola the Gallerina, with the fact she already had a baby brother—one she never even wanted to know. Tyler.

  “Teaching Matthew about birds and nature, about staying strong and getting through hard times the best you can,” her mother said.

  “I wouldn’t say I’m doing great at that.”

  “She said ‘the best you can,’” Jed said. “And that counts. Take it from someone who knows.”

  On the way home in the car that day, Sam glanced over at her mother. They weren’t the type of mother-daughters who had deep talks. They were close but in ways that did not involve talking about problems. Except for the occasional comment, her mom kept quiet about their family mess. Questions had been building up. Sam wasn’t sure why, but having Jed be so kind made it seem okay to ask.

  “Why do you stay with Dad?” Sam asked. Most kids wished their parents wouldn’t get divorced. She couldn’t say that she was crazy about the idea, but on the other hand, it troubled her that her mother would put up with her dad’s bullshit.

  “We’re a family,” her mother said slowly.

  “But he’s demeaning you,” Sam said. “Flaunting Nicola.”

  “She’s nothing,” her mother said. “I actually feel sorry for her.”

  “How can you?”

  “She has to be pretty insecure to do what she did. Fall in love with someone else’s husband.”

  “She had a baby so now you have to?”

  “It bothers you?”

  Sam shrugged.

  Her mother was quiet, maybe deciding how much Sam could handle.

  “Sam, I know how much we will love this boy,” her mother said. “I have you, and soon we’ll have Matthew.” She paused, glancing over, then back at the road. “When I first got married, I thought I needed someone to take care of me. Even though I was smart, educated, knew how to run a business—my family business—I had gone through a lot. With my mother, all that. You know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your dad came into my life, saw what I needed—someone who understood, who could take care of me. Fill a big hole in my life. He convinced me he could do that, and I wanted to believe him.”

  “Did you ever love him?”

  “Of course. So much. But things changed along the way. Just because I married him doesn’t mean I’m not enough on my own. I had stopped knowing that. It took the garbage with Nicola to really figure it out. I hope you know that about yourself, that you are perfect on your own. You have to make yourself whole—no one else can.”

  “I know,” Sam said.

  “Good,” her mother said.

  “I’m not sure Dad believes it about you, though,” Sam said.

  “That’s been the problem,” her mother had said.

  Now, sitting alone in the kitchen with the piece of broken glass, Sam thought how much everything had changed. The world was upside down. She only wished her parents had gotten divorced—maybe her mother would still be alive.

  And what did that mean? The thought scared her, as if she could believe her father would rather kill her mom than go through a divorce.

  “He didn’t kill her,” Sam said out loud.

  She counted the reasons why: she was pregnant, he loved her and Sam, he could never hurt his family that way—having an affair was one thing, but actually planning and murdering her—no way. But deep down, Sam couldn’t help thinking of what her mother had been skirting around that day driving home from the shelter. Her father hadn’t liked her getting strong.

  A light breeze came through the open windows. She stared out at the garden. Without her mom to tend it, the flowers looked dry and weedy. The bird feeders were empty. The sight of those birdless feeders made Sam feel almost as bad as anything.

  She started to throw the little piece of glass away, but instead she tucked it into an antique brass bowl her mother always filled with pine cones in the fall. Then she went into the garage, took the lid off the large galvanized bucket. It was full to the brim with #2 sunflower seed—the mix her mother had bought at the Audubon shop in Madison. She lugged the bucket outside, then went back into the garage for smaller pails of thistle seed, peanuts, and safflower seed. Suet could wait till winter.

  The feeders were long tubes that hung from four curved arms on a decorative wrought-iron pole. A large cylindrical baffle halfway up the pole d
eterred raccoons and squirrels from climbing up. Across the yard, a house-shaped feeder swung from a branch in a big red oak tree. It had a flat platform that nonperching birds like cardinals could use. Sam took her time, carefully filling each feeder to the brim.

  When she was finished, she went to sit on the stone wall and wait for the birds to discover their food was back. Sam’s heart expanded a little. It had been so small and tight for weeks. Looking at those empty feeders had made it shrink even more. But just then, she felt some blood flowing around her body, back into her heart. Just a little, not a lot. Filling the feeders was like bringing something back to life.

  She couldn’t do that for her mother, couldn’t even do it for their house. But at least she could do it for the birds. At least that. She caught sight of the clear red feeder, its base shaped like a flower. How could she have forgotten the hummingbirds? It was always magical to see the tiny birds hover, dip in for a taste, dart away, faster than bees. They were attracted to red; her mother planted columbine and trumpet vines for them, and she also kept their feeder full.

  Standing on tiptoes, Sam removed the scarlet flower from the suction cups sticking it to the window over the kitchen sink. She went back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Inside was a crystal pitcher filled with sugar syrup. Her mother made it fresh every week. Sam started to pour, then noticed a ridge of frosted sugar around the rim.

  The syrup was a few weeks old now. Was it still okay? Maybe Sam could make some more. It had to be simple, but why had she never watched her mother do it? She was pretty sure she had to cook it, or perhaps she could just stir the sugar and water together. That was when it hit her—this was the last hummingbird syrup her mother would ever make.

  Sam placed the pitcher back in the refrigerator. She closed the door and left the red flower feeder in the sink. Her heart shrank again—she felt it close up, tight and hard. She thought of the glass sliver. She grabbed it from the brass bowl and headed into the basement, making sure to close the door behind her.

  Summer silent, the furnace hulked in the corner. Her dad had a workshop filled with his tools. Sam walked to the far end, toward the laundry room with the washer and dryer, some wooden dryer racks, and a wicker basket of single socks. Her mother had decorated the whitewashed concrete walls with pictures Sam had drawn in elementary school, photographs she had taken more recently.