Last Day

by Luanne Rice

  Kate held her hand above the rabbit’s head and felt energy passing between them. All her senses were engaged. Beth was still with her. She felt warm breath on the back of her neck and actually turned around to see if her sister was standing there. She had the sudden feeling that she was coming alive in a different way.

  Kate’s gaze fell upon the bowl of oranges, and the rabbit’s name came to her. “You’re Clementine,” she said. “You’re going to get better.”

  She carried Clementine to the other side of the loft, away from the windows, where it was dark and toasty. She put her back into the crate. It was 2:30, nearly time to leave to meet the others. She’d have to gather tall grass from Mathilda’s yard, arrange it in a nest for Clementine. And food—she’d need to learn what wild rabbits liked to eat. She’d seen families of them in the meadow, hopping through clover. She wondered where she could find clover in late November.

  “It will be all right,” Kate whispered. She thought of Lulu and Beth, the ritual of drawing a heart on the back of the painting. She cringed to think of the secrets they had kept from her.

  Since July, her heart had ached more than she thought was safe. She’d thought maybe she would collapse. Her sister was gone, and she’d never see her again. The feelings were similar to what she’d felt when her mother had died, when it had seemed that if someone she loved could be taken so violently, there might be no reason to go on.

  Sitting with Clementine, feeling sudden and deep commitment to saving her, she saw clearly what she’d known all along—that she’d already been doing that with Sam. She had decided, without putting it into words, that she would be her niece’s person. Less than a mother but more than the somewhat distant aunt she had always been. She might have thought she was shut down, but she had loved as deeply and totally as anyone else all along. She just hadn’t let herself feel it.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she stared through the crate’s open door and watched Clementine watching her. She remembered being eleven, rescuing a feral cat that had lived behind the gallery, the last pet she’d ever had—loving every second with Maggie, feeling her warmth as she snuggled against her side.

  After those hours in the basement, Kate couldn’t even look at her sister. She had been too numb to grip her hand, to hold her little sister tight, to bond together and try to dispel the horrors of that day and night.

  Kate’s love of her sister had never left her, but after their mother had died, after the brutality of the ropes, she’d stopped being able to open her heart to physical, hands-on caring for any living being. You never knew when they would be taken from you.

  She thought about what Lulu had told her. If not for the photos and video, she would have had a hard time picturing Beth with the knife, cutting Moonlight from the frame, and she couldn’t help feeling angry at her sister. Beth had staged a fake crime, reminiscent of what their father had done with the same painting.

  “Beth,” she said out loud. Then she closed her eyes and listened. She ached to hear her sister’s voice. After a few minutes, she leaned down to stare into the rabbit’s big beautiful eyes.

  “You’re going to be fine, Clementine. It will all be okay,” Kate said, unable to stop herself from reaching into the crate, gently touching the head of her injured cottontail. “I love you more than you could ever know,” Kate said, and she wasn’t completely sure whether she was talking to Clementine or to Beth. She stood up. It was time to meet the others and celebrate Beth’s birthday.

  51

  Scotty and her family lived in a winterized beach cottage overlooking the boat basin at Hubbard’s Point, and at this time of year, she never felt quite warm enough. The November wind whistled through every window. Most boats had been hauled for the season, but gazing out her kitchen window, Scotty saw that there were still two tied up in their slips. Lobster pots were piled on the bulkhead between them. Late fall and winter weren’t bad times to be lobster fishermen, if you were hardy enough.

  Isabel and Sam had gotten off the bus after school, had a quick snack, and were up in Isabel’s room with the door closed. She had no idea what they were talking about. It was time for Scotty and Sam to head to Mathilda’s—Isabel would stay here and babysit Julie—but try prying the best friends apart. It had been the same for Scotty and the rest of the Compass Rose when they were that age.

  Scotty walked into the pantry and stood looking at the liquor. She wanted a drink badly. Often she let herself have a small one at this time of day. She used to wait till 6:00, the official cocktail hour, but lately she’d begun telling herself an hour or two earlier didn’t make a real difference. She didn’t drink to get drunk—just to take the edge off.

  But other than her two days a week at the food pantry, she didn’t usually have to drive anywhere. She actually missed volunteering on the days she wasn’t there. She knew it would be frowned upon, but every so often she’d take a walk with one or more of her favorite clients and treat them to a cocktail. Why not? They were all adults, and if it brought a little pleasure into their painful lives, she was happy to provide it.

  Beth might not have approved of her sharing alcohol with them—many had substance abuse issues. But Beth had understood almost everything else that mattered to Scotty.

  They talked about how it felt to have teenage daughters, how unnecessary they’d started to feel. Both Isabel and Sam had found their independence on what had seemed to Scotty the early side—they’d embraced the belief they didn’t need their moms the same way. They had lives of their own, and the last thing they wanted were mothers hovering.

  But of course they did need their mothers, more than ever. These were crucial days—that’s how Scotty thought of it: mere days, six hundred or so, before they went off to college. The comfort of years stretching ahead—a seemingly endless time for the entire family to nestle together, for Scotty to savor the closeness with her older daughter—was over.

  Beth had thought she had that luxury too. Even though life had changed, with Sam growing up, they were still together, and Sam, although perhaps not in the same way as she had in middle school, needed her guidance and love. Beth had loved that girl, and she had been so ready to love Matthew. It was supposed to last forever.

  Scotty shivered, thinking of the terrible loss. Beth, gone from their lives. Today, on her birthday, the emptiness was almost unbearable. She stared at the vodka bottle, then abruptly turned her back on it. She had to stay strong. And sober for today.

  Kate and Lulu would be expecting her and Sam, but she knew they wouldn’t mind if two more joined them. She knew in that moment she couldn’t leave Isabel at home on Beth’s birthday, and that meant she’d take Julie along too. Her children were everything.

  She paused. The last talk with Beth had been so upsetting. Her sweet Beth, so hurt by the men in her life. Was that why Beth had refused to give either one of them, Pete or Jed, the satisfaction of knowing he was the father? Scotty had no use for Pete, and she couldn’t see much good in Jed. He was an ex-con, probably drawn to Beth for her money and the connections she could make for him in the art world. He certainly didn’t deserve any respect, not after tempting Beth away from her marriage.

  Money, clearly. And the prestige of the gallery. Beth must have realized he didn’t have good motives. That had to be the reason Beth wouldn’t tell him whether he was or was not Matthew’s father. Although Jed wasn’t honorable, it wasn’t fair to keep that fact from him. If he was about to be a parent, he deserved to know, and it was terribly unfair of Beth to not tell him. Everyone had loved Beth, but very few had realized how deeply flawed she had been.

  There were certain rules in life that had to be adhered to. You simply couldn’t come between a person and his child. That would be selfish and unforgivable. The important thing was to celebrate Beth’s life. To be with everyone who had loved her as much as Scotty had.

  “Girls!” Scotty called from the bottom of the stairs. “Hurry up; it’s time to go! Dress warm—it’s cold out!”


  52

  November 21

  It’s my birthday.

  It’s so strange to be here instead of there on this day. On any day.

  You’re not supposed to ask for gifts; if they are freely given, you are grateful. But you can’t expect them.

  Am I allowed to wish for one?

  The gift I would like is for them to know, to exact payment. They are my beloveds, my sister, daughter, and best friends. In some ways I believe they’ve known all along, for how could they miss it?

  Or maybe my own experience has been colored: of trusting and loving, then turning my back and my skull being smashed—hearing the bones in my head crack. Then feeling hands around my throat, seeing that wild gaze—so charged with fury, but then emotion draining away, staring into my eyes with no emotion as dispassionately as someone trying to loosen a particularly tight lid from a jar. It has colored my judgment, made me believe that there could be no questions—none at all. That is the drawback of knowledge. It gives you a singular point of view that you cannot, in fairness, expect others to share.

  I would have liked to have remained blank as I died, to not give the satisfaction of my panic and desperation, but I wasn’t that strong, or perhaps a better word would be disciplined. I so quickly lost track of what I wanted—to remain calm. My survival instinct made me want to fight with everything I had. But instinct wasn’t enough. I started to die the minute that sculpture, the owl I had loved so much, struck my head. I would have withheld my fear if I could. I believe it was accepted as a gift.

  Although I couldn’t scream—the grip around my neck was too tight—I could hear the terrible choking, gurgling sounds coming from my throat, the fine bones breaking under the pressure of strong thumbs. In that most human of moments, I thought I sounded inhuman.

  I reached for those hands, wanting to pull them away, but I couldn’t even reach them. My muscles tensed, softened, and my arms fell slack. I imagine the power bestowed by my weakness. Is it odd that I didn’t wonder why this was happening to me? Every cell in my body knew, so why bother asking the question? The point is, while being murdered, I was purely there on the bed, physically and therefore mentally present in the moment, experiencing my own death.

  And Matthew’s death. My son had been moving and dancing and kicking for weeks. He was even more active in my womb than Sam had been, and that is saying a lot. I was sure she’d come out a champion tennis player. Her prebirth serve-and-volley game was strong.

  Matthew was ready to be born. If he could have arrived in July, instead of October when he was expected, I believe he would have. He had such an exuberant life force. I felt I already knew him. When he kept me awake, his feet contentedly tapping, I could picture him learning to walk early, chortling with pleasure as he toddled after Popcorn, a dancer who would grow up singing and laughing.

  He had a wonderful personality.

  He fought even harder than I did. Even as my own life faded away, I felt Matthew twisting and punching. His little fists balled up, moving in slow motion in the fluid in which he swam. My heart beat oxygen into his. Every breath I took was a breath for Matthew. When I stopped being able to breathe, so would he. That was the only thought that pulled me away from the physical act of dying. The sorrow that my son, already so alive, would lose his life before he had the chance to truly live it. I felt such heartbreak for his father—that his father would never know his beautiful son.

  So many misconceptions about the moment of death. They say your entire life flashes before your eyes. You have time to make peace with your regrets, to forgive and let go of resentments, to fill your heart with love. I can see why people want to believe that in the minutes before death, a person can find perfect peace. For me, that did not happen. My entire wonderful life was wiped out, as if it had never been, in violent thrashing, despair, pain beyond belief.

  I would have thought it was pure anger that drove my killer—a crazed moment that would surely end as the rage stopped, when realization that this was happening, that I was dying, would have halted the whole thing. But it didn’t. That’s when I saw that terrible calm enter the eyes staring down at me.

  I was so focused on that familiar, once so-loved face, during those long minutes of death. At the very end, when I’d stopped breathing, before the last spark of consciousness left me, I heard the sigh. My vision was gone, but I heard footsteps across the room, the sound of the air-conditioning cranking up, and my sensation was of cold air blowing from the vent, a harbinger of cold beyond human understanding, the ice of death.

  Until those final moments in my frigid room, I couldn’t spare a thought for my daughter. There was no clinging to the girl that I love, no sense of goodbye. It was all me and Matthew, because we were together, and my death was his death.

  But at that last instant, when my life flickered and extinguished, it was Sam I thought of. It was all my daughter. I gave my entire self, my spirit, to Sam. It was all I could do for her, my daughter, my girl. The dead mourn the living, the loss of closeness and the future. I won’t be there to teach Sam what I knew about growing up, and I have lost the chance to be guided by her.

  When she was little, she would come to the gallery after school and paint and draw. The works that inspired her most were so different from my beloved American Impressionists. After my grandmother and Ruth took a trip to India and Nepal, Mathilda acquired several fifteenth-century Tibetan paintings and a hundred-year-old English translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The illustrations were colorful, painted in shades of red and green on parchment, filled with images of protector and wrathful gods, bodhisattvas, and Green Tara, the mother of Buddhism. Sam was fascinated with all the characters, but hungry ghosts moved her most, and she drew an entire book of stories about the desperate souls who died in violence and misery, who haunted the earth without ever finding peace.

  What would Sam think, to know that I have become a hungry ghost?

  After my mother died, when I was too sad to do anything but dream about heaven, I read the book of the dead and learned that the bardo state lasts for forty-five days after death. The bardo is a ghost world, a period of time before a person is reborn. It gave me comfort to imagine that after a month and a half in the bardo, my mother could find peace in another life. I looked for her everywhere: in feral kittens, a bobcat that stalked the meadow, a new baby at the beach.

  Will Sam remember those Tibetan-inspired drawings she did of beings in the bardo? Will they make her think of me?

  Many more than forty-five days have passed since my murder. My death was in July, and now it is November, my birthday. A single birth, a death, and there has been no rebirth, no respite from wandering. I’m left to believe that there never will be. My violent end leaves me ravenous for justice, a hunger that hasn’t been sated.

  Being a mother was the best part of my life. Scotty had nothing on me in that department—I remember how I scared her, upset her, in that moment early in my pregnancy when I wavered, when I thought having Matthew might change everything too much, upset the order of things. It was just a few seconds, but it angered her. I didn’t appreciate her feelings enough; I wish I had been more sensitive.

  Motherhood. Yes, Scotty understood more than anyone what it meant to me. When I think of Sam now, what she is about to face. How will she manage? I remember how I felt when my mother died. Scholarship and achievement had been my way of healing from what the Andersons had done. But once I conceived Sam, nothing else mattered in the same way. I wanted Kate to have this too—the eternal connection to a child, the transformation from a victim who had suffered at the hands of others to a powerful woman able to give life. Lulu too—our dear and not-so-dear secretive mystery girl Lulu. It sometimes felt so unfair to me that only Scotty and I had experienced motherhood. But frankly, not everyone deserves it—not just the childless, but not even every woman who’s become a mother.

  I need Kate now. If justice is to come, my sister will deliver it. She is strong and furious, more single minded t
han anyone I know. It has served her well in the air, in her work. She thinks I look down on her for not having the life I do—family, children, my garden. But I don’t—she would never have created the mess I did. I took the painting, one I already owned, to prove to myself I deserved my own life.

  The complication of Jed. I tried so hard to keep them both happy: my husband and my lover. Giving Jed the photo of Matthew from the sonogram, encouraging him to think he was my baby’s father before I knew for sure. Playing with someone’s feelings, when the stakes are so high, is serious business. Leaving Pete with an empty frame on the wall. Lies and manipulations I hadn’t known I was capable of. They felt good at the time—vital, even. A good girl all my life, it felt exhilarating to step out of line. But why couldn’t I have been content with my children, living surrounded by the art that has sustained me from the beginning?

  I lost myself in love. And then I lost my life.

  53

  On Beth’s birthday, Reid drove to New London to meet Tom for lunch. He had plenty to keep him busy at his desk, but the date made him uneasy, and he really needed to get away from the office. He had been sure he would have wrapped up the case by now. He had wanted it for Beth.

  He parked in the Saint Ignatius Loyola Church parking lot at the end of Bank Street—just a few blocks from Kate’s loft. He walked slowly toward the Black Whale, keeping his eyes open for her. He had told Tom to meet here because Tom was lecturing at the Coast Guard Academy this week, and New London would be convenient for him. But he knew there was another reason. He hadn’t spoken to Kate in over two weeks; he felt ashamed of having nothing to report, but he wanted to run into her.

  The place was packed with people from the courthouse up the street—lawyers, defendants, jurors, cops. Reid recognized half of them and said hello as he made his way through the restaurant. He spotted his brother in his Coast Guard uniform, sitting in a booth in the back.