Ed and Steven began to track down documents about the sale of Mandy’s car, in an effort to piece together a paper trail that could uncover Richard’s whereabouts. “We’d like to have a talk with him,” the brothers said to Clara, punching their fists into their palms. “Me too,” she said. They went out onto the driveway to search the crevices between the cushions in the car, under the floor mat, in the trunk and glove box. “We should have brought a trash bag with us,” Steven said, holding his nose at the smell of discarded fast food hamburgers and pizza boxes on the floor and shoved under the seats. There were candy wrappers and dirty socks, and like a diamond in a lump of coal, a notebook of architectural sketches. “I didn’t know she was interested in this kind of art,” Clara said. “What do these represent anyway? Cabinets? Bookcases? They look like storage systems for an underground bunker or something.” “She was probably redesigning that storage facility of hers. I think she mentioned it to me one time. Has anybody paid the fee, by the way? I guess we should do something about striking the set. Or else we could just keep it.” “We shouldn’t rush into closing anything down,” Eddie said. “You never know when the doctors will turn out to be wrong. They can’t predict outcomes in every case.” Hoping. Losing hope. Clara stood alongside the car and stretched. “There’s nothing here we can trace to Richard. Maybe the car really was a loan, or else an actual gift, like Mandy said. She probably didn’t buy it, and if she did, she wouldn’t have necessarily remembered to keep a receipt.” Steven said, “I remember, a long time ago, when we abandoned one of her other old clunkers. It was in much worse shape than this one. It was giving off stinky fumes and she didn’t want to pay a fine, or use up her money for repairs. “It’ll be cheaper to buy a new one,” she said with the kind of logic I knew I couldn’t argue with. So we took off in the middle of the night to abandon the car somewhere that wouldn’t be traced back to us. We drove through a field of wheat taller than the car, and we ended up by a thatch of trees, stuck in mud. I remember being thankful there was good cloud cover, but then the bridge overhead kind of gleamed when the moon came through and shone on it. It was like a spotlight in those prison movies when someone escapes. Mandy liked the look of the light and shadow, and she stared and stared until I had to pull her away. We weren’t done with our job yet. We still had to run up onto the highway so we could hitch a ride back home, but she acted like she wanted to stay right where we were forever, watching the shapes and shadows play on the bridge with all the homeless people setting up tents underneath.” “Speaking of her clunker series, remember the green car that had a huge hole in the floorboard?” Eddie joined in the storytelling, coming at it sideways. “I’d have to push off it like it was a scooter whenever we’d come to a stop and had to start up again. I wonder why Mom put up with the way our driveway looked, what with your old van, Steven, plus Mandy’s clunkers, and the green Galaxie500 Dad bought me just before he died. Mom told him it was an old man’s car and he should have bought me something sportier.” “Wow, first world problems!” Clara wondered if anybody remembered she had been the only one without her own car. She had been expected to share. “At any rate, I pretty much stank up the interior with beer and Brut pretty quick,” Eddie said. “Dad wouldn’t have put up with the way we all acted out after his death.” Pulled back to all the Saturday nights that began at eleven pm, they reminisced about going to bars to dance and drink, until the girls, in their cups, ran into the restroom crying over their father’s death, and the brothers found someone to fight. Some nights the brothers ended up in the emergency room; some nights the other guys did. They had been inconsolable over losing their father, but gave little thought to his widow waiting in the empty house for them to come back. Listening for the garage door to go up, and then judging the children’s degree of impairment by their gaits, she cursed her husband for leaving her alone to deal with the mess his leaving caused. A lull settled in the family’s reminiscences. Whenever their father came up in conversation, there was a held breath of silence, remembering. How to flush out a man living on the wind? Clara stirred her coffee at the cafe, her eye on Mandy’s car parked just outside the glass door. Where was Richard? If he had nothing to hide, why was he hiding? Over the past two weeks, during which there had been no official news, the general verdict of the coffee klatch girls had swayed from suicide to murder. Clara’s “accident” theory had been drowned out as wishful thinking by the whispering drama queens, and they decided not to help Clara find Richard. That was a job for police, they said. So Clara had only a vague plan when she began to drive Mandy’s old car around. Someone who recognized the car as Richard’s might stop her to ask about him, or about Mandy. In the spirit of throwing mud against a wall to see what stuck, Clara parked the car where she could see it, and waited at the café for something, anything, to happen. After sitting in the same place at the same time for several days running, Clara sensed a change of light, registered a flicker of color, and then heard a noise in the vicinity of the car. Someone was rapping on the window. She snapped to attention and hurried from her booth out into the weak winter sunshine. “May I help you?” she demanded of the man peering in the window. One hand still shielding his squint, he straightened up, and moved his fingers from his salute to his wavy grey hair. His face broadened with a smile that quickly crumbled in confusion. His hands fluttered to his sides and he said, “Clara? Don’t you recognize me?” What she recognized was his voice, that familiar rich bass. “Lonnie? Lonnie!” she said, her voice breaking as she stepped into the cradle of his arms. The two of them walked back into the coffee shop hand in hand, and for the next few hours would fill the hole in which time had stranded them. “How are you?” Clara said. “Tell me everything.” Lonnie looked at her with such an intense, complex attention she couldn’t decipher its full meaning. The sunburst of little lines at his eyes gave him a cheeriness he’d never had before, Clara observed; leaving her hadn’t ruined him after all. Did it bother him that she hadn’t recognized him until he spoke? Had it made him feel forgettable? “You haven’t changed a bit. I would have known you anywhere,” he said. Was he scolding her? They had been so young, and so much life had happened since. They ordered coffee. “Do you still like it with two creams, no sugar?” he asked, claiming their past. “I take it black nowadays.” He nodded, and began to drum his fingers on the table: a pianist’s nervous tic. She patted his hand, and named the piece he was playing in his mind. He grinned. “I woke up with that Partita in my head.” “What? Not one of our duets?” She meant it lightly, and wanted to call the words back when he flinched. She hadn’t intended to pick the scab of their past; only to remind him of the happy times. He pulled his hand out from under hers and tipped his chair too far back. She caught her breath. Good, she still worries about me. “Do you remember our first review?” he said. She playfully accepted his challenge, and called up the words on their nearly note-perfect recital, “The duo-pianists, Patterson and Jones, play as if with one breath.” Lonnie smiled, and so did Clara, her skin pinking up like a woman in the bloom of youth, and for a long while they spoke of things known only to the two of them, the private and the deeply felt. She reminded him about their most memorable rehearsals, he reminisced about their slippery falling in love. The sun slowly sank behind the parking lot. “Where did you just go?” Lonnie asked when Clara, dragged away by a memory, failed to answer one of his questions. “You checked out for a minute.” “Sorry. I didn’t hear you.” Lonnie smiled, and signaled the waitress to refill her mug. He had always been attentive to her small needs. Although they both had been avoiding the subject, at last they began to speak about Mandy. “Remember when she turned your second bedroom at the apartment into an art studio?” “I wound up sleeping on a mattress on the living room floor.” “What was her excuse for that, again?” “She had developed anxiety attacks and needed a bedroom with a door that shut.” “I always thought it was because she didn’t want me staying over.” “She was very possessive of me, there’s no denying it.” When I love someone I want to crawl under their skin. “However, the anxiety attacks were real. And as for setting up the studio, she just always liked to work where she lived.” Clara had never admitted to her own irritation when Mandy edged her out of her space, the space she was paying for with her first real job. To her, it was a problem of logistics, not some kind of sisterly coup. When Clara rented the apartment, she assumed Mandy would find a separate studio for her artmaking. There was simply not enough room in their new digs. But one day Clara came home to find her mattress propped up in the hallway and an easel set up in the middle of her bedroom. Mandy shrugged off her sister’s protests. “We can share the other bedroom. We slept in the same bed as kids, after all.” The extra mattress would come in handy when Mom or their brothers visited, she pointed out. Later, when her panic attacks began to come in fast and thick, Mandy decided that sharing a room wasn’t good enough. She needed to be absolutely alone whenever, or in case, they struck. She needed the room with the door that locked, plus blackout curtains on all the windows, to keep the daylight out. Clara found herself exiled by her sister’s need, sleeping on the mattress on the living room floor, wondering each night how she had let it happen. The girls continued to live together, with Clara dutifully taking care of the little sister who searched for inspiration in the local bars, awaiting her big break into the art world. It was a relief to Clara when Mandy’s old classmate from art school, Brenda, became Mandy’s drinking buddy. Loud and full of energy, Brenda had made the night come alive for Mandy during their college years. She pulled Mandy into the center of things, showed her how it was done. Clara was too conventional for the two of them, they decided. “We’d invite you along,” they’d tease her,” but we’ll be up way past your bedtime.” Brenda had an entrepreneurial bent, and was always on the lookout for opportunities for Mandy and she to both show their art. When they had racked up a stack of rejections, she decided to organize her own exhibit for them, before they gave up and lost their ambition in the bottom of a beer mug. It didn’t matter that Brenda was not yet a gallerist. She lived in one of those spacious old Baltimore brownstones with enough wall space to mount a respectable number of paintings, and enough floor space for viewers to mill around. And she knew people. So Brenda hung Mandy’s still-wet paintings on her walls, along with her own recent work, and invited their old classmates and current crop of friends to the “show.” Clara and Mandy arrived with a bottle of wine and two cases of nerves. The room was packed, humid with sweat. “Sorry. The radiator is stuck and one of my friends is trying to fix it,” Brenda explained, taking the wine and ushering them in. “It’s cooler over there,” she said, pointing to the other end of the L shaped room, where a cluster of guests bent over a coffee table with photos fanned out across the surface. The people looked up at Brenda’s approach and one of them tried to hide what had them so absorbed: a collection of art nudes of the hostess. Brenda snatched the pictures up, bellowing her huge laugh. When she caught Mandy’s eye, she marched over to her, waving the photos, and kissed her full on the lips. “The woman of the hour!” she shouted. “She is a true visionary.” She erupted into another laugh, loud enough to make Clara, already shocked by the kiss, jump. She didn’t know where to look. Not at her sister, certainly, who seemed less embarrassed that she should have been. Turning away, Clara saw a man in the corner holding his hands over his ears, protection against Brenda’s noise. He approached her and said, “My name is Lonnie Jones. Don’t we go to school together?” Of course! He was one of the other piano teachers. “Indeed we do,” Clara said. “How do you know Brenda?” “I don’t. I’m here with Tom, the violinist over there. He knows her. They used to go out. I wondered if the featured artist Mandy Patterson he was talking about was related to Clara Patterson. Imagine my surprise…” The colleagues talked for a while, aiming the words directly into one another’s ears with cupped palms, an intimacy necessary every time someone turned up the music. The gesture shaped the space until it felt like it held just the two of them. They barely noticed it when Brenda hopped on the furniture to dance, but somebody once again had turned the music up so loud that Lonnie put his hands over his sensitive ears. “Would you like to get out of here?” he mouthed. “I would, but I can’t. I’m my sister’s designated driver.” Mandy whirled by just then, and Clara caught her by the wrist to make the introductions, pretending as if Mandy’s stare was an ordinary thing. Later, Lonnie would admit the stare made him feel like prey, and Clara instantly gave up the fantasy that he and her sister would ever become friends. She also found it easier than she expected to lie to Lonnie: my sister and I are not that close. In that moment of picking sides, it was true. She had given up so much for Mandy, and she was sick of it. She deserved to have something she didn’t have to share. “He’ll grab all the glory and then leave you flat,” Mandy viciously predicted when Clara and he began to play together. “He’ll break your heart and I’ll have to clean up your mess, as usual.” Clara never imagined that in her sister’s mind, Mandy was her caregiver, not the other way around. It should have been no surprise, coming from someone who insisted I’m always the dominant one in my own paintings. “Where is Mandy, by the way?” Lonnie asked Clara now. “What do you mean?” Lonnie laughed. “It’s not a trick question.” “You didn’t know? She shot herself.” Color drained from his face and his hands began to shake. “No. No, no, no.” Clara lowered her eyes. “It’s true.” “But I just talked to her a few months ago. I saw the car parked outside, just like today, except with her inside it. I asked her how it was running.” “You thought she was here at the coffee shop and that’s why you were looking in the car?” “I just wanted to know how she was doing with the car. It’s a good car, even though it’s short on looks.” Clara cocked her head. What was she missing? “At least I didn’t overcharge her. She paid me $100 for it.” Clara took this piece of the puzzle to her dumbfounded brothers that night. “Let me get this straight. Old Lonnie sold Mandy the car. Richard did not give it to her,” Steven said. “Yes. Mandy lied about that too, big surprise.” “Maybe it was wishful thinking. She wanted Richard to care for her more than he actually did, I guess,” Ed said, still giving her the benefit of the doubt. “Did Lonnie mention anything Mandy might have said about Richard? We still need to find him. I’d like to know how he and Mandy were getting along, which one blamed the other for the failure of the last show, things of that nature.” Steven wanted a deeper dive into the subject than his brother could tolerate. “No. He seemed too devastated by the news of the shooting to tell me much of anything.” “Damn! The car connection was our best bet.” “I’ll probably get more out of him later.” “So you’re going to see him again?” If they were going to tease her, she would pretend to scowl at them. “Mind your own businesses.” After their first encounter at the café, Clara and Lonnie had avoided too much reminiscing about the early stages of their romance; and steered far away from the time when their future together became so murky with Amanda’s disease they could barely breathe. They were starting over. Perhaps they could write a different ending. They had grown up three blocks from one another in the little town. Having found their way back home again, they spent hours showing each other their favorite childhood places— the hiking trail in the park, the zoo, the fabled historic mansion. “Remember Chrissy Hynde’s song about this town?” “What, this one? I went back to Ohio /But my city was gone /There was no train station /There was no downtown /South Howard had disappeared …” “You’re full of surprises!” “Her music was one of my guilty pleasures.” Lonnie laughed and held Clara’s hand tighter. She started to say something, but Lonnie dropped her hand to point at a landmark stone church as they passed it. It was set back from the sidewalk and beribboned in yellow police tape. It had recently been burned. They got out of the car and slowly approached it. It was a sentimental place for both Lonnie and Clara. They had grown up hearing and playing recitals there, but not together. Clara stood in front of the red wooden door and tried the handle. It moved with a creaking sound, but she hesitated. “Will they let us come in? Is it safe?” Lonnie pushed through the door. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” They found that the part of the church that had been used as a recital hall had survived. The wood pews were mostly intact, although a campfire fragrance clung to them. “It’s almost like I remember it,” Clara said. Time and distance, more than the fire, had smudged some details in her mind’s eye. “Me too. It’s impossible that we each performed here so many times when we were kids, but never together.” “Let’s fix that.” When they fell in love all those years ago, it was first with one another’s playing. Now as they joined hands and walked down the aisle separating the two sections of pews Clara could have sworn she recognized the piano on the stage from an old scratch on its lid. They settled themselves on the bench and began to play Debussy’s Petite Suite, their signature encore from days gone by. A custodian started clapping in the middle of it, but it was not applause. Rather, he was trying to get their attention. “You should not be here. It is dangerous. Leave now!” “We used to play here…” “I don’t need your life story. I need you to leave!” So they left. “Do you think he knows our taxes pay his salary?” “I don’t imagine he knows much about anything. At least this one wasn’t armed.” Instead of getting back into the car, they walked for a while to settle their nerves. They came to a restaurant they had each frequented years before. “It’s still here!” It hadn’t changed much: pink leatherette seating and speckled Formica counters, a glass case of pastries in the front. Clara slid into a booth, Lonnie tumbling in after her on the same side, the way he used to in their early days. Clara smoothed her shin with her hand. Good. She had remembered to shave. Lonnie noticed the gesture and with a twinkle in his eye, hurried her through her snack, suddenly in a very good mood. Once in his apartment, where the baby grand in the corner grinned at Clara as if she was an old friend, Lonnie walked her backward into the bedroom. The years between them fell away as easily as clothes. Clara touched the lines that had appeared along either side of his mouth. “They just showed up one day,” Lonnie said, faintly embarrassed. She kissed each one, and then smoothed the line between his eyebrows. “I knew this would happen one day,” she chuckled low in her throat. “You always frowned when you listened to music.” She pulled the sheet up, feeling a sudden awareness of her body. He pulled it down again, meaning to look at her slowly and deliberately, but the feeling took on urgency as blinding as a first time they were together. He sank into her; soon the only sounds were their quick breaths and the rumble of traffic outside. Afterward, they stayed as they were for a long while before she wriggled out from under him. The bed was a tight fit but she thought his narrow mattress was touching. She couldn’t resist imbuing it with a meaning beyond what it actually represented. It was a souvenir from his childhood bedroom, kept for sentimental reasons. It did not mean he’d lived like a monk since their breakup. Someone must have taken her place from time to time. You have no right to be jealous, she told herself all the way to the bathroom. None whatsoever. In another era, Clara would have been more careful letting Brenda into Mandy’s studio, but she opened the door now with something close to anticipation. Brenda’s company had grown on her over the past weeks, and even Mom liked her. “Are you happy with us?” she asked every time the visitor came over, when she only meant How are you. Brenda had brought an armful of blank forms on this particular day. She was ready to inventory some art, her hair pulled back with an elastic band, body swaddled in brown overalls one size too big. The studio itself always seemed to disorient her for a few minutes after entering; that smell of old paint and chemicals, the swirl of colors that had chronicled Mandy’s creative life. Brenda nearly lost her balance this time, stubbing her toe on several black catalogues haphazardly piled on the floor. She winced and said, “Mandy’s early pictures need to be listed too. It will save you trouble down the line.” Brenda scooped up the books and put them on a metal table ( a reminder to thumb through them later?) and then quickly climbed the ladder, pulling down a stack of old canvases from the highest shelf. Clara recalled another feat of her physical daring, from an ancient afternoon: the three of them at The Tavern, and Brenda, finding a smudge on her glass, growling “Filthy bastards!” She’d jumped onto the bar, straight up like a cat, to get a clean glass. On the way back down, her fake ponytail fell off. “We better pick out the rest of the work for the show, first order of business,” Brenda said. “Oh, there’s no rush for that, is there?” Brenda shot a quizzical look at Clara. “Except for all the obvious reasons.” The date had been chosen, arrangements all made, and still Clara was dragging her feet about it. It was too late to explain why−she had missed chance after chance to come clean to Mandy’s friends. Each time, Clara had felt her courage wither, her nerve fail. She cast around for an obstacle to help shore her up. “I don’t know why the director offered to host the show at the museum. That’s a lot of expense to go to for someone she wasn’t very interested in.” “Why do you say that? She was interested in Mandy. She admitted she made a mistake when she rejected her for a show all those years ago. But they were both barely out of college then, and trying to fill roles that were too big for them.” Brenda rifled through the stack of older paintings propped against the wall. She pulled one out. “This is nice. Did she ever say anything about it?” “She said she wanted to see if she could make a white painting that wasn’t cold.” Mandy had made the picture in a single sitting, working through the night. The sisters had just come in from a gallery opening featuring Mandy’s paintings. Brenda came late, dressed in yellow tights and a scowl. She drank everybody’s wine, picked a fight with the curator about aesthetics, and loudly pointed out what she considered weaknesses in her friend’s work. When the curator defended his choice of pictures, Brenda stormed out of the gallery without a word to him or the sisters. Once home, Mandy slid into the studio. From time to time, her quick sobs disturbed the quiet, but by the time the sun rose, she had a wet painting to show Clara: a pair of white figures, embracing, protective of one another, melancholy. Was one of them sick? The warmth born of devotion rose up out of the white oil paint. “It’s not cold at all,” Brenda said, now. Looking at the small third figure in yellow tights at the bottom of the picture, she wondered aloud who it represented. “I had a pair of yellow tights like that. But it looks like that figure is trying to tear the other two other figures apart, so it can’t be me.” My work is always autobiographical. “Well, Picasso said that painting was another way of keeping a diary, so you never know,” Clara said. After Brenda left, Clara told her brothers, “That show−it’s like a train barreling down the tracks. There’s no way to stop it now without all of us looking really bad.” She held up the large photograph of their sister that Brenda had made for her to use at the memorial. “The weird thing is that Mandy used to have a fantasy of faking her own death just so she could see what people really thought about her,” Eddie said. “That’s the weird thing?!” Steven laughed bitterly. “Well, among others, I guess.” “I guess we’ll just have to go all in, and turn the service into the museum retrospective Mandy always wanted.” “What does Lonnie think about all this, under the circumstances?” Eddie asked. He had been tracking the progress of Clara’s relationship. Mom, too, had somehow caught wind of the rekindled romance, and asked her daughter, “Do you have a man, dear?” The question startled Clara. She gave her mother a mischievous smile and a quick nod, and Mom patted her hand approvingly. Turning to Eddie, Clara said, “I haven’t told Lonnie anything. He made the same assumption everyone else did when I told him, so I let it stand. I may have to fill in some gaps later, do a mea culpa, but for now, I think it’s important to be consistent. I hope neither of you have said anything to your friends.” “Friends?” Steven laughed again. He had just been served with divorce papers earlier in the day. “I haven’t told anyone anything,” Ed said. “In any case, with Mom at the service, most of the attention will go to her. And since she can’t really answer nosy questions, people will probably back off.” “Yeah, in a perfect world, maybe.” Steven was in a worse mood than usual, not just because of his divorce, but also the fact he had run into Brenda on the way out of the house that afternoon. She had begun to load Mandy’s pictures into her car to take to the museum. “Apparently the art needed professional photographing, but she couldn’t explain to me why, exactly. When she left I saw her laughing as she revved the engine,” Steven told Clara. “Maybe I’m just in a paranoid mood, but she had the look of someone getting away with something.” “Hmm,” Clara murmured. Brenda had volunteered many hours to organize Mandy’s pieces, and steadfastly refused payment for her work; this is the least I can do for Mandy, she repeatedly said. Brenda doesn’t do favors, Mandy once told Clara. A memory surfaced in Clara’s mind, blurry at first, but then snapping into focus. The sisters, on their way to a celebratory dinner years before, had run into Brenda on the street. “So how are you?” Brenda said in a tone that indicated she was not very interested in the answer. The friends had been on the outs for quite a while. “Couldn’t be better.” Clara spoke first, to buy Mandy a few moments to un-tie her tongue. “Yeah,” she managed to chime in, a beat behind. “I’ve got a meeting with the director at Gallery K tomorrow.” “Isn’t that something,” Brenda said. “Which one of you pulled the strings?” “Neither one. Mandy’s old professor made the connection. It’s the gallery he shows at, too.” Brenda sucked in her breath and breathed out again, slowly. “How about that. Didn’t he have the hots for you, Mandy?” “I was his favorite student, but not for the reason you think.” “Well, I hope everything goes ok. The director of that gallery has a boyfriend who eats lunch at the same place I do. He’s not a practicing artist but he has influence over what gets on the walls for the group shows. I’ll put in a good word for you.” “Oh, my old teacher put in all the good words I need. And it’s not for a group show. Representation is pretty much a done deal. Hey, could you give me back the paintings you still have of mine? There’s a few I’d like to let these people see.” Brenda squirmed with a manufactured embarrassment. “Oh Jesus, I forgot to tell you they were lost during my move. Sorry about that. Do you have insurance? No? Well, your new pictures are probably better anyhow.” It was a mugging, the knife hastily withdrawn. Brenda made a quick exit while Clara guided her sister into the restaurant as if she was physically wounded. A man seated across from them immediately sent over a bottle of champagne. This happened often enough, and sometimes one thing led to another, but not tonight. The sisters both waved the gift away. “I can’t believe she stole my paintings,” Mandy seethed. “We gotta get back at her.” “She said she lost them.” “She’s lying. She stole them.” “Any ideas? We haven’t got the money for small claims court.” “I need to figure out something that will really hurt her. I just don’t know what, yet.” “Maybe this is Brenda’s revenge for you breaking away from her and spending so much time with me.” “Well, duh. She always thought she could just swallow me whole, and I’d be grateful for the attention. It worked when we were back at school. Having her around brought me out of my shell. She probably still thinks we’re more alike than we actually are because I imitated her a lot. Pretty soon, I couldn’t see where she ended and I began.” “That’s a little too close for comfort,” Clara said. “Why do you say that? It’s the same way with you and me, but even more so, because we’re kind of like twins.” Mandy took a forkful of filet mignon, voluptuously put it in her mouth, and swallowed it almost without chewing. If she saw her sister’s face grow pale, she didn’t comment on it; but looking down at her plate, she said in a near-whisper, “Do you think I’ll crash and burn?” “Of course not!” Clara said. “Yes, what was I thinking? Of course I won’t screw up.” The sisters would always wonder what Brenda said to the gallery’s board members to make them unanimously reject her.
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Clara lived through the days after Amanda shot herself as if her hair was on fire, her body underwater. When she broke through the surface, gasping for air, she felt the full force of grief hurtle through the ground beneath her feet. It aimed straight toward her, and settled in her gut.
She couldn’t eat. She slept fitfully. Anger showed on her face, distorting her features. There was no privacy in her physical being, no place to hide her feelings, so when she met with Mandy’s friends at the coffee shop, her lips were pinched into a grimace only distantly related to a smile, and the women approached her as if she was some untamed creature. Clara slipped into her sister’s old place like a spy, warding off the proffered hugs. She couldn’t bear to be touched, especially in such a crowded space, and they seemed to understand that. She took off her sunglasses but quickly put them back on again. The bright lights that usually made the shop so cheery blinded her now. “I’m so sorry,” one of the women began to say. ”I can’t believe it.” “We just saw her last week…” Clara heard the phrases as from a great distance, vibrations in a chorus, echoing syllables divorced from meaning. A lukewarm interest was all she had expected, or at most, a wave of fabricated sympathy. Looking at their faces, she wondered why she had sold her sister’s friends so short. These were the same people who had challenged a psychotic Mandy when she characterized Clara as a thief who had stolen her art. That doesn’t sound like her. Your sister would do anything for you. “Are the authorities sure it was suicide? I can’t find any official news about it. I never thought I’d miss my policeman ex-husband, but he would have known what’s going on.” If we made a pact, who would be the suicide and who would be the murder? The back of Clara’s neck prickled. When a shooting occurs, suicide is only one explanation, but these women had already settled on it. They would need more information if the scope of possibility was to be stretched. They would need to be convinced. The flow of information should go both ways. Clara wanted to pick the women’s brains as well. She had plenty of questions; what she wanted now were answers. The whole point of coming here was to uncover something she did not know or had not absorbed about her sister, some detail to help her to understand what had really happened to Mandy. “It might have been an accident,” she said in an almost inaudible voice. That possibility was swallowed by a commotion in the corner. The manager was loudly shooing a homeless man away from the door. “Suicide is so hard on the survivors,” said one woman, whose voice rose above the disturbance. The voice itself startled Clara more than the words. Harsh and grainy, it reminded Clara of quicksand somehow. By the time both the sound and sense settled into the folds of Clara’s brain, the woman had already moved onto her next thought. “We all think it must be our fault, the way little kids look at their parents’ divorce.” “I bet that any catalyst in Mandy’s case had more to do with her last show flopping. Wasn’t all of that Richard’s fault? He was the one who arranged it.” “The review mentioned an anonymous collaborator wrecking the pictures. They were talking about him, am I right?” “Right. So why didn’t she shoot him, you know, for messing her work up? Or maybe they had a suicide pact and he chickened out after she went through with it?” “Maybe he’s hiding while his wounds heal.” “You’ve been watching too much Netflix! Seriously, though. Has anyone heard from him directly? He should know there’s interest in what he has to say for himself.” “Not to speak of his moral and civic duty. I don’t know what kind of a man he is, and I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.” “Mandy never really showed him off.” “Let’s not turn this into a whodunit, people. Show some respect.” Cherie jerked her head toward a stony-faced Clara. A half-beat of silence, followed by another opinion: “I always thought Richard was an imaginary friend.” “Mandy was calling all men Richard for a while. It was like calling guys John Doe.” “That’s her sense of humor, alright.” “The police should want to speak with Richard about the death. Also, to find out if there’s anything to the art forgery rumor that involved Mandy.” To Michi, the conspiracy theorist of the group, the mere suggestion of a crime surfacing in their small community excited her, whereas it only embarrassed the other women. “The authorities probably have spoken to everyone involved.” “Even if there are two different cases?” “Sure. They wouldn’t bother to report on either one to us. We don’t figure in the whole mess.” “Nobody’s asked any of us what we know, true enough. They probably think we’re not important enough to question. And as for anything to do with the art world, we’re dilettantes at best.” “Yes. Mandy was the only real artist among us hobbyists,” said Aurora. Michi flushed with irritation, and shoved the sketchbook she had brought to show them deeper into her bag. ”We probably seem like casual friends to outsiders. We only have coffee together once a week. Most people wouldn’t think we’re all that close.” “I felt close to her, but none of us looked out for her enough. We knew she was sick. Did any of you have any inkling this was going to happen? And how did she manage to score a gun with her record of mental illness?” Kim, although she had known Mandy the longest, had the least information. “She’s had it for ages. The guy at the gun store just handed it over. Haven’t you kept up with the news? It’s easier to buy a gun nowadays than practically anything! You can be crazy or blind or still in your teens, it doesn’t matter. The NRA doesn’t care how many innocents get murdered as long as all the fear and loathing increases gun sales!” “And thar she blows! Come back, come back, Michi, we’re trying to discuss suicide here. As I was about to say, suicides plan it all carefully and then feel better because they’ve made a decision. They get all cheerful, and so nobody is suspicious about their plan.” Aurora looked at Clara for some response. It came in a voice knotted tight. “My sister was not suicidal. Neither depressed, manic, unusually cheerful, nor resigned. The doctors considered her stable. She was living in the actual real world, not in some hallucination. She was not psychotic when she pulled the trigger, I’d bet my own life on it. There must have been a reason. We’re missing something. It doesn’t make sense.” Clara cursed the quaver in her voice. She had not forgotten how Aurora had advised Mandy, in the throes of her breakdown, to exercise her political freedom and just spit out her drugs if she wanted. Now Clara wanted to spit her own words in Aurora’s face, in all these women’s faces. How dare they think of her sister as a freak, and therefore less-than the likes of them? Had their friendship merely been extended to her out of pity, or even worse, voyeurism? Had Mandy known? “Yes, there could be something we’re missing. It’s best not to take things at face value.” The woman with the loud voice had modulated it, but the voice itself bothered Clara. It was so familiar that it made her ask, “Have we met?” “Yes. I’m Brenda, Mandy’s old friend from art school. You and I knew each other too, from when you sisters lived in that apartment with the blackout drapes and the foam mattress on the living room floor. The grand piano in the corner always looked like a ship lost at sea in the midst of all that makeshift stuff.” Clara focused her memory inward. Mandy had insisted on those blackout drapes, the better to sleep all day after drinking all night. Her drinking buddy was most often Brenda, until they fell out, first over a competition for a place in an art show; then Brenda’s jealousy over the sisters’ own attachment to one another. Mandy and Brenda always made up in the end, and Brenda was the one who witnessed Mandy’s first psychosis on the day she was admitted to the hospital. Did she remember tearing down the blackout drapes from the window after Mandy was carted off screaming about stolen paintings? “Brenda! Of course I remember you.” Brenda: drama queen, would-be star-maker and saboteur. “Do you live here now?” “No, I heard about Amanda, and came to attend whatever service you’re planning for her, and to see if you needed help with cataloging her work or anything. That’s a big part of my job now that I’ve got my own gallery. But for however long you need me, I’m here. I’ll be staying with my old friend, Lauren.” She patted Lauren’s arm, who added, “Yes, we were all wondering about the memorial. We certainly understand if you want a private funeral, but we’d all like to pay our respects.” Who gave this stranger a vote? Clara wondered. Mandy never mentioned a Lauren. “Did you know my sister well?” Lauren blinked the way people do when they’re about to lie. Then she reconsidered. “Not so much,” she admitted, and the image of a churchgoer who stalks funerals just because she can, flashed through Clara’s mind. The director of the art museum came by the table. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, looking at Clara, “but I couldn’t help overhearing. I’m so deeply sorry about Amanda and I’d be glad to arrange a memorial show for her at the museum, if you’d like. She was one of the city’s bright stars and her loss is a great wound for the arts community.” “Thank you kindly, Director,” Clara said. “How about we organize a celebration-of-life kind of a thing?” Brenda suggested, looking from the director to Clara and back. “We could put Mandy’s art up at the museum, especially since she hated church. Mandy never did get religion, did she? So I suppose a church setting would be hypocritical. Remember when I organized that show in my apartment for her, Clara?” Clara remembered. She also remembered how, when Mandy’s pictures dwarfed the response to her own lesser works, she had turned up the music, taken off her clothes, and danced on her sturdy wood dining table. Redirecting attention from Mandy’s work had always been her goal. “An art-themed memorial is a great idea!” This from Kim, Mandy’s oldest friend. From the second grade onward, Kim had attended all Mandy’s events and shows, celebrated her birthdays, and later posed for portraits. “She was always trying to get people to look at her work.” Kim didn’t mean it the way it sounded, but her words were enough to ignite a memory for Clara: Mandy explaining her pictures to an audience made of thin air, like an actress playing a part against an actor not on set; turning, bending, pointing out elements on the canvases. Clara, standing in the doorway, knees just beginning to buckle, a strangely calm question floating through her mind: Does the rule to never interrupt a sleepwalker apply to this kind of altered state? As in a dream, she had tried to scream, but no sound came out. It was the first time she had witnessed her sister hallucinate. Remembering, Clara covered her face with her hand. Brenda was the first to misunderstand the gesture. “Sorry, girl. We didn’t mean to overstep.” Clara glared at them all, to acknowledge that indeed they had. “It’s ok, but it’s not as if Mandy will come back if only we throw a good enough party. She’s not ever coming back.” “We didn’t mean it like that. Oh god, we didn’t mean to make you cry.” Clara leaned back in her chair, dabbed at her eyes, and then opened her mouth to say something about accidents versus suicide. Before she could, Cherie had jumped in to ask everyone in general, but nobody in particular, “What are the stages of grief, by the way?” To delay a discussion of Mandy’s details in favor of the universal experience of sorrow was a good move. The general is always the safer choice. People want to relate things to their own lives. “There’s shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, right?” The pride of the good student, third seat on the left. “By that token, having a memorial does seem like bargaining with God to let her come back.” “That’s more like acceptance.” “What about not throwing away the deceased person’s shoes, in case they might need them when they finally show up again?” “That’s more like magical thinking.” Aurora always needed the last word. Her restless fingers clicked her phone, and she pulled up an article about Kubler-Ross. “Five stages. Looks like you’re in for quite a trip.” She read more about each of the stages, aloud. Then, this: “Hey, it sounds like the country’s reaction to the orange yam in the White House!” “Yeah, America’s abusive boyfriend.” “He’s like Mandy’s Richard. Two huge losers, twins separated at birth.” A tentative wash of laughter. “Also take into consideration the various types of grief. What you’re suffering from is called complicated grief.” This one’s tone was authoritative, and the company came to attention, backs suddenly meerkat straight. Clara stifled a giggle at the sight, and fumbled for the speaker’s name. She often saw her marching across campus in hiking boots; they’d nod but had never spoken until today. Susan? Sharon? Stephanie? “It’s not the same as anticipatory grief, like with your Mom’s Alzheimer’s, which can only end one way. But they both involve mourning the final loss of somebody who’s already left the building in important respects, like the case of your mother’s faculties, and your sister’s mental health. It’s a real pile-up.” Sharon (yes, that was it— Sharon) looked down at the balled-up napkin in her hand. The gesture related the subject at hand to her own experience, whatever it was, but nobody wanted to hear about that. Michi rattled the newspaper featuring a gossip column blaring Which local artist is suspected of making art forgeries? Watch this space. She shook it as if the whole truth could be forced from it. “They really are talking about Mandy here, aren’t they?” “What, because she’s the only artist you know?” snarled Susan. “Fake news!” Feigning ignorance was the safest move when Clara didn’t know whom to trust. She could have given a fuller answer about the origin of this rumor. She could have talked about the day she unrolled the many paintings taken from Richard’s closet, and Mandy was as outraged as if they had caught him cheating. “How many artists must Richard be using anyways? There’s no way all these are mine.” “Maybe some of them are much older, painted over who knows how long ago?” Clara had gently offered. Mandy examined the pictures closely and pronounced a sharp “Nope. They’re fairly new, even the ones painted to look old.” The Art of Cracquelure. “And you’re sure they couldn’t all have been painted by one person?” “Impossible. Not by me at least. Look how long it’s taken me to do the few reproductions Richard wants, to decorate our walls.” But when Clara, without the knowledge of the family, had taken the paintings to a lab outside the city, the expert had said, “These are all done by the same hand. And she signed them very cleverly and imperceptibly. She wants to be caught, but only by the worthiest of sleuths.” Nobody at this table filled that particular bill, and the gossip columnist was only that, a small town gossip. To Michi and the others Clara said, “Since my sister is not able to defend herself, or explain, please regard all this as mere speculation, or worse, idle trouble-making. I’d like to know who started such a vicious rumor.” She shook her fist at the unknown perpetrator, and the women shrank back. None of the women wanted to be pasted with a label like gossip, or to be considered gullible, so they sat in their seats, chastened. No one spoke. Michi winced at the coffee grinder’s noise, as if she wished she could shush it. Did any of the women remember that spreading rumors is part of schizoaffective disorder? Clara glanced at Michi’s newspaper. How long had she been carrying the column around, anyway? Did she show it to everyone she met? It was a strange way for the would-be artist to claim connection to Mandy. Michi unfolded the paper and handed it to Clara, who had not asked for it. “Who would start a rumor like that?” Michi thought she found an opening. “What would they have to gain?” She looked at Clara, who stared back this time, both women unblinking. “It’s probably Richard, doing misguided public relations for Mandy.” Aurora wasn’t ready to let her own tangent go; she wanted to compare-and-contrast Richard with the president. “Like our great leader. Did you read that Trump used to impersonate his own PR person? These guys are both psychopaths, gas-lighting everyone in sight.” Aurora’s quirks and leaps of logic were tolerated by the women who had gone to elementary school with her. “Amanda’s very ambitious, and she probably thought Richard could deliver on his wild promises, whatever they were, by whatever means.” “Richard was more likely blackmailing her,” Brenda, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, said. “It couldn’t have been blackmail. What could she have that he would think was valuable?” Susan said. “Her talent. He preyed on artists with talent,” Clara said through gritted teeth. Susan saw her mistake and stuttered an apology, or something close to it, ending with, “Of course. We all know she’s a genius! We each have a portrait by her! She gave us the friends-and-family discounts!” “Friends and family? You mean the people who should support the artist most fully? Then again, I suppose everyone wants a bargain.” An uncomfortable silence spread across the table until it had stretched so thin, anything could have broken it. “It seemed like Richard was doing a good job for Mandy’s career, at least.” “What was his job title anyway? I heard her refer to him as her agent, her gallerist, her broker, her manager, and her boyfriend. Seems like a lot of hats for one guy to wear.” “The whole relationship was confusing. Was Mandy afraid of him? Forgive me, but is it at all possible he abused her?” “The cops would have looked at that.” “Not necessarily, if they knew she was sick. Her whole point of view on everything would not be credible in that instance.” Clara thought of all the times the police had come to determine Mandy’s mental state during some emergency or other, and left without believing what they saw with their own eyes. “Cops know those folks live in some kind of alternate reality that seems real to them.” Those folks. “You mean like the alternative facts that are currently all the rage?” A dodge by Aurora, backed up with snickering from the gallery. In another era, it would have been called cackling. No wonder Mandy had sometimes referred to these women as The Coven. Brenda cleared her throat. “Be that as it may, the docs probably wouldn’t have discharged her to go live with an Alzheimer’s patient if she wasn’t up to it. But she wasn’t even in charge of your mother, was she, Clara? You hired lots of aides, and you and your brothers were on site. Mandy knew that she didn’t really have to do anything other than paint. You said she was free as a bird, I bet. She could’ve even got a job if she wanted. I bet a few of us wish someone would make us an offer like that.” Have I gone mad? I’m afraid so…All the best people are. “It would be so cool to have a patron!” Several women laughed in agreement. Clara understood they thought Mandy had been too spoiled to consider something as mundane as an ordinary nine-to-five. The possibility that the family was protecting her, and had always protected her, didn’t occur to any of them. They had no idea that when she moved back home after art school all those years ago, she took a job as a waitress and it nearly broke her. She would be so wound up by the end of her shift that she couldn’t sleep until dawn, so she’d spend the night drinking in the local bars and obsessing over whichever young man had last attracted her. When one romance backfired, her paranoia erupted and she bought a German shepherd for protection. She took the big dog everywhere, like an eccentric from the jazz age strolling with her leashed leopard. The guard dog waiting in the red Camaro outside the strip of bars had taken on the mystique of an urban legend. Bar-keepers still had a customer or two who kept the story alive. “She had limitations that most of you can’t imagine.” Clara’s voice came in low and dangerous. “You whine about your headaches and colds, your stiff muscles, bad choice of men and thwarted careers. Talk about thwart! My sister was capable of extraordinary art, but ordinary things threw her for a loop. Yet her doctors said her disease was in remission and she was stable. Not suicidal. How many times do I have to say it? The shooting must have been an accident.” “Don’t get mad. It just goes to show how fluid the medical definition of stability must be.” Susan saw things as black or white, and had no use for fluidity in definitions of any kind. Leaning forward on her elbows, Clara put her head in her hands. She realized she had come to the wrong place at the wrong time. She had come hoping these women could give her insight about her sister, somehow mitigate her grief. She had received nothing she could use, and still the voices droned on. “If she hadn’t shot herself first, wouldn’t she have had to go to prison for the forgeries? If all that’s true, I mean. Or would they just have hospitalized her?” Someone stage-whispered the phrase criminally insane and someone else hushed her. Suddenly, Clara couldn’t stand to be with her sister’s friends for another moment. Pushing away from the table, she stood up and walked away without a word. The women’s eyes followed her out of the door. “She looked like she didn’t even recognize me.” “Did you hear what she said to me?” “She’s usually so nice.” At dinner that night, Ed dangled a piece of broccoli in front of Mom, cooing about little trees. Mom giggled and pried the vegetable off the fork with her fingers. “How was your visit with Mandy’s artistes?” he said, not looking at Clara, unwilling to break eye contact with their mother. “They decided it was a suicide, unless Richard was involved. In that case it might have been a suicide pact, with him backing out of it. Those are the two main theories. That it may have been an accident is too basic for them. I kept saying the one thing and they kept insisting I meant something else. It was surreal.” “Sounds like the whole taking-the-knee debate.” “Yes. Also, now they’re experts on grief. They googled it right in front of me.” “Really. Like, the stages and all?” Eddie’s mouth turned up in a smirk. “Yep. They want to plan a memorial service.” Eddie shot his sister a sharp look. “What did you say to that?” “Nothing. I just went with it.” He didn’t respond for a moment. “Are you going to tell them not to?” “I wasn’t planning on it.” She had gone to the café with a view to telling them everything, but she was too angry now. Besides, she didn’t owe them a thing. They were Amanda’s friends, not hers. “I suppose I should, though. I’ll get around to it later.” Eddie considered this, and finally said, “Well, it’s not as if they’ll ever see her again anyway.” “No.” And so they were agreed. |
AuthorCheryl Snell is an award-winning poet and novelist, author of the new family saga Bombay Trilogy, a retelling of her previous novels Shiva's Arms, Rescuing Ranu, and Kalpavriksha. Archives
October 2020
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