The Black Painting

4

In a fever dream she rose and fell. Surfacing, she was in the bedroom at Owl’s Point. It was day, but the light through the curtains was weak. Rain spattered the window. Her skin was hot and damp. James stood next to the bed, watching her with a clinical concern. He was a boy again, or still, or always.

Is she going to die?

She better not, said another voice. Or we’ll get the blame.

We didn’t make her sick.

We’re in charge of her until they get back from burying Grandma.

Why isn’t Ilsa in charge?

Don’t be stupid, Audrey said. Ilsa’s the help. We’re family.

James leaned in and touched her burning neck with his cool finger. His touch was soothing.

I don’t want her to die.

Then get your hands off her, Audrey said.

Why? he asked, pulling away.

Because you’re the Angel of Death. Everyone you touch dies.

I am not, he screamed. James rarely raised his voice, and the pained cry was awful to hear. That’s not true. That’s not true.

All right, Audrey groaned. Shut up, I’m sorry. She slumped down in the window seat. God, this is boring. Tell me if she stops breathing.

James leaned close again, careful not to touch her. There were angry tears in his eyes. Don’t die, Tay. Please. I’m going to help you, Tay.

She was pulled under, into a black and suffocating silence. She struggled, not seeing, not breathing, a red flashing behind her eyes. Suddenly the darkness released her, and she shot upward.

The same room. But empty and nighttime. Teresa was sitting up in a small bed. The same that she had slept in when visiting this house as a child. The same bed in which she had thrashed in a fever on the day of her grandmother’s funeral. Miranda had not understood how sick her daughter was, and in any case it was her mother they were burying. She had to be there. Audrey was assigned to watch Teresa, and James stayed with them. Which meant they were all in the house when the theft occurred.

Teresa reached for the water glass and took a sip. It was a different dream than usual. She knew dreams were not memory, and that even memory lied. But the standard nightmare featured James’ faraway scream of terror. Audrey waking from her nap in the window seat to rush out and find him. Teresa desperately trying to rise from the bed, only to collapse again. Something like those things had happened. This new dream took place earlier that day, and must be an anxiety-fueled construction of her unconscious. Surely Audrey never said those cruel things. Surely James’ words to Teresa the previous evening—that he would be blamed—had simply worked their way into her sleep.

She drank more water and put the glass down. Where had he gotten the idea? How could he be blamed? She had learned no more; they were not left alone the rest of the evening. James receded into himself while everyone else talked manically and to no purpose. Teresa fell asleep in her chair, then finally dragged herself to bed. She waited for James to tap on her door, but if he ever did she was long gone to dreamland.

As the room slowly brightened she realized there would be no more sleep. She rolled out of bed and unzipped the travel bag her mother had brought, with spare clothes. The ugly green corduroys and extra-large Yale sweatshirt. Good old Mom. Teresa dressed, pulled on her sensible boots and went down the back stairs to the kitchen. Then out the mudroom door. A heavy mist rolled in from the sea. The pines were shadows and the ocean invisible. The house might have been sitting in the clouds. It was cold. She needed a jacket, but was not willing to go back for it. She drew her hands into the sleeves of the sweatshirt and wrapped her arms around herself, then made her way toward the sound of surf. The gazebo materialized out of the mist. It needed paint, and the floorboards were rotting. How long since anyone had sat here, drinking a cocktail and watching the sunset over the Sound? What a bleak and barren place this had become in her time away. She could not have imagined it. Maybe she would come out here this evening. Wrapped in blankets, with a whisky.

The lawn ended abruptly and there was the ocean. Or a murky stretch of it. Just beyond where she stood, a rocky slope fell thirty feet to the phosphorescing water. Teresa looked for a spot where Audrey might have leaped into the waves without killing herself. It did not seem possible. Maybe it had been farther along the ledge, or maybe the tide was higher. Maybe Audrey was indestructible. For the first time in days, Teresa missed Marc. He would try to comfort her if she called him now, but she would not do that.

She stared down at the dark seaweed swaying in the white foam. Afraid of losing her balance, she crouched. Her fingers twitched, seeking a pencil. How would she capture this on paper? The monstrous shape of that rock, the black water. Would she shade in the mist or represent it as an absence, the white of the page? And why was she thinking about this when she had not sketched in months? A shred of memory or an image from a dream flitted around her brain, and she tried to get hold of it. Before she could, a strong emotion seized her. Indistinct at first, it coalesced into a kind of dread. Which shifted quickly to fear as Teresa sensed someone rushing at her from behind. She stood up fast and turned.

No one. Only the mist, beginning to dissipate. She had been certain of a presence, about to place a hand on her shoulder. An involuntary shudder went through her. Cold and damp were penetrating the sweatshirt. She started back to the house and immediately saw a figure in the pines. It was a man in a gray coat, his head bent in thought. He had cleared the trees and was crossing the lawn before she realized it was James.

“Good morning,” she called.

He stopped and looked at her, making no reply. He seemed distracted, possibly anxious. Damp hair hung in his face.

“I didn’t think anyone else was awake,” Teresa said as she reached him.

“Me, neither,” James replied. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“And I’m all slept out.” She nearly mentioned the dream, then did not.

“Kenny snores.”

“What, Mister Perfect?” she laughed. “Don’t tell me you were in the same room.”

Kenny and James had shared a bunk bed those summers when the house was full.

“No, but I could hear him through the wall.”

“He had a lot of wine,” Teresa remembered. “I guess we all did.”

“Not me.”

“You still don’t drink?”

“A little,” he conceded. “People make a big deal if you refuse. But I don’t like the feeling it gives me.”

“I didn’t used to,” she said. A fallen woman. “Now I like it too much.”

“You seem the same.” The words surprised her. “I thought you would have changed, but you seem the same to me.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes.” He smiled bashfully. His smiles were so rare that it felt like a gift to get one. “I think it is.”

“We’ve all changed, but I’m glad that I seem familiar. You also seem the same, except for being too freaking tall.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Couldn’t help it.”

James had never cared for small talk, and Teresa waited for him to seize this chance to speak of what troubled him. Yet he showed no inclination. Last night’s urgency had vanished, or been suppressed.

“You’re brave to walk the woods on a morning like this,” she said, taking his arm and starting them forward again. “Must be spooky.”

“They’re just trees,” he said with a shrug. “I was looking for our old tree house.”

“My God, is it still there?”

“Sort of. The roof and one wall are gone, but the rest is intact.”

“I don’t remember how we got up. There was a ladder?”

“Wooden rungs nailed into the trunk.”

“Right,” she said, the memory coming back.

“They looked kind of rotted. I didn’t try to climb.”

“That was wise. Audrey would have,” she said, at the same precise moment that he did. They both laughed. Even his laugh was awkward, a high-pitched gurgle that pulled on her heart. She squeezed his arm. “How is school?”

James was in medical school in Boston. Doing well, Teresa had heard, which was no surprise. He tested off the charts in IQ and everything else. But he did not do well with other people, and needed five years and three colleges for his undergraduate degree. Then he left law school after one year, hating it. No one in the family had gone into medicine before.

“Good,” he said firmly. “I like it, especially the labs. I like doing things instead of talking about them.”

“Have you dealt with cadavers yet?”

“It doesn’t bother me. Everyone is afraid of them, but you can’t hurt the dead.”

“That doesn’t make them fun to spend time with,” she said, fighting another shiver.

“There’s no better way to understand the human body than to open it up and look inside. I want to help people. No one knows that about me. Nobody believes it.”

“I believe it,” Teresa said.

“They think I’m crazy and can’t take care of myself. But I want to help people. You have to be willing to do the hard things.”

They were near the mudroom door, and James shuffled to a stop. As if he could not bear going inside. Teresa tugged him the other way, toward the front of the house.

“What did you want to talk about last night?”

He looked away, then shook his head quickly.

“I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“I’m not going to call you crazy. Trust me.” But he would not speak. The yew hedges beside the garage had grown rangy and brown. The sun was beginning to cut through the mist. She tried a different tack. “What happened yesterday, with Grandpa?”

James tensed up instantly.

“Do you mean the day before?” he asked.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Sorry, I’ve lost track.” It seemed one long and shapeless day since she had stepped onto the platform at Langford Station. It also seemed like a week.

“It was bad,” said James, biting off the words. “We argued.”

“About what?”

“My erratic behavior. I think that’s the word he used. One of them.”

“Such as?”

“You know,” he said impatiently. Assuming that Teresa had heard the family gossip. “Temper tantrums, as if no one else has those. As if Audrey’s aren’t ten times worse than mine.”

“What else?” she asked.

“Pointing a knife at her. At Audrey. I wasn’t going to hurt her, but you know the things she says. Threatening a professor.”

“Really? How did you threaten him?”

“This was years ago,” he insisted, as if she was missing the point. “At Amherst. The guy was a condescending jerk. I don’t remember what I said, but I didn’t do anything. I wasn’t going to do anything.”

“Okay.” Teresa squeezed his arm again. “It’s okay, I believe you.”

“I guess Grandpa was writing it all down,” he said bitterly. “Keeping track of everything I ever did wrong. And not only me, all of us.”

“So we’re all behaving erratically?” she asked, trying to lighten the mood. The things he said should have disturbed her, but she had witnessed such behavior when they were children. She knew what Grandpa Morse was getting at, but she also knew James. He did not understand people, didn’t get their jokes, became easily frustrated. Instead of taking that into account, friends and family taunted him. For their amusement, maybe, or simply because it’s what people did. James’ own father, Fred, was a terrible tease. Miranda, too. And of course Audrey was the worst. She knew how to send James into a fit with just a few words. He would cry and yell and break things. Hurt himself, perhaps. But never hurt anyone else. She had never heard of his doing so, and could not imagine it.

“Kenny argued with him, too.” James spit the words out, as if ashamed of speaking.

“He told you that?”

“Yes. He left before I got here, but after my talk with Grandpa I went to the city to find him. He was staying with a friend, in the place he rented when he used to live there.”

Which answered a question that Teresa had been meaning to ask. Why had James arrived with Kenny from New York instead of coming from Boston?

“I couldn’t remember where it was,” he went on, “so I wandered around for a long time. It’s a big city.”

“It is,” Teresa agreed, imagining James wandering Manhattan’s late-night streets. He was lucky he didn’t get mugged.

“I slept on a bench. When I woke up I remembered the address, so I went there.”

“In the middle of the night?” she laughed. “I bet he was thrilled to see you.”

“It was morning, but yeah, he wasn’t happy. He had someone with him.”

“I bet she wasn’t too happy either.”

“It was awkward,” James concurred. “Once we started talking, I could see he was upset, too. That his conversation had been as bad as mine.”

“What was Grandpa’s problem with him?” she asked. Curious to know what flaws Kenny could possibly possess.

“The thing is, he had a problem with all of us. He was calling us in one by one to tell us our faults. What we had to fix. The old jerk.”

“Jerk” was about as harsh as James got. But she heard more hurt in his voice than anger. They cleared the last corner of the house and the sun struck them full in the face.

“Why?” Teresa brought them to halt short of the circular drive. “Why was he doing it?”

“Because he didn’t think his heart was going to last much longer.”

“So?” she said, exasperated. “He had to tell us the errors of our ways before sailing off into eternity?”

“I like how you put things,” he said. “I should read more.”

“It rots the mind.”

“It’s about money, Tay.” James shifted uncomfortably. “We had to change these things about ourselves if we wanted to get any money. In his will.”

She looked to see if he was joking, but of course he would never make such a joke.

“You’ve got to be kidding. That’s what it was about?”

Could he be lying? Not lying, James would not consciously lie, but telling a story he believed? Why would he come up with this? No, it was a sad revelation, but all too credible. And yet more proof that she had never really known her grandfather. What would her own flaw have been? She could think of many, but what would have seemed important to the old man? And what about Audrey? Drinking, drugs, sleeping around? A list too long to consider. It did not matter now; they would never know.