During the life span of my marriage, I became gripped by a growing urgency to capture the truth. I chased it in my dreams. I worried my memories would fade like an old color photograph that’s been bleached by light, so I tried to keep them alive. I began to write everything down in a kind of diary—a black Moleskine notebook that I hid from Richard under the mattress of the bed in our guest room.
It’s ironic now, because I’ve surrounded myself with lies. Sometimes I am tempted to succumb to them. It might be simpler that way, to quietly sink into the new reality I’ve created as though it were quicksand. To disappear beneath its surface.
It would be so much easier to just let go, I think.
But I cannot. Because of her.
I set aside the album and walk to the small desk in the corner of my room. I retrieve my legal pad and pen and start again.
Dear Emma,
I would never have listened to anyone who told me not to marry Richard. So I understand why you’re resisting me. I haven’t been clear because it’s hard to know where to begin.
I write until I fill the page. I consider adding one final line—Richard visited me last night—but leave it out when I realize she may think I’m trying to make her jealous, to create the wrong kinds of doubts in her.
So I simply sign the letter and fold it into thirds and tuck it into the top drawer to read one more time before I give it to her.
A little later that morning, I have showered and dressed. I am tracing lipstick over my mouth, covering up the imprint of Richard’s touch, when I hear Aunt Charlotte yell. I run into the kitchen.
Black smoke curls toward the ceiling. Aunt Charlotte is batting a dish towel at orange flames dancing on the surface of the stove.
“Baking soda!” she cries.
I grab a box from the cabinet and toss it on the flames, dousing them. Aunt Charlotte drops the dish towel and turns on the kitchen tap to cold. I see the angry red mark on her forearm as water courses over it.
I remove the pan of burning bacon from the stove and grab an ice pack from the freezer. “Here.” When she moves her arm away from the water, I turn off the tap. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I was pouring the bacon drippings into the old coffee can.” I pull out a stool for her and she sits down heavily. “I missed. Just a little grease fire.”
“Do you want to go to a doctor?”
She pulls away the ice pack and peers at her arm. The burn is the width of a finger and about two inches long. Luckily it isn’t blistering. “It’s not that bad,” she says.
I look at the overturned box of Domino sugar on the counter, grains spilling out onto the stove.
“I threw sugar on it by accident. Maybe that made it worse.”
“Let me get you some aloe.” I hurry to her bathroom and find a tube in the medicine cabinet, behind her old tortoiseshell glasses and a bottle of ibuprofen. I bring the painkillers back to the kitchen, too, and shake three tablets into my hand, then pass them to her.
She sighs as she smooths on some aloe. “That helps.” I pour her a glass of water and she swallows the pills.
I look at the thick new glasses that sit on the bridge of Aunt Charlotte’s nose, then I sit down heavily on the stool next to hers.
How could I have missed it?
I’ve been so fixated on potential clues about Emma and Richard’s relationship that I haven’t caught on to what has been unfolding right in front of me.
Her clumsiness and headaches. The appointment with D—for “doctor.” The furniture clearing, for easier movement through the apartment. My aunt peering at the menu at the Robertson bar, then ordering a drink that isn’t on it. Her more tentative pace on our walk along the Hudson. And the square box of sugar that doesn’t look anything like the baking soda, but would feel similar to someone in a rush. Someone who is reaching for it through a thin veil of smoke.
Someone who is losing her eyesight.
A sob thickens my throat. But I cannot have her be the one to comfort me. I reach for her hand with its papery-thin skin.
“I’m going blind,” Aunt Charlotte says softly. “I just had a second appointment to confirm it. Macular degeneration. I was going to tell you soon. But maybe not in such a dramatic fashion.”
I think of how she once spent a week layering hundreds of strokes of paint onto a canvas to replicate the bark of an ancient redwood. How, when she took me to the beach during one of my mother’s lights-out days, we lay on our backs looking up into the sky, and she explained that although we perceive the glow from the sun as white, it is really made up of all the colors of the rainbow.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
I am still thinking of that day—of the turkey-and-cheese sandwiches and thermos of lemonade my aunt packed, of the deck of cards she’d brought along in her purse to teach me how to play gin rummy—when she speaks again.
“Do you remember when we read Little Women together?”
I nod. “Yes.” I’m already wondering what she can and can’t see.
“In the book, Amy said, ‘I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.’ Well, I’ve never feared bad weather, either.”
Then my aunt does one of the bravest things I have ever seen. She smiles.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
I hate it when I can’t see.
Maggie, the shy seventeen-year-old pledge from Jacksonville, had said those exact words to me the night of our sorority initiation.
But I hadn’t listened to her. I was too fixated on how Daniel had brushed me off. Tomorrow isn’t good enough, I’d thought as my anger mounted.
Somehow I managed to participate in most of the evening’s rituals. I hovered behind Maggie as she stood in the circle of girls in our living room, their faces illuminated by candlelight. When all of the sisters had gathered together to vote after rush week, Maggie hadn’t been on our original list of the twenty selected. The other pledges were pretty, lively, and fun—the sort of girls who would be asked to fraternity formals and enhance the spirit of the house. But Maggie was different. When I’d talked to her during one of our social events, I’d learned that during high school, she had started a volunteer program aimed at helping animals in a shelter near her family’s home.
“I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was growing up,” Maggie had told me, shrugging. “I was kind of an outsider.” She’d grinned, but I’d seen vulnerability in her eyes. “I guess helping animals kept me from feeling alone.”
“That’s amazing. Can you explain how you started that program? I want to get our house more involved in service.”
Her face had lit up as she described the three-legged dachshund named Ike that had sparked her idea. I decided that no matter what the other girls in the house thought, Maggie needed to be one of our pledges.
But as I stood behind her, listening to the voices of my sorority sisters rise in song, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. Maggie was dressed in a childish white cotton top printed with a pattern of little cherries and matching shorts, and she had barely said a word all night. She’d told me she was looking forward to a fresh start in college, that she wanted to form connections with the other girls here. But she wasn’t putting forth any effort to bond with the sisters. She hadn’t memorized our anthem; I could see her pretending to mouth the words. She’d taken a sip of the Dirty Hunch Punch and spat it back into her cup. “Gross,” she’d said, leaving the cup on the table instead of throwing it out, then reaching for a Jell-O shot.
It was my job to watch over Maggie, to make sure she was completing her tasks—including the scavenger hunt through the house—and, especially, to track her during the ocean plunge. Even we college kids knew that drinking and swimming in the choppy waves at night could be treacherous.
I couldn’t focus on Maggie, though. I was too aware of the change in my body, the silent phone in my pocket. When she complained that she couldn’t locate the brass rooster we jokingly called our mascot and had hidden in the house, I shrugged and ticked it off her list anyway. “Just find what you can,” I said, then I checked my phone again. Daniel still hadn’t called.