I had called my father and told him that I was spending the night with Heather Prescott at her apartment just off the UVM campus. By then my grandparents had left. My aunt and uncle and my cousins had returned to Manhattan, as well.
On my way home Saturday morning, I drove past Heather’s place and considered dropping by. I was looking for a reason not to return to the strange, sad emptiness of the red Victorian. I could explain to Heather that I had used her as an alibi if it ever came up. She’d like to be complicit in a lie about a lover. But if she were home—and awake—she’d want to know who I had been with the night before. She’d ask who this new man was in my life. And I wasn’t prepared to discuss Gavin. Moreover, she’d probably want to smoke a bowl, and I would have to defend my resistance, my rather sudden aversion to dope.
And so I returned to Bartlett, but I did make one stop there before going home. I dropped by Marilyn Bryce’s and found the woman in her studio. She was standing before a canvas the size of a queen mattress in a pair of jeans and a well-worn and impressively stained sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. She was listening to late Beatles on a boom box and staring at the kaleidoscopic waves of neon that rippled across the painting. I had expected the room to reek of weed—and wondered briefly what it said about me that I had passed on one stoner and wound up with another—but there was only the tiniest hint of skunk. She seemed so focused on her work that I considered whether I needed to take her more seriously.
She suggested that we go inside the house for a cup of tea, but I said I only had a couple of minutes, so she motioned for me to take one of the two wobbly, paint-splattered ladder-back chairs in the corner, and she took the other. We discussed the funeral and I reiterated how much I appreciated what she had said about my mother—which was true. But then I asked her the question that was on my mind, the reason why I had come here: “Did you and my mom ever talk about her miscarriages?”
“Oh, of course. How could we not?”
“Did she ever, I don’t know, speculate why?”
“Why they happened? As in a meaning of life, spiritual thing? Or why they happened biologically?”
“The latter.”
“Well, she knew, didn’t she? They did all those tests. Wasn’t it something to do with your dad?”
“I don’t know,” I lied, curious where this was leading.
“It was,” she said. “Your mom was quite sure.”
“And my dad?”
“Well, he had to know, too, didn’t he? If it wasn’t her, it had to be him. Right?”
I thought of the e-mail from him I had discovered. I recalled what he had said to me in his office. “I would think if my father knew, he would have felt horrible. He would have felt pretty bad.”
“I’m sure he did. But after Paige was born, none of that mattered now, did it?”
“But all the years in between?”
“What about them?”
“How did it affect their marriage?”
“It added stress, I guess. How could it not? But I don’t know what you’re driving at. I have no idea where you’re going with this, sweetie.”
“I’m not sure, either.”
She scrunched up her face and looked at me intently. She sat forward on her chair and leaned into me. “Are you worried that Paige is, I don’t know, just your half sister? Because that’s insane. That is seriously kooky talk.”
I was stunned, and yet at the same time I understood this was precisely what, on some level, had been dogging me. Marilyn had verbalized what had been gnawing at me for weeks, but had not yet been exhumed from deep inside me. “Yes, that is what I’m thinking,” I admitted, and I could hear the utter tonelessness in my voice. “Do other people think that?”
“No!”
“Do you?”
“Of course not! It’s just…”
“It’s just what?” I pressed.
“Fine. You and your mom and dad all have light hair. I mean, your mother? Good Lord, she looked like a Swedish model. And the three of you have blue eyes. But Paige? Black hair. And those magnificent dark eyes. And she’s such an…athlete. She is just so different from the rest of you.”
I nodded to myself. She was actually corroborating the notion. “And yet in your opinion, she is”—and I had to think for a moment to phrase this question properly—“my father’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re positive this isn’t a rumor around here?”
“Completely. People don’t know about the miscarriages. Only I do.”
“Katherine Edwards does.”
“Okay, some people know. But rumor is too strong a word. So is gossip. Maybe joke is better. I mean, your mom used to make them, too.”
“Jokes that Paige isn’t my father’s daughter?”
“Yes! She was kidding, of course—and always just because Paige is so unlike you. She is so unlike your father.”
“Then who is she like?”
“Are you asking who people speculate is her father?”
“I guess.”