Chapter 22: Summer

I didn't answer her.

I looked at Clara.

It was her room Paisley had taken, her pool, her name on that pink schedule.

Clara stood in the headlights for a long moment with her arms crossed.

"Where's the brooch?" she said.

Paisley unzipped the front of the white suitcase and took it out of a sock.

Then my mother's diamond earrings, in a tissue.

Then a Ziploc bag of Clara's old drawings, the ones from under her bed, creased.

She held them out on her palms.

Clara took the drawings. She left the jewelry for me.

"You can't sleep in the house," Clara said.

Paisley nodded. She'd expected that.

The cottage door opened down by the gate.

The housekeeper came up the gravel in her raincoat over her nightgown, the way she'd come the night of the rain.

She looked at Paisley, and at the suitcase, and sighed.

"She can have my spare room," she said. "I get up at six. So will she."

That was June.

Paisley's terms were Clara's, and Clara wrote them on the back of that pink schedule.

Every post about Clara came down.

In their place went one video.

The practice pages lay on the kitchen table, and Paisley said in a flat voice what she'd done with them.

She didn't cry in it. Clara made her film it three times until she stopped.

Clara's old bedroom had been painted pink in February and her desk had gone to the dump.

Paisley spent June repainting it the blue it had been, two coats, with the housekeeper standing in the door telling her she'd missed a bit.

Clara didn't press charges for the forgery.

In return, Paisley told the detective everything she knew about her father, on the record, twice.

She cried the second time. Not for a camera.

In the second week of June, I flew the young woman from the fire home to her mother in Sion, and went with her.

I stood at the back of a small church and didn't say who I was.

Her mother knew anyway, and held my hands.

Then Clara went to Woods Hole.

I drove her there myself.

On the ferry dock she said, "You're going to call every day, aren't you."

"No. You call. I answer."

She called on a Tuesday in the middle of a board meeting, to tell me she'd seen a minke.

I stood up from the walnut table and took it in the window while twelve people waited.

"A minke," I told the board when I sat back down.

The Undertaker said, "Congratulations," and meant it.

The Deep Water drawings came home from New Haven and went up along the front hall.

Matthias lived in the boathouse loft all summer and complained about the humidity every morning.

He swam in the Sound at six instead of walking in the park.

He taught the housekeeper to make rösti. She taught him that our cook would quit if he touched her copper pans again.

He found a hill in Westchester and said, grudgingly, that it was nearly a real hill.

In the last week of August, Clara called at nine at night from the dock at Woods Hole.