She tried to convince herself that her continued anxiety was because Deb’s voice reminded her so much of their mother. But Dee Dee’s vigilance had the potential to strain her relationship with her only sibling. She knew Debora was weary of having to account for herself at the beginning of every conversation.
Dee Dee turned to Lorenzo on the couch and asked, using a neutral tone, “So does Deb want me to call her or what?”
“Nope,” Lorenzo answered, his eyes on the TV screen, his thumb working the buttons. “She’ll send you an email. She and Amory are having a twenty-year anniversary celebration in a couple of months—spa stuff, a golf outing, and then a dinner dance.”
“When is this?”
“May . . . June? The ninth and tenth . . . or tenth and eleventh . . . or twelfth . . .” Lorenzo’s eyes and concentration were fixed on the T. Rex-sized TV screen.
“Wow,” Dee Dee said and meant it. “Okay. Well, I’ll let you know when I see the email. Then we can plan the road trip to Chicago.”
“Uh-huh,” her husband replied, his mind now in sports-chat oblivion.
Dee Dee patted him on the shoulder, rose, and walked back toward the kitchen, grabbing her tote and purse. Frances’s music was audible again, and Phoebe’s thumbs were flying across her phone.
“Phoebe! No texting! Homework,” she said, shaking her head from side to side because her daughter still had the earbuds in. Phoebe shrugged her shoulders, sighed, then pressed a button and set the phone down. Dee Dee smiled and headed upstairs.
She yawned as she walked down the hall toward her elder daughter’s room. Work, yoga, dinner, margaritas . . . It used to be, back in the day, she could go twenty hours on four hours of sleep. But that was twenty years, Lorenzo, two babies, and thousands of ten-hour workdays ago. Now she needed seven hours of sleep, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough.
Dee Dee knocked on Frances’s door, then opened it a crack and peeked in. Frances stood in the corner with her back to the door, the ceiling lights illuminating a large sheet of sketch paper mounted on an easel. Frances didn’t turn around—she was plugged into her phone—and she stood nearly motionless as she applied a detail to the painting with a near-miniature paintbrush, leaning in close to add a nuance of color or detail. It was an impressionistic painting, reminding Dee Dee of Monet and the colors of Giverny. Frances was so absorbed that she didn’t sense she was being observed. Dee Dee smiled and gently closed the door.
Frances was artistic, excelling at the cello and with a paintbrush. And her temperament was volatile, optimistic, and brave. So much like my mother. Dee Dee pushed that thought away.
She’d enjoyed the evening with Elise and Carmen. It had been a long time since she’d had an evening out with friends, old or new. The laughter and conversation had lightened her mood and had provided a much-needed retreat from the stress of her hectic day. But still . . . Dee Dee continued to feel as if something was following her. She didn’t look over her shoulder because she knew what it was: fear, a loyal but unwanted companion for most of her life.
Dee Dee didn’t remember how old she was when she first realized that her mommy behaved differently from the other mommies. Was she five? Six? It was a gradual awareness, and, at first, she had no words for “it.” She was too young and still guided by instinct, having no idea what “it” was, only that it was as strong as she was and suffocating in its completeness. It was as if the blankets on her bed were being pulled up before she went to sleep, slowly covering her feet and calves, then her hips and her torso and, finally, her shoulders. By the time the blankets were tucked in, Dee Dee’s realization shape-shifted into what she later would identify as cold fear.
“Your mommy crazy!” a boy in her second-grade class said to her one day.
Dee Dee pushed him down on the playground and he scraped his knee. She spent that afternoon standing in the corner of Mrs. Cochran’s room. But deep down, even though she didn’t have words for it yet, she knew the boy had been telling the truth.
On the way to the grocery store one summer afternoon, Laura O’Neill drove 70 miles per hour in a 40 mile-per-hour zone, zigzagging through traffic while screeching with laughter during a conversation she was having with herself. She told her daughters, crouched and terrified in the back seat, that she was chatting with her friend and was going to get some milk and hamburger meat. It was hours before Deanna and Debora stopped trembling.
The terror Dee Dee experienced on that day, and on many others like it, was the shadow that followed her through most of her life. It was like she lived on a fault line at the rim of an active volcano during a thunderstorm. She never knew when the ground would shift and throw her off her feet, or when the mountain would explode and bury her in heat and misery, or when the sky would open up and send zigzags of lightning down on her head. It would be the most complete destruction there was. She’d seen something destroy her mother, an outgoing and creative woman. She’d seen it try to destroy her sister. Every day, even though she had no symptoms, Dee Dee woke in the morning terrified that it would try to destroy her too. And now, without any evidence or reason, she was worried about Frances.
And then there was the matter of four roughed-up water-stained boxes sitting on the old Ping-Pong table in the back of the basement, the ones she’d never opened. The ones with her mother’s name on them.
Chapter 5
Carmen
It was Carmen’s idea. Elise thought it was brilliant, and Dee Dee too was enthusiastic, but Carmen refused to accept the credit.
“I just listened, that’s all,” she said, explaining how she pulled together the common threads of their stories about their mothers and tied them with a bow. “It’s what I do. Listen to stories, true and untrue, pull out useful information, and formulate a solution.”
“Hmmm, like Olivia Pope,” Dee Dee said, referring to the character in a TV show. But it was more basic than that. It was so easy that Carmen couldn’t explain why she hadn’t thought of it sooner—the idea had been right in front of her nose. Instead, it had come to her like a lightning bolt—when she was in the shower washing her hair. Or, rather, rinsing the shampoo out of her eyes, blinking to ease the irritation from the suds, her mind wandering off to a new line of hair products she’d seen on QVC, then on to a meeting she had to attend in New York in the coming week. The weather had been iffy—pop-up thunderstorms and tornadoes, especially in the South. What if her plane was coming from Atlanta? Would her flight be cancelled? Carmen loved one of the new display windows at Saks: a minimalist scene with a trio of faceless mannequins wearing red designer clothing and standing next to a tower of boxes stacked haphazardly. It reminded her of the Tower of Pisa. Wasn’t there an email in her in-box from the tour group about her upcoming foodie tour of Tuscany? Or was it Umbria? And she wondered if . . .
Boxes. They all had boxes to sort through. Boxes containing things—none of them knew for certain what things, but things that had belonged to their mothers. Elise was still facing the clear-out of her mother’s condominium: furniture, dishes and other household goods, books, things, things, things—the whole idea of the project had overwhelmed her into misery. And inactivity. (“When in doubt,” Elise quipped, “do nothing!”) Dee Dee teased that her mother—dead many years now—was a bountiful person when it came to her art and her life but a minimalist as far as possessions were concerned. Besides a few crates of her works stored in a small gallery owned by one of her mother’s friends, she had only four small boxes of her mother’s belongings sitting on the Ping-Pong table in the back of her basement. Carmen, on the other hand, had boxes on the workbench in her garage and several more in the basement at her childhood home—the same boxes her father, now enjoying the company of Elaine Oakes, was nudging her to remove.