“Still. You need to call Layla. To let her know he’s gone.”
The slamming of the front door is followed by footfalls on the hardwood floors and my sister’s voice echoing throughout the house. “Lillian!”
My body tenses. “Speaking of the devil.”
“She’s not the devil. She’s your sister.”
“She’s the devil,” I repeat. “Layla, Princess of Planet Stoney, has returned. We might as well get this over with.”
I start off toward the front of the house. When Trudy doesn’t follow, I say, “Aren’t you coming?”
“This is family time. I’ll be right here if you need me.”
“Chicken.” I leave her standing in the doorway, snickering into her apron.
Layla and her husband and their ensemble of matching Tumi luggage are waiting at the top of the stairs outside the drawing room. My sister, a fashion designer, looks the part in her black jumpsuit and leopard skin booties. She has expensive highlights in her blonde hair now, but growing up, our hair was the exact same shade of blonde—beach blonde Dad called it when it bleached out in the summers. I’ve allowed mine to darken naturally to what some call dirty blonde.
Standing next to Layla, two heads taller than she, Roger, her husband is sporting a gray crew neck sweater and tapered jeans with designer sunglasses embedded in his thick head of dark hair.
“How was the drive?” I ask, kissing each of them on the cheek.
“It was five hours of bliss, Lil. What do you think?” Layla’s arm shoots out, a black lacquered nail pointing at Dad’s hospital bed. “Why’d you put him on display in the drawing room?”
My gaze follows her finger. Our father lies perfectly still. His skin is translucent, and his lips have turned blue. If she’d allowed her glance to linger for even a few seconds, my sister would have realized he’s dead.
“Dad insisted on it,” I say. “He wanted to be close to his study. Three flights of stairs are a lot to manage for a man riddled with cancer.”
Squinting, Layla says, “He looks so pale. He’s okay, right?”
“Actually, he’s not,” I say in a tight voice. “I’m sorry, Layla. You’re twenty minutes too late.”
“Wait a minute, what?” My sister, the great Houdini of emotions, shakes off disbelief and slips into anger. “You never told me the situation was urgent.”
My jaw hits the floor, and I shift my gaze to my brother-in-law who shrugs as though he, too, can’t believe the absurdity of his wife’s comment. “Seriously, Layla? I called you no fewer than twenty times in the past seven days. When we spoke yesterday afternoon, I told you that Dad’s hospice nurse”—I sweep my arm at Rose, who’s talking on her cell phone in the corner of the drawing room—“predicted he wouldn’t make it through the weekend.”
A flush creeps up my sister’s neck to her cheeks. “We had an important function last night. We couldn’t get away until this morning.”
“You didn’t mention an important function when we spoke on the phone.” I’m tempted to ask her if she deems saying goodbye to one’s father on his deathbed unimportant, but I hold my tongue. “Whatever Layla. I’m sure you’ll want some time alone with him now.”
Brushing past her, I hurry down the stairs and out into the sultry afternoon. I cross East Battery Street to the seawall and lean against the railing on the promenade. The sight of the sailboats gliding across the Cooper River has a calming effect on my nerves. The Lowcountry is in my blood—the marshes, the oak trees, the cuisine. Following his diagnosis, my father talked obsessively about my future, as though he could not rest in peace until he knew for certain I had a clear-cut path in mind.
“After I’m gone, I want you to pack your easel and leave this town,” he said, repeatedly. “You have no obligations tying you down. Go explore the world, paint until your heart’s content.”
Contrary to what my father wants . . . wanted for me, I can’t imagine ever leaving Charleston. As for artistic inspiration, the number of enchanting scenes for me to paint in this town and the surrounding areas is infinite.
Placing my back to the harbor, I stare across the street at our home. Just as I can’t imagine moving away from Charleston, I never want to leave this house. My ancestor, my too-many-greats-to-count grandfather, built the gray-stuccoed three-story Federal-style house in the 1820s. One member of the Stoney family after another has lived here ever since.
Narrow on the street side, the house extends deep into the property. Informal sitting rooms occupy the first floor of the main house, but we spend the majority of our time on the upper two levels, which allow for more scenic views. Back in the olden days, kitchens were built separate from the main dwelling for fear of fire. That dependency is now attached to the main house, providing space on the first and second floors for kitchen and laundry and the third floor for rarely used bedrooms. At the far back of the property, the original carriage house offers a fully equipped apartment that has been used by many over the years. A visitor to our home needs a map to find his way from the front door to the kitchen through our conglomeration of chopped-up rooms.
I’ve always assumed I would be the one to inherit the house, but when I got up the nerve to question my father about it a month ago, he said, “You’ll have to work that out with your sister.”
“But she lives in Atlanta,” I argued. “She’s never expressed any interest in moving back to Charleston.”
“I can’t explain it now, sweetheart. You’ll understand everything in due time.”
Due time has now come.
A white van whips into our driveway and comes to a screeching halt in front of the main entrance on the first-floor piazza on the side of the house. Two men dressed entirely in gray get out. I don’t need to see the logos on their uniforms to know they’ve come to collect my father’s body. I long to run after them, to beg them not to take him away, but I’m frozen to my spot on the railing by a sudden vision. A bird’s eye view through a rain-splattered window. A much-younger version of my father pacing the driveway, raking his hands through a thick head of dark hair. The transfer vehicle in my vision is not a van but an ambulance. The sheet-draped body on the stretcher can only be my mother. The tiny figure in the third-floor window is my six-year-old self on the day she died.
Lillian
For the next two days, I hide out in my room away from my sister. Layla’s always been domineering, but she’s grown difficult and more demanding since we last spent any real time together. Besides, I’ve been managing our father’s care for the past three months, including his brief and ineffective regime of chemotherapy. It’s time for her to do her share. She’s in her element, anyway, socializing with friends she hasn’t seen in years who stop in to pay their respects.
Because Dad had the foresight to plan his own funeral, Layla and I have only one fight over the specifics. She wants to bury him in a navy-blue suit she discovers in his closet that I’ve never seen him wear. But my father had specified his favorite tweed blazer with the suede patches on the elbows and his worn brown corduroy pants. It dawns on me that our father left his list of instructions, not to make things easier for my sister and me but to prevent arguments over the details.