7.
There was a big box of photographs on the top shelf of my father’s bedroom closet. I carried it to his bed, which I’d stripped when I was in town the last time, washing the sheets and pulling the quilt up. I’d noticed then that the quilt had initials in the corner: “JL to FM.” At the time, I hadn’t thought much about it, too caught up in the sorrow over losing my father. Now I realized Jeannie had most likely made the blue and yellow patchwork quilt for him. A personal thing. Something for his bed.
I wasn’t sure why that woman made me so uncomfortable. The fact that she seemed to have been closer to my father than I’d been, I guessed. The suspicion that she’d been happy to get my mother out of the way so she could take her place? That was unfair. My mother’d been her oldest friend—I knew that for a fact—and surely Jeannie was telling the truth when she said that her grief and my father’s grief had drawn them together. It was the way she spoke to me. The way she stared at me, especially there on the street after lunch. I was trained, though, to look beyond behavior to motivation. Maybe she was simply uncomfortable with me. She didn’t know how to behave with the daughter of her lover.
Whatever.
I sat cross-legged on the bed in front of the box and pulled out photographs by the fistful. For a man who fastidiously displayed his collections, my father was sloppy about the family photos. I spread them around me on the bed. Many of them were from the years before I was born. Baby pictures of Lisa, but not too many of Danny as an infant and even fewer of me. I knew that younger children were neglected when it came to photographs and the recording of every developmental milestone. My parents were probably tired by the time Danny and I came along. Lisa had been eleven years old when Danny was born, and I was sure he and I were surprises. Mom had been a devout Catholic and I doubted she’d used birth control.
As babies, Lisa and Danny looked very much alike. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, long faces. I was the odd one with a little mop of dark hair and dark eyes, a round face and a button nose I was glad I’d outgrown.
There were pictures of Lisa as a child of about five or six. She wore a ruffled pink dress and held a diminutive violin. Her smile was wide, and she still had every one of her small, perfect baby teeth. What had happened? I wondered. How did that happy-looking little girl turn into a teenager sad enough to kill herself?
In the middle of the box were two old VHS tapes. One was labeled “Lisa, April 1980” and the other “Rome Music Festival, June 1987.” My heart sped up. I could see and hear my sister! The only problem was, I hadn’t seen a VHS player anywhere in the house. I hadn’t seen one anywhere in years.
I set the tapes on my father’s night table and continued digging through the box. There was a picture of Lisa as a very young teen standing with a boy about her own age, both of them holding violins to their chins but smiling for the camera. On the back of the picture, someone had written “Lisa and Matty, ’85.” She would have been around thirteen. I had no idea who Matty was, other than a cute kid with a mass of dark curls and chocolate-brown eyes. I found another picture of the two of them at sixteen, standing back-to-back, a strand of Lisa’s pale hair tangled in one of Matty’s dark curls. Lisa wore a white oval-shaped pendant around her neck. Matty’s smile looked genuine, but I thought Lisa’d had to work at hers. Or maybe I was reading too much into a photograph, one tiny fraction of a second, frozen in time.
I recognized Jeannie in one of the pictures. Her dark hair was long and she had her arm around my mother. Lisa, about eight years old in the picture, leaned against my mother’s side and a black-haired girl a couple of years older and several inches taller leaned against Jeannie’s. That had to be her daughter, Christine, the one who could help me with an estate sale. Everyone looked happy in this picture, my mother included. Her smile was wide, the tilt of her head playful. It was a jolt, seeing that relaxed and lighthearted side of her. But in this happy photograph, she hadn’t yet lost her daughter.
As I looked at the picture of my mother, I remembered the weeks before her death from cancer. She’d wanted to be at home, and the hospice nurses taught Daddy and me how to care for her here in this bedroom. I’d nearly lived at her bedside night and day during those last weeks. I felt like I grew up that summer. I bathed my mother, managed her medications, held her hand. I told her every day that I loved her, and sometimes when Daddy wanted to take over from me, I resisted. I wanted every extra minute with her that I could have. My usually reserved mother was softer, more open, in those last weeks, and although our conversations were never deep or profound, we probably talked more than we did during my whole life. Her focus was on our future—mine and Daddy’s and Danny’s. Danny was still in the hospital in Maryland then and unable to travel. “You all need to stay in touch with each other,” my mother had said. “You need to take care of each other.” I hadn’t done such a great job of that with Danny. He made it hard. I thought I’d stayed in good touch with my father, but now, knowing he’d been unable to be open with me about his life, I worried that I’d failed not just Danny, but everybody.
I set the picture aside, wondering if I should give it to Jeannie, but then I thought about the hundreds of photographs Jeannie most likely had of herself and her daughter over the years, and the few I had of my mother and sister, and I set the picture with the others that I would keep. I wanted to remember my mother this way, happy and content with her life.
The next picture I pulled from the box was of Danny in his uniform. The expression in his eyes was empty, as though he was surrendering to his fate. Or maybe I was once again reading too much into a picture with the benefit of hindsight.
There was another picture of Matty, the boy with the curly dark hair. He sat on a bench at a baby grand piano—ours?—between Danny and myself. I couldn’t have been more than two and Matty had his hand on mine above the piano keys, as if he was trying to teach me to play. Good luck with that, I thought. Funny to see myself in that picture when I didn’t remember Matty at all.
Beneath those pictures was a large framed photograph that made me gasp with recognition. I knew this picture. It was a professional shot of Lisa, Danny, and myself. Lisa and Danny sat side by side on a white upholstered love seat and I sat on Lisa’s lap. I couldn’t have been more than a year and a half. That would have made Danny about five and Lisa sixteen. All three of us were dressed in white. My hair was the only dark thing in the whole photograph and I wondered if it had irritated the photographer. Had I messed up an otherwise ethereal composition? Danny grinned at the camera, a gap where one of his front teeth should have been. My head was turned to the side and I was reaching up, toward his chin. I felt a twist in my chest, looking at the picture. I’d loved him so much, my big brother. He’d looked out for me. I was always mystified when other kids said they hated their siblings or tried to get them in trouble. There was never any of that between Danny and me. I treasured this picture. I was glad my parents selected this one over their other choices—surely there had been one where I was looking directly at the camera? But this photograph, with my hand reaching out for my brother, said so much more. Was there any way, I wondered, to get that connection back?
And what did the photograph say about Lisa? She was only months from her death, and I swore I could see the pain in her face. She smiled for the camera, of course, like a dutiful daughter, but when people say “her smile didn’t reach her eyes” … well, looking at this picture, I understood that phrase. Had she been thinking about her application to Juilliard when this picture was taken? Had the fact that she was talented enough to apply not been enough to validate her? What pressure she must have been under during her whole young life. Child prodigy. It couldn’t have been easy for her.
I must have stared at the picture for half an hour, wishing I could change things for her, the sister I never got to know. “I’m changing things for other kids,” I whispered out loud to the room. I hoped that, somehow, she could hear me.
I suddenly remembered the first time I’d seen this photograph. I’d found it tucked away, facedown, in the dresser drawer where my mother kept her scarves. I was seven. I’d recognized Danny and myself, of course, but I didn’t know who the older girl was, though she was a little bit familiar. I carried the photograph into the living room, where my father was playing the piano and my mother sat on the couch, helping Danny with his homework.
“Who’s this girl?” I asked, holding up the picture in its carved wooden frame.
All three of them looked at me, and then my parents looked at each other.
“It’s Lisa,” Danny said. “Don’t you remember her?” I’d heard her name before, scattered here and there in conversations that went over my head.
“Come here, Riley,” my mother said, patting the couch next to her. My father turned on the piano bench to face us as I took a seat next to my mother. I held the framed photograph on my lap.
“Lisa was your sister,” my mother said. “She passed away when she was seventeen. You were not quite two.”
I looked at the picture again. The girl suddenly seemed more familiar to me, yet I couldn’t remember her. Not really. I couldn’t remember ever talking to her or touching her. I didn’t know much about death at that age. All four of my grandparents were dead, and the only one I’d ever gotten to know had died of a heart attack the year before.
I looked up at my mother. “Was it a heart attack?” I asked.
“No,” Danny said. “She did it to herself.”
“Danny!” my father snapped at him, and my mother gave him a little smack on his knee, but that cat was out of the bag.
I looked across my mother’s lap at my brother. “What’s that mean?” I asked.
“She drowned,” my father said. “That’s all you need to know.”
“Why did Danny say she did it to herself?”
“She drowned on purpose,” Danny said.
How could you drown on purpose? I could hold my breath for forty seconds and after that I needed air. I couldn’t imagine how someone could drown herself.
“Why did she do it?” I asked.
My mother glanced at the picture in my lap, but only for a second. “Sometimes when a person is very, very unhappy,” she said, “they forget that they’ll someday feel better and they just want to end the unhappiness. That’s what happened to Lisa. She felt so unhappy that she thought she’d never be happy again, and she ended her life. It was a terrible and very wrong thing to do. Don’t ever think about doing anything like that, Riley,” she added.
“If you ever feel that sad, you come tell us,” my father said.
“I could never be that sad,” I said, looking at the girl in the picture, still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she’d ever existed at all.
I never forgot my mother’s words about Lisa feeling unhappy and thinking she’d never feel happy again. I thought about that every time I counseled a depressed kid. I thought about it every time I felt unhappy, reminding myself I would one day be happy again. I could use that reminder right now.
I carried the photograph into my bedroom and set it on the nightstand. I’d sort through all those other pictures soon and decide which ones to keep and which to toss. But this one picture, I would keep always. I smiled at it where it rested upright on the nightstand. The three of us, together. My family.