A Slender Thread (4 page)

His painting was taking on a heaviness, the colors growing murky. Why couldn't he get that light? Shit. What was the matter with him? His mind's eye had it, but his hands couldn't get the color right. It was as if he could no longer handle his brushes, as if he was painting wearing boxing gloves. Some of his work veered toward abstraction, but something always kept him grounded in nature: a wash of sky, the underlying sparkle of water, the girth of trees. The figures in his pictures created a narrative underpinning, whether he wanted it or not.

The airplane continued to bump its way down through the uneven atmosphere. If Margot had been with him she would have given him one of her pep talks, telling him not to worry, to be patient, that eventually he would accomplish the effect he wanted. Oliver closed his eyes. It was good of Margot to let him have this time with Jenna. His ex-wife, Linda, almost a stranger to him now, had remarried and lived in Phoenix, yet they would always share their child. Hardly a child. Jenna was thirty.

His grown-up child had become his friend. After Linda had remarried and moved to Arizona, it had been difficult to see his daughter. He continued to pay child support, but it had been cumbersome and expensive to fly back and forth across the country. Jenna came to him every July, but by high school she wanted to have a summer job and stay close to her friends. For a while, there was a growing distance between them. Eventually, after dropping out of college, she had moved to Atlanta with a friend to work for a catering company. “Daddy, I don't want to study. I want to do things.”

Four years ago, with his help, and his insistence that the money was in lieu of two years' worth of college tuition, she opened Super Soups, a tiny restaurant in midtown Atlanta. Jenna loved the food world, and to Linda's surprise, the business venture was thriving. Jenna's starting the restaurant had brought Oliver into a much closer relationship with his daughter. He liked Atlanta and he liked seeing Jenna there, away from Linda's realm, where the desert landscape reminded him of his failed marriage.

The flight attendant, collecting the final round of trash, bumped his arm. Oliver tightened his seat belt. Jenna. Freckles, that shiny hair, now cut short, nonstop energy, the silly laugh that accompanied a shake of her head, her determination. Always on her feet, always working, always sure the restaurant would be a success. Margot was right. He had only these few days, but it would be good to be with his daughter.

He shut his eyes, imagining Jenna's funky apartment. She had painted the rooms in food colors—aubergine, celery, and cream—and filled them with her treasured “antiques,” the kind of furniture dating from his own boyhood. Oliver knew that Jenna's Thanksgiving table would be surrounded by a hip, ragtag group of friends and covered with all the expected dishes, along with some unexpected ones too. She made delicious dishes with tofu and bowls of brownish grains for her vegan guests. Leo, Jenna's boyfriend, would valiantly carve the turkey into strange, uneven lumps, while she smiled indulgently at his ineptitude.

How different from the meal that would take place in New Castle. There, the always competent Alex would carve the bird into thin, elegant slices, and the dining room with its sleek sideboard made by a Maine cabinetmaker would be covered in an array of artfully plated dishes. The silver on the table would be gleaming, the napkins starched and white, a fire crackling in the grate. Lacey, a natural hostess, would bring everyone into the conversation, putting her guests at ease. Everything would be perfect with Margot's sister at the helm. In his present frame of mind, Oliver was glad he didn't have to be there.

The plane hit the tarmac in a final lurch. Oliver was thankful that he and Margot would be apart for only a few days. He missed her already.

M
argot tiptoed down to the kitchen on Thanksgiving morning. She wanted to make a cup of tea to bring up to bed. The guest room, a small space under the eaves, was on the third floor, across the hall from Lacey's studio. Margot had had a second sleepless night and her body was sore, as if holding back this news from her twin nieces was some kind of physical endeavor. She had spent the day with them yesterday, taking them shopping and out to lunch in Portsmouth, their annual day-before-Thanksgiving tradition. Lacey and Alex had gone off somewhere together for the afternoon. They had not said where.

The stairs creaked in the old house. Margot paused and looked out the window on the landing. The sky had begun to lighten; the garden behind the house was cloaked in silvery shadow. All the leaves had fallen and the flower beds had been heavily mulched, awaiting the full impact of winter. One lone bench was set in the curve of the lawn with two empty pots on either side. Lacey called it her tea place, where she would pause, drink a glass of iced tea, and decide what she would tackle next.

Lacey had designed and planted this garden by herself. Margot had helped her drag a hose around to determine the curve of the beds the first summer she and Alex had owned the property. Lacey loved her flowers, particularly the richly colored blooms—the deep blues of her delphiniums early in the season, and later the hot pinks of the cosmos and zinnias, and the dahlias, whose jewellike shades didn't fade until frost. She never tired of the relentless daily tasks that a garden required: weeding, deadheading, dividing, pruning, staking a tall top-heavy bloom, or coddling a rare rose more suited to an English cottage garden than the uncertain climate of the New Hampshire seacoast. Margot admired her dedication.

“The best part about gardening is that you always have another chance,” Lacey had explained to Margot. “If it's not perfect now, there's always next year.” She had wiped a smear of soil off her cheek before picking up the shovel. That was Lacey—positive, always looking ahead, certain that she could make it right. Now she was facing a future she could not fix. What would next year bring?

Margot wasn't used to thinking of her sister as vulnerable. Lacey's life had always been like her garden, well tended, orderly, predictable, the perennial flowers reappearing every year. Always beautiful. Now, with this illness, it was as if Lacey's life had become a garden infested with deadly insects, or an unstoppable blight. Margot shivered. Alex and Lacey kept the house cool at night.

She reached for the railing and continued down the stairs. A light was on in the kitchen. A cupboard door clicked shut. She had lost her opportunity to fix her tea and slip unnoticed back to her room, but she went into the kitchen anyway.

“I hope I didn't wake you,” Alex said. “I wanted to get the turkey out of the fridge.” The large bird sat in the roasting pan on the counter, its flesh a ghostly white in the dimly lit kitchen.

“No,” Margot said, pulling her robe around her and tying the sash. “I was going to make a cup of tea.”

“Let me do that for you.” He reached for the kettle next to the sink. He wore sweatpants and a shapeless blue sweater. His hair, once a reddish blond, was now flecked with gray. He was a tall man. His face was angular, and with age he had grown into his beaklike nose. He no longer had the freckles she remembered from their childhood summers on Bow Lake. His family had had a cottage just down the lake from Grandmother Winkler's camp. To Margot, he had always been the fabulous older boy in baggy boxer swim trunks diving off the float into the icy blue lake.

“Is Lacey still asleep?”

“The doctor put her on a prescription sleeping pill. She takes it every night now. As you can imagine, we haven't been sleeping too well lately.”

“Alex, I'm so sorry.” This was the first time they had been alone. Margot knew that the girls would sleep for hours.

“She's going to get better.” He opened a cupboard and took out two mugs, then reached in a canister for a tea bag. He shook his head. “There's quite an assortment. You choose.” He handed Margot the canister. She took the one on top, country peach, not wanting to search any further.

Alex turned his back to her and began to make coffee in the machine on the far counter. He filled the carafe with water, shoveled out scoops of coffee from a different canister, and pressed a switch. His movements were quick and jerky, as if he were uneasy being alone with her. The teakettle started to whistle.

Margot grabbed it before the noise could wake the rest of the family. She poured water into her mug and stared into the liquid, watching it steep. The amber liquid slowly darkened. “Lacey said the doctors told her the aphasia would grow worse.” Margot hesitated. She didn't want to upset Alex, but she wanted to understand everything that was going on. “She said they had taken brain scans.”

“Yes, but nothing might happen for years. We saw another doctor yesterday. He said they couldn't say for sure.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Shit, Margot. Why can't these guys give us a straight answer?”

Margot looked away from him. Alex, always so calm, so thoughtful, looked shaken.

He said, his voice pleading, “It doesn't make sense. Lacey's the picture of health. She runs. She does yoga. She's smarter than any of us. So what if she has a little trouble remembering the right word? We all do.”

“Can't they give her anything to stop the progression? She seems convinced there's no way out of this. I just wondered.”

“They say there's nothing.” He rested his elbows on the counter and covered his eyes with his hands. “I'm sure it's because she's overtired. As usual, she's doing too much. She's going to take the sleeping pills, get her rest, and she's not going to get worse. We're going to take it one step at a time.”

“Of course,” Margot said, trying to conceal her doubt. “Lacey's always been strong.” Margot blinked back tears and swirled the tea bag in her mug.

Lacey was the capable one, wise and practical even as a young woman. After their mother died Lacey had been the one to travel home on weekends to check on their father. When his health had deteriorated a few years later, Lacey helped him find doctors, visited him in the hospital, and was with him when he died. She even arranged for the funeral. By then, she was married to Alex and living in New Hampshire. Margot thought of Lacey and Alex as the adults, while she, four years younger, was still floundering and trying to figure out her life.

The kitchen filled with the aroma of coffee. Margot swished her tea bag once more before removing it and putting it on a saucer next to the sink. She sat on a stool at the far side of the counter. She couldn't leave Alex now that they had started to talk.

“Lacey said she'd tell the girls once they had decided about college,” she said.

“There's nothing to tell them.” He pulled himself up and away from the counter. “Lacey will come through this. I just know it.” He had dark circles beneath his eyes.

“But what if she gets worse?”

“You can't say that,” he said, his voice sharp. “Okay. She has a problem, a big one—I grant you that, but problems can be solved.”

“Lacey said the scans showed deterioration.”

“Damn the scans. She's managing fine now.” Alex looked down at Margot. She thought he might reach over and shake her, insisting that she listen to him and trust that he was going to find a solution.

“Please, Alex,” Margot said. “I want to believe you. You know how I love Lacey. I love both of you. I don't want any of this to be happening.”

“I know that,” he said more kindly.

Margot wanted to tell him that it would be fine, that maybe he was right. Lacey might not get worse. She wished she could comfort him, but she felt so inadequate. Lacey was always the one who calmed, who soothed, who made the world better for all of them.

Alex's face went slack. He lowered himself onto the stool opposite her. “You can't imagine what we've been through. What she's been through.” He spoke more softly. “They've found some deterioration in her left frontal lobe. It could have been there for years.” His eyes met hers. “I haven't heard any definitive reason to believe that it might get worse.”

Margot took in a big breath and nodded. The final sputtering of the coffee machine ended and Alex got up and busied himself filling his cup and pouring in milk. And why shouldn't she believe him? Alex was smart, good at his work. Years before, he had reorganized and sold his family's manufacturing business. Now he worked as a consultant to other family-run corporations. He fixed things. He was used to grappling with problems—making things turn out right.

“I'm sorry I snapped at you,” he said. “We've got a lot going on right now.”

“It's okay.” Maybe Lacey hadn't really understood what the doctors had said.

Alex put down his coffee and took an orange from a bowl on the counter. “Lacey says that Oliver is working on paintings for a dealer out in California.” He tore into the skin of the orange and peeled it off in big chunks.

“He wants to get better known there.” Margot could tell that the topic of Lacey's illness was closed. “He's worried that the New York market is fading for him.”

“He's still selling for big bucks, according to Toni.” He held some of the orange toward her, an offering of sorts. Margot accepted the sections of fruit.

Her niece Toni was curious about Oliver and was always plying him with questions. “His paintings sell for a lot,” Margot said, “but the art world is fickle. Oliver is the first to admit that.” She didn't want to talk about Oliver's frustration with his work. Any job had its rough periods. Oliver hadn't sold a major painting in over a year, but Alex didn't need to know that. Oliver's problems hardly mattered in light of all that Alex and Lacey were going through.