“Loads,” she says with a smile.
“Fun comes so naturally to them. Children, I mean.”
Nessa sips the wine. “Your daughter-in-law is adorable. She told me about their plans.”
“You approve?”
“Approve? I think it’s marvelous. You must be thrilled for them.”
Is it simply the mood of the afternoon that he suddenly feels this way? Not thrilled, perhaps, but certainly more comfortable with the notion. Yes, why not, he thinks. A vineyard in the country. Open spaces, cool, moist dawns, a night sky exploding with stars. Who wouldn’t want that?
“
And
you can keep the land in the family,” Nessa goes on. She lifts her glass in a little toast. “A bit of history, no? Sounds to me like that would be right up your alley.”
The great ceremony comes: the presents are unwrapped. The boys barely acknowledge each one before tearing into the next. Hamburgers and hot dogs, chips, strawberries and slices of melon, cake. Among the children, heads begin to droop, minor disagreements flare, eyes grow heavy-lidded. As evening comes on, they make their departures while some of the adults linger, drinking on the patio. Everyone seems to acknowledge Nessa as an important new presence, especially Bettina, who in the gathering dusk gives Nessa a tour of her gardens.
By the time they leave, there are almost no cars out front. Nessa, exhausted and perhaps a little drunk, leans back in her seat as they pull away.
“You have a wonderful family,” she says sleepily.
It’s true, Logan thinks; he does. Even his ex-wife, who, despite their difficulties, has emerged at this late stage of life as an advocate for his happiness. Under the influence of the day he feels something long-clenched relaxing inside him. Life is not so bad, so purely dutiful, as he has thought. As they drive, his mind travels to the ranch. He has already spoken to his lawyer to set the paperwork in motion. Soon his son and his family will be there, infusing it with fresh life, fresh memories.
“I was thinking,” Logan begins, “perhaps I should drive out and have a look at the old place. I haven’t been there for years.”
Nessa nods dreamily. “I think that’s a good idea.”
“Would you like to come? It would only be for a couple of days. Next weekend, say.”
Nessa’s eyes are closed. Another mistake; he has gotten ahead of himself. She is drunk; he is taking advantage of this moment of warm feeling. Perhaps she has fallen asleep.
“It could be useful to you,” he offers quickly. “Another article, perhaps.”
“An article,” Nessa repeats neutrally. Another moment lapses. “So, just to be clear, you’re asking me to go away with you for the weekend to help me write an article.”
“Yes, I suppose. If that’s what you want.”
“Pull over.”
“Are you feeling ill?” The worst is upon him. The night is ruined.
“Please, just do it.”
He draws the car to the side of the road. He expects her to burst from the door, but instead she turns to face him.
“Nessa, are you all right?”
She seems about to laugh. Before he can utter another word, she takes his cheeks in her hands and draws him toward her, crushing his mouth with a kiss.
They have lunch together on Tuesday, see a film the following night, and on Saturday depart in the early morning. The city falls away as they drive deep into the heart of the country. The day is cool, with fat white clouds, though the temperature begins to rise as they make their way west, away from the sea.
It is just noon when they arrive in Headly. The town has improved somewhat. More commercial concerns now line the dusty main street, and the school has expanded. A new municipal hall stands at the top of the square. They check into the inn—Logan has booked separate rooms, not wanting to assume too much—and, with a picnic lunch, drive on to the ranch.
The sight is dispiriting. The land, untended for years, is weedy and wild; the barn has caved in, as well as many of the outbuildings. The house is only a little better—paint peeling, porch tipping to one side, gutters languishing off the eaves. Logan stands in silence for a moment, taking it in. The house was never large, but like all revisited places it seems a lesser version of the one held in memory. Its degraded condition disturbs him. Yet he also experiences an upwelling of emotion that he hasn’t experienced in years: the feeling of homecoming, of home.
“Logan? All right?”
He turns to Nessa. She is standing slightly apart from him. “Strange to be back,” he says and shrugs diffidently, though the word “strange,” hardly does the situation justice.
“It’s really not so bad, you know. I’m sure they can fix it up.”
He does not want to enter the house yet. They put their blanket on the ground and lay out their picnic: bread and cheese, fruit, smoked meat, lemonade. The site they have selected has a view of the parched hills; the sun is hot but clouds scud past, creating brief intervals of shade. As they eat, Logan points out the sites, explaining the history: the barns, the paddocks, the fields where horses once grazed, the thickets where he spent idle hours as a boy, lost in worlds of his own imagining. He begins to relax; the tension between what he remembers and what he now sees softens; the past flows forth, wanting to be told—though there is, of course, more to the story.
The moment comes when the house can no longer be avoided. Logan takes the key from his pocket—it has lain in his desk drawer, untouched, for years—and lets them in. The door opens directly onto the front parlor. The air is stale. Some of the furnishings remain: a couple of armchairs, shelves, the desk where his father did his accounts. A thick layer of dust coats every surface. They move deeper into the house. All the kitchen cabinets stand open, as if explored by hungry ghosts. Despite the staleness, smells assault him, tinged with the past.
They press on to the back room. Logan is drawn to it as if by a magnetic force. There, covered by a tarp, is the unmistakable shape of the piano. He pulls the cloth aside and raises the fall, exposing the keys, which are yellow as old teeth.
“Do you play?” Nessa asks.
They are the first words either of them has spoken since entering the house. Logan depresses a key, expelling a sour note. “Me? No.” The sound hovers in the air, then is gone. “I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with you,” he says, looking up. “You asked me if I came from a religious family. My mother was what used to be known as an ‘Amy dreamer.’ Are you familiar with the term?”
Nessa frowns. “Isn’t that a myth?”
“You mean, hasn’t modern science rebranded the phenomenon? In conventional terms, I suppose you could say she was crazy. Schizophrenic with a tendency toward grandiosity. That’s more or less what the doctors told us.”
“But you don’t think so.”
Logan shrugs. “It’s not really a yes-or-no question. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. At least she came by it honestly. Her maiden name was Jaxon.”
Nessa is visibly taken aback. “You’re First Family?”
Logan nods. “It’s not something I like to talk about. People make assumptions.”
“I hardly think these days anyone would make much of it.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised. Out here, folks put stock in a thing like that.”
Nessa pauses, then asks, “What about your father?”
“My father was a simple man.
Straightforward
would be the term. If he had a religion, it was horses. That, and my mother. He loved her a great deal, even when things got bad. When they married, according to him, she was just like anybody else. Perhaps a little more devout than most, but that wasn’t so unusual in these parts. It wasn’t until later that she started having spells. Visions, episodes, waking dreams, whatever you like to call them.”
“Was the piano hers?”
Nessa has correctly intuited this. “My mother was a country girl, but she came from a musical family. From an early age she was quite good. Some people said she was a prodigy, even. She could have gone on to a real career, but then she met my father, and that was that. They were very traditional in that way. She still played sometimes, though I think she had mixed feelings about it.”
He pauses, takes a deep breath, and continues: “Then one night I woke up and heard her playing. I was very young, six, maybe seven. The music wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Incredibly beautiful, hypnotic almost. I can’t even describe it. It swept me up completely. After a while, I went downstairs. My mother was still playing, though she wasn’t alone. My father was there, too. He was sitting in a chair with his face in his hands. My mother’s eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at the keys or anything else. Her face had a kind of erased blankness to it. It was as if some outside force was borrowing her body for its own intentions. It’s hard to explain—maybe I’m not telling it right—but I knew instinctively that the person playing the piano wasn’t my mother. She’d become someone else. ‘Penny, stop,’ my father was saying—pleading, really. ‘It’s not real, it’s not real.’ ”
“It must have been terrifying.”
“It was. There he was, this proud man, strong as a bull, completely helpless, shaking with tears. It rocked me to the core. I wanted to get the hell out of there and pretend the whole thing had never happened, but then my mother stopped playing.” Logan snaps his fingers for emphasis. “Just like that, right in the middle of a phrase, as if somebody had thrown a switch. She stood up from the piano and marched right past me like I wasn’t even there. ‘What’s happening,’ I asked my father, ‘what’s wrong with her?’ But he didn’t answer me. We followed her outside. I didn’t know what time it was, though it was late, the middle of the night. She stopped at the edge of the porch, looking out over the fields. For a little while nothing happened—she just stood there, the same empty look on her face. Then she began to mutter something. At first I couldn’t tell what she was saying. One phrase, over and over. ‘Come to me,’ she was saying. ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me.’ I’ll never forget it.”
Nessa is watching his face intently. “Who do you think she was talking to?”
Logan shrugs. “Who knows? I don’t remember what happened after that. I suppose I went to bed. A few days later, the same thing happened. Over time it became a kind of nightly ritual.
Oh, Mom’s playing the piano again at four
A.M.
During the day she seemed fine, but then that changed, too. She became harried, obsessive, or else wandered around the house in a kind of daze. That’s when the painting started.”
“ ‘Painting’?” Nessa repeats. “You mean, pictures?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.”
He escorts her upstairs. Three tiny bedrooms, tucked under the eaves; in the ceiling of the hallway is a hatch with a cord. Logan pulls it down and unfolds the rickety wooden stairs that lead to the attic.
They ascend into the cramped, low-ceilinged space. Standing a dozen deep, his mother’s paintings line nearly a whole wall. Logan kneels and draws the protective cloth aside.
It is like opening a door onto a garden. The paintings, of various sizes, depict a landscape of wildflowers, the colors burning with an almost supernatural brightness. Some show a background of mountains; others, the sea.
“Logan, these are beautiful.”
They are. Bound up in pain, they are, nevertheless, creations of stunning beauty. He takes the first one and brings it to Nessa, who holds it in her hands.
“It’s …” she begins, then stops. “I’m not even sure how to say it.”
“Unearthly?”
“I was going to say haunting.” She looks up. “And they’re all the same?”
“Different viewpoints, and her style improved over time. But the subjects are identical. The fields, the flowers, the ocean in the background.”
“There are hundreds.”
“Three hundred and seventy-two.”
“What do you think this place is? Was it someplace she’d been?”
“If it is, I never saw it. Neither did my father. No, I think the image came from inside her head someplace. Like the music.”
Nessa considers this. “A vision.”
“Perhaps that’s the word.”
She examines the painting again. A long silence passes.
“What became of her, Logan?”
He takes a long breath to steady himself. “It eventually got to be too much. The spells, the craziness. I was sixteen when my father had her committed. He visited every week, sometimes more, but he wouldn’t let me see her; I gather her state was rather bad. My junior year in college, she killed herself.”
For a moment, Nessa says nothing. And, really, what is there to say? Logan has never known. One minute there, in another one gone. All of it far in the past, nearly forty years ago.
“I’m sorry, Logan. That must have been very hard.”
“She left a note,” he adds. “It wasn’t very long.”
“What did it say?”
The rope, the chair, the silent building after everyone had gone to bed: this is where his imagination ends. He has never permitted it to go further, to envision the mortal moment.
“ ‘Let her rest.’ ”
They return to the inn. There, for the first time, in Nessa’s room, they make love. The act is unhurried; they conduct it without words. Her body, firm and smooth, is extraordinary to him, as wondrous a present as he has ever received. In the aftermath, they sleep.
Night is falling when Logan awakens to the sound of running water. The shower shuts off with a groan and Nessa emerges from the bathroom in a soft robe, a towel wrapping her hair. She sits on the edge of the bed.
“Hungry?” she asks, smiling.
“There aren’t a lot of choices. I thought we’d go to the restaurant downstairs.”
She kisses him on the mouth. The kiss is brisk, but she allows her face to linger close to his. “Go dress.”
She returns to the bathroom to finish her preparations. How swiftly life can change, Logan thinks. There was no one, now there is someone; he is not alone. Telling the story of his mother was, he realizes, his intention from the start; he has no other way of explaining who he is. That is what two people must give to each other, he thinks: the history of themselves. How else can we hope to be known?
He puts on his trousers and shirt to go next door to change for dinner, but as he enters the hallway he hears his name being called.