We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(63)

He was an artist, not a scholar. Never much of an athlete. His brothers always bested him at the tasks his parents valued. None of them counted painting as work.

Kincaid was just a kid. He was searching for himself. He didn’t want to emulate his father. And to his father, that was a disappointment.

The eldest brother, Harris, became everything the family wanted him to be. The second brother, Dean, appeared to become everything the family wanted him to be. And Kincaid left the family. He disappeared into the art scenes of Bologna and Florence. He learned Italian. He indulged his whims, broke his mother’s heart, and wasted his education, if you heard Jonathan tell it. But Kincaid would probably say that he questioned what he’d been taught, and made some huge mistakes, and searched for some deeper meaning in this beautiful chance at life we are all given.

In other words, Kincaid shed his Sinclair skin.

He burned it, like a

donkey skin,

to escape from his past self.

He ripped it off with sharp claws, like a Narnian dragon skin,

to reveal the person inside.

He shucked it, like the

human skin of a selkie,

so that he could go into the sea as the seal he was always meant to be.

The Sinclair parents formally disowned him. And disinherited him. They mourned him almost as if he had died.

“Kincaid returned from Italy having reinvented himself as Kingsley Cello,” says Holland. “And your family is our family.”

“If Kingsley is a Sinclair, then Meer is a Sinclair.”

“Yes.”

“And so am I.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Those kids who died were my—what?”

“Cousins once removed,” says Holland. “Removed one generation.”

She takes a glucose monitor out of a bowl on the counter and checks her sugar as she explains the rest.

Kingsley Cello became an exciting new voice in the art scene. He never spoke to his parents again but remained in very occasional touch with his brothers and their wives. In fact, his older brother Harris funded Kingsley’s first show in New York. He was the anonymous sponsor.

Kingsley became famous, painting his imprisonment and escape from the metaphorical kingdom of the Sinclair family over and over, a thousand different ways. He fathered two children in his forties, at a time when his older brothers were on the verge of becoming grandfathers. And though he claimed to hate everything about his family of origin, Cello built his alternate kingdom on the same island where Dean spent his summers. Hidden Beach was so close to Beechwood Island that Kingsley could see Harris’s home from his tower studio.

Perhaps he loved his brothers, still. Or perhaps he knew that proximity to the family he’d escaped would fuel his greatest works of art.

The main contact between Kingsley Cello and Harris Sinclair was through Harris’s wife, Tipper. A peacemaker, Tipper bought paintings from Kingsley and now and then gave him updates on his brother. She also kept up with Dean after Harris renounced him. When Tipper died last year, contact between the three brothers ceased entirely, until the house on Beechwood Island caught fire.

“He wrote Harris a note,” I tell Holland. “At least, I think he did. But he never sent it. It was a Narnia thing. They must have had games where Harris was Peter, Dean was someone else, and Kingsley was Eustace.”

“What did it say?” she asks.

    Oh, Peter Pevensie of Narnia, I have heard your news. I think of you all the time.

—Eustace Scrubb





58


A bit more than a year ago, Holland explains, when Kingsley first began showing signs of dementia, Tipper Sinclair had a talk with Meer. It happened because she stopped by Hidden Beach. She had an appointment with Kingsley for him to show her a couple new paintings for a family acquisition.

But Kingsley wasn’t home. June and Brock had taken the car to a crafts market for the morning. Tatum was at school. So only Meer was there to answer the door.

They called Kingsley’s phone to find out where he’d gone, but he didn’t answer. They went up to the studio, but he wasn’t there. Meer hadn’t seen his father since breakfast.

What followed was a long hunt for Kingsley, all over the property. Finally, they took Tipper’s car slowly along South Road, calling his name.

They found him at the gas station, sitting on a bench with a couple attendants, drinking an orange soda. The workers had convinced him to stay when they saw him wandering down the road. They were trying to get him to call someone to pick him up. He had his phone with him, but he wouldn’t make the call. He said he was fine.

Tipper and Meer took Kingsley back to Hidden Beach. Together, they settled him upstairs in the studio, where he began to paint.

Once they were alone again, Tipper took Meer for a long walk on the beach and told him his father had been born Kincaid Sinclair. She explained the history of the brothers and that she was Meer’s aunt. Tipper said Kingsley had asked her never to reveal his parentage or their family connection to June or Meer. In fact, Kingsley kept his family of origin secret from everyone.

Tipper told Meer she thought Kingsley was ill. And that Meer needed to know about his extended family if his father was really sinking into dementia. She told Meer about Holland, Johnny, Cadence, and Mirren, all his cousins once removed, all close to his own age. Plus some little cousins as well. And Meer told Tipper about the half sister he’d never met, Matilda Klein.