It’s getting dark outside, the moon fingernail thin, and I start the long walk back up the dock. I agreed to stay the night after shooting my neighbor a text to check on Roscoe. Maybe it’s because I don’t want to go home, feel the restored emptiness of my house without Waylon in it, or think about how all those people at the conference had been right all along. How they had somehow seen me more clearly than I’ve ever been able to see myself.
Or maybe it’s because, after all these years, it finally feels like the icy wall my parents have erected between us since Margaret’s death is slowly starting to melt. That in coming here, I had extended an olive branch. That I was apologizing, for the very first time, for what I did—and in return, they were apologizing for leaving me so alone.
For seeming to forget that I’m their daughter, too.
I walk through the backyard, past the statues and the rose bushes and the giant stone birdbath with a dead palmetto bug floating on its back. Then I step through the back door, the house quiet and still. My parents retreated to their bedroom an hour ago—partly, I think, because we ran out of things to say—and I walk into the kitchen again, emptying the bottle of wine we opened earlier into a fresh glass. Then I walk up the stairs, down the hallway, and into my old bedroom.
They’ve redecorated here, too, a new queen in place of the childhood bed I took with me to Savannah. It looks like a proper guest room now, though I know they don’t have any guests. I resist the urge to peek into Margaret’s room—to see if they’ve erased that, too—and instead place my wine on the bedside table, stripping off my clothes and changing into the pair of pajamas Mom laid out for me on the mattress.
Then I sit on the floor, cradling the wine against my chest, and wonder how I’ll spend the next ten hours alone in the dark.
Just like when I was a child, the house seems to come alive at night. I can hear it breathing—the draft in the hallway like a long exhale; the pop of the floorboards a cracking neck. Margaret’s voice: You ever feel like we’re not alone? I creep out of my bedroom and glance at the stairs: the third floor. Where we used to paint, Margaret and I, the French doors swung open and a warm breeze like breath on our necks.
I start to climb, remembering the way we used to huddle on the balcony, mugs of hot chocolate cupped in our hands anytime the temperature dropped below fifty. Margaret making wishes on shooting stars or pointing hungrily at the water anytime we saw the breach of a fin or the skid of shrimp dimpling the glassy surface.
I reach the landing and look around, the giant open room now housing old furniture covered in sheets like banished ghosts. Mom’s easel is still in the corner, facing the floor-to-ceiling windows like she was just mid-paint, and I can picture her eyes flicking back and forth between the canvas and the backyard, swirling her brush against the various colors of her palette, its own abstract work of art. That thin slab of wood tells the stories of paintings past: the pink she used to color Margaret’s flushed cheeks, the green of my father’s armchair, the blue of the rising tide.
I walk the perimeter of the room, holding the glass below my chin like a security blanket, trying to make out the shapes in the dark.
In the back corner, I come across a pile of paintings perched against the wall, so I sit on the hardwood floor, legs crossed, and start thumbing through them. Some of them are finished—a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter, the creeping jasmine swallowing the bricks of our front gate—while some she abandoned midway through: the rough outline of a face, lines disjointed. Eyes lifeless and blank.
I flip through a couple more, smiling at the ones I recognize, when suddenly, I stop.
There, in the back, is the one I had seen that summer: me in my white nightgown, standing at the edge of the marsh—only now I realize what I had seen before wasn’t finished. Now that girl is flanked by two other bodies: one with brown hair cascading over her shoulders and the other, so small, with locks the color of caramel candy. The three of them are holding hands, walking into the water together, that spring tide moon lighting the way.
And that’s when it hits me.
The girl I had seen in the painting—the girl Margaret had pointed to and assumed to be me—wasn’t actually me at all.
And she isn’t wearing a nightgown. The one in the middle: She’s wearing a robe.
“Isabelle.”
I jump at the voice behind me, knocking my wineglass over with my knee. Then I spin around, the red liquid spilling across the floorboards like blood, and register a body in the dark before me. It’s my mother, the glow of the moon illuminating her face; tears streaming down her cheeks like rain on a window.