“Impossible,” Maisie says, rubbing circles on her back.
“I would have refused to let you go,” I say. “Even if you were his, which you weren’t.”
“Maybe you remember him,” Nell says to her.
Emily considers this, looking into her own memory for Duke. “It’s like watching a movie,” she says. “I can see the whole thing now that you’ve told us. So yes, I remember Duke, but I also remember you and Veronica sitting at that table registering people for auditions, and I remember Ripley standing by the swimming pool, and I remember your grandmother. I mean, it’s not the same thing.”
“Still,” Nell says encouragingly. “It’s something.”
“It’s not. It’s nothing.” Emily’s beautiful eyes fill up again. “I just wish he could go back to being a famous movie star who I wanted to be my father when I was a teenager. I wish he could have waited out the pandemic on a yacht in Capri.”
“Everybody wishes that,” I say.
Maisie takes Emily’s braid into her hands. “But then we’d have spent the rest of our lives thinking that Duke played George in Our Town and Mom dumped Duke for Dad. I never would have known that Mom used to spell her name with a ‘u,’ or that she wanted to be a vet for a week in high school, or that she ruptured her Achilles. I never would have known that Dad played the Stage Manager. I’m not saying Duke needed to drown so that we could get our facts straight, but I’m not sorry to know. The truth is I’ve never been one hundred percent positive who your father was and now I am. I mean, I knew it was probably Dad, but didn’t part of you think that paternity was going to be the big reveal?”
I look at Maisie, aghast. “Are you serious?”
She shrugs. “The only thing she ever said to me when I was a kid was that Duke was her father.”
“She told me the same thing and I never believed it,” Nell says. “Didn’t you ever watch her in the barn with Dad? It’s like they’re the same person.”
Joe started taking Emily with him to work after Nell was born, at least for a few hours in the morning, affording me the luxury of having only two children under the age of five instead of three. He showed her which green plants were weeds and taught her how to take those weeds out by the roots. He laminated a small picture of the dreaded plum curculio beetle for her to keep in her pocket so she could be on the lookout. Emily has always been Joe’s.
Emily stands, then reaches down to pull her sisters to their feet, one with each hand. “Is there anything else we need to know about the past?” Back to work, is what she’s telling us.
“I think that’s everything.”
“Then tell us what happened when Duke died,” Emily says.
Emily, Emily, stop. I shake my head. “You know that story already.” Talking about Duke as I knew him when he was alive has kept him alive this past week. I’d just as soon leave it at that.
For a good ten minutes we work without talking, which may be the new family record, but then Maisie breaks down just after emptying her bucket. “I was at the Minties’，” she says. “Lauren Mintie called me in the middle of the night because Ramona had gone into labor and she was barking and whining.”
“Doesn’t every living thing whine during labor?” Nell asks.
“Lauren said she was afraid something would go wrong and the kids would wake up in the morning and the dog would be dead and the puppies would be dead and then they’d be traumatized. Like dogs have never done this without human supervision before. But births are a good experience so I told her I’d come. Plus she said Ramona was in the bathtub downstairs and she’d leave the door open and the lights on but they’d all stay upstairs so I wouldn’t have to see anyone but the dog.”
“Contactless whelping,” Emily says.
“Ramona’s a nice dog,” Nell says.
Maisie nods. “She was very good. She had seven puppies so it took a long time. I got the window open and turned on the overhead fan. You can’t believe how awful puppies smell.”
“Everything you do smells,” Nell says.
Maisie ignores this. “The third one came out sideways so who knows, maybe it was a good thing I was there. That one died. I found a baggie for it in the kitchen and took it with me.”
“Don’t tell us that,” Emily says.
I wonder if there’s a puppy in the freezer somewhere.
Maisie keeps going. “I was just rubbing puppies, trying to get them stimulated to nurse, trying to get them to latch on. By the time Ramona was finished and I’d wiped the mess out of the bathtub and put the dirty towels in the laundry it was really late. Lauren left out extra towels and I made a new bed in the tub and brought Ramona some food and water. It must have been two o’clock before I got out of there. I drove home with the windows down because I was covered in puppy stink. I came up over the hill in the pitch--black dark and saw Duchess in my headlights, standing in the middle of the road. I swear to god, if I’d turned my head for a second I would have killed her.”
Emily turns around. “What?”
“Duchess was in the middle of the road.”
“You didn’t tell me any of this,” I say to her.
“I didn’t even think about it then but what are the chances?”
“If you were leaving the Minties’ then she was a long way from home,” Emily says.
“Right? And if she’s just standing in the road in the dark, somebody was going to hit her. So I pulled over and got her in the car and she was practically in my lap, licking my sweatshirt, going out of her mind over the puppy slime. That’s not a small dog. I drove her back to the Whitings’ and put her in the yard. I was all keyed up. By the time I took a shower and looked at my phone it was three o’clock. That’s when I saw the news about Duke.” Maisie looks at me. “I don’t know why I woke you up. You’d been working all day. I should have let you sleep.”
“Of course you woke me up.”
She shakes her head. “He was still going to be dead in the morning.”
That night when I opened my eyes, Maisie was sitting on my side of the bed in the dark, scrolling on her phone. It was the light of the phone that woke me up.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
She ran her hand over my leg, over the summer quilt that covered my leg, and I knew it was bad. Joe was asleep beside me. I asked her where the girls were.
She shook her head. “Everyone’s fine.” Then she told me Duke was dead, and I thought for a second she was talking about a dog because Maisie was always going out in the middle of the night for one animal or another. And then I understood.
“How?” I whispered.
“He drowned. He was on a boat in Capri and he drowned.”
She meant both the famous actor and a young man I’d known a hundred years ago, the one who hadn’t crossed my mind in such long time. The two of them died together. I remembered how he would shake me gently awake at four in the morning, his hand running up my arm in the tangle of our sheets. Wake up, wake up, he’d say. It’s time to smoke.
“Mom and I went down to the kitchen and looked at our phones. There wasn’t any update in the news but the internet was flooded with pictures of him. There must have been a thousand pictures, and I said, one of these days, you’re going to have to tell us what happened.”