“So tell me about your new man,” she said to me after a moment. She was smiling, but I knew there was a serrated edge to her question.
“What’s to say? What do you want to know?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Is the plan to pull him back from the abyss, too? Help him see some angelic meaning in the way his parishioners imitated Mom and Dad?”
It always struck me that Amanda could still refer to those two individuals as Mom and Dad. It was a linguistic nearness that now evaded me. They would, at best, be my parents. My mother. My father. I saw them largely through the formal prism of how they had fought and died or (on good days) the ways they had seemed so glamorous when I was young.
“I think that’s how it started,” I admitted. “That
“But now it’s just him.”
“We have a connection.”
“The angels have whispered in each of your ears?”
“They have in mine. I can’t speak for him.”
“Interesting choice in people to help,” she murmured, and she draped one of her skeletal arms over her eyes.
“Meaning?”
“He seems pretty damn self-sufficient.”
“Maybe that’s his problem.”
“I’d focus on the girl. The teenager. She’s the one who could end up like us,” said my sister.
“Katie.”
“Uh-huh.”
I considered correcting her: I didn’t think that Amanda and I had wound up similarly. But so much of life is about forgiveness and healing-restraining that urge to tweak or lash out or get in the last word-that I said simply, “I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition. At least I hope it isn’t.”
“How much do you like him?”
“So far? Plenty.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Excuse me?”
She yawned, and I noticed when she went to cover her mouth that she was no longer wearing either of the two silver bracelets that usually adorned her wrists. I feared that either they no longer fit or they hurt. My sister was disappearing once again into a wisp of a woman, frightening in her calculated emaciation, and I made a mental note to call her doctors as soon as Stephen and I had left.
“I said, do you trust him? Don’t you worry that this country pastor sees you as his new meal ticket? All of a sudden, a rich, pretty lady drops into his life like an angel-and, please, sis, I only used that word because the simile was irresistible-and he sees in her an opportunity. A retirement plan, if you will.”
“He clearly has assets of his own.”
“Not like yours, I promise. One of these days, you will branch out into angel merchandise. Angel baubles and angel jewelry boxes. Angel note cards. Angel figurines and Christmas ornaments. Angel rainbow catchers for kitchen windows. Angel vacation cruises.”
The sun had warmed the rock beneath me, and I gingerly rolled off my towel so I could feel the heat on all of my skin. My sister was enjoying herself, having a little fun at my expense. “What would occur on an angel cruise?” I asked, in part to change the subject but also in some way to indulge her.
“Oh, you’d give your lectures,” she said. “Everyone would watch the stars from the middle of the ocean. They’d tell stories of the angels who had saved their lives. There would be yoga. Meditation. Angel food cake at all the buffets.”
“You’ve really thought this through.”
“No I haven’t. I was just being glib.”
I smiled at her, but she couldn’t see me because her eyes were still covered by her arm. I said a silent prayer that either she would open her heart to an angel or that an angel would do for my sister what clearly I could not: encourage her to save her own life.
THERE WERE A half dozen boxes of familial history that wouldn’t be sold in the estate sale that followed my parents’ deaths. There was their wedding album and a long shelf of college and high-school yearbooks. There were scrapbooks and photo albums. And there were the long trays of slides, many of which had belonged originally to my grandparents: my father’s mother and father. These cartons, after the house in upstate New York had been sold, were stored in the attic in my aunt and uncle’s home in Fairfield, Connecticut.
I had been out of college and living alone in a small studio in a corner of Brooklyn not quite a dozen subway stops from lower Manhattan when I came across a Bell & Howell slide projector with a carousel in the window of an antique shop in Bay Ridge. It was twenty-five dollars, which seemed like a lot of money for a piece of technology so profoundly useless in the advent of the digital age. But I recalled those yellow-and-blue cartons of slides in the attic in Fairfield, some holding thirty images and some holding forty, and how I hadn’t looked at any of them since one New Year’s Eve when I’d been in the sixth grade. It had been at a dinner party, and my mother had decided in the period between dessert and the moment when the grown-ups would all stand in front of the television with champagne flutes in their hands to watch the ball drop in Times Square that it might be fun to savor the fading Kodachrome images. In all fairness, a great many of the slides would include my parents’ friends who were with them that evening, so the idea wasn’t as self-absorbed and egocentric as it might sound.
And it proved to be a lovely idea. The grown-ups were just tipsy enough to be moved, but not so drunk that they would pass out in the dark. My father set up the white screen in front of the bay window, and we-a dozen grown-ups and the two Laurent daughters-positioned ourselves on the couch and the floor and the dining-room chairs that we carried into the living room. We stopped watching a few minutes before midnight only because the adults felt a moral obligation to bear witness to the precise second that the New Year was commemorated on Broadway.
And so I decided there on the street in Brooklyn to buy the projector and carry it back to my studio. It must have weighed twenty-five pounds, and my apartment was on the fifth floor of a five-story walk-up. The five flights were, in my mind, a great gift: They helped keep me in shape, and the apartment that awaited me at the top was high enough that I could see a part of the bay (though not the Statue of Liberty) through a sliver between two taller buildings to the west.
A few weeks after I bought the slide projector, I went to my aunt and uncle’s for Thanksgiving. When I returned that evening to Brooklyn, I brought with me a dozen trays of slides in a canvas bag. Amanda, who was living in Boston at the time, hadn’t come to Connecticut that year. None of the slide trays had been labeled, but my selection hadn’t been entirely random. I’d made sure that I had images that covered the early years of my parents’ marriage as well as ones highlighting Amanda and me as little girls. (By the time we were in elementary school, even my father-who had savored his use of slides as the family documentarian-had boxed away his slide camera and was using only film.) And then the next evening, completely alone, I allowed myself to study for long moments the man who had murdered my mother and then killed himself; the woman who would die at the hands of a man whom, I have to assume, she had once loved and with whom she had expected to grow old; and their two little girls, each of whom was transformed by their parents’ deaths in ways it would take years to fully comprehend. That night I used a white bedsheet for a screen.
What struck me most as I sipped a glass of wine and studied the images was how charismatic and elegant my parents had been. The colors were faded, which gave the two of them an even more retro sort of allure: Rock Hudson and Doris Day. My father was more robust than I usually thought of him, though my mother was exactly as beautiful. In some of the slides, when she was just about my age then, she was decked out in dresses with pointed collars and cuffed sleeves. In others, as the 1960s became the 1970s, she was in gold-sequined bathing suits on the white sands of Palm Beach and the farthest tip of Long Island, her skin nearly the red of a lobster. Meanwhile my father, who appeared in considerably fewer photos than my mother, would be decked out in beige trench coats and black wing tips, in charcoal gray business suits, or in tennis shorts and navy blue sweaters. In one shot, years before I was born, he was wearing a salmon-colored Nehru shirt and a peace medallion the size of a coaster, and my sense was that he was at a Halloween costume party. My father with a peace medallion? Had to be his idea of
