“Darling,” she says gently, “I think we can leave that assessment for Dr. Hancock. But he should have all the facts—”
“Like he’s had all the facts about her?” He jabs his finger at Edith so violently that Edith cowers and whimpers. Chloe, who has been happily engaged in peekaboo with Edith, begins to cry.
“As a matter of fact,” Sky says, the doubt in her eyes hardening into ice, “he knows all about Edith. I told him everything when he took over, after my father died. If there were any way Edith could live outside, I would have her here with me. If there were any way I could go back and undo what I did forty-five years ago, I would. But remember, I was all alone. Your father was dead.”
“So you said. A tragic car accident. Still you could have fought harder to keep me.”
I notice that Sky looks away from Peter when he says “car accident” and then looks at him sideways the way Peter looks when he’s lying. That single eye reminds me of something—
I look in through the window to the parlor, where I can see the portrait hanging over the mantel. The bright primary colors look familiar. I picture the landscapes in the lounge at Crantham, those two figures on the bench, then that disembodied eye outside of Hancock’s office—
“Peter’s father was a painter, wasn’t he?” I ask Sky. She gives me a warning look but I go on. “And a patient at Crantham.”
Peter whips his head around to stare at Sky. “You told me that you met him in France.”
“I was sent to France after we fell in love,” Sky says gently. “My father wanted to separate us.”
“He was a mental patient?” Peter asks, aghast.
“He was a talented painter,” Sky says reprovingly. “A misunderstood genius. His paintings still hang at the hospital.”
“They do,” I say, thinking of the landscapes in the lounge and then what the paintings turned into when the woman disappeared. “He put all his sorrow at losing you into his paintings.”
Sky gives me a grateful look. “Yes, you understand. When I came back from France I saw how much he loved me. He painted that portrait of me.” She looks through the window into the parlor at the painting over the mantel.
“And then you went away again,” I say.
A shadow passes over Sky’s face. Edith reaches up to stroke her cheek, as if to banish her sadness. “You were so sad those first months at college,” Edith says. “I didn’t understand at first. You had been broken apart.”
“That’s how he painted you,” I say, “broken into pieces. And then . . .”—I remember what Dr. Hancock said the first time I commented on the paintings—“he killed himself.”
A tear rolls down Sky’s weathered cheek. She looks toward Peter. “I didn’t want you to know.”
“My father was a suicide,” he says, his voice curiously flat. I remember what he said to me after I almost drowned in the tub: What kind of a mother kills herself, leaving a child behind? Even after all he’s done I recognize the anguish of being left and want to spare him.
“He must not have known you were pregnant,” I say to Sky.
“I never had a chance to tell him,” Sky says. “By the time I knew, he had killed himself. I’ve always regretted that I let my father send me away and that I let him convince me to give you up. That’s why I don’t want you to saddle yourself to one wrong decision. Believe me, son, you don’t want to live with that kind of regret.”
I think she has used the word son deliberately, but what she doesn’t know is that Peter once told me he hated when his father (his adopted father, I realize now) called him that. He did it to make me feel small, he’d said, and my heart had bled for the boy who had grown up feeling so unloved. Now I see his jaw stiffen. “What do you suggest we do?” he asks in a tight voice. He’s taken the pain and shame of learning that his father was a suicide and turned it into anger against Sky.
“I suggest we sleep on it,” Sky says with an easy smile that tells me she has not heard the threat in his voice.
“Under the same roof as two lunatics?” he asks.
Sky frowns. “Edith is harmless, and as for Daphne . . . if you thought she was dangerous, why did you send her to me?”
A vein pulses at Peter’s temple. He doesn’t like to have people question him. He is going to explode. For a moment I am hopeful. Then Sky will know he is the crazy one. But before he can get out a word, another man announces himself on the terrace.
“I see you’ve found them.” Dr. Hancock says, two orderlies in tow. My heart sinks. “I’ll take them back to the hospital now.”
“There,” Sky says. “Problem solved. We’ll discuss the matter tonight. And we’ll talk about your father. Perhaps tomorrow we can go look at his paintings together.” She pats Peter on the knee, then turns to me. “Don’t worry, dear, just one more night and it’ll all come right if I know my boy.”
But she doesn’t, I think, she doesn’t know him at all.
Edith’s Journal, December 10, 1971 (cont.)
I think I lost a little time after the baby came. The next thing I knew, I was holding the baby wrapped in the college blanket I’d bought from the bookstore my first week. A pair of bloody scissors lay on the floor. I didn’t remember getting them or the blanket from the room. Had Libby gone for them?
“You have to get rid of it,” Libby said.
She was sitting next to me on the bathroom floor. There was blood on her nightgown and mine. Blood on the baby’s face. Everything was
