“I want him out of here,” he said quietly. It was almost time for his next pill, so his voice was gone. The sound scratched as if tearing his throat. But his words were unmistakable.
18
ZEE TOOK THE PHONE into the den. She’d been talking to Melville for the last half hour, trying her best to calm him down. By the time she hung up, Jessina had put Finch to bed and had left Zee a note.
“Get some sleep,” she said to Melville after they’d talked in circles for the third time. “We’ll figure things out tomorrow.”
The television was still on, but muted. Zee sat on the couch, flipped the remote, finding Turner Classics: Jane Eyre with Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles. She didn’t turn up the sound but just sat staring at the screen. “Who is Grace Poole?” she said to the television set. It was a game they had invented, she and Melville and Finch, a kind of Jeopardy! for the literary set. Something Finch had tried on his lit classes. Who is Grace Poole? was the answer. The question was one she had written herself: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife in the attic. No one had talked about the parallel to her mother when the question was asked. She thought now about the way her question should have been worded: She takes care of Rochester’s crazy wife. There was never any mention of an attic in Bronte’s book, and, in the film, it was more like a tower room than an attic. She had always gotten it wrong. It was Maureen and not Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife who lived in the attic. And though both Finch and Melville had challenged wrong answers all the time and must certainly have noticed the error of her question, they had never challenged Zee on this one.
Zee fell asleep to the sound of foghorns. She dreamed of the stars and of the Friendship, not the reproduction that was at the wharves today but the old one that Maureen had tried to write about. Then she dreamed about Bernini’s sculpture of Neptune and Triton as it had once been described to her by Maureen. Or maybe it was Lilly… No, it was Maureen.
19
THE DAY MAUREEN KILLED herself, Zee had borrowed Mickey’s dory and gone to Baker’s Island to get the Yeats book in an effort to cheer her mother.
Maureen’s mood seemed better that day. Certainly she was kinder to Zee, whom she had been ignoring ever since the visit to Arcana’s psychic studio. The last few months had reminded Zee of the Snow White fairy tale, not just because of Arcana and an image she kept having of her holding out a poisoned apple, but because her mother, who had once loved Zee so much, had grown cold ever since the pronouncement of the psychic, as if the very existence of Zee were keeping her from her fairy-tale ending.
That was the way it was between them for the rest of the summer. Maureen stopped writing “The Once”-in fact, she stopped writing altogether. Mostly she just stared out at the water or sat upstairs in her room. She hardly ate and rarely if ever slept.
So on her way to the island to get the book, Zee was encouraged. Her mother’s mood seemed lighter, and though Zee hadn’t been able to talk her into coming along, Maureen had sounded almost interested when Zee told her what she was planning to do.
“You’ve always loved that book,” Zee said hopefully.
“Thank you for doing this,” Maureen said, and actually got out of bed and came down to the kitchen to see Zee off.
“I love you,” Maureen said to her.
It seemed an odd thing to say, because of how bad things had been between them since the episode with the psychic. But Maureen was smiling when she said it, another encouraging sign, or so Zee thought at the time.
In retrospect, Zee knew that such behavior was a common occurrence in suicide cases. The victim would often feel much better once the decision to end things had finally been made. The uplift in spirits often left family members that much more shocked when the suicide happened. “She seemed so much better,” they would declare.
Though Lilly had been Zee’s first suicide since she’d become a psychologist, she had heard stories from other therapists, including Mattei. A vast and rapid improvement in a depressed mood can be cause for alarm. In bipolar patients it is often the signal of impending mania. In suicidal patients it often means that they’ve made that final decision and, upon making it, feel an almost exhilarating sense of relief. But Zee had no such knowledge when Maureen died. Though to most people who met her, she seemed older, Zee had only recently turned thirteen.
Baker’s Island wasn’t as close by as some of the other Salem islands were; it was actually closer to Manchester than to Salem. When Zee finally got there, it was after three. She tied up the dory and hurried up the ramp.
Zee walked past the spot where the residents parked their wheel-barrows, the only vehicles used to carry things to and from the old cottages, and then she headed toward the cottage, greeting people as she passed, grown-ups and children she’d known since she was little, whose families had summered here for generations. She wanted to stop and chat with them, but she couldn’t. Not today.
She let herself into the cottage with the key that Maureen always left in the window box. The front room was dark and shuttered. Maureen hadn’t been here once all summer, a clue that only in hindsight Zee realized should have been cause for alarm. Every summer since Zee was a baby, Maureen had used the cottage as her writing space.
This year the house had not been opened. As Zee entered the doorway, she watched a mouse dart and hide; she couldn’t see where it went. The cottage was tiny, only two rooms, the large front room with a small soapstone sink and hand pump and an old-fashioned icebox. A round table sat in the middle of the floor. If the house had been on the mainland, its decoration might have been right out of the Shabby Chic or Maine Cottage catalogs, but here one recognized it as the accumulation of hand-me-downs or discarded items from other places that had been collected over a number of summers: an old rubber bathing cap hanging on a hook, its chin piece cracked and splintered, a straw sun hat from the 1920s that had once had a silk flower on top but that now had only a small hole where that flower had once been attached.
Zee pulled open the four French windows over the sink, then pushed out the shutters beyond. Bright light flooded the room. A nursery web spider took shelter in a crack between the rafters.
Zee had always loved this place. When Maureen planned to stay overnight, she usually brought Zee along, her only requirement being that Zee learn to amuse herself, so that Maureen could write undisturbed. That was fine by Zee, who spent as much time outside as she could. On rainy days she would sit on the rug and draw pictures or play solitaire while her mother worked on her stories. Sometimes Zee read the old Nancy Drew mysteries that had been left there by her step-grandfather’s first wife when she was a child.
The rug was rolled up in a corner. It bulged slightly in the center, something she hadn’t noticed before. Either it had been improperly stored or something had been rolled up with it. Her cards, maybe? A box of crayons?
The door to the bedroom was closed. Zee hesitated before it. For as long as she could remember, she’d been forbidden to enter what had once been the bedroom. Though there was a double brass bed in the corner, they did not sleep in the room when they stayed here. Maureen slept instead on the couch and Zee in a sleeping bag on a huge canvas air mattress on the floor next to her mother.
Zee opened the door and stood looking at what had once been her parents’ marriage bed. The brass was greening where a leak in the roof had caused a slow drip. She could see the sheets on the bed, never changed, and she could make out the faded green chenille bedspread, which smelled musty from the leak.
On that last day of Maureen’s life, Zee stood again in the bedroom on Baker’s Island. But something was wrong with the picture. It wasn’t just that the roof was leaking or that the green chenille bedspread was mildewed from the moisture. It was something else. As she looked at the pillow, she realized that the Yeats book was not there. The one thing her mother wanted, the one thing she had come here to get, was missing.
Zee tore the house apart looking for the book. She looked behind and under the bed. She looked in the icebox
