Souvenir
It is a quirk of the old house that the porch is often warmer in the winter than in late August. The afternoon sun slips between the neighboring houses at just the right angle, sending a cascade of warm, orange light onto the empty wall. Martha falls into the padded metal lounge chair and stares at the place where the painting should be. She tries to recreate it from memory, but for once her mind is blank. Martha sits and stares, perhaps for hours. She loses track.
By the time Fiona was diagnosed, it was too late to do anything. Against her wishes, Alice quit school to care for her. At the time Martha was in Boston, taking classes at the museum school to complete her degree. Her mother refused further help—she would not have two dropout daughters on her hands—and Martha knew she preferred to have Alice take care of her anyway. So she returned only at the end, when her pale shell of a mother was wrapped in bathrobe and propped here in the sunroom, where she died one Friday morning with her face turned toward the sun. Her last words to Martha were, “Take care of your sister.”
By the time Martha hears Alice pull into the driveway, it is dark. She has stared for so long that she can see the canvas on the wall. It looks like cracked stained glass. A face emerges slowly from the shards, the glittering emeralds and sapphires, the angry black edges. That’s when she realizes she and Alice were wrong. It is not self-portrait. It is a painting of their father. He had caught his foot in a net and thrown over the side of his boat. They never found his body.
Through the dark house, Martha hears footsteps. Alice appears in the doorway dressed in Tim’s faded red BU sweatshirt, one of their mother’s flowered skirts, and combat boots that belonged to an old boyfriend. If Alice has clothes of her own, Martha has never seen them.
“You took Mom’s painting,” says Martha.
“You have to promise you won’t be mad.”
“Too late.”
“Tim found me after class,” Alice turns to flick on the overhead light. They squint at each other in the sudden brightness. “He wants you to know he’s okay. And he’s sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Martha wants to hear Alice admit what she’s done.
Alice sighs dramatically at her sister’s oblique games. “Mom’s painting. It was the only chance he had to save the Cary Anne.”
“So it’s his boat or our painting?” Martha grips the armrest until the metal edge cuts into her palm.
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what’s it like?”
Alice’s flushed cheeks could be taken as a sign of remorse, but Martha knows her sister to be incapable of the emotion. Alice believes that it is the purity of intention that counts, especially when one of her schemes doesn’t turn out right.
“Our parents are gone, but he can still save his.”
Of course, Alice is supporting Tim in his rescue mission. She always saving something: the whales, the boat, their mother.
“But that painting was all we had.” Martha’s heart clenched inside her. “There’s nothing left of her now.”
“It’s just a painting, Marty. It’s not like it can bring her back.”
Alice has never understood that they were not just paintings to Martha.
Alice pulls a check from her back pocket and thrusts it toward her sister. Even in the dark Martha recognizes Tim’s quavering block letters and knows he is gone for good this time. He cannot face her. Unlike Alice, he knows what he has done is unforgivable.
“He gave us half,” says Alice. “It was worth more than you’d think.”
Martha shakes her head. She has never thought about how much she could get for the painting, and was foolish enough to think her sister felt the same way.
“It’s not a self-portrait, you know,” says Martha finally.
“Sure it is,” says Alice. “I remember the day she painted it.”
“It’s Dad. But you don’t remember him, do you?”