“So it is,” I said. It was true. For all the unending tension between us, as I looked into that face that was so like my own, I felt a certain peace I had lost since Dad’s death.
But she broke the spell by saying sharply, “I know you think I should have stayed longer after the funeral.”
“You’ve got your life to live here. It was easier for me to handle it.”
“I suppose it was,” she said. It was a coded put-down, of course. You had the time because, by contrast with me, you don’t have a life. That’s sibling rivalry for you.
I pulled her scrapbook about Regina out of my jacket pocket and put it on the table. “I found this at home. I don’t remember you making it.”
“Before your time, I suppose.”
“I thought you might want it.”
She pulled the dog-eared little book toward her. She didn’t pick it up, but turned the pages with the tips of her thumb and forefinger. It was as if I had presented her with her afterbirth pickled in a jar. She said coldly, “Thanks.”
I was irritated, with her and myself. “Shit, Gina. Why do we find it so hard to get on? Even at a time like this. I’m not here to fight—”
“Then why?” she said coldly.
“For Rosa,” I said without hesitation. I was satisfied to see how her smoke-filled eyes, so similar to mine, widened.
That was when the boys burst in, to our mutual relief.
“George!” “Hey, Uncle George …”
Michael was ten, John twelve. They were wearing summer gear, T-shirts, shorts, and huge, expensive- looking trainers. Michael had some kind of complicated Frisbee under his arm. I actually got a hug from Michael, and a punch on the shoulder from his older brother, hard enough to hurt. From those two I took whatever I could get.
I could see their gazes wandering around the kitchen. “Go to my hire car and take a look in the boot.”
“The trunk,” they chorused.
“Whatever. Go, go.”
I always enjoyed playing the indulgent uncle, if only because I had a knack of spotting presents that suited my nephews’ tastes. John always seemed a little duller than his brother, and would be content with computer games and the like, passive entertainments. But little Michael was always a tinkerer. Once I found an old Meccano set — an antique from the sixties, from my own childhood, but in mint condition. Michael had loved it.
My gifts didn’t work quite so well this time. I’d bought them both robot-making kits. You’d put together a motor and wheelbase with a processor you could command via a PC interface, so producing a little beetlelike creature that could scuttle around the room, avoiding chair legs. The beetles could even learn simple tasks, like how to push a table-tennis ball up a ramp. But in the better American schools they build critters like this for homework. The boys dutifully played with the kits for a while, though.
We ate lunch, a simple but typically delicious fish salad — my sister was annoyingly good at everything -
and Gina sent us all outside the house.
Over the immense back lawn we chased Michael’s Frisbee back and forth. He had modified it: it had a series of round holes carved neatly around its perimeter. It shot through the air like a spinning bullet. More engineering: later Michael showed me a whole collection of modified Frisbees, kept in a box under his bed.
He was actually working through a series of experiments in a systematic way, using a bunch of stuff from junk shops and friends’ lofts, trying to design a better Frisbee. At first he had done what you’d expect a kid to do, cutting out smiley faces, building on cabins for model soldiers, installing gigantic fins. But he’d quickly progressed to experiments focused on improving the Frisbees’ actual aerodynamic performance. He had cut out patterned holes, or notched their edges, or scratched spirals and loops into their surfaces. He was even keeping a little log on his computer, with a scanned-in photograph of each change, and results given as objectively as he could, such as records of greatest distance achieved. I was impressed, but I felt kind of wistful, for I would have loved to have been around to share this with him.
I found flying that damn Frisbee hard work, however. When the boys had been smaller it had been easy for me to keep ahead of them. But now John was nearly as tall as me, and both of them were a hell of a lot more athletic. I was soon puffing hard, and embarrassed at my lack of competence with the Frisbee. And tensions between the two of them soon emerged. They made up a catching game with rules that quickly elaborated far beyond my comprehension, and when John infringed a rule — or anyhow Michael thought he did — the bickering started.
Anyhow, so it went. Running around that sandy lawn, with the Atlantic breakers rumbling in the background, I worked as hard as I could while the boys barely broke a sweat, and it was with relief that I welcomed the next milestone in the day, which was Dan’s arrival home from work.
“Hey, boys.” He left his briefcase at the back door of the house and came bounding out onto the lawn to join in the Frisbee game. “George! How’s the mother ship?”
“England swings, Dan.”
He asked about my flight and my hotel, and I was gratified that Michael started telling him about my robot kit. We played for a while. Then we took a walk along the beach — sandy and empty, a private stretch reserved for the estate of which this house was a part.
As the boys ran ahead, still impossibly full of energy, Dan and I walked together. Dan Bazalget was a big man, built like a rugby player. I knew he had played football at college, thirty years before, and his bulk seemed too large for his short-sleeved white shirt. His face was broad, his eyes small. He was bald, and had shaved the remnant fringe of his hair, so that his head gleamed like a cannonball.
Dan was good at conversation. He asked me about the aftermath of Dad’s death, and unlike my sister drew me out a little about the state of my life, my work. But there was always an odd reserve about him, his deep brown eyes unreadable. He would look at me and smile, ostensibly generous, neither judging nor caring. To him I was surely just an appendage of his wife’s past, neither welcome nor unwelcome in his life, just there.
As the sun began its journey down the western sky, we returned home for dinner, the boys running ahead, still whooping, hollering, and fighting.
The meal was strained. The kids picked up on the tension and were subdued. Gina was polite enough during the meal, and her gentle chiding of her children for lapses in manners and so forth was as calm and efficient as ever. But her smiles were steel and fooled nobody.
Before the dessert she went to the kitchen, and I joined her, ostensibly to stack dishes and help make coffee.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“For springing that on you about Rosa. It wasn’t fair.”
“No, it wasn’t.” She loaded her dishwasher with as much aggression as her expensive crockery would allow her.
“But I know she exists, Gina. Or at least existed.” I told her about the photograph.
She sighed and faced me. “And now you’re asking me.”
“ You must know. You must have been — what, twelve, thirteen? You saw her born, growing up—”
“I don’t want to think about this.”
“I need you to tell me the truth,” I said, my voice harder. “I think you have a duty, Gina. You’re my sister, for Christ’s sake. You’re all I’ve got left. Et cetera. I even know where they sent her — to some kind of school, run by a religious order in Rome. The Puissant Order of—”