"Henderson told me you wanted to talk about the funeral," I said, looking from Ginny to Susanna. My annoyance with mercurial Clare had peaked, and I was prepared to endure whatever new indignity they might foist on me.
"Not actually about the funeral," Susanna said, the baby sleeping against her bosom.
"But you are reading something, aren't you?" Clare asked. "We have you slotted between Will's friends Diane and Ben Gibbs."
"Between?"
"Is there somewhere else you'd rather be?"
This was not what I had in mind, to be "slotted," one of several people in Will's life saying a few words. I wanted to be last; I wanted the last word-but I said nothing for the time being.
"What are you going to read?" Ginny asked.
"A poem by an Irish writer about the birth of his daughter. It's very celebratory." Henderson's friend in New York had faxed it shortly before we'd left the Lighthouse Motel.
At that Susanna pulled Rose tighter against her and started to tear up. "Thank you, Sophy." Her sweetness made me remember another line from Will's diary, about his wanting to go to California to see Rose but putting it off until I feel better than this. When I read it, it made me think he had not killed himself, that he would not have chosen to die before seeing his granddaughter.
"What we wanted to talk to you about," Ginny said, "is Daddy's house."
"We're trying to figure out what to do with it," Susanna said. "Neither of us can be here for the summer, except for a few weeks. Mommy thinks we should rent it out for gazillions of dollars, but we don't want to right away"
"I didn't say you had to," Clare said. "I merely said that financially, it makes sense to-"
"We can't bear to go through Daddy's things now and try to make the house all nice for summer rental. So we wondered if you'd house-sit until Labor Day. In September we'll get a renter for the winter."
It was a touching gift, but it couldn't have been more complicated. I don't imagine the girls had thought it through: the house stored the memories of everything I had yearned for and loved and abandoned. It was a branch of my psyche, and I didn't know how long I could stand being there.
Then I was puzzled. Did they know the depth of their father's anguish, or was that clear only to those of us who'd read the diary? Would they change their minds about the house if they knew how deeply I had hurt him? "Thank you," I said softly. "I don't exactly know how to-"
Susanna must have been reading my mind or the bemusement on my face. "We thought it was awful that he left you a dollar in his will."
"On the other hand," Clare said, "you wanted the divorce."
"Mother," Ginny said, "was that necessary?"
"I only meant that's why he was hostile." When the rest of us greeted her explanation with stony silence, she went on: "I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has experienced Will's spitefulness."
"Ginny and I didn't come here to bash Daddy," Susanna said.
"I didn't either," I said, taking shelter in the lee of the girls' criticism and still smarting from Clare's jab at me.
Her face darkened. Did she always say whatever came into her head? Or was there a coherent pattern to her personality that I was missing? Within seconds, she pasted on a thin smile and said cheerily, "How about some dessert?" She leaped out of her seat and moved toward the kitchen. I could see her daughters roll their eyes at each other as she pushed open the swinging door. "I picked up a splendid apple pie at the bakery on Main Street. And I'll make a pot of decaf for us."
Once Clare was out of the room, Ginny turned to Henderson and me. "I can't believe the things that come out of her mouth." Two days before, Ginny had been keen on her mother's arrival, but she was being reminded that Clare did not wear well, though she had enough money to make a splashy entrance and enough chutzpah to promise she could part the sea.
"There are people who hate to miss a funeral," Henderson said. "It's one of great stages for drama, the pageant of death. When my lover Ricardo died, I felt like the star of my favorite opera, La Traviata. And my favorite soap opera, 'General Hospital.' But all of that was nothing compared with what happened when Ricardo's mother arrived: Hello, Mommy Dearest."
"I'm thinking about your offer," I said. It was easier to speak with Clare out of the room. "I'm touched, but I'm not sure if spending the summer there would be the way to get on with my life or to avoid getting on with it." I tried to picture Daniel and his children there, and to imagine a life without any of them. Could I douse every last spark that flew between him and me? Crush out of existence my tender feelings for the children? But when I considered my idea for a book about all of these lives and deaths, I thought Will's house might be a fertile place to start writing it. Maybe the best place. Certainly the riskiest. The eye of the storm. But painful as it would be, wouldn't I rather be there than inside the mind of Bill and Melinda Gates's nanny?
I looked from Ginny, whose face was soft and focused on mine, to Susanna, who had wandered deep into her own thoughts. Then she looked up at me, somberly, and at everyone around the table, except Andy, who had taken the baby to the couch. "I hadn't seen him in two years, not since Andy and I got married and he came to the wedding. The last time I talked to him was a few days after Sophy left. He cried. I sent him pictures of the baby and kept telling him to visit us. He promised he would, but I stopped believing it when he said he had to help someone deliver a sailboat to the Virgin Islands."
Her hand on the table was close enough for me to touch. I wrapped my palm around it and saw her eyes glass over with tears. Should I tell her what I had read in the diary: his children frightened him; real life was terrifying; and sailing was the best way he knew to dull the terror. "He wanted to," I said softly. "I know he wanted to. He was just so… fragile." So fragile, and I had left him. Should I have stayed? If I had, would he be alive now? Did his daughters need to know that these questions pressed on me like the March wind?
"But he wasn't always fragile," Ginny said. "He used to be full of energy. Always planning adventures for us, wanting us to sail and rock-climb and learn Chinese. Remember the summer we were ten and he took us down the Wye River on a barge? And afterward we went to Bath, and he hired a horse and buggy to take us around the city center? We went about five times, like a merry-go-round we didn't want to get off. And the summer we both did Outward Bound and Daddy couldn't stop telling everyone? Do you know what we found, Sophy, when Mom and I were at his house this morning? His old passports. There was one from the 1960s, and every single inch of every page was stamped. Hong Kong, Saigon, Taipei, Manila, hundreds of trips. God only knows what creepy spy things he was doing, but he wasn't moping around feeling sorry for himself. That wasn't always Daddy's life. We have to remember that."
"He was different after Jesse died," Susanna said.
"We all were."
"Daddy was more different," Susanna said. "I read a story in the paper a few years ago about a hunter who accidentally shot his son. As soon as he saw what he'd done, he shot himself dead. That's how Daddy must have felt after Jesse died, like a man who wanted to turn the gun on himself."
"But he didn't do that," I said. "We don't know he killed himself. He didn't in any obvious way, so until we hear otherwise, we-"
"Daddy was ingenious," Susanna said. "Maybe he thought that if he killed himself, we wouldn't get the insurance money, so he found a way that didn't seem like suicide."
"There aren't too many of those," Henderson said. "But if he did, it'll turn up in the autopsy."
Did I need to remind them that there was a chance it wouldn't? Did I need to tell them everything I knew, felt, and feared? Isn't it a parent's prerogative, to withhold information? Isn't it everyone's?