Энн Пэтчетт - The Dutch House

“I would have missed you too much.”

She turned around and looked at the painting again. “That look on my face? That’s me looking at Simon.” She took a last pull on her cigarette and then tossed it out the window. “After he left everything really went to hell, or probably it went to hell those two weeks I was sitting in the observatory but I was too happy to notice it then. Mommy couldn’t have stayed. I really do believe that. She would have gone crazy if she had to live in a mansion and have her portrait painted.”

“She seems comfortable enough in there now.” I looked over at the house but there was no one looking back at us through the windows. I threw out my cigarette and coughed, then we each lit another.

“Now there are people in the house she can feel sorry for. When she lived there the only person she could feel sorry for was herself.” She pulled the smoke in and then emptied her lungs of smoke. “That was untenable.”

Maeve was right, of course, although the insight provided no comfort. When at last our mother came out of the house and got into the back seat with the painting, she was changed. Even before she spoke, there was an air of purpose I hadn’t seen in her before. I knew things would be different now. Our mother was going back to work.

“Sweet people,” she said. “Inez has been a saint. She’s the first person Norma’s been able to keep for more than a month. Norma’s been out in Palo Alto since medical school. She’d been managing things from California but then she said it all fell apart. She had to move home to take care of her mother.”

“We figured that much out.” We each took the last draw off our final cigarettes and pitched them into the grass like darts, then Maeve headed down the driveway to VanHoebeek Street. We did not look back.

“Norma wanted to put her into care at first but Andrea won’t leave the house.”

“I could have gotten her out of the house,” Maeve said.

“She’s not comfortable out of the house, and she doesn’t like people in the house either. The cleaners and repairmen, everything upsets her. It’s been very hard for Norma.”

“She’s a doctor?” I asked. Someone in the family should have been.

“She’s a pediatric oncologist. She told me it was all because of you. Apparently her mother felt very competitive when you went to medical school.”

Poor Norma. It had never occurred to me that someone else had been forced into the race. “What about her sister? What about Bright?”

“She’s a yoga instructor. She lives in Banff.”

“The pediatric oncologist leaves Stanford to take care of her mother and the yoga instructor stays in Canada?” Maeve asked.

“I think that’s right,” our mother said. “All I know is that the younger girl doesn’t come home.”

“Go, Bright,” Maeve said.

“Norma needs help, Norma and Inez. Norma’s just started practicing at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.”

I said that I felt certain there was still a great deal of money. The house hadn’t changed. Andrea didn’t go anywhere.

“Andrea knows more about money than J.D. Rockefeller,” Maeve said. “Believe me, she’s still got it.”

“I don’t think money’s the problem. They just need to find someone they can trust, someone Andrea feels comfortable with.”

Maeve hit the brakes so abruptly I was sure she was saving our lives, that there was a collision coming up in my blind spot. She and I had our seatbelts on but our mother and the painting were thrown forward into the seats in front of them with blunt force.

“Listen to me,” Maeve said, whipping around, the cords of her neck straining to hold her head in place. “You’re not going back there. You were curious. We went with you. It’s done.”

Our mother gave herself a shake to see if she was hurt. She touched her nose. There was blood on her fingers. “They need me,” she said.

“ I need you!” Maeve said, her voice raised. “I’ve always needed you. You are not going back to that house.”

My mother took a tissue from her pocket and held it under her nose, then settled the painting back in its place. She put on her seatbelt using one hand. The Toyota behind us laid on the horn. “Let’s talk about this at home.” She had made her decision but had yet to find a way to make it palatable to her children.

Maeve had meant to drive me to the train station the next day but the traffic was so light, and she was so furious, she wound up taking me all the way to New York. “All this bull shit about service and forgiveness and peace. I’m not going to have her going back and forth between my house and Andrea.”

“Are you going to tell her to leave?” I tried to keep any trace of eagerness from my voice, reminding myself that this was Maeve’s mother, Maeve’s joy.

She was stricken at the thought. “She’d just move in over there. You know they’d love that. She keeps saying that Andrea’s comfortable with her and that’s why she needs to help, as if I give a fuck about Andrea’s comfort.”

“Let me talk to her,” I said. “I’ll tell her it’s not good for your health.”

“I’ve already told her that. And by the way, it’s not good for my health. The thought that she would go back there for her and not—” She stopped herself before she said it.

Somehow with everything that had happened we’d forgotten the painting in the back of the car. “Take it to May,” Maeve said when she pulled up in front of my house.

“No,” I said. “It’s yours. Give it to May when she’s grown and has her own house. You need to keep it awhile. Put it over your mantel and think of Simon.”

Maeve shook her head. “I don’t want anything that was in that house. I’m telling you, it will only make me crazier than I already am.”

I looked at the girl in the portrait. They should have let her always be that girl. “Then you have to promise me you’ll take it back later.”

“I will,” she said.

“Let’s find a parking place and you can come in and give it to May.” We were double-parked.

Maeve shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a parking space. Please.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re right here.”

She shook her head. She almost looked like she was going to cry. “I’m tired.” And then she said please again.

So I let her go. I went around to the back and pulled out the painting and my duffel bag. It had started to rain and so I didn’t stand on the street and watch her drive off. I didn’t wave. I found my keys and hustled to get the painting inside.

We talked plenty after that, about our mother’s daily reports of Andrea and Norma and the house, and how it was turning Maeve into a complete wreck. She talked about Otterson’s. I told her about a building I wanted to buy that would require me to sell another building I didn’t want to sell. I told her May was ecstatic about the painting. “We put it in the living room, over the fireplace.”

“Me in your living room every day?”

“It’s gorgeous.”

“Celeste doesn’t mind?”

“It looks too much like May for Celeste to mind. Everybody thinks it’s May except May. When anybody asks her she says, ‘It’s a portrait of me and my aunt.’ ”

Two weeks after our trip to the Dutch House, my mother called me just before daylight to tell me that Maeve was dead.

“Is she there?” I asked. I didn’t believe her. I wanted Maeve to come to the phone and say it herself.

Celeste sat up in bed, looked at me. “What is it?”

“She’s here,” my mother said. “I’m with her.”

“Have you called an ambulance?”

“I will. I wanted to call you first.”