“I think we’ve said everything that needed to be said.” I hung up the phone.
The insolence, the audacity of this therapist, I thought. And I’ll never forgive Edward for having put her in such incompetent hands. Horses, of all things. What was Edward thinking?
* * *
• • •
Penelope returned home the following week. She had lost ten pounds and was pale but seemed upbeat and in good spirits.
It soon became apparent she had begun to retreat into herself even more than before, and the private child void of grand gestures or public displays of affection was now completely aloof. If you didn’t demand to be let into her world, you’d remain an outsider. I felt grief for the girl she used to be, her—
I stop myself. Penelope was never easy and happy, never without trouble. I grieve the daughter I never had, I understand that now.
After she returned home from the clinic, I witnessed her hurriedly tucking something underneath a pillow or sliding a piece of paper inside a book when I entered the room. I felt compelled to act. One day, while she was in the shower, I checked every trite hiding place I could think of: beneath the mattress, between books on her shelf, in her nightstand, at the bottom of the clothes hamper, I even rifled through her underwear drawer. I found nothing.
What else was I supposed to do, how else was I going to find out—park at her school and keep an eye on her during recess as she stood huddled in a corner? Should I follow her to the mall and hide behind clothing racks, eavesdropping on her phone calls? What good would that do?
Pure luck intervened. Weeks after she returned from that dreaded horse farm, in the middle of the night, while I was in the kitchen getting a drink of water, Penelope made her way down the stairs in the dark, her feet in sandals, flip as her foot hit the bottom of her heel, flop as it hit the ground. I watched her slide open the glass doors leading onto the terrace. It was a chilly night, March, and unseasonably cold, and I instinctively wanted to call out to her, just a mother reminding her child to wear a coat in the cold. She marched across the lawn, her arms crossed in front of her body, clutching something to her chest. The cotton fabric hugging her body made it clear that she had lost even more weight than I had thought. She entered the pool house but reappeared within seconds. Less than a minute and she was back in her room and in her bed. Judging by the speed with which it all occurred, she couldn’t have spent much time concealing anything.
What do you do when you imagine the worst, at the same time realizing that once you know you cannot unknow? And so I didn’t go out to the pool house that night and not the following day. It took me three days of wringing my hands, but then I could no longer resist. I began to root through that old and grimy place, shabby floor of glossy terracotta tile that made it impossible to walk on with heels, pool supplies stacked in every corner and Adirondack chairs with peeled paint covered in spider webs.
I searched every corner, behind every piece of wood leaning against the wall, went through the dusty bin with deflated pool toys covered in dead bugs. Nothing. I bumped into a wooden structure hanging off the ceiling and it made a half turn just to pirouette back into its original position. It was that old wooden kayak. I had seen it before but never so much as wasted a thought on its peculiarity, no lakes were nearby and that was odd but maybe it was just decoration, a flea market find or a leftover from a previous owner. It had a Martha’s Vineyard kind of feel in an authentic and vintage way and it dangled on a rope tied to a metal peg, swayed like a bicycle hanging off a heavy-duty steel hook. There was a compartment with a handle. I held the kayak in place with one hand and with the other I pulled the handle. It popped open. That’s where I found a plastic bag folded over twice with papers inside.
I knew immediately those were the letters she’d written, her victim reparations, those declarations of guilt. Was I prepared to read something I would never be able to unread? I popped the compartment door back into place, knowing once I crossed that line, I had no way of remaining oblivious. The kayak swayed and the hook dislodged from the ceiling. I turned away and covered my eyes. When I opened them again, the kayak had come to rest against the wall, the bulkhead facing the corner. I took it as a sign and left it at that. I dusted myself off and left the kayak untouched in the corner, allowed it to lean in place as if it held up the entire structure and without it, my world would cave in.
25
DONNA
I listen to the house and there’s not a sound to be heard. Edward must have returned to the bedroom but I’m no longer worried. I don’t think he ever set foot in this room, given the disgust he had voiced when I staged it. Here I am in Penelope’s playroom with the bag of letters I refused myself all those years ago.
I pull one of Penelope’s childhood quilts from the top shelf of the closet, two chenille pillows and a blanket from the linen locker behind the door. Musty waves of mothball clouds come at me and a tinge of anger bobs up—the neglect Edward has allowed—but I spread them out on the floor though the blanket is dirty and unkempt. I need to rest. Following Edward around this house has taken a toll on my hip. Remembering the pain earlier from the pool house, I dip down with my pelvis in an anterior tilt and carefully lower myself so as to not aggravate my injury. I lie down and look up at the ceiling.
My final days here, before Edward took me to Shadow Garden, when tiredness came in both forms, physical and mental, are not days I care to revisit. All those weeks and months when I was up all night and felt like I was melting into the walls, every night a useless wrangle of conflicting thoughts, but that’s not what this feeling is. Something else is happening.
As I’m about to discover my daughter in ways I might regret, finding things out about her that I didn’t know, it finally comes to pass, stark and final: there will be no going back. But that’s not all, is it? I will also find out things about myself, shortcomings I will have to face. Having gained distance from Shadow Garden, I see another me. A second identity, not apart from me but like a layer on top of the person I know myself to be. It’s a double-edged sword in a way, finding out truths about yourself.
I brace myself and unfold the first letter.
* * *
• • •
The letter is about the day of the party. It’s nothing like I remember it. The story was, her story was, that the boy left our property, and she didn’t know what happened because she wasn’t there. Heart in my mouth, I don’t have to look hard for the next memory: We encountered the boy after that night, years later at a gas station, in the backseat of his mother’s car. He stared at Penelope, a subtle tremor about him as if he was in a state of constant nodding. I mostly remember how untroubled Penelope’s face was after she spotted him. Neither of us mentioned him.
I stop reading because I don’t want to know more. No, I’m lying to myself. I don’t want to read what I already know. If you hear hoofbeats, look for horses, not zebras, is what they say.