THE LARGE OIL PORTRAIT of Charlotte and her children began with a photo snapped on a Hilton Head Island beach at sunset. Charlotte wanted the night to be perfect. She packed a cooler of beer and Cokes in glass bottles. They were sunburned, light-headed. Winston considered himself an amateur photographer.
In the portrait, Charlotte looks happy but not too happy. She is thirty-nine, thin and sunburned, perched on a blanket in the sand. Her three children surround her: Lee, blond hair wispy in the salt-smelling wind; Cord, dressed in seersucker shorts and a white polo shirt; and baby Regan, barefoot in a sundress.
Lee, just six, was eager to please. She read her parents like a ghost story, alert for danger. Winston had spent the day in their vacation villa smoking cigarettes and watching television. Although he had showered, he still smelled sharp. Lee had thought weekends, when Winston was home, were the worst. She was wrong.
It was the sun, making Lee’s skin hurt, even after Charlotte applied sticky aloe. It was the hours not knowing when he would emerge from the bedroom, and if he’d be angry or just blank and sad. Charlotte was more nervous than usual: it seemed desperately important that their weeklong holiday be perfect, and Lee tried to understand what this meant. Staying quiet was definitely good. Seeming excited by lighthouses, sand dollars, and collecting shells was imperative. If you were stung by a jellyfish, you should tell Charlotte quietly and not “be dramatic,” no matter how much it hurt. No sand in the condo. No talking back. No “gimme gimme gimme.” If you got an ice cream, you ate it, all of it, even if it wasn’t the flavor you wanted, and you did not allow a melted drop to spill. If you ordered chicken fingers at the Salty Dog, you did not leave half-cooked fries in the paper tray like a spoiled brat.
Lee did her best but sometimes, as soon as she figured out a rule, one of her siblings would break it. She understood that Regan was an infant, but just that afternoon her little sister had started crying with Winston in the room. Lee’s stomach hurt as their father looked at them, his eyes narrowing. Lee was learning to be a ghost herself, even while her body remained in Winston’s line of fire. Nobody could tell. She’d just take her brain somewhere else, somewhere safe. But when she left, it meant nobody was protecting four-year-old Cord and baby Regan. So Lee tried to stay, sometimes biting the side of her mouth to keep from making a sound.
Cord, Lee could tell, was starting to get it. He didn’t run up the stairs anymore. He pretended to enjoy crabbing with his father, though Lee saw the flash of despair when Winston handed his son a chicken neck to put on the hook. It was so hot. Cord was fragile. Lee saw him blink back tears and grip the crabbing pole. Winston would slap his son on the back, but Cord steeled himself, did not recoil. When Winston looked at the water, it seemed as if he was seeing something else, something heartbreaking in the distance.
Lee and her father were the early birds in the family, and would hold hands and walk along the boardwalk to the beach to watch the sun rise. The sand was still cool. Her father said kind things to her: he loved her golden hair, she was his superstar. But he also said strange things. “I really am trying,” Winston said, speaking maybe to himself. “It’s like a fog. I wish I could make it go away but I don’t know how.”
Lee hugged him hard. Many years later, she would understand what he was talking about, but that morning, his words were a mystery.
* * *
—
TIME FOR THE PHOTO. Charlotte was laughing in her high, frightened way, fluffing her hair back. “How do I look, honey?” she said.
“Fine, you all look fine,” said Winston. “My family. There you are.”
It was as if he couldn’t believe it himself, as if they were a movie he wanted to like but just didn’t. Cord rested his head on Charlotte’s knee, gazing placidly at the camera. Maybe he knew how to take his brain elsewhere, too.
“Cord, you look miserable,” said Winston.
Cord blinked, as if woken from a deep sleep. Baby Regan was silent in her mother’s arms. Charlotte lifted her chin.
“That’s right, that’s right,” said Winston as his expensive Nikon clicked.
Regan gripped Lee’s finger in her tiny hand and Lee reached around Charlotte to touch her brother. At least she had Regan and Cord, thought Lee. Because of them, she would never be alone. She yearned to make things okay in her family: to fix her father’s “fog,” to keep her siblings from making Winston yell, to tell her mother she was beautiful and could stop fishing for compliments.
“Lee!” said Winston. “Come on now, give me that smile.”
Lee smiled with brilliance, hoping to make her father proud. This day, and the two more excruciating days that followed—days of sand and beer-scented misery—would be the last time Lee went on vacation with her mother and siblings.
Until thirty-two years later, when they became jetsetters.
SOME EVENINGS, CHARLOTTE FOUND herself standing in front of the family portrait. It hung in her Savannah, Georgia, condominium, above the gas fireplace she rarely turned on. In the painting, her hair was a marvel of burnt umber and gold, falling in loose waves around her jawline. Her face was inscrutable with a “Mona Lisa smile,” as they called it, alluring in its standoffishness. No actual person smiled in this way. It was an expression meant to be gazed upon, not the sort of smile that came spontaneously, from joy. And yet, Charlotte concluded, she looked lovely, much better than she’d ever looked in real life. And certainly much better than she looked now that she was seventy-one years old, her gray hair frosted to Marilyn Monroe platinum every third Tuesday by Hannah at Shear Envy.
* * *
—
CHARLOTTE DECIDED TO WEAR a little black dress to her best friend’s funeral. Minnie had made gentle fun of Charlotte when she bought a neon-pink cardigan at the Ralph Lauren outlet store, so Charlotte tossed it over her shoulders and added a white Coach purse. Charlotte could have called her daughter Regan for a ride, but then she would have to hear about the Weight Watchers gift certificate again, so Charlotte drove herself.
Charlotte and Minnie had discussed caskets more than once. Charlotte felt an open casket was both scary and kind of tacky. Minnie disagreed. She believed that saying goodbye to an actual face gave you more closure afterward. “I deal in reality,” Minnie had said, “and you live in denial. Or you try. But it’s going to catch up with you one day, Char.”
Perhaps today was the day.
* * *
—
CHARLOTTE WALKED SLOWLY TO the altar, weak and dizzy. She could see Father Thomas watching her, and appreciated his concern. She peered inside the open casket, as Minnie would have wanted her to do. Minnie was wearing too much bronzer, but then she had always worn too much bronzer. Charlotte had tried to tell her, “Minnie, go easy with the bronzer!” But Minnie hadn’t listened, had gone on doing whatever she wanted. It was part of why Charlotte had loved her, ever since they’d first met at a St. James pancake breakfast, soon after Minnie had moved to Savannah. The pancakes had been awful—mealy, drenched with cheap syrup—and Minnie had turned to Charlotte and said, “Eyuck!”