He drove past the new bank building and the old courthouse, the empty place where the theater once stood. A thin woman was walk?ing down the sidewalk, her head bent, her arms folded, her dark hair moving in the wind. For the first time in years Paul thought of Lauren Lobeglio, the silent determined way she had walked across the empty garage to him week after week. He had reached for her, again and then again; he had woken in the middle of so many dark nights, fearing with Lauren all he now so desired with Michelle: marriage, children, an interweaving of lives.
He drove, humming his newest song to himself. "A Tree in the Heart" it was called—maybe he would play this one tonight, at Ly-nagh's pub. Michelle would be shocked by that, but Paul didn't care. Lately, since his father died, he had been playing more at in?formal venues as well as concert halls: he'd pick up a guitar and play in bars or restaurants, classical pieces but also more popular works that he had always, in the past, disdained. He couldn't explain his change of heart, but it had something to do with the intimacy in those places, the connection he felt to the audience, close enough to reach out and touch. Michelle didn't approve; she believed it was a consequence of grief, and she wanted him to get over it. But Paul couldn't give it up. All the years of his adolescence, he had played out of anger and longing for connection, as if through music he could bring some order, some invisible beauty, into his family. Now his father was gone, and there was no one to play against. So he had this new freedom.
He drove to the old neighborhood, past the stately houses and deep front yards, the sidewalks and eternal quiet. The front door of his mother's house was closed. He turned off the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the birds and the distant sound of lawn mowers.
A tree in the heart. His father had been dead for a year and his mother was marrying Frederic and moving to France for a while, and he was here not as a child or as a visitor but as caretaker of the past. His to choose, what to keep and what to discard. He'd tried to talk with Michelle about this, his deep sense of responsibility, how what he kept from this house of his childhood would become, in turn, what he passed down to his own children someday—all they would ever know, in a tangible way, of what had shaped him. He'd been thinking of his father, whose past was still a mystery, but Michelle misunderstood; she stiffened at this casual mention of children. That's not what I meant, he protested, angry, and she was angry too. Whether or not you knew it, that's what you meant.
He leaned back, searching in his pocket for the house key. Once his mother understood that his father's work was valuable, she'd started keeping the doors locked, though the boxes sat unopened in the studio.
Well, he didn't want to look at that stuff either.
When Paul finally got out of the car he stood for a moment on the curb, looking around the neighborhood. It was hot; a high faint breeze moved through the tops of the trees. Pin oak leaves dug into the light, creating a play of shadows on the ground. Strangely, too, the air seemed to be full of snow, a feathery gray-white substance drifting down through the blue sky. Paul reached out into the hot, humid air, feeling as if he were standing in one of his father's photo?graphs, where trees bloomed up in the pulse of a heart, where the world was suddenly not what it seemed. He caught a flake in one palm; when he closed his hand into a fist and opened it again, his flesh was smeared with black. Ashes were drifting down like snow in the dense July heat.
He left footprints on the sidewalk as he walked up the steps. The front door was unlocked, but the house was empty. Hello? Paul called, walking through the rooms, the furniture pushed into the middle of the floor and covered with tarps, the walls bare, ready for painting. He hadn't lived here for years but he found himself paus?ing in the living room, stripped of everything that had made it meaningful. How many times had his mother decorated this room? And yet it was just a room, finally. Mom? he called, but got no an?swer. Upstairs, he stood in the doorway of his own room. Boxes were piled here too, full of old things he had to sort. She hadn't thrown anything away; even his posters were rolled neatly and se?cured with rubber bands. There were faint rectangles on the walls where they'd once hung.
"Mom?" he called again. He went downstairs and onto the back porch.
She was there, sitting on the steps, wearing old blue shorts and a limp white T-shirt. He stopped, wordless, taking in the strange scene. A fire still smoldered in a circle of stones, and the ashes and wisps of burned paper that had fallen around him in the front yard were here too, caught in the bushes and in his mother's hair. Papers were scattered all over the lawn, pressed against the bases of trees, against the rusting metal legs of the ancient swing set. Paul realized with shock that his mother had been burning his father's photo?graphs. She looked up, her face streaked with ashes and with tears.
"It's all right," she said, in an even voice. "I've stopped burning them. I was so angry with your father, Paul, but then it struck me: This is your inheritance too. I only burned one box. It was the box with all the girls, so I don't imagine it was very valuable."
"What are you talking about?" he asked, sitting down beside her.
She handed him a photo of himself, one he'd never seen. He was about fourteen, sitting in the porch swing, bent over his guitar, play?ing intently, oblivious to everything around him, caught up in the music. It startled him that his father had captured this moment—a private moment, completely unself-conscious, one of the moments of his life when Paul felt most alive.
"Okay. But I don't understand. Why are you so mad?"
His mother pressed her hands to her face, briefly, and sighed. "Do you remember the story of the night you were born, Paul? The blizzard, how we barely got to the clinic in time?"
"Sure." He waited for her to go on, not knowing what to say, yet understanding at some instinctive level that this had to do with his twin sister, who had died.
"Do you remember the nurse, Caroline Gill? Did we tell you about her?" i
"Yes. Not her name. You said she had blue eyes."
"She does. Very blue. She came here yesterday, Paul. Caroline Gill. I haven't seen her since that night. She brought news, shocking news. I'm just going to tell you, since I don't know what else to do."
She took his hand. He didn't pull away. His sister, she told him calmly, had not died at birth after all. She'd been born with Down's syndrome, and his father had asked Caroline Gill to take her to a home in Louisville.
"To spare us," his mother said, and her voice caught. "That's what she said. But she couldn't go through with it, Caroline Gill. She took your sister, Paul. She took Phoebe. All these years your twin has been alive and well, growing up in Pittsburgh."
"My sister?" Paul said. "In Pittsburgh? I was just in Pittsburgh last week." It was not an appropriate response, but he did not know what else to say; he was filled with a strange emptiness, a kind of stunned detachment. He had a sister: that was news enough. She was retarded, not perfect, so his father had sent her away. It wasn't anger, strangely, but fear that rose up next, some old apprehension born of the pressure his father had focused on him as the only child. Born, too, of Paul's need to make his own way, even if his father might disapprove enough to leave. A fear Paul had transformed all these years, like a gifted alchemist, into anger and rebellion.
"Caroline went to Pittsburgh and started a new life," his mother said. "She raised your sister. I guess it was a struggle; it would have been, especially in those days. I keep trying to be thankful that she was good to Phoebe, but there's a part of me that's just raging."
Paul closed his eyes for a moment, trying to hold all these ideas together. The world felt flat, strange, and unfamiliar. All these years he'd tried to imagine his sister, what she would be like, but now he couldn't bring a single idea of her to mind.
"How could he?" he asked finally. "How could he keep this a secret?"
"I don't know," his mother said. "I've been asking myself the same thing for hours. How could he? And how dare he die and leave us to discover this alone?"
They sat there silently. Paul remembered an afternoon of devel?oping photos with his father on the day after he'd trashed the dark?room, when he was full of guilt and his father was too, when the very air was charged with what they said and what they left unspo?ken. Camera, his father told him, came from the French chambre, room. To be in camera was to operate in secret. This was what his father had believed: that each person was an isolated universe. Dark trees in the heart, a fistful of bones: that was his father's world, and it had never made him more bitter than at this moment.
"I'm surprised he didn't give me away," he said, thinking of how hard he'd always fought against his father's vision of the world. He had gone out and played his guitar, music rising straight up through him and entering the world, and people turned, put down their drinks, and listened, and a room full of strangers was con?nected, each to each. "I'm sure he wanted to."
"Paul!" His mother frowned. "No. If anything, he wanted even more for you because of all this. Expected even more. Demanded perfection of himself. That's one of the things that's become clear to me. That's the terrible part, actually. Now that I know about Phoebe, so many mysteries about your father make sense. That wall I always felt—it was real."
She got up, went inside, and came back with two Polaroids. "Here she is," she said. "This is your sister: Phoebe."
Paul took them and stared from one to the other: a posed picture of a girl, smiling, and then a candid shot of her shooting a basket. He was still trying to take in what his mother had told him: that this stranger with the almond eyes and sturdy legs was his twin.
"You have the same hair," Norah said softly, sitting down next to him again. "She likes to sing, Paul. Isn't that something?" She laughed. "And guess what—she's a basketball fan."
Paul's laugh was sharp and full of pain.
"Well," he said, "I guess Dad chose the wrong kid."
His mother took the photos in her ash-stained hands.
"Don't be bitter, Paul. Phoebe has Down's syndrome. I don't know much about it, but Caroline Gill had a lot to say. So much I could hardly take it all in, really."
Paul had been running his thumb along the concrete edge of the step and now he stopped, watching blood seep up where he'd scraped it raw.
"Don't be bitter? We visited her grave," he said, remembering his mother walking through the cast-iron gate with her arms full of flowers, telling him to wait in the car. Remembering her kneeling the dirt, planting morning glory seeds. "What about that?"
"I don't know. It was Dr. Bentley's land, so he must have known too. Your father never wanted to take me there. I had to fight so hard. At the time I thought he was afraid I'd have a nervous break?down. Oh, it made me so mad—the way he always knew best."
Paul started at the vehemence in her voice, remembering his conversation that morning with Michelle. He pressed the edge of his thumb to his lips and sucked away the little beads of blood, glad for the sharp copper taste. They sat in silence for a time, looking at the backyard with its wisps of ash, its scattered photos and damp boxes.
"What does it mean," he asked at last, "that she's retarded? I mean, day-to-day."
His mother looked at the photographs again. "I don't know. Caroline said she's quite high-functioning, whatever that means. She has a job. A boyfriend. She went to school. But apparently she can't really live on her own."
"This nurse—Caroline Gill—why did she come here now, after all these years? What did she want?"
"She just wanted to tell me," his mother said softly. "That's all. She didn't ask for anything. She was opening a door, Paul. I really do believe that. It was an invitation. But whatever happens next is up to us."
"And what is that?" he asked. "What happens now?"
"I'll go to Pittsburgh. I know I have to see her. But after that, I don't know anything. Should I bring her back here? We'll be strangers to her. And I have to talk with Frederic; he has to know." She put her face in her hands for a moment. "Oh, Paul—how can I go to France for two years and leave her behind? I don't know what to do. It's too much for me, all at once."
A breeze fluttered the photographs scattered across the lawn. Paul sat quietly, struggling with many confused emotions: anger at his father, and surprise, and sadness for what he'd lost. Worry, too; it was terrible to be concerned about this, but what if he had to take care of this sister who couldn't live on her own? How could he pos?sibly do that? He'd never even met a retarded person, and he found that the images he had were all negative. None of them fit with the sweetly smiling girl in the photograph, and that was disconcert?ing too.
"I don't know either," Paul said. "Maybe the first thing is to clean this mess up."
"Your inheritance," his mother said.
"Not just mine," he said thoughtfully, testing the words. "It's my sister's too."
They worked through that day and the next, sorting the photos and repacking the boxes, dragging them into the cool depths of the garage. While his mother met with the curators, Paul called Michelle to explain what had happened and to tell her he would not be at her concert after all. He expected her to be angry, but she lis?tened without comment and hung up. When he tried to call back, the machine picked up; that happened all day long. More than once he considered getting in his car and driving like wild home to Cincinnati, but he knew it would do no good. Knew, too, that he didn't really want to go on this way, always loving Michelle more than she could love him back. So he forced himself to stay. He turned to the physical work of packing up the house, and in the eve?ning he walked downtown to the library to check out books on Down's syndrome.
