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The problem was Sammy. At least that’s what Clara told herself. Sammy—her spitting image—whom Clara could protect, at least for now. She shuddered to think of Sammy seeing
The Accident.
Or
Clara with the Lizard.
She wondered if she should go talk to someone—Jonathan had often urged her to get professional help—but what could anyone tell her that would change things?

“Who are you protecting?” Jonathan asks her.

They are sitting on the front porch. Sammy is swinging on the brand-new tire swing Jonathan has tied to the low branch of the oak. Sammy: age four. Her dark hair glinting gold in the sunlight. Her tanned legs pumping, arms holding the thick rope. Was this what Ruth had first seen, this simple beauty—this heartbreaking innocence? The long line of her neck, the flawlessness of her skin? Clara knows the feeling—now, as a mother, she knows. The desire to devour, the almost physical need to envelop and keep safe. Was this—was this how Ruth had looked at her in the bathtub that day? The mother and the artist so completely inseparable that Ruth was driven to capture the moment, to control it—to
compose
it—and by doing so, freeze it forever in time?

“I’m protecting Sammy,” Clara answers.

“Are you sure?” Jonathan is acting as if he knows something Clara doesn’t. It’s infuriating.

“What are you getting at?”

“I don’t know, honey.” He rubs her feet. “I just think—maybe—there’s going to come a time when—”

“She’s four years old!”

“All the more reason to start introducing the whole idea now, so it won’t seem like such a big deal, as opposed to someday having to actually sit her down and—”

She jumps up. Needing, suddenly, to get away from Jonathan. He’s talking about things he doesn’t understand.

“I think you’re protecting yourself,” Jonathan says quietly.

Her rage feels childish, even to herself. Jonathan’s only trying to help. She knows that. But still—

“Let’s go,” she says. Changing directions, hoping he’ll follow suit. It’s a quiet Monday afternoon and there’s a lot of work to do in the shop. They catch up on paperwork on Mondays, usually, especially in summer when the shop is jammed with tourists during the rest of the week.

“Clara, really, I—”

“Please.”

Something in her face must stop him. He adores her—this much she knows—and he feels for her, as much as anyone can. But how long will it be okay with him, the slammed door inside of her? He doesn’t entirely realize that she has no intention of opening it ever.

“Okay.” He rises from the wicker sofa. “Let’s go.”

At the shop, Sammy sits cross-legged on the floor, playing with a small pile of gemstones, trying to string them onto thin strands of leather. Jonathan has been letting Sammy play with the loose stones in his inventory since she was old enough to hold them in her hands. Newspaper is spread out beneath her, covering any of the cracks in the wood floor through which a single tiny garnet or freshwater pearl might fall.

“Here are the invoices from Bali.” Jonathan hands Clara a pile of fax paper, curled at the ends. “We need to order more of that yellow gold—you know, the kind I’ve been using for the bracelets—”

“Fine.” Clara makes a note.

“Oh, and Marjorie Waller stopped in on Saturday—she was very interested in the black diamond necklace.”

“Really!”

Only a few of Jonathan’s pieces were priced in the thousands; he just couldn’t afford to make them. But once in a while he fell in love with a stone—a black diamond, this time, glistening like wet coal. The necklace had been in the front case, displayed on a white cloth mannequin, for months.

“We’ll see what happens.”

“Mommy, look!” Sam holds up the leather strand, strung from one end to the other with pearls.

“Pretty, sweetheart.”

“Actually, I also forgot to mention that I got a call from a buyer in New York—from a store called Fragments in SoHo.”

Jonathan doesn’t look up when he says this. He focuses instead on a repair he’s working on, a broken clasp.

“What do you mean? How did they—”

“I sent my slides.”

“When?”

“A while back.”

Marketing and promoting Jonathan’s work has been Clara’s job. She’s the one who sends out his slides to some of the higher-end craft stores around the country. Portland, Boston, Seattle, Minneapolis.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Finally, he looks up from the broken clasp.

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just did it on a whim.”

New York. SoHo.
The words don’t belong in this room. This cozy little shop with the worn wood floors, the elegant glass cases, the leather chairs propped in the corners in case husbands want to read the paper while their wives browse.
SoHo.
Kubovy’s face floats before her, smiling his leonine smile.
Clara, my beauty. Come, let me look at you.

She feels a sudden hollowness.

“Well, what did the buyer say?”

“She wants me to come down—to show her my stuff in person.”

“I wish you had said something.” Her voice is sharp, wounded.

“It didn’t seem important.”

“I don’t want you to go to New York.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

But then he takes her in. Trembling, as if she’s in actual physical danger.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m sure she can decide from the slides.”

T
HE FORSYTHIA
outside the kitchen window has started to bloom. Crocuses are pushing their hardy little heads through the still-cold earth in the front yard. And the air has lost some of its harsh late-winter bite. Spring has come earlier than usual to Southwest Harbor. Some years, it doesn’t come at all. The endless winter rages on, fading away only when the summer people arrive, claiming the island as their own.

Sam’s school is on spring break. Some of the families of Southwest go to Florida this time of year: Disney World, Fort Lauderdale, Key Biscayne. Others try to get in some late-season skiing. Many of the families travel together, rent houses to save money—but no one ever asks the Brodeurs. It isn’t that people don’t like Jonathan and Clara, quite the contrary. But they do feel—the moms and dads of Sammy’s friends—that the Brodeurs are a bit…
remote.
Hard to get a handle on. They don’t quite fit in.

Clara’s on the phone, trying to arrange a play date for Sammy, when the call-waiting beeps. Without thinking—without, for once, checking the caller ID—she asks Jenny Fuhrman’s mother to hold and answers the phone.

“Hi, it’s me.” Robin’s voice on the other end.

Clara leans against the counter, her legs suddenly rubbery. She had been shelling peas. These last couple of weeks she has found she has to constantly be doing something with her hands. Chopping vegetables. Letting down the hems of Sam’s jeans. Even crocheting—something she swore she would never do.

“Hi,” she says faintly.

Robin’s on her cell phone, somewhere on the street. Clara can hear the metallic sigh of a bus stopping at the curb, the sound of taxis honking, the high-pitched beep of a truck backing up. New York City traffic. Why is Robin calling? In the silence, Clara feels her body growing ice cold. Is it possible that Ruth—no. It can’t be. It’s too soon. Isn’t it? But what’s this? Her mind is racing, thoughts impossible to decipher as they zoom by, like one of those crawls at the bottom of the television screen gone completely berserk.
Please don’t be dead.
That’s all Clara can make out.
Please don’t be—

“Robin?” Her voice thin with tension.

Still, Robin says nothing. Is this some kind of game? Clara hears a siren through the phone.

“Rob?”

“I—I can’t. Clara, it’s just too—”

The words are coming out in gulps. Robin is sobbing, Clara finally realizes. Sobbing. On the street. In broad daylight.

“What happened?” Clara asks. “Is Ruth—”

“No,” Robin manages to say. “No. That’s not—hello? Clara? Clara? Oh, fuck. I’ve lost you.”

Clara slowly replaces the receiver on its hook.
Please don’t be dead.
It was the only clear thought she had. What did it mean? Why did she care? She hadn’t planned on ever seeing Ruth again. She was finished with her mother. The slate of her life once more wiped clean. There was only this mess with Sammy to deal with. Sammy, who had been asking a few more questions with each passing day.

How old is my grandmother?

Why is she dying?

Has she ever asked about me?

And then, finally:
Why can’t I meet her?

She stands frozen, waiting for the phone to ring again.

“Mom?” Sam has padded into the kitchen in her bare feet. “Was that Jenny’s mom calling?”

Shit.
Jenny Fuhrman’s mom. Clara had completely forgotten about her.

“Sorry, sweetheart, let me just try her now.”

Clara picks up the phone, manages to dial with her shaky fingers.

“Hi, it’s Clara Brodeur—so sorry about that! Anyway, I was hoping maybe the girls could—”

Beep.
Call waiting again.

“So do you think—okay, perfect. We’ll see Jenny here at three.”

Beep.

Clara lets it ring in her ear until it stops. Sammy peers into the refrigerator, then pulls out some turkey wrapped in wax paper. Blood rushes to Clara’s head—a swift sudden vertigo—and she sits down at the kitchen table. Flips through the ever-present pile of catalogs, trying to calm herself down. She has lived her life, all these years, without her mother in it—but with the knowledge, always the knowledge, that Ruth existed elsewhere. Hundreds of miles south, an airplane flight, a long car ride away. Had she somehow counted on that? On Ruth’s sheer existence?

“Mom?”

The spinning room slows to a stop.

“I want to see a picture,” Sam says in a small voice.

“I’m sorry, sweetie?”

“A picture,” Sam says. “Of Grandma.”

She walks over to the kitchen table, then sits down, hugging her knees to her chest. Her hair spills over her face, and she brushes it away.

“I don’t—” Clara begins, then stops.
Grandma.
Sam has already decided on a name for Ruth. Not
Nana.
Not
Grammy.
Clara doesn’t have the heart to tell Sam that Ruth isn’t really the grandma type.

She tries again. “Honey, I don’t really have—”

No more lies.
The remnants of her past—the few things she has been unable to part with—are stuffed into a shoe box in the bottom drawer of her dresser, behind the long underwear and dozens of pairs of winter socks.

“Okay,” Clara says. Feeling Sam’s eyes on her, intent, darting all around her face. Reading her. “Okay.” She walks out of the kitchen and up the flight of stairs, past the framed family photos hanging along the landing. How many times has she looked at these photographs of herself, Jonathan, and Sam—on Hunter’s Beach, skating on Echo Lake, at picnics and barbecues—and thought
There they are, that’s my whole family,
like an artist painting over an unsuccessful canvas, covering the awkward, pained brushstrokes that came before?

Sam is behind her on the stairs, not letting Clara out of her sight. She follows her mother into the bedroom. Clara opens the dresser, feels through the bottom drawer for the shoe box. It’s from a store in New York—Harry’s Shoes on Broadway—the same box she took with her fourteen years earlier. She pulls it out and opens the lid, sifting through papers and letters, her birth certificate. Baby pictures of her and Robin. A snapshot of Nathan, a rolled-up diploma in his hand, standing on the steps of Low Library at Columbia. And then finally—the one photograph of Ruth that she kept—a photograph that Clara took herself on a sticky summer morning twenty-five years ago.

Mommy, I want to take your picture!

No, darling. Please—no.

Why not? You look so pretty. Please let me?

They were upstate, in Hillsdale, and had just finished shooting
Clara and the Popsicle,
the sugary purple juice dripping down Clara’s bare chest. Flies swirled around her in the summer heat. Laughing, Ruth lowered the tripod so that Clara could see into the lens.