The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners (17 page)

When I returned home from the strange and haunted ruins of Villa Jovis, from that devastated observatory, I tore off my sweaty shirt—I’d just run a mile in the heat—and put on a new one.

I grabbed my cell phone and my wallet, passport, and return airline ticket. I jammed them and a few clothes into my backpack. I didn’t want to be there when my mother returned.

I dashed out the door and straight down the steep, shady stairs toward the beach. The impulse felt primal.

Halfway down the stairs I stopped, sat on a step. My head was spinning, my throat raw from emotion. I was desperate to talk to someone. I dialed Lucy first. I wanted to tell her what had just happened, what I’d just learned. But the second she answered, I hung up. The sound of her voice was so dear, and she loved our father so much, I couldn’t bear the idea of telling her the horrible truth.

I sat there on the cool stone step, shaded by pines and cypress trees, hiding in the shadows. I stared at my phone, wanting to call Travis, hear his voice, tell him I was coming home. But that didn’t seem right either. I had a huge, cosmic rock in my chest, and to get it out, I needed blood family. I dialed my grandmother.

It was early in Newport, barely dawn. Her maid, Heloise, answered, and said my grandmother was still asleep.

“Wake her up, please,” I said.

“Miss Pell, you know your grandmother doesn’t like to be disturbed before—”

“Get her, Heloise. Right now.”

Sometimes, when necessary, I can be not only persuasive, but quite imposing. It comes naturally, from spending the years immediately following my father’s death with Edith Nicholson. Several minutes later, I heard her voice on the line.

“What is it, Pell?” she asked. “I’m very cross with you, waking me—”

“My father told my mother to leave?” I asked.

“What nonsense is this? Do you have any idea what time—”

“Tell me right now, Grandmother. Did my mother leave us because my father kicked her out?”

The sound of bedclothes rustling. I could almost see her slipping off her black satin eye mask, rearranging pillows, pushing back her summer-weight monogrammed coverlet.

“There was no ‘kicking out,’” she said, as if I’d just used objectionable language. “He simply needed to find a solution based on your welfare. He was in a dreadful dilemma; she really left him no choice.”

“Then it’s true? It was his decision, not hers?”

“Lyra is my daughter,” my grandmother said. “It pains me unutterably to see the absolute mess she has made of her life. From the day she married your father and moved to Michigan, I knew it was a terrible mistake.”

That meant I was a mistake. “Grandmother …,” I began, staring out at the menacing silhouette of Mount Vesuvius, feeling volcanic.

“She was fragile. Emotionally and mentally. Your father told me what she did—he described every detail.”

“She told him she wanted to kill me too?”

“No,” she said, her tone somber. “Only herself. But she took you with her. Your father discovered her standing with you on the very edge of the tallest bridge, over an absolutely treacherous beat of river.” She fell silent.

“So when she returned from the hospital, he was afraid she might try again. And he told her to leave?” I asked.

“It was a discussion between them. However, ultimately, yes. He did.”

“But she must have been better. The hospital wouldn’t have let her out if they’d thought she was a danger to herself or us.”

“Your father couldn’t take that chance.”

I took that in. My father, whom I’d loved and trusted my whole life, had sent my mother away. He’d been
the grownups
. He’d been judge and jury and neither she nor Lucy and I had had any recourse. Had he wrestled with the decision during the months she was in the hospital? Lucy and I had been so worried about her, missed her so much, we’d had fevers. He had comforted us. I pictured him sitting on the edge of my bed, reading
The Jungle Book
to us. His voice had been so calm. Was he, even then, thinking that he didn’t want her home?

The grownups decided
.

“How could he have let us think
she
wanted to leave?” I asked my grandmother. “Why did he trick us?”

“He didn’t, Pell,” my grandmother said. “I don’t know what your mother told you, but this was a shared decision. He merely suggested it, quite strongly, I’ll grant you, as a solution. She was desperate; you’re too young to understand how frightening it was to see her falling apart. He was terrified for you and Lucy.”

“You let us think she had affairs.”

“Darling, would you rather have known your mother nearly took your life?”

How could I even answer that? I felt scalding emotion starting in my toes; I really was a volcano. Hot fury overtook me; I pictured my grandmother in her perfect bed in her limestone mansion, and knew that she had helped my father hide every important truth from me and Lucy. He was dead, and I’d never get to confront him. I had enough rage for everyone.

“I was so alarmed for Lyra and you. So afraid for her health, and so ashamed of what the truth could do if it got out. I have never wanted to speak of this with you or anyone.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Were you really afraid it would hurt us? Or just make you look bad to your friends?”

“Do not speak to me that way, Pell. I love you and Lucy. You can’t doubt that, I won’t have it!” my grandmother said in her most imperious and unshakable tone, and I didn’t stop to listen. I knew that what she said and what was true were two different things.

“Our family is in pieces,” I said.

“Darling, Lyra wasn’t meant to be a mother,” she said.

My mother wasn’t meant to be a mother. Oh, wow. Those words would ring in my ears for a long time. They weren’t unlike what she’d told me herself, that day at the moon gate. I just hadn’t wanted to hear them.

I ended the call. My cell phone instantly rang—it was Lucy ringing me back, after missing my last call. I didn’t answer it. I picked up my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and ran down the rest of the stairs toward the rock beach.

Rafe stood by the boathouse, paintbrush in hand. He wore bathing trunks, no shirt, and he didn’t see me right away; I watched him rinsing out the whitewash, cleaning the brush. When he was done, I stepped out from the shadows of pines growing on the hillside. My eyes were stinging, my mouth half open. I felt like a zombie, and all I knew was that I had to escape.

“Hey,” he said. “Where’ve you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“Il Faraglioni,” I said. “Can you take me there?” I wanted to see the seahorses before I left.

“The stone arch? Sure,” he said.

“And then to Sorrento?” I asked.

“Why, you taking off?” he asked, laughing.

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t smile.

His smile immediately disappeared. He nodded, finished rinsing his paintbrush. He pulled a shirt on.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Fourteen

L
yra ran as fast as she could, but Pell had made it home first. With a stitch in her side, running down the winding road, Lyra wished they’d taken the car to the Villa Jovis, so she could be home waiting for her daughter, so she could greet her and hug her and try to explain. As it was, she tore into the house, looking on the terrace, through the loggia, into Pell’s room. Pell had been here—the T-shirt she’d been wearing earlier lay on the bed.

Sinking down, Lyra sat beside it. She held the shirt in her hands. It was soaking with sweat. Lyra spread it out on her knees, straightening it out: green cotton, with
Newport Academy
in white. Lyra traced the letters with one finger. She lifted the shirt, pressed it to her face.

She wished she could tell herself that everything would be okay. She wanted to reassure herself she’d done no harm, but she knew that wasn’t the case. When she’d gone away ten years ago, she’d left her daughters to their father’s love and protection. They’d needed to idolize him, to make up for the fact their mother was gone. Today, in the ruins of a heavenly observatory, she’d ripped Taylor to shreds.

She’d finally told Pell the truth, but like all truths, it was far from black and white. This one, the story of what happened to their family, was filled with shadows, reflections, mirages, shades of gray. For a long time, Lyra had wanted to make Taylor the bad guy. He had told her he thought she should leave. Lyra had finally revealed that to Pell, but what she’d held back was the relief she’d felt at Taylor’s suggestion.

McLean Hospital, winter, ten years ago.

To send Lyra there, Taylor had had to start by taking her to the local ER. She’d been admitted, kept seventy-two hours for a psych evaluation. She’d felt she’d stumbled into hell. The woman in the next bed had been brought in from the county prison. Serving a sentence for killing her boyfriend, she’d attempted suicide by swallowing bleach. Her sister, visiting, told Lyra the boyfriend had molested the woman’s daughter; the daughter was now strung out on drugs.

After three days there, with a referral to McLean, a private hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, Lyra had climbed into Taylor’s car. He drove her to Detroit Metro Airport.

Just as if she’d been a child plotting to escape, slip out of the snare, he’d shepherded her through the airport, staying right by her side, waiting until her plane took off. He would have accompanied her all the way to McLean, but the girls needed him too much. Lyra remembered how pale he looked, how hollow his hazel eyes were as they said goodbye.

They’d embraced just outside airport security. She’d held him so tight, and she was so afraid. Not because of what she’d seen at the hospital, but because of what lay ahead for her and her family.

“I don’t want to go,” she’d said.

“Lyra, you have to get better,” he’d said.

“I will. I promise. I’ll work on it here, with you and the girls. I want to be with you.”

“You wanted to
die,”
he’d said, tears brimming. “Three days ago,
that’s
what you wanted.”

“It was a mistake,” she’d wept. “I didn’t mean it.”

“You were on the bridge,” he’d said. “You were ready. And you had Pell with you.”

“I never would have hurt her. Never!”

“Then what, Lyra? You’d have jumped off the bridge right in front of her?”

“No, Taylor!” But that had been Lyra’s plan—as much as she’d had any idea at all. She loved Pell so much, had been unable to say goodbye at the house, before leaving for the bridge. Lucy was asleep, but Pell had still been awake. She had asked where Lyra was going, if she could come too, and Lyra had been unable to rip herself away. She’d let Pell into the car, and they’d driven off.

“You weren’t in your right mind,” Taylor had said, holding her, stroking her hair.

“I want to go home now,” Lyra had said. “Make sure Pell is fine.”

“She is fine,” Taylor had assured her. “She’ll be even better once you get well.”

Lyra had sobbed at that, clutching Taylor in the middle of the airport. This was the same place she’d flown into their senior year of college, to be with him at his parents’ funeral. She’d had so much strength for him then; how could she have gotten to this point?

They’d called her flight, and she had to leave. Taylor had stood there, right outside security. Her last sight of him before boarding the plane had been of him standing tall, watching her go. She knew he’d been guarding against her changing her mind, not getting on the flight.

The flight had been bumpy, through turbulent air from storms dumping snow below. The plane had circled Boston’s Logan Airport for an hour, waiting to land. Lyra had sat in seat 1a, first row of first class, praying they’d have to turn back. She needed to see Pell; her mind raced with words to say, loving reassurances, to set things straight with her. But eventually the plane touched down, and a driver sent by the hospital met Lyra. She’d felt like a prisoner—seen off by her husband, greeted by hospital personnel, no chance to get lost or hurt herself.

A black town car drove her into the snowy Massachusetts countryside. She had grown up in New England. The landscape felt like home. Except, instead of going to her mother’s house, she was taken to a private psychiatric hospital.

Intake, medical exam, then an escort from one building to another. She’d be staying in Proctor. It looked stately from the outside; with red brick Jacobean Revival architecture, roof peaks, gables, decorative wrought-iron balconies, chimneys, white brick trim, it could almost have been a Newport mansion.

They took her to Proctor Two, a locked unit. No more Newport mansion. This was a hospital. There were some gracious old rooms with curved walls and ornate molding, a place to be elegantly insane, heavy mesh on the windows, no mirrors on the walls, checks every five minutes—even through the night, while Lyra lay in bed, a nurse would poke her head in, making sure Lyra hadn’t killed herself.

Lyra was high risk. In spite of what she’d told Taylor, she still wanted to die. Her mind raced with ways to accomplish that: get to the roof, throw herself off. She felt it in her bones, a quivering, jellylike shimmer, discomfort down to her marrow, a feeling that she had to end things, make the agony stop. Those first weeks, she felt she was being boiled alive. She knew she’d done something terrible, taking Pell to the bridge.

The doctors were the best in the world. At the beginning she’d tell them how much she loved her children, then in the next breath sob that she wished her life was over. Over time she began to see that she actually felt worse now than before going to the bridge; half of her anguish came from what she’d done to Pell.

They wrote letters to each other. The high point of every day was mail call, when Lyra would pick up letters from Pell and Lucy. Taylor too. He never stopped writing to her, telling her he loved her, giving her encouragement for the shock therapy, telling her to work hard with her doctors and get better.

Twice a day, morning and night, the nurses would take Lyra and all the other crazy women on Proctor Two walking outside. The nurse was the only one with a lighter; patients were not allowed to have sharps or fire, so many of the patients would take the opportunity to have her light their cigarettes, and they’d walk around the “campus” in a big cloud of smoke.

The paths led all around the lovely, snow-covered grounds, through groves of maple, oak, and elm. On walks after dark, Lyra would look up through the bare branches at the constellations, missing Pell and Lucy more than ever. She’d stare at the stars, wondering if they were gazing out their window at the same sight.

The nurse was a little like a dog walker you see in cities, leading a pack of dogs to the nearest park. They were under constant watch and supervision. It began to sink in, one morning when the snow was starting to melt, run in rivulets down the winding drive, that Lyra had brought herself to this moment in life—being led through the lovely grounds on her way back to a locked ward, unable to make decisions for herself. That was the instant her real work began.

She’d gone at it with a vengeance. Art therapy: collages, drawings, clay sculptures. Two themes emerged: gardens and stars. She exalted in her creativity, happily amazed by how much she had inside. She explored her discoveries with Dr. Wilson, her psychiatrist. She told him that her father had once said, “Day and night were created for Lyra; sunlight because she loves gardens, and darkness so she can see the stars.”

Her father told her she’d been named for a star: Alpha Lyrae, also known as Vega, of the constellation Lyra, the fifth-brightest star in the sky, the second-brightest in the northern celestial hemisphere, after Arcturus. She’d adored her father; a yachtsman, he’d navigated by the stars, given her a brass sextant and telescope for her first Christmas. She didn’t know what had happened to the sextant, but she’d never part with the telescope.

Her earliest happy memories were of looking at the stars with her father. They’d walk around her family’s estate, just as Lyra would do later with Pell and Lucy in the backyard, and he would point out all the heavenly bodies.

“There’s Capella, in the constellation Auriga, the eleventh-brightest star in the sky,” he’d say. “And there’s Pollux, an orange star, in the constellation Gemini.”

Those were Lyra’s nights; but because she also loved the day, she and her father would go strolling through the gardens. As a young boy his nanny would take him to Roger Williams Park in Providence. She was Irish, and her father had been a gardener; she’d taught him to identify every tree, each plant. Lyra’s father did that for her, testing her as they walked the gravel path through their formal gardens.

She’d told Dr. Wilson about wanting to be an astronomer and a gardener, and how her mother had laughed. “What you’ll be, darling, is a wife.”

She’d confided in him a secret not even Taylor knew. Like her father before her, she’d named her children after the stars: Pell was Cappella, and Lucy was Pollux. Her Pell, her Lulu, Lux, Lucy. Taylor had thought they were just nice names; he hadn’t realized they were talismans holding Lyra together.

When she was ten, her father gave her a window box. It had been their secret. He’d shown her how to fill it with potting soil, let her plant seeds. The box couldn’t go on any window in the main house; they’d set it out back, in the window of the garage. Lyra had tended it all that summer. The petunias she’d planted had bloomed, coral pink and white, more beautiful to Lyra than any of the English gardens on her family’s grounds.

She’d gone to boarding school that fall. Her parents got divorced that winter, and the next summer, Lyra didn’t touch the window box. Her father wasn’t there to help her. He married a younger woman, and they spent summers in East Hampton. They eventually had two children, and Lyra hardly ever saw him after that. Her mother was on the party circuit, mostly in Newport, but sometimes going to Europe. She never took Lyra with her.

Dr. Wilson had helped Lyra see how all her dreams had been killed: her interest in astronomy and gardening put down by her mother, and with her father gone, no one to encourage her or help her. She told him about her graduation trip through Europe, how she’d visited Capri and felt she’d come home: the gentle sadness, the dangerous landscape, the deep sea and blue mists, had matched the way she felt inside. Sometimes she felt it calling to her.

She’d cried at that, the idea of a foreign island she’d visited only once feeling more like home than her beautiful house, her husband who loved her, her two children. The sense of isolation, the dream of life in a place where no one knew her, felt more comforting than the thought of returning to her comfortable home.

Dr. Wilson had been the one to show Lyra the lines from Thomas, about “bringing forth what is within you.” She’d been so full of love and brightness and interest, but it had all been stopped, and that had nearly destroyed her.

“It’s why I wanted to kill myself,” she’d said, finally realizing. And that day, for the first time, she’d admitted the most dreadful thing she’d ever felt: maybe, deep down, she had wanted to take Pell off the bridge with her. Because life had felt so impossible and cruel, how could she escape and leave Pell behind? That reality had scared her more than anything she’d ever encountered in life.

By the time she left McLean, it was springtime. She asked to meet Taylor alone first, without the girls. He’d picked her up at the airport. She remembered the look on his face: so happy to see her. She’d melted at the sight of him, and they’d held each other.

They’d driven partway home, parked on a side street. She’d told him everything she could—about her past, and her parents, and her thwarted dreams, and how it had all led her to the bridge last winter. He’d listened, avid but cautious, watching her face so carefully.

“Are you sure you’re ready to come home?” he asked.

“I want to say yes,” she said.

“But you can’t?”

“I was ready to leave the hospital,” she said slowly. “I know there’s nothing more they can do for me. I have to do it for myself.”