Throughout the conversation, Arietta watched Shannon, wondering if her sisters’ happiness exacerbated her breakup sorrows. But Shannon wasn’t the type to make anyone pay for her feelings, not like her father. Slowly, she got up and swept past Arietta, heading back toward the kitchen. Isabelle and Felicity kept laughing and telling stories.
Arietta hurried after Shannon. She found her in the kitchen, scrubbing plates and looking out the window. From behind, her back was stooped, and her clothes were so worn that she looked much older. Arietta tried to help Shannon clean the kitchen, but Shannon ordered her back to the veranda and told her to pour herself another glass of wine.
“I want to take care of you,” Shannon said. “You’ve put too much of this on yourself.”
Arietta took a step back. She searched Shannon’s face, then returned to the veranda, where she sat and watched the night fall gently through the gray clouds.
When her daughters were younger, they’d been just like this: Isabelle the girlish, artistic one; Felicity the funny but headstrong one; and Shannon the serious one, the academic one, the one who took it all on. Shannon felt the weight of the world more than her sisters. Arietta had tried and failed to lighten her daughter up over the years. She’d tried to teach her how to have fun, how to rejoice in music and movies and jokes. Sometimes that worked, and sometimes it really didn’t.
When Shannon finished cleaning the kitchen, she returned to the veranda and sat down. By the sounds of things, Isabelle and Felicity were hot on her heels, coming back from their visit with their father. Right before they sat down, Shannon looked Arietta dead in the eye and said, “You’re still alive, Mom. I’m so glad you’re still alive. But you have to think about yourself. You have to think about your heart.”
Arietta was taken aback. “I am thinking about my heart,” she said.
But all at once, Isabelle and Felicity were there, talking more about Isabelle’s boyfriend and Felicity’s new dating habits and Felicity’s college graduation, which Arietta hadn’t been able to attend, as she’d been in Greece, waiting to see if her husband was going to die.
Arietta couldn’t believe she’d missed her daughter’s college graduation. More than that, she couldn’t believe that she’d forgotten about it till now. Had the girls texted her any photographs?
She asked them now, and they said they hadn’t wanted to bother her. But they showed her a bunch of photographs of thethree of them, all in a row, her darling daughters, Felicity in her cap and gown, and Shannon and Isabelle in pretty summer dresses.
Their smiles were strangled in the photographs, obviously. But they hadn’t known if their father was going to die, either.
In looking at the photos, Arietta had the strangest feeling that she was looking at her daughters’ lives long after she and Fred had passed away. “You look so beautiful, my girls,” she said.
They’ll never talk to me again if they learn what’s behind this blackmail, she thought suddenly, throwing herself into a moment of panic.When they figure out what Fred and I did, they’ll end our relationship. Fred won’t have to know the girls hate us, but I will.
She didn’t know where these thoughts were coming from. She didn’t know what to fear.
“Mom?” Shannon called her back to reality.
Arietta handed back the phone filled with graduation photos and wiped tears from her eyes. “I just hate that I missed it. I should have been there. I was supposed to be,” she said.
“We can reenact it tonight,” Felicity suggested.
“That’s a great idea!” Isabelle said. “I can be that awful guy who gave the speech about the future of artificial intelligence.”
“I don’t need to live through that again.” Shannon laughed.
Slowly, the three Peters girls and Arietta drifted into better conversations. They found ways to laugh, tell stories, play good music, and eat to their hearts’ content. But all the while, Arietta felt the darkness of all she didn’t know about her husband and her blackmailers. She prayed that that darkness wouldn’t swallow them all whole.
6
Two Years Ago
Three weeks before Shannon graduated from Yale undergrad, her Grandma Regina passed away. Shannon just happened to be there when it happened. After a harrowing test, she’d driven to the Boston hospital where her grandmother was living out her final days, connected to beeping machines, her body getting thinner and thinner as her mind let go.
Shannon was the only one there when it happened. It was one of the strangest days of her life.
During those final weeks of her grandmother’s life, Shannon’s mother, Arietta, stayed at Grandma Regina’s bedside almost constantly, holding her hand. Shannon’s father, Fred, came every few days to pay his respects and keep Arietta company. Still, he usually sat nervously at Arietta’s side, his back hunched in a way that made him look entirely unlike himself. He made several excuses, stepping into the waiting room to make business calls and avoid all signs of Grandma Regina’s death.
Terribly, during the week before Grandma Regina’s death, Arietta had developed a cold that kept her in bed most of thetime. Shannon called her frequently to update her on Grandma Regina’s status.
“I’ll be there soon,” Arietta said in a tiny voice.
But she hadn’t made it. Shannon knew that this had destroyed a part of her mother’s heart, one that couldn’t be repaired.
Grandma Regina had first been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s six years ago. At that time, Shannon was only sixteen years old. She’d noticed her grandmother’s forgetfulness and her quickness to anger, her confusion. Arietta had noticed it, too. But everyone had tried to pretend everything was all right for a little while, at least until Grandma Regina had gotten lost in the grocery store and started screaming at an employee. This wasn’t like their kindhearted and funny Grandma Regina. Something was wrong.
Grandma Regina’s diagnosis was the reason Shannon grew passionate about the brain and all it was capable of and all it was capable of losing. During her last two years of high school, she’d thrown herself into her science classes with the goal of attending one of the prestigious Ivy League universities, Harvard or Yale. She’d gotten into both, but she’d decided on Yale for reasons that were no longer relevant. Something to do with an urging from a teacher at high school who’d gone there and had wonderful memories. It didn’t matter.