The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [142]
On Russian Hill they saw a two-bedroom apartment with high ceilings and honey-colored floors. The bedrooms were far apart, an advantage (though it went unmentioned) now that Jack often spent the night. In spite of herself, Phoebe felt a certain excitement, wandering the grand, empty rooms as dusk blinked in through the curtainless windows. Her mother, too, seemed inspired by the place. “A dining room!” she exclaimed, though their own was much bigger. “We can start throwing dinner parties.”
They discussed rugs and desks and curtains, which of their several couches they would keep. Their voices echoed through the empty rooms. Abruptly they heard themselves, and a momentary shyness overcame them.
“Mom,” Phoebe said.
Her mother looked up.
Now, Phoebe told herself—now! There was a long pause while she wondered what exactly she’d meant to tell her mother. For something else was pushing out from inside her, clamoring to be heard. “I’m sorry I disappeared,” she said. “And missed your film.” It was almost a whisper.
Her mother crossed the room and took Phoebe in her arms. Her lemony smell seemed to arrive from a great distance. “I missed you,” she said.
Back outside, they paused to look at the building. It was of an old California style, salmon-colored, decorations like frosting, lacy black grillwork over massive glass doors. Behind it the sky was a dark, lucid blue, fog rushing across it. Phoebe’s pulse was still racing from what had happened in the apartment. What was it about Faith that she’d wanted so badly to impart? It seemed to Phoebe now that she had never named it directly, even to herself. Was it Wolf’s having been present when she died? The terrorists? The dead man? But no, it was none of these. The truth was that her sister had killed herself. And everyone knew it.
As they walked to the car, Phoebe’s mother took her hand.
They rented the apartment. They would move the fifteenth of October.
Through open windows a wind flushed their house, lifting clouds of silty dust from the floors, bare now of furniture. Moving men with trembling biceps carried everything down the brick steps to a long Bekins truck.
Barry had taken the afternoon off to help with the move. He and Phoebe had the job of sorting through their father’s paintings, picking three or so to keep, packing up the rest to give away. In silence they descended the basement steps to the storeroom, a jigsaw of canvases crammed haphazardly from wall to wall. Barry unfolded several huge Bekins boxes and they began, Phoebe handing paintings to Barry, who fitted them carefully inside the box. The older paintings were deeper inside the room, so as they worked, the years seemed to lift from Faith, transforming her from the sad teenager propped by their father’s hospital bed to a sweet, grinning child.
Phoebe lifted one painting and paused, holding it up to the stray, weak light from the door. It was a portrait of her sister aged eight or nine, standing on the very cliff where, not ten years later, they had scattered her ashes into the sea. She wore a white sunsuit and was grinning, reaching out, a purple ice plant flower clutched in her fist. “Bear,” Phoebe said.
He came over. They looked at the painting. At first glance, Faith appeared in her usual state of chaotic happiness, but the longer Phoebe looked, the more her sister’s hectic grin seemed belied by a deeper anxiety, as if with this flower she were warding something off. Phoebe looked away, jarred by the impression, then wondered if what she’d seen was really there. She couldn’t tell. When she looked at the painting again, her sister just seemed happy.
Barry seemed about to speak, then didn’t. “Let’s keep it,” he said.
Finally the paintings were packed, arranged meticulously in four giant boxes and part of a fifth. “I guess we should pick two more,” Barry said, but he seemed restless, weary of the project. “You do it, Pheeb.”
Phoebe looked at the boxes of paintings,