Page 71 of The Dutch House

“No,” I said. “It’s yours. Give it to May when she’s grown and has her own house. You need to keep it awhile. Put it over your mantel and think of Simon.”

Maeve shook her head. “I don’t want anything that was in that house. I’m telling you, it will only make me crazier than I already am.”

I looked at the girl in the portrait. They should have let her always be that girl. “Then you have to promise me you’ll take it back later.”

“I will,” she said.

“Let’s find a parking place and you can come in and give it to May.” We were double-parked.

Maeve shook her head. “There’s no such thing as a parking space. Please.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be ridiculous. You’re right here.”

She shook her head. She almost looked like she was going to cry. “I’m tired.” And then she saidpleaseagain.

So I let her go. I went around to the back and pulled out the painting and my duffel bag. It had started to rain and so I didn’t stand on the street and watch her drive off. I didn’t wave. I found my keys and hustled to get the painting inside.

We talked plenty after that, about our mother’s daily reports of Andrea and Norma and the house, and how it was turning Maeve into a complete wreck. She talked about Otterson’s. I told her about a building I wanted to buy that would require me to sell another building I didn’t want to sell. I told her May was ecstatic about the painting. “We put it in the living room, over the fireplace.”

“Me in your living room every day?”

“It’s gorgeous.”

“Celeste doesn’t mind?”

“It looks too much like May for Celeste to mind. Everybody thinks it’s May except May. When anybody asks her she says, ‘It’s a portrait of me and my aunt.’”

Two weeks after our trip to the Dutch House, my mother called me just before daylight to tell me that Maeve was dead.

“Is she there?” I asked. I didn’t believe her. I wanted Maeve to come to the phone and say it herself.

Celeste sat up in bed, looked at me. “What is it?”

“She’s here,” my mother said. “I’m with her.”

“Have you called an ambulance?”

“I will. I wanted to call you first.”

“Don’t waste time calling me! Call an ambulance.” My voice was splintering.

“Oh, Danny,” my mother said, and then she started to cry.

Chapter 19

Iremember very little about the time just after Maeve died, except for Mr. Otterson, who sat with the family at her funeral Mass and covered his face with his hands as he cried. His grief was a river as deep and as wide as my own. I knew that I should have gone to him later, I should have tried to comfort him, but there was no comfort in me.

Chapter 20

The story of my sister was the only one I was ever meant to tell, but there are still a few things to say. Three years later, when Celeste and I were working through the details of our divorce in the lawyer’s office, she told me she didn’t want the house. “I never liked it,” she said.

“Our house?”

She shook her head. “It’s not my taste. It’s heavy and old. It’s too dark. You don’t have to think about that because you aren’t home all day.”

I’d wanted to surprise her. I took her through every room, letting her think it was something I was planning to buy as a rental. I told her I could cut it into two units. I could even make it four, though that, of course, would be real work. Celeste, infinitely game, went up and down the stairs with May strapped to her chest, looking at the bathrooms, checking the water pressure. I didn’t ask her if she liked it then. I could have but I didn’t. I handed her the deed instead. In my mind it had been one of the few truly romantic gestures I’d ever made. “It’s our house,” I said.

Everything in me wanted to excuse myself from the proceedings and go out to the hall and call my sister. That never stopped happening.