A note of intrigue plays in my head. I’d give anything to have even one conversation with Robin.
One probably wouldn’t be enough.
I see a photo of her finally, upstairs in her room. Not a childhood photo, like the faded studio portraits downstairs in the parlor, but a grown-up one. The driftwood frame sits on the delicate, spindle-legged writing desk, offering an image of a smiling woman with pale blond hair. She’s slight and narrow-faced. The deep blue-green orbs of her eyes seem to dominate the photo. They’re warm, beautiful eyes. Her brother’s eyes.
She’s standing on a shrimp boat with Nathan, then a teenager, in the background. They’re both laughing as she holds up a hopelessly tangled fishing rod. “The boat was our uncle’s.” Nathan looks over my shoulder. “On my mom’s side. She didn’t grow up with money, but man oh man, her dad and her uncles knew how to have a good time. We’d hitch on the shrimp boats once in a while, ride along wherever they were going. Drop a line if we could. Maybe get off here or there and stay a day or two. Paps and his brothers knew everybody and were related to half the population around there.”
“Sounds like fun.” I picture it again—the shrimp boat, Nathan’s other life. His ties down on the coast.
“It was. Mom couldn’t stand to be back in the swamp for very long, though. Sometimes people have a thing about where they come from and how they were raised. She married a guy fifteen years older and rich, and she always felt like people on both sides faulted her for it—gold digger and that kind of thing. She didn’t know what to do with all that, so she moved away from it. Asheville gave her the art scene, sort of a new identity, you know?”
“Yeah, I do.” More than I can possibly say. When I left home, I expunged every bit of my past, or I tried to, at least. Augustine has taught me that the past travels with you. It’s whether you run from it or learn from it that makes all the difference.
“It’s not as hard as I thought it would be…coming in here,” Nathan says, but the stiff way he carries himself says otherwise. “I have no idea what we’re looking for, though. And to tell you the truth, whatever it is, it could be gone. Will and Manford and their wives and kids let themselves in and appropriated most of what they wanted right after Robin died.”
Even though Robin has been gone for two years, our search of her room feels uncomfortably invasive. Her personal belongings are still here. We carefully check drawers, shelves, the closet, a box in the corner, an old leather suitcase. All of it looks as if it has been previously rummaged through, then dumped haphazardly back into place.
We come up with nothing of significance. Credit card bills and medications, letters from friends, holiday notes, blank stationery, a journal with a cute little gold hasp on the front. It’s unlocked, the key still tucked among the pages, but when Nathan leafs through, all he finds is Robin’s reading list, complete with favorite quotations jotted down, mini summaries of each book, and the dates she started and finished. Sometimes she read several books in a week, everything from classics and Westerns to nonfiction and the Reader’s Digest condensed editions from the boxes downstairs.
“Your sister was a definite bibliophile,” I remark, looking over Nathan’s shoulder at the book list.
“She got that from the judge,” he replies. Tucked inside the diary, there’s also a running tally of billiard games played on the old Brunswick table downstairs in the library, sort of an ongoing tournament between grandfather and granddaughter in the last year of the judge’s life. “They had a lot in common.”
The desk drawer tips forward as Nathan opens it to put papers back in. A cue ball rolls to the front corner, clatters to the floor, then starts moving, seemingly under its own power. Nathan and I watch it weave over the uneven plank floors, this direction, then that, catching the sun and reflecting fairy lights on the wall before finally disappearing under the bed.
My shoulders shimmy