Page 32 of Butterfly Sisters
“Yes.” She grabbed his wrist and pulled, causing him to rise.
When Colton stood up, Elvis jumped to his feet, the three of them going back inside the cabin.
“Maybe she has a message for me,” Leigh said, rooting through the other drawers that lined the side of the desk. They held a few old paper phone books, some stationery, and a couple knickknacks that looked as though Nan may have stashed them in there with no other place to put them.
She lifted up a few file folders and then shut the drawer she was searching, moving on to Nan’s magazine rack that was kept on the floor by the sofa. She thumbed through the magazines, but there was nothing there.
“What does it look like?” Colton asked, scanning the bookshelf.
“It’s thin, about the size of a record album, and it’s brown with a leather tie.” She opened the hall closet and lifted the folded sheets and towels, not seeing it. “Maybe it’s in her art room.”
They walked down the hallway together, and she stopped at the door of Nan’s workshop. She hadn’t allowed herself to go in since she’d gotten there. That room had been entirely Nan’s. Meredith would stop in to paint with their grandmother every now and again, but Leigh had stayed away from this room most of the time, never feeling like she fit in it.
“When I paint, my soul takes over my body and shows me what it’s capable of,” Nan had said once when Leigh had been about fifteen. “Sometimes I’m not even conscious of what I’m doing until I step back and take a look at it when I’m done. It surprises me every time.”
This room was her soul’s space, the place where her nan would be if by some miracle she could be tied to the cabin. One would have thought that Leigh would have gone running for that room first without thinking, but it had been the exact opposite. She’d felt unworthy to enter, unable to match the grandeur of Nan’s soul without her physical body to even them out.
Tentatively, Leigh grabbed hold of the doorknob and twisted, the hinges creaking as she pushed it open. She stood in the doorway, with Colton behind her.
Nan’s canvases were still on their easels. One of them had an unfinished landscape painting of mountains, the other two blank as if waiting to feel the soft caress of her grandmother’s brushstrokes. Nan’s paintbrushes still sat in an empty cup with a line from the murky water circling the inside, her shriveled aluminum tubes of paint askew on the table next to the painting. Everything was just as she’d left it the day she’d called and told Leigh’s mother that she thought she should go to the hospital to get her cough checked. The room was waiting as if she might be back to pick up where she’d left off.
That was the thing with life: it never seemed finished when people left it. They just disappeared, leaving their lives where they’d been. She’d probably had big plans for that mountain painting—perhaps it would hang in someone’s home or overlook an office full of productivity. That painting had no idea it had no future, that its destiny was to sit, incomplete.
“I know where Meredith gets her talent for landscapes,” Colton said, stepping up beside Leigh and walking into the room to stand in front of the painting.
With shallow breaths, Leigh followed. The river snaking around the mountains seemed almost fluid, like she could dip her finger in it.
“Yes,” she said, finally responding to Colton’s comment, her thoughts heavy.
“They weren’t that close—Meredith and your nan—were they?”
“No,” she replied, “they had tons in common, but Meredith was hardly ever here. She never spent time in the cabin with Nan.”
“She’s a traveler,” he said. “It’s just who she is.”
“You’re making excuses for her,” Leigh said. “At the end of the day, she wasn’t here for any of us and we felt it.”
“You’re unbelievable.” Meredith’s voice came from the doorway, surprising Leigh.
She turned around to face her sister. “How so?”
“Poor you, feeling left out. Well, I felt left out my whole life.”
“I should let you all have a minute,” Colton said, taking a step to leave.
“No.” Meredith stopped him, blocking the door. “We don’t need a minute because I’m getting out of here.”
“Typical,” Leigh said under her breath. Leave it to Meredith to make this conversation a whole dramatic thing when really it should be solved in a calm manner, together. That had been the problem all their lives. Communication was nonexistent. Before Leigh could stop her, Meredith was already down the hall, the smack of the screen door telling them she’d left the cabin.
“What in the world is going on?” Mama said, pacing down the hallway toward Leigh and Colton. She stopped halfway there, clearly not wanting to go any further. Meredith’s issues were enough to deal with, without having to face Nan’s studio. “Meredith and I just had a lovely boat ride, but we’re not home two seconds and she’s storming out. What did you say to her, Leigh?”
“Nothing she doesn’t already know, but she refuses to act like an adult about anything.”
Mama rolled her head on her shoulders, blowing a puff of breath through her lips, that edge to her beginning to show like a crack in a porcelain cup; one wrong move would shatter it. “Meredith is right: we won’t be on the same page. I’m going to have to tell you both the news whether we all like it or not. When Meredith has cooled off, we need to all sit down together and talk.”
It hadn’t escaped Leigh that Mama had agreed with Meredith. What was happening?
“I’m going to the back porch to clear my head,” Mama said.
