Page 96 of The Lost Heiress
“It’s from an E. E. Cummings poem,” Bass said.
“Yes, I know,” Saoirse said. “Mother’s favorite poet. She kept a book of his poems on her bedside table.”
“Yes,” Bass said, nodding. He looked like he was somewhere far away in the past in that moment, in a time when her mother was flesh and blood, rather than just a memory.
“You know it?” Saoirse asked.
“Of course I know it,” Bass said. “I was the one who gave her that book, for her fortieth birthday.”
Something cut through Saoirse’s champagne-induced haze—a needling feeling underneath her rib cage. She shook her head to clear it. Bass’s words didn’t make any sense. She recalled the hand-scrawled inscription on the inside title page of the poetry book that her mother kept on her nightstand:Love defies reason.It was unsigned, but it had always been obvious to Saoirse who had gifted her mother the book, who had written that inscription. It was a book of love poems, after all.
“Daddy gave her that,” Saoirse said.
“Charles?” Bass said, breaking from his reverie. He laughed. “No, Charles was always more of a Keats man. Or Tennyson. He always said Cummings was too esoteric, too idiosyncratic, to be to his liking.”
Saoirse instinctively took a step back.
It didn’t make any sense, what he was telling her.
Or perhaps the problem was that it did make sense, a great deal of sense—it was more that Saoirse didn’t want it to. The pieces were falling into place against her will. Every memory like a puzzle piece fastening itself together, forming a picture she didn’t want to see. Bass at every birthday party, every Christmas, every family vacation. The way he rested his arm on the back of her mother’s chair when they were at dinner. One time, while stepping off the boat onto the pier, Saoirse’s mother had lost her footing and fallen back into the boat, and Bass had cried out, as if he had been the one to fall. He’d jumped down into the boat after her to make sure she was all right.
“You’re lying,” Saoirse said. “You’re a liar.”
Only then did Bass seem to realize that something was wrong. He reached out and grabbed Saoirse’s forearm to steady her.
“My dear, are you all right?” he asked.
Saoirse’s throat was constricting. She couldn’t breathe.
The next realization was cold and sharp, like a knife cutting through her: of course her mother hadn’t given her that necklace, the one she always wore, the one that proclaimed how her mother really felt about her. It had been Bass all along. Bass, the master of gifts. Which meant that Saoirse had never misunderstood her mother’s resentment. Her dislike, her lack of regard—which had always shown so plainly in her mother’s actions toward her—was probably exactly how she had really felt.
Saoirse groped for the chain around her neck. It wasn’t tight, but still, it felt like it was choking her; she had to get it off. She grasped at it and pulled hard—one sharp yank, then two. She felt the clasp give; there was a sharp pain at the back of her neck. She pulled the chain off her, and she felt the pendant slide off and fall into the neckline of her dress, but she barely noticed. She clasped the chain so hard that the sharp stars that jutted out cut into the flesh of her palm, and the pain was a welcome, if insufficient, distraction from her thoughts.
“Saoirse—what?” Bass started, alarmed, but she cut him off.
“Did Daddy know?” she asked. She could barely get the words out.
Out of everyone in her family, her relationship with her father had been the only one that hadn’t been riddled with complications. He had loved her without strings. That had been the one pure thing in her life.
And it wasn’t even real.
Bass looked confused at first and then panicked. He removed his hand from her arm and looked away from her.
“I don’t ... I’m not sure what you think—”
“Tell me the truth, for once,” Saoirse said, her voice loud.
The people closest to them stopped talking, turned to look.
Bass stuttered, red in the face, but he wouldn’t give her an answer.
Saoirse felt a lump rise into her throat.
Maybe her father had died thinking she was still his little girl. But if there was a heaven, if there was an afterlife, maybe now he knew the truth: that she didn’t belong to him. That the one thing that had been good about her life was actually a lie.
Saoirse ardently wished there weren’t a heaven or a hell, or any sentience or omniscience granted to us after death. She wished for oblivion. Blinding and numbing oblivion. That way, at least, things would never change between them. They’d go on, just as they had been, until she died.
Saoirse dropped the chain of her necklace at Bass’s feet.
