Page 6 of Drawing Home
Kyle came around and opened Bea’s door, and when the cool night air hit her cheeks, she almost lost her footing. It was real. This was happening. She was at Windsong, but Henry was not. Henry was gone.
Kyle managed the luggage while Bea walked to the door clutching the single key in her hand. The darkness of night lifted when the security lights were activated by their movements. Kyle let out a low whistle as the house, in all of its modern, dramatic glory, suddenly came into view.
It was a masterpiece designed by Henry himself decades ago. Henry was an artist to his core, and he had never been constrained by medium. He painted, he drew, he sculpted, and he created his home. Bea, a nonartist who had always surrounded herself with talented people, did not possess the drive to create, but she was in awe of it.
The one thing all of Henry Wyatt’s work shared was minimalism, and Windsong was an absolute extension of that. A combination of wood, stone, and metal, the house had floor-to-ceiling glass walls and an open layout.
Bea put the key in the lock. It had been a few years since she’d used it, but she hadn’t taken the key off her key chain since the day Henry had given it to her.
She moved through darkness and found the central light switch from memory.
“This place is insane,” Kyle said. Even at night, the spectacular integration of the interior of the house and the outdoors was breathtaking. “You’re sure we should be here?”
“I have a key, don’t I?” Bea snapped. She walked deeper into the house, each painting on the wall triggering a memory of the friend she’d just lost. She took a few minutes to run her hands over a few of the sculptures meticulously placed throughout, still in disbelief.
A thirty-two-by-forty-inch oil painting with large swaths of green and black dominated the living room. As with all of his paintings, the piece had a central element to ground it. This particular canvas had hung in the Guggenheim for many years. EntitledGreene Street, 1972,it was named after the location of the gallery they had once owned together.
“Follow me to the guest suites.”
How long had it been since she was at the house? She had forgotten the tranquillity of the space, with its white oak floors and ceilings, the flat-panel doors with hidden fixtures. Everything was perfectly designed and seamless. Every inch was Henry.
The news reports speculated that Henry had suffered a massive heart attack, but Bea needed to get the facts from official channels. She’d left a message for Henry’s attorney Victor Bonivent but had not heard back from him. Now she wondered if he had still retained Victor. How much did she really know about Henry’s life in recent years?
The stairs to the upper level gave the illusion of floating along a white wall. Bea briefly considered going up to Henry’s room but decided against it. She wasn’t emotionally prepared for that; she would instead take a room in the guest suite.
For a few years after Henry built the house, Bea had declined his invitations to visit. Windsong had been the mistress who stole him away from Manhattan, away from her. Their rift had not been caused by the house, but it had coincided with the construction of Windsong, and so the place had seemed, for a time, to be the embodiment of their lost friendship.
“Do you want me to unpack your bag now?” Kyle asked in the doorway of a glass-walled room with a view of the bay.
Bea waved him off dismissively. “Tomorrow.”
“Um, Bea, how long will we be staying here? Through the weekend?”
How long. How long indeed! How long did it take to honor the past? How long to stop feeling like she was staring into the churning waters of her own obsolescence? Of course there was no sense trying to explain this to a thirty-two-year-old, a man who no doubt believed he had all the time in the world. Bea remembered that feeling. And it was indelibly intertwined with her memories of meeting Henry.
“Kyle, Henry Wyatt was my oldest friend. And I was essentially his family—the only family he had.” She couldn’t change the past. She couldn’t bring Henry back. But, filled with a sense of purpose she hadn’t experienced for a very long time, she said, “I must settle his estate. I know he’d want me to take care of Windsong. We will be here indefinitely.”
“Sorry my mom had to call you,” Penny said to Angus.
He barely glanced at her. Angus had white hair and wore frameless round glasses. He wasn’t fat but he had broad shoulders and he was big, like a former football player. Angus was a retired high-school history teacher, and as far as Penny was concerned, he needed to go back to work. He clearly missed it, since he was constantly subjecting her to impromptu lessons about Sag Harbor. He was a nonstop trivia machine, and although her mother found this endlessly fascinating, Penny didn’t like feeling as if she should be taking notes over her breakfast cereal.
Penny’s mother had told her that when she moved into the house on Mount Misery, shortly after Penny was born, she had immediately bonded with two of her new neighbors, Angus Sinclair and his wife, Celia. Unlike the waves of newcomers who’d been snapping up property for the past decade or so, and also very unlike the summer people, Emma Mapson had deep roots in Sag Harbor. The Sinclairs did as well; Angus’s family had been one of the first African-American families to buy a vacation house in Ninevah Beach. This was in the 1940s, a time when African-Americans weren’t allowed to buy homes in many other parts of the country.
“I wasn’t asleep yet,” Angus said, pulling up to their house on Mount Misery Drive. “I was watching the news.” His voice was so deep, it made everything he said sound important. Tonight, maybe because she felt guilty about the party, it also made him sound angry.
Once inside the house, Penny tried to creep up the stairs without any more conversation, but Angus wasn’t letting her off the hook.
“I just hope you’re not getting yourself into trouble, Penelope Bay Mapson,” he said.
Angus’s late wife, Celia, had always used Penny’s full given name when she was babysitting and got serious about something.Bayhad been chosen by Penny’s father. Her parents had met when her father was in town one summer performing in a play at the Bay Street Theater. He’d long since left, but Penny was still stuck with the weird name.
Penny went into the kitchen. “No trouble at all,” she told Angus.Lies, lies, lies.
At the party, alcohol was everywhere and in whatever form anyone could possibly want—kegs, Jell-O shots, bottles of vodka and tequila. By the time Penny had arrived, empty red Solo cups were scattered over every surface, inside the house and out on the wide deck right on the water.
Penny didn’t dare drink. Her mother would kill her. And unlike a lot of kids’ parents, Emma worked around drunk people all the time and would notice the slightest sign of it. So while everyone was having fun, Penny was not. No one was talking to her. No one was even looking at her. And in her mind, she could still hear those sirens outside the hotel.
She couldn’t be sure it was Mr. Wyatt who had died. But somehow, she just knew. All she would have to do was borrow someone’s phone and Google it, but she was afraid to make it all real. At the same time, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Every ten minutes she’d gone to the bathroom and washed her hands, lathering and lathering to calm herself and then standing over the sink and letting them drip-dry. She couldn’t bring herself to touch the towel hanging on the rack. And so, when Robin finally came over to talk to her and offered her a round white pill, as innocent-looking as aspirin, she took it. Anything to escape her own thoughts. “Don’t worry, Mindy says her mother pops these like Tic Tacs,” Robin had said.
