Prouts Neck

The upper-right corner of the crescent-shaped bay scythed inward, and it was there, on that anonymous corner of heaven, that we spent every summer of my childhood.

Painters, contemporary and historical, set up easels along the coastline and captured the pink, cloudless sunsets of my adolescence. The moon stood so still in the canvas of black that, on July nights with our feet in the water, it seemed to belong only to us. There was always, night upon night, a wild and untamed thicket of stars.

Light pollution did not seem to exist on those jagged shores, not when I was young and not now, as I stood by the wooden fence at the edge of our beachfront property. It had belonged to my family since 1989, the same year I was born.

The only glow of light came from the amber warmth inside my family kitchen. My mother was making earl grey tea. I was avoiding the conversation I would inevitably have to share with her, seated across the table with my own steely eyes staring pityingly back at me.

For now I could listen to the churn of the waves against the rocks and breathe without my anxiety hitching in my throat and wishing for a spare klonopin. Barefoot in the grass, I watched the fireflies dart through the overgrown grass. The beach was so close I could smell the saltwater. The waves whispered, the tiny shard of lunar glass reflected dimly in the waters of the Atlantic, where I had learned to swim as a precocious child.

I was shivering lightly in the seabreeze, wrapped in the only cardigan I had bothered to pack in my overnight bag.

It was the last week of June. I had only returned because of my father.

Everything always came back to him, I thought, trying not to misplace my anger. To do that would be to condemn myself to his fate.

*

His presence loomed large even with his ailing health, because he had not produced a successful movie in two decades and he was losing his memory and, almost overnight, he had grown terribly cruel. He had never been affectionate, but as the gaps in his memory increased, so did his violent streaks. Dementia brought forth the bitter bile he had apparently been choking back for over three decades.

To avoid him, my siblings had quietly dispersed. In that sense I mean they had chosen different coasts, and different vices, to preoccupy themselves. My brother had moved upstate with his wife and bought eighty acres on which they played at homesteading. My sister had nineteen tattoos and a Narcotics Anonymous sponsor in Oxnard.

As the oldest, I was the one who learned all the details: about Dad’s health, about the family finances, about Mom’s childish new life at middle age.

I knew that this trip, mainly, would involve the will. He was certain Tara, my little sister, should be removed.

The dementia was a slow burn, but a sudden medical emergency had struck a week before. Our father was at a business lunch two blocks from Cedars-Sinai, conveniently, when his mottled hand suddenly dropped his Manhattan, where it shattered on the marbled floor, and his face drooped and he babbled like an incoherent child learning to speak.

Since the divorce ten years prior, we had rarely been able to get in touch with Mom. She was busy, she always emphasized. She was not resentful of us kids. Nothing like that. Not like Dad could be. But nevertheless, she insisted, she needed her space.

Now that we were grown and had our own lives she seemed determined to reclaim her lost youth, and it set a feeling of embarrassment in the pit of my stomach that I didn’t know how to put a name to.

She was acting like a teenager. Shopping trips in Italy. A new interest in photography. Opening a gallery in Hudson funded almost entirely by her Sicilian boyfriend, fifteen years her junior. He sculpted women’s naked torsos, decapitated and limbless.

Mom made a point of making her calls short and curt. She didn’t like to reminisce. Yet she endured my calls far longer than theirs. Eldest daughter syndrome, my therapist had explained, a month before I fired her. As if that phraseology was unfamiliar to me, who had been pre-med at Brown before I dropped out sophomore year.

Yet I thought of that very dull therapist now, her candy-sweet voice and her office overpacked with flowers and "affirmations." When Mom had called me in hysterics on Friday night, I canceled my weekend plans, packed a bag, and flew to Maine. Eldest daughter that I was.