B L A I R E
•
It starts to rain when I'm halfway home. The heavens open, cracking a split in the dark grey clouds that steal the air and the light, and I'm drenched in seconds. Even the trees bending over the winding road can't keep the rain away, pellets of water pelting me as I pedal, hands slipping on the brakes. It only gets stronger, until I'm struggling to see and the rain is forming puddles, bouncing off the slick tarmac.
It's not a long journey, but it feels like forever by the time I make it back to Elizabeth's house, and I see the scuffed, rusted plaque on the gate, and now I realise why it's called Taighmartin. It's not the bird; it's not a house martin. It's the house of a Martin. Elizabeth Martins lives here.
I throw the bike into the garage, out of the storm, and my wet hands slip on the front door knob as I let myself into the house, shaking like a wet dog. Tact and sense are out of the window: I rush straight upstairs, only stopping in my room to switch out a sodden hoodie for a dry one, and I open the door to the attic.
I've never been up here, but I don't think before I storm up the steps and come face to face with a bewildered Elizabeth. She's standing in front of a canvas, a paintbrush in her hand, and I lose my balance when I see what she's painting.
Not what. Who.
Mum's face looks back at me, mid-laugh. Elizabeth has captured the light in her eyes, golden flecks in her hazel-brown irises; she's captured the dirty blonde of her hair, streaked with the occasional grey, the laughter lines around her eyes.
"What ... what are you doing?" I ask when I find my voice, all purpose floating away at the sight of the painting. "You're painting Mum? Why are you painting Mum?"
And then I look around. The attic is filled with paintings. I spot one that looks so like Mum and so like Elizabeth in equal measures, the smallest differences, and I just know it is Lissa. Alison. My aunt. And then I spot Fee, too. It's like looking at myself, fifteen years ago. We have the same hair, the same freckles, the same eyes.
"Who ... who are all these people?"
"Family," Elizabeth says. She looks concerned, and she advances towards me, and I almost fall down the stairs trying to get away from her. "What're you doing up here, Blaire?"
"This is all family?" I ask, ignoring her. "Where am I?"
She frowns. Puts down the paintbrush, and her phone. I see why the painting of Mum is so familiar - it isn't just because I know her face so well. Elizabeth's copying a photo, one of the best pictures of Mum that most of the news outlets used for their articles about her death.
"You're still here, Blaire."
"How long have you lived here?"
"I bought this h-"
"No, not here. Anchor Lake. Loch Iuchair. How long have you lived here, Elizabeth?"
There's a pause. A beat. She must know that I know. The jig is up. Time to see her cards.
"I've never left," she says.
"Never?"
"Never."
I sink onto a stool, staying away from the paintings. I can feel their eyes on me, so many eyes. "I know you're Betsy Martins," I say. Her expression changes. She pinches her lips, looks away, looks down. Her chin creases, her eyes going glassy.
I press on. "I know your parents were murdered in 1969. I know you survived a crash that killed everybody else. I know your sister and your daughter were killed in 1994." I take a breath. "I know you wrote that fucking book."
Elizabeth takes off her apron, hooking it over her easel, and she sinks into an armchair.
I stare at her when she says nothing. "You lied to me."
"I didn't want to hurt you," she says. It's as blatant an admission as anything.
"What does that even mean?"
"You've read the book. You know my life story now. Every sordid detail. You know what I've suffered through, what this town has suffered through. I never wanted you to have to experience that," she says, her voice low, her eyes cast down. "You came to me broken and sad, and so lost, and I didn't know what to do, Blaire. I thought the least I could do was try to keep this awful history from you."
"But it's my history too. Why not just let me know, let me decide for myself?"
"Because look at what it does!" She flings out her arms. "It steals. It saps out the joy and happiness and life. You think this is how I wanted to live my life? Holed up in this house, scared to stay and scared to go?"
I don't know what to say to that. It's not what I expected her to say. I anticipated a cold response, more lies, some way she would shrug it off and tell me to get help. Not this. This honesty. She swipes at her eyes. She's crying. It jars me to see her emotions.
"I lost everything," she says. "My parents were murdered in front of me. I was eleven years old, and I saw them die, and then my sister ran away. She left us; she left Lissa to pick up the pieces." She sniffs, her nose turning red. "When that bus crashed, I hoped I would die. I wanted to die, because then all of the pain would stop."
My eyes drop to the scars that I noticed before, long, jagged wounds that must have grown with her since she was a child. She folds her arms, closing her hands over them.
"I survived. I was the only one to survive. There is no guilt like that, Blaire. You have no idea what it's like to be trapped for hours with seventeen dead bodies. My friends."
No. I can't possibly imagine. The thought alone twists my gut.
"It took me decades to get over that, and then I had Fee." There's a glimmer of a smile, a memory of a happier time. "I thought finally, my life was going to be okay. I still had one sister, and I had my daughter too." She chokes on a sob and covers her mouth, her words swallowed by her tears when she says, "And then I lost them too. My baby girl. I didn't let her out of my sight for six years, and the one time I did..."
I'm crying too, my throat thick. I can't bear to see this, to see her relive the moments I've only read about, moments that didn't seem fully real until this second.
"I didn't know what to do myself. I wanted to die. Instead, I wrote that book." Wiping her eyes, she takes a shaky breath. "I put my house on the market and I hid away, and I spent six years writing that damn book, because it helped me to throw myself into a project that consumed me. Something that took up so much of my time, I couldn't waste time grieving for my daughter, my sister, my parents."
She lifts her head, meets my eye. "You know how that feels," she says. "You've been doing it too." Her shoulders start to shake. "The one thing I wanted to keep from you, and you found it anyway."
"Why didn't you leave?" It's all I can think to ask, my voice hoarse.
"I can't leave this town." Her hair falls in her face when she shakes her head. "Everyone I loved has died here. My daughter is buried here. I can't leave her. I hate this town, but I can't leave. It's my destiny to die here."
"No."
"Yes. Everyone does eventually."
"Do you want me dead?" I don't mean to ask it. Fuck. The words just slip out. She reacts like I've slapped her, horror painted across her face.
"Why the hell would you think that?"
"I found your copy," I say, gripping the edges of the stool, toes curled around the rungs. "You wrote my name. Bets-no, you, you wrote that timeline, and you wrote Who next? And I saw my name. And Mum's."
"Blaire, no, no, no, I don't want you dead." She starts to cry again, wet tracks down her cheeks. "This wretched town takes everyone I love. I wrote down all the people I have left. I thought it was me and Anna and Esme. She was my aunt - she made it to old age. Not many of us get to do that, though she lost her mind twenty years before she died."
"And then you heard about me."
She nods. "I heard about you. I didn't know how to feel, Blaire. I wanted to help you, to get to know you. But the thought of bringing you here, my god, I didn't want to. This ... this place is a dead end, Blaire. I love you, you're my family, but this isn't what I want for you."
She loves me. No matter the emotions crowding me out right now, those words light a flame that melts my hard edges. "I don't have anywhere else to go."
"I know." She sighs a shuddery sigh. "I'm not going to act like I think I made the right decision. I didn't know what to do. I thought ... if you read that book, if you knew about our family, it would only make everything worse. You've been doing so well. I didn't want to hurt you again."
There's a breath of a pause. Elizabeth drops her head into her hands, covering her face when she starts to cry again. I slip off my stool, padding across the floorboards to her chair. I perch on the arm, unsure of what to do with my hand. It ends up on her shoulder. She tries to control her tears, and she rests her head against my waist.
"I thought..." I trail off. No, it won't do any good to share what I thought.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Please. What did you think?"
"When I saw my name, I thought ... I don't know, I thought it was a hit list. It was this timeline of tragedy and death, and then my name, and Mum's."
"Oh, Blaire, no. I'm so sorry. I never meant for you to see that." She shakes her head; I feel it against my side. "I hate that book. I hate what I did, but I can't let go of it. All I wanted was to keep track of who was left. I added your name when I heard about you. It felt so good to write a new name, rather than cross one out."
"Why did you change your name?"
"I've lived in this town my entire life," she says. "The furthest I've ever been is the hospital where Fee was born. Where Lissa died. Everybody knew me. I was a spectacle. I was the girl who lived, over and over. I survived when my parents died. I survived when my friends died. I survived when my family died. Everyone knew about Betsy Martins. I couldn't be her anymore. Nothing good ever happened to Betsy."
"Has anything good ever happened to Elizabeth?"
"You."
That does it for me. I break down. It's too hard to hold everything in any longer and I let it out with an ugly sniffle that makes Elizabeth jump. She uncurls herself from the chair and pulls me against her, burying her face in my neck and shushing me.
"I'm sorry I lied to you. I didn't realise how much I was hurting you."
"I tried to tell you."
"I know. I know, I do. I didn't listen, and I'm sorry. I thought I knew better. A side effect of fifty years of therapy, I suppose."
"Why print the book?" I ask. "If you hate it so much, why get it printed?"
"I had to. It was a compulsion," she says. "I gave six years of my life to that book and once I wrote the final words, I had to hold it. But I couldn't bear to see my own name attached to this dissection of my own grief, so I scrambled it. Then I ordered one copy, and four showed up."
"So you left them at the library?"
She nods. "It was never meant for anyone but me, not really," she says. "It was like my own personal dissertation, but I had no point to prove, no audience. I was just screaming into this void within, and hoping to hear an echo." A long sigh escapes her. "I didn't know anyone else had read it."
I splutter at that. "Everyone's obsessed. The whole town, pretty much."
She presses her fingers to her eyes, shaking her head. "They're obsessed with my sad obsession," she says. "I wish I'd never written it down. All it's done is memorialise so much heartbreak."
My face is pressed into her bony chest, her soft jumper muffling my words when I say, "This family's had the shittest luck for fifty years."
"Oh, no," she murmurs. "More like four hundred."
"What?"
She lets go of me, gently peeling away from me, and she moves aside stacked piles of canvases to pull out a roll of paper that she pins to a bare easel and unfurls. This isn't a painting, or a drawing. It's a family tree.
"This is me," she says, pointing to the second-to-last row. Her name, alongside Mum's and Alison's. She takes out a pen from her pocket and under Annaliese, she writes my name. Liberty Blaire. Capping the pen, she taps the top of the sheet. I have to move closer to see what it says.
Temperance Key.
"We're all descended from Temperance," Elizabeth says. "Of course, there were others before her, but that's as far as I went. And if she's the first generation, then you're the ... sixteenth."
"She's ... what the fuck? This is our family tree?"
She nods mournfully. "I'm afraid so."
"The book is ... it's all the atrocious things that happened to our family?"
"Yes. Maudlin, I know. But you know just as well as I do how therapeutic it can be to delve into old sorrow to ease the pain of the freshest wounds."
"These are all the people from the book."
"Mmm."
"Your paintings. Are they these people?"
"How I imagine them. Except for the few I knew." Her gaze goes to the portrait of Fee. She was so young. Unbearably young to die. "This is Esme." She touches a painting of an old lady with white curls, staring into the distance, unseeing. "And that one"-she points to a stunning painting of a woman with captivating eyes and a fiery halo of red curls-"is how I picture Temperance."
"It's beautiful. You're an incredible painter."
"Thank you."
I turn my attention to the family tree. The numbers in Elizabeth's book make sense now. They're the generations. She's a fifteen. I'm a sixteen. Temperance is one. Angling closer, I scan the names, trying to commit them to memory. My heritage, my ancestry.
Temperance is the first, the top of the list. Her son is Henry; he marries Norma. They have Michael and Alice. Michael dies young. Alice marries Nicholas, the preacher, and has six children. He dies in the church collapse; so does their daughter, Isabel. Twenty-five years later, Alice dies along with three more of her children: Henrietta; Savannah; Francis.
Her son George survives. He has a daughter, Rachel. She has a son, Simon. Simon's daughters are Rebecca and Emily; Emily has Oscar. I remember him. The boy who was struck by lightning. She also has Sophie, whose only child is Ronald. Ronald has Robert; Robert fathers two children. Duncan and Louise. Duncan dies young; Louise is a survivor. She has Amelia, who has six children. One of them is Margaret, who has two daughters in the 1920s. Esme and Eleanor.
And Eleanor was my grandmother.
"Did you know Temperance owned this town?" I ask.
"I had my suspicions." She stands right next to me, our arms pressed together. "Blaire, can you be honest with me?"
I nod. She slips an arm around me and rests her cheek on top of my head. I want to stay like this for a while, anchored to her. Anchored to my history.
"Are you okay?"
I honour my promise and I think about it.
"No. Not really, no."
She squeezes my shoulder. "Thank you." She presses her lips to my hair. "Can we work together?"
"Yes. I think so."
"Okay. That's good."
"I know I'm not good at saying it, and I'm difficult, and I'm not very good at controlling my emotions. But I do love you, Elizabeth. Especially now that I know you don't want to kill me."
Her half hug tightens. "I love you too, Blaire."
We're standing in front of the painting of my mother, so close to finished, but not quite. I can't see what's missing, until it's all I can see.
"She had a mole, right there." I point at the smooth, empty space below Mum's left eye. "A little brown one. Like a beauty mark."
"Of course." She slips away and grabs the paintbrush, mixing the perfect shade of brown without consulting the photo any more. It's such a small detail, but it completes the painting. Elizabeth looks over her shoulder at me. "How's that?"
"Perfect." I hold myself together, nodding at the replication of my mother's infectious joy. Joy that she had to leave this town to find. "It's perfect."
*