Due Preparations for the Plague

“I know that, Sam. Whereas I try not to. I try to stay back here in the photo album, before it happened.” The muscles in Lou’s shoulders and back are taut. “Two different ways of coping, that’s all.”

“You have more before than I have,” Sam accuses.

Lou breathes slowly. Samantha can see her counting silently to keep her agitation in check. “Sam, don’t you think this is pointless? You’ve already won the gold medal for suffering—I’ll sign a certificate if you like—and I’m not even a runner-up. Nothing we do will change the past, will it?”

“I would just like to have a past.”

Samantha’s aunt presses her fingertips against her brows, the way Jacob does when his migraines come. She pushes hard at the edge of her skull. She presses the pads of her thumbs against her temples. She speaks so quietly, Sam has to lean forward to hear. “I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t know what more I can tell you. I can’t do it. I can’t give you what you want.”

“Won’t, you mean.”

“The truth is, I don’t see you for six months at a time, I miss you, I feel so happy when you call to say you’ll come by, and then it takes me weeks to recover when you do.”

“Okay, then I won’t visit anymore.”

“I think that would be best,” Lou says, and Samantha feels a small lurch of panic.

“Fine,” she says bitterly. “I’ll head for the escape hatch, then.”

“Sam, Sam.”

Even Sam is embarrassed by herself, though she does feel queasy. She can see the dark nothing below the hatch, before she was pushed from the plane. “I’m sorry. That was cheap. I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t. I’ll try, Sam. What exactly did you want to know this time?”

“What were we all doing in Paris? I’ve never known that.”

“You never let me talk about it.”

“Now I’m letting you. Why were we there?”

“You were there because I was,” Lou sighs. “Officially I was studying French painting.”

“We were there because you were. All these years and you never once said.”

“You always storm out before I get to that.” Lou goes to her shelves and takes down books on the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, large heavy tomes of colored plates. “I was twenty-four. When you’re twenty-four, you think living in Paris will be the most glamorous thing you’ll ever do. You think you’ll be in seventh heaven, and in fact you live in some miserable little studio apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement where it’s cheap, and you have to share it with someone you don’t much like, and you’re so lonely you’d take the next plane home except your pride and your scholarship won’t let you.” She stares for a long time at Manet’s White Peonies with Secateurs. “My roommate was a French girl and we didn’t like each other much. She was moody and strange and she despised Americans.”

“Why?”

“She had an American father, she said. I guess she didn’t think much of him, but he wasn’t around, so she took it out on me.”

“And that’s why you were miserable.”

“Françoise didn’t help, but it wasn’t her fault.” Lou traces Manet’s secateurs with a fingertip. Only the black blades are visible; the handles are outside the frame. “I was depressed when I went and I got into one of those—”

“Depressed.”

“—downward spirals …”

“Why were you depressed?”

Lou studies Sam without speaking for some time, and her melancholy eyes irritate her niece. “I’d really gone away to get over someone,” she says.

“Oh. A broken heart.” Sam gives the statement a sardonic edge.

“Yes.”

In the page of text opposite the peonies, Samantha manages to read: Manet’s “Olympia” caused a tremendous scandal in 1865 because of its subversive reinterpretation of the past and its almost satirical echo of Titian’s—Her aunt turns the page. There is a double spread of Olympia, the center fold passing through the creamy thighs of the woman lounging on satin sheets. “When you’re desperate,” Lou says, “you do things that you—”

“I know about desperate.”

“I suppose you do, Sam.” But Lou is lost in the desolation of thirteen years ago in Paris.

“So what did you do?” Sam demands.

Lou turns away and presses her forehead against Manet’s brushstrokes, but Samantha does not relent. “What did you do?” she prods.

“I gave in and called my big sister.”

Big sister. A rush of excitement seizes Samantha: a new angle; another puzzle piece; something that might jar a two-dimensional image into life.

“You were close.” Samantha keeps her voice neutral. “You and my mother.”

“Of course we were. We used to be so close that you couldn’t have put—”

“Used to be.”

“Before you came along. Before she got married.”

“You resented me.” Samantha pounces on an undernote and will not let go. “You resented my father and me.”

“Nothing’s that simple, Sam.” Lou studies her niece, deciding what to tell. “I needed to see you again so badly—”

“Me?” Samantha says, startled.

“All of you, I mean. When your mother had Matthew, I went into a tailspin. I can’t explain. I just had to—Rosalie and you, and the new baby, and Jonathan, before you all dis—” Lou’s hand flies to her mouth. “It had been so long.”

“You were going to say disappeared.” Samantha is watching Lou closely, riveted. She does not believe in chance or coincidence. Every thread, in her experience, leads into the knot.

“I was going to say: disappeared into terminal respectability. You wouldn’t understand.”

A word comes back to Samantha from nowhere. Disreputable. Your sister is so disreputable.

“Were you disreputable, Lou?”

Lou gives her niece a strange look. “What made you say that?”

“My father said it. Grandma and Grandpa used to say it.”