Send the Ugly One, He’ll Reject Her! They Laughed — But the Mafia Boss Was Speechless!

Chapter Thirty — The Left Side of Her Face

She was forty-nine years old, and she was standing at the window of a house on a hill.

They had bought it in the eleventh year, after the argument — the only real argument of the marriage, eleven years in, four days long, involving a shipping dispute in Newark and a director of a hospital board who had said something in a room that Lucian did not like, and a question Maren had asked him in the kitchen at two in the morning which had ended in him walking out of the house and not coming back for two nights. She had not followed. He had come back on the third morning and had stood in the doorway of the kitchen with his coat still on and had said: You were right, and I’m not going to say more than that, and I want to buy the house in Rockport.

They had bought the house in Rockport.

It was old, and it was white, and it stood on a ledge above the water with a view of the harbor and the breakwater and, on clear days, the thin gray line of Boston on the horizon, forty minutes south. It had a long porch. It had a kitchen with a table in it. It had a room at the top with a window facing east, which Maren had taken for her study, and in which there was a desk and four thousand books’ worth of shelves and, on the wall by the door, framed, a photograph of a woman in her twenties at a kitchen table with a coffee cup.

She was standing at the window of that study on a Sunday afternoon in October, forty-nine years old, in a gray sweater with her hair back and a bird pin in it, watching a squall come up the harbor, when her daughter came in.

Estelle was fifteen.

She was fifteen, and she was tall, and she had her grandmother’s hands and her father’s black eyes, and she was the only person in the world whom Maren Ashcroft had never once been able to read, and she came into the room on that Sunday afternoon and sat down on the arm of the chair by the window in the way that fifteen-year-olds sit, and looked at her mother for a while, and then said:

“Can I ask you something.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Mom.” Estelle looked out at the water. “You know how you’ve told me about the car. Since I was little. The accident. The way it happened and who was in the front and what you saw, and how you were facing her, and how the glass—” she stopped, and restarted. “You’ve told me that story about four hundred times. I could tell it to anybody. I could tell it to a stranger, I’ve heard it so many times.”

“I know.”

“And I’ve been thinking about it.” Estelle looked at her. “You’ve never once told me what it felt like. You’ve told me what happened. You’ve told me the timeline, and the seat, and the glass, and the four minutes and how you were aware of the brakes and how the man in Somerville did the brakes.” She was speaking carefully, the way her mother spoke, the way she had learned. “But you’ve never once told me what it was actually like to be nine years old in the front of that car.”

Maren Ashcroft stood at the window of a room on a hill in Rockport with her daughter’s eyes on her and the squall coming up the harbor.

“Nobody’s ever asked me that,” she said.

“I know,” Estelle said. “I’ve noticed.”

And Maren stood there for a long moment, and then she turned around and sat down in the chair across from her daughter, and she looked at her, and she did the last piece of arithmetic she was ever going to have to do in her life, and then she began.

“It was raining,” she said. “Not hard — a thin rain, the kind that makes the windshield look like a map. And she was talking about nothing. That’s the part I’ve never told you, because there’s no place for it in the version with the timeline. She was talking about nothing. She was talking about a birthday cake. My birthday was in three weeks, and she was describing the cake she was going to make, and it was going to be chocolate and she was going to put raspberries on the top and she was going to let me put the candles in myself, and I remember being annoyed, because the raspberries were the part I didn’t like, and I was working out how to tell her that without hurting her feelings, and I was nine, so I was working it out badly.” She looked at her daughter. “And then the light changed and she said my name — not loudly, she said it the way you say a thing when you’re interrupting yourself — and her hands came off the wheel.”

Estelle was very still.

“And then?” she said.

“And then nothing,” Maren said. “There was no moment. That’s what nobody ever tells you, and it’s the thing I’ve been trying to put into the timeline for forty years and it will not go in. There was no moment where I understood. I was thinking about raspberries and then I was against the door and there was a rain sound that was very loud and a second sound that was the metal, and my face was wet and it was not water, and I could see her hand.” She said it steadily. “I could see her hand on the gear shift and there was a bird pin on her wrist, and the pin was later in a plastic bag with a watch and one earring, and her hand was not on the wheel and never got back on the wheel, and that is the last thing I have of her, and I have carried it for forty years, and the reason I’ve never said it out loud is that saying it out loud makes it true, and I have been in rooms my whole life where the truth was a load-bearing wall, and I learned not to touch the walls.”

The squall came up the harbor and struck the house and the rain started, all at once, on the roof.

“I kept the pin,” Maren said. “I put it in my hair the night I married your father, in a ballroom, in front of six hundred people, and I have worn it on every important day of my life since, including the day I signed the papers on the house on Commonwealth Avenue, and the day I met your grandmother, and the day you were born.”

“I know,” Estelle said. “I’ve seen it in every photograph.”

They sat there for a while.

“Was it worth it,” Estelle said, at last. “The whole thing. All of it. The years and the machine and the wedding and the man in the apartment in Winthrop.”

Maren Ashcroft looked at her daughter.

“Here’s the truth,” she said. “I don’t know. Nobody who does a thing like that knows. Your grandmother wrote me a letter when I was nine years old and she was two weeks from dying, and she told me to do all the arithmetic and then stop and go and be a person in a place with a view, and I did the arithmetic, and I did it well, and it made me rich and free and very hard to push around, and then I did not stop for a long time. I was cruel to your grandfather, in a way that was legal and clean and permanent, and I have thought about it every year of my life, and I have decided, in the end, that I don’t have an answer for you.” She leaned forward. “What I can tell you is the second half of it, which is that I have been a person in a place with a view since I was forty-one years old. I have a house on a hill. I have a husband who looks at the left side of my face. I have a job that keeps four hundred families in health insurance and a plate of soda bread that somebody’s mother made for my father’s funeral.” She put her hand on the arm of the chair. “And I have a daughter who just asked me the only question anybody has ever asked me about the worst day of my life, and I told her the truth, and it took me forty years and it was worth every single second of the wait.”

Estelle looked at her mother for a long moment.

“Does it hurt?” she said. “When you touch it?”

“No,” Maren said. “It hasn’t hurt to touch since I was about sixteen. It hurts to look at, but only because of what other people’s faces do.”

“Dad doesn’t do anything with his face.”

“No,” Maren said. “He doesn’t.”

She went out onto the porch that evening, after the rain, when the harbor had gone flat and pink and the gulls were working the shallows, and Lucian was on the porch in a coat with two glasses, one of which he handed her, and they stood at the rail and looked at the water and did not talk for a while.

“Estelle asked you something,” he said.

“She asked me what it was like.”

“Did you tell her?”

“I told her.”

Lucian Vescari looked out at the harbor.

“Your mother,” he said.

“Yes.”

“She wrote to you to tell you to stop.”

“She wrote to me to tell me to stop,” Maren said. “And I stopped, eventually, and it took me about thirty years, and I’m not going to pretend I did it beautifully, or that I would do it differently, or that I’m finished — because I’m not going to pretend in the last page of the story, and you know I can’t, because I drafted a memorandum with eleven clauses and an annex and I have been the same person for forty-nine years and I will be the same person at eighty-eight.” She turned to look at him. “But I stopped. That’s the whole thing. I did the arithmetic and then I put the pen down. And a woman in a chair in Brookline held my hand for four minutes every Thursday for eleven years and never once knew who I was, and a girl in Somerville told me the truth when I was eleven years old, and my mother sat in an attic with rain in the eaves and wrote nine pages to a daughter who couldn’t read them yet, and I made it out of that house and out of that library and out of that dress, and I am standing on a porch in Rockport with the harbor in front of me and a glass in my hand and the man who married me standing next to me and looking at the left side of my face.”

She took a sip of the whiskey.

“So here’s the last sentence,” she said. “And I want you to hear it, because it’s the only thing I’ve ever learned that I’d write in an attic myself.” She looked at the water. “They spend your whole life telling you that the thing that makes you invisible is the thing that makes you worthless. Every person in that house, for fifteen years, in every way a family can say a thing without saying it. And the truth, the actual arithmetic, is the exact opposite: the thing that made me invisible was a lock, and the only reason it worked was that nobody in that family ever once bothered to look at me hard enough to notice there was a door in me at all.”

Lucian Vescari turned his head and looked at her — full on, the way he had looked at her on the first night in a study with a fire going, with her glasses in his hand and a wet green dress on her body and nothing in the world between him and the left side of her face.

“Your mother,” he said, “would have liked the harbor.”

“I know,” Maren said. “That’s why I bought the house.”

They stood on the porch until the light went, and the gulls came in, and the water went from pink to gray to black, and somewhere south, forty minutes down the coast, four hundred people were asleep in a city where a firm with her great-grandfather’s name on the door would open at nine in the morning under the hand of a woman who had once been a girl in a library with a scar and a bag of books and a key in a drawer.

Behind them, in the house, upstairs, in a room with a window facing east, a bird pin sat on a desk next to a folded letter and a black USB stick with a crack in one corner.

And the door at the bottom of the stairs was not locked, and had not been locked for years, and there was nobody in the house who did not know that.

The End.