Heroes Are My Weakness(10)
By the time she’d reached the frozen marsh, her legs were rebelling. She distracted herself by practicing variations on her eerie moans. Something almost like a laugh squeezed out of her. She might be a failure as an actress, but not as a ventriloquist.
And Theo Harp hadn’t suspected a thing.
BY HER SECOND MORNING, ANNIE had water, electricity, and a house that was chilly but livable. Thanks to Barbara Rose’s garrulous husband, Booker, Annie learned that the return of Theo Harp was the talk of the island. “Tragedy what happened to his wife,” Booker said, after he’d taught Annie how to keep the pipes from freezing up, operate the generator, and conserve her propane. “We all feel real bad for the boy. He was an odd one, but he spent a lot of summers here. Did you read his book?”
She hated admitting she had, so she gave a noncommittal shrug.
“It gave my wife nightmares worse than Stephen King,” Booker said. “Can’t imagine where he got his imagination.”
The Sanitarium had been an unnecessarily grisly novel about a mental hospital for the criminally insane with a room that transported its residents—especially those who got their kicks out of torture—back through time. Annie had hated it. Theo had a juicy trust fund, thanks to his grandmother, so he didn’t have to write for a living, and in Annie’s mind that made what he’d created more reprehensible, even if it had been a best seller. He was supposed to be working on a sequel, and this one she definitely wasn’t reading.
After Booker left, Annie unpacked the groceries she’d brought from the mainland, checked all the windows, shoved a steel accent table in front of the door, and slept for twelve hours. As always, she awoke coughing and thinking about money. She was drowning in debt and sick of worrying about it. She lay under the covers, eyes on the ceiling, trying to see her way out.
After Mariah had been diagnosed, she’d needed Annie for the first time, and Annie had been there, even giving up her own jobs when it got to the point that she couldn’t leave Mariah alone.
“How did I raise such a timid child?” her mother used to say. But at the end Mariah had been the fearful one, clinging to Annie and begging her not to leave.
Annie had used her small savings to pay the rent on Mariah’s beloved Manhattan apartment so her mother wouldn’t have to leave, then relied on credit cards for the first time in her life. She bought the herbal remedies Mariah swore made her feel better, the books that fed her mother’s artistic spirit, and the special foods that kept Mariah from losing too much weight.
The weaker Mariah grew, the more appreciative she became. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” The words were balm to the little girl who still lived inside Annie’s adult soul yearning for her critical mother’s approval.
Annie might have managed to stay afloat if she hadn’t decided to fulfill her mother’s dream of one last trip to London. Relying on more credit cards, she’d spent a week pushing Mariah in a wheelchair through the museums and galleries she loved the most. The moment at the Tate Modern when they’d stopped before an enormous red and gray canvas by the artist Niven Garr had made her sacrifice worthwhile. Mariah had pressed her lips to Annie’s palm and uttered the words Annie had yearned to hear all her life. “I love you.”
Annie dragged herself out of bed and spent the morning digging through the cottage’s five rooms: a living area, kitchen, bathroom, Mariah’s bedroom, and an artist’s studio that had also served as a guest room. The artists who’d stayed here over the years had given Mariah paintings and small pieces of sculpture, the most valuable of which her mother had long ago sold off. But what had she saved?
Nothing and everything jumped out at her. The tufted-back hot pink Victorian sofa and futuristic taupe armchair, a stone Thai goddess, the bird skulls, a wall-size painting of an upside-down elm tree. The hodgepodge of objects and furniture styles were unified by her mother’s infallible sense of color—vanilla walls and solid upholstery fabrics of periwinkle, olive, and taupe. The sofa’s hit of hot pink along with an ugly iridescent painted plaster chair shaped like a mermaid provided the shock value.
As she rested over her second cup of coffee, she decided she had to be more systematic in her search. She started in the living room, listing every art object and its description in a notebook. It would be so much easier if Mariah had told her what to look for. Or if she could sell the cottage.
Crumpet pouted. You didn’t have to take your mother on that trip to London. You should have bought me a new gown instead. And a tiara.
You did the right thing, ever-supportive Peter said. Mariah wasn’t a bad person, just a bad mother.