The Favorite Daughter Read online

  “No.” Lena shook her head. “Let me.” Lena wanted to find her best friend, the other half of her heart. She opened the door to an empty hallway, breathing in the aroma of mildew and incense. The ancient stone walls offered the impression of being in a castle far away, a place she’d never been. She took a few steps out and glanced left and right. “Hallie?”

  Only “How Great Thou Art” answered her call until Mrs. Martin, Lena’s second grade teacher, stepped out from the ladies’ room and gasped. “Oh, my. Lena! You are so beautiful. Who knew you’d turn into such a lovely young woman?”

  Lena laughed and smiled. “Thank you.” One of the vagaries of living in a town you’d never left was the danger that people’s memories of you at your most awkward age might be revived at any moment. Lena and Walter had gone round and round about where to live and had decided to stay in Watersend. He was new in town and she didn’t want to abandon her family—a tight-knit group that both nourished and made each other nutty. His family had disbanded—his word—when he was nine years old and his parents had divorced. An only child, he was shuffled back and forth, here and there, without ever feeling at home anywhere. Until, he said, until he met the Donohue family. This was what he’d been looking for, this kind of deep connection and family life, right alongside the kind of love that swept him away.

  It wasn’t just love of family that made them stay in Watersend—logic was also part of their decision. Walter was a builder who could work anywhere and what with the Donohue family connections he could thrive in town while also finding work in both Savannah thirty minutes away and Charleston two hours away. Lena’s job as a writer for the local newspaper would be enough for her until she started getting bigger assignments with more important news sources, which she had faith would happen soon.

  Walter. His name made Lena smile, the quiver of rightness in her chest quickening. That he’d chosen her was still a surprise. Yes, they were getting married “too quickly,” having known each other just eight months—six before he knelt on one knee and proposed, and two since they’d begun planning the wedding, which was easy for Mother and Hallie to arrange as just another backyard party. But love is love and this was love. It doesn’t take long to plan a party in a place like Watersend, where the town is waiting at the ready for something just like this to happen, like the night sky waiting for the stars to appear.

  Walter’s distant—both in geography and in emotional support—parents argued about which of them would attend, so that, in the end, neither of them were present. His groomsmen equaled Lena’s bridesmaids in number, and all of them he considered “brothers.” Lena measured them with unease as she’d only met them the day before the wedding and found them both loud and annoying with their private jokes and vague assertions of Walter’s partying past life. When Hallie had asked, “Are you sure?” Lena had told her, “You can’t dictate love. You can’t tell it when and when not to appear. You have to grab it when it comes—such a rare and wonderful gift.”

  From the moment Lena had met Walter Littleton from Atlanta, Georgia, she’d been adrift in feelings she’d never felt before—most strongly, the desire to share her life with someone else, with this particular someone else.

  Lena was twenty-five years old, the age she’d always told her little brother, Shane, and Hallie she would be when she married. When she and Walter had burst through the door of the pub to announce their engagement that January night, Shane had laughed and said, “Right on time.”

  Now at the church, Lena’s ballet slippers—she’d refused high heels, convinced that she would fall in them halfway down the aisle—were smooth along the stone hallway as she looked for her sister.

  The vestibule appeared ahead and Lena backed away. Legend and lore told that seeing Walter would be bad luck. She wanted to fully experience that moment—the one when she walked down the aisle and Walter eyed her all aglow with the veil wafting behind. Lena wasn’t traditional by any means, but some wedding mythology was ingrained in a girl’s mind, so permanently and elementally etched into the psyche that even she couldn’t resist.

  She turned swiftly and lifted her skirts to walk back down the hallway to the bridal room. The organist had shifted to her second song—“Amazing Grace.” The pew dwellers would be getting antsy. It was five past the hour.

  Lena pulled open two wooden doors to spy two empty rooms before she opened a third one where two lovebirds were entangled in an embrace so tight that Lena smiled at love so evident on her wedding day. They were kissing, the woman’s face lifted to the man’s. His hand was in her hair, pulling her close. His other hand raised the skirt of her dress so that white silk panties flashed. Lena almost turned away in embarrassment for intruding on such an intimate moment, but something in the scene didn’t allow denial. The man’s lips traveled down the woman’s neck, and the flower crown Lena had created with her sister the night before fell to the floor.

  A tiny woman with blond hair in a pink dress and a man in a tuxedo.

  He was Walter.

  She was Hallie.

  Lena’s belly turned to fire, ignited by the truth of what she was seeing. There Lena stood, a walking cliché: the sister betrayed on her wedding day. If it weren’t so stunning it would be laughable. It was the annihilation of everything Lena Donohue believed in: true love, her family’s protection, and her sister’s fidelity. It was death, so why was she still alive?

  The champagne bottle shattered on the stone floor, a bombshell of splintered glass and fractured reality as she dropped it in shocked pain. All that had seemed real was illusion; all solid ground fell away; all love dissolved into treachery. Only one pure thought exploded through her mind—This is the end of everything good.

  Chapter One

  May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten.

  Irish proverb

  TEN YEARS LATER

  The problem with memories, Colleen Donohue often thought, wasn’t with the ones she couldn’t let go of, but with those that wouldn’t let go of her.

  She was no longer called Lena; now she was Colleen. She had long ironed-straight hair, bright red lipstick, a loft apartment in New York City and scant vestiges of a Lowcountry river running through her veins. Gone were the curls and the sundresses, the flip-flops and fishing poles.

  Her apartment in Brooklyn was a studio—functional, sunny and chic. Once a Presbyterian church, the stone building had years ago been divided into apartments. Colleen lived in the smallest unit, in the far top corner overlooking Arlington Place. She’d once found faded photos of the church and believed her studio had been part of the old choir loft.

  That August morning she knew better than to leave the apartment. Although the air conditioner strained, it still kept her space at a lovely seventy-two degrees. Outside, the city was almost intolerable, the heat roasting the garbage and wilting anything green and lovely. No one talked much of that, but it was why New Yorkers who had them left for their Hamptons homes or their seaside cabins. Colleen had neither; her job as a freelance travel writer kept her out of the city most of the time anyway. Yet she was home that day, having just returned from Mexico.

  The rainy morning was sluggish and insolent, having its own personality it wanted to impose on Colleen.

  She needed coffee.

  It was ten a.m. Colleen wasn’t exactly the type to jump out of bed and make a run for the day. She brought the day to herself on her own terms, slowly and carefully. How many office jobs had she turned down merely because she’d have to rise to an alarm, dress in something presentable and chat inanely with colleagues over the tops of cubicles? Here, she rose at her own internal clock—sometimes early but usually not—and poured coffee before launching into her writing.

  With her coffee cup and a stale croissant beside her, Colleen set to work on an article describing the Mexican resort. It was coming slowly. Too slowly. She hadn’t yet found a hook
for the reader, an overarching narrative that might turn a run-of-the-mill tourist trap into something special. They’d paid her to go. She’d indulged in the Presidential Suite and the spa treatments. She’d met a guy at the bar and enjoyed an easy flirtation. She’d taken the ecotour and suffered through a slide show. She’d drunk the house margarita and tolerated the mariachi band. Now she needed to craft words to turn it all into an exotic journey.

  She tapped her fingers on the keyboard and words scrolled across the white space. Music from the apartment next door vibrated the wall—her neighbor’s teenage son was home alone, obviously skipping school, and listening to the Grateful Dead. She rose from her chair and banged on the wall, knowing the gesture would be ineffectual. She turned up her own music, Nina Simone, coming from the wireless speaker on the kitchen counter version of her family’s old turntable in the kitchen at Watersend. Why she wanted to re-create a place she’d rejected, she left that to her subconscious.

  She glanced around her apartment and smiled. This place made her happy. As happy as the May River? her brother had asked her one day over the phone. Yes, she’d said, although it wasn’t really true. Yet and still, this space soothed her. It was all one room—with a curtain that hung between the bed and the living space and a kitchen area with a long bar made of honed black marble. One couch of cream linen faced two bright blue upholstered chairs. The narrow windows framed in iron looked over the lanterns and sidewalks of her neighborhood streetscape. Everything inside her studio was in its place, unlike the cluttered family house in Watersend where the collections and remnants of years of Donohue life needed dusting and organizing. Here, photos of the exotic locales she’d visited were set on tables in matching white frames and hung in pleasing arrangements. The kitchen was stocked with pale blue plates and appliances. This space belonged to Colleen.

  Two hours until her deadline. Procrastination usually spurred her toward productivity, but not now.

  Hearing her phone ring and seeing her brother’s name on her cell made her jump up to answer. God, she loved talking to Shane, hearing his voice across the miles; he and Dad were her last ties to the Lowcountry and she wanted to hold tight to both of them.

  She answered on the second ring, imagining him at the family pub, the Lark, cleaning glasses behind the bar or meeting a delivery truck in the back alley. If Colleen closed her eyes, she could smell the hoppy aroma of beer; she could visualize the dark wood paneling glowing under the lantern lights and hear the clang of glasses, the call of patrons, and a fiddle being tuned in the corner. Nothing, not one thing in her life, was as familiar to her as the Lark.

  “Sis.” Shane’s voice vibrated in her ear.

  “What’s up?”

  “A lot.”

  “Is something wrong?” she asked, as she could tell his voice was off, something amiss. Colleen automatically placed her hand over her stomach, where fear seemed to wait to be awoken.

  “There is,” he said.

  She heard the difference; his tone lower and quieter. There wasn’t a joke hidden in his voice this time.

  “Dad.” Colleen walked to the window overlooking the street, brownstones across the way lit with the sun rising to midsky, and she rested her forehead on the glass. “It’s Dad, isn’t it?”

  “He’s been acting funny.”

  “He’s always acting funny.” She smiled as she invoked her dad’s favorite entry into a sentence. “As the Irish say, when Irish eyes are smiling, they’re usually up to something.”

  “This isn’t about his funny sayings, Lena. It’s complicated, too. And I don’t know if I can tell you everything over the phone. You have to come home.”

  Colleen laughed, relieved now because nothing was really wrong with her dad. This was another ploy to get her to return home. Another trick. They’d tried many times before and in many ways—her niece Rosie’s baptism; her other niece, Sadie’s, first birthday party; her sister Hallie’s pneumonia that was so threatening. Of course there were also the holidays and anniversaries and milestones of family life. She was accustomed to the pleas to return.

  “Shane, what’s going on?” Colleen walked the few steps to the kitchen, poured more coffee into her pottery mug shaped like an owl’s face, one she bought in a city and country already forgotten.

  “Dad’s not doing well. Don’t make me go over this entirely complex situation on the phone. I’ve tried to handle it without you, but now I need you.”

  “I’ve already made plans to come for his birthday party in two weeks. I can’t come right now.”

  “Lena.” He said the name she didn’t use anymore. “It’s been six months of fast decline. I’ve tried to figure it out by myself. Like you, Hallie is too busy to help and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  He usually knew better than to mention Hallie’s name, and now the dull pain crashed into Lena’s chest. “Fast decline?” she asked.

  “Yes. Forgetting names; losing things; getting lost . . .”

  “It’s just comedy-Dad—he’s like that. He’s always been like that: absentminded, stumbling along. Why is this time different?”

  “I’ve tried to keep the worst of it from you, but I took him to the doctor last week. He believes it’s Alzheimer’s.” He paused in the time it took Colleen’s breath to gather in fear. “I need you to come home.”

  Dizziness enveloped Colleen and she sat on a stool as coffee sloshed from the mug onto the black marble counter. “You better not be mucking with me,” she said, using her dad’s only curse word, if it could be called a curse word at all.

  “I’m not mucking with you.”

  Between brother and sister, this line was a solemn vow that they were telling the truth.

  “It can’t be,” Colleen said, brightening for only a breath. “His sixtieth birthday is in two weeks, and that’s too early. I know that—”

  “Yes, it’s called early onset.”

  “Why am I only hearing this now? I talked to him just a few days ago. He was fine.”

  “That’s the thing, Lena. He’s fine until he isn’t. You only talk to him when he is. But when I received a late mortgage notice . . . It’s a long story. Come home and I’ll tell you everything.” Shane had never been so direct. Maybe he was thinking that her arguments often won, that she always had excuses. Maybe this time her baby brother didn’t want to hear them.

  “Okay,” she said softly. “I hear you. So what are we going to do?”

  “I have an idea.” His voice was resolute; she’d heard it before. “I have a really good idea.”

  Chapter Two

  The past is never just the past.

  David Whyte, Consolations

  Colleen stood at the window with the disconnected phone still in her hand.

  No.

  Not Dad.

  Her brother had hung up on her, but not before telling her to text her flight info a.s.a.p. For tomorrow, he’d said.

  Tomorrow.

  “Oh, Dad.” Her voice broke as she spoke into the silent apartment.

  Gavin Donohue was the kindest man Colleen had ever known. He was the barometer of all things good and true; he was the most stable and loving presence in her life, and she missed him every day. If her brother was right—and he’d used the solemn phrase and incantation, so he must believe he was—then of course she must go home tomorrow. If what he’d said was true, she didn’t have the luxury of time, to amble home whenever she felt strong enough to face Hallie and the memories.

  Memories. They were being destroyed in her dad’s brain. Yet memories were why Colleen was in New York, the reason she’d left her family and the life she once thought she’d never abandon.

  Then she did what she always did when her mind acted like a runaway train, like a rubber ball bouncing in a closed room—she grabbed a pad of paper and a pen from her Lucite desk and began to write a neat list. First, finish the article. Second
, make plane reservations. Third, do not Google Alzheimer’s.

  Nothing good, ever, came from over-Googling.

  * * *

  • • •

  The article was shit. Colleen knew it and yet she hit the send button anyway. “Mexican Fun in the Sun.” Even the title was the worst. But she didn’t care. Her heart hadn’t settled for even a minute since Shane had called that morning.

  It’s all in the details—this was a universal law in the writing world, as unbending as a physics equation. Colleen had kept the focus on trivialities—the scattered sparkle of morning sun on the river; the gravel road with weeds forcing their way up in the ruts and grooves; the thickness of hotel room towels; the floral rug with vines that wriggled through the pattern like snakes. Well-chosen details added together made a vivid picture, and she gathered the minutiae and decided which ones to share, which ones would send a reader to plan a trip to the location she’d just vacated.

  But the overarching narrative of her own story? Ah, she’d avoided that for years. It was easier to notice the smallest things in her forest than to rise above the treetops and gaze down to see the not-quite-green relationships and withering spaces.

  And now? Her sight was fixed firmly on home and on all the emotional uncertainty a visit there would entail.

  Colleen had learned to be happy in the years since the heartbreak that had caused her to run from Watersend. She made a good living and had enough friends to stay as busy as she pleased. Sometimes she sensed a glass wall stood between her and her pals, as she was never able to tell the full truth of why she chose New York, why she never went home. Avoiding all mention of family and home, there seemed to always be a piece missing in her relationships, as if by leaving out the subject of her family she’d left the bottle of wine at home when she arrived at a dinner party. She cherished her work and her apartment and someday—maybe someday—she would again love a man. Until then, she went on as many adventures as possible and talked to her brother and father at least once a week. To her sister she didn’t speak at all.