The Favorite Daughter Read online

  Colleen still didn’t like to think about the day of the funeral. The deep sorrow pressing on her, the knowledge that whatever she felt she was missing from her mother she would never know or have, the weight of who they all used to be and would never be again: a complete family.

  This trip home would have to be different. If the siblings were going to help their dad, they couldn’t ignore each other. But she damn sure wasn’t going to run to Watersend with open arms and magnanimous forgiveness. Cautiously polite would be Colleen’s goal—all for Dad.

  Memories had originally kept Colleen away, and now that her dad might be losing his, she would return.

  Chapter Four

  Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

  Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

  When Colleen finally slept that night, she fell into fractured dreams of childhood: pleasant, filmy dreams of when it had been the five of them, secure in their family and fast in the absolute certainty of their love. Dad, Mother, Colleen, Hallie and Shane on the banks of the May River.

  When she half woke before the alarm sounded, a memory of the languid Sundays they’d spent together lingered in the luminous space between sleep and wakefulness.

  Dad had always taught her that the natural world revealed the face of God; that spirit lived in his creation. This was all Colleen knew about religion. While her friends went to church on Sundays in their frilly sundresses and patent leather shoes, Dad ensured that this family kept the Sabbath in the landscape surrounding Watersend. Gavin infused their family rituals with a sense of the divine. “As the Irish say, what fills the eye fills the heart.” Even now, his voice resonated in Colleen’s mind.

  Each Sunday they would embark on an outdoor excursion: a trip on the johnboat through the secret alleyways of marsh and sea islands, their faces raised to the wind; a dockside lesson on casting the shrimp net; or maybe a hike through the nearby nature preserve, booklet in hand, to find and name the majestic birds that fluttered and flocked there. There were treasure hunts in the parks, kayaking in the estuaries, hikes to hidden ponds.

  When Colleen had first relocated to New York, she’d awoken on Sundays with such a profound sense of loss that she felt as sick as if she had the flu. When she finally realized what was ailing her, she’d started walking through Prospect Park on Sunday mornings to capture at least some of what she’d lost. But it hadn’t been the same. Not one little bit.

  The Lowcountry was a seductress, a holy and righteous one, but one nonetheless. She was irrevocably beautiful in her ever-changing seasons and personalities. She kept her secrets well hidden in the lush and meandering tidal river creeks that only a very few people knew their way around. Her dad was one of them—the waterways were as familiar to him as his own body: the river water his blood and the land his bones. It had been the same for Colleen.

  Leaving her childhood home and family had crushed the last fragile bits of her already broken heart. Hallie had always been the first person Colleen turned to with everything in their lives. The cruel part about this heartbreak, the shocking part, was that the first person Colleen wanted to talk to about the betrayal was the betrayer.

  Finally one Sunday, she’d wandered into Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral and taken a seat in the back row. As the priest offered communion to the congregants, she had felt left out of every kind of family there was. It was time, she decided when the tears were spent, to create a life of her own. That was what everyone had to do eventually—make their own life. And so she’d moved forward, making friends, succeeding at her job, finding lovers and becoming involved with her little community, leaving the past behind.

  * * *

  • • •

  The Savannah Airport was as charming as ever. White rocking chairs in clusters, faux pillars meant to suggest a house of the Old South, and photographs of the marsh, oyster beds and river docks—all images that still evoked the word “home” in Colleen’s mind, despite having worked so damn hard to erase it. What she wanted home to be instead? She had no idea. A first-class seat in an airplane? A studio apartment in an old church? A park in New York City? A hotel room in another country?

  Dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, her hair pulled into a ponytail, she tossed her backpack over her shoulder and dragged her small rolling suitcase across the concourse, the wheels popping and squeaking until she saw Shane sitting in a rocking chair reading the paper as if he were waiting on their back porch for her to finish throwing the shrimp net. “Hello, bro,” she called out as she reached him.

  He glanced up and smiled. Her little brother—the most adorable of the three of them, with his black curls and green eyes, an upturned grin that didn’t show his teeth, and the small silver scar on his top lip from when he’d taken Colleen’s dare to kiss a crab.

  “Well, hello, big sis.” He stood and hugged her tightly and then stepped back. “No matter how many times you come home I’m a little shocked to see how different you look.”

  “Different?” She cocked her head and smiled. “Better, you mean?”

  He kissed her cheek. “I mean without the wild hair and the sundresses and sunburned nose.”

  “Well, I’m here. So let’s get started on your big idea, whatever it is. And you must tell me every single thing going on with Dad. I can’t bear to think of him failing. I’ve hardly slept.”

  Shane took the rolling bag from Colleen and headed for baggage claim. “This is it.” Colleen placed her hand on his arm. “I don’t have another bag.”

  “This is it? Taking your own advice to travel light?”

  “Yup.” She grinned at his reference to her article.

  “Colleen.” Shane rubbed the stubble on his face. “You are going to be here for a while. This isn’t a quick in-and-out. Not this time. I know you can work anywhere—no excuses.”

  “I know, Shane.” She slipped her arm through his.

  Shane raised his eyebrows in question. He wasn’t used to her being so agreeable.

  Colleen felt the cold fingers of panic tickle beneath her throat. Her worst fear escaped in a quiet voice. “Is he . . . dying or something and you’re not telling me?”

  “No!”

  “Okay.”

  Once in Shane’s banged-up navy blue Jeep, Colleen settled into the seat and rolled down the passenger-side window, letting in a blast of hot, humid air. “Dang,” she said. “And I thought New York was miserable in August. Now I remember why I’ve never come back in summertime.”

  “Sorry Dad’s crisis didn’t coordinate with your schedule.”

  Colleen studied her brother’s profile. “Are you angry?”

  “No,” he said quietly as he maneuvered the Jeep out of the parking deck. “I’m sorry. It’s just scary and I’ve needed my big sister.”

  “I’m here,” Colleen said and reached to pat his shoulder. “I’m here. Now tell me everything.”

  While Shane drove the thirty minutes to Watersend, through miles of green marshland set against gray-blue estuaries, and under Spanish moss dangling from live oaks, Colleen tried not to think about the day she’d driven away from this beloved place. She turned away from the scenery to her brother, who spoke.

  “It began a few months ago. You know I’ve been living above the pub for a while now, so sometimes I don’t go to the old house for weeks. One afternoon, a rare free one, I decided to take out our old johnboat. At the house I found three weeks’ worth of unopened mail and a burner on the stove that had been left on for God knows how long. After that, things started to make sense—now he forgets names, repeats questions, wears the same outfit for days in a row, and more.”

  “Oh, Shane.” Colleen set her hand against her heart. “What if that burner had caught something . . .”

  “Don’t even play the what-if game right now, Colleen. It’s too terrible.” Shane turned left to drive over the Savannah brid
ge, a sailboat of a structure winging its way over the moving waters of the Savannah River, dividing Georgia from South Carolina. Below on the right were the spires of the grand dame city and to the left the smoke-chugging port of Savannah. Colleen held her breath as they crossed—an old childhood habit from when Shane had told her that ghosts could get them if they took a breath while crossing a river.

  “Welcome home,” he said as they passed the wooden sign declaring they’d entered South Carolina.

  “Go on about Dad,” she said. “I want to know everything before we see him.”

  “Looking back, Lena, I believe this dementia has been happening for a long while, a slow decline, and Mother covered for him. You know how they were—so tightly knit together. I think she made sure we didn’t know, or maybe she herself didn’t want to know. Either way, she concealed it.”

  “That makes sense. She would protect him from anything.” Colleen leaned back on the seat and watched the landscape fly by—the wooden stands selling fresh shrimp, trees crowding the road alongside ramshackle cottages on the two-lane highway. “We will figure this out together.”

  He took a breath and then paused before asking, “Did you know Hallie moved from Savannah? They’re only ten minutes away now, at the edge of town.”

  “Yep. Dad told me.”

  They were silent for a while as the mere mention of her name created open spaces, timid pauses. At a red light a few miles from town, Shane turned to Colleen. “Hallie is meeting us at the pub,” he said. “Dad’s having lunch with some old buddies and we’ll catch up with him at home later.”

  “Hallie? Can’t that wait?” Colleen wanted to find her feet first, to take a breath and inhale the Lowcountry air, to hug her dad before she had to face her sister.

  “Lena.” It was a one-word admonishment.

  “I go by Colleen now. You know that, Shane.”

  “Not with me you don’t.”

  Colleen let the comment rest and inhaled the briny scent of the marsh as she began to take it all in, as if she would be required to write about the spruce and pine proudly shooting toward the sky, about the summer green grasses and the hand-painted signs announcing fresh shrimp, peaches and strawberries. She held her hand out the window and let it roll with the wind, dipping and rising. She and Hallie had done that as children—perched on opposite sides of the backseat and put their hands and arms out the windows to pretend the car was a plane.

  “You’ll cut off your hand when a truck passes by,” Shane said with the grin that all the girls had fallen for since he was a young child.

  They laughed, easing the tension that had filtered between them. The line was what he’d told them when they were young—always so logical, their little brother.

  “Lena,” he said as she pulled her arm back into the car, “it’s happening fast.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Even though Mother might have hid it for a while, he’s now gone too far, too fast.”

  “For example?”

  “I’ve had to take his car keys.” Shane’s voice cracked on the last word. “He thinks the car is in the shop. But twice he became lost and once he hit a light pole. It was time. I also discovered that the bank was about to seize the pub. Dad hadn’t paid the mortgage in almost a year. A year!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve caught up—it’s all fixable. But there are other things, too. There were late notices. Packages unopened.”

  “Didn’t you realize anything weird about him before this? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I did, but here’s the thing—I just thought he was being his eccentric self. You know, changing subjects midstream, never finishing a sentence, making inappropriate jokes to the customers, losing his keys. But then the bigger things started happening—forgetting what day it was. Asking where you were, like you were upstairs.”

  “My God, this breaks my heart.” Colleen swallowed past sudden tears. Her sweet dad had been looking for her in the next room when she was eight hundred miles away.

  “I finally took him to the doctor, trying to convince myself maybe he was just getting sick or had low iron or something, because the truth is that a lot of the time he seems okay. But then something will happen, like he’ll put his cell phone in the dishwasher at the pub or pour a beer into a whiskey glass. Nothing big, all things that can be explained by distraction.”

  “I found my earrings in the silverware drawer the other day,” Colleen said. “I took them off when I was unloading the dishwasher and—”

  “I know,” Shane said. “That’s what I told myself, too. But the tests came back. Early-onset Alzheimer’s.”

  “Have you told him?”

  By then Shane had arrived at the pub, and he maneuvered the Jeep in the alleyway to the sign that announced, Owner Parking. “Of course I’ve told him.” Shane shifted into park. “But he doesn’t believe me and he thinks he’s fine and doctors are quacks.”

  He placed his hand on Colleen’s shoulder. “I have an appointment with a specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Jacksonville. I need you to take him.”

  She smiled. “Ah, that’s why I’m here.”

  “Partly, yes. I thought if I told you on the phone you might not come.”

  She shook her head. “Of course I’d come. I want to take him. I want to help.”

  He faced her before opening the car door. “There’s more to it. I need you to chip in. We decided to get this test—it’s called a PET amyloid plaque-imaging scan. A mouthful, right? Anyway, it’s one of the only tests that will give a mostly definitive diagnosis and insurance doesn’t cover it. It’s still considered experimental, but . . .”

  “Why isn’t it covered?”

  “Because even if it shows the plaque, even if it’s there, there’s nothing to be done about it. There aren’t any medicines or treatments . . .”

  “Plaque?”

  “From what little I understand, that’s what Alzheimer’s is essentially—plaque and tangles in your brain cells. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s above my pay grade.”

  “Oh, God. Yes, of course I’ll help pay. Yes.” Tears gathered and Colleen pressed her palms to her eyes. “This is so scary.”

  Shane nodded and she knew he didn’t trust his voice, what it would sound like with fear and grief mingled. Together they climbed out of the car and Colleen stood in the parking lot of the Lark as waves of emotion—joy, melancholy, regret and something that felt vaguely like peace—swept over her until she remembered her sister. “When does Hallie arrive?” she asked quietly.

  “She’s probably inside waiting,” Shane said. “Let’s go, sis.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  “I’ve given you years.”

  Chapter Five

  Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original . . . it is a continuing act of creation.

  Rosalind Cartwright, The Twenty-four Hour Mind

  The Lark was housed in an eighty-year-old brick and tabby building that had always been a pub, as far as Colleen knew, although it had once been known by another name and owned by another family. Her dad had baptized it the Lark some thirty-five years ago, after his favorite Irish poem and song. He and Mother had just married when they bought the place and Colleen was only a twinkle in their eyes.

  Colleen ambled slowly around to the front of the building, wanting to see its face before entering; Shane followed.

  The name was writ large in a golden Celtic font across an emerald-green frieze above the pub door. The single front door was arched and painted a bright red with dark green trim. The slate roof sloped with a single chimney pot poking up like a submarine tower from a sea of dark shingles. A brass knocker forged into the Claddagh design—two hands surrounding a heart—hung in the middle of the door. It was a home to many and definitely to the Donohue family. The Lark’s facade was as familiar to
Colleen as the smile of her dad’s face.

  “It never changes,” she said to Shane and leaned against his shoulder.

  “I hope it never will. It feels like the only stable thing right now.”

  Colleen kissed her brother’s cheek. “We’ll get through this. He’s here with us. That’s what matters most.”

  Shane gave her that look, the one that let her know he didn’t agree but wasn’t going to fight with his big sister. Colleen pulled out her ponytail, feeling her hair come loose around her face. “And the hair puff begins,” she said. “Welcome to South Carolina and a hundred percent humidity.”

  Shane laughed as he pushed open the front door and together they entered the main room of the pub. She was all of her ages when she walked through that front door—from childhood to preteen to adolescence and beyond. Memories pulsed like electricity.

  Dark wood was blushed golden by low-slung lanterns casting their glow across the floors and tables. The back wall glistened with the starlight of glass barware and bottles lined on wooden shelves. Posters announcing bands and singers, some events past and some coming soon, shared space on the walls with signed photos of small-town celebrities. Strung across the back of the bar, pennant flags announced the countries from which they’d received visitors through the years. The flags flapped with the breeze when the bartenders were busy behind the lacquered bar.

  Colleen looked at her brother. “The bar stools. They’re new.”

  Leather bar stools were lined like the bottles on the shelves, ready for the customers that would come later in the day. Behind the bar, the shiny brass taps with their rounded heads were ready to dispense the requested brand of beer.

  “Yep. It was one of the many things Dad did before I took over the finances. He found the stools on eBay and bought a load of them. Brand new. Leather with brass nail-heads. He misunderstood the terms of sale—thought the price for one of them was the price for the lot of them.”