The Red Coat

The carriage house smelled of linen, wood, and the damp that collected in buildings nobody opened often enough.

Lorenzo unlocked the side door, then stepped back so Clara could enter first.

She had left Mia with Rosa. Today she wanted to be able to look at whatever they found without arranging her face for a child.

A dozen paintings leaned against the far wall. Boxes occupied two shelves. There were no grand secrets visible, only dust and a dead beetle on the windowsill.

Clara stood still.

"Would you like the door open?" Lorenzo asked.

"Yes, please."

He wedged it with a brick.

The first canvas showed a harbor beneath a pale winter sky. The second was a city street at dusk. Julian had painted light with loose, confident strokes; up close, Clara could see the ridges left by his brush.

She thought of the photograph of him holding her.

These had been his hands, too.

"Was he good?" she asked.

Lorenzo looked over her shoulder.

"I thought so. My father considered that irrelevant."

"Because he wanted him in the business?"

"He wanted his eldest son where he could see him. It wasn't always the same thing."

They uncovered a portrait of Eleanor seated beside a window, one shoe dangling from her toes. She looked impatient with being made to sit still.

Lorenzo touched the wooden frame.

"I remember that day. She kept getting up to answer the telephone. Julian threatened to paint an empty chair."

"How old were you?"

"Sixteen, maybe."

Clara calculated the years without wanting to. She would have been three. Mia's age.

"Did you see Rebecca then?"

"Occasionally. Mother called her a friend. I was more interested in borrowing Julian's car."

He sounded ashamed of how ordinary that was.

"You were sixteen," Clara said.

"Yes."

They let that stand.

In a box of sketchbooks, she found a drawing of a narrow-faced teenage boy asleep on a sofa, one arm thrown over his eyes. Someone had written Lorenzo, exhausted by his many burdens beneath it.

She turned it toward him.

He stared.

Then, very reluctantly, he smiled.

"He was a nuisance."

"Were the burdens terrible?"

"I wasn't allowed to borrow the car."

For a moment she could see them: the older brother making jokes, the younger one trying to seem grown, neither knowing how much they would lose.

She put the sketchbook aside carefully.

Beneath a sheet of linen, the next painting showed a woman at a window with a mug between her hands.

Rebecca.

Not as Clara remembered her at the end, thin and tired in a cardigan. Young Rebecca, barefoot, impatient, her hair twisted into a loose knot.

"That's the yellow cup," Clara said.

Lorenzo glanced at her.

"Yours?"

"Hers first."

She moved closer. Julian had caught the slight lift of her mother's left eyebrow. Clara knew that expression. It meant a story wasn't being believed.

She laughed once and covered her mouth.

"I know that face."

Lorenzo pulled another crate into the light so she could sit.

She didn't cry. Not yet. She looked until the strange familiarity stopped hurting quite so sharply.

Behind Rebecca's portrait was a smaller canvas.

A playground. An iron fence. A little girl in a red coat running toward a swing.

Clara's hand stopped on the frame.

She knew the coat.

Rebecca had bought it too big and let down the sleeves twice. One button had been replaced with a black one because the matching red button had rolled beneath a bus stop bench.

There was the black button, a tiny dark mark in the paint.

"When was this done?"

Lorenzo examined the corner.

"Eighteen years ago."

She had been ten.

She knew the playground, too. It stood behind the apartment where they had lived before Albany. Her mother used to sit beneath the tree with a book and remind her not to jump from the swing.

"That's me."

Lorenzo moved beside her.

Clara pointed at the button.

He said nothing.

Another canvas stood behind it. This one showed a teenage girl coming down library steps with a canvas bag against her hip.

Clara remembered the bag. She had sewn a crooked patch over a hole in its bottom.

The date made her sixteen.

She backed away from the paintings.

For years she had pictured her father somewhere distant, perhaps ignorant of her existence, perhaps unable to find them. Now there were the library steps. Her own red coat.

He had been near enough to see a button.

"He knew where we were."

Lorenzo's face had gone rigid.

"It looks that way."

Clara pressed her hands flat against her thighs.

"Did my mother know?"

"I don't know."

The answer no longer frustrated her. She was beginning to understand how often this family had mistaken assumptions for knowledge.

They examined the back of the final canvas. An envelope had been secured beneath the frame's crosspiece.

Matteo was written across it in a broad, uneven hand.

Lorenzo held it without opening it.

"May I read it first? It was addressed to my father."

Clara nodded.

He unfolded the paper. The muscles beside his jaw shifted as he read.

Then he handed it to her.

Near the middle of the page, Julian had written:

I saw Clara last Thursday. She has Rebecca's way of pulling her sleeve over her hand when she's cold. She walked past me without knowing who I was.

Clara sat down again.

From outside came the rustle of wind through the trees, a gardener calling to someone across the lawn.

Her father had stood on a pavement somewhere.

And let her walk past.