Winter Garden

“Are you okay, Mom?” Nina said, getting up.

“How could I be?”

Meredith got up, too. Although they said nothing, didn’t even make eye contact, Meredith felt for once as if they were in perfect agreement. She took her sister’s hand and they walked over to the bed.

“Your mother and sister knew how hard you tried, and how much you loved them,” Meredith said.

“Do not do that,” Mom said.

Meredith frowned. “Don’t do what?”

“Make excuses for me. ”

“It’s not an excuse, Mom. Just an observation. They must have known how much you loved them,” Meredith said as gently as she could.

Nina nodded.

“But you didn’t,” Mom said, looking at each of them in turn.

Meredith could have lied then, could have told her eighty-one-year-old mother that yes, she’d felt loved, and even a week ago she might have done it to keep the peace. Now she said, “No. I never thought you loved me. ”

She waited for her mother’s response, imagining her saying something that would change everything, change them, though she didn’t know what words those would be.

In the end, it was Nina who spoke.

“All these years we wondered what was wrong with us. Meredith and I couldn’t figure out how a woman who loved her husband could hate her own children. ”

Mom flinched at the word hate and waved a hand in dismissal. “Go now. ”

“It wasn’t us, was it, Mom?” Nina said. “You didn’t hate your children. You hated yourself. ”

At that, Mom crumbled. There was no other word for it. “I tried not to love you girls . . . ,” she said quietly. “Now go. Leave me before you say something you’ll wish you hadn’t. ”

“What would that be?” Nina asked, but they all knew.

“Just go. Please. Don’t say anything to me until you’ve heard it all. ”

Meredith heard the way Mom’s voice caught on please and shook, and she knew how close Mom was to falling apart. “Okay,” she said, “we’ll go. ” She leaned down and kissed her mother’s soft, pleated cheek, smelling the rose-scented shampoo she used on her hair. It was something she hadn’t known: that her mother used scented shampoo. For the first time ever, she pulled her mother into an embrace and whispered, “Good night, Mom. ”

All the way to the door, Meredith expected to be called back, to hear her mother say, Wait. But there was no last-minute revelation. Meredith and Nina went back to their own room. In a contemplative silence, they slipped past each other in the bathroom and brushed their teeth and put on their pajamas and climbed into their separate beds.

It was all connected; Meredith knew that now. Her life and her mother’s. They were joined, and not only by blood. By inclination, perhaps even by temperament. She was more and more sure that whatever loss had finally broken her mother—turned Vera into Anya—would have ruined Meredith, too. And she was afraid of hearing it.

“What do you think happened to Leo and Anya?” Nina asked.

Meredith wished it wasn’t a question. She would have preferred a statement she could ignore. Before this trip and all that she’d learned about the three of them, she would have gotten angry or changed the subject. Anything to obscure the pain she felt. Now she knew better. You carried your pain with you in life. There was no outrunning it. “I’m afraid to guess. ”

“What will happen to her when she gets to the end?” Nina asked quietly.

That had begun to worry Meredith, too. “I don’t know. ”

According to their guidebook, Sitka was one of the most charming—and certainly among the most historic—of all Alaskan towns. Two hundred years ago, when San Francisco was barely a dot on the map of California and Seattle was a hillside of ancient evergreens, this sleepy waterfront community had had theaters and music halls and well-dressed men in beaver hats drinking Russian vodka in the warm summer nights. Built and lost to fire and rebuilt again, the new Sitka was equal parts Russian and Tlingit and American.

Shallow water prohibited the arrival of big cruise ships, so Sitka waited, like a particularly beautiful woman, for visitors to arrive in small launches. As they entered Sitka Harbor, Nina took one picture after another. This was one of the most pristine places she’d ever seen. The natural beauty was staggering on this day of blue sky and golden sunlight, the water flat and sapphire-blue. All around were forested islands, rising up from the quiet sea like a necklace of jagged jade pieces. Behind it all were the mountains, still draped in snow.

On shore, Nina capped her lens and let the camera dangle around her neck.

Mom stood with a hand tented over her eyes, gazing at the town laid out before them. From here they could see a spire rising high into the sky, its top a three-tiered Russian cross.