The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Jane Flanagan, started calling her, leaving messages about Lake Grove, making it impossible to think of anything else. Marilyn ended up telling Caitlin the whole story over dinner. She needed to unburden herself of it. And she wanted Caitlin’s advice as to whether she ought to call back. “You asked why I stopped painting,” she said. She paused, unsure how to go on. “Start at the beginning,” she said out loud, to herself, then took a deep breath. “Something I haven’t told you is that I had a little girl.”

When Marilyn finished talking, Caitlin came and sat beside her in the booth and put her arms around her, and wept. Marilyn wasn’t one for physical affection, but she appreciated that more than Caitlin would ever know. To see her grief reflected, even felt, after all these years.

Forlorn, Marilyn spent most of her time in bed, feeling nauseous and exhausted and alone. She thought often that what she missed most about her youth was not the loss of her beauty or her figure, like women usually said. She had never been all that pretty to begin with. What she missed was the capacity for love. That intense love, which she and Herbert felt for one another in the beginning, and for music and art. You couldn’t ever love that way when you were older.

Marilyn found her creativity reawakened after her daughter was born. She wanted to paint, and did so as much as possible, fighting off the desire to rest, which was almost equally strong. She and Herbert were both surprised when Marilyn pulled out ahead professionally, when certain critics they admired started crediting her with boldly reviving the still life when it wasn’t remotely cool.

There was a gorgeous house up on a cliff, just outside of town. A beautiful oceanfront property that had been owned for as long as anyone could remember by a pair of sisters, Ethel and Honey Troy. The younger of the two had recently passed away, weeks after the first. “They couldn’t live without each other, I guess,” the waitress said. “I never did see one without the other.” Their house had been handed down to a nephew out west, and word was he was eager to sell.

She was amazed at all he did to improve it. Sometimes, watching him, so capable, so strong, she felt like she was falling back in love, and maybe this was what marriage was supposed to be. Pulling apart, coming back together. They started sleeping together again, with a frequency they hadn’t had since before the baby.

The second summer, or maybe it was the third, she found love letters from a former student. Not Betsy. Another one. Marilyn burned the letters in the fireplace. She closed herself to him, but not to their beautiful life. Herbert was a lousy husband, but a good father. A great father. She believed then that he loved Daisy as much as she did.

She and Daisy both loved the old cemetery. They tended to it, placing flowers on the graves on birthdays. They planted pink beach roses around the perimeter, where once there must have been a rope or a chain of some kind, but now there were only four rusted black metal stakes in the ground.

They made up stories, especially about Sister Eliza. Who was she? they wanted to know. Why was her grave different from the others? It was just a large rock that looked as if it had been pulled straight from a quarry and plopped down there. It had no decorative carvings, no engraved dates of birth and death. Only those two words. Sister Eliza. Was she Hannah’s sister or Samuel’s? Or was she their daughter?

Herbert posited that the stone was so unusual and informal that perhaps Sister Eliza was the family dog.

Sometimes they sat there all afternoon and read books to keep the dead company. Daisy worried about the children. Marilyn told a half lie, explaining that in the old days, children did die sometimes, but not anymore. Daisy seemed satisfied with that.

Marilyn hung up with a sense of unease. She never should have left. What sort of mother was she? She was bowled over with love for her daughter, always. She told Daisy she loved her every day, something her own parents never did.

After dinner, when it was time to go, the leaving felt physically painful. She held Daisy so long and so hard, as if she knew they would not see each other again in this lifetime.

“There’s a telephone call for you in the office in Colony Hall,” he said. “There’s been an emergency. An accident. Back home.”

Herbert was on the line. He was at the hospital in Winston. He said the doctors did all they could. But they couldn’t keep Daisy alive. “What are you talking about?” she said. He was drunk, she decided. He was insane.

After he had put Daisy to bed that night, Mary Flanagan came over for a nightcap. “One thing led to another,” he said, as if it had never happened before. As if there was any reason to lie at this point. “Fucking shut up and get on with it,” she said, her words hard-edged. From the corner, gentle Petey looked at her through startled eyes. Marilyn hadn’t realized he was still in the room. “You had a glass jar of marbles in the closet off the kitchen,” Herbert said.

“All day she kept asking me to take them down and I told her no,” he said.

“She must have snuck downstairs and taken them after I put her to bed. I guess she carried them to the upstairs hallway but she tripped in the dark. The marbles went everywhere, the bottle shattered. Mary wasn’t thinking. She ran out of our room, wrapped up in a sheet.

But when Mary called out to her, she ran. Only, it was dark, I guess she got disoriented. She went right into the railing and—” He stopped speaking. He wheezed, as if hyperventilating. “Fuck. Sorry,” he said. “Marilyn, the railing collapsed and she went with it. She broke her neck.”

“Herbert,” she said. The quality of her voice surprised her. It was soft, slow, as if coaxing the truth from him. “Are you absolutely sure she’s dead?” “I’m sorry,” he said. “Let me talk to a doctor,” she said. A few minutes passed and then a man confirmed it, in a kind but rushed manner.

She stayed at MacDowell three months longer than planned, because she had nowhere to go. She didn’t work, didn’t bathe, didn’t sleep. She just lay there in darkness. Petey continued to leave her lunch in a basket outside her studio. He brought breakfast and dinner too. She rarely ate, rarely opened the door. Marilyn had no interest in returning home. She had no interest in ever seeing Herbert again. He came to MacDowell, banging on doors, hysterical, thinking he could force his way in as usual. But he was mistaken.

From the first voicemail Jane Flanagan left, Marilyn had wondered about the name.

A few years after Daisy’s death, Mary Flanagan had managed to get a letter to Marilyn, through her divorce lawyer. She wrote that she was newly sober, doing a twelve-step program, and wanted to make amends. To explain herself. At the time of her affair with Herbert, she said, she was grieving her husband. She was drinking too much; she was in a fog. She wrote that she had been there the morning of Daisy’s birthday, when Marilyn came home unannounced. She knew then what a wonderful mother Marilyn was, and tried to end it with Herbert. She would regret for the rest of her life that she didn’t try harder.

The memory of the night Daisy died would be with her forever. Mary reminded her that she was the mother of a daughter too and could only imagine what Marilyn was going through. She made a point of saying Marilyn was a far better mother than she had ever been. And that every time she laid eyes on her own daughter, she thought of Marilyn’s.

The letter was self-indulgent in the extreme. No doubt, writing it made her feel better. But it only cemented Marilyn’s loathing for the woman.

She was happy, at least, that she hadn’t told Jane all the truth. When Jane asked, she said that when her marriage ended, it was the last time she ever saw the house. But in fact, Marilyn did go back once, on the first anniversary of Daisy’s death. At Marilyn’s request, Daisy was buried in the Littleton family plot. That beautiful spot on the ocean, Daisy’s favorite place, with other children she knew, in her way. Herbert’s mother handled the details, but for the headstone, which Marilyn said she would provide, though she couldn’t bring herself to do it. Nor did she visit.

A doctor prescribed sleeping pills. She took them constantly, needing to be awake as little as possible. One year to the day after Daisy died, Marilyn drove straight to Awadapquit, starting out before sunrise, not stopping for gas, or to look at the beach one last time. When she arrived, she did exactly as she planned. She had written a note, which she set on the dashboard, instructions for anyone who might find her. She wanted to be buried next to Daisy.

Herbert, in absentia, had surprised Marilyn once more during their divorce proceedings, when the judge raised the issue of debt from the mortgage they had taken out on Lake Grove in order to buy a second house in Awadapquit, at an address she had never heard before. “It’s a mistake. We own Lake Grove outright,” she said. “You did, but then you borrowed against it,” her lawyer said, gently, as if Marilyn might just not understand finances. “You signed the papers, right here.”

“Oh God. He forged your signature.” The house Herbert bought, with Marilyn’s money, was Mary Flanagan’s.

She went to the cool patch of earth where Daisy was, and put her hand there. She told her without words that they would be together soon. Marilyn got in her car and slowly pulled it into the barn. She closed the barn doors tight, then sat in the driver’s seat with the engine running, listening to classical music on the radio.

Soon she would be reunited with her girl, or else she would be nothing. Either way, she would be free of her pain. Eventually, she fell asleep, expecting never to wake up. But she did wake up. She had no idea how or why. Some force she couldn’t name stopped her, shook her awake. It said she would be dead soon enough, and then forever. Marilyn got out of the car.

Maybe that was why she never went back to Lake Grove after that day, even though Daisy was there.

At seventy-three, she fell down the stairs and broke her hip. She had almost gotten old then. If Lionel hadn’t come along. Her childhood neighbor, recently widowed and, by chance, seated beside her in the waiting room of her physical therapist’s office in Philadelphia.

For a decade, they had such adventures. They went to China, where his son lived at the time. They went to New Zealand just because she had always wanted to see it. When Lionel died three years ago, Marilyn left their Craftsman in the suburbs to his children and moved back into her apartment downtown, which she had never given up.

Her daughter would be a grown woman now. The grief never abated.

She missed David. He had been her companion all those times she came here to explore. Jane hadn’t done a thing, big or small, these past ten years that he didn’t know about, until now. She wondered what he was doing at this moment. If he missed her too, or if it was ultimately a relief to have her gone.

Cora spoke at length about how the Civil War played a pivotal role in the popularity of mediums. “The entire country was grieving,” she said. “Everyone wanted to reach their lost loved ones. Ten years after the war ended, Spiritualism had over a million practitioners in the United States and Europe. It was the second most popular religion in America. We are still a recognized religion today, though our numbers are far lower.

In England the Spiritualist movement gained momentum when Queen Victoria’s husband Albert died. He died at the age of 42 from typhoid fever in 1861.

The woman introduced herself as Evangeline, a resident of the island and the medium who would lead them in the past life regression. But first, she said, they would hear from a visitor, Dr. Jon Abrams, the head of the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.

According to Evangeline’s introduction, the center at UVA had been there since the sixties. Its founder, the university’s then chair of psychiatry, had recorded over three thousand cases of young children with past life memories over the course of his career. He had been a mentor to the man onstage, Abrams, who had since taken over the role.

Life was painfully, unimaginably brief. In some strange way, the thought filled Jane with courage. It made her want to act. The situation with David was bad, but at least they were both alive and breathing. So many people on this boat couldn’t say as much about the ones they loved most. Jane would call him and tell him she wanted to come home. Or maybe she would go to him in person tomorrow, let him know she was willing to do whatever it might take. They had no time for anything less.

“I’m just about to finish this fascinating book on repatriation,” Jane said. “Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits by Chip Colwell.” “I should probably know this. But remind me—what’s repatriation?” Allison said. “Basically it’s a process by which stolen funerary objects and sacred items and body parts are returned to the proper Indian tribes and lineal descendants.” “Body parts?” Genevieve said, sounding horrified. “Stolen by whom?” Allison said. “The federal government, the Smithsonian, Harvard. Every major museum and university in the country and the world, pretty much,” Jane said.

When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, one of the first things they did was come across mounds in the earth. Out of curiosity, they dug them up. They later wrote that finding buried there a Wampanoag man and child, they made off with ‘sundry of the prettiest things.’ Thomas Jefferson did the same. He sent his slaves out to excavate burial mounds and then displayed these Native people’s remains and sacred items in the entryway to Monticello.”

in the 1860s, US soldiers ambushed members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes at dawn, and scalped them. Men, women, and children. Which brings the issue of repatriation into even sharper focus, because these were not people who died and were buried. They never got buried in the first place.

Soldiers hacked off body parts and kept them as trophies—fingers, toes. They cut out labias and stretched them over saddles and hats. Scalps were kept, and handed down one generation to the next.” The book posed a question: How could modern members of these tribes ever heal from the atrocities committed against their people when the bones and scalps and body parts taken that day continued to circulate, in families and private collections around the country?

“Why,” she said, “do you suppose that in past life regression, people always see themselves as being royalty or a hero who fought the Nazis or something like that? I bet no one ever does one of those meditations and finds out, hey, I was one of the millions of unremarkable people who lived through the Holocaust and just went about my business. When statistically, the heroic and the evil combined throughout humankind must be a fraction of the do-nothings.”

“You pointed out that I was writing stuff down today at Mira. Jane, I write everything down now. I have this pathological need to have it all on paper. What I’ve done each day, where things are in the house. The recipes I know by heart, because what if one morning I wake up and I don’t know them anymore? I find myself recording conversations with the kids on my phone when we’re driving home from school. In case a day comes when a basic conversation isn’t something I can have.

For the first time, Jane realized what should have been clear much sooner: they had both lost their mothers. There were so many conversations they would never get to have. “I’m so sorry,” Jane said. “It’s okay. I’ve got my boyfriend, Zoloft, to help me through.”

Last winter, I couldn’t get out of bed I was so depressed, so I started taking it and it helps.”

She thought of how that last medium of the day, Camille, had said Allison had the weight of the world on her shoulders. “Maybe one night next week, you and Chris can go to dinner and I can hang with the kids,” Jane said. Allison smiled. “That would be nice.” “You deserve a break,” Jane said.

As they watched her walk inside, Allison said, “That one grew on me a teeny bit today.” “Me too,” Jane said.