What Could Be Saved

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Laura Preston is a reclusive artist at odds with her older sister Bea as their elegant, formidable mother slowly slides into dementia. When a stranger contacts Laura claiming to be her brother who disappeared 40 years earlier when the family lived in Bangkok, Laura ignores Bea's warnings of a scam and flies to Thailand to see if it can be true. But meeting him in person leads to more questions than answers. Alternating between past and present as all of the secrets are revealed, What Could Be Saved is an unforgettable story about a family shattered by loss and betrayal, and the beauty that can exist even in the midst of brokenness.

Release date: January 12, 2021

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 464

Sample

Chapter One

2019

Chapter One

“CAUGHT IN the act,” said Sullivan, appearing at the top of the studio stairs. He stood there for a moment, slightly out of breath from the four-story climb.

“Not quite,” said Laura. She was in the little kitchen area, working the color from her hands using a rag dipped in mineral spirits; her cleaned brushes lay in an exhausted regiment across the counter.

Sullivan’s nose wrinkled. “All this technology and you can’t open a window?” he said. “I’m going to find you dead in here one of these days.”

“Where’s your business sense?” she said dryly as he crossed to the glass panel set into the wall. “My untimely demise would definitely drive prices up.” Although how untimely would it be, really? Fifty-four was young enough for people to murmur so young but not mean it, old enough for youthful sins to have caught up.

He tapped at the controls. A muted growl came from the back wall as motorized shades began to descend over the windows there. They stopped and reversed. The side lights blinked on and then off again, then the overhead lights on and off. Finally, a click overhead and a whir, and two of the high slanted skylights began to move. Sullivan stood with his head back, watching them lift away from the ceiling. A damp spring air blew in.

“It is a good smell, though,” he said, taking his hand down from the control panel. “Means you’ve been working.” He crossed the room to stand in front of the easel. “Another ghost, I see.” His voice maddeningly neutral.

Sullivan had been excited about the Ghost Pictures at the beginning. He’d given them a prime-time autumn opening in the New York space, had written lyrical catalog copy: scraped canvases intrigue the viewer with muted, suggestive images, like the residue of a dream. That had been four years ago.

“Why are you here?” It came out more abruptly than she’d intended.

“Because you don’t answer your phone,” he said. “Or email. Or texts.” He bent close to scrutinize a section of the painting. “Someone called the gallery trying to reach you.”

“I think my phone is downstairs.” Finding a clean place on the solvent-wet rag, working it into the webbed crotch between two fingers, she nodded to the landline squatting on the counter. “You could have called me on that.”

He shrugged. “It gave me an excuse to check on you.”

That was what it had come to. Sullivan was six years younger than she was; at one point, he’d wanted to sleep with her and she’d considered it—he was funny and smart and good-looking, and she’d been feeling raggedy after Adam and wanting a boost—but had decided against it on principles of don’t shit where you eat. Since then, apparently, Laura had edged over an invisible hill: now Sullivan was checking on her as though she were his elderly aunt.

“Also I promised Kelsey,” he added. “She’s the one who took the telephone calls.”

“Oho,” Laura said. Kelsey, the Washington gallery’s new front-desk girl. Mid-twenties, very pretty, her manner toward Laura infused with that millennial you-go-girl faux heartiness reserved for the elderly or otherwise pathetic. It’s been a world wind in here, Kelsey had told Laura when they met. Laura, indulging an evil impulse, had gotten the girl to repeat herself and Kelsey had obliged, speaking more slowly. There again was the space between the syllables, the unmistakable thud of the extra D: Kelsey was saying world wind—or possibly whirled wind. She was at least twenty years younger than Sullivan, but no one would blink if the two of them began an affair. Perhaps they already had.

“Apparently you’ve ignored three emails,” said Sullivan. He had his phone out now, was tapping and swiping through screens. “The caller was very upset.” Laura imagined Kelsey’s whimper: He yelled at me, he was awful. “Here.” He held out the phone. “Something about your brother. You don’t have a brother, right?”

Laura stared at him, then put down the rag and reached to take the phone, ignoring his wince at her still-painty hand. She read the brief message through once, twice; then holding it up before her, eyes on the screen, she walked over to the landline, took up the receiver, and dialed.

“Listen to this email,” she said when Beatrice answered. She cradled the receiver between ear and neck and read aloud.

I believe I have found your brother Philip. Are you Laura Preston born on 25 March 1965 to Robert and Genevieve Preston? If so, please reply. If you are not the correct Laura Preston, I am sorry for deranging you.

Thank you. Claude Bossert

When she finished, Bea was silent.

“It has my birthday in it,” said Laura in an arguing voice. Across the room, Sullivan was looking at her, eyebrows raised. She turned her back on him. “Did Mum ever give out that information?”

“Who knows,” said Bea, her words surfing down through the phone on a sigh. “Probably.” Her voice held the weary reflexive accommodation of the elder sibling, always an aggrieved shadow of They left me alone to look after you when I was ten years old in it. As if the servants hadn’t been there too. “Just delete it.”

“But why would it come now,” said Laura.

The squeak of the terrace door latch, the rattle as it shut: she turned to see that Sullivan had gone outside and was standing at the railing looking down over Woodley Park.

“Did you mention him in the Post profile?” said Bea.

“No,” Laura said.

“Maybe someone did a deep dive on Google,” said Bea. “Everything lives forever on the internet.” Voice taut: “You’re not thinking of responding to it.”

“It didn’t ask for money,” said Laura.

“The next one will,” said Bea.

“Well, they could ask, but that doesn’t mean I would give. One reply email, asking for details—what could that hurt?” Laura heard the bargaining tone in her own voice with irritation. How did an older sister keep the power to shrink you back to childhood? One minute on the phone with Beatrice reduced Laura to the tagalong little sister she had once been, whining Play with me.

“I thought we were done with all this,” said Bea. “It was the only silver lining about Mum.”

“I’m not an idiot.” That truculent baby sister again, lower lip stuck out. Laura strove to make her voice neutral. “The first demand for money, and I’d be out.”

“Why engage at all?” said Bea. “What would be the point?”

She was so much like their mother, swift and breathtakingly confident in her assessments, dismissing whatever she deemed unworthy of her attention, capably taking charge of the rest. Like their mother had been, Laura corrected herself.

A long pause. Morning was leavening the sky outside the windows of her aerie, the knotted spires of the Gothic cathedral pushing up from the skyline. She’d been smart or lucky or both, to add this level to the narrow brick town house back when this was a modest middle-class neighborhood. No way she’d be able to get a permit to do it now.

“Are you going to see Mum today?” asked Bea, her voice turned brisk, as if moving to the next item on a checklist. “I can’t get over there. There’s a thing at the boys’ school.” A thing. A tennis tournament, or diving championship, or academic awards ceremony: it could be any of those. Beatrice’s twins were multiply, almost preternaturally gifted. You’d never know it from Beatrice, though: trophies stayed out of sight in the boys’ bedrooms, and she didn’t boast about their accomplishments. It seemed like humility, but Laura knew it was actually the most rarefied form of pride. Of course Bea’s children were extraordinary; proof wasn’t necessary.

“I was planning to have lunch over there—” said Laura. What day was it? She looked at Sullivan’s phone, which by now had flicked to the lock screen: Tuesday. “Tomorrow.” Thank goodness; she hadn’t missed Tuesday dinner. Edward hated when she missed.

“If you do, make sure to check on the garden. Noi says the gardener’s been slacking off.”

“I will,” said Laura. Wondering, what would she look for? Weeds? “But Bea, if it is him,” she said. “What if it is.”

“It isn’t,” said her sister. “It never is.”

“You hungry?” said Sullivan, coming back inside and finding Laura cleaning his phone off with the mineral-spirit rag. “Come on. I’ll treat you to breakfast.”

“I was going to take a walk,” said Laura. “I haven’t been out of this house in three days.”

She held his phone out; he took it between two fingers, waving it gingerly in the air to speed the evaporation of solvent.

“Do you want to talk about that whole thing?” He inclined his head toward the landline.

“Nope,” Laura said.

He followed her down the stairs, through the kitchen to the back door she held open for him, stood below her on the long exterior flight of concrete steps while she locked up.

“I’ll send the guys for the painting in—” he said.

“Two weeks,” she said. It would be varnished by then and dry, ready for transport. At the moment of completion it had been vital, almost like a living part of her; now it was a husk, inanimate, taking up space in her studio. Wampum, to trade for groceries.

Sullivan’s car waited in the parking space beside the weedy oblong that was far too small to be called a backyard. He hesitated beside it, keys in hand.

“The new painting,” he said. “It’s not really new, is it.”

His eyes were manganese blue well-diluted, maybe a little viridian mixed in, a rim of indigo. During the last twenty years she had looked into these eyes as often as any others, even Edward’s, even her sister’s or mother’s. A sad statement: her gallery owner might be her closest friend.

“I’m not done with the series,” she said. “Or it’s not done with me.”

“It’s just—” he said, and stopped himself.

“What?” she said.

“It’s starting to feel like a gimmick.” In a jokey tone to soften that, he added, “Not to mention a waste of a lot of perfectly good paint.”

“Kawara’s Today series went on for decades.”

“Time was part of that concept,” he said. He did not add, And you are not Kawara. He pressed the fob in his hand and the car double-chirped; he opened the driver’s door. “Come on. Let’s talk over breakfast. This new place in Tenley does great avocado toast. Also French toast. All the toasts.”

“They sell, right?” she said, not moving. “So why do you care?”

He sighed, looked away from her, down the alley. Then back. “I’m going to have to put someone else into the slot I was holding for you in New York.”

“Fine,” she said, turning away.

“Laura,” he called as she took long strides up the one-way alley, past the garbage and recycling bins paired tidily behind each house. As she came out of the alley onto Cathedral Avenue, she heard his car start up behind her and drive away.

This part of Washington was beautifully walkable; Laura hadn’t owned a car in years. The neighborhood had evolved since she’d moved there, the teachers and midlevel professionals dying or downsizing, the rich young moving in. The old sidewalks that had been humped and broken over the roots of midcentury maples were jackhammered up and the trees themselves replaced; now concrete flowed in smooth pram-friendly ribbons beside compact and fruitless ginkgoes. Laura reached Connecticut Avenue and turned left, toward what had once been a strip of secondhand shops and bars and a battered Safeway. It was now a decorous array of pastel-painted boutiques, a vegan bakery, a gourmet supermarket. Tucked in the middle was a tiny ultra-hip coffee shop, where Laura joined the line that snaked patiently away from the counter.

She carried her shade-grown, fair-trade decaf latte past a rank of gleaming smartbikes toward the zoo. On a weekday morning with school still in session, crowds would be thin and she’d be able to walk for nearly two miles, taking the long outside loop all the way to the end, swinging around the Kids’ Farm and coming back through Amazonia. She paused for a don’t walk light beside the corner kiosk that was, as always, neatly color-blocked with notices for local events, items for sale, music lessons. She admired the dedication of the invisible someone who managed this small piece of the world, taking down the past-date advertisements and stapling new ones into place.

A mild misting rain had started by the time she reached the zoo. She discarded the coffee cup into a bin and set off, hands balled in her pockets. The long walk after finishing a painting was usually something she enjoyed: it drove the fumes from her sinuses and stretched out her tight muscles. It also allowed her to savor a curious and temporary aftereffect that made her vision sharper and colors almost surreal, her brain still painting after her body had stopped. But today she found herself brooding, annoyed. By Beatrice’s dismissiveness, by Sullivan’s bland intrusion, his gimmick. With that word he had turned Laura to face what she’d been resolutely trying to ignore.

Down the years, she had known other artists who were suffering from block; she had sympathized, of course, but not really understood. Her mental knock on wood, an internal There but for the grace of God had been reflexive and insincere. How smug she’d been, how certain that her own engine of inspiration would never fail.

Yet it had. Or at least, it had downshifted. Laura still turned out paintings regularly—too regularly. Too comfortably. Making art had once felt exhilarating and terrifying, like combustion or freefall, like peeling herself open. It had felt dangerous and important. Had youth been the necessary ingredient there, or naiveté?

She passed a zoo worker, huddled into his windbreaker. He shot Laura a concerned look and she saw herself through his eyes: a middle-aged woman in jeans and T-shirt and scrubby ponytail, rambling alone past the Small Mammal House in the rain, without an umbrella or even a jacket. She had to laugh: this was what counted as iconoclasm now.

Gimmick. She rolled the word around like a bitter pill. With trepidation, and not a little panic. But also, she realized, gratitude. No one else would have said it. Sullivan’s investment in her work wasn’t solely financial. He’d been the one to discover her, back when he was a gallery assistant, had stuck by her through the long, slow rise; he was willing to say the hard thing to her now. It was part of the reason why Laura had also stuck with him all these years, spurning the lures dangled by fancier venues. She knew better than most: truth was hard to come by.

When she let herself into Edward’s house that evening, the air smelled heavenly. She followed the scent back to the kitchen and found Edward there, at the stove.

“We’re at T minus seven minutes,” he said with a smile, replacing a lid on a saucepan. When she went to the cutlery drawer, he said, “Table’s already set. Just relax.”

He poured a glass of wine, nudged it across the counter toward her. The first sip spread across her palate and rolled a rich vapor up into her nasal passages. She watched him plate: a fish fillet laid onto a pallet of ivory grains, a clutch of brussels sprouts nestled beside, a sauce drizzled over the lot.

In the dining room, there were fresh flowers on the table; silverware winked under the chandelier.

“It’s a new recipe,” said Edward as they sat down. “The sauce has a secret ingredient.”

A fancy table for no occasion. A new recipe with a secret ingredient. The conclusion was inescapable: something was bothering Edward. The nature of his work was often confidential, and sometimes when wrestling with a dilemma he could not discuss he’d become terse and preoccupied, a tortoise with his head pulled into his shell. A very productive tortoise: a lot of house projects got accomplished during these periods.

No amount of coaxing would draw Tortoise Edward out before he was ready, so without resentment Laura carried on a largely one-sided dinner conversation, commenting on the fish (quite good), trying and failing to guess the secret ingredient (white pepper).

“Oh,” she remembered when they were nearly done eating. “Sully brought over the weirdest email this morning.” She told Edward about it, and also what Bea had said.

“How did Sullivan get the email if it was sent to you?” asked Edward, forking up a bite of fish.

“It was sent to my gallery email,” she said. “It’s set up so that if my inbox reaches one hundred unread items, he gets an alert. He’s like an overflow valve.” To Edward’s amused headshake, she added, “Bea was in fine form. Totally dismissive.”

“She’s right, though, isn’t she?” he said. “After all this time. It’s not really possible.”

“It’s not impossible,” she said. “He was never found.”

The words opened up a well inside her. That was what it was like—like having a well inside you with no bottom. Things dropped in and fell forever.

Edward was looking at her closely.

“Was there something in particular about this email?” he asked.

“Just a feeling.” Although as she said it, she realized that the feeling she’d had that morning had faded significantly; what she felt now was mainly defiance against her sister. “Also this Claude person is persistent—he telephoned the gallery when I didn’t respond to the emails.”

“He will stop, though, if you don’t respond,” said Edward. “Right? Sullivan will handle it.” There was a tinge there of condescension, as though Sullivan were her trusty Saint Bernard. But then, a minute before, Laura had likened him to an engine part.

“I guess I’m curious,” she said. “I mean, what would the angle be?”

“Money,” Edward said baldly.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

His eyebrows asked for him: But?

“But—my mother wouldn’t ignore it.” There it was; that was the kernel of the matter. She scraped her knife through the sauce on her plate and watched the line fill in, hearing her mother’s admonition across the decades: Don’t play with your food. “I know I should delete the email and forget about it. But she wouldn’t.” She looked up at Edward. “What do you think?”

He didn’t respond immediately, frowning down at his plate as though scrutinizing the remnants of his dinner. Laura knew his legal mind was ratcheting and processing, choosing language that would convey his meaning as precisely as possible. Others might cheerlead Go for it or Listen to your heart, with a gushing, easy volubility that had all the depth of a social media Like, but for Edward, delivering an opinion was a commitment.

“I think that you’re under no obligation to chase this particular wild goose,” he said. “Even if your mother would choose to chase it.” A gentle smile as he took up his water glass. “And even if your sister wouldn’t.”

A lawyerly way to say Make up your own mind. Laura laid her silverware across her empty plate, wondering whether Edward’s work problem had been knotty enough to have inspired dessert.

Edward put his water glass down, cleared his throat. “Martin asked me today if my girlfriend would be attending the partner dinner on Saturday.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Laura said.

“My girlfriend,” repeated Edward. “That word. At my age. It sounds so… flighty.”

Flighty he was not. Edward lived by Flaubert’s philosophy, Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. Edward’s original violence required an alarm at 5:40 a.m. each weekday, ablutions and breakfast and on the road by a quarter to seven, carrying the same steel travel coffee cup that had been brought home and washed out and left on the drainboard the night before. Why waste precious thought choosing a cup every morning? After reliable purveyors of shirts, socks, and underwear had been found, why seek others? Serial killer closet, Sullivan had commented after Laura described the row of identical button-downs and slacks to him, back when she and Edward were new.

“Martin could just use my name,” Laura said. “He’s known me for six years.” She added, “You know he does this kind of thing to goad you.”

“Maybe so,” he said with a hint of surprise. Although his career butted him up daily against politicians and other criminals, he never assumed the worst of people. “Still.” He was fussing at his plate, brows knitted, scraping some pearls of quinoa together with the tip of his knife.

“What is it?” she said. Although suddenly she knew.

How could she have been so stupid? It wasn’t a work problem that was preoccupying Edward. The flowers, the nicely set table, his nervousness. She knew. She knew, even though she’d had only one marriage proposal in her life before, and that was decades ago and totally different, Adam going down on one knee with a tiny box in his trembling hand, his voice fracturing with emotion.

“We’re happy together,” Edward said. His knife pushing, pushing the grains into a damp little hill. He shot a glance up at her. “I mean, I’m happy.”

“We’re happy,” she said.

“And it has been six years.” He laid the knife down and put his hand out to capture hers. “At our age, it’s not a big jump. It’s not like skydiving.” A smile fluttered at the corners of his mouth. “More like stepping down from a curb.”

She looked down at her fingers trapped in his. Paint rimed one of her fingernails, Sap Green that had stubbornly prevailed against the mineral spirits, the long shower, the scrubbing with a nailbrush. Rough, dry, big-knuckled, these were not the hands of a bride.

“Why can’t we just continue as we are?” she said.

It was terrible to watch the hope drain from Edward’s face, see it replaced by disappointment and hurt. What was wrong with her, blurting it out like that? Perhaps the long, solitary hours in the studio these many years had eroded her social skills. Or simply too much wine with dinner.

“We’re happy as we are,” she said, squeezing his hand. “As you said. We’re happy.”

He gripped back briefly, then pulled his fingers from hers and took the napkin from his lap, put it onto the table.

“Maybe Shelby was right,” he said with a tight, rueful smile. “I should have had a ring.” Shelby. So he’d talked to his daughter about this. “I told her you didn’t wear jewelry on your hands because of the paint.” He stood up, lifting his plate and reaching for hers, carrying both into the kitchen.

Laura could imagine Shelby, who was as forthright as Edward was reserved, telling him Dad, don’t be a dope, it doesn’t matter about the paint, women are magpies, we like shiny things. Shelby’s mother, Edward’s wife, Elaine, was dead for years yet still part of the world in her vibrant, good-hearted daughter, as well as other ways: the stained-glass panel across the top of Edward’s kitchen window that glowed a jewel pattern onto the floor in the light of morning, the layout of the garden beds. Elaine had made Edward a good home. Which he had cherished, and which now he was offering to Laura. She and Edward spent most nights together in this house. Wasn’t he simply suggesting the natural next step?

She followed him into the kitchen, where he was scraping the plates into the step-bin.

“I don’t need a ring,” she said to his back. “I don’t need the piece of paper either.” After all, the ring and the paper had meant nothing to Adam. She’d learned recently that he’d married again, to a woman barely thirty. Laura hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry when she had the realization that on that long-ago day when Adam was down on one knee stammering his eternal devotion to Laura, his future second wife was two years away from being born.

“Do you realize that you never call me just to check in?” said Edward. He let the bin lid drop, set the plates in the sink. “Just to ask how I am doing?”

“Do you want me to do that?” She’d liked that they weren’t like other couples, relentlessly checking with each other all the time. She’d also liked, she realized, the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday template of their dates, the element of spontaneity it granted to the rest of the week. Seeing him always felt like a choice happily made.

“When you disappear into your work, it sometimes feels like I disappear for you too.” He turned on the tap, pulled the spray nozzle out of the end of the faucet, and directed it over the dishes. “It isn’t just paper,” he said. Raising his voice a little above the sound of the water. “And it’s not what the paper means. It’s what the absence of the paper means.”

“It means nothing,” she said. She put her arms around him, laid her head against his back. “It means that we’re happy without it.” She felt his shoulder blade moving under her face as he reached forward to turn off the tap.

“I want us to be married,” he said, his voice thrumming against her cheek. He turned in her arms and looked down at her. “I know it’s old-fashioned. I’m old-fashioned.”

“Not that old-fashioned,” she said, smiling up at him. “Not like take-your-name old-fashioned.” Her voice teasing. She hadn’t even taken Adam’s surname, and back then she hadn’t yet sold a painting.

“I wouldn’t ask that,” Edward said.

His voice held a wistfulness that surprised her; the flood of rage she felt hearing it surprised her more. His emphasis on ask felt like an assault. He wanted to swallow her identity up into his? She took a step back, out of his arms.

“I want us to live in the same house,” he continued earnestly, oblivious to her reaction. “You could keep your house, of course, for the studio, and stay there whenever you wanted.”

“Thank you,” she said, unable to stop the sarcasm that shot out of her like a slim angry knife.

He blinked, perceiving her animosity. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. He turned, opened the dishwasher, began slotting the rinsed items into it. “I don’t want to change much. I just want us to be official.” Dropping the cutlery into the basket in separate tiny jolts. “I don’t want my obituary to include the words longtime companion.”

Obituary. “Is this about Geoff?” One of Edward’s friends had unexpectedly dropped dead the month before; he’d been a couple of years younger than Edward.

“Not entirely. But his death has made me think about what I want.” He corrected himself, “What I need.”

“