Red Wine

“Must be lonely in there.”

She peered into her mother’s vacant eyes, and found herself mildly surprised that she didn’t regret saying it.

The old woman half-smiled and blinked, staring into somewhere. She’d heard her daughter’s voice, but not the words.

The hell with this, Rey thought. She’s not snapping out of it anytime soon.

She was sitting on the couch next to her mother’s chair in the day room. There were only two other residents in the room, and they were on the other side, out of earshot. They’d surely have been shocked by the chill in her voice.

Her mother blinked again, still half-smiling. She looked much older than she actually was; barely a senior citizen at all, not yet seventy, but it occurred to Rey that she could easily pass for her grandmother. Her wispy white hair and blue eyes seemed alien to her own long-blonde and brown. She had always been petite, even frail; now she was the size and weight of a twelve-year-old.

She had needed to talk about the contents of her mother’s house – several pieces of remaining furniture, some pictures in need of salvage, and all the things in the attic – old boxes of papers, yellowed books. Everything that had belonged to her and her older sister had long since been evacuated. Everything that had belonged to their father had been disposed of when he died.

The house had sold, and they less than a week to finish emptying it out. Her sister had pestered her to get a list of things their mother might want them to keep an eye out for. Why couldn’t she ask her herself?

She’d gotten nothing. Her mother had recognized her at first, but had faded quickly, even before the tea that neither had touched. If it was up to her, they’d throw every last bit of that old shit in a dumpster. But Becky had insisted.

Why do I bother?

“I don’t have all day,” she said irritably, just to vent her impatience. Of course it was a futile thing to say.

Her mother’s head slowly turned. Their eyes met. Her mother nodded slightly.

“Honey Bee,” she said very quietly.

Her mother hadn’t called her that since she was six. It was like a slap.

As quickly as she could without drawing attention, she gathered up her purse and jacket and left the room.

“Goodbye, Mother,” she said over her shoulder.

___________________________________________

As a young girl, she’d been frightened of the attic.

The house was an old one, the oldest in the neighborhood. Country-style with an extensive covered porch, it had been built before her parents were born, on an expansive tract of land beyond the city. When the suburbs had encroached, more contemporary houses had simply sprung up around it.

It had that anachronistic character of an older home, walls a little too high and doors a little too wide, with floorboards and doorjambs and trimmings from another time. To her and her sister, all of that had seemed normal, growing up; it had been the homes of their friends that had seemed not quite right.

The attic was another matter. Claustrophobic and shadowed and dusky, it felt like a place people didn’t belong. Their father had been up here fairly often, and had forbidden them to play up here. Her sister had resented it; she had been happy to comply.

Several boxes of their parents’ papers and files were arranged on the attic floor, a lengthy triage already in progress. She had begun the sorting here in the attic, rather than simply taking the boxes and chore somewhere else, as a kind of passive defiance: she wanted it all to die here; she didn’t want to bring any of this old shit back to life by having it on her own kitchen table.

Most of the sifting had only turned up saved magazines, ancient receipts, old correspondence. The point of the search was to locate anything that might be important to their mother later on. She wasn’t in the mood for that right now.

Crossing to the far corner, she began poking through the remaining unmarked boxes there, which neither she nor her sister had yet explored.

There was a crate filled with phased-out Christmas decorations; another housed a very obsolete World Book Encyclopedia. She resisted the impulse to peruse a cardboard box of old toys.

Behind that box was another. She pulled it forward, found it heavy. Ripping thick packing tape off the top, she opened it and immediately realized it had belonged to her father.

What was in the box astonished her.

There were dozens of travel brochures. Some were conventional – Hawaii, the Bahamas – and some inexplicable. Peru. Hidalgo. Burma. Nepal.

What the actual fuck???

An obsidian incense burner that smelled like weed. Some jewelry, a handful of necklaces made of colorful stones; a bracelet that looked like real silver. Asian curios. A wooden bowl. A man’s wristwatch, European. A dark silk scarf.

And a rectangular wooden box with a leather latch.

She pulled out the wooden box and unlatched the lid.

It held what was obviously a very old bottle of wine. She took it out and held it.

The glass was black; the cork had been waxed in by hand. The label was the brown of aged newspaper, with cursive markings in a language she’d never seen.

The wine was strange, but no stranger than anything else in the box. These things had come from all over the world. Her father had clearly collected them on his business trips. She had grown up used to her father being away, but she’d never been fully aware that those business trips had been abroad – and certainly not to places as strange as these.

She repacked the box, but left out the wine.

_____________________________________

The next day was a Saturday, and her sister had said they could meet at their mother’s house to continue clearing it out. They sat at the table in the sparse dining room, eating take-out paninis and salad. Rey went to the kitchen to retrieve the bottle of Riesling her sister had left in the refrigerator early in the week. Becky would only drink white; she would only drink red. It reflected their general dichotomy: her sister had inherited their mother’s brown hair and eyes. A stranger would not have thought them sisters.

Damn. She hadn’t thought to bring wine for herself.

Aha.

She’d brought her father’s mystery bottle down from the attic and set it down on a remaining end table in the living room, forgetting to take it home. She retrieved both the bottle and the portable corkscrew in her purse and opened it, having trouble with the wax. She poured the red and white into paper cups retrieved from a box of pantry items on the counter.

She snifted the red just to make sure it was okay. It smelled like an ordinary Pinot Noir, a heady bouquet. She ventured a sip. It was potent, but in no way deflecting. She took another sip.

“I found a box of Dad’s stuff upstairs,” she said as she returned to the dining room.

“I thought we’d gotten rid of everything.”

“It was in an unmarked box, behind some other boxes. All kinds of weird shit...” She described what she’d found, including the wine.

Her sister sat in silence for a moment.

“What do you make of it?” she asked cautiously.

Rey shrugged. “Junk he accumulated on his trips,” she shrugged, “though I never realized he went overseas.”

Her sister was tight-lipped. “Oh, he did.”

They ate and sipped as they mulled over a potential schedule for completing the emptying of the house in the coming week. Rey reluctantly agreed to return to the Sunnybrook for another try at getting input from their mother.

Two-thirds of the way through the wine cup, she started feeling it.

It was a hard buzz, surging into her at an unbelievable speed – like a big hit of weed, but with the impact of tequila. She felt overwhelmingly disoriented.

What is this shit? she thought, frowning at the cup.

Her sister was talking to her. She fought to focus.

“Sorry,” she frowned, “what did you say?”

“I said, you’ve got to get something out of her this time. We have less than a week to have this place ready, and neither of us wants to schlep all that old junk in the attic home with us. And we don’t want to throw away anything important.”

She stared at her sister.

It was as if she were seeing her for the first time. Waves of resentment surged through her. She realized, with sudden clarity, how much she couldn’t stand her, didn’t want to be around her. No reason for these feelings presented themselves; she just wanted her gone. Her animus was almost tangible. That she’d never felt this way about Becky before didn’t even register.

“Are you all right?”

Her sister’s voice snapped her back into the moment.

“Are you okay? You look sick.”

She stared at the cup.

Her sister’s eyes widened.

“Oh, Rey, tell me you didn’t drink that shit you found in Dad’s box...”

“Mind your own business!”

Her sister looked as if she’d been slapped. In her life, she’d never spoken to her with such venom.

Recovering, Becky nodded toward the cup.

“No telling where Dad found that,” she said, “on his ‘business trips’.” The insinuation was obvious in her tone.

“What is that supposed to mean???”

This time her sister simply stared back at her.

“Seriously, don’t drink any more of that.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!!!”

Becky rose and picked up her jacket.

“Just get Mom to talk. I’ll call you Monday.”

And she left.

______________________________________

Rey sat by her mother’s bed in her room at Sunnybrook, watching as the old lady’s chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly. She would probably sleep all afternoon, and Rey had already wasted more than an hour waiting for her to wake up. Her sister would be even more annoyed.

She had spent the time thinking about her strange behavior the day before. She had acted in ways she never had with Becky. She was at a loss to explain it; the feelings had faded within an hour or two of her sister’s leaving, and she could locate no source for them. There was nothing buried, nothing hidden, no event from their past she might be reliving.

And even if something was there to be found, some remote incident that could cause such rancor, the suddenness of its appearance-

The wine.

The wine!

The feelings had swept into her with the speed of the wine buzz, and had matched its intensity. And they’d faded as her head cleared.

She searched herself for some reason she’d have experienced those particular feelings, when they hadn’t been in her before. The only person in her life she resented was the one sleeping in front of her. And even those feelings couldn’t match the intensity of yesterday’s experience.

No, it had just been her and Becky, and Becky didn’t-

Surely not.

She searched through her memory of the lunch. She went back farther. When Becky and called her, tasking her with the Mom chore and the attic work. She went back farther. And farther.

The more she reviewed those moments, the more hints emerged – a shadow in Becky’s tone, a distance in her posture, something behind her eyes...

The wine...

Was it even possible?

That her sister felt differently about her than she assumed she did was a jolt. That she had discovered as she had was much bigger.

And you, you old hypocrite, she thought to her mother, do you know how I feel about you? About what you did?

She wondered if she covered her feelings as efficiently as Becky did. Well, they’d learned from the best, hadn’t they?

She’d taken the bottle home, intending to pour it out but keep the bottle.

She was glad she hadn’t. An experiment was in order.

___________________________________

Her husband had gone to the office on a Sunday, which normally annoyed her, but this time she was pleased: it gave her an opportunity to set up a test of the wine. She cooked his favorite dinner and tidied up the living room, dining room, and bedroom. She took a second shower shortly before she thought he’d be home.

She and Doug hadn’t been married that long, and though things had started off well, she’d rapidly become disillusioned; he was a good man, loving and attentive, but too busy, too distracted. He worked himself to exhaustion, spending too little time with her, though he tried to make up for it when they did connect. He’d send texts frequently, would bring her gifts from time to time, and was complimentary when they were together. When he’d been away, he’d make love to her passionately and enthusiastically upon his return.

He was a good and loving husband. She just didn’t get enough of him.

The test was simple: she felt disconnected from and annoyed by Doug; he, on the other hand, adored her, and had passionate feelings to spare. His feelings would be amplified by the romantic gesture of the meal. If her theory – crazy theory! - was correct, then as she drank the wine, she’d begin to feel that same adoration and passion for him.

“What’s all this?” he asked when he finally arrived, forty-five minutes behind schedule. She’d lit the candles and incense when he’d pulled into the driveway.

She kissed him like she meant it.

“Well,” he smiled, “I think we’re in for a very happy evening!”

She served him the beef bourguignon and sipped the red wine – it looked almost black, in an actual wine glass – as he told her about his latest crisis at the office.

A few more sips, and again, the buzz hit her like a sledgehammer. Again, the dizziness was overwhelming. As she watched him eating and drinking and intermittently talking, his voice seemed to disappear, and she began to feel herself seething with disdain, with loathing, with utter disrespect. This man was pitiful – a disappointment in every way. A convenience, nothing more. How could she ever have loved him?

So fierce were the emotions that she was only distantly connecting to the greater, more appalling truth.

Her eyes watered.

She suddenly excused herself, rushed to the bathroom and vomited.

_______________________________________

When her sister called the next day, it was as if her outburst on the weekend hadn’t happened. Becky was that way – non-confrontational, and in hindsight, she was burying feelings she couldn’t get past. She was predictably annoyed when Rey told her she’d gotten nothing from their mother on special items to watch for.

On impulse, Rey blurted out her suspicion about her husband.

“I can’t say how I know,” she said, “But I’m just pretty sure it’s true.”

“Yes,” her sister agreed, “those are the classic signs. He’s gaslighting you, trying to create a false reality to cover what he’s doing.”

“I’ve been wracking my brain, trying to imagine who it could be,” she had continued. “Someone at his office?”

For a moment there was no response. Then her sister said, “Check your own backyard.”

“What? What do you m-”

“Gotta go.”

__________________________________

Her sister had to mean Sarah.

Sarah, her best friend since high school. Sarah, maid of honor at her wedding.

She was free the next day, so Rey invited her to lunch at her home. She had Panera deliver, and found a bottle of Chardonnay for Sarah – like Becky, she would only drink white.

She adored Sarah, and felt adored in return. They didn’t open up a lot, but she’d seldom felt a need to, and even if she did, she’d have felt uncomfortable talking about her family issues.

And Sarah had always intimidated her a bit. She was elegant, far more beautiful and confident and successful than Rey. It was obvious in the way she dressed and carried herself. But she’d never done it on purpose, and had always treated her like a sister. More than her actual sister, at any rate.

She poured the white and the red, and they started lunch.

There was the usual chit-chat. She went into a bit of detail about the hassle of dealing with their mother’s house, but nothing specific. As the wine made its way into her emotions, she wondered if she’d feel the expected kinship and warmth.

The buzz. Worse, this time, probably because she had worked up some anxiety, anticipating it. And a moment later, a feeling of... superiority. Sarah was beneath her. Sarah was an object of pity. To be laughed at.

She had consumed the usual more-than-half. With a sudden gulp, she downed the rest and set down her fork. Her eyes fixed on her friend.

Now, the test.

“Doug is going to Washington on business next month, did I tell you?

Suddenly she became aroused, both her emotions and her body stirring. At the mention of his name. At the mention of an upcoming out of town.

“It’s you.”

Her meaning was so unmistakable that Sarah simply put down her own fork.

“This doesn’t have to get ugly,” she smiled.

“Oh, it’s plenty ugly already,” Rey answered, and through her intense disdain she felt some intellectual distance. It will be interesting to see, she thought, what it looks like when her face and her words match what I’m feeling.

“He doesn’t love you,” Sarah said, in a voice that was somewhere between pity and hurt. Rey knew it was true.

“I wonder how much of that is your doing,” Rey mused.

Sarah picked up her purse and rose from the table.

“You aren’t worthy of him,” she said as she headed for the door. Rey found it almost entertaining to play the mirror her best friend didn’t realize she was looking into.

_____________________________________

There were threats. There was shouting. A door slammed.

She was as done with him as she was with Sarah. There would be lawyers in the coming months.

Through her bitterness she felt something beyond the betrayal, a sense of bewilderment at her own disconnection from reality. How is this even possible? How could it be that the two people she thought would never leave her side didn’t really love her at all.

Who else in her life felt that way? Did anyone really care for her?

Dad had.

Her father, when he wasn’t away, had doted on her. She had never seen anything like affection between him and her mother, and Becky had always radiated either indifference or derision. But she’d always felt a bond with him.

For the thousandth time, she felt herself missing him.

And for the thousandth time, she despised her mother.

____________________________________

There was one glass left in the bottle, she thought as she opened yet another box of papers in the attic.

One more glass.

She would find out who her mother really was.

The last box had been financial records, and had taken forever to go through. This one seemed to be more correspondence. Because she didn’t know what was and wasn’t important, it could take even longer. Becky would be here soon to help.

As she explored the top layer, it seemed the letters seemed personal. Some were from faraway family. A few were vacation postcards from friends of her mother’s whom she’d never heard of, dated long, long ago.

She came to a red envelope. Opening it, she found a handmade Mother’s Day card – one that she’d made herself, more than twenty years ago. She opened it.

Happy Mother’s Day I Love You! with hearts. And a crayon picture of a honey bee beneath.

She didn’t know how to feel.

She pressed on, sorting by Obviously Important, Possibly Important, Unimportant. And she came to an unmarked envelope that had been sealed and then torn open. She unfolded the letter within.

__________

Philip,

If you are reading this, then I am gone. I have taken Rebecca and Renata with me. Do not try to find us. We are in a safe place where we will be beyond your reach.

I suppose it is possible that I could forgive all that you did to me, but I can never forgive what you did to Rebecca. She and I have protected Renata, who for some reason worships you, and perhaps that is what has kept her from your corruption. When we are free, she will know the truth about you.

You are a vile, poisonous man, and the most I can hope for now is to somehow teach my daughters to seek out men who are more honest and loving and genuine.

I am beyond wishing you good or ill. I simply must go on living now, for the sake of my daughters.

Dorothy

______________

Forgive all that he did to her? What he had done to Becky???

Clearly Becky had been hinting that their father had cheated on their mother last weekend. Apparently that was the tip of the iceberg.

She felt completely adrift. Nothing in her life was what it seemed. She’d invested herself in fantasies, and been completely oblivious to what had been real.

A door opened and closed downstairs.

Several minutes passed before her sister appeared on the attic stairs, a coffee cup of Riesling in hand. Wordlessly, Rey handed her the letter.

Becky’s eyes blinked as if tear-filled, but no tears would come. Whatever pain the letter was reviving within her was unreleased.

She set the letter down and sat on the attic floor next to Rey. A long moment passed.

“I don’t know where to start,” she began.

“I think I’ve figured a lot of it out,” Rey said. “Is it what I’m thinking?”

“I’m not ready to talk about that.”

Another moment passed.

“What was this plan to leave? Mom never worked, and Dad controlled the money. She had no way to set us up somewhere else.”

Becky smiled grimly.

“That’s what all of this is about,” she replied. “She got a big chunk of money and was going to move us out west and get an apartment. She was even going to change our names.”

“Big chunk of money?”

“She stole it.”

Rey almost gasped.

“...from Granny,” Becky continued. “Almost fifty thousand dollars.”

Rey’s head was spinning.

“Dad found out,” Becky went on. “I overheard him tearing into her one night. He threatened her, held it over her head. When Granny died, it was even worse; she never knew the money was missing, and with her gone, he could have gone to the police.”

She sipped her wine.

“This is where it gets really interesting,” she continued. “Remember your scholarship? The thing that got you out of here, and into a real life?”

No...

“You didn’t win that scholarship,” Becky said, not unkindly. “Dad just told you that. Granny was your scholarship. The whole thing was Dad’s way of controlling the situation, so that if what Mom had done had ever came to light, it would be treated sympathetically. He didn’t want her in jail; he wanted her under his thumb. In jail, she might start saying things.”

Rey could hardly breathe.

“...and that, little sister, is why I bugged out. When you got to go to college on Dad’s sins and Mom’s crimes, I’d had enough. Especially after... other things.”

“That’s when she turned on me,” Rey said, in barely a whisper. “She did everything she could to keep me from going. She even said terrible things. Made me feel like I wasn’t cut out for it.”

“That’s on me, sister,” Becky said, and now she looked like she actually might tear up. “When I ran off, that left just the three of you. And if you split for school then, it would have been just the two of them, and that thought must have completely terrified her. You can say it was selfish of her, but I’ll never see it that way.”

One tear fell.

“I just wish I’d seen it all this clearly back then.”

She felt like she was seeing Becky for the first time. She reached out and touched her arm.

Becky wiped the tear from her cheek.

“You were our firewall,” she said. “You were a kind of trophy to Dad. You loved him, and your affection sort of vindicated him, gave him some bizarre evidence that he really was who he pretended to be. It kept you safe, and it kept us safer than we’d have been without you. The things that happened were bad enough... if you weren’t there, it would have been far worse.”

“And I left, and then you left, and it did get worse. By the time he died, there was nothing left of her.”

She had fallen out with her mother, and when she’d returned home on holidays, they’d barely spoken. Her mother had gone completely distant. She’d always assumed...

It was her turn for tears.

“This was my fault,” she whispered.

Becky took her hand and squeezed it.

“I felt for a long time that it was my fault,” she said, “but neither of us is to blame. He was a monster, and he’s gone, and good fucking riddance.”

She sipped her wine again.

“I never told you much about where I went when I left,” Becky went on, “and that’s a story for later. But a couple of years after, the guy I was with convinced me to come back home and talk to the police. And I did - the week of Dad’s heart attack.

“Mom wouldn’t talk to me. And as you’ll recall, I skipped the funeral.”

Rey began to sob.

Her sister held her.

“You’re just like her, you know,” Becky said moments later. “Isolated. Naive. Terrible taste in men,” and they both laughed.

_____________________________

It was a sunny afternoon, unseasonably warm. Her mother wore a light sweater, but Rey did not, even in the expansive shade of the giant maple in the vast yard behind Sunnybrook. She had arranged for a tea table and chairs, and an orderly had helped her bring her mother out and seat her.

A tray of toast, halved grapes and soft cheese sat on the table before them, along with tea. Her mother was smiling, and seemed happy.

“Mom?” she prompted, looking into her eyes. “Do you know where you are?”

Her mother breathed in the early spring air.

“Lovely,” her mother replied, “just lovely!”

“It is, it’s lovely,” she agreed, “now I want you to look at me. Do you know who I am?”

Still smiling, her mother looked into her eyes and frowned a bit. In a moment her face lit up with a childlike smile.

“Honey Bee! It’s my Honey Bee!”

A tear fell down Rey’s cheek and she burst into a grin.

“That’s right, Mom, it’s me. It’s your Honey Bee!”

Her mother laughed, and Rey fed her a piece of cheese, and they laughed some more and sang songs from her childhood.

And part of Rey’s mind hovered over the past few days, all that had happened. All that she’d lost. Husband, best friend, and false memories of a father who was someone else. And the people she’d held at a distance -

The real thing had turned out to be counterfeit, and the counterfeit had turned out to be the real thing.

She didn’t know how she was going to get through the coming months. The divorce would likely not go well. And Sarah -

Her thoughts suddenly went to Becky. She and her big sister had a long talk in their future. Probably many. That was a good thing, though; I guess I need a new best friend...

And her mother. She’d gotten her mother back, after all this time – the mother she remembered from very long ago. She watched her mother voicelessly singing some song from long ago, her eyes closed, her head swaying softly back and forth.

How long do we have?

Knowing what she’d given up for her, all that she’d lost – she couldn’t remember ever being this important to another person.

In this moment, she felt more loved, more cherished than she could ever remember feeling. This woman in front her was the very source of love to her, reaching back to a time before her memories even began. Tears flowed, and her smile widened as she let that love pour out of her, that feeling of knowing she was valued, treasured, worthy of another’s sacrifice and devotion.

She opened the thermos on the ground beside her, poured the last of the wine into a paper cup, and lifted it to her mother’s lips.