Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

By the age of five she supposes her personality is mostly developed. She has a sanguine temperament, little to no shifts in mood on a day-to-day basis, a disdain for mealtime typical of children her age, and a penchant for building structures in the sand and tearing them down almost immediately afterwards. James outlives falling victim to the latter habit and becomes her partner in crime instead. They corkscrew holes into their most recent edifice and watch sand bleed out until the whole thing quietly collapses.

“Let’s build a fortress next,” Phillipa instructs. They collect millipedes to put inside, then bury them alive in it. They come wriggling out, to James’ delight. He is three.

Mom and dad take coffee on a porch. Mom has an elbow on the circular garden table and her palm pressed against her mouth. Her eyes are blue-green pools in the afternoon light. James and Phillipa come inside the house to the promise of pancakes with sugar and butter. Phillipa supposes she has some appetite for pancakes typical of children her age.

By ten she has a collection of colored rocks with flat surfaces she plans to skip along the ocean, a library of books each of which she has read at least twice, and analytical skills beyond her years. The latter trait manifests itself in the scholar’s mate, which she spontaneously discovers one day on the chessboard playing against her mom.

Mom has an elbow on the coffee table they sit across and her palm pressed against her mouth. Her eyes are luminous as she congratulates Phillipa on her first (and only) win. Mom teaches her the fianchetto, which she opens with from then on.

James is dead.

* * *

“How old was I when my brother died?”

She guesses she is around twelve now, and suddenly aware of how heartless she sounds (is?) when she looks behind her shoulder and meets mom’s stricken, orb-like eyes. She immediately turns back to her open book – a gesture of avoidance and pretense – which is one of the architectural digests mom and dad leave in stacks on the dining table. The spread shows a brutalist, two-story house built on a cliff. Portholes are carved all along one side. She imagines millipedes crawling out of them.

Mom doesn’t reply, and Phillipa learns to answer her own questions in her mind instead of asking out loud for the answers. She outgrows her library, collection of pebbles, love for pancakes, and even her disdain for mealtime. She now prefers stone fruit and mom and dad’s old records. She listens to Satie’s Gymnopédies again and again, closes her eyes, and imagines finding James in a tall grass maze.

Her adolescence is probably when she tries developing her own interests instead of hijacking her mom and dad’s. Among them are silver age sci-fi and a boy in her class with longish hair and a face that crumples when he smiles. Both interests are short-lived, and she falls back on the things that inevitably remind her of home: wading through a low tide, elaborate sand castles, coffee table books, Erik Satie and friends on vinyl, chess annotations, Oregon cherries. Phillipa learns that questions and answers sequentially follow one another, and if she has one she can usually discover the other.

For instance – “I miss your brother,” is a line mom says now, constantly, during mundane activities like peeling root crops or having wine in the living room before dinner. This is an answer mom delivers with a quick, apologetic glance at Phillipa. The question she is asking is, Do you miss your brother?

She turns the question over in her mind until she falls asleep. She never dreams.

* * *

Mom and dad are taking coffee on the porch when she sits between them with her own cup cradled in both hands. She takes her coffee with a swab of butter, something she learned to do in college. Dad is gazing out at the yard – or just past it, towards the ocean – but mom looks at her and smiles. Did I interrupt something? she asks. Mom’s smile had been the answer.

“I wanted to give you this,” mom says and passes a folded slip of paper across the table. Phillipa looks at her curiously, unfolds the paper and starts. It is a childhood photo of her and her brother bent over something unseen in their backyard. Her own face is hidden by a curtain of hair, but James is looking up at the camera from his crouched position, revealing a blond fringe, two rows of perfect baby teeth, and a gummy smile. He can’t be more than three. She smiles back at him, even though she suddenly feels like she has just tumbled down a spiral and maybe needs to scream. She can’t seem to catch her breath.

Mom notices, because she sets a hand over the one Phillipa still has on her mug, soothing the quivers wracking through it and rippling through the surface of her coffee.

“I know you don’t want to remember, Phillipa,” mom says quickly, “and I don’t need you to, either. But when you start to miss him, it will help to think of him as more than just a shade.”

What the hell do you mean by that? she asks, trying to steady her breathing. She pulls her hands away from the table, curls them into fists on her lap then consciously uncurls them. She closes her eyes and thinks her way out of the spiral; imagines it unfolding like a Penrose staircase she can climb out of.

Her coffee stills.

“I remember that day,” she says after a while, voice weak but steady.

Dad is looking at her now. There is a question in his eyes she can’t figure out, but she knows she is answering him: “We were digging for worms.”

Chapter Text

What is it about the late afternoon that makes her so sad? Phillipa can’t figure it out. She prefers the salt-laden humidity of early mornings, when practically nothing moves on the beachside but the ocean. Then she can imagine no one exists. She opens her eyes and for a split-second thinks she is drowning because of how vast the grey sky is, before she remembers: Phillipa (her), Dom (dad), Mal (mom), and James (dead).

She whistles out a breath to steady her rabbiting heartbeat, tries to hum Gymnopédie No. 1. Lying on the edge of the low tide has made her jeans wet and grainy. Phillipa doesn’t care. She can’t even remember how she got here, on her back on the sand with a grey sky about to swallow her whole, but it’s her favorite time of the day. Next to her, dead jellyfish wash up and glimmer faintly.

In a few hours, she will head home with her hair damp and her face ruddy from the seaside winds. Mom will fret about the sand she is getting on the tiles but hand her a mug of coffee anyway and press a kiss against her damp locks, tell her she has prepared her favorite breakfast – marbled pancakes. Phillipa will pretend to groan. I haven’t liked that in years, mom. It’s true, too. She will bring out the plates. Dad will watch them set the table with his knuckles against his lips and almost, almost smile.

Out of the pocket of her cardigan Phillipa pulls out a picture, slightly damp now, and stares.

Phillipa (her) and James (dead). In the picture, it is late afternoon, and she and James are digging for worms. Since mom gave it to her, Phillipa has been trying to figure out what about the picture is making her so sad. It’s only in these quiet mornings that she can admit to herself it isn’t James.

“It’s Dom,” she tells her brother’s picture.

* * *

“I miss your brother,” Mal says with a tremor tucked into her voice. She is painting her nails a deep boysenberry. Phillipa has always preferred to keep her nails short and clean.

She turns the page of an old architectural digest and pretends not to hear, takes a noisy bite out of the water apple Mal has washed and peeled for her and chews with gusto. A three-story house unfolds itself from the page for her mind’s eye to discover: sliding doors, lattice windows, gold foam-brushed walls, tatami mat bedrooms and a mahogany hall with high ceilings and heavy, crystal chandeliers.

Phillipa walks down the hallway and slides a door open, just a crack. She is in the master bedroom.

“You know how to find me.”

Mom and dad sit across each other by the window. Their conversation is hushed and urgent. Did I interrupt something? Phillipa asks.

“You know what you have to do,” mom goes on. Dad doesn’t answer, barely seems to hear her. Mom cards fingers through his hair, her nails short and clean. Phillipa can’t see dad’s face from this angle, but his shoulders are pitched forward like he might fall face-first into mom’s lap at any moment.

What do you have to do? she asks the tired lines of dad’s shoulders, the corded muscles of his back. A lock of his hair slips, which Mal immediately brushes back. One of his hands grasps for Mal’s arm, the other for the hand she has on his face. He turns his head up to look at her, and Phillipa feels that acute sense of grief again, like she is looking into a picture at the face of a dead brother she barely knew. Or a dead lover.

Mal’s eyes turn sharply to her, and Phillipa starts.

“I said, did you want me to paint your nails?”

Phillipa slams her book shut. It is late afternoon, and she is sitting inside the wood interiors of her mom and dad’s living room. She has come home from college for the summer, and nothing appears to have changed. There are chips on the jewel-yellow coffee mugs mom says have always been there. The library of old French records collects dust while Satie plays on loop. Lent et douloureux remains her favorite track. Mom prepares her favorite foods, plays her favorite songs on the piano, cards her fingers lovingly through Dom’s hair.

Phillipa takes a deep breath.

“Do you have any red on you?” she asks mom without looking at her. She has run out of water apples to eat, but the porcelain bowl provides her a view of Mal’s face just behind her. Her orb-like eyes are boring holes into Phillipa’s back.

“Just burgundy,” Mal says, unblinking. Her tone is apologetic, but there is a question in her eyes now, coiled tight and secret just behind them. Phillipa strains to read it through her reflection in the bowl. If she could just gather the courage to turn around and look her mom straight in the eye, she knows she could find her answer.

Instead, Phillipa looks away from the porcelain bowl, thumbs the curled corners of the digest. She can’t, she thinks. She wants to look at James’s picture. I’m sorry, James, she wants to tell him. I’m sorry, dad.

“Burgundy is fine,” she tells Mal.

Mal smiles, her question answered.

Chapter Text

Summer at home grows long enough to wind into a routine. Phillipa puts on her trainers and walks along the shore, tracking her steps on a pedometer clipped to the waist of her jeans. She decides to take the device apart later and inspect the engineering inside. She suspects it involves a fulcrum under a metal ball which seesaws back and forth when shaken, or a pseudospherical top tipping over with every change in elevation.

Phillipa shakes the images from her mind.

Still, she revels in the excitement of taking a thing apart, smashing the pedometer to pieces after learning how it works. Who had she borrowed it from anyway? It had been dusty from lack of use when she first picked it up. Mom and dad always walked without any sense of time, aimless and hand-in-hand, lovers to each other before they were parents to Phillipa and James.

Anger flares inside Phillipa for a moment before a wave of ocean hits her feet and washes it away. The tide is rising. It retreats from Phillipa’s trainers to reveal entreating gifts in the sand: sea slaters, entrances to crab tunnels, colored glass and white coral. Phillipa forgets her anger then and stoops to collect her treasures.

* * *

Forget James, a part of her thinks. James is dead.

Unbidden, another thought slowly floats to the surface.

So is Dom, if this goes on any longer.

* * *

She finds herself observing dad more and more as he drafts. Ever the old timer, Dom still works on an immense drafting table tilted at a 100-degree angle near the windows of the living room, wasting entire afternoons away.

Phillipa watches Dom’s shoulders work as his arms move across the table. He lays his fingers purposefully on the edges of the vellum to hold it down, drawing line after line. Occasionally his hand falls against his hip, fumbles for a lukewarm coffee mug, or smooths a lock of his own hair back.

Without Mal around, Dom looks almost robotic: an efficient mass of muscles, 20-20 vision and braincells programmed solely to architect lakeside homes as he pretends not to watch his daughter watching him.

Despite everything, Phillipa likes Dom. She likes dad – his distance, his quiet, the symmetry of his face, the permanent crease between his brows, the dark gold hair (Phillipa, unfortunately, inherited Mal’s dark mane), the sheer amount of talent he has and the hard work he puts in despite it. Unlike mom, dad is all work and no play with Phillipa; barely acknowledges her when she enters the room and sits as close to him as she dares. It becomes a game to Phillipa then: coming home from the beach, hanging up her cardigan to dry, pouring herself a coffee and sitting on the couch so she can watch dad draft blueprint after blueprint. Her favorite film on loop. She sits closer and closer to the edge of the couch each day and wonders if Dom will notice the gap between them closing, if he will pick up Phillipa's scent like an animal when she is close enough to touch him and finally, finally see her.

The thought of Dom seeing her shoots sparks down her spine, ripples over the surface of her coffee.

She has always loved his eyes.

* * *

In the end, dad never looks up from his work. Not once. He goes through his drafts like a timed machine and ends by putting his pencil down with a sigh and a looking out the window towards a dusky sky. He then pulls the curtains closed and heads to the kitchen where mom cooks her family dinner. Often dinner is something oven-baked – an eggplant casserole or roasted vegetables – and accompanied with glasses of red wine and the clinking of silverware as they eat in relative silence. Mal recalls snippets of Phillipa and James’ childhood over the table, waits for Phillipa to grunt some kind of reply or acknowledgment. Phillipa grows increasingly irritated by mom’s sentimentality. It feels like a sham, somehow, like Mal is making up stories about her son and daughter to make up for the fact that one of them is dead and the other increasingly distant.

Dom chews through his casserole with his head slightly dipped, as if Mal’s invisible hand is clamped down his neck. He rarely joins the conversation, and Phillipa’s fondness for him swells.

* * *

The next time she comes into the living to find Dom at work, Phillipa busies herself next to him. She puts her feet up on the couch and draws increasingly complex mazes on the ad pages of architectural digests. Phillipa imagines finding James inside each of them; leading him out of its depths again with the unspooling thread of her cardigan.

* * *

When Phillipa wakes up one afternoon, the living room is empty. Dom has left her sleeping on the couch next to his unfinished drafts and closed curtains, an afghan over her shoulders. No doubt he has drifted into the kitchen by now. Phillipa can smell an oven-roast chicken or pot pie in the making.

She sits up, and the digest on her lap slides to the floor. Phillipa picks it up and finds her maze has been solved with a ballpen. A single, confident line traces a path from entrance to exit. She flips through the digest to find that all her mazes have been answered this way.

Phillipa smiles despite the obvious ease with which her mazes were solved. She turns each maze over to run her fingers against the grooves left behind by the ballpen nib, pictures Dom’s heavy hand at work. Dad’s fingers were likely pressed against the page to keep it steady as he solved each maze in less than a minute.

Phillipa tears a page out, lifts it against the light to examine it better. True enough, there are half and crescent moon-shaped fingerprints near the corners of the maze. She places her thumb and ring finger against the stains left by Dom’s own, imagines every one of Galton’s minutiae line up, as if she and Dom were a single person instead of father and daughter. Phillipa’s eyes darken before they close.

Her mom and dad are not the only ones with a secret.

* * *

What is Dom and Mal’s secret?

Phillipa struggles with this question; only knows, somehow, that she already has the answer.