Lila

Chapter 4: The Withdrawal

The medical record arrived at my lawyer's office on a Tuesday. I read it on the train back from the university, and by the time I reached my stop I understood exactly what Blair had done.

Our mother's physician had noted a change in her medication on the same afternoon she signed the second letter. The note said she had seemed fatigued. It did not say she was confused. It did not say she was incompetent. But a lawyer could make it say anything, and Blair's lawyer was already making it say everything.

I called Marguerite. She did not answer. I called Ellis. He sounded nervous and said the foundation had asked for the scholarship budget by Friday, earlier than usual, and that he had been told to prepare a scenario with twenty-two students instead of fifty.

I went home and opened our mother's desk again.

Under the canceled checks, under the first envelope, under a stack of old correspondence from a cousin in Maine, I found a leather binder. It was our mother's handwriting, dated over four years. It was a record of the foundation's grants, every one of them, with notes in the margin. Beside the scholarship line for each of the last three years, in the same careful hand, she had written a single word. Keep.

Beside the donor dinner, beside the administrative raise Blair had approved for herself, beside a new line item called strategic consulting, she had written different words. Watch. Ask. Why.

Our mother had been watching Blair run the foundation. She had been writing it down. And she had never once told Blair, because telling Blair was not how our family worked. Our family worked by leaving letters in drawers and letting the daughters find them.

I sat with the binder until the room went dark. Then I called my lawyer and said I wanted to subpoena the foundation's financials.

He said the board would fight it.

I said let them.

*****

The subpoena landed on a Friday. By Monday, Blair was on my porch.

She did not knock. She stood at the bottom of the steps with her heels in her hand and her hair coming down, and she said, "You went through her desk."

"She kept a binder," I said. "She wrote notes."

"About me."

"About the money. About the consulting line. About the raise you gave yourself the month she had her first stroke."

Blair came up the steps and sat on the porch swing, the one our father had hung the year before he left, the one that creaked. She put her heels on the boards and looked out at the dark yard. It was the first time in years I had seen her sit anywhere that did not have an armrest.

"The raise was approved by the board," she said. "The consulting line is real. I hired a firm to audit the grants. Everything I did was legal."

"Legal isn't the question."

"Then what is?"

I sat down at the other end of the swing. The chains complained. "She wrote keep next to the scholarship every year. She wrote watch next to everything you touched. She wasn't confused, Blair. She knew what she was doing. She just never told you."

Blair was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "She told you."

"She left me a letter."

"She left you the door," Blair said. "She left me the locks." She turned and looked at me, and in the porch light her eyes were the same as our mother's, gray and patient and impossible to read. "Do you know what it's like to be the one she trusted with the money? Every year, every audit, every time a grant went wrong, she called me. She never called you. She called me and she asked me to fix it, and I fixed it, and she wrote watch in her little book. I was doing the work. She was grading me."

"You could have told me."

"You would have told me I was taking something."

"You were taking something."

"Maybe." Blair looked back at the yard. "Maybe I was. But I was also the only one she would let carry it, and I have been carrying it since I was twenty-one, and I am tired, Lila. I am so tired."

The swing creaked. Somewhere down the street a dog barked. I thought about the earrings and the locket and the combs, and I thought about a binder full of keep, and I understood that our mother had built a house with two rooms and put each of us in one and told us the other was empty.

"The board votes Thursday," I said.

"I know."

"If I win, I'm going to keep the fifty students."

Blair laughed, a short, dry sound. "Of course you are. You were always the generous one. That was the room she put you in."

"And you were the capable one."

"Yes."

We sat on the swing until the porch light clicked off on its timer, and then we sat in the dark, and neither of us got up.