PROLOGUE 1991
On the day of the memorial service, Dennis Griffin stood on the lakeshore, under a cold gray sky, facing the water. The whine of a chainsaw echoed somewhere along the shore. The air smelled like pine, wood smoke, and the coming winter.
When the chill got to him, he went inside.
He avoided the post-funeral supper and went instead to the flagstoned entry hall where the guests had hung their coats. He searched through the pockets, stuffing any cash or items of interest he found in his own jacket pockets.
They had arrived yesterday. Dennis had watched from inside the garage as Brenna emerged from the car and embraced her mother, Meg. He’d watched intently as Brenna’s little girl, Sadie, stepped out of the back seat but stayed close to the car, looking uncertain, until Meg went to her, scooped her up, and took her inside.
Now, in the front hall, he discovered a black leather purse on a hook behind a dark green coat. The subdued tones of the assembled guests’ voices drifted in, but no one came to disturb him. Dennis listened and tried to make out words; he couldn’t. He stuck his hand in the purse, rummaging around. He pulled out a red eel-skin wallet, unsnapped it, and found Brenna’s driver’s license picture staring back at him. She didn’t have any cash in her wallet, just photos and credit cards. There was a Mastercard; a Chevron gas card; and a professional-looking wallet-size portrait of Brenna, her husband, Peter, and Sadie seated in a grove of trees, smiling. When Dennis could stand to look no longer, he dropped the wallet back into Brenna’s purse.
He sifted through the rest of her things. There was a hairbrush, key ring, packet of Kleenex, pack of Virginia Slims, and a lighter. He spun the wheel on the lighter and it lit up; he put it in his pocket. He removed a snarled ball of hair from her brush and put that in his pocket too. At the bottom of her bag was a small silver flask. Dennis unscrewed the cap and sniffed. He smelled nothing. He took a swig just as he heard his wife calling his name. He tasted vodka.
“Dennis? . . . Dennis?”
The sound of her footsteps got louder. He dropped the flask back into the purse and slipped out the front door into the oncoming evening. He ran silently across the driveway and up the stairs to their apartment above the garage. In the bedroom, he retrieved a leather briefcase (with his initials, DEG, embossed on it) from under the bed, and opened it with a small key he got from his sock drawer. He took the hairball out of his pocket and dropped it into the briefcase. He locked it and placed it back under the bed.
That done, he put the key back in the drawer and went back outside, down the stairs, and along the path to the lakeshore. He sat on a log and lit up a cigarette with Brenna’s lighter. The air was cold with the promise of snow.
PART ONE
1965–1985
CHAPTER ONE
Brenna Riley loved her father’s study. It smelled like books and cigars, and the walls were filled with photos of her father as a younger man. He had been a rower at the Naval Academy and had won a gold medal in the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. The medal was in a frame and hung next to a picture of nine men standing in a row on a dock, each holding an oar, except the shortest of them who held a megaphone. Their names were written along the bottom of the photograph, including her father’s, Jack Riley.
Brenna also loved the picture of her parents when they got married at a wedding chapel in Reno, Nevada. Her mother had run away with Jack from her home in Maryland because her family had not approved of the marriage. Brenna found this fascinating and exciting. She looked at the photo so often she’d memorized it. Her handsome, powerfully built father, with his dazzling smile, in his navy uniform, towered over her dark-haired and petite mother, who was wearing a light-colored suit and a shy but radiant smile. Behind them, off to the left, was the exterior door of the little faux church with a sign that read Silver Bells Wedding Chapel.
***
When Brenna was six, she announced to her father, “I’m going to row, like you did.”
Her father laughed and said, “Girls don’t row.”
Brenna resolved, right then, to be the first girl rower.
She and her dad had a special bond. Brenna loved her mother too, of course, but didn’t spend a lot of time with her. She knew her mother loved her, but not in the same way her father did, or even the same way her nanny, Mrs. Dalrymple, did. Mrs. Dalrymple, from the time of Brenna’s earliest memories, asked her every day, “How much do I love Brenna?” “This much!” Brenna would answer by holding her arms open as wide as she could. Her father worked a lot but always made time for her.
Her mother mostly made time for her father.
***
Brenna was eight when she first heard them fighting. It was late at night and Brenna was walking, half asleep, to the bathroom when she heard them. Suddenly wide awake, she crept down the hall and stood outside their bedroom.
“It just looked like you and Linda were arguing, that’s all,” her mother said. Her voice sounded shaky, as if she was on the verge of tears.
“Arguing? I barely know the woman! How much did you have to drink tonight?”
At first, she hadn’t recognized her father’s voice. He had never spoken to Brenna that way, with such anger and frustration.
“We’ve known Linda and Stan for at least ten years,” she heard her mother say quietly.
“Where are you going with this, Meg?” her father hissed in that weird furious tone.
“It was just an observation. I’m sorry to upset you.” Now it sounded like her mother was crying.
“Whatever you thought you saw”—her father’s voice was getting louder, and closer! Brenna hurried back down the hall and slipped into the bathroom just as her parents’ bedroom door opened—“it was nothing. Nothing for you to be concerned about.”
She heard the door slam and her father’s feet stomping down the hall and down the stairs.
***
By the time she was ten, Brenna had begun to notice things. Like the three of them would be having dinner, and she and her father would be talking a mile a minute—about Brenna’s day at school, what he’d done all day at his newspaper job, what books Brenna was reading, what it had been like when Jack was on his navy ship, what it had been like to march in the opening ceremony at the Olympics—and her mother would sit quietly, smiling pleasantly and nodding at the things they were saying, but detached, not altogether present. Her father would pour her wine, but if her mother reached for the bottle herself, her father would stop her and shake his head, saying, “You’ve had enough.”
Or when they were up at the vacation house in Tahoe. Her mother had a small art studio in their San Francisco house and liked to paint the view of the bay from the terrace from time to time, but, at Tahoe, she painted outside every day, capturing the lake and the surrounding mountains in all seasons and all times of the day.
When she was eleven, Brenna overheard them arguing while they were in Tahoe.
“No, absolutely not!” she heard her father shout. Brenna was on the patio eating a bowl of cereal, and his voice boomed from the open window of his study. The sun was just rising above the tops of the pine trees, and Brenna was planning to take the old wooden rowboat out on the lake. She was trying to convince her dad that she could be a rower by practicing every day. Maybe then, he’d buy her a proper rowing shell.
“I don’t understand why not, Jack. Gene and Charlotte are here. I wouldn’t be alone.”
Gene and Charlotte lived in the apartment above the garage. Gene was the handyman and caretaker of the property, and Charlotte cooked and cleaned the house.
“I’ve been asked to join the painting group in town,” her mother said. “I could even show my work in the gallery. I only want to spend a month in the summer here.”
“What about Brenna? You’re going to leave her alone for a month?”
“It would be in August when she’s away at camp.”
“I will take August off and come with you,” her father said.
“I would think you’d want to be rid of me.”
“Oh, no. Not this again, Meg!”
Her mother said something, but too quietly for Brenna to hear the words. She heard a loud thump, like a fist on a table.
“For Christ sakes, Meg! My ‘other interests’—as you call them—are nothing for you to be concerned about, not to mention only in your imagination. You will wait to come up here when I can accompany you. And that is my final word!”
Brenna retreated to the boathouse, leaving her cereal bowl on the patio table. Charlotte would find it later. Brenna wondered what other interests her mother was referring to. She loved her father but didn’t understand why he treated her mother the way he did. She promised herself she’d never let a man treat her like that, never let anyone control her, dominate her, or yell at her.
***
When Brenna was thirteen, she succeeded in talking her father into buying her a single rowing shell and teaching her to row. Her boat was impossibly skinny, made of wood, polished until it gleamed. Brenna loved her boat. She kept it at the Lake Merritt Rowing Club in Oakland, and she and her dad would spend at least one weekend day on the water. He was patient with her as he rowed alongside in his own single shell and instructed her on her stroke.
“You’re a natural!” he often said, beaming.
“You have excellent boat feel,” he said one day.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you work with the boat and the way it moves through the water, rather than against it. Not everyone has that. In fact, most don’t.”
She also noticed that a lot of girls rowed, in singles as well as in bigger boats with other girls. Her dad had told her girls don’t row. Either he’d lied or girls had only recently started rowing.
***
When Brenna started high school, her father relented and allowed her mother to spend time in Tahoe a few weeks out of the year to focus on her painting. Brenna had heard him brag to others about her mother’s artistic talents, much as he bragged about Brenna’s rowing and writing abilities. Brenna wondered again about her parent's marriage. About how her father spoke to her mother so differently than he spoke to Brenna.
But, as she grew older, she didn’t give it too much thought. She felt sorry for her mother but knew such a relationship was never going to happen to Brenna. Plus, she was busy and becoming more independent, allowed to take the BART to Lake Merritt with rowing friends and walk to school with the neighbors. Her parents had argued about that—her mother insisting it was safe, while Jack railed about the many dangers Brenna would encounter on the train and walking through Oakland. Brenna was more distant from her mother than ever. If she had homework problems or questions about politics or current affairs, she went to her father. If her mother entered the room and tried to join the conversation, she and her father would wave her off or change the subject to a lighter topic, like what was for dinner or the weather or how nice Meg’s flowers looked out on the terrace.
Brenna’s, Jack’s, or the world’s problems were nothing for Meg to be concerned about.
