Page 89 of We Fell Apart
They were told they deserved the best because of that hard work. They believed in democracy and equal rights, and it never occurred to them that the society they lived in might be unjust.
But Kincaid, the youngest, felt the pain of the competition between them. He was the baby of the family and had, for a short while, been unconditionally beloved by all. But as he grew, he lost his father’s favor. And then his mother’s.
He was an artist, not a scholar. Never much of an athlete. His brothers always bested him at the tasks his parents valued. None of them counted painting as work.
Kincaid was just a kid. He was searching for himself. He didn’t want to emulate his father. And to his father, that was a disappointment.
The eldest brother, Harris, became everything the family wanted him to be. The second brother, Dean,appearedto become everything the family wanted him to be. And Kincaid left the family. He disappeared into the art scenes of Bologna and Florence. He learned Italian. He indulged his whims, broke his mother’s heart, and wasted his education, if you heard Jonathan tell it. But Kincaid would probably say that he questioned what he’d been taught, andmade some huge mistakes, and searched for some deeper meaning in this beautiful chance at life we are all given.
In other words, Kincaid shed his
Sinclair skin.
He burned it, like a
donkey skin,
to escape from his past self.
He ripped it off with sharp claws, like a
Narnian dragon skin,
to reveal the person inside.
He shucked it, like the
human skin of a selkie,
so that he could go into the sea as the
seal he was always meant to be.
The Sinclair parents formally disowned him. And disinherited him. They mourned him almost as if he had died.
“Kincaid returned from Italy having reinvented himself as Kingsley Cello,” says Holland. “And your family is our family.”
“If Kingsley is a Sinclair, then Meer is a Sinclair.”
“Yes.”
“And so am I.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Those kids who died were my—what?”
“Cousins once removed,” says Holland. “Removed one generation.”
She takes a glucose monitor out of a bowl on the counter and checks her sugar as she explains the rest.
Kingsley Cello became an exciting new voice in the art scene. He never spoke to his parents again but remained in very occasionaltouch with his brothers and their wives. In fact, his older brother Harris funded Kingsley’s first show in New York. He was the anonymous sponsor.
Kingsley became famous, painting his imprisonment and escape from the metaphorical kingdom of the Sinclair family over and over, a thousand different ways. He fathered two children in his forties, at a time when his older brothers were on the verge of becoming grandfathers. And though he claimed to hate everything about his family of origin, Cello built his alternate kingdom on the same island where Dean spent his summers. Hidden Beach was so close to Beechwood Island that Kingsley could see Harris’s home from his tower studio.
Perhaps he loved his brothers, still. Or perhaps he knew that proximity to the family he’d escaped would fuel his greatest works of art.
The main contact between Kingsley Cello and Harris Sinclair was through Harris’s wife, Tipper. A peacemaker, Tipper bought paintings from Kingsley and now and then gave him updates on his brother. She also kept up with Dean after Harris renounced him. When Tipper died last year, contact between the three brothers ceased entirely, until the house on Beechwood Island caughtfire.
