She began pouncing the cheesecloth bag over the cartoon, climbing up and down the ladder to reach the various parts of the design. She knew it was difficult for some of the people to really see the cartoon and what she was doing, but they stood riveted, patiently waiting for the end result.
Jesse’s aunt Jewel and little Nellie arrived when Anna was about halfway through. They stood in the back, but Anna insisted they come up front next to Jesse so Nellie would be able to see, and no one made a fuss. This was Anna’s space and she could have whoever she wanted in her audience. She let Nellie do some of the low pouncing herself, hoping Mrs. Williams wouldn’t be annoyed that her daughter’s fingers and pinafore got a bit of charcoal dust on them. Nellie seemed to enjoy performing in front of the crowd, even taking a cute curtsy once she was finished. Maybe there would end up being two artists in the Williams family.
When Anna finally completed the pouncing, Jesse and Peter helped her remove the cartoon and everyone cheered when they saw the outline of the drawing on the canvas. The photographer had Anna and the boys pose with the canvas for the newspaper. Then the crowd slowly trickled out of the warehouse, Jesse and Peter along with them.
“It’s Valentine’s Day, Miz Dale,” Peter informed her with a wink as they sauntered out, and she guessed both boys had special girls they wanted to see. She watched them leave with a smile, and although she was left alone in the warehouse, sweeping up charcoal dust like Cinderella, she felt as content as she’d ever felt in her life.
Anna arrived at the warehouse Saturday morning to find that someone had painted the words NIGGER LOVER in huge red letters on the side of the building by the door. A wave of nausea moved through her and she pressed her hands to her mouth. Who had done it? Had it been someone from the crowd who’d watched her pounce the cartoon on Wednesday? Someone who stood there with ugliness in his heart while she’d giddily, naïvely, happily gone about her tasks with Peter and Jesse helping her? She hated the thought of Jesse arriving that morning and seeing those words in a place he’d come to feel comfortable and important. She wished she could snap her fingers and make them go away.
As she stood there trying to figure out what to do, she spotted Peter riding his bike up the dirt road toward the warehouse. Then suddenly, a good distance before he reached her, he turned around and headed back the way he’d come.
“Peter!” she called after him, her hands a megaphone around her mouth. She suddenly felt spooked being there alone and wanted someone—anyone but Jesse—with her. She couldn’t imagine why Peter was riding away like that. Surely he’d seen the words, though. They were big enough to see from a distance. Maybe he felt the way she did: neither of them wanted to be there when Jesse arrived.
She thought of leaving, nervous about being there by herself, but she wouldn’t let whoever had done this frighten her away, especially not today—the day she would begin painting. Steeling herself, she opened the warehouse door, walked inside, and turned on all the lights to illuminate every inch of the space.
She was mixing paint a short time later when Jesse showed up. He walked into the warehouse as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Stopping right inside the door, he slumped heavily against the wall.
“I’m so sorry, Jesse,” Anna said.
“Maybe I shouldn’t come here,” he said. “Daddy says no good can come of it. Maybe he’s right.”
Anna hesitated. She wanted to say, No he’s not right! You deserve to be here every bit as much as Peter, but she was worried. A person who wrote such ugly words in the middle of the night might be capable of doing even uglier deeds. In that moment, she felt afraid, both for Jesse and herself. She thought back to Wednesday. What must the crowd have thought when Jesse and Peter and Anna displayed such a casual and easy camaraderie among them? Had it been misinterpreted? Did the “lover” on the wall of her warehouse imply something more than the fact that she treated Jesse the way she treated everyone else?
All those thoughts ran through her mind in the seconds after Jesse spoke. Finally, she found her voice.
“Nonsense!” she said. “Let’s not let some small-minded fool ruin what we’ve accomplished here.”
They heard the sound of a car on the dirt road and both of them froze, their eyes on the door. Anna’s heart climbed into her throat. In a moment, the door opened and Mr. Arndt and Peter stood in the doorway. A can of paint hung from the postmaster’s hand, while Peter held two brushes, and Anna let out her breath in relief. She’d thought Peter had been a coward, but he’d only gone to get help. She sent him a look of gratitude.
“You two all right?” Mr. Arndt asked her and Jesse. Anna nodded. Jesse seemed frozen, perhaps still stuck in the moment before as he and Anna imagined who might be driving up the road. Mr. Arndt looked at him. “You stay inside, son,” he said. “Me and Peter’ll fix this right up.” He started to head back out the door, but took a moment to look toward Anna again. “This ain’t the real Edenton, Miss Dale,” he said, cocking his head in the direction of the exterior wall with its hateful lettering. “I hope you know that.”
Anna thought of the lovely people she’d met in Edenton. Jesse and Peter. Miss Myrtle and her maid Freda. Pauline and Karl, and so very many others.
“I do know that,” she said.
Jesse helped her mix paint and clean brushes, while Peter and Mr. Arndt undid the damage outside, but there was no denying that they all worked in a wounded silence. Even when the painting outside was finished and Peter joined her and Jesse in the warehouse, they were quiet, and she believed their hearts were still heavy when the three of them finally headed home that night.
Chapter 39
MORGAN
July 11, 2018
Oliver talked me into going to the ER, the last place I wanted to be. Emergency rooms would forever remind me of the night of the accident. Plus, I thought he was overreacting, but once we were sitting in the crowded waiting room where I could finally pry my purplish foot out of my blue Birkenstock, I knew he’d been right. My ankle was positively bulbous by then. We were surrounded by people who looked worse off than I did, though, with their bloody bandages and faces contorted with pain, and I knew we were in for a long wait.
Oliver managed to get an ice pack from a nurse, and I sat with my legs across his lap as he held the pack to my bloated ankle. If I held my foot perfectly still, the pain was bearable, but the second I moved it a millimeter left or right, I had to bite my tongue to keep from whimpering.
“I hope it’s not broken,” I said.
“I think your pain would be even worse,” he said. He leaned over my ankles and sniffed.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked. I would have pulled my feet away from him if the pain wouldn’t have killed me.
“Don’t smell any booze.” He smiled at me. “I think your monitor was spared.”
I laughed. “You’re crazy,” I said. It was a lucky miracle that nothing had spilled on the monitor during the melee. I had an appointment with Rebecca in the morning and didn’t know how I’d explain myself if the monitor had gone off.
We were quiet for a moment and I realized I was shivering, though I didn’t feel the least bit cold. “I hate this place,” I said.
“I doubt there’s anyone who actually likes it,” he said. “I’ve spent too much time in emergency rooms myself.”
“When did you need the ER?” I’d get him talking about his own experience and skip right over mine.
“I’ve never needed one for myself, but Nathan was another matter,” he said. “Asthma attacks as a little kid, too many times to count. When he was two he ate a bunch of glass beads Stephanie was using to make a necklace. At four, he fell trying to climb over a fence. At six, he was scratched by a neighbor’s cat and the scratch got infected. When he was eight, he broke his arm playing soccer, and when he was ten he got whacked in the head by a softball.”
I watched his face as he spoke. The way his eyes lit up. The way the corners of his lips lifted in
to a half smile. “You sparkle when you talk about Nathan,” I said.
“I sparkle?” He laughed. His cheeks grew even pinker than usual.
“You do.” I smiled in spite of my painful ankle.
“Well, I guess that’s not surprising, since he means everything to me.” His voice was thick. I knew how much he wished he could have more time with his son. I touched his shoulder. “Such a good father,” I said quietly, and his smile turned a little sad. “Every two years,” I added.
He frowned at me. “Every two years?” he asked.
“Nathan’s been in the ER every two years.”
He stared at me. “I honestly hadn’t thought of that,” he said, then groaned. “And he’s only a few months into twelve. I guess I should expect the call any day now.”
“Hope not.” I smiled.
“So how about you?” he asked. “What’s your ER history?”
“Well,” I said slowly, remembering. “Just twice. When I was nine, I broke my arm. I fell on a neighbor’s brick steps. The neighbor took me home—I was screaming and crying. My mother was three sheets to the wind and she said, ‘Oh, she’s okay. She’ll be fine.’ And the neighbor said I should be taken to the ER and my mother said she could take me if she was so worried about me.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. So the neighbor took me and they set my arm, and then they sent protective services out to my house the next day, but my mother explained the situation away, and that was that.”
Oliver shook his head. “I don’t understand parents like that,” he said.
“Neither do I.” I looked across the waiting room without really seeing anything. “That’s one of the reasons I was so hooked on Trey,” I said. “His family. I loved them. They were normal.” I shook my head at how pathetic that must sound. “They were very kind and loving. I hated losing them.”
“Do they know their son lied about driving the night of the accident?” Oliver asked.
I loved hearing those words from his mouth. I loved that he’d believed me about Trey driving. He was the only person who did.
“His parents were really … compassionate to me after the accident,” I said. His father had said, “Anyone can make a mistake,” to me as I sat numbly in their living room two days after it happened, the stitches on my forehead burning. “It’s what you do about that mistake that matters.”
“Eventually, though, I started telling the truth,” I said. “That their son had been driving. And of course, like everybody else, they thought I was lying.” I’d lost them then. Lost their sympathy. Their love. I lost my place in their hearts, which I’d believed to be so secure. “I’ll never know if they actually believed Trey over me,” I said. “They acted as though they did. I guess they had to. He was their son, and I was not their daughter, much as I wanted to be. I’d become a liability.”
Oliver’s hands rested on my shins, and he squeezed my left leg through my jeans. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then, “So I guess that was your other time in the ER? The accident?”
I hesitated. “Yes,” I said.
“You told me you weren’t injured.”
“Just a scratch.” I lifted my bangs to show him the scar. “Five stitches. I got off easy,” I said. “But I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Gotcha,” he said.
We waited another ten minutes in silence before we were finally called back to the treatment area and set up in a curtained cubicle. Oliver stayed there while I was wheeled down the hall for X-rays. When I returned to the cubicle, I was transferred to the examining table while he sat in a chair next to me. A nurse gave me a pill for the pain. We had another long wait, and I became aware of something dire happening in the cubicle next to mine. Doctors and nurses rushed back and forth. Female yelps of pain pierced the air. The sounds took me back to the accident. They took me back to Emily Maxwell’s broken body. I pictured a twisted, ruined, bloody body on the other side of the curtain next to me, and I pressed my hands over my ears.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said. I was shaking convulsively.
Oliver found a basin and a blanket. He spread the blanket over me and put the basin on my lap.
“You are a little green,” he said.
“I can’t stop shaking,” I said, my hands on my thighs now.
“It’s probably from the medication they gave you.”
I shook my head. I knew what was freaking me out. I wished we were in a different cubicle, and I wished they could help that poor woman who was in agony on the other side of the curtain.
“I just need to know how the girl we hurt is doing,” I blurted out, surprising myself. I looked at Oliver.
His eyes were serious behind his glasses. “There must be a way to find out,” he said.
“I’m sort of afraid to.”
“But it sounds like you can’t really rest easy until you know. You said you can’t find her online?”
I shook my head. “She’s not on social media,” I said. “Or maybe she is and keeps it all private. Or maybe she’s in such bad shape, social media is the last thing on her mind. Or maybe she has no mind. Maybe she ended up with brain damage.” I squeezed my trembling hands together. “I know she was paralyzed, but who knows what else is wrong with her?” I said. “When I Google her name, I just get the newspaper report of the accident. That’s it.”
He pressed his lips together as I rambled on, sympathy in his face. Then he reached over and wrapped his hand around both of mine where they were locked together on my lap next to the basin. “I’m so sorry, Morgan,” he said.
I looked at him. “Do you know about the ninth step in AA?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Something about forgiveness?”
“Not exactly. It’s about making amends.” I shuddered. “I think about it a lot, but I don’t think I could do it. I don’t think I could ever face her.”
Oliver let go of my hands as the doctor interrupted us, pulling open the curtain to my cubicle. She greeted us with a smile. “Good news,” she said. “No break. Just a grade one sprain. The nurse will be in with a compression bandage and walking boot for you. Ice it. Keep it elevated. Should be good as new in a week or two. I’ll write a prescription for the pain.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want anything for the pain,” I said. I wasn’t going to trade alcohol for opioids. No, thank you.
She hesitated, her quizzical look giving way to understanding. “Are you in recovery?” she asked.
I nodded. I felt myself blush that Oliver was hearing this, not that it was news to him.
“See how you do with acetaminophen or ibuprofen,” she said. “I’ll give you the scrip, just in case, and you can talk to your regular doctor about it.” She held the slip of paper out to me, but I didn’t reach for it. Oliver finally took it and slid it into his jeans pocket.
We were quiet as we waited in the cubicle for someone to bring me the walking boot, but after a while, Oliver broke the silence.
“What’s her name?” he asked. “The girl you … your boyfriend … hurt? Where does she live?”
“Emily Maxwell,” I said. “Somewhere … I don’t know. The accident happened in Raleigh. Why?”
He shrugged. “Maybe I can track her down,” he said. “I have friends in high places.” He winked at me and a lightning bolt of panic pierced my chest.
“I don’t want to talk to her,” I said quickly. “I can’t. But I really wish I could just know how she’s doing.” I bit my lip. “You wouldn’t try to contact her or anything, would you?”
“Of course not,” he said. Then he smiled at me. Squeezed my hands again. “That, Morgan Christopher, would be your job.”
Chapter 40
ANNA
February 28–1940
Anna awakened with a weight on her chest that made it hard to breathe. She knew that weight. It had been with her off and on since her mother’s death in November, and she knew why it was so heavy and breath-stealing this morning: today was
February 28. Her mother would have turned forty-four today.
“Why, Mom?” she whispered into the air above her bed. She wished she could wind back time and do everything differently. It seemed she should be able to do that somehow, if she could only figure out the secret. If only she could go back to that argument with Aunt Alice, she could turn the horror of what happened on its head. She would still have her mother with her.
It took her nearly an hour to shift the weight off her chest long enough to get up, shower, and put on her pants and blouse. She had no appetite, and she was glad Miss Myrtle wasn’t home so she didn’t have to make idle chatter over a breakfast she didn’t want to eat. Freda, always easygoing, didn’t bat an eye when Anna said she wasn’t hungry, and for once, Anna was glad for the housekeeper’s muteness.
She drove to the warehouse and wasn’t surprised to find Jesse already inside at his easel, intently working on an overly ambitious painting of a woman staring out a window. Anna had bought him three more canvases as well as a couple of sketchbooks, and his paintings and sketches were now strewn all over the walls of the warehouse. He’d taken to arriving very early in the morning. Sometimes he would get there before sunup, and Anna was no longer surprised to find him already at the easel when she arrived. He wanted to get as much time in the warehouse as he could before he had to go home to the farm.
On the table next to the easel, she could see that he had the Old Masters library book open, probably to one of the Vermeers, since it was clear he was experimenting with evening light in the painting. It did something to her heart, seeing this young boy’s attempt to emulate his idol, and she smiled for the first time that morning. There was so much she wanted to teach him. So much she wanted him to have the chance to learn. She wished she could take him to New York. She’d told him about the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the new Whitney Museum, but telling him about them was no substitute for actually being there. For seeing the art up close. She’d told him, too, that he would be allowed into any museum he wanted to visit in New York City. “The color of your skin wouldn’t matter up there,” she’d said. She knew that was a lie, but at the moment she said it, she felt giddy with the thought of all he could do and see in the city. But then she snapped back to reality. They were trapped in a warehouse in Edenton, and she was filled with sadness again.
Big Lies in a Small Town Page 22