“Never mind, I didn’t mean to get off on that. About the sermon? I wasn’t there, but I’m told Brother Stevens started out about Maisie, praying for her recovery, then went into this spiel about how Alec had been working on your car, getting it to running again, so he must be to blame for the accident. Only Brother Stevens hinted it wasn’t an accident that the car went off the road, and that it was only by the grace of God that you weren’t in it.”
It was all true, as far as it went. Just how far did it go?
“Mother? Are you still there?”
“Yes, yes, I’m here.”
“Oh, I thought you might have hung up. Anyway, Brother Stevens said that you were supposed to be a sacrifice, but it didn’t happen that way. He said that you’re under an evil spell cast by Alec, that the two of you have been practicing Satanic rites, killing animals, and all that weird mess that was in those horrible letters. Oh, Mother, and he said that if anything happened to you, it would be the Lord’s will, that you should never have become involved with a man so much younger, and with a past so steeped in iniquity. His words, not mine. He said that the wrath of God would smite you both for your sins, that whatever happened would be a judgment upon you.”
It was like hearing a death sentence. The words had been proclaimed in public and backed by the power of the church. Laurel’s scalp prickled and her breath came in short gasps, yet her reaction had nothing to do with a fear of God. It came, rather, from her sudden, clear understanding of the purpose behind this latest crisis.
Whoever was behind what was happening had chosen the way it would end. She and Alec had been found guilty in the eyes of the community.
Alec was right.
He was to be the scapegoat.
Alec was slated to be the real sacrifice in the garden they had built. Slowly but surely, the blame for what had happened in California was being attached to him here in Hillsboro. Surely and steadily, the responsibility for everything that had gone wrong at Ivywild was being shifted to his shoulders. Finally, when everything was done, he was to take the burden of guilt—and the punishment—for whatever might be going to happen to her.
“Mother?” Marcia’s voice came, anxious and concerned, in her ear. “Did you understand me?”
“Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I think I did.”
“I don’t believe all that stuff, and you’re not to think I do for even a minute. I’ve known for a long time that you didn’t kill Daddy on purpose, since I got old enough to see what you were like, think for myself. I certainly knew by the time I—well, by the time I was unfaithful to Jimmy. Oh, and then he went so crazy, cursing me, saying such mean, ugly things. He reminded me of Meemaw and how she used to be about you. I don’t deserve to be treated like that, and I thought…Oh, Mom, I don’t think you did, either!”
“Thank you, Marcia,” Laurel said, her voice strained as her throat nearly closed with the press of tears. “That means a lot to me.”
“Evan hasn’t thought it was right for a long time, but he was never as close to Meemaw.”
“I…appreciate you telling me.” Laurel was happy, yet sad at the same time. She should have reached out to her children long ago. It had taken Alec to show her how to stand up for herself, how to let go of the past and think of the future, think of other people.
“So,” Marcia went on, her voice uncertain, “what will you do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
“You can’t just stay there and let things happen to you. You’ve got to fight this thing, got to make a move, somehow, even if it’s the wrong one.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” But if she made the wrong move, who else would be hurt? Marcia? Evan? Alec? Where would it all end?
“We’ll help you if you’ll let us, Evan and I,” her daughter said, the words strained, as if she wasn’t sure her offer would be welcome. “You just have to tell us what to do.”
Laurel filled her lungs with air, grasping for a thought that had lain dormant, like a slug in winter, in the back of her mind for days. Exhaling again in slow control, she replied, “It might be best if I did nothing, after all. Everything was quiet and simple as long as I was here by myself. Maybe it will be that way again if I just—”
“Stay there at Ivywild without anyone? Oh, Mother, no!”
It sounded so strange, that plea coming from Marcia who had never wanted her to change anything. “You can’t fight gossip and innuendo, honey,” Laurel said, her voice steady, “and you can’t stop people from talking. I don’t know who is so against my relationship with Alec that they would go to such extremes to end it, but I only have two choices the way I see it—I can stay or I can go.”
“Go? You mean somewhere else? With Alec?”
“I take it you don’t like that idea?” Her words were more caustic than she had intended. The last few days had worn her nerves away to the raw ends.
“It’s not that, exactly.”
“What?”
“Brother Stevens hinted that Alec’s brother has AIDS, that the cancer he’s dying from is the kind that takes over in the last stages, when the immune system can’t fight any longer. You know it’s contagious, especially in—in intimate situations. I don’t mean to sound unkind or stupidly alarmist, but, really, Mother.”
“What are you suggesting?” Laurel said in terse accents.
“A fling is one thing, particularly when you didn’t know about his brother. But to even consider a long-term commitment is, well, almost suicidal!”
Laurel was quiet for a long moment while her mind raced. Then her thoughts settled, solidified. She knew exactly what she had to do. As well as how it must be done. And when. She also knew it required far more courage than she had ever needed to overcome her fear of leaving Ivywild.
“Mother?”
“Yes, love, I’m here,” she said softly. “I’ll always be…here.”
Laurel threw the food she had been cooking into the trash after she hung up the phone, then she opened the windows to air out the smell. The sound and scent of the rain swept inside on the warm, moist air. Clamminess coated her skin, and she shivered. Sick, she felt so sick and cold and desolate. At the same time, she was gripped by a dark, icy composure that left her mental processes detached and implacably certain. It made what she was about to do seem right and inevitable, as if there could have been no other way from the very beginning.
She turned from the window above the sink as Alec walked into the kitchen. She clenched her hands together in front of her until they felt numb.
His hair was towel-wet and pulled back from the strong, angular beauty of his face. Steady determination shone from the darkness of his eyes. He wore no shirt in the warmth of the rainy summer morning. The dragon that clung to his shoulder could be seen in its entirety, including its tail looped around his shoulder. Coiled and dangerous, it seemed to have a glint of laughter in its eyes.
She wanted to remember Alec like this. Always.
For a single instant, she allowed herself to feel the ache in her lower body that remained from the love they had shared, and to feel, as well, the deeper ache in her heart. Then she closed it off, wiping all feeling from her features like clearing marks from a chalkboard. Lifting her lashes, she looked him in the eyes.
Alec paused, his every sense tingling with the near-painful alertness of imminent danger. He searched Laurel’s pale face, her stiff stance. Treading warily, he moved closer and watched as she shifted away to put the table between them.
“Since it’s raining,” she said in tones that scraped like a knife on a glass cutting-board, “there’s nothing to be done here at Ivywild, and you probably need to spend some time with Gregory. I think it will be best if you go home for today. In fact, I think it would be even better if you don’t come back.”
“You’re firing me again.” The words were as tight and hard as the fist he held at his side.
“That’s about the size of it. If you’ll tell me how many hours you have t
his week, I’ll send a check to—”
“To hell with the check! If this is because of what happened in bed just now, it’s like using an Uzi to kill a mosquito.”
“What happened in bed only convinced me of something I should have known all along,” she said, relentlessly reasonable. “This isn’t going to work. Even if it wasn’t for the age thing, we’re just too different.”
Alec saw his own face reflected in the chrome side of the toaster on the countertop. It was the dull, copper-gray color of an old penny. “The age thing,” he said, “as you call it, doesn’t matter a damn bit. Nor do our differences. The truth is, I scare you.”
She opened her mouth as if to deny it, then changed her mind. “Cause enough to call it off, don’t you think? Love and fear don’t go together.”
“Who says? You scare me spitless, woman, and I still keep coming back, keep trying to reach you.”
“Proving what?” She lifted her chin so quickly her hair gleamed like frost on drapings of corn silk. “Bravery or stupidity? There’s nothing for you here. How much plainer can I say it? I’m not rich enough or fool enough to be useful to you beyond a few quick rolls in the hay. We had that. Now it’s over.”
Light-headed with the sudden ebb of blood from his head, Alec said, “Not for me.”
She turned her shoulder to him, gripping the back of a chair and holding so hard her fingertips turned white around the neat, shapely nails. “Maybe you think I’m ungrateful? I’m not. I know what you’ve done, or tried to do. You released me from my prison and gave me back my true self so I’m a whole person again. The thing is, I have other uses for this new woman than tagging along at your heels, begging for attention.”
“Right,” he replied between his teeth. “Only it’s me you don’t want tagging along like a kid. You don’t want me dragging at your skirt tail, pitching tantrums, so you’re weaning me in a single morning. Don’t you think that’s a little cruel?”
“It could be,” she said, turning back to him, her eyes as cold as a Nordic sea, “but you tend to bite when aroused, and I have my health to consider.”
“If you mean I’m a mad dog—”
“I mean your brother has AIDS, and any exchange of bodily fluids has suddenly lost its appeal.”
“God, Laurel!” His chest hurt, as if from a strike straight to the heart.
“I’m sorry. You seemed determined to know the worst.”
She didn’t look sorry, or particularly conscious of what she had just done to him. He couldn’t breathe, could hardly think for the agony in his mind. Speaking in carefully measured cadences against it, he said, “Sweet, gentle, caring, lovely lady, beautiful in spirit. That’s how I thought of you from the first. I was wrong, and that’s my mistake. Yours is in thinking I would ever touch you, knowing I might cause your death.”
“Is that supposed to convince me? I can’t say it does, but then I’ve already admitted to a failure of trust.”
“But not to one of common decency. I am not HIV positive. Gregory is, yes, though his illness is no plague to be retreated from in horror and disgust. It’s a human tragedy, just like any other disease that afflicts us poor mortals. It’s betrayed promise and vanished hope that will be repeated again and again until it’s stopped. Or until we are all ghosts dancing on borrowed time.”
“Poetic,” she said with tight disdain, “but I was speaking of you.”
“So was I. If you can turn away from me because of Gregory, then you are not the woman I thought I loved. So you can shut yourself away again, here in your old house with your old ideas, if that’s what you want. But in the end, you’ll be no better off than my brother. You will still be caught in a prison of your own making, enduring your own brand of living death.”
Now their pain was shared, he thought, for the look in her eyes was blank, unseeing. The knowledge gave him no satisfaction, no end to his own grief. He needed violence for that, or the comfort only she could give. Afraid he might seek either one—or both—he swung away and blundered out of the room, out of the house.
He was halfway back to Gran’s house, riding hard and fast, before he realized he wore only a pair of jeans. They were soaking wet, and the rain hitting his face streamed backward into his hair. But the moisture in his eyes had nothing to do with the weather. Nothing at all.
Laurel waited until she heard the roar of the bike fade away down the drive. Then she let free the high, keening cry that strained, knife-edged, in her throat. It sliced through the humid air of the high-ceilinged room, vibrating off the dangling light fixture over the kitchen table and making the crystal in the china closet sing. Before its echoes died away, her knees gave way and she fell back against the wall behind her and slid down to crouch on the floor. Huddling there, she dissolved in acid tears.
She would have been quiet and controlled about it if there had been anyone to see or hear, but there was no one. So she assaulted the old walls with her racking sobs, letting her anguish fill all the cool, empty rooms. She cried until her eyes were swollen and her nose red and her cheeks chapped from scrubbing away the dripping tears. Cried until her throat was raw and her head throbbed and her chest felt as if a tight band were holding her ribs in place.
She struggled to her feet and made her way to the bathroom where she blew her nose, then wet a washcloth and bathed her face. In the midst of telling herself she couldn’t cry any longer she saw her swollen face and was wrenched by the memory of the pain in Alec’s eyes. The endless, molten grief of loss swam before her vision and washed down her face again.
It was hours later, sometime in the night, when she stopped, finally. She slept, curled into a ball in the middle of the bed that smelled of love and Alec. In the morning, she awoke headachy and sore and not quite herself. She felt as if she had become the ghost Alec had called her—a pale and wan wraith drifting from room to room, from bed to table to bathroom and back again.
She lost track of time, hardly knew whether it was day or night, light outside or dark. Sometimes she thought about calling for news of Maisie or to talk to Marcia or Evan or even Zelda. The effort seemed too much. Everything was too much.
Yet inside she was crying aloud at the loss of everything that mattered. Sticks, gone. Her pottery, gone. Maisie, gone. Alec, Alec, Alec. Gone.
Just as painful was the amputation of promise, the death of hope. Who had said that or something similar? Alec, of course, about Gregory. It was also true of her, just as he had shouted at her. And like a prisoner who had almost escaped, being closed back into her confinement was twice as hard to bear. She felt as if she were smothering, shut away from air and light by all the sneers, lies and gossip, the narrow, borrowed opinions, all the malice concocted by little, little minds.
She forgot to get her mail. Never thought of mowing. Left the fountain and reflecting pools filled with blown leaves and debris from the rainstorm. Failed to clip the deadheads from the roses so they almost stopped blooming. Let dust and pollen lie in drifts on the veranda. Allowed the milk in the refrigerator to sour and the bread to turn moldy. Nothing mattered.
She was dying slowly, being buried alive under the memories. Alec sitting bareheaded and at peace on top of the old cistern. Alec placing Sticks carefully in his grave. Alec falling, boneless, from the pine tree. Alec sitting on his bike, showing her the fountain, teaching her she could not have killed by design, teaching her to love. Loving her.
But he wasn’t at Ivywild. He was gone, so he was safe.
It was some tiny consolation.
Still, she was alone. No one to see her. No one to hear her. No one to care. She felt as if she had become invisible. She must be a ghost, then, and ghosts could not love. But they could hurt. They could die from the pain of remembering love. And remembering how they had coldly, deliberately killed it.
21
Gregory was fading fast. Like a light plane running into trouble at a high altitude, his angle of descent had been a long, fairly even glide. Now, near the end, it suddenly accelerated t
o become a steep rush toward a crash landing.
It hurt Alec to watch him. Hearing him was even more painful, for Gregory was not going quietly. And who could blame him?
He refused to go into the hospital, preferring to wait for the end in the bed where he had slept during the long, special summers he remembered as a boy. Alec sent for Mita, who flew in at once. Calm, quiet and superefficient, his little sister relieved Grannie Callie of much of the heavy work by providing Gregory with clean sheets and special meals. Mita’s medical training also proved invaluable for keeping the invalid free of pain. Still, she spent only short periods of time in the sickroom. Gregory preferred that Alec take care of his personal needs and rested better when it was he who watched over him, heard him curse, dried his tears. So Alec sat and watched and listened and tried not to think of anything else, anyone else. He would not think of Laurel, but only of the brother who was leaving him.
Gregory’s sudden decline made a good excuse for why he was no longer going to Ivywild. Gran seemed to accept it, but Gregory did not. His questions were straight and to the point. Alec gave him no more information than necessary, but still his brother read what he wanted into that small amount, and his comments on the deceit and fickleness of women were bitter.
Alec found them hard to take. He would hear no slur against Laurel, allow no ugly epithets attached to her in his presence. Gregory’s partisanship sprang from concern, he knew, but Alec still got up and walked out when it started and didn’t come back for hours. Gregory learned to moderate his language or forfeit his brother’s company.
They held long discussions, the two of them, in the middle of the night when neither could sleep. They talked of the dysfunctional past they shared, and of the strange drug and liberation years of the sixties and seventies that had caught and held their mother in their snare like some hapless insect in amber. They came to grips with the result of those years—her aimless drifting from man to man in search of a perfect love that could not be found. They spoke, too, of Gregory’s drug use with HIV-infected needles, and of the nature of AIDS that caused it to be regarded with all the superstition of some medieval scourge.
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