It is Peter’s office. They need him to fly to Memphis in the morning for a story. Flight details. Hotel information. Local telephone numbers.
I look around for a pen and something to write on. All I can find is a takeout menu and a flyer for a local production of The Silver Cord. Nearby, thumbtacked to a wooden shelf above the phone, is my mother’s list of important phone numbers. It has been there since I was a child, by now covered in scribbles and corrections, names of local plumbers and electricians, the Park Ranger station; numbers crossed out in ballpoint pen, rewritten in pencil; a peace sign Anna once drew in green Magic Marker. In the middle of the list, written in faded blue ink, Conrad’s mother’s phone number in Memphis is still visible. The handwriting is Leo’s.
* * *
—
“Wasn’t your stepfather from Memphis?” Peter says, throwing a few things into a carry-on bag. “Socks.”
“He was.” I pull open a lower drawer and take out four pairs of socks.
“Have you ever been?”
“Once. For Conrad’s funeral.”
“Of course. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“How old was Conrad when he died?”
“Jack’s age,” I say. “Do you need undershirts?”
“Christ. How do you ever get over something like that?” Peter throws a few last things into the bag—a pack of gum, a comb, the book from his bedside table—and zips it.
I sit down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t.”
Down the path, I hear Finn and Maddy arguing. “No shouting on the pond,” my mother yells from the porch.
“I can’t believe you’re abandoning me with that crazy woman.” I chip at the red nail polish on my big toe. My heels look like they are made of rhino horn. “I need a pedicure.”
“Come with me. We can have a romantic getaway.”
“In Memphis?”
“Anywhere we can have sex without your mother hearing us.”
“Much as I love you, Memphis is the last place on earth I ever want to see again.”
Peter sits down beside me on the bed. “I’m serious. It’ll be cathartic. I’ll take you out for barbecue spaghetti.”
I stare out the cabin door, mind searching for a simple excuse. The pond is golden, glassy, tipping toward evening. Here and there a few small turtle heads have popped up like thumbs, basking in the last of the sun. I wonder whether Peter is right—whether there could ever be such a thing as catharsis.
“Come,” he says again. “You’ll be rescuing me from four depressing days on my own in the murder capital of America. We can have loud sex. You can get a pedicure.”
“I doubt Mum’s willing to watch the kids,” I say. But even as I sidestep, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, the pep talk she would always give me and Anna when we were afraid of anything—the dark, a bad grade in social studies, the idea that, one day, she would die and rot: “We are not a family of cowards, girls. We face our fears head on.”
“Let me ask her,” Peter says. “You know if I ask, she’ll say yes.”
“True.”
“And you can visit Conrad’s grave.”
30
Three Days Ago. July 29, Memphis.
The cemetery is prettier than I remember—an arboretum of mature flowering trees and shaded slopes giving way to wide lawns dotted with the gray teeth of the dead. Carved angels cling to the edges of tombstones. It takes me half an hour to find Conrad’s grave. I make my way through row after row of Chinese headstones and crumbling Confederate graves. Groups of tourists wander the cemetery listening to an audio tour of Dead People Greatest Hits. I watch them move like lemmings between the tombstones.
His marker is small, strewn with spongy fallen petals—pale pinks browning to rot. A flowering dogwood towers above, shading and littering his plot. Nearby is a large granite obelisk with a nice low ledge to sit on, the ground around it carpeted with thick green grass. Someone has recently left a bouquet of fresh flowers. I move the flowers to one side and sit down on the cool stone seat. Anna hated grassy graves. “They’re grassier because there are more worms in the soil. Think about it.” Instead, I think about the picnic lunches Anna and I had as children, when we would visit our grandparents. Sitting on the cool marble tombstone of the suicide grave, playing with our paper dolls. Mine were awkward, bulbous stick figures with rounded feet and simple faces. Anna’s were always magazine-perfect—girls with Susan Dey hair, boys with brown shags. An endless wardrobe of miniature clothes—hip-huggers and purple clogs, French sailor sweaters, bandana bikinis, Fair Isles, kilts with teensy safety pins. Our secret one-dimensional world—the world we pretended was ours as we sat on a sad man’s grave eating ham sandwiches on buttered white bread, looking out across the old cemetery to our grandparents’ house on the hill, the fields of cows and cud beyond.
I stand up, brush off the back of my skirt, walk over to Conrad’s grave. The grass here is weedy, sparse. This at least would have made Anna happy. The headstone is plain. No inscription. Only Conrad’s name and dates: 1964–1983. He was barely eighteen when he died. A stupid kid who dreamed of being Hulk Hogan, who loved his mother more than she loved him, who wanted his father’s approval. It would have made him so happy to see Leo desperate, falling to pieces, after he drowned—to know how much his father truly loved him. I try to picture Conrad doing pull-ups in his doorway, arguing with Anna, his ugly terry cloth bathrobe, reading a comic on his cabin steps. Anything. But all I can see is his face, white with fear, terrified, pleading, while Jonas sat beside me on the boat and stayed my hand. The sudden understanding in his eyes before the waves sucked him under. I think about the choices I’ve made—the ones I’ve spent my life hiding from. The choice Jonas and I made that blustery day. The choice I made to keep Conrad’s secret from Mum; if I had had the courage to tell my mother—to allow her life to fall apart instead of mine—Conrad would still be alive. It wasn’t only Conrad’s dreams that died. Stupid, stupid children. Conrad ruined everything. Jonas ruined everything. I ruined everything.
I lie down on Conrad’s grave, put my mouth to the ground, and though I know he will never hear me, talk to him. I tell him I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve this. You did something terrible, I say, but I did something worse. I tell him about the prices I’ve paid, hoping it will count for something, though I know the burden of carrying a secret is nothing compared to the burden of earth he carries. I tell him about Peter, about the kids. And, for the first time in almost thirty-five years, I cry for him.
* * *
—
Peter is at the hotel bar, shoulders slumped, drinking something amber on the rocks. I can tell from the doorway that he’s had a long day. I know he’s waiting for me, looking forward to unburdening himself. But all I want is to go up to the room and crawl under the covers, hide from him, from myself. I am backing out when he turns, sees me.
“Memphis is a truly crap city,” he says as I pull up a barstool next to him. “And I can’t smoke in the bar.”
“What are you drinking?” I pick up his glass and take a sip. “Rum? That’s a weird choice. You okay? You look tired.”
“I spent the day talking to the dead. It’s no wonder this city has fallen into economic ruin. These people are so numbed by poverty and violence. It’s tragic. I interviewed a schoolteacher who’s already had three of his students murdered this year. Kids. It’s like a war zone, but even more pointless. And you?”
“I spent the day talking to the dead, too.”
Peter drains his drink and signals the bartender. “You went to the cemetery?”
“I did.”
“How was that?”
“It was strange to see it after all these years.” I picture the grave—Conrad’s headstone already worn by time, my tears watering bare patches of dirt. “It took me a while to find it. In my memory, he
was buried on top of a hill. But the grave was down in a low hollow. All I really remember about the funeral is how muggy it was, and Anna complaining that her hair was getting frizzy and refusing to say the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Classic Anna.”
“Conrad’s mother never said a single word to any of us. Not even to Mum. And my stepsister Rosemary, clinging to her mother—this little white ghosty thing.”
“Do they still live here?”
“I have no idea. We never saw them after that. Leo left Mum a few months after Conrad died.”
“How old was Rosemary?”
“When Conrad died?”
Peter nods.
“Maybe fourteen?”
“Were you friends?”
“With Rosemary? God, no.”
“Why not?”
“She was . . . I don’t know. Odd. Spectrum-y—like she missed all the normal social cues, if that makes sense. I remember she liked to sing hymns.”
“You should look her up, see if she still exists.”
“She probably moved away ages ago.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“Anyway, it would be too awkward. Calling out of the blue after all these years of making zero effort.”
“Better late than never.” Peter gets up off his barstool. “I’m going outside for a smoke.”
“You really should quit.”
“One of these days,” he says. I watch him cross the lobby away from me, push through the revolving doors out onto the sooty sidewalk.
Two Days Ago, July 30. Memphis.
Rosemary lives in a quiet, nondescript neighborhood on the east side of the city. Block after block of almost identical ranch houses with tidy front yards. But I know her house the minute the taxi pulls up: on the front landing is the alligator umbrella stand from her mother’s porch, its mouth still agape after all these years. Rosemary comes to the door holding a small dog—a rescue, she tells me. Her hair is beige, cut short. She’s a professor of musicology. Her husband Edmund teaches quantum physics. They have no children.
“My area is Baroque,” she says as I follow her into the living room. “I have herbal tea or decaf. Caffeine makes me jittery.”
“Decaf’s great.”
“Make yourself comfortable. I made a carrot cake.” She heads into the kitchen, leaving me alone in the living room. The mantelpiece is covered with framed photographs: Rosemary looking drab in a cap and gown; Rosemary and her husband on their wedding day; Rosemary as a young girl riding on a trolley car with Leo. There isn’t a single photo of Conrad. I pick up a silver-framed photo of Rosemary with an elderly couple on a cruise ship. It takes me a moment to realize the man is Leo. He has his arm around a woman I recognize as Rosemary’s mother.
“They remarried,” Rosemary says, coming up behind me.
“I didn’t know.”
“A few years after my brother died.” She takes the photo from me and puts it back on the mantel. “They’ve both passed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s what happens.” She hands me a slice of carrot cake. “I use applesauce instead of sugar. And how is Anna?”
“Anna died, too. Almost twenty years ago. As a matter of fact, tomorrow is the anniversary of her death.”
“You two never really got along, as I recall,” Rosemary says.
I bristle. “She was my best friend. I feel her absence every single day.”
“Life can be lonely.”
We sit there together silent, each pretending to concentrate on eating.
“This is delicious,” I say after a while.
“The applesauce makes it moist. So, what brings you to Memphis?”
“My husband Peter. He had to come here for work. Mum’s at the pond, taking care of the kids. We have three.”
“And is this the first time you’ve been back?”
I nod. “I should have come sooner. I visited Conrad’s grave yesterday.”
“I’ve never been. Cemeteries depress me. Mother visited him once a week. She never quite recovered from it all. I think she blamed you.”
I feel as if she’s thrown a glass of ice water in my face.
“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling the inadequacy of those words. “I couldn’t save him.”
“Oh, well. If you’d jumped in he probably would have pulled you down with him in his panic. He was that type.” She takes a big bite of cake, chews slowly. “You saw him drown.”
“Yes.”
“That must be a hard thing to get out of your head.”
“I never have.”
Rosemary fingers a small cross that hangs around her neck. She seems to be considering something. “I’ve tried to picture it: Conrad falling off the boat into the cold open ocean. He was a terrible swimmer. What was it like, watching him go under? I wish I’d been there to see it myself.”
It is such a bizarre thing to say. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” She gives me a long hard look. “You remember that summer he came home to stay with me and Mother?”
I nod, feeling a dull dread.
“Well, that was my idea. I was quite lonely after Con left. Mother was in a mood half the time. I’d sit on the porch swing, try to stay quiet as a mouse. She said noise made her nervy. Anyway, Conrad, Mother, and I made a plan to drive across country to my uncle’s home in Santa Fe. I was so excited. The first night Conrad was home, he came to my room after Mother was asleep. I woke up with him on top of me. I could barely breathe. I tried to call out for help, but he kept his hand over my mouth. I sobbed into his palm.” She pauses, picks a bit of lint off her trousers. “The whole time he was raping me, he kept saying your name.”
The room bleeds into a white blur. I feel as though I am being sucked slow motion through the center of a star. I can vaguely hear the low hum of the air conditioner. Somewhere down the street children are shouting. I imagine them playing with a hose, dousing each other in cool water. A car drives past. Then another.
“He came to my room almost every night that summer. I was thirteen years old.” Her face is impassive, bland. She could be talking about cats. “My brother was a monster. Every night I prayed to God he would die. And finally God answered my prayers.” She pauses. “Part of me has always wondered if it wasn’t God who answered my prayers, but you.”
Rosemary reaches over to the coffeepot and pours herself another inch of decaf, carefully adds two sugar cubes with a little pronged tong. “Edmund wanted children, but I could never see the point. More coffee?”
I am too numb to respond.
The front doorbell rings. “Oh good,” Rosemary says, standing up. “That’ll be the dry cleaning.”
* * *
—
Outside Rosemary’s house, the sun is still shining, the air dripping with heat and the exhaustion of being. A boy bicycles past, ringing his tinny bell. Weeds grow up from a crack in the sidewalk. I come to a crosswalk. The smell of banana peel, a vacant brown lot strewn with plastic bags that float and settle like a broken laundry line of wife-beaters. I need to call Jonas.
31
Yesterday. July 31, the Back Woods.
“What time are people coming?”
“I said sevenish.” My mother has her head deep in the refrigerator, hunting for a lost tube of tomato paste.
I grab a white linen tablecloth from a drawer and throw it over the porch table. “Are we eight or ten?”
“Nine, including Jonas’s insufferable mother. I don’t know why we had to include her. I hate odd numbers.”
I take a stack of pasta bowls from the shelf, carry them carefully to the table, and set them around. “What about Dixon and Andrea?”
Mum hands me a pile of cloth napkins. “Dixon, yes. Andrea, no. Use these. And the brass candlesticks.”
“Why not?
”
“That dreadful son of hers is visiting from Boulder for the weekend. She asked if she could bring him, and I said no.”
“You truly are the absolute worst.”
She hands me a breadboard. “Why on earth would I include him? He didn’t know Anna.”
I bring wineglasses to the table, two by two. Forks and knives. Salt. Pepper. I concentrate on each small task as if it is a lifeline, anchoring me to the present, to my life right now. I cannot get Rosemary’s words out of my head, her mundane, unvarnished voice as she handed me absolution, a pardon for my crime.
“What else needs doing?” I say.
“You can open a few bottles of claret to let them breathe. And grate the cheese. There’s a hunk of Parmesan on the door of the refrigerator.” She places a white ironstone compote filled with limes and bright green pears in the center of the table.
“That looks nice,” I say.
“You must be exhausted.”
“I am.”
“I still don’t understand why on earth you wanted to go to Memphis with Peter.”
“He asked me. He never asks.” I wander into the pantry. “I’m glad I went. Do you have any idea where the corkscrew has gone? It’s not here.”
“Last time I looked it was right there on its hook. It may have fallen down. Grab me a head of garlic while you’re in there.”
“Got it. I saw Rosemary,” I say, bringing it to her. “I went to her house.”
“Rosemary,” she says. “I’d practically forgotten she existed.”
“It was Peter’s idea.”
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