“I have not chosen her in my heart, Elizabeth. And I promise you, I never will.”
35
White Hill, Michigan—April 1999
Having left the sea behind,
Having turned suddenly and left the shore
That I had loved beyond all words…
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950), “Mist in the Valley”
As Lydia stood with Jack in the shadows on the road watching for Nicholas, Frank’s truck backed wildly down the driveway and lurched off in the direction of White Hill. She took off running toward the house, yanked the front door open, and went inside, calling her son’s name. Then she was stopped in her tracks.
“Oh God, no!” Furniture was overturned and smashed, books strewn from their shelves, the large mirror over the fireplace mantel shattered.
She heard someone enter, and she turned toward the sound, hoping it was Nicholas, fearing it was Frank, and confused for a moment by the sight of Jack Kenilworth.
“What has he done? He’s lost his mind!” Her knees and her jaw shook, but her body seemed far away. Jack stood in front of her with his fingers wrapped around her wrist. He caught her attention and held it.
“Lydia, these are just things. Replaceable things.”
“Jack,” she whispered intensely, staring into his eyes. “My husband has lost his mind. Something has snapped. And where is my son?”
She pressed her fist against her mouth. Part of her mind flew through imagined spaces in search of Nicholas, while the other was frozen, half believing that if she just sat back down on the couch and willed it, she could undo the events of the last twenty-four hours.
“Nicholas!” she shouted toward the back of the house. “Nick!”
“Yes, Mom. I’m here.”
Lydia and Jack whipped toward the darkness beyond the living room where Nicholas’s form took shape in the hall. He stopped before he entered the shattered room where the argument had taken place. Lydia rushed to him, but something in his demeanor prevented her from taking him in her arms.
“Nicholas…what are you doing?” She held her hands out toward him, but he said nothing and didn’t move.
“What are we supposed to do now, Mom?” Tremulous as his voice was, the words were angry.
“I will figure that out, Nicholas. Don’t worry.”
“What if Dad comes back and smashes up the rest of the house?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Why not? Why did he do this?” He struggled to maintain control of his voice. “All because of that poem?”
“No, certainly not.” Lydia stepped up to him and gripped his hands in hers. “He’s not well. You can see that! This is not a normal reaction under any circumstance. He needs…” She glanced at Jack, whose face discouraged any words of sympathy for Frank. “He needs to really take a good look at himself. Come on, let’s go to the kitchen and sit down for a minute.”
“No! I don’t want to be here when he comes back!” Nicholas said with an edge of fury.
“It’s okay, Nicholas,” Lydia said, reaching her hand out toward him. “I just need some water. And I think I should call the police.”
“The police? That will just make him madder! Please don’t, Mom!”
“Okay, Nicholas, calm down. I’ll think about how to handle this.” She urged him toward the kitchen, where nothing seemed broken. Her car keys lay on the floor as if Frank had thrown them down, along with the coats and scarves from the wall hooks that must have been in the way of his own. Her hands shook as she ran the water, then passed a cup to Nicholas, who took it but did not drink. In the light of the kitchen, he looked excessively pale, the natural shadows around his eyes very dark.
“Nick, do you have any idea where your father went?” Jack asked.
Nicholas shook his head and pointed to the kitchen door. “I sneaked in this door and then hid in the bushes while he was leaving.”
“You mean you came in here while he was destroying everything? Nicholas, what for?” Lydia cried.
“I had to…for just a minute. I heard him smashing things. I was trying to think how to stop him, but…it didn’t seem possible.”
“No, of course it wasn’t possible! Oh, Nicholas!”
“Lydia, I think we should all get the hell out of here,” Jack said.
“Yes, of course. I’ll gather some things so we can stay away for a day or two. Could you take Nicholas to your house, and I will come as soon as I can?”
“What’s wrong with right now?” he said.
They looked at each other. How strange, part of her mind mused, that I am standing in the ruins of my marriage with this man I hardly know.
“I will hurry,” she said firmly. “Please go. I promise I will hurry.”
“All right. Let’s get you out of here,” Jack said to Nicholas, and they started quickly for the front door.
“Wait.” Nicholas started up the stairs. “My backpack.”
Jack took a few steps back toward Lydia. “If you aren’t at my house within an hour,” he said in a low voice, “I’m coming back. You got that?”
After watching the taillights of Jack’s truck glide down the road, Lydia faced the eerie silence of her house with the sensation that she was a ghost returning. She left lamps that were on still lit, and those that were off she did not touch. The pale-green lights of the stereo gleamed silently, and the furnace breathed on with a commonplace rattle and huff.
On the hall table, the violets and pussy willow sprigs she had clipped for Frank’s gathering opened into emptiness. As if the house occupants had left because of an invasion or a house fire, abandoned wineglasses and coffee cups containing cold sips were clustered here and there on the white linen of the dining room table, and dessert plates held bits of shortcake, whipped cream, and strawberries, some stacked together, some remaining at their places with forks and knives resting on them like clock hands. Habit tempted Lydia to straighten up the messes everywhere, but it felt like any attempt at order would be unseemly. After all, there was a death underway: the family she’d been part of would never live here again.
But somewhere, she told herself with a stubbornness born of despair, home could be made right again for her and her son. Somewhere. This house was only a building, and the years lived here were irretrievable for repair. A longing to correct the past should not define the future.
Her gaze caught on the bough of a lilac tree bobbing in the wind outside the kitchen window. She moved to the sink and pressed her hands on its cold edge. The lilacs by the window would bloom pink in a few weeks; the ones by the barn would be dark purple. Their leaves were emerging already, and she might not be there to smell their blossoms. The truth of this twisted like a cruel hand in her chest. But there were lilacs in other soil. And there were millions of kitchen windows.
Then suddenly they were lit, the lilac leaves by the barn flashing white with the beams of headlights. Her heart raced, and she caught her breath. It was Frank. And then beside his lights on the barn, another set. Quickly she leaned forward to see—a police car. Lydia shrank back into the shadows, her hands instantly damp and cold, her eyes darting around the room. Why would he bring a policeman? Could Frank be searching for them? Maybe he was frightened at what he’d done; maybe he’d realized his own madness. Her heart thudded in her chest.
Should she face them right here, right now? No. She could not let them see her. She looked around with an adrenaline-cleared mind. Had she left anything out to betray that she was here? They would enter right at this door. She had to hide immediately.
Lydia heard their voices outside, approaching. Somewhere far behind them, a train whistle sounded. Again, she ran her gaze around the room and along the path to the staircase, finding no accidental clues of her presence. Silently, she flew up the steps to the dark second-story hallway. From that spot, she could hear. From t
hat spot, she could also slip easily over to her study and lock herself in if she had to. But that was ridiculous. She had as much right to be in her home as Frank did.
The kitchen doorknob rattled, there was the nibbling sound of a key in the lock, and the door creaked open. Their voices floated inside, and then their footsteps.
“In here mostly.” Frank led the policeman across the kitchen floor.
“It was this door that was left open?” The voice was that of Tom Epson, a White Hill police detective Frank had sometimes traded stories with over coffee. She wondered if he had told Epson about the argument and their disappearance afterward, or if Frank had spotted Nicholas and was now seeking to track him down.
“Yes, this one was wide open.”
Lydia’s mind clung to the idea that Tom was somehow being enlisted to help straighten things out because Frank had realized his mistake. But the dialogue began to suggest something else.
“Holy shit,” Tom said, his voice slightly muffled to Lydia’s ears. The two men were standing in the living room Frank had torn to pieces. “Why would anyone do this?”
“I know. It’s unbelievable.” Frank’s voice was strung tight, but he was trying to sound somber. “I can only speculate.”
“It’s doesn’t… It’s not quite the look of someone searching for something.”
“Vandalism. Rage.”
“Over the book?”
“Jealousy.”
“Over a book.”
“You gotta imagine, Tom. It’s out of your usual realm. It’s…it’s not even academics. It’s collectors; it’s possessive townspeople; it’s three generations of Evans kin. God only knows what it is. There is a whole history behind that woman and her writings and her unexplained disappearance. Sixty years now. I don’t know who would do this, but I can give you a long list of people who might have. Here. Look.” Lydia heard Frank walk a few steps away, then back.
“This is it?”
“Open it up. Last page. See? Torn out. Gone. The literary discovery of a lifetime. Scheduled to be sent to the Library of Congress. Ripped. Out.”
Tom Epson was silent for several seconds. Lydia noticed that she was holding her breath and that her eyes stung from staring without blinking. The page with the poem on it was gone?
“Yeah, you told me about this… But who would know where to go, where to look…back there in your office?”
Frank guffawed. “Obviously they didn’t.”
“But they did. They came here to your house, and they did find it. It’s not like there’s been a newspaper article or anything. And Jesus, you have thousands of books. How would anyone pinpoint the one? It just doesn’t seem—”
“Well, I see where you’re coming from. I can’t answer everything.” Lydia could picture Frank’s broad disarming shrug as he shook his head. Then he sighed heavily. “I hate to say this. I really do hate to say this. But in my heart, I haven’t completely ruled out family.”
“You mentioned that. The Evanses are all over the place now, though there may be a few remaining in Michigan.”
“No, my family. My son. My wife. There was… There’s something abnormal, even mentally unsound, about Lydia’s reaction to this discovery.”
“Huh…really? How so?”
“She seems to feel threatened by it. Almost like Mary’s a rival. Taking her place in the form of this poem. Back from the dead.” He pretended a laugh. “If you will.”
“Mary?”
“Mary Stone Walker. The poet…”
“Oh, yes. Yes.”
“Lydia’s always wished she were a poet herself. When this poem was discovered, she even started to think it was her own. I don’t know, don’t understand it, and I don’t think she did either. She has seemed worried about her own state of mind, actually. Maybe I never should have involved her or my son with this work. Never should have shared my passion for it. Some people need simpler lives.”
“Hmm. Frank, uh…it sounds like I need to speak to Lydia. Seems from what you’re saying that she might be the most likely suspect.”
“Yes, it does seem so. I don’t know. I mean, I say that, and I can’t rule out the possibility, but at the same time it’s hard to imagine.”
“Well, I agree with you there. I can’t picture it. I mean…is she even tall enough to get a good whack at that mirror? Somebody had to. It looks like the main hit was near the top there.”
For two or three minutes, neither man spoke above a murmur. They seemed to be walking around the room assessing damage. So vivid was her recall of the wreckage that Lydia felt she was invisible and examining with them, every detail, every angle of each broken thing against the memory of the way it should have been. She was no longer poised to dart away with her back against the wall; she had sunk to the floor with her arms around her abdomen, her breath pinched and shallow, as she suppressed an urge to hysterically decry Frank’s charade. If Tom Epson had climbed the stairs and found her there, he would have believed Frank’s tale that she was insane.
“I tell you what, Frank. I’m going to go back to the station to get a camera. Should have brought one. Don’t move anything. In fact, why don’t you come with me and fill out the forms?”
“I’ll do that. You go on ahead, though. I have a couple of calls to make.”
“I don’t know if you’re aware, but it’s well after midnight. After two, actually.”
“Yes, but there are people, close colleagues, who will want to know. They might have ideas.”
“All right, but if you could come promptly. And do not touch anything, much as you might be tempted.”
“Sure, sure.”
As Frank walked Tom to the kitchen door, Lydia slowly pulled herself up and edged down to the landing. Frank returned to the dining room where she heard him open a bottle of wine, then heard the bottle clink on the edge of a glass as the wine glugged into it. She craned her neck and could see in the fractured mirror a reflection of his hands holding the glass as he sat down on a dining room chair. He sighed, took a long drink, then set the glass on the table.
Elbows propped on his knees, he lowered his head to his hands. A sound like weeping accompanied the clenching of his hands fiercely together. Lydia’s breath caught. She could almost see his whole form.
Frank picked the wineglass up again and turned it slowly. “My love.” His voice was broken.
He raised the glass as if in toast, and Lydia wished for him to lean forward so she could clearly see his face. Would his features contain that expression of affection that she knew well once but had not seen directed at her for months, maybe years? His hand and the wine were both shaking slightly.
“You’re the only one,” he said mournfully. “The one woman capable of understanding the point…of all of this…of everything. And, my dear, I will remain devoted. Sweet Mary, nothing will stop me… I will resurrect you.”
Lydia swallowed against a rise of bile.
Frank emptied his wineglass in one gulp and clumsily set it on the table.
Then he left. She heard him shuffle through the house, shut the door behind him, and start his truck.
She bolted to the bathroom and retched into the sink, heaving, crying without tears. No, it just couldn’t be. His warped mind really had cast her aside for a dead woman.
This time, the old denial had no power against the voice inside that said, So…that is that. It was a cold, detached voice as she teetered on the edge of shock. At last—at long last—she saw things as they were.
The stone bird called,
and all that seemed living
was dead.
They were Mary Stone Walker’s lines from the hundreds of lines a younger Lydia once memorized. What a fool she had been. For so very long. Frank had been devoted to a fictional figment, nothing more. He adored the ink of Mary that he animated with a handful of photographic images
. Together, those pieces formed the perfect skeleton to hang his heavy idealism on. He kept a dozen or so photos of Mary in her twenties by themselves in a box that he locked, but Lydia knew that he took them out regularly to study the lines of the dead woman’s arms, brow, jawline, shoulders. It was from these reimagined details and the snatches of Mary’s mind glinting in her poetry and journals that Frank had created a blueprint for the perfect woman, his imagination’s lover. Ah, the seduction of a woman without skin or a beating heart. And every inch of the way in his descent from reality, she herself had supported him.
Lydia reeled from the bathroom to the hall and fumbled down the stairs, her eyes moving mechanically around the shadowy walls where scenes from the protracted drama of the night seemed to replay: Frank’s hideous scolding of them all around the table as he burned her poem, Nicholas crying out to him that it wasn’t fair, Frank’s description of Lydia as an unstable woman who wished she were a poet, and his pathetic toast to the cherished woman he never knew, who today would be almost eighty-five. That man in those scenes—that man was her husband. What fantasies had she been surviving on all of these years?
She was not stupid, so how she had missed what was happening? And now…it was too late. It was far, far too late.
There was something else that Frank had said to Tom Epson—that the poem in the back of the book had been torn out. Had Frank done that himself to heighten excitement around the poem? Or to implicate her? Or maybe…was he considering ending the charade? If he didn’t do it, had Nicholas come back into the house in the middle of his father’s storm for that?
Her son had devised and executed a forgery. What else was he capable of? What else might he do? What had he been going through? Driven by a desire to solve family problems, he’d committed a crime. Through his entire life, Nicholas had shared the search for valuable hidden literature, believing that it mattered more than almost anything, and that they were all in it together. And now she saw the childlike view he held of his own potential for mending the situation, and how this mending would bring his family peace and keep them together. All of us happy again, he must have imagined as he scribed Lydia’s poem in Mary’s handwriting.
The Lake and the Lost Girl Page 30