by Bill Clegg
Jackie was thrilled. She’d already ventured onto the lawns at Edgeweather dozens of times by then, had peeked into the windows of the stable when it looked like no one was around. And now she was going inside. At first her mother said no one would be going to the stables the next day but Jackie pestered and begged and convinced her father to take her in the morning. Her mother refused to go and only agreed to let her father take her by making him swear not to leave her side the entire time.
Careful not to stumble, Jackie moves away from the gate and makes her way down the dirt road toward the stable door. Something shines off one of the windows and her heart lurches for a moment. What did she expect to find here? When she looks again she realizes it’s not a lamp or light, as she’d thought earlier, just the reflection of the moon on one of the panes. She feels foolish but relieved no one is there. It doesn’t look like anyone’s been in or around the building in a long time. Weeds and saplings have grown up along the thick walls; vines appear around the windows, stealthily disrupting the mortar, slate shingles and copper drains. Still, the stable door is for the most part clear. She steps up to it and puts her right hand on the cool wood.
This is where she and her father came that morning, where she saw Dana for the first time. Pushy and loud and surrounded by two farm hands, her father, and another man whom she would later know as Joe Lopez. Dana was wearing an aqua blue ankle-length wool coat with navy velvet cuffs and collar, and below the collar and down the front, there were six gold buttons in two rows of three. It was the most beautiful piece of clothing Jackie had ever seen, and against the dark slacks and shirts of the men, and the general brown of the barn, she seemed like a character who’d stepped out of a color movie, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. After the fathers introduced themselves, Dana approached Jackie and said, with deadpan seriousness, I’m Dana, but you can call me Dana. Clearly a joke she thought was funny, she repeated twice more before Jackie snapped, I heard you, your name is Dana. Jackie’s father dropped a soft but firm hand on her shoulder, a clear signal to be more friendly. Dana then proceeded to show off the horses. Come along, she bossed, gently, let me show you. She held out her hand and Jackie said as politely as she could No thanks, but walked toward her and looked ahead to the stalls to indicate she was game for the tour, just not holding hands.
Unfazed, Dana began pointing and describing this gelding and that mare; who was fast, who was crazy, and then she approached a stall door behind which stood an enormous black stallion, an Arabian Jackie would later know commanded stud fees more than her father made in a year. Dana pointed to the horse, which by now had turned around and provided an ample view of his reproductive anatomy, and said, This is Cindy. She’s one of the sweetest. Isn’t she beautiful? Jackie looked at the two stable hands, Joe Lopez, and at her father but everyone was smiling and staying silent. Dana seemed to be waiting to see if Jackie would go along with her shenanigans or challenge them. She chose the latter: What’s wrong with you? Look at his privates. Dana didn’t respond, did not look at the horse’s privates. Instead she smiled like someone who’d waited her whole life to hear a very particular and secret password, held out her hand again, and said, C’mon, I’ll show you the saddles. And this time, after only a brief moment of hesitation, Jackie took her hand.
* * *
Instead of opening the stable door, Jackie turns back to the road. Without knowing what she’d been looking for here, she’d found what she needed: something to remind her what started it all. Some clue, beyond proximity and boredom—which obviously played important roles—to what bonded her to Dana for so long. Before she reaches its wide oval driveway, she can see Edgeweather through the trees, lit like a department store. Every window alive with light. Jackie instinctively thinks of the electric bill and can hear Floyd teasing her for being so thrifty when she’d switch off lamps and radios and fans in the few rooms in their house. Remembering the lightness between them that came later, after Rick was born, triggers not only a fresh protectiveness and a rekindled anger toward Dana, but also an unwanted thud of doubt. Despite everything she believed she knew, and all that had happened in response to that belief—Floyd sleeping in the spare room for half a year, terminating her friendship with Dana—could she have possibly gotten it wrong? Dana’s taunting her about knowing nothing, about there being more to the story, had, with the onslaught of memories of simpler times at Edgeweather, loosened her tightly held conviction. As had the briefcase—filled with documents she could not make sense of, covered with names and places she didn’t recognize. It was a dreadful, dizzying feeling to be both furious and unsure. There was no remedy but to go toward its source, so for the second time in almost forty-nine years, she crosses the driveway to Edgeweather’s front door. But this time she will not go inside, not be drawn into and confused by the rooms where she and Dana were young together. With fists, she knocks.
Lupita
Lupita’s phone, which she’d put in the chest pocket of her denim shirt, buzzed a few hours ago. She knew it would. It had been early evening in New York when Cristina tried again to reach her. By the sound of her jumpy greeting—Hi! Oh! Oh my gosh—it was clear she hadn’t expected Lupita to pick up. And then she explained why she’d been trying to reach her. She wanted to let her know what Lupita had guessed already but had not been ready to hear—Ada was dead. She’d passed away in hospice the day before Cristina’s first phone call over a week ago. She’d called to let her know about the plans for the funeral, which was quick and small and had now already happened. She also wanted to tell her that Ada went peacefully, without a struggle, and that the Catholic priest from her church came and was able to perform last rites while she was conscious. She was woozy, Cristina said, but managed to ask the priest to bless her family, and had named Lupita, specifically—my sister, she’d insisted several times—along with her own husband, Mateo, who’d died years before. Near the end, she mumbled something about a house, about her father, too, Cristina thought, but she was making little sense and soon the morphine swept her into sleep and she was gone.
Before Lupita could respond, Cristina said she wanted to explain how she had her phone number: I work for Dana Goss. Lupita had not heard Dana’s name spoken out loud since she was eighteen years old. The strangest sensation, like erratic currents of electricity racing from the back of her head, across her chest, and down through her spine and legs. She did not want to hear more but she could not make her mouth and throat say the words.
Cristina spoke quickly, nervously, as if she might get hung up on at any moment.
I shouldn’t say, but a few years ago I saw your name on a file sticking out from a pile of papers on Dana’s desk and I couldn’t help but look. I was so thrilled to see your name! There was an old photo of you in your van. I’d only ever seen a few pictures from the family albums my mother kept from her childhood. Your parents… I… I wrote down the telephone number on the side of your van but never dared call it until now. I don’t… whenever I tried to talk about you with my mother she… I’m sorry… I realize this is all at once… and you don’t even know me…
Lupita finally broke through her immobilized state and interrupted Cristina to thank her for letting her know about Ada. She didn’t know what else to say so she asked her niece if she needed anything. A phone call?, she answered apologetically. In a few weeks, maybe? To get to know each other… Lupita promised she’d call, but doubted she would.
Lupita stands up from the place on her lawn where she’s been sitting and leaves her phone in the grass. She turns back to the charred fire pit and pictures her sister on her deathbed, mumbling about the past. She imagines her cloudy eyes, her dried skin and cracked lips; her voice, desperate under the drugs to be absolved. It was not their father she was trying to say something about. It was not him.
As a very young girl, Lupita developed a muscle that allowed her to shut her mind to what she could not bear. It was a skill she began using before she had words to describe what she needed to erase. In Flor
ida, before moving to Wells, it was her father’s hands gripping her mother’s arm, his gray-socked foot kicking a bag of groceries that had been left on the floor, flour exploding onto his bare leg, milk spraying across the hallway floor onto the wall; in Wells it was a thousand twists of her skin between his thumb and pointer finger, countless shoves and smacks, slammed doors and thrown objects. She could bear these by learning how to move on from them, as they happened, even, shove them under her awareness, stored but not remembered, away but not gone, influencing everything but never taking credit. Lupita expected Ada had done the same, though for different reasons. At her end, morphine and fear of what waited on the other side must have loosened what had lurked unsaid for most of her adult life. And out it came. Unintelligible to anyone but Lupita. Lupita tried to imagine the consequences of her sister’s last words making sense to anyone; how many lives upended, if any, now that so much time had passed and so many people had died. Whatever the answer, here was a reason to celebrate Ada’s death, she recognizes, with unexpected relief. Everyone was finally safe from the truth.
Beyond the gate, Lupita steps slowly across the cold sand toward the low breaking surf. She lets the water and foam run over her feet and ring her ankles, the sand dissolving under her feet with the reach and retreat of each wave. The electric current unleashed by Cristina’s words still streaks along her spine and up along her brow and crown. It is neither unpleasant nor pleasant, but as it moves through her it heightens her senses. She turns back to shore and can see the cedar shake roofing that needs replacing, has needed replacing for more than a decade. As it is, she barely keeps pace with the gas, electric, and property tax bills. Still, after thirty years and three refinanced mortgages, the place is hers. She owns it. She knows she could sell the house now for more than a million dollars, which amuses her. I’m a millionaire but I can’t afford to fix my roof, she has joked with friends. But Lupita will never sell. This is the one place in the world where she is not an employee, not a tenant, not a guest. There are no rules and no authority above her here. It is hers and she will do what she needs to do to keep it. She will do what she needs to do to stay safe.
There were very few times before coming to Kauai, and for years after, when Lupita felt safe. But by the time she was in high school she at least felt like she could spot danger. Mainly from her father whose violent eruptions increased as his marriage deteriorated and his children needed him less and less. She knows he must be dead by now, and when she thinks of him it is not with fear or fury anymore. She thinks how lonely his life must have been, how few skills he had to interact with the people he loved or to navigate a world where he was, if not invisible, translucent enough that people looked through him. It’s not that he was despised or feared as Lupita knew many Mexicans were in the other parts of the United States, it was that he was not considered. The Goss family relied on him but they did not care to know him. The men he hired to work at Edgeweather were grateful for the jobs; but as he got older he became bossier, pestering and second-guessing them more frequently. It hurt her to think of him as someone who was either ignored or tolerated. Lupita understood some of what he must have felt. She was invisible to most of the tourists who came here—in a hurry to get to their hotels or rented condos, running late and reluctant to make their flights when they left. She was a necessary interaction for most of the people she encountered each day, not a desired or chosen one. This, too, she had made peace with, long ago, but it is only lately that she can see between her life and her father’s a sameness. The tears that fall now are not only for Ada, they are also for the man she lived alongside more than any other person. She made more meals for him than her mother ever did, washed his clothes and hid the marks and scars and bruises he left on her. He did not know any better, nor did she.
She settles down at the edge of the foamy sea, leans back and nudges her elbows into the damp sand. With each wave, the tide creeps, crosses her feet, skims her shins and wrists, and pools around her. The night before with no sleep, the rising water, the confirmation of Ada’s death from her niece, who works for Dana Goss of all people—Lupita can feel the disrupting force of each of these things release a web of long-constricted tendons and muscles and initiate the slow uncoiling of an old, tough knot. Her teeth chatter, lightly, the only sound she can hear above the noise of water breaking. She pictures faint sparks falling from her mouth. The salt spray stings her eyes and she imagines it as holy water, washing her clean, wiping away old stains. But she knows that nothing can clean her, not even an ocean of holy water. And nothing can prevent her from remembering what she had been gifted until now to bury, if not forget. It has begun and she has lost the will to stop it.
* * *
You’re welcome, Dana had said once they had pulled out of the driveway and tore down Undermountain Road like bank robbers fleeing a scene. She spoke through a thick plume of cigarette smoke that whipped and vanished in the air outside the convertible. Lupita knew right away that Dana expected something in return for covering for her, so instead of replying, which she knew wouldn’t impact what would be asked, she just focused on the road, felt again the new thrill of driving the car at high speed.
The striped jersey Dana was wearing was one Lupita remembered sneaking into Dana’s bedroom at Edgeweather and trying on. It had been tight in the shoulders but hugged her chest in a way that made her appear more developed than she was. It achieved the same effect on Dana. Lupita knew every stitch and pleat of Dana’s wardrobe. She was certain she’d worn her clothes more often and with more care and appreciation than Dana ever had, even though there were many pieces that were uncomfortably snug or altogether too small.
Lupita had been trying on Dana’s clothes since she was twelve years old, after her father left her alone at home for the first time while he ran errands. That day and most every time after, when he drove off she’d race to his bedroom and look out the window to see his truck’s brake lights flare before he pulled out from the driveway onto the road. And then she flew—from the window, down the hall, to the kitchen where her father kept the Edgeweather keys on a hook next to the phone. From there she rushed down the steps, across the drive, to the service entrance of the big house. There were two keys for that door—one that looked like an antique, black and heavy and cold in her hands, and the other shiny, copper-colored, and new. Lupita’s hands shook every time she twisted them in their locks to free the door. The first time, she stayed downstairs. She’d been inside Edgeweather each Christmas to help with the tree, but never beyond the foyer, and her father never let anyone inside when the Gosses were in the city. This was the first time she’d seen the ballroom with its giant fireplaces and long bank of tall windows festooned with curtains that appeared to be made from gold. And above it all loomed the dizzying plaster ceiling organized in a pattern of circles and ovals that held small paintings like the kind she’d seen in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford on her seventh-grade school trip; these were surrounded by geometric shapes that framed dusty pale green and pink panels bound by gold borders. The details of the paintings were too small to see clearly, but they looked like party scenes, festively attired people gathered before backdrops of mountains and trees. From two of the circles hung magnificent crystal chandeliers, each nearly the size of the tractor her father mowed the lawn with. It did not seem possible that a room like this one could be as near as a short run from the garage where she lived. In it she felt small and foolish, and even more so when she imagined the beauty and displayed wealth the windows and mirrors had reflected for a century.
On later visits, she hardly ever returned to the ballroom, but instead lingered on the second floor where the family bedrooms were located. Mostly, she scoured Dana’s closet, systematically trying on every sock, nightgown, sweater, dress, coat, and undergarment she could find. Lupita’s own wardrobe consisted of simple wool dresses and plaid skirts her mother bought on sale at Korvette’s on Thirty-Fourth Street in the city and hand-me-down blouses and sweaters from Ada.
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But the first time, on that first visit, Lupita lay down on Dana’s bed wearing a white cotton training bra and sky blue silk panties, both of which she’d discovered in one of the dresser drawers. Under the white lace canopy, she stifled a nervous laugh. She’d never before experienced such a potent collision of the physical and emotional. Trespassing into rooms she’d lived next door to for years but had only imagined, the first-ever feeling of an undergarment on her flat chest, the smooth surface of silk against her skin—all of it was shot through with a tactile wonder.
Later, after she’d smoothed the bedspread, folded and put away the clothes she’d tried on, and returned home, she would struggle to remember each individual detail and moment, but everything merged into one intoxicating jumble. The closest things she could compare it to were her childhood recollections of her grandmother, which came to her as an amalgam of sensory impressions—the close, warm safety of being held in her lap, the roughness of her hands. But unlike the memory of her grandmother, which had always soothed her, especially after first moving to Florida, the one of stealing into Edgeweather was exciting, irresistible. And though Lupita never again encountered precisely the same charged euphoria of her first visit to Dana’s room, it was a place she returned to whenever she could, dozens of times between the ages of twelve and eighteen.