A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

  His voice was warm and friendly, completely at odds with his body language. “Welcome to Mississippi, Chloe. I know your stepmother is happy to see you again, although you didn’t give her a chance to tell you how much. I know she will do her best to make sure you’re comfortable during your visit. Now, I’m not sure how you do it where you come from, but when in Rome and all that.” He smiled, but it did nothing to reassure either Chloe or me. “Around here we put a lot of pride in good manners, and we respect our elders.” He leaned in a little closer and I saw Chloe’s eyes widen inside their thick, blackened rims. “If I ever hear or hear of you speaking disrespectfully to Vivien or any other adult, I will personally carry you onto the next flight back to Los Angeles. Do you understand?”

  She tightened her lips.

  “I asked you a question, Chloe, and I expect an answer.” He leaned forward a little, making Chloe take a step back, bumping into the side of the car so she had no place else to go.

  “Yes,” she mumbled.

  “It’s ‘yes, sir.’”

  “Are you freaking kidding me?”

  “Don’t make me grab your bag and stick you on a plane before you’ve had a chance to stay a single night in Mississippi.” He began walking toward the trunk. “I’ll get your bag right now if that’s what you want.”

  “Yes, sir,” she mumbled, a little louder.

  “Good. I’m glad we could come to this little understanding.” He unlocked her door and held it open for her. After we’d all sat down and closed our doors, Tripp glanced in his rearview mirror. “And, Chloe?”

  I held my breath, wondering what was coming next. I could see that Chloe was doing the same thing.

  “You’re a real pretty girl. I’m glad most of your makeup was rubbed off on that guy’s face. He needs it more than you do.” He turned the key in the ignition, shaking his head. “His face could scare a buzzard off roadkill. You can do much better. When you’re thirty and ready to start dating, that is.”

  I looked into the backseat. Chloe’s lips were clamped shut, as if she were conflicted about whether to argue with Tripp about his not being her father and keeping his opinions to himself, or to thank him for telling her she was pretty.

  To save her, I said, “It’s late and we’ve got a two-hour drive ahead of us. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head away from me. “I never sleep in cars.”

  I faced forward again and glanced over at Tripp, whose fingers were tapping an unheard beat on his steering wheel. I wanted to thank him for being there and for being a good friend, but I couldn’t forget what he’d said while we were arguing in the parking lot. Yet here you are.

  I looked back again at Chloe and found her head slumped against the window; she was sound asleep. I stared out into the Mississippi night as we headed west on Interstate 20, feeling the darkness swallow me as I wondered what I was supposed to do next.

  Chapter 9

  Carol Lynne Walker Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  OCTOBER 21, 1962

  Dear Diary,

  Bootsie’s having the house painted, and the smell of the paint is like to make me sick. It was a good year for cotton, so she’s throwing a big party at Christmastime to celebrate with all of our neighbors. My arms already hurt from all the silver polishing she’s going to make me do.

  She spent about a million hours looking at different paint color samples, and even got me and Mathilda to look at them with her and give our opinions. Not that any of it mattered. Bootsie went ahead and picked the same yellow the house has been since the Ice Age.

  When I complained, she told me that in life there’s a time for change and a time for holding close. That’s how she talks about family traditions. Holding close is like using the same china and silver that have been in the family for years, and showing off the watermark on the stairs from the 1927 flood no matter how ratty that wallpaper gets. It means working in the garden that was started two hundred years ago, growing the same old flowers and vegetables that have always grown there, and maybe adding to what’s there without making it too different. And holding close means never getting rid of the old creepy black bed in the master bedroom, no matter how many times I tell her that it gives me nightmares.

  When Bootsie and I moved back into the house when I was six, I was put in the smaller room that I still have and she moved into the room with the creepy bed. She said it was a family tradition. I was only little, but I asked if leaving your child behind was another family tradition. I got my mouth washed out with soap for sassing. It made me mad, because I really did want to know.

  Bootsie calls family traditions the glue that binds a family from one generation to the next. I guess she means using the monogrammed sterling silverware with the big “W”s on the handles. I’d rather just use plastic, and spare myself all that damned polishing.

  She tells me the big black bed she sleeps in will be mine as soon as I get married, and my children will be born in it just like I was. Like that will ever happen. As soon as I can, I’m going off to see the world. I don’t reckon I’m going to have much time for a husband and children, much less an old house and four-poster bed that looks like it belongs in a museum. I want to live in a modern house with metal furniture and bright colors. She calls traditions the glue that binds a family. I call them the things that hold us back from change.

  I like change. This might be the South, where things hardly seem to change at all, but I can see it. Like all those riots at Ole Miss up in Oxford because some black boy wanted to go to school there. It makes me feel like we’re all moving forward to something bigger and better. And then Bootsie goes and paints the house yellow again, making me feel almost paralyzed. I just don’t see the point in holding on to something that will one day be just dust.

  Even though it’s Sunday and supposedly a day of rest, she dragged me out to the garden to get it ready for the winter. I moved slowly and complained enough that she told me I was getting in the way and to just sit and watch and learn. I explained to her that there are things called grocery stores where you can buy all sorts of vegetables and other foods, and I didn’t see the point of her vegetable garden. She didn’t say anything, probably because she knows I’m right. When she went inside for a glass of sweet tea, I saw that as a chance to escape and ran to my cypress tree. It looks like it doesn’t belong right there in the yard, so far from the swamp and surrounded by loblolly pines. I think that’s why I like it so much—it reminds me of me.

  I sat down on the side of the tree that faces the swamp, where Bootsie couldn’t see me from the garden. I knew she’d send Mathilda to come look for me just as much as I knew that Mathilda wouldn’t come anywhere near my cypress. She said there was a haint near the tree, a lost and lonely soul looking for something. I wanted to see it, too, to chase it and find out what it wanted. But Mathilda warned me not to. She said that you can never catch the ghosts you chase. It made me sad, the way she said it, and I wondered if she wasn’t talking about haints anymore.

  I waited there until dusk, falling asleep just as the porch lights came on. I dreamed I saw a wispy figure standing by the tree and I starting running toward it, but no matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t catch it. I woke up sweating and panting as if I’d been running, and I was so scared that I ran all the way to the back porch and into the house. I turned around to look out the screen door, but all I could see was the shadows of the trees and a sliver of moon in the sky.

  Bootsie made me go to bed without supper for hiding when I was supposed to be in the garden, but I didn’t care, because I didn’t want to eat anyway. For the first time since I was a little girl, I plugged in my night-light and then lit a cigarette. I watched the glowing end get brighter with each puff, and imagined I could hear Mathilda warning me about chasing ghosts.

  Chapter 10

  Vivien Walker
Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  APRIL 2013

  I awoke lying across my bed in the same clothes I’d worn the night before, a bright shaft of sunlight from the uncovered window stabbing my face. My head throbbed, reminding me that I’d passed out from exhaustion before I’d thought to take a pill.

  Cursing under my breath for forgetting to close the blinds, I rolled over so that I faced the wall and closed my eyes again. I was just about to drift off when my eyes popped open as I recalled why I’d been so exhausted. Chloe. I pictured her waking up alone and frightened in a strange house, and wondering where I was.

  I catapulted from the bed, my foot tangling in the sheet and making me stumble, barely catching myself before I ran into the dressing table and tumbling a few of my beauty pageant trophies. Flinging open my door, I entered the upstairs hallway that ran in a square around the main staircase. There were three bedrooms off this hall, the fourth door leading onto a short flight of steps and another hallway with two more bedrooms and another set of stairs that led down to the kitchen.

  The door to the bedroom next to mine, the guest bedroom where I’d put Chloe the night before, stood ajar. I peered inside and saw only an unmade bed and an open duffel bag with the contents strewn over the floor and every surface, as if a small tornado had managed to contain itself within the four walls of the bedroom.

  I peered behind the door to make sure she wasn’t hiding from me. “Chloe?” I called out, just in case. I waited a moment before heading back into the hallway.

  I glanced into the empty third bedroom, then turned toward the second hallway, pausing on the threshold to the master bedroom. The tall black-ash four-poster bed dominated the large room, making the rest of the furniture appear to be shrinking back in awe. Nobody knew for sure which was older, the house or the bed, and I’d long ago stopped caring.

  Guests always asked why the master bedroom wasn’t in the main part of the house, and I’d had to explain dozens of times that it was thought this had been part of the original structure, the two front windows of the bedroom placed strategically in front of the oak alley that had long ago led up to the front door. It was assumed this vantage point was intended for the mistress and master of the house so they’d know when it was time to greet guests. Because it was my family, it was most likely a matter of knowing who they were avoiding.

  The bed had been neatly made; two house slippers—the pair my mother had been wearing the previous evening—sat primly by the side of the bed. An antique mantel clock chimed over the fireplace and I looked at it with surprise. Nine o’clock. I remembered Tommy saying that Cora usually got to the house by noon to help my mother get out of bed, and except for school days I’d never seen Chloe out of bed before one. Even accounting for jet lag and time-zone issues, she shouldn’t have been up and about.

  “Carol Lynne?” I called, walking quickly toward the bathroom that had been added when my mother had come home for the last time when I was sixteen, and Bootsie had relinquished the bedroom to her. It had seemed to me at the time that Bootsie had given up her room as a way of thanking my mother for coming back, and maybe even as a bribe to get her to stay. It had driven a wedge between my grandmother and me, an unbridgeable chasm that I’d never been able to cross.

  A silver-backed hairbrush and comb sat neatly on the laminate counter by the sink, surrounded by a mirrored tray where tubes of lipstick and mascara lay with precision between a powder compact and a bottle of foundation and a bottle of Youth Dew. The inside of the bottle was cloudy, the dark brown liquid viscous, and I wondered if the perfume had been Bootsie’s.

  Despite my growing worry as to where my mother and Chloe might be, I couldn’t stop myself from staring at the orderliness of my mother’s room. The Carol Lynne I had known had been disorganized and messy, a revolving hurricane of mindless, far-reaching plans that had her bouncing from one idea to the next, an indecisive bee unable to settle for long on a single flower. She was a constant revolution fueled by illegal substances and alcohol that allowed her to touch ground only sporadically. During her infrequent stays in this house while I’d been growing up, her room had more closely resembled Chloe’s than Bootsie’s meticulously ordered world.

  I backed out of the bedroom, closing the door with a slam before racing down the hallway toward the back stairs and the kitchen. A piece of folded paper with my name scribbled on the outside sat on the counter by the sink and I snatched it up. It was from Tommy, giving me his cell number and asking me to call him.

  I fumbled at my jeans pocket before I realized that I still hadn’t charged my cell phone. Damn. My head throbbed and I thought for a moment that I could run upstairs and plug in my phone and grab another pill. But then I thought of Chloe and Carol Lynne and assumed that if the two of them were together, it couldn’t be good.

  Sticking the note into my pocket, I headed out the back door and into the ruined garden, barely noticing the healthy collection of weeds that seemed to have sprouted since I’d seen it the day before.

  The ground was still soft from the heavy rain but not as flooded, the standing puddles shallow. Long running trenches had been carved around the cypress tree as the CSI team had searched for more evidence. Or more bones. Although the remains had been removed, Tripp had told me to expect more people today, just to make sure nothing remained. I paused, looking around me at the destruction, both man-made and not, and it unsettled me. Maybe it reminded me too much of my own life, with everything out of place and not appearing as it should. I half turned to go back inside but stopped when I heard voices.

  I stepped past the broken gate and moved toward the cotton shed. The chant of a thousand cicadas came to me in waves, the sound oscillating like a song on the radio in Bootsie’s old car, the red line of the tuner stuck between stations. My gaze moved toward the base of the felled tree and stopped. The blue tarp that had covered the hole had been pushed aside and a long stretch of the yellow caution tape appeared to have been ripped in half. With matching bare feet gripping the edge of a large root that bisected an edge of the hole, my mother and Chloe stood, holding hands. My stepdaughter’s black hair, usually unbrushed and flying around her head in uncontrolled curls, had been smoothed back into a ponytail held back by a bright red bandanna similar to the one I’d seen my mother wearing.

  I regarded them in silence for a few moments, trying to catch my breath, feeling betrayed somehow. As if I’d been circumvented and the two of them had found their way to each other before I could intervene.

  “Chloe!” I shouted, realizing my error as both of them began to sway on their precarious perch.

  I watched with relief as their momentum slowed and they were once again still. I pressed my fingers to my temple, wishing the pain would stop. “What are you doing? Do you have no clue what yellow crime-scene tape is all about?”

  “Some guy named Tommy made us breakfast and told me that they found a skeleton here,” Chloe said, her black-rimmed eyes—smeared from sleep—and black T-shirt giving her pale skin an ashen cast.

  “I know,” I said cautiously, cursing Tommy under my breath. He and my mother had been asleep when we’d arrived home the previous night, and I’d hoped to waylay him this morning to prepare him for Chloe.

  “I had no idea,” my mother said, shaking her head. “We should ask Bootsie if she knows about it.”

  I imagined I could feel my brain throbbing inside my skull. “Bootsie is de . . .” I stopped, recalling what Tommy had said: She’s in her own little world right now, a world that’s gonna get smaller and smaller, and I’m not going to recognize her anymore.

  “Bootsie isn’t here,” I said, harsher than I’d meant to. Trying to change the subject to something less volatile, I said, “You both need to come back to the other side of the tape. The sheriff is coming here this morning and I don’t want him to find you where you’re not supposed to be.”

  Like a docile child
, my mother left her perch on the root and moved to stand next to me. With a heavy sigh, Chloe followed at a much slower pace. When they were securely on my side of the tape, I reached down and grabbed both ends before tying them together in a knot, hoping the sheriff wouldn’t notice.

  Carol Lynne grabbed Chloe’s hand and began leading her toward the garden. “You need to meet Bootsie. I’m sure she’ll have some clothes with a little more color that would be appropriate for a young girl. Maybe we can go downtown after lunch to Hamlin’s to find some new makeup for you that’s more flattering.”

  I wanted to tell her that Hamlin’s probably didn’t sell anything that Chloe would want to wear, and remind her that I hadn’t been allowed to wear makeup until I was fourteen. Bootsie had taken me to the Merle Norman store at the mall for my birthday present. I still had the lip gloss, tucked into one of my bedroom drawers. I’d never used it, waiting until I could show it to my mother when she came back. And when she finally did, it was too late for me to want to include her in any of the rites of passage she’d so easily let pass without her involvement.

  Spots began to dance in front of my eyes, indicating that I was on the verge of a major migraine. “Bootsie’s gone,” I shouted, appalled as soon as the words left my mouth.

  They both stared at me with widened eyes.

  My mother drew back her shoulders. “Go to your room right now, Vivien Leigh. You will not speak to your mother in that tone of voice.”

  Chloe’s eyebrows rose even higher.

  I drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly, counting backward from twenty, not having too much faith that it would work. It had been a technique recommended by a shrink I’d been to only once, never returning after he’d explained he didn’t believe in pills.

  Very slowly and as calmly as I could, I said, “Carol Lynne, it is way too late for you to start pretending to be a mother. And I’m way too old to be sent to my room.”