A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

  Ever since that night when we’d had to sneak a drunk Sarah Beth up to her room, I’d been grilling her on which gin joints she went to and what she did when she was there. It was hard to believe that we were nearly the same age, yet she seemed to have lived much more than I had. She’d always had an adventurous streak in her, but since she’d been sent home from boarding school in North Carolina, there’d been almost a desperation to her wildness. Like something was chasing her and she was trying to make the most of things before she got caught.

  “I suppose she would,” he said, his expression suddenly serious. “I’ll take you, but only if you promise you’ll go with me, and not with Sarah Beth and Willie.”

  “Why?”

  He kissed the tip of my nose. “Because I only want the best places for my girl. Ones with a dance floor, so you don’t have to dance on the tables.”

  I smiled, blushing deeply because he’d called me his girl. “Well, I’m already dressed, so I’m thinking tonight?”

  He threw back his head and laughed, and I had to laugh, too. “What’s so funny?”

  “You. And your eagerness. You’re like a puppy. You just need to learn a little patience.”

  Crossing my arms over my chest, I pretended to scowl at him. “I believe you just called me a dog. And what would you know about patience, anyway?”

  He considered me for a moment, then walked quickly toward the door and flipped the sign to CLOSED. He held out his hand to me, and I took it without question. “Let me show you something.”

  He led me to the back of the shop, a place I’d never been, although I’d visited the jewelry store many times. It was a small, windowless room lined with shelves that seemed to tick. Looking closely, I saw carriage clocks, wall clocks, watches of all sizes and types covering most of the shelves as well as the long worktable that sat beneath two large overhead lamps. A chair was pushed back from the table, with John’s jacket hanging on the back. There was something so personal about seeing that, like a glimpse into the part of him he usually didn’t show me, and it made my chest feel tight and warm.

  “Over here,” he said, pulling me toward the worktable. On top of a rectangular piece of cream linen placed over a cleared section of wood was a beautiful ladies’ pendant watch. The case back was painted with daisies against a red enamel background, all within an engraved gold floral border, and when John opened the case, I saw that the design extended to the bezel. The white enamel dial had red and black markings with blued steel hands marking off the minutes.

  “It belonged to a woman who was lost on the Titanic. Her sister sent it to me because she wants to wear it, to honor her sister.” He was silent for a moment. “There’s something about these old timepieces. They remind us that time is short for those of us who live each day in the present, yet interminable for those who long for what is just over the horizon.”

  I touched his hand, wanting to take away the sadness that clouded his eyes. “It’s probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I said, almost whispering, as if not to disturb the ticking clocks and the advance of time.

  He flipped the watch over and opened up the back, revealing the inner workings. “To me, this is the beautiful part of it. All of those wheels and pins. They have to be so precise in their movement, so exact in their size and placement.”

  A long case clock leaning against the wall chimed the incorrect hour, the sound melancholy. “My mother had a bracelet watch that she used to let me play with when I was little. I don’t know what happened to it—it wasn’t with her jewelry that we sold to Mr. Peacock. Maybe Aunt Louise still has it.”

  He touched my cheek. “Ask her. You might want to wear it, to keep your mother close to you.”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to keep her close.”

  He gently placed the pendant watch back on the table. “I was angry with my father for a long time for sending me away. It took me many years to understand that he did it because he loved me and wanted to keep me safe and give me opportunities I wouldn’t have if I’d remained in Missouri. You told me what your mother did, but maybe her reason was because she loved you. That she wanted to spare you from being raised by a mother who could never get past her grief.”

  I pulled away, his words echoing in my head but finding no place to settle. Eager to change the subject, I said, “So what made you decide you wanted to repair timepieces instead of farm?”

  “My grandfather was a horologist in Germany, and my father has a small business up in Missouri. He taught me everything he knows, just as his father taught him. I hope I have a son someday so I can pass it on to him. There’s more to a family’s legacy than the color of our hair or a good head for numbers.”

  I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but I stopped, recalling the memory of me following my mother in her garden, learning the names of things and the feel of soil against my bare skin.

  The front bell rang, and we glanced at each other, remembering the CLOSED sign John had placed in the window. For a moment I panicked, thinking Mr. Peacock had returned early from dinner.

  “Mr. Richmond?”

  I didn’t recognize the voice, but John must have, because an odd look passed over his face. Glancing briefly at the doorway leading to the store, he turned to me. “I need you to leave now. Quickly. Don’t look at anything but the door. Do you understand? You just need to go.”

  “But . . .”

  He had his hand on my back and was already pushing me out of the back room. I headed directly to the door, but I couldn’t help taking a peek at the visitor. He was short, but built like a barrel, with massive arms and stocky, powerful legs. He kept his fedora on, but I could tell that his hair was very dark, almost black, and his skin was olive toned. His navy blue pin-striped suit fit him like Mr. Heathman’s instead of loose and baggy like Uncle Joe’s Sunday suit.

  Just as I reached the door, he stepped in front of it, blocking my way. Taking off his hat, he smiled at me. “I’m afraid we haven’t been introduced.”

  “I need to get home,” I stammered. “My aunt is expecting me.”

  As if I hadn’t said anything, he said, “My name is Angelo Berlini. I’m an associate of Mr. Richmond’s.”

  John’s voice held a hard edge to it that I hadn’t heard before. “Let her leave, Angelo. She’s got no business with you.”

  I didn’t understand what was going on, but I wanted it to be over. “I’m Miss Adelaide Bodine. It’s a pleasure meeting you, but I really must be leaving. . . .”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, too.” He stepped back from the door. “Maybe next time you won’t be in such a rush and we can get to know each other better.”

  John stepped around me, then jerked open the door, the sound of the tinkling bell as out of place as a weed in my garden.

  The door shut quickly behind me, the shade drawn before I could form the word “why.”

  I turned my back to the store, trying to recover my breath and still my thumping heart, when I noticed a familiar figure standing on the sidewalk directly across the street from the jewelry store.

  It was the man Leon, whom John had known and called by name that day at the Ellis plantation. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but he put his fingers to his forelock and nodded his head, a peculiar smile on his lips, like he knew something I didn’t.

  I turned down the sidewalk without acknowledging him, walking away as quickly as I could, shivering and remembering too late that I’d left Sarah Beth’s coat on the floor of Mr. Peacock’s shop.

  Chapter 19

  Vivien Walker Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  APRIL 2013

  I was up and dressed by nine o’clock, ready for the trip to see Mathilda. Cora was scheduled to work at the school’s media center, so it would just be me, Carol Lynne, and Chloe. Chloe had stubbornly insisted that she be left behind to look for more bon
es in the yard, which was exactly why I told her she needed to come with us.

  I wasn’t surprised to find their rooms empty, as the two of them had somehow gravitated into the habit of eating breakfast together and then walking outside so Chloe could report with excessive drama and adjectives the suspicious-looking places on the property where she and my mother thought other bodies might be buried. On one of their jaunts, they’d hauled the broken chair swing to the porch and re-placed Bootsie’s green garden chairs in their original spots. I’d sometimes find them sitting in the barren garden, making me feel like I was the only one not seeing any plants.

  I was halfway through the kitchen’s screen door when my cell phone rang. I dug it out of my purse and stared at it while it rang two more times. Slam. The door slipped through my fingers, the vibration echoing in the still morning air.

  “Hello?” I said, barely recognizing the confidence in my voice.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Hello, Mark. It’s good to hear from you.” It took all my control to keep my words from quavering.

  “I’m this close to calling the police and having you arrested. You’d better have a very good reason why my daughter is with you in Pig Swallow, Mississippi.”

  I frowned for a moment, wondering how he and Chloe had coordinated their geographical slurs. “Because she was lonely without you there. School was out and all of her friends were gone. She just showed up—I obeyed the court order and haven’t had any prior contact with her. I promise.”

  “Good. Then you can just put her on a plane to LA and I’ll have Imelda pick her up. Then I won’t have to call the police.”

  I took a deep breath, trying to quell the panic flushing through me. “Please, Mark. Let her stay. At least until the end of your honeymoon. She’s getting along fine here. I’ll put her in school, or homeschool her, if that’s what you’d prefer. I know a retired English teacher, and she could help me.” I bit my lip, mentally apologizing to Cora for such a presumption.

  “You still taking the pills?”

  She’s a drug addict. The words flung across the table in his lawyer’s office still stung with enough force to steal my breath. I closed my eyes, feeling for a moment as if I were standing on a boat with the water moving beneath me. I’d hated the ocean, hated the blue of it, if only because it wasn’t muddy brown, hated the wild waves that pushed you out to deeper water. Mark had forced me to learn how to sail, said it was good for me to get over my fear. But I’d despised it. I remembered that now, the memory of the rolling water making me feel reckless and desperate. Before I even realized what I was thinking, I said, “I’ll stop. Today. If you’ll just let her stay, I’ll stop.”

  “You know you can’t, Vivien. How many times have you tried before and you failed? Chloe doesn’t need a drug addict taking care of her.”

  Or a father who can’t be bothered to call her. I forced myself to keep calm. “Please, Mark. I promise this time is for real. And if I fail, I’ll send her back to LA.”

  “Why, Vivi? Why are you so desperate to keep her?”

  I remembered something Bootsie had said to me a long, long time ago: Everybody needs to know that they’re number one on somebody’s list. You and Tommy are my number one. When you’re lost or alone and all give out from the road behind you or in front of you, remember that.

  I saw Chloe as the clingy five-year-old afraid to be left alone, and the eight-year-old who was afraid of thunder but who loved the rain, and the eleven-year-old who cried with me each time we watched our favorite movie, My Dog Skip. I didn’t know how or when it had happened, but she was number one on my list. Not because there was nobody else who’d put her on the top or their list or even because every time I looked at her I saw the abandoned and bitter child I’d been, but because she’d somehow managed to make me feel as if she belonged there. I wasn’t sure where I numbered on her list, but that didn’t matter.

  “Because I care deeply for her,” I said, unable to translate my complicated feelings for Chloe into words he could understand.

  He snorted into the phone. “The only thing you care about is your pills.”

  I put my hand over my mouth, holding in my scream. Because deep down I feared that he was right.

  I heard a woman’s voice in the background, and then Mark’s muffled voice as he said something away from the phone. When he came back, he said, “My beautiful new wife has put me in a generous mood, so I’m willing to bend a little bit.” He paused, as if he hadn’t already decided what he was going to say. “Chloe can stay with you until I get back—which will be May fifteenth. We might extend our trip for a bit to see some of Europe and the Riviera, but we can play that by ear. I guess I’m going to have to deal with calling her school, but you’re in charge of getting everything else sorted out. Try not to bother me too much if you need my signature on anything. And I want to hear from your doctor, who will be giving you daily drug tests and reporting back to my office, where they will inform me if there’s any problems—and that needs to start right away. The first positive test, Chloe gets on a plane.”

  My hand was clenched so hard my fingernails bit into my palms. “Why do you care that I quit, Mark?”

  “I don’t. I just know you can’t do it.”

  The woman’s voice came from the background again and I just stood there and shook, waiting for him to speak. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yes,” I managed.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Do you want to speak with Chloe? I can go get her—it’ll only take a minute. . . .”

  I could tell from the air on the line that he was already gone.

  I poured a cup of black coffee from the pot—probably made before dawn by Tommy—and drank it, not caring that it was cold but needing caffeine to wake me up and mask my need to run back upstairs and hide under the covers.

  I found Chloe and Carol Lynne after some searching on top of the Indian mound that had been a part of the landscape long before the Walkers had claimed this parcel of land. A reminder of the native Indians who’d once inhabited this corner of the world, what was left of their civilizations remained in the small flat-topped hills that dotted the landscape like humps on a camel.

  Over the years, student groups from several universities had come out with more and more sophisticated equipment to see if there were any artifacts that should be salvaged from our mound. But it was clear that anything of value had long since been removed or eroded away. It was called the Walker Mound, but I’d never been able to find any pride in claiming something that was all about a way of life that had been erased from the earth and wasn’t coming back. It was a monument to loss, and we had enough of those in the world already, some of us still living and breathing.

  They were lying on the ground with their eyes closed, facing the sky, their heads touching like Siamese twins. I was fidgety and annoyed at having had to look for them and walked with heavy footsteps.

  “Shhh,” said Chloe without opening her eyes. “We’re trying to listen to what the earth is saying.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s saying that we should have left half an hour ago, and that you’d better be in the car in the next five minutes or we’re not going.”

  My mother didn’t open her eyes. “Did you hear that, JoEllen? Did you hear the rumble?”

  Chloe’s eyes were shut tightly. “No, because Vivien was talking.”

  A soft smile lifted Carol Lynne’s cheeks. “Vivien doesn’t like to do this, unless she thinks she might get a tan on her legs. I could never get her to lie still long enough, like she had ants in her pants. Always too busy thinking about what comes next.”

  Chloe snickered. “‘Ants in her pants’?”

  My mother started snickering, too, and soon they were both howling together, like the image of me with insects in my pants was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Despite my
self, my cheek trembled until it lifted in a quasi-smile. But then I remembered lying out here with my mother when I was no more than five, and Bootsie coming out to say that Carol Lynne had a phone call, and that some boy with a Yankee accent was waiting to speak with her. She’d left her sandals and I’d waited for a long time for her to come back. When Bootsie had come to get me for supper and told me that Carol Lynne had left again, I’d run with the sandals and thrown them as hard as I could into the swamp.

  I pressed my fingers to my temples, feeling the beginnings of another headache. “Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”

  Carol Lynne stopped laughing. “Where are we going?”

  “To see Mathilda.”

  Her skin furrowed between her brows. “Did she move?”

  Chloe stood, then offered her hand to Carol Lynne. “I haven’t met her yet. That’s why we’re going.”

  I watched as my mother took Chloe’s hand and rolled to a stand with the agility of a child. I felt an odd pang as she smiled at Chloe and I turned away, trying to remember the last time my mother had smiled at me.

  As I opened the passenger door of my car and moved the front seat for Chloe to crawl in the back, Carol Lynne looked over at the old Cadillac that was splattered with dried mud and covered in dust. “Is Bootsie coming with us?”

  My temples thrummed and I opened my mouth to tell her where Bootsie really was when Chloe cut me off.

  “We’ll meet her later.” She slid into the car, then pulled down the back of the front seat so Carol Lynne could get in.

  My mother stared at the seat, her brows knitted. “Where are we going?”

  “To see Mathilda. She moved, so we’re going to visit her.” The words slid from Chloe’s mouth with ease.

  I met Chloe’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Either she was a better liar than a twelve-year-old should be, or she was much more compassionate than anybody had ever given her credit for.

  I had to remind Carol Lynne to close the door and put on her seat belt, which she did without argument. I flipped on the radio where it was set on the sixties satellite radio station that I’d been listening to for most of my drive from LA. I hadn’t liked sixties music until I was in high school, when Tripp would drive me to school. He’d always had eclectic music tastes, liked most everything except for whatever was currently popular, and I had to endure listening to everything from forties big-band music, the blues, to sixties music and pretty much all types in between. I’d hate to admit to him now that after all that time when I’d scorned his music, the first three presets on my car radio were the sixties, forties, and blues stations.