Sea Change

by Karen White

  I walked slowly through the meandering beds of brilliant blooms and bright foliage until I found the trellises with the passionflower vines against the charred bricks of the old chimney. I hadn’t seen them the first time because I hadn’t been looking for them. My gaze traveled to the ground, where the vines erupted from the soil, and imagined an almost two-year-old child cowering under their sparse shelter.

  “Hi, Miss Ava. You here to talk about your garden?”

  I turned around quickly, my heart thudding. “Jimmy! I didn’t see your truck.”

  He motioned with his chin. “I parked it on the other side of the house. You can’t see it from here.”

  He wasn’t wearing his gloves, and I remembered the pair I’d found in the cemetery. “I found your gloves, but I left them in the basket on my bike. I’ll bring them to you later, if you like.”

  He took off his UGA hat and swiped his forehead with his sleeve like I’d seen him do so many times before. But this time I was noticing his blond hair, darkened with sweat, and his slender, capable hands. Like mine. I wondered whether we’d inherited them from our mother.

  “Or I could come get them when I come to work in your garden.” He smiled, and I knew he was thinking of the flowers he was determined to plant there. He wasn’t one to easily take no for an answer, either, and I wondered who’d win this battle.

  I stepped closer to him. “Do you know who I am, Jimmy?”

  He tilted his head and nodded shyly.

  “How long have you known?”

  He scrunched up his face as he thought. “I think it was when you hurt your leg real bad, but you didn’t cry. You didn’t do that when you were little, either. Even when Daddy hurt you and your legs got broke, you didn’t cry. I figured there couldn’t be two people like that.” He smiled brightly. “And you look like me.”

  I wanted to laugh out loud. “Then you’re a lot smarter than I am.” I stepped closer and took his scarred hands in mine. They were cooler to the touch than I expected, as if the scars should somehow carry the heat of the fire three decades later. “Thank you,” I said, staring into a pair of eyes as brown as my own. “You saved my life.”

  He shrugged, but he was smiling, too. “Nah. I just took you out of the house. Your mama and daddy did the hard part.”

  “No, Jimmy. What they did was wrong.”

  He regarded me closely, and I remembered how I’d once thought that Jimmy was a lot smarter than people probably gave him credit for. I squirmed under his scrutiny, trying not to hear the truth of his words. “I was the one that ran. I was that scared I was going to jail, even though your daddy said that I wouldn’t. But I knew jail was filled with men just like my daddy, and that’s all I could think of.”

  He squinted into the sun. “See those dead flowers over there by the wood railing?” He jerked his head to an area separated from the woods. “I planted tuberose bulbs in the spring and only one of them grew. And that was because it was the only one in full sun. I don’t think I did the wrong thing by planting the rest in partial shade, because if I hadn’t done that, then I wouldn’t have found the perfect spot for them.”

  I frowned up at him, wondering whether I’d been wrong about him, wondering whether he really understood what I was saying. “If my daddy had told the authorities what had happened, we could have been together. We could have grown up together.”

  He moved to a bed of leggy petunias and began pulling them out by their roots, adding them to a pile he’d already started. “I didn’t know who Gloria was at first when she came to the cemetery to see the graves a few weeks ago. I didn’t see her the night of the fire or at the funeral, so I didn’t know she was your mama. But I recognized her from that time she came to see Mama’s garden when I was in Joshua’s class. I liked her. I liked the way she listened to Mama as if Mama had something important to say. It was funny, because she was saying that she’d never planted a garden before and needed help with her wisteria. And Mama told her to be patient and plant what she loved. That she couldn’t make mistakes, because mistakes were just chances to learn. Like my tuberoses.” He paused. “I knew she was your mama when she brought the passionflower vine for me to plant.”

  Jimmy focused again on the petunias, and I followed him as I swallowed my frustration. “You’re not making any sense, Jimmy. What has any of this got to do with my parents stealing me and lying to me all these years? Don’t you care? Aren’t you mad?”

  He didn’t look up as he continued to yank up the flowers. “I’m mad that Mama and Skeeter aren’t here. Sure, your parents lied to you, but maybe because they didn’t want to hurt you with the truth, because it’s a pretty big, awful thing. And maybe you just weren’t ready to hear it until now. Even as a baby you didn’t like it when the truth wasn’t what you wanted. You’d break a toy and still expect it to work just because you wanted it to.” He sat back on his heels and looked up at me. “Seems to me that you and me ended up blooming anyway.”

  I dropped down on my knees, needing an outlet for my anger, and began yanking petunias out of the ground. “I’ve only known that you’re my brother for less than twenty-four hours, and we’re already arguing.”

  He gave me a lopsided grin. “Feels good, huh?”

  Despite all my conflicting emotions, I felt a laugh bubble to my lips. “Feels normal.”

  His expression became thoughtful. “Do you think your parents would get into trouble if everybody knows now?”

  I wanted to say that I didn’t care, but I knew that wasn’t true. “I don’t know.”

  “Then I don’t think we should say anything to anybody who doesn’t need to know. The bad guy is already dead. Can’t kill him twice.”

  I stopped yanking out flowers, remembering something he’d said before. Then you’ll know what you want to take root, and what you want pulled out. I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew he was right. He’d suffered much more than I had, yet he understood what was important to hold on to, and what was okay to weed out. My family had kept an unimaginable secret from me. But they’d also given me a wonderful life, and more love than could last a single lifetime.

  I stared at my brother for a long moment, then threw my arms around him in a tight hug, catching him off guard so that he staggered a bit on his knees before regaining his balance. “I think you might be the smartest person I ever met.”

  “Shh. Just don’t tell anybody, okay?”

  His body shook as he chuckled, his hands patting me on the back, the same hands that had carried me out of a burning house and into the arms of a family who would love and cherish me regardless of where I came from.

  I half expected to see my mother’s car in the driveway when I returned home. Despite what I’d said, neither Gloria nor Mimi had ever given up anything without a fight, and I figured they wouldn’t have already headed back to Antioch without communicating with me again. Since Mimi hadn’t already called, that meant that they were giving me time.

  I was trying to decide whether I should call first or show up unannounced at their condo when I spotted Adrienne’s datebook that I’d left on the kitchen counter the day before as my mother led me to see the nursery.

  I picked it up, holding it lightly as I recalled my conversation with Diane Wise, and the appointments Adrienne had made with a specialist in high-risk pregnancies. Adrienne and Dr. Walker had worked in the same practice together, so there were several reasons why they would have met. But only one of those reasons kept returning to me, spinning its web like a spider preparing to lay its eggs.

  I walked upstairs to the nursery, the datebook still in my hand. Mimi and Gloria had closed the door when they’d left the house, and I hadn’t had the heart to look inside it this morning before I’d seen Jimmy. But my talk with him had changed things, had made me see things differently, like a blind person who’d been suddenly given the gift of sight. I suppose that, in a way, I had.

  I stood in the doorway, smelling the fresh paint and seeing everything that I had seen the day before:
the rocking horse, the crib, the three framed portraits. And the miniature murals on the walls of flowers and birds and butterflies. It was as if they’d known what my vision of the perfect nursery was, down to the mobile over the crib, and made it come to life with needle, thread, and paint. And love.

  The stirrings of guilt that I’d been wrestling with since my conversation with Jimmy worked to overtake all my other whirling emotions. Mimi and Gloria had driven across the state for me because they knew I’d needed them. Not just to tell me the truth of what happened too many years ago to count, but to be there to let me know that I wasn’t alone. And then they’d given my baby and me this beautiful nursery. Seems to me that you and me ended up blooming anyway. Maybe if I started now, I’d have enough time before I died to thank them.

  My phone buzzed in my back pocket, and I saw it was Tish. I quickly took a deep breath to calm my voice before answering, belatedly remembering the three phone calls she’d made earlier that I hadn’t returned.

  “Hi, Tish.”

  “Where are you?” she asked, sounding breathless.

  “At home. In the new nursery.” My voice wobbled, and I hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  “I’ve been trying to get hold of you.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I saw you called, but you didn’t leave any messages, so I figured it wasn’t important. I’ve been…busy,” I said.

  “I bet you didn’t find Georgina’s grave in the cemetery, did you? I could have saved you the trouble, because I didn’t find her name on the grave list, either.”

  She paused and I sat down in the glider, wondering how long it would be before I could get Tish off the phone and be alone with my thoughts. “So that means she moved up north with Nathaniel and it’s just not mentioned. Or she’s still here.”

  “Bingo.”

  When I didn’t ask her to elaborate, she said, “So which do you want first—the good news or the bad news?”

  I closed my eyes, having no energy to play our little game. “Tish, I’m not feeling very well, so if there’s something you need to tell me, could you please just spit it out?”

  I heard voices in the background before her voice came back on the phone, and I knew she hadn’t heard me, so at least that was one less person I needed to apologize to. “I’m sorry—I’m at the site of the old Smith Plantation, where you found the grave of the British doctor. Right after you left my shop, I got a call from Dr. Hirsch. They’ve found something pretty big.”

  I was listening with only half an ear, still feeling consumed with my mother’s story of how I came to be her daughter, and my conversation with Jimmy. And feeling desperately alone because I’d sent the one person I wanted to talk to right now to Savannah.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me what they found?” Tish’s voice sounded impatient.

  “Found where?” I asked, realizing too late that she’d probably already told me.

  “Near the doctor’s grave. They found more remains. And these appear to be those of a female.”

  My field of vision seemed to shrink to a tunnel as memories swirled around in flashes of colors and faces. I saw Georgina and Pamela on the road to Cannon’s Point, and heard the word “Godspeed.” And then I saw Pamela hand a pistol to Georgina.

  “Ava? Are you still there?”

  “Yes. Sorry. I was just thinking who it might be. I know it’s early, but can they tell how she died?”

  “You mean like a bullet hole or something like we found in the doctor? No such luck. And there’s no makeshift grave marker either. Like she was just dumped into a hole and covered. But it doesn’t look like she was shot. From the skull fragments, it appears it could have been some kind of puncture wound. They’re not sure what could have made it, but they’re pretty sure it wasn’t a knife.”

  “You’re right. That’s pretty big news.” The images of Georgina and Pamela returned, and I struggled to follow them to the next scene. But all was blank. “Look, can I call you back? I…need to go.” Without waiting for her to answer, I hung up the phone, feeling light-headed. I tried to remember how much water I’d had so far, and wondered whether I might be dehydrated.

  I stood to get water from the kitchen, and the datebook I’d placed in my lap fell on the floor, the back cover splayed open. Inside the leather flap used to hold the yearly inserts in place was a familiar black-and-gray film, with small letters and numbers in white in the top right corner.

  I began seeing spots in front of my eyes before I realized I was holding my breath. Slowly, I let air into my lungs, then leaned over and picked up the book from the floor, then very carefully slid the sonogram out of its spot. I studied the image of the sixteen-week fetus with the eye of a clinician, seeing its rounded head and soft nose, the curled hands and retracted legs. At sixteen weeks, the baby would have been covered in a protective down, and fat would have just been starting to form underneath the skin. The baby would have been able to hear external voices, and even experience dreams. Squinting at the small lettering on the sonogram, I read the date: August 15, 1997. Two weeks before Adrienne died.

  I sat down again in the glider and rocked back and forth for a long time, experiencing the sense of being in an open elevator as it fell through the shaft, the floors flying by with impressions of color and faces, all of them turned to me with expressions of expectation.

  I stopped rocking, hearing my mother asking me whether I was strong enough to hear the truth, and her telling me that I was. I returned the sonogram to the back of the datebook, then pulled out my cell phone. After hesitating for only a moment, I hit Matthew’s speed dial.

  I didn’t know any of the answers I needed. But I knew that whatever they were, he and I were meant to discover them together.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Ava

  ST. SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA

  AUGUST 2011

  It was nearly sunset when I heard Matthew’s car outside. I sat on the sofa in the dying light, preferring to stay in the shadow. The key turned in the lock and he stepped into the foyer.

  The first thing I noticed was that he still looked the same, and that my heart and body still ached just by being near him again. The second thing I noticed was that he carried a bouquet of red roses in their trademark iridescent pink paper from Eternal Carnation. Tish would have had to meet him right at the curb with the flowers already wrapped for him to have made it to our house from Savannah in such a short period of time. That and he must have gone seventy-five the whole way.

  He headed for the stairs, but I called him back. “Matthew.”

  Surprised, he turned to me, his smile fading when he noticed my expression, then disappearing completely when he saw the datebook and sonogram on the small table in front of me. Laying the flowers on the hall table, he walked toward me, his hands hanging loosely at his sides. I wanted to end this now, to go back to the moment when we’d first met and we’d seen only possibilities. But hiding from the truth didn’t make it go away.

  He read my face and didn’t approach me, as if he knew his touch would be my undoing. And that would be the unforgivable. He sat in the chair opposite the sofa, and a dark wave of hair fell over his forehead. I wanted to reach over and push it away, but knew that I could not.

  He brushed his finger over the datebook, then picked up the sonogram. I wished then that I’d turned on the lights so that I could read his eyes.

  “Where did you find them?”

  “Upstairs in the kitchen house, behind a loose rock in the fireplace. Adrienne must have hidden them there.”

  He looked down at the sonogram in his hand, the baby barely visible in the dim light, but its presence between us as large and looming as the ocean itself. “I didn’t know about the hiding place.”

  “I know,” I said quietly. “Or else you would have destroyed the datebook like the briefcase.”

  His eyes were guarded as they sought mine. “Do you think I killed Adrienne?”

  I was glad he hadn’t tried to lie to me again. “All th
e evidence is circumstantial, but it all seems to point to you, doesn’t it? Why was she in the car that night, and where was she going? I don’t think she was having an affair—there’s nothing to really indicate that—although John says that you thought she was, which of course gives you motive.

  “And then there’s the way you cleared out the potting shed of everything that had belonged to Adrienne, and you found her briefcase in the attic before I could, and then you threw it into the creek after you went digging for it in the old root cellar. And every time I asked you about these things, you always had a good and ready excuse that I accepted. Because I trusted you. Because I loved you.”

  I indicated the datebook and the sonogram. “The pregnancy must have been on the autopsy report, but I think you already knew about it.”

  When he looked at me, I was relieved to see Matthew’s eyes: eyes I’d seen warm and tender and sparking with laughter. He didn’t say anything.

  I continued. “It’s why she wanted to stop smoking, because she was pregnant. Which is why she asked you to try hypnosis that first time. But things didn’t go as planned. She saw something, didn’t she? Just like I did. She saw something that changed her.”

  He placed the sonogram carefully on the table and sat back in his chair, his palms spread on his knees. “What do you want me to say? That I killed her because she was pregnant? Is that what you really believe?”

  “I want you to tell me the truth. Because there’s only one thing right now that I know is true, and that is that I love you. I think I always have, even before I met you.”

  His eyes flickered in understanding, but he didn’t interrupt.

  “I know you didn’t hurt Adrienne. I believe you’re trying to protect her, and are willingly accepting all accusations, because that’s who you are. I believe you when you tell me you had nothing to do with her death, although everything I’ve discovered, all of your lies and misdirections, tell me that you did. That’s my leap of faith, Matthew. I love you and believe you. And because of that, I want you to take a leap of faith, too.”