by Karen White
She pulled Ceecee away from her to look in her face. “You are so young, Sessalee. With all of life’s joys and disappointments ahead of you. Be patient. Your life will unfold the way it’s supposed to, but not necessarily the way you plan or expect. Your father would tell you it’s God’s will, and he’d be right. But I’d also like to think that if you follow your heart, it will lead you to where you’re supposed to be.”
This was the first time Ceecee’s mother had ever mentioned matters of the heart, and it warmed her as much as it scared her. “Why are you telling me this, Mama?”
“Because you’re my daughter and I love you. I know you’re a woman now, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop worrying about you.” She pursed her lips, considering her next words. “Remember how I used to caution you about a friendship with Margaret?”
Ceecee nodded, feeling suddenly light-headed.
“It’s easy to be kind and giving and loyal when you have everything. But the mark of a true friend is when everything is taken away and you’re still kind, giving, and loyal.”
“Margaret’s going through a difficult time, Mama. We need to be forgiving.”
Her mother took a step back, her eyes darkening. “I’m afraid Boyd’s come with bad news. I could tell from the look on his face when he arrived, and I sent you in here because I thought it was about Margaret.”
“Is she all right?” Ceecee tried to keep her voice calm as she picked up the three glasses.
Her mother lifted the pitcher of tea. “Yes, thank goodness.” She stopped in the doorway. “But I’m afraid Boyd has bad news about his brother.”
Boyd rose from one of the porch chairs and opened the screened door for them. His eyes met Ceecee’s, the intensity of his gaze making her stumble. He caught her with a hand on each shoulder, the tea from the glasses splashing up onto his sleeve.
“You have news of Reggie?” she asked, hardly recognizing her own voice.
He nodded, his expression one of pure misery. “He’s gone, Ceecee. Reggie was killed during a training mission in Japan.”
Ceecee was aware of the sound of the glasses hitting the wooden porch floor and almost obliterating the sound of screaming that kept reverberating in her ears. She only realized they were her own screams when Boyd put his arms around her and held her close, telling her everything would be all right.
But even then, she knew that things could never be all right again.
twenty-six
Ivy
2010
The ceiling above my hospital bed is an azure blue now, the same color as the sky after a hurricane has come and gone. People always find it surprising that the sky could be so clear after so much turmoil, but they shouldn’t. As Gabriel once told me, hurricanes scrub the skies clean to give us something to distract us from the debris left in their wake.
Life’s like that, I’ve found. If you can find the one good and pure thing to focus on in your life, the rest won’t matter. I didn’t realize the truth of that until the day I fell through the floor at Carrowmore.
Ceecee is humming along to the music as she waters the various flowers and plants that have begun to accumulate in my hospital room. I recognize the song but can’t name it, and I find myself hoping that Larkin will walk in and tell us what it is. It’s such a peculiar habit, her reciting the titles of songs, but I know why she does it. When Mack and I fought, music was her pure blue sky. It’s what she focused on to take her mind away to something good.
I’m pressed against the ceiling again, and I keep seeing flashes of the yellow dress that I know is Mama’s, and Ellis’s car engine just keeps revving and revving, like he’s impatient to go.
“I asked Mack to bring down my old photo album and pictures to show Larkin,” Ceecee’s saying. She puts the watering can on the floor by the window and comes to sit in the chair by my bed. “I always promised you that we’d look at them together, so I’ll leave them downstairs so we can when you wake up.”
I wonder if she believes what she’s telling herself, or if she’s just saying it to make me feel better. She clasps her hands between her knees like a schoolgirl, and I wish I could laugh, because it’s funny to see her like that. Ceecee has always been so serious, the job of motherhood too important for her to act like she was anything but. Of course, it all makes sense now. Maybe if I’d known earlier, I could have made it easier for both of us.
“Larkin saw the records from the fire. The fire chief marked your mother’s death as ‘suspicious.’” She waits a moment as if expecting me to answer. “I’m thinking you must have known that, but I can’t figure out how. You were just a baby at the time.”
Ceecee looks out the window, although there’s nothing to see except the side of another building. “‘I know about Margaret.’ When you wrote that on the ribbon, that’s what you were talking about, wasn’t it? About what happened during the fire.”
Again she pauses, and I strain and push and tug against the weight that’s pressing me into this world. I want to tell her what I know. And how I found out. Not from the official reports at all. But a place she’d never think to look. A place hidden in plain sight.
“I remember being interviewed by the police, and by the fire chief,” she says. “I told them that I was there looking for you and Margaret, and that’s true. But there was something I didn’t tell them. I thought it would look bad. That they wouldn’t let me have you if they knew. Nothing else mattered, you see. Because you should have always been mine to begin with.”
The ceiling light shifts and twinkles as if it’s made of water, and my bonds feel looser somehow. I’m listening carefully to Ceecee, knowing that whatever she needs to tell me is part of why I’m still here.
“I was so exhausted that night. Worried about you and your mother. We thought you were both wandering somewhere outside, and we were all so scared. For both of you, but especially you. You were an innocent baby—just two years old. Margaret was the one who’d put you in danger. She was supposed to have evacuated to Augusta.
“I remember being so angry. I didn’t know where you were, if you were in trouble, even. Bitty and I went out in the storm, searching for you and your mother. Of course, the first place I thought of was Carrowmore. I remember driving my car through the rain, my nerves making my hands slip off the steering wheel. I thought for sure I’d drive off a bridge. I honestly have no idea how I made it, but I did.”
She swallows, her eyes distant, as if seeing something beyond the four walls of the hospital room.
“I didn’t see your mama’s car when I got to Carrowmore,” she continues, “so I thought you weren’t there. I figured out later that Margaret must have parked at the back of the house, but the storm was so bad, it never occurred to me to look there.”
She reaches over to the bedside table and picks up the bottle of hand lotion she brought me when I first got here. She’d been upset at the condition of my hands and nails, as if it were the hospital’s fault. I wanted to remind her that I’d been refinishing furniture.
She picks up my hand and begins massaging lotion into the dried skin and cracked cuticles. I can barely feel it, like when your arm falls asleep and you pinch it. I’m like a cicada, fooling everyone into believing that I’m in the bed, even though my spirit has flown away and is trapped against the ceiling.
But I want to feel Ceecee’s touch, to know that I am loved and to recall just how much. And I want her to remember the reason why my hands and nails are in such bad shape.
She stops, lifts her elbow to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “I thought you were lost out there in the storm. If something had happened to you, it would have been Margaret’s fault, and I would never have been able to forgive her. Or myself.”
Ceecee is quiet, but I hear her sniffing and see a tear drop onto my hand. “I found you, though. You and Margaret, safe and sound. At first, anyway.
“I told the p
olice and the fire chief that I must have been sleeping when the fire started. And that’s true. They asked me why I was upstairs in one of the bedrooms instead of in the wine cellar or someplace safe from the storm, and I told them I didn’t know. That’s the only lie I told that night. Because I do remember, and the truth was too shameful.”
She moves with the lotion to the other side of the bed and picks up my right hand. She moves slowly, like an old woman, and it saddens me. I’ve done this to her. I know that. I want to tell her that I love her. And I want to tell her good-bye. But I can’t seem to figure out how.
“I need you to tell me what you know about Margaret. I’m so afraid that I did something when I was asleep, or thought I was asleep. I need to know the truth of what happened.”
She stops rubbing lotion into my hand and looks down at the shell of my body, as if I’m still there. “When I was being interviewed, the police and fire chief asked if maybe I’d dropped a candle, or left one lit too near a curtain. Or if I was smoking cigarettes. Which was nonsense.
“I’ve never smoked a day in my life.” She bristles. “They said they found cigarette butts in a charred ashtray that managed to survive the fire. But of course they did. Bitty smoked, and she and I were at Carrowmore almost every day.”
There is something in her voice that makes the cracking sound in the ceiling stop, magnifying the sound of the lotion and the pump on the bottle. It’s like Ceecee’s just been forced to take a bitter medicine, and she can’t quite get the taste off her tongue.
“Almost every day,” she says again, and I can tell she’s crying, using the sleeve of her shirt to wipe her eyes. “And each time I went, it was like walking on broken glass. But I did it gladly, because it meant I could spend time with you.”
The nurse appears in the doorway to say it’s time for my bath, and Ceecee stands and smiles. She puts the lotion away and kisses me on the forehead. “Good-bye, sweet Ivy. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She walks to the doorway, but turns back, her eyes troubled. “Please wake up, darling. Please.”
I hear her footsteps in the hallway, and I smell the lotion she’s put on my hands. I say a prayer that she smells it, too, and that it makes her wonder why my nails and the skin on my hands are as frail as the filament that seems to be keeping me from pressing through the ceiling.
I’m in a thin place, I think, where this world is so close to the next. I just wish I knew what I’m supposed to do about it.
* * *
• • •
Larkin
2010
I sat down at the dining room table where Ceecee had left a thick photo album and a shoebox stuffed with photographs. She’d apologized for their being so disorganized, but it had been too painful for her to sort through them, which was why they’d ended up in the attic. I thought I’d go through them, and if it looked like I’d be here for another week, put them in some kind of order. Maybe place them in new albums, those archival ones. Although if they’d survived this long in a South Carolina attic, perhaps they didn’t need anything so technically advanced.
Before I had opened the album’s cover, the doorbell rang and the front door opened. I froze. Only a few people I knew would walk into Ceecee’s house without waiting for the door to be answered, and one of them was someone I really didn’t want to see ever again.
“Larkin? Are you here?”
It was Mabry, not Bennett, and I let out a sigh of relief. “I’m in the dining room.”
She appeared in the doorway, holding two lidded cups with the name Gabriel’s Heavenly Ice Cream & Soda and the logo printed on the side, two pink plastic spoons and napkins clenched in her other hand. “I’ve come to apologize.”
“For Bennett?” I asked.
She looked surprised. “No—although from your expression, it looks like maybe he owes you one, too. We’ll talk about that later.” She held up the ice cream. “This is an apology for Ellis. He would have come himself, but Grandpa said he needed Ellis’s help painting the shed out back.”
“An apology? For what?”
“For throwing up on you. He did say it was an ugly black dress, so it didn’t matter, but I think he could have just been repeating something Bennett said.”
Mabry sat down at the table and placed a cup, spoon, and napkin in front of me. “It’s sea salt caramel and pecan—your favorite. But only one scoop and in a cup, instead of a giant waffle cone like we used to eat.” She made a face. “The older I get, the less my stomach can handle that kind of sugar overload.” Leaning over, she popped open the lids on both cups. “It got kind of soft on the walk over here, but I remember that you like it almost like pudding.”
“Thanks,” I said, grinning. Slipping back into our friendship was like finding a favorite pair of sweatpants that had been shoved into the back of a drawer and forgotten. If only it were possible to eradicate some memories and past experiences that hovered over us like a storm cloud.
I took a big spoonful and put it in my mouth, letting it slide over my tongue and drip down my throat. “Oh. My. Gosh. Just as amazing as I remember. Not that Ellis is the one who should be apologizing, but thank you. Perfect timing, too.”
She sat in the chair next to mine. “What’s all this?”
“Old photographs. Of Ceecee, Bitty, and my grandmother Margaret when they were younger. And a bunch of Mama when she was growing up. They’ve been in the attic this whole time. I guess it’s not entirely my fault that I never asked about my grandmother. No one ever mentioned her. I barely knew she existed.”
Mabry raised both eyebrows but didn’t say anything. I pulled the album in front of me, the dark brown leather dry and cracked around the edges, the spine flap stretched almost to capacity. Seeing my hesitation, Mabry reached over and flipped open the front cover.
“It’s Carrowmore,” I said. Not the ruined Carrowmore that I knew, but the way it once was. The photograph was black-and-white, but the columns gleamed in the sunlight, the trees and grass trimmed and manicured. Glass-paned windows reflected sky and tree limbs, and intact brick steps led invitingly up to the front porch and massive front door.
“Look,” Mabry said, pointing a finger at something on the porch.
I followed her finger to the porch swing, the collapsed and rotten one I’d noticed before on what was left of the porch. Except in the photo, the swing still hung, and the figures of three young girls, not much older than seven or eight, sat on it, the frilly crinolines of their dresses smashed together. It must have been a birthday party, because there were balloons tied to the back of the swing, and the girls all wore ribbons in their hair, and black patent leather Mary Janes with ankle socks on their feet.
“I bet that’s Margaret,” Mabry said, pointing to the girl in the middle. It was impossible to see her features clearly from where the photographer would have been standing, but the girl’s hair shone like spun gold. She eclipsed the two girls sitting on either side so that at first glance, it appeared there was only her.
“And Ceecee,” I said, pointing to a girl with light hair that was clearly blond but not as bright as Margaret’s. Her hands were folded demurely in her lap, whereas Margaret’s were held tightly together and pressed against her chest as if she were full of love and joy and everything good in the world.
“And Bitty,” Mabry said, indicating the other girl. She was putting something in her mouth, and her gaze was facing the photographer. Her hair, though longer than it was now, was shorter than that of her two friends, the bow hanging haphazardly over her ear as if getting ready to abandon ship.
“I bet that’s a Tootsie Roll she’s eating,” I said. “But only because she’s a little too young to be smoking.”
I turned the page. More pictures of apparently the same party, including several other children all wearing party hats and holding balloons, but in the photos of Margaret, she always had the other two girls at her side. Even in the pose
d photos of Margaret with her parents—my great-grandparents, whose names I didn’t even know—Ceecee and Bitty stood at the edge of the picture, waiting to return to their rightful places at Margaret’s side.
I flipped slowly, eating my ice cream as it melted, as Mabry and I pointed and commented on pictures of the three friends growing up together from elementary school to high school graduation and beyond. There were more pictures at Carrowmore, with a large number centered on a white room that looked like a wedding cake. It was for more formal gatherings, such as one where Margaret was dressed as a debutante, the brilliant white of her dress almost blending into the exquisite trim and moldings of the wall behind her.
There were photos from the grounds, too, of the three girls sunbathing on a dock of which there was no trace now, and sitting on the back-porch steps, painting their toenails. There were photos of them by the Tree of Dreams, too, a look of conspiracy gracing the face of each girl.
My favorite photo was of the three of them piled into the front bench seat of an old-fashioned convertible, with Margaret at the wheel, wearing a nearly sheer scarf over her hair and enormous dark sunglasses. She was breathtaking in her elegance and style, her poise and sophistication in direct contrast to her two friends.
“Want me to go get more?” Mabry asked, indicating my empty ice-cream cup. “You’ve been scraping the paper bottom for a while now.”
I glanced down at my empty cup with surprise. “Thanks, but no. I’m good.”
“Look at this one,” Mabry said, stacking our cups in the middle of the table. “If I didn’t know better, I could swear this was you.”
It was a photograph of Margaret in the driver’s seat of the convertible. She was looking out over the door at the camera, her sunglasses off and her hair uncovered. Mabry was right. It could have been me. But I had never in my life worn such an expression. It told the world this was a woman who knew she was beautiful. And knew how to use that beauty to get what she wanted. I sat back in my chair as if I’d been stung.