by Holly LeCraw
She walked through her own front door, and after a moment he followed her. The door opened directly into the living room. She moved around, switching on lamps. “Please, sit down.”
“Thank you,” he said, but didn’t move.
“Have you eaten? I’ll make us a snack.” Dio mio, she thought, a snack. Don’t babble. She took a breath. “I’ll just clean up first, quickly,” she said. “Then I’ll make us a drink. I’m not sure what I have—I’m afraid not much. I drink very rarely,” she said. She turned to go down the hall, wincing. He would think she was chasing him away.
“Water is fine,” he said behind her. “Thank you.”
She could tell, from his grave tone, that he was still standing. She turned back to him. He was looking at her intently. In one hand he held a plastic grocery sack with something squarish inside. When he saw her look at the bag he glanced down at it himself. “Can I take that for you?” she said.
“No. Thank you.” Slowly, he sat.
She detoured quickly to the bathroom, washed off all the most visible dirt, and slipped into the first clean thing she could find, an old linen dress. She brushed her hair and wound it again on top of her head: it would do. In the kitchen, she fixed two glasses of water, opened a box of crackers. Her fingers trembled as she unwrapped a wedge of cheese. Stop. Stop. She breathed, and then found the cheese knife and set it down, very slowly, with a tiny clink against the plate.
Carefully, she carried the tray back to the front room. It was a pretty space, cheery with the glow of lamplight. Look around. Calm. The flowered chairs, the arrangements of faience plates—she had done it all, made it cozy and welcoming. There were pictures of Toni, of relatives and friends; Jed wouldn’t know how infrequently they spoke. The room was only hers. She felt the sweat still on her skin and wished she had taken a shower. Put the tray down, breathe deeply again, click on another lamp. The dusk outside had faded; the windowpanes were black. She sat down on the sofa. Jed was in the chair. He would not hurt her here, in her haven. Why would he hurt her? And she let herself look, full on, at Jed McClatchey.
Cecil had been blond, before she knew him, before his hair had thinned and grayed, and his face had had a roundness that she had loved, sweet and boyish. He had been tall and had had to guard against portliness; Jed was slighter. But when he leaned forward to pick up a cracker, the lamplight hit him in a certain way and the bones of his face seemed to briefly settle into one of Cecil’s expressions—grave, almost angry, one she had rarely seen, except on that last night. “Do people ever tell you you look like your father?” she said.
“Not very often.”
“No. But I saw it. Just for a moment.”
Jed shifted in his chair and sat up with his glass. “People told me I looked like him after he died,” he said. “Like that would make me feel better.”
“I wish I could have come to the funeral.” She pressed her lips together.
Jed looked at her piercingly. “Did you know my parents well? I don’t remember—well, I don’t remember you and Mr. Atkinson being around much.”
“We were summer friends. So.” She was light-headed, the world out of focus. “How is Mashantum? I haven’t been there in years. I hear some news from Toni but she isn’t so reliable.”
“It’s the same. I think. I haven’t been there much myself. Until this summer. It doesn’t change.”
“Everything changes,” she said. “Eventually.”
“Well, it shouldn’t.” Unexpectedly, he smiled.
“Is Toni doing a good job? You can tell me.”
“She’s very good with the baby. But I don’t think child care is her vocation. Put it that way.”
“Yes, I know what you mean.”
“Mrs. Atkinson—”
“Marcella.”
“Marcella.” He cleared his throat. “I found something, and I was wondering if it was yours.”
“That’s why you came?” She looked at the bag in his hands.
“It was a whim,” he said. “That’s what I’m doing this summer. I guess. Following whims.”
She said brightly, not knowing where this social voice was coming from, “That can be rather dangerous.”
“You’re probably right,” he said.
And then he was reaching into the bag and bringing something out, and she suppressed a little cry. “Why, I lost that—years ago.”
Jed was holding the suit up by its thin straps. He stood, walked over, and dropped it in her lap. “Why was it in our house? I found it in a closet. In this box, wrapped in tissue paper.”
“I must have left it at your pool. At a party.”
“Why was it in a box?”
“I don’t know.” He was standing over her, too tall, too close; she could feel his presence like a mountain although she could not make herself look up at him. I’m keeping it, Cecil had said. I’ve never done anything like this before. I have to have something of you. She had watched him crumple it to his face, smell her in it. My God, Chella, my God.
But why in the world had he left it in a closet? Poor Cecil, guilty boy, wanting to be caught. “Why are you crying?” Jed said, clinically.
“It seems so long ago. Another life,” she said—oh, she was good. Disgusting. She breathed deeply, willed the tears to dry. “How did you know it was mine?” He didn’t answer, and she was forced to look up. “Jed?”
Since he had walked into her house he had looked stern, unabashed. A man who wanted answers. But now there was a different look on his face. He backed away, sat down in his chair. No, his dark eyes were nothing like Cecil’s. “I remembered you in it,” he said.
“Really.”
And to their deep surprise, they both laughed.
SHE CONVINCED HIM TO STAY for dinner. “I will just make a salad,” she said. “It’s what I would have anyway.” Her dining room table was covered with her papers, and when she began to clear it off he said he didn’t want to put her to any trouble. So they ate in the kitchen, across from each other at the little round table. She found placemats and cloth napkins, and when she opened her cabinet to get the salt and pepper, she saw a candlestick with a half-burned taper and decided to set that out too. I am following whims. When she struck the match, her hand trembled.
The question of why he was really there hung over them, embroidering itself in the air the more they avoided it. As they ate she wished again that she knew how to chat. Her grandmother had been able to take charge of any conversation, directing it exactly the way she wanted it to go while she pretended deference, coquettishness, and even now Marcella was trying to imitate her and failing. But as it turned out, Jed was no good at small talk either, only he did not seem to care.
“How is your sister?” Marcella managed. “And her babies?”
“Fine. I think.”
“It is hard.” Marcella saw herself putting on a wise, maternal face. “One is so sleepy. And all those chemicals are going whiz-whiz, making the milk, healing the body.” She made her voice light. “I’m glad she has Toni to help her. And you. How long can you stay with her?”
Jed cleared his throat. “All summer. Or so.”
“And your job?” Marcella said, before she could stop herself, like he was still a boy. “I mean—I am sorry. That is personal.”
“No, I don’t mind. I’m taking a leave. Callie needs me here. She—called a few weeks ago, and I decided.”
“This is one of your whims,” Marcella said.
“Yes.”
A breeze blew through the open window over the sink, ruffling the curtain.
Marcella said, “It’s not easy being a mother when your own mother is gone. I remember.”
“How old were you when your mother died?”
“I was twenty,” Marcella said.
“I was too.”
“Yes.” She wanted to say I know, I know exactly. Finally he gave her a polite little look: Go on. “Yes, well. They had sent me here for college. My mother died when I was a junior. And then my nonn
a died right after I was married. And that”—she shrugged—“was it.”
“And your father?”
“He died before I was born.”
“It’s strange being all alone.”
“Yes, it is. Would you like more salad?” She half-rose from her seat.
“No, thank you.” She sank back down. “You feel—weightless,” he continued. “When you’re alone like that.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “But not in a good way.”
“No.” He arranged his fork and knife carefully together on his empty plate. “Your mother must have been young when she died.”
“She had a bad heart.”
“So did my father.” Jed looked up at her. “They think he died of a heart attack. That that caused the accident. But they’re not sure.”
“It is hard to be sure.”
“That’s a coroner’s job, though.”
She nodded; it was all she could do. The silence stretched. He kept looking at her, and she looked away. “Would you like some tea?” she said, into the void. “It’s gotten cooler outside. Cool enough to drink something warm, do you think?”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
She wasn’t so sure about being a ma’am, but she remembered it was the Southern way. She took their plates to the counter and then busied herself finding mugs and tea bags and heating the water. Having her back to him for a moment was a relief, and she felt her face darkening, her mouth twisting, with the released effort of her politeness. Nancy Hale from the Cape had called her about Cecil, told her he had died alone in Atlanta, at night, in a one-car accident. It had been May; Betsy had died the previous November. She would never forget it, Nancy’s patrician voice, the pity in it, pity for Cecil and the whole human race, really, that calm noblesse oblige. Marcella had not been able to speak, she had been afraid of what she would blurt. By then Anthony had moved out. She had been alone in the Wellesley house. She was lucky she heard the news at all. No one knew, of course, that she would care, that she would care so much. That after she hung up the phone, she would sink to the floor and wail.
Behind her, Jed said, “At first—before the autopsy came back—Callie and I thought he had killed himself. Crashed the car on purpose. He still could have. We’ll never know.”
She poured the water. She brought sugar and milk to the table and then their full mugs. She tried to calm her heart. Finally she said, “How could you think that?”
He waited until she was seated again. He was very lawyerly now, she thought; it was like he was taking a deposition. “They never solved it, you know. My mother’s murder. They never found out who did it.”
“Yes. I know. That makes it worse—doesn’t it?”
The grim look was back on his face. “Did you know that my father was a suspect?”
She breathed in sharply. “I do not listen to gossip,” she said.
“He was away the night she was killed. In North Carolina. The bed in his hotel room hadn’t been slept in.”
“Why not?” she said, without thinking.
Jed raised an eyebrow. “He said he couldn’t sleep that night. That he had been out driving around.”
Cecil on the unfamiliar black mountain roads, swerving back and forth. What had he been thinking about? Had he regretted his decision? Had he been wavering? Not that it mattered. Not in the end.
Jed said, “Does that make any sense to you? Because it doesn’t to me.”
Cecil had said, Don’t tell anyone, Chella. Please. I’m sorry to ask. But I can’t do it to my children. Please. And she had promised, not knowing she would never speak to him again. “They always look at the husband,” she said now. “It’s natural. Is it not? Even if he’s not guilty. Even if there is no way he could be guilty.”
“You believe that? About my father?”
Her heart thudded inside her chest. “Of course. I know it.”
“How?” His face was hard.
“There is— I knew him. There is no way.”
“They always say that. It’s always a surprise. Everything always looks perfect.”
“Jed, is that why you came here? To ask me this? My God!” Marcella got up and walked over to the stove, pointlessly turned the burner under the kettle back on. Her hand on the knob was shaking.
After a moment Jed said, “I’m sorry I upset you.”
“Your own father! Do you ask everyone these questions?”
“No.”
“Well, then, why to me? It is a strange thing to come here and do!” Her back was still to him, her face was safe, she could let it crumple. Please, Chella. The last thing he had asked of her—begged. But if his son wanted answers, why should she not give them to him, his son behind her living and breathing, tortured by sickening thoughts, instead of obeying Cecil, who had made his choices and left them all? Surely her obligation was over by now. How long did one have to keep promises to the dead?
“I’m sorry,” Jed was saying. “You are right. I have been completely out of line. Thank you for the dinner.”
She turned back to him. The already-hot water began to whistle again and she turned it off without looking. “Where are you staying?”
“I’ll drive back tonight.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s only three hours. Give or take.”
“But your sister thinks you are away for the weekend—”
“The friend got sick.” He smiled a little.
“You will stay,” she said. She could not believe she was commanding him. She was furious at Cecil, at his memory and what he had asked of her—so much. “You can sleep in Toni’s room, or on the couch, if you’d rather. You must not be on the road so late.” He opened his mouth to answer but she went on, her voice rising. “Do you really think your family needs to lose someone else?”
“Mrs. Atkinson—”
She swallowed. “Marcella,” she said.
“It will be fine.”
“Jed,” she said, “why did you come here?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
His eyes were so dark. They bored into her, down to her secrets. She looked straight back at him and said, “Please stay.”
IV
Callie had not expected it, but almost as soon as she gave birth to Grace she had thought of the Cape house, and longed to be there. She sat in neonatal intensive care with her tiny daughter and pictured the long vista from the kitchen, where everyone came in the back door, through the line of other narrow doorways, the low-ceilinged rooms like a string of boxes, one after the other, to the end of the house. Her father had always wanted to enlarge those doors, but they had never let him. He had been tall, taller than either Jed or Billy; he had always been laughing about short little Pilgrims, always bumping his head.
Every so often one of Grace’s wires would get dislodged and set off an alarm, and a nurse would come, insultingly calm, and reset it while Callie waited, her mind suspended as if she were holding her breath. When the nurse finally walked away she could start her imaginary tour all over again. Kitchen to the dining room, there was the table with the cracked leaf, there was the hutch with the lobster platter; then the living room, there was the trunk she and Jed always said was full of pirate treasure; now up the steep stairs to her bedroom (her childhood bedroom, not the one she shared with Billy), now lie down on the blue and yellow quilt, look out the window at the thick leaves of the privet. She traveled the house over and over, slowly round and round, a spatial lullaby. If she concentrated on each step, each detail, she could drive away other thoughts, the ones that sneaked up, peeked leering around corners.
Meanwhile, Grace was endlessly asleep and could barely eat. She’ll wake up, said Callie’s least favorite nurse, don’t you worry, as if scolding her for thinking only of trivialities—and maybe she was right: wasn’t Grace alive, after all? Alive when she could have been dead? For the time being, though, there was a tube threaded through Grace’s tiny nostril going down to her stomach. Multipl
e times a day Callie attached herself to the chugging breast pump, and later the nurse would simply pour the milk down the tube. One day Callie opened her mouth to say, Isn’t there something a little more high-tech? Something better? But the stern nurse was again on duty and Callie, who normally was not afraid of anyone, kept her mouth shut. It had been a ward full of the desperately ill, infants so small they looked larval. Grace, breathing by herself, was boring. Callie knew this was yet another thing for which she should feel thankful. But instead she looked at all the wires around her and thought how easily they could wrap around a baby’s throat, if a person wasn’t careful. How hard the floor was, what it would do to a soft little skull, if a person slipped—
She clutched Grace more tightly, sat back down in the creaky hospital rocking chair. She waited for the nurse to move on so she could begin her lullaby again, but instead a new and clearer idea began to form in her mind, her heart: that although nothing had gone as it should, and she was in foreign Connecticut in a foreign hospital with not enough visitors, a wound across her stomach, holding a foreign child she had not pictured, who was not Jamie, an infant born too soon who lay in her arms like a changeling, whom she worried about only mechanically—that even though all these things were true, all would right itself in Mashantum.
She would go there, as soon as she could.
She knew she wasn’t loving her daughter properly, she knew her feelings were all wrong; that would fix itself in Mashantum. Growing up, Mashantum had been far from Atlanta; now she lived here up north but Mashantum was still far, far in the best way—removed, unchanging. The pink rambler roses would bloom as they always had, the bees would thrum in the privet, and all would be well. Soon, soon, she would be at the house itself, she would walk through it and be bathed in the light and the smells and the very dust that were the essence of who she was. Her father’s tennis visor would be hanging from a peg in the hall. She would see the linen closet shelves labeled in her mother’s hand. She would walk barefoot through the porch, along the cool brick floor, and the screen door would slap shut behind her and then she would walk across the lawn, under the wild, overgrown arbor, to the pool.