by Holly LeCraw
At the same time there was an old arrogance at work, that of a younger, privileged self: he was outraged that his integrity, no, his humanity, was being impugned by these suspicions. He refused to believe that such a false accusation could hold up, and indeed, it didn’t—he was never close to being indicted, they had no evidence, because of course there was none.
When the detective had left that time, the first of many times, he went into the kitchen and got a glass and some ice. Callie was there but said nothing. However, she followed him into the dining room, where he had gone to the liquor cabinet. “Dad, maybe you should get a lawyer,” she said, in a low voice, although there was no one else in the room.
He smiled at her naïveté. “Honey, I’ve got one. But I don’t need him every second.”
“What if they twist what you say? What if you say the wrong thing?”
“I don’t have any wrong things to say, sweetie.” He did not even blush.
It was as if his guilt were balanced by something equally strong: his innocence. Recently he had woken from a dream, a nightmare: Betsy was dead, her body visible somehow in the distance, indistinct but bloody and tattered. He himself was surrounded by iron bars—but it was a cage open to the sky, and now he was atop a pile of kindling, being burned alive like a medieval martyr. He woke up, panicked, and thought, Did I do it? Did I do it? and then as the waking world solidified around him in his and Betsy’s bed he felt a brief elation. He could believe her death was divine justice. He could believe he had that guilt. But had he held the knife? No. Of course not. At least, he thought, I have that.
II
It was Monday evening and Billy was there and Jed was not, it was all wrong. Jed had taken off, Callie was not sure when, not sure how long he had been gone. She knew (as though she had read it long ago, in some elemental instruction manual, long since lost) that it shouldn’t matter, she should be able to depend on her husband first and foremost, but instead of feeling anchored by Billy’s presence she felt she was washing away, being carried out to wild, open ocean, losing sight of land.
And of Billy. Even though he was standing right in front of her, he was turning to a distant speck. He was saying that he thought he’d take Jamie camping. Somewhere real, an actual campground. He knew it was kind of last minute, but it would give her some peace and quiet—
Callie had to squint at his lips to understand what he was saying. To hear the real words. She said, “You’re taking Jamie?”
“Camping. Just camping, honey. There’s a campground over in Orleans, I already called, they have space for tonight.”
“You called?” she said. “You called some place in Orleans? You’ve planned it already?”
She saw the fear in his eyes. She wanted to step back from herself, join her husband and say, Isn’t she crazy, this babbling woman, who is she anyway? But instead she turned away from him to the kitchen window. Outside she saw a rabbit, nibbling grass under cover of dusk. As if it sensed her attention, it raised its head, then froze. So stupid! To think it could hide in the middle of the lawn! Maybe she and Billy could say together, Let’s get rid of that woman, chase her away. Like a scared rabbit, flashing into bushes, down into its hole—Let’s send the fox after her—let it catch her by the throat, shake her until she’s limp, until she couldn’t bother them anymore, that woman—
She caught her breath with fear. “Please don’t take Jamie,” she said. The rabbit lowered its head again to the grass, then loped away.
Billy reached forward and turned her to him, took her into his arms. Dear Billy. Hadn’t he once been dear? He was saying, “Don’t worry, okay? You’ll get some sleep. Gracie will be good, I know she will—”
What he did not say was do you want me to stay and although her head was full of pleading stay stay don’t take Jamie from me don’t leave me here she could not make herself say it. A short while later, when she hugged Jamie good-bye, she held him too tight and tears rolled down her cheeks, and Jamie, who had been dancing up and down with excitement, grew still and said “Mommy?” and his face was like Billy’s, afraid. Ah, she was infecting them all—
“Have a good time!” trilled a voice. Her own and yet not—devious, automatic.
She wiped her tears and if Billy noticed, he said nothing; instead he gave her his cheerful-fearful look and strapped Jamie in his car seat and tossed the tent in the trunk and drove away.
The badness is in me and he knows it, she thought—no, no, he didn’t, she had fooled him. But bring Jamie back to me, bring him back—no, no, he got him away, good, he had gotten her baby away—no—bring back my baby—
In her mind she saw the rabbit, clenched in the mouth of the fox.
She walked into the house and began a circle through the rooms, one then the other, just as she had walked through them in her mind, in the hospital, so long ago. She had come here, hadn’t she? But she had thought she would find them, her father and especially her mother, she had thought maybe her mother would have left her a sign, would have let herself be found here in the house she had loved so much if only she, Callie, came and stayed, hunkered down, waited. But she had been waiting all summer, it was August and would soon be September and she finally had to admit that her mother was not here to be found.
And now that Callie was really alone, no Billy, no Jed, there was nothing to stop the badness swirling in her head, rotting it, leaving a ragged hole at her core. It seemed Billy had driven away hours before. He and Jamie had been gone for days. Jamie, oh, my baby, my baby and in the other room Grace began to cry. She was not alone. There was the other one. Her baby.
She stood frozen. The other one. What was she supposed to do? She remembered that sometimes the baby’s cries went through her like a blade and made her rush and pick her up, anything to stop the crying. That was how it usually happened. But now Callie walked into the living room and stood looking down the little hall at the closed door and felt she had stumbled upon a puzzle. There was some force keeping her from understanding and at some point she would have to fight it, but for now she sat down on the sofa and turned her head numbly to the door and waited. The crying rose and cycled down and rose again and she waited to feel something. She did not know how long it was that she waited. Then there was a long silence and something slid into place with a click of inevitability and she rose and went to the door and opened it.
Grace was lying on her back in her crib. Her face was red and now that Callie had come into the room she could hear her, she was not silent after all, Grace’s baby breaths were loud and ragged with hysteria, and Callie felt her breasts hardening and then the front of her shirt was blossoming with milk. She watched Grace, terrified, as she felt the milk dripping, and knew that she should be scooping the baby up and was not, and knew with certainty how horrible she was, how she, Callie, was broken and could not be fixed and how she would infect Grace, too, with this badness, perhaps already had, and there was no cure. She crept closer and Grace quieted, smelling the milk. Then Callie was at the side of the crib. She reached her hand over. She touched her baby’s head.
Now you know.
She looked at her hand.
You know what you must do, you have no choice.
She saw how her own hand could encircle Grace’s neck, how small the neck was, how soft the bones. But then the hand was in front of her—she looked at it in wonder—it was empty, Grace was still crying, and she knew that was not the way. You know what you must do and she knew she was to pick Grace up, go outside to the pool, the surface gleaming in the dark. Pick her up, so light, so heavy. The water outside a live thing calling.
Her mother’s dark head breaking the surface of the water, her arm over her head in her beautiful stroke and just as quickly gone, then the other, and she had reached the end.
Grace’s cries were longer and quieter now. She was tiring out. If I just wait, she will stop crying, it will be over, it will be all right, she begged—
no.
Callie was so tired. She wavered on
her feet. It would be a relief, to obey; it was required of her. Do it. She realized she had been fighting it for a very long time. So long. She would gather her strength, to do this one last thing. It had been so long since she had been told what to do, since she had not had to decide. She was gathering her strength
then come here
in a different voice. A voice like bells. She had never heard it before—had she? Come here. Hear. It washed over her. She took a step away from the crib. The other voice was shrieking now, her head was splintering into these voices, it was physically painful; they were nails and she was the chalkboard, she was being gouged in long bloody furrows, the only way to make it stop was to do the right thing, pick Grace up, carry her, far but not far, outside to the water, so easy, the splash—
but at the farthest, farthest distance like a pinprick of light was that other voice. She could no longer hear it but even so she took another step backward and seemed to float or be carried and she was outside Grace’s room and the door was closed.
She had no strength and she leaned against something else strong that she could not see. She let it hold her up and move her. Across the room was a hutch, an old, rough thing, made of oak boards from a barn. It took up half the long dining room wall.
She set her shoulder against it and pushed it across the room to the hall, on and on to Grace’s door, china shattering down.
There was the old pirate chest, even empty it was too heavy to move, but she let the wind push her again across the room and the chest came to rest beside the hutch.
The voice was still screaming and she knew that soon her brain would rip apart. She begged it and then saw the best way to beg was to keep pushing, moving, lifting, making gashes in the bare wood floor, crushing china under her shoes. The pile in front of Grace’s door grew higher. Still she waited to hear the other voice again, the bells, and still there was only the dot of light, and then she remembered her box.
Her box. Of course. Her pretties, her treasure. She had been thinking of it all along, she had been holding herself from the thought because it was too delicious, but she couldn’t resist anymore and she went to the shelf in her closet and took the box down. She ignored all the voices and the wind was gone now, and the tiny light flickered and died. Now finally she could go outside, where she was supposed to go, to the smooth water, the liquid glass that would never break.
JED DROVE HOME DEPLETED. He did not turn on the radio. He didn’t turn on the air-conditioning either, but instead rolled down the windows and let the air buffet him. He thought about how often he had driven this route and even considered counting the actual journeys, the weekends stacked up in a tall pile, which would not have been hard to do, but instead he made his brain stop and back away because he knew the number didn’t matter. It was enormous, endless. He tried to remember Atlanta and his job and his apartment and the life he had left, but they were like things that had happened to him as a child, and now he was an old, old man. He had left them, and in their place he had had Marcella.
The two of them had not said ending words. They had not said much of anything, but for miles and miles his only thought was that whatever he had had with her was almost over. The thought became a physical sensation, whipping him along with the wind.
But as he drove farther from Marcella he rolled up the windows and turned on the air-conditioning and in the new, artificial quiet his drumming mind changed course. He remembered that he had come north not for Marcella, but for Callie and her children. Minutes passed, dark unseen Connecticut flew by, until he admitted to himself that he had come to Callie not because she needed him but because he needed her. In Atlanta, he had lost hope that understanding or contentment would ever come; he had wanted Callie and her routines and resolute practicality to comfort him. But then, almost as soon as he’d arrived, the gallant brother, he’d left again.
He drove in silence, the miles ticking, shame washing over him.
He decided he would tell Callie everything. He owed it to her. He would tell her what their father had done and not done, and before her eyes Cecil McClatchey would shrink from both hero and monster until she, too, saw him clearly, a flawed, adulterous, grief-stricken man who had died of a heart attack, and together they would look at that deflated sad balloon and ache with grief—that would all come back, it plainly had never gone away—but at least they would know more truth than they had known before.
After this he still drove with grim speed and efficiency but his hopelessness had lifted the smallest bit.
When he was approaching the Sagamore Bridge he thought, as he always did, of his father, and how when they were driving north every June he would honk the horn as soon as they had crossed it to announce the news, waking up anyone who happened to be asleep. No one had ever minded. To Jed it had always felt as though they were almost, finally, home, a home at the top of the earth where it was always summer. He had felt it in his body, like an acrobat keeping his balance—they were traveling up the globe, the air was getting thinner, the trees turning to northern evergreens, everything subtly changing. That was when time had been endless in a different way, a child’s way, when the future was barely an idea.
It was what he had found again with Marcella—a Saturday afternoon in her bed with the light streaming in had been an eternal present. He had been happiest on Saturdays, not Sundays where the ending tolled—had it been happiness? He did not want to figure out. Instead he thought, stubbornly, that he if had achieved summer endlessness with her, it was the same as happiness.
He was coming into Mashantum now. Route 6A had a few cars and so it did not feel so late; he passed a restaurant and then another that must have had people inside, with the lights bright and the talk loud, but then he turned off the main road toward home and the streets were abruptly deserted. He drove down Whig Street and turned into their driveway and parked next to Callie’s car. When he got out, the thunk of his closing door was loud in the stillness. It was chilly, the cold that also meant endings. As a child, in August, he had known that he would go back to Atlanta and it would be weeks before the same cold came, and it would be so strange, to think that two places he loved could be so different.
He walked across the gravel to the soft silent lawn, and although he couldn’t see it he sensed the swimming pool behind the fence like a living thing, the surface of the water trembling with potential energy. Inside the house, the babies would be sleeping, maybe Callie too. He hoped not. He wanted to talk to her now. He noted that Billy’s car was gone and thought how he would have to wait until Billy got back, from the diaper run or the beer run or wherever he had gone, and hoped it would not be too long, because he thought he should tell them together. He would sit them down and say Let me tell you about Marcie, and Callie might hate him then, she would scream, be furious, and Billy might say he was sick or loathsome, but in the end Billy would help Callie and they would both understand. He winced a little thinking of how they might hate Marcella, his lovely … no, he couldn’t think about that, it couldn’t be helped. So he walked to the back door.
It was unlocked, as always. The kitchen was a mess—dinner dishes still on the table, two wineglasses with dark red dregs in them. The dishwasher door was open and he closed it with his foot. Lately there were times when Callie would just give up and go to bed without washing every last dish as she usually did. And Billy definitely was not compulsive. No, this mess was explainable. He wanted to call out to her but something about the silent disorder made him hesitate. He didn’t hear the TV; he had been right, Billy was out.
But the lights in the living room were on, and through the doorway the slice of it he could see looked askew. He could not say how, exactly, but then he was there, only in the next room, but it was a different country. He stood and stared. The loveseat had been pushed clear across the room and stood upended against a door—Grace’s door. And the hutch too. There was a trail of broken china, and chairs and an end table on the pile. He saw the pirate chest on its side, the iron lock da
ngling. “Callie?” he said, his voice rising. “Billy?” Nothing was missing that he could see, the TV or the stereo, what else … “Grace?” he said. He whispered now. “Grace?”
He ran past the pile and up the stairs, opened doors, found no one. There was no sound from an awakened Jamie. Jed realized that he was looking for blood. “Callie?” he cried. “Jamie? Billy?” He ran downstairs, bellowing, and then he heard it somehow through his own voice, behind Grace’s barricaded door: a cry.
He shoved away the furniture, had to set himself twice against the hutch before he could move it, every muscle stretched, about to tear. The thing ground against the floor and he moved it enough to reach the door handle, to wedge himself in.
She was crying in her crib. There was no blood. She had worked her way out of her swaddling and flailed weakly. She looked younger, shrunken, like the newborn she had been, who hadn’t smiled. “Oh, Gracie, baby,” he said, and she cried again and then as he picked her up there was a long shuddering pause.
She had been crying for a while. He felt how her cheeks were wet with real tears, how her little back was hot with her effort. He clutched her but she felt loose to him, insecure, and he put her down—she began crying again when he did, heartbroken resigned cries—and he swaddled her quickly the way Callie had taught him and picked her up again, and she stopped. “Gracie, Gracie.” He felt fierce, like Callie. He was a lion, he would protect this child. He knew without question that she had been rocking in a sea of danger tonight but he did not know how or why.
The baby began to whimper again and to turn her head and root at his chest. “Sweetheart,” he murmured, surprised he could find words, “this calls for some formula,” and he carried her into the kitchen and found the emergency stash and shook it up and poured it into a bottle. Usually when he gave her a bottle it was Callie’s breast milk, bluish and pale; this stuff was thicker and didn’t smell too good, but he tipped the bottle and after a moment found the angle and Grace began sucking without hesitation. “Little girl,” he crooned, “little girl, what are we going to do here?” He leaned back against the counter and let his mind go numb, feeling the energy in his arms of Grace’s sucking, knowing that in a moment he would have to begin his search again. The window over the sink was behind him. He became aware of it gradually. He didn’t know why but he felt he was being watched and finally he turned around and saw Callie sitting by the pool, not looking at him after all but with her back toward him. She was sitting at the deep end, her legs dangling in. She must have been sitting there a long time because as he watched the motionsensor light went out. He stood and stared, like it was a movie and the film had broken and he was waiting for it to be repaired, and then he was rewarded for his patience, because the light blinked back on and Callie had indeed moved; now she was holding one leg out in front of her, examining her bare foot.