by Holly LeCraw
Anger rose in him then and mixed with the fear. He took the bottle out of the baby’s mouth and brought her up to his shoulder, patting her back. He felt the air come out and felt her relax, probably she was going to sleep already, and with her still on his shoulder he went to the patio door and opened it with his elbow and walked down the flagstone path.
Ahead of him, the silhouette of Callie was motionless again. She still held her leg stiff in front of her. “Cal?” He came up behind her. “What the hell is going on?”
She lowered her leg into the water slow and graceful as a dancer and turned to him, her head wavering a little. “Hello.” Her voice was dreamy.
“Where’s Billy? Where’s Jamie?”
She turned her gaze back to the pool, and slowly began to shake her head. “Ohh,” she moaned softly. “Ohhh.”
“Callie? What the hell? Grace was screaming her head off.” He squatted down, holding the baby tightly to his shoulder. “I was”—he found he had suddenly lost his voice. He cleared his throat. “You had me scared, there.”
Callie was still shaking her head, back and forth, moaning so softly he almost couldn’t hear her. “Callie?” he whispered. “Who moved all the furniture?”
Her head stopped. “Mom did,” she said.
He went down on his knees. He held the baby and reached to Callie with his free hand, touched her shoulder, and she flinched but it was not a flinch, it was slow, as though she were moving through water. “Cal. Cal, honey.” He saw that one hand was curled into her chest. “Cal, what is that? What have you got?” She brought the thing she was holding up to her cheek, caressed it, it was precious. “Callie, honey,” he coaxed, “let me see.” In the back of his mind a voice said There was something I was going to tell her, and he knew it had been big, immeasurable, but he couldn’t think about it right now. He reached for her clenched hand and it opened and a little bottle dropped into the water and bobbed away. As it fell, her head lolled to the side and she would have fallen into the pool, too, if he hadn’t caught her, and as he held her with one arm and the baby with the other, he knew that whatever it had been, he was not going to tell her for a long time.
I
In the spring after Betsy died, as soon as the freezer was finally emptied of casseroles (although they still appeared every few weeks), Callie began to cook. Cecil didn’t know where or when she had learned how. He would not have been surprised to find that she was spending hours in the kitchen with Betsy’s cookbooks teaching herself, the way she would study for a test, and he kept meaning to tell her how proud he was of her, but then would forget. Most nights, after she and Jed got back from their classes downtown, she would prepare a main dish and two sides and dessert and put them on the table with a stern look like a farm wife who was feeding the hands. But none of them could ever eat very much, and the leftovers piled up in the fridge. Sometimes, when Callie wasn’t looking, Cecil would sneak in and throw things away.
One evening before dinner, Cecil went into the family room and sat down to read the paper. He had glanced at the headlines that morning, but he remembered the old civilized days when his own father had gotten home at five and sat down with his cocktail and the evening paper, and he liked every now and then to imitate the old rhythm.
Inside the Metro section, where he had not seen it earlier, was an article about the district attorney and his failure to solve some highprofile cases; Cecil’s name was there, a suspect so far having escaped indictment.
He had seen his name in the paper like this many times before, but there had been a brief lull, and he wasn’t prepared for the injustice of this fresh insinuation. His daughter was in the kitchen, cooking dinner—she loved him, for God’s sake! He could not believe that people he had known since childhood were now looking at him askance, that his own Atlanta paper, which he had been reading all his life, still could be saying these things. It was unreal. Right after the murder, of course, everything had been unreal and nothing, in the weird upended world, had been unbelievable; his being a suspect was as fantastic as everything else and he had floated along, numbly deflecting the detectives and their questions. But now, suddenly, he couldn’t bear it. He got up and walked into the kitchen. Jed was already sitting obediently at the table. “Daddy,” Callie said, seeing his face, “what’s wrong?”
Cecil waved the folded paper mutely, dropped it, and then sat down. “I can’t take it.”
Jed picked up the paper and bent his head to read. Callie’s lips were pressed together. She set a platter of roast chicken on the table and stepped back, the oven mitts still on her hands. “It’s horrible!” she burst out. “Why can’t they leave you alone?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what more to do,” he said. The knowledge of what he could do—what he could say—seemed irrelevant; there should be no suspicion of him, of all people, none at all.
“I hate them!” Callie cried.
Cecil became aware that Jed had finished reading. He looked at his son’s handsome averted face. “You know I didn’t do it,” he whispered. “You two know that.”
He was not even sure if he had said this before.
“Stop it,” Callie said.
Had he said it? Early on? Of course it didn’t need to be said, but look at his son, so recently a child, you had to explain things to children, they did not understand the most basic processes of the world—why apples fell downward, why the sky was blue. “I didn’t do it,” he said again. He was looking straight at Jed now.
“My God!” Callie cried. “Of course you didn’t!”
Jed began serving plates.
“You don’t believe me,” Cecil said.
“Yes, we do!” Callie said. “Of course we do! How could you say that? How could we not believe you?”
Jed spooned peas, potatoes. “They’re full of shit, Dad,” he said, not looking up.
Was this enough? Cecil wondered. “I should have been there,” he said.
“It was some crazy person!” Callie cried. “Someone evil! A murderer! Why are we talking about this!”
Cecil nodded absently. He was remembering being a son. He realized there was no way a son, even a grown one, could see his father broken and not believe he was guilty of something. He rose and hugged Callie for a long moment, so hard he felt a pain in his own chest, but she didn’t flinch. “I’m sorry, honey,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He let her go and sat down, not looking at either of them. “Let’s eat this marvelous feast,” he said.
But dinner was nearly silent and they picked at their food, and after they had pretended for as long as he could stand it and it became clear that no one was going to eat any more, Cecil said he was going for a drive. “What do you mean?” Callie said. “Where?”
“Just want to clear my head,” Cecil said.
They knew he did this. They knew he couldn’t sleep. That sometimes he let pointless miles calm him; that that was what he had done, one night in November, in the mountains of North Carolina. He had told them that, and it was true; he did not have to remind Callie, and she did not ask again.
As Cecil drove down the peaceful, dark streets of their neighborhood, the car seemed to steer itself. He felt he was watching himself looking into the rearview mirror, merging into traffic, clicking on the turn signal. He watched his hands on the wheel.
He really was not surprised—how could he be? His children were rational people, they could pursue a thought, from a to b and onward to its logical conclusion. Logic was the thing, it couldn’t be argued with, he had to remember that. If Jed had seen policemen talking to his father, over and over; if he had waited and waited along with the rest of them but had never been given a culprit, a conclusion, why would he not look across the table at his father and accuse him? Why had it even taken so long for Cecil to see? The linearity was unassailable. Cecil pointed his own finger at himself every day. He could not blame his son for doing the same.
An entrance to I-75 was not far from their house and he went there first and in
a few miles exited onto I-285, the perimeter. He did this as if he had been programmed. He would not go north to Charlotte or Chattanooga, or east to Augusta, or south to the ocean—or even west, true west, true American escape. Instead, he would keep to an endless circle. There was no escape to be had. He had always had this essential weakness, this secret lack of bravery. He could have asked Betsy about it, she would have said No, don’t be silly, she would have known him and loved him and made him stronger; but now that she was gone, there was only the Betsy of his mind, who told the truth. She looked at him with steely, blaming eyes. And he bowed his head and did not argue.
So now he drove. He drove west, then south, then east, feeling the directions as though the compass needle were in his gut. And then north, and he was pointing to the place where he had begun. He knew about circles. For the past months he had, more times than he could count, felt he was moving, moving, and then all of a sudden would realize he had gotten nowhere, had only gone once more around a hopeless track. He always ended up in a place where he could do nothing, learn nothing. He seemed to never leave it.
It was an old habit of his to drive in the left lane. He had once had a car that pulled to the right, it had been years ago but he still stayed left to compensate. He did it now even though he was barely driving the speed limit. Cars and trucks flashed their high beams and honked with malevolent exasperation, but he was powerless to change course. He had no idea now how he had managed to get himself on the highway. He didn’t know how he would get home. It felt pointless to wonder. Pain pumped through his heart like boiling water.
Another truck bore down on him and, through the pain, he pressed the gas. When the Jersey barriers were somehow suddenly in front of him instead of to his left he thought, Oh. I see. He saw his hands on the wheel; he could have turned it back to center, but did not; there was a moment of almost calm regret but then it was over, before he could think what it was that he regretted.
II
Nancy Hale would keep Grace. Jed had not known at first whom to call; he had seen, with a kind of tangential clarity, how impoverished he and Callie were, how for years now they had not let the people who wanted to help them do it. But there were still a few of them around, these people who, he had thought, belittlingly, were merely well-meaning, not understanding what that meant, how they wove a fabric that kept a person from being completely exposed to the elements of the world. He knew he needed to ponder that someday, when he had time, but for now he had called Nancy Hale and she had come.
She arrived in less than five minutes, looking as she always did, collected and alert, with her iron-gray pageboy and the ever-present bobby pin on either side holding back the rigid curl—some odd decision of style made long ago and never changed. He explained what he had to, what little he knew. He told the truth.
Her brow furrowed and she made a little ticking noise that was almost comical, except that it was a sound of sympathy, not surprise, and for this he was absurdly grateful. The fact that she was not shocked calmed him down in a way he would never have expected. “Go on, Jed,” she said. “You need to leave right now. Where’s the baby?”
He pointed to her room. “She’s asleep,” he said. “I just fed her— a little while ago. The formula is in the kitchen—over here, I’ll show you—”
“I’ll find it.” She shooed him away with her hand. “Go. Oh—where is Billy? And Jamie?”
“I don’t know. They—must have gone on some outing. An overnight. Billy’s been talking about it.”
He said this out of an impulse to make up a story that would make sense to Nancy Hale, although he knew she didn’t need one, but when he said it he felt even more of the unaccountable calm. That was when he thought to look for the tent. He needed to go to the hospital, the ambulance had already gone screaming away, but first he went upstairs to look in Jamie’s closet, where he kept his special things. The tent wasn’t there. He didn’t bother to look anywhere else. He had to resist the urge to call down the stairs to Nancy and have her come see for herself: Look! No tent! Something that makes sense!
But instead he went back down to the kitchen and said, “They went camping.” Although he cared nothing for appearances he was glad, for the moment, that Billy was covered. Glad he was off being a dad, sleeping in the woods with his little boy, maybe with the flashlight still on to scare away bears, coyotes, monsters. Jed knew that later he would scream himself hoarse at Billy, because Billy had left her, but he also hoped that Billy and Jamie might stay in some enchanted wood forever and never be hurtled forward into this new present that they did not know existed—
“Jed? I’ll wait here for Billy,” Nancy said, her voice nudging him forward.
He was remembering the dean at the door of his room, early one November morning. How Callie had been out in the hall too, gray-faced. He had been a junior in college, it was a Saturday, he was hungover but something in their faces made his mind perfectly clear, and he had wanted to close the door and lock it and not hear whatever it was they were going to say, because he knew it would hurl him someplace he did not want to go. Sometimes he still dreamed that he had never let them in.
“Jed, dear?”
He looked at her bleakly. “Thank you, Mrs. Hale,” he said. And he left.
BUT WHEN HE GOT TO THE HOSPITAL Callie was not dead, and after a long time, he was not sure how long, they gave him a room number on another floor, and instead of thinking about what this meant and how the main worry was over, for now, he mutely followed the nurse’s directions.
The hall was brightly, institutionally lit, but when Jed eased open the door of Callie’s room, it was dim inside. The only light came from a bulb over the desk area and the blinking sensors of various machines. Sitting in a chair next to her was a heavyset woman, her white uniform stretched tight around her thighs. “I’m her brother,” Jed said, but the woman only nodded. The nurse had briefed him—this person was the suicide watch: she, or someone, would be with Callie all the time. Jed sat down in a chair on the other side of the bed.
They sat in silence for a few minutes. The presence of the stranger filled Jed’s head with a buzzing. “You can take a break if you want,” he said.
“I’m not supposed to leave her,” the woman said.
“I’m here,” Jed said. “I’ll push the button—I’ll push it for anything.” The woman’s face was kind, plain, tired. “Have you eaten?” Jed said. “Go eat, I’ll be here.”
He was not kind, wanted only for her to leave.
The door closed behind her with its pneumatic whoosh and as he moved across to the woman’s chair, the buzzing went away. Callie’s head was slightly turned, he could see her face better here. It was slack. Not peaceful, but blank; there was no richness. The richness of sleep when he watched Marcella. All she had seemed to hold within her. Callie was in between, in shadow. When she woke up it would not be day, with the sun out; it would be dark or at best early, early dawn, they would have to lead her gently hoping not to lose her.
They said she might have wrecked her liver. That was all Percocet did; people didn’t know. And if she had really meant it, they said, she would have really done it. Apparently people who really mean it do the research. They didn’t try twice. Jed thought of his father.
A machine beeped in the corner: her heart. The jagged bright line. Its movement was supposed to be a comfort.
This is when the mother is supposed to come, Jed thought. When the soft light should come on, when the hand strokes the forehead. This was when the mother appears and the chaos reorders itself around her and she becomes the sun, with planets revolving in their courses. This was when the polestar should appear in the sky, true north unwavering, all questions quieted.
The machine beeped in the corner. The red line, the mountain range building itself over and over and then the valley. Instead there was that. No polestar, no center; a line instead of a circle. A line going forward, the future always unknown, the line probing on into nothing until it was something, a c
liff and then the fall and then again the climb. The mother gone, all that was left was the journey away.
Instead the shadows under Callie’s eyes were circles. The globes of her eyes under her closed lids. The roundness of her earlobes, the curve of her chin. The hollow at her throat. She seemed all hollows. Hallowed. The beeping line an incantation. The beating of her heart solemn music he did not understand.
He wanted Marcella there. What do you make of this? he would say, pointing at his sister, like an experiment gone amok, in the bed. What does it mean? And he tried to think of Marcella as stark and cold, as a clean angular figure in this new world he saw of unadorned lines and spikes and valleys. But she blurred, the distinctions in his mind dissolved. Darling, she would say. Circles under her eyes. Her hand on his brow. Explain this, he would say.