by Holly LeCraw
He thought of Marcella as a child, the solemn face she had surely had, her first communion, Marcellina kneeling, white veil, little child-bride of God. Explain this to me. The white veil turned ghostly. Explain it!
He thought of all the explanations he had wanted. He saw instead of Marcella’s face his father’s, looking at him that last night, before he drove away and did not come back. The agony in his eyes. His father, whom he had not believed—whom he had also loved so badly. Was he, Jed, to blame? For what was he not to blame?
The machine continued to beep. He bowed his head to the hard circles of his fists and waited.
CALLIE WAS LOST but she was not floating aimlessly; instead she was anchored in place with the tide lapping at her chin, and only her mind could roam free, her memory. She cruised an endless shadowy landscape, and although her body was trapped she felt a strange leisure in her spirit and from far above, like an eagle, spied a bright place to land. She wheeled down to the blue gleam of a swimming pool set in a green lawn.
A party. She saw herself with a fledgling independence and in-betweenness, and a hard lean body unstretched by childbirth, and a belief that life would only ever be exciting. She was twenty years old. She remembered herself and the light and shadows falling over the pool, the soft rustle of leaves. She remembered her parents as they always had been at parties, gathering the guests into themselves, her father always the more tense one, louder when they started arriving—the one who was relieved to be surrounded by people, who liked to take care of them, put drinks in their hands, to feel that he had woven a social fabric that had not existed hours before, a particular, palpable energy.
Her mother was calmer; but sometimes she had a hard sheen that surprised Callie, that she thought was part of her mother’s way of being efficient, of getting the canapés on the plates, the flowers on the table. Odd to see her mother retreating into herself, for that was what it was, a shell she wore, before a party, and sometimes other times too. That thinnest of veneers, a bright polish that only Callie sensed, that kept her from burrowing into her mother’s secret heart.
She had not known then but knew now, floating both within and above, that her father had sensed the barrier too, not even realizing he did, feeling only respect for his pretty capable wife that was also distance. And that her brother also felt it but that he had loved their mother for it; maybe he had the same thing himself; Jed saw their mother and understood the clarity of her outline, that their mother knew who she was, there were things she would and would not do. She was a woman who spent little time on doubt. Callie saw that her brother leaned on her, needing to know only that she would never fall.
But Callie, being her daughter, needed to understand how she worked and of what materials she had composed herself, and felt deflected by this crystalline calm that soothed Jed. That day by the pool, in the swirling midst of the party and the shifting shadows of the leaves, she saw that her mother had sat down at the edge, was dangling her legs in, and like a jealous child Callie was drawn to her and the empty space beside her, wanting to take it before it was taken by someone else.
Betsy was talking to someone in the water, Larry Stowell, who had been doing cannonballs, splashing everyone and making them feel that they were youthful and carefree. That would have been something her mother appreciated. Stirring things up, just a proper little bit. She was the only woman touching the water, her mother was. She could not be said in any way to be an iconoclast but nevertheless cared little for what other people thought. It was a hot day, after all. After folding a towel to sit on, taking off her white dressy sandals and hiking up her flowered dress, she had situated herself at the edge of the pool and sunk her legs in up to the knee.
And Callie drew next to her and sat down. Betsy continued to talk to Larry but leaned almost imperceptibly toward her daughter, and Callie felt embraced. So how did she feel at the same time deflected? The party drifted slowly around the pool and the patio and on the shaded grass under the trees outside the gate. She saw her father in his madras shorts handing around mint juleps. A thought had flickered past—Is Dad handsome?—and then disappeared, since it was a matter of no importance. She saw men grouped around the grill and women by the table of salads picking at them and keeping an eye out for their children who were playing on the lawn. It was not like Callie to sit and watch middle-aged adults so carefully but her friends weren’t there yet, they were coming later, and besides she felt attached to her mother, who continued to chat with Larry but who nevertheless held her.
Jed was in the water, he was leaping in the air, catching something, Callie could tell he was showing off. She wondered for whom.
Her mother was beside her and the air was hot and humid like Southern air. The water had been cool and she had been bored and not wanting to talk to anyone either older or younger and feeling abandoned so far by her friends who had said they were coming. They had come eventually, had all left together—maybe that was the night she had made out with Hammy Storer at Mayflower Beach. But at that point she was alone and it was odd, she wanted her mother to herself, she wanted to tug at her elbow, insistent. But she was twenty and an adult, or so she had then believed, and instead she had stretched her leg out in front of her, examining herself to pass the time. She held her leg up straight over the water, flexed her foot, studied her red-painted toes. It was the silent display of one pleased with her young body; it meant nothing.
Larry Stowell swam off with a heavy splash like a sea lion and her mother, freed, looked at her with a smile and instead of saying anything stretched her own leg out also. For a moment, long enough to lodge itself in Callie’s mind and now years later float to the surface, they looked at their legs outstretched and Callie saw her foot, a replica of her mother’s, saw her leg the same, Betsy’s with silk-fine folds of skin above the knee and the twisty blue vein on her calf that was the lasting mark of pregnancy but still a familiar shape, their feet together a single Rorschach blot, the ink their own flesh, revealing two where there had been one, the shape of creation. Then they bent their legs again, they were under water, the vision was gone.
Callie saw it now and understood as she had not then. She understood that the diamond-hard barrier of her mother was meant only to keep Betsy sane—meant not to keep Callie out but to hold her mother up. It had been the scaffolding of her sanity, her way to say This is who I am, and if her mother had lived and grown older with Callie the barrier would have crumbled, there would have been no use for it, and one day Callie would have looked at her mother and they would have been on equal footing.
She remembered her mother and remembered also how that day by the pool, feeling suddenly alone, she had wanted to dive into her mother’s lap, entwine herself in the being of her mother. But also—she felt this as memory, although it was a shining thing, newly emerged—she had felt herself strong and joyful and separate, because sitting next to her mother, next to her mother’s flesh that was her own, she had seen her mother within her. She had seen of what she was made.
Jed, watching her in the dim hospital room, saw the shapes passing over her face, not cloud or shadow but light. He wondered if she dreamed in her artificial sleep. She had almost left him and he knew he could have been furious, but he saw that his fury had become irrelevant, that it had burned itself down to a cinder as weightless as dreams themselves. When the sitter came back and settled herself, without speaking, into a chair in another corner, Jed sat back also, and slept.
III
When Marcella did not hear from Jed for several days she thought she knew what it meant. She was surprised. She hadn’t thought he would simply disappear. She hadn’t thought he would act badly, she told herself, in a severe schoolmistress tone. But as hard as she tried, she couldn’t manufacture pettiness to cover her grief. She longed for him. And she still hadn’t told him about Anthony—or, rather, there still had not come a moment when she said to herself, once and for all, yes or no.
The heat returned, one last August wave, and this s
eemed cruel, because if Jed was not coming back to her she wanted the summer to be over, over. On the hottest day, the sky low and oppressive, she spent the entire afternoon in her garden, tearing out the weeds she had let take over, cutting back the overgrown plants that might have flowered again had she taken care of them, but that were now spent. There were split tomatoes, which she hadn’t bothered to pick, rotting on the ground. Everything was parched. That day she watered and watered, and at first the moisture simply beaded up over the dust and then made a great muddy mess, but she didn’t care. At one point she stood and looked at her longest border, her hands at the small of her back where an ache was beginning. She felt her eyes sting with tears and then thought, unexpectedly, impatiently, Stop it. It was a garden, they were plants, and if she’d killed anything, something else would come to take its place, and it was not so hard to restore order, a different order. Fool! she thought. It was her nonna’s voice, and she agreed with it. She turned on her heel and went back into the house.
She was showering when she heard a noise outside the half-open bathroom door. Her body went rigid but she stayed under the spray, rinsing her hair, until it came again, a muffled crash. She knew what it sounded like—what it was: the unmistakable footsteps of an intruder going through her house.
Without thinking, she thrust the faucet off and yanked at the shower curtain. It flew open across the bar with a screech on its metal rings and she stared levelly at the door, naked, dripping, waiting for whoever had come for her to appear. In the sudden silence, she heard only her own breathing. It seemed like a moment she had been waiting for for a long time.
Then the noise came again: thunder.
She felt her face slacken, but did not feel relief so much as surprise. Slowly, she reached for a towel. She wiped the water out of her eyes, and then wrapped the towel around herself without drying off. She glanced at the faucet. Her hand had smacked the lever. Not so long ago, she would have left the water on, cowering against the wet tile, praying, dear God, only that trouble would pass her by.
And she thought, as she had so often lately, of Betsy. Of Betsy opening her own kitchen door and entering her dark house, not knowing what awaited her. She wanted to believe that Betsy had been brave. Betsy the blameless, the innocent. Had she had any time to think? Had she fought the man who had been sent by Anthony—or who had not?
Had she believed this was the final price for a life too easy, for challenges not met, for people not adequately loved?
No, those were Marcella’s own sins.
Slowly she left the bathroom and walked down the hall. In the heat, she could not tell if she was merely wet or if she was perspiring again. Never clean—
Fool. Stop it. And she remembered her hand striking the faucet, how strong it had been. She remembered how she had glared at the open door.
She had just put on fresh clothes when the phone rang, for the first time in several days. She knew it could be anyone, not just Jed, but nevertheless she began to shake. Decide, she thought, thinking of Betsy in her kitchen. Marcella knew she should be terrified but she hurried to answer anyway and it was Jed and she wanted to sing into the telephone like a girl. She dropped into the nearest chair, her hair still dripping down her back, to listen as hard as she could—decide, oh, decide—but in the next instant she heard something in his voice that she knew had nothing to do with her and she said, “What is it?”
He told her. “I should have known. I should have seen. I mean—I did—oh, God, I knew she was bad off. But not that bad. I should have known.”
“Darling, no, it’s so easy not to see,” she cried. “And Callie is all right. She is all right. That is the main thing—” She was thinking, My God, not another one, Cecil, what did we do?
“I was distracted,” Jed was saying. “You know.” He laughed a little. “Just a little bit preoccupied. I saw it.” He took a deep breath. “I just didn’t want to.”
“You think that now, darling. But you knew she was tired—you just wanted to assume the best, that is natural.” Not another one. But she is all right, she is all right—
“You don’t have to defend me.” She heard the weariness in his voice and also a new, great distance. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s natural or not.”
Marcella didn’t answer. She was gripping the phone so tightly her knuckles were white. She remembered when Cecil had called her about Betsy. When she had picked up the phone and heard his voice and been glad in spite of herself, because his voice was all she wanted to hear—even though she had known what he would say, by then, because Anthony had told her. Had told her that Betsy was dead. And she had thought too, waiting for him to speak, that everything would be different; she didn’t know how different, she had known she was about to find out. She had said, Darling, I know, I heard. She had wanted to spare Cecil having to say it. She’d said, I know, darling, oh my God—and her voice had trailed off to a whimper because she could already feel his agony over the phone, and then a sound had come that she had never heard before from a man, an animal sound, and she knew he had not made that sound before and would not again. In the midst of her disbelief and confusion and weird pain—how to describe it? the death of one’s lover’s wife? the death of the innocent obstacle?—she had been proud, she never forgot it, proud that he gave that unearthly sound of pure pain to her and her alone. She would never stop being sorry that she had felt pride at that moment.
Cecil had begged, Please don’t tell anyone about us.
Telling. No one telling anything.
But she had told Jed—and that had been right. She had defied Cecil. She had done that one thing.
Jed said, “Marcella?”
And she was back, and it was Jed on the phone, not Cecil, and Jed was alive. “I’m here, caro,” she said, more fiercely than she had meant to. “Callie is lucky to have you! You have done nothing wrong!”
What she really wanted to say was, Enough. Enough. Don’t get ideas. You cannot leave me too.
But a chorus of voices was growing in her head. Fool, fool. Who was the fool? Herself? Callie? But she did not die, her babies still have her. And, They are not yours. Callie, Jed, the babies. None of them. They never were.
“I have to stay here,” Jed was saying. “I have to watch the kids. Billy is a mess. And he’s threatening to have his mother come up—God.” He gave a weak laugh. “I’d call Toni, except I know she hates me.”
“You could, darling,” she said. Toni. Toni’s face when she had looked at Jed.
“I—no,” he said. “I can’t.”
She murmured, “I know.”
“Chella.” His voice broke. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Darling. It will be all right,” she crooned, and she knew that the conversation was slipping away. She knew she hadn’t told him, and that she wouldn’t, not now. Not because it would hurt him, not because he would hate her, but because she could see Toni, her own child, in her mind’s eye as clearly as she could see Jed.
“I don’t know if it will be all right. Chella,” he whispered. “I want you.”
“Oh,” she said, “oh, I want you too,” and it was all she could do not to go on and on, to pull him to her with the rope of her voice. She sat in the hard chair and felt her blood pulsing, her real blood in real veins. Felt her living hands hold the hard plastic of the phone. “But caro. Carissimo. We cannot do anything about that.”
“In a week or two—when things have calmed down—”
And she knew. “No, darling. Not in a week or two.”
“Please—”
“Jed,” she whispered.
There was a long, long pause, and then he said, his voice ragged, “I’ve made so many mistakes.”
“No,” she said, and her own tears were spilling over. “No. Not you.”
“I have. But that’s my problem. Marcella?”
“Yes, caro.”
There was another pause. “Are you all right?”
His voice was more tender than she had ev
er heard it. “No,” she murmured. “I’m not. But don’t worry, darling. Don’t worry.” There was silence. She would have to tell him. She would have to be the one to do it. “You must go now,” she said.
More silence, and then a whisper. “Yes.”
She listened to his breathing and his tears but he did not say anything else and she took the phone away from her ear so she would not hear the click. She got up and walked over to the little table and very carefully set the telephone into its base, and then she tiptoed away, as if it were a baby, and she did not want to wake it.
IV
Betsy McClatchey and her friend Shirley Barnes drove, in Shirley’s car, down Betsy’s dark street. They were dissecting the movie they had just seen and laughing about the leading man and how they thought he was hot (it was Shirley’s word, she had fifteen-year-old twin daughters in the house) and how their husbands would be amazed that they thought such things anymore. Betsy skated easily along the surface of this conversation, grateful for her friend and the easy connection, their laughter bright like the stars outside in the chilly sky. It was cold that night, for Atlanta, for November.
Betsy thought her friend would be surprised to learn that under her chatter Betsy was thinking a different set of thoughts entirely, slow and gelid like the water under the surface of a frozen lake. She thought about the empty house to which she was returning, wondered if she had left the back door light on. She stayed at this prosaic thought a moment to steel herself. Then, Cecil. One tentative finger touched his name in her mind. It was a wound, and she winced. He was with his mistress. Whoever she was. Betsy knew this.
She and Cecil had always shared a deep understanding, to which Cecil had admitted only long ago, when they were in college and he was not afraid to sound poetic occasionally; but it was still there and what it amounted to now, for her, was a picayune kind of transparency. She could read the set of his shoulders or a motion of his head like an old-fashioned telegram, brief and concise. After enough of these missives—months of guilt and exhilaration and despair, extremes of familiar feeling that she hadn’t seen in a long time—she had realized, even without hard evidence, what was going on.