by Deborah Reed
“Men can be so confusing,” Sidsel finally says, but it’s the wind slapping the trumpet vine against the glass door in the kitchen that fully brings Annie back into the room. It’s grown even darker in the room, though maybe this is only because she’s been staring into the fire and now she’s looking at Sidsel and it just now sinks in what she’s said. Annie feels the need to stand up and go. But she doesn’t. “I’m sure they think the same of us,” she says.
“Sometimes I wish we didn’t need them at all,” Sidsel says. “And then sometimes I wish we needed them more than we really do.”
Annie tilts her head to the side and nods to let her know she may be onto on something.
“Calder told me about his problem with drinking,” she says.
“Yes. Well.” She’s caught Annie off guard.
Sidsel sighs and crosses her other leg and swings her foot.
“Why are you bringing it up?”
“I worry when he gets out that he may start again,” Sidsel says.
“I was under the impression that he had it under control. And he’s certainly not drinking in jail.”
“No. But…It’s something else. Something that happened before he went in.”
“What?”
“He started drinking.”
“When?”
“Magnus found out about our affair the day before he was killed.”
Annie waits for her to continue. She takes too long. “What does this have to do with my brother’s drinking?”
“I don’t even know how Magnus found out about us. I knew the day would come sooner or later. But I always imagined when it did that I would be the one who would be killed for it. Really. The whole time Calder and I were together I thought it was only a matter of time before Magnus found out and came after me, and yet I couldn’t stop seeing Calder.” She presses herself forward as if a small ache has formed in her stomach. “I love your brother,” she says. “More than anything.”
“I have no reason to doubt that,” Annie says, unsure if this is true. “But what does this have to do with his drinking?”
“Magnus met me at the door when I came home from work that evening and said, ‘I know all about you two.’ He was very calm. Not at all the way I thought he’d be. He told me he was going to have a little talk with Calder and he left the house and that was the last time I saw him alive.”
The papers have said nothing of this. Annie wonders if Sidsel has told this to Detectives Rick and Ron. “What did you do?”
“I called Calder and he told me not to worry. He said he could handle whatever was going to happen. He said he was glad that we wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore.”
“Then what happened?”
“A couple of hours went by and Magnus didn’t come back and I tried calling Calder again but he didn’t pick up. I left several messages, and then I finally drove by his house and his truck wasn’t there. Then something strange happened. I can’t explain it but I just knew Calder was safe somewhere. I trusted he had a good reason for not answering his phone. Of course, Magnus never came home, and early the next morning when I talked to Calder he sounded different on the phone. I asked if he’d seen Magnus. He said no, but his voice was, I don’t know, heavy, and tired, like he was sick. I asked what was wrong and he said he did something really stupid.”
Annie’s insides twist. Here it comes.
“He was drinking.”
“Oh,” Annie says, and can tell by the quickness of Sidsel’s eyes that she sees the relief in Annie’s face.
“He said he just wanted one drink to help him relax and think of what to do next but he opened a bottle and ended up drinking until he passed out.”
“So his alibi is that he was passed out drunk the night Magnus was killed?”
“Yes.”
“Well, obviously the police don’t think that’s what happened.”
“They know he bought the whiskey, they just think he drove out to Hal’s after that and waited for Magnus in the parking lot.”
“How would he know Magnus was at Hal’s?”
“Of course that’s the part that doesn’t make sense. He had no idea where Magnus was. Maybe they think I told him. Maybe they think Magnus told me where he was going and I told Calder. I don’t know. No one even saw Calder at Hal’s that night. But there’s something strange about it. The police said someone called Calder’s house from the pay phone inside Hal’s that night.”
“Who?”
“Nobody knows. Calder wasn’t home so he didn’t answer. The police think it was some kind of signal.”
“For what?”
“To tell him Magnus was there, I guess.”
“So if Calder wasn’t at Hal’s and he wasn’t home when you drove by, then where was he?”
“Out buying the whiskey. I’d just missed him.”
Annie rubs her hands down her thighs and pulls in a deep breath.
“I know how it looks but he didn’t kill Magnus,” Sidsel says. “I already said that. I’m just worried that he isn’t strong enough to withstand all this when it’s finally over.”
“You have no idea what my brother can withstand,” Annie says. “I’ve known him since the day he came into the world.” For the first time tonight she has something over on Sidsel, though the satisfaction she ought to feel isn’t there.
“You’re probably right,” Sidsel says, and Annie can see in her face, hear in her voice that she believes this.
“No wonder the prosecutor is going after the death penalty,” Annie says. “Who’s going to believe an alibi like that?”
Sidsel suddenly bursts into tears.
“I’m sorry,” Annie says. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. See? We all mess up what we mean to say, even in our own language.”
Sidsel covers her face and lowers her head and her shoulders shake with tears.
“Listen.” A soreness fills Annie’s throat. “I’m going to help him get a better lawyer.”
Sidsel bolts upright in her chair. “I can’t talk about this anymore,” she says, wiping her tears. “Please. It’s late and I haven’t even offered you anything. Can I cook something for us? Can you stay?”
Annie hasn’t eaten since breakfast and realizes at the mention of food just how hungry she is. “That would be nice.”
“Thank you.” Sidsel rises from the chair with a dancer’s long grace. Annie recognizes the sadness that weighs in her arms as she lifts the groceries and steps into the kitchen. She washes her hands and takes a plate from the cupboard, places it on the counter, and then remembers to grab another. She must have lived alone for many years. Annie does the opposite in her own kitchen, choosing two plates before remembering that she only needs one.
When she stands to join Sidsel in the kitchen she finds she’s light-headed from hunger. Sidsel greets her with a saucer. At the center is a home-baked Christmas cookie in the shape of a star. Annie lifts it to her tongue, and there is nothing she knows of in this world to compare it to.
From her grocery bag Sidsel grabs a small plastic box of red Christmas lights. “I thought I would string these on the Bird of Paradise. For when he comes home.”
Annie thinks of her brother’s words on her porch that day. I’ve never known in all my life what it is to love like this.
Sidsel has her back to Annie when she says, “I think you and I are going to be great friends.”
But Annie is still thinking of Calder. Of his happy face whistling a tune on her porch that day. She wants to warn him to stay away. “This love is like sharks,” she wants to tell him. “Taking us all down in pieces.”
EIGHTEEN
It was the hottest Thanksgiving on record and her mother refused to turn on the air-conditioner.
“It’ll be fine,” she said. “It costs a fortune to run that thing.”
The ceiling fan spun the smell of roasting turkey and sage to all corners of the house. The scent was so familiar, so comforting, that the possibility of having a normal holida
y bubbled through Annie’s veins for the better part of the morning. She made her bed and swept the sand off the porch and trimmed her own bangs. Calder watered the begonias along the house and spent the next two hours reading quietly in the blue, oversized living room chair. Her mother hadn’t left the kitchen for hours. She’d cooked more in a few hours than she’d cooked in months. They were turning a corner. Annie could feel it. They were repairing, at least beginning to, the damage that’d been done.
But by the time her mother plopped the turkey on the table Annie felt weak beneath the boiler room heat. Sweat beaded across her forehead and streamed down her ribs. Her mother was now making herself another drink while the mashed potatoes dried out on the counter and the rolls burned and the green beans shriveled in the pan.
Calder sat across the table from Annie holding an Avenger comic like a fort in front of his face. His upper lip glistened with sweat. “I bet he can figure out a way to come back if he wants to,” he whispered, referring to their father.
How could she have thought for a minute that today could be a normal holiday?
Their father had a glossy black tombstone with flat gray lettering. Our Beloved, Kearney Riley Walsh, 1938–1976. He had been dead for nearly four months. How long was Calder going to talk like this?
He flipped the pages and the back cover caught the sunlight. Annie strained to read the ad. Miracle Plant, Instantly Brought Back to Life. It had before and after photos. One brown and wilted, the other upright and shiny green. She knew what they were selling. She’d grown up with these plants, the dense furry coat of what looked like dead plants lining the bark and forks of live oak trees. They were no better than weeds. Swarms of brown and green spikes curled on the ends like fiddle heads. Those plants weren’t dead. They were Resurrection Ferns, capable of “coming back to life” within minutes of a falling rain. Somebody was charging five dollars plus shipping and handling for those things.
“Why are you starting this again?” Annie whispered. For someone whose mind had always been bent on facts Calder now seemed willing to believe anything.
“Cause it’s true.”
“It’s not true.”
“You don’t know.”
“Of course I know. People don’t rise back up, Calder, unless you happen to be Jesus Christ.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t happen.” His knees banged beneath the table.
“It sure as hell does mean it can’t happen,” Annie hissed.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” her mother said with a tone of irony as she came back in with the rubbery green beans and sat in her chair, suddenly motionless, staring at her father’s empty seat.
Two days earlier, Annie had lost track of her in a department store. Annie was outgrowing all her clothes, which struck her as odd, that she should go on growing while her father was dead. It didn’t seem right that anything should go on as it had before without him. But it had, and she felt guilty and distracted, looking for a new dress to wear on Thanksgiving. She played along and held up dress after dress to see what her mother thought of each, and she guessed her mother was feeling the same way because the dresses all seemed wrong to her, too. But then Annie came across one that she really did like. It was sleeveless and blue, the same blue as her eyes, the same blue as her father’s and Calder’s, and the dress had tiny white stitching along the hem and neckline and when she held it up she knew it was the one. She said (maybe a little too loud), “This is the one!” But when she turned there was no one and nothing but Muzak streaming through the ceiling. Her mother was gone. At some point Annie put down the dress. This was how it felt to have no parents. It was a long and seemingly endless black hall where there was nothing and no one to help her make sense of the world. She’d had no idea a person could feel so alone.
She searched the aisles. Makeup, jewelry, accessories. Her mother always liked scarves but there was no one there, and for a moment Annie stopped to gather her scattered thoughts, calm her panic between the swatches of silk. It was in the men’s shoes that she finally found her. A sales lady was patting her mother’s back and trying to get her to drink water from a Dixie cup, but her mother just kept sobbing with a man’s black dress shoe hanging limply in her hand.
Now Annie sat at the table in the old yellow dress that pulled across her back and beneath her arms. She had begun to grow breasts since the last time she wore it, and it was only a matter of time before the seams tore apart. So she held still, watching Calder bang his knees and read his comic. His arms on the table trembled slightly from the movement of his legs, and the whole table shook just enough to get on a person’s nerves.
Her mother jumped up to fetch something else from the kitchen. She wobbled and caught herself in the doorway. “Whoop,” she said, apparently having started drinking since before she started cooking. Annie was afraid to cut into the turkey and find it raw, or worse, stuffed with a man’s shoe.
“I want him to come back as bad as anybody ever wanted anything,” Annie whispered to Calder. “But it’s not going to happen. It’s just not. He had a tumor in his brain, Calder. He had cancer. “
“Mrs. Brinkman had cancer and she’s still walking around the halls of Lakewood Elementary, yelling at everybody,” he said from behind his comic.
“That’s not the same.”
“What’s not the same?”
“The same cancer. She didn’t have a brain tumor. Hers was different. They caught it in time and got rid of it. It’s gone. That’s why she’s still here, yelling at everybody.”
“Daddy never yelled at anybody.”
“No. He wasn’t much for yelling.”
“Then why’d he have to go and Mrs. Brinkman got to stay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know he’s not coming back?”
“Cause he’s not!” Annie shoved her chair out and felt the seam give along the zipper between her shoulders. She walked to the doorway leading into the hall. Stepping all the way through it seemed mean and final, so she turned around as the ceiling fan blew warm air into her opened seam. Calder had slapped his comic onto the table and her mother froze opposite Annie in the kitchen doorway on the other side of the room. Another drink sloshed in her hand.
“He’s not coming back!” Annie screamed at both of them. “Ever. Not ever. Not even for a minute. So stop saying it, stop acting like a little kid, Calder. Stop asking like asking itself is going to make it come true!” She smelled the whiskey in her mother’s glass and on her sweaty skin as she stomped past through the kitchen and out into the screened-in porch. She threw herself down on the chaise lounge with the moth holes. Her stomach growled loud enough for anyone to hear.
Calder cleared his throat when he opened the door to the porch. He walked over with blinking eyes and slid next to her. She sat up.
A dining room chair scraped and crashed inside. A glass broke and she had no doubt it was her mother’s drink against a wall. Calder and Annie didn’t even look at each other, they just looked outside at the patio and the grill and the big grassy field beyond. It could have been the middle of summer for the heat.
Calder cleared his throat again. “Should we call Uncle Calder?”
“I shouldn’t have said what I said.” Annie glanced toward the kitchen. “I’m sorry.” But even as she said this she was still reeling from how good it felt to get it all out and she wasn’t the least bit sorry at all. As for Uncle Calder, she’d tired of calling him long ago. Every time he knocked at the door their mother glared as if she were ashamed of them, of her life, of the fact that her husband had died, and they were putting that shame on display for the whole world to see. “Don’t answer that door,” she’d say. “Don’t you dare answer that door.” After the last time when he came straight through the back door without knocking and stuffed her in the shower with her clothes on, even as she threw punches in the air around his head, she’d forbidden Annie and Calder, with a loosely pointed finger, to ever call him again.
“Let her g
o,” Annie said. “Let her do what she’s got to do around here. It’s not like we have to sit here and listen to it.”
Annie stepped outside where the air was even thicker than she expected. The sun beat down and reflected off the backyard like a toaster cooking everything from both sides. Calder let the screen slam behind him when he came out, and the sound of it must have caught their mother’s attention.
By the time they reached the tire swing, their mother was wedged between the screen door and frame like she was caught in a trap. “I made this dinner for you!” she hollered. “I’m not even hungry.” She started to go inside and then turned. “Don’t go swatting at bees.” There was an edge to her voice. “That Pinckney boy is nowhere in sight.” She glanced from side to side as if she were searching for him.
Sweat trickled down the center of Annie’s chest. A dragonfly buzzed past her ear, the sun burned through the hole in the back of her dress. Ever since her father died the world had turned into one giant riddle. She could no longer wake up and move around inside it without thinking, without needing to figure something out. She couldn’t just do the things she liked to do. Every day was a maze she had to work her way out of. “What are you talking about?” she asked her mother from across the yard, and then she turned to Calder. “What’s she talking about?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”
“Didn’t anyone tell you?” her mother asked. A sudden look of confusion, of concern came over her face. “I thought I told you in the hospital that day.” She stumbled into the yard and reached for Calder. “I guess I had other things on my mind—”
Calder backed off and she stumbled forward in the sandy grass and caught herself with flailing arms.
“You’ve got five seconds to tell me or else,” Annie said to Calder, not knowing what she meant by or else, but guessing that the image of her beating the Pinckneys was now fresh in his mind.
“She’s nothing but a drunk,” he said, and the shock of those words stopped everything—birds, dragonflies, wind, everything.