by Unknown
A scent drifted to her that encouraged yet another recollection of their time together. Lully had a closetful of powders and potions concocted from herbs. She discovered aromatherapy the year before Emma left home. The house reeked of scents that were sometimes not so pleasant, the rooms lit by smoldering pots and flickering wicks. Lully had been searching for something. Emma realized that now. Some deep, hidden meaning in life. For a while she’d gotten into meditating and tried to entice Emma to sit with eyes closed, hands folded, clearing her mind of all thought. Lully once thought that if she could empty her mind of everything, then God could fill it. Emma couldn’t do it, though she’d tried. She’d come home many an afternoon to find Lully standing on her head in a corner, eyes closed, thin body flattened against the wall, long red hair spilling onto the dark, oriental carpet that dominated the overheated living room.
Lully had started chanting; she’d found out that monks chanted, and she said it cleared her mind of clutter. Her reed-like voice floated in and through the dusty crystal chandelier, along the stained plaster ceiling, saturating the heavy crimson drapes and fading cabbage-rose wallpaper, straining to sift through the locked front windows to reach the outside world. Emma wondered what was in that outside world that Lully avoided so ardently and why she sought God so desperately.
At some point Lully finally realized that God could not be found through her own devices. She threw away the books on meditation and chanting and spent her time in the Bible.
She didn’t have friends. The few times she ventured to town had been only to go to the bank or to pick up extra groceries. After even the briefest venture into the outside world she’d scurry home as if chased by something or someone unseen. Chased by fears unnamed, by people who looked and leered behind their hands about the “crazy Mansi girl.”
Emma sank onto the edge of Lully’s unmade bed, holding the small compact in her hands, warming the cold metal. The Mansi girls were thought to be too strange to be invited to school dances and Friday evening football games, and they were too tired of dealing with the gossip to be brave enough to go on their own. While Lully feared going out, Emma had longed to be part of everything, to join in, to prove she wasn’t weird. Until she was fifteen and Sam insisted she go with him. Sam, the lanky senior who’d pushed a tormentor against a locker one afternoon and ordered him to leave her alone.
“Let up on Emma,” Sam had said. The words sang in her heart for two days afterward. The hecklers hadn’t let up, of course, but when Sam was around they left Emma and Lully alone. The other girls had simply ignored them.
Then Sam started to be around more often. Sometimes standing outside the school beside the bicycle rack at three-thirty. Often, and quite coincidentally, Emma had marveled, he’d be somewhere in the immediate vicinity of her locker between classes. On rare occasions they would sit in the shade beneath a row of aspens near the football bleachers during lunch break and eat together.
Emma had cherished every moment with Sam. She didn’t know why he was there, and she didn’t want to examine the miracle too closely. He was a protector by nature, she told herself, and she was his beneficiary. He confessed much later that she was mistaken. She’d said she’d known he was there because he had nothing better to do and sharing a sandwich with one of the Mansi girls was a way to prove his machismo. He’d laughed. He wasn’t afraid of Lully or of her very quiet sister, and his machismo was never in doubt.
Sam had invited her to a football game, then to a school dance. He’d told her to ignore everyone but him. And she had. Then he’d kissed her and she’d fallen totally and helplessly in love.
And then one snowy Saturday afternoon he asked her to marry him. He convinced her to elope, because they were too young to marry in the eyes of everyone but themselves. On that day she felt like a princess, a beautiful princess, with the world at her feet.
Gismo whined, breaking the spell of the bittersweet memory. Emma glanced down at the dog staring up at her, his crossed eye winking comically. The eye was the result of a birth injury; Lully had written the Christmas she’d gotten the pup. Gismo’s mother rejected him and made a deliberate attempt to kill him. The grocery boy had brought the injured pup to Lully on his delivery, saying no one else wanted him. Lully had taken the puppy, probably identifying with him in some way. The odd pair bonded immediately. Until the will was read, Emma thought the dog was the only friend Lully had.
Reaching down to rub his ears affectionately, Emma smiled. “We knew the real Lully, didn’t we, Gismo? A tad odd. Much confused. But we loved her anyway.” Oh yes, we loved her, Emma repeated to herself. Love mixed with guilt and regret.
Gismo missed Lully. That was clear. He searched for her in every room of the house, and then trotted back to Emma to look up with a sad question in those strange gold eyes. Where’s Lully? Where’s my friend?
Wasn’t that what life was about? Loving someone so much that when she was gone she left a void, a big hole in your heart? That’s how it had been with Mom. When she died the world stopped for a time, at least for the Mansi family.
Emma remembered how Lully would read the Bible aloud about how God was the comforter in times of sorrow. Emma would climb into bed and pull the sheet over her head and cry, trying to pray like Lully told her to. She’d asked God to take away the awful, terrible ache inside her, the pain that seemed to be eating her alive. The house was cold and empty, so silent when she and Lully came home from school. No good smells came from the kitchen. No chocolate cake with chocolate icing sitting on the glass cake stand on the counter. No chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven. Only a musty-smelling house with the fire in the woodstove gone cold; unmade beds and macaroni and cheese still clumped on dishes piled in the sink waiting to be washed.
Sometimes she thought prayer helped; sometimes a little peace had come over Emma that allowed her to sleep, get her through the next day. But the emptiness always came back—swift, penetrating, blinding in intensity. God wasn’t helping. He’d abandoned her like everyone else.
Emma shoved the hurtful memories aside. Her stomach reminded her that she hadn’t eaten all day. She didn’t think she was hungry, hadn’t been when Sam invited her for a hamburger. She wouldn’t have gone with him anyway. Gismo’s nails clicked on the floor behind her when she went to the kitchen to see what she could find there to eat. She looked the other way when she passed Lully’s rather sizable work area. Pieces of unfinished jewelry were scattered about the long worktable—lovely jewelry. Familiar-looking jewelry, as if she’d seen it somewhere else. But she couldn’t place where.
The house was even colder than the night before. She chafed her arms with her hands to ward off the chill. The house had always been one of two things—miserably cold or insufferably stuffy. Lully didn’t open windows. That might have been because after so many years they were warped, unable to be opened. Or it might have had something to do with Lully’s desire to avoid anything to do with the outside world once she’d graduated high school. Emma wondered briefly if Lully ever had any real desire to go somewhere else, do something else, be someone else. Had all the ambition been hers? Or had Lully simply been too afraid to leave the Mansi house? If so, what about that outside world was so frightening to her? Sure, there was the talk, the unkindness. Emma hated it too. But Emma was able to push herself out into the world and make a life for herself. Why hadn’t Lully?
The house sat on a small rise so it got a nice cross breeze when the front and back doors were open, but even in summer Lully had been reluctant to open windows. Emma managed to open her bedroom sash a couple of inches for better sleeping in July and August. Fortunately, Serenity experienced rare days of hot temperatures and survived. Lully complained of being cold all the time, though Emma couldn’t imagine why. She would lie in bed at night, covers thrown aside, the sound of wind in the pines muted by Lully’s chanting.
When Emma rented an apartment in Seattle, she’d chosen one that, though small, had wide windows—windows that she kept open an inch e
ven in winter. Rain didn’t bother her. She loved to hear the patter of drops on the roof as she fell asleep at night. And ordinarily there wasn’t enough snow to worry about. One of her first purchases was an electric mattress pad. When her room grew cold, she’d simply nudge it up a notch higher and snuggle deeper into the covers while breathing deeply of the clear, crisp air coming in the window, and thank God she wasn’t in Colorado.
Emma opened the refrigerator and stared at the contents. A half-eaten carton of low-fat cottage cheese, a can of refrigerator crescent rolls—last year’s expiration date. A container of refried beans, with a layer of mold on top. A carton of soured milk behind the fresh one she’d bought earlier. A carton of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter—and Emma couldn’t believe it either—in a squeeze bottle.
A bottle of catsup, one of mustard, half a jar of mayonnaise, and a jar of red pimentos that had never been opened. Emma couldn’t imagine what possessed Lully to buy red pimentos. Pitching the old staples in the trash, she reconsidered the options.
Nothing appealing here. She closed the refrigerator and wished she’d bought more groceries earlier. But she hadn’t been hungry then. She surveyed the kitchen as if something should beckon to her. It was huge, reaching across the entire back of the house. Ugly—it hadn’t been updated since being built. Unsightly, dark-stained pine cabinets met a faded and worn, green block linoleum. A Kelvinator stove—top of the line when it was new—was the same one her grandmother used. Beside it a sprung mousetrap flipped on its back. There were no furry feet peeking out, so Emma breathed a sigh of relief. In the middle of the room was an old wooden table with six chairs that evidenced the wear of fifty years of use.
Six chairs. The Mansi family never had extra guests in their entire lives. A minister visited once shortly after Mom died. He didn’t stay long, obviously uncomfortable with the situation. He left several pamphlets on salvation and grief after inquiring if it was all right to pray with the family. When Dad didn’t object, Emma wagged her head and he prayed briefly and left. She’d picked up the pamphlets entitled How to Deal with Loss and Turning to God in Times of Trouble. Emma read them under the covers that night with a flashlight, hoping there would be something there to help ease her pain. Dad ignored the whole event. He sat in his chair and stared at the wall, drinking a beer.
The refrigerator was the only new thing in the room. The side-by-side had an ice maker and buttons that offered both crushed or cubed ice and cold filtered water. Emma hadn’t known Lully made the purchase but figured the old one had finally given out.
She turned to the pantry that was to the left of the cabinet. The shelves once held all kinds of goods canned from the garden’s fresh produce. Now there were fewer than a dozen jars lining the ledge. She picked up a can of tomato soup she’d bought and a box of crackers with one tube of crackers unopened. Probably stale, she thought, but better than nothing. She’d forgotten to buy crackers—and Sam forgot to give her Gismo’s food. Wasn’t that just great? Her foot encountered something crunchy. A crushed roach.
Yikes.
She turned when she heard a knock at the back door.
Still thinking about Sam’s thoughtlessness—here she was, all alone, and now she had to make a trip to the grocery store for dog food—she opened the door.
Sam handed her a sack of dog food and turned around and left without saying a word.
She shut the door. Great. Just great. A hunk of cheese would have been thoughtful.
She found a hand can opener in a drawer and dumped the soup into a pan with milk to heat, after she’d washed and wiped the pan first. Dumping dog food in a bowl, she then sat down to eat. After dinner, she decided she might as well go to bed. The sheets she’d found in the linen closet smelled faintly of lavender. She’d also found a stack of threadbare blankets and taken them all.
Her room was as cold as a meat locker, but at least the musty smell was nearly gone. Wind whistled outside, coming in around the warped window. The sheets were icy when she got into bed, and she held her breath a few moments before she could move. She absolutely hated cold sheets and longed for her electrically warmed bed back in Seattle.
Sleep evaded her. Finally she got out of bed and yanked the heavy drapes open. Weak moonlight sifted in through the dirty pane. Directly in view was the tombstone of Ezra Mott. The moon slid behind a cloud, momentarily throwing the stone into shadowy light. Emma shivered, wrapping her arms tightly around her middle as she huddled in front of the window. In the darkness, the familiar cemetery turned sinister, the darkening of the moon a premonition of things to come.
Emma shook herself, tossing off the idea of premonitions. She’d forgotten how she could see Ezra Mott’s headstone from her window. She could almost touch the cold granite.
Her grandmother, Celia Williams, had planted pretty red and white flowers in porch boxes and in patches in the large yard. Grandpa Frank, a carpenter, spruced up the inside when they’d moved in. Still, once a funeral home, always a funeral home.
When Emma’s parents moved into the house, all traces of the funeral home were removed, but the superstitions and tales remained in the minds of the townspeople. The kids liked to think the house was haunted, and the Mansi girls bore the brunt of the stupidity. Lully’s unruly red hair, pale skin, and slanted green cat eyes made her the butt of jokes. A redheaded Morticia—like in the television show The Addams Family.
The moon slid from behind a cloud, and Emma read the inscription on Ezra’s tombstone, though she could recite it by memory.
Ezra Mott
Born March 8, 1839
Died March 23, 1864
Beloved son of Mattie and Mason Mott,
devoted husband, loving father.
Asleep in Christ.
When she was little Emma wondered how long someone could sleep? Once she’d figured up how long it had been since 1864. Ezra had been asleep for … well, a very long time. Over a hundred and twelve years! Maybe time was different in heaven, she’d told herself, or maybe people were just worn out. She’d never decided.
She used to listen on warm summer evenings, when children gathered beneath overhanging limbs of the cedars beyond the cemetery’s rusting iron gate to swap stories. They told of how Ezra prowled the graveyard on dark nights looking for young children to snatch away. No one admitted to actually seeing this mysterious, brave soldier who reportedly perished in a fight with a “dirty, rotten Union polecat.” For all they knew Ezra could have been a deserter—but then Emma preferred to think he was a hero.
Many a night she would sit at her bedroom window staring at the tombstone, imagining a handsome, powerful young Mott sitting astride a sturdy mount, bayonet drawn, charging the enemy while loving parents, devoted wife, and adoring children cowered in fear and dismay.
A sad smile curved Emma’s mouth when she remembered that even then her image of the dashing young cavalryman had taken on Sam Gold’s features. The skinny kid, the oldest son of the town’s mayor, always told the scariest stories about Mott and his fellow soldiers. Once, when Emma felt her skin chill at one of his exaggerated stories, she’d jumped up and shouted out what she could remember of a Bible verse that Lully had read aloud the night before: “Fear is not of God. Fear comes from the devil!”
Instead of comforting, the mention of the devil made the children’s eyes grow larger.
“Go home,” Sam told Emma before he turned his back on her and continued his tale.
That brash young man who irritated his mother, the mayor, and anyone else by causing all kinds of mischief in his early teen years was a far cry from the man she’d encountered today. Experience matured him, and the chin that held the barest hint of a cleft was now well defined, strong, and determined.
Emma’s cheeks warmed. As a preteen she’d spent hours fantasizing about Sam Gold. And when he’d become her protector years later, she’d held hope that he’d always hold feelings and fantasies about her. In those moments before sleep came, did he think of her? When the world wasn’
t looking and the town wasn’t talking about the “nutty Mansi girl” and his parents didn’t know of his feelings, did he think of her?
No. He hadn’t. His feelings for her had been, at best, infatuation. Lully told Emma she was a foolish romantic and she needed to grow up. Emma thought that funny since Lully lived in the fantasy that their father was going to come home any day. Still, it was clear that her love for Sam was a foolish dream on her part. He rode no charging steed, swung no sharp bayonet in her defense. There had been no passion there; only his quiet submission cut her more deeply than a bayonet. He’d simply done as his mother wished and walked away.
Now he said he’d written a letter. Should she believe him? Such an ordinary excuse. Couldn’t he be more original? Say that he’d gone temporarily insane? Something bit him and rendered him senseless? She could think of a dozen exotic excuses than his mother didn’t want him to marry. And if there were such a letter, would it have made a difference? Yes, it would have—a huge difference, if he explained his actions. Maybe he just affirmed that it was over; that would have been worse.
But what if there had been a letter and he’d told her he loved her and somehow they would find a way to be together? The possibility tore at her heart.
Had he thought of her since? Doubts flooded back. She’d thought of him, especially in those first days. She’d prayed for a sense of peace, knowledge that all would be made right, with the same desperation she’d prayed after Mom had died. She’d sat on the front porch for hours, her gaze fixed on the rutted lane, ignoring Lully’s shouts to come inside, hoping for the sound of his pickup. Any kind of sign that Sam was coming for her, his true love—rushing to proclaim his undying devotion, eager to assert his fidelity, for how would Ezra have handled such a travesty? Someone like Ezra Mott would never have allowed such an outrageous defeat.