Pretty soon here he comes. He was wearing his sweat suit, the green one with white stripes. The newspaper he always swipes from the lobby under his arm, that little bounce to his step. Heading back for his afternoon nap. My heart ached looking at him, it really did. His silver hair on his collar, them long legs. He looked up, sniffed the sky, and smiled like the wind and sun were made just for him.
You are some kind of fool, Cora Sledge, I told myself. Sorry as the day is long.
About halfway to the bench he saw me. He paused with one of his big sandaled feet hovering in the air like he might turn tail and go back the other way. I didn’t move, didn’t lift my hand or change my face, just kept my eyes trained on him. Wasn’t but a second before that foot came down and he started moving forward again, heading straight for me. Boldness itself. When he was about ten paces away, I saw he didn’t mean to stop. He aimed to sail right past me like I was no more than a skunk flattened on the road.
“It’s our wedding day, Vitus,” I called out. “You set to get hitched?”
He made to speed up and cut a wide berth around me. I hauled myself up to my feet. “Don’t you pass me by, Vitus, or I’ll raise all manner of hell!” I stepped out in the middle of the path and dared him to take another step.
“I’m leaving here, Cora,” he said, raising his hands like I was holding a gun on him. “They’re coming to pick me up this afternoon.”
“It’s a good thing, because I never want to see your sorry ass again. How could you treat me like you did? How could you play me for a half-wit all this time? You think I’m some fat hillbilly don’t know any better?”
He gave me a nervous smile and made to start moving again. I do believe he was afraid of me. I don’t know what it was about the expression on his face, the shifty way he looked around me to the place he wanted to be that gave him away, but all of a sudden I knew as sure as I was born that everything I suspected was true.
“Not so fast, Vitus. You should thank me for covering your ass with my family, otherwise you’d be in jail. So you listen to me. It was you that took Ivy’s jewelry and my money, and everything else that went missing around here, wasn’t it? You even stole that goddamn gift basket. It was you that put that fountain pen in my drawer. And you who put those things in Marcos’s locker. You wanted me to wear that ring so I’d get caught and accused, just like Marcos. You sold me down the river without a second thought, Vitus.”
He didn’t bother denying it. He looked me right in the eye and said, “Are you finished with your little rant, Cora, so I can be on my way?”
“No, I’m not! You have a hell of a nerve.” I stamped my foot. “You were fixing to do more, playing Romeo and cozying up. You were going to take me for everything I have. You are a snake, Vitus, slithering around on the ground. Shame on you!”
He shrugged, like he didn’t care one iota what I thought. I was shocked at how cold-blooded he was. I was so disgusted I spit on the ground in front of him.
“You’ve always been crass, Cora,” he said in his smooth voice. “But now you’ve outdone yourself.”
I was ready to light into him when the thought hit me. I sank down on the bench. “It was you that gave that boy that necklace, wasn’t it? Were you trying to play him, too?”
He just smiled. His eyes teased me, like he had a secret he dared me to guess.
My mind inched toward the truth. I could feel it stretching, trying to reach it. Finally, it grabbed hold and everything stopped, stood still.
“You’re that way, aren’t you, Vitus? You’re like Marcos and that boy.”
He didn’t have to answer. I knew it was true.
“Well, that explains a lot, don’t it?” I said. “I should have known, the way you acted.”
The smile didn’t leave his face. “That boy loves me, Cora,” he said quietly. “I’m going to take care of him.”
“You’re an old fool!” I spat. “Worse than me.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Well, that’s debatable. But maybe we are in the same boat.”
Would you believe it, after everything that had happened, I was jealous of that boy? I felt it coursing through me, envy and shame, wanting and hating. I still loved that devil! My heart ached that he didn’t love me back. I wanted to throw myself down on that same path where we first met and grovel on the ground. But I couldn’t move. I sat on that bench like a stone that fell from the sky. And Vitus, he must have seen how I was rooted there, just as sure as the tree growing beside me, because he took a step, and then another, and before I knew it he’d moved around me, keeping on that same path, walking out of my life forever.
I had just the tiniest bit of breath left in my lungs. “At least I loved you true,” I said as he walked past.
“Everybody makes mistakes.” Without turning around, he raised his hand and twiddled his fingers good-bye.
THE KEY
You’d think with the state I was in last night, I wouldn’t sleep a wink, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t slumber like a baby. Abel’s voice woke me up. “It ain’t over, Toad,” he said. “You got things to do.” I opened my eyes in time to see his face up there in the curtain for just a few seconds before it faded away.
“Easy for you to say when you’re dead as a doornail and not a care in the world!” I called out. I must be losing my mind because I laughed before I swung my feet over the side of the bed and stood up.
I knew Abel was right.
I didn’t bother getting dressed or putting in my teeth. I walked right over to the phone and called Glenda. I didn’t waste time with any hello how are you’s, or would you look at this weather. “Listen here,” I said, soon as she answered. “Whatever happened with Vitus is done and over. I admit it’s a right mess, so there’s no use rubbing it in. But I still want out of here. I’m ready to go back home. If you love me, you’ll help.”
After a big, fat silence, she asked, “How come you always call me about things like this? How come you never call Dean or Kenneth?”
I’d sure like to slap her. “Glenda, you know that’s neither here nor there! You’re my daughter. I expect you to understand. If you think it’ll do any good, I’ll call Dean and Kenny, too. I’ll call the goddamn president of the United States. What I’m asking is simple. Those people have already moved out. All I want is to go back to my home where I belong. I just want to live in peace in my own home.”
“Look what happened last time,” she mewled. “Look how you were living before we put you in The Palisades.”
“That’s all past. I won’t give you any problems now. I’m on the straight and narrow, I promise.”
Oh, I ate crow by the shovelful. She tried my patience, but I managed to hold my tongue and stay civil. “Look at me,” I said. “I lost all that weight. I’m walking like I haven’t for years. I’m off them pills. My mind is clear.”
“What’s wrong with where you are? It’s a nice place. We don’t have to worry about you. What if something else happens? We might not be able to find something so good again.”
“They got nurses that’ll come out to your house,” I told her. “If it makes you feel better, I got a special man who knows me, who’ll come give me my treatment and take my signs, just like he did here.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
My nerves were wearing thin by that time. “How’d you like to live here where it’s half hospital, half prison? Can you imagine what it feels like to sit and stare at these four walls, all the time knowing that my own house is empty, just waiting for me to come back?”
Glenda sighed. Of course she sighed. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
“Think fast,” I said. “I’m hanging on by a thread.”
I hung up the phone and paced like a tiger. Lord, I was restless. That’s when I realized that getting married to Vitus and moving out of this place were mixed up together in my mind so I couldn’t tell one from the other.
&
nbsp; “I need to get back there to the house!” I called up to the ceiling. “That’s our house, Abel! Those kids got no right to keep me from it!”
“I didn’t work my ass to the bone all those years for you to be taken away from your home,” Abel answered. It was full light now, and I couldn’t see him proper, but his voice was still coming from over by the window. “I never meant for you to be shut up in a prison. It ain’t right. Don’t let them kids jerk you around, Toad. Take matters into your own hands. Do what you need to.”
Soon as he said that I had the feeling deep inside that he’d work for me, pull strings from the other side. Just like that, the idea popped into my head. It was so simple, I laughed. Vitus, I thought. He gave me the key. He might not have known what he was doing, but he set things in motion, bought me my ticket out of here.
THE HOLE
It’s late. The building’s quiet and the rain has started again. It’s pattering on the loading dock outside the window, dinging the metal Dumpsters, and plopping in the bushes and trees out in the courtyard. I lugged myself over here to my dressing table, and took out this book. My heart thumps along like a broken-down mare for a few paces, then speeds up like a jackrabbit for a few more. But I need to finish my story. Need to get the last words out. Hard as it is, I got to get to the end.
We buried Alice in November. It had been freezing and thawing off and on for days and the ground was a mess: churned up and muddy in places, crunchy with ice in others. I watched the points of my oxblood pumps make their way across it out there in the cemetery, walking careful so I wouldn’t slip. I stared at the earth that was going to swallow up my baby, thinking of it different than I ever had before because that’s where she’d be forever, sleeping under that gooey tan soil that sucked at my feet and stuck to my shoes. The ground was uneven and the dirt churned up from the people walking ahead of us. I stumbled a few times, holding onto Abel’s arm, and thinking how different this here dirt was, thin and ashen, weak compared to the sweet black earth back home that smelled of leaves and animals, that was thick and alive, warm as a stove. I moved my feet so slow all the others had to hang back to wait for me, but it was the best I could do seeing as my baby was going to be buried here in this unfamiliar soil, this bleak lifeless ground where none of her people had lived before.
We came to a stop and I realized that everyone was gathering around, that they were making a ring around the thing my mind had been fighting all along. But I stopped, and I looked, and there it was, the hole in the ground, the small rectangular void in the hard cold earth. Abel knew what I was thinking because he braced his feet, dug his fingers into my arm, and jerked me back. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for the sinister sight of that gaping pit.
Seeing a wood box lowered into the ground with your own child inside is something you can’t fathom unless it happens to you. Just as awful as the grave was the heap of sodden earth piled beside it, the mountain of dismal clods and rocks. Rain spattered, coming in gusts like someone was tossing it by the handful. The sky was purplish gray. Beside me Abel’s breath rasped in and out. He must have felt sick because he breathed out a sour, decaying smell, like his gullet was rotting. All the time I told myself, No, they are not going to put my baby down there they are not going to lower her down they are not going to cover her up and leave her there, in the cold and dark, all by herself.
I don’t remember much about walking back to the car. I hadn’t worn my pumps but a few times. They gouged blisters on the backs of my heels and I felt them biting deeper with each step, the blood soaking into my hose, running into my shoes. Abel had bought them for me, along with a matching purse. I’d been so proud, but now they were caked with muck. I panted across the oozing ground, clutching my purse, feeling like I might drop any minute. When we got to the car, I looked at the drips pelting the mire along the curb and remembered how I’d stood on the second-story porch the day Alice died and looked down at the hollow the rain made in the mud as it fell from the eaves. Two days later, here I was. A different person in a different world.
Later on I imagined her in a cutaway picture, like a slice had been made in the earth and I could see all the layers—pebbles and clay and stone, with a thin shell of grass on top. In the middle, like a strawberry in a Jell-O mold, was Alice, her hands folded on her chest, her eyes open, staring up at nothing, quiet by herself underground while the rest of us went about our business there on the surface, under the sky.
• • •
SHAME’S LIKE A plant that needs repotting. When it fills up your whole body, sends its roots and creepers into every ounce of flesh so there’s no room for anything else—then it sends runners out in all directions, looking for new soil to grow in. You get to hating not only yourself, but everybody you know. You get to thinking they’re the ones that’s shaming you, like the crime was theirs in the first place. Pretty soon everything is tainted. You don’t know if the shame is coming from inside or outside, but nothing is right and nobody is worth loving, or even liking. You don’t want nothing for yourself, but what other people has burns you up, makes you mad that they can still enjoy listening to a song or visiting friends or taking a Sunday drive. This is what I’m starting to realize as I write all this about Alice, like my eyes have been slowly opening.
Talking about Alice has been like burying her all over again, but this time I feel like I’m putting her to rest, like she can finally sleep. She can stop this feverish living inside me and go be with her own kind, go to that other place and leave me be.
Now that I have told my story, it’s like I was looking down on myself from up above, like there’s no ceiling to my room and from the sky I saw me in the middle of this cinder-block square, sitting here in this chair with my book in front of me. It has been my lifeline, the rope pulling me back to myself.
Cora Sledge, I forgive you. I pity the girl you were and the shame you’ve suffered. I’m not feeling sorry for you like I’ve done year after year. I’m opening my heart to the sorrow I feel. Though the tears are sluicing down my face and I’m rocking back and forth here in my chair, I feel a calm because I forgive you. A space is opening in my heart. I didn’t know how much pain there was until now, when it melted away and peace came in to take its place.
THE EMERALD
I never rightly saw how beautiful that emerald was, but when I got in the back of my closet and pulled the ring out of the toe of my shoe, I gasped at the pure green—deep and sparkling as the clearest lake. That jewel is like a cat’s eye, like the gems on the casket of King Tut, heavy as a golf ball. I felt it gazing back at me, like I was swimming in its emerald light.
That Poison Ivy. She must have some big bucks.
I dressed special for dinner. The pumpkin-colored pantsuit and the gold slippers, the big papier-mâché earrings. I brushed my teeth, took extra time with my hair, and painted my face. When I was all ready, I slid that ring on my wedding finger. Then I set sail, strolled to the dining room with my head held high.
I haven’t taken any meals there for over a week. When I sashayed in like a queen, the talking stopped and heads spun round. All eyes were on me. Word sure does get around. You could tell everyone knew about Vitus. Their eyes gleamed like wolves. Out of habit I looked over at Vitus’s table. They’d already plugged in a man I’d never seen before—a fat round man with bright red cheeks and oxygen tubes in his nose. My heart gave way. Still, I sucked in a big breath and headed for my table.
Carolyn glanced up and nodded, then fastened her eyes on her plate. Old Krol never missed a beat. His jaw moved in a circle like the wheels on a locomotive. He stared at me, placid as a cow in a field. Oh, but Ivy! My Lord! She was outraged. She’s the type of person who never tolerates no mistakes. Far as she’s concerned, certain people are not fit to show their faces in polite society. Her eyes burned, her nose curled up, and her lips puckered so tight you’d be hard-pressed to fit a needle between them. She could not believe that I had the nerve to go on livi
ng, much less sit down at her table to eat.
“Evening, everybody,” I said as I settled into my chair.
They brought my plate: Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes they never get tired of spooning out, and that nasty succotash I can hardly stomach. I smiled all round and shook out my napkin. Cut my meat in little pieces, flashing that ring and ignoring Ivy who sat ramrod stiff in her chair, staring at me like I was a polecat climbed up in the chair and said please pass the salt.
“Your food is getting cold,” I told her, nice as could be.
I swear she was quivering.
“Something wrong with your meat?” I asked. I ate my own like it was a thick, juicy T-bone instead of something you pulled out of a plugged drain. Ivy still didn’t see fit to answer. She just stared. They came round with the bread and I helped myself to a piece. Took my time buttering it. Meanwhile I was giggling to myself, trying to picture what she was going to do at the moment of truth.
Right before I was sure something was about to give, she managed to unscrew her lips and spit, “Your friend left here, I see.”
I looked at her mild and sweet and gave her my best smile. “Well, you must be talking about Vitus. Yes, he’s moved on.”
That ring gave me special powers.
“I heard they made him leave, heard he was mixed up in all kinds of things,” she hissed. “Illegal things. Things you’d never dream of.”
I laid my knife and fork down and wiped my lips. “Hmm,” I said. “Is that so?”
She rose up like a cobra. “Yes it is, and you know it! He was up to no good from the minute he got here! Horrible things!”
“Really? Well, people say all kinds of things,” I said with a shrug. “It don’t make them true.”
“He stole, he lied, and he debauched! He was the worst kind of man, a charlatan through and through! There’s even rumors that he had dealings with some of the boys here!” Her shrill voice rose over the clatter of plates.
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