by Ann Hood
And so she knew that getting a farm and gathering everyone back together was her only hope. She tried to explain this to Suzanne, all of it—the silent evenings, the descriptions of battles fought in ancient Greece. When the two women had been roommates, Claudia would tell Suzanne everything. No detail had been too small to repeat, no secret too private to keep from her. She would sneak into the room after curfew and wake up Suzanne and whisper in the dark to her. Still groggy and wrapped in a fuzzy peach bathrobe, Suzanne would listen and talk until the sun came up. More than once, unable to regain entry into the locked dormitory, Suzanne would help Claudia back inside, then shake at the thought of getting caught. But now, Suzanne had no time. Not for secrets or fears. “I have a meeting,” she would say abruptly. “But—” Claudia would say, “remember the time you had a mid-term and I needed to talk. I thought I had VD or something and I was crazy the whole night waiting for the results. And you stayed up with me and took the test late. You told the professor your grandmother died. Remember?” “I remember, Claudia, but I have no time right now.”
Later, after Simon died, it still seemed right to talk to Suzanne. Even though people told Claudia that Suzanne showed up at the funeral as if she had just left an Elizabeth Arden salon, her hair and makeup in perfect place. “At my son’s funeral,” Peter said, “all she could think about was how she looked.” But Claudia didn’t remember any of that. Instead, she remembered a young girl in a peach bathrobe, ready at any time to listen. And late at night, alone in the dark, she would call Suzanne. “I’m pregnant,” she would whisper into the phone, “and Peter’s the father. Peter from the farm. You know.” And Suzanne would sigh. “I work, you know, Claudia. I get up at six. If you want to talk about Simon, we’ll set up a time. But right now you’re not making any sense and it’s very late.” Claudia would laugh. “Talk about Simon? Simon is fine and there’s nothing to say about that.”
Peter told her to stop calling Suzanne. “Don’t bother her with this,” he said.
“You just don’t understand about friends,” Claudia said.
Once, during an argument, Peter told her that Suzanne was probably glad Simon died. “I did the right thing,” he said. “I married you and we had Simon. But Abel abandoned her. He called me up and asked me if he could borrow money so she could have an abortion. He said he could send her to Puerto Rico to get it for only five hundred dollars.”
“Suzanne’s my friend. She wasn’t jealous.”
“Listen to me!” he screamed. “She called me up and asked me to make you stop calling in the middle of the night. ‘Claudia has to learn to cope with this. To cope with the past and what’s happened,’ she said, ‘and I can’t help her.’”
It was after this fight that he bought her the bird. Not that the fight bothered her. They fought a lot back then. At least Peter did. He screamed and shook her and cried, but she just sat, smiling, and when he was finished she would go down to the pond until he went and got her and carried her back home.
BEFORE ELIZABETH AND HOWARD came to look at the farm, Claudia spent three days cleaning it. While she waxed the floor, Simon washed the windows. He sprayed the glass with Windex, then wiped it with paper towels. Claudia leaned in the doorway and watched him work. There had never been a time when she looked at Simon without being flooded with love for him. She had asked Elizabeth once if all mothers felt that way for the firstborn.
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth had said. “I love Rebekah, but sometimes when I look at her I feel more frustrated than loving. When I look at Howard, even if I’m mad as hell, I still feel my heartstrings being tugged.”
“Simon set me on the right path,” Claudia had said.
“He’s the model kid,” Elizabeth had told her. “He’ll probably be president some day.”
When Simon caught Claudia looking at him, he turned to face her.
“I’m a monster,” he said, crossing his eyes and curling his lips and tongue.
Claudia laughed. “Very scary,” she said.
“You laugh like a kid, not like a mother,” he told her.
“Maybe I am a kid,” she said. “Maybe I’m only nine years old.”
“Ninety years old,” Simon said. “Nine hundred years old.”
Outside, she could hear Peter chopping the fallen tree, already thinking of firewood for the winter ahead. There was laughter upstairs, where Henry and Johnathan were. And beside her, Simon was talking about, yes, how terrific it was to live there. Claudia leaned against the wall and listened, and the sounds she heard were good.
PETER GAVE HER THE bird and that was the last thing. No more blond baby boys or teeth marks on her shoulders from his passion. Not long after that he started selling copy machines. He sold the dusty red pickup truck they had bought when they first moved to the farm. The truck that Claudia had loved. She could look at it and see it full of old furniture they’d bought and refinished for the house—chairs with broken spindles, and badly painted tables. Or she could look at it and see the three boys and Rebekah in the back, all shirtless in the summer, and Simon trying to make Rebekah laugh as they went off to town with Howard and Peter. Then it would pull up again and the boys would pile out, sticky from ice cream, and they would run down to the pond to clean up. She could see Rebekah, frowning, standing alone in the back, still holding the cone with ice cream, bright purple ice cream melting down her hand, waiting for Howard to lift her out. Peter sold the pickup and bought a blue Nova with plaid interior.
For a while after he sold it, she would continue to search the yard and the barn for the truck, convinced this was a cruel joke and he had hidden it somewhere. Until finally he took her roughly by the arm and led her all around the farm yelling, “I sold it! Do you understand? It’s not here.”
Every day he would put on his tan suit and get into the Nova and drive off to sell copy machines. One day, before he’d left, Claudia thought she heard Simon talking. She heard his voice, deep and gravelly for his age, and thought, “He’s not dead. He’s not dead after all.” She ran into his room, but it was empty. She opened door after door expecting to see Simon, but they were all empty. And her panic was so great that she ran to the Nova, got in, and drove away. She didn’t stop until she reached a diner in Connecticut, where she ate a salad, a cheeseburger, French fries, apple pie, and then ordered spaghetti and a hot fudge sundae. When the waitress gave her the check, Claudia laughed. She laughed so hard that she got the hiccups.
“Excuse me,” she said—hiccup—“but I have no money at all. I’m very sorry.” Then she hiccuped and burped at the same time, very loudly, which made her start to laugh all over again.
She drove a little farther, then pulled over to the side of the road just before Route 8 ended and slept until the sun came up. By then, the panic had subsided and Claudia couldn’t quite remember what it had been about.
She looked around the cluttered car as if for the first time. An entire other life existed there. Old Dunkin’ Donuts coffee containers and McDonald’s bags littered the floor. There were copy machine brochures and order forms and commission calculations everywhere. And in the midst of it all, there were love letters to Peter from a woman in Bennington, a woman who taught modern American history there. “I stand in front of a classroom full of freshmen and think of you inside me,” one said. “I think the English department needs a copy machine too. Come ASAP,” she wrote in another.
Claudia laid her head on the steering wheel, tried to think. It was so difficult to think anymore. She used to know all about great battles between Sparta and Athens, names and dates just a moment’s thought away. But not anymore. Now, if she tried to think about one single thing, suddenly her mind was open to memories better left pushed to the back, like letting a little boy go swimming right after he eats and him getting a cramp and drowning, dying while his brothers watched. There. It happened again. She was trying to think about Peter. Something about Peter and a woman in Vermont. But instead, she was thinking about a hot August day when she slept too
late. Think of the vegetables, she told herself. First the tomatoes, then radishes and carrots. Get to the pond, she thought. Get to the pond and you can save him.
She jumped out of the car and waved her arms wildly until someone stopped.
“Car trouble?” the man said. He looked like he had been fishing. His hat had different types of baits pinned to it. They dangled when he talked.
“Please,” Claudia said, “I have to get to the pond.”
He frowned. “What pond?”
She shook her head.
“Let me see if I can get the car to start. You got gas? I can’t begin to tell you how many times my wife has forgotten to get gas and runs out somewhere and I have to go and fetch her.” The man climbed into the Nova. “And I’ll ask her, ‘You got gas?’ and she’ll say of course and then I look at the tank and it’s right at E. Nope. You’ve got gas. Must be the battery.”
“I’ve got to get to the pond.”
“So you said.” He turned the key and the car started, easily. “Why, this car’s fine. You can go to your pond.”
“Thank you for fixing it,” Claudia said.
“No problem,” the man said.
“I didn’t even know it was broken,” she said.
BACK AT HOME, PETER was furious. He didn’t yell or fight with her, but he looked like he might. He looked like he might kill her. He’d needed the car for work, he told her, straining for control. And the boys were sick from worry. “I missed two appointments. Two. Now do you mind telling me where you went?”
She thought very hard before she answered. “I went out to dinner and then I got the car fixed.”
“Fixed? There was nothing wrong with the car.”
Claudia walked into the living room and flopped on the couch.
“Hello, Polly,” she said to the bird.
Peter would go to the history professor in Bennington. Maybe he would give her babies too. Beautiful blond ones. The woman liked to think of him inside her. Claudia closed her eyes and tried to remember what he had felt like inside her, but could only faintly recall the mooing of the cows and the smell of hay and manure. She was empty inside. Even that sweet memory had left her. Everything goes away. She thought of Henry, talking about college. He would go away soon too. Henry and Peter and Simon. She watched the bright green bird hop around its cage. Claudia got up and went over to it.
“Hello, Polly,” she said again.
It wasn’t right to keep it, to cage it in like this. The bird should fly free, away from here. What a release that would be! Claudia could imagine the neon green against a blue sky and it looked beautiful. She wished she could be the one to fly away. But instead, she opened the cage and let Polly perch on her finger. Then she brought her upstairs, opened the window, and let her go free.
Below her she heard the car door slam, the engine start. She heard Henry and Johnathan whispering in the kitchen. The sounds she heard were so sad that she sat on the sill, clutching the edge tightly. In the distance, through the trees, a flash of green hovered, then disappeared.
PART THREE
Finding Out
Henry and Rebekah, 1985•
HENRY STOOD AT THE bus station in Providence, a yellow rose in his hand, waiting for Rebekah. They hadn’t seen each other since the night of her parents’ clambake. She’d told him that she was drunk that night and had made a terrible mistake. “I was upset about this nose thing,” she explained. But he told her that when people get drunk, they do things that they’ve really wanted to do all along. Henry had called Rebekah every week from Brown to invite her for a visit. He tried bribing her with promises of a ride to the beach, a lobster dinner in Newport, a ferry ride to Block Island—anything that sounded exciting, different. Now that she was on her way there, Henry wasn’t sure what had actually convinced her. It didn’t matter. He had one weekend to make her fall in love with him. He would try anything.
The bus pulled up and Henry watched the people get off. For a moment, panic seized him, and he feared that she’d changed her mind, gotten off in Roxboro and taken the next bus back. But no, there she was, wearing painter’s pants and a blue plaid flannel shirt with a man’s baggy coat over it. Around her neck was a magenta and gold scarf, draped to her waist and ending in a ragged fringe. At first, Henry was jarred by the sight of her, not just her new bumpless nose, but her walk, confident and sure. Beside her was a young man who carried her overnight bag, a large, flowered thing with a broken zipper. Rebekah smiled up at the boy, swished her hair flirtatiously, and spoke words that Henry couldn’t hear. He frowned.
But then she was there beside him and the boy handed Henry the bag and was gone. Henry thrust the rose at her, considered kissing her on the cheek. Before he could decide, however, she was already bursting through the bus station and he had to scurry to catch up with her. Once outside, he grabbed her elbow and led her to an old white VW bug.
“It’s mine,” he said proudly. “I got it for only two hundred fifty dollars.”
When he opened the door for her, it creaked and swung heavily until it opened halfway. “You sort of have to squeeze in,” he said.
They drove through the city. Henry was so nervous that his mouth felt cottony and his lips smacked noisily when he spoke. “That’s the Providence River,” he said, and pointed. Rebekah didn’t look, and his hand hung awkwardly in front of her for a moment.
“I thought we’d have lunch,” Henry said.
“I’m starved, Henry. Famished.”
He took her to a small restaurant that was filled with men in gray suits and women with fashionably clunky jewelry and large hats. Classical music played in the background.
“Order anything you want,” Henry told Rebekah.
“Do you come here a lot, Henry?”
He hesitated. Rebekah had a knack for putting him down and he wasn’t sure if that’s what she was doing now, laughing at him for bringing her to such a place. But when he looked at her, she looked back in a kind of pleasant and sincere way.
“Sometimes,” he lied.
“How did you get all this money, Henry? I hope it’s legal.”
“Of course it’s legal.”
“No, I don’t think so. What is it? Cocaine smuggling down the Providence River?”
Again, Henry searched her face for a clue of condescension. Instead, he saw the slightest hint of a blush. His heart quickened. She’s flirting with me, he thought.
“Not cocaine,” he whispered. “Quahogs. Contraband quahogs.”
Rebekah laughed. Her teeth were large and even. Henry began to feel as if he were dreaming.
“What about your girlfriend from the A&P?” she asked suddenly.
Henry shrugged.
“Is she still in the picture?”
“Oh, no. Not at all.”
“Good,” Rebekah said firmly.
Good? Henry thought. This must be a dream.
HENRY BROUGHT REBEKAH TO the IHOP, where he worked as a cook three nights a week. He introduced her to everyone. “So this is Rebekah?” one of the waitresses said with a wink.
“Have you been talking about me?” Rebekah asked him when they left.
“They knew you were coming.”
She smiled again. Henry shook his head. Everything that usually made her mad was making her smile now. They walked to the campus and sat on the green under a tree.
Henry lit a joint, pointed out where his classes were held.
“I thought you were writing a paper this weekend, Henry,” said a voice from behind them.
Henry turned. It was a girl from his English class. He had tried to explain As I Lay Dying to her one night. “I hate preppies,” she had told him. “People think I’m a preppy just because I’m from Westport.” Then she had asked him to spend the night. He hadn’t. Now she was wearing a purple cardigan with a pin of an alligator with a red slash through it.
Henry offered Melissa the joint but she just stared at Rebekah.
“This is my friend Rebekah Morgan,” he said.<
br />
“Melissa Emery,” she said, and extended her hand. After they shook, Melissa said, “Some more Faulkner tutoring, Henry?”
Before he could answer, she was gone.
“She’s a friend from English class,” he told Rebekah.
“You certainly have a lot of friends, don’t you? Me and the A&P girl and now this Melissa person.”
My God, Henry thought, is Rebekah jealous? What is going on here?
THEY RAN INTO MELISSA again at the movie that night, An American Werewolf in London. Rebekah waved and smiled at her. “What is she doing, following us?” she whispered to Henry.
For as long as Henry could remember, Rebekah had tormented him. She had insulted him, ignored him, refused him. Henry had spent more time daydreaming about Rebekah than almost anything else he had ever done. He had imagined her here at Brown with him, holding hands, kissing. Alone at night he had tried to call to mind her smell, the feel of her hair, even her tight frown. And now, here he was, really with her. Whenever she shifted in her seat beside him, her hair touched his arm lightly. When Van Morrison sang “Moondance” in the movie, Henry felt Rebekah sway slightly in time with the music. In this one day, she had flirted with him, giggled with him, and acted jealous. Henry smiled. For some reason, he decided, Rebekah had had a change of heart. She likes me, he thought. And he could not remember a time when he felt quite so happy.