This hospital was way more quiet than that one had been. And even scarier because it was so quiet. Where was everybody? Her grandma’s friend sat down on the sofa beside her and stared.
Rowan tried to smile at her, all the while thinking, It’s not polite to stare. This woman was sort of scary too.
“What are you dear, twelve?”
“Uh-huh.” Rowan leaned forward to stare down the hall as best she could, at the door that her mother had disappeared behind.
The woman frowned. “You shouldn’t say ‘uh-huh.’ It’s disrespectful. You should say, ‘Yes, Mrs. Riley.’ ”
Rowan blushed. “Um, sorry.”
The woman kept staring at Rowan, which made her cheeks bloom hot. She wished her mom would come out. “Um, Mrs. Riley? Were you going to get the doctor for my mom?”
The woman ignored the question. “Mmm,” she said instead. “You’re a pretty thing. Have you started your period yet?’
Rowan wished she could totally disappear. She stared hard down the hall, willing her mother to come out. She swallowed. She did not answer
(no)
and hoped that Mrs. Riley would go away.
She did not.
They sat in silence. Worse, Mrs. Riley put her hand on top of Rowan’s head and absently stroked her hair.
And Rowan wished hard
(mom mom mom mom mom)
for her mom to come out and get her.
–
Paula had a single moment of trepidation, but then there she was—her mother, in a hospital gown, in a hospital bed. The two of them locked eyes, alone for the first time in four, maybe five years.
Her mother smiled broadly, sadly. She reached her arms out to Paula.
“Oh, you’re really here—,” she rasped. The shocking voice caught Paula by surprise.
“You sound terrible!” Paula moved to the bed. She took her mom’s hands. “Do you know what’s wrong?” It was hard to tell in the dimmed lights how her mother really looked. Her hair was lank and flat to her head, and her eyes had an odd—something—look to them. She was thinner than the last time Paula had seen her, but that could be for any reason at all.
“I’m … just, I’m fine, Paula. Really. You didn’t have to come.”
“Mom—” Her mother’s hands were warm in hers. As if she had a fever. “I just wish I’d been here when you got sick. What does the doctor say?”
“Izzy called you?”
Paula nodded.
Audra brightened a little. “Have you brought my beautiful granddaughter?”
Paula smiled. “Yes. She’s in the lounge—”
“With Izzy?”
“Mom, don’t talk so much, your throat sounds so … raw.”
Audra’s eyes darted around the room, to the door, to the far corner. She shifted stiffly, as if she hurt everywhere. She looked into Paula’s eyes, then tugged at her hands, pulling her closer. Paula leaned in.
“I’ll whisper,” she said, very low.
“Yes, good,” Paula answered, in a whisper herself.
“It’s not safe for you to be here.”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t stay—”
“Mom? What do you mean?”
Audra flashed a look at the closed door.
Paula did not get the hint. “We’ll stay as long as you need us to—”
Audra shook her head. “No,” she croaked.
In the lounge, Mrs. Riley stood up suddenly, startling Rowan. She headed in the direction of her grandmother’s room.
Bye, Weirdo.
Izzy stuck her head inside Audra’s room. “How are things in here?” The two had their heads together, scheming. She let the door snuff shut behind her.
Audra’s eyes narrowed when she saw her, but Paula’s were questioning. She wasn’t too late, then.
“Paula, dear, you don’t want to tire your mother out.”
“Of course not. Mrs. Riley, did you find the doctor?”
Izzy smiled sympathetically as she lied. “He’s gone for the day. We’ll find him tomorrow. Are you going to stay at your mother’s?” She bustled to the bed and smoothed Audra’s blanket. “I think the key’s still where it always is, isn’t it, Aud?”
Audra didn’t answer, just glared at her old friend.
“I used it myself the day I found your poor mom,” Izzy said to Paula. “How’re you feeling, Aud? I think I should hustle these girls home.”
Audra protested. “No. I want to see Rowan.”
“Of course,” Paula said.
“Absolutely,” Izzy said. “You haven’t seen that grandbaby for such a long time. Paula, why don’t you go get her?” She leaned in closer to Audra. “We’ve been chatting out there.”
“Izzy—” Audra hadn’t let go of Paula’s hand.
“What is it, Aud? Can I get you something? Some water?” Izzy took the pitcher from the side table and poured water into a fresh glass, then held it out to her.
Warily Audra took the glass. She drank noisily and Izzy grimaced. It was a little disgusting.
“I’ll get Ro,” Paula said. She touched her mother’s hair briefly and left the room.
Audra held the empty glass out for Izzy to take. She mouthed the words leave them be.
Izzy smiled. “It’s about numbers, Audra. And bloodlines.”
The door opened. Rowan stood there shyly, framed by the light from the hall, her mother behind her.
“And here’s your little granddaughter!”
When Rowan’s eyes had adjusted to the room’s dimness, she saw two faces staring at her, Grandma and Mrs.
(weirdo)
Riley.
Something about the way they looked at her kept her rooted to the floor.
“Rowan,” her grandmother said, in a terrible raspy voice.
“Hi,” she said.
“Come over here, hon. I can’t quite jump out of bed right now—” Her grandma smiled, and though her voice was raw, she didn’t look very sick, she looked … the same.
When she got to the bedside, her grandmother put her hand on Rowan’s arm. She was hot. “Oh, it’s good to see you, Rowan. You’re getting so big—”
“We’re going to stay at your house, I think.”
Her grandmother nodded. “Yes.” She smiled again, and that’s when Ro saw that she was sick. Her smiled looked off-centre and forced. “You’ll take care of my dog, won’t you?”
Ro’s eyes lit up. “Sure I will!”
Her grandmother nodded. “Good girl. His name is Old Tex. Paula, will you get my purse out of the cupboard for me?”
“Sure.”
As her mom went to the cupboard, Audra leaned towards Rowan and whispered, “I have something for you.”
“Grandma, you sound like you have a cold.”
Her grandma chuckled weakly and their eyes met, then
(just for a second)
there was an odd reflecting—a flash, like light. Then it was gone. Her mom handed over the handbag and her grandmother took out a small change purse and squeezed it open. From inside she pulled out a key. She held it up. To Paula and Mrs. Riley she said, “This is a secret between me and my granddaughter, ladies, so no listening in.” She grinned. Her first real one.
Rowan leaned in eagerly, turning her head so that her ear was close to her grandmother’s mouth.
“This key is for a box under my bed. It’s a blue box. There’s a new collar in there for Tex. It’s red and it’s … decorated. Can you put it on him?”
“Okay,” she whispered back. She took the key.
“Old Tex can be your dog while you’re in Haven Woods, okay?” her grandma rasped.
Rowan nodded. “Okay,” she said again. She put the key in the pocket of her school blazer.
Her grandma sighed and lay back against the pillows, every movement clearly painful.
“Mom,” Paula said, “do you want us to sit with you a little longer?”
And then
(weird weird have you started y
our period weirdo)
said, “Well, if you’d like to do that, Paula, I could take Rowan home with me for the night.”
Rowan gave her mother a wide-eyed, meaningful stare.
“No, Paula, don’t bother. I’m just going to fall asleep here. You two go and settle in at the house,” Audra said, and closed her eyes.
Paula put her arm around Rowan. “Okay, I’ll come back in the morning. And I’ll try and talk to the doctor then.”
She kissed her mother and Rowan heard her say, “I’m glad I came. And I’m staying.” Her grandmother’s eyes opened at that, but it was Rowan she looked at. There was something unsettling in her gaze. Rowan wondered what it was that she and her mom weren’t getting.
Just before Izzy closed the door on Audra, she poked her head back inside and cleared her throat delicately until Audra opened her eyes.
“I’ll take good care of the girls,” Izzy said.
“Leave. Them. Be.”
Izzy smiled gently, and with just a touch of the true friend she used to be, said, “It’s not just up to me.”
FOUR
IT WAS NIGHTTIME IN HAVEN WOODS. Lights had popped on inside living rooms, glowing through freshly hung summer drapes. TV sets were tuned to CSI and House, the hour-longs of prime time. Streetlamps illuminated roofs and cast a shadow over broad lawns—tidy, green, the sort of lawns that would feel good on bare feet in a month or so. All the cars in the driveways were SUVs and minivans.
Izzy Riley drove courteously behind the junior Wittmores until they reached Audra’s dark house. She waited in the car while they found the key under the pot of pansies on the front porch, and then gave them a cheery wave as they stepped inside, glad they could not see the expression on her face. Izzy was weary.
At home she turned out the light she had left burning in the foyer and climbed slowly up the stairs to her bedroom, Tansy at her heels. At one time it had been her and Roger’s bedroom, but Roger had been dead about five years. Heart attack
(or something)
Sometimes she missed him, sometimes she didn’t.
She stepped out of her shoes, then dropped them into her closet and stripped to her bra and panties. She put on her robe. The cat jumped on the bed, used to the ritual, and curled up. Tansy would sleep a few hours and then wake to do whatever dirty work cats did in the dark, via the pet door.
It had been a hard day. Margaret’s funeral had been difficult. They had been friends for many, many years—good friends—before she started to piss her off, then topped it with a betrayal that got them all in trouble. But it wasn’t worth thinking about anymore. The point was to move forward.
Izzy sat at her dressing table and creamed off her makeup. Her skin was very good, very receptive to repair. The girl at the MAC counter had said so. Izzy smiled as she remembered the girl at the MAC counter. A silly, silly bitch.
You look just wonderful for your age, the silly bitch had said.
Izzy had reacted hardly at all to the comment and, in fact, she had bought many more products than she had ever planned to buy, or certainly to use, and had thanked the girl with a nice, wide smile. Oh, thank you, dear, you’ve just been such a love.
The MAC products were sitting on her dressing table. She quite liked the eye pencil.
When Izzy dropped in at the MAC kiosk a week or so later, she asked about the girl and was told that she had quit. For personal reasons.
I’ll bet. Taking pains to appear concerned, Izzy gently asked what had happened, and the girl leaned in and whispered, I’m not supposed to tell but … her face, something horrible happened to—but then the counter manager had come around and she couldn’t finish, which was such a shame. But she bet the girl’s face was … well, just awful.
A cup of cold tea she’d forgotten about had formed a skin, but she didn’t have the energy to carry it down to the kitchen. There was still a counter and sink full of dishes down there she needed to clean up after the wake …
She imagined Audra in her hospital bed, unable to sleep for worry about what Izzy was doing with her precious daughter and her precious daughter’s daughter. It would be good for her, that kind of worrying, a proper penance. Marla would call it karma. But that wasn’t really what karma was. Karma was a more complicated comeuppance. This was more like Jainism … all Audra’s doing. Marla wouldn’t know about that, nor would that crowd of hers. They weren’t readers, those girls.
A book lay invitingly open on the bed: Carol Karlsen’s history of New England. She’d only just started it and it hadn’t quite grabbed her yet. The good stuff, she suspected, happened around the late 1600S, so to speak.
In the privacy of her bedroom she let herself admit that it had been a difficult day. It was unfathomable, really, that Chick had crawled into bed and lit herself on fire. How was that even possible? How could she?
She would have a shower and then take the teacup down to the kitchen and make herself a fresh cup. Sleep, she knew, would be reluctant to come. Memories had been unavoidable all day. They’d been such a close-knit gang once, the whole lot of them. The husbands too. When they’d all been young and the children had been at home
hey Mom, I need five bucks
and they’d spent whole weekends together at each other’s houses. Drinks and cards and
what’s this scar here, Iz?
backyard barbecues.
When she forced herself to think it through from Margaret’s point of view, she guessed she understood it well enough. Margaret was a (foolish) romantic, unfashionably in love with her husband, enough to take a great risk, make a great sacrifice. Audra had got caught in that (foolish) romanticism.
Over the past year things had been changing. She couldn’t put her finger on it; it was sort of a constant loose feeling, like a button hanging by a thread, a wobbly heel on a shoe, a pot handle shifting. Their solid group was wiggling and slipping, and that was what was wrong. They had to stick together, they had to maintain. Margaret had broken the rules. It was good, in a way, that she was dead.
Stupid, stupid woman.
a stupid woman gets what she deserves
Her grandmother used to say that all the time. It was all spinning out of control. If she closed her eyes and concentrated she would be able to feel it, as if the very room were spinning, centrifugal force tugging them apart.
Why did Margaret think she was so special? They’d all lost somebody. They’d all had to pay.
She’d been trying to think of the word since the hospital, and it suddenly came to her. Menarche. A girl’s introduction into womanhood. So powerful, that moment in a girl’s life, the transition from useless girl into woman. She smiled, remembering the girl’s shocked face when she asked whether she was bleeding yet …
The fact that Rowan had not yet entered into menarche was a blessing that would save them all. She wanted to applaud her own cleverness, the serendipity of it all. She would be sure to remind Audra of that.
Izzy stood up then, securely tied the robe around her waist and walked down the hall to the closed door. The door that was always closed, except when she opened it.
It was dark inside David’s room, the blinds drawn and the lights off, but she could find every item in the room by memory. She turned the light on anyway. In a cruel, sharp electric gasp, the room laid itself open for her.
It was all as it had been, right down to the forgotten pair of socks at the end of the bed where a sixteen-year-old boy had dropped them. The side table still held a copy of East of Eden, the bookmark a dragon slyly watching a tiny knight at his feet be careful in the company of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup, and four small chunks of agate and a watch, the battery long dead, reading 12:10, whether day or night unknown.
If she opened the closet door there would be his clothes still hanging, and in the dresser, underwear, T-shirts, the many and varied bits and pieces of soccer, baseball, football, basketball uniforms: gold and purple socks, satin shorts in blue with white stripes up the leg, jerse
ys in electric yellow and green, numbers stencilled onto everything: 11, 15, 67.
The air in the room was bruised with time, filled with a heavy sadness that had once been a sharp, bleeding pain.
Izzy sat on the bed and the springs squeaked. She leaned back and spread herself over it. Closed her eyes. Tried to find him in the room.
Mom you’re the best
I’m going to Lonnie’s
Mom, I’m late for practice
“I look wonderful for my age,” she said into the empty room. The words caught and held in the heavy air, fading slowly. She kept her body still to keep the springs quiet. When she shifted they cried out … awful. Like David that day. So she stayed very still, except for two times when she moved just to hear that noise, like a tongue that can’t stay out of the rotten tooth.
what’s this scar, Iz?
She tucked her hands under his pillow and felt there a soft, worn T-shirt. Without looking she knew what it said. HAVEN WOODS SENIOR BOYS CHAMPS 1997. She tugged out a corner of it and held it under her nose. If she tried very, very hard, she could still smell him.
He smelled like time.
She would dream of him tonight, as she did every now and then. In her dreams he was always as he had been that day, her beautiful golden son, her sun.
The others had lost husbands. She’d lost her son. They did not know pain the way she did.
All would soon be made right. The daughters were here, and that would balance things out. Legacy. Blood relatives.
Most important, of course, blood.
FIVE
GLASS WIND CHIMES HUNG from a cord on her grandmother’s front porch. The pieces were all different colours, very pretty, and when Rowan pushed, they swung lazily in an arc. Three, four swings and they settled to a stop. When they became still, Rowan pushed them again.
It was weird not to be at school. She tried to just enjoy the fact, but she couldn’t help looking at her watch once in awhile and wondering where everyone was. There was a funny feeling attached to it, like the way it felt when you stood at the top of the circle stairs in Convocation Hall and leaned over the rail. You could see all the way down to the lobby, the black railing against the white marble floor spinning and spinning. If you looked too long it felt a little like you might fall. That was sort of how it felt not to be at school
The Thirteen Page 5