The old carriage house functioned as a garage now. It was built of adobe, and had been renovated in the middle of the century during one of the periods when the house was used as a rectory by the Catholic church, and even now it was easy to distinguish the relatively new, hard-edged adobe bricks from the weather-softened adobe of the original structure. Some years ago a wooden floor had been built on creosote-soaked beams over the original packed earth.
Behind the carriage house stood the water tower. Long ago the tank and pipes had been cut apart and removed, and the tower was simply storage now. When Phil had taken the house, the tower windows were nailed shut and the door was secured with a rusty padlock. Phil had only recently opened the place up, finding nothing inside but boxes of books, most of which evidently belonged to the church from the house’s rectory days. Perhaps some time he would turn it into something more than storage space, but for now it remained dormant, locked away from the world. It was the top story of the water tower, with its shadowed windows and shingle roof, that was first visible when they descended the hill on their way home from the airport. It was dark, shortly after eight o’clock in the evening. The moon shone overhead, and the sky was clear and starry. Phil slowed the car and turned into the driveway, the headlights illuminating the carriage-house doors as they swung past. He shut the engine off and coasted to a stop, home at last.
A roofed porch ran entirely around the house, in the style of nineteenth-century ranch houses. There were willow chairs and a glider swing in front, which Phil had repaired and recushioned when he had moved in. The side porches were screened and fitted with storm windows, which were stored six months of the year in the carriage house, and which, in the winter, perfumed the porches with the ghosts of old wood and the coal tar smell of creosote. One of the side porches contained beds for sleeping on summer nights, as well as a long dining table. The porch on the opposite side of the house, the side that faced the tower and the old well, had been his mother’s studio and catchall room. Phil had left it entirely alone, aside from cleaning it, and there was still an artist’s cabinet against the inside wall that contained a couple of dozen narrow drawers full of pencils and pens and water color brushes and scraps of charcoal.
The studio porch ran the length of the west-facing side of the house, large enough to house several other pieces of old furniture, including wood and glass cases scattered with a dusty collection of seashells and rocks and Indian baskets and pottery. There were threadbare Navajo rugs on the wooden floors and over the backs of overstuffed chairs, and copper wall lamps with shades of age-browned parchment.
Phil unlocked the porch door, and Betsy walked in and switched on the lamps, then walked straight to a glass case where she stood looking at a heavy chunk of amethyst crystal that lay among a tumble of rocks and minerals and seashells. Phil had never lost his fascination with that same piece of amethyst or for the nautilus shells and the polished agate. The enclosed porch had the atmosphere of a dusty and rarely visited desert museum, a place that, ironically, recalled the world when it was young, when wonderful things lay strewn on the ground like castaway gems. Watching Betsy now, he was certain that she saw all of it as he did: the same suggestive wonder in the purple amethyst and the chunks of desert rose and petrified stone, the same seacoast dreams in the turban shells and brittle stars and cowries. There was an old trunk full of games in the corner, most of them nearly antiques now, and Betsy opened the trunk and looked in, pulling out Puzzle Peg, which was exactly what he anticipated she’d do.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s the same,” she said. Her voice carried the sound of satisfaction.
“Just exactly.”
“It smells the same, too. Just like I remember.” She sat down in a chair, sliding into it so that her feet sprawled out in front of her. “This is where I used to like to read,” she said, opening the box and pulling out the game board and the tiny carton of pegs, which she lay on the table by the chair. Then she slid open one of the narrow drawers in the old map cabinet, which contained thousands of photographic prints, roughly shuffled into a sensible order. “Can I look at these?” she asked.
“Sure. You can look at anything you want. Put them back in the right drawers, though, okay?”
She nodded, then shut the door without looking at any of the prints. She sat down on a chair by the table and started putting loose pegs in the Puzzle Peg board. Phil went back outside and got the rest of the bags and boxes out of the trunk, and then stood in the darkness for a moment watching Betsy for a moment longer through the window. Somehow he didn’t feel overwhelmed anymore by the thought of caring for her. A couple of days ago it had seemed unimaginable, but now it wasn’t unimaginable at all. Some time this week he would see about getting her into school, which sat at the back of the adjacent neighborhood. It was an easy walk through the grove and down the path by the creek. He had a friend who coached softball, and Phil and Betsy had talked on the flight from Austin about her getting into the spring league. She had wondered if she could take a break from playing piano, which had always been Mrs. Darwin’s idea and not her own, but Phil had talked her into trying it for a couple of months more on a trial basis as soon as he could get a tuner out to work over his mother’s old upright Baldwin. These familiar things might provide a little bit of structure for her anyway, and the rest of their life together—the shape and tenor of their relationship—would have to take care of itself. Inevitably it would.
He headed inside, carrying her suitcases up the stairs to her attic bedroom. Betsy followed, lugging another small suitcase and her carry-on bag with her ball glove shoved inside. She hadn’t let go of it since she’d left home in Austin. Straight off, as soon as the light blinked on, she saw the two framed photos sitting on the night-stand. She dropped her bags onto the bed and looked at the photo of Marianne.
“It’s my mom?”
“Yeah,” he said. “When she was a girl scout. She kept it framed like that. I think your grandma had it up in the house when we were kids, but it got put with your mom’s stuff that was stored away. I put the rest of the things in the drawer there.”
Betsy nodded, looking at the drawer but not opening it. “And this one kind of looks like my mom, too. But old.”
“That’s your grandma. Don’t you think you look kind of like her?”
Betsy shrugged. “She’s old.”
“Only about forty, I think. That’s not old.”
“I think she looks like my mom.”
“So do you. You three are peas in a pod. Sweet peas.”
Betsy rolled her eyes at him and smiled. “I like these,” she said.
“I didn’t know whether you’d want them put up,” Phil said, “and so if you don’t …”
“It’s okay,” she said.
She moved to the window and looked down over the grove, and in the silence he considered asking her if she was certain she was all right, if she wanted to talk about her mother. But he had already covered that ground on the plane, and she had certainly sounded all right. She had always been quiet. Perhaps she was more quiet now than ever, but it was hard to tell. And anyway, talking things out had always seemed to him to be overrated; too much talking was often the same thing as getting worked up.
“I’ll just leave you to it, then,” he said. “All of this stuff is yours now. If you don’t like the pictures on the wall or something, just tell me, and we’ll move them out.”
“I like it,” she said. “I like these windows.”
“I do, too. The rest of the house is yours, too. It’s your home. There’s no place in it where you can’t go.”
“Okay.” She looked at him evenly, as if none of this was news to her, and he realized that he expected something from her, some indication that she grasped the tragedy of her own life, that she was reacting, that she wasn’t bottling it up only to be steamrollered by it later. He knew, too, that he wanted reassurance, and there was nobody else but Betsy to give it to him. She smiled at him
again. She apparently was satisfied.
“And there’s ice cream in the kitchen,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Do you need anything at all?”
She shook her head. Then she opened her luggage and took out two stuffed animal toys, Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. She made the two creatures comfortable on the pillows.
Phil liked that. They made the room a child’s room in their small way, something that it hadn’t been until that moment, and they were the first thing about the room that was distinctly Betsy’s. He felt an irrational element of hope in this small beginning, although the notion made him want to say something else—the right thing, whatever that was. It occurred to him suddenly that Betsy wasn’t necessarily avoiding anything at all with her silence, that this was just as likely her own attempt at quiet dignity. She rummaged in her unlatched suitcase, and Phil stepped toward the stairs. Just then the doorbell rang, and he headed down, leaving her to unpack. It was Elizabeth on the front porch, as he had half expected it would be. She was holding a basket with a bottle of wine in it and what looked like cheeses and crackers.
“This is for you,” she said when he opened the door and let her in. “It’s for being so gallant to me the other night.”
25
THE PRIEST STOOD up again. He was stiff, and his knees ached. The aluminum frame of the chair cut across his back just below his shoulders, and he had to sit hunched forward to avoid being crippled by it. Clearly the chair was designed by a sadist. Still, it was better than no chair at all. He flexed his back and neck, loosening up. He looked out past the edge of the shed, keeping himself hidden, and checked the front of the house. A half-hour ago a second car had pulled into the driveway, and the car was still there. The last thing he wanted to be was a snoop, but he had thought he recognized the car, and for the entire half-hour he had been waiting for the woman who owned it to appear from within the house in order to have a look around outside. It might, of course, not be who he thought it was. In the darkness it was hard to tell. Cars all looked alike these days.
He smashed up the wrapper to the sandwich he’d just finished and put it into his pocket, then stepped out from inside the open shed and peered down into the depths of the pool. The moonlight that shone on the water was mere moonlight, and he saw nothing within the pool but darkness. He felt something more, though, felt it in his bones and joints, like winter weather. He knew exactly what it was, too: a ghost, a lost soul, someone long gone out of the world, awakened from its sleep by heavy rains and rising water. He focused his eyes on the wind-ruffled reflection of the moon.
26
BETSY SAT DOWN on the bed—on her bed—and stared at the mason jar that sat on the windowsill. It hadn’t sat on the windowsill last time she was here; she would have remembered. Inside the wax-sealed jar lay half a dozen objects, including an old hatpin with a carved jewel on top, red like a cloudy ruby. There was a junky old pocketknife, a thimble with a red smudge on the side like a bloody fingerprint, a little horse made of dull metal, a small glass that reminded her of her inkwell.
It struck her that this was the first time she had thought about it as her inkwell, and not her mother’s or her grandmother’s. She remembered Uncle Phil referring to it as “Mrs. Darwin’s glass inkwell.” She wished she could tell him about it, about why Mrs. Darwin had wanted it, about Mrs. Darwin sneaking around the house looking for it, going into her mother’s room. But she wouldn’t tell him. She wouldn’t tell anybody about it, and anyway, Mrs. Darwin was far away now.
She glanced around, suddenly cautious. Did Uncle Phil know what these things were? As an experiment she pushed at the jar lid, careful not to tear the wax. It was twisted on solidly. The force of loosening it would break the seal for sure. She pictured scraping the wax from the lid, maybe into a pan or something, and melting it again to reseal the jar after she’d opened it. Perhaps she could cut a line around the wax right at the base of the lid, twist the lid off, and then press the wax back into place when she replaced the lid.
She set the jar down again and stepped away from the window, where she stood listening for a moment, barely breathing. The old stairs were creaky, and there was no chance of anyone surprising her, but even so she would have to be careful. A woman laughed downstairs; Uncle Phil said something.
There was a patch of moonlight on the sill of the adjacent window, and she picked up the jar now and set it carefully into the light, then bent over and looked at the contents more closely. They seemed to glow now, as if soaked with moonlight. The red glass of the hatpin was clear, and not the dull color it had seemed to be in the lamplight. It seemed almost to burn, and the red smudge on the white thimble wasn’t a fingerprint after all, but was clearly a miniature painting: the cross-hatched structure of a tiny roller-coaster. The spiral swirl in the marble seemed to be turning slowly on edge, like a rainbow nebula, and its colors were bright and clear. Her eye was drawn to the roller-coaster, and although the painting couldn’t have been more than half an inch high, it was perfectly and completely rendered with a three-dimensional clarity. She stared at it now, her eyes following the swerve of the tracks until she made out the little car, halfway down an immensely steep hill, and she was swept suddenly with the dreamlike feeling of falling, and then of wind blowing her hair back as she was swept upward on the rackety rails of an old beach-side coaster, straight toward an immense blue sky. …
She looked away, breathed deeply, and focused on the room around her. It seemed to her that if she had let herself go, she might have lost herself in that sky, that she might have flown upward until she was so far out of the earth’s atmosphere that she wouldn’t be able to find her way down again, and the realization both frightened her and thrilled her.
She moved the jar back out of the moonlight. The glow faded within the jar and the objects appeared once again to be old, weather-beaten, and dirty. Uncle Phil didn’t know what they were. She was certain of that. She stood looking through the window, at the tree beyond the balcony, at the way the heavy branches wrapped around the narrow ledge. It would be nothing to step out through the high windows, climb over the balcony railing, and make her way out into those branches. She picked up her book bag and then stood at the window, making perfectly certain that she was alone.
The voices downstairs had settled into conversation.
She pushed the window open and stepped out onto the narrow balcony, feeling the moist night air through her clothes, carrying her book bag and leaving the light on in the room behind her. After glancing back one last time and listening again for the sound of voices downstairs, she swung her leg over the railing and set her foot on a branch, which swayed slightly under her weight. The limbs of the pepper tree were gnarled, and there were bumps and depressions in the rough bark. It would be an easy tree to climb, even in rainy weather. She slung the bag over her shoulder and reached into the foliage to grab a branch overhead. Holding on, she walked steadily out into the center of the tree, the leaves brushing her face. The ground was invisible far below, the tree trunk half-obscured by shadow. When she glanced back she could still see the edge of the lit window through the feathery leaves. Lamplight from the interior of the room shone out onto the trunk a few feet below the limb she stood on. There, nearly hidden by the heavy scar of a broken-off limb, was a deep hollow in the tree. The hollow was deep, deep enough to hide the box.
She sat down on the branch and slid downward, leaning backward to balance herself, reaching with her toe for the branch beneath her. She tipped forward and slid, braking her fall by grabbing the trunk of the tree, and landed solidly on the limb underneath. Her balcony was above her now, and one of the kitchen windows directly below. She crouched on the branch, and felt inside the hollow. It was dry inside, sheltered from the rain. She took the box out of the bag and set it in the hole, tilting it against the back wall. The depression that it sat in would keep it from falling out, and there was no way in the world that anyone could see the hollow from the ground, let alone the box hidd
en inside.
Remaining there for a moment, she looked up through the branches at the moon overhead, which shone through a leafy window in the canopy of the tree. The night air was cool, but not as cold as at home. Home … Austin wasn’t her home anymore. She didn’t go to Jonas Salk School anymore, and maybe she would never see her friends there again. Where she had lived all her life was gone, and she knew that she would never go back. She found that she was crying, sitting on the limb now with her feet dangling, holding on with one hand. Her mother had been sick for a long time—off and on for years. Sometimes there were good times when she was well, but Betsy had learned that those were just the in-between times: sometimes as short as a couple of days, sometimes as long as a year. But things would always be bad again.
She stood up on the branch and wiped her eyes. It was time to go back in. If Uncle Phil came upstairs he probably wouldn’t like it that she had climbed out through the window, and she didn’t want him to start thinking about the tree and why she was climbing around in it—especially because of what Mrs. Darwin had told him about the inkwell, how she had lied about it. And now Uncle Phil probably thought that she was lying. He was just too nice to say so.
Betsy turned around and felt for a handhold above, realizing with growing fear that it wasn’t going to be easy to climb back up onto the limb above her. Getting down had been simple, but …
The Rainy Season Page 13