Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  “You survived it,” Rachel said.

  “You know what I want to be when I grow up?” Pepper said.

  “A cop!” Rachel said to Carole and Will. “Where did I go wrong?”

  “Maybe highway patrol,” Pepper said. “Maybe the marines.”

  “Oh, please,” Rachel said.

  “It’s good to know what you want,” Carole said. At ten she’d been completely under her parents’ thumb. At ten, they’d already made Vassar a fact of her future. It amazed her that Pepper could be so independent so soon. “What made you suddenly decide?”

  Pepper shrugged and looked around. “Stuff,” he said.

  Rachel smiled wanly. She handed Carole some armloads of bittersweet for the table decoration, prickly, difficult stuff to work with. Carole set about untangling the vines.

  “You always said it was up to me.” Pepper never knew when they were kidding and when they were serious, which was probably why he wanted so much structure.

  “And it is, kid,” Rachel said. “You make your own way in this world.”

  There was a noise outside, and Morgan stomped in, shaking off snow. “God damn,” he said. “I almost bought the farm out there.” He unzipped his snowmobile suit and hung it up. Underneath he was wearing a plaid Nehru jacket. He’d put pomade or something on his hair to slick it down. It made him look like Keith Richards, with those spindly legs and his dark smile.

  “What happened?” Will asked.

  “Fell,” Morgan said. “I’m up in back, about halfway between here and the tower. Place I don’t recognize. Looks like it had been planted for Christmas trees or something, although I don’t know how anybody’d be able to harvest way up there.”

  “You fell through?” Will said.

  “It was so deep I couldn’t get up. I got all tangled in the branches under the snow.”

  “You got lucky,” Will said. “Could have been a real bitch.”

  “It was a real bitch,” Morgan said. “I should have been wearing snowshoes. The snow got so deep all of a sudden.”

  “Good thing you weren’t,” Will said. “They can get stuck in the branches. Probably a spruce trap. So how’d you get out?”

  “I swam,” Morgan said, doing a breaststroke for them. “Swam right out until I could stand up again.”

  Carole looked at all the books on the couch. Soul on Ice, Isadora Duncan’s autobiography, and Peyton Place. “You reading these?” she said to Pepper. He nodded.

  “The classics,” Rachel said.

  “Let me show you what I’ve done,” Morgan said to Will, and the two men left on the annual tour of the place, with Morgan showing Will where he’d caulked windows or plugged up holes or put in something new with those odd-looking antique tools he had. Built to last, Morgan liked to say, although the house looked inconsistent. The kitchen cabinets were beautiful, handcrafted of cherry wood, but the appliances were scattered here and there, and there were no counters. There was a magnificent staircase to the mud-floored cellar, but the walls were flimsy and leaky and the doorways had no doors on them. Morgan called in that he was taking Will out to see the barn. They’d be back in a few.

  After they’d gone, Rachel poured wine for herself and seltzer for Carole, took a tin box of cheese crackers from the shelf, and sniffed them. “Not too bad,” she said. She’d taken to wearing her hair parted down the middle, braided, and then the braids coiled into thick rounds at the ears.

  “You look like those Von Trapp chicks,” Carole said of the women who sometimes walked around Montpelier in their dirndles and braids.

  “I can leave it like this for days.” Rachel peered inside a big mason jar of flour. “Damn,” she said. She took the jar to the compost tray in the corner and upended it. The flour spilled out and puffed into a white cloud, and miller moths flew out.

  Carole bit her lip. At the restaurant, she kept everything squeaky clean. She had to. People could get so sick. The fallacy, of course, was that Carole had been eating Rachel’s food for years and never got sick. It made her smile. You thought a thing was true, but maybe it wasn’t.

  “What do you know about the Rowling house?” Carole asked, sitting down at the table.

  “That one up on Molly Supple? What about it?”

  “Do you know if it’s been sold?”

  “Why?”

  “Somebody I used to know. From New York. Said she came up here and looked at it, maybe to buy.”

  “Get out.” Rachel sat down at the table opposite Carole. “Who? Like high school?”

  “Yes.”

  “You keep up with those people? I thought you cut all that off.”

  “She just got in touch out of the blue. Said she was moving up. I told her to stay in New York.”

  Rachel sipped her wine carefully. “How did she know where you are? I mean, really. I always thought nobody knew.”

  “No idea.” And Carole was afraid to know exactly. Could Naomi have tracked down her Social Security number? She’d been using it for the restaurant. The danger was that if Naomi could find her then so could Eddie. He hadn’t yet bothered to do it, so just maybe he never would.

  Rachel pushed the tray of cheese things toward Carole. “You’re all bottled up again, you know that? God, just look at your fingernails, bitten down to the quick.” Carole made fists of her hands. She wished Rachel would just answer the question. “There’s a new CR group at the Episcopal church. You should go, you know. It’s never too late.”

  “I don’t think so,” Carole said. Rachel had gotten her into the consciousness-raising group in San Francisco once. It was all women who took turns talking, and the rule was that you had to let each person talk. No cross-talk was allowed, which meant that there were lots of long, awful silences.

  Carole had hated it. It had embarrassed her the way one after another of the women talked so openly about their private lives. One woman said she had bought a dozen doughnuts and eaten them all in the car. Another was trying not to live in her head, as she put it, but in her body. Carole had found the discussion annoying. Finally a woman named Jo said in this little voice that she needed to speak because she’d cheated on her husband. Carole had perked up. She expected a chorus of questions. With who? When? Does Dave know? She’d forgotten the rule about no interruptions, and the women had waited in silence as Jo labored through some disjointed, off-the-wall story about being on a ladder and some guy holding onto her hand too long and Dave getting in his moods and something that she’d seen in a magazine. Jo was all over the map with her story, and it made no sense at all to Carole at first, but then the parts of it began to fall into place. It was a complete story told in fits and starts and out of sequence, with Jo weeping sometimes and laughing other times, adding up to a very clear whole picture of what had happened and when.

  Jo stopped talking, and there was another long silence. Carole by this time had been fully sucked in by the story. She wondered what the other women were going to do. They couldn’t leave it alone. They would need to do something. And then, as though at some signal, the women crept forward toward Jo. There were seven or eight of them altogether, and they surrounded her murmuring things like It’s okay. You’re only human. These things happen. The soft sound of all those voices was unexpected. They stroked Jo’s hair and took her hands in theirs. Carole’s eyes welled with tears. All that forgiveness. All that comfort.

  “Suit yourself,” Rachel said. “But if you ask me—”

  “I did ask you Rach,” Carole said. “I asked you about that house. The Rowling place. If you know anything.”

  Rachel frowned. “No,” she said. “It’s probably a dump.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “I’m trying to put myself in your shoes,” Rachel said. “I’m thinking that if somebody from my old school showed up. I mean, they all must have known what happened, me leaving school so suddenly and then never coming back. But if they found me, I’d want them to see me, see that everything’s cool now. How I’ve done all right for myself. How I
live. How I kept Pepper and how great he is. I’d want to see what they looked like too, how they changed. If they had at all. God, I’d be riddled with curiosity.” She poked Carole in the arm to make her look up. “Aren’t you?”

  “I’ve already seen her. I went down to New York a few weeks ago to head her off. I told her not to come.”

  “To New York City? What’s the story?”

  “There’s no story. I just told you the story.”

  “You did not, Carole. Try to remember who you’re talking to here.”

  “She has an agenda.”

  “Which is?”

  “It doesn’t matter. She won’t be coming. I was firm.”

  “Firm?” Rachel grinned. “You? What did you say?”

  “I told her she wasn’t welcome, that I’m not her friend and never will be.”

  Rachel stared. “You’re kidding.”

  “Will and I might take a ride by the Rowlings’ on the way home,” Carole said. “See if anybody’s there.”

  “It’s not exactly on the way home,” Rachel said.

  Morgan and Will came stomping in just then, chuffing from the cold, and it was time to fill their plates to overflowing with squash and lasagna and cheese and vegetables canned last summer from the garden. They held hands around the table. On one side, Carole had Dylan, on the other, Will. One big heavy hand and one tiny one. In that circle she felt a current travel among them, connecting them. She was thinking about how good it felt to be here with her friends, so comforting and safe.

  They ate quietly, passing the food up and down the table. After several minutes, they started to talk about holidays when they were kids. Rachel’s childhood had big family dinners after mass. Morgan’s sounded pretty bleak. There never seemed to have been much food. And Will told the story of his mother’s turkey. … Carole was silent, as she always was when the talk turned to the times before they’d known one another. But she was remembering something so vivid she couldn’t get it out of her head. That incredible Christmas tree and the presents at Naomi’s house their senior year.

  Naomi had insisted on Carole’s going over there. Carole just had to see this. They had a real tree this time. And, she’d said with excitement, Daddy and Elayne were not waiting until the last minute or blowing the tree thing off altogether like they usually did. No way. This year she’d begged and begged because it was her senior year and who knew where she’d be next Christmas? And not only had they done it, but Carole had to see the thing. It was so incredibly beautiful, it made up for all the other years.

  Carole had gone over, and sure enough, it was the most gorgeous tree she’d ever seen. It sat in front of the windows in the living room with a million small white lights, covered in big pink and silver bows and shiny ornaments. It had been sprayed with something pearly so it looked like it had been snowed on. But the really amazing part had been the presents, heaped in piles underneath. There had to be fifty, from huge to tiny, and there were only the three people in Naomi’s household. The presents were all wrapped to match the tree. Pink and silver and gold. Naomi had been out of her mind about it. It was as though they’d finally noticed her, she kept saying. They had finally done something that was important to her, and not just grudgingly but in this really big way.

  Carole and Naomi had sat on the couch and admired the tree for a long time. They were giddy with speculation about what might be in the boxes, and it was inevitable that they’d slip off the couch, kneel on the floor, and start shaking one or two, knowing full well they weren’t going to stop there. They were going to open a couple and rewrap them so nobody would ever know.

  Naomi had picked one of the presents. She shook it and made a face. No sound. She’d taken another and done the same thing. So Carole had started rooting around. She picked a big package, the kind of box that a coat might come in. She was expecting the weight of something like that, but the box was so light it slipped from her hands.

  Naomi ripped the paper off the package, and it was empty. She opened more, and they were all empty. She’d just sat there staring at all those empty boxes. Carole knew right then that things like this probably happened to Naomi a lot, but she never talked about them. What made this so much worse was having Carole there to witness her humiliation. Then Elayne had come barging in just like a madwoman. She’d been taking a nap, and when she saw the tree, she’d started screaming. Stupid girls, what do you think you’re doing? She needed the tree to be perfect for a party they were having. When Carole left, Elayne was on the phone to Naomi’s father barking orders for him to call that window-dressing company and do it pronto. Naomi didn’t call Carole for days after that, and when she finally did, she never mentioned the tree.

  “And speaking of old times,” Rachel said, pulling Carole from her memories, “this one has a high school friend who maybe bought the Rowling house and maybe didn’t or won’t— Oh, you tell them.”

  Carole felt loose and out of control. It was one thing to tell Will and then to tell Rachel, one to one, to be in charge of what she said. It was another to hear the information spoken aloud, suddenly everybody else’s property, up for grabs. She wanted to gather it all back in, to vacuum it up. “Just somebody I used to know,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make a mountain out of a molehill.”

  “Call information,” Morgan said. “When you get home, just call and see if there’s a new listing.”

  “They’re driving by,” Rachel said. “After.”

  Carole felt her life spilling out again, becoming public.

  “I want to go, too,” Pepper said.

  “I know right where that house is,” Morgan said. “You go—” His long fingers began to gesture. “It’s hard to explain, but I could show you. I could take you. Hell, we could all go.”

  “Oh,” Carole said.

  “We do need to get out,” Rachel said. “We’ve been here for four days straight.” She glanced at Carole. “You cool with that?”

  To say no would make it all flat-out bizarre. It would put up a red flag in all their minds. “Sure,” she said.

  They cleared the table and put out the pies. Apple, mince, and pumpkin. Then, together, they washed the dishes, which was an ordeal in that house unless, as Morgan said, you really got into the moment Zen-like, enjoying the bubbles, enjoying the great tubs of scalding water that were heated on the stove and brought over for the dishes. By the time they headed out, Carole was feeling confident that the house would be dark and all this worry would be over. But just in case, she wanted to make sure the others understood absolutely. “We’ll only drive by. We won’t stop.”

  Rachel crossed herself. “Scout’s honor,” she said.

  Morgan, Pepper, and Dylan left on the snowmobile, and by the time Carole, Will, and Rachel got to the road, Morgan had the truck idling. Carole and Rachel climbed into the back and sat on a pile of lumber. Carole zipped her parka to the neck and held tight to the side of the truck as they started down the road. Rachel yodeled a few times. She hauled Carole to her knees and made her do it too. Scream at the top of her lungs. She did it until Morgan threw on the brakes for a turn, and they were slammed against the back of the cab. She had a vague idea of where the old Rowling sisters lived. Somewhere out in the hills. Molly Supple was a familiar road name, but she’d never been on it. There were so many little dirt roads crisscrossing out there.

  The truck slowed almost to a stop, then took a sharp right. Overhead branches snapped and whipped at them, and they had to crouch even lower down. “This looks like a damn driveway,” Carole said. “We shouldn’t be going up any driveway.” She got to her knees and banged on the cab roof to get Morgan to stop. He banged back.

  By now the truck was fishtailing and lurching. Its wheels spun and caught. A dog barked up ahead. Carole held on to the rails of the truck bed. She peered around the edge of the cab. “Turn off the headlights,” she yelled at Morgan, and he did. But they were already in somebody’s yard. Before them was a house in full view, every window blazing with li
ght. A Jaguar and a new Toyota Land Cruiser sat in the driveway. Rachel let out a low whistle that set the dog off again. “Shush,” Carole said to the dog.

  Carole could see right through the picture windows to new Sheetrock, all hospital white. In all that light she couldn’t make out where the dog was. But then it moved. It was tied up at the back door, a white dog as big as a calf, with a huge head, working the air with its nose.

  A sound from the house set the dog off even worse. The back door opened, and Naomi stepped onto the porch, looking out into the night. She had a glass in one hand and took a sip. “Shut the fuck up,” she said. The dog snapped at her.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Carole said. But the next thing she knew, Naomi was coming across the front walk toward them, a tiny, thin shadow skittering along in high heels, the dog straining for her on its tether, barking and snarling. She stopped a few feet from the truck, cupped her eyes with one hand, and peered at the truck bed. “Carole bloody Mason?” she said, “Is that you?”

  “You’ll pay for this,” Carole said to Rachel.

  “Sorry,” Rachel whispered. “Really.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Naomi said.

  The light was so bright behind Naomi that it was hard to see her face. “We were just going by,” Carole said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Who do you have with you?” Naomi peered into the cab. “Oh,” she said. “Kids.” Then she noticed Morgan, still at the wheel. “Hello there,” she said.

  “We can’t stay,” Carole said.

  “Of course you can.” Naomi opened the door to the cab. “There’s nobody here but me.”