by Pam Lewis
Rachel and Will had filled her hospital room with snapshots. They were taped to the walls and propped up on the dresser, the night table, and the vacant second bed. She supposed it was a type of therapy for when she came out of her sleep, to remind her of who she was, to pull her back into the world again. She went through the room, looking at each one. Carole and Rachel as hippie chicks in Golden Gate Park, Carole holding Dylan as a brand-new baby, the six of them—Will, Carole, and all the Weaver-Lears—crammed onto the sofa at Chacha’s. She took several to the window and studied them in the light. In each one, she was the one with the half smile, the reluctant one, like in that children’s song, Which one of these is not like the others? It was staggering to see this, to see in these pictures how different she was from everybody else, and it made her wonder if there was any undoing what she’d done, any chance that she would ever be free of what she’d done, and worse, what she’d done to them, how she’d betrayed her friends, one after the other, for years. She went back to look at the pictures spread out in the room, looking for what else, but of course it wasn’t there. Her life had begun with Rita’s death, so there was nothing from before, not here, not at home, not anywhere. She had betrayed not only the people in these pictures, but everyone. Her mother, her father, her aunt. Everyone.
She looked at a picture of Will and herself on Mount Hunger, a picture they’d had in the house for years. Why hadn’t she ever noticed before the way he held on to her with such gusto, for dear life, his arm tightly around her and not letting go, his smile huge and happy, while she, smaller and slighter beside him, looked stiff and tentative, seemed even to be pulling away, her head tilted just slightly away from him as if she wasn’t sure? Oh, how she wished she could just go back and hug him to her, open her mouth the way he did in that wide, carefree smile.
She could hear him out in the corridor, talking to one of the nurses or to her doctor as he did each time he visited her. He was the one in charge, the one they talked to. He would put her well-being ahead of everything else. He would never do anything to interfere with her recovery from the trauma of that night. The door swung open, and he came in. He kissed her lightly on the cheek, put a hand to her forehead to check her temperature the way he always did, then held up her hand to check the bandages on her fingers. “How are you?” he asked her.
“Good,” she said.
“How good?” His face was empty of expression, as though he was about to give her bad news.
“Good enough,” she said. She knew it was coming, and it made her heart pound.
“I can’t keep waiting on it, Carole,” he said. “But I don’t want to do this too soon.”
“Do it now,” she said, feeling tears building in her eyes. She’d opened the dialogue on the day she told him about Eddie. She knew he would have his say.
He walked to the window and looked out, then turned. “That day?” he said. “I need to tell you what happened that day. I want you to know.” He came back toward her, but instead of sitting on the bed as he usually did, he drew up a chair and sat facing her, eye to eye, the same chair Weed had sat in, and began. “When I came home that day and found you with those pictures and you told me about Eddie and what happened.” He shook his head. “It was like I didn’t even know you. And then you went flying out of our house like it was all between you and him, and I was left sitting with the pictures all spread out and the sight of your truck going like hell down East Hill Road. And I thought to myself, shit. What just happened? I watched your truck lay rubber, and you know what kept coming into my head?” His eyes wouldn’t let hers go. “Fuck you, Carole Mason,” he said, and the shock of it, like this, face to face, was like a blow. “I thought we knew each other pretty well. I know two people can’t know everything. But the major stuff. And all that time you had that guy, Eddie, on the brain. You thought you killed somebody and you didn’t tell me. Me. Will.” His hand rose and thudded against his heart. “I was in your corner, baby. Flat out. That’s the way it was, and I always thought you knew that. But then, see, I began to wonder if maybe I’d just been the jerk all along. Maybe I was just part of the disguise. Like who’s going to come looking for you here? With me? With that ol’ nigga boy Will Burbank.”
“Oh, Will.”
“Shut up.” He glared at her. “You didn’t trust me, Carole. I saw you ride off, and I knew what a son of a bitch Eddie was, and I didn’t care. They all deserve each other, I thought. You lied through your teeth to me.” He shook his head without taking his eyes from hers. “It’s still hard to believe. I put on my coat and I left. I walked almost to Shady Rill, and when it got dark, I turned around. I was gone maybe three hours. When I came back, you were still gone. I kicked around here for a while. I ate dinner by myself at the table. And then just to drive the spike further into my heart, I turned over all those pictures again and I read that article. If I hadn’t done that, I’d have stayed there feeling pissed off, and you’d be dead. But those pictures. What kind of a guy would do that with a kid? That’s a sick guy who would show you that. And you still hadn’t come back. By then it must have been four hours. Four hours. I called over there and got no answer. I called Chacha’s just in case you went there—”
She reached out to touch him, but he folded his arms over his chest and leaned back. “I knew what to do.” He smiled but without warmth. “At least I’m good for that much. When something goes wrong, I know what to do, and I do it. I went over there. I called emergency from Naomi’s phone.” He looked at the backs of his hands briefly and then back at her. “You almost didn’t make it, Carole. You’d done all the wrong things. You know it. I don’t have to tell you.”
All the wrong things, and for a long time too, not just that night. “I—” she began.
“I’m not done. Where they found you, you weren’t even very far in the woods. I knew Naomi was dead when I saw her, and so did Weed, but he did everything by the book. Nobody’s ever dead until they’re warm and dead. They got you both into hypothermia wraps. It took a while to get you out. They found Eddie the next day with dogs. He was pretty twisted up. What happened out there?”
“He pushed us both into the brook and then left us to die of hypothermia,” she said. “I followed him out, and he took the wrong path. I was there when he went into that spruce trap. I knew exactly what it was and I called to him so he would fall in.” She looked into his dark eyes. “I wanted to be the one who did it.”
“Oh, man,” he said.
“He tried to kill us both. He used the information in your column, Will. He knew all about it.”
“You should have told me about him.” His eyes were wet. “None of that needed to happen if you’d just said something.”
It might all have been taken care of some other way. The thought was staggering. It was true. Naomi would be alive. Eddie. She wouldn’t have nearly died herself. Will would never have had to find her. If she’d just said something. She remembered all the times she’d almost told him, all the times she’d imagined taking charge, telling Will to sit down and listen and not say a word until she was through telling him and to hell with the consequences. She’d imagined that dozens of times, yearned for it. And she knew the reason she’d never done it. Because of what might happen if she did, what he would be faced with. She’d never had the courage to find out before, and while it wasn’t exactly courage now, the time had come and there was no getting around it. She was surprised at how calm she felt, how sure of the truth.
“You said I never told you because I didn’t trust you, Will.” He nodded. “But that’s not true. The reality is, Will, that I did trust you, and I do trust you now. I trusted you to understand the choice you would have had to make once you knew. To stay with me knowing what you knew, or to leave me because of it. I didn’t know which you would do, and I was too afraid to find out.” She was looking directly into his eyes. “I still am,” she said. She waited for what seemed like forever. He sat back, not taking his eyes from hers. He blinked once, but he never look
ed away. She could hear the PA system in the hall, the little chimes, and then “Will Dr. Adams please pick up on seven. Paging Dr. Adams.”
He was studying her face the way he had that first night at Chacha’s, the night they met. Her eyes, her nose, her lips. “I’m not going to leave,” he said.
* * *
The day Carole returned to work was sunny and warm. All the hillsides were that pale chartreuse that comes only for a few days in May. The bandages were off her hands and feet, and there was only a little permanent damage. The tips of the index and middle fingers of her right hand were gone. Otherwise, she was fine. She caressed the two smooth mounds with her thumb. In the month she’d spent at home after her release from the hospital, she’d gained six pounds and had to buy some clothes. Will had gone along to help her. He had picked out the dress she had on today. Lighter than air, and pretty. White with blue flowers. She had on white sandals, and her hair was loose around her shoulders, a strand of white beads warm at her throat.
She was resting at a table at the front when she heard unbroken honking in the street below. She stepped to the window to see that an old man was standing in the middle of Main Street, stopping traffic with one hand while the woman with him crossed the street. The woman had on a red cape and was younger, with jet-black hair drawn so tightly back that even from where Carole stood, the sharp line of the woman’s part was clear. It was pretty obvious they weren’t from here, and pretty obvious the man was showing off for her. A couple of people yelled out at him, and then the two of them disappeared on Carole’s side of the street under the window, where she couldn’t see them anymore.
A few minutes later, she was in the kitchen, and Sandy came through the swinging doors. “People out there want to speak to the owner,” she said.
Carole came out to the floor, drying her hands on a towel. First she recognized the red cape of the woman from the street, and a moment later, once she could see his face, she knew the man.
Her father was standing tight at the woman’s side, glancing about the room. Carole stopped and took a breath at the same moment her father saw her and raised an arm like a salute. She was stunned to see how old he’d become. His hair was white and coarse, and he walked toward her tilted slightly, as if making an effort to conceal a real limp. In all these years, whenever she’d thought of him, she’d recalled the man he was at her mother’s memorial service, gliding around the place fully in charge. And handsome. The women that day had been all over him.
They stood facing each other for several seconds. She wasn’t sure what to do. Then he wrapped his arms around her, and she was filled with the familiar smell of him—at once bitter and clean. He held her for several seconds and then backed off, staring at her. He shook his head. “My God,” he said. “Look at you. More like your mother than ever.”
The woman stepped forward and gave her a strong, hard handshake. Her wrist was harnessed in silver and bone jewelry. “I’m Gloria,” she said. “At last we meet.”
“May we sit down?” her father asked.
She led the way to a free table close to the front. Her father attended to Gloria, pulling out her chair a bit, standing behind her as she pulled the chair in. Then he sat opposite Carole and looked around, surveying the restaurant.
“I’ve had it for four years. It keeps me busy.” She knew how great it looked, full and bustling, and it smelled great too. Her father had to see that. He had to be impressed.
But he made a slight grimace and held his hand to his eyes. “I wonder if we could take the table over there?” He pointed a few tables away. “We’ll be looking directly into the sun in a few minutes.” Gloria was already gathering up her big slouchy bag for the move. She was obviously used to this.
When they were settled again, her father looked around. “Hard to find you here,” he said. “We had to ask a number of times where Chacha’s was. You should hang a sign out there. Advertise.”
Gloria gave Carole’s hand a reassuring pat as if to say, Don’t take your father too seriously, dear. He means well. Her mother used to run interference for him that way, but it irritated her coming from Gloria.
“I don’t want a sign,” Carole said to her father. “I’ve never needed one. People know—”
He looked around. “But more people would know if—”
“Daddy,” she said. “Please. I said I didn’t need one.”
“Your father and I went back and forth, didn’t we, Conrad?” Gloria said, changing the subject for them. “Should we just arrive and surprise you, or call ahead? Well, we just took a chance and came. We’ve been in Montreal, and we have to go on this afternoon. I hope it isn’t too big a shock, dear. We didn’t mean for that, of course.”
Carole felt all at sixes and sevens with him. Familiar, strange, with everything to talk about and nothing at all. He was out of context, like someone she barely knew. She’d bolted from that memorial service and left him stranded, and she’d often thought how he must have looked for her, how bitter he would have been and disappointed. But then he’d had detectives. “You’ve always known where I was,” she said. “And yet you never came.”
He sucked in his lips in the way she remembered. “I hit you that time,” he said. “I was never able to forgive myself.”
“It was never because you hit me,” she said. “You had every right.”
He put a finger to his lips. “No.”
“Not for that, for something else.”
Now the tears were coming, one trail then two, streaming down his old cheeks. “Let’s not,” he said.
She wiped her own tears away with the back of her hand and smiled at him and then at Gloria. “I used to go back and look at our building on Sixty-second,” she said. “I’d stand out there and look up.”
“Oh, my,” he said. And she was aware of Gloria moving closer to him protectively.
“Are you hungry?” Carole said.
“I think just a tuna sandwich for me,” her father said. Gloria ordered a salad. It wasn’t exactly the kind of food that would show off her restaurant, but she called Sandy over and placed the orders. Her father took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, then sat up straight, his eyes dry. He nudged Gloria and pointed to her purse.
“Oh, yes!” Gloria said. She removed a stack of photographs and handed them to him. He spread them on the table. “The family,” he said. He pointed to the smiling faces. Carole looked eagerly for pictures of herself, her mother. Instead they were photographs of strangers. Schoolchildren with missing teeth. Smiling families. Her father became animated, naming these new stepbrothers and sisters-in-law. Her new nieces and nephews. Gloria told little stories about some of them. All the faces blurred.
“You’ll come to visit us,” her father said. “You’re welcome anytime, and of course the kids will all be so happy to meet you.” Her father had that old way of owning a conversation, as though after all these years and then coming into her world, he was still the person in charge, still the daddy.
At that moment, Sandy arrived and slid the platters onto the table.
“Marvelous,” Gloria said. Carole looked at the two of them, inspecting their plates the way people did, and she knew then. Let’s not, her father had said. He didn’t want to know why she left.
He made a fuss of repositioning his plate as though it had been done all wrong. He paused and looked at Carole. “You’re very changed.” He glanced at Gloria. “Right? Isn’t she very different from the pictures I showed you?”
Gloria studied her before speaking. Then she smiled and didn’t look so hard. “She’s very lovely, Conrad,” she said.
“We’ve lost so much time,” he said, his eyes on Carole. “Ten years. All those years. And now this.” He gestured to the restaurant and shook his head. “Hardly what we—” he began.
“But quite wonderful,” Gloria said.
“Hardly what your mother and I had in mind for you.”
“What you had in mind?” she said, feeling momentarily blindsided the wa
y she used to, as a girl, by how easy it was to disappoint him. How, once, she would have needed to find out what they had in mind and then try to make it happen, but that no longer mattered. Well, this is what I’m doing, she thought to herself. She looked over to where Rachel and Morgan and the kids were sitting, their usual place by the window. “Some people you should meet,” she said to them. “Come on over. Sandy will bring your sandwiches.”
When they were settled on the couches at the window, Carole introduced them all to one another. “Get out!” Rachel said. “You’re Carole’s dad?” She drew closer, her bells jingling. Morgan sprawled beside her, an arm slung over her shoulders.
Her father was immediately taken with Pepper. Pepper now ironed all his own clothes, and it showed in the crisp seams running down the fronts of his secondhand pants. He went to the barber on his own every five weeks and looked like a kid who’d stepped right out of the 1950s. Her father quizzed the boy about school, about what he liked to do, and Pepper explained that he had been home-schooled at times in the past, but this fall he was entering seventh grade at Union 32, the regional school. He was interested in math. Somehow Pepper knew to call him “sir” at the end of every answer.
Carole enjoyed seeing them hit it off so well, enjoyed seeing her father smile and nod with interest at the things Pepper said. She enjoyed seeing Pepper sit with his erect posture, understanding that he was making a good impression, playing to his audience. And it gave her pleasure to think about the time all those years ago when she’d gone to her father’s office and asked for legal advice about Rachel’s pregnancy. He’d refused to give it to her because he’d had contempt for the girls at the home. She’d known her own mind better than she knew at the time, and she’d chosen well. Rachel was the person to whom she had remained loyal. Now here was her father, enchanted by that same baby. She wanted to tell him, but to do so would be to embarrass Rachel and Pepper both, so she kept quiet.