After the cake and presents and the playing of the album multiple times, her girlfriends left and she and Carson played Scrabble, Kara looking on and offering suggestions to both, which of course skewed the game. They gave it up and went outside into the sultry June evening, walking through damp pasture rife with croaking toads and the loud love songs of cicadas, to their usual spot. When she thought, now, of how much freedom she’d had with Carson, how her parents never followed her or asked where she went or what she did, she wondered how they could have been so unconcerned. She knew Savannah’s every movement, could reach her by cell phone anytime; she couldn’t imagine allowing such freedom—and with a boyfriend, no less! Her parents had put such faith in her…too much, it turned out, but she was trying not to blame them—they’d been as well intentioned as she.
That evening, her birthday, she’d felt so certain of her life, of her future with Carson. He was seventeen then, his body a man’s body, sculpted by the hard, respectable work of farming. They’d taken everything off, there in the deep shadows of the wooded hillside, and explored each other’s bodies with the unabashed joy of being young and together and free. She had tasted all of him, as he had her, and they’d talked in husky low voices about when they would make love for real. They wanted it to be special, believed they were special, that their love was rare and real. He had said, that evening, that they should plan on building their house on that very spot some day, so that they would always be a part of the lives their parents led, always close by and ready to help out.
She’d ruined everything by marrying Brian. She didn’t see it that way at the time; she’d seen an essential good being done, believed that making such a sacrifice for the love of her family was an act that could not be wrong. That the outcome must, by virtue of the power of moral correctness, be positive for everyone involved. That Carson would recover and eventually find the woman truly meant for him. And maybe now he had. She wondered if he thought so—then she thought, of course he did. He was delighted with Val; why wouldn’t he be?
Even so, the outcome hadn’t been as good as she’d hoped for the people who were supposed to have benefited: the farm continued hemorrhaging money, Julianne got pregnant in high school, Beth was turned off from marriage and domestic life, and Kara—well, Kara was fine, Kara was happy, but she would’ve been regardless. She’d gotten the best of their parents’ attributes, all the wheat and none of the chaff. And Meg got Brian, and this life of cool privilege. She also got Savannah—but she might have gotten her anyway. Seeing her and Carson together had not resolved a thing.
Carson, though…lucky for him, he was about to be married to a young, healthy, beautiful woman who clearly adored him. And his parents, they’d continued to do all right even with him away. Maybe she shouldn’t feel guilty; she’d unknowingly protected him from what Brian was about to have to handle: a terminally ill wife whose pre-death care would be laborious and expensive, if she waited until after she was wheelchair-bound to end things; a spouse who would take her own life—though how she’d do it she didn’t know. She knew very well what she didn’t want; figuring out what she did want, however, was no simple thing.
In the journal, she wrote:
It’s Tuesday, and raining. Should I take the rain as a sign? No softball practice for you this afternoon, no golf for Dad. I could make us a good family dinner, feed you well, then tell you both what’s happening with me. I might do that, after we get back from seeing Grandpa Spencer. Or I might not. Right now I feel like a fugitive, keeping my truth hidden behind a façade of normal life—our life, where we are all so busy that none of us really sees what’s true about the others around us.
She stopped to consider that last sentence. My, how the subconscious flows from the pen. What might she be missing about her husband or her daughter while peering so intently inward? What might she have missed all along? It was impossible to know, especially in Brian’s case. She didn’t bother to look too closely there, unwilling to raise in herself what would be the required reaction to, say, his having an affair.
She thought, too, of the secrets she’d been keeping over the years. Secrets from Brian about the question of Savannah’s paternity, secrets from Savannah about how well she knew Carson, secrets from Carson and from her sisters about why she’d taken up with Brian—it was a muddy spiral of revisionist history, and it no longer sat well with her.
What to do about it? She had no idea.
For a long time she sat and watched the raindrops dimpling the surface of the pool, streaming off the potted palms; for all the gloom, she did love the smell of a rainy day, mist thickening the air with divine perfume. Her mother had liked to say that rain was the Virgin Mother weeping with joy and replenishing the Earth for all her children. Meg hadn’t been as attached to her mother’s sainted idol, hadn’t ever been able to see such benevolence in the hardscrabble life they’d lived. Maybe if they’d gone to church as their mother had as a girl—but her father said church was more likely to ruin them. She wondered now if his real issue was in facing all those judgmental eyes, in having his girls scrutinized and pitied…. She wrote:
Be brave in your life, Savannah, but not foolish. Regrets are inevitable, and pile up like the stones of a cairn—but be careful not to let them rise so high that you can’t see over the top.
Like a song whose words had been too quiet to decipher until now, she heard her own advice echoing in the pattering rain. Had she let her stones pile up too high? She saw the poor choices she’d made as boulders, her good intentions buried and gasping under the weight of unforeseen consequences. But maybe it wasn’t too late to redeem herself, at least in part.
She went inside to get the phone.
Thirty-seven
IT WAS A RARE DAY WHEN CARSON WASN’T WITH VAL OR GENE OR ANY OF his friends and also had no professional event on his immediate horizon. The promoter of his New Orleans concert had canceled the date at the last minute, citing reconstruction foul-ups; they’d try again for late summer. So he’d returned to Seattle and let Val go on to Bali without him; he could use the time to get his condo cleaned up before the movers came. In his experience, they’d pack everything in the place, even the garbage, if you didn’t tell them otherwise.
He’d just poured himself a tall glass of Japanese beer when his phone rang. He glanced at the display but without his reading glasses, he couldn’t see who was calling.
“McKay here,” he answered.
A short silence, then, “It’s Meg. Is it raining there?”
“Meg who?” he asked, never imagining his Meg would ever call, let alone start such an exceptional event so casually.
“Powell. Hamilton. Powell-Hamilton.”
“Meg?”
“Yes. Have I called at a bad time?”
“No! I’m—no! And it is raining here. Why do you ask?”
“It’s raining here,” she said. “Has been all day. But it’s warm, and, really sort of pleasant.”
She sounded so odd; was she drunk? He looked at the clock, an antique circle of distressed wood hung high up his painted brick wall, between twelve-foot-tall windows. Eleven-twenty-five, which meant three hours later in Florida. A bit early for her to be drinking. Him too, now that he thought of it, but he’d been up sorting and discarding since six.
“Not so warm here, but not bad. I mean, I’m inside, so…”
“Your mother said I’d be lucky to find you home. You’re hard to reach, she said.”
“Mom gave you my number, then.”
“I hope that was okay. I told her…” she sighed, “I told her I needed to tell you something very important—and she relented, even though I refused to tell her what it was. Is. It’s—well, you know, I probably should’ve thought about this a little more before I called. I’m sorry…”
He sat on a bar stool, baffled and intrigued by the calm yet eerie quality of her voice. “Don’t be. It’s fine. I mean…I’m, well, I’m glad to hear from you.” He was, strangely.
“I d
on’t know…I feel like I might be burdening you, when what I want is to unburden me. Well, and you, too. I think it’s something you’ll be glad to know…”
“Spit it out,” he said, and in saying it remembered hearing the same hesitancy the day they broke up, remembered telling her to just spit out whatever it was. So little had changed.
“If this were a movie, I’d make a dramatic pause here, then say, ‘Carson, I’m dying.’”
“Good thing it’s not a movie, then,” he said, taking a sip of beer.
“…Carson?”
At the sound of her voice, his body went cold.
“No one knows yet,” she went on. “No one except the specialist I saw last week and my partner Manisha—I had to tell her because, well, I can’t go back to work. But nobody else…just you.”
He stood and looked around the room as if searching for her; he needed to see her. This couldn’t be real. The once-upon-a-time love of your life did not just call and say she was dying. It was unreal; it was crazy. Maybe that was it—maybe she was crazy.
“Just wait,” he said, looking out the window at Puget Sound but not seeing it. “What do you mean, dying?”
“I know…I’m sorry. I mean, it’s a rotten thing to drop on you, but I have to tell you because that way you’ll understand why I’m saying what I’m about to say.”
“Dying how? Dying—dying when?” He couldn’t seem to move past this single point.
“I don’t know when—or how, for sure; that’s a problem I’m still struggling with. It’s ALS. Lou Gehrig’s disease?”
“No.” He refused to believe her. “Come on. Nobody gets that anymore—they found a cure after all those Jerry Lewis telethon things.”
“Carson, that’s for muscular dystrophy—a different disease, which, I should add, also has no cure. But that one’s not always fatal, thank God.”
“Okay, well—wait, what do you mean, you’re struggling with how?”
“That’s…never mind, all right? I…I misspoke. The important thing is, I need to tell you something, explain something, just to…I suppose just so I can die knowing you know the truth. About what happened—about why I married Brian.”
So. She wanted to unburden herself, confess that it had been all about what Hamilton could give her that he, Carson, couldn’t—not then. She’d say something like, she was sorry for rejecting him and if she’d known he had such high aspirations, she would’ve hung onto him—something lame like that. Well, he’d figured that out a long time ago. “Yeah? Okay, I’m listening.”
“You sound angry.”
“Well, it’s not such a mystery, is it?”
“You know already? How do you know? Nobody knew—I mean, I thought it was kept quiet—”
“It was obvious, Meg. He had money. I didn’t.”
She didn’t speak. Then, “Oh. Well, okay, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion. And, well, if you boil it down to its simplest common denominator, as they say, I might even agree. But it isn’t quite—that’s not how I looked at it, at the time.”
And so she told him how it was. How it wasn’t the fact of Hamilton’s wealth that drew her in, but what he’d proposed to do with some of it. She told how desperate things had gotten for her folks.
“Remember how there was talk of the bank foreclosing in late ’87? It didn’t seem to matter that I was helping with the bills—my parents, they were buried in debt, and, well, Brian knew it because Hamilton had the mortgage and it was paid late, or sometimes only in part, pretty much every month.
“I never told you, but he’d been pursuing me…and I always turned him down. This time, if I agreed to give him a shot, they’d forgive the late payments, and if I married him, they’d wipe the mortgage off the books. If not…well, it was pretty sure we’d lose the farm, at the very least. I couldn’t just…I mean, I really thought…Oh, Carson,” she sighed. “They were saying, how generous for me to even think about it, what a huge burden I’d be lifting from their shoulders—I mean, they never said to do it, but I knew how it was. And I made myself believe we’d get over it, you and me. You, especially. I figured you’d hate me and that would be it.”
“I did hate you,” he said.
He thought about what she was telling him, about how Hamilton was able to wipe out almost four hundred grand of debt for them. How could he blame her for considering it? Sure, it would be easy to take her to task for selling out, compromising her integrity—he could say she sold herself, and he wouldn’t exactly be wrong. He wouldn’t exactly be right, either.
He said, “So let me get this straight: Hamilton waited until they were about to foreclose, then set you up as the savior? That dirty son of a bitch.”
“Car—”
“What? That sucks, Meg—what he did…. Christ, you never even had a choice!”
“Look, I didn’t call to get you pissed off at Brian; he’s not a criminal…he just, well, he took advantage of an opportunity. If my parents had been keeping up with the payments, he wouldn’t have had that leverage. So it isn’t all his doing.”
“Hmmm,” Carson said, not willing to excuse Hamilton at all. He had to admit, though, that her parents did share the blame. Meg, however, bore the least responsibility. What wonderful relief to know that she hadn’t rejected him. She hadn’t been seduced by the money, she’d been a lamb led to slaughter.
“I hated you for about ten minutes,” he said, “and then I was just a sorry mess for those eighteen months before you got married. It wasn’t until after we…well, once you were married, I decided I needed to put a compass on my life and get on with things.”
“I wish I could’ve told you…. It was unconscionable, Carson. Ridiculous. I can hardly believe that’s what I did, that’s what I chose—I should have looked for some other solution. I can only say how sorry I am to have put you through what I did. It…things…” She sighed again. “It was a bad choice. I was wrong to make it, and I apologize from, from the bottom of my heart.” The last was almost a whisper.
“Ah, Meg…”
He was caught up in the past, in revising his assessment of what went on and why, all those years ago. Suppose she had refused Hamilton’s offer and then gone on to marry him while her parents were drowning in debt, losing their business and their land? It never would’ve worked, that seemed pretty clear.
And then, like a buoy that had been pushed under by a wave, Meg’s other news resurfaced in his brain. She was dying. Or was she?
“Hey—hold on. Wait. Is it—I mean, you aren’t planning to kill yourself?” Maybe she wasn’t ill at all, maybe only depressed and reaching out for help. Or if not help, just trying to make her peace before she did herself in.
She said, “I really do have ALS. At best, I have a couple months before I’m bedridden…. It’s…it’s not a pretty picture, Car…. And…and…I just can’t see how I can put Savannah through—”
She was crying now, quietly, but he could hear it, hear the pain she was feeling on her daughter’s behalf, the helplessness. He wanted desperately to be there, wherever she was. She hadn’t even told Brian; she was just handling it, alone, the same way she’d managed everything when she was growing up. Spencer and Anna, they’d counted on their good, responsible, mature little Meggie to see that dinner was ready or the girls’ homework was done right or the paddocks were closed off for the night. Counted on her to work at the bank, give them her earnings, and then to rescue them from their incompetence, from Spencer’s willful irresponsibility.
But who had ever taken care of her? He’d wanted to, he’d tried to…Jesus, they’d been so young. He was there for her then, but it wasn’t quite enough—he hadn’t been able to keep the wolves at bay. He hadn’t known how to even think about solving her folks’ problems. Wasn’t that their job? Still, he felt he’d failed her, too.
“Meg…hey, you’re going to tell your sisters, right? Can they help, or…”
“I’ll tell them. I’ll tell everybody soon. I’m still just—Friday, befor
e your concert? That’s when I found out.”
He remembered how she’d looked, the brittleness of her—and what an ass he’d been, all snide about the Hamiltons and their social standing. She must think so little of him.
She went on, “Listen, I’m sure we could talk about all this longer, but, I have to go. I’m picking Savannah up from school, so…. But thanks for letting me get this off my chest. I—well, I always wanted to tell you, but at first I was kind of trapped—I couldn’t risk Bruce reinstating the debt. And then later, when I could’ve paid it back myself, I figured, ‘Carson hates me so what’s the point?’” She laughed, a self-conscious sound. “Dad did repay Bruce, by the way, when he sold the farm.”
“So Bruce called in the debt, huh?” This was the only conclusion that made sense—not that any of it did, not really.
“No—believe it or not, Dad just decided it was the right thing to do.” Her voice, still thick from her crying, softened a little.
So Spencer volunteered the money. Imagine that. He’d undone the deal—in a fit of long-overdue guilt, maybe. Nice for Hamilton to finally get his money back, and Spencer’s conscience might be eased, but where did that leave Meg? Freed from chains she didn’t bother to break because she believed that he, Carson, hated her….
But then, if that was the only reason, why didn’t she leave Brian and live on her own?
For Savannah’s sake, he supposed. Whatever her reasons, he couldn’t blame her—staying with Brian was no more reprehensible than what he’d done, whoring around for a dozen years.
She went on, “I have to run now. I’m glad we talked—and I’m glad I saw you and…and met Val. I wish all the best for you, Carson. For both of you.”
He wanted to say something equally kind, something hopeful, supportive, but before he thought of just what that would be, she hung up, without saying good-bye.
Thirty-eight
SAVANNAH RAN TO HER MOM’S CAR FROM THE SCHOOL’S FRONT OVERHANG Tuesday after school, but she was still soaked when she climbed in. She shoved her book bag in back and reached up to twist her wet hair into a ponytail.
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