Little Black Dress with Bonus Material

by Susan McBride

  “Thank you, Jonathan, you are so thoughtful.” My mother managed a smile as she took the flowers from him and promptly headed to the kitchen to put them in water.

  “You’re welcome, ma’am,” Jon said to her departing back then extended a hand to my father. “How’re you doing, sir?”

  “Fine, son, just fine,” my father lied and tapped a finger on the tobacco tin. “I’ll make good use of this after supper. Very thoughtful of you.”

  “You’re most welcome.”

  My folks had met Jon briefly before, but I’d never invited him in, not for more than a minute or two of quick chitchat. They knew he’d grown up in Ste. Gen, that his mother was widowed, and that he was a mechanic by trade, mostly working on boats and barges; but if his background or job disappointed them, they didn’t show it. Perhaps they appreciated that he always appeared freshly scrubbed and clean-shaven, no visible grease beneath his fingernails, and boots carefully polished; or else they were simply relieved I’d found a man to court me and might not end up the spinster they’d doubtless envisioned.

  Whatever the reason for them acting on their best behavior, I basked in the vague sense of normalcy that momentarily descended. Mother had done her hair and applied powder and rouge over her strained features, and Daddy’s scowl disappeared as he played the sociable host, something he hadn’t had the chance to do in quite a while.

  “How about we sit down and have a drink while the ladies finish up in the kitchen,” my father said, clapping Jonathan’s back and settling him into a club chair in the living room.

  Jon glanced back at me helplessly, and I grinned to encourage him. He could hold his own, I was sure of it. And still I stood and watched them for a moment before I dared leave them alone.

  I could hear the chatter of their voices as Mother and I worked in the kitchen, side by side, something we rarely ever did.

  “He’s a good catch for you, Evelyn,” she said without prompting, her eyes on the green beans she carefully drained in the sink. “Anna always had so much attention from the boys in Blue Hills, maybe too much.” A faraway smile slid across her lips, though she still didn’t look at me. “You were her opposite, caught up in books and solitary pursuits.” She nodded to herself. “Jonathan is solid and nice enough looking, but you are smart and better-bred.”

  Her words froze me in place. I stopped putting warm rolls into the lined basket and puzzled over what she meant. That Anna could have had her pick of suitors, but I was not so fortunate? That Jon brought reliability and decent looks to the table, but I was educated and reared to have better manners? Was that how she saw our match?

  “You’re right, I am not Anna,” I said, feeling the faintest quiver running through me. “I don’t need the attention of all the boys in Blue Hills. The only man I care for is Jonathan, and I believe he cares for me equally.”

  “Of course he does.” She turned her head to look at me. “You did well to find him, and you should hold on tightly.”

  Tightly, because Jon was my only chance?

  My spine stiffened, and I bit the inside of my cheek to keep silent as we finished preparing dinner, which we planned to serve buffet-style.

  “I’m sure Jonathan’s the type of fellow who appreciates when things are done simply,” my mother had suggested, and I couldn’t disagree.

  We soon had my grandmother Charlotte’s heavy turn-of-the-century sideboard laden with dishes and I called the men to eat. I poured iced tea into glasses while everyone filled plates and settled at the table. Jon and Daddy were discussing mechanical equipment and how the winery might be updated to produce superior product with less manpower.

  Mother took tiny bites and forced a smile now and then, but she drank more than she chewed (sipping often from her glass of sherry and not from the iced tea). Soon, I noticed her gaze drifting off toward the windows.

  “The food’s delicious, Mrs. Evans,” Jonathan said, and I could tell he meant it, as he’d eaten two helpings and had nearly scraped his plate clean.

  “Evie slaved over the stove plenty today, too,” my daddy added, jerking his chin my way. “Didn’t you, String Bean?”

  “Sweated and slaved.” I dramatically wiped my brow with a forearm, causing Jon to laugh and father to chuckle. Mother smiled weakly.

  I wouldn’t say conversation flowed, but it wasn’t as awkward as I’d imagined. In fact, I was rather pleased up until the moment when my mother’s dazed eyes turned back to the table and she uttered without warning, “Do you remember, Evie, how Anna used to love my brisket? She always said the smell of it could lead her home if she were lost. If I made it more often, perhaps she’d find her way.”

  “Anna knows where we live,” I said instinctively. “We’re not the ones who are hiding.”

  “She’s not hiding, Evelyn.” My mother frowned at me, and I saw the newly emptied glass of sherry tremble in her hand. “There must be a reason why she’s still gone. Perhaps, she’s sick or hurt or—”

  “Having the time of her life,” I said, interrupting, because I couldn’t hold my tongue. I simply couldn’t take any more of my mother’s pretenses, the way she had always brushed off or glossed over every wrong thing my sister did. “As I see it, Anna’s enjoying her newfound freedom a little too much. It’s one thing to call off a wedding but another entirely to leave your family wondering if you’re alive or lying dead in a gutter in Tanzania.”

  There! I’d said it. Because that’s what bothered me the most about my sister’s vanishing act: she’d deserted me without any more explanation than “the dress made me do it.” We were sisters, we were blood, and yet she hadn’t elected to write me a single letter. In my eyes, that was unconscionable. Even if I saw her again, I wasn’t sure whether I could completely forgive her.

  “Tanzania?” my mother asked, blinking back tears. “So you have heard something, Evie. Is that where she is? Do you know how to reach her?”

  “Good Lord, Mother!” My frustration bubbled to the surface. I had no idea where Anna was, no more than anyone else in the room. All the food I’d eaten churned in my belly, and I felt sick that Jon had to witness this. My mother’s denial was beyond maddening. “Don’t you think I’d tell you if I had any news about her?”

  “You can be terribly secretive sometimes—”

  “And Anna can be terribly selfish—”

  “Enough!” My father struck the table with his fist, knife jutting up from between his clenched fingers. His face turned florid, and his chin quivered as he struggled to maintain his equilibrium. “I don’t want to hear another word about Anna from either of you. Bea, Evie”—he turned a flinty stare on Mother and then on me—“I mean it. Not one word.”

  Jon glanced at me across the table, his eyes narrowed and jaw tense, as if prepared to launch out of his seat in my defense. But I gently shook my head and kept mum, not knowing what else to do. Perhaps this eruption was overdue, considering how furious we all were with Anna, no matter how deeply we’d suppressed our emotions.

  “Franklin, please,” Mother scolded. Her skin was as pale as his was inflamed. “Don’t say such things.”

  But he shook his head, and there was no sign of conciliation in his voice as he told her, “No more, Bea, no more. I don’t want to hear her name mentioned in this house again, do you understand me? I’m done with her, done. She’s torn us apart enough already. For Christ’s sake, she hasn’t even had the decency to apologize, and all the while she’s out there, doing things that no good daughter would, without a single thought of how she’s made us suffer. So far as I’m concerned, Anna’s no longer a child of mine.”

  My mother gasped; I might have, too, but I was too stunned to do much but sit with my hands in my lap, biting my lip.

  Then he did something he’d never done before, not as long as I’d been alive, and certainly not when we had a guest at our table: he put aside his napkin, set down his silverware, pushed back his chair, got up, and left before dessert had been served.

  “Franklin!” M
other called after him, but he kept right on going. Flustered, she turned to Jonathan and me. “Excuse us, please,” she said, her chair scraping the floor as she hurried after him, leaving Jon to gaze down at his hands and me to gawk at my father’s empty seat, wondering what the devil had just happened.

  Chapter 12

  Toni

  After surviving an interminable lunch with Bridget hovering like a mother hen and practically force-feeding her a sandwich and an apple, Toni went back to the hospital. She managed a cheery enough “hello” for the on-duty nurse, one Elizabeth Effertz, R.N., according to the badge on her scrubs, before she made a beeline for Evie’s tiny room and pulled the chair up to the bed.

  “So you want to hear what I did this afternoon?” Toni leaned over the metal rail, setting her chin on her forearm. “Bridget gave me a lecture about what a bad daughter I am,” she said, figuring she might as well say exactly what was on her mind. Maybe if it pissed off Evie enough, she’d open her eyes despite the medication. That would surely be worth an argument, wouldn’t it?

  “You know, Ma,” she went on, keeping her voice low, “if you were angry at me for leaving, you should have spoken up. I can’t read your mind, much as I wish I could. And if I was too busy to come home and you missed me, you should’ve come up. The highway doesn’t just go in one direction.”

  How strange it was to say exactly what she was feeling, right to her mother’s face, and not have to worry about repercussions. And still her pulse thudded frantically in her veins. She cleared her throat.

  “In spite of what Bridget seems to think, you don’t have the market cornered on lonely,” she murmured. “I miss Daddy, too, only I didn’t give up when he left us. I kept going, because it’s what he would’ve wanted me to do.”

  For a moment, Toni held her breath, staring at the squiggles on the monitor measuring her mother’s every heartbeat. Slow and steady, not a blip out of place.

  What had she expected? That the blips would suddenly spike, and Evie would sit upright, glare at her only daughter, tug the tube from her throat, and reply, “How dare you speak to me like that!”

  Well, hey, one never knew.

  “What I really want to know is why you went to Hunter Cummings instead of coming to me when you realized the winery was in trouble. Did you think I wouldn’t care? That I wouldn’t want to help? Okay, don’t answer that,” Toni said and stopped herself, because, honestly, she wasn’t sure how she would’ve responded either.

  What if Bridget was right, and she hadn’t made the wisest choices in the past? What if she wasn’t as good a daughter as she could have been?

  Ix-nay on the self-flagellation, Toni thought and took a deep breath before she refocused on Evie.

  “Are you okay?” She gazed at the bruised spot where the IV needle went into the back of her mother’s hand, stuck smack into a fat blue vein. Hesitantly, she reached over and touched the white taped “X” with a fingertip. “Does it hurt?” she asked. “Can you feel anything?”

  In lieu of an answer, she heard the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator that caused Evie’s chest to rise and fall. Her mother’s hair puffed about her thin face like a cotton ball, and her skin appeared nearly as pale. Her lips, too, seemed absent of color.

  She looked lifeless; lifeless and old.

  In all her years growing up, Toni had never thought of her mother as any particular age. She was simply Evelyn Evans Ashton, wife and mother, the bedrock of the family, the lighthouse that guided boats safely into the harbor, as solid as a granite pillar, and too resilient to be entirely human.

  Toni shifted in her seat, placing her forearms on the bed rail, watching her mother’s expressionless features. “So what made you go up to the attic yesterday morning in your nightgown?” she whispered. “Why did you put on the black dress? Did something about it remind you of Daddy? Or maybe of Anna?”

  The shift was subtle, but something changed in Evie’s face. Toni detected the flicker of motion beneath Evie’s eyelids, as if she were dreaming, frantically dreaming.

  Could coma patients do that? And had the heart monitor begun to blip the slightest bit faster?

  Her own pulse careening, Toni leaped up from the chair and raced out of the room, straight to the nurses’ station. Breathlessly, she blurted out, “Something happened with my mother, something changed”—she gestured at Elizabeth Effertz, who quickly got up—“please, come see.”

  Toni followed the woman’s quick footsteps back to Evie’s bedside, standing back a bit as the nurse checked her mother’s monitors that showed her vital signs and the leads measuring her EEG.

  “I was talking to her about going up to the attic, and I asked if it had something to do with my dad,” Toni babbled. “Bridget found her surrounded by photographs and wearing an old dress, and I wondered if it was important to her, if maybe it was connected to my father somehow. It seemed like she heard me, like she reacted—”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Ashton, but that’s not possible,” Nurse Effertz told her very matter-of-factly. “Your mother’s unresponsive.”

  “I saw her eyes move—”

  “She opened them?”

  “Not exactly,” Toni tried to explain, suddenly feeling stupid. “It looked like she was dreaming. You know, the whole REM thing, and I don’t mean the band.”

  “I know about rapid eye movement, yes,” the nurse dryly noted.

  Toni saw Evie’s hand hanging over the edge of the bed, and she stepped past the other woman to gently tuck it back against her mother’s side.

  When she was done, she straightened up to find Nurse Effertz watching her with a sympathetic expression. “Here’s the thing, Miss Ashton. People want to believe their loved ones dream when they’re in comas, but it’s really not possible. Dreams occur during the deepest sleep, and we’d see that in her EEG. Everything we know about coma patients tells us they don’t dream at all. It’s likely they don’t think of anything. Maybe it was an involuntary movement”—her smocked shoulders shrugged—“or it’s just that you want to see something so badly that you imagined it.”

  “I didn’t imagine it,” Toni insisted, curling fingernails into her palm.

  “It’s okay.”

  No, it wasn’t okay. None of this felt okay in the slightest. Toni glanced past the nurse and looked at her mother, lying so still on the bed, no different from when Toni had come in. Had her mind played a trick on her? Had she truly not seen what she thought she’d seen?

  “Look, if it’s any consolation, your mother is holding her own. All her vital signs and her cranial pressure are stable. There’s been no further bleeding. Hopefully, her brain is working hard to heal itself. I’m sure having you here is a comfort.” The woman smiled indulgently and started toward the door.

  “Wait!” Toni blurted out before she could forget. “Do you still have it?”

  The nurse paused and glanced over her shoulder. “Have what?”

  “The dress my mother was wearing when she was brought in.” Toni needed to retrieve it. What if, when Evie did wake up, she asked about it? If she’d wandered up to the attic at the crack of dawn to put it on, it clearly meant something to her. “I’d like to take it home.”

  Once again, Nurse Effertz smiled that indulgent I’m-sure-you’re-acting-cuckoo-because-you’re-under-stress smile. “It’s in a bag at the station. I apologize for the shape it’s in though. They had to cut it off her in the ER.”

  Toni didn’t care what condition it was in. “I’ll pick it up on my way out.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sorry to have bothered you,” Toni apologized, even if she wasn’t sorry at all.

  “That’s what we’re here for,” the nurse replied before she disappeared through the door in a muted squeak of her rubber-soled shoes.

  Toni settled back into the chair beside her mother’s bed and reached through the side rails to hold Evie’s hand. “I know what I saw,” she said quietly and squinted at her mom’s impassive face.

  Evie was in there,
lurking somewhere within her frail human shell, perhaps even hearing; Toni wasn’t taking any chances.

  “You are in there, aren’t you? Maybe you’re not listening to every word I say”—she let out a dry laugh—“but then neither of us was very good at listening to the other, eh? Nurse Liz might think I’m hallucinating, but I know the difference between real and imagined, and something’s going on inside your head. Whatever you’re doing, be quick about it, would you? You know I totally suck at being patient.”

  Chapter 13

  Evie

  A few days after Daddy’s eruption at dinner, I arrived home from school and found sitting on the porch a half dozen closed crates, the kind the wine was packed in before it was shipped. One of the vineyard workers I recognized as Thomas was in the process of hauling the cartons onto the bed of a rusted-out pickup. I pulled my car up behind it and got out, catching Tom’s attention as I slammed the door.

  “What’s this?” I asked and tucked behind my ears the hair that had escaped from my ponytail. “It looks like someone’s moving out.”

  The broad-shouldered fellow finished dumping a load onto the truck and turned to face me, shrugging. “I’m just doing a job for your father, is all.”

  “But whose things are these?” I said and might as well have been talking to myself as Thomas didn’t answer.

  When I pushed the lid off a box, I saw a tangled mess of sweaters, books, and a faded Blue Birds uniform, all belongings of Anna’s. I went to the next crate and opened it as well, finding much the same, and my mouth went dry.

  “Excuse me, Miss Evie.”

  I straightened up to find Thomas wiping gloved hands on the front of his overalls as he waited for me to step aside.

  “Sorry,” I murmured, my mouth gone dry.

  This was wrong. Very wrong.

  Panicked, I raced inside to find my mother, who was no help at all. She’d taken the prescription for her headaches and was out cold, curled up in bed, eyes closed. Even when I gently shook her arm, she didn’t respond.