I glanced at the wood-paneled wall of the den, at all the picture frames that were sporadically lit up by the glare of the television. They were mostly pictures of Hank, Will, Lonnie, and my mother when they were younger. Hank as a lifeguard at the community pool; Will in his Marine Corps uniform at Parris Island; Lonnie on his skateboard; my mother standing on the podium next to a pool in some gymnasium, a “State Champion” sash around her shoulder, her hair still wet, beaming proudly at the camera. There were other pictures of my mother: In one, she had ice cream all over her face and she was laughing, her mouth open so wide it almost looked painful; in another, she was all dressed up for a high school dance in a scarlet dress, her hair pulled back. A young dark-haired man in a suit and tie had his arms around her, pulling her close.
My mother was the only girl; she grew up among a band of brothers. I thought this made her tough. I could tell from looking at the pictures that before she was a teenager, she was kind of a tomboy, always chasing after her brothers, trying to keep up, all skinned knees and dirty palms. When she got older, she became more feminine, with makeup and crop tops and the occasional dress. But I realized looking at these pictures that there had never been anything soft about my mother. That last summer that we spent together, I remembered her with her chin up, shoulders squared, as if she was always looking for a fight.
Around ten o’clock, we all piled into the kitchen around the table. There were too many of us to all fit in the room at once, and so some of us leaned in doorways or stood on tiptoes to see over the crowd from the den. My grandma pulled me to the front of the table. She put her arm around me to keep me there. She had baked a birthday cake for my mother and frosted it herself. “Happy Birthday, Grace,” it said in purple frosting, and two numbered candles, “4” and “3,” slouched in the frosting. Everyone sang a discordant chorus of “Happy Birthday,” with Lonnie crooning, “How old are you, how old are you, you look like a monkey, and you smell like a zoo,” at the end. And then they all looked at me, and my grandma whispered in my ear with her arm still around me, “Blow out the candles, Charlotte.”
As they looked at me, I knew they couldn’t help but see her. I leaned forward and took a deep breath to put out the candles, and I imagined my mother on a white-sand beach somewhere a world away, doing the exact same thing. Together, we took a breath, and together, we extinguished the flames.
Eight
Grace Calloway
August 4, 2007
8:48 p.m.
By the time I reached the water, it had started to rain. I walked in up to my waist, the sandy lake bottom giving way beneath my feet; I sank a little deeper with every step I took. The water was still lukewarm, even though the sun had disappeared. I took a deep breath, filled my lungs with air, and dove.
In high school, I could break a minute in the hundred-meter breaststroke. I’d always been a natural swimmer; I felt a strange kinship with the water, which was one reason it was so shocking when my boyfriend Jake drowned in a cold ravine up in northern New Hampshire.
When I heard the news, I didn’t say much. Death doesn’t make any sense when you’re sixteen. Death doesn’t make any sense when you’re older either. It just becomes a familiar stranger, a presence you’ve grown used to. But when you’re sixteen, you’re stubborn enough to demand answers. Death is a dark abyss that you shout down into. You throw rocks into its belly and listen for the echo, trying to figure out its dimensions. But there isn’t any knowing.
The next week at school I skipped fifth-period econ and snuck into the high school pool. On the bleachers, I stripped down to my underwear and I jumped into the deep end. I let myself sink, down and down and down.
I wanted to know what it felt like. My heart beat like a drum in my ears. I held my breath until I grew light-headed and my lungs screamed in my chest. I opened my eyes and they burned against the chlorine.
Now I was on top of the water, sprinting across the surface, my breath quick and hard. Bobbing in and out as I worked my way across the lake, out to the raft, and back to shore. Then back to the raft again, until I felt that sweet sense of utter exhaustion fill me. The cuts on my shoulder ached.
It wasn’t until my final lap that it happened. As I turned toward the house, the back porch light went out. I was suddenly sheathed in darkness, with only the gentle glow of the moon above me to illuminate my way. The moonlight caught along the water, the edges of the house, and I stared hard into the darkness, trying to make out if there was anything—anyone—there.
Don’t be silly, I told myself. Of course there wasn’t anyone there. We were all alone out there; there wasn’t anyone for miles. The back porch light must have burned out.
But still, some small primal part of me stood on edge. Suddenly, I heard a shrill shriek and my head jerked hard in the direction of the noise. It was coming from the backyard; I saw a dash of movement near the waterline. Something heavy, dark, lumbering. My gut twisted, and I sank down lower in the water, which suddenly felt colder. I shivered, tracking the moving object with my eyes, my heart hammering in my chest.
The shriek came again, and this time I recognized it. It was the metal chain tied to the old elm, and the mysterious object I was so carefully tracking was the tire swing, blowing in the wind. I laughed at myself. There was nothing dark and ominous waiting for me out there. It was just my mind and my nerves playing tricks. There was nothing to be afraid of.
I looked up at the night sky. The rain was coming down harder now; the storm was picking up. I had better head in. I took a deep steadying breath and plunged once again into the water, back toward the house.
Nine
Charlie Calloway
2017
The next morning I woke up in my mother’s old bedroom. It was in the attic of my grandparents’ house, with walls that sloped in the middle to the ceiling. Next to the bed was a small circular window that looked out over the driveway and a basketball hoop. I imagined my mother being woken up on Saturday mornings by my uncle Will and uncle Hank playing a game of H-O-R-S-E.
My mother’s bedspread was a patchwork quilt that my grandma had made. Next to it was a rocking chair, and a white dresser with a mirror overlooking it, and dozens of pictures stuck into the edges of the mirror. The snapshots were faded now: school pictures of my mother’s friends and classmates, a picture of my mother and Claire as teenagers at the boardwalk in Jersey, my mother sitting next to a dark-haired boy on the front porch steps, laughing. There were shelves in the far corner of the room that held rows of trophies and ribbons from my mother’s time on the swim team in high school, and an easel and an old smock next to them.
It struck me then that I hadn’t known her at all, really. For a long time I had tried to forget her, or to hate her. And before that, she wasn’t a person but my mother. She was the woman who braided my wet hair into plaits after my baths. The woman who sat up with me all night when I was sick, feeding me push-up ice pops to ease my sore throat and watching Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken again and again and again until the DVD was scratched and would no longer play. But my mother had been a person before she had been my mother. A person with her own friends, her own likes and dislikes, her own memories and adventures and heartaches. She had lived a whole life before I came along. Maybe if I tried to understand a little bit of that, I could understand why she left.
I figured the best place to start was where Uncle Hank had left off: at the house on Langely Lake. He had found the pictures there, which surely were some kind of clue. I hadn’t been to the lake house in years, but maybe if I went back now, saw the place with fresh eyes, I would find something, or maybe I would at least remember something that could be useful.
When I came down to the kitchen, Grandma was at the stove cooking pancakes. There was bacon frying in a skillet. Her smile fell a little when she saw that I was fully dressed and had my overnight bag slung over my shoulder.
“Leaving already?” she asked.
“I thought I’d get an early start,” I lied.
“I have this big trig exam tomorrow that I still need to study for. But I can stay for breakfast.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “Pull up a chair and I’ll get you a plate.”
I sat at the kitchen table as she made up a plate of bacon and eggs and pancakes and sat down next to me with a cup of coffee to watch me eat.
“Your grandpa is having a bit of a lie-in,” she said with an exasperated smile. “The man’s seventy-five and doesn’t know his own limits.”
“Is that bacon I smell?”
I looked up to see Uncle Hank wandering in from the den, in the same jeans and rumpled plaid button-up he’d been wearing the night before. He was suffering from a serious case of bedhead.
“Speaking of children who don’t know how to grow up,” Grandma Fairchild said.
I didn’t really want to be around my uncle Hank, and I was a little afraid of what might happen if my grandma left the room for any reason and Uncle Hank got me alone. Would he start in again with the questions and his theories? So I ate my pancakes quickly, before he had the chance.
When I went to stack my plate in the sink, I noticed piles of washed Tupperware containers on the counter. Each pile had a little sticky note with a name on it, and I saw one with Claire’s name. I hadn’t had a chance to really talk to Claire last night at the party, but if I could get her alone, probe her a little, maybe she could give me some insight into the photos that Uncle Hank had found, among other things.
“Hey, Grandma,” I said. “Do you want me to drop these by Claire’s? It’s on my way.”
“Are you sure you remember where it is?” she asked. “I’ll jot down the address for you, just in case.”
She wrote the address down on another sticky note and hugged me a little longer than was comfortable in the doorway.
“Don’t let it be another year before you come by again,” she said. “It was good—so good—to have you here.”
When she pulled away, I could see there were tears in her eyes. She turned her head to try to hide them.
The Rhodeses lived in a blue two-story house on Maple Street. There was a green hatchback in the driveway when I pulled up. I stood on the front porch and rang the doorbell with the Tupperware containers stacked in my arms.
Greyson answered the door. He was wearing jeans and a light V-neck T-shirt. His hair was still wet from the shower. He smelled like citrus and nutmeg.
“Martha Stewart, nice to see you again,” he said.
“Is Claire here?” I asked. “My grandma just wanted me to drop these off on my way out of town.”
But Greyson didn’t reach for them. Instead he held the screen door open for me and motioned for me to come inside.
“She took the boys swimming,” he said. “It’s a rare quiet and peaceful morning in the Rhodes house.”
I tried to hide my disappointment.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, do you know when she might be back?”
“It’ll probably be a couple hours,” he said. “Come on in.”
I didn’t know what else to do so I followed him inside to the kitchen.
“You can just set those on the counter there,” Greyson said. “I’ll put them away later.”
He opened the fridge and ducked his head in. “Want a soda or something to drink?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve actually got to get going. I have this philosophy test tomorrow I need to study for.”
“Philosophy, huh?” Greyson said as he took a drink from his water bottle. “Who are you studying? Aristotle? Descartes? Nietzsche?”
Shit. “Um, Foucault actually.”
“Oh, I wrote a paper on Foucault’s theory of panopticism,” he said, yawning and stretching his hands over his head. I tried to ignore the way his shirt rode up and exposed his tight, muscled abs.
“Right,” I said, swallowing the lump that had risen into my throat. What was wrong with me? I averted my gaze. “Panopticism—that’s what I have to write my paper on,” I said.
Greyson narrowed his eyes at me. “I thought you said you had to study for an exam.”
Shit.
“Yeah, well, the exam is a paper. But I need to study up a little to write it,” I said.
Take that, jerk-off.
He was smiling at me now.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re up to something,” he said. “You’re doing that thing where you scrunch up your face like you’re concentrating really hard or something. It’s the same face you made that time I was babysitting you and you and Ryder disappeared together and when you came back and I asked you what you were up to you said, ‘Nothing,’ but then I went upstairs to find you had TP’d my bedroom.”
“Yeah, well, maybe someone should have been paying a little more attention to babysitting than playing Donkey Kong on his Nintendo.”
“I was on level nine. I was about to save the princess.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I really have to get going.”
“To write your paper on Kant’s theory of panopticism?”
“Yes, to write my paper on Kant’s theory of panopticism.”
“Nice try, but panopticism was Foucault’s theory, not Kant’s,” Greyson said.
Shit.
“See, this is why I need to study,” I said.
“Charlotte, just tell me what you’re up to.”
I sighed. “Fine,” I said. “But you can’t tell Claire.”
“Perfect. My favorite things to do are the things I can’t tell my mother about,” Greyson said with a smile.
“What are you even doing here anyways?” I asked. “Didn’t you just graduate from college? Shouldn’t you be out there in the real world like a grown man?”
Greyson picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter. He took a bite and answered me with his mouth full. “I did graduate,” he said. “I even have a grown-up job. But it’s hard to beat free rent and home-cooked meals.”
I rolled my eyes. “So, basically, you’re a man-child?”
“Not all of us have trust funds,” Greyson said.
I only shrugged in response. I never felt ashamed when people brought up that I came from money I didn’t earn, just as I never thought people who didn’t come from money should be ashamed of the fact that they didn’t have it. In my mind, you were dealt the cards you were dealt, but it was how you played them that mattered.
“Actually, do you have a flashlight I can borrow?”
“You can borrow it if I can come with you,” Greyson said.
“Fine,” I said. “Meet me in the car. You have two minutes, and then I’m leaving with or without you.”
In the car on the way to the lake house, I told Greyson about the pictures Uncle Hank had found. It was actually nice to tell someone about them, and Greyson was the perfect audience. He knew enough about my mother and me and my family not to need a lot of background, but he was also as impartial a party as I could find. It was probably a good idea to have someone come with me to the lake house, anyway. I was a little nervous about going there by myself. And it was better to have two pairs of eyes. There was a better chance we would find something.
“How are we going to get in?” Greyson asked when I told him where we were going. “Is this a breaking-and-entering situation? And is it really considered breaking and entering if it’s your own place? Should I google this?”
He smiled at me and ran his hand haphazardly through his hair again.
“Stop doing that,” I said.
“Doing what?”
I exaggerated running my hand through my hair and flipping it over my shoulder. “That,” I said.
Greyson laughed. “I’m sorry, am I distracting you with my beautiful man mane?”
“Hardly,” I said. “And don’t google it. Uncle Hank found a way in, and he didn’t have a key. We’ll figure it out.”
I signaled right and we started down the long winding driveway to the house. From the outside, the house looked just as we had left it years ago. My fath
er had hired a groundskeeper to look after the property and you couldn’t tell from the outside that the house was unlived in. The lawn was neatly mown, the flower beds weeded, the bushes trimmed.
Getting in was a lot less difficult or even interesting than Greyson or I had imagined. The spare key was where we had hidden it when I was a kid: in the frog statue by the back kitchen door.
Inside, the house looked dark and forlorn: the floorboards were coated with a thick layer of dust, the curtains were drawn tight, and the furniture was sheathed in large white sheets. It would have been bright enough to see if we had drawn back the curtains, but we opted to keep them closed and used our flashlights instead.
The pictures still hung in their places on the walls. There was a picture of my mother at the Jersey Shore. She was dressed in a red bathing suit, standing ankle-deep in the water. She looked over her shoulder at whoever was taking the picture (my father?) and smiled, as if they’d caught her in some private moment. It struck me how young my mother was in some of these pictures—perhaps only a few years older than I was now. And the resemblance between us was striking—the same wide gray eyes and heart-shaped face. The same dark brown hair and pale skin. She had the same slightly crooked smile, the same dimple that peeked out of her right cheek.
There were so many pictures. Pictures of my mother and father in Grandmother Eugenia’s garden at the Greenwich house, pictures of my sister and me playing in the Fairchilds’ backyard on my mother’s old swing set. A candid shot of my father holding my mother in his arms and her looking up at him. Snapshots of who my family used to be.
Hanging next to these pictures was a family portrait in a heavy gilt frame. Seraphina was only a baby, and she was sitting in my mother’s lap. I stood beside her, in front of my father, Alistair Calloway. He was tall and lean and handsome in that Calloway way, with his blue eyes and blond hair and high forehead. It was strange, but except for his hair, which was now graying at the temples, he looked the same now as he did then, as if he hadn’t aged a day.
All These Beautiful Strangers Page 9