At the Scent of Water

by Linda Nichols

  Annie laughed out loud, and Mrs. Rogers smiled, gratified.

  “She’s not altogether a bad girl,” Mrs. Rogers said, her face softening. “I know she really does care for me, but sometimes, with Imagene, caring looks a lot more like running over folks. Been that way ever since she was a little girl. Contrary. Throw her in a river and she’d float upstream.”

  Annie grinned.

  “Sit down,” Mrs. Rogers invited. “I’ll put on some coffee.” Annie sat and put down her purse and the rug. Her hostess disappeared into the store again and came back with a cellophane-wrapped coconut cake, which she opened and sliced.

  “My grandmother used to buy those,” Annie said. “They were her favorite treat.”

  “They’re not good for me, but they’re good to me,” Mrs. Rogers said.

  They sipped and ate.

  “Were you close to your grandmother?” Mrs. Rogers asked.

  Annie nodded. “She led me to the Lord.” For a moment she was lost in her memories. She remembered going to church with her grandmother and singing old hymns and memorizing verses in Sunday school.

  “I was nine years old,” she said. “I was sitting in her porch swing, and she told me about the ABCs of salvation. Accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your heart. Believe that He is the Son of God and that He died for you. Confess Him with your mouth, and you’ll be saved.” She remembered praying after her, repeating the words, then sitting at her kitchen table, feeling the oilcloth slick under her hands, reading her King James Scofield Reference Bible.

  She looked around and realized Mamie’s kitchen was not so different from this one. That was probably why she was so comfortable here. She remembered that kitchen well, full of the soft chatter of women’s voices. She remembered the feeling she had when she was there—safe, cocooned, loved enough to be scolded and taught. She remembered the broad bosoms and shirtwaist dresses and starched hair and Chantilly cologne of her great-aunts. She remembered paper fans, with pictures of Jesus kneeling in the garden or of The Last Supper, waving in sonorous rhythm after the last dish was washed. She remembered the white linen tablecloth and the chipped dishes.

  She remembered the babies, for it seemed that there were always one or two at their family gatherings, and how she, the only child, the motherless one, had loved to hold them. She remembered their fat cheeks and lard bellies and the smell of them in the hot Carolina summer—a mixture of powder and milk and Ivory Snow.

  “I brought you something,” Annie said, reaching down and handing Mrs. Rogers the rolled rug.

  Mrs. Rogers’ face lit with pleasure, and Annie was amused to see that she didn’t waste time protesting the gift. She untied the bow and unrolled the rug, then caught her breath in surprise.

  “Why, mercy’s sake.” She unfolded it and turned it over in amazement, then stroked it with her hand. “Did you make this?”

  “I did,” Annie said.

  “Why, it’s beautiful.” She gave Annie a smile that was beautiful, as well.

  “It has all the things I love about this place,” Annie said, and she pointed out each color and design and told what they meant to her.

  “I’ll treasure it always,” Mrs. Rogers promised. “And I’ll think to pray for you every time my eyes fall upon it. I hate the thought of stepping on it, though. Maybe I’ll hang it on the wall,” she said and beamed.

  They sat in silence for a moment, then Mrs. Rogers spoke. “You sound like you’re fixing to leave.”

  Annie was struck again at how astute the old woman was. She nodded.

  Mrs. Rogers didn’t look dismayed or try to protest. She leaned back and began speaking. “I never did finish my story,” she said. “I’m glad you came back.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” Annie said, and she realized that was one reason she had made the trip, in addition to saying good-bye.

  Mrs. Rogers went into the bedroom and came out with the now-familiar box. She pulled out another journal, took three brown-tinted photographs from the front, and handed them to Annie.

  “This was the reverend,” she said.

  Annie looked at the picture. The first thing she noticed was that he was smiling, unusual for that time when posing for a portrait could mean hours instead of seconds. He had kind eyes and a smile that caught at her heart, but it could have been the other part of the scene that did it, for a little girl, about four or so sat on his lap, her arm about his neck. Clearly she adored him.

  “That’s Sarah with him,” Mrs. Rogers said. “Annie’s child. My mother,” she said with a gentle smile.

  Annie felt startled. Of course, it stood to reason that one of the children would be Mrs. Rogers’ parent, and somehow the connection between herself and the other Annie and the old woman before her seemed even more real now.

  “Did they have any of their own?” Annie asked.

  Mrs. Rogers passed her the second photograph.

  It was Annie and Lucas and Sarah, now a young woman. Still smiling and lined up across the picture were three young boys wearing uncomfortable-looking suits, but in spite of the formality of their dress, their faces showed mischief and good cheer. She remembered what Annie had said about her first boys, that they had been strong and happy, and she thought that perhaps her Margaret had been, as well. She examined Annie. She was sitting beside her husband, holding an infant. Her face was calm and full of quiet joy.

  “That was Clarence and Frederick and Douglas, and the baby was Minnie. Reverend Johnson planted churches all around the Smokies. One at Grassy Creek, one at Hopper’s Gap, one up at Pigeon River, and another over at Dillon’s Cove.”

  “Did Annie travel with him?”

  “Sometimes. Until the children came along.”

  “Was she happy?” Annie asked. She knew the answer, she thought, but somehow she wanted to hear it said.

  “Here,” Mrs. Rogers said, handing her the journal. “Read for yourself.”

  She paged through a few entries. There were details about the children’s education, housekeeping lists, and then an entry. She scanned it.

  We took in the last of the potatoes this afternoon. The cellar is full, as well as the smokehouse. Lucas says the Lord has blessed us, and looking at our children lined up around the table, I know it is true. The Lord has appointed me my portion and my cup.

  Annie startled and felt a little chill, for she had once quoted that verse about her own life.

  My portion has included sorrow as well as joy, but whose has not? I can say now, after all, that the boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. God is good. And I am grateful.

  She handed the diary back. “How did her life end up?” she asked.

  Mrs. Rogers smiled. “Her children grew up and went various places. She and Lucas lived here in Silver Falls. Lucas died when he was eighty-five, but Annie lived on ten more years, teaching Sunday school right up until the day she died.”

  Annie sighed and looked at her watch. “I suppose I’d better go.”

  Mrs. Rogers didn’t argue, just rose along with her.

  “I’ll never forget you,” Annie said, and she hugged the thin shoulders.

  “Nor I you,” Mrs. Rogers answered, patting her face with a veined hand. “I’ll pray for you every day,” she promised, and Annie blinked away tears as she drove away.

  ****

  As Annie had feared, the supper at Mary’s was a strained, tense affair. Papa’s presence livened things up a little, but everyone seemed quiet, lost in their own thoughts. Annie was subdued and so was Sam, she noticed. After supper she found him out in the yard by the statue of Margaret. He handed her an envelope. She stared down, not knowing what was inside.

  “The divorce papers,” he said. “I signed them like you wanted. The property settlement looks fine. I’m happy to give you half of everything.”

  She couldn’t have felt any worse if he had slapped her. She nodded and handed him the package she had carried herself.

  “They’re the photos of Margaret,” she said. “I
made copies. Now we each have a set.”

  “Thank you,” he said bleakly, then looked down at his shoes.

  “I’ll go over and finish at the house tonight,” she said.

  “Like I said, whatever you leave, I’ll take care of.”

  “Is there anything else you want?” she asked, and something in her hoped he answered the real question behind those words.

  He shook his head.

  She nodded and felt her throat close, for this wasn’t what she had intended. This was all wrong, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. It felt like a runaway train, like a car without brakes. It was rolling, going, and there was nothing she could do to change its course.

  Sam’s cell phone rang. He answered it in that way she remembered. “Truelove,” he clipped out, back now to being the pressured surgeon, the man who had no time and carried the weight of tiny souls on his shoulders. She watched as he listened silently, and his face went from expectancy to shock to grief. “Thank you,” he said, then signed off.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “That was Melvin,” he said.

  After a moment she placed the name. Sam’s attorney.

  “Kelly Bright just passed away.”

  Forty-two

  Annie left Mary’s soon after that and drove back to her father’s house, trying to decide what this new event would mean, both in the abstract arena of the heart and in the practical realm of travel arrangements. She postponed any decision past the obvious one that had occurred to her when she had heard the news. She would perform this last task, this favor for Sam. She would leave him this parting gift that would, perhaps, ease a little of his pain. And it would be a gift to Rosalie Cubbins, as well. Perhaps it would soften her heart, would cause her to grant the request Annie would make of her tonight. It didn’t take long to write up what she had gathered. A few notes, but most of it was in her memory. She wrote quickly and easily, the words flying from her heart through her fingertips onto the computer screen. When she finished, she printed out the piece, then set out for Knoxville. For Varner’s Grove. For the scribbled address on the card that Griffin White had given her, the address of Rosalie Cubbins, Kelly Bright’s mother.

  There was little traffic. She rolled down the window and let the dry hot wind beat in. It felt good, somehow, against the chill that had settled in her bones. She found the address after stopping once for directions. Kelly Bright had lived in a run-down boxy house, one of a block of others just like it. The projects, as Jordan Abrams had said.

  Annie knocked and waited. She could hear a television, the sound of feet, and then Rosalie was there. She stared, a puzzled look on her face, but after a second she opened the door, perhaps accepting this incongruity as one more in a lifetime that tended more toward absurdity than sense. “Come in,” she said, and walked away before Annie could speak, waving her cigarette toward the couch, leaving a stream of smoke behind her as a trail for Annie to follow.

  “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief,” she said. Such banal words. And so meaningless, for that is exactly what she had intended to do.

  Rosalie lifted one shoulder and let it fall. She was dead-eyed, tired-eyed, and Annie didn’t know how much of it was from the loss of the child and how much had been there before, since she was a child, perhaps. Her hair was two lank strands that fell down on either side of her face. She rubbed a hand across her eyes, and Annie noticed her fingernails. They were bitten, raw, red.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, inestimably weary.

  Annie’s mouth was suddenly dry, for she realized where she was and what she was doing. She took the two things she had brought out of her purse. She handed Rosalie the sheaf of papers first.

  “I didn’t tell you everything when I met you before,” she said. “I’m a reporter.”

  Rosalie’s eyes clouded with cynicism. The jaded reaction of someone who had been betrayed before.

  Annie shook her head. “I’m giving this just to you,” she said. “It’s not going into any paper.”

  Rosalie looked down at the papers, and the hand with which she was holding them shook. She began to read, her lips moving slightly. She set down the cigarette and picked up a crumpled tissue from the table. She read some more. She turned over the first page. After a moment the second. Then the last. By the time she finished, her face was wet with tears.

  “You’re not going to print this?” she asked quietly when she was done.

  “That wasn’t my intention when I wrote it,” Annie said.

  Rosalie didn’t answer, just leaned over the end table, picked up a school picture, and held it out to Annie. “Here she is. My baby.” She sniffed.

  Annie took the picture, cardboard framed. Kelly was about nine or so. She had freckles. Clean brown hair, parted straight in the middle, then immediately falling into disarranged waves. Her eyes were bright, her skin clear. She wore a cheap cross necklace, a pink T-shirt, and had braces on her teeth.

  “How long had she had braces?” Annie asked.

  Rosalie shook her head, blew out another stream of smoke, blew her nose clumsily into the shredded tissue. “Those things. She was supposed to get them off six months before the accident, but she never wore the head brace thing. Had to sign on for another round. I had to do an extra shift a week to pay for them.” She dissolved into tears again, and Annie knew what she was thinking. Oh, how I wish I had that duty now. How I would gladly trade a shift, a day, a week, my life, for you to have yours back.

  “Oh, God,” she wailed. “Oh, oh, God.” She bent at the waist, pressed her arm against her stomach as if she were in great pain. She rocked back and forth, and her cries filled up the little house.

  Annie moved close and put her arms around the shaking shoulders. She held her until she stopped crying.

  “I never should’ve let him pick her up. I should’ve known.” She bent her head and cried again, and Annie knew what she was feeling. Knew it because she had felt it, as well. Still felt it, that curious, torturous sense of prescience, that conviction that if she had only been paying attention, if she had seen what anyone else would have seen, if she had not been distracted by the glaring, all-absorbing ME, she would have done what was necessary to protect her daughter. To save her.

  “It was an accident,” she said to Rosalie. “Just an accident. Sometimes you don’t see how things are going to turn out. Sometimes you can’t help it.”

  Rosalie shuddered quietly and pulled away from Annie’s arms. She went into the other room and came back with a roll of toilet paper. She blew her nose. She picked up the papers again and looked them over slowly. She smiled a few times as she read the words, and when she was finished, she put them down and spoke decisively.

  “I want people to know my daughter like she was,” she said. “I want you to put it in the paper.”

  Annie nodded. “All right. I think I can arrange that.”

  “Can I keep this?”

  “Sure,” Annie said, then took a breath for what she must say next. “I’m not just a reporter,” she finally said, her voice low and hesitant. She had been staring at the floor, at a matted spot of faded brown carpet. Her eyes lifted to Rosalie’s confused face.

  “I’m Sam Truelove’s wife.” The pending divorce an irrelevant detail.

  Rosalie stared, not comprehending, and it suddenly hit Annie as supremely ironic that Rosalie did not recognize the name.

  “My husband,” she said, and there was that word again, sliding from her mouth as easily as if it were true, “my husband was the surgeon on call the day your daughter was injured.”

  Rosalie sat back on the couch, her face twisted into an expression Annie couldn’t read, and Annie, not knowing what else to do, began to talk. Random words, but things she had been turning around in her own mind for the last days and weeks.

  “My husband gets up every morning at four-thirty,” she said softly, remembering, as if just this morning she had reached out her hand and felt the warm
place beside her in bed, as if she might rise up and walk into the next room and see him there, measuring out his coffee, going over his charts one more time before the long drive back to Knoxville. “He goes to the hospital, where he spends most of his time. He doesn’t sleep much, especially the night before he does a surgery, because he goes over and over the procedure in his mind.

  “He used to be a different person than he is now. He used to go to the hospital in the evening because that’s when the parents were there. ‘They need to see me, Annie,’ he would say. ‘They need to look at my eyes and touch my hand and feel my hope. That’s the only way they can endure it.’ He used to go to the hospital and read all their charts, then go to his office and see them. Oh, it would break your heart to see what he sees,” she said. “All those little broken children. I don’t know how he bore it. He said the Lord helped him bear it with them, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. I suppose he needed a corner of his life that grief hadn’t touched.”

  Rosalie was staring at her now, her mouth slightly open.

  “He would go to his office and see his patients, and some days he would be in surgery all day. He told me he never felt much when he was there. No pain. No fatigue. Time sort of stopped for him. Nothing was there except him and the thing he was trying to fix. It was like a contest, he said. Between him and death. Like he had stepped into the ring, and only one of them would win. He would stay there in that operating room sometimes six, eight, ten hours before he would stop. He would come home those nights so empty, and I would cook for him and he would eat and I could see him fill up, recharge, but he never told me much about it.

  “The hardest days, though, were the funeral days. He went to the funerals. Nearly every one. He said it was his duty to walk the path with them. It was the burden the Lord had placed on him.

  “He needs to go to your daughter’s funeral, Rosalie.” And she could suddenly see him in his black suit, starched white shirt, square competent hands folded, face worn and solemn. His shoulders slumped, the lines appearing from nose to mouth the way they did when he was worried or sad. “He needs to be there. I know he would want to come. If you would let him.”