“It has to be a mistake.”
“For thirty-five years?” Phinneaus sat down next to her and pushed the stack of ledgers toward her. “I don’t think so.”
His tone had modulated, his voice the rational and measured one he used when trying to explain life’s ponderous questions to Frankie: why evil occasionally seemed to win out over good; how things tended to equal out in the end; why you couldn’t make people change even when it was for their own good, they had to want to change themselves. She realized Phinneaus was trying, in the only way he knew how, to tell her something very bad, something neither of them was going to be able to fix. Her breath came faster, and she felt it moving up high in her lungs. She wanted to hold it there, to stop what came next.
“Alice, do you hear me?”
What she heard was a pounding ocean in her ears, a field of static obscuring all logical thought. Breathe, she thought. Just breathe.
“Maybe Natalie felt guilty for letting her go.”
Phinneaus held out his hand, and when she didn’t move he covered both of hers with his. “I think it must have been for something else.”
“What else? And ‘Ask Therese’? Ask Therese what?” She shook him off and stood up, relieved her legs still functioned even if her lungs were letting her down. She felt the urge to knock all of his carefully arranged papers off the table. “Neither of us may have thought very highly of her, Phinneaus, but it sounds like you’re suggesting Natalie was involved in something criminal. That’s not possible. There has to be a simple explanation for this.”
“There is. It’s just I don’t think you’re going to want to hear it.”
“Try me.” She couldn’t look at him. She’d already made up her mind whatever he said wasn’t going to be true.
“All right.” He pulled the legal tablet from the center of the table and turned over the first page. Out of the corner of her eye she saw he’d drawn an elaborate diagram—paragraphs and arrows, question marks and suppositions. He’d already worked the whole thing out in his head.
“I don’t think Natalie told you the truth. Not about why you had to leave Connecticut, not about what happened that night in the attic. Not even about the grave she took you to see that day it was raining. I think something else happened. And I think Therese and Natalie were the only two people who knew anything about it.”
Her nose was flooded with the scent of something sickly sweet, and she choked on it, gasping for air. She was drowning, drowning on land, and Phinneaus was just standing there, watching her go down. The simplest thing in the world would be to tell him to stop right now. She could think the word, but could not get her lips to form it.
He pulled her back down onto the chair. “I know this is hurting you. And I’m sorry to be the one doing it.”
“Then don’t.”
“Alice, you need to hear the rest of this. Natalie kept meticulous records. I’m guessing she needed documentation for the insurance company regarding all your medications, blood work, X-rays, your visits to your rheumatologist. Which makes sense, considering the terms of the trust would have required her to document any expenses before receiving disbursements. But there’s absolutely nothing documented regarding your pregnancy. You saw a doctor, didn’t you?”
“Of course I saw a doctor.”
“But there aren’t records of any visits to an obstetrician. There’s no record of a hospital stay; no receipts for pain prescriptions, antibiotics. There’s nothing.” His voice dropped, and he looked away from her. “There’s no certificate of stillbirth, and there’s no record of any payment to a cemetery.”
“You mean it’s as if I was never pregnant.”
“Yes. At least, I think that’s how Natalie wanted it to look.” He shuffled through another stack of papers and brought out an envelope, hesitating before he handed it to her. “I’m guessing her bitterness caused her to do something even she couldn’t imagine, Alice. And then after the fact, she just couldn’t find a way to undo what she’d done. I found this with her papers.”
It was a business envelope, a standard number 10 in ivory with “Steele and Greene Property Management” printed on the back flap in dark ink and directly below, a return address in Hartford. It was heavy when she took it from him; a cotton bond, woven, with a watermark. The weight of fine stationery. Her mother had always had good stationery: response cards, envelopes in two sizes, creamy standard sheets with her initials, raised and linked at the top. She’d opened all of her mail with a sterling letter opener, as if each piece of correspondence deserved its own small ceremony. Alice turned the envelope over and saw who it was addressed to: Agnete S. Kessler. ASK. Agnete. Natalie had named her after the storm.
The envelope dropped from her hand and lay faceup on the carpet at her feet. An address in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The words “Return to Sender” followed by three exclamation points, written emphatically in black and underlined three times. Someone should pick that up, she thought. But she couldn’t move.
It was too much to comprehend, not that she could understand it any better in another ten minutes, or ten days, or even a year. It was inconceivable that her sister—with whom she shared blood, DNA, history—might be the architect of her suffering, her slow unraveling. And yet Alice could conceive of it, now, when faced with a room full of evidence. Her mouth opened, and she turned to Phinneaus, but her voice had already floated away from her, beyond this room and toward the west, calling out for a grown woman who might be her daughter.
So she was someone’s mother, but she was not. And hadn’t been for thirty-five years. Mother. But evidently not the sort who would know, instinctively, her own daughter was alive. She felt a horrifying kinship with Frankie’s mother in jail, knowing him yet uninterested in the circumstances of her son’s life, his small triumphs, his ongoing battles. Were they that different? How was it possible she’d accepted everything Natalie told her, every detail, every lie? She’d allowed grief to make her slow and stupid.
Phinneaus picked up the envelope from the floor. “Alice, we don’t know anything for sure.”
“You wouldn’t have told me any of this if you weren’t sure. You believe she’s alive, don’t you? And that Natalie was hiding her from me all this time.”
“For as long as I’ve known you, Natalie’s gone away twice a year, for about two weeks at a time. From what I remember, she left right before Thanksgiving the first year you were living here, and then went away again in the spring. Same thing every year after that.”
“But those were vacations. She went to New York to visit friends. New Orleans for Mardi Gras. California for . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Four weeks of vacation every year? On what she was making at the bank?” Phinneaus shook his head. “And what friends would she be visiting, Alice? She was in New York, but I think she must have been seeing someone at Steele and Greene when she was there. I couldn’t find much in her papers about the company, but there was one signature from the firm on a lease document.” He looked at his notes. “Have you ever heard of a George Reston, Jr.?”
It was like a building coming down, this collapse. The last hope she harbored that Phinneaus might be wrong, that there could be some other explanation, shattered and turned to dust. She pictured Natalie’s face as her sister lay on the carpet, clutching her hand, her look of surprise and regret. Alice had always considered herself the smart one, but as it turned out, she’d been the one most easily fooled. She’d underestimated George’s capacity for cruelty and how desperately he wanted to win Natalie’s affection.
What had they cost Natalie, she wondered, favors of such magnitude? She could only guess. All she really wanted now was for Phinneaus to help her find George Reston. To hunt him down and then leave her alone with him in a locked room. She had nothing more to lose.
Phinneaus was still talking, but it was little more than a buzz in her ear.
“I checked Natalie’s credit card statements. There are airline charges for tickets to New York, and
then a day or two later, another flight to Albuquerque. I found charges from a car rental company, too, but no hotel charges. She must have stayed with them.”
“Them?”
He cleared his throat. “Therese and Agnete.”
She struggled to pay attention. “Why would Natalie leave a trail for someone to follow? Wouldn’t she pay cash for everything if she didn’t want anyone to know where she was going?”
“Have you been upstairs in this house since the two of you moved in? Who was there to go through her things? Saisee? Maybe she felt sure you’d never see any of this. Or maybe Natalie wanted to be found out. I don’t know.”
Alice gestured toward the envelope, still in Phinneaus’s hand. “This letter, is there anything after that?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find. But Natalie did have tickets. They were for October twentieth.”
“The last letter was returned.”
“Yes.” He handed her the envelope.
“The postmark is from two months ago. She could be anywhere by now.”
Phinneaus was circling the table again, gathering things up. “I suppose she could. But it seems like the best place to start.”
“To start?”
“Looking for her. So you can find her and tell her the truth. There’s no knowing what Natalie might have told her. She’s got to understand you didn’t . . .” He stopped when he noticed Alice shaking her head.
She’d been afraid she would disappoint him at some point; he thought too much of her. She just hadn’t anticipated these would be the circumstances of that disappointment. She’d thought it might be with the offer of her body, when that came, although they’d both reached an age where perfection would be more intimidating than alluring. This was who he was, an organizer, a resolver of problems. Nothing was more satisfying to him than the offer of solutions. But this wasn’t anything he could fix for her. He was assuming they wanted the same things, dreamt the same dreams. And now he would realize he didn’t know her at all.
“I need some time to think, Phinneaus. I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I want to be alone for a while.”
“You’re afraid.”
Of course I am. Stop asking me to do things I can’t do. She pulled her sweater tighter around her. “I need some time.”
“Alice, Natalie’s gone. The only person you’re at war with now is yourself. Let me help you.”
She shook her head and stumbled away from him, retreating to her bedroom. She locked the door behind her, an action completely unnecessary and meant more to keep her in than him out. But the house, old and poorly insulated, continually gave itself away. She knew he would hear the turn of the bolt and be offended, and she stood waiting with her forehead pressed against the doorframe, perfectly still. It was only another minute before she heard the kitchen door slam.
Saisee had already cleaned her room. The bed, so comfortable last night, looked orderly and sterile, the pillows stacked against each other, the sheets pulled tight and tucked into crisp corners beneath the blanket. She sat down on the edge of it and pulled her hair back, knotting it loosely at her neck. There was no way to make him understand.
How many times had she sat on this bed and smoothed her imaginary daughter’s hair, or dragged a thumb across the furrow between her brows? How many years had she sung a silent “Happy Birthday,” imagined what school clothes to set out for the first day, written down a child’s Christmas list? When the students she tutored gathered in the dining room for their lessons, clustered together with their chittering voices, their fidgeting, their anxious glances at each other’s notes, hadn’t she counted her daughter’s head among theirs? All of it pretend. She was a pretend parent, even in her attentions to the children she taught. She had them for an hour or two, then released them and like homing pigeons they flew back to their nests, any thought of her forgotten until the next time they walked into her house.
Phinneaus was right, of course. She was a coward. If her daughter had known her from the start, things might be different. It wouldn’t seem strange to have a mother who moved at a turtle’s pace on a good day, and didn’t walk at all on a bad one. She’d think of her mother’s swollen joints no differently than the bloated plastic snap-and-lock beads she would have pushed together and pulled apart as a toddler. All that time spent resting in bed would have included fairy tales and poetry, crossword puzzles and Chinese checkers. The child’s arms would be strong, her fingers limber.
But that hadn’t happened. There seemed to be no upside in throwing herself into a stranger’s life now, rather, a woman’s life. At thirty-five, her daughter was an adult. Alice’s imagination carried her only to the point of Agnete as an adolescent; she didn’t try to picture the woman her daughter had become, fearful of seeing the legacy of her own genes passed on. Natalie was dead, but she had won.
There was the whole day left in front of her. She couldn’t sleep. Walking the perimeter of the hooked rug again seemed equally useless. She left the refuge of her bedroom and took her coat from the back hall, pulled on mittens, and wrapped a scarf across the bottom of her face. The air outside was crisp with the scoured scent of winter. She looked down as she walked, watching for cracks in the sidewalk, for the treacherous spiny fruits of sweet gum, for patches of ice. While most people learned their neighborhood by the houses they passed, the people they waved to, Alice had learned hers by looking up and down. She could tell where she was by an abandoned nest in a tree, by the odd pits in the sidewalk cement, by the shabby brick border that contained Mrs. Deacon’s roses, and the trowel stuck halfway in the ground near the edge of the church driveway, marking something unnamed.
At some point during the years the town had stopped being a way station and turned into her home. It claimed her in spite of her efforts to remain isolated, her attempts to keep herself away from judgment, speculation, and pity, the thought of the last especially repugnant. But Saisee, Frankie, and Phinneaus dismantled her defenses. They threw down casual crumbs for her to follow, luring her out of hiding and into the world. They brought in tantalizing threads of gossip and took out with them evidence of her commonness, the small seeds they planted to establish her not as ghost but as flesh and blood—Alice caught Frankie’s cold; Alice loved the recipe for Mrs. Whittaker’s corn bread; Alice said she thought the PTA should have a fund-raiser to get new books for the school library. She had done nothing to deserve them. And Phinneaus? Already her hand missed the thin, worn flannel of his shirt, her face the scratch of his day-old beard.
She circled the block twice, letting everything inside of her tick down until her feet were too heavy to lift and the air too heavy to breathe. When she came back in the house, Saisee had lunch waiting: hot tea, beef and vegetable stew, and a plate of crackers with a relish dish of pimento cheese. The housekeeper stood with her back to the sink, her arms folded in front of her, her eyebrows raised as if waiting for an excuse.
Alice looked at her friend. “You know, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout.”
“The pimento cheese gave you away. The only time you make it for me is when you’re trying to coerce me into doing something I don’t want to.”
Saisee sniffed. “Not my fault these walls are so thin.”
Alice pushed the food aside and laid her head on the table.
“You gonna eat that perfectly good lunch I made?”
“Not hungry.”
Saisee slapped her hand against her side, and Alice jumped. “Don’t go makin’ me any madder at you than I already am. Listen to me now. It’s not for you to decide how somebody else is gonna feel about you. Whether they gonna want you or not. That girl deserves . . .”
“She’s not a girl anymore, Saisee.”
“You know what I mean. This person deserves to know what happened.”
“Why? Because it absolves me? And what about her? Natalie went to see her twice a year, Saisee, ever since she was a baby. Agnete must have loved her. I doubt s
he even knows Natalie’s gone. How can I tear their relationship down, if it’s just to force a place for myself in her life? Would I be any less cruel than Natalie?”
“You never once tore down Miss Natalie when she was alive. I don’t suppose you have to do it now. Truth will out. Always does.” Saisee sat down next to her. “You tellin’ me you don’t want to see your own girl?”
See. That was the word that tripped the switch and started the machinations. She wouldn’t actually have to say anything to Agnete. If there was some way to find her, wouldn’t it do just to see her face, to stand close enough to feel the echo of her walk, to memorize the tilt of her head, the curve of her fingers? It was equal parts subterfuge and deceit—the sort of thing Natalie would have done. But the idea had already taken on a life of its own and was running rampant in her brain, stoking a small, steady flame at her core. I could see my daughter.
THIRTEEN
The sky was purple when she looked out the window of the train, somewhere in the middle of Kansas, a state wider than she would have imagined. Phinneaus had driven her south the hour to Newbern to catch the 58 City of New Orleans and waited with her, both of them shifting back and forth on a hard bench in the depot, until she boarded the train shortly after midnight. They were talked out, having spent much of the previous week arguing, first about her insistence on going alone and second, about her chosen means of transportation. All of the squabbling and wheedling had left them done in, and she worried about him driving back so late, as tired as he was, but he was still too angry with her to act sensibly, and she didn’t have the strength to fight another battle. Once she found her seat in the coach car and the attendant put her bags up, she slept through most of the eight and half hours to Chicago. Then there was a six-hour wait at Union Station before boarding the Southwest Chief to Lamy, fifteen miles south of Santa Fe. She slept through that, too, unconcerned with what she looked like, or whether anyone would try to take her bags or knock her over the head. It was so long since she’d been reckless she scarcely recognized the feeling. It felt oddly liberating to test her physical limits after such a long time.
The Gravity of Birds: A Novel Page 25