Summertime
Page 40
‘Does she understand, do you think?’ Sasha asks me quietly as we walk back through the cemetery together.
‘She understands too well and feels too much,’ I say.
We drive Mother back to Redbush. When we have delivered her to her nurse, Sasha and I hover uncertainly in the parking lot. Despite the rain, the sprinklers are still switched on across the grounds. Without the sun they do not sparkle.
‘Well?’ he says. ‘Have you changed your mind?’
‘No, Sash.’
Jane is incarcerated at Redbush too. Larry negotiated to have her bailed here to the secure wing.
‘The reunion cannot be a pleasant one, Larry has warned us of that,’ says Sasha. Larry has looked old and tired since Jane’s arrest and now he has announced his retirement.
‘I must go in, she’s all alone,’ I insist.
‘Scott has refused to visit her and he is right. She killed his son, she is not entitled to his compassion.’
‘No one could forgive her for that,’ I say carefully, feeling the rain dampen my hair, my eyelashes. ‘But you know, Daddy and Mother never should have covered up the first death. By protecting her, they exposed the rest of us to risk.’
‘If they were wrong, they have paid dearly for their mistake, your mother with her sanity and your father with his life.’
I turn towards the secure wing.
‘I have to go,’ I say. ‘Jane needs me.’
Sasha lights a cigarette before he follows me. ‘Lucia, must we really regard her needs as paramount?’
‘She loved me and looked after me for years and years. Should I just forget that now?’
‘Loved you and looked after you.’ He snorts. ‘She presented herself as your protector when she was actually your controller and everyone but you was aware of this. She constantly diagnosed bogus health complaints which enabled her to regulate your life, she isolated you from your friends, she attempted to kill you on a number of occasions while appearing to save you, and she created a version of your past, a series of fictions about your childhood, which disguised her own destructive role.’
He draws fiercely on his cigarette.
‘But Sash, we all create fictions about our past for our own ends and a couple of days ago you were recommending that to me,’ I remind him. ‘After all, you’ve created a Russian past for yourself which involves red neckerchiefs and singing Young Pioneer songs around the campfire.’
‘We structure our own past with narrative. We have no right to structure other people’s.’
He waves his cigarette at me.
‘Since you are determined to defend Jane, let us visit her. But we can expect little thanks for our trouble.’
Despite everyone’s warnings, I imagine myself talking over recent events with Jane. I even believe she might attempt to offer some kind of explanation. I am convinced that at the very least she will be pleased to see me.
I am told that I may only speak to her through a grille. When it opens I peer anxiously through it like a visitor at the zoo searching for some particularly well-camouflaged reptile. Finally I locate her across the room. She sits, her body still, her face turned away, her hair like a curtain between us.
I call her name gently and she does not respond. I say: ‘It’s Lucy. Jane, it’s Lucy.’
I know that this will make her turn and smile, that she will come right over to me when she hears my name and ask me how I am. My heart beats faster. But she does not look up or respond.
Sasha and I drive home in silence. When we are back in the kitchen and Aunt Zina is crashing pans around us, I ask: ‘Sash, what did you mean when you said that everyone knew Jane tried to control me?’
‘Exactly that. For example, your childhood visits to this apartment.’
Aunt Zina pauses. ‘She visited us seldom and when she did so, she sulked jealously.’
‘It was clear to Grandma, Mother and me that she disliked your forming any relationship over which she could not exercise direct influence,’ says Sasha. ‘I imagine that she usually tried to dissuade you from visiting? And often succeeded.’
When Mrs Joseph came to see me she told me that, after the crash in the valley, Robert had called me many times. She herself had both called and written. Jane had intercepted each time, informing the Josephs I didn’t want to speak to them again.
‘If you’d had the confidence to pick up the phone yourself,’ Mrs Joseph said, ‘she never could have controlled things so effectively.’
‘But unconsciously, Lucia,’ says Sasha, ‘you knew about her. You escaped from her to New York into a manageable world of figures and when you returned you chose to stay with us. I believe you knew it all.’
Scott takes me to the airport.
He says: ‘Am I allowed to ask exactly when you’re coming back?’
‘I just have to say goodbye to Jim and pack my apartment. I’ll be home in a week.’
He smiles and picks me up as though I’m as small and weightless as a toy and then swings me around.
‘Everything’s lighter now,’ he tells me.
I am walking away from him as he yells: ‘Lucy, don’t take three years about it this time. Or we’ll come and get you. Me and your brother.’
As the plane nears New York I see Manhattan glittering in the distance. The cab driver informs me that the weather just changed. That heatwave they had in the west has worked its way right across the continent, he tells me, and arrived, weakened by travel, in New York city.
‘It’s great, it’s summer!’ he says.
‘It’s spring,’ I remind him.
My key in the lock of the apartment, my bag over my shoulder, a stack of mail from the lobby under my arm. The lock feels surprised, a little stiffer than usual, but the door swings open easily enough. It’s been waiting for me a long time.
Everything’s exactly as I left it. A few clothes on the bed which I thought of taking and then didn’t while Jim Finnigan sat in the living-room weeping and talking to me. The phone a little out of place: I used it to call Sasha that night, to hear Daddy’s message. Daddy’s rocks, handled by Jim, rearranged.
I sit down and enjoy the silence and stillness of my own place. Nothing moves. One hour slips into another and all four figures on the digital clock change simultaneously and silently to four different figures. Then the apartment is still again. I can hear the noise of the street outside, the airplanes overhead, distant music from my neighbours, but in here there is no noise unless I make it, no movement unless I create it.
Eventually I stretch and fetch the mail I carried up from the lobby. I start to sort through it. Junk in one pile, reading in another, bills in another. One letter arrests me. Handwritten envelope. Familiar writing, small, intelligent, tidy. My hand starts to shake. I fight for breath. Tears sting at my eyes.
I sit down and stare at the letter that was mailed to me in some other era and has waited for me to return from my long, long journey. I stare at it, bracing myself for the new reality it might contain. I prepare for another shift in my knowledge, after so many, and just when I thought I was home.
Slowly, reluctantly, I tear open the envelope. I unfold the letter.
My dear Lucy, I’ve tried calling, now I’m writing because it’s clear to me that I won’t be around so very much longer. I don’t want to go, Lucy. I don’t want to leave you. But when I do, please don’t be too sad. Don’t be too angry. Don’t ask why unless you’re ready for what you might find. Don’t come back to California. Don’t have any more children here, have them in some other part of the world, but for God’s sake, have them, you were a good mother and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Don’t think too badly of your father, he loves you dearly. And don’t you dare forget me. As long as you remember me, I’m still there. Daddy.
Table of Contents
Cover
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Su
mmertime
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