The Unremembered Girl: A Novel

by Eliza Maxwell

  Alice stood quickly from the table, meeting Henry’s eye as she did. He could see she couldn’t get out of there fast enough to suit her.

  Del, though, Del tried. “Dad, I—”

  “I said get out.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean that. I was just—”

  “I know what you meant, boy. You don’t have to sugarcoat it now that it’s sitting out in the middle of the room like a rotten egg. You don’t have any respect for me, and worse, you don’t have any respect for the Lord. Your sister, God rest her soul, she was the better of the two of you.”

  Del reared back like he’d taken a physical blow, and Alice gasped.

  “Livingston!” Mama rebuked.

  “No, Caroline. There’s no need to walk on eggshells around the boy’s feelings. He’s a man now, or so he thinks. It’s time he heard some hard truths. Maribel was the better of the pair, and that’s a damn shame.”

  “What’s a shame, Dad?” Del asked quietly. “That Mari’s gone, or that Mari’s gone and I’m not?”

  Livingston sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He’d drawn his line in the sand, and he wasn’t backing down. “You take it however you like, boy.”

  “Livingston Renard Doucet! That is quite enough of that foolishness,” Mama said, shocking them all. She rarely disputed her husband’s nonsense in front of others. Henry had heard them hash it out behind closed doors but never in front of the family.

  Livingston looked as surprised as the rest of them, before his jaw set with a stubborn intractability that Henry had seen many times before.

  “Don’t bother, Caroline. It’s not like it’s ever been a secret,” Del said, rising from the table.

  “It was a fine dinner, Caroline, thank you,” Alice murmured, following her husband toward the door. Henry rose to see them out, feeling like an usher at the picture show. The question he’d yet to figure out was if the show was a comedy or a tragedy.

  Alice made it to the doorway of the kitchen, but she turned and spoke once more to Livingston’s back.

  “You all forget sometimes, I think. I was friends with Mari. Probably knew her better than any of you did.”

  Her words were soft, but there could be no doubt that Livingston was listening.

  “You’ve painted that picture in your memory, sir, with a rose-colored brush. And that’s fine. Just fine. Right up until you use it as a weapon against your son. Mari was no angel.”

  “I thought I told you to get going,” Livingston said without turning around to face her.

  Alice ignored his bluster and patted Henry on the shoulder on her way out the door.

  “You take care, Henry,” she said.

  “You too, Alice.”

  Henry closed the door behind them and walked back to the kitchen in time to see his mother pick up the slice of cake that Livingston’s fork was poised over and sweep it away.

  Without a word, she dumped it in the trash and left the room.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was late. The part of the deep night when it’s impractical to do anything useful, but sleep won’t come, so the mind swirls around in the dark, skirting past old memories and bumping against unvoiced desires.

  With a sigh, Henry threw back the blankets and went in search of a distraction.

  Muffled noises from the kitchen told him he wasn’t the only one rattling around the quiet house. He found his mother in her nightgown and robe, heaping leftovers onto a tray.

  Considering she hadn’t had much of an appetite since her diagnosis, and Henry had passed Livingston snoring on the couch in the study, to where he’d been banished, Henry was confused by the sheer volume of food she was piling up.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  Mama gasped and swung around, her hand at her throat.

  “Oh Lord, Henry! Didn’t anybody ever teach you not to sneak up on an old lady like that?”

  “What in the world are you doing?”

  His mother opened her mouth, then closed it again. No words came out, and Henry was surprised to see a flush creep up her neck. Was she embarrassed? He couldn’t think of a single time he’d ever seen his mother embarrassed of anything.

  He watched as she squared her shoulders under the dim kitchen light and tightened her robe.

  “Since you’re here, you can carry this for me,” she said.

  “Carry it where?”

  “Just follow me, and quit with the questions.”

  Henry turned his head and watched her walk out of the kitchen. Finally, seeing no other way to satisfy his curiosity, he picked up the tray filled with roast beef and vegetables and a large slab of coconut cake and followed his mother.

  His step faltered when he saw her open the front door and glance back at him.

  “Well, come on, then.”

  The stray thought occurred to him that if it weren’t for women, in all their cloaks of unfathomed mysteries, men would lead very boring lives.

  Pulled along like a small boat in a strong current, Henry followed.

  In bare feet, with the breeze blowing her faded robe and nightgown around her ankles, Mama walked down the steps of the porch and into the surrounding starlit night.

  She walked through the field and toward the edge of the woods, and Henry followed.

  When she came to the same break in the trees where he’d been just that morning, she stopped.

  “There,” she said.

  He looked at her. “You want to have a picnic? At the edge of the woods . . . at two o’clock in the morning?”

  “Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Henry’s brows shot up, but luckily for him, it was dark and his mother couldn’t see his face clearly.

  “Set the tray there,” she said, motioning to the ground again and turning back to the house.

  Henry watched her retreating back outlined only by the low lights coming from the windows of their home, then, seeing no other choice at this odd juncture, did as she asked.

  He trotted to catch up with her but didn’t bother with questions.

  When they reached the porch, she settled down on the swing that hung from one of the beams and crossed her ankles.

  “Don’t you have anything to say about that?” Henry settled next to her, listening to the old swing creak as he did.

  “Nope.” She chuckled and patted him on the leg. “You remind me a great deal of Weston sometimes.”

  Henry didn’t remember his real father, who’d died before he was two, but he’d heard her say that before, and it always left him feeling adrift.

  They lived their lives in his father’s house. Everything here had belonged to his father’s family for a hundred years. Even the moonshine still, which provided a large chunk of the family’s income, had belonged to Weston Martell. Many of the tools that Henry toted in his toolbox doing odd jobs around the county were branded with the initials “WM” on their wooden handles.

  But with no memory of the man, Henry couldn’t help but feel that a line of history had been broken with his father’s death, and Henry had never been able to repair it.

  So he floated along with his father’s features staring back at him in the mirror, using the things the man had left behind, and always, there was the feeling that he was surrounded by ghosts. Ghosts who were disappointed in him and his inability to understand what they wanted him to know.

  Or maybe the night was playing games with his mind. He’d always had a tendency to grow contemplative in the night.

  “You think the girl is still out there?” he finally asked.

  “I do,” his mother replied.

  He didn’t question her conviction. He’d learned long ago that was a waste of time.

  “You realize that girl might be dangerous.” There’d been an untamed wildness about her, and Henry sensed it went deeper than the dirty skin and clothes. He didn’t mention the lingering uneasiness she had left in him. He didn’t know how to put it into words, that sense as he’d met her eyes
of being untethered from what was real.

  Mama nodded. “I’ve considered it.”

  “That doesn’t concern you?”

  “Not particularly, no.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “Because I’ve found that most people are generally a danger only to themselves.”

  Henry thought about that for a moment but found he couldn’t agree.

  He’d been eleven when Mari had died. The quake of grief and pain had been devastating, leaving behind a changed landscape, full of shaky, uneven ground. The aftershocks were still happening, a dozen years later.

  He glanced toward the trees shrouded in inky-black darkness.

  After a moment, he did feel compelled to ask, “So you’ve decided to feed her?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Yes, I have.”

  His mind rifled through the various responses he could give right now but came up short.

  “Hmm.”

  “Aren’t you going to tell me not to go looking for trouble?”

  That had been one of the responses he’d considered, then skipped right past. “Nope.”

  “Thank you.”

  They sat in comfortable silence, staring at nothing and listening to the night sounds. But the comfort only lasted until she broke the silence.

  “Henry, I know how badly you want to join the military. And I know that I’m the reason you’ve stayed here.”

  “Mama, I don’t—”

  “Henry. I’m your mother. Give me a little credit. I know my boy.”

  Henry’s face was troubled. “I’m not going anywhere, Mama.”

  She nodded, looking off into the distance. “A better person would tell you to go. Go start your life.”

  “It wouldn’t matter, even if you said it. I’m not going anywhere.”

  She patted his leg again. “I know. And I’m not so selfless anyway. I’m glad you’re here.” She let the subject go. “Del and Alice are trying IVF again. Alice told me before dinner.”

  “What is this, the third time?” Henry asked.

  Alice and Del had been trying, unsuccessfully, to have a baby for nearly as long as they’d been married. In the past year, they’d pinned their hopes on in vitro fertilization.

  “I’m praying for them, Henry. A baby would be a fine thing. Not just for them, I think, but for Livingston too. He needs something to keep his feet firmly on the ground. I won’t be here to do that forever.”

  He hated how cavalier she could sound when speaking of her own death.

  Mama rose. “It’s late. I’m going to turn in. Goodnight, Henry.”

  “Night, Mama.”

  In the distance, he couldn’t make out any movement, but he had a sense that there was plenty going on that he couldn’t see.

  It was a familiar feeling.

  The next day, the food was gone. In spite of the late night, Henry rose early to check.

  He stared down at the dishes as the sun began to light up the day. Raccoons hadn’t stacked the plates neatly upon one another.

  The stranger was still in their woods. There could be no doubt. The real question was, what kind of person was she, and why was she there?

  Whatever the answers, there was no sign of her now.

  Henry took the tray and headed inside the house. He needed coffee.

  Mama had also risen early, as was her habit, even now. Henry set the tray on the kitchen counter and poured some fresh coffee into his thermos, noting his mother’s face as she took in the sight of the stacked dirty dishes.

  “You were right,” he said. “She’s still there.”

  She peered out the window over the kitchen sink that faced the woods.

  “Yep,” she said softly. “I usually am.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  While Livingston’s congregation, such that it was, gathered, Henry fell into the words of the book in front of him, fitted snugly inside the cover of an old Bible.

  He’d found the Bible in Mari’s room when they were cleaning it out after her death. What she’d done with the original text inside, Henry couldn’t guess, but when he’d opened up the worn white leather cover to flip through the pages, he’d found an Anne Rice novel tucked inside, rather than the Scriptures he’d expected.

  It was then that he’d understood his stepsister’s absorption with the thing, particularly during her father’s long-winded diatribes in church. Mari, a far cry from devout, had always been happy enough to attend on Sundays. At that moment, it finally made sense.

  Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Henry had asked his mother if he could keep Mari’s Bible, and the tradition had continued with him, though he’d long since given up Anne Rice’s dark tales and moved on to whatever struck his fancy that week.

  It was a connection to his dead sister. One that Henry cherished. He’d grown up on the words of Ian Fleming and Jack Kerouac. On S. E. Hinton and Louis L’Amour. All borrowed from the town library. All with Mari’s blessing, her ghostly hand on his shoulder while she sent him a sly wink.

  It was the only way he managed to get through Sunday mornings, truth be told. And the only way he managed to get out of this town, even if his travels were confined to his imagination.

  Livingston no longer had a real church to preach from. After his daughter died, he’d gone off the rails. The powers that be had eventually tired of his drunken rants and ravings, his eyes and his discourse fiery, with a madman’s spittle flying from his lips behind the pulpit.

  But losing his church didn’t stop him. No, sir. Not Livingston Doucet. Hardly one to go gentle into that good night, Livingston had taken a chainsaw from the barn the next day and set to felling the largest tree in the back forest that he could find.

  With a tremendous crashing death, the pine had come down. Not done yet, Livingston wiped the sweat from his brow, then set to work again.

  The roar of the chainsaw was egregious as he cut the tree into sections. As loud and grating as any father’s cry of grief, and no one dared interrupt. Not the wildlife, which had all darted away at the first rumble, nor the family, who could hear the saw whine all the way back at the house, as they waited with tense shoulders and bated breath to see what Livingston had in store.

  Glancing around the clearing under hooded eyes, Henry noted that not much had changed since that first Sunday Livingston had called his new congregation to him to hear his version of the Lord’s word.

  The sections that Livingston had cut from the sacrificial pine sat in two semicircular rows around the three-foot stump that Henry’s stepfather, the ousted preacher, hoisted himself onto each week, come rain or shine.

  Most of the flock had stayed true to the Second Baptist Church of Blackwater, happy to have the man and his harsh words banished to the backwoods.

  But there were a few die-hard fundamentalists who were drawn like moths to Livingston’s way of seeing the world. Not many, it was true, which gave Henry a modicum of hope for the future of humanity, but a few all the same.

  The sections of bark-covered pine that served as uncomfortably hard seating for the makeshift congregation, perhaps by design, had never been full, but that didn’t seem to bother Livingston. In fact, Henry thought the man found a self-righteous sort of satisfaction in the empty seats, which provided him with a visual representation to gesticulate at while he decried how very far society had fallen from grace.

  “And the first commandment . . . yes, I did say commandment! Not suggestion! Not recommendation! Not pretty-good-idea! Nay, the Lord commands us to honor thy father!” Livingston expounded from his self-made pulpit.

  Henry tried valiantly not to roll his eyes.

  “Amen,” Clayton Simmons added vehemently from the front row, nodding in agreement. Apparently he was out on bail after the Winn Dixie incident.

  Henry glanced over at his mother, and his mouth twitched as he caught sight of the arch in her brow. Clearly she was aware that Livingston had decided to reorder the commandments to suit his own purposes, not to mention truncating the phr
ase “Honor thy father . . . and mother.”

  If memory served, Livingston had altogether skipped over the ones about the one true God, not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and how idols were a no-no. There was another one in there too, although Henry couldn’t bring it to mind.

  It had been a long time since he’d picked up a Bible. Just after Mari had died, in fact. Not the faux version he now held in his hands, but his own copy, the leather cover brown instead of Mari’s white, with his name and the words HOLY BIBLE embossed in gold.

  In his youthful search for answers to questions he could barely comprehend, he’d read the thing from cover to cover, a little bit each night before bed. It had taken him nearly a year.

  When he was done, he started again, thinking perhaps he’d missed something.

  But after coming to the end a second time, Henry had realized that there were no answers to be had in those holy words. Not for him at least. He knew now that unless a person already had the faith to believe in them to begin with, those words were just words. Like the fire under a hot-air balloon, faith was the fuel that gave them shape and meaning, allowing them to soar. It was a catch-22.

  At twelve years old, he’d felt profoundly disappointed. And somehow lacking.

  His own copy of the Good Book was sitting on the shelf in his room, where it had sat, gathering dust, ever since he’d snapped that leather cover closed after the second read.

  “And so the Lord God did recognize that the father holds dominion over his household. He did affirm that this is as it should be, for so long as the father shall live. For so long as the father shall live, the honor to be bestowed upon him by his earthly children should reflect the honor that the children of the earth bestow upon our father the Lord in heaven. And so shall it be!”

  “Amen!” came another interjection from Clayton. “Amen, Brother Doucet!”

  This time Henry couldn’t hold back the eye roll, so he was sure to keep his head tilted downward to the pages of the spy novel, though he couldn’t help but send a glance toward Del and Alice before he did.

  Henry was sure that Del realized his father’s words were aimed at him. Del might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but sometimes a blunt instrument was all you needed.