The House

by Anjuelle Floyd

  Anna lay upon the bed. Fumbling through remnants of memories. She was deep in thought and holding her arms when after a knock sounded from the door, Linda entered.

  “Dad’s not feeling well. Brad’s bringing him up.”

  Reaching the landing, Anna saw Brad and Theo helping Edward climb the stairs.

  “I’m just tired,” Edward said as if to calm her.

  You were only reading, Anna thought.

  She turned to Linda. “Where are Matt and Grant?”

  “I’ll see to them.” Linda started downstairs. Serine was still in her room sulking.

  Anna went inside the bedroom where Edward lay on the bed. She closed the door as Theo and Brad left, then proceeded to tuck Edward under the covers.

  “It’s some mess we’ve gotten ourselves into,” he murmured as she propped his head upon the pillow. “Our children are lost,” he added. “They’re fine,” Anna said. She gave the covers one last pull. “This is not something you can clean away or that can be ironed out in the dryer.” Edward’s words shocked her.

  “The way you appeared on the patio seemed to indicate you had full confidence in our children.” She went to the closet and pulled down another pillow.

  “I’m a fool,” Edward said. “Or rather, I’ve developed the uncanny ability to convince people I’m stronger or less affected, or that I don’t know any better.”

  “Like me.” Anna returned with the pillow hugged to her chest. Edward regarded the pillow. “You could smother me you know? I couldn’t stop you.”

  “Was that supposed to be some kind of sick joke?” Stunned, Anna took a moment to register the words, their meaning, and then on bolstering his pillow. “Sit up,” she placed the pillow under his head.

  “I’m serious,” Edward egged on while obeying her.

  “You want me to smother you and go to jail?” She stepped back. “What good would that do?”

  “Maybe get out some of your anger.”

  She sighed.

  “I just want it to be over,” Edward stated blankly. “Actually, I’m scared.”

  “I need to see about Matt and Grant, and dinner.” She walked to the door.

  “It’s going to get messy.”

  “It’s been messy all along.” Anna turned back.

  “Not like now. This time I won’t be coming back.”

  Anna wanted to lunge herself upon Edward, shake him and scream, How could you do this? Instead, she pulled the door open, and was about to exit when Edward spoke.

  “About Stella and Esther?” The door wide open, Anna slowly turned once more. “They had nothing on you,” he said. Edward’s amber eyes appeared lost and dazed—a feature she had never seen nor associated with the Edward Manning with whom she had be come accustomed. Something had happened over the past year. Anna steeled herself against a torrent of emotions brewing to a boil. “I was scared,” he said. Edward lowered his head.

  Anna breathed in the hurt she so wanted to relinquish, feelings of betrayal she had hoped to abandon while moving through The Louvre and The Hermitage museums of Paris and St. Petersburg while viewing the works of art they housed. Calmly, she walked to Edward.

  “You were arrogant and self-serving just like our youngest daughter.” Matt’s soft pink face came before her. I don’t think it’s meant for me to be with your daughter in this lifetime... We won’t relinquish our dreams. “Your behavior has been abominable,” Anna continued. “It hurt, terribly. Most of all, it affected these children, our children. Your children.”

  Edward examined his hands and pulled at his fingers. He still wore his wedding band. A roller coaster of memories reeled across her thoughts. She considered the late night breast-feedings of David, Theo, Linda, and Serine. As infants in her arms, their tiny lips explored her nipples. Edward was either absent or watching from a distance, heated anger writhing within his stare.

  “What was it about me becoming a mother?” Anna asked. “What turned you away when I gave birth to your children and loved them?” She had only been trying to give them what she had not received from Elena, and what Violet had lacked, irrespective of her intent toward Edward. A show of love. Someone.

  “I envied them,” Edward said. The sorrow of his admission over took the room, and ripped away one more layer of the dank, sordid history standing between them.

  “You were jealous of them? They were babies, infants—our children.” Anna’s chest sank.

  “I was jealous of you.” Edward lifted his head. And for a moment, Anna beheld the hurting child he had been when he confronted the doctor with whom Edward’s mother had had a long-standing affair. She recalled Edward’s fury at Violet’s grave site. He had caught the doctor kneeling at Violet’s casket about to be lowered into the ground.

  “You killed her,” Edward had said to him. “You killed her more than the drugs you prescribed for her.”

  “I loved your mother,” the pale-skinned doctor had said. “You’re a liar. An absolute, fucking, liar.”

  “Your mother meant everything to me.”

  “Then, why didn’t you marry her?”

  “I asked and she refused. She said she could never trust a white man.”

  “You’re a goddamn lie!” Edward punched the man and knocked him to the ground.

  Anna rushed to Edward and pulled at his arm as others looked on. “We should go,” she whispered.

  He pushed her away, his attention fixed upon the doctor lying in the dirt. Placing his foot upon the man’s neck, he riled, “Don’t ever come near my mother’s grave site again. If I suspect, or even wake up from a dream where I see you here, I swear I’ll hunt you down, and kill you, piece by piece.” The same rage that welled in Edward’s eyes that day three decades earlier had swirled in Serine’s when she described Matt as nothing but a sexual toy. Matt’s dream of Edward’s dying body upon the bed came into focus then dissipated.

  The memory faded. Settled back in the present moment, Anna took in Edward lying upon the bed. Death was encroaching upon his weak body. He was shriveling. Slowly, she returned to the door, walked through, and pulled it closed.?

  Chapter 17

  Grant Seifert had removed the jacket to his suit when Anna approached him on the patio. He was standing by the pool with his back to her, his hands pocketed as he observed the water.

  “It’s normally full of trash this time of the year,” Anna said on reaching him, “I’m usually biting my nails and trying to decide whether to continue with the weekly cleanings or to close it for the winter.”

  Grant turned to her, removed his hands from his pocket, and gave a half chuckle. “My mother always had the same problem.”

  “What does she do now?”

  “Nothing presently. She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.” Anna glanced down at the water.

  “Don’t be. She’s in a better place.”

  Where Matt was soft spoken and direct in his questioning, Grant Seifert wanted to convey that he possessed all the answers. Anna took in Grant’s chiseled, athletic face and wondered had his mother’s death been sudden. “Were you with her when she died?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was in Europe. She was in a car accident.” Grant sighed. “It paralyzed her from the neck down. She was on a ventilator.”

  “How long did she survive like that?”

  “Three days. My plane landed six hours after she died.” A melancholic smile assumed control of Grant’s all-about-business demeanor. His shoulders became curved and human-like rather than square and soldierly as if prepared to fight the enemy of the ubiquitous and ever present criminal. “My father was with her when she passed.”

  “That was good,” Anna said, “—that she wasn’t alone.”

  The brightness went from Grant’s eyes. Yet they remained sternly attentive. “My mother was a strong woman. What white people term a loner. She kept the truth about herself and who she really was close to her vest.”

  A chilly sense of self-recognition rushed through Anna. She lifted
her hands to her chest. Realizing what she had done, she let them fall to her sides.

  “I don’t know what it is with you women,” Grant said, and then on catching the harshness of his words, “Excuse me, but I need to be frank.” Anna recognized that beyond outward appearances that Grant needed Serine more than the reverse. “Why isn’t it enough for us to love and need you? Why can’t you lean and depend on us, and let us take care of you?”

  “Perhaps it’s because too many of us have been let down and disappointed.”

  “We’re not all the same.” Grant clinched his jaw. He had connected with Serine’s goodness, what was hidden and protected by her anger.

  Anna considered Stella, Esther, and the three or four others with whom Edward had been involved.

  “I want to give myself to Serine, all of myself, not parts like that artist fellow.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a correct assessment of Matt’s intentions.” Anna’s identification with Matt went deep. “Perhaps the better question is why did Serine let it happen?”

  “She was confused,” Grant said. “Your decision to divorce her father was tearing her apart, upsetting her. Her father had been unfaithful to you many times, but she couldn’t understand why you waited so long, and after so much had gone on.”

  That seemed to be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. Anna calmed herself. “Sometimes it takes awhile to realize that not only are we unhappy but what we might do about it.”

  “Thirty-three years?” Grant frowned. Anna sensed that Grant’s interest in why she had chosen to divorce Edward somehow trailed back to his mother’s death. “Why do you stay with the ones of us who mistreat you and don’t give you what you want and need, but leave those of us who love you, open our hearts, and pour out all we have?”

  “Is that what you view me as having done?” Anna considered her words to Inman when telling him of Edward’s illness and wanting to care for him. I need to be with him, to which, Inman had replied, I also need you to be certain of what you feel for me.

  Grant’s countenance turned sad. “My mother left my father for a man half her age, and with none of my father’s integrity. I was in law school, studying in Budapest at the time. Mama and I talked often. I was an only child. She never said anything about why she had ditched Dad—even when I told her that I knew, and questioned her. I found out through my grandmother, her mother, that she’d left my father. She never told me she was leaving, or why.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t know why.”

  “Oh, she knew alright,” Grant said. The prosecutor driven by the young adult searching for answers had returned. “She knew her answer betrayed her guilt and would never measure up. My Dad was innocent.” The force with which Grant spoke launched a blast of insight.

  Anna saw herself not only as like Grant’s deceased mother some part of her dead and another part dying—Anna also felt a kinship with Grant’s father, the part of herself that possessed no voice, or rather refused to speak. “No one’s innocent in a marriage,” Anna said. “Guilt is always shared. We are not what we think, you, me, Serine, Edward, Matt, my children, your parents.” Anna was amazed at the level of honesty with which Serine had spoken to Grant of Edwards’s dalliances. It revealed a depth of truth unblemished by youth and innocence.

  Matt’s a fuck buddy; that’s all. Again, Anna trembled at having slapped the most vulnerable of her children.

  “For the past year, I have been engaged in trying to divorce Ed ward. I’ve wanted my freedom for a long time. And now that Edward is dying and has maybe less time than the doctor says, I’m afraid. I’m afraid and angry that death is taking him from me.” Anna had never realized until she met Matt, and was now speaking with Grant that without Edward in the world, as unfaithful as he was, she would be alone.

  “I would expect you to feel vindicated.” Grant’s eyes receded as if recalling his father’s loss—the anger and hurt he might have felt when his wife, Grant’s mother, died.

  “For thirty-three years I’ve been having an affair with my loneliness and private frustrations. “They’ve been with me all my life. It’s drew me to marry Edward. I wanted to escape myself, who I was, what I hated.” Anna forced a bittersweet smile, and staved back tears. “Now I won’t have him abandoning and frustrating me with his self-absorption and perpetual traveling. When he leaves this time, he’ll never return.” ?

  Chapter 18

  Anna’s conversation with Grant awakened within her a nest of questions buzzing for answers. She drove to the cemetery behind the Chapel of the Chimes. The quietness held within the high stone walls surrounding the graveyard against the bustle of the streets beyond delivered a tranquilizing effect as she walked between the headstones of the dead. Anna slowed in nearing the markers bearing her mother’s and father’s names: Elena Chason and Reverend Elijah Chason. Kneeling at the marker, she recalled her father’s words when learning of Elena’s prognosis. Your mother’s dying. I don’t know what I’m going to do.

  “You’ll be fine.” Anna had said. They were at the old Providence Hospital; her mother was in a room a few steps beyond where she and her father stood. She had placed her hand upon Elijah’s trembling shoulder. His face was blank; his eyes were empty pools of misery. Anna wished she could have entered his eyes then traveled the banks of his memory and uncovered why and what had ever drawn him to her mother.

  “I love her,” he said.

  “I’ll drive you home,”

  “But my car,” Elijah said. “How will I get it home?” He had come hours earlier. After speaking with Elena’s doctors, he had called Anna.

  “Edward and I will come back for your car.”

  “Is he home?”

  “Yes,” Anna said.

  Reverend Elijah seemed surprised. He handed over the keys to his car. She accompanied him downstairs and to the garage.

  Minutes later and moving down Telegraph Avenue, he asked, “Are you happy?” The Reverend had seemed more bereft in asking that question than in telling Anna of her mother’s prognosis.

  “Yes,” Anna said. Pregnant with Linda, she still held hope for her marriage.

  They reached her parents’ home on Union Street in Oakland. She took him inside and prepared dinner.

  “I doubt I’ll be able to eat anything.” Elijah moaned. One day Elena had been ironing his shirts for Sunday services; the next she’d been unable to get out of bed. Her illness had shocked him. Brain cancer last stages, the doctors had said. Anna set the plate on the table. “What will I do?” Reverend Elijah had asked. He looked to his only child.

  “What you’ve always done.” Anna sat next to him. “What we’ve always done. Pray.” But she hadn’t prayed in a while. This would be her first time in years looking to God for help. Not even Edward’s malfeasances had forced her to look outside herself for answers. The approaching death of Elena Chason, stalwart helpmate of a minister, and a mother with little show of affection, had drawn on Anna’s vulnerabilities. My mother’s dying. Daddy is losing his wife. We don’t know what to do. Help us, oh Lord, to see this through. Help us. And, there was the church where Elijah had ministered for more than thirty years. Guide Daddy in what to do. During the last five years of occupying his position, Elijah had been reticent to share his duties with a younger assistant who would eventually take over and make it difficult to attract another minister.

  Anna began washing the dishes.

  “Daddy, you need to think about finding someone to help out at the church,” she urged. “Not that they have to completely take over, but you need someone to preach at least two Sundays a month.”

  “Delivering the word of God is my way of life.” Elijah sighed. Still at the kitchen table, he leaned back in his chair as if acquiescing. “Without your mother around, not preaching would be like—” He turned to Anna. “It would be like you losing David, Theo, and the baby you’re carrying, no clothes to fold, no one needing your food, or you. With Edward away all the time, you’d lose hope.”

 
Anna realized that Elijah knew of the problem plaguing her marriage, Edward’s unfaithfulness.

  Back at home, she told Edward of her mother’s condition. “Ma ma’s dying and Daddy doesn’t know what to do. I’m worried about him.”

  “Then, bring him here,” Edward said as he undressing.

  “I don’t want to move him here. And, besides, he wouldn’t come.”

  “Why not? The house is plenty big enough. We have five bed rooms.” Edward had begun plans for a house when learning that Anna was pregnant with David two years earlier. Violet had died the afternoon Edward was meeting with the architect.

  “I don’t think it would be good to uproot him. Two losses might topple him over.”

  “Suit yourself. The offer stands.”

  Fuming at Edward’s callous response, she turned from the closet, and walked to him. “If you really want to know why I don’t want Daddy here, it’s because I’m ashamed for him to see me here alone with you away all the time.”

  “I work,” Edward snapped.

  “Yes, you work. But you also play quite rudely and very dangerously.” Anna wondered if any of the women with whom Edward had affairs were married or had boyfriends.

  “Come off your high horse, Anna. You have everything any woman could need or want.”

  “Except you.”

  He got in bed. “You have me as much as any woman can expect to have a man when he’s working to provide for his family.”

  “Did you give Stella as much as you give me, David, and Theo?” Anna had massaged her abdomen containing Linda.

  Edward rolled over and turned away from her.

  “I told you that was over.”

  “And, I don’t believe you.” Anna had seen letters from Esther. “That’s your choice. As long as I provide for you and David, I’d say you have little to grumble about.”

  “I deserve better,” she spoke to his back then hit his shoulder. He whipped over on the bed and grabbed her wrist. “This is the only way I can get you to touch me.”