by Monica Wood
She did the world a favor, Pauline says. Then she gets out and disappears into the house.
He goes around back, where the dooryard appears unravaged, a puddle beneath the water spigot the only sign. He heads down the lane, holding his breath as he passes the new grave, then enters his own kitchen.
They face each other. He is filthy and sweating. He can smell himself.
We can’t—, she begins. We can’t ever be—
She looks scraped out and ruined.
People would put the two and two together, she says. They would make the assumptions.
He blinks at her, trying to find her former face.
She says: They would think I killed Ray for you.
He watches her go, her hand on the latch, her foot at the floor, her body moving through space that vanishes the instant she enters it. In his kitchen, all around him, signs of beginning: the shiny bookbag packed with Lizzy’s first homework of fourth grade, her school shoes neatly placed beneath a folded sweater.
He takes in these things, then blunders outside and slips down the path and stands vigil on the ground near the grave. Blood rushing, he explains to his heavenly Father.
He makes his case: bad man. Bad husband.
He must add: human being. Child of God.
He makes his prayer for the dead.
Weeks stutter by. The dead man ransacks his dreams, poisons his appetite, loots his daily Mass. The stony rage he felt at the quarry is gone, and remorse moves in. He is sick with it.
Every day safely passed drops another stitch from his life. He feels unmasked, unclothed, unable to look the children in the eye.
His conscience becomes a live and writhing thing, and he braces for punishment. He will take what he deserves.
It is believed that Ray Blanchard left for parts unknown after leaving Gus Fournier’s boat crew a man short. He’ll come back when he’s good and ready, which may be never, and good riddance anyway. Nothing changes; Ray’s absence goes largely unremarked. Except among the children. They want to know where their papa has gone. Why does he stay away so long? If he is not at sea, then where? They cry all the time.
Lizzy, too, cries now, so sorry for her friend. She recalls Ray’s dancing. He was a good dancer, Father, remember how he danced?
The children whimper in his dreams. All night long.
He stops eating now, begins instead to be eaten.
She comes to him in the privacy of the confessional.
Bless me, Father, she says. For I have sinned.
Through the trees, he has been watching her moving around in her dooryard. She avoids the woods but otherwise appears to move freely, a winglike lift to her step.
It has been one week since my last confession.
She has told the children to keep out of the woods. No playing there. I sprayed something on the weeds.
These are my sins: I committed murder. I love you.
Once a week, here in this vessel of oiled wood, he grants absolution again, as he must.
A cold noontime, mid-November, he taps on the farmhouse door to fetch Lizzy for lunch. Pauline says: Chummy Foster saw Ray’s truck.
The air dampens with panic. Can the children feel it? He packs the children off, sends them down the lane to Mrs. Hanson.
Tell me. His face goes hot and clammy. Across the white Formica are strewn the remains of Lizzy and Mariette’s game of Sorry, a tin of color pencils, a box of paper dolls. This evidence of innocence quells his terror.
It’s not you he saw, Vivienne says, her color rising. Who would ever think it was you?
Never in a million years, agrees Pauline. No one.
He stands up, his cassock grazing his polished shoes, his collar chafing.
Even if they find the truck, Pauline says.
They won’t, Vivienne reminds her. The quarry is filled with old trucks. Old stoves, old everything.
But even if they did, they’ll think it was Ray anyway. Who would suspect the priest?
He doesn’t like the way Pauline says the priest, as if her sister’s woes can be laid entirely at his feet. As if her sister killed at his behest.
His stomach pitches. Where is the woman who came to him with the brushed hair, the lovely dress? She is all tapping fingers now, and bitten lips, nothing but nervous darting.
Still, he believes Pauline. Who would think of Father Murphy driving Ray Blanchard’s truck in the middle of the night?
They breathe easier, one by one by one.
His cassock feels papered on, paper clothes on a paper man.
I’m sorry, Vivienne says.
He turns, once, before pushing open the door.
Tell God, he says. Tell Ray.
A day later, he asks for a transfer. Which is denied.
Tuesday night, another week gone, the children abed, he knocks again at Vivienne’s door. A glint of alarm flares in her eyes, but also the old longing that, despite everything, fills him.
Something’s happened, Vivienne. He looks at her now, straight at her; he needs her.
Of course she thinks it’s about Ray, now past two months in the ground. He reads her fear.
Have the police—? Have you told—?
Not that, he says. Something worse.
Her hand goes to her throat. What could be worse?
I’ve been accused—He can’t bring himself to say it.
Again, she’s thinking: Ray.
Not Ray, he says. Lizzy.
He scratches the slanderous words on Vivienne’s grocery list. A word, and another, beneath the words milk, potatoes, Pop Tarts. By the time she puts it together, he is weeping.
Don’t cry, she says. Oh, don’t.
He clings to her bony shoulders, fingers dug in.
Ida Hanson must be crazy, she says. Who would believe such a thing?
It’s so difficult to meet her eyes. Something different has been born in her face, a savage clarity around the mouth, a vulpine cast to her once temperate features. Is this his own reflection? It’s so difficult to look.
She saw you in my bed, Vivienne, he says, eyes averted. She thought you were Lizzy.
What? she cries. That’s impossible.
In your beautiful white dress with the red snowflakes. She mistook you for a child.
Her face flushes briefly. What comes to him is the buckled skull of Ray Blanchard, the collapsed and glutinous mess of it.
My dress—?
It looks like a nightgown, he tells her. Lizzy has one with red dots.
Now she gets up, pacing, hugging herself. Don’t tell, please don’t tell. The two of us together that way, and then Ray disappears. They will guess.
We’ll have to chance it, he says.
She turns around, and he receives her face in its newly brutal beauty, its capacity to surprise. No chances, Michael. I won ‘t.
We have to, he whispers.
They will put the two and two together!
You’re not listening, Vivienne. I stand accused with no witness but you.
He lies there, Michael, she whispers bitterly, thrusting an incriminating finger toward the window as if Ray buried himself in the ground. He lies right there under our feet! The police will know. They will ask the children, and the children will tell where we forbid them to play.
We is the word she uses. We. Tears now, dear God, copious, rivering tears. They will know.
Self-defense, he pleads. You tell them it was self-defense.
He could not see me coming. They can tell. Her face horrifies him, the way its lovely contours shift slightly, then lock. He thought I would always be afraid.
Listen to me.
No, Michael, she says. You listen. Her face—merciful God, who is she?—lifts to him. You dug a hole and put him in it. If you tell, we will both lose our children. Spare me, Father. Please, Father. She is very close to him now, closer than she has been in weeks, her breath warm and clean, her lips warm and clean, but she is leaving him, this very minute she is leaving, and it feels like strips of sk
in being torn away.
He pleads but she won’t listen. Nothing will happen, she insists. Nobody will believe that stupid woman. Nobody will believe you could desire to hurt Lizzy.
But what if they do?
They won’t. Trust God.
I can’t trust God! God can’t be trusted!
Her body holds fast to the place it takes. Then trust me, she whispers, taking him into her arms. The physical fact of her feels like destination.
Nothing will happen, she croons, guiding him to the blue chair. She fits herself there with him. Nothing will happen.
He closes his eyes, listening to her.
Michael.
He still loves his name when she speaks it.
Spare me, Michael. Let one of us keep what is ours.
In his head runs their history in an endless loop, all those days with the children in their sun-brightened yards, all those cook-outs and sled rides and the small conversations at her table or his, all his missteps turned graceful through the eye of his neighbor and friend. She has all her life for people who put their foot down. You go ahead.
Her arms tense around him. Promise me you’ll never tell.
I do. I Promise.
Be merciful. Promise.
Ido, he says, resting now, choosing her anew. How many feverish nights she has cut short his prayers. How many more to come.
COMPLINE
TWENTY-EIGHT
Although Mrs. Blanchard had not lived in the farmhouse since Buddy, her youngest, left for college, her apartment retained the faintest scent of leather. Perhaps the years of piecework had settled onto her clothes and dishes, or perhaps my accident—which had altered my physiology in unknowable ways—had added to my memory the sense of smell. In either case, her apartment made me think of unstitched shoes.
She lived in one of the new complexes in Stanton with her basset hound, Pierre, the reincarnation of Major right down to a fear of cats and a knack for opening doors. Except for the dog, the new place betrayed no outward sign of our shared past. It was small and tidy, like her. No jam jars left open on the sideboard, no recipes stashed behind the blender, certainly no skeins of rawhide laid out, no pouches full of needles. After the shoe shop closed she’d taken a job at ShopRite as a cashier, where she still worked five nights a week, leaving daytime for babysitting Paulie. Nearing sixty, Mrs. Blanchard was still lovely; her eyelashes retained their inky darkness and her lips were still full. But the radiance she had once possessed was gone, in its place a statuelike sheath, a structural beauty that gave the viewer nothing but surface.
Charlie met us at the door with Paulie hoisted against his chest. “I was summoned,” he said. He looked flushed and harried in his McDonald’s-owner costume, a Ronald McDonald tie floating out the front of his half-zipped jacket.
“Hi, Fluffy,” I said to Paulie, which normally made him laugh, but he’d been torn from a nap and squashed his face into his father’s collar.
Mariette exchanged a look with Charlie as he passed us. “Something’s up,” he said. “She asked me to clear the deck, so that’s what I’m doing.”
Nothing looked right. She kept the place eerily clean, the counters clear, the chairs pushed in, like a stage set tended by prop masters. The Mrs. Blanchard of my childhood had always seemed nestled, at one with her surroundings; now she lived in rooms designed to make normal human activity seem like acting. We found her waiting for us in the living room, which despite the daily presence of Paulie and a fifty-pound dog looked freshly swept.
“Sit, girls,” she said. “I require you to sit.”
We sat.
“Maman,” Mariette said, “what is it?”
Her mother did not smile or sigh. She held me in her sights. “You plan to find him?”
I glanced at Mariette, then nodded uncertainly.
Mrs. Blanchard’s eyes closed. “Then I have a story.”
Bad news usually arrives ugly. A jangling telephone, ugly in the evening quiet. A doctor’s voice in a bright and ugly room. There is no elegance in bad news. It thumps you on the forehead, causes physical pain, hurts your ears.
Mrs. Blanchard’s news did not sound like that. With her supple throat and Franco accent, she released her kept secrets like a flight of doves, a steady, gradual rushing. Her voice, though grave, possessed a natural music that let the story she told us arrive in waves, the impact of the words landing just behind the words, a time-delay that made for a confusion of the senses. What? we asked, over and over, our comprehension arriving late by several beats.
Mariette and I were wedged together on a loveseat, mouths partly opened, coats still on, positioned an arm’s length from the stuffed chair in which her mother sat with her ankles crossed, head erect, full mouth moving, words winging out. What? we kept saying, but she repeated nothing, moving on in the same undulating tones that had once animated our bedtime stories.
She reached for an unreachable man and was mistaken for a child. She felled her husband with the nearest weapon, a shovel for digging up gardens. She called on the man she loved to dig a grave and save her.
What?
I groped for Mariette’s hand; our fingers twined. Her mother was explaining, calmly and without apparent apology, that the vessel we’d been sailing twenty-one years ago had capsized and that she’d claimed the only seat in the lifeboat.
I turned to Mariette, either to offer comfort, or receive it. She stood up, her mouth slack and foundering.
Mrs. Blanchard regarded us wanly, her eyes wounded but dry. “You girls don’t know what it is to live with a man who owns you.”
The dog, who had been sitting next to his mistress in a fog of inattention, suddenly took note of a barometric drop in emotional pressure and headed for a corner of the den. Mariette sprang up and spun toward the door, then slumped into a different chair, then stood up and began to move again, like an animal zigzagging to confuse its predator. It was hard to watch. Remorse washed over me. If not for me and my voices from the dead, my friend would never have had to know this. Ray Blanchard could have roamed her world alive for as long as she cared to accommodate him. She shook her head, slowly, beseechingly, side to side to side, eyes wide and fixed, trying to un-know. Overwhelmed and out of options, she fell still, hands covering her mouth, the rest of her face a puckered mess.
“My only girl,” her mother said. “I’m sorry.”
Mariette groaned, a bone-deep guttering. She lunged into the kitchen and her mother followed, lamenting in a soft, rapid French. Mariette banged the door open, and vanished down the stairs.
Mrs. Blanchard clutched the fridge for balance. She lifted her head, slow as a dying animal, until her gaze rested on me.
“I don’t believe you,” I said to her. “I won’t believe he helped you.”
“I wish I could say it was a lie.”
“You see this?” I pulled the scrap of paper from my pocket. “He lives in Ohio. I have his phone number right here. I could ask him myself.”
“He is married,” she said evenly. “Her name is Frannie. She has a son, twelve years old. He works in a place for men more broken than he is.”
The concussion of words hurt my face, and I squinted against it. “Is that true?
She nodded, her face finally taking on the vividness of a living thing.
“You knew he was out there? The whole time?”
She nodded again. “He was in your hospital room. You were not wrong.”
“Then it was you who called him?”
“He brought you the sacrament,” she said. “Drew would not send for a priest.”
“Why would Drew send for a priest? I hadn’t been to church in years.”
Her eyes were such a deep fallish brown, the color of crushable leaves; I could imagine my uncle falling in love with her. “You regret that he came?” she asked.
“No.” My head boiled with news. “Were you in touch? All these years?”
“More, at first. But then only on big days. When you finished at your littl
e school. When you graduated from the college. When you girls came back to Hinton. The day after your marriage ceremony. Then the last time, after the accident.”
Her body seemed old to me all of a sudden, a certain eroded quality in her stance that I hadn’t noticed before, as if she’d been defying a hard tide, each crash of wave making off with a cell or two until finally the difference showed in her bearing.
“He’s married?” I asked woodenly.
“Five years.” She tried to smile and failed. “Just like you.”
Mrs. Blanchard’s kitchen felt like a place afloat. Weirdly, I braced myself for the bad news I had already received. Maybe she would tell the story again, adjusting the details in minute ways—a shift in chronology, words dropped from dialogue—microscopic changes to make the story hold.
I waited. The story stood, unamended. I was thinking of the packages she sent to me at Sacred Heart—soft things: molasses cookies, hand-knitted mittens—once monthly, without fail.
“I don’t know,” I stammered, “I don’t know how you could do this to me. You let Celie drive in there and take me. You were standing right there in the yard.” I reached out and cradled her face with one hand. “You knew the truth and said nothing. He did nothing to me and you knew it. This face was the last face I saw.” I squeezed as hard as I could, surprised by her unyielding bones, her tightly gritted teeth. “I was one of your little chickens, remember?”
She winced but did not resist me. I let go, confused to find the same Mrs. Blanchard, the same graying, doe-eyed Mrs. Blanchard, Mariette’s mother then and now, her hands still leathered from that long-ago stitching. “And how do I give away the truth, Lizzy?” she said, her voice beginning to unravel. “How do I explain? It was not a child in his bed, it was me, and I love him, and such a coincidence that my husband has disappeared from the face of this Earth?” Her eyes went flat now, and her face, too—flat with all those stifled years. “No, I did not take that chance.”
“And neither did he.”
“He would lose you if I gave away the truth, and he would lose you if I kept it for myself.” She sounded as vacant as a winter field. “How would they let you stay with him if they know that he buried a man and threw his truck in the water?” She knotted her hands together. “So I kept the truth to myself. I chose my children.”