Any Bitter Thing

by Monica Wood

  “And he chose you.” The shock of this stole my breath. Her arms lifted—the most embedded motherly gesture—but I made another sound, and she flinched from me. “You killed your children’s father,” I said. “He should have exposed you no matter what he had to lose. Was he that much in love?”

  In her scoured kitchen my friend’s mother stared like a trapped rabbit—or like the owl sweeping down for the kill, it was hard to say which. “He was a priest, Lizzy,” she said slowly. “I made my confession.”

  I let this sink in. “of course you did.”

  She said nothing.

  “So,” I said. “Absolution. In the privacy of the sacrament.” I remembered First Fridays, confessing to Father Mike—I lied once; I disobeyed twice—and how he handed out my penance of three Hail Marys, pretending not to recognize me. I looked at Mrs. Blanchard. “What was your penance?”

  “This,” she said. She was crying now, noiseless and delicate.

  “And his?” I demanded. Blood sludged through my limbs, thick and logy, as if my body were slowing to a stop from the inside out. Soon I would lose the power of speech.

  “His? Oh, Lizzy. He nearly died of missing you.” She swiped at her eyes. “When you see him,” she said, “I hope you will be kind.” A moment passed. “You were so young. We hoped time would erase him.”

  “Then you underestimated both me, and time.”

  When she spoke again I could barely hear her. “I would have taken you myself, Lizzy. I offered to those people, let me take her. But they said no, you had to go with family.”

  When I didn’t—couldn’t—answer, she said, “Mariette needs you, Lizzy. Go to your friend.”

  I obeyed, leaving her—in slow motion, it seemed, down the steps one at a time, every movement reminiscent of the aftermath of accident. Mariette sat crumpled on the curb, crying. When she saw me she shot up, seemed to come to, then began frantically looking around, checking her car, then mine, where’s Paulie where’s Paulie where’s Paulie oh my God some-one ‘s taken Paulie, as I drew her toward me, he’s okay, Charlie took him, he’s fine, he’s safe, get in Mariette get in and she got in, her tongue so garbled by grief it was impossible to understand anything she was saying until she threw back her head, sucked up all her breath, and released one perfectly intelligible word: “Home.”

  I knew what she meant, and took her there.

  A hundred yards straight in. Past the parish hall, past the church. Into the turnaround, where I parked a few feet from the rectory porch. Mariette sprang from the car and thundered down the grown-over shortcut, crashing through the underbrush and shying at the end where the farmhouse came into full view.

  Another family lived there now. Somebody else’s clothes on the line, drawers stuffed with somebody else’s mismatched spoons and half-burned candles. No one appeared to be home. Two children’s bicycles had been stashed on the porch. The tire swing Father Mike put up—with Ray Blanchard, one blistering August morning, when Mariette and I were four years old—looked like the aftermath of a hanging, nothing left but a tatter of rope flapping from the limb of an exhausted maple.

  “Here,” Mariette said when I caught up with her. She was off the path, kicking away needles and rotting leaves—her father was here somewhere. I glanced around at the barely discernible spots where we’d impersonated dying Indians, the boulder where we played King of the Hill. Mariette knelt down and ran her hands over the damp, cold ground. “Here,” she said, out of breath. “Has to be. Where she told us not to play, remember?” I experienced a frisson of presence, realizing that far beneath us the ground was still warm.

  She pointed to her old house, her old bedroom window. “I was up there,” she said. “They were in the dooryard. I thought they were tending the moon garden. But something seemed off. They were hugging. It was something secret.”

  I crouched next to her, keeping one hand on her back. “I didn’t see Papa,” she said. “Just them. Together in the moon-light.” She paused for a few moments, getting her breath. “The way they were looking at each other, I knew I wasn’t supposed to see. He was pleading, or praying. She was in her housecoat. Then he looked up, and I ran back to my bed. Papa never came back, but Lizzy, how would I ever make such a connection? How in a million years? After a while it started to seem like something I dreamed.”

  I petted her back. “She must have been so afraid of him”

  “I wasn’t afraid of him at all.” She pressed her forehead reverently to the ground. “She’s my mother, Lizzy. What am I supposed to do now?”

  “Ladies?” came a voice from behind us. The priest—the same priest whose Mass Drew and I had attended only a day earlier—stood in the path. He leaned down as if to hear our confession. “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes, Father,” I said, helping Mariette up.

  “Can I—can I help you then?”

  “I don’t think so,” I told him, but I went with him anyway. Taking Mariette with me, I followed him into the rectory. I touched the door post, the coat rack, the deacon’s bench that once served as a repository for our winter hats. I touched everything I could reach as the nervous priest led us into the parlor, which still held my mother’s breakfront, unchanged. Same beloved books on the lower shelves, same bric-a-brac on the higher ones. My mother’s silver jam server, a commemorative plate from Ste. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec, six crystal champagne flutes, a set of pink teacups, a deck of playing cards with PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND printed on their backs. The glass doors had been shut for two decades, the key buried somewhere along Interstate 95, where I flung it from the back seat of Celie’s car on the day I was taken away. No one had since mustered the imagination to pry open the doors. Our things had simply waited here, unmoved, part of the parcel of house and land checked into and out of every few years by a new priest with no taste. The furniture, though much of it had been replaced, occupied exactly the same space on the blueprint—chair where a chair was, sofa where a sofa was, different pictures hanging in the same places. I checked to see if Mariette had taken note, but her eyes had gone distant and glassy. She crossed her arms over her middle and stared at the floor.

  “Her father died,” I explained, herding her to a chair. Not the same chair we had, a different chair, some godawful Marden’s close-out in mud brown. This priest lacked imagination even in the most elementary matters, and I hated him for it.

  “Oh, I’m very sorry,” the priest said. “When?”

  I was going to say, Twenty-one years ago, but Mariette answered, “Just now.”

  “What can I do?” the priest asked. He laid his hand on his heart, and I thought, You poor, incompetent man.

  Then Mariette—strong, level-headed Mariette, Mariette who always played the store owner, the army officer, the head Indian, Mariette whose favorite saint was Joan of Arc—said, sliding off the chair, “I think I’m going to faint,” and did.

  She came to as she hit the floor, and lay there awhile, blinking up at a ceiling we had once tried to paint with colored water in squirt guns. The priest headed for the phone, but I called after him, “Don’t. She’s fine,” and he turned around reluctantly. He would have to be the expert here. The person in charge. He looked like a man unhappily acquainted with his own limitations.

  “What’s going on?” he said, helping Mariette back into the chair.

  “We used to live here,” I told him.

  He looked at me. “Oh,” he said, remembering the story, but I could see him thinking, There were two of them? Two little girls? My God.

  “That’s my mother’s breakfront,” I said.

  He looked worried. “Would you like to have it back?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I did. “But I think I’d better get her home.”

  Mariette was slumped in the ugly chair, limp as an over-loved ragdoll. “This house used to be pretty,” I said to the priest as I helped my friend. “It had pizzazz.”

  I gentled Mariette to her feet, accepting her weight against me. It was as if she had fallen in
to a freshly dug hole herself and couldn’t quite find her feet after the shock of climbing out. The priest escorted us to the car but gave us wide berth, his lips moving—interceding, no doubt, on our behalf, or apologizing for his performance. Despite his appeal to Heaven I felt wholly of this world, moving slowly, Mariette’s arm mantled across my shoulders.

  “Just a few more steps,” I said to her.

  “Lizzy,” she murmured. “I don’t want to know this.”

  “We’re almost there,” I said, “here we go.” But as I inched her closer to the car door, I began to slow, profoundly aware that our friendship was turning—for better or worse, I did not know. I knew only that we would look back at this day as the point where another Before became another After. I tried to receive the hastening moment in all its bitter sweetness, to appreciate, for once, what I was losing at the time of its being lost.

  TWENTY-NINE

  That night, Charlie arrived. “I gotta talk to you guys.” Cold wafted off his clothes; he helped Paulie out of his jacket and released him into our kitchen.

  “Where’s the kitty, where’s the kitty, where’s the kitty?”

  Drew swung Paulie up and gave him a nuzzle. “Hiding, my man. He’s hip to your jive.”

  As Paulie trotted off in search of the cat, Charlie dropped into a chair and pushed away a supper plate. “I’m dying, here,” he said, running his hands through the filmy remains of his hair.

  “She told you everything?” I said.

  “I sure the hell hope so. Unless there’s another body buried someplace.” We observed an awkward moment of silence at the mention of Ray Blanchard, his bones now commingled with the ground where his children once played.

  “I don’t know what to do, you guys,” Charlie said. “I wanted to at least call her brothers. She threw me out of the house.”

  “Should I—?”

  “She won’t see anyone, Lizzy. Not even you.” He groaned, stiff and wall-eyed. “Please, you guys, Jesus God, help me out here.” When Drew put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder, Charlie shuddered like a building about to collapse. “The guy’s got two other kids,” he said. “Don’t the boys deserve to know?”

  I pictured Buddy reading in a carrel at the Franklin Pierce Law Library, Bernard leading his geology students through abandoned mines in Wyoming. Two kids who had never really known a father, but they’d done all right, they’d turned out responsible, upright, passionate. Holidays they arrived toting likeable girlfriends, full of stories.

  “He’s got family in Canada, right?” Charlie asked. “St. John?”

  “Shediac. Brothers, I think,” I said, my stomach bunching. There was Ray Blanchard, summoned from down the years, step-dancing to Acadian fiddle music one summer’s evening, drunk and jolly, his feet pounding so hard the record skipped with him. Now he was irretrievably dead; I suppose I’d always thought I would see him again.

  “I mean, Mother of God,” Charlie persisted. “I’d sure want my son to know if it was me. I’d want my brothers to know where to dig me up.”

  Paulie toddled in just then, lugging the cat. “Hey look, hey look, hey look,” he crooned, “look who loves me.”

  “What do we do?” Drew said, freeing the cat and drawing Paulie onto his lap.

  Paulie echoed, “What do we do?”

  Charlie looked at us with a face as broad and earnest as a scrubbed potato. “My wife seems to think this—knowledge, as she puts it—is something you just kind of live with.”

  “Where’s the kitty?” Paulie said, scrambling down for a second pursuit.

  Charlie sighed. “I have to get him to bed.”

  “Let him sleep here,” I said. “We can stay up and talk as long as you want.”

  Before Paulie was born, the four of us, newly wed, had sat around this very table on countless evenings, playing hearts or poker for M&M’S. More often than not, Mrs. Blanchard would stop by with one of her sisters (not Pauline, our once favorite, who had moved to New Hampshire for reasons that now seemed clear). Mrs. Blanchard brought little gifts—dish towels, a chocolate cake, basil seedlings in plastic pots. I had come to depend on her face, the passionate focus I took for affection, the melancholy I traced to widowhood.

  “How do I deliver my son to her every morning, after this?” Charlie said. “I’m really asking. Mariette talks to her twice a day. She comes for supper every Sunday. How do we keep doing that?”

  As Charlie talked—as much to himself as to us—I feared that Drew and I might be witnessing the beginning of the end of Charlie and Mariette’s marriage. Drew slid his hand over, and I latched on.

  For another hour we divined ways to live with what Charlie kept referring to as “the knowledge.” Paulie fell asleep in the double chair, Drew carried him upstairs, then Charlie called Mariette and talked awhile. We moved into the living room with some beer and a box of Oreos, and suddenly our home looked like a parody of old times, three friends minus one preparing to talk long into the night.

  “It’s not like I don’t think she had reasons,” Charlie said at one point. “You don’t do something like that over nothing.”

  “He could be scary,” I said. “Mariette doesn’t remember that.”

  “Course she remembers,” Charlie said. “Why else would she have married a marshmallow like me?”

  “Because you’re a beautiful guy, Charlie,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I love my wife, you guys. More than anything. But I’m not the kind of person who can live the rest of my life with a body buried in the backyard.”

  He was lying on the couch at this point, his forearm draped over his face, and with his arm serving as a screen he mumbled, “Even if the guy was a bastard who got exactly what he asked for, doesn’t he deserve a Christian burial? This is my son’s grandfather we’re talking about. It’s not right that he’s just down there, decomposing. Unmarked.”

  “What are you suggesting, Charlie?” I asked uneasily, thinking of Ray Blanchard’s twenty-one-year-old corpse, well weathered and gone to ash.

  “I’m a Catholic. The guy’s my family.” He took a rattling breath. “Mariette’s bawling her eyes out because her mother’s in trouble and she thinks it’s up to her to decide what to do about it, okay? But she’s also crying because she plain loved the guy.” He paused. “There’s a family plot at Calvary cemetery. It’s got room.”

  Drew set down his beer. “Don’t even think it.”

  “Ground’s still workable. There wouldn’t be much left to him after this much time, would there? Dust to dust. It’s not like he’d weigh anything.”

  I covered my mouth. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Charlie groaned, sitting up. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m saying. Crazy things.”

  “If you mean exhuming a corpse under cover of darkness,” Drew said, “then yeah, crazy things. You okay, Lizzy?”

  I nodded, thinking, I am the sort of person who could live with the body in the yard, and I started running down the list. Mariette: could. Charlie: couldn’t. Drew: could. I knew these things about the ones I loved, and it was a heartless way to divide them, but it told me something. Father Mike: couldn’t. But he had done it anyway.

  “I don’t know if I want Paulie in her house,” Charlie said. “God help me,” he added, and it wasn’t just an expression; he was praying.

  “She’d never hurt Paulie,” I said.

  “It’s not like we’re talking about a murderer,” Drew offered, then fell silent, because, of course, we were talking about a murderer.

  Charlie’s voice—that hearty, gladhanding cascade—had dropped to a grasshopper’s whisper. “She hit him from behind. She had a plan for the truck. She had a guy next door, a priest, thank you very much, who kissed the ground she walked on. It’s just that it doesn’t seem completely spontaneous. I can’t believe she didn’t have another choice.” His mouth buckled. “The woman’s been a second mother to me, you guys. She’s Mariette’s be-all and end-all, she lights Paulie’s world. I lo
ve her.”

  And around he went. At one-thirty I made coffee. At two, Drew said, “I won’t tell.”

  Ah, I thought. I knew it.

  I said, “I won’t tell, either.”

  Charlie gave me a look. “Of course you won’t. Your uncle’s not exactly an innocent bystander.”

  “I’m not protecting him,” I said, stung. “Mariette’s the one I’m thinking of.”

  “People live with all kinds of things,” Charlie said. He looked at us long and longingly. Ray Blanchard would soon become the thing that both bound us and broke us. Our parting had already begun.

  We dozed off, the three of us, somewhere around four. At five-thirty I woke to find Charlie carrying Paulie out to the car.

  I watched them from the window, Paulie’s legs dangling from the bearlike shelter of his father’s body. After a time I heard Drew get up, then felt his arms around me. “Charlie got the worst of it,” I said. I leaned against him. My body relaxed, a sudden exhaustion overtaking my bones.

  “I would have done what your uncle did,” Drew murmured. “For you, I mean, at the beginning. I would have done that for you, if you’d asked.” Charlie was backing out of our driveway now, into the dim light of morning. “Back then, I’d have given up everything.”

  Back then. When we were two drowning people exchanging life rafts. But it struck me that he had givenupevery-thing: Boston, his real photography, his imagined future.

  We lingered at the window. “This was home,” I said. I could sense the river beyond the rooftops, its inexorable forward motion toward the sea.

  At six our alarm went off upstairs, and because it was Tuesday morning and we had landed in a life where people awaited us, we scurried around our bedroom and bathroom, the cat prowling underfoot, the day arriving whether we asked it to or not. Every gush of water, every flush and gargle and slid-shut drawer announced my present life, with its most fundamental architecture—a man and a woman—still holding after a few dozen unexpected heaves of the earth.