“Did you tell him about Geoff?”
“No, I didn’t. I swear.”
Ceel turned her head. In the clear slashing winter light her profile was sharp. “You still think about him, don’t you,” I said. “What he did to you?”
She wiped her eyes. “Geoff O’Connor hasn’t mattered to me in a long, long time. I know it’s no one’s fault. It’s just convenient to blame someone, myself, God.”
I sat on the sofa, pulled the rumpled afghan over her bare cold feet. “You won’t give up, will you? Not now. You’re too close.”
She pulled her feet away from my clasp and drew her knees to her chin. “I’m reconciled, Hannah. You be reconciled, too. She’s gone.”
“Who?”
“Everyone has a Daintry in their life. Let her go.”
* * *
“Asheville Academy is wrestling with whether there should be a full-time chaplain or a full-time librarian,” Hal said. “There isn’t enough money for both.”
I looked over my book at the gridded Scrabble board, an unfinished crossword. “I vote for the librarian,” I said, and for the third time flipped the tiny hourglass timer Mark had given us for Christmas.
Hal was unfazed. He lingered over his letters for so long that I read a book between moves.
“Faith has to be caught, not taught,” he said.
That. I fingered the seven lettered tiles in my tray. “Isn’t seven the number mentioned most often in the Bible? Seven plagues, seven tribes, seven something? Someone taught me that.”
He fit his word in a corner already cluttered with words: jig, and said, “You know what I’m talking about.”
We approached the game so differently. I hoarded valuable consonants, the M and B and J, until I could create words with substance: JUMBLE, MERGER, MAYBE; words with integrity, I’d once explained to Hal. He’d laughed. He concentrated on the triple- and double-word scores to form intricate combinations of three-letter words yielding forty points: axe, jet, zoo.
Sender I put down, points paltry but opening a quadrant, and said, “That’s a gift.” Prepared for a wait, I returned to my book, one of the volumes I’d brought to Rural Ridge and vowed to read. It was a collection of John Updike stories, tales of overt suburban infidelities amid subtle struggles with morality. “I get the impression everybody but us is jumping into bed with their neighbors.”
“They’re just bored baddies looking for mischief.”
“The women or the men?”
Hal opened the dictionary. “You read too much.”
“Wait a minute. You can’t look up a word before you put it down.”
“What’s the big deal?”
“It’s against the rules. It’s cheating.”
“Are you getting your period? Do you have PMS?” That.
Zero Hal put down, sealing off the section I’d opened to benefit us both. “There isn’t a spontaneous bone in your body,” my husband had said. “Quit following the rules,” Daintry had said.
The reasons and the justifications tumble and accumulate and gain mass like a fist-size snowball rolled along the ground until it grows too large to move and stops dead. Or hits an immovable wall of sheer desire. Then you get the bound-tos, forgetting how you told him that the bound-tos are closely connected to the reand-res, regrets and remorses.
I hadn’t lied to Ceel, not entirely. Someone had inquired about making a gift to the columbarium, and he wanted to talk to me about it. It had been a business meeting. Or begun that way.
I’d been to his office before, when we’d moved the four urns from the columbarium for safekeeping while I was installing shrubs and plants. I remembered the mission fondly, a lunchtime caper charged with hilarity and delicacy and secrecy as we hid the urns inside a crawl space corner in Peter’s office where the paten and chalice had once been kept. Maude and the other staff member had gone out for Chinese. The urns had been returned to the columbarium by now; by now Peter and I had a different secret.
I opened the door. Walls on either side were filled floor to ceiling with shelves of books and the odd, haphazard object, a pottery piece, a sketch of some nameless church. Opposite the door was a window above a cabinet ledge, looking over the church courtyard. The office was a small square, and with his back to me, gazing out the window, Peter seemed too large for the space. Hemmed in by the bookshelves, crowded by the single armchair pushed beneath a standing lamp on which he’d thrown his coat. His energy was checked by the desk between us, but visible in those taut fabric wrinkles across his back. As though the shirt were too small. As though he were straining against it.
“Peter.”
He swiveled. The shoulders slackened. “Come here. Around here with me.”
“Peter—”
“Please. I want to show you something.”
I eased by the narrow space beside the desk, by wastebasket and rolling chair, and stood beside him. He pointed out the window. The day was gray and bone chilling, February to the core. “Acuba, euonymous, sasanqua, berfordia,” he said, tapping a pencil on the sill, “and. . . and the tall skinny green bushes that grow fast and hide things.”
“Leyland cypress.”
“Leyland cypress. You taught me all that.” Taptaptaptaptap.
“Give me that.” I managed a laugh and tugged the pencil from his fingers. “What is it?”
“I’m sorry.”
“That I took your pencil away? That I taught you?”
“For Daintry, with Mark,” he said. His voice was low. “Sometimes I think Daintry has, has worked so hard for what she has and where she is in a male-dominated career that she forgets how to be with women. And I know she doesn’t understand what it’s like to be a mother. I’m sorry.”
I looked down at the vents that topped the cabinet. Dear God, don’t talk about Daintry. “Forget it, it was weeks ago.”
“But I haven’t seen you alone in those weeks, to tell you so. Is he all right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you?”
Though warm air flowed through, the metal strips were cold. I looked at my hand spread across the horizontal metal slats, amazed that it was still, not quivering. Not from cold, but from a coiled, high-strung tension his tender, genuine question didn’t appease. Nervous tension, sexual tension. So distracted by it that I thought I might cry if I didn’t touch him. Or bolt. “It’s so raw and gloomy,” I said desperately. “Will winter never end?”
“I thought you loved winter. I thought you wanted it to snow.”
What I wanted, at that moment, was to have someone taller and larger and stronger tower over me and cup me into his body. To warm me, want me. He was all those things. “I don’t know what I want.”
He covered my hand with his. I pulled it away, utterly conscious of the metallic tink of my wedding band against the slats. I stepped around to the other side of the desk, pulled the chair to it. “Tell me about the gift.”
His eyes were pained, but he sat, kneading his forehead, knuckling back the hair. “Someone wants to make a gift, as I said, and I wanted to check with you to make sure you hadn’t planned on anything else, some piece of statuary, or a sundial, or. . . ”
I shook my head.
“Just the bench.”
“Just the bench.” Just the bench where we’d kissed, held each other on a similarly bleak afternoon.
“I’ll tell them to go ahead, then.” Peter ran a finger between collar and flesh, the unconscious gesture I’d so often seen. Suddenly, reaching behind his neck, he un-fastened the white band of collar and placed it on the desk blotter. “Maude ordered a size too small. She thinks slow strangulation will get rid of me. Then she can go back to doing things the old way.”
The collar lay beside a small metal cross with lettering along the vertical length. “Sportsman’s Paradise,” it read, and I knew the story behind it, that a prisoner in Louisiana had made it from a dented license plate.
I reached for the circlet, white against green. It was stiff, a cardboard r
im sheathed in fine-textured fabric, linen, perhaps. “I’ve never touched one.” I fingered the snaps at the back. “Just ordinary snaps.”
“Yes, ordinary. Just like I once told you.”
I looked across the desk at him. “Was there anything else you wanted?”
“Is that what you’re going to say, Hannah, talk to me like some employer?”
“What did you want me to say?”
I moved to put the collar back, and he reached across the desk and covered my hand with his. “I want you to say you’ll see me.”
Noises amplified in the sudden profound silence: the tick of sleety rain against the panes, steps in the hall, the chug of the basement furnace, the race of my heart. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Peter’s grip tightened, and the collar curled inside my palm. “Say you will. Please.”
Say you will come to my first sermon. Say you will take the job. Say you will see me, meet me. In the face of being wanted, doubts dissolve. Being wanted is powerful, irresistible motivation. Being wanted is an aphrodisiac that generates its own heat, often having nothing to do with love. And though I learned this fact late in life, I should have known already. His wife had been a good teacher. “Yes,” I said for the third time. “When?”
Then the opportunity presents itself: the abracadabra of adultery.
I looked at my watch. Ellen was going home from school to spend Friday night with the admired and mercurial Jennifer Tomlinson. Mark had an away wrestling meet and wouldn’t be home until after ten. Ben and Hal had left directly from school for a two-day Independent Schools Conference in Winston-Salem, picking up Ceel on the way. The phone rang. I glanced at my watch again.
“What are you doing?” Ceel said.
“Checking the time.” The truth, if the last of it.
“I called to apologize again for that. . . attack of hysteria. Every now and then I need to blow someone out. You just happened to be conveniently on hand. Usually Ben’s the unlucky target.”
“Better me than Ben. Besides, I asked for it. What are you doing at home? I thought you were leaving.”
“Supposedly. I’m waiting to be picked up, but I don’t know, I’m feeling fluey. Maybe I’ll stay. You can come over, we’ll make hot chocolate from scratch.” No, I said to myself, mentally willing her to go. I couldn’t say no to Ceel’s invitation, but I’d already said yes to his. “Looks like you’re finally going to get your wish.”
“What wish?” I answered too swiftly.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t heard the forecast.”
“Oh, that. I don’t believe it. It’s too close to Easter.” Not today. Not now. I looked at my watch again. It’s a well-known fact that priests have scattered, unpredictable schedules. Even through the phone I could hear the horn honk.
“Oh well,” Ceel said. “There they are. Might as well go.”
And after dates and times are fixed, what do people think about as they wind toward liaisons? As they bank back-road curves, pass steep-roofed homes and rusting farm implements and whitewashed tires outlining dirt driveways. Dogs tied to trees, metal gliders on porches, fallow vegetable gardens with defunct pie-plate scare- crows. Are there as many humble whitewashed churches that leap out from grass parking lots on journeys to illicit couplings, or was it only here, on my road, that Matthews Memorial Baptist and Pathways Chapel lay in the same measured mile?
One time, they think, recalling a dorm room avowal among Sissys and Charlottes and Megs. Just one time he screws somebody else and that’s it, it’s over. When we were so certain of our faithfulness and our futures.
And on past ramshackle roadside buildings with hand-lettered signs: GARDENOF PRAYER APOSTOLIC CHURCH; CHURCHOFTHE HOLY SPIRIT. It would depend, they might remember amending the avowal, whether it was just a one-night stand or a long-term affair. It would depend.
Longevity counts for something, they might remember deciding even later, an avowal’s reversal, when children and homes and years were part of the package. You don’t throw everything away because of one mistake.
THE DEVIL IS NOT AFRAIDOF A DUSTY BIBLE, they might read on a roll-away rent sign parked outside some cinder-block structure. “What are you doing with Peter Whicker?” Ceel asked. “Haven’t you ever heard your parents doing it?” Daintry once bluntly asked me. Not having sex. Not making love. Doing it.
They must look the same everywhere: the stippled walls and pebbled carpet and cellophaned cups, a sense of squalor despite sanitized strips. The blatant bed in the rented room, and there too the bedside Bible. The heater’s gushed blow did little to permeate the thick chill. I waited for Peter and thought of Peter, longed for Peter, for his car to appear in the pitted parking lot, imagined his arms finally around me, someone to hold me closely, closely, use his body to loosen the tightness in my mind. A tightness that was both absolute desire and absolute fear.
I turned on the television, whose single snowy channel reported nothing but the weather predictions. I flicked it off and pulled aside the heavy curtain to study the weighted skies. I knew about watching for snow. It required dedicated staring at a dark, nearby backdrop— magnolias, pines, a rooftop. As a child I was superstitiously convinced that if I looked away even once, dropped my guard or lessened the wanting for an instant, the snow wouldn’t fall from sheer spite.
As the daylight drains you check for cars, you check for snow, you check your watch. You fret, begin to doubt yourself and him. You wait. For a knock, for a noise, for your lover. For the snow, for the phone, for your heart to stop hammering. “Just remember A for aorta, V for ventricle, A comes before V in the alphabet, so you can remember the blood from the aorta goes into the V for ventricle and—”
“Right or left? I’ll never remember.”
“All you have to do is remember it once, Hannah. You’ll never need to know how the heart works again. Ever.” She’d been so sure. And still I’d failed the test.
I looked in the mirror. And do any of these lovers who were wanted, who agreed and arranged, do any of them ever realize, ever admit, as they wait with quiet terror and thumping desire—that sometimes it’s not attraction, or proximity, or timing? Sometimes it’s as simple as the fact that the one they wait for belongs to somebody else. Do they look in the mirror and see this stark, dark truth: retaliation? Was I sleeping with Peter Whicker to punish Daintry O’Connor?
I picked up the phone and dialed not Peter, not the church, but home. I punched in the message code. Surely he’d never be so foolish, but—
“Mom, answer,” the thin voice sobbed, clotted with crying. “Mom, pick up, where are you?” Click. A whirred silence and another message: “Mom. Dad’s already gone. So are Ben and Ceel. Mom? I’m not spending the night with Jennifer anymore. Mommy, I’m at school and I want to come home. She cheated off my paper and got in trouble and we’re not— Mommy, please . . .” The trailing despair. “Mommy, she took my underpants from my cubby during gym and showed everybody. They laughed.” A choked and pleading finale: “Where are you, Mommy? Please.”
That swiftly, that simply, it’s over. Love and duty and a new fear intervene, collide and conspire to save you from yourself. Or maybe it was God. Perhaps love and duty and fear are all one and the same with Him. I left the key in the motel door.
“I’ve come for Ellen Marsh. She’s waiting for me.”
“Yes, there was some mix-up about whom she was supposed to leave with. A change of plans, apparently. But even for faculty children we have to have a note, Mrs. Marsh—”
“I understand.”
“Before we—”
“Where’s Ellen?”
“She tried to call.”
“I know. I’ve just gotten the message.”
“That was some time ago, she was quite upset. I—”
“Which building is she in? The library? Where does the after-school care meet?”
“Everyone’s gone now, they—”
“Where is she? Did she go home with another friend?”
; “She tried to call Mrs. Carlson, but no one answered there, either. And with your husband away with Mr. Carlson, we didn’t have another emergency number.”
“Where is my daughter?”
“She said she knew someone who could look after her until you came home. A woman, a friend of yours, she said, Irish name. O’Brien?”
“Daintry?”
“Yes, I believe that’s what Ellen called her. The phone number is right here—”
“She went home with Daintry?” Another child, another night. The same savior and captor.
“We couldn’t find you, Mrs. Marsh. Ms. O’Connor was home and picked Ellen up.” The woman straightened pink phone slips and called after me, “Ellen seemed very glad to see her.”
The door’s brass knob was frigid. This time I didn’t wait for it to open. “Ellen?” The foyer was empty. “Ellen!”
“Mom!” Not a plea for help, but a squeal of pleasure as she bounded barefoot down the stairs, her hair in a dozen cornrow plaits. My knees buckled with relief, and I stooped to meet her, hold her, enfold her.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
“Why, are you okay?”
“’Course! Look, but don’t touch. It’s not dry yet.” She displayed her fingernails, ten small ovals lacquered with pink stripes and red polka dots. “You can’t do this to yourself. Daintry painted them for me.”
Descending the carpeted risers, she looked scrubbed and girlish, hair pulled cleanly back from her face with a hairband. A black-headed Alice in Wonderland dressed for lounging in a pale gray cashmere robe. The color of my sweet, dumb, clumsy doves. The cat, still graceful despite the bulk of pregnancy, followed. Ellen left me and climbed the stairs again toward both of them, sitting at Daintry’s bare feet to stroke the animal’s fur with a carefully flattened palm. I thought of my smilax cardinals. Whenever I’d heard the baby birds’ frantic cheeps, I’d whispered, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. A cat will hear you, find you, eat you.”
“Ellen, what happened?” Though clearly whatever had happened no longer worried her. Daintry had brought her around and made it right and taken my place.
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