It was no longer her duty to accompany Nathan to these parties, and she told him so. But the divorce was affecting him more than it was Linda, and she felt bad for him. He seemed to take it as not just a personal failure but also a professional one, as if the end of his marriage would stunt his career growth.
As always, Linda was underdressed and out of place at the party, ill fed and over-drunk. Bottomless glasses of wine need an equal abundance of pasta to soak them up, but lunch meant only a fistful of pasta per guest, a small salad each. Even with the food and wine, the house smelled blank. Guy and his wife, Sophie, resembled a pair of stick bugs in business casual and perfume, beetling around the dining room, clinking wineglasses, laughing their insect-clicking laughs, ignoring their meager portions of food. When Linda’s meal was gone, she sneaked food off their plates. And why not? Who was she trying to impress?
After dinner, the group was herded into the drawing room, where Guy and Sophie hoped to awe with their artwork (which made Linda feel nothing but poor), their eclectic tastes in world music (though, when pressed, the Wexlers couldn’t tell you the names of the instruments in the recordings), and their immaculate white furniture. Linda hunted out a love seat in the corner, hoping to hide behind a sculpture, but Guy found her, wine bottle at the ready to refill her glass. He seated himself next to her, his thigh touching her own. The wine had pickled Guy, ripening him into a bolder flavor of man. He let his hand wander along her leg. Linda said nothing, so he kept his hand there. And while he knew that no meant no, he hadn’t yet realized silence also meant no.
He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “What did Cinderella do when she got to the ball?” He paused just long enough to laugh through his nose, a puff of air on her neck. “She gagged.”
“I saw that one on Facebook,” Linda said.
“Wait, I got another.”
His breath smelled of Chianti and cabbage, even though no cabbage had been served. At some point that afternoon, Guy left the seat, and Nathan took his place. Linda didn’t even notice the change.
“You and Guy were awfully cozy,” Nathan said. Linda would have liked to blame the anger in his voice on the wine, but knowing Nathan, he had been carrying around the same half glass all afternoon, only pretending to sip it for show.
If she’d had any doubts about the divorce before, they’d dissolved last night. Back at home, Linda quietly packed a few belongings, wrestled her cat, Arthur, into his carrier, loaded her car. Nathan had already refused to move out during the proceedings. It would have been much less awkward if he had. He was still there, in the house, hovering around the edges of the rooms as Linda walked through them, telling herself she wouldn’t miss any of it: the china hutch, the leather upholstery, the silver tableware, the brocade drapery, the wood floors, the marble counters, the gilt mirror over the fireplace, the garden tub, round and deep enough to sink up to her neck. Okay, she might miss the garden tub.
“At least sleep here tonight,” Nathan said finally. “You can go in the morning.” He hoped that if she delayed she’d change her mind. He knew she wasn’t happy in Houston, but he couldn’t fathom why she would want to move home to that backward little town when she could live in an elegant house, shop at the Galleria, dine at posh restaurants, and drive a sleek black car.
Linda wouldn’t stay. She was never one for dragging things out. Instead, she drove nineteen hours straight, stopping only for gas, coffee, and rest areas. She arrived with very little money in her purse and no food in her stomach, her hands shaky on the steering wheel, her eyes crusted in the corners with sleep crud even though she hadn’t slept.
* * *
• • •
River Bend has hardly changed since Linda left six years ago. The only difference is that the townspeople finally voted for the highway bypass, so that the highway now skirts around town. Linda gets lost on the way, foolishly following the highway instead of the business loop; she finds herself at the next town north before she realizes her mistake, and on her way back, she takes another wrong street and ends up turning around in the Thurber driveway, that creepy old house next to the park, its bright paint at odds with the gnarled crabapple tree, its knee-length grass as dry as tinder and full of dog shit. She’d never paid it much attention before, but on the drive here, she kept catching snippets of a national news story, surprisingly out of River Bend. Gilmer Thurber and his sister. The things they were accused of. This must be what was happening in the video her half sister, Skyla, had sent; the cops were waiting to arrest Thurber. Now the yard and house lay empty, quiet.
Linda has a hard time believing this could happen in her hometown. Her knee-jerk reaction was that it couldn’t possibly be true; the street is so peaceful, how could anything bad have happened here? Hearing the story from her car in the middle of the country, Linda had felt sick, but also safely isolated from it all. She couldn’t connect the news with her memories of the town. The report from River Bend was just another story in a vast sea of bad news. Still, it feels odd to see the house again in person.
As she backs out of the drive, her car shudders and dies, its dashboard lighting up. Linda turns the key, but the car’s only response is to release a hot electrical smell. How many times has Nathan tried to get her to junk this car? He even bought her a big black Lexus when her Ion failed its first safety inspection. This car isn’t even registered. She’d cringed every time she started it; the muffler had been shot for ages, and the vehicle made an ungodly ruckus, causing neighbors to pause in their driveways or peek out from behind their blinds, but she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. As much as she’d wanted to get out of River Bend, out of Michigan, she found herself nostalgic in Texas, clinging to anything that reminded her of home.
She gets out and pushes her car to the side of the road, pops the hood. The smell is overwhelming. It makes her turn her head into her shoulder, bury her nose in her sleeve. She doesn’t really know what she’s looking for—the engine on fire, maybe?—but she sees nothing of obvious concern. In the backseat, Arthur’s cat carrier is unusually quiet. In a moment of insight, when Linda packed Arthur in the car, she’d draped a sweater over the carrier, and her cat had been sleeping peacefully. She’s surprised he’s lasted this long; she figured along about Arkansas, he would start scratching to be let out.
She checks on Arthur now. Still asleep, on his side, one paw draped over his face, his gray fur looking bluish in the sunlight. Despite the noise from the car and the open windows, he doesn’t move. He’s old and arthritic, and she’d had a terrible time wrangling him into his carrier. Her blouse is still covered in cat hair, has made her itch the entire drive.
Fuck it, she thinks, then puts the car in neutral and pushes it down Main Street, her shoulder wedged into the open driver’s-side door, her hand on the wheel. It’s only a few miles to her family’s farm. Little town like this, there’s almost no traffic. She’ll push it the whole damn way if she has to. She has spent long Houston summers imagining the feel of freedom as a cool breeze on her face, only now that it’s here, it’s a metallic heap on the side of the road. And what do you do with that? You get out and push, that’s what.
Despite its recent emergence into the national spotlight, River Bend is stubbornly the same. It still has one stoplight, one bar, one church, no grocery store, a single block of two-story buildings marking its downtown—the street there lined with faux gaslights. The village was a shipping hub in the 1830s, and is hugged on three sides by the St. Gerard River, which once carried goods to Lake Michigan. Then the railroads came, nowhere near River Bend, and the village was forgotten. It struggled for a century and a half, unable to grow beyond the river’s stranglehold.
Main Street is quiet, the houses lying sleepily along it. As far as Linda can tell, the only soul around is an old man sitting on the front porch of a pale blue house framed by columns, with turrets running up the west face and a round cupola at the top. The DeWitt place, the old
est house in town. Which would make the man Ernest DeWitt. Linda vaguely remembers him; his daughter, Eliza, used to babysit her. He watches Linda as she pushes her car up the road. When she looks closer, she sees that he isn’t as old as she thought. His hair is graying, yes, but his eyes are bright. And laughing. At her.
He doesn’t mean to laugh. He just can’t believe his good fortune, that a car should break down in front of his house, and the driver should be such a doll. Dirty-blond hair, curvy body.
“Need a hand?”
“I think this might be the end,” she says.
“Will be if you don’t go catch it.” He nods at the car, and Linda turns to find it gaining speed down a slight hill. She chases it. Climbs in and puts it in park. Before she gets back out, she takes a second to check him out in the rearview mirror.
Ernest DeWitt had a reputation. The aging bachelor. The ladies’ man. Although, come to think of it, Linda remembers talking to him a few times. He seemed nice enough. He seemed very nice, in fact. Linda finds herself wanting to touch him.
“I’m Linda,” she says, her hand outstretched.
And even though his eyes are laughing at her again, he takes her hand in both of his. “You haven’t been gone so long that I don’t know who you are,” he says. His skin is warm, and a little calloused. His response throws her. She had hoped she was safe from recognition, that she could return anonymously, but already, here’s someone who knew her. Knows her.
Ernest pushes the car into the alley behind his house. Linda steers. In her rearview mirror, she watches his face turning red, a vein protruding in his forehead. What is he, like, sixty? He doesn’t look sixty. He looks pretty good, in fact, even when he strains like that. Once he gets the car into his driveway, he pops the hood. Linda stands behind him, peering over his shoulder.
“Mind fetching my toolbox?” He gestures toward his garage.
Linda is loath to leave his side. The effort of pushing the car has left his tee shirt damp with sweat, and his skin and hair release a scent that makes Linda take deep breaths. After she gives him his toolbox, she shakes her head clear. She goes to the backseat and checks on Arthur again. He hasn’t so much as moved. God, what Linda wouldn’t give to be able to sleep like that. When she was fourteen, after her mother, Paula, left the first time, she’d had problems sleeping. She went through a phase where she slept with the radio blasting, the mindless chatter of DJs and the top forty drowning out her thoughts. Her stepdad, Jared, would come into her room after he thought she was asleep and turn it down. Sometimes she was asleep, and she would wake up in the morning with the radio on quiet. Other times she would lie awake most of the night, straining to hear the low drone. She’d resumed this habit not long after she was married, listening to headphones all night to drown out the sounds of traffic and sirens, the neighbors’ dogs barking.
“You can leave it here for now,” he says, shutting the hood. “I don’t know if I can fix it, but I’ll try. You want to call your sister, maybe?” He hopes her sister doesn’t answer. He doesn’t really want her to go.
It’s Saturday. Her sister Paige is likely busy with her son, and while Linda knows that Skyla just got her license, she isn’t sure whether Skyla has a car. She could try her grandma Dinah, but she would be out in the barn or the fields. And Jared, Dinah’s son, would be anywhere but at home today—maybe at the bar shooting pool, or at his hardware store, even though he’s supposed to be semi-retired.
Linda dials Skyla, but her sister doesn’t pick up. She leaves a message.
“I can give you a ride,” Ernest says. Linda grabs her suitcase and the cat carrier. Sitting in Ernest’s car, she pulls back the sweater, puts a finger through the grille, and scritches Arthur’s head. He still doesn’t move, doesn’t purr. Linda has to admit it. Her cat is dead.
* * *
• • •
Grandma Dinah’s house sits on a drumlin, the land falling sharply in the backyard. Linda and Paige sledded down this snowy hill when they were girls, rolled down its grassy shoulder in the summer. At its base, a creek trickles, all but dry now. The sisters had picnicked in this grass. In her teens, Linda escaped to this place when she wanted to be alone. By then, Paige wouldn’t come here anymore, said it was too muddy. Skyla was just a baby and wasn’t allowed out of the yard. That was the summer before Linda set out for college, the summer their mother left for good, having come back to Jared just long enough to get pregnant and birth, ween, and potty train Skyla. When the creek flooded, the grindstone in their old flour mill still ran, groaning out of its rust, spooking the cows, so that even the animals shied away, preferring to drink from the pond. This was where Linda planned to bury Arthur.
She isn’t sure how her family will respond when she gets to their farm; she didn’t tell them she was leaving her husband. She didn’t tell anyone. In the six years she was away, she visited home only twice. She imagines her family’s shock when she shows up—will Grandma Dinah gloat? She never liked Nathan to begin with. For that matter, neither did Jared. But when Linda arrives in the early evening, waving goodbye to Ernest, Dinah asks no questions. Instead, she offers to bury Arthur.
“I suspect you’ve been through enough already,” Dinah says. These girls, she thinks. Always uprooting their lives. Dinah grew up on this farm, as did her mother before her. She’d never felt the need to go traipsing around the country like this generation does. She sets up a small cat funeral, Dinah digging when Linda starts crying too hard to use a shovel. Afterward, Dinah fixes Linda a plate of leftovers, lets her settle in.
While Linda finishes her dinner, Skyla comes in from the fields. She’s wearing boots and jeans, has her hair up in a baseball cap. She’s been out riding horses, and is in a mood from it. Unlike Linda, Skyla doesn’t enjoy riding. Even before Linda moved away, Skyla had been on her grandma to sell the horses, since it had fallen mostly to Skyla to make sure they got enough exercise.
When Skyla sees Linda sitting at the dinner table, though, she squeals.
“You’re back!” she says, and hugs her sister fiercely. “Where’s the boy toy?”
Skyla usually tries to pass for the kind of angsty teenager who doesn’t care, but in reality, she’s as tender and fragile as Linda had been at her age.
“I suppose he’s still back in Texas,” Linda says.
“So you’re home for good?” Skyla says, doing a little skip. “Thank God. You can ride the horses now.”
“I don’t even know if I could anymore,” Linda says with a sigh.
Skyla shrugs. “At least it’ll be fun now that you’re back. It’s been so boring here with just me and Grandma.”
Linda’s other sister, Paige, got married two years ago, and moved with her wife to Kalamazoo. Paige’s wedding was the last time Linda had been back in town. Linda’s stepbrother, Derek, had bought a house on the outskirts of town soon after Linda left River Bend. Poor Skyla has been experiencing what it is to be an only child. With Jared never at home, it had to be lonely.
Skyla grabs a yogurt from the fridge and settles in at the table to gossip with Linda late into the night. And while Linda loves catching up with her sister, part of her feels like she’s taken a huge step back. She knows that, being back under Grandma Dinah’s roof, she is once more subject to house rules.
Grandma Dinah’s idea of raising girls had mostly consisted of criticism: Don’t sit with your mouth hanging open; button up that collar; stand up straight; a lady doesn’t take any bull, but she doesn’t give any, either. It had all seemed impossibly rigid, especially to Paige, who often struck Linda as being more boy than girl. Paige never liked dresses, even to wear to church, and completely rejected makeup and crushes and slumber parties. Linda had always had a boyfriend and a backup, was sure to keep the latter close enough that he could be called up at a moment’s notice. She spent more time on the backups than the boyfriends, chatting on the phone, bringing them homemade baked goods
. Even as a teenager, Linda had had a profound fear of being alone.
When Paula left the first time, Linda had watched her father’s loneliness, watched him split his time between his hardware store and the bar, coming home only to fall into bed for a few hours. When Paula returned a year later and slipped back into his life like nothing, Linda had made no attempt to forgive her.
“We don’t need you,” she’d told her mother one day out of the blue.
They were in Grandma’s kitchen. Linda had snapped beans for dinner; Paula had shucked corn. Without looking up from her task, Paula had said, “You got a mouth on you. Just like your daddy.”
“I’ll go live with him, then. Better than being around you.” An empty threat, since neither Linda nor Paula knew where Linda’s biological father was.
Paula stuck around about three years, then. In that time, Jared had insisted on adopting the girls, and giving them his name, ensuring he had a legal tie to them. When Paula left again, nobody was surprised, and nobody went into mourning—Jared having never fully come out of it from the last time.
All of this comes back to Linda now. Now that she’s here, she has the support of family, sure, but she also remembers all the ways family tears you down. Sitting at the kitchen table with her sister, Linda wonders whether she made the right choice in coming back.
* * *
• • •
Early the next morning, Dinah knocks on Linda’s door, ostensibly to collect laundry, although really Dinah wants to let Linda know it’s inexcusable to sleep past eight, especially when there are chores to be done.
“I saved you some breakfast,” Dinah says. “After that, you can help with the wash.”
Once they’ve eaten, Linda and Skyla lug the baskets out to the clotheslines, strung along the drumlin to catch wind from all directions. Weak sun and a sky hazed with thin clouds. The air will leave the laundry smelling like summer by the end of the day. Linda feels a strange excitement in the pit of her stomach. She looks forward to wearing the clothes once they’re dry.
The House of Deep Water Page 2