Peyton struggled to get her mind around it.
“Weren’t you scared for him?” she said. “Couldn’t you have called the police or something?”
Nora laughed. There was little of amusement in it. “The police probably helped hide him. The law in Cuba is very flexible. It expands to fit whatever it needs to. No, I wasn’t scared for him, and I’m still not. Cubans adore children; they’re little royalty. They’re all that most of them have. The whole village will be Roberto’s family. They’d never have let me take him away. Oh, they wouldn’t have harmed me; they liked me, as far as it went. The family I lived with loved me. But I was essentially an outsider, and Roberto wasn’t. He’s the jewel of the family. He’s set into their crown with cement. He’ll have a better life in Cuba, even in that poor little village, than I could have given him here in the South. His color, you know. His color would have made him a pariah, no matter how hard I tried to protect him. I couldn’t have borne that.”
“Don’t you miss him?”
“Like my arms and legs,” Nora said. “Like my heart.”
Peyton felt a pang that was different from the shock of surprise and the surge of pity for Nora. It was jealousy. She knew it absolutely, just as she knew it was unworthy of her. But it did not go away.
“Will you go back there?” she said finally.
“No,” Nora said.
The silence spun out.
Hesitantly, Peyton said, “Does your husband help take care of him?”
Nora turned her head and smiled down at her.
“He’s not my husband,” she said. “He’s the son of the family I lived with. He is a beautiful man, a sweet man. He adored me, and the baby is simply his heart. The Cuban men and their sons! But when I…knew I had to come back, he wouldn’t come with me. He was very angry. He had assumed I would stay in Cuba with them always, and…I guess I just never told him that couldn’t happen. He helped his mother hide Roberto, and then he went into the mountains with Castro. He doesn’t write, and his mother doesn’t tell me about him. I presume he comes down to see Roberto occasionally, but I don’t know where he is.”
“Maybe he’ll come here one day,” Peyton said. “Maybe he’ll bring Roberto, and when he sees what a good country it is he’ll want to stay.”
“He’ll never leave Cuba,” Nora said.
They were quiet again. Peyton could smell mimosa and new-cut grass, and she could hear songbirds and Trailways’s raucous purr. But over them were the hot, sweet smells and sounds of Cuba.
“It’s awful,” she said at last.
“Yes, it is,” Nora said. “It wasn’t smart of me. But I don’t regret it. Raoul was the lover of a lifetime, and Roberto is in the world now. I’ll always have those two things.”
Another silence, and then Nora said, “You mustn’t tell anyone, Peyton. Not anyone, not even your father. I’ll have to decide when I’ll do that, or even if I will. If anyone else knew I’d have to leave.”
“Daddy wouldn’t care!”
“Maybe not, but there’s no way it wouldn’t get out eventually. Augusta would ruin both of you in a minute, just to get at me. You may not think so, but I couldn’t stay. The rural South simply will not have it. I could never stay and let that kind of thing happen to you and him.”
Peyton’s heart hurt.
“I promise,” she said. “I’ll never, ever tell anybody. It’ll always be just our secret.”
After a time Nora stretched out on the bed and gathered Trailways to her and smiled up at Peyton. Her eyes were wet. Peyton was so giddy with shock and deliverance and pity for Nora and pride that Nora had confided in her that she could not speak. She knew that if she did she would cry. She smiled back, tremulously.
“It seems to me that it’s mainly your secret,” Nora said. “You know mine now, but I don’t know any of yours.”
“I don’t have any secrets. I’ve never done anything,” Peyton said, feeling inadequacy crest over her like a tsunami. Never, not even at the Losers Club, had she felt so utterly bereft of anything to offer.
“The best secrets can be the ones that you make with your mind,” Nora said, reaching across the coverlet for her cigarettes. “Didn’t you ever have a secret dream? Didn’t you want to be a ballet dancer or a spy or something when you got older? Didn’t you ever have a great love affair in your mind?”
“No,” Peyton said, wincing.
“Oh, Peyton,” Nora said, blowing smoke. “The day that you will isn’t far away at all. Don’t be afraid of it. It won’t happen until you’re ready. And it’s just the greatest thing, to be crazy in love with somebody. You wouldn’t want to miss that.”
“I’ll never get married,” Peyton said.
“I’m not talking about marriage,” Nora said, smiling through the smoke. Peyton blushed.
“I do have a secret,” she said suddenly. “I have a huge one. I don’t know how I could have forgotten.”
“And it is?” Nora said.
“I killed my mother,” Peyton said, and this time, unlike the time at the Losers Club, she did not feel dizzy with the enormity of it, only as if she had handed off something heavy to Nora, and Nora had taken it.
Nora stared at her.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Well…she bled to death after she had me. Didn’t you know that?” Peyton said.
“Who told you that?” Nora’s face was whitening as she spoke. Her cheekbones were reddening.
“Aunt Augusta, I guess. Or maybe Chloe. But I think it was Aunt Augusta. It was a long time after Mother died. I must have been seven or eight.”
“And she told you you killed your mother?”
“Oh, no. Nobody had to tell me that. I mean, if I came and then she bled to death, what else could it be?”
“Peyton, did you ever talk to your father about this?”
Peyton looked down. “No. We never talked about her. Not much, anyway. Every now and then I’d ask Chloe about her, and I have some old home movies with her in them, but I never asked Daddy about her.”
“Why in the hell not?” Nora cried. Peyton flinched. There was hot anger in Nora’s voice.
“I thought he was grieving for her too much. And then Buddy…I thought it would be just too awful to remind him. I guess I thought it was enough that he thought about it every time he looked at me.”
She felt the old salt in her throat.
Nora sat up and reached over and took Peyton’s face in her hands. Peyton tried to twist her head away, but Nora held firm.
“No, now listen,” she said. “I have something to tell you, and I want you to be looking at me when I do. It’s about your mother, and you have to know it now. It’s way past time.”
Peyton looked steadily at her cousin, unable to move her head, unable to close her eyes. It was here now, this great change that had cast its shadow before it. She had never wanted to hear anything less in her life. Please, she said in her mind, please just let’s go back to the way things were this morning. Please don’t let this be my punishment for snooping in your things. She said nothing aloud.
Still holding her face in cupped hands, Nora looked away, and pursed her lips and blew air through them. Then she said, “Peyton, you did not kill your mother. Your mother was just fine when you were born. She was bleeding a little, but a lot of women do that. I did. The doctor propped her legs up on a pillow and told her not to get up until the next morning, and he gave her a shot of something. She was asleep when he left. Your father and your aunt were taking care of you. Your father was ecstatic.”
Peyton’s heart filled. He had held her, then, had looked down at her, had rejoiced that she was in the world.
“What happened, then, if she was all right?” she said in a low, fearful voice.
“What happened was that she got out of bed that afternoon and slipped out and drove to the country club and shacked up with the tennis pro,” Nora said calmly. “She’d been doing it for months. She must have been out of her mind
. It knocked something loose and she came home and bled to death in the bathroom. The professional asshole was gone the next morning.”
A great whispering whiteness, like snow, filled Peyton’s heart and mind. She looked into it as if she were looking at a blizzard through a windowpane.
“How do you know?” she said, thinking with incredulity that she sounded as if she were asking Nora about her morning.
“My mother told me. She told me not long before she died. I don’t know how she knew, but someone in the family obviously got wind of it, and told her. She said she didn’t want me to go worshiping Cousin Lila Lee like an idol, when she was just as human as the rest of us. But I think now she just told me out of spite. They were always enemies.”
“Did…does my father know?” Peyton whispered. Her voice was dying.
“Yes,” Nora said.
“But he couldn’t have told me,” Peyton said, as if arguing with Nora. “He loved her so much. Everybody knows how crazy he was about her. And he must have thought it would have hurt me awfully if he told me.…It was a kind thing, really.”
“I don’t happen to think it’s too terribly kind to let your child think all of her life that she killed her mother,” Nora said in a constricted voice.
“He didn’t know I thought that. I’ve never told anybody that, except the Losers Club and now you.”
“Well, anybody with eyes in their head could have seen that something’s been bothering you for all these years. He damned well should have found out what it was, and the hell with his tender sensibilities.”
“Please don’t be mad at him,” Peyton said, beginning to cry. She felt nothing about her mother, only the terrible possibility of the loss of Nora.
Nora shook her head swiftly and then got up.
“I’m going out and have a talk with your father,” she said, cheeks flaming. “I want you to stay here until I come back and call you. I do not want you listening at the door this time. Oh, yeah, I know you do. I don’t usually care, but I care about this. Hear what I’m saying, Peyton: If you eavesdrop on us I will know it and I will leave here this afternoon. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Peyton said through thick, stinging tears.
Nora had reached the door when Peyton cried, “Wait! Could he be my…could I be…?”
“God, no,” Nora said. “You’re every inch a McKenzie. He was a Neanderthal. His eyebrows met over his nose.”
She flung herself out of the room and slammed the door. Peyton pulled the muttering Trailways to her and curled into a ball around him and turned on the air conditioner. Its whumping roar drowned out all sound, even the cat’s affronted growl. Even the slam of her father’s office door. She stayed there until the cat fell asleep and the light outside the window went from yellow to blue, until she finally dozed.
She did not wake until Nora opened the door and put her head into the room.
“Your father and I are going to get a hamburger,” she said. Her voice was level, even light. There were silver snail tracks on her cheeks, though. She had been crying.
“There’s cold roast beef in the fridge, and some potato salad,” her cousin said. “Or we’ll bring you a hamburger. But this time you can’t come with us.”
Peyton could think of little on earth she wanted to do less.
“A hamburger would be nice,” she said meekly.
But she had fallen asleep again on her narrow bed long before they returned. She slept until morning, and she did not dream, and when she woke she felt so much lighter that she thought she might float. Whatever else she had been—and Peyton knew that she might never catch the sense of it—her mother was not, after all, a saint, and she herself was not a killer.
14
She did not float, though. When she got up that Sunday morning and put her foot on the rag rug by her bed, it felt as if she had stepped onto a suspension bridge high over cold space. She stood holding on to her bedpost for a moment, rocking with the frail bridge and trying to get her bearings. Everything around her—the little room, her clothes strewn about, the window and the slice of backyard beyond it, the door into her tiny bathroom—seemed too bright by far, flaring in her eyes and making her blink, disorienting her as if she stood in a world made of glass. Strangeness hummed in the air like a hive. She put a tentative foot forward, almost convinced that she would crash through this brittle, transparent floor into whistling nothingness.
She crept into the bathroom and washed her face and then crawled back into her bed. The lightness continued; she drew up the covers so that she would not simply waft away like milkweed silk. Trailways jumped up on her stomach, purring in her face and kneading his big paws on her chest. She buried her face in his spiky ruff and closed her eyes.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she whispered to him. “I feel so funny. Everything feels funny.”
He backed out of her grip, tail lashing angrily. Then he made a circle of himself and found his place in the hollow of her bent knees and settled down. This was right, this was so familiar that Peyton was afraid to move lest she lose this tenuous anchor to the known world.
Presently Nora tapped on her door and then came in before Peyton could call out. She was dressed in her church “lady” outfit, a soft yellow linen suit with a short buttoned jacket. She had bought it at Rich’s after, as she said, it became obvious that it made Aunt Augusta far angrier to see her properly and demurely clad than decked out in tongue-clucking exotica. She even carried short white gloves, and her fiery hair was pulled into a shining bundle on the back of her head. The yellow linen cast a glow upon her neck and washed her tawny face faintly, as if she had held a bouquet of buttercups under her chin. Peyton thought she looked wonderful. Somehow she was free to think so now. Another strangeness on this strangest of days.
“You OK, kiddo?” Nora said, sitting down on the edge of Peyton’s bed. “You had a big day yesterday. I was thinking last night that maybe I should have saved the stuff about your mother. Roberto was probably enough for one day.”
“I feel funny,” Peyton said dreamily. Her head felt disconnected from her neck. It felt as if it were floating above her shoulders like a balloon on a string.
“Funny how?”
“I don’t know…kind of floaty. Nothing seems very real. Everything looks all bright and lit up. It almost feels like I’m in a place I don’t know.”
“Well, in a way you are,” Nora said. “Everything that shaped the world for you all your life changed yesterday. Of course things seem strange. But I think that when you get used to them you may feel better than you have in a long time. That was a hell of a load you were carrying on your shoulders. You want to talk about any of it?”
Peyton considered. If she could not think about her mother in the same way that she had all her life, how then must she think of her? It did not seem very important or very real. What seemed real was Nora, right now, sitting on her bed in yellow linen.
“I guess there’s a lot I want to know, but I can’t quite think what it is,” she said. “She just seems like somebody I only heard about, and what I heard was wrong.”
“Well, that’s what she was. That’s how it was. Don’t push it. You’ll find just the right place for her in your mind. Then you can love her for what she really was.”
“Will I ever know what she really was?”
“If you want to—as much as anyone knows anyone else. I’ll tell you everything I know whenever you ask. Your father will talk to you about her, too. He hasn’t before now because he thought it would be too hard for you. But he’s promised that he will, when you want him to.”
“Did you all have a fight about this?”
“Mmmm-hmmm. A monstrous one. We were furious with each other. We yelled and screamed. Finally it occurred to both of us that this was not about us, it was about you, and then everything seemed just to fall into place. He knows he should have been closer to you all these years; he knows now what he’s let you carry on your shoulders. It hurt h
im terribly when he realized. He wanted most to spare you any pain, and so he just didn’t talk to you about anything. He thought it would upset you. In the long run he didn’t talk to you about anything much at all. That’s going to change, though.”
Peyton felt uneasy. Did she really want a volatile new father who bared his soul to her and invited her own this late in the game? She rather thought not. It was enough to know that it was not, after all, she who had struck him to chilly silence all those years. She would have to live her way into that.
“Maybe Daddy and I can talk later,” she said. “I just don’t feel like I know what to say yet. I was that other way for so long that I don’t know what way I need to be now.”
Nora laughed and hugged her.
“Point taken,” she said. “I’ll relay the message. Do you want to come to church with us, or would you rather just piddle around here and collect yourself?”
“Piddle,” Peyton said gratefully. The thought of Aunt Augusta’s drilling blue eyes trained on her made her faintly sick. Her aunt would smell the profound change, she knew, even if she could not see it. She would be relentless in her pursuit of it.
Nora went to the door and looked back.
“She did love you, you know,” she said. “And she loved your father a great deal. What she did had nothing to do with that.”
“How could it not? How can you leave people you love and go off and…do that?” Peyton’s voice shook.
“They’re not at all the same thing,” Nora said. “Not at all. One is like scratching an itch. When the itch stops, the scratching ends. But the other is better in every way. It lasts. And the other is what she felt for you and your brother and your father. Your father knows that. You will, too, when you’re older.”
Peyton heard her father’s voice then, calling from the living room. “You gals ready to go?”
“Let’s let this gal sleep in,” Nora called back. “She had a big day yesterday. She’ll have lunch with us. Maybe Howard Johnson’s fried clams again. Are you buying?”
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