Big Lies in a Small Town

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Do you want some help?” she asked, trading her sweater for the smock that hung over the back of her chair.

  “Not yet,” he said. “I wanna figger this out by myself.” He stood back and studied the painting on the easel. “Can you tell who this is?” he asked.

  Anna came to stand next to him, buttoning her smock over her blouse. The woman was looking out the window, and her large eyes, so much like Jesse’s, gave her identity away. Slowly, she nodded. “Your mother,” she said. “Without a doubt.” The angle of the fading daylight on the woman’s bare arms was not quite right, but she thought it best to let him see that on his own. “Did she model for you?”

  “I sketched it while she was washin’ dishes,” he said, chuckling. “Then she hollered at me for jest sittin’ around, doin’ nothin’ worthwhile.”

  “Did you show her the sketch?”

  “Nah, it’s gonna be a surprise, this paintin’.” He nodded toward the easel. “Next week’s her birthday so this’ll be her present.”

  “Oh, she’ll love it,” Anna said, hoping that was the truth. A beat of silence followed, then without thinking, she said, “Today would have been my mother’s birthday.”

  She felt Jesse’s eyes on her but kept her own gaze on his painting, her hands resting on the back of the chair in front of the easel.

  “Would’ve been?” he asked.

  “She died in November,” she said. “Just a couple of weeks before I came here.” She glanced at him. “She killed herself.” It was the first time she’d said those words out loud. Why she said them to Jesse but not Miss Myrtle, not Pauline, she had no idea. But there they were, a burden of syllables dumped on the shoulders of a seventeen-year-old boy.

  “Damn,” he said. “How … I mean … why she do that?”

  Anna returned her gaze to the woman in the painting. “She had an illness called manic-depressive psychosis,” she said. “That means she would be very happy and energetic—extremely energetic—for a while—sometimes months—and then she’d be very sad for just as long. Her sadness this time lasted and lasted and … it just didn’t let up. My aunt Alice thought she needed to go into the hospital where they’d…” She didn’t want to have to explain the electroshock treatments and all of that with him. “I didn’t think she needed to go and she didn’t want to go. My aunt tried to insist, but I finally won the argument.” Anna felt her lower lip start to tremble and she bit down on it to stop the quiver. Jesse was so still and quiet that she barely knew he was next to her. “I came home from job hunting one day,” she said, “and I couldn’t find her. I knew she was home because I could see her car through the windows in the garage door. I called for her. Walked around the house. Finally I went out to the garage.” Anna shut her eyes, her hands locked tight on the back of the chair. Jesse waited, still as stone next to her. “She’d hung herself from the beams in the garage ceiling.” She lifted a hand to her mouth, pressing her fist against her lips, wishing she could block out the image she would never forget. Her mother’s grotesque, almost unrecognizable face. Eyes wide open, features twisted, her skin gray. She had suffered; that much was clear. Anna could feel the beams of the warehouse high above her. She did not look up. “Aunt Alice had been right,” she said to Jesse. “She needed to go to the hospital, but I was too—”

  “Weren’t your fault,” Jesse said, force in his voice. “Not no way.”

  His words jerked her out of the memory, and for a moment neither of them spoke.

  “I’m sorry I told you all that,” she said finally. “It’s just … I’m not myself today. It’s all I can think about. Her birthday. And that she’s not here.”

  “Maybe don’t work today?” he suggested softly. “Go someplace quiet.”

  She looked at him. “Have you ever lost someone special?” she asked.

  “Ever’one of my grandparents,” he said.

  She moved toward the mural and leaned against her paint table, arms folded across her chest. “Were you close to them?” she asked.

  “Only really my granny. My mother’s mama. Two year ago, she left us. There was a big funeral and lots of food and talkin’ and you know what I did?” He widened his gentle doe eyes, waiting for her response.

  “What did you do?”

  “It was August and the south field was chock full o’ corn. I jest went out there and set down in the middle of all them cornstalks where no one could see me except the worms and sap beetles and thought on the things Granny used to do … like how she’d drag me around by the ear when she was mad at me.” He laughed. “But she’d play horseshoes with me and she’d smoke a pipe and give it to me when Mama wasn’t lookin’. Them kind of things.”

  Anna smiled at him. He was such a tender soul. “You’re very wise, Jesse Williams,” she said. “But actually, I don’t want to go someplace quiet. I think it would be best for me to stay here and focus on my work today.”

  He nodded. “That’s jest like you, Miss Anna,” he said. “But you change your mind, I can point you to some good places for hidin’ out by yourself.”

  “I’ll let you know,” she said, still smiling as she turned around, reaching for her palette. She didn’t say what she truly wanted to say: This was the first time I’ve said it all out loud. It feels good to tell someone what happened. Thank you for listening. Perhaps now that she’d told the story, it would lose its power over her. She hoped she would never have to repeat it to anyone ever again.

  Chapter 41

  MORGAN

  July 12, 2018

  It was nearly three in the morning by the time an orderly wheeled me out of the emergency room toward Oliver’s van. I was wearing the awkward walking boot, and it took some careful maneuvering for me to stretch out on the van’s second-row seat, my back against the side door. Finally, we were off.

  “How’re you doing back there?” Oliver asked once we’d put a few miles between us and the hospital.

  I watched my walking boot glow each time we passed beneath a streetlight. “I’m okay,” I said. “It’s not too bad.” The van’s radio was on, playing softly. A guy was singing about Vietnam, and I smiled. “We have to do something about your music, though,” I added, and Oliver laughed.

  “You mean right now, or in general?” he asked.

  “In general. It’s old-people music. Vietnam protests are ancient history.”

  “My parents were old folkies and I grew up on this stuff,” he said. “It’s deeper than today’s music. Has more of a message than ‘oh, I wanna get laid tonight’ or whatever.”

  I laughed. I love you, I thought, but of course I kept my mouth shut. Dangerous thinking. The last man I’d fallen in love with screwed me over royally. Instead, I said, “It’ll be easier to relate to Nathan if you listen to the music he listens to. Music’s a bridge between people.”

  In the rearview mirror, I saw his face, caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. His look was sober, and he nodded.

  “Point taken,” he said.

  In another few minutes, he turned the van into Lisa’s driveway. I drew in a long breath. What a terrible night it had been, and yet I felt oddly happy. Happier than I’d felt in a long time.

  Oliver helped me hop my way to the front door. I opened it with my key and quickly turned off the alarm system once we were inside, not wanting to awaken Lisa. The house was dark and silent.

  “Where’s your room?” Oliver asked quietly.

  “At the back of the house. The sunroom.”

  “Jesse’s old room?”

  “Yes.”

  He put his arm around my waist and helped me maneuver through the dark living room and dining room. Instead of the pain, I focused on how wonderful his hand felt against my side, but he let go of me as soon as we reached the sunroom. I turned on the light, glad I’d made my bed that morning. I sat down on it and looked up at him.

  “How am I going to work?” I asked.

  He put his hands on his hips and looked down at me. “We’ll figure out a way,” he
said. “For right now, what can I get you? Water? Snack? Can you take off the boot by yourself? Can you get to the bathroom?”

  Oh God, I didn’t want to be this needy around him! I could feel the pain beginning to throb in my ankle now that the medication they’d given me in the ER was wearing off.

  “Just one thing,” I said. “Lisa has Tylenol in the kitchen cabinet by the sink. Could you bring me a couple and a glass of water, please?”

  “You’ve got it,” he said, and he disappeared into the hallway.

  He returned a moment later with the Tylenol, water, and an ice pack. “Look what I found in the freezer,” he said, holding up the ice pack.

  I took the ice pack from him and set it on the bed, then looked up at him. He was eyeing me with worry. The night table lamp caught the blue of his eyes. The straight line of his nose.

  “What else can I do?” he asked.

  You can lie here next to me until I fall asleep, I thought. It would be so comforting to curl up against him all night long, breathing in the leathery scent of his aftershave or whatever it was. Instead, I smiled up at him.

  “You’ve done a lot,” I said quickly, before I said anything I’d regret later. “And I’m fine, really. I’ll see you tomorrow—after my appointment with my PO—and we can figure out how the hell I’m going to work with a screwed-up foot.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Call if you need me.” Then he leaned over to give me a hug I could only describe as brotherly. It was all I could do to let go.

  Chapter 42

  ANNA

  March 6, 1940

  Ever since the anniversary of her mother’s death, Anna had been staying late in the warehouse each day, unable to tear herself away from the mural. At first, she thought she was focusing on her painting as a way to stop the memories, but now she knew she was painting simply for the joy of it, the way she had as a student. There was nothing she would rather do. This was her passion. Her calling. She wondered if she would ever have time for a husband and children. She doubted she could attract a man at the moment, anyway. She always seemed to have paint in her hair and she’d stopped trying to get all of it out from under her fingernails. Looking pretty wasn’t her priority, and she believed Miss Myrtle had completely given up on turning her into a lady.

  So, she had no man in her life, but she did have a best friend—Jesse Jameson Williams—and she thought that was even better. What would she do without him? It wasn’t so much that Jesse seemed to know what she needed in the warehouse even before she did—moving the ladder a few feet to the left, or adding a bit of Prussian blue to her palette—but that he was a hungry student and she enjoyed teaching him. He devoured every art book she brought him from the library, giving them back to her when they were due and asking her to check them out again a few days later. She let him read the books in the warehouse, because when he was at home on the farm, he was expected to work—work he loathed.

  Peter was no longer helping in the warehouse. Baseball season had begun in the high school, and Anna was surprised to learn that Peter, despite being small and slender, was the star catcher on Edenton High School’s baseball team. That meant he had practice after school every day. Anna missed his industriousness, but she had little work for two boys now that the heavy lifting was over, and to be truthful, Peter was never going to be an artist. He was technically competent and created detailed renderings of car engines and tractors, but he lacked Jesse’s passion and creativity. Anna thought Peter would make a fine engineer someday.

  She was rarely alone in the warehouse these days, whether Jesse was there or not. People stopped in during the day to watch her progress. Teenagers came by after school. Housewives running errands stopped in to watch and chat. And the men. The tiresome men. They stopped in during their lunch hours or after work, and they were curious and often critical. The women were kind, accepting of anything Anna chose to do in her painting, but the men all had opinions. They seemed to enjoy telling Anna what she was doing wrong, as if they could possibly know. She ignored them. The movers and shakers—Mayor Sykes, Mr. Fiering, and Billy Calhoun—were still distressed about having the Tea Party front and center, but they complained about it less now, at least to her, so she guessed they’d come to realize it was out of their hands.

  Two men had not returned and for that Anna was grateful: Theresa Wayman’s father and Martin Drapple, whom she hadn’t seen since the day he’d slapped his wife. He was wise to stay away. She had no need of him now that the canvas was on the wall, anyhow. Some of the women asked her if she’d paint portraits of their children. She had no time for that, but she was both flattered and taken aback by the requests. Martin was the portrait artist in Edenton. Everyone knew that, and she had no desire to harm his career.

  March 8–9, 1940

  Anna awakened at three Friday morning, unable to go back to sleep because all she could think about was how much she wanted to go to the warehouse and get back to work. After tossing and turning for half an hour, she finally got out of bed, dressed, tiptoed out of the house, and drove herself to the warehouse in the dark. The dirt road was black and silent, the woods too late for the cicadas, too early for the birds, and she fought her nerves as she drove through the trees. Walking into the suffocating pitch-blackness of the warehouse was even more of a challenge, but once she turned on the lights, her heartbeat began to settle down and the mural came to life in front of her in all its half-painted glory.

  She painted until nearly nine A.M. It was as though some force were under her skin that wouldn’t let her stop, and she was filled with the joy of creating. But then, suddenly, all the steam seemed to go out of her body and she was utterly exhausted. What she wouldn’t give for a bed to climb into! She remembered that Jesse was working on the farm this morning, so she had the warehouse to herself. Sitting down next to her worktable, she leaned forward and rested her head on her arms, and before she even had a chance to think, she was asleep.

  “Wake up sleepyhead!”

  Dazed, Anna lifted her head from her worktable. It took her a moment to get her bearings. She was in the warehouse and Pauline stood in front of her, a garment bag in her arms.

  “Oh, my.” Anna rubbed the back of her stiff neck and looked up at Pauline. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep. What time is it?”

  “Nearly noon,” Pauline said. “And I’m taking you to lunch at the Albemarle, though you look like you need a nap more than a meal. You work way too hard, Anna.”

  “I can’t go to lunch.” Anna pushed her chair away from her worktable and stood up. She held her arms wide to display her paint-stained pants and smock. “I’m hardly dressed for it.”

  “That’s why I brought you one of my skirts and blouses.” Pauline shoved the garment bag into Anna’s arms, then looked worriedly down at her oxfords. “Your feet and bare legs will be hidden by the table, I hope,” she said.

  It had been a while since Anna had visited with Pauline. If her friend had gone to that much trouble to get her out of the warehouse, she should go, exhausted or not. She carried the garment bag to her small bathroom at the far end of the warehouse, where she changed into Pauline’s skirt and blouse. They hung a bit loosely on her, but what did it matter? They would do.

  Pauline drove them to the Albemarle Restaurant on Broad Street, where they both ordered the platter with chicken salad, tuna salad, a bit of candied apple, and a slice of American cheese. They chatted about this and that and then Pauline gave her a secret-looking smile.

  “I have news,” she said, her cheeks flushing. “I’m expecting a baby! Karl is over the moon about it.”

  “Well, my goodness!” Anna said. “How wonderful!” She was surprised by the confusion of feelings that came over her. Joy for her friend’s happiness. Excitement at the thought of a new baby in their midst … although she would certainly be back in New Jersey by the time the child was born. And envy. That surprised her. Did she want to have a baby? Or was she just concerned about losing Pauline’s friendship as her prioriti
es changed? It made Anna glad she’d decided to join Pauline for lunch today. She had to nurture her friendships. They were too easy to lose. “Your mother must be thrilled,” she said.

  “Oh, she is! And Karl and I are coming over to dinner tonight to celebrate, so I wanted you to know ahead of time. You’ll join us, of course.”

  “I’d love to.” She always enjoyed it when Karl and Pauline came to dinner, although she was so sleepy today she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stay up for much merriment.

  Pauline chatted for a while about her plans for a nursery, but then abruptly changed topics, leaning across the table toward Anna.

  “People are talking about you and the colored boy, honey,” she said quietly. “You need to be careful.”

  “Pauline!” Anna was stunned. She felt sorely disappointed. “First of all, I consider Jesse an art student who has also become a friend.” She remembered telling Jesse about her mother. How he’d listened. How he’d truly heard her. “And second,” she said, “I don’t care what people say.”

  “Well, you should care,” Pauline said. “Karl told me how someone painted”—she leaned forward to whisper—“those words on the warehouse.”

  “That was weeks ago. Nothing’s happened since then. Probably just some hoodlums out causing trouble. I don’t want to live my life in fear.”