by Karen White
chapter 21
EDITH
DECEMBER 1977
The house carried the scent of pine and cinnamon, owing completely to Cecelia’s decorating skills. Garlands artfully wrapped the banister, held in position with oversize red velvet bows, and festooned with pinecones sparkling under a dusting of frosty-white paint.
The enormous Christmas tree in the middle of the foyer reached almost to the ceiling, and C.J. had not been happy about having to cut off part of the trunk so Cecelia could put the gold star at the top. It had been a first Christmas gift from her parents two months after her wedding to C.J., which was most likely the reason for her insistence that it be put on the top of the tree, much as it was the cause for his reluctance.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly . . . Christmas music sang out from the large stereo console in the parlor as Edith touched one of the beautiful gold and red glass ornaments, the surface reflecting the large colored bulbs that wound through all of the branches—another sore spot for C.J. He would have been happy with a single strand, but had been outvoted by his wife and mother. He’d laughed when Cecelia said that, but there had been a look in his eyes that made Edith worry, an expression that made him appear too much like his father.
Cal began to cry in his room, screaming like he always did when he awakened. Edith paused to see whether Cecilia would go get him. She and C.J. were in their bedroom—the one that had once been Edith’s before her son’s marriage and his request to have the larger room for himself and his new bride.
Edith had heard arguing behind the closed door a little while before, which was the reason she’d put the Christmas music eight-track on the stereo, hoping to shut out their voices. She’d still been able to hear them, making her wonder whether the old house had absorbed the sound of arguing through generations, playing the same sound track over and over. She still held out hope that Cecelia would be different, that her daughter-in-law would be the one to break the pattern. But since Cal’s birth nearly four years earlier, Edith had found herself clinging to that hope as precariously as a sand castle clung to shore.
“Mama!” Cal screamed.
The bedroom door remained shut, so Edith began climbing the steps slowly, hoping her son or daughter-in-law would hear their son before she reached him. It wasn’t because she didn’t want to be with Cal. She loved her grandson. From the first moment she’d held him and seen his mother’s amber-colored eyes, she’d harbored the belief that he was his mother’s son. But lately she’d begun to see chinks in her firm beliefs, and the more time she spent with Cal, the more evidence to the contrary she discovered.
She waited outside the little boy’s room, listening to the rhythmic thumping against the wall and the squeak of the bedsprings before gently opening the door. He stopped when he spotted her, then sat in the middle of his toddler bed, his eyes puffy from sleep, a plastic yellow and blue shape-sorter ball at the foot of the bed. Several yellow plastic shapes were scattered on the floor, far enough from the bed that they’d most likely been thrown.
He looked at her with disconsolate eyes as she approached and sat on the side of the bed. She ran her hand through his fine, sandy-colored hair, sticky with sleep sweat. He was big for his age, just like C.J. had been, with thick, broad shoulders and heavy legs. C.J. liked to say he was born a USC linebacker, but Edith hadn’t had the heart to tell him that a parent’s dream for his child rarely came to fruition just from wishing.
She leaned down and kissed his forehead, and he sighed as if giving up his effort to fight whatever battle he seemed to have been waging since birth.
“Did you have a good nap, sweetheart?”
He threw himself down on the bed, kicking the plastic ball hard with his foot. “I don’t like that.”
Edith retrieved the toy and examined it. It was a baby toy, one that Cal hadn’t allowed her to pack away with all of the other infant and toddler toys when they took down the crib and brought in his new big-boy bed. Two incorrect shapes had been forced into the wrong holes and were stuck. She tugged on each one in turn, but neither would budge. She reached for one of the shapes on the floor and lifted it to show Cal. “This is a triangle—see? It’s got three sides.” She held up the toy. “Then you find the opening that is also a triangle, and it fits right in.” She gave the shape to the little boy, careful to make sure that it was correctly positioned.
“I want it to go there,” he said, pointing to a rectangular opening near the top. “It’s yellow.”
She’d already opened her mouth to correct him, then stopped. The top half of the ball was yellow. And to Cal it made sense that all the yellow pieces should go through the yellow holes regardless of whether they’d fit.
“I see,” she said, putting the toy aside. Since he was an infant, he’d had a clear view of the world and the way it should work. If his bottle was too warm or not warm enough, he wouldn’t drink it. If his shoelaces were uneven, he’d throw a fit until the shoes were removed and retied. If you told him you would take him for a walk after his nap and you forgot, he’d remind you and make you go even if it was pouring rain outside.
It worried Edith, and not just because C.J. had been the same way as a boy, but because it made the world a difficult place to live in if your view of it was always black-and-white—a difficult place for those who believed that, and for those who had the misfortune to love them.
Edith wanted to think that his strong personality had to do with the fact that he was an only child like his father, and wondered whether having a little brother or sister would help him to see that all things didn’t revolve around him, that sometimes your favorite shorts weren’t clean yet or your potatoes touched the Brussels sprouts on your plate. Cecelia had tried twice before, miscarrying each time, the last just three weeks earlier. She’d tripped and fallen down the stairs. She’d been far enough along that the doctors had been able to tell that it had been a little girl. Cecelia had taken it well, her eyes dry when they’d brought her home, and she’d immediately gone upstairs and closed the nursery door. It was almost as if, Edith thought, she’d become only a shadow of the bright, pretty girl she’d been when C.J. had first carried her across the threshold.
“I want to play fire truck,” Cal said, pointing a chubby finger toward his favorite toy, a large, bright red fire truck with a working siren and a ladder that went up and down.
Edith had mentioned the previous day that she’d play fire truck with him soon, and to him that meant right then. She thought of the Christmas presents she still needed to wrap, and her dress for the party that night, which she still needed to iron. And the seating assignments from the plane, which she’d recently acquired through her friendship with a local newspaper journalist and that offered her so many more opportunities for further study of the crash. But Cal would scream until she’d played with him, so it wasn’t as if she really had a choice anyway.
“All right,” she said, standing up and lifting him from the bed. She helped him put on the big plastic fire chief helmet, then knelt on the floor next to the truck and waited for Cal to give her orders. He was always the fire chief, and she a firefighter who had to do everything he asked. It was her job to make the Lincoln Log structures that would go up in flames, but it was up to Cal to come up with the reason for the fire. He was very good at placing blame: The candle was left where the dog’s tail could knock it over; the man with the cigarette didn’t put it out all the way and the garbage caught on fire.
Edith had no idea where his scenarios came from, only that C.J. thought it funny when he read accident reports from the newspaper out loud at the breakfast table, each story concluding with one of them shouting out who was to blame. The only benefit to that, Edith had found, was that Cal had a deep-seated belief that there were no such things as accidents, just people not paying attention.
“Where are your little people?” she asked.
He pointed to a LEGO house they’d made together with enough bedrooms to house the small dolls she’d made for h
im. He hadn’t liked the Fisher Price people because they didn’t look real, with no arms, and legs and hair that came off. He liked the dolls Grandma Edith made, because they had painted faces and wore real clothes and had hair that moved. It wasn’t that he lacked imagination; it was just the way things should be.
“What’s burning?” Edith asked.
“A house. Somebody had real candles on the Christmas tree and it got burnt down.”
Edith remembered the story from the Sunday paper. A family of six had perished because the mother had wanted to give her own mother a reminder of the Christmases of her childhood.
“All right. Where is everybody when the fire starts?”
He studied the large LEGO house, pointing out all the places the dolls should be.
“Are you going to save everybody?”
He nodded, his face serious. Despite his rather fatalistic outlook toward the cause of the fires he and his imaginary crew fought to extinguish, it was always his goal to save every life. It was the right order of things, the way he saw how to make all the pieces fit together. Edith took a great deal of consolation from this, from his clear knowledge of right and wrong. Surely this meant that despite everything else, he might still find his way in the world.
They played for nearly half an hour—or, rather, Cal played while Edith followed instructions. This was the part of her grandson she enjoyed most, when he was absorbed in his role-playing and he was happy because he could control the miniature world he’d created. His chubby fingers were surprisingly agile at manipulating the small levers on the fire truck and moving the doll-people down the fire ladder. He’ll be fine. Edith found herself thinking that often, ever since she’d first gone to his crib when he’d been just an infant and found that the reason for his high-pitched crying was that a corner of his blanket had exposed one tiny foot.
“Oops.”
Edith paused in her efforts to tie the laces on the older sister’s shoes (Cal had informed her that the sister was going to have a burned leg because she’d stopped to tie her shoes instead of running to safety), and focused on Cal.
Cal held the mother and father dolls in both hands at the top of the staircase. The plastic LEGO flames were still downstairs, where the fire had started in a fireplace that hadn’t been properly banked for the night, blocking the front door. Before Edith could ask how they were going to escape, Cal lifted the man’s arms and shoved the woman, making her topple down the stairs until she lay facedown on the black and white tiled foyer floor.
“Oops,” he said again, but in the deep voice of the father. “It was an accident,” he said again, the low rumble of that voice coming from a child sending chills up Edith’s spine.
But there are no such things as accidents, she wanted to say. Her thoughts paralyzed her, thoughts that no mother should have about her children. Thoughts that could lead to very dangerous places.
Leaning close to her grandson, she said, “It wasn’t really an accident, was it?”
He kept his head down and shook it. “She made the man angry. That’s why he pushed her.” His voice was small and childlike and choked with tears.
Edith swallowed. “Even when we’re angry, we use our words and not our hands, remember?”
Cal nodded slowly. “But sometimes when the man gets mad he forgets to use his words and instead does bad things.” He looked up at her and his eyes were bright with tears. “Can you fix her?”
Edith picked up the doll. Even without lifting the nightgown, she could feel the neck lolling loosely in her palm, and one arm was bent in a way it shouldn’t have been. “Yes,” Edith said, already standing, needing to get out of that room as soon as possible. Wanting to circumvent a tantrum for ending their play session so suddenly, she said, “I’ll let you come up to my workroom to watch me work while I fix her.” She leaned forward, looking into his eyes. “But it will have to be our secret.”
She saw his need for rules and structure battling with his desire to see what went on up in her attic workroom, a place he’d been forbidden since he was old enough to walk.
“Can you do that, Cal? Can you keep a secret?”
“Yes,” he said quickly. As if he’d been asked that before and already knew the answer.
A door slammed in the hallway, and they were both silent as they listened to C.J.’s heavy tread pass their door, then jog down the stairs before crossing the house toward the kitchen. A minute later, C.J.’s car sped out of the garage and down the drive, its tires crunching on the oyster-shell driveway.
Edith slipped the doll into her pocket. “Let’s clean up first, all right? And when your mother goes out to the beauty parlor later we’ll go upstairs.”
He regarded her with a serious face. “Okay.”
Edith began making the bed while Cal carefully tucked his dolls back into their beds and parked the truck where it belonged next to the LEGO fire station. They were almost finished when the bedroom door slowly opened and Cecelia stuck her head inside.
“Oh, hello, little man. I thought you were still sleeping.”
“Mama!” Cal ran to her with arms outstretched, gripping her tightly around her legs.
Cecelia bent to hug him, their hair blending together. When his father was around, he was much less demonstrative toward his mother, but Edith sensed that their bond went beyond mother and son. Sometimes, it seemed to Edith, it was more about just the two of them in a two-person boat, where they decided how fast and where to go, and there was no room for anybody else. Except when C.J. was around, and his physical similarity to his son seemed to meld them together to form a single person instead of just a team.
“We were playing fire truck,” Edith explained, glad the doll was hidden in the pocket of her housedress. She noticed that Cecelia was wearing the emerald green cashmere turtleneck sweater C.J. had given her on her last birthday, but the neck was pulled up as high as it could go instead of being folded over, hiding as much skin as possible.
Cal jumped with his hands held up, wanting his mother to lift him. Cecelia looked too thin and weary and certainly not strong enough to lift her son, but telling her not to would have been fruitless. She bent down and winced only a little as she lifted Cal to her hip.
“Mama, where’s your necklace?”
Before Cal was born, C.J. had bought a gold locket for Cecelia and had cut a lock of his own hair to put inside. Only Edith knew that Cecelia had replaced it with a lock of the baby’s hair, and she wore it against her heart almost every day.
Before she could protest, Cal was pulling at the neck of her sweater, looking for the chain. Cecelia stopped him, but not before Edith saw the finger-size bruises on the side of her neck, dark spots that looked like insects marching up from her chest.
Edith gasped before she could stop herself, causing both Cecelia and Cal to turn to her. Her daughter-in-law gave a quick shake of her head, and Edith dropped her hand from her own neck and forced a smile.
Reaching for her grandson, she said, “Let’s go bake some cookies so when your mama gets back from having her hair done, we can have a nice snack together.”
“I’ve decided to do my hair for the party myself.”
Cecelia smiled, and Edith caught the scent of alcohol on her breath, as thin and wispy as smoke from a hidden fire. Of course she couldn’t have her hair done. Because then she’d have to remove the sweater.
“Oh, all right. I’ll be happy to watch Cal for you.” She smiled the same smile others had given her all those years of her own marriage, and she was ashamed. Not because she’d raised a son who was as brutal as his father, but because she had learned nothing and was still as ignorant as those well-meaning people who chose to look past the bruises and see only what they wanted to. To think what they wanted to. To believe they understood and placed blame accordingly.
“Thank you, Edith,” Cecelia said as she relinquished her son.
Edith tried to prop the boy on her hip, but he was too big and he slid back to the floor. He looked up at her wit
h his mother’s eyes and Edith felt the oddest urge to cry. He didn’t break eye contact until she’d given him a little nod, knowing he was waiting for her to acknowledge her promise to take him up to the attic.
Cecelia paused in the doorway, her lips parted slightly, as if the words waited on her tongue. Edith stepped forward, wanting to meet her halfway, to prove that she wasn’t the coward she knew herself to be. And suddenly she saw the face of the letter writer, the woman who’d written the word Beloved on a folded letter to her husband and tucked it neatly inside his suitcase. The face of the woman Edith had imagined dozens of times, waiting by a telephone for news. Waiting for the sound of her husband’s footfall outside the door. And the face Edith saw was Cecelia’s.
“Let me help you,” Edith said softly, the words floating between them like petals. They could be caught, or allowed to fall to the ground.
Their eyes met, yet to Edith it seemed they were standing very far apart, their lives connected yet separated by an invisible barrier that neither one of them knew how to break through.
Finally Cecelia’s lips closed and she swallowed. “I don’t need any help. Everything’s fine.”
Relief and shame flooded Edith, making her want to beg Cecilia to let her help at the same time she wanted to pretend that she hadn’t seen the marks on her neck. She felt the absurd need to go talk to the statue of Saint Michael in her garden, to ask him for protection. And forgiveness.
“Grandma, I’m hungry.” Cal pulled on her arm, and Edith looked at him gratefully.
“All right, sweetheart. Let’s get out of your mother’s way so she can get her hair done for the party.”
Cecelia ruffled Cal’s hair as they walked past her. “I love you, baby,” she said.
“I love you, too, Mama,” Cal answered automatically as he followed Edith to the hallway and down the stairs and into the kitchen.
