by Karen White
For all the years she’d carried her secret, she’d never once imagined she’d be having that conversation. After she had mailed the handkerchief and letter, she’d kept nothing of the suitcase’s contents, nothing to give her away. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten about it; it was more like knowing that the family silver was in the dining room breakfront without actually looking at it.
She cleared her throat, trying to figure what half-truths she could tell him. Because his sense of justice and rightness, of punishment and retribution, were still tangled up in his childhood belief that everything was black-and-white, good or evil, right or wrong. There were no shades of the truth. Unless she could somehow manage to make him believe that justice had actually prevailed. She looked down at where the suitcase lay on the ground, smelling the tart scent of fresh soil, and saw the name tag. Her eyes met Cal’s and she knew he’d seen it, too. Had probably already memorized the name and address just as she had. She still knew it. Could recite it without having to think very hard.
Keeping her voice calm, she said, “I didn’t think his widow wanted the police to have it.”
He reached down and gripped the name tag, then wrenched it loose with a single hard tug. He looked at her with an expression that was half triumph, half sneer. “Is she the one? The one who put the bomb on the plane?”
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. But she had experience with that and was able to stop herself from reeling, keeping her eyes on his. “Yes,” she said calmly. “How did you know?”
He took a step toward her and she dropped her eyes, but didn’t move back. “I know what you’ve been doing up in the attic, Edith. I saw the mangled bodies and the blown-apart plane, even though you tried to hide it from me. I even made my own LEGO airplane so I could pretend I was working alongside you, helping to solve the mystery. And I saw the shoe-box model you made of a woman in her kitchen making a bomb with sticks of dynamite and an alarm clock. You destroyed it, didn’t you? Right after Mama died you destroyed it. It’s just taken me this long to figure out why.” He thrust his finger at her, jabbing her in the chest. “I assumed you’d demolished all the evidence so nothing could ever be proved. But I was wrong.” His face was half jeer, half incredulous disappointment.
Edith kept her voice calm. “The damage had been done. People died, but it was an accident, Cal. You do know that, don’t you? She didn’t mean to blow up the plane—that wasn’t meant to happen. She was sick in her head. You don’t understand what happens to a woman’s mind—a woman who’s been beaten and belittled for so long that she can’t think straight anymore. She can only think in the present, and not anticipate things going wrong—just the single focus of ending her torment. And all those people who died—there was no way to bring them back. I wanted that poor woman to find some peace, although I don’t know whether she ever could.”
Edith knew before he spoke that her words would not sway him.
“No matter what you say, or what trials you think you’ve been through in your life and at the hands of my grandfather, nothing, nothing justifies you being an accessory to murder. Yes, that’s what you are. A murderer. You knew the plane’s explosion wasn’t an accident, and you found out who had caused it. But you kept it to yourself.”
She broke her own rule and raised her voice. “Because I felt a kinship toward her. She left a letter in the suitcase. He hurt her, Cal. Like your grandfather hurt me. Like your father hurt your mother. Except she had the courage to make it stop.”
Without warning, he reached up and slapped her hard on the face, knocking her down. “You don’t even know her first name,” he spat.
She looked up at him and wiped the blood from her cut lip. “I didn’t need to. Because I could have filled in the blank with half a dozen names. Like Cecelia.”
Cal took a step toward her, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see the next blow, but refused to shrink back.
“Grandma?”
Gibbes’s voice came from the top of the stairs.
“Don’t come down here, Gibbes. Not if you know what’s good for you,” Cal called out.
Edith opened her eyes. “Go back to your room, sweetie,” she managed, tasting blood in her mouth. “I’m all right.”
Cal looked down at her, his eyes softening as if seeing her for the first time and wondering why she was on the ground and bleeding from her lip. He knelt beside her and tucked her hair behind her ears, then pressed his forehead against hers. She realized that he was crying, his tears warm and sticky on her face.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.” He pressed his forehead against hers even harder, as if he could melt inside her and disappear.
She reached up and placed a hand on his cheek. “I know, sweetheart. I know.”
“I can’t . . . I can’t let this go. You know that, right?”
“Please don’t, Cal. Let it be. I have carried this knowledge on my shoulders for all these years. Let it die with me. No good can come of it.”
He took her head in both his hands, and she felt the power in them and the gentleness, too. He’d always been that way, ever since he was a little boy playing fire and deciding that everybody would live, and that the perpetrator was caught and blame and justice correctly attributed. It was a fatal flaw in his character, the thing that would one day destroy him.
He pulled away and stood. “I have to leave. I can’t stay here anymore, knowing what I know. Knowing what you’ve done. I don’t know where I’m going, or what I’ll do, but I can’t stay here.”
Edith scrambled to her hands and knees, pulling herself up using the hall table, her limbs heavy and sore. “Please stay. We can work through this. Do some kind of penance together—community service, maybe. Something good.”
“You know I couldn’t live like that—knowing that somebody got away with killing forty-nine people and that my own grandmother has known all these years. Somebody has to pay.”
“You will, Cal. In the end, you will. You don’t know when to stop.”
He turned away from her and headed toward the stairs.
“Where will you go? Will you try to find her?”
He stopped without turning around. “I don’t know. I just can’t stay here with you. I don’t know what could happen the next time I lose my temper.”
“You need help, Cal.”
His shoulders sagged. “I know. Or maybe just leaving this place will be all the help I need.”
She didn’t call him back, knowing she could never change his mind. As soon as she heard his door shut, she picked up the suitcase and the torn tag and hid them behind the parlor sofa to rebury later, to make sure they would never be found. As she walked from the room she stopped suddenly, almost running into Gibbes.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, touching her chin.
“I know. I bumped into something. How clumsy of me.”
He looked at her with his mother’s eyes, and it was as if Cecelia were looking at Edith with understanding and compassion, and for the first time Edith felt as if her silence had at least given her a moment of triumph, a small restitution paid for Cecelia’s sake. She simply didn’t know whether it had all been worth it.
Gibbes put his arms around her waist, then patted her back as if he were the adult. “It’ll be all right, Grandma. That’s what you told me when Mama died, remember? It’ll be all right. Maybe not tomorrow or even the next day, but one day it won’t hurt so much.”
They listened as drawers were opened and slammed shut upstairs in Cal’s room, and then heard the sound of a suitcase sliding out from under his bed. Edith took Gibbes’s hand, then knelt in front of him. Her heart ached as she brushed her fingers against his soft cheek, and he looked at her with his mother’s eyes. She had failed to save Cecelia, had failed to raise good men. Gibbes was her only hope, her last chance. “I’m going to take you to the Williamses’. Go on upstairs and pack your overnight bag with a couple of changes of clothes. If you need more, I’ll bring the
m.”
“Why are you sending me away? Did I do something bad?”
She shook her head, then kissed his forehead. “No, sweetheart. You’re the only one who hasn’t.” She touched his face, wishing she were strong enough to start over, to do a better job with Gibbes. But she was tainted with too many ghosts, haunted by the daughter-in-law she couldn’t save and the faceless passengers on the doomed plane. She’d thought she could justify what had happened, telling herself it was an accident, that being physically and mentally abused by someone you loved did awful things to the way you saw the world. But it didn’t matter anymore what she thought; Cal had discovered her secret and would enact his own twisted sense of justice, and she was helpless to stop him.
She looked into Gibbes’s golden brown eyes and saw Cecelia. “I want you to be happy, and I know you can’t find that here, or with me. At least not right now. Promise me that you’ll be happy, that you’ll see the good in people, and seek forgiveness first. Can you promise me that?”
He nodded solemnly as his arms slid from around her before he turned and headed slowly up the stairs. He stopped and faced her again. “Can I come back here? Is this still my home?”
“Yes. Always. But right now the Williamses can give you the family and guidance you need and that I have failed to provide. I hope you will understand it one day. That you will forgive me for all my failures.”
He studied her for a long time before continuing his ascent as Edith stood at the bottom of the steps, listening to the sounds of her two grandsons packing their belongings along with the final pieces of her heart. She’d thought of the useless energies of her life, all wasted, all misunderstood. She would be alone until she died. It was all she had left to do. It would take years, she supposed. Wasn’t it true that only the good died young? It would be a fitting punishment for a woman who’d only ever wanted justice for the silent victims of crimes people never spoke about, and those who were only whispered about in confidence.
She stepped out onto the porch and took a deep breath of the fall air that already carried a hint of cooler temperatures. The afternoon lay still in the curve of the river where her beautiful house perched on the bluff, the low tide exposing stagnant pluff mud and listless grass. She felt like that now, sensed her own outgoing tide with each breath.
The wind chimes hung limply, hollow shells of the tumultuous journey that had brought them to her. She willed them to move, to let her know that all of her efforts hadn’t been in vain, but they remained motionless, mocking her.
She turned her back on the river and headed into the house, but paused on the threshold as she felt the stirrings of a breeze at her back, imagined the gentle swaying of the wind chimes behind her. She closed the door without turning around, listening for the faint sound of the glass stones as they whispered together a soft good-bye.
chapter 32
MERRITT
I set down the suitcase on the dirt floor in the corner of the basement beneath the house, then placed the plane model and the bag of dolls and debris next to it. Last, I placed the letter on top of the suitcase, balancing it so that it didn’t rest flat as a reminder that I wasn’t finished with this—with the suitcase, the letter, the victims of the plane crash. With the memory of my grandmother. My grandmother. The woman who’d placed a bomb in her husband’s suitcase, expecting it to explode when he was safely in Miami, and had inadvertently killed forty-eight other people.
It was a horrible tragedy—no, an unspeakable and horrendous tragedy, albeit one that was more than fifty years old, the memory of those lost mostly faded by now, the survivors of their loved ones older now, or dead. Dealing with it would have to wait a little longer, because right now a ten-year-old boy was about to lose his mother, and I had to somehow find the resources I didn’t believe I had to be strong enough for both of them. I ignored the inner voice that continued to prick my conscience that said there were other, darker reasons for my reticence, an old, familiar voice telling me that I was a coward.
I climbed the steps to Loralee’s room, picking up a shopping bag in my room on the way. I paused on the threshold, listening to her labored breathing, her body emaciated except for the rounded dome of her belly. In the weeks since she’d been in hospice care, I’d seen Loralee gracefully surrendering her life bit by bit. She’d shrunk so much that I doubted she weighed much more than Owen. She’d sent me to Victoria’s Secret to get pretty nightgowns in the smallest sizes, but even those seemed to dwarf her.
The cancer had spread to her liver, which was what had caused her skin to yellow, and had continued its insidious and invasive spread to other organs. She didn’t get out of bed anymore, even to make her two laps around her room to “keep her girlish figure.”
Her bed was littered with Owen’s LEGOs and the Harry Potter book he was reading out loud to his mother. He didn’t like being away from her, and it would be only after Loralee told him to go to Maris’s or head to the store with me that he’d reluctantly leave her side. Several times I’d found him sleeping on the floor in the hallway outside her door, bathed in the light from the Darth Vader night-light, keeping the encroaching darkness away.
Gibbes came by almost every day if his work schedule allowed, usually bringing her flowers, and stayed for a bit to talk with her and to Owen. I always found an excuse to be in some other part of the house, because every time I saw him I thought of the letter. And how the truth kept nudging me, wanting me to face things I wasn’t ready for. I hadn’t shared the letter with him, not yet. I simply didn’t have the courage to watch him put the pieces together, and to confront the aftermath.
The television was on low, showing one of Loralee’s favorite soaps—one in which even I could now name the characters and who was sleeping with whom. I watched it for a few minutes, then walked over to turn it off.
“Just turn down the volume, please,” she said.
“Sorry—I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was mostly thinking.”
I sat down on the side of her bed. “What about?”
“About what I want to be buried in.” She paused to catch her breath. It was difficult for her to talk, and she paused often between sentences and sometimes words. “I’ve got a really pretty pink suit with a bow at the collar; I’ll show you which one. And I want my hair down and curled the way I like to wear it—nice and big. Will you take care of that for me? I want Owen to remember his mama looking her best.”
“Loralee,” I began, feeling the ever-present sob in the back of my throat.
“And I want you to wear red. Go buy yourself a new dress, and every time you wear it, I want you to remember me and how fabulous we both looked at my funeral.”
A half sob, half laugh erupted from my mouth. “All right. What about Owen?”
A soft smile fell on her lips. “He’ll probably pick his little-man suit with the striped tie, but if he doesn’t that’s all right. Let him wear what he wants to. Maybe he’ll rebel and wear tennis shoes or something. There’s nothing wrong with that. A show of independence now and again is a good thing.” Her breath rattled as she tried to suck in air.
“Got it,” I said, wishing I had my own journal to write down all of Loralee’s child-rearing tips and general wisdom. I had a strong feeling I would need it.
“Where’d you put the suitcase?”
“In the basement. For now. Along with the rest of it.”
She didn’t say anything, but I knew she wanted to. Since we’d read the letter, she hadn’t said one word about it, and it must have taken all of her strength to keep it inside. I stood and began tidying the items on her dresser, waiting.
Pushing herself up against the pillows behind her, she said, “Lying in bed all day gives a person lots of time to think, and I do believe I have finally figured out something important.”
“And?” I braced myself.
It took a moment until she was ready to speak again. “As you know, my mama taught me a lot. But lying here watching so much television,
I’ve finally figured out that everything I’ve ever needed to know in life I learned from my mama and my soaps.”
“Really?” I said, turning around to lean against the dresser.
She nodded, her nostrils flaring as she struggled to breathe. “I’m watching these people and it’s basically the same thing over and over—people never learning from their mistakes so that they make the same ones again and again.” She paused. “And then there’s people who make mistakes, acknowledge them, and then keep picking at that mistake like it’s an old scab, so that it never goes away and they can’t go forward. And then there’s those who stick their heads in the sand, pretending that everything is fine and that nobody can see them there with their heads stuck right there in plain view, and believing that they already know what people think and therefore there’s no point in laying their cards out on the table for discussion.”
She sounded like she’d just run a mile. I poured a fresh glass of water from the pitcher on her nightstand and helped her drink before I began my rebuttal. “If that last part is about me not telling Gibbes about the letter, I told you—that’s temporary. I’d rather just focus on you and Owen right now. I will eventually show him the letter and everything else, and give the suitcase to the police.”
I wanted to tell her that I was still wondering at the truth—the truth that involved the path that had brought Cal and me together, that had started long before we were born, the threads already woven together and knotted in places. At some point I would have to attempt to unravel them, to pick apart the knots and confront my seven-year marriage to a man who’d married me only because he’d been looking for somebody else. But I couldn’t lie to her, even with a grain of truth. She deserved my honesty, so I kept silent.
She looked at me with tired eyes, but eyes that still had so much light in them. “I get it—you want to cross the creek one stone at a time. But you don’t have to cross the creek alone, you know.” She smiled the smile that was part joy, part friendship, but wholly honest. “I’m running out of time here, and I just can’t wait until you’re ready to ask for my opinion, so I’m going to give it to you whether you want it or not.”
