I watched her, her small pale face. “No time like the present. It really is a great little place now.”
* * *
St. Margaret’s isn’t a hard place to find people who know how to fix things. In fact, there is an embarrassment of riches in terms of handymen, and like everyone else, some are better than others; some full of bravado and puff and others humble and kind and, for all the lot I knew, terrible at what they did. With some of the money from the insurance settlement on the house, I hired three men from My Brother’s Handiwork, a company in which the brothers Murphy did just that: refinished floors and installed kitchens and drywalled basements, and yes, righted tilting barns for young widows.
“I heard about your loss,” said Jack Murphy, dropping his eyes while he shook my hand in a grasp that swallowed my palm. I met him and his brothers at the property on a shining day in early August. All three men were tall with different versions of the same face: long nose, sunburnt skin, a tangle of facial hair. Like a trio of lumberjacks. They were older than me, but that means nothing when it comes to a small place, where gossip just runs downhill. They had a sister in Hattie’s year, Joni, who they claimed had been broken up by the death of my husband, you know, since it was such a tragedy. I inhaled and pushed away the feeling that Joni had been just Buddy’s type. I smiled tightly, and we all looked around at the state of the barn, which I had turned into a kind of squatter’s hut with my tent and sleeping bag in the corner under a blanket, some cooking implements piled up beside.
“Has someone been living in here?” Jack’s brother Davy asked me. He lifted the blanket and inspected a pot.
“I’ve spent a few nights here.”
He dropped the blanket quickly, reddening as though he’d been holding my underwear, and shook his head. “You shouldn’t do that, Miss Grayson—I mean, Collerfield—this place isn’t safe.” His brothers murmured agreements while nodding gravely at the splintering walls.
“Well,” I said. “That’s why you’re here.”
There is something called a come-along, a glorified winch system used for righting tilting barns among other jobs. Watching the Murphy brothers anchor the come-along to a large chestnut tree in the front of the barn and work to slowly pull up the walls, a couple of delicate inches at a time, was a moving event that I took not at face value, but as a grin-worthy symbol that my life was going to improve, that I would stand on my own. For not the first time, I would fall victim to poetic fallacy. I could hardly help applauding when it was done.
My Brother’s Handiwork fixed the old barn, adding new and safe infrastructure, holding it up and supporting it, adding beams and slats to keep out the elements. They asked if I wanted it sanded and stained and were confused when I declined.
“Are you going to raise cattle? Sheep?”
I shook my head, smiling, giving them cash for their fine work, and sent them on their way. I stood in the center of the barn and laughed out loud, my happiness echoing. It was my place. It was drafty and old and perfect.
* * *
And now, I had a new haircut and Jameson and Hattie were coming for dinner. Feeling light and cautiously carefree, I went grocery shopping to buy some food for that night. I wheeled my cart through the aisles, my mind elsewhere, and then I realized someone had called my name, an old name.
“Mrs. Collerfield.”
I turned to see Iain Moore, coming towards me. I smiled.
“Officer Moore.” I nodded. “It’s Penny.” He stopped and our carts were side by side, taking up the aisle.
“Okay. How are you?” He looked uncomfortable to see me. Irritated, almost, if I had to give it a word.
“Very well. And you?”
“Fine, thank you. It’s nice to see you. I’ve been thinking of you and Hattie lately.”
“Oh?” I kept my voice light, already shifting my cart, my body, to signify that I was done talking.
He nodded. “I’ve driven by your old property a few times. I see you fixed up that barn.”
“I did, yes,” I managed, startled.
He paused and looked at me thoughtfully.
“Well, I …” I gestured at my cart apologetically and turned away. “I have to get going. Have a great day, Officer.”
As I reached for some crackers a few minutes later, I noticed my hands shaking slightly.
* * *
I put up lanterns and a table in the barn, tried to make it homey. When Jameson and Hattie arrived, she hung back, almost like her legs wouldn’t work, and I watched her over Jameson’s shoulder as he marveled at the soundness of the barn’s rebirth. She was looking at where the house had been.
“Hattie!” I called. “Come here!” She looked up, smiled resolutely and marched over to the barn, giving me a big hug.
“It looks great, Pen.”
She was shivering despite the warmth of the evening.
Nothing music and booze couldn’t fix. The night cantered on, and we resumed our familiar practice of eating and drinking and telling stories, singing, dancing to a battery-run boom box and music pulled from a shoebox of tapes. Somewhere around midnight, Hattie looked at Jameson and grinned. His eyes were glassy and there was an exchange that I took to mean something lusty and lovey, and it irritated me. Hattie cleared her throat.
“Hey. So,” she said, looking at him, “we have something we’ve been trying to tell you. You know, if you hadn’t gone off the grid, you weirdo.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Um …”
He nodded happily, encouraging her, and I dimly registered how handsome he looked in the lamplight.
“Jameson and I are trying to get me pregnant.”
I started at the shock of this news. She laughed and burped spectacularly as she reached for a wedge of cheese. Jameson held her hand.
“Don’t you think it’s a little soon?” I asked, and they shared a glance that told me they’d expected this.
“No,” Hattie said, boldly. “We don’t. But I’m guessing you do.” Jameson smiled bashfully, and I had the feeling he’d been talked into something.
“Yes, I do, I mean—”
“Then lucky it’s not you doing it.”
There was a pause, and the woods around us chattered.
“Well.” I cleared my throat, trying to recover. “Then that’s that.” I poured a glass of wine for each of us, and we toasted to a future baby.
I watched them stumble home, arms around waists, and felt a cold snap raise the hair on my arms. I rubbed them closely and turned to blow out the candles only to discover that a gust through the door had done the job for me.
* * *
We were harvesting beets in the backyard, putting the garden to bed. It was bright out, with a cool, telling breeze. My shirt lifted at the back and my skin was goose-bumped. Hattie banged a beet against the wooden side of the raised bed to knock off the dirt and a stubborn slug. I looked at her beautiful, youthful face, so much like she was as a child. So unchanged in some ways.
She was so keen about the baby that I had to fall back and let her be. She read books, ate all the right things, took vitamins and researched the hell right out of the serendipity of conception. I busied myself with other things, tried to stay above the fray, out of the house, in the sand, because as happy as I was for them on the surface, something was itching inside me. Something old and familiar. Lucky it’s not you.
9
And then, it had been a year. There had been no more police visits but there was no full belly either, no glowing skin, no fuller hair, no crib in Mum’s old room that was earmarked as the nursery. Jameson had officially moved in, but his presence didn’t change anything other than the tension in the place. I heard urgent whispers and quiet anxiety through the walls. I wore headphones and listened to music to fall asleep, the curly black cord that plugged into my stereo invariably tangled around my arm by morning, a deep purple mark left on my skin.
In the mornings, I would lie awake and stare for a few moments at an old framed pic
ture across from my bed. It was an embroidered portrait of Saint Margaret that had hung in my room since childhood. I had loved the picture always, spending many nights staring dreamily at the patron saint of our strange little town, its eerie Catholic mysticism so seductive to me as a girl. But now she seemed, like the rest of St. Margaret’s, to be watching us. Waiting for us to stumble.
Hattie was frustrated, delicate, moody. She made me nervous. She was erratic and seemed to have moved, almost overnight, from sweet and happy to unstable and irritable. She wanted me around all the time, and while I knew that the closer I was, the more I could be sure to keep her in check, her moods threw me, and I avoided her when I could. It was fall, and Jameson had returned to the demands of the school year, the heady summer of fun slipping seamlessly into the season of grown-ups. She was flailing, trying to tempt Jameson and me into late nights and shaming us when we demurred and declined her increasingly urgent invitations. Sometimes, crossing paths in the preparation for bed, meeting in the doorway of the bathroom, Jameson and I would exchange knowing and sympathetic smiles, and I caught something between us. We were in this together, somehow.
One night, after I’d had a bath, I stopped in the hallway, wrapped in a towel, my cheeks flushed and my hair curling against my face. I saw him through the open bedroom door, lying in bed, book in hand. He noticed me and lowered his book onto his lap. He lifted his hand in a small greeting, our eyes locked. There was a noise downstairs as Hattie dropped something, breaking the spell. I felt my face burn and finally looked away, going into my own room beside his.
With every month of not becoming a glowing woman with child, my sister became more childlike. She came close to tantrums when her period arrived, taking to her room and skipping work at the salon. Tear-streaked face, demanding to know why we looked so happy, why Jameson and I had come home together. Are you two talking about me on your little trips home from your “real jobs”? She required constant reassurance, exhausting Jameson with moods that took her from cute and whimsical to sarcastic and paranoid in the changing direction of the wind.
One afternoon when we were alone together in the house, she stood wringing her hands while I folded laundry.
“What is it, Hattie?”
She took a deep breath.
“I think we should maybe think about going to confession. You know, at the church.”
I dropped the shirt I was holding and turned to face her.
“Hattie,” I said calmly but firmly, “that is not an option. I understand how you’re feeling—”
“What if I’m being punished?” She wailed, suddenly, “What if God doesn’t want me to have a child because we are evil? If we just confessed the secret, it maybe wouldn’t be stuck inside, like a growth or something—”
“Hattie, NO.”
“I just …” She flopped on a chair and held her face in her hands. I scooted beside her, and wrapped myself around her while I stared ahead, terrified of what this meant.
“I know, honey. I know. I am so grateful that you have kept this between us. I am. My life depends on it, and I don’t take that lightly. But, I also don’t for a second believe that you are being punished by God. If that were the case, I’d have been struck by lightning by now.”
She chuckled and wiped a tear.
“It’ll happen for you, I’m sure of it. You crazy kids will have a baby. These things don’t happen instantly.”
She nodded, sniffling like a child.
“And listen, if you want to go to church again, I’ll go with you. Just not to confession. Okay?”
“Okay.” She looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Penny. I’m sorry I’ve been acting so nuts.”
“I love you, you nut.” I gave her a squeeze.
* * *
Still, I evaded her, spent as many nights as I could in the barn, even as colder weather would invariably interrupt the warm fall.
On a balmy October afternoon, a few weeks later, I saw Mrs. Neufeldt, my old neighbor, walking at the boundary of the property close to the trees, through piles of orange and red, crisp crackling leaves. I watched her lift her arm and wave at me, and then, when I hoped she’d move on, she waved me over. I crossed the tall grass, a few pieces slipping under the cuffs of my jeans and scraping my ankles. Tall cedars were casting shadows across the dry ground, and not for the first time, I thought of fire. I wanted to move on, to push past this, and quickened my pace. I was out of breath when I met Mrs. Neufeldt at the deer fence. She looked ruddy and freckled, more lined than I’d remembered but still the same kindly woman who had greeted Buddy and me when we’d first moved there.
“Hello, dear,” she said, and, “look at all the work you’ve done here. I think it’s wonderful!”
I thanked her and asked after her family, her husband. She offered kindly platitudes, small health-related bits of news, comments on the weather. “I’m so glad to hear, that’s great, please give them my best.” I thought we might be finished, and smiled and nodded cheerfully, turning my body ever so slightly.
“Dear,” she paused, “I know you’ve been staying out here lately, and I just wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“I am, Mrs. Neufeldt, don’t worry.”
“Yes, well,” she paused, then continued, “I have seen, when I’m out walking, someone coming here occasionally, when you’re not here.”
I froze, the smile fading. I grabbed the fence, pushed the fat of my palm into the wire. I cleared my throat, furrowed my brow. “What do you mean?”
“I—I’m sure he means no harm, but I just worry about a young woman here alone. I think it’s that—Well, you probably know him: the Williams boy?”
Mac Williams. I nodded slowly.
“Sure, Mac. He was a friend of Buddy’s.”
“I see. Okay, well, I’m sure it’s fine. He just seems to come here and drink. Sometimes he pours beer out where the house was. Sometimes he seems to be talking to someone …”
I pictured Mac, drunk, stumbling around the empty space where he had so often drunk and brawled with Buddy, slamming the screen door when he left Buddy alone with me, driving out the back way from the property, through the overgrown road, leaving Buddy somewhere to place his rage.
“Okay. Thank you, Mrs. Neufeldt. I’ll keep an eye.”
“Right. Okay, dear. I also mentioned it to that young officer Iain Moore, the one who was, I guess,” she paused again, searching for words, “investigating things after the fire. I ran into him in town. I’m sure he’ll look out for you, also.” She smiled, thinking this would be welcome news, while I just felt it as another complication. I needed the past to be simple, but it refused to comply. She continued, “You know, Penny, love, I owe you an apology. I have felt terrible for not reaching out to you for so long. For not offering our home to you, just for somewhere to take a break, or for someone to talk to.” She looked at the dirt between us. “We just pretended that there was nothing wrong, but I knew, dear. I knew that he wasn’t treating you right.” Mrs. Neufeldt’s eyes were welling up, and I put up a hand, the fence between us, trying to smile.
“Oh no! Please! Don’t get the wrong idea. I mean, we had our moments, Buddy and I, but he was a good man.” Almost choking on these words, teasing them out. “He was good to me. Truly. Please don’t for a second worry about me.” I needed to get out of there, away from there. Smiling, smiling, sweating, my mouth drying up. I waved away her worry.
“Don’t give it another thought. I do have to get back, though. I have a rose bush that isn’t going to wrap itself in burlap.” Ha ha. Reassurances, changing the subject, sending love to family. Yes, yes. Bye now.
I hurried against the tall dry grass as it whipped about my legs, and panic coursed through my body. In the barn, I rolled up my sleeping bag and hurriedly packed up my things in a clattering, banging whirl against the cooling afternoon as the sun ducked behind the roof beams. I was afraid to even think that my secret might betray me somehow, might be on my face, my breath, but my mind took me back to
that day, to the plan, to the foolish foolproof nonsense I had drafted in my furious brain. This goddamn town was so small.
I thought of leaving St. Margaret’s altogether, of really leaving this time, reclaiming the life I felt I was owed. Taking off somewhere far and foreign, and hoping that I wouldn’t leave a smoke trail of my misdeeds, of mindlessness and murder. I squeezed my eyes shut and shoved my fists in them. Buddy’s huge body a red and peeled thing, his skin like puckered fruit, his hair burnt away to his scalp, which curled up like pigskin. I cried out for him and me, and gulped the air around me. What a reckless thing. Why hadn’t Hattie talked me out of it? I wondered if she would stand by me still, if we had to do it all over again. I shook my head fiercely. It was right. It was right what I did, it was right. And then I swore I smelled his cigarettes, those goddamn Belmonts right there in the barn, and I tripped. I stumbled getting up, left all of my belongings and ran to the car in the burgeoning darkness, gravel kicking up around me.
* * *
That evening, I sat on my bed, frozen with a cold and nervous fear, Saint Margaret’s portrait regarding me from across the room. I thought about Hattie’s desperate idea to return to church, to try and appeal to a vengeful God, and how little she had changed, in some ways, from the girl she used to be.
Guilt. It didn’t come to me often, but when it did, it was overwhelming. I had done the largest thing. The biggest thing we cannot undo. And not just me; Hattie was wrapped up in it as well. She had tried moving forward but was forever changed. She was scarred. If we had only known that we were forging an unbreakable bond wrought from fear and justice. That we could never leave it, or each other, behind. I am not a murderer. That is not me. That is not us. All around us, people were busily living their lives, and we worked so hard, every day, to live ours.
Coming back to the house hadn’t calmed my nerves entirely. Hadn’t smoothed down my panic. My breath was quick, and I needed to sit on the edge of the bed, head between my knees. This will pass. It will pass. I’d been telling myself the same thing since the fire, but it was taking longer, it was harder than I had ever imagined.
Sister of Mine Page 7
