by Sonja Yoerg
“Have you spoken with your sister? She was so upset about my accident!”
Geneva had two sisters, but her mother spoke of only one. After thirty years, her mother’s erasure of Paris still registered.
“I called Florence yesterday after I spoke with your doctor. She’s fine. I mean, we’re all upset, Mom.” She noted a defensive tone had crept into her speech: I’m a good daughter! I’m here, aren’t I? She told herself not to be pathetic. “How are you feeling? You were sleeping so heavily.”
“I don’t do anything but sleep.” The nurse picked up Helen’s wrist, silently counted pulses, then moved to the end of the bed and picked up the chart. Helen looked Geneva in the eye. “Every time I wake up I pray I’m not here anymore.”
The ambiguity of the statement hung in the air between them.
The nurse handed Helen her pills, ensured she had swallowed, then wrote the time in the log. “A few more days, Mrs. Riley. Then you can go home.”
Geneva reminded herself to talk with Dublin about home care assistance after Helen’s release. It might be a while before she could get around.
“Who brought those dahlias?”
“I did, Mom.”
“They’re my favorite.”
“I know.”
The nurse asked Helen about headaches and the level of pain in her shoulder and leg.
“It’s tolerable, but I don’t much care for that medication you’ve been giving me. Makes me feel I’m floating along like a bunch of balloons in a breeze. Why can’t I choose my own medication? It’s a free country, isn’t it?”
“Mrs. Riley, we’ve gone over this . . .”
“I know, I know. Hospital policy. Too much policy and too little sense, if you ask me. It’s only a drink, for Pete’s sake.” She turned to her daughter with a look that said this would be an appropriate moment for Geneva to speak up and demonstrate her solidarity. Geneva’s face was noncommittal, so Helen changed direction. “Have you seen Dublin? Do you know when he’s coming?”
Geneva was used to this question, and the anxious tone accompanying it. Her mother was always searching for one of her children. It started when Paris was fifteen. Geneva, at nine, would walk into the house, and her mother would be standing at the window, hands nervously flattening the front of her skirt. Her first question was always “Have you seen Paris?” Geneva didn’t understand her concern because Paris wasn’t ever hard to find. If she wasn’t at the school library or the one in town, she was at the mayor’s office with their father. For as long as Geneva could remember, Paris wanted to follow in their father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. She applied herself at school with remarkable dedication, determined to be the top of her class as Eustace had been. After she graduated, she secured an internship at the State House in Columbia, and moved there. Several months later their father died, and after the initial shock wore off, Helen began asking Dublin and Geneva if they’d seen Florence, the next eldest. Didn’t her basketball game end an hour ago? Why isn’t she back from her friend’s house? Then Florence graduated and left to play college basketball at Chapel Hill. She was too busy to return home often, so Helen shifted her focus to Dublin. When Geneva started high school, she began to wonder if she would finally become visible to her mother only after she left her behind. It never happened.
“He should be here soon, Mom. It’s rush hour, so it’s hard to say exactly when.”
Ten minutes of stilted small talk later, her brother blew into the room like a dust devil, wearing the same leather jacket he’d had since college, his brown hair rumpled as if he had been roused from a nap. His smile was tense at the corners. He flung his arms wide, and Geneva sank into his bear hug. They were the exact same height. Bookends, Helen had called them.
“It’s good to see you,” she said.
“You, too, Ginny.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and appraised her. “You look like hell. Good hell. Hell that’s keeping up appearances. But still hell.”
“Thanks.”
“That’s enough cursing, Dublin.” Helen tried to sit up. “Aren’t you going to say hello to me?”
He gave her a hard look. “I’m weighing my options.”
“What ever are you talking about?”
“I got to hand it to you, Mom. I did not see this coming. Blindsided, sucker-punched, bushwhacked . . .”
“See what coming? Geneva, what is he talking about?”
“I have no idea.”
Dublin sat down. “She has no idea. You know why, Mom? Because I just found out myself. Yeah. Only a few minutes ago from the friendly folks downstairs in the billing department. Correction. They were friendly. Now, not so much. But that was my fault.”
“Oh, the billing department! This is about money, is it? Don’t worry yourself. I’ve got plenty.”
Dublin looked pointedly at Geneva, then back to his mother. “Had.”
“Had?”
“You had plenty of money. But then you had a little accident and, oh, yeah, before that, you canceled your health insurance. . . .”
Geneva put a hand on his arm. “What?”
“They admitted her because the card in her purse looked valid. For three days, no one followed up. But the formerly friendly folks in billing informed me that Mom will be transferred to a county facility in the morning unless she forks over cash for the bills she’s racked up so far.” He addressed Helen. “Unless, Mom, you’ve got insurance coverage somewhere else?”
“Well . . .”
“Of course not! Too easy!”
“It must be a mistake,” Geneva said. “Mom, you didn’t cancel it, did you?”
Helen threw her hands in the air. “They wanted to raise my premium! It was already so high. I figured I’d be eligible for Medicare before long. I never go to the doctor. Why spend all that money when I’m in perfect health?” She fixed Geneva with her bright blue eyes, daring her to contradict.
Geneva gripped the railing at the end of the bed. “That’s the nature of insurance. As I’m sure you know.” She pushed down on her frustration and anger. “Dublin, what’s the damage?”
He cocked his head and studied the ceiling. “A five-series BMW with all the extras. But if she stays here a few more days and you include the outpatient care she’ll need, you’re looking at a Porsche, and a pretty nice one.”
“Who’s buying a car?” Helen asked.
“Not you,” he said. “Ever again.”
“Anyway, they took away my license.”
“That’s not the point.”
“I still have car insurance.”
“That was lucky, wasn’t it, Ginny? Can you imagine the fucking mess if she’d canceled that, too?”
“Dublin! I asked you to quit your cursing. Honestly!”
Geneva shook her head in dismay. “Mom, I don’t understand you. Don’t you care?”
“About the money? I’ve been poor. I’m not afraid of it.”
Dublin said, “I’m guessing it’s worse when you’re old.”
“I’ve got news for you, son. Everything’s worse when you’re old.” She rubbed her temple. “The two of you have given me a headache. Why don’t you let me rest? Go find something else to get your panties in a twist about.”
• • •
Geneva sat in a lawn chair in Dublin and Talia’s backyard in Sherman Oaks. She pulled her sweater closed and crossed her arms against the evening chill. Through the window, she listened to Talia read to Jack and admired her slight Russian accent. Talia had lived in the United States since the age of sixteen, but her vowels still emerged deep and rounded. She was reading the same chapter for a third time. Three was Jack’s number. Three slices of apple on his plate. Three flicks of the light switch when he entered or left a room. Three knots for his shoelaces. At dinner earlier that evening, Geneva had joined them at the dinner table and Jack had refus
ed to eat. “I have dinner with three people, not four!” His ten-year-old brother, Whit, had said, “Guests don’t count. Just pretend she’s not here.” Before Dublin and Talia could intervene, Geneva picked up her plate and moved to the nearby breakfast bar. “Is this okay, Jack?” He’d bent his head and began eating.
Light from the kitchen fell in parallelograms on the patchy lawn. A stack of empty planters leaned against the fence next to a bag of potting soil, perforated by rot. Weeds grew under the rusted swing set, next to a sandbox where hundreds of tiny soldiers—a green army and a brown one—had been painstakingly arrayed for battle. Jack’s work, Geneva thought.
The back door creaked and Dublin stepped out. “Like what we’ve done with the place? I call it Postmodern Disintegration.”
“It’s lovely. You’ve really made it look as though it were simply neglected.”
“Only a trained eye such as yours could spot the difference.” He took the chair next to her.
She nodded toward the swing set. “Remember when Charlie and Whit knocked Ella off the slide? I thought her head would never stop bleeding.”
“And Jack—what was he? Four? He ran around in circles for hours afterward with his hands over his ears, screaming, ‘No! No! No!’ The neighbors were threatening to call the cops. Those were the days.”
“Jack seemed okay tonight.” She knew enough not to use the word better. A good day was a good day, not a trend.
“He likes you.”
“And I like him. He doesn’t seem so strange to me.”
“I’ll resist the obvious reply.” He grinned at his sister. “I’m guessing it’s your animal behavior thing.”
“My ‘animal behavior thing’?”
“You don’t take him personally. You just go with what he gives you, work with what he will do instead of what he won’t. His specialist says it’s the best route forward.”
“Maybe it is from years of working with animals—and their owners. No one’s behavior surprises me anymore.”
“Except Mom’s.”
She laughed. “Except Mom’s.” She drummed her fingers on the armrest. “What are we going to do? It’s going to be weeks before she can get around on her artificial knee.”
“I thought they wanted her using it pretty quickly.”
“They do, but in therapy. She can’t use a walker because of the shoulder injury. With the insurance debacle, do you think she can afford weeks of nursing care?”
“I’ll look at it more carefully but I doubt it. Not decent care. We don’t want just anybody in her condo, driving her to therapy and all that.”
“No. Although it’d be tempting to teach her a lesson by getting her someone really cranky.”
“Or maybe a beefy loudmouth who sings opera all day.”
“That’s good!” She shoved him playfully. “Seriously, though. Who’s going to be willing to put up with her drinking?”
“We could clear the booze out of her condo.”
“Okay. Who’d be willing to deal with her then?”
They stared into the starless night.
She said, “Do you remember how she was when we were little, before she started drinking?”
“I do. She was fun—one of us.”
“Yes, as long as ‘us’ didn’t include Paris.”
Talia appeared in the doorway. “You guys want anything before I collapse?”
Dublin said, “No, we’re good. I’ve about had enough of this particular day.”
“Ditto,” said Geneva.
The writing was on the wall. Someone would have to take care of Helen. Dublin and Talia had too much to cope with already, and Florence’s tiny Manhattan walk-up wouldn’t work—and wouldn’t be offered. This would be a perfect time for Paris to materialize, call a truce with their mother, and start making up for all the vodka-fueled disasters she’d missed.
Geneva listened to a siren wail in the distance and wished herself away.
CHAPTER FOUR
HELEN
Eustace Riley claimed it was Helen’s butterscotch pie that did it. But even a Blue Ribbon dessert (two years running) was no match for that figure of hers at sixteen, and they both knew it. Any fool could see the way he looked her up and down. Then he pretended to wave hello to someone behind her, so she’d spin around and he could investigate her calves. As if she hadn’t seen that trick coming.
That Fourth of July was hotter than a billy goat in a pepper patch. Eustace invited her to the show barn, where he claimed it was cooler. They leaned over the rails and laughed at the piglets pulling at one another’s tails. He bought her a lemonade and wiped the sweat off the glass before he handed it to her. It struck her then what the difference was between a man like Eustace and the boys who’d been chasing her like bees from a shook hive. Eustace had manners and a confident air, as if he already had what he wanted before he thought to ask for it.
“You seventeen yet, Miss Helen?”
“Near enough.”
And her daddy thought the same, though it surprised her some. Of course back then she wasn’t thinking about the same things her daddy was—Eustace’s family money and law degree, and getting loose of his daughter before she ended up damaged goods. Helen believed she had found True Love. Certainly her feelings matched up with what she read in those romances her mama hid behind the pickle jars in the pantry. The bare-chested pirate on the cover of one bore a likeness to Eustace, with his strong jaw and hair black as coal, though she’d never seen him with his shirt off and blushed to think of it. When her mama let drop that Eustace was thirty-two, she nearly fainted. Twice her age! But then she came around to look at it from another side. A man of such experience (and breeding) wasn’t likely to make a foolish mistake, meaning he loved her and aimed to keep her. That thought made her bold and desirous, not only of Eustace but of leaving her childhood behind. As love goes at sixteen, Helen did love Eustace. And considering what was to transpire, her love was plenty true.
He courted her through the summer swelter. They held hands during the picture show and along the river walk in the evenings. If everyone in town gossiped about them, they gave no notice of caring. Helen held her head high, sure as sure could be that the opinion of the populace of Aliceville, and the entire state of South Carolina, mattered not a penny to her, not next to the attentions of a man of Eustace’s stripe. He told her the townspeople had their jaws pinned to the floor because she was pretty. So pretty, in fact, he might just have to marry her. He let the comment fall real casual, but her heart jumped and her palms went clammy. He owned he wasn’t in a particular hurry, but neither did he see any purpose in delaying the full measure of their happiness.
One evening in the middle of August they sat on his porch swing, sipping sweet tea and watching swallows cartwheeling across the sky. Eustace stood up and bent down on one knee. He held her hand light as a baby bird inside both of his. His eyes, dark and knowing, caught the gleam off the porch light. When she said yes, he kissed her like he was dying.
The next day they drove the thirty miles to Wilbur to see his folks. Helen’s stomach exchanged positions with her heart the whole way there. Eustace’s father came from a long line of tobacco farmers, but not the kind whose boots ever saw dirt. When Eustace and Helen arrived, the Rileys’ girl saw them to the parlor, and kept her head bowed the whole time. Mrs. Riley’s manners held up well, considering her only son was presenting her with a child as a daughter-in-law—and one from the wrong side of town. The elder Mr. Riley leaned his forearm on his belly as he sucked on a cigar. He eyed Helen over his bifocals. His eyebrows twitched like caterpillars on a hot plate.
“Young and frisky! Didn’t know that was your taste, boy!”
She stared at her shoes.
Eustace’s mother clucked. Then she barked at the girl to hurry up with the drinks.
• • •
Since she was six
years old, Helen’d reckoned she wear her mama’s wedding dress when the time came. It hung mysterious in a dark bag in her parents’ closet behind Mama’s funeral suit and the Bo Peep outfit she had sewn for a masquerade party twenty years before and worn to every Halloween party since, not that there’d been many. When Eustace asked for her hand, she expected her mama to offer up the dress, but it didn’t happen. Helen suspected forces were at work, meaning Eustace. Sure enough, two weeks before the wedding day, Mama waltzed into Helen’s room with a dress draped over her arms. “Eustace’s folks brought this by. Modern, they called it.” It was finer than any she’d seen. Lace appliqué over satin, with hundreds of tiny pearls stitched in a delicate flower and paisley design. She turned it over and counted thirty-four corset buttons down the back. Later, while her mama hung out the washing, she dug to the rear of the closet and pulled out the old dress. She fingered the dime-store buttons and yellowed fabric—not the Cinderella gown she remembered—and put it away.
Come the wedding day, Helen had dropped so much weight from nervous excitement that her mama had to stuff the bosom of her gown with cotton wool to make it fit proper. She would remember as much of that day as she might of a dream. One picture did stick in her mind: Eustace beside the preacher, taller by a head and easier, it appeared, in the house of the Lord. Satisfaction writ large across his face.
• • •
They celebrated her seventeenth birthday on the honeymoon. She’d never stayed in a hotel before. Never had reason to. Once in a blue moon Daddy’d drive them somewhere—to a lake for a swim, to a fishing hole he’d heard about and, on one occasion, clear into Columbia—but they’d always come home at the end of the day. He’d drive tired. Coming home from Columbia he’d swerved like a drunk, with only Mama’s yelling to keep them out of the ditch. They’d already paid for home, he said, so that’s where they’d sleep.
Not Eustace. They stayed a week in the Tower Suite at the Hotel Tybee near Savannah. Every day they walked the boardwalk, hand in hand, and swam in the ocean. Eustace laughed when Helen said if she stood on his shoulders she bet she could see Europe. But in the evening, while they were slow dancing on the lawn under the palms, he whispered that in Europe they would crown her, because that’s how beautiful she was. His voice was honey pouring into her head. She was susceptible to such nonsense then.
