by Karen Brown
I kept walking to the next mailbox, this one on the opposite side of the road. The paved driveway rose up, and the house at the end of it was brightly lit. People moved about—a man passing by with an armful of plates, a table in another room filled with people holding glasses of wine, the women’s heads tipped back in laughter. I regretted having to interrupt their gaiety, but I went to the door anyway. I would call the phone in Del’s apartment and have her find Geoff to come get me.
A woman answered after I rang the bell, her dark hair framing a blurred face. She smiled at me, as if from a distance, and then her expression grew alarmed. She took my arm and led me into the house—brightly painted, filled with books and photographs, rugs and lights. I wondered if I could use her phone, and I was taken to a warm bench by a table and a phone was placed into my hands. The woman hovered over me, and then word must have spread, because a group formed around me, their faces peering at me. Someone brought a damp cloth that she pressed to my head. When it was removed it held a bloom of bright blood.
I managed to dial Del’s number and she answered, her voice far off and small. I told her to come get me or to send Geoff. I asked the dark-haired woman where I was, and she took the phone from me and gave an address to Del, who must have written it down.
The woman said I should get my head looked at. “You’ve got a nasty cut,” she said, applying the cloth to my forehead. “Were you in an accident?”
Anne was back in her car in the ravine, and I needed to tell someone, even though in the warmth of this happy house the accident felt unreal. The details of the evening had begun to fade—the martinis that tasted like snow, the beautiful car, Anne herself, her bare head. I might have doubted any of it had happened at all if my coat hadn’t smelled of wood smoke, the beef Wellington.
“Yes,” I said. “I was.”
The woman’s eyes darkened with concern. She told someone to call an ambulance. She offered me a change of clothes, and I was led up to a softly carpeted room and helped into a warm shirt, a pair of jeans. Downstairs I was given a glass of water, a plate with a piece of chocolate cake.
“You can’t say no to cake on someone’s birthday,” she said. “It’s just not right.”
I felt awful I had brought this tragedy to someone’s birthday. I took a bite of the cake and the sugar made me queasy. The sea of faces around me shifted and receded. I wanted to lie my head down, and another woman, this one smelling of sandalwood, lifted me onto my feet.
“Are you one of my past lives?” I asked her.
“Don’t go to sleep,” she said. “Stay awake now.”
She walked me up and down the hall and I looked at the photographs—groups of smiling people posing on sloping lawns, on a rock jetty with the sea behind them, on the porch of a large house surrounded by pines.
“Someone needs to get Anne’s car out,” I said. “And Anne.”
This was when the EMTs arrived, a police car. I was asked questions that I couldn’t answer. “Where is the car?” a police officer said, his face marked by a growth of beard, his eyes filled with sympathy.
“It’s up the road,” I said. “I walked here.”
I was given a temporary bandage for my head, and I got into the officer’s cruiser and we set off to look for the place where Anne’s car went off the road. But nothing seemed familiar to me, and the dark, wooded roadside revealed nothing.
“I don’t know the area,” I said, and I sensed the man was frustrated with me.
It was decided I would be transported to the hospital for assessment, even though I protested that my ride would be arriving. As I was taken off in the ambulance, the group of people gathered at the door, like a send-off. At some point, on a stiff-sheeted gurney, I did fall asleep, and then Del was there. She stood beside me, her face white, her rounded belly protruding from the folds of her sweater.
“What happened?” she asked me.
Beside Del stood Alice, and beside Alice was Randy, the three of them smelling of cigarettes, their eyes dark with worry. “Where’s Anne?” Alice asked.
My head had begun to throb, and I closed my eyes.
“She has stitches,” Del said to Alice. “She has a concussion.”
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Can you tell us what happened?” she said slowly.
I opened my eyes. “I don’t know,” I said. “Anne was taking me home, and we went off the road.”
I pictured Anne’s car in the ravine, the snow covering it up, the wet eyes of the dead stag’s head mounted on her wall. But these images came as flashes, flat images, like something I’d invented.
“You weren’t found anywhere near our house,” Del said. “You weren’t anywhere near Anne’s.”
“I know she’s dead,” I said.
Alice sobbed and covered her mouth. I’d given her another reason to hate me.
Del made a shushing sound and smoothed my stiff hair back from my forehead like our mother used to do when we were sick. I closed my eyes and I held Del’s hand and felt the shape of her fingers, the texture of her skin, grateful to be delivered back into the world of the living.
32
I have never had a confidant to whom I could describe the feeling of being in touch with the dead. It’s an intimacy that I would have trouble explaining, one that lingers long after I’ve seen them, after whatever message they relay, though most of the time I am given no message at all. If one of them is standing innocuously outside the post office, or lingering after everyone has left a room, I can try avoidance, but the effects of having seen them cannot be ignored. I experience a sweetness, a warmth like a flush of embarrassed surprise. The encounter’s unpleasant if you’re the type of person who would rather be alone, who generally keeps far away from others, who allows only a few to get close.
Anne’s farewell event was a week after the accident. The authorities had found her car late that evening and hauled it out of the ravine. Her body was transported and taken care of per explicit instructions she’d left with a sister none of the Milton girls knew she had. The sister, Tara, was notified by the authorities after Anne’s doctor reported her listed as “next of kin” on Anne’s medical records. Tara came to Milton from Saratoga Springs—a foreigner placed in our midst. The Milton girls grieved more for Anne than I’d seen them do for Mary Rae—though Mary Rae’s prolonged disappearance before her body was found might have had something to do with that. Anne’s death, though it had been imminent, was sudden, and the cause was unexpected. Since Anne had planned to return as a bird, no grave site had been purchased. There was no service. Instead, we were invited to meet at Anne’s house.
The girls sat in the living room passing a box of tissues. Joseph, Randy, and their friends stood outside by their cars with cigarettes and beers, and few of them ventured into the house. Del assigned herself the job of chef, preparing small sandwiches and crudités, and Lucie and Alice played hostess, serving on Anne’s sterling trays. Geoff was too sad to do much more than sit on the couch beneath the stag heads with his bourbon. Every so often he would sigh and say, “Oh dear, Annie, Annie,” and put his face in his hands. Someone would pat his back and refresh his drink. The living room filled with the smoke from the Milton girls’ clove cigarettes. Lucie kept pushing the cigarette box’s button, and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” played so often that someone had to ask her to stop. Alice put the cigarette box on a high shelf.
Del had talked me into going to Anne’s. I’d suggested that my lurid injury might make the others upset. And I didn’t want to go back there, to the beef Wellington I expected was rotting on the stove top, to the cold glass doors. Del had come to my apartment door almost cautiously. “You have to go,” she said.
“Why?” I said. “So no one thinks I killed her?”
Del blanched. “Who would think that?” She twisted a wooden toggle button on Mary Rae’s hand-me-down duffle coat. “You were the last to see her and the girls will want to know what she said.”
It wasn’t some
thing she said; it was more what she hadn’t said that they wouldn’t like. That William had been the last to see Mary Rae alive. Even if I had the necklace to show them, Anne was no longer present to vouch for when it was given to Mary Rae. The girls might be slightly surprised that their friend had given in, envious even. But they wouldn’t have understood Anne’s shock, her intimation about William. Since the accident I’d thought about Anne’s behavior that night, how I’d felt afraid of her, and how she had refused to explain what was wrong or where she was taking me. Now, I reasoned that she’d probably been taking me home, as she claimed. She’d been upset, and drunk, and had gotten turned around somehow.
At Anne’s, someone, presumably Tara, had cleaned the house. There was no rotting Wellington. The day was a rare one—infused with sun and the beginnings of warmth. The new snow had melted away. Crocuses came up around Anne’s lamppost. There were university friends at the house, and many had taken their drinks out onto Anne’s deck. Though it was still chilly, the sun was enough to send them out, like the crocuses. Tara approached me and told me she had my bag.
“It was recovered from the car,” she said. She led me up the narrow stairs to the guest bedroom and handed it to me. “I did look through it, I’ll admit. I had to find out whose it was. The photographs are, well, intriguing.”
I explained they weren’t my work.
“They’re Will’s,” she said. “Right?”
“They are,” I said, surprised that she knew William.
Tara was taller than Anne, more robust, though I didn’t know Anne before she was sick. And Tara’s eyes were green, not Anne’s blue. But there was something about Tara’s gaze reminiscent of Anne’s, a canniness.
“They were close when he was a student,” Tara said. “She talked about him all the time. He helped her out around the house, taking over in a sense when her husband left. But I wish she hadn’t gotten mixed up with him. With these photographs, and these girls.”
“They’re like her family,” I said, and then I saw Tara’s expression. “Of course they aren’t.”
“I absented myself,” Tara said. “But that girl’s death upset her. She called me, drunk, when they found the body.”
I looked around at the little guest room, at the narrow old pine bed and at the worktable in the corner. Tara’s suitcase was nearby on a chair. I’d only been in this room in the dark, and now the blinds were open, and the view of the backyard revealed. Out there, on All Hallows’ Eve, the trees had been strung with little lights.
Tara sat down on the bed and gestured for me to sit as well.
I said I’d met Anne right after Mary Rae died. “And she had me here for dinner the night of the accident,” I said. “She saw these photographs, and then she got upset, told me she would have to bring me home.”
“She would get confused easily,” Tara said, reassuring me. “It was the tumor.”
I stood from the bed and walked to the window. “I don’t know how we ended up where we did.”
“I’m sure this is quite traumatic for you,” Tara said.
If I’d taken Anne’s offer to stay the night, I would have woken up here, and everything might have been different.
“I feel it’s somehow my fault,” I said.
Tara looked, for the first time, sad. “It was going to happen soon anyway. And let’s face it, she shouldn’t have been driving.”
She ran her hand over the coverlet, smoothing out the wrinkles we’d left. “Ready?”
Back in the living room the Milton girls held plates of food and talked in subdued tones, passing the tissues. When I came in the room they grew quieter.
“We want to know what she said,” Alice said.
“We’re just curious about her last night.” Jeannette’s voice was squeaky from tears.
“It’s not like she knew it was her last night,” I said.
“She made beef Wellington,” Geoff said from his end of the couch. “For God’s sake. She must have sensed something.”
They were wondering why it hadn’t been them with Anne.
In the living room, dust motes mingled with the smoke from everyone’s cigarettes. Del stood in the doorway wearing her apron, her hair so blond and fine, it seemed translucent. The fireplace was cold, but the sun streaming through the living-room windows made up for it. Tara walked a few of Anne’s colleagues to the door. None of them ventured into the living room or disrupted the Milton girls’ interrogation of me.
“I want to know where Billy is,” Alice said. “Why isn’t he here?”
They looked to me, even though Del, with her expanding midsection, was only a few feet away. “Tahiti?” I said. “Singapore?”
Alice wouldn’t be deterred. “What did you and Anne talk about?”
“We talked about William’s work,” I said. “About the photographs he took of all of you.”
Alice’s mouth flattened and seemed to seal itself up. The girls readjusted their positions on the couch.
“Why would that be a topic of conversation?” Lucie said.
“We were talking about him,” I said. “I found the photographs and I showed them to her.”
The girls shared a look.
“Where are they?” Alice blurted out.
I opened my bag, took out the portfolio, and handed it to them.
The Milton girls rose as one from their seats and gathered in the center of the couch. It seemed they had never seen the images, either. They slowly turned the pages, their heads touching, their faces unreadable.
“It doesn’t even seem like me,” Lucie said. Her face reddened. “I hardly remember.”
Alice and Jeanette concurred. “It was like a dream,” they said.
Del came into the room and sat on the arm of my chair.
“The secondhand smoke won’t be good for the baby,” Alice snapped.
Del wrapped her arms around herself, as if to ward it off.
“Anne told me,” I said. I caught Del’s eye. “Sleeping pills.”
The Milton girls slowed their page-flipping.
“What are you talking about?” Lucie said.
“You’ve lost the plot,” Kitty said.
Geoff roused himself and inched forward on the couch.
“That’s ridiculous,” Alice said. She grabbed her hair in her hands and twisted it into a long rope. “I mean I don’t remember really falling asleep,” she said. “I remember waking up in the guest room.”
“Anne made breakfast,” Kitty said.
“I had chocolate chip pancakes,” Alice said quietly.
I was surprised they hadn’t discussed these experiences before. Had jealousy made them guarded?
Del left the arm of my chair and sat beside Alice on the couch. “They drugged you,” Del said. “The two of them.”
At Del’s dinner party, the night before the asylum trip, I’d been confused, fighting the sleep that overtook me despite my efforts to hold it at bay. I felt as if I’d had sex, though the details escaped me.
Tara stepped into the doorway from the hall. “I think it’s time you leave,” she said, firmly. “Anne is gone. You’ve paid your respects.”
This might have produced renewed crying earlier in the day, but now it did not. We got up, Del and I and the Milton girls. Del helped Geoff from the couch. He stood in the center of the room and looked around, as if he’d lost something. I tugged on his arm and he came along with us, reluctantly. “That’s it?” he said.
Had Geoff been involved in the sleeping pill scenario? His befuddled air, his sorrow, seemed to reveal that he had not. We left the house slowly, funneling through the front door, down the stone steps to the yard, aware that it was probably for the last time. Randy and Joseph leaned on the hoods of their cars. Randy approached Del, and she told him she’d call him later. He turned away, dejected, scuffing his worn-down boots. Del helped Geoff into the car and got behind the wheel. My head ached, and I couldn’t drive. I opened the door to the backseat, but it occurred to me that the girls might
fill in part of the mystery of the night with Anne.
“Where’s the Peterson field?” I asked.
The girls, gathered on the lawn in a clutch of winter coats and long, dark hair, turned their white faces toward me, stricken.
Joseph pushed himself off the hood of his car, accidentally kicking one of his glass empties into the driveway. “They found Mary Rae in the trailer there,” he said. And then, to the girls, soothingly, “She probably didn’t know that.”
I hadn’t known. I got inside the car and, as Del pulled away, Anne’s farmhouse receded through the back window.
“The plot thickens,” I said.
But did it matter anymore? Even if William had murdered Mary Rae, he would no longer be a threat to anyone.
Del flashed her eyes at me in the rearview mirror. Geoff sat slumped in the passenger seat. Poor Geoff.
Tara had turned on the lights inside Anne’s house, and the Milton girls stood on the yellow grass, in the spring mud, like statues in the game of freeze tag we’d play as children. The town was a place to escape from, and in some ways they understood that and in others they were destined to remain prisoners—marrying the local boys, having babies who would grow up to fulfill the quota of the town’s tragic losses. On Anne’s lawn they made a tableau. Geoff’s car tires reached the asphalt of the road and left the gravel drive behind.
33
I called my mother and told her I wouldn’t be coming home for Easter. She said, “Oh,” and then the rusty spring on the screen door to the terrace grated, and the little finches that came around my grandfather’s old birdfeeder made their piping sound. “I’m sorry,” she said. She pulled out one of the iron chairs—the metal feet scraping against the slate—and sat down with her morning coffee.
