by Karen Brown
“I suspected you saw things,” she said. “After, you know, that summer.”
It was easier to let her believe in what she’d seen. It was a relief to have her understand what that was like.
We went right into her apartment, and I helped her pack for Connecticut. She’d asked me again to come with her, but I told her I couldn’t.
“I have classes to finish,” I said.
“Will he follow me?” Del asked. I’d loaned her a suitcase, and she folded hand-me-down sweaters and T-shirts from the Milton girls.
“No,” I told her. “He won’t.”
At first, she’d surprised me by making plans to go home on her own, but now I was glad. I guessed my mother and Del had kept up a regular conversation, regained ground they’d lost, and now I was on the outside of things. I drove Del to the airport, and said good-bye in the car. Before she got out she handed me a folded piece of paper. “It’s Alice’s phone number,” she said. I put the paper in my bag, but we both knew I wouldn’t use it. I watched Del enter the airport’s glass doors and had a fleeting, childish resentment that she was going and I was not.
True, I wouldn’t have to endure my mother’s elaborate preparations for our arrival—the cut-glass bowl of pastel mints, her suit and her pumps and her hairdo. My grandmother would hold court in a chair in the living room, talking about the past as if it were the present. I didn’t understand how my mother could continue to live in that place. The old house hadn’t fallen into disrepair; my mother wouldn’t let that happen. It was simply deserted; its many rooms filled with dust, were cleaned, and slowly refilled with dust. Dust clung to chair skirts and caught in bedspread fringe. Dust filmed my grandfather’s books, Sarah’s and Leanne’s yearbooks, and my English Lit paperbacks. Dust coated my grandmother’s antiques, Leanne’s collection of porcelain butter plates, and Sarah’s sea glass.
In my and Del’s room the shelves were bare save for an odd stuffed animal or two won from the Catholic church carnival, a wooden box with two miniature drawers filled with old earrings and periwinkle shells.
“Do you even go into the rooms upstairs?” I’d asked my mother once.
“I sleep upstairs.” She’d yanked open a kitchen drawer, hunted through matchbooks, twine, and dried-up pens. “I’m up and down those stairs twenty times a day.”
The old neighborhood housed the same old families. The same old children, grown into adults, returned for visits with their own children. But there was less socializing and a kind of closed-off feeling to the neighbors’ homes tucked behind their privet hedges. The cocktail parties on summer patios, my mother’s friends mixing their whiskey sours—all of that had been eradicated by divorce and alcoholism. The flight from Ithaca to Hartford had a stop in Philadelphia, and I assumed my mother would tell Del to take a cab to the house. By that time, Sarah, who’d been waiting with her new baby to see Del, would have already left. Leanne, more patient, and childless, would have progressed to her second or third sherry. They’d have eaten pizza from the Greek place in town, the same pizza from the same place we had ordered out from when we were children, where we’d meet with friends as young teenagers. The pizza was heavy with tomatoes and strewn with oregano. The ancient jukebox played “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” and the boys sat red-faced and gangly in the booths, while we girls made chains out of chewing gum wrappers.
I couldn’t imagine the taste of that pizza without remembering David Pinney, how his death had stained everything that came after. When a boy leaned over to kiss me in a dark car it would be David Pinney’s lips and the pressure of his hand on my breast. I’d sequestered myself in the tomb of a house during my teen and young adult years, sealed off from anything that might trigger my memory. And what was that memory, exactly? Whichever version of the past might not match Del’s. I had rid the world of a violent boy, but she once claimed she knew what she was doing, that the sex had been her idea. “That doesn’t make what he did right,” I’d said. And at the look on my face, she’d changed her story to match with mine.
* * *
IN MY APARTMENT, the little travel clock let me know that by now my mother would have met Del by the door, would have given Del one of her usual hugs, applying a faint and cursory pressure with her sinewy arms. My mother would have invited Del to sit down in one of the wing chairs, and would have tried to appear as if she weren’t evaluating her—jumping to gather drinks from the kitchen, to offer snacks, to close the windows so the breeze wouldn’t blow the napkins around the room. My mother would be kind and accommodating, and would exhaust herself with the effort.
Del’s pregnancy would be immediately apparent, and my mother would know I had slipped in my responsibilities in more ways than one. She would suspect this was the reason I hadn’t come, and it had been, originally. I didn’t want to face my mother’s disappointment in me. Since it was late, my mother would soon usher Del into our old bedroom, where the cold, spring night air would come in, smelling of forsythia and sap. The spread would have been turned down on one of the twin beds, the same spread that had been on the beds for years—white, with raised threads that made intricate designs on your skin if you slept on them.
On Easter morning at the old house, everyone would leave for Mass at the Sacred Heart Church in town, the whole family in two pews. Sarah and Leanne would skip their own church services and come with their husbands, and with the baby. Of course Del’s pregnancy might alter this tradition a bit. I couldn’t be sure about my mother’s reaction—if she’d wonder aloud about the possibility of getting rid of it, or if she’d call our father to consult.
Most of my predictions were proven correct when Del called me a week later and recounted everything, nearly exactly as I’d imagined it, except for one startling revelation: she would stay in Connecticut with our mother. They’d had a long talk Easter evening, she said, sitting on our mother’s bed. Our mother thought it would be easier to have the baby there. She had offered the support I had not, and while I had to admit that staying in Connecticut was a more practical option—the availability of our sister’s gently used baby furniture, our mother as experienced babysitter—I was suspicious. Why would our mother with her newfound freedom from child rearing, and the drudgery she so hated when we were young, agree to help Del? Del said that they went out shopping at Nordstrom and A Pea in the Pod, and I pictured Del laying out each outfit on the twin beds in our old bedroom. I was reminded of the days when we’d choose our clothes for the first day of school. The whole scene was so redolent of the past, I felt a wave of sadness. How leery I was of any attempt to recapture lost happiness. I’d learned that it was impossible, an endeavor pit-holed with disappointment, and I steered clear.
“Who will break the news to Randy?” I asked her. “I hear he’s got the trailer all set up with a crib.”
Del closed a door and the hush, as if she’d shut herself in a closet, dampened her voice. “I wish you’d leave there,” she said.
She told me she’d sent me something, and the next day I received a small package that contained Sister’s missal. As a child I had often slept with the missal; it had been a comfort. I’d held the small book in my hands or tucked it under my pillow. During the day I knew I would have to hide it from Del, who sought out anything I valued. I’d slipped the missal beneath the bottom shelf of the built-ins against the wall, a white-painted shelf that lifted like the lid of a box. Like Mary Rae’s hiding spot for her journals. Del must have realized how I’d know where Mary Rae’s journals had been and explored my hiding place once she got home.
I took the little volume out of the envelope. Its cover was mildewed, and as I thumbed the gilt pages, so thin and fragile, most of them stuck together. I turned on the desk lamp and sat down at the table and looked again at the illustrations with a sense of having merged with the past, the younger version of myself somewhere, living out her days. On the inside cover, my great-aunt had placed her signature, and the date, 1943. She’d died at twenty-nine, in 1962; she’d been about ten yea
rs old. She’d written in the book with pencil, but underneath I noted there’d been another name, one erased, presumably by Martha Mary. I pulled the light closer and saw the etched-in name: Rose. The missal had been Rose’s, but Martha had claimed it as her own. I understood that. Someone had given Rose the missal, and Martha had wanted it, coveted it, and taken it, as I had.
In her phone call Del had reminded me of the pink inflatable rabbit she received one Easter as a child. It had been nearly as big as she was, and she’d taken to sleeping with it each night. It sprang leaks, and by morning it was out of air. We had to keep blowing it up, and our mother patched it with black electrical tape. “How sad for me,” Del said.
Would Del start another life with our mother and Leanne and Sarah, a life of babies and tending and birthdays and occasions for celebrating? During the years she’d been at the Institute, and then at Ashley Manor, the old house had been as much mine as my mother’s. We’d had our routine—tea in the Brown Betty pot, toast with orange marmalade in the afternoons. Like two spinsters, we’d spent our evenings reading under throw blankets. Would Del heat the water for the tea, open the back door and feed the gray cat? Would she move back into our old room, sleep in her long-empty bed, hang her new clothes in the closet where I’d left my summer dresses? My mother and I were often at odds, but we’d slipped easily into a pattern of life together. Would Del now step into my place and reestablish my and my mother’s old routine? And if she did, what was left for me? I felt a strange sadness, much as Del must have felt remembering her dependence on the pink plastic bunny, bandaged again and again with the shiny black tape.
Through the small window the sky is gray with burden, and out of that brushed charcoal shade the snow tumbles, delicate and dizzying. The flakes make a sound like pinging on the metal roof, and I try to imagine each cluster of crystals—hexagonal plate, crystal with broad branches, stellar crystal, ordinary dendritic, fernlike—like the images classified in the book we found on Grandfather’s shelves. Dark boards, a gilt snowflake on the cover, and inside thousands of photographs, the images so beautiful we spent hours turning the pages.
Snow Crystals by W. A. Bentley. Where is that book now?
The trailer is empty, everything is still and cold. Outside, the silence is broken by the sound of footsteps in snow, and then the door thrown open and someone struggling in with a burden, breathing with exertion. Mary Rae, wrapped in her blanket, her hair trailing dark along the floor. It is a man, lumbering in heavy winter clothes, who places her on the bed, who takes the blanket from her body, and sets a pile of clothing nearby, neatly folded—jeans, wool, sweater, bra. The down coat. She wears her panties, nylon bikinis, twisted, on backward, clearly a fumbled attempt at getting dressed. He stands over her for a long moment, but not long enough to hint at any regret, before he huffs—yes, huffs, as if he’s angry, and then, his bulk hidden in the winter coat, he trundles out, taking the blanket. His footsteps recede. The thin layer of ice breaks. Snow pings gently on the roof. I sit down on the edge of the bed and watch her expel breath—a soft filament of moisture that rises from her lungs.
35
I was certain that once the semester was over I would leave the apartment. I emptied the bureau and stacked my clothes on the floor. I piled my books and papers. I was waiting for more from William, waiting for him to make some move, whatever that might be. I began to look for him at the Korean place, walking up College Street, or through the Commons, mingling with students. We were playing a game. I wouldn’t leave the apartment until the game was finished.
One afternoon I came across the old flyer of Mary Rae, pinned to a pole on State Street. And, like the first time I’d touched one tacked onto the Wegmans bulletin board, when I grabbed it down, I saw the Silver Streak, the snow falling beyond the window. I was almost sure that William had left Mary Rae there to die. Though I hadn’t seen his face, I recognized the angry huffing sound he’d made. That was William’s impatience, his irritation with the sequence of events, his inability to start over, his helplessness.
We’d both done terrible things. After David Pinney’s death, when it seemed I wouldn’t be caught, my sentence came from the astral world. When Del was admitted to the hospital, I worried that I would emerge unscathed once again, and then I worried about the repercussions of emerging unscathed. How would the balance be righted?
The weather grew warmer and people shed their clothes, revealing whitish limbs. They sunbathed on the flat rocks in the gorge. At night they sat on balconies and drank, lining their empties on the wooden railings. And then exams were over. I was restless, ready to leave, but so much remained unresolved, and I didn’t feel I had a place to go. One evening, Del called.
“It will be summer soon,” she said. “The Spiritualists will be back.”
She laughed, pretending she was joking, but I suspected she thought this might really lure me home.
“She’s spring cleaning,” Del said, about our mother.
She told me that our sisters came over to the old house and stood around complaining while our mother made a big pile for the League of Mercy.
“If you don’t take these things now, they will be gone,” our mother said.
Boxes came up from the basement, down from the attic. One full of ice skates, the white leather cracked, the blades dull. Out of others came the relish trays; old spectator pumps; a seersucker sport coat; a fox stole with the head intact, its tiny teeth still vicious; piles of old high school texts with illegible penciled marginalia; heating pads with frayed wires; eyeglass frames missing the prescription lenses; my mother’s discarded handbags; the dresses she wore to her senior prom, her spring wedding, a formal dinner, a cocktail party on New Year’s. Spread out on the living room floor were years of our family’s lives—mildewed Barbie doll clothes, snowsuits and red plastic boots, gloves and hats I could donate to the people in the encampment. My mother discarded these things with vigor, her eyes shining, her movements quick.
“I hardly know her,” Del said.
I didn’t want to live with my mother and Del, with a baby that might or might not have been my husband’s. My sisters, my father—they had separate lives. Del mentioned Detective Thomson, briefly. He was reviewing old evidence—especially a long, blond hair found on David Pinney’s body. He’d come by and “sat and chatted, as usual,” Del said. She’d done her bland replies, her struck-dumb stare.
“He must have gotten bored with me,” she said. “He asked when you were coming home.”
But our mother did not want to be bullied. She called her attorney, who discovered the strand of hair contained no root or follicle and that conclusive DNA could not be acquired from it. “Lots of long-haired blond girls in town six years ago,” the attorney said.
I wasn’t sure that would be the end of Detective Thomson. I couldn’t sleep, and some of the disturbance seemed to come from worry about where I’d end up.
Then, one afternoon I came in from the grocery store and my mother’s travel alarm clock was missing. I glanced around the room, wondering what else might be gone. I opened a bureau drawer and sifted through my clothing. Then I knocked on Geoff’s door, and he stuck his head out, his hair dirty and wild.
“Did you borrow my clock?” Geoff’s apartment was oppressively dark, though it was a bright, spring day outside.
“If I borrowed it, I would have asked first, correct?” he said.
“Where could it be?” I said.
Suzie thrust her head out from behind Geoff’s pant leg, and he blocked her from leaving the apartment. “How should I know?” he said, closing the door on me.
The next day my mirror was gone, and the day after that the lamp that sat on my end table. I felt part of some art installation, the contents within the frames dissolving piece by piece. I told Geoff I wanted to change the locks. This time when he came to the door the window blinds were open in the apartment behind him. He’d washed his hair.
“That’s a chore,” he said. He yanked Suzie’s leash
and stepped around me into the landing.
“Someone is coming into my apartment,” I said.
Geoff moved to the stairs and started his way down. “Are you sure you didn’t misplace these things?”
“A mirror?” I said. I found I was shouting, and I’d never gotten angry at Geoff before.
He paused on the stairs. “No need to raise your voice.”
My heart dipped with remorse. I watched him slip out of the front door, dragging Suzie behind him.
The next morning, rubber-soled shoes bounded up the stairs. Unless Geoff had gotten a new pair of shoes, it was a stranger. Whoever it was hesitated at the top step and knocked on my door. Out the window, parked beneath the bright buds of the elm, was a police cruiser. I felt entirely alone and vulnerable. I was sure William’s body had been discovered, the film in his pocket developed. Somehow, I had been identified. I found I couldn’t summon the strength with which I’d faced Detective Thomson, but those times my mother had been with me.
I would pretend I wasn’t home. But the knocking continued, and Geoff came out into the upstairs hall and told whoever it was that I had been there earlier.
“Perhaps she’s in the shower,” Geoff added.
The knocking was louder, and there wasn’t a possibility for me to slip away—no escape route out a window, down a trellis. I opened the door, resigned, and was surprised to see Officer Paul. In the daylight, his expression was kind. Despite his large ears, he resembled the ruggedly handsome men in old cigarette ads. I understood why Del had found him attractive. He had on his uniform, the one I’d thought was a costume at Anne’s cookout.
“Are you Martha? I wonder if you have a few minutes?” he said. His voice was soft. He smelled of shaving cream. He introduced himself as Officer Donaldson, and I peered at his badge, confused.
