by Karen White
He regarded me in his nonjudgmental way that only made me feel worse. I wanted him to yell at me, to accuse me of being self-centered and a horrible friend, anything to deflect my own self-loathing.
Instead, he led me back to the kitchen, its fixtures of a more recent vintage than my own kitchen’s. He saw me looking at the stainless-steel dishwasher with envy. “Claire paid to redo the kitchen for our parents’ thirtieth wedding anniversary. Mama hated it, wanted her old sink and countertops back, but never told Claire. I don’t think she knows to this day.”
A single plate and empty bottle of beer sat on a small table in the bay window. He switched off the television that sat on the counter, then moved the plate and bottle to the sink. “Can I get you something to drink? I made a pitcher of sweet tea. It’s not as good as my mama used to make, but it’s not too bad.”
“Sure,” I said, needing a distraction from the purpose of my visit. I sat down at the table, recognizing the scratches in the surface beneath more recent ones. I knew that if I looked closely, I could find my name in cursive where I’d forgotten to place a magazine under my homework paper when I’d signed it. I watched as he poured a glass for me, then pulled out a beer for himself. It didn’t escape my notice that he hadn’t offered one to me.
He set the glass in front of me before joining me at the table. I took a drink, my lips puckering from the sweetness. In the low-cal, low-sugar world of California, I’d forgotten all about real sweet tea. As I tried to adjust my taste buds, I looked around me. “It’s a lot of house for a bachelor. You ever thought of selling?”
A peculiar light shone in his eyes. “Yeah, a couple of times. Being in the real estate business means I get to see a lot of available properties that might suit me better. But besides this house, there’s only one other place I’ve ever wanted to live.”
Tripp had always loved my yellow house, had even called it Dr. Seuss’s house when we were in kindergarten, because of its bright color and refusal to adhere to any person’s idea of what a home should look like. Since the day he’d found out that’s where I lived, he’d resolutely claimed that he would live there one day, too. I would have thought it funny if he hadn’t been so serious.
“Yeah, well, that house isn’t for sale. If I decide to get rid of it, I’ll sell it to Tommy for some nominal amount so he can live there as long as he wants.”
“Buying it has never been exactly what I had in mind.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the outer edges of panic begin to work through my veins. “Don’t, Tripp. Please. I am not that girl you once thought you were in love with. She’s so long gone I wouldn’t even know how to find her. And to tell you the truth, she wasn’t that great to begin with. So get over it, okay? We’re not in high school. And don’t tell me that you ignored all those Duke girls because of some misguided affection for somebody else.”
He leaned back in his chair and put his bare feet up on another one. After taking a long pull from his beer, he said, “Nope, can’t say I ignored them. But let’s just say there’s no comparison.” What could only be described as a leer crossed his face. “You’re still as fine as frog’s hair, Vivi.”
“Gee, thanks. I can’t say anybody’s ever told me that before.” I leaned forward, my elbows on the table as my fingers skimmed the icy wetness of the glass. “I need a favor.”
His expression didn’t change as he watched me from the other side of the table.
“Do you know anybody who does regular doctor stuff? You know, like send in a urine sample to a lab for analysis even if the patient isn’t dead yet?”
He took another draw from his beer. “Yep.”
Knowing we would sit in silence for hours while I waited for him to ask me why, I explained. “Mark told me I could keep Chloe until the end of his honeymoon if I stopped taking the pills.” I just know you can’t do it. I bit my lip, trying to erase Mark’s harsh words. “I haven’t had one since yesterday.”
He sat up, but his expression didn’t change. “It’s not good to go cold turkey, Vivi. It’s doable, but not recommended. There can be some pretty serious side effects, including convulsions that could kill you. I’ve seen it more than once in my line of work.”
I stared at the slice of lemon bobbing along the top of my sweet tea like a life preserver. “I won’t have convulsions. I’ll feel sick and have insomnia, and when I sleep I’ll have nightmares. And I’ll probably shake and have bad headaches. But nothing that I can’t handle.”
He continued to watch me in silence.
“I quit before. When I found out I was pregnant. I didn’t want to hurt the baby.”
He said nothing, his eyes empty of reproach, as if he already knew what had made me start again.
“I don’t want to see a shrink.”
His eyebrows lifted. “I didn’t say you should.”
“Not out loud. I can do this on my own. If I couldn’t do it for me, maybe I can do it for Chloe. Not because I think she’ll want to stay here with me on a regular basis, but because I want to give her the option.”
“You’re a good mother, Vivi.”
I shook my head. “Don’t say that. It’s not in my blood to be a good mother. And God must have agreed, because he didn’t even let me carry a pregnancy to term. Chloe is just . . . She needs somebody in her life to look after her, and I didn’t see anybody else standing in line,” I said, borrowing his own words so he couldn’t contradict me.
“Did Chloe make that for you?” he asked.
I realized I’d been turning the wire-and-bead ring Chloe had made for me over and over on my finger. I’d worn the ring for so long that the gesture had become a habit, despite the green marks it left on my skin.
“Yeah. During her jewelry-making phase. The stuff I made was definitely uninspired, but she was pretty good at it. But then she discovered anime and we had to learn something new all over again.”
His silence unnerved me. “So will you help me?” I prompted.
“Have I ever said no to you, Vivi? Of course I’ll help you. If only because it will give me the opportunity to see you regularly to make sure you’re not having any out-of-body experiences because of the withdrawal.”
I drained my glass, then slid my chair back. “He wants it done every day—although that’s a bit ridiculous, and I’m hoping I can convince him to go up to once a week—and we’ll have to send the results to his office. Can you just make sure it doesn’t say ‘coroner’s office’ on any of the paperwork? I don’t want him to think that your office is the hub of all lab-related activities in Indian Mound. He already thinks we’re just a bunch of rednecks who hunt and drink all day.”
“Well, he’s not too far off the mark, if you think about it. Actually, you’ll have to go into a doctor’s office to have a witness and then they’ll send it to a lab.” He reached up to the counter and pulled off a pad and pen, then wrote something down on it. “Remember old Dr. Griffith? He still has his practice, although he doesn’t do house calls anymore. He’s been holding off on retirement, hoping I’ll one day give in and go to medical school and then take over his practice. I keep telling him that dealing with dead people is a lot easier than dealing with the live ones.” He tore off the top piece of paper and slid it over to me. “I’ll give him a call to let him know what’s going on, and then you can call and set up a schedule.”
“Thanks,” I said, staring down at the paper. Without looking up, I said, “What’s the real reason you didn’t go to medical school?”
He didn’t speak for a long moment, and I found myself wishing I hadn’t said anything. “I did go. But halfway through, when I realized that you weren’t coming back, I sort of reevaluated what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to do something that had no memories of you attached to it. Working with dead people sort of fit the bill.”
I slumped against the back of my chair. “Don’t feel you always h
ave to be so honest with me, okay? What happened to all that Southern politeness we’re supposed to be so famous for?”
“You deserve better than that.” He stood and took my glass, putting it and his bottle in the sink. “I was headed toward your house this evening, but you saved me a trip. The crime lab was able to extract DNA from the remains. The lab supervisor owed me a favor and she pushed it up the priority list.”
I felt a little stab at the word “she,” but chose to ignore it. Judging by the calmness on Tripp’s face, he had something dramatic to tell me. “It’s a match, isn’t it?” I didn’t feel any surprise. In the medicated cloud in which I’d been living, I hadn’t allowed myself to examine too deeply the implications of why a woman would be buried on my property. But now I felt the insidious fingers of real emotions nudge at my heart, and all I could do was wish I had a pill to take.
“Yes, it is. The mitochondrial DNA—that’s the DNA passed down through the women in a family—was a match.”
I tried to think of what that meant, but my brain remained fuzzy. “So what do we do now?”
“Sheriff Adams will probably want to come over again and chat with you and Tommy, maybe even go see Mathilda—although she always wants to go to sleep when he gets there. I’d start digging in your attic, see if there are any old letters, newspaper articles, or diaries—anything that might mention a woman who went away and never came back. I saw Carrie Holmes the other day—she told me to remind you about the archives that are waiting to be sorted and organized. That might be a good place to start. Especially since Sheriff Adams is a little shorthanded, and this is definitely a cold case. I’m afraid if you want this case solved before you’re in Sunset Acres, you’ll have to do some of your own sleuthing.”
“Great,” I said, feeling a small tremor in my hands.
“You okay to drive?” he asked, and I realized he’d seen them shaking.
“I’m fine. I’ve done this before, remember? The withdrawal effects will be gone within the week. Two at the most.”
Without a word, he picked up my phone that I’d left on the table and pushed a few buttons before handing it to me. “True, but the reasons you reach for a pill will still be there until you confront them. You have my number now. Just call me if you need to talk to somebody.”
I snatched the phone from his hand and tossed it into my purse. “I don’t think that will be necessary.”
He followed me out the door, his long strides keeping up with mine. “Hang on; I’ve got a watch for Tommy. He said he’d have a little time once the planting is over, and I was planning on bringing it when I dropped by with the DNA news.”
I sighed, annoyed that he’d ruined my dramatic exit. All through my growing-up years, I’d been famous for them. I’d even once thought that it meant something.
We stopped at his car and I waited while he opened the glove box and pulled out a silver watch in a Ziploc bag. I opened my large purse for him to dump it inside and we both caught sight of the bottle of pills sitting in the bottom. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pulled out the bottle and handed it to him. “There. Even trade.”
I snapped my purse shut, then got in my car and started the engine. Tripp leaned into the open window of the passenger side. I looked at him expectantly, wondering if he was going to apologize.
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
I pressed down hard on the accelerator and backed out of the driveway with a squeal of tires, just like I’d done when he’d said that to me nine years before.
Almost a week later, I stood barefoot in the garden, dirt and sweat sticking to every part of my body and making me feel like a chicken leg ready for the fryer. Firmly embedded soil clung to my fingernails like polish had once done, and I wore a pair of cutoff denim shorts that could only be described as Daisy Dukes. None of my clothes from LA seemed to be good gardening clothes, and I’d been left to dig through my dresser drawers. The shorts were at least a size too small, and I prayed the zipper would stay up, since I hadn’t quite managed to fasten the top button.
My sunglasses kept slipping down my nose, but my eyes couldn’t take the brightness of the sun. My tremors had gotten better, as had the nausea, but the insomnia and nightmares seemed to be getting worse, the lack of sleep doing nothing to improve my mood or ever-present headache.
I leaned down to uproot yet another weed.
“Nice jorts, Booger.”
Straightening, I scowled at my brother. He looked worse than me, with dark circles under his eyes, his hair sticking up around his head from him running his fingers through it one too many times, and it looked like he’d worn the same shirt and jeans enough times that they could stand up without him.
“How’s the planting?” I asked. I hadn’t seen more than his coming or going since he’d started to seed his fields. It was important to get all the fields seeded at the same time so everything was on the same schedule, even if it meant working sixteen- to eighteen-hour days. I’d once thought riding in the tractor next to Emmett was just this side of heaven, the hum and jerk of the motor like being rocked in a cradle. Emmett said it was because I had a connection to this land, because my family had worked it for generations. I remembered that now—remembered how I’d regarded the long furrows of the fields like the arms of my ancestors reaching out to embrace me. But as I got older, I began to regard them as the arms that wanted to hold me down.
“Not too bad. The weather’s holding out. For now.” He looked up at the sky with a frown and I followed his gaze toward the high, thin clouds that Emmett had called mare’s tails, and which he taught us always meant a change in the weather. “Breeze is picking up, too.”
“‘Wind out of the southeast is good for neither man nor beast,’” I said, quoting Emmett’s favorite phrase.
We both smiled, but Tommy’s face remained grim. “I don’t think I’ll really sleep until harvest.”
“Only five more months,” I said, trying for a light tone. But I couldn’t help but wonder which one of us looked worse or needed the sleep more.
“I thought you hated to get your hands dirty—that you were strictly an observation-only gardener.”
“Yeah, well, I needed something to do, and I couldn’t stand seeing Bootsie’s garden looking so pathetic.”
He nodded. “Where’s Mama?”
I jerked my head in the direction of the back door. “Inside with Chloe and Cora. Cora’s involved with a homeschool group and agreed to help me get Chloe up to speed so she can finish her school year here. Carol Lynne wanted to join them, and it was okay with Cora. They’re supposed to be diagramming sentences this morning. I figure it couldn’t hurt. Maybe jog something in Carol Lynne’s brain.”
Tommy’s face grew serious. “It won’t come back, you know. Her memory. Every once in a while you’ll see a flash of it, and she’ll act like she knows what’s going on, but most of the time she’s just somebody who kinda looks like our mother and sorta remembers who you are. Or who you were, anyway.”
I grabbed a fistful of grass and yanked it from the earth, scattering dirt like confetti. “Well, isn’t that convenient for her. How I’d love it if I didn’t have to answer for all of my past mistakes.”
“You think she did this on purpose?” Tommy’s voice was low and serious, but lacked any malice or recrimination. It was simply his way of trying to find the truth of things.
I yanked up another clump of dogged weeds. “I don’t know, Tommy. I don’t know anything right now except that I can’t sleep, the woman they found buried in our yard is related to us, and I’ve pretty much lost everything I once thought I wanted, and all I want to do is take a pill so it will all go away.” Yank. “But I can’t, because I promised my ex-husband that I would stop so Chloe could stay here.” Yank. “So, no, I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other as to whether or not Carol Lynne had anything to do with her own illness.”
He examined the gate with the eye of a carpenter, then spoke without looking at me.
“Before she got sick, she never stopped asking about you, or thinking about schemes to bring you back. It was Bootsie who said you’d have to come back on your own. On your own terms. I don’t think Mama ever accepted that. She kept trying to convince Bootsie and me to drive out to California to bring you back. She would have done it on her own, but she’d never learned to drive.”
He paused and I sat back on my heels, searching for something to say that would make him stop. But no words came, like they, too, were prisoners of the same false hope I’d had as a child that had made me rush to my bedroom window every time I heard a car pull up outside the house.
“When she first started with the symptoms, she told me it was important you knew that. Knew that she’d never stopped loving you, or wishing she’d have another chance to show you. You have that in common, you know. No matter how many times you failed at something, you always picked yourself up and tried again.”
Not this time. “It’s too late, Tommy. It’s been too late for a long, long time.”
He was silent, and I thought he’d left, but when I looked up he was watching me, his face looking as tired as I felt. “Carrie called me—not sure who gave her my cell, but whatever. She wanted me to convince you that she really needs your help with the archives. The new library opens in October, and she’s afraid that the shelves in the historical reference section will be empty.”
I squinted at him, seeing the fuzzy edges of an optical migraine beginning to cloud my vision. “Do you think she’s really that desperate or just trying to find an excuse to talk with you?”
He gave me his boyish grin that made him look like the brother who’d taught me how to fish and ride a bike, and helped me not notice too much that our mama had left us again. “Maybe a little of both.” He shrugged. “Either way, working at the library might give you something to do right now while you’re waiting to figure out what’s next. And you always liked to write. Carrie said they could really use somebody to write a regular column to get people excited about the opening of the library. Sounds like a win-win to me.”
