The Girl On Legare Street

by Karen White

  I looked away, pretending to study the elegant mahogany balustrade I remembered staining by hand and the numbness in my lower back that had lasted for weeks afterward as a reminder. Throughout the restoration, I’d snuck in sanders, heat guns, and an assortment of other contraband modern conveniences behind Sophie’s back to preserve my own. I intended for both the house and me still to be standing by the end of the restoration.

  “Whatever’s best,” I said noncommittally as I leaned forward to stare at an imaginary smudge in the stain.

  “Uh-huh,” she said as she blew her nose on a wadded Kleenex before shoving it back into the pocket of her hideous skirt. She walked past me to the large main staircase and I followed behind her.

  “How’s Chad?” I asked, referring to another professor at the college who had originally been my client until he’d met Sophie and decided to move in with her. As just roommates, or so they both claimed.

  “Don’t change the subject, Melanie. We were talking about your mother.”

  I stopped. “Actually, we weren’t. And we’re not going to, either. Did Jack call you?”

  “No, your father did. Jack called him.”

  I slapped my hand against the banister. “Great, so now all of you can condemn me for being so unfeeling. The point you all seem to be missing is that I’m the victim here.”

  Sophie paused at the top of the stairs and waited for me to catch up. “You’re only a victim if you choose to be.”

  “I didn’t choose to be abandoned by my mother, in case you didn’t notice. And yes, my dad recently told me that she tried to speak with me many times while I was growing up but that he interfered. But it doesn’t change the fact that she just left me without saying good-bye and without a reason why. I’ve gotten over it and made my own life. And there’s no room in it for her.”

  Sophie regarded me for a long moment. “Did you ever think that there might have been a really good reason for her to leave? Have you ever asked her?”

  I swallowed, knowing her questions had been my own for a child’s handful of years until all my grief and hurt had finally buried even the tiniest glimmer of hope that my mother’s reason for leaving had been about anything else but me.

  Instead of answering, I walked past her to the double doors that led into the upstairs drawing room. “Come show me those amazing cornices.”

  I heard her following behind me. “Ignoring the problem won’t make it go away, you know. It’s always the problems we try our hardest to ignore that eventually end up biting us on the butt.”

  Facing her, I said, “Well, then. I guess I don’t need to worry about it, do I? I don’t have a problem; therefore my butt can’t get bitten.”

  Sophie opened her mouth to say something but was interrupted by the doorbell.

  As I headed down the stairs I heard her say under her breath, “Or maybe that butt bite might happen a little sooner than we expected.”

  I glared at her over my shoulder before I opened the door and saw my father standing on the threshold, a bouquet of pink roses cradled in his arms like a newborn.

  “Hi, Dad,” I said as I kissed him on the cheek. His robust appearance still hit me softly around the heart despite nearly six months of getting used to his being sober. I’d never known him this way, and we’d both been wading into unfamiliar territory as we renavigated the father-daughter roles that had been reversed when I was a child. We were like new coworkers, still trying to determine which of us got the desk by the window.

  I noticed he was looking over my shoulder, and I stepped back to allow him to enter. “Come in. Are you here for dinner? I could ask Mrs. Houlihan to set an extra place.”

  Sophie’s voice sounded a little forced. “Hello, Colonel Middleton. I’ve got a stack of receipts for you, so don’t leave without getting them from me.”

  My dad, the trustee for my former client Nevin Vanderhorst’s house and estate—of which I was the only beneficiary—was responsible for overseeing the costs of the restoration. And for playing referee between Sophie and the rest of us mortals working on the house—whose need to employ authentic materials and processes wasn’t nearly as rigid as hers.

  I glanced from one to the other, realizing an undercurrent of communication was going on between them, their forced words making it clear that they didn’t want me in on the secret. I looked at the roses. “Are these for me?”

  “No,” he said at the same time Sophie said, “Yes.” I closed the door behind me and put my hands on my hips. “What’s going on here?”

  Again, they exchanged glances, confirming my suspicions. Finally, my father cleared his voice and spoke. “Pink roses are your mother’s favorite.”

  I stopped to think for a moment. “Why on earth would you be bringing Mother roses here?”

  I stepped between them so that they couldn’t make eye contact and faced my father. “What did Jack tell you that would make you think Mother would be at my house?”

  Sheepishly, he placed the bouquet on the hall table. “I spoke to him this morning before he met you for breakfast. He was pretty sure that after you listened to what your mother had to say, you would invite her here to stay with you. I, uh, assume things didn’t work out the way Jack thought?”

  “That would be a real good assumption.” I stepped back to include Sophie. “And you bought into this, too?”

  “Your mother convinced Jack that you were in danger.We all thought that would make you listen to her.”

  I walked across the marble foyer, heels clicking with my agitated steps, and into the restored drawing room with the stately mahogany grandfather clock that dominated one side of the room. I flopped down into a French sofa with faded yellow silk upholstery—returned from storage to be reupholstered—then stood again to fluff the cushions. “You all thought that after more than thirty years of avoiding her I might forgive her in fifteen minutes and invite her to live with me? Are you all out of your minds?” I walked around the room, straightening pillows, dusting off the tops of picture frames with my index finger, and rewinding the clock—anything to keep from using my hands to squeeze the breath out of somebody’s throat.

  Sophie sat down on a Chippendale chair, her Birkenstocks looking out of place next to the delicately carved ball-and-claw legs. Quietly, she said, “I saw the phone out in the hallway, Melanie. Something’s up, isn’t it?”

  Sophie was one of exactly two people—Jack being the other—I’d confided in about my peculiar “gift.” My ability to communicate with the dead never felt like much of a gift because it had caused more trauma in my life than anything else, but it was reassuring to know there were others out there who believed you when you told them that your dead grandmother liked to call you on the phone to let you know there was trouble in the air. Unfortunately, my father was not one of them.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Nobody mentioned any hocus-pocus.Your mother told me she’d been having disturbing dreams. That’s all, nothing about phone calls from dead people. You know how I feel about that, Melanie. It’s not healthy to think that stuff’s real.”

  I sat down in a chair identical to the one Sophie had chosen and put my chin in my hands. “Dad, I’m not having this conversation with you. Especially when I should be asking you about those flowers. Mother left you, remember? She dumped me with you and then left. So if you’re bringing her flowers because you still have feelings for her, I think I might have to throw up.”

  My father cleared this throat again, something he always did when he was nervous, and managed to look hurt. “I brought them because I thought they might help a bit with dealing with what happened to her mother’s grave.”

  Both Sophie and I turned to him. “What are you talking about?” we asked in unison.

  “Oh, you haven’t heard? It was on the twelve o’clock news this afternoon. They said somebody vandalized St. Philip’s cemetery this afternoon. I was about to change the channel when I heard them mention the name Sarah Manigault Prioleau. Apparently, hers was the only
grave that was disturbed.”

  Sophie stood. “That’s your grandmother, right, Melanie?”

  I nodded, the odd sensation of drowning sweeping over me again. I turned my head, catching the pungent smell of salt water. It faded softly, making me wonder if I’d smelled it at all. “Do you smell that?”

  Both my father and Sophie shook their heads. “Smell what?” my father asked.

  “Never mind.” I faced my father again. “Do they know who did it?”

  “No. The tombstone was toppled but no other damage was done to it or other graves.” He shook his head. “They interviewed somebody on the grounds committee of the church who said that the tombstone could not have been lifted out intact except by some kind of construction equipment, but there was no sign of anything despite it being broad daylight.”

  I felt Sophie staring at me. “Was there anything unusual about the tombstone, Melanie?”

  Shrugging, I said, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen it. I went to her funeral, but I left with Dad for Japan right afterward and never saw the tombstone my grandmother selected prior to her death.”

  “You mean you haven’t been to visit since you came back to Charleston?”

  Embarrassed, I focused on standing and refluffing the seat cushion. “No. I just . . .” I stopped, then tried again. “It would have reminded me too much about a period of my life that I preferred to pretend never happened.”

  My father moved toward me. “Like how your mother always told you that your grandmother’s house on Legare would one day be yours and then sold it after your grandmother died?”

  I looked at him in surprise. “You never said anything to me about that. I never thought you knew. Or cared.”

  He gave me a half smile. “Oh, I knew. And I cared. But there was nothing I could have done about it. And you made it very clear that you didn’t want to talk about it or your mother. Even drunk, I couldn’t take your screaming fits. So I just let it go.”

  Sophie approached and put her arm around my shoulder. “I’m thinking you need to go to the cemetery. I’ll come with you if you want.”

  “Me, too,” said my father, although I could see he was uncomfortable. Things had always had to be black or white to him. The shady area between light and darkness that my mother and I inhabited didn’t exist for him. I had long since learned to skirt the issue with him, and he developed his own “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as far as my sixth sense was concerned.

  We are not as we seem. I closed my eyes, trying to block out the words and the distant voice on the telephone. After Jack and I had spent half a year eradicating the ghosts that had haunted my new home, I had hoped that my days of ghost hunting were over. Disembodied voices on a telephone made it obvious that perhaps they weren’t. A sliver of apprehension crept up my spine and wedged its way into my false bravado despite my efforts to minimize the implications.

  I straightened my shoulders, trying to shake the feeling of unease. “Thank you both, but I think I can handle this. I’ll go first thing tomorrow morning to pay my respects and take care of anything that needs to be done to repair the stone so my mother doesn’t have to. But then I’m through. That’s it. And don’t think for one minute that any of this means that I’m going to be forging a relationship with my mother now because I’m not.”

  I pretended that I didn’t notice Sophie and my father exchanging glances with each other and instead marched toward the kitchen, the smell of salt water suddenly heavy in the air.

  CHAPTER 3

  Since I was a young girl, I’d learned to avoid hospitals, battlefields, and cemeteries. At first I’d thought everybody could hear the cacophony of voices, but it was only after I realized that they were calling my name that I learned how very different I was. I was the only child in elementary school who consistently missed every field trip to historic sites due to sudden onsets of stomach pains and headaches against which my father was powerless. Even back then I knew that revealing I was different would have been social suicide, and thus a lifetime of avoidance and denial was launched. The fact that my mother and I shared this odd gift coupled with my father’s insistence that whatever I saw was in my imagination gave me even more reason to pretend otherwise.

  I parked my car on Church Street about a block down from St. Philip’s cemetery, where my grandmother was buried. Even though I didn’t remember exactly where she’d been interred, and the yellow police tape notwithstanding, I would have known approximately where to find her as only those who were born in Charleston were allowed to be buried on the same side of the street as the church. Even famed statesman John C. Calhoun was buried across the street, since he’d been born in Clemson, South Carolina. I remembered my mother gleefully mentioning that his wife, a true Charlestonian, was buried in a separate grave—across the street and nearer the church—as if even in death being a Charlestonian was more important than being Mr. Calhoun’s wife.

  I heard the babble of voices as I neared the cemetery gates, though I was experienced enough by now to know not to look around to see who was talking. Taking a deep breath, I focused on the sidewalk in front of me and sang the words to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” under my breath to keep from hearing my name called over and over. I knew that if I kept walking—and kept ignoring them—they would eventually stop. My mother once told me that we were beacons of light. It wasn’t until after she left that I figured out to whom, but by then I’d only ever seen myself as a moving target, eager not to get hit.

  My grandmother’s grave was toward the back of the cemetery, near the fence. I remembered now standing here with my mother and father feeling the scratchy starchiness of my new black cotton dress, the high humidity of summer, and the oppressive scent of too many flowers making me sigh in the heat. My father had taken me up in his arms and that’s when I’d seen all of the people crowding around the empty grave—not all of them breathing. Most disconcerting of all was that they all were looking at me.

  I stopped outside the yellow police tape that surrounded the grave site—my breath blowing fat puffs of steam into the chilly air—and noted the neatly trimmed grass and the white marble tombstone that looked like it had been gently pulled from the sucking earth and laid to rest on the cool grass. There was no disturbance of the nearby grass or graves, and the hole in which it had stood lay a foot in front of it as if to clarify that the stone hadn’t just toppled over but had been deliberately placed.

  After first glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, I stepped over the yellow tape and walked closer to the stone so I could get a better look. In carved lettering, I read my grandmother’s birth and death dates as well as her complete name, Sarah Manigault Prioleau. Then my eyes widened as I read the inscription beneath:

  When bricks crumble, the fireplace falls;

  When children cry, the mothers call.

  When lies are told, the sins are built,

  Within the waves, hide all our guilt.

  I read the words two more times, trying to make sense of them. Then my gaze shifted back to the woman’s name to make sure that I was at the right grave. Within the waves, hide all our guilt. I recalled the scent of salt water wafting through my house and drops of ice slipped down my back.

  “I don’t know what it means, either, if that’s any consolation.”

  I jerked my head around to see my mother standing behind me wearing a black mink coat with matching hat, her gloved hands clutching the neck closed against the bitter cold. Always the gloves.

  “It’s not,” I said coolly.

  She moved to stand next to me and gazed down toward the stone. “It’s odd how spirits choose to manifest themselves, isn’t it? She’s trying to tell us something.”

  “You think so?” I asked, using sarcasm to hide the brief shimmer of hope I’d felt when she’d used the word “us.”

  Her eyes met mine and she smiled. “What I don’t know is what we’re going to do about it.”

  I shoved my hands deep inside my pockets as much becau
se of the cold as because I needed to tighten them into fists. “There’s no ‘we’re’ about it. I’m going inside now to find out if I need to pay to get it fixed or if they have insurance for this kind of thing.”

  I made a move to go past her, but she put her hand on my arm. “Mellie, this is serious. I think this is related to my dream, and if it is, then you’re in more danger than I thought.”

  “Then I’ll deal with it. Alone. Like I have for thirty-three years.” I shook my arm free and stepped over the tape.

  “Do you remember the day your grandmother died?”

  I stopped, an old memory pushing at my brain like a scar that hadn’t faded enough to let you forget what caused it completely. “Yes,” I said. “She fell down the stairs.” Slowly, I faced my mother. A look of relief passed over her face, and I realized that she hadn’t expected me to stay.

  She continued. “She was still alive when I found her at the bottom of the steps.”

  “That’s not what the police report said. She tripped on her high heels and fell. She died immediately.” I only knew this because of some perverse curiosity that had made me search through my father’s papers once when he was on yet another drinking binge. In a childlike rage, I had hoped to find the reason my mother had abandoned me documented somewhere. As if by seeing it in black-and-white, I could find a way to defend myself. But all I’d found were my parents’ divorce papers stating the reason as irreconcilable differences and a copy of the police report concerning my grandmother’s sudden death.

  My mother raised an elegant eyebrow but didn’t ask me how I knew. It was like I was a little girl again and she knew all there was to know about me, which always made it that much harder to handle her abandonment. Everything she knew about me wasn’t enough to make her stay.

  She dipped her head and I could see her struggling for composure. “I held her head in my lap while she died. I heard her last words.”