by Karen White
My gaze strayed to the small tabby outbuilding with the boarded windows. It appeared to be as old as the main house, and it had a chimney at one end of the structure. It was large for a potting shed, but its placement by the garden made it the perfect spot. Placing my empty cup on the back step, I walked through the overgrown grass and stopped in front of it, hearing crickets and the distant caw of an unseen bird. I tilted my head as if I expected to hear something else, as if this strange building came with its own sounds in the same way it was constructed of tabby and had a fireplace within. I closed my eyes, straining to hear…what?
Feeling foolish, I moved forward and up the crushed-shell steps and examined the two-by-four that bisected the opening. The nails connecting it to the wooden doorframe half protruded from the board, as if whoever had nailed them had done so quickly, like an afterthought.
Reaching up, I grabbed hold of the board and jiggled it, watching the nails shimmy. I thought briefly of just yanking hard, but recalled again how old the building must be, and how easy it would be for the wood frame to splinter or pull away entirely from the doorway.
I remembered a toolbox I’d seen in the detached garage and walked quickly to the other side of the yard to find it, my feet and lower legs wet from the dew of the tall grasses. Aiming the claw end of the hammer toward the nail heads, I pried the nails out of the wood with surprising ease, almost as if the tabby structure had been waiting for me to come and discover its secrets.
I decided to wait until later to unboard the windows and instead carefully leaned the board against the front of the little house and slowly turned the door handle, not at all surprised to find it locked. Somewhere in me, I must have hoped that it would be unlocked, as if the only reason it would have been boarded up was to keep the door closed.
I examined the handle in my hand. It was fairly new, and cheaply made, like the ones people put on garages or sheds to be a deterrent, if not a preventive. I knew I should wait for Matthew and ask him for a key, that even if the handle were inexpensive and easy to repair, what I might find on the other side might not be.
I ran back into the kitchen, listening for any signs that Matthew might be awake, and retrieved a butter knife from the drawer before walking quickly back to the deserted building.
Using a skill taught to me by my enterprising older brothers, whose popularity in high school was no doubt attributed to their access to the funeral home, where they were guaranteed quiet and privacy, I slid the knife into the jamb and wiggled it back and forth. When I heard the lock click, I dropped the knife, too eager to get inside to see where it landed or to even be grateful that it hadn’t landed on my exposed toes. Thinking of Mimi and how she’d always told me that closed doors were only doors we hadn’t yet opened, I pushed on the door.
The first thing that registered in my mind was the smell of ashes and the scent of cooked food from meals long since consumed. The second thing was that I’d been there before, stood beneath the low ceiling before the large stone fireplace dominating the far wall where the chimney stood on the outside. I blinked in the mote-filled light filtering in from the open doorway and from the slats of the boarded windows, and tried to understand how a place I’d never been could seem so familiar.
Easels stood scattered around the room on the scarred bare-wood floor, some open and some leaning against the tabby walls. Large partitioned folders with handles lay on an oversize thick-legged table in the middle of the room, several with curled and yellowed papers sticking out of the edges. A wooden caddy held stubby charcoal sticks and artist’s pencils, and one of the easels held pads of drawing paper in various sizes, the covers of them, like everything else in the room, covered in dust.
I knew from looking at the space that this hadn’t been where Adrienne worked, but merely a catchall room for her supplies and finished work. From the drawings and sketches I’d seen so far, I imagined she’d set up her easel on the beach or on a bluff overlooking the marsh or on the pier. I didn’t know what she looked like, but I pictured her with white-blond hair and aquamarine eyes that were neither blue nor green, but not brown like mine.
I moved to the table and carefully lifted one of the smaller portfolios and slid a sketch out of its folder. It was a drawing of a baby, its sex undeterminable from the pose, its face invisible to the viewer as it stared away from the artist. All that was visible was the curve of a cheek, the soft roundness of a bare shoulder, the small nub of a nose.
Curious, I took out more sketches, discovering that all of them were of the same child from different vantage points. Some were of simply a baby’s hand or foot. Although I went through every single sketch, I couldn’t find a single one of the child’s face.
I placed each sketch back where I’d found it, then replaced the portfolio, making sure I stacked it exactly where it had been. I didn’t want to think about why I was trying to hide my presence here, only that I needed to.
A door at the back of the room caught my attention and I walked toward it, eager to leave the anonymous baby behind. The old wood door opened with little resistance, but angry hinges protested as I pushed it open until it hit the staircase wall behind it and I found myself at the bottom of a set of narrow stone steps. I hesitated, knowing that whatever room they led to had to be very small and dark, since from the outside the structure appeared to be only a single story, and there were no windows higher than the two on the bottom floor.
I had my foot on the bottom step when I heard a voice behind me. “What are you doing in here?”
I jerked back as if I’d been slapped, my foot sliding off the narrow step and throwing me into the door. “Matthew,” I said, trying to regain my footing. “You scared me.”
He moved from the door toward me. “What are you doing in here?” he repeated.
I looked up into his face, seeing a stranger. “I want to start a garden. I thought this would make a good potting shed.”
His beautiful skin was a mottled red and tan, his eyes unrecognizable. “Did you not see the nailed board across the door? Or the locked door? How did you get in?”
At first I was embarrassed to admit how hard I’d worked at gaining access. But then I felt the slow-burning embers of anger. I stepped toward him. “Except for the path leading down to the creek and the dock, the rest of the backyard is overgrown and wild. It didn’t occur to me that any part of your house—our house—would be off-limits to me.”
“Not this place,” he said as if I hadn’t spoken at all, his gaze darting from easel to table to walls as if he were half expecting to see his dead wife. “Not this place,” he said again.
“Is this her shrine?” I shouted, unable to see past my anger and only wanting to hurt him as much as he had hurt me. “Is it?” I shouted again as I used both hands to shove a stack of portfolios onto the dirty wooden floorboards. They landed with a thud that seemed to echo in the nearly bare space, a puff of dust rising into the air like a last breath.
The noise seemed to make him aware of my presence and he stared at me, blinking as if wondering how I had gotten there.
“I am your wife, Matthew. Me, Ava. Not Adrienne. I don’t mind you hanging her pictures on the walls, or even talking about her if that’s what you want to do. But I will not live in the same space with her, where she’s allowed to lock doors to places where I’m not allowed. I will not live that way. I didn’t marry both of you.” I felt the hot, angry tears on my cheek and wiped them away, not wanting him to see how much this place and his protection of it hurt me.
He moved toward me, his face stricken. “I’m sorry, Ava. I didn’t think…” He stopped.
“You didn’t think what?” My voice shook, but I kept looking at him, willing him to say the right thing, whatever that would be.
He didn’t answer but just kept staring at me.
“That I would mind sharing you and your house with her?”
Very quietly he said, “No. I thought that nothing else would matter once I met you.”
I allowed
his words to settle on me for a moment. “But it does,” I said, my anger still like sharp rocks on a riverbed, hard and immovable even in a strong current. “It all does.” I took a step back, wanting to clean up the mess I’d made but unable to start. I stared at the faceless baby sketches, spilled on the floor like milk and just as impossible to leave untouched. “What is in here that you don’t want me to see?”
A shadow seemed to flicker behind his eyes like a walking ghost, transferring to the back of my neck like tiny, icy footsteps. They think I killed her.
He took a step toward me. “Why would you think that?” His voice was low, almost cajoling.
I raised my hands to indicate the room that had been off-limits to me until I’d forced it open with a hammer and a butter knife. Instead he reached for my hand, and as always when he touched me, my brain slowed to a subtle hum, blocking out reason and all conscious thought. I fought the numbness, trying to focus on the twinges of cold fear that had wound their way through what threads of consciousness he hadn’t yet stripped away.
“I love you,” he said, drawing me close. “Nothing else matters.”
“But it does,” I tried to say, but his lips had already descended on mine.
“Let’s go back to bed,” he said, attempting to pull me toward the door.
“Not yet.” I turned around so he was pressing us both against the wall, the tabby hard and unyielding against my back. “Let me have this place for my gardening. Let it be mine and not hers.”
His desire for me had darkened his eyes, but my anger was a needy thing, too. “Show me that it doesn’t matter, Matthew. Show me that I’m your wife now.”
I pulled him close to me as I felt his surrender, felt his need for me as if the two could not be separated. I pulled my shirt over my head and his eyes met mine. Silently, he lifted me so my legs straddled his hips, and he moved us so my back was against the smooth surface of the door.
My hands clutched at the muscles on his shoulders as we moved together in silent surrender, eradicating memories and exorcising ghosts, the easels against the walls witnesses to my first victory over Adrienne.
Gloria
ANTIOCH, GEORGIA
MAY 2011
The old porch swing at the back of the house creaked its ancient rhythm in the late-afternoon haze. The temperature had been hovering in the high nineties all week, wilting my great-grandmother’s roses. Their heady aroma clouded my thoughts, making me think of our time on St. Simons when Henry had worked in the coroner’s office, and my garden was a barren yard of grass. Things had changed suddenly for us in our move to Antioch, and it had been a hard adjustment. In the end, it had all worked out, just not in the way we’d expected.
A yellow jacket landed stealthily on my forearm. Too weary from the heat to swipe it away, I sat staring at it, daring it to sting me. It seemed to slip on the dewy sweat of my skin before beating its wings and droning on to find a cooler spot.
“It is just too damned hot!” I said, not for the first time that week.
My exclamation brought down the corner of the newspaper next to me. “Gloria, you don’t swear. Why are you swearing?” He didn’t wait for an answer; the newspaper curtain went up again, blocking my husband from view.
I frowned down at my fingernails, spotting the broken nail I’d sustained while repotting my trilliums. Ava’s hands were small and slender like reeds, whereas mine were as big as baseball mitts—something a mother of five had a great deal of use for. But our nails had been the same—short and without polish, with jagged breaks where a nail had dared to grow over the nail bed. Thinking about her made my chest hurt, and I fanned myself again with a rice-paper fan my daughter-in-law June had brought me from one of her mission trips to India. It was too small and too thin and mostly useless, but it had been a well-meant gift, so I used it. Frowning, I looked again at the back of the newspaper and murmured, “Because it’s just too damned hot.”
This didn’t even bring a crinkle of notice from Henry. My gaze strayed from the old porch to the row of magnolia trees in the front yard. The milky white petals drooped in the heat. I had been married nearly fifty-six years ago under a similar row of magnolias in my hometown of Social Circle, Georgia, as had my mother, my grandmother, her mother before her, and so on up the family tree to way before the War Between the States. That’s what Mimi called it, and she taught me everything I know. And some things I didn’t want to.
I’d always imagined Ava marrying under these trees in the backyard of the house she’d grown up in, wearing the antique wedding dress that I had worn. I could picture her standing in the sunlight of the backyard, sheltered by the matronly magnolias, her veil glowing like an effervescent halo as she said her vows.
My sons had married in their wives’ hometowns, in foreign churches or gardens that hadn’t meant anything to me. But these trees were different. Mimi and I had planted them when Ava was a baby, marking each foot grown, each year, as an extravagant gift, too fragile to hold too tightly, yet too sturdy to keep.
I reached my arm around the back of the swing and rested my hand on Henry’s shoulder. “What are we going to do?”
The newspaper didn’t move. “About what?”
“About Ava.”
Slowly and methodically, as he did all things, he folded the newspaper and set it on the floor of the porch. “I think it’s out of our hands.”
I leaned my head on his shoulder, knowing he was right but fighting it just the same. It wasn’t in my nature—or Ava’s—to let things take their natural course if that was at odds with our vision of the way things should be. We’d battled pest infestations, drought, and flood in our garden, tending the plants as a mother tends her babies to make sure they survived.
“I can’t accept that.”
His hand stroked my hair. “For the first time in your life, Gloria, you might have to. And she’s happy. Happier than I’ve ever known her to be.”
I brought my head up to look directly into his eyes. “How do you know?”
He looked sheepish. “Matthew’s called several times. He wasn’t sure if your brief conversations with Ava were enough to let us know that all was well with them.”
I looked away and rested my head against Henry’s shoulder again. “I wish she’d married Phil.”
He was silent for a moment, the chains of the swing groaning as we moved back and forth. “We don’t always get to choose who we love.”
Closing my eyes, I allowed his words to seep down into me like a glass of cold iced tea, knowing the truth of them, but not wanting to hear them.
Henry continued. “Matthew’s a good man, and he loves Ava and she loves him. Let’s let them be happy.”
“But how can they be? What if…?” I couldn’t say any more, my fear like a ball in the pit of my stomach.
He patted my shoulder. “No what-ifs, remember? We agreed to that.”
His eyes met mine, calm and reassuring, and I was reminded of why I’d fallen in love with him all those years ago. And why he was a successful funeral director. He had a way of calming the spirit without having to say a single word.
“Aren’t you afraid?” I asked quietly.
“I don’t allow myself to be,” he said, as if emotions could be willed. As if a mother could forget what it had been like to hold her baby’s hands in her own.
I shook my head. “Mimi’s having one of her headaches. That always means a storm’s brewing.” I looked up into the clear evening, at the stars pressing against the darkening sky and the crescent moon hanging above us like a knowing smile. “She’s never wrong.”
“We’ll deal with it if we have to. It’s what we’ve always done.”
“But this is Ava,” I said, as if that explained the past thirty-four years.
The sun sank low on the horizon, the last traces of it reaching through the magnolia petals and creeping up the steps of the porch. Cicadas began their last chorus of the day while the fireflies dimmed and glowed in unison. I kissed Henry gently on t
he cheek, then gave a big send-off with my legs, the porch swing swaying drunkenly in my wake.
Sighing, I stood, the swing bouncing against my legs. I walked into the house, the screen door snapping shut behind me, and Henry’s newspaper pages fluttering like moths in the gathering gloom.
CHAPTER TEN
Ava
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA
MAY 2011
I pulled into the parking lot of the drugstore I’d passed on the way to work, hoping it would carry not only a few basic gardening tools, but also a film processing center. In the age of digital cameras, film processing had gone the way of vinyl records and Walkmans.
I was exhausted, yet exhilarated after my first day at my new job. It had mostly been a routine day of meeting my coworkers and a few patients, filling out paperwork, and learning where the restrooms were. Still, it felt good to be using another part of my brain again and, in time, to be helping babies into the world. My profession had always been more than a career for me; it defined who I was. And I tried not to think about how Matthew had married two midwives, even encouraging the first wife to become one. It was almost as if an unwritten script had dictated this small feat, and he’d accomplished it with relative ease.
I grabbed a small shopping cart at the front of the store, figuring I’d need it if I happened to find the pots I planned to scatter on the edges of the steps leading to both the front and back doors. Despite the abundance of rich green foliage surrounding the house, it looked abandoned and forlorn without potted flowers and shrubs close to the house.
Although I usually felt that fragrant blooms were extraneous in a yard, my mother’s teachings refused to let go of me, and I found myself wanting the bright hues of perennials to bring color to the old tabby house. I tried to tell myself that it had nothing to do with Adrienne’s sketch on the parlor wall that showed the house as it appeared now. As with the old kitchen house, I felt the need to make it my own, to make it different from how Adrienne had known it. It was almost as if I wanted her ghost to find everything unrecognizable and leave.
