Sea Change

by Karen White

  Geoffrey held the dugout against the dock while Zeus lifted Jemma out, then helped me and my portmanteau onto the dock. My husband lifted my hand and kissed it, the thrill of his touch as startling as if we had been separated for two hundred days instead of only two.

  “Everything went well, I trust?” he asked, tucking my hand into the crook of his arm as Jemma took my bag.

  “Yes, blessedly so. Although the St. Claires already have six children; I cannot imagine how they will fit this seventh and eighth into their small house.”

  I had not meant to sound bitter, and only a squeeze from Geoffrey’s hand told me that he had heard and was not condemning me for it.

  “Georgina,” I said. “How kind of you to come greet me. All is well with you, I hope?”

  Nathaniel Smith had been courting her in earnest for nearly two years, ever since my conversation with him. Every day I hoped for some settlement between them, and not just for their sakes. I loved my sister, but I had grown to want my husband and son to myself without the hovering presence of another woman in the house.

  Geoffrey had accepted the courtship, but only at my urging, and even tolerated Nathaniel’s presence at our dining table on occasion. Still, no marriage plans had been announced, and I was afraid that Georgina would never marry if she didn’t accept Nathaniel or move to Savannah—neither of which she seemed willing to do.

  “I am well, thank you. I thought that Geoffrey might want the company, having no exact idea of the time you would be returning. He has been standing out here half the day, making himself sick with worry.” Her voice was teasing, but there was another note there, too, something that reminded me of our childhood, when Georgina had complained to our father that I had won again at a game of scotch-hopper.

  Geoffrey patted my hand that was curled into the crook of his elbow. “In my defense, I was not out here all day, but only part of it. I brought Robbie once, as the boy is missing you sorely. He is asleep now in Leda’s care, but I promised him that as soon as you returned you would go see him and at least kiss him on his cheek if he is sound asleep.”

  I rested my head against his cloak as we walked, feeling the scratch of wool against my cheek, my heart too full to count all of my blessings at once.

  Geoffrey retired to his desk and his pipe in the small library with assurances that he would not linger too long, while I climbed the stairs to Robbie’s room. I was surprised to find Georgina following me into my son’s room instead of going to her own. It was full dark now, and I lifted my lamp high to see better, turning to Georgina with a finger to my lips when I saw Robbie’s eyes were closed, his long, dark eyelashes fanning his soft cheeks.

  Leda stirred from the straw pallet on the floor by the small child’s bed Geoffrey had made. It had the faces of horses carved into the headboard and footboard, and although Robbie was fast outgrowing the bed, he was loath to part with it. I had long since warned Geoffrey that he would spend a lifetime carving bigger and bigger beds with horse faces for our son until we succumbed and got him a horse of his own.

  “He be a good boy, Miz Pamela. Just an angel.”

  “Thank you, Leda.” I looked behind her to the doorway where Jemma stood, silently watching, waiting to help Leda down the stairs. She was good that way, anticipating what needed to be done before I thought to ask her. She was the same in the birthing room, which was why I had come to rely on her more and more.

  I leaned over my sleeping boy, shielding his face from the brightest light from the lamp. He was his father’s child, all dark hair and blue eyes, the roundness of his face and limbs not quite hiding the sharpness of the bones beneath. He held our hearts in his chubby hands, and my breath caught in my throat every time I thought of him riding a horse, or growing too big for my arms to hold. I pressed my lips against his cheek, smelling his sweet little-boy scent, then straightened to find Georgina watching me, an odd glint in her eyes.

  I moved the lamp, relieved to see that it had been only my imagination. But as I made to move past her, she touched my arm.

  “I need to speak with you,” she whispered. “In confidence.”

  Moving away from the sleeping child, I paused by the door. “Of course. You know you can speak to me about anything. We are sisters.”

  The sound of her swallowing seemed loud in the quiet room, punctuated only by Robbie’s soft and rhythmic breathing. “I need you to make a tea. With pennyroyal.”

  The clock in the downstairs hall chimed softly, five minutes fast as always. No clockmaker had been able to repair it, and we had simply become accustomed to deducting five minutes each time it chimed. I stared at my sister.

  “Pennyroyal? But that is…” I couldn’t say it. “Do you need it for pain during your courses?” I dared not think of why else she might need it.

  “No. It is not for discomfort.”

  My throat grew tight. “Then why do you need it?”

  Her eyes were hard. “It is not for me. It is for a poor soul who has had to fend off the unwanted attentions of an overseer. She does not want to bear his child or the shame.”

  I glanced over at the sleeping form of my only son, the emptiness of my womb his sibling and my constant companion. I could not do what Georgina asked of me. I could not. I shook my head. “I cannot kill an unborn child. You cannot ask this of me.”

  “Is it not a sin that has put her in that condition? A sin that she was forced to commit? The pennyroyal would only right a wrong.”

  “No, Georgina.” I shook my head again, as always at a loss in any argument with her. She was so forceful that until that moment I did not think I had ever not let her have her way. “Two sins will not make this right. I cannot and will not help you.”

  She lifted her head so that the light from the lamp hit the bottom of her chin, deflecting the light and casting each eye in shadow. “I know where you keep the pennyroyal in the root cellar, and where it is grown in your garden. You and Mother with your clever skills in the garden, ignoring me because I could not bear to get my hands dirty long enough to learn what the shapes of leaves meant. But I learned—enough, anyway, to make a useful tea.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I thought you would want to help, but I see my faith in you was misguided.”

  She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, but I grabbed her elbow, the movement making the light from the lamp cast apparitions on the wall behind her. “You need to know what you are doing. The amount of the pennyroyal leaves you infuse for a tea has to be exact. Any more can kill a person. Can you not understand that?”

  Georgina turned to me, her voice a low hiss. “I understand, but do you? I only know that this woman will do whatever she needs to do, even if it kills her. She is that desperate. And if you will not help her, then I suppose I will have to do my best.”

  I listened as Geoffrey’s footsteps crossed the hall downstairs, heading toward the stairs. Turning to Georgina, I felt my own despair, my own inability to say no to her reason. “I will help you. I cannot sit idly by and allow you to kill both the mother and child.” Glancing in the direction of the stairwell, I whispered, “Meet me in the kitchen house tomorrow morning after Leda has cleaned the breakfast dishes. I will show you how to make a tea and the proper dosage. But that is all I will do.”

  She smiled brightly, as if I had just given her a present she’d been coveting. “Thank you, Pamela. I knew I could make you understand.”

  We both turned as Geoffrey came to the top of the stairs, bringing with him the scent of pipe tobacco, his candle flickering from his movement. He said good night to Georgina, then held out his hand to me. I gave my lamp to my sister, then slipped my hand into my husband’s and allowed him to lead me into our bedroom. I felt Georgina’s gaze on my back as I began to close the door, Geoffrey’s free hand already on the hooks at the back of my gown. A cool breeze swept up the stairs behind us, bringing with it the smell of ashes and extinguishing the candle, throwing us into darkness as the door clicked shut.

  CHAPTER THI
RTEEN

  Ava

  ST. SIMONS ISLAND

  JUNE 2011

  With bare hands I pressed the potting soil around the roots of the fragrant ginger lily, making sure I’d gone all the way around the plant squeezing out the air just like my mother had shown me. It was a showy bloom, tolerated only because it reminded me of my mother’s garden and the time we had spent together there. This was the first day off from work I’d had since Matthew’s gift of the potting shed, and I was determined to make up for lost time and show my appreciation.

  I looked out of the cleaned window and saw the markers for my freshly dug garden, the white of the shaved wood even brighter against the black earth. Tiny tags stuck into the ground next to even tinier green shoots—my herb garden. I told myself that adding fresh herbs to my kitchen concoctions was bound to make them better.

  After arranging the snowy white lily on the step below my petunias—another one of my mother’s favorites—I straightened to admire the mix of colors of not only the blooms but of the pots as well. I checked my watch and saw that I had another hour before I had to meet Tish at an unmarked cemetery thought to be located in the vicinity of one of the old cotton plantations near the Hampton River. Figuring I could suffer through anything for just an hour, I resolutely opened the back door with the purpose of going through the cookbooks and recipes people had been throwing at me since my marriage and making a menu plan for the week.

  I heard the sound of water from upstairs as I entered the kitchen. Matthew had two later appointments in Savannah and would be staying there overnight. I’d considered going with him, since I didn’t have to be to work until ten o’clock the next morning, but I was looking forward to cemetery hunting with Tish, and I really needed to figure out what we were going to eat for the rest of the week and head to the grocery store.

  My resolve lasted until I spotted the box of photo albums Mimi had sent. I’d placed the box on the floor next to the small desk in the kitchen, hoping it would prompt me to go through them and call Mimi to thank her. Carefully, I lifted the box and placed it on the kitchen table. I yanked a pair of pink-handled scissors—something else I needed to replace—out of a drawer and began to slice through the packing tape on the box.

  Wadded newspapers from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution huddled on the top like dandelion heads, and I swiped them out of the way to peer underneath. I stared at the pale pink linen cover of the album on top, remembering sitting on Mimi’s lap when I was a child while she turned the pages and told me stories of my childhood.

  I took the pink album off the top and placed it on the table, knowing this was the first album because of the gold foil lettering Mimi had placed on the cover:

  AVA JANE WHALEN

  VOLUME 1

  DECEMBER 1977 TO DECEMBER 1980

  I opened the cover and turned to the first page, where I saw me as a toddler wearing a large red bow one of my brothers had most likely stuck onto my nearly bald scalp, and sitting under the Christmas tree. I was holding a rattle in one hand and reaching for a low-hanging branch of the tree with the other. More photos showed me on my mother’s lap or her holding me in her arms. As I looked more closely, I realized that there were a few pictures of me being held by my father or Mimi, but mostly by my mother. My brothers and other relatives would be pictured next to me, with a hand on me or around me, but I was always with my mother, her hands holding me around the waist like a shield.

  I didn’t remember that Christmas, of course, but the pictures showed a happy family, a normal family by most standards. But even when I was perched on a lap or held upright, my face was tilted away from the person holding me, my arms reaching toward something out of the camera’s viewfinder. Flipping back to the cover, I looked to see if I’d skipped a page, wondering whether I’d missed earlier photographs, or even whether I remembered ever seeing any. One in a crib, perhaps, or at my baptism. I suppose being the fifth child made those sorts of pictures redundant. I suppose I should have been happy that I hadn’t been dressed in my brothers’ hand-me-downs.

  Standing, I took the rest of the albums from the box and placed them on the table in numerical order. These were Mimi’s albums, the same ones she’d kept on the low shelves in her bedroom and allowed me to pore over when I was a girl, the pages chronicling my life like a colorized memoir without words. Mimi told me it was important to remember my happy childhood, to be able to pluck out memories to smooth over rough patches once I reached adulthood.

  I wondered why she’d sent these, and why there’d been no note. From the haphazard way they were placed inside the box, it almost seemed like she’d been rushed. I imagined her, her blond hair half up with her pink foam rollers, making her decision and acting on it all in the same moment. I’d inherited that from her, I’d always thought, having been the student who finished her homework five minutes before it was due, and who planned to live the rest of her life with a man she’d known for only two months before marrying him.

  I made myself a cup of tea and sat down with the first album, then paged my way through each one, my face beginning to hurt when I realized how much I’d been smiling. I paused at the photographs of Lucy, my dachshund-terrier mix, who’d been rescued from a wet street when I was seven. My mother and I had almost hit her in the car as she huddled shivering in the middle of the road, her sweet brown eyes imploring.

  “I think she needs to go home with us,” I’d said, trying to keep my voice from rising in excitement, as if those words weren’t the most important words I’d ever said to my mother.

  “Ava, why on earth would you say such a thing?” Mama hated dogs and took every opportunity to tell us. They shed and they smelled, and—the worst sin—they might dig up the garden.

  My mind skidded and raced, trying to come up with a compelling reason that would make my mother get out of the car instead of driving past the trembling ball of fur. Then I remembered something my third-grade teacher had taught us, and though I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant, it had sounded profound at the time. “Because sometimes we have to be a hero and do the right thing, even if it’s just for one person and even if nobody else notices.” I paused. “Even if that person is a dog,” I’d added, my fingers crossed tightly as I willed my mother to say yes.

  She’d given me a peculiar look, her eyes bright and shining and her face speckled by the shadows of the raindrops on the windshield. Her hands had tightened on the steering wheel for a tiny moment, and then, looking at me one more time, she opened the door and stepped out into the rain without even opening an umbrella. Of all the things that happened that night, that was the oddest. Mama always got her hair done on Wednesdays, and that had been Wednesday night, and I couldn’t believe she’d ruined her hairdo in the rain to go pick up a dog because I’d asked her to.

  Luckily, Lucy hadn’t been in the mood to run, because I don’t think my mother would have chased after her. But afterward, even after Lucy had dug up Mama’s tulip bulbs or peed on the carpet, it was at Mama’s feet Lucy sat while we watched television at night, and it had been my mother who would sneak table scraps to the little dog—something forbidden to the rest of us—during meals. When Lucy died thirteen years later, I don’t remember who’d cried harder—Mama or me.

  I heard Matthew’s footsteps on the stairs, then leaned into him as he stood behind my chair and put his hands on my shoulders. After kissing me good morning, he looked at the album spread open on the table.

  “Nice haircut,” he said, pointing to my junior-year school picture.

  I slapped his hand. “Hey, perms were popular then.”

  “Where did these come from?” he asked as he made himself a cup of coffee from the new single-serve machine I’d bought. I’d made the decision to replace the coffeemaker after Tish mentioned that the old one had been her wedding gift to Matthew and Adrienne.

  “Mimi sent them. They were in that box you brought in.” I jerked my chin in the direction of the empty box.

  He sat down with his coffee
and slid his hand over mine. “I have to get to work, but leave the albums out. I want to look at them when I get back.” He squeezed my hand. “I can’t wait to see your baby pictures.”

  I couldn’t help the silly grin that sprouted on my face, a regular occurrence since the two pregnancy tests I’d taken had shown two promising and very solid pink plus signs. “Why? So you can laugh at my hairstyles?”

  “No. So I can picture what our baby will look like.”

  I frowned, remembering the missing baby photos. “The albums start when I was a toddler—I’ll have to ask Mimi if there are any older ones. But I’m sure there’s enough material for you to laugh at.”

  “Good,” he said, before draining his cup and standing. “I’m going to be late if traffic’s bad. If I decide to come home tonight, I’ll call you.”

  I slid my chair back and stood. “Don’t. I’ll be fine, really. I’ll be better than fine knowing you’re not driving across the bridge at night after a long day of patients.”

  “What’s this?” Matthew was peering into the bottom of the box, where I’d left a layer of wadded newspaper on the bottom. Leaning over, he reached inside and, after a brief rustling noise, brought up something small and pink.

  “My dress,” I said, feeling almost sick that I might have thrown it out with the box. I took the tiny crocheted garment in my hands, smelling the cedar chest Mimi had kept it in.

  “I don’t think it still fits,” Matthew said, his laughing eyes making a mockery of his serious face.

  I smirked. “This was made by Mimi’s grandmother, and there’s a picture of her wearing it, and my mom wearing it, and one of me—all when we were about two years old. Their pictures are framed in the hallway at my parents’ house.” I paused, feeling the old hurt again. “There’s a space on the wall for mine, but for some reason Mama never hung my picture. I think Mimi stuck it in one of the albums.”