by Karen White
With no updates about my mother, and none expected for at least another day, I left the hospital and went home with Ceecee and Bitty, despite my father’s hopeful glances and Bitty’s pointed suggestion that I stay with him.
As a consolation, Ceecee invited him for dinner and fixed a large supper of fried chicken, butter beans, and biscuits that nobody had any appetite for, and set the dining room table with her best china and heirloom silver. She and Bitty kept the conversation rolling. Considering the talk was all about my life in New York and I answered mostly in single sentences, it didn’t take long before we were staring at our still-full plates in silence, moving the food around with the occasional scrape of a fork or knife against Ceecee’s Limoges.
Finally, I pushed my plate away after just a few bites, my appetite gone while my stomach twisted with worry over my mother. “Who’s Ellis?” Out of habit, I addressed the question to Bitty. Of the three, she would answer the most directly.
But nobody spoke. My father looked down at his plate; Bitty shared a long glance with Ceecee, and I knew that I had just inserted a pin in the fragile eggshell of my mother’s past. The past I’d selfishly been blissfully ignorant about until I’d seen my mother lying broken beneath a hole in the floor at Carrowmore.
“You really should eat some more,” Ceecee said, standing and retrieving the bowl of potato salad. She scooped out a large spoonful and dumped it on top of the untouched pile already on my plate. “I know how much you love my potato salad. And there’s my mud brownies—the ones you used to eat a whole plate of, remember? I always make sure I have a batch in the freezer, just in case you ever decide on a last-minute visit.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. Ceecee always used food to make things better, to soothe me, like a thick grout to cover the cracks in my life. But grout gets old and crumbles, and the cracks are still there, showing themselves when you least expect them. Like now.
“I’m really too worried about Mama to eat. Maybe later if I get hungry.” I turned back to Bitty. “Who is Ellis?”
Again, no one spoke. Finally, Bitty said, “Where did you hear that name?”
“I didn’t—I saw it. It was on a ribbon—the one I remembered Mama putting in the Tree of Dreams a long time ago. When I was just a little girl. I took it out to see what it was. I’d forgotten all about it until yesterday. When we . . . when we found her.” I didn’t tell them what else was on the ribbon. I’d already shared enough of a secret that wasn’t mine to share.
“Ellis Alton was your mama’s first husband.” Bitty said it quietly, as if she didn’t really want me to hear.
Daddy was still looking down at his plate. All I could hear was the ticking of the clock in the hall and the rush of blood in my ears. I tried to put into a single sentence all the words that swirled around my head, but they formed a logjam in my throat, and I couldn’t speak.
“She was only seventeen,” Bitty continued. “And Ellis was nineteen. He was the love of her life.”
Daddy took a sharp intake of breath, but Bitty didn’t look ashamed for having said it. I was glad he was having trouble with this conversation. So was I. “What happened?”
“He was drafted.” That was Ceecee, her back to us as she arranged brownies on a plate. “It was 1969. The war in Vietnam . . . He never thought twice about doing his duty. He went proudly and willingly, and it broke Ivy’s heart.”
“How long were they married?” My voice was reed thin, like I couldn’t find enough air to push out the words.
“Not long.” Ceecee put the plate of brownies in the middle of the table. I could smell the chocolate. I remembered what they tasted like, how good they’d made me feel. At least for as long as it took to swallow, and then I’d feel empty again.
“He went MIA only four months after being deployed.” Ceecee sat down and reached for a brownie. “It broke Ivy. Cut her in two. Sometimes I think it would have been easier on her if he’d been killed outright. I think it was the not knowing that got to her. Nowadays I would have taken her for counseling, but back in the day, that wasn’t something people did. We just sort of said, buck up and suck it in. But that doesn’t work when your heart is crushed and you’re bleeding from the inside.”
“Larkin . . .” Daddy reached his hand toward me, but I didn’t take it. I couldn’t. And we both knew why.
I folded my arms across my chest and forced myself to look into my father’s face. “Why have I never heard about this?”
Ceecee took her time cutting a brownie into small bites. “Your grandfather and I decided it would be easier to forget if we never talked about him. To let Ivy heal. She’d already had enough sadness in her life.”
“You mean because her mother died when Mama was so young?”
Bitty and Ceecee rose at the same time, bringing plates and food back to the kitchen.
“Yes,” Bitty said, pausing in the doorway and staring down at the bowl of potato salad as if wondering why it was in her hands. “It was probably the worst thing we could have done, but, like Ceecee said, there wasn’t a lot of discussion back then about mental health. So we just swept it all under the rug and pretended we couldn’t see the lump.”
“Until someone tripped on it.” Daddy stood and picked up his plate. Something in his voice made me look at him, really see him for the first time in years. It could have been the overhead lighting or the lack of sleep since Mama’s accident, but he seemed haggard, his skin blanched and without elasticity.
I followed him into the kitchen. “Did you know? When you married her?”
He nodded slowly. “Ceecee told me. Your mama and I never really talked about it. Not until the Vietnam War Memorial was completed. It was 1982—I remember because she was pregnant with you. On the news, they were showing all the names inscribed on the wall, and she . . .” He stopped.
“She what?” I demanded.
“She told me that she’d never love anyone like she’d loved Ellis Alton.”
His eyes were bleak as I held my breath, waiting for him to say more.
Ceecee came and took the plate from his hands. “It’s still no excuse for what you did, Mack.” She walked into the kitchen, leaving my father and me alone, his eyes on my face.
“I never thought my actions would cause you to leave. I’m so sorry.”
I closed my eyes briefly. “It’s not what made me leave, Daddy. But it’s one of the things that made it easy to stay away.” I stood suddenly. “I need some air,” I said. “This is all really whacked, you know. Families shouldn’t keep these things secret. Despite popular opinion, it will not make the problem go away.”
I almost ran to the back door before throwing it open to stand on the porch, my hands on my hips as I sucked in deep breaths of warm river-scented air.
Someone touched my arm, and I knew it was Bitty. She’d always been the peacemaker, the person who could bridge Ceecee’s black-and-white world with my own messy one. “Do you need some company?”
“No. I really need to be alone right now.”
“I get it.” I heard her fumbling with something. I turned, and saw her pulling out a cigarette and lighter.
“Does Ceecee know you still smoke?”
She grunted, holding the cigarette between her lips. “That woman doesn’t miss a thing. She just prefers not to mention it if it’s something she’d rather not discuss.”
I nodded in the near darkness, feeling the sting of my first mosquito bite since my arrival. I slapped my arm, hoping I’d killed it and that it had hurt. “Like what ‘I know about Margaret’ means? Am I going to have to wait until Mama wakes up to ask her?”
Bitty exhaled. I smelled the acrid scent of burned tobacco and paper. “That’s probably best. Ceecee never talks about Margaret. Never.”
I looked up at the wok call of a chunky night heron that was swooping low over the water before landing on a dock piling. “Ne
ither does Mama. But she was only two when her mother died. She probably doesn’t remember her at all.”
I faced Bitty, realizing there was so much to that story I didn’t know. I’d never asked. I’d never thought to ask. “How did she die?”
Bitty coughed before drawing deeply on her cigarette, the glowing tip creating small pinpoints of light in her pupils. “Fire.” She turned her head to the side and blew out the smoke. “The fire at Carrowmore happened the morning after Hurricane Hazel. The power was out. They say Margaret must have lit a candle or something. So very sad. For all of us, but especially for little Ivy.”
I thought for a moment, trying to picture my mother as a baby, trying to understand what it had been like to be a motherless little girl. “Where was Mama during the fire?”
The night heron took off from the piling, spiraled upward over the water, then glided silently over the house and out of sight. Bitty took another drag and coughed again. “These are questions you’d best ask her when she wakes up. It’s not my story to tell. Of course, you could ask Ceecee, but I’m guessing she’ll tell you the same thing.”
“And nobody has ever thought to tell me about all this?” I blinked hard, trying to believe it was the cigarette smoke stinging my eyes, not the imagined scent of a house on fire with a woman inside. My grandmother.
“You never asked.” She blew air out of her nose, the sound like a soft snort. “Ceecee always did a good job of protecting you and Ivy, making sure you wouldn’t feel any of the pain in life. The jury’s still out on whether that was a good plan.”
Bitty took a long drag of her cigarette and added, her voice raspy, “I’d suggest you start smoking if I didn’t know it was so unhealthy. Ceecee in one of her moods always makes me need a cigarette.”
I thought of her coughing and the ragged sound of her voice, and I almost told her that she should quit. But I’d been telling her that since I was a little girl, and it didn’t seem to matter. Bitty was one of the most fiercely independent people I had ever known, intent on doing what she wanted.
I turned around and faced the river, listening to the faint clanging of halyards against metal masts from the nearby marina. The sound gave me an unsettled feeling, like an unfinished sentence. A constant reminder of where home was. Even in New York, surrounded by two rivers, I never felt that way. Maybe the salt water that ran through my veins recognized the East and Hudson rivers as foreign entities, incompatible with my blood type.
“I . . . I think I need some time alone to think.”
“I get it. But while you’re sorting things out, I want you to remember something important. Regardless of how annoying and unsympathetic she can seem, everything Ceecee has ever done has come from a heart so big, you could park a shrimp boat in it and still have room for a kayak or two. Her whole life has been you and your mama, and you can’t fault a person for loving too much.”
It seemed as if she was warning me against rushing to judgment about some fault in Ceecee’s reasoning that I didn’t yet know. I wasn’t sure I could take one more surprise or disappointment. Not tonight.
“Tell Ceecee I won’t be long.” I heard Bitty draw on the cigarette again as I moved toward the porch steps.
“Larkin?”
I stopped and faced her in the growing darkness. “Yes?”
“I’m glad you’re back. We all are. We all missed you something terrible—your mama most of all.”
I took a step forward, then stopped, lacing my hands in front of me. “Yeah, well, she’s one of the reasons why I stayed away.” I listened to the silence, almost hearing Bitty’s unasked question, but unwilling to answer it.
“Good night,” I said as I stepped down onto the lawn, then walked around to the front of the house, and headed down Front Street in the direction of Prince Street. Mabry had said she lived next to her parents, and even without knowing the address, I was pretty sure I could guess which house would be hers. The yard would be immaculate, with beds full of multihued flowers that weren’t meant to go together, but they would look fabulous and coordinated just because Mabry dictated it.
But I didn’t want to see Mabry or Bennett. I’d already reasoned with myself that my mother would be on the mend in the next few days. I could ask my father why he and Bennett were together when they arrived at Carrowmore. The knowledge of whatever it was couldn’t possibly be worth the awkward awfulness of knocking on Mabry’s door.
It was almost full dark when I set out. The pretty overhead streetlights cast a welcome glow as I passed under live oaks as large and imposing as the ones I remembered from my childhood, as familiar as Ceecee’s brownies. A car passed, the windows down, a song trailing in its wake. I recognized “It’s My Life” by Bon Jovi. From the album Crush. 2000. I rolled my eyes at myself. Some things would never change.
I reached Orange Street and paused. Instead of turning right to go toward Mabry’s house, I turned left, heading toward Harborwalk—the wooden boardwalk that ran alongside the Sampit River and traversed nearly the full length of Georgetown’s historic district. Even though it was the number one destination for tourists, it was a beautiful spot on the river to shop and eat and people watch for locals and visitors alike. As soon as we’d been allowed to go by ourselves, I’d sat on a bench there with Mabry and Bennett, eating ice cream and making up dramatic stories about the people we’d seen, their hidden lives and dark secrets.
Mabry said I gave her nightmares sometimes, that that was the true mark of a storyteller, to make people believe something made-up was real. It was Bennett who’d first said I should write novels. Mabry said I’d be good at picking out the music when they were made into movies, since I knew every song ever written. Like everything back then, I’d believed it all possible.
There were more people on Harborwalk, mostly tourists, although it was still early in the season. Snowbirds from up north found the mild Lowcountry winters preferable to shoveling snow, though they’d usually head back before the South Carolina sun became too hot.
My feet seemed to know where they were going, and I found myself in front of Gabriel’s Heavenly Ice Cream & Soda, one of many eateries perched between Harborwalk and Front Street, their colorful awnings like a happy wave on warm days.
I stopped inside the large rear window, smelling the familiar sugary sweetness. Three small café tables were still set against the wall, just as I remembered, two with couples enjoying what I’d always thought was the best ice cream in the world—not that I’d had a lot of experience from my limited travels outside Georgetown County. On the rear wall was a painted mural of a local scene, the adjacent walls still a pale yellow, decorated with photographs of dolphins, the edges beginning to curl around their thumbtacks.
And there, behind the curved glass counter that covered the bins of ice cream, was Gabriel Jones, his skin as dark as I remembered, his black hair now mostly gray. But his smile as he spoke with a customer was as large and warm as it had been the first time I’d come there with my mama and daddy as a little girl.
The door was propped open to allow in the cool river breeze, and I stepped inside, waiting against the wall for Gabriel to finish with his customers. A tall man peered into one of the cases, his hand resting protectively on the back of a petite brunette standing next to him, both focused on their flavor selections.
I didn’t recognize the woman, but there was something about the man, something about the way his broad shoulders filled out his shirt and the way his sandy brown hair flopped over his forehead as he leaned down, his cheek very close to the woman’s.
In the way a person can tell when they’re being stared at, he turned his head to look at me. That’s when I knew I’d been right. I did know him. Had known him almost as long as I’d known Mabry and Bennett. Except Jackson Porter and I had never been friends. Ever.
His gaze settled on me for a brief moment, long enough for me to see that his boyish good looks had morphe
d into strong, handsome features, like Christopher Reeve’s in the old Superman movies. But of course they had. People like Jackson didn’t allow themselves to grow soft with age.
He frowned slightly, as if wondering whether he should recognize me, then turned back to the woman. It was stupid, really, the rush of heat to my face, the not-so-distant feeling of humiliation. Maybe I found it hard to believe that someone who was such an important part of the worst day of my life didn’t even recognize me.
I waited, my mouth dry and aching for a root beer float to help push down the shame and embarrassment. Gabriel finished their order, took their cash, then waited for them to leave, Jackson holding open the door for his companion.
“Miss Larkin,” Gabriel said, beaming as if he’d invented my name. “Just as pretty as you ever were.” Before he could make it out from behind the counter, he paused to look up at the ceiling speaker, which was playing something smooth and mellow. He’d only ever played music from the decades right after World War II, saying all the modern stuff was poison to the mind and an affront to his ears.
“‘I’ll Never Stop Loving You.’ Doris Day.”
He must have heard the quiver in my voice, because when he reached me, he already had his arms stretched out. “You don’t pay him no mind.” He jerked his head toward the door. “Some people are too stupid to know any better.”
I started to cry—big painful sobs for my mother, for the good parts of the old me I’d gotten rid of along with the bad parts, and for my shallow, weak heart, which was still infatuated with Jackson Porter after all these years.
eight
Ceecee
