He had the good sense to let it drop. “Jenny tracked me down through the lawyer,” he said. “She wants to open up Evermore again, although it’s a shocking mess. It would take a crew, but she doesn’t want anyone here but us. She’s firm on that. She won’t let her mother and Dr. Baker on the property. They came by when I first got here. Estelle still wants to tear it down. She says she’ll sell the contents to antiquity dealers, auction off every piece inside. The land alone is worth a fortune now. They’ve been quarrelling for twelve years straight, it seems. Doesn’t matter, because Jenny owns everything. But now Jenny’s sick, and Estelle says she isn’t competent.”
“Estelle used to say the same thing about Marigold. Maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with Jenny that she needs a caregiver,” I said. “Raymond Delquist said he wasn’t authorized to give me any additional information. That’s how he put it.”
“Raymond is a good man and he does what Jenny says. As for what’s wrong with her, it goes back to before she was born. Estelle took some drugs so she wouldn’t have miscarriages, but those drugs have ended up giving Jenny cancer in her cervix and uterus. They didn’t catch it soon enough because she refused to go for regular tests. She said she didn’t want doctors touching her. It’s spreading all through her now.” Art was more like his old self then, long pauses between his thoughts, looking at me to see if I understood. But my face only puzzled him so he explained more, as though that would help. “Jenny wants the gate locked all the time. She doesn’t want any visitors.” We continued our walk. “You should be prepared, Fancy. She looks aged far, far beyond her years. And she goes by Agatha now. You get used to calling her that but it’s weird at first. I’ve been here for two weeks. If you call her Jenny she won’t even acknowledge you are in the room.”
“I see. Well, Agatha’s paying me enough I’m happy to call her whatever she wants, and looking after people is what I’m trained to do.”
“I hope so, because she’s sick, Fancy. She’s doing okay right now, though. Oh, and brace yourself … she’s doing all the cooking. She says she never cooked in her life but it’s never too late to learn something new.” Art chuckled. “How’s your mother? I hear she’s sick.”
“I don’t know how Ma is. I can do the cooking. And look after Agatha.”
The big house was not as I remembered it. The paint was peeling and the shingles were covered in bushy moss. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stone gargoyles hanging there on the corners of the third floor. Most of the windows were boarded up. The grass was waist high and the gardens were lost in a sea of weeds. Thick ivy covered the walls.
The weather is hard on a house that goes unattended for twelve years. It looked derelict. A sea of blue lupins covered the front grounds and flowed around the house. Art put his hand on my arm. I looked at him and he was pointing. Little blue butterflies were flitting about on the blossoms.
I held out my hand hoping a butterfly might come to me but they only fluttered by on the breeze. “I named my daughter after them butterflies, Melissa Blue. We just use Melissa though for there ain’t nothing blue about her. She’s a joyous thing.”
There are still Melissa Blues here now, although I am no young woman. It is a sanctuary for the butterflies and for me as well. They say there are few places left where the Melissa Blue breeds but they do here at Petal’s End, where the lupins grow.
Art did not try to force me to discuss anything, as confusing as it must have been following my meandering comments. He was the kind of person who can love the unlovable, and who can accept the unacceptable. He understood without me needing to explain. “It’s a pretty name for a little girl. I’m sorry, Fancy, for all you’ve gone through. For what happened. I didn’t think it could get any worse than out there on the island. Or finding Charlie that day. But I suppose it can always get worse.” Art told me he’d learned interesting meditation and self-relaxation techniques that could help. He would teach me.
I took his hand. “I got no need of that. But there ain’t no need to look glum. Maybe you should try out your psychology on yourself. They had us doing enough of that down in the hospital. I agreed to come here so I wouldn’t have to go banging on any more bongo drums like some stupid hippie. Pomeline dying was a tragedy but what’s past is the past. This job’s for getting Melissa back, you see, Art? And I mean to make the most of it. We can only help Jenny now. There’s nothing we can do for Pomeline. You got to remember that.”
“I see,” he said. “I see, Fancy.” But Art didn’t look like he could see at all. He hugged me tight and I was like a stick in his arms. He only cried for a moment, his tears stopping as he kissed me on the forehead. “Everything’s going to be all right, Fancy.”
“Didn’t Yvette used to say something about that?”
“All fruits ripe, she used to say.”
Art didn’t sound as though he believed himself a single bit. Maybe he wanted to, but in the same way he wanted to believe in the moon illusion, that it really was bigger when it rose. I kissed both his cheeks.
And, my dear, you see, when I got to Petal’s End I really believed if I did the right thing perhaps I’d capture back a bit of what I’d lost.
4.
Miss Agatha Parker
WE CAME in the grand front entrance. There was a tinkle. Pomeline’s wind bells were hanging off the roof of the verandah. The blue and yellow flowers painted on them looked as perfect as when I had first seen them twelve years earlier. Art said Jenny had him put the wind bells up when she found them on a hook in the Water House. Hers were hung in one of the willows by the pond in Evermore.
Art held the door for me, and I tried not to make it obvious as I glanced in the warped mirror still there by the door frame. If he noticed, he didn’t let on. There was only a reflection of forest and sky. I realized I had been holding my breath as I walked over the threshold. We went through the great hall where much of the furniture was covered in white sheets. The air was dusty and dank, the way it is when the windows haven’t been opened in years and the sunlight has not reached inside. There were dustballs on the floor and cobwebs on the light fixtures. The door to the music room was closed and there was an empty vase in the centre of the enormous round hall table.
When Art and I came into the kitchen, me with my suitcase, the scent of lupins still in my nose, Jenny was there stirring a big pot. She’d made a soup and she had a strawberry-rhubarb pie in the oven. The kitchen looked the same for the most part, except it was a disastrous mess, which I had never seen in all the time I’d spent there as a child. Loretta and I kept it tidy, and I learned to cook and clean as I went. Jenny had the dirty dishes piled, flour dusted all about the table, walls and floor. She stood on a wooden stool beaming like she was going to win a prize at the country fair. She had her face made up just as Marigold always had, with dark eyeliner and bright lipstick, crooked, as though she hadn’t thought to use a magnifying glass like her grandmother had. Jenny handed me a cup of iced herbal tea, an elixir for any ailment she claimed. It smelled revolting. I set it on the table and said I wasn’t thirsty.
“Off with you, Fancy Mosher,” Jenny said. “Get yourself used to the place. I’m making your welcome supper.” She wiped her hands on the great big apron. She wanted to be useful, she said, talking like her cousin Harry. It was understandable, seeing she come from a line of people who never did much that was useful in their lives combined. She planned on redeeming herself, she proclaimed from her small pulpit.
Art carried my suitcase upstairs to my old room, which I had requested, and on the way up I asked him why we were here, as it seemed to me Jenny just wanted company. She looked frail and flimsy but not like she was on death’s doorstep. It was fine with me, I said, if she wanted to pay for company. It was her money. Art just shrugged, never the kind to say nothing bad. He told me to settle in and went back down to the kitchen.
I thought it might bring up painful emotions being back in my room but it didn’t. The pictures I had made at school were st
ill on the walls, but other than that bit of personality it was just the empty chest of drawers and the bookshelf, the single bed, a chair in the corner and the window looking south over the property, over the carriage houses and off to the stone walls of Evermore. I saw the trees rising from behind the walled garden. The lace curtains were rotting and tearing in places.
The first thing I did when Art left was look for the letter from Grampie. I crawled under the bed and found the floorboard, the dust tickling my nose. The metal hook was stiff and I gave it a pull and the board opened up without so much as a creak. But the space underneath was empty. The lavender and peony sachet was there but it was scentless. I had a sudden attack of grief for I was sure I had left the letter, but then, in that moment, I was not at all sure. My mind was confused and I wanted it empty and clear. It was a tricky thing sorting through the past. The anguish it was causing me to go back far in time wasn’t worth the bother. In the closet, in the same old spot, I found the box of my mother’s old embroidery materials and the frames I’d taken from the third floor that day when Margaret and I had interrupted Pomeline and Dr. Baker’s tryst. I didn’t have much to unpack, just some clothes and a small pink sweater of Melissa’s.
When I came downstairs they didn’t hear me, and Art and Jenny were having a serious conversation in the foyer. Art kept pointing at the stairs, and he finally looked over and gave a little cough when he saw me standing there.
Art took me outside for a walk around. We didn’t go into Evermore but he showed me how he’d started on the gardens around the front—in the two weeks he’d been there he hadn’t done much to the house yet. Jenny was only using the library and the day room and the dining room. The music room was closed up, and so was the parlour.
The welcome supper almost killed me. I swear it was Holy Mother Mercy who kept me from projectile vomiting in that formal dining room. I insisted Jenny let me help serve, and when we came into the dining room Jenny was sitting comfy as can be at the head of the table with candles lit, draped in heirloom jewels and a faded party dress that was too big for her. Jenny was dwarfed by the massive room. She held out her hand to me, as though she forgot meeting me in the kitchen earlier. Stale face powder and the acrid scent of lily of the valley perfume billowed all around her. It was a late supper, and while it was still plenty light outside it was dark in there. The walls were painted a midnight blue, and the buffet and china cabinets were dark wood. Huge portraits of dead Parkers loomed on the walls as we sat there slurping on her soup, which consisted almost exclusively of salt and water. The vegetables had turned to mush. The biscuits were so hard you could have broke the windows with them.
After we choked the meal down, Art served the pie. Jenny said she’d added lemon to give it some zest, just like Loretta did. It made your lips pucker like you was a mackerel on a hook. The crust was so tough I swear she cut out a cardboard box and baked that. What fine cooking, we lied to her, and she beamed. At least the tea was hot and strong. She offered to get me sugar cookies she’d made and I said, “Dear God no, Agatha, I’m full enough I think I might perish in this here chair.”
Jenny and Art each had a glass of wine. Jenny was taking pills and said she shouldn’t drink too much. Or at all, I said, and she just waved her hand like I was a mote of dust in the air. They didn’t offer me none. It was understood I didn’t drink. I had no trouble with other people drinking, though. They both got giggly and talked about how fine it was to have me join them, like we was at a resort. I thought about my daughter on a constant loop, that’s what I did, although it did feel reassuring to be surrounded by the familiar. There was some comfort in it, being back. By then it was twilight and the candles had almost burned down.
They toasted, and I joined with my glass of water. “To friendship,” Art said.
“To old times,” Jenny said, slurping her wine with the same disgusting table manners she’d had as a child, which no one had ever dared reprimand her for. Art talked about how he wanted to make stepping stones with some of the broken china, probably so we didn’t have to sit there in the quiet of the house like the past was going to crawl out of the walls and bite us on the necks. Jenny said she’d knocked a whole pile of dishes over when she was getting used to the kitchen. Art glanced at me then. I knew he was thinking about Grampie’s teacup pieces out in the Wishing Pool. One thing was clear—I wasn’t seeing no dead like Grampie, and there was no need to speak of it.
I slept deep and long that first night, only waking one time when a night bird sang out. The smell of the room was familiar and I fell back into a heavy slumber.
On my first morning at Petal’s End I awoke early and headed to the kitchen. I poked around and saw Art had stocked the pantry. I ate cereal and then began making dough for bread. If I could let it rise I could punch it down and rise it again and bake it before the weather outside heated up too much for the oven to be on. The bread pans had been moved and I rooted around and found them in the cupboards. It was then I noticed pictures sticking out from the bottom of the cupboard stand, photos that must have been misplaced years ago. There was a young woman picking water lilies while her child played by the side of the pond. It took me a moment to recognize that it was Ma and John Lee. It choked me up seeing them, Ma up to her knees in the water, surrounded by all them pretty flowers, and John Lee on the grass by the edge. They was looking at each other, her smiling, and John Lee’s head thrown back in a giggle. Ma, younger than I was at that moment. Ma, when she was well, as Loretta had encouraged me to remember her. There was another photo of her with a very young John Lee down on the seashore, him toddling about while she picked through the seaweed, harvesting dulse.
Melissa adored water lilies. Being near a summertime pond made me feel close to her. I became determined to pick them water lilies to remind me of her, and why I was back to Petal’s End with the absurd job I had found myself in, looking after Jenny who was weirder than she’d ever been, and Art who’d gone weird in his own way. My attention was fixed on having my daughter back. No men, no drinking the wine or sherry Jenny enjoyed every evening. Not giving in to temptation. It was living life on the straight and narrow, like I was circling round a picture frame, seeing what I wanted in the centre and trying to slip inside with it. Me and Melissa together. Finding the photos of Ma and John Lee made me determined that things would not end up that way for us. I cried and cried over that picture for I couldn’t bear how it was making me think about my own daughter. I would not stray, I promised myself.
After I had set the bread to rise I went out to Evermore, but it was nothing like my unchanged bedroom. The walled garden was a tangled-up jungle. The stone walls were the same but it was now a shadow version of the garden I once knew. Of course Jenny had decreed no cut flowers in the house, but I could not resist the temptation to pick the hardy peonies growing happy and splendid without human touch. The pond was dense with fragrant white water lilies. Jenny’s pretty glass wind bells were ringing sweet. It was a picture-perfect day. Some of the showy pink lilies bloomed farther out near the swan house on the centre island. Even picking the white water lilies close to the edge of the pond was tricky, but I wasn’t about to go in the water with the swans lurking about. I bent out as far as I could and grabbed one by the stem. As I leaned over the glassy pond I screamed, for there was a grimacing face looking up at me from the smooth surface. The water rippled as I fell back on the bank. But the water calmed and it seemed it was only my dark empty eyes staring up from between the lilies. I was spooking myself. I could not trust my own sight. I decided to speak not a word of this to Art or Jenny, because if I told them I was imagining eyes in the water they might go and tell the lawyer, who might report me to the hospital. Then the social worker would know, and that would be the end of me getting Melissa back.
To prove to myself that there was nothing in the water, I tried again. I’d picked lilies with Ma so I was a professional harvester, I reminded myself. But when I grabbed another water lily my fingers were shaking and slipper
y. I didn’t pinch the stem real hard as Ma had always instructed. When I tugged it was like another hand was reaching out from the water and pulling me splashing and wailing into the pond. Once I was in there, the water tingled on my skin. I drifted there on my back. It was quiet but for the birds singing. Then I heard a horrible gurgling noise. Sure enough it was old Sweet William and Iris White followed by a couple of other great big swans and a few babies. The mute swan is an ancient beast. Such long-lived, mean-spirited creatures, their only redeeming feature is their loyalty to each other. Their descendants are still paddling in the pond in Evermore to this day. I fled the pond just as Sweet William starting flapping his wings and skimming over the water like some lunatic set on bashing my face in. I dashed off with my armful of water lilies over the ragged path Art had hacked away. I could hear the faint sound of the wind bells behind me.
After that, those first days passed smooth and steady, each one a card laid down by some expert hand we could not see. Jenny said every evening how pleased she was having me there to help, even though she really wouldn’t let me do much for her. Jenny was looking at me queerly from time to time but it didn’t seem out of the ordinary, not for someone like her. And in fairness, she had brought me here out of a mental hospital so she had a right to keep her big myopic eye on me. After a few weeks of her observations it was clear she was watching for more than me being delusional or talking to myself. She was always muttering under her breath, and this give her a big range for normal.
One morning we was having coffee on the verandah and her eyes were intent on me with every sip I took.
The Memento Page 29
