The Cutting Season

by Attica Locke

  “What?”

  “She didn’t see any blood, Caren.”

  “I showed it to her, Eric,” she said. “It was on her shirt.”

  “Are you sure it was blood?”

  His tone was gentle, an exaggerated show of patience for a woman whose motives it was clear he no longer trusted.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Caren.”

  “I know what I saw, Eric.”

  “But, Christ, if it really was blood on her shirt, why the hell did you wash it?”

  “I just panicked,” she said, which was a lie. But it was the only sentiment she thought he would understand. She knew exactly what she’d done, had handled the task with care and relative calm. There wasn’t much in her life she could completely control, but her daughter’s laundry was under her jurisdiction, she’d decided. Eric sighed again, sinking onto the side of the bed, Morgan’s shirt still balled in his hands.

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “Yes, you did. You knew if you called me with this, if Morgan was in any kind of trouble, that I would come down here. You knew I would drop everything.”

  “You think I made all this up just so I could see you again?”

  Eric looked up, his eyes meeting hers, but he didn’t say anything, and his silence revealed his suspicions.

  “A woman was murdered, Eric!”

  “I know that.”

  “There were police here, and they were talking to our daughter. I was scared, Eric, and, yes, if I’m being honest, I’m glad you’re here,” she said, which, on its own, was hard enough to admit. “Why in the hell should I have to go through all this alone?”

  “I have never asked you to raise Morgan alone. Let’s be clear about that.”

  He stared at the shirt in his hands. “That was your choice, Caren.”

  Outside her bedroom window, the light was moving toward dawn. The sky was slate gray, and there were droplets of rain dotting the glass. Eric clasped his hands around Morgan’s shirt. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He was momentarily lost in his thoughts.

  Finally, he set the laundered shirt gingerly atop her quilt.

  “This is weird for me,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Being here with you,” he said. “I mean, I’m getting married in three weeks.”

  He glanced down at his hands, resting them as a set in the space between his bare knees. “You’ve been dragging your feet about getting Morgan’s plane ticket for the wedding. You haven’t made any plans to get her there. And I don’t know what to think, what you must be feeling.” He looked up, waiting for her to tell him what she was feeling. She didn’t, however, and in the end Eric seemed to have expected this. He rose from the bed, leaving the shirt behind. “I just want to move on, Caren.” Fine, she thought.

  “I’ll buy her plane ticket tomorrow.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, heading for the door. She could sense his dissatisfaction. But it was only long after he was gone that it occurred to her that maybe Eric had wanted something more from her, needed it even, especially now, on the eve of his marriage to another woman. Maybe, she thought, he had his own reason for coming all the way down to Louisiana, blood or no blood.

  He had always said he didn’t blame her for what happened.

  And she supposed she was meant to feel grateful for that.

  But, truth be told, she had always very quietly considered his lack of rage over her behavior, what she’d done, his own act of betrayal. He had not taken the news like a man so much as he had taken it like a lawyer, with a level head and a clear tone of voice. He asked for few details but seemed comforted to know that it had happened only once, with a man she hardly knew, a guest passing through her hotel. Inside of fifteen minutes, he was holding her hand, owning up to his own bad behavior—the way he often used work as a shield, holing up in their extra bedroom with stacks of files most nights, just so he could have an hour or two to himself, something that, on the other side of becoming a father, he’d come to cherish more than sleep. Parenthood had turned out to be a costly miracle. It gave them a beautiful girl, yes, and a vaulted perch upon which to see the world, to sit and reflect on the nature of pure grace, the surprises life can bring. But it took from them, too. Eric was a new lawyer at a prestigious firm, working eighty-hour weeks; and Caren was by then managing most of the hotel’s day-to-day operations, the dream of someday returning to law school having been laid aside by motherhood. Whatever of them was left at the end of the day went to Morgan first. She and Eric spent more and more time in their separate corners, their separate roles as her parents. Mothering, she learned the hard way, was about loss as well as love.

  Those were rough years for Caren, right after Morgan’s birth.

  She had taken Helen’s death particularly hard, and having a child so soon after losing her mother had felt almost like a base form of punishment, pointed and cruel.

  Eric repeatedly brought up Chicago as an option, a solution to their overworked lives and a place where they might settle down. His mother could watch Morgan some days. She might offer both of them, but Caren in particular, a guiding hand in parenthood. But the mention of his mother in place of her own only made Caren’s grief thicker, hardening in places to an impenetrable crust. Eric told her almost daily that he hadn’t meant it that way, but by then she wasn’t listening. Any mention of Chicago and she would change the subject, sometimes walking out of the room. Eric grew irritated, then angry, repeatedly accusing her of making things deliberately harder on them, of having no real concept of family—which was as close as he would ever come to commenting on her background.

  This from a man who had yet to propose marriage, she thought.

  She didn’t think it was fair, Eric asking her to move across the country without some kind of commitment, or at least a spoken promise to stay by her side. It was a kernel of resentment that grew into an irrational panic: he was going to eventually leave her, just like her father had left her mother behind. She and Eric were two people who had started out about as far apart in life as a man and a woman could have, and she started to wonder if Eric sensed it, too. The marriage talk had ended almost as soon as Morgan was born. She was starting to worry that her background mattered more than he let on.

  She didn’t even realize how angry she was.

  Only how easy it was to act out.

  Men came through the doors of her hotel every day, dozens by the hour, in fact. She found one from some far corner of the country, Seattle, or maybe it was Boston or Newport. She didn’t remember. Nor did it matter, anyway. There was no way to soften it, to get around what she’d done. It was a stupid and impulsive act, a test with unseen consequences. And she, of all people, should have known better. One of the first things they teach you in law school, in the first week of any decent trial prep course: don’t ever ask a question if you can’t live with the answer.

  The night she told him about the affair, they actually went to bed together, falling asleep in tandem for the first time in months. And then just before dawn the next morning, Morgan starting to stir in the next room, Eric whispered in her ear that he was sorry. It was obvious to him now, and he could finally admit to himself that there was a reason he had never proposed to her after all these years, why he’d never made it official. Lying half-awake in their bed, she listened as he told her that, deep down, if he was being honest with himself, he could admit that he’d always had doubts about whether she was the one. “I don’t blame you, Caren,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  She was lying on her side, facing the wall.

  She remembered feeling numb from the waist down.

  “So that’s it?” she said. “You’re done?”

  “I’m tired, Caren.”

  M
organ called out from her bedroom. She was still sleeping in Pull-Ups, even at five, and needed to be changed first thing. The morning duty was always Caren’s, since Morgan was born, and so she alone walked down the hall to her daughter’s room, helping her pick clothes for school and then starting breakfast. By the time she returned to their bedroom, Eric was already dressed for work. He kissed her, quite tenderly, his breath warm and sweet. It was the look in his eyes that finally broke her, when she finally started to cry. What she saw was relief. In the end, her transgression had cost him nothing. She had given him his way out.

  That was August, 2005.

  Within weeks, Eric, without telling her, went to Chicago for a second interview in the Economic Development Department of then-senator Barack Obama’s hometown office. Eric had grown up in Chicago and had ties to the newly elected freshman senator.

  He blew his cover that weekend, though, calling home to tell Caren he was not meeting a client in Tulsa, as he’d said, but was actually in Chicago. He’d been watching news reports about the hurricane, and he wanted her and Morgan to get out of the city while they still could. Caren, who had grown up near the Gulf (and slept through Category 3 hurricanes), would have stayed in the city, at the Grand Luxe Hotel, where some of her coworkers were bringing their families . . . if Eric hadn’t insisted they leave.

  Two last-minute plane tickets to join him in Chicago seemed extravagant and unnecessary, and things between them were still quite raw. She thought it was best if she stayed down south. She had wrongly assumed that getting a hotel room would be easy. But everything was booked, from the capital to Alexandria, even as far north as Monroe. In the end, they headed west. Caren pulled Morgan out of school and loaded up the Volvo with a single suitcase for both of them, plus a plastic bag with crayons and coloring paper . . . grabbing at the last minute the paisley-covered box of her mother’s things that Lorraine had sent her, setting it on the front seat beside her for the five-hour drive across the state line. They rode out the tail end of Katrina in a motel room outside of Beaumont, Texas, on and off the phone with Eric, neither one of them with any idea that the last evidence of their life together was being washed away as they spoke, Morgan reaching for the phone every few minutes to say hi.

  Eric took that job in Chicago.

  He wanted Morgan with him, but made no specific mention of Caren.

  She asked for time to think about it.

  They stayed in that motel room for days, she and Morgan, with its sage-colored curtains and thick, dusty carpet. Caren made the beds every day and cooked their meals on a small range stove in a corner of the room. A trucker’s special, they called it, a place for people with no real home. They ate grits and butter, fried apples when she could find the right kind, and thick slices of ham on toasted bread—the sort of food her mother used to set aside just for Caren, nights she worked in the kitchen, nights Caren waited up for her. She felt a strange peace there, the whole of her life contained within the four walls of that motel room, her daughter napping on her lap some afternoons.

  “I’m your mother,” she said to her one day, a whisper in her ear as she slept.

  I’m your family, she said.

  They stayed a few more nights, just the two of them, until Caren was finally ready to go home, to the only one she had left. What they had, they packed into the car, heading out early, early in the morning, Caren with that box of her mother’s things riding shotgun beside her. Interstate 10 will take you all the way into New Orleans if you let it, but instead they cut south from Baton Rouge, heading for Ascension and Belle Vie. She had steeled herself for the reunion. She’d prepared herself to hate the place on sight, pointedly refusing to be courted by a pretty picture, or its pretense of antebellum grace. And she made herself a single promise: she would not forget her family’s generations of sweat here, and how trapped she’d felt by that very legacy, growing up in the shade of these trees. Her original contract was for one year. The job paid well and provided a roof over their heads. The plantation was furnished and populated, and she thought it might soften the losses they’d endured, for a while at least. The plan was to sit out for a few months, to stow away in a familiar place, until she could figure what she wanted to do next, what she wanted for her life and for her daughter. It was only supposed to be for one year. But the place got a hold of her, from that first day, the first hour even. And it surprised as much as it confused her to discover that she did not, after all these years, hate the plantation at all, that she could not hate what was now, and maybe always had been, her real home, the way she came into this world.

  14

  Things were tense between her and Eric the next morning, and he said very little as he waited for Morgan to get dressed, even eschewing Letty’s hot, honeyed milk and French toast. Letty didn’t seem to know what to make of them together, Caren and Eric. Each time she caught Caren’s eye across the kitchen, she smiled knowingly, until Caren could hardly stand it anymore, eventually forgoing the idea of a formal breakfast and instead grabbing an apple on her way to work. Eric waited until she was halfway to the door before mentioning his return flight to D.C. that afternoon.

  “You’re leaving?”

  Morgan had just come down the stairs. She was wearing jeans and a pink T-shirt and white socks. It was Saturday, and she didn’t have school, and she’d had it in her mind that she and her dad would be spending the whole day together. Her eyes were doleful and wide, and she let a small leather purse fall with a thud at her feet. She looked back and forth between her mom and her dad, waiting on some kind of an explanation. Letty was bent over the stove, the bangles on her wrist tolling lightly as she stirred a pot of grits. Caren knew she was listening to every word. She wanted to ask her to leave, but had never once in four years made a similar request and to do so now would only draw more attention to the situation, or signal that something was wrong.

  Eric said to Morgan, “I have to get back to work, honey.”

  Caren wondered if it was really Lela that Eric had to get back to.

  “Did she ask you to leave?” Morgan said. She was looking at her mother.

  “No, honey,” he said. “This isn’t about me and your mom.”

  Which, even to Caren, sounded like a lie.

  He glanced her way before standing and crossing to his daughter. He lifted her tiny purse from the foot of the stairs. “I have to get back to Washington, Morgan. I kind of took off without telling anybody, and I need to get back to my work. Your mom’s got everything under control here, and now that I know you’re okay, I need to go home.” Then he bent down, so they were somewhat eye-to-eye. “But, listen, if you need anything, anything at all, you know you can call me or Lela . . . anytime, okay?” Belatedly, he added, “We can still hang out this morning.”

  “It’s not fair,” she said.

  “I’m going to see you in a few weeks anyway.”

  “Mom won’t let me go.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, looking at Caren.

  “I never said that, Morgan.”

  “She hasn’t even bought my ticket yet.”

  “I’ll take care of it today,” Caren said. “I should have done it a long time ago.” It was true. She had been stalling, and it wasn’t fair to either one of them. “You’re not going to miss your dad’s wedding.” That was all it took. Morgan broke out into a huge grin, showing the tiny gap between her two front teeth, looking, in the moment, just like Helen Gray, the grandmother she’d never laid eyes on. “Thanks, Mom,” she said, leaping across the room to throw her arms around Caren’s neck. She held her mother close and kissed her cheek, as sweetly as she did every year at Christmas when she discovered that, against all odds, she’d gotten exactly what she wanted. Letty likewise seemed pleased with the outcome. Caren caught her smiling to herself at the stove.

  The tasting went off as planned at nine a.m., Lorraine having set an elegant table in the dining hall of the
main house: china painted with gold and rose, silver flatware and taper candles and a shock of yellow chrysanthemums from the garden. And the food, of course, a five-course spread. The bride didn’t touch a thing, letting her mother act as her surrogate. Caren had seen this many times, women who ceased eating in the days and weeks leading up to the big day. They were invariably the ones fuming on their wedding day because the food, the first they’d tasted in weeks, probably, was not up to their exacting standards, brides who ended up spending part of their reception in the ladies’ room, crying. Miss Whitman’s mother was a good sport, enjoying the food and the bottomless flute of champagne. The daughter, Shannon, was tense and brittle and far too young to get married, Caren thought. She made her mother describe, in detail, each and every forkful and mentioned at least three times that she wanted her own baker in Alexandria to do the cake. “Not a problem, baby,” Lorraine said. She was wearing a white chef’s hat today and a matching smock, for the full-service effect. She made sure to keep the older woman’s throat wet, pouring the mother another glass of champagne. Mrs. Whitman giggled. Shannon, cranky and hungry, rolled her eyes.

  On her laptop, Caren made a series of notes for their file.

  Later, they took a ride across the plantation so she could show them every corner of the land. Shannon Whitman wanted the doors and windows to the cottages open for at least thirty-six hours before her wedding day to get rid of the “old people smell.” She also wanted to know what could be done about the bugs. Come sundown, they’d be nipping at everyone’s ears. Caren made no promises, but said she could have Luis fog the front lawn on the morning of. Mrs. Whitman, still nursing a glass of bubbly, nodded agreeably. Caren ferried the clients along the fence line, out by the cane fields, and Shannon Whitman screwed her perfectly made-up face at the sight of all those machines and Mexicans sweating in the fields. “They’re not going to be out there like that on my wedding day, are they?” Caren tried to explain that the cane farm operated separately from the plantation, and that she didn’t imagine any of Miss Whitman’s guests would venture this far out to the property line. But Shannon Whitman was unmoved. “Mama, can’t they do something about this?” she said.