She was not impressed. “Yeah, ’cause that old glass is more like a liquid. You told me that before.” She was perusing the menu.
I ran my finger over the glass. It’s strange to think of something that appeared to be solid like this as actually being a liquid, but that’s what it was. A very thick, very slow-moving liquid. I was starting to think of my mother like that. She seemed solid. She seemed to be exactly what you saw. But now as I looked back at her I realized that she was morphing before my eyes. Why did she want to come home again after she died? She wasn’t what I thought she was. Then what was she? Who was she? Maybe she was the same, but it was my perception of her that was changing.
The waiter was standing there staring at me. I hadn’t heard him pop up. We ordered our food and then chatted about the strange reality of mom’s hometown being underwater.
I was getting anxious about digging into the history of the place. “I wish the library was open late. We could go there to research.” I loved—I mean loved—starting a new research project. At first the wedding planning had started that way. I had a new notebook and a new three-ring binder. I had torn pictures of dresses and cakes and flowers out of magazines and filed them all appropriately. I had taken notes from caterers and event facilities and florists. I was having a ball planning a big party, picking out favors, deciding on color schemes. In all that time doing party planning I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that an actual marriage was the inevitable conclusion of the festivities.
It was all so frantic and rushed. Leo had a very small and nonnegotiable window in his work schedule where we could fit in time off for a honeymoon. Between his schedule and mine, finding the perfect wedding day was a little bit like negotiating the moon landing. Then my mother got sick and it all fell apart. We put the planning and the wedding on hold.
My mother’s illness was quick, not the drawn-out heart failure that my father endured, but a swift painful cancer. Stomach cancer.
I would never forget the look on her face when we went to the doctor to hear the results of the biopsy. Georgia was in the chair on my mom’s left and I was on her right. The three of us sat silently staring ahead, afraid to make too much noise or touch anything in the doctor’s office, as if our behavior while we waited could somehow impact her diagnosis.
Georgia was reading through the doctor’s pedigree on the wall as I browsed the obligatory family photos on his desk. His children were painfully ugly. Pug-nosed, fish lipped, and mousy haired. They looked alarmingly like our family’s old French bulldog, Chloe. I pointed at the line of photos and nudged Georgia. She gave me her “shut up this is serious” face.
My mother turned to where I was pointing and said, “Oh dear, that poor man. Those children have been absolutely beaten to death with the ugly stick.”
We couldn’t stop laughing. Especially because we knew we shouldn’t be laughing. Once you try to contain it, it just bursts out of you. When the doctor came in he thought we were crying and handed us a box of tissues.
Once we got ourselves under control he told us the results of the biopsy. Georgia started crying for real and I started asking him about the next course of action. My mother was utterly calm. Almost like she was looking death in the eye and saying, Thank God. What the hell took you so long?
She smiled and stood up, thanking him for his time, and then announced that she wanted us to go out for a nice lunch. She refused to talk to the surgeon or the radiologist about treatment options, saying she wouldn’t waste her time with that nonsense. Her husband was already gone and she didn’t intend to make her daughters go through several more years watching a parent get weaker. She only did pain management with her general physician, and even that she kept to a minimum. As if suffering through the pain was part of her necessary final journey.
Maybe, if we could find out enough about her childhood, I would finally understand why she acted the way she did at the end. So ready to die and end this life. To me she was an amazing, complex, loving mother. I just couldn’t understand why it was so easy for her to accept her fate and leave us. I needed to be careful that I didn’t forget who she was to me while I tried to figure out who she was before me.
Logan was thinking back to my comment earlier. “Why do you need a library?”
I took all of the abandoned beets off her salad plate and added them to mine. “So we can look things up like maps and old newspaper accounts of the town being flooded.”
“Jeez, you can find all of that online.”
“You don’t even remember a world before Google.”
“There was a world before Google?” She teased.
“Be nice to me or I won’t tell you anything else that I learned about Graham.”
She gave me a snide look that reminded me so much of her mother that I had to smile. Why do we always turn into our mother?
After dinner we settled into a very cozy corner of the lobby and each started our laptops to begin searching. I ordered a cocktail, which Logan made a point to comment on.
I could see Mrs. Chatham, the innkeeper, sitting at the bar talking to an older gentleman. He seemed to be holding court at his perch on the bar. People were obviously eager to have an audience with him, so Mrs. Chatham didn’t stay with him long.
While I was glancing up to see whom he would receive next, Mrs. Chatham materialized right next to me. “I have been meaning to come meet you. My name’s Mrs. Chatham. We are so pleased to have you here at the inn.”
Mrs. Chatham made me believe that she was genuinely thrilled to have us here. I wondered if she meant it or if it was just her job as a hostess to be polite.
I shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m Olivia and this is my niece, Logan.” Mrs. Chatham sat down with us. I said quite sincerely, “Your inn is lovely.”
She crossed her legs and leaned in like we were old friends. “Thank you so much! We just did the renovation last year, and I really thought it’d be the end of me.” She looked at Logan and said, “I have never met a girl named Logan before.” Then Mrs. Chatham addressed the next comment to me. “You know, because Logan is a family name. But I guess people just don’t hold to that like they used to.”
“My sister always liked the name so . . .” I wondered what it meant for something to be a family name. Whose family? I was about to ask her when she turned her charms on Logan.
“Well, you’re such a beautiful girl you can have any name your mother wants you to have.” Mrs. Chatham was smiling and shaking her head at Logan. “I mean look at that skin. Like silk. My daughter had such a hard time at your age with her skin.” She sighed, “Bless her heart.”
Logan and I looked at each other and smiled. Bless her heart. It was the exact same tone and inflection my mother used to use.
There was no stopping Mrs. Chatham. “So what are you two doing in town? Are you shopping or just visiting?” Where exactly did all these people think we were shopping around here?
“We’re just visiting. My mother is from”—I paused for a second not wanting to say “the town under the lake” then continued—“around here. So Logan and I just wanted to come see it for ourselves.”
“Well, isn’t that nice. Is she anyone I would know?”
It had never occurred to me that there could still be people living here that had known my mother. But Mrs. Chatham looked to be about the same age as my mom. I held my breath for just a second as I said, “Her maiden name was Jane Rutledge.”
“Was? Has she passed?” When I nodded, she sighed a little and put her hand on her heart. We accepted her sincere condolences. She seemed legitimately distressed that my mother had died. She was twisting her pearls and tugging at the sleeves of her twinset while knitting her brows together and resting her hand on my knee. She really felt our pain. That woman had a gift.
She gave one last consolatory pat on my leg and then composed herself. “I didn’t know her, but you must be one of the Huntley Rutledges.”
“I’m not sure exactly. I guess that�
��s what we’re here to find out.” It occurred to me in an instant how much easier it would be to find out about my mom’s past if we could meet the people who had known her. And then, just as quickly, that there may not be anyone left from Huntley to ask.
Mrs. Chatham was thrilled at the prospect of some old family bloodline returning to its roots. “Isn’t that exciting? You’ll have to let me know everything you discover. I’m not sure if there’s anyone around here who remembers having Rutledges among us.”
Logan finally chimed in. “Excuse me, what did you mean when you said that Logan is a family name?”
Well, that sent Mrs. Rutherford Chatham into a sort of fascinating lecture about how one should name their children. Apparently there were a lot of rules that I had never heard before regarding naming a child.
Logan and I sat patiently as she explained lineage and firstborns and monograms. “One should never ever use the husband’s name for a monogram. Good Lord, I don’t know who decided to start mixing up the names. That just undoes me. Traditions are traditions and are there for a reason.” As she said that I noticed the monograms on the pillows and napkins in the lobby and bar area and asked her about them.
“Those are the initials of Lady Elizabeth Wright, James Oglethorpe’s wife. Like I said, always use the woman’s initials. Everything in the house belongs to the woman.” She pointed at Logan. “You remember that.”
That sounded like a lot of baggage. I was starting to get that prickly feeling again about not wanting to get married. It occurred to me that if I had been home on Saturday instead of the office I could have intercepted that call from the chapel and politely declined the time slot. I had a fresh wave of loathing for my job.
One didn’t have to be very present while Mrs. Chatham was speaking; she didn’t require much in the way of response. At the moment she was retelling the family tree of nearly everyone in town. It seemed as if everyone was knotted together in one way or another as she went through the names. Coming from the transient world of DC, I couldn’t help but wonder if it was hard for people in this small town to always be surrounded by the same families.
I was having a hard time keeping up with Mrs. Chatham as she explained the pedigree of someone named “the fourth.”
“It’s a shame,” she said wistfully. “Of course people used to get married so much earlier and have babies so much earlier. It gave you a better shot at the older generation still being alive when the great-grandbabies came. I think Jimmy may be the only fourth left in town.”
I was trying to give the impression that I was following her. “Mm hmm, Jimmy? The fourth?”
“The story goes that Jimmy’s mother, Sarah, was in labor in one room and her husband’s grandfather was dying in the next room, so Dr. Mathews was running back and forth trying to get Jimmy to go ahead and be born while trying his best to keep that old man from dying.”
I finished my drink, careful to put the empty glass on a coaster. “That’s awful. Although I suppose there’s a lot to be said for living a long life and—”
“Well, you know to be named a fourth, James Tillman Calhoun the fourth, he had to be born while James Tillman Calhoun the first was still alive.”
Logan piped up. “Who makes up these rules?”
But Mrs. Chatham was patently ignoring questions she deemed unworthy of an answer. She was on a personal mission to impart some tiny bit of proper naming pedigree to us poor ignorant souls.
She waved her hand in the general direction of the front door and the town square beyond it. “You probably met Jimmy at the coffee shop.”
Oh my gosh, I actually knew someone in her story. “We did meet Jimmy. He doesn’t seem like a fourth.” I had a very clear mental image of Thurston Howell the third in my mind when I heard “the fourth” and Jimmy—that skinny, bearded man with an easy smile and an arm full of tattoos who was laughing at me in the coffee shop—did not seem like he belonged in an ascot with Lovey on his arm.
Mrs. Chatham said, “No? Well, looks can fool you. Jimmy owns half that block. Maybe the whole block.” She laughed at her own joke.
She wished us luck on our search for the Rutledge family line and then glanced over her shoulder at the gentleman at the bar who was surrounded by a pack of men in suits. There was clearly something about him she found distasteful. She leaned in to us and said pointedly, “Names are important. Name and family are the only things a person can’t buy.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that but then again I wasn’t sure of much about this place. It was a town of contradictions. The lake was hiding a town, the bearded slacker behind the coffee counter was James Snooty Something the fourth and owned a huge chunk of the town, and we outsiders may be the long-lost Huntley Rutledges. Whatever that meant.
We said our good-nights to her and she made us promise we would call on her if we needed anything. I didn’t tell her about scattering the ashes or that most of what we were looking for was probably under a whole lot of water.
Logan and I packed up our things to head up to the room. I checked the time to make sure it wasn’t too late and then I called Leo. I hadn’t been able to get hold of him all day.
As soon as he answered I knew I’d woken him up. I practically whispered, “Hey, it’s me. I’m sorry. You’re asleep. I’ll call you in the morning.”
I could hear Leo rubbing his face. “No, it’s fine. How’s it going?”
“Good, sort of. Maybe weird is a better answer. It turns out the town of Huntley is underneath the lake. They drowned the town so it’s not even here anymore.”
“Hmm. That is weird.” He sounded unimpressed. “When are you sprinkling the ashes?” I heard him yawn. He probably wanted an exact time and date that he could put into his schedule and then check off once the chore was finished. The thought irritated me.
“I’m not sure, but I’ll let you know. Go back to sleep; we can talk tomorrow.” I was absentmindedly following Logan up the stairs.
“Okay, ’night.”
I disconnected the call and found myself staring at the phone. I’m not sure why. We got into the room and I threw my phone into my open suitcase.
Logan watched my beloved cell phone fly precariously through the air and when it landed she gave me a knowing look. “Are you and Leo fighting?”
“No, we don’t fight.”
“Maybe you should start.”
I ignored that. How could picking a fight help matters? She and I got ready for bed and then climbed into the tall four-poster queens. I sighed and kicked my foot out so that it wasn’t being trapped by the sheet.
“What?” Logan asked me.
“What d’you mean?”
“You did that moany thing. My mom does it when she’s thinking about something.”
“I think I’m just frustrated about today. I’m beginning to realize just how much we don’t know. If that makes sense.”
“What do you mean! We found out there’s a super creepy underwater town, and that Grandma got all of her weird stuff from growing up here. I mean the ‘bless her heart’ thing and the monograms all over the place? These people put their letters on anything that sits still. They are totally wiggy about names.” She yawned. “I bet that’s why she named my mom Georgia, ’cause it’s where she was from.”
“I wonder why she named me Olivia?”
Logan shrugged. “Maybe we’ll find out tomorrow.”
“Maybe. Good-night, Lugnut.”
“ ’Night, Livie.”
All night I had dreams of my mother. She was swimming in the dark lake late at night. I was trying to follow her but she kept turning a corner into one of those jagged coves, going just out of sight. I could see the splashes of water being kicked up by her feet and sparkling in the reflection of the moonlight. Then the dream changed and I was in a boat chasing her and I was finally catching up.
FIVE
I woke up to the realization that it was Tuesday, a workday, and I was not on my way to work. That’s a pretty great Tuesday. I
tossed a pillow onto the sleeping lump in the next bed. It moaned. “Hey, Logan. There’s no work today!”
“Ibmsleepingoway.”
“What?”
Logan sat up in a huff. “I said I’m sleeping. Go. Away.” She put the pillow over her face and went back to sleep.
Not that a teenage girl isn’t a little slice of joy in the mornings, but I decided to start my day without her. I got ready quickly and then headed down to Viscount James Something the fourth’s coffee shop to redeem myself after the whole waiter fiasco of the day before. I went straight to the counter to place my order and then waited there like a local until the food was ready. I cleared all of my work e-mails and returned a few calls while I was standing there.
Jimmy passed my order across the counter and winked as he said “good girl” for figuring out how it was supposed to work.
I decided that we needed to hit the cemetery at some point and at least see if they had any conditions regarding the deposit of my mother. I called Huntley Memorial Gardens while I ate my breakfast. The sweet woman who answered the phone had such a thick country accent that we had a hard time communicating. She didn’t really understand what I was asking for and I didn’t really understand her answers. This was a conversation that would need to take place face-to-face, so I thanked her for her help and hung up.
I went back up to the counter to get some food to take to Logan. While I waited I asked Jimmy about the library and the local paper. The library wouldn’t open until eleven o’clock, so he told me where the newspaper office was as he handed me the to-go bag. There weren’t quite as many people out and about in the square this morning. Hazy rays of sunshine were breaking through the trees overhead and there were distant sounds of sprinklers bursting to life.
I followed the directions Jimmy had given me across the dewy grass to the other side of the square. The newspaper’s office was located in an old house that must have been rezoned at some point as a commercial building. I was hoping the archives were digital because there was no way they could store much in the way of paper copies in that small building.
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