I woke up the next morning to find Elliott propped up on his elbow watching me sleep. I smiled at him.
He brushed the hair away from my face and said, “Don’t be alarmed but some bandits snuck in here in the middle of the night and I let them have Logan.”
“You are a terrible bodyguard.” I hit his elbow making him fall on me. Now he was at my mercy.
I wrapped my arms around him, not letting him back up, and said a proper good morning. I’m not sure how that would have ended if his phone hadn’t started to clamber across the coffee table, ringing and vibrating.
He groaned and sat up to turn it off. “That’s my alarm. I have meetings all morning.”
“Well, I can see why you need such a persistent alarm. You sleep like the dead.”
“My ninja-like reflexes were ready to spring into action if there had been an actual threat.”
I leaned over the edge of the couch and picked up the racket from the floor. I held it up as exhibit A. “With your plastic badminton racket?”
“When used correctly, that can be a weapon of deadly force.”
I tapped him on the head with the racket and offered to make him some coffee. He followed me into the kitchen and pulled a note off the refrigerator. It was from Logan; she had already left for camp. Which meant she had seen me sleeping on the couch with Elliott. I felt a wave of embarrassment. Was there no end to the debauchery that child would be exposed to by her aunt? At least we hadn’t been doing anything. And we were fully clothed. I felt a tiny bit better.
Elliott balled up the note and swished it into the trash can like a basketball goal. He said, “I’m having dinner at my parents’ house tonight. Come with me. You could finally meet everyone. Except Michael.”
I knew Michael was the second-youngest sibling and was going to college at the Citadel in South Carolina. Elliott had told me that Michael’s major was French literature, but I was sure that had to be a joke. I kept meaning to look that up to see if it was really an available course of study at a military college.
I pulled two mugs from the shelf. “Right, Michael won’t be there because he’s in Paris or something? Reading French plays?”
Elliott squinted at me. “Why don’t you believe me?”
“French literature? Really?” I poured us both coffee and handed Elliott’s to him. Light and sweet, just like he liked it.
“You can ask my mom about it tonight.” He took my hand and started swinging it back and forth. “When you come to dinner with me.”
He looked so cute all disheveled from sleep. His hair was bent down at strange angles and he had lines from the pillow on his face. I was getting ready to tell him that I would go anywhere he wanted. Then I remembered what Logan had said about Elliott’s mother being unhappy about his breakup with Amy.
I put my coffee down. “I think I’ll pass on the family dinner this time. Your ridiculous lie about Michael and French lit are safe for another day.”
He must have known why I didn’t want to go. “You have to meet them sometime.”
“I think it will have to be sometime later.”
He held my hand tighter. “They won’t blame any of it on you.”
“Why not? I would if I were them.” I wasn’t going to budge on this. “I’m just not ready for all that yet. Is that okay?”
He sighed. “No. But I can tell I won’t be able to change your mind.”
He had to work all day and then he would be at his parents’ for dinner. I wouldn’t get to see him until tomorrow. I handed him his keys from the table.
Elliott was putting his shoes on, and he looked up at me. “What are you planning to do today?”
I shrugged. “Chores, I guess. I have to clear a bunch of work e-mails. I’ve been ignoring them for days.” Being on a leave of absence wasn’t exactly the full stop I had hoped it would be.
Elliott went to the front door and turned to look back one last time. He smiled at me and again I thought, This one is mine.
TWENTY-THREE
It was raining the day I was supposed to meet Elliott at the courthouse to search for some documents and maps. The Huntley County Courthouse sat up on a pediment overlooking Tillman’s main square. It was constructed of the same local granite as the library and the other monumental buildings in Tillman, and it was the tallest structure for miles around.
I was watching the sheets of rain hit the lake below and hoping it would let up soon so I could walk to the courthouse without getting drenched when my doorbell rang. To my great surprise it was Buddy. He had looked so strong and robust up on the ridge, but he looked small and frail framed in my doorway. Behind him the blue hydrangeas bordering the walkway were sodden with water and drooping down, limp on the sidewalk. The asphalt on the street was steaming as the rain began to evaporate on impact.
I was so shocked to see Buddy standing there that I was slow to invite him in. He said, “Are you planning to leave me out here in the damn rain all day?”
“No, I’m sorry. Come in, Buddy. It’s nice to see you again.” I took his umbrella from him, shaking it out a bit, and then led him into the family room. “I’m glad it’s raining. Won’t this help your trees?”
Buddy was wearing his uniform of old blue jeans and the tan windbreaker. He carried a brown paper sack crumpled over and darkened from getting wet. “This is too much damn rain all at once. My roots are already all pushed up to the surface.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I regretted bringing up the weather. I wasn’t sure what he was doing here or how to entertain him so I fell back on years of polite manners drilled into me by my mother and began asking him how he was doing, if he’d like a drink, if I could get him a bite to eat. I was about to invite him to stay for dinner when he cut me off.
“Damn girl, I can’t stay. I’ve got more things to do than sit around here with you all day. I just came to drop this off.” The brown paper bag fell apart when he opened it so he tossed it on the floor exposing the package inside. It was a shoebox wrapped in a plastic grocery bag. He handed the bundle over to me and said, “I found a few things of Nate’s you might like to see. Not much, I didn’t go climbing into the attic for you or anything.”
I pulled the box from the bag and opened it to find stacks of snapshots. It was the single largest cache of photographic evidence of Huntley, Georgia, I had been able to get my hands on yet. I think I gasped a little bit. I let my fingers thumb through the pictures: some of them were square black-and-white photos on thick paper with scalloped edges and others were glossy hypersaturated color with big white borders. I couldn’t help but start crying.
My emotions were making Buddy fidgety. He started wringing his hands together. I discreetly wiped my eyes and pulled one of the pictures from the stack, at least pretending to be completely composed. It was a group of teenagers swimming in the river. The river was rushing over a waterfall of rocks, maybe twenty feet tall and sloped on an incline making a giant waterslide. The bank on the far side of the river that you could see in the photo was steep and covered with granite boulders and pine trees. There were a few kids standing at the top of the rushing water, waiting to slide down. One boy was in midtrip down the waterfall with a huge spray of water splashing him in the face. Wading in the shallow pool at the base of the slide were Janie and George. I moved over to sit next to Buddy and pointed at them in the picture.
“It’s my mom and George.”
He squinted at the photo. “That’s Oliver.”
“It is? How can you tell?”
One gnarled finger pointed to a scar, clearly visible, running across Oliver’s chest. “You could always tell them apart by the scars. Oliver had a lot of scars.”
Buddy named the other kids in the picture. Nate was the one captured sliding down the waterfall, which was called Slide Rock. It was one of the many landmarks now sitting quiet and still underneath the lake.
I pulled out a slightly blurry black-and-white image showing a group of boys leaning on a truck. Arm
s crossed, faces tight, young men attempting to look cool for the camera. I tried to name them all. I managed to get Oliver, George, and Nate picked out of the lineup. The rest of the boys were people I hadn’t met yet.
Buddy searched through the box looking for a particular picture and pulled it out when he found it. I recognized Nate standing comfortably with his arm around the waist of a girl. She must be Margaret. He was wearing a white jacket and a tie. Margaret had dark curly hair and she wore a yellow dress and a large purple wrist corsage. They were standing at the entrance of a barn; the huge wooden doors, dark with age, were swung open to a party. A hazy yellow light poured from the open barn, haloing the couple in a flattering glow.
Behind them the barn twinkled with strings of lights strung from the rafters. The walls were lined with rows of hay bales covered with horse blankets offering a place to sit. The barn was packed with kids similarly dressed, some of them blurry because they were dancing.
Buddy said, “This is Nate and Margaret at one of the parties. You probably don’t care much about seeing them, but I put it in here because it shows the barn.”
“The barn?”
“Your mother really never told you anything.”
When Buddy told me about the barn I remembered Florence saying something about it. About the birthday party that George, Oliver, and Janie threw every year in the old barn on the Jones property. Buddy told me that when the kids were all little they would play party games, have cake, and bring in some of the baby farm animals to pet. But when they got older the parties got bigger with every kid in town planning whom to ask and what to wear for weeks. There was music on the stereo and dancing on the dance floor. There was plenty of food and punch, and nothing but trouble happening in the dark recesses behind the hay bales.
I was straining my eyes at the picture trying to see if I could find Janie and George in the crowd. Buddy picked up another picture and turned it over showing me that there were names written on the back. Most of the pictures had names and dates written on them, which would make it so much easier to figure out who all of these people were.
Buddy pulled another picture from the box and handed it to me. It was a faded color shot of my mom’s house. “That was your mom’s house before it fell. I have a few more shots of it in here; I pulled out the ones I could find of it.”
It showed a crowd of people in the yard sitting on lawn chairs, and smoke from a grill was wafting off into the horizon. I suddenly realized that I recognized this picture. I glanced at the Wall of Discovery and found almost the same picture tacked up there. It was the image we had found that first day in the library when we were searching for pictures of the lake.
“Do you know what this party was for?”
“That was the welcome home barbeque for Oliver when he got back from Vietnam.” He glanced at the nearly identical picture I had under the TVA research on the wall. He nodded. “Yep, that was the same day it hit full pool. I’d forgotten that.” I assumed that “full pool” meant that was the day the lake had finished being filled. That would explain why there had been a photographer there from the TVA to capture the occasion on film.
Buddy pulled out a few more images from that day and handed them to me. One was another shot of the crowd. I recognized a few faces, but I didn’t see Janie or George. I found Nate and Margaret sitting under a tree. Margaret was very pregnant and toasting the camera with a bottle of Coke. Nate had happy written all over his face.
The next picture was a shot of the throng attacking Oliver as he climbed out of a blue sedan. A lot of the people in the picture were out of focus as they rushed to welcome Oliver back home. His face was completely vacant. He looked strange, shocked or surprised maybe. George was climbing out of the open door on the drivers’ side of the car. Janie was walking toward him and their eyes were locked. Frozen on their faces was a shared look that spoke of worry and concern.
The last picture of the welcome home barbeque was taken at twilight. The group of partygoers who remained was sitting on the deep back porch of the house overlooking the lake. The automatic flash from the camera threw them into stark white contrast to the darkening sky behind them. I looked for Janie first, as always. She was sitting on the porch swing with a cigarette in her hand and her hair pulled back from her face with a red scarf. I never knew she had once smoked.
Oliver sat next to her, in the middle of the swing; his feet were bare making him look like a small, frightened child. He had yet another scar, this one on his neck. It was still fresh and pink. Oliver looked gaunt and his face was a pasty gray color even in the wash of the bright camera flash. George sat on the other side of him, fit, tan, and healthy. They were a study in contrasts. Janie and George were doing a poor job of smiling for the camera. They looked like bookends trying desperately to keep Oliver upright.
I asked Buddy, “What happened to Oliver? How did he die?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. Finally he said again, “Oliver had a lot of scars.” I wasn’t sure if he was being metaphorical or literal.
Sitting in the foreground of the picture, in profile, was another recently discharged sailor. He was wearing the same green-gray military issue T-shirt as Oliver. I couldn’t see his face very clearly. I flipped the picture over and read the names listed on the back. The new arrival was Johnnie. There had been a Johnnie on the boat with Oliver in the pictures that Florence had given me with the letters from Vietnam. He must have come home with Oliver after the war.
I squinted at the picture, desperate to get a peek inside of the house I would never ever get to see, but the windows were black.
I thought I might start crying again. “Buddy, thank you so much for letting me see these.”
He didn’t like the way this was going with me thinking he was a nice guy and getting weepy every few minutes. He cleared his throat. “You can’t keep them, you know. They belong to Nate. But you can look at them for a bit.”
“I know, but I still really appreciate you sharing them with me.”
He got up and started walking himself to the door, talking over his shoulder. “I wrote my address on the top of the box so you can bring them back to me. But don’t go breaking into my damn house when you come. Knock on the door.”
It had stopped raining by the time he left. I watched him throw his umbrella into the bed of his truck and climb behind the wheel. I waved to him as he drove away; he just shook his head at me.
I wanted to sit down and go through the entire box of pictures systematically, but I didn’t have time. I had to meet Elliott at the courthouse. I took out my phone and snapped a picture of the kids all swimming at Slide Rock and sent it to Georgia.
As I hurried across the square, being careful to miss the puddles of red mud, I called my sister.
“Hey, I just got my hands on some pictures of Huntley. I sent you one of Mom and Oliver swimming in the river.”
“Hi, Olivia. I’m glad you called.”
Something was wrong, we always spoke to each other in shorthand, not in full formal sentences. “And why are you glad that I called, Georgia?”
She tossed out a fake laugh. “That’s so funny that you ask. Yes, he’s right here. Do you want to talk to him?” Georgia pulled the phone away from her ear and said very loudly, for my benefit, “Leo, do you want to say hi to Livie?”
Dammit. I stopped walking and hid out underneath an awning trying not to get dripped on. I said, “Hi there.”
“Hi, what are you doing?” It was Leo’s mad voice. What in the world had Georgia said to him? Why was he at her house?
I told him briefly about the pictures that Buddy had dropped off. I began to describe one of them when he cut me off. “Listen, Georgia and I were just talking about Janie’s birthday. Do you want me to fly down with her to help you scatter the ashes?”
I felt myself flinch when he said that. What day was it? I spun around looking at the shop windows for some indication of the date. “What . . . you were what? What day is it?”
&
nbsp; “It’s the twenty-eighth, Georgia is flying down in two days.”
I couldn’t seem to say anything.
“Livie?”
“Um, no I . . . I think it should just be me and Georgia. But I’m not sure I’m ready. There are still so many things I don’t know. I don’t think . . .” How could it be here already? Time seemed to be rushing past me and I was unable to keep up.
Leo said, “You can’t stay.”
“What?”
“You can’t stay there, Olivia. You’ve been gone for almost a month. You need to put your mom to rest and come home.”
“I . . . I know.” We sat on the phone in a long uncomfortable pause.
Leo broke first. “I’ve got to run. I’ll call you later. Love you.”
“Me too.” I hung up and threw my head in my hands. I waited in the shelter of the hardware store awning for Georgia to call me back. I knew as soon as Leo was out the door she’d start dialing.
When my phone rang I picked up and began talking before Georgia could say anything. “I didn’t realize it was almost the thirtieth. I’m not ready.” I felt choked for time. “You can’t come down here yet.” That jar of ashes was my indemnity. It was the only thing allowing me to stay down in Tillman. I couldn’t let go of it, not yet.
“Livie, we said we’d do it on her birthday. It’s time. I’ve already got my ticket.”
“Well, cancel it. I’ll pay for it. But I’m not doing it, not yet.” My voice was high and sounded panicky. “There’s still too much I have to figure out.”
I think Georgia might have seen this coming because she didn’t sound surprised, just tired and disappointed. “Figure out about what? About Mom or about you and Leo?”
“I don’t want to fight with you about this. I didn’t realize how close we were to her birthday.” She didn’t say anything so I waited her out. I was watching the remains of the storm blow out past the square and cloak the mountains in fog.
Finally she sighed. “You need to talk to Leo and tell him how you’re feeling.”
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