“I’m so sorry, Leo. I was trying to finish this stupid thing”—I waved my hand at the wall full of clues and hints at my mother’s life—“before I began dealing with my own life.”
“I know you were.” There was a tone of kindness to his voice, finally. “I don’t think you would’ve been able to do much of anything until you had gotten this behind you.”
We were startled by a knock at the front door. It was Jimmy’s delivery boy dropping off a casserole from the coffee shop. I thanked him quickly, sent him away, and locked the deadbolt.
As I put the food in the kitchen I noticed that Leo was struggling over whether or not to examine for himself the injury that had necessitated this extra care. He decided to resist the urge.
He fell into the armchair in the corner. “I didn’t ask you to marry me because it would benefit my career.”
I nodded. “I know.” I had lobbed that one about two hours ago. “I wasn’t using you as a crutch to get through the funerals.”
“I know.” I think he actually felt bad about that one. The urn containing my mother’s remains was on the table next to him and he motioned to it without actually touching it. “I really did want to come here to help you put Janie to rest.”
He was wringing his hands. We sat in silence for a long time. Longer than I have ever been quiet with Leo; normally I am filling every void with something. But now I just waited, waited for him to process his thoughts. Finally he said, “I know what I want for us, for me. I just—”
There was another knock at the door.
Leo threw his hands up, irritated, and yelled, “Come back later!”
There was a pause and then another knock, this one louder, demanding. Whoever it was wasn’t going away. I did not have time for this. I threw the door open and found Elliott standing there. I gasped. I stared at Elliott for a second then looked back at Leo. He was walking from the back of the living room toward me. Toward Elliott and me.
I was startled into complete brain malfunction. I said, “Elliott.”
“Liv.” His eyes were darting back and forth between Leo and me. He couldn’t make sense of it; there was obviously a lot of tension in the air. He held up the papers he was holding as if to explain what he was doing there and said, “I’ve figured it out. Everything. I’ve figured it out.”
All I could think was, You’re not supposed to be here until dinnertime. Is it dinnertime?
Leo said rather rudely, “Can we help you?”
Elliott heard the word “we” and he looked utterly confused. He looked at me with the most pained expression. Then he looked at Leo, who just seemed annoyed by the interruption.
Elliott pointed at Leo and asked, “Who is this?”
Leo answered for me. “I’m her fiancé. Who the hell are you?”
Elliott looked at me with complete shock. “You’re . . . engaged?” His expression morphed quickly into a mixture of disappointment and disgust. He threw down the stack of papers he was holding and walked away.
I wanted to call out to him. To explain. To follow him. I couldn’t do that of course. All I could do at that moment was watch him go. I picked up everything he had dropped and quietly closed the door.
Leo was waiting for me to explain that. “Who the hell was that?”
So much for Leo and I having a civil, amenable, quiet little breakup. I could feel his anger spooling up as he stood there.
Some primitive territorial beast roared up in Leo. He yelled again. “Who the hell was that, Olivia!” He was consumed with rage at the ugly reality that maybe I wasn’t alone down here.
“That was Elliott. He owns the local newspaper. He’s been helping me find out about Mom’s past.” My voice was very low, barely above a whisper.
Mottled red blotches were erupting on Leo’s cheeks. Those only made an appearance when the Redskins were losing or apparently when he was faced with the proposition that I was cheating on him. “Helping you!” he said very sarcastically. “Are you kidding me? Have you been cheating on me down here?”
“It’s not like that.” Well, maybe it was a little. “I needed help with—”
“Answer me!”
“Don’t yell at me!”
“Are you sleeping with him!”
I actually felt sad when I answered that question. “No. I never slept with him.” I think Leo could hear the regret in my voice.
Leo punched the wall next to the door then started pacing wildly. He looked like one of those sharks in the throes of a feeding frenzy circling frantically with the smell of blood in the water. He seemed directionless. It wasn’t like Leo.
I opened my mouth to start to explain, to start at the beginning and tell him everything about Elliott, but before I could speak Leo started laughing. It was the meanest sound I had ever heard come out of him. It was a deep gurgle of a laugh and it was full of nothing but spite and anger. “You are unbelievable.”
I approached him slowly while glancing at the front door half expecting Elliott to come bursting through it. “Leo, you have to let me explain—”
“You don’t get to explain anything! I can see it in your face.”
I vaguely wondered what in the world my face was giving away. I had to make him talk to me again. “Stop it. Listen to me.”
He was looking me up and down; it was an unkind assessment. “You lying bitch.” Leo never took to name-calling and in some detached way I realized how angry he must be to have called me a bitch. When the strange angry laughing had stopped it was replaced by an even stranger smile. There was no trace of the smile in his voice, however. “After all I’ve done for you, all I’ve been through. Taking care of you when you lost your parents and became this pathetic depressed weepy thing.” He was on a rather undignified roll now and going to some places I never thought he would. “I stayed with you all that time because what kind of asshole leaves his girlfriend when she just lost her parents? I did all that and then you pull this shit? You have the nerve to cheat on me?”
Years ago, before we were engaged, before we owned property together, before either of my parents had died, Leo had what I referred to as an “emotional affair” with a woman at work. He never conceded that it was cheating because in Leo’s mind if there was no sex then there was no cheat. You can’t have a murder without the body. Or something like that. I held firm that an emotional relationship was more serious than a sexual one, and therefore constituted cheating. Neither one of us wavered in our definition of what it meant to cheat. For Leo it was sex; for me it was intimacy. It had been a long time since I’d thrown that in his face. “You were the one who said it wasn’t cheating if there was no sex!”
“Bullshit! You can’t switch sides now! That’s even worse! I can’t believe you did this to me!”
“Well, it sounds like you wanted out anyway! You basically just said you wanted to leave a long time ago but you couldn’t abandon the poor orphan!”
“You’re not a goddamn orphan, Olivia! You’re thirty-two years old! And I can’t believe I’ve wasted this much time on you!”
“Wasted?” I had to ratchet this back down to civil, or at least less vindictive. “It wasn’t wasted, Leo. Just because it’s ending doesn’t—” He shut me up with one look.
He stormed to the front door, grabbing his overnight bag on the way. “You are a lying, damaged bitch and I’m glad I’m getting rid of you.”
The door slammed behind him knocking a picture off the wall and shattering the glass as it hit the floor.
I stood there for a long time staring at the vacancy of Leo. He was just gone. Out of the house, out of this town, out of my life. How had things spiraled so horribly out of control? Leo hated me, really and truly hated me. I had honestly thought he didn’t care about me enough to hate me. I cleaned up the broken glass and then wandered out to the back deck to catch my breath. I could see Logan sitting in one of the chairs down by the water. Oh no, how long has she been stuck out there?
I walked down the path to the lakefront wher
e she was sitting. I tapped her on the shoulder. “Hey, kiddo.”
“Hey. How’d it go?”
“It was pretty horrific, actually.” I sat down next to her and stared out over the water.
“I figured. When I got back to the house I could hear you guys fighting through the door so I thought I’d just wait down here.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged that off. Even a teenager knows how hard it is to go through a breakup. Logan glanced up at the house. “Where’d Leo go?”
“I’m not sure.”
When I closed my eyes all I could see was that look on Elliott’s face when the word “fiancé” came out of Leo’s mouth. His eyes went from Leo, to me, to the bag in the hall. I just kept seeing it over and over on some masochistic loop in my mind’s eye.
I sat up. “You can go up to the house, Lo. I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
“I need to talk to Elliott. He stopped by and said he had figured out everything. About Mom. But then he saw Leo and . . . I need to go find him.”
I practically ran to his house. I hoped he would be there. But if he wasn’t then I would try the office, the dock, the coffee shop. I would just do a hard target search of the entire town until I found him.
I ran up the steps of his front porch and then stopped for a minute to catch my breath. I knocked and waited. I knocked again. I was getting ready to leave but I could feel that he was there. He was inside; he just didn’t want to talk to me.
I opened the door and let myself in. “Elliott?”
He was sitting on the couch, his hands clenched into fists in his lap. He didn’t look up at me. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
I moved over toward him slowly. “I have to explain.”
He glared at me. “Explain what?”
I opened my mouth to speak but he cut me off.
“Explain why you lied to me? That you led me to believe you were free to be with me when you weren’t? When were you planning on telling me that you were engaged?”
I said, “I’m not engaged anymore.” My voice sounded meek.
He stood up and started yelling, jabbing his finger toward my face. “That’s not what I asked you! I asked you if you were planning to explain why you lied to me!”
I wasn’t feeling the least bit meek anymore. I moved into the room with the same angry pointing finger. “Don’t yell at me! It was complicated! You don’t understand—”
“I do understand, goddammit! I was in the same position! But I never lied to you about it!”
How was I supposed to explain this? “I owed it to Leo to see him and talk to him first. He deserved that.”
“And what the hell did I deserve?”
“I was trying to be fair! It was complicated. And you didn’t even know anything about me or my life! It isn’t fair of you to think I had some obligation to tell you everything.”
He screamed, “Don’t pull that shit! It was a lie of omission and you know it. How could you not tell me about him?”
“Don’t get on your moral high horse with me! You dumped your girlfriend of four years for some girl you didn’t even know! Who does that?” I was grasping at straws with that, but I was emotionally wrung dry and I couldn’t think of anything better. “Would it really have been better for me to break up with Leo from hundreds of miles away before I even knew what this was?”
“Yes!”
“That wouldn’t have been fair to him.”
“And how was this fair to anyone? I ended things with Amy because I had feelings for you. That’s not immoral. Lying to me, lying to that poor bastard that was engaged to you, that’s immoral! You’re right about one thing though. I don’t know you.”
He turned his back to me and I took a deep breath trying to calm myself down. I couldn’t remember a time in recent history when I had been so furious, not even the scant minutes ago when I was breaking up with my fiancé. I thought, vaguely, Huh, so this is passion.
I tried to keep my voice even so this could be a conversation instead of a brawl. “Goddammit, Elliot. You’re not being fair.”
He spun around, facing me again. His face was red. “I don’t have to be fair! I’m pissed off! Honesty is the only thing I really care about and you just destroyed that before we even got started.”
“Destroyed?” Had I destroyed it? Us? What were we anyway? My mind was reeling. “Stop it! I picked you!” I couldn’t think with him yelling at me like that. “You completely blindsided me. Meeting you . . . I was already trying to reconcile the way I was feeling about Leo when I just . . . I was overwhelmed by these feelings for you. I didn’t know what to do! I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t know what to tell you. I was—”
“You didn’t tell either one of us anything! Is that who called the day you threw your phone in the lake? Dammit, and you’ve been lying to my face this whole time.”
“Jesus, you are completely overreacting. I wasn’t lying to you to be deceitful and you know it. I felt stuck in a situation and I needed time to figure it out.”
He crossed his arms and stood his ground, glaring at me. “Was this whole thing just some kind of joke to you? Some kind of time-out from your life? Did you think you could just come down here and do as you please, say whatever you want, act however you want, and then leave when it’s over? Not giving a shit about the destruction you left behind? Is this some kind of mother-daughter thing? This secret life bullshit?”
That felt like a blow to the face and I flinched. “Fuck you, Elliott.”
I stormed back to the house trying not to cry. I was not very successful in that endeavor. Elliott was being too goddamn unfair. Acting like a child. I wasn’t lying to him! Well, I was, but not to be hurtful anyway. Dammit. What did I expect to happen?
I got to the house and went to my room and lay down on the bed. I could hear the water running in the bathroom. Thank goodness, Logan was in the shower. I would have a good hour before I had to speak to another human.
I had blown up Leo and pushed away Elliott. All I needed to do now was get fired from my job so that I could complete the trifecta of ruining my life. I felt physically beaten. I had a headache from the back of my neck all the way around to my forehead.
The water turned off in the bathroom and I put the pillow over my head. And I cried. I tried to cry for Leo but if I were being honest I was crying for Elliott. I felt like I had just lost something that I didn’t know how much I desperately needed. Until it was gone. Life works that way sometimes. Because life revels in the idea of being a bitch.
Logan came out of the bathroom and asked, “Are you going to tell me what happened with Elliott?”
I propped my head up on the pillow and sniffled. “We got in a fight.”
She looked at my red, tear-stained eyes and said, “Duh. I meant about Grandma.”
I had completely forgotten that Elliott had said he had figured it all out. I went out to the main room and looked around. I found the pile of papers that he had dropped when he popped in and ran smack into my fiancé. That memory made me feel a little bit sick at my stomach.
I gathered up the papers and read through them. I was so shocked by what I was reading that I had to keep starting over again at the beginning. Without even realizing that I was speaking I kept saying, “Oh my God.”
Logan was getting anxious. “What is it!”
I put the papers down and looked up at her stunned. “He figured it out. Everything.”
Logan’s eyes grew wide. “Figured what out?”
I handed the papers to Logan so she could read through them too. I said, “About the lake. Why she wanted to be buried in the lake. We had the right idea but the wrong dates.” I picked up my phone and as I dialed Georgia I noticed that Logan’s wet hair was dripping all over the printouts.
“Goddammit Lo, be careful!”
Georgia had already answered her phone. She heard me yelling at Logan and scolded me over the phone line. “Do not curse at
her, Olivia!”
For Christ’s sake. I didn’t even respond to that. “What time will you get here tomorrow?”
She said, “I’m not sure. Maybe eight?”
“Can you make it earlier? Like six?”
“Why?”
“Because when you get here . . . we’re digging up a grave.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
I couldn’t get any sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes there was some new horror looking back at me. It was the look on Elliott’s face when he saw Leo. Or the realization on Leo’s when he saw Elliott. It was my mother, ghostly white, floating alone in the lake while her house burned down on the shore, red and gold flames licking the sky. Or the body of Oliver bloated and tinged blue being discovered in the muddy reeds. It was George, frozen in time, with that same adoring smile again and again as he looked at Janie’s face.
I woke up early the next day and sat on the porch watching the sun slowly move across the surface of the lake.
Logan finally woke up and came out to sit with me. “You feeling any better today?”
“No. Not really.”
“It’ll be okay, Aunt Livie.”
Ah, the ignorance of youth. “I’m sitting here thinking that it would have been difficult for me to handle things any worse than I had. Truly.”
“I don’t know. You could’ve slept with Jimmy or something. That would’ve been a scandal. Or you could’ve found out that you and Elliott were actually related, but like not until it was too late.” She snapped her fingers, the ideas coming in fast now. “Oh! Or you could have discovered that you were pregnant, but not known who the father was.”
“You are seriously not allowed to watch daytime television anymore.” I stood up to get to work. “Come on. Let’s get all of our stuff organized before your mom gets here.”
While Georgia was driving down to Tillman, Logan and I spent the day going through all of our research so that it was laid out in a logical timeline. I had been sending things to Georgia as I discovered them so she had seen just about everything. But it had come to her piecemeal and now, now I wanted to get it straight in all of our minds.
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