Good Conscience
I WAITED FOR MY MOTHER ON THE front porch to make sure she couldn’t avoid me. When she came home from work, she wouldn’t have any choice but to walk past, and then she’d have to listen when I told her what we had to do. I guess after she pulled into the driveway she could tell it was kind of a trap, because she stayed in her car for a while before she got out. She thought things over, then she came down the path and sat next to me on the porch steps. She shook her car keys until they sounded like bells.
“What is it now?” she said.
My mother smelled good, she smelled like Joy. the scent she always wore, but she looked so tired after working all day that I almost kept my mouth shut. Still, I couldn’t ignore my second vow, even though it would have been easier that way. I told her we had some business to clear up, and that we’d better get it settled today.
“Does it have to be today?” My mother sighed and looked wary, as if I were just one of a thousand people who wanted something from her, as if there were a line of needy, demanding daughters that stretched from our house to the highway.
“I want you to take me somewhere.” I said.
I expected my mother to argue with me, I thought I’d have to beg and plead to get my way. but she just stood up and went back to the car. She got in behind the wheel and turned the key in the ignition, so I took my place in the passenger seat, and we started driving toward Hamilton. The stonecutter was right at the end of King George’s Road, past the Monroe house and the fallen-down stone walls. My mother sat in the car while I went in, but that was fine with me, I knew what I wanted. There were blocks of marble and granite lining the path, every color from pale pink to black, but when I went inside I told the stonecutter I wanted something that looked as if it had been there forever. I wanted gray slate lined with mica, and the only thing I wanted written on it was my father’s name,
It was dusty in the stonecutter office, and the walls were covered with patterns that had previously been used for memorials, messages of heartbreak and love. In the back of the workshop, there was an angel whose wing had cracked in two that the stonecutter was in the process of repairing. There were still bits of granite in the air, floating around like moths, but I didn’t care. I closed my eyes and made a wish on that angel; then I went out to the car to get a check from my mother.
“Did we get something expensive?” she asked me.
“We got something he would have liked.”
My mother laughed at that. “He would have liked to be here with us.”
This was more than we had talked to each other in the past year, and we both sounded funny, like people whod been lost in the desert. whose throats were bound to hurt every time they spoke. My mother had begun to riffle through her purse to look for her checkbook. She was acting like finding her checkbook was the most important thing in the world. I thought about how I wished I could have seen my father one more time. I thought about how he would always be with me, no matter what.
After I took the check in, the stonecutter wrote out a receipt. He must have thought I was younger than I am, because he patted me on the head.
God bless you, he called when I ran back outside, and for some reason his blessing meant something to me. When I got in the car I didn’t wait for my mother to start driving. I threw my arms around her, and she let me hug her. Then we were careful to act as though nothing had happened, but something had. My mother stayed on King George’s Road, and she took the turn that leads to Hamilton instead of heading for home, and we went out to the cemetery. We knew exactly where the spot was, the place where the orange lilies were growing, the last blooms looking like sunlight even when they fell onto the grass. I was glad my mother had had that fight with the cemetery owners and that she'd insisted on getting what she’d wanted, at least that one time.
“It looks good,” I said to her.
We didn’t get out of the car, that would have been too much, we couldn’t have taken that just then, but I could tell that the stone I picked would look as though it belonged here. I knew I’d done the right thing. We drove home with the windows open, and for once my mother looked young. We stopped at the Dairy Queen and got banana splits, and my mother laughed when I took huge spoonfuls of ice cream and whipped cream and stuck them in my mouth so that my cheeks puffed out like a hamster’s. We had more fun than we’d had in ages, but when we drove home in the dark, I knew my childhood was over. I felt it the way some people can feel the weather changing, deep in their bones.
That night I waited up for Rosarie, who was staying late at a defense fund meeting. I knew what she was planning, but I’d kept my mouth shut.
Where is your sister? my grandmother would ask at suppertime and on Sunday mornings, and I’d just shrug. She’s probably with Kelly, I’d assure my grandmother, but of course that wasn’t the case, since Kelly was no longer speaking to Rosarie.
“I can’t believe the way you hurt Brendan! You never think of anyone but yourself,” Kelly had said to Rosarie the last time they’d happened to meet at Hannah’s Coffee Shoppe. I was there with my sister, and I wanted to say, Wake up, Kelly. If Rosarie hadn’t dumped Brendan, you never would have had him. He’d be right in the palm of her hand, hanging all over her, crazy in love. But of course I said nothing. I just waved when she huffed off, like I wished her well.
“You have so few friends, you can’t afford to lose one,” I advised Rosarie as we walked home. “Unless you think the only person you need is Ethan Ford.”
My sister looked at me. “For your information, his wife has taken off and nobody knows where to, but she won’t be going to Maryland with him, that’s for sure.”
I understood then. Somebody had to be there for Ethan Ford, and Rosarie had decided that someone was going to be her. She was in a spiral, but no one saw it except for me. My mother and my grandmother thought everything was fine because Rosarie wasn’t going running around town with one or another of her boyfriends anymore. She was so well behaved that if grades had been given out for all-around conduct, she could probably match Gigi Lyle. If any boys called Rosarie, she refused to come to the phone. She said she had far more important things to think about. She looked so serious these days, with her long hair knotted, and her face washed clean, and her dark eyes burning as though she were on fire. My mother and grandmother didn’t see that fire when they looked at her; they didn’t notice the suitcase she had stowed under her bed. But I knew Rosarie had withdrawn every cent from her bank account. She’d started confiding in me, so I knew about how she was planning to go to Maryland with Mark Derry and be his assistant so she could stay close to Ethan Ford. I let her talk, I acted as though I was behind her all the way, but the vow I had made to protect her was going to put a stop to her plans. I just didn’t know how I’d manage it until I got a letter from Collie.
He wasn’t supposed to write to anyone, at least not yet, but he’d written to me. He told me that his mother was trying to get a teaching job in a small town in Michigan, and the funny thing was the countryside was filled with orchards. Even though they had different varieties than we did, Jonathan and Honeygold and Fire-side, the air smelled like apples and reminded him of home. It wasn’t so bad, not as bad as he’d expected, and the best thing was, he’d gotten a dog. Before theyd bought food or unpacked their belongings, Collie and his mother had driven down to the pound and gotten a puppy, a mixed breed they’d named Toad because it couldn’t seem to stay out of mud puddles. Hed send me a picture, he said, and I planned to keep it on my bureau when I got it. I planned to look at it every day.
I was glad that Collie didn’t hold what had happened against me. At the very end of the letter he wrote that he knew I’d been the one who made the phone call to the television station. He wrote that he forgave me, and I read that line over and over again. But I couldn’t forgive myself until I completed my third task. so I waited for Rosarie on the night before Ethan Ford was being sent away. I closed my eyes for a minute, but I must have fallen asleep, bec
ause I didn’t hear her come in until she lay down beside me.
“Who said you could be in my room?” she whispered, but I could tell she didn’t care. Lately, she liked to have me around. There was something lonely about her now.
“I need you to write a letter to Collie for me.” Some lies are easy to tell, and this was one of them. “You have to tell him I don’t want anything to do with him anymore. He’s gone and I’m here, and I’m not going to wait for him forever.”
“Write it yourself” Rosarie told me, but I’d already gone to her bureau for some paper and a pen. “Can’t you do anything?” Rosarie complained, but she still got a little charge when it came to breaking someone’s heart, so she set to writing the letter.
“Tell him never really cared about him and that he should just forget about me. Tell him I hate him and that I wish I’d never known him in the first place.”
“You’re meaner than I thought you were.” Rosarie grinned as she wrote to Collie. “Here you go.” She handed the letter to me when she was done. “Don’t get all sappy about this.” she added, “but I’ve decided that when I’m gone from here you can have my room.”
“Gone?” I said, like I didn’t know anything about it. when in fact I had been the only one home earlier in the day when Mark Derry stopped by to leave a plane ticket for Rosarie. I promised I’d give it to her, just as I vowed to tell her to meet Mark and the rest of the defense team at the jail at two o’clock the next day, but as soon as hed gone, I stuck the ticket in my night table drawer. It was round-trip to Baltimore, paid for by the defense fund. and I kept that ticket right where it was, even though I’d wanted Rosarie’s room forever. I’d already decided that I wasn’t about to tell her where she was supposed to go in order to make that trip to Maryland. “Gone for good?” I sounded so innocent, no one would suspect I had plans of myown.
“You wouldn’t understand.” Rosarie told me.
But I did. I understood that if she followed Ethan Ford to Maryland she would ruin her life, and it would be my fault, and that’s why I had her write that letter that I made certain not to sign with my own name.
That night, I watched the news with my grandmother. There was a good deal of carrying-on down at the jail because on the following afternoon Ethan Ford was going to be transferred to Maryland. People were demonstrating, for and against him. Mostly for, which shouldn’t have surprised me, considering how Rosarie had reacted. My mother came in to watch TV with us; she sat on the arm of the couch the way she always told us not to.
“That is one handsome man,” my grandmother said when they showed a photograph of Ethan, the very same one I’d first seen at the start of the summer. “Let that be a lesson. You can’t tell a book by its cover.”
“What do you think it means when someone’s reflection doesn’t show up in a mirror?” I hoped my question would appear casual, but I saw my mother shoot my grandmother a look.
“It means there’s something wrong with the mirror,” my grandmother said, but I knew what it really meant was that there was something wrong with the man.
I went out to the garage when I was sure everyone was asleep. I climbed out my bedroom window and crept over to where the roof overhung the yard, then I jumped and circled around to the back of the house. The crickets were calling too fast, the way they always do at the end of August, and the air was humming. I carefully opened the garage door and slipped inside. It was cool and pitch dark. I felt my way along and sat down on the cement floor, where I took out the last two candles and some matches. I thought about my father while I lit the candles. I asked him to watch over Rosarie, even though she had so many bad habits and could be so rude. I begged him to help me protect her and not let her run off with some man who didn’t even have a reflection, and I promised if he did this for me, I wouldn’t come back to the garage late at night. I’d accept what had happened and what I had lost.
When I woke the next morning, I knew what I had to do. I got my bike and went through town and turned onto King George’s Road. It was early and there was no traffic, and I pedaled so fast I was practically flying. I tried not to think too much or be too afraid. I went right into the county building and I told Sheriff Meyers that I had to see Ethan Ford. I said I’d been his neighbor all my life and his son’s best friend and that I just wanted to say good-bye before they took him down to Maryland. I got a teary look, and that must have been the thing that convinced the sheriff to let me visit Ethan Ford even though he was getting flown down to Baltimore that afternoon, where he’d be met by a marshal and driven to the Eastern Shore, to the town where the whole thing happened.
“He’s got a busy day, little lady, so I can just let you stay a minute or so,” Dave Meyers told me, and I smiled like I wasn’t scared down to my toes. “Are you ready for seventh grade?” Sheriff Meyers asked, because his son Jesse was in my class, and Jesse was probably excited about a stupid thing like that.
“Oh, yeah,” I said to him, like I cared about anything beyond the next few minutes. “I can’t wait.”
“Weren’t you friends with Hillary?” he said, referring to his daughter. who was such a snob she wouldn’t speak to me, especially after I wrote what I thought of her on the wall outside the school.
“I don’t think that was me,” I told him.
The sheriff led me down the hall. He said hello to the guard, Frankie Links, then unlocked the door into the jail. Dave Meyers was cheery and whistling, but that didn’t fool me, there was nothing cheerful about what was happening today Nobody else was incarcerated in the jail, which figured in a town like Monroe, but the emptiness didn’t feel like a good thing. The fact that it was clean and had a long line of fluorescent lights switched on didn’t hide the darkness inside, and just walking down the hall gave me goose bumps along my arms.
When we got to his cell, Mr. Ford was waiting. He must have heard our footsteps, because you could tell he was expecting company, although he certainly wasn’t expecting me. He looked the same as all those boys who came searching for Rosarie and wound up talking to me instead, disappointed and let down, but this time the flicker of disappointment I noticed made me happy Then, just as fast, I got scared again. Dave Meyers was unlocking the jail cell so I could go inside, which was just about the last thing I wanted to do in my life.
“I can talk to him from here.” Even I could hear that my voice was fluttery “Right through the bars.”
“It fine for you to step inside,” Dave Meyers urged. “Go on in.”
I had no choice but to do it and be face-to-face with Ethan Ford, even though I knew he had no reflection and that he probably never would. I went up to him like I wasn’t nervous, like I’d been to jail each and every day of my life. You wouldn’t think I’d be a good liar, but I am. For a second I thought about the fact that Mr. Ford was where he was because of me, but then I closed that idea out of my mind. Too many people’s lives have changed because of what I did for me to think about it anymore. So I kept to the subject. I told him Rosarie sent me to see him because she didn’t want to let him down in person. She wouldn’t be making that trip to Maryland to work for the defense fund and she wouldn’t be meeting Mark Derry and the other members of the defense team today, that’s what I said, and I used kind of a snippy tone, like our whole family was far too good for him and we knew it. Like he was just some charity work that Rosarie had fooled around with over the summer.
“Wouldn’t you know it, but she fell in love,” I say.
I see that flicker in his eyes again when I say the thing about love, so I keep on going. I make up a beautiful name, the name of the sort of man who would be honest and true, not that Rosarie deserves that sort of devotion. “Michael Dove,” I say with a real sorrowful sound to my voice, like I feel bad for Ethan Ford, like he’s missing out on a really good thing by missing out on Rosarie. Michael Dove who’s going to law school out in California, and Rosarie’s going off with him. She’s already a thousand miles away from here, and, anyway, she can’t go helping
out every man who’s in trouble. When it comes right down to it, she’s got her whole life ahead of her.
“I guess I’d like to hear Rosarie tell me that for herself,” Ethan Ford says, and for some reason I get even braver then. It’s hearing him say my sister’s name that does it. It’s thinking about the look in Collie’s eyes when we came out here and the way he rode his bike into the fence, like he couldn’t be any more wounded than he already was no matter how he might bleed or what he might break in half.
I hand Ethan Ford the letter, which is a good thing because I can tell he doesn’t believe me, at least not yet. You can see doubt in a person’s eyes, but that disappears fast when he reads the letter. Rosarie thought what I told her to write was too heartless when she thought it was for Collie, and I guess she was right from the look on Ethan Ford’s face. If I didn’t know better I’d pity him, but I’m not the pitying kind.
I’d been afraid he’d laugh at me and tell me he was going to write to Rosarie and that he’d manage to get his way somehow; he’d send line after line of sweet words that would lead her down to Maryland eventually. But I guess that letter I had her write was pretty good, and I could tell he recognized Rosarie’s handwriting, just like I hoped he would, and I have to say I hope his heart did break, even a little, even though I knew it was impossible with a man like him. The whole time Ethan Ford was begging his wife to come to Maryland, he’d been making plans for Rosarie to be there, too. I bet once he got there he’d find someone else, someone who worked for the court, maybe, some girl who was lonely in some deep way, just like Rosarie. Even I could tell that he was the kind of man who needed a woman to believe in him, and who she was mattered far less than how much faith she had in him.
Blue Diary Page 27
