by Nevada Barr
17
Marshall was scared. Polly could see it behind the sparkle in his eyes, behind the sparkle of the two-and-a-half-carat diamond ring on the table between them. Whether he was scared she would say yes or refuse, she didn’t know.
Despite the cynicism she cultivated in her dealings with the opposite sex, Polly was a romantic. Ivanhoe was a favorite of hers, Sense and Sensibility, Sleepless in Seattle. As a girl, she’d read Costain’s The Black Rose so many times the cover began to look like third base at the Little League park. She had taught True Love, as seen by poets, playwrights, and novelists most of her adult life. As she would point out to her students, not only did true love not necessarily run smooth, it was often fatal.
They were in the courtyard of the Court of Two Sisters in the Quarter. A canopy of ancient oaks sequestered the garden, each tree strung with a thousand tiny lights, and each light refracting in the facets of the diamond engagement ring. It surprised her that she wasn’t surprised. It also surprised her that she wanted to pick it up, slip it on her finger, and scamper down the aisle in a cloud of white taffeta. Perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her.
Staring at the black velvet box with its glittering promise so lusciously displayed, she heard herself saying, “We’ve only been together for a month.”
“But what a month,” Marshall replied and, with the long-fingered hand she loved to hold and watch when he drew pictures for Emma and Gracie, nudged the box a few inches closer.
She wondered if she eyed it as the mouse eyes the bit of cheese in the trap, not knowing it will soon make literal the notion that it was dying for a nibble.
“Cliché or not, I feel like I’ve known you my whole life,” Marshall said softly.
Polly felt that way as well. They had re-created a timeline she had skipped over: They played as children with her daughters, they giggled on the phone for hours like teenagers, they sat up late over wine arguing politics and saving the world like college sweethearts, they went to openings and museums like upwardly mobile thirty-somethings, they sat on his balcony in rocking chairs the way old folks were said to do. A lifetime together.
“The girls… ” Polly said lamely.
“I aced the interview,” he reminded her with his wonderful smile, slightly crooked, as if a part of him mocked the hope of his own happiness.
Polly worked hard at treading the thin line between being completely open and honest with her daughters and burdening them with adult concerns. She had kept her so-called love life-the sporadic dates she’d enjoyed over the years-separate from her home life and her children. That hadn’t been true with Marshall. Knowing Gracie and Emma noticed the interplay between them, she told them they might be getting serious.
The next afternoon, as she walked across campus to her car, her cell phone rang. Fishing it from her purse, she checked the screen. Gracie. Cold spiked in Polly’s chest. Their cell was only to be used for emergencies.
“Are you okay? Is Emma okay?” Polly demanded. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“Momma, take a breath,” Gracie returned. The annoyance in her tone reassured Polly. “We are at school. It’s recess. Momma… ” The quality of the sound dwindled. From the use of “we,” Polly guessed Gracie was conferring with her sister. In a couple of seconds she was back. “Momma, remember last night you said you and Marshall were like serious boyfriend-girlfriend? Do you think he wants to marry us?”
The fear that had gripped her when the cell phone rang returned. If the girls rejected Marshall, then he was out of their lives. It was as simple as that. Except this time it wasn’t. Polly was in love. Being in love, though as grand as the poets had promised, brought with it a terrifying helplessness.
“I remember, sugar,” she said carefully. She beeped the Volvo open and slid behind the wheel, her briefcase and purse on her lap. She put the key in the ignition and started the car so the air would run, but made no move to go.
“Well… ” There was another brief conference at the other end of the ether.
Realizing she was clutching her phone so tightly she was in danger of breaking it, Polly forced herself to relax.
“Momma?”
“I’m here. Tell me.”
“Me and Emma want to interview him.”
“Emma and I,” Polly corrected automatically.
When Gracie hung up, Polly called Marshall and invited him for dinner. “Come early, around five,” she told him. “The girls want to talk to you.”
After school, Emma and Gracie went into their room and closed the door. Polly could hear them murmuring and laughing; sounds that usually filled her with joy grated on her nerves.
They didn’t come out until Marshall rang the doorbell at four-forty-five. Gracie emerged as Polly let him in. “You’re early. We’re not ready yet,” she said and disappeared back into the bedroom.
Polly laughed nervously. “I have no idea what they’re planning, Marshall, only that it’s important to them. Can I offer you a strong drink?”
“Later, maybe,” he replied. “Later, definitely,” he amended. “I’m afraid it might not make a good impression on my inquisitors.”
He was not joking.
Sitting in the living room, he on the couch and she in the chair, they tried to make small talk. When that failed, they stared at one another and waited.
At five o’clock the bedroom door again opened and the girls came out. Both had on their best dresses. Both wore shoes. It should have been endearing, comical, even, but Polly saw the alarm she felt reflected in Marshall ’s eyes.
Gracie carried a yellow legal pad and a pencil. “Mr. Marchand,” she said politely. “Would you like a glass of water or to go to the bathroom or anything before we get started?”
“Mr. Marchand?” he said, with a half-smile and a cocked eyebrow.
“It’s formal,” Emma explained gravely. “You’ll be Marshall again after. Okay?”
“Okay. As long as I get to be Marshall again.”
Gracie sat on the coffee table facing him. Emma, just as serious but still Emma, bounded up onto the sofa next to him.
“Ready?” Gracie asked.
Marshall nodded. Polly imagined his palms were starting to sweat.
“First question: Why do you like Momma so much?” Gracie read from the legal pad.
It was a good question. Polly had to make an effort not to beam at her offspring.
Marshall thought for a while, his hands folded neatly on his crossed knees. Finally he said, “I think it’s because, even though the world can be a scary place, she makes me feel like it’s full of wonderful things and that we will find them and be happy. Not all the time, of course, but a lot more than we are ever sad.”
Gracie looked at Emma. Emma nodded, her blonde hair, as fine as it was when she was a baby, swinging over her pixie ears. Gracie drew a neat line through the question.
Marshall shot a glance at Polly. She shrugged. He was on his own.
“Do you like children?” Gracie read off the next question on their list.
“I don’t know any children but you guys. If all children are like you, then I like children. My guess is that children are like everybody else. I’ll like some and won’t like others.”
Again the exchange of nods and the line through the asked-and-answered question.
“This is the last one,” Gracie said encouragingly. “If we let you be Momma’s boyfriend, how would our lives be better?”
No wonder the list had taken them all afternoon, Polly thought. They must have been googling advice columnists and picking out the hard questions.
“Gosh,” Marshal said. Then, “Gosh, that’s a tough one.”
“Take your time,” Emma said kindly.
“How about that drink now?” he said to Polly. She laughed but didn’t move. She had no intention of missing a minute of this.
“Okay. Let me think. I have some money,” he said slowly. “But your mom makes enoug
h to buy everything you need, so that wouldn’t make it better.” He seemed to be floundering. Polly worried that he would choke. “It’s easier to fold sheets with two people. There would be two cars, so it would be easier to get to all the places we want to go. I could take care of the lawn and fix things if they got broken. I could help build things-I’m a trained architect and builder, you know. I could kill cockroaches for you.”
“We don’t kill them. We put them out,” Gracie said repressively. Neither she nor Emma was looking impressed, and Polly felt oddly hollow.
Marshall looked at his hands for a minute or more. When he looked up, his face was as open as a child’s. “The only thing I could bring to make your lives better would be more love,” he said. “I have a lifetime’s worth saved up. That should count for something.”
Gracie looked to Emma. Emma nodded. Gracie drew a line through the question. “That will be all,” she said formally. “Thank you, Mr. Marchand, Momma.”
“Thank you,” Emma echoed, and, Gracie leading, they filed back into the bedroom and closed the door.
Simultaneously Polly and Marshall expelled their breath, then laughed.
“What happens now?” Marshall asked. “Do I go home and wait by the phone? Give the names and addresses of my former employers?”
He stood and Polly rose to put her arms around him and lay her head on his chest. They stayed like that without speaking until the bedroom door flew open and Emma, dressed again in shorts and a T-shirt, exploded from the room and launched herself in Marshall ’s general direction.
“You passed!” she shouted as he caught her. “You aced it!”
Gracie followed her sister. She’d changed out of her tribunal clothes as well and wore blue cropped pants and a matching tank top with a giant pink paw print in glitter on the front.
“Does this mean you’ll marry me?” Marshall asked her. Had Polly not been seated, her knees would have buckled. Marriage had not yet been discussed.
“No,” Gracie replied. “It means we won’t not marry you.”
Polly smiled at the memory. “Yes, you did ace the interview,” she admitted and took a sip of champagne, giving herself time to settle.
“I love you,” he said simply. “Finding you was like finding I was not deaf, dumb, and blind, though I had learned to live that way. I wish you’d been in the square when I was thirty, but you weren’t. Now my biggest concern is that, even if we both live to a hundred, we won’t have enough time together.”
Polly arched an eyebrow. “I do not have one foot in the grave. The women in my family live to a great old age. Well, our bodies do; it’s our minds that tend to go when we’re in our seventies,” she teased. All of it was a tease. Polly had no idea how long the women in her family lived. Her mother had died at forty-three. According to the neighbors Hilda passed out drunk and fell face down outside. It rained heavily that night and Hilda, like the apocryphal turkey, drowned in two inches of water.
Marshall pushed the hair back from his forehead. His fingers didn’t merely comb through the hair, they raked.
Removing a crown of thorns was the image that flashed in Polly’s mind, and for a heartbeat, she waited for the drops of blood to seep from his flesh. The thought was sacrilegious. Though she no longer believed in heaven, the concept of hell had never truly left her.
He reached across the table and rested his hand over hers on the white cloth. “I suppose, if it weren’t for the girls, we could just move in together, but even that wouldn’t be enough for me. It wouldn’t pay you the honor you deserve, and it wouldn’t honor the love I have for you.” He smiled. “Quite a speech. Believe it or not, before I met you, I was the strong silent type.”
Proposals of marriage were not alien to Polly. Something about her put men in a marrying frame of mind. There were a couple of reasons that prevented her from indulging in gestures of mad passion: Emma and Gracie. No less carefully than Marshall built his houses had Polly built hers: her daughters and her teaching, friends, quiet moments with a book, ballet lessons, soccer, the theater, flower-arranging classes, evenings with Martha. She owned her own home and did as she pleased.
American mythology would have it that divorced or widowed women in their middle years were desperate to remarry. That had not been Polly’s experience. Most had made lives they enjoyed and would only compromise for a very shiny white knight with a particularly breathtaking steed.
And a very long lance, Polly thought, and smiled at the turn her thoughts took.
“A smile. Is that a yes?” Marshall was trying for lightness and failing. The shadows in his eyes suggested her answer was a matter of life or death.
Both flattering and unsettling.
“We have known one another for four weeks,” she reminded him gently.
“The time doesn’t mean anything,” Marshall insisted. “You can live with someone for years and have the marriage fall apart two weeks after the wedding. You know that’s true. Polly, since the night we had tea, I have never had a second thought. Never. About the logistics, sure. But not about how I feel about you.”
Polly had been carried away on the same whirlwind. On their third date-the night following their second, two nights after their first, she’d brought Marshall home to meet the girls. Very few of the men she had dated had been privileged to meet Emma and Gracie. Because they were good girls, they had been polite but maintained a sense of reserve. Not with Marshall. He fit into the family as if there had always been a place waiting for him.
His quiet gravity, the way he addressed them as adults and listened with genuine interest to what they had to say, the easy concern he showed when they were worried, the kindness when they were peevish or tired had won them over with a stunning rapidity. Another reason to proceed with caution: should she and Marshall separate, hers would not be the only heart broken. She pushed the glittering diamond back toward him. “Much as I would like to, I cannot,” she said simply. “This is too much, too soon.”
“Keep the ring. Think about it. Please. These chances don’t come often. For most people they never come.”
His urgency had the quality of a man who knows he’s dying-and wants to collect the brass ring before the Grim Reaper collects him.
“Maybe we should take a breather,” she said. “Take a little time apart. I need to collect my thoughts.” He looked so devastated, she softened her decision by saying, “A girl cannot think clearly around you, my darling.”
“Don’t reject it.” He nudged the ring back toward her. “Think about it.”
“Despite the wisdom of song and tradition, diamonds are not a girl’s best friend. Though I must admit, most women take better care of their diamonds than men do of their dogs.” Polly was trying to lighten a mood that had suddenly become fraught with storms she couldn’t see but only feel as a pressure behind her eyes.
“I will think about it,” she promised.
“Don’t think too long.”
18
The phone had been ringing for some time before the sound worked its way through Polly’s dreams and dragged her into the waking world. “Yes?” she said into the receiver as she felt around for her glasses.
“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”
Marshall. They’d not spoken in the week since he’d proposed. She switched on the bedside lamp and squinted at the clock. One-fifteen a.m. His intensity had scared her. The girls asked after him. She enjoyed her freedom. Her thoughts were only of him. Emotions hard to quantify during the day batted inside her head like birds in a chimney. “It’s late,” was all she could manage.
“I’m sorry. I woke up. I guess I heard a noise or something and… and I needed to hear your voice.” He sounded like a man who had awakened from a nightmare of hell fire and brimstone. He laughed ironically. “If you can’t stay awake, just put the phone on the pillow and let me listen to you breathing.”
A nightmare of fire and brimstone.
Polly smelled smoke. Gray-white tentacles were reaching under
her bedroom door, curling up the dark wood of the door.
“Oh, my Lord!” she whispered.
“What, what is it?”
“Smoke.”
“Is the smoke alarm going off?”
Phone to her ear, Polly swung her legs from the bed and took two steps toward the door.
Like a blind hungry ghost, smoke reached for her feet. Peach-colored paint on the door began to crack, black fissures snapping through, blistering like burned skin. She opened her mouth to scream for the girls but stopped herself. If Gracie and Emma heard her voice, they would wake and try to come to her.
“Don’t open the door. Don’t hang up. I’m coming,” Marshall was saying. Polly disconnected and pushed 911.
“Please, please, please,” she murmured to whatever gods listened as she ran for the bedroom window, the phone pressed hard to her ear. “There’s a fire,” she said when the emergency dispatcher answered and gave her address.
“Get out of the house immediately,” the dispatcher said. “The fire station nearest you was flooded after Katrina and has not been reopened. The closest trucks are fifteen to twenty minutes away. Stay calm.”
The bedroom’s one window was the only way out and it had been painted shut when Polly bought the house. Without hesitation, she picked up her dressing chair and smashed the glass.
The 911 dispatcher was still talking as she threw the phone out onto the grass. Shards of glass the size and viciousness of shark’s teeth razored out from the broken mullions. She’d be gutted like a fish. Using the legs of the chair, she cleared out as much glass as she could. Behind her, all around her, she could hear the fire snickering, licking, devouring, a thinking beast that roasted and ate human flesh. Again and again she banged at the old window, its many layers of paint holding onto daggers of glass like stubborn old gums to the few remaining teeth. Screaming an obscenity she’d grounded Gracie two weeks for using she threw the chair against the wall. Spinning from the wreckage she dragged the bedspread off the bed and shoved it through the opening. Belly on the sill, Polly began pushing her body through the ruined window.
