But later on, when she was seated at the kitchen table and staring despondently down at her food, she found that she just couldn’t force down the meal to her protesting stomach. And so her meal was thrown away, again.
She decided that morning that she would go to visit Mrs. Cessler, the elderly lady who had for many years been their neighbour and who still owned the land and house which David Raymond was renting. Mrs. Cessler had been a nice neighbour, living in a gentle, perpetual state of mild sadness, missing her dead husband and reliving her happier past. Dana was good friends with her, finding her sympathetic and kind, and more than willing to have a quiet, rather withdrawn visitor. Now the older lady could not live at home alone, because of an accident and a broken hip, and so she had rented her house recently to David Raymond and currently lived with her sister as her brittle old bones slowly and painfully healed.
Dana had been to see Mrs. Cessler several times already, and one subject they never broached was just how Dana had known that the older lady had been hurt. Dana had been the one to find her, crouching in pain at the bottom of her stairs. She’d been afraid the first few times she’d gone, that Mrs. Cessler would become curious about that and ask her uncomfortable questions, but the old lady said nothing and Dana gradually grew easier in her mind and relaxed.
After telling her mother where she was going, Dana left the house and headed for the garage, which was a separate building from the house. She entered, opened the garage, and reversed the car competently. Mrs. Cessler and her sister lived on the other side of town, and Dana forced herself to drive very carefully. After two weeks or so of very little or no sleep, she was wary of having an accident through sheer exhaustion. She pulled up by a tiny home that was nestled in a landscape of several neatly trimmed bushes, with two oak trees. She parked just behind a car in the street, in front of the house, and ran up the walk to tap lightly at the door. Footsteps sounded, heavier than she’d expected, and the door swung to reveal to her David Raymond. He stood still, staring frowningly down at her.
She backed up an involuntary step, muttering something; she wasn’t sure what. Then he was swinging the door open wide and calling over his shoulder, “It’s Dana Haslow, Grace. Come on in, Dana.” And she heard the older lady call out a welcome from the living room. She had no choice. Even if she’d entertained a brief, vague hope of leaving and coming back later, she had to go in now.
Stepping gingerly by the silent and still man, she sent him an uncertain, wary look before heading on into the living room with as much of an appearance of normality as she could muster. Mrs. Cessler was positioned on the couch where she spent all her day, still in a heavy cast. Dana noticed with a pang that her hair since the accident had become even more wispy and white, and her lined face seemed to have shrunken in under the eyes and in the hollows of her cheekbones. She had aged.
Dana went over and gently kissed her on her frail seeming cheek before finding the armchair by the couch to sit in. She avoided looking in David’s direction, being painfully aware of his silent wariness and unspoken dislike. She was also overwhelmed in the simple awareness of pain, for Mrs. Cessler always seemed to be suffering some discomfort. She determinedly ignored it as best she could. If the older lady could be silent and uncomplaining, then so could she. These visits were always very hard on Dana, but she knew how delighted Mrs. Cessler was to see her and how much it meant to her. So she gritted her teeth and came anyway.
“Dana, my dear!” Mrs. Cessler said brightly, settling back on to her pillows and smiling. “It’s always so good to see you. But you aren’t looking well, child. You’ve lost so much weight! You and David, I can see, have much in common. Have you met David?”
“Yes, we’ve met,” she murmured, not quite understanding everything Mrs. Cessler had said. She didn’t glance his way and leaned forward in an effort to get control of the conversation. “And how are you doing? You’re looking better every time I see you.”
“Nonsense!” the older lady snorted, and a twinge from her still tender side made Dana wince. Her eyes caught David Raymond’s quick glance, and then slid away. She tried not to think of what had happened the day before. She wondered what he thought of it, and her. She knew that he didn’t trust her; this distrust came through as clearly as his dislike of her. She didn’t really understand why, unless it had something to do with the strange picture she’d drawn and he had recognised. What had she drawn? Why would it make him react so violently? She focused on what the older lady was saying to her. “…and it’s been such a comfort to know that he is taking care of my house instead of some stranger. I know that David will keep things well taken care of.” And she smiled at him fondly.
Dana nodded, unsurprised. “I was wondering how you’d managed to rent the house so soon after your accident.” She addressed David personally. “Are you two related, then?”
As he nodded, still watching her from under lowered, heavy brows, Mrs. Cessler answered verbally, “Yes, dear. He’s my cousin’s grandson. I don’t believe that you have met that side of my family.” Dana shook her head.
After talking for a few more minutes, she then sought the opportunity to leave, but Mrs. Cessler would have none of it. She listened, resigned, as the older woman extolled her to stay and perhaps fix them all some fresh coffee. After a few demurs, with David in his corner staying absolutely silent, Dana finally gave in when she saw that the other woman was just not willing to let her go yet. And so, with a sinking heart, she went into the kitchen to prepare a tray and start the coffee maker.
As she was about to carry the tray into the other room, a sound at the doorway made her jump and turn around. David was of course there, lounging against the doorpost and watching her unnervingly. She was unsurprised. Even if he hadn’t been the only mobile person in the house, she would have felt his entrance even as she heard his footsteps. After a wide-eyed stare at his unfathomable expression, she turned and with trembling hands rearranged the cups on the tray, without speaking. The air was charged with things left unsaid and questions she knew he wanted to ask her, and that wary hostility.
He made a move and she just waited for him to say something, any of the things that were hovering on his lips, but all he said was, “I came to see if I could help carry anything in for you. You don’t look strong enough to carry a flea, let alone that heavy tray.” He came away from the doorpost and walked her way. His stride was graceful.
She backed away from the tray immediately as if it had become contaminated, using the opportunity to put distance between him and her. Why did he make her feel so edgy, so tense and stretched tight? Why was she so sensitive to this man, of all people? “I’m stronger than I look,” she muttered, and he cocked a sardonic eyebrow at her.
“You’d have to be; you don’t look strong enough to hold your head up straight. Grace is right. You’re too thin.” He picked up the tray and then went on into the other room. She was left cocking her head in silent sarcasm to his back, and she found herself suddenly, surprisingly grinning at his unprecedented personal remarks.
Back in the living room she poured, kneeling in front of the coffee table and handing a cup first to Mrs. Cessler and then to David. She backed away from him immediately and felt a surge of irritation from him at this. So he’d noticed it before. She took her own cup and retreated back to her chair, sipping at it as an excuse to keep from having to say anything. The whole visit had rapidly become a fiasco for her. Nervous, uncomfortable, with Mrs. Cessler’s pain rubbing at her raw nerves, Dana felt close to the edge of something. She felt as if the tightness in her head was about to explode or break. She felt ready to lose all control, ready to fall into a pit and never climb out again. She felt—with a queer sense of shock in her heart, she felt that it was not her own crisis she felt approaching, but that of the strange man sitting across the room. It was David who was stretched so tightly something was bound to snap. It was David who was exercising such a rigid control over himself that the tightness and the desperation were reaching out and grabbing
her by force. She was unable to shake it off; she was as caught as him.
Dana had fallen silent as her thoughts rattled through this revelation, and the other two were talking on, apparently not noticing anything wrong with her other than the fact that she had withdrawn momentarily from the conversation. With a sluggish click back to the surface, she focused only partially on what was being said, still with half of her mind on the undercurrents in the room and her own surmises.
“…and weren’t you doing something else about six years ago?” Mrs. Cessler was asking David. Dana heard the last of the question, but she didn’t catch the context of it or the first part and so she wasn’t sure what was being discussed. She glanced briefly at David and found him looking down at his hands as he lounged easily in his chair. “I thought your grandmother told me something about you working as an editor for a newspaper, right?”
She didn’t know what came over her. She had only been paying attention with half her mind; she wasn’t even planning to speak; she’d every intention of just sitting back and staying silent until she could somehow contrive to slip away without hurting Mrs. Cessler’s feelings. But Dana found herself saying offhandedly, “Oh, that was four years ago, not six.” And even as the words came out of her mouth she tried to catch them back, to stop them from being uttered, but they’d already flown out like a bird that launches and hovers a moment in the air before soaring.
Silence. Mrs. Cessler and David looking at her sharply. Her hand crept to her mouth and her eyes widened, and she felt sickened at what she’d just done. Where had that come from? Even if she’d sensed his thoughts before he spoke them, she usually had enough control over herself to hide that, to keep silent. Just after her own wave of sickening shock came a wave of fury so intense from him she thought she’d physically been hit and blanched. It swamped her like a tidal wave.
But all he did in actuality was let his features go completely cold and mocking, letting his contempt and dislike for her show without any attempt to mask it. “Since Miss Haslow knows so much about me,” he said with a softness that made her turn her head away, “why don’t we just let her answer all your questions, Grace? She obviously has a good source of information.” His very quietness was biting enough to make tears come to her eyes. She looked down at her hands as they twisted together in her lap, her face stricken.
“I really don’t know what came over me, I—I’m sorry, I—” her muttered apology, spoken dully, petered away into nothing and like a recalcitrant child caught in a crime, she hung her head miserably.
His fury had not abated and that more than anything lashed at her. “You don’t know what came over you to listen to gossip, or you don’t know what made you give yourself away?” he asked, with that quiet, intensely sarcastic voice. “You really must tell me your source of information. They must be damned good to get such facts—perhaps I could learn a few tricks from them to help my journalistic endeavours.”
Face white, eyes sick, she looked to the older lady and found Mrs. Cessler smiling at her with such compassion that it, more than anything, made two great tears splash down her cheeks. She stood abruptly, clattered her cup and saucer on to the tray without looking to see if it had landed safely, and mumbled, “I’ll be by to see you again soon.” And without looking at the still seated, furious man across the room and too near, she headed for the front door at a run.
He was quick to get out of his chair in a kind of lunge, and was after her even as she was opening the door and she could feel him coming, could feel his intent so that her fingers trembled in panic, and then she was out of the door and heading for her car blindly. She wouldn’t make it. He was too fast.
Mrs. Cessler called out sharply, “David! Let her go, please!” Then more sharply, “David, I must talk to you right now! Please, come back inside!”
He stopped at the doorway, one hand clenched on the doorpost, as he watched Dana climb into her car and drive away. The anger was still throbbing in him. It was so strong and overpowering that it began to frighten even him. He took a few deep breaths, chest heaving, in an effort to calm down. The edge was closer than he’d thought. It was right there beside him, and he’d have to be very careful to make sure he didn’t lose all control. He clamped down on his emotions, asserting his own will over them until he found himself becoming calmer. Then, bit by bit, he forced all of those dangerous feelings out and locked them away. When he went back into the living room, scant moments later, his face was normal, expressionless. He sat down and looked at the old woman.
Grace Cessler was staring down at her gnarled, fragile hands. She plucked at the fringe of the afghan that covered her. Then she started to speak, strangely hesitant. “I want to tell you something, David. I want to tell you something that, for young Dana’s sake and for your sake, I don’t want you to repeat to anyone. Not anyone, do you hear? Will you promise me that, my dear?”
Frowning now in puzzlement, he curtly made his promise, and without realising it leaned forward in his chair. She smiled at him and cleared her throat, as if self-conscious.
“I remember when the Haslows moved in right by me. They were such a handsome family. They were everything a family should be, warm and caring and full of laughter. They seemed ideal to everyone else. And I remember Dana. She was such a pretty little thing, all eyes and braids and as quiet as a church mouse. When autumn came around, she was to have gone to school as she was of age, along with the other children in the neighbourhood. But she didn’t go and at first, when I thought about it, I’d assumed that her birthday had fallen just on the other side of the cut-off date for starting school. But I saw that it couldn’t be so when she didn’t go the next year either. Please bear with me,” she added, smiling, though he had made no impatient move. “I have a point to make and I’m trying to get around to it in the right way.”
“I wasn’t interrupting, Grace,” he said quietly, eyes slightly twinkling. Without being asked he reached forward and refilled her cup, and she thanked him.
“No, you weren’t. You are a good boy, you’ve always been a good boy. It’s just that I think I know how you are going to react to what I want to say. But never mind that now. I’ll just go on and leave you to react how you will. Of course, all of this was happening over a period of years and, I must confess, I showed only a passing interest in what happened to little Dana, being involved as I was with grieving at Karl’s death and wrapped up in my own affairs. But it was very noticeable that she was unusually secluded as a child, and I wondered why. She seemed perfectly normal to me. She did not have a physical handicap that I had noticed, and was not mentally retarded to the best of my knowledge. I remember one conversation that I had with her mother, Denise. Have you met her?”
He stirred himself and answered shortly, “No. In fact, I barely know Dana, only in passing. She roams all over the place, just as you’d warned.”
Mrs. Cessler smiled. “Yes, she’s a restless soul. But getting back to that conversation, I happened to ask Denise if Dana had a learning disability and was being kept out of public school because of that. I still remember the strange look she gave me. She just hesitated and then said, no, Dana was perfectly able to keep up and even surpass many youngsters her age. That was when I found out that Denise was a teacher and had left her career to teach Dana, herself. That’s quite something, isn’t it? Many people would have supplemented their child’s learning with perhaps something on the side, but to actually leave a career to devote all that time to their child’s learning development is something extraordinary. The Haslows weren’t rich by any means. They did well enough on Jerry’s salary, but they would have been much more comfortable if they’d had the added income from Denise’s teaching. But it was still not something in itself that was so different that it caught my eye. No, what was different about little Dana was that she never played with other children who lived on the block. She seemed perfectly happy to play by herself in the house, or outside, and it even seemed to me that she avoided other children. It wasn�
��t her parents. They acted very normally around her, and never seemed overprotective. No, it was Dana’s own choice, so whenever I was around the child, I perhaps watched her more closely than I would have normally, because she’d caught my eye. And I noticed little things about her. I remember I was over having coffee with Denise, and Dana was colouring in a picture book on the floor beside me. This sticks out in my mind as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. It was the first time that I’d ever been over for any length of time at their house, and the first time, to the best of my knowledge, that I’d ever had coffee at the Haslows’ in front of Dana. I take sugar in my coffee, and the sugar bowl had been out of my reach. Before I’d made any gesture towards the bowl, indeed, just as I’d framed the intention in my mind, Dana silently got up from the floor and handed the sugar bowl to me, just like that.”
His eyes, which had wandered to the carpet in front of him, returned sharply to her face. She could tell that for the first time since her narration had begun, his interest was snagged. He said slowly, “So, she was an observant and intelligent child. Is that what you wanted to tell me so badly?”
Mrs. Cessler slowly shook her head, her wispy white hair framing her lined face delicately. “No. I’m only partially through with my story, David. After she handed the sugar bowl to me, Denise and Dana just looked at each other, as if they’d been caught in the middle of a guilty act. Then, without a verbal word from her mother, Dana went and picked up her crayons and book and left the room.” Grace stopped and then realised that she had braided the edge of the fringe together with her restless, wandering hands. She very carefully began to take it apart. Then with an apparent change of subject, she said, almost idly, “Jerry Haslow died three years ago in an accident at the mill where he’d worked. It was—horrible. A few of the supervisors came by and asked me to help them tell Denise; I went over to their house, with another neighbour you haven’t met yet, and we knocked on the front door for a long time. No one answered, so we went in after trying the door and finding it unlocked. We found Denise sitting on the couch beside Dana, looking stunned and grief-stricken, and Dana…well, Dana looked as if she’d been hit by a car. She couldn’t talk to us. She was all huddled in a shaking ball and we couldn’t get her to stop trembling. David, they already knew that Jerry was dead.”
Flashback Page 3
