Charlotte’s Story

by Benedict, Laura

  She’d awoken from her nap that day as I slept downstairs, and tried to draw herself a bath in the bathroom off the nursery. Press said she had turned off the water and hadn’t yet undressed, but must have tumbled in, hitting her head. By the time he took me up to see her, he had laid her on her bed and taken Michael from the bedroom. Yet sometimes in my dreams I saw her in the water face down, yet somehow alive. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—imagine her otherwise.

  Even though my dreams were tortured, I slept. To my shame, I rarely thought of the Heasters, and my dreams were filled with only Eva.

  I knew it was only a matter of time before Nonie would force me from my bed. I could only remain there as long as she was willing to chase after Michael, whom I made sure to see at least once a day. Even though I couldn’t trust myself to be left alone with him, I knew better than anyone that he shouldn’t be allowed to think that I had abandoned him completely.

  Waking to sunshine, I could hear Press moving around in his bedroom. (Does it surprise you that we had separate bedrooms? That was the family’s tradition, and I quickly got used to having my privacy whenever I wished. I loved my room with its pale green-and-white dogwood-blossom wallpaper, thick wool green-and-tan carpet, and sumptuous white bedding. I realize now how considerate Olivia had been by updating the bathroom and redecorating the bedroom before I moved in.) He was probably getting ready for work, which I should describe as work, such as it was. He kept a law office in Old Gate proper, handling the affairs of a few of his mother’s old friends, but he mostly dealt with the details of the Bliss estate.

  He’d told me the night before that he was going to work, and that he was visiting Rachel and Jack afterwards, if I didn’t mind. There had been something, too, about a memorial for Helen and Zion, but I hadn’t really listened. Or cared. I assumed that he just wanted to get away from my sadness.

  I wondered, silently, how he could move so quickly and go on with living. Wasn’t it his sadness, too?

  “Charlotte?” His voice was muffled by the door connecting our rooms, but I heard both my name and the soft knock.

  I didn’t answer. Everything could continue to go on without me, and I had no desire to see him. I couldn’t yet let go of my self-blame. It was mine. My guilt, and my shame. I wasn’t willing to share.

  Nonie was with Michael, and Marlene and Terrance would mind the house as they always did. There would be a breakfast tray outside my room, left there at 8:30 by Terrance if I hadn’t appeared in the dining room earlier. Nothing compelled me to move from where I lay. Eva was gone, no matter what I did or didn’t do.

  Press came quietly into the room. Standing beside my bed, he was a shadow blocking the sharp light of early fall that filtered through my eyelids. His cologne, the Floris No. 89 he’d begun wearing after his trip to New York to see plays with Jack and Rachel (I’d had terrible morning sickness with Michael and couldn’t go), was overpowering in the still air. I kept my eyes closed. Finally, he bent to kiss my cheek, brushing my hair lightly with his fingertips.

  He walked across my room, not back to the door, but toward my tall dresser.

  I opened my eyes just a little to see him raise the bottle of sleeping drops that Jack had brought to me after Eva died up to the light of the window. Jack was a firm believer in the power of pharmaceuticals, and always said that there was no reason anyone should suffer if there was a drug to help. I shut my eyes again quickly.

  I knew Jack had meant well, but I hadn’t taken the drops in over a week. I was certain that if Olivia could come back, then Eva could too. I just wanted to see her one more time. It had to be possible. I worried that the drops might make me sleep so deeply that I might miss her in the night.

  I didn’t know who to pray to in order to see my child again. Not God. God didn’t govern Bliss House. After years of being immune to whatever link Bliss House had to the dead, Bliss House had shown me Olivia. There had to be more. It had to show me more.

  Press left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

  “Michael, go to Mother.” Nonie’s voice.

  I opened my eyes to a different light.

  My one-year-old son gave a shrill crow of pleasure as he ran across the carpet to my bed.

  Had I fallen back asleep? Yes. I’d fallen asleep with a prayer on my lips.

  “Eva.”

  In a dream, she’d been in the kitchen, standing on a stool beside Olivia, her yellow curls tied back out of her face with a Wedgwood blue velvet ribbon I’d never seen before. Olivia, who had long ago taught Marlene all the recipes she’d learned herself as a girl, seldom went into the kitchen except to give instructions or to catalogue the pantry’s contents. (“Even the best staff makes mistakes,” she’d once confided to me. “They become careless, and get cheated or become too generous with the family’s things. It’s rarely malicious, but they need to remember whose things they are minding.”) This dream-Olivia was stirring something into the kitchen’s enormous crockery mixing bowl, and I could hear her murmur to Eva, who was watching, rapt. I had almost heard what she was saying, but Nonie’s voice had broken the dream. It was gone.

  “What is it?”

  My tone must have irritated Nonie, because she responded with a forceful “I’ve brought Michael. It’s time you got up.”

  Michael, oblivious to the tension, gave another small shriek and clambered up the bed stairs to my four-poster. His blond head was damp and his cheeks were bright pink. They’d obviously been outside for a walk.

  “Mmmm. Mamamamama.” He fell over onto my stomach and collapsed with a grunt.

  I felt the heat of his little body through the sheet. I sighed.

  “What time is it?”

  Nonie stood, watchful, beside the bed. As always, she was neat and impeccably dressed, despite the fact that she spent her days with small children. She wore rich browns and tans and, given that her hair was a warm caramel color, she gave the impression of always being ready for fall. Today, the abstract elephant-and-leaf pattern of her short-sleeved cotton shirtdress was whimsical—for her, anyway—but the dress was carefully tailored, with a matching belt that cinched her still-tidy waist. Other than long walks, I never knew Nonie to take much exercise. She kept herself covered when she was outside, so her fifty-something face beneath her delicately striped brown eyeglasses was virtually unlined. She’d been in her mid-twenties when she came to help raise me, and while her beakish nose and assertive jaw kept her from being conventionally pretty, the harsh angles of her face had softened over the years so that she seemed much less intimidating on first glance than she had when I was little. Of course, I’d grown to love her too.

  “I’m about to put him down for his afternoon nap.”

  I winced as Michael tried to stand up on my thigh, unsteady in his hard-soled white walkers. I took one of his hands, and he wrapped his fingers around one of mine and squeezed as he righted himself. He was so determined, always persevering even when something challenged him.

  Everything had seemed to come more easily to Eva, as though she knew that nothing was too difficult for her to do or try.

  “You’re hurting Mother, Michael. Get down.” Nonie’s voice was still sharper than I’d heard it in a long while, and Michael looked back at her so that he almost lost his balance. But I pulled him toward me so he would fall onto me instead of onto the bed, or perhaps the floor.

  “Why are you frightening him?”

  In fact, Michael looked more surprised than frightened, and quickly resumed trying to balance on me. I didn’t care that it hurt. I was finally happy to have him with me. Something had changed, just a little. It wasn’t the desperate kind of feeling I’d had every time I’d seen him over the past weeks.

  “I understand your husband will be staying in town to have dinner with Rachel and Jack. Maybe you should dress and join him, Lottie.”

  I didn’t respond at first. I knew I should go and spend time with Rachel. She was surely still very upset about Helen and Zion. That I didn’t care much
for them shouldn’t have influenced my decision to stay home, but it did.

  “They’ll understand. They’ll be talking a lot about Helen and Zion. I don’t need to be there.”

  Nonie was finally quiet. I knew she meant well. I also knew that, like me, she hadn’t cared much for the Heasters. When they came to the house, she stayed in her room and listened to the radio or watched the television we had bought her for her fiftieth birthday (Press thought it was fine to indulge Nonie, but he believed televisions were foolish and plebeian and wouldn’t own one). She referred to them as “those New York people” and was unimpressed with Zion’s booming voice and full, leonine hair and the way Rachel and Jack and Preston hung on his every word. Also in the silence between us was the knowledge that she had been out of town when Eva died. Her guilt, I knew, was comparable to my own. But she had still cared for Michael when I couldn’t. No real grandmother could have done better.

  I did get up and dress and wash my face a few minutes after she took a very wound-up, sleepy Michael back to the nursery. Time was still slow. But when I left my room, I saw through eyes that hadn’t cried that day.

  In the hallway, I was assaulted by the smell of decaying flowers: lilies and roses and carnations, sent or brought to the house even days after Eva’s funeral. They were scattered in vases downstairs and on the second-floor gallery, which was where the family’s bedrooms were. Press’s and my bedrooms, the nursery, and Nonie’s room were all on the eastern side of the house. Olivia’s rooms and two guest rooms were directly opposite, across the wide expanse of the hall, which was open to the third floor and the ceiling’s dome. I stood looking over the gallery railing, remembering how the church had also smelled heavily of flowers during Eva’s church service.

  The hall and gallery walls—upstairs and down—were covered with paintings. There were many portraits, mostly Bliss family members, but a few from Olivia’s family as well, including one of her stern, plain-faced parents. As I went down the front stairs, I stopped, arrested by the portrait we’d had done of a two-year-old Eva and me that was hung above the landing near the bottom of the stairs. It was a very feminine painting, set in the rose garden with the maze blurred in the background, and full of the colors of late spring. In contrast, we wore ivory dresses: a tea gown for me, a simple silk dress piped in pink for Eva, who sat at my feet, her hand resting on a stuffed white peacock wearing a gold crown. I hadn’t wanted it in the painting, but Press’s friend J. C. Jaquith had had it sent from F.A.O. Schwartz in New York, and it pleased Press that it was a peacock and that Eva loved it, so I had relented. I didn’t like the way its head was tilted, as though its sharp orange beak were about to strike our daughter on the knee, but Press had laughed and said the artist was just having a joke.

  Why had Olivia wanted it here in the hall, rather than in the salon or in one of the sunnier rooms? She’d never said, but had had it hung while I was out of the house, in time for a dinner party she was giving in honor of the painting’s completion. She’d had me dress Eva in the dress from the portrait, even though it was, by then, a bit too small. Press had beamed, holding Eva like a prize, as we stood beneath the painting for the assembled guests. Eva had smiled placidly and even clapped her hands along with the guests. I was anxious, not liking the attention, the stares of Olivia’s Historical Society friends and bridge partners and their husbands.

  Now I wondered if I could bear to look at the portrait every day. As I passed it in the afternoon sunlight, I ran my fingertips over the edge of the frame. It was hung too high for me to touch the textured paint strokes that made up my daughter’s face.

  I found Marlene in the kitchen making bread for our dinner. She had twisted her hair into its usual chignon, and wore a full white apron over her dark gray dress.

  “I’d like all the funeral flowers removed, Marlene. Have any more notes arrived?”

  She looked up, startled, the half-smile I’d seen on her lips before she’d heard me fading into a look of surprise.

  “No, Miss Charlotte. Mr. Preston may have met the postman on his way into town. There’s been no mail delivered here today.”

  Both Marlene and Terrance called Press by the familiar Mr. Preston, and referred to me as Miss Charlotte at, I suspected, Olivia’s original direction. It had occurred to me to ask them to start calling me Mrs. Bliss, but I wasn’t sure I was ready for them to. And since I’d seen Olivia on the day of the funeral—for certainly it was Olivia—it also felt strangely presumptuous.

  “Mr. Preston won’t be here for dinner tonight.”

  “Yes, ma’am. He mentioned that.”

  I left Marlene and went to the dining room where all the peacock eyes seemed to watch me. The thought that Olivia might be watching as well made me feel strangely shy.

  Moving past the enormous cabinet filled with the silver pieces that Terrance was forever polishing, I went to stand exactly where I’d seen Olivia behind the glass. Outside the window, the October sunshine beckoned, but I closed my eyes against it. Olivia and I hadn’t been close, but we shared a love for Press and the children, and she was always kind to me. Though I hadn’t had the chance or inclination to explore them yet, she had specifically left all of her personal belongings—the contents of her bedroom and morning room—to me.

  Did it feel just a bit cooler here than in the rest of the dining room? There had to be a reason why she wanted me to see her. I was certain that I would have heard immediately if anyone else had caught sight of her. Bliss House was notorious enough that anyone who had direct experience of some strange occurrence there was unlikely to keep it a secret. God only knew, they must have still been talking about the deaths of the Heasters in the drive.

  I thought that perhaps I already knew the reason Olivia had appeared only to me. She was here to help me keep Eva close, perhaps even guide me to her.

  “Olivia.” I whispered so that Marlene wouldn’t hear. “Help me.”

  I opened my eyes. Outside the doors, a breeze ruffled the delicate blood-red leaves of the miniature Japanese maples Olivia had planted as accents around the patio. How odd, that provincial Olivia would pick something so boldly exotic to decorate the outside of Bliss House.

  I waited, listening to the faint sounds of Marlene in the kitchen and my own breathing. After a few minutes, I began to feel the slightest bit foolish. I wanted to believe, to trust that Olivia was with me. But it felt a little unnatural. Or perhaps I was afraid.

  It occurred to me that I might get closer to Olivia by looking through her things. It was my right, yes? No one would ask why. They belonged to me. Marlene had already been hinting that she would get Terrance to pack up whatever clothing of Olivia’s I wanted to give away and take it to the Presbyterian thrift store in town.

  As though reading my mind, Marlene called me from the dining room’s kitchen entrance.

  Turning at the sound of her voice, I was just in time to see one of the glass patio doors swing violently open, as though by a strong wind, and hit the corner of a chair placed against the wall. Two of the door’s panels shattered, scattering shards of glass onto the carpet below.

  Chapter 6

  Domestic Bliss

  Up to that point in my life, I was no liar. My father could look at my face and know in an instant that I was about to tell him an untruth.

  “Don’t tell me what you think you want to say, Lottie. I see in your eyes it’s not the truth.” My mother was just like me, he said. And I have her eyes: bright blue and guileless.

  But I learned to lie. If there is shame in that fact, I don’t feel it.

  The previous day, I’d been sufficiently shaken by the incident with the door that I hadn’t ventured into Olivia’s room, and neither had I wanted to return to the dining room. Because Press was out, I had Terrance bring supper up to the nursery. Nonie, Michael, and I ate in companionable chaos, with Michael delighting in being able to climb off and on his small chair at the child-sized nursery table any time he wanted. Even Nonie was amused with him, though
I could tell she wasn’t trying to show it. I felt more content in the nursery, closer to Eva’s things that still sat on their shelves and in their drawers, and closer to her. I could miss her here, but the pain was almost bearable because she seemed so close.

  When Press had finally come home, I was already asleep. He didn’t enter my room—not then, and not in the morning—so it had been more than a day since we’d spoken. Was I wrong to prefer it that way? I couldn’t reconcile his swift return to normality with the physical ache in my chest that rose every time I put my hand on the nursery door, or looked at the cushioned booster seat we’d had made so Eva could sit at the dining-room table with us like a big girl, or at the lonesome playhouse beside the stone path leading to the swimming pool, or nearly every time I breathed in the air that she would never breathe again. What was wrong with him?

  When I came downstairs in the morning to make sure I hadn’t dreamed the incident with the broken glass, Press was there, sitting at the table. His head was bent over a book—probably recommended to him by Zion, who had often sent him home with philosophy and theater books. When he looked up, I saw his skin was flush with color and health: he’d been out rowing on the James with Jack at dawn. So, that had resumed as well.