by Sharon Short
“No,” I said. “Autism is not something that can be cured. But Guy, like many adults with autism, has been helped to be the best person he can be, to live as independently as—”
“How sad,” Effie said, staring off into the distance. “To have a child less than perfect. I wonder what his mother did . . . Clara seemed like such a nice lady.”
“Mother—” Rachel started.
“That’s okay,” I said, trying to keep my tone even. “She didn’t do anything. That was a common myth, especially years ago, that autism was somehow the mother’s fault. It’s a condition, like many others, that has its origins in the genes . . .”
“Well, now, my little darling is too busy watching over me and the house to keep up with such things,” Rich said—again, both implying an endearment, while subtly putting his wife down.
Rachel stiffened.
“I remember how much your mama loved her nephew,” Lenny said. “She talked about Guy all the time. I think she felt defensive about Guy and her brother—your Uncle Horace—because their parents were embarrassed about Guy.”
I stared at Lenny. How did he know so much about my family?
He smiled at me. “I’m the same age as your mother. As Mother said earlier, we were in high school together—”
Effie coughed. “Yes. They were friends. And May was like a daughter to me. Anyway, I’m just so glad my children turned out perfectly.”
I thought, I should have stayed at the messy, nutty, turkey-torching Toadfern house and played with my nephews.
Maybe, I thought, I could go back. It wasn’t that late. It sure wasn’t late enough that Harry, Barry, and Larry were being tucked in.
“Well, this has been delightful,” I said. More like dull . . . and somewhat pointless, except I’d learned that as nuts as the Toadferns were, they were a sight more interesting. Perfect wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Rachel, thank you for inviting me.” I started to stand up.
Effie stood up, too. “Thank you for coming, dear.” She sounded relieved that I was leaving. “I’ll take your mug . . .”
Suddenly, she started to swoon.
Lenny was on his feet in a split second, grabbing his mother’s arm, while Rich just watched, looking amused. “Mama, you okay?” his voice, filled with worry, had reverted to the Paradise twang I was familiar with.
“Fine, fine, dear—just a little dizzy.” She looked at me, gave a little twittering laugh. “It’s just a new blood-pressure medicine. And all the excitement over Rich’s retirement parties . . .”
“Don’t go just yet, Josie,” Rachel said anxiously. “I was, um, hoping to talk with you. Maybe we could take a walk on the old canal path?”
“Oh, dear, Josie wouldn’t want to ruin her nice shoes,” Effie said.
I glanced down at my shoes, tan suede flats that had seen better days and didn’t quite live up to Effie’s description of nice, but I didn’t fancy a trip up to Masonville to the PayLess Shoe Outlet to try to replace them.
“Maybe another time,” I said, edging back out of the room, as Lenny was saying to his mother that she should sit down and he’d go fix her a cup of tea.
“We have hiking boots,” Rachel said. “We used them earlier but they’re dry enough and I’m sure my pair would fit you and I could just wear extra socks and use Lenny’s . . .”
She looked so pathetically hopeful and pleading that of course I said yes.
Besides, her desperation reignited my curiosity about why she’d really brought me out there.
* * *
And so I found myself walking alongside Rachel across their backyard. I’d ended up in Lenny’s hiking boots—with extra socks—because Rachel’s were too tight. And I had to admit that in the soft gray twilight, the snow looked lovely, like a tender blanket protecting the earth until spring came again. It had snowed at least another inch and a half since I’d left Mamaw Toadfern’s. And it was still snowing again, a prickly cold snow that warned of ice later. We’d have at least a half foot of both snow and ice by the next morning. Driving up to Stillwater would be tricky, I thought, but I wouldn’t miss the mysterious meeting for anything . . .
“Thank you so much for coming with me on this walk,” Rachel said, breaking into my thoughts of Guy and Stillwater. “I needed to get out of that house!”
I looked at her. “You couldn’t go on a walk by yourself?”
“Of course,” Rachel said, bristling a little. “But then mother gets so worried if I’m off by myself. ‘You never know what you’ll stumble across,’ she always says. I went earlier with Lenny, but I know he’ll want to fuss over Mama until he’s reassured she’s just light-headed from her blood-pressure medicine.”
I glanced around. If they’d come this way, their footprints were well filled in by now.
Rachel suddenly ducked, then stopped, looking around, confused. I looked around, too, and saw we were between two clothesline poles.
Rachel looked a little sheepish. “I forgot . . . of course . . . Mama took the clothesline down for the winter.”
I guessed she and Lenny hadn’t come this way on their walk. And then I remembered the clothesline that was still tied between two trees in front of Mamaw Toadfern’s house. Effie—not Mamaw—would be organized enough to take in her clothesline for winter, although I was surprised she used a clothesline at all.
We started walking again, crossing from backyard to corn stubbled field. Even in the thick boots, I could feel the sharp spikes pressing into the soles of my borrowed boots.
“So why did you want me to come for a walk with you? To tell me you’re representing my parents in their attempt to purchase the old orphanage?”
Rachel looked at me, startled. “You found out?”
“They told me—everyone, really—after they showed up unexpectedly at my Mamaw Toadfern’s.”
“They were supposed to keep it confidential until the county commissioners’ meeting, after my dad’s retirement party—”
“They’re not the most reliable people in the world.” Rachel winced at the sarcasm in my voice. I would like to say I felt badly about that, but I didn’t. I went on. “So how did you happen to connect up with them?”
Rachel shrugged, hurried on. “Coincidence, I guess. The commissioners needed someone to represent the property and it wasn’t selling locally, so my dad suggested my name—and some others—who specialize in investment real estate deals across the country. Then one day, I received a call from Henry Toadfern. He was interested in the property. I knew the town wouldn’t like what your parents have planned for the property, but business is business, and it’s better for the orphanage to be used for something, rather than sitting there abandoned. And I had no idea they were coming in for the weekend. They really don’t need to be here for the negotiations next week.”
I felt an immediate tug of “warning, warning!” in my solar plexus. Her story didn’t add up. How had my dad found out about the property in the first place . . . unless he or Mama had stayed in touch with someone in Paradise.
But before I could ask more, we’d stopped where the Burkette property bordered the orphanage property on one side, and where the towpath ran behind both properties. On the other side of the orphanage was Mamaw Toadfern’s farmhouse.
We’d stopped near an old wooden shed, its red paint now a mere smudge on the weathered wood. The shed was shielded from the path by a line of trees, and though I’d passed it many times in the summers on my bike or walking, I’d forgotten about it.
Now, the sight of the old shed brought a rush of memory, the memory that had been edging around my mind at Sandy’s Restaurant just a few days before.
The summer I stayed at the orphanage, before Aunt Clara and Uncle Horace took me in, I’d sneak out at night, taking with me a book and my sheet and something I’d saved back from dinner and a flashlight, telling myself I was going to run away, find Mama, maybe even Daddy.
I’d get as far as an old shed on the far edge of the property, a shed that I
knew marked a clearing to the old towpath. But then, I’d lose my courage and climb up a ladder that leaned against the back of the shed, and lie on the flat roof in the cooling evening, and sometimes read by the flashlight, and sometimes just close my eyes and listen to the summer bugs’ sweet chorus.
And one night, another young girl climbed up that ladder and sat down beside me. It turned out the shed wasn’t on the orphanage property as I’d thought, but on the Burkette’s farmland.
The young girl was Rachel, and she’d climb up there and tell me stories about her family—her perfect family. Her daddy. Her mama. And her big brother, who was much older and lived somewhere else, but always brought her her own special box of chocolates when he came to visit.
And how she had a room all to herself, and she got to redecorate it whenever she wanted . . .
“The ladder’s gone.” My voice sounded distant, as if someone else spoke the words. “The ladder’s gone,” I repeated, and that was enough to bring me back to the present.
“I’m sorry, Josie, so sorry.” I looked back at Rachel and saw she was crying. She had been remembering, too, I realized.
I sighed. “You were a little girl, Rachel. Just about my age. I was, what, seven. So you were . . .”
“Nine.”
“Okay, nine. Who knows any better at nine?”
“But I did,” she said. “At some level, I knew it was cruel . . . telling you stories about my perfect family, and you from the orphanage . . .”
I smiled. “It gave me something to dream about, Rachel. Maybe I’d end up with a perfect family after all. And it probably kept me from eventually taking off down this path, because sooner or later I would have gotten my courage up, and then Aunt Clara and Uncle Horace might not have had a chance to adopt me, and God only knows what might have happened to me if I’d taken off down this path.”
Funny, all the times I’d biked down the path, I hadn’t thought about that—or about those evenings listening to Rachel’s melodic voice talk about her perfect family.
She gasped, and the sound caught in her throat. “Oh, God, Josie. I don’t deserve that. We’re not the perfect family! Anything but that!”
I looked at her, curiously. “What do you mean? Everyone looks up to your family. Everyone is so polite . . .”
“And so tense! The pressure is always on to be just so, just perfect, just right—or God knows Daddy’ll say something—nothing outright—but just something that will devastate us. It was like that when I was a kid, like that with Mama, especially when Lenny would come home to visit, for some reason. All those ‘down home’ comments . . . why doesn’t he just come out straight with it and call her a hick and say he feels so much superior to her?
“And whenever I’d bring someone home from school, it was the same. There’d be some subtle comment, and my friends would be left just a little confused, feeling put down but not quite sure why, and then there would be a distance at school the next day . . . so somewhere around the fourth grade I just stopped asking friends over.
“I felt like all the attention was on me. To look perfect. Get perfect grades. No one was ever good enough to be my friend. And I know Lenny feels the same way. He’s not my daddy’s son, after all, and through subtle comments, Daddy makes sure none of us ever forget that, or that Mom had a ‘past’ as he calls it—like she’s the only woman to ever get divorced and have her ex run off.
“But there were never any fights in our house—nothing overt. And yet it was always there . . . this pressure from Mother for me to be perfect, to not displease Daddy.
“I think that’s why I just went nuts during my commencement speech. I knew I was leaving and didn’t want to come back, to where I was expected to be so perfect . . .”
And yet she’d gone off and, from what I’d seen and she’d said, tried to recreate another perfect life. Was that one reason she’d taken on my parents as clients—however they’d actually found her? To rock the perfect boat again?
She stopped, stared down at her boots. “I’m sorry. I’m doing it again, being a self-centered little brat. I just wanted to come out here, apologize to you, get some sense of closure, I guess . . .”
“I think you’re being kind of hard on yourself.” Truth be told, I felt sorry for Rachel. All those years ago, I thought she’d had the perfect family and the perfect life.
Maybe I’d gotten the better deal, after all.
“I’m glad I listened years ago,” I said. “And I’m glad to listen now.”
Of course, that came as much from my desire to satisfy my own curiosity as anything . . . but I didn’t tell her that.
I started through the tree line to the path. “Come on,” I said, tagging her on the arm as I passed her. “Let’s go look at the old telegraph poles. Somehow, they always make me feel better.”
“The what?” She caught up with me. We stepped onto the towpath. It glistened with unbroken snow. Our footprints appeared to be the first on the path. I stared up at the snow swirling down. It was like being in a snow globe.
“You mean you never went exploring in the woods behind your house?”
The towpath had only been converted to a paved hiking/biking path in the past ten years.
“No. I was told not to.”
We started walking down the path.
“And you didn’t disobey? That’s sad . . . you really were the perfect child.” She stared at me. I elbowed her. “Oh, come on,” I said. She laughed, finally.
“There are a few old telegraph poles still standing just a few yards farther. And there’s something about that . . . the layers, you know, of time . . . the canal, and the telegraph, and just a few yards to our right, the old train line . . . all those layers make me feel better.”
“Why?”
“It’s a reminder. Time passes. Things change. Life moves on. Doesn’t that help put your problems in perspective?”
She seemed to think about that. “I guess, yes—oh look!”
She pointed, and we both gazed at a telegraph pole, just visible through the bare branches of the trees.
We walked to the edge of the path. This telegraph pole was falling apart—the top crossbeam had rotted and slipped, and criss-crossed the bottom crossbeam. One of the metal conductors—they looked like bells on either end of the two beams—had long ago fallen off. Of course, there were no longer any wires connecting this pole to the next.
“There’s one in better shape, farther down, but we’ll have to go off the path to see it.”
“Fine with me!” Rachel said, sounding eager. I smiled, glad she was feeling better.
We walked a few feet down the path and I looked for the sparse trail that led off the official path.
There were what looked like two sets of footprints, partially filled in with the new snow, that imprinted the snow from the opposite direction, along the boundary of the orphanage property.
Had someone cut across the orphanage property to the path, or come to it from Mamaw Toadfern’s? I couldn’t see that far, especially through the swirling snow.
Besides, I was more intrigued by the fact that the footprints went off the path and into the woods, right where the better-preserved telegraph pole was.
I looked back at the path, squinted at the footprints. The duo that had gone off the path at that spot hadn’t returned on it. Whoever it was must have cut through the woods and picked up the path elsewhere, which didn’t make sense unless they were hunters. Hunting was prohibited this close to the path and private property, but that didn’t mean laws were always obeyed.
On the other hand, I knew my uncles—and Daddy—were supposed to go hunting the next day. That was the most popular time for hunting around Paradise—the Friday and weekend after Thanksgiving. It was unlikely anyone would be hunting at twilight on Thanksgiving evening, so I felt safe stepping off the path into the woods, to see the old telegraph pole.
But the minute I saw it, I stopped short, my mind and body going cold with shock.
Th
ere was the telegraph pole . . . and Uncle Fenwick. A length of clothesline looped around the lowest rung on the telegraph pole, and then around his neck. The old rung had given way under his weight, and the bottom of his boots just brushed the frozen ground. The ladder, which I’d remembered always being on the side of the Burkette’s shed, lay on the ground nearby, as if Uncle Fenwick had kicked it away in his suicide attempt.
But it was clear that this was not suicide. Someone had wanted to make it look like Uncle Fenwick had tried to kill himself, and when the rung broke, must have realized this wasn’t going to work, because Uncle Fenwick had also been stabbed.
His winter jacket was open, revealing his undershirt and several stab wounds, from which blood bloomed and spread into the thin cloth of his undershirt, like grotesque flowers.
On the heels of that realization came the awareness that Rachel was behind me, stammering “Oh my God, oh my God,” repeatedly; that I was shaking and it had nothing to do with the cold; and that I was about to throw up.
I couldn’t do a thing about Rachel or the shaking. I whirled around, let myself get sick, and then dug my cell phone out of my pocket and called the police.
7
She came, seemingly, from out of nowhere.
One minute I was blissfully floating in gray nothingness. At least, I think I was. Ever notice how you never really remember dreamless sleep? Anyway, the next moment I was aware, in my dream state, of being in fog, which for me is a sure sign that I’m just about to ease into a dream.
Usually—even on nights when I fall asleep concentrating on a name or image that I hope will generate a pleasant dream (George Clooney, George Clooney . . .)—my dreams are anxiety driven. I’m back in high school, late for a French test, unable to find the classroom because I’ve only just remembered I signed up for French in the first place.
Or I’m in my laundromat, and I’m trying my best to help Purdey Whitlock, the Baptist minister’s wife who is complaining that the washer door is stuck, and when I finally open it, dozens of her husband’s white dress shirts spring forth, stained with red lipstick, and Mrs. Whitlock starts screaming, because her sole shade of lipstick is tangerine.
