Orchids and Stone

by Lisa Preston

  “Daphne, don’t leave,” Josie called. “I … I’ll be …”

  Vic’s voice was soft. “Jose, come inside.”

  Starting her truck, Daphne saw Vic, his face dim in the dark, a mask. He held his daughter and kissed her hair.

  CHAPTER 25

  A shin-high gray shadow boiled out of the house on Mapleview Drive. Daphne gasped but, hampered by an armload of tools, her reflexes amounted to flinching.

  “Cinderfella, you scared me,” she told the rumbling cat. “Inside, now. I’ve come to keep you company.”

  Stepping across the threshold at home pelted Daphne with memories. Here was the tile floor where her mother dropped her father’s coffee mug the day police came to tell them about his suicide. Straight across was the living room with the same furniture she’d grown up with, the carpet where Suzanne had taught her to play checkers. This home had seen Suzanne fight with their mother about what Suzanne wore, about whether she could extend her curfew, go to a party, see that boy. Daphne closed her eyes.

  If she turned to the right, there would be the kitchen and the dining area toward the back of that long room, also full of memories. To her left were two sets of stairs, one down to the basement—where her father had paced and ranted when Suzanne went missing—the other up to the two bedrooms.

  Daphne pinched tears from the inner corners of her eyes thinking about those two bedrooms, the one she had shared with her sister, the one her mother had shared with her father.

  Last month, when her mother started talking about this weekend, Daphne had snapped. Snapped at her mother and hung up. She’d scheduled time off from work for these last two days.

  But she hadn’t followed through, hadn’t acted on the impulse to break away from her family’s old patterns. No matter how fleeting thoughts of escape might tantalize her, she couldn’t finish the deed. She’d known it the second she heard the hurt in her mother’s response. They couldn’t change.

  Daphne dumped her loaded tool belt and coil nailer by the kitchen doorway. With the neighborhood not as good as it used to be, she didn’t want to leave her tools in the truck overnight.

  In her mother’s living room, Daphne flopped on the couch. The heavy cat jumped on her stomach, making her grunt, then hopped onto the couch arm, his tail rattling pictures on the end table. Suzanne’s high school graduation graced one frame, Daphne’s the other. The sight of the telephone behind the framed photos made her think of calling Vic. She wanted to. She didn’t want the night to end this way.

  She didn’t want them to end at all. She didn’t. But sometimes, it was just too hard. If it hadn’t been for this weekend with the anniversaries of her father’s death and her dead sister’s birthday, she could have kept herself together.

  Or if it hadn’t been for Minnie Watts.

  Minnie, are you safe?

  No. Daphne shook her head. Minnie is not safe. She looked at the phone again, wondering if she should give her mother’s phone number to Officer Taminsky in case he had an update.

  No. No need. Vic would call her if he received news. Vic was like that. He’d never let a spat stand in the way of doing the decent thing.

  She pulled Cinderfella to her chest, pressing her face to warm fur as she rose. From the living room, she could see a great deal of clutter in the dining area and she half-wondered what unnecessary cleaning her mother had been up to. The cat nuzzled her as she carried him up the stairs.

  When she’d moved out of this house and in with Thea, Daphne had once referred to the cat her mother adopted as her replacement. Her mother had snapped that no one could replace a daughter, and Daphne didn’t try to get lighthearted with her again.

  Cinderfella loved to be carried. Her mom said he was too heavy to carry and he had to walk himself around. His rumbling purr filled Daphne’s body as she held him. Loose hair tickled her nose as they rubbed faces.

  The pleasure of petting a friendly animal brought to mind first meeting Vic, with Grazie making introductions. Before he’d gotten to the point of buying them ice cream, he’d been trying hard with chitchat.

  “I’m a meteorologist,” he’d said.

  “Are those necessary anymore? I mean, isn’t the weather monitored with computers? Or can’t we look out the window or stand on a rooftop?”

  “Well, there’s even more to me, you see. I’m dual-educated. An oceanographer and a meteorologist.”

  “Oh.” Daphne had no snappy comeback material for oceanography majors.

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a roofer.” Having loaded drywall that day didn’t change her love of being on building summits.

  He’d gaped, stunned as people always were when faced with a young woman who chose her trade. “Don’t buildings pretty much already have roofs on them?”

  They’d both laughed at his weak effort, and she rewarded him by indicating the empty spot on the bench. After a great chat, he’d bought three vanilla cones while she held Grazie’s leash. Daphne wanted to feed Grazie the extra cone, so Vic held two cones while she and the dog made a great mess. After, they’d walked and talked and turned the encounter into lunch. They chose a place with sidewalk seating, so they could keep the snuffling, chuffing mass of yellow fur at their feet. Daphne could not stop petting the dog, telling her what a fine girl she was. Something clicked, felt comfortable, in whatever she or Vic said right from the beginning. They talked about everything. The city, themselves. The present, the past, people and work and coffee and how good those sandwiches were.

  When he asked about her family, she told him. She told him the whole deal about her sister and her father, stopping just shy of Suzanne’s contingency notes and the guilty question blanketing Daphne ever since. Before, she’d always gotten the signal from men that they couldn’t take it all in, but Vic was different. He didn’t get distant or bored with her, didn’t become standoffish or fidgety at her family’s tragedies. He listened, his face contorted in beautiful sympathy. It was a first, all of this great kindness in a new man.

  Just into couplehood, he told her his great secret—that Jed was not his child. That when Cassandra admitted this, he’d wondered whether Josie was his and then he’d put the thought away, but not because he necessarily thought Cassandra hadn’t let another man father their daughter, too. He’d thought instead of changing the kids’ diapers, of holding them when they were sick, of reading to them and playing with them, of taking them places. He took them to school, extracurricular activities, and their friends’ houses. And he knew in his bones that he did what a father does, so he was their father.

  He was a good father.

  When he’d told Daphne about managing to reconcile the truth about his son’s paternity, and how he chose to be Jed’s father forever because he’d served as Jed’s father, and because he loved Jed and wanted the best for the boy, Daphne had been impressed by Vic’s handling of his great secret and cowed by her own—what if my sister left me a note that last night and I never found it, never told a soul? She didn’t reveal her secret, her secret fear.

  But as the anniversary of her father’s death and her sister’s birthday approached on her and Vic’s first year together, Daphne succumbed to circling the drain. The doubly hideous anniversary always brought her down. While Vic stroked her shoulders and nuzzled her hair and told her how sorry he was for her pain, she told him about the note she never found, about how she wondered so many things, like why her father quit life, and why Suzanne was killed and by whom, and whether a final note existed at all.

  He’d wrinkled his brow and asked a lot more questions about Suzanne, general things that brought Daphne to gush about an adventurous, beautiful, young iconoclast who’d awed her kid sister. Then she told him more about the sneaking out and the notes.

  Vic had talked about the unlikelihood of there having been a final note. He’d told Daphne she’d done enough, done all she could. She could safely step aside. There probably wasn’t another note, not that final night, since she never found it.
/>   But, Vic, I can’t ever know for sure. As soon as the words were out, her mouth hung open; then she’d snapped it shut it, closed her eyes. Leaning against his chest, she told herself to stop it, just stop it. She wouldn’t say that again—complain about not knowing—not to a man living as a father of a boy who was not his child. Not to a man who held himself as the father of a girl whose paternity he doubted.

  Instead she told Vic she agreed that all the worry and wonder in the world wouldn’t bring back her sister or her father and this was the way it was.

  But sometimes, especially this one weekend every year, it was a hard reality to live.

  “So, I, uh, ran away, Cinder-kitty,” she told the kneading, purring cat.

  Suzanne ran away, and was gone for a weekend the first time. She’d told Daphne when she came back that it had just been a lark, and Daphne, then seven, had pictured songbirds in trees, morning larks.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Lopez.”

  “What’s that? Is that a man you went to see?”

  “It’s one of the San Juans, Daffy. Don’t you ever look at a map?” Suzanne had braided Daphne’s hair as she talked.

  When she and Vic were a firm couple, several months after meeting, he’d asked if she’d like to get away for a weekend.

  “Maybe to Lopez?” Daphne had said, heeding the ancient, lurking call of the island. She longed for the possibility of understanding her sister and the places on the planet that spoke to a wild child.

  He’d nodded and checked the ferry schedule, booking them for a night at a bed and breakfast on a rocky beach. They’d left his car in Anacortes and walked onto the ferry. She’d been disappointed that it was just an hour’s ride on the water.

  She didn’t find answers to her sister there, but Vic was beside her and attentive. He was a man in his own rut who made room for her because he wanted her in his life. And she wanted him right back.

  Upstairs, Daphne released Cinderfella when he asked to go into her mother’s bedroom. It had been years after her father’s death, Daphne recalled, before she stopped thinking of the last room on the right as her parents’ bedroom.

  And she still thought of her old room as the one she shared with Suzanne.

  “Hang on, Cinder-cat,” she said, and turned the knob to her old bedroom. The dent in her old bed—from the last time she’d sat there to talk to Suzanne’s ghost—was gone. Her mother had straightened out the girls’ old room. Daphne smiled, thinking of her mother, the perpetual housewife, tidying and minding her household, even though the deep cleaning—releasing the hoarded past—was more than Frances Mayfield had ever done.

  Suzanne’s bed had a new dent, a full-length imprint.

  Daphne’s fond feelings turned wistful as she pictured her mother there, aching again over her murdered child.

  She should leave her mother a note, she decided. She could put it in her mom’s bedroom.

  Something concrete, a bit of learning about the past, occurred to her. She could leave a note of real substance. Remember Lindsay? I found her, Mom, and …

  Opening her old closet to find a bit of surplus notebook paper and a pencil, Daphne was stunned. Bags and boxes of clothes and kids’ things were compiled in the previously untouched girls’ closet.

  Some of the bags were labeled girls clothes and another pile was marked garbage. A box of old novels and textbooks had a big black question mark on the side. School supplies were gathered in a carton marked Boys and Girls Club and another box was labeled Salvation Army.

  I have a surprise. A little sound of understanding, of sorrow, escaped Daphne as she looked at her mother’s hard work, recalled her mother’s promise.

  “Good for you, Mom.” She swallowed down a cry. “Good for me. For us. Thanks.”

  Taking a piece of paper and a pen from the box of school supplies, Daphne began her note: Mom, remember—

  The cat yowled from her bed.

  Daphne nodded. “Come on, Cinderfella.”

  Crumpling the note paper, just as her face crumpled, Daphne tried with moderate success to resist a good bawl. Of course her mother remembered Lindsay Wallach. Why wouldn’t she? Her mother needed no help in recalling misery and pain and unanswered questions.

  Swallowing, Daphne decided that she would never mention seeing Lindsay.

  But she thought of the part the ex–best friend had played in Suzanne’s death. Lindsay Wallach and Ross Bouchard cheated on Suzanne. They broke her heart.

  They broke my sister’s heart on the last night of her life.

  How strong had Lindsay Wallach been to sound the alarm on Suzanne’s behalf?

  Suppose I’d told our parents? Just tattled on Suzanne once for all the sneaking out? Suppose Suzanne had stopped because I told Mom and Dad?

  Identifying this old guilt with new clarity offered bare answers.

  Then Suzanne might have made safer choices. And then her father would never have been so bleak he decided to stop living.

  And there was other tattling she could have done, things she’d kept quiet. Suzanne had said things. Suzanne had written things.

  So, Daphne would make an official visit.

  And Daphne would talk to Lindsay one more time. She would thank Lindsay for raising the alarm the moment her gut told her Suzanne was missing.

  It was too late to call tonight, but she promised herself she’d thank Lindsay before the weekend was out.

  Cinderfella pawed at her mother’s bedroom door, his purr erupting into little meows as he begged.

  “She’s not in there,” Daphne told the cat, but cracked the door open for him.

  A spare suitcase gaped on the bed, a note and photos beside it. Daphne pushed the door all the way open.

  The largest suitcase of her mother’s luggage set lay open and empty on the bed beside a few folded sweaters and slacks. Her mother had had a hard time deciding what to take on her weekend away and had come to opt for the smaller of her two suitcases.

  And Frances Mayfield had been looking at two photos of gravestones. Daphne picked up the note.

  Frances—

  Don’t hold off, don’t hold back. You can see them anytime, talk to them anytime. Come away with us and have a nice weekend.

  -Blanche

  Daphne fingered the note and swallowed, looking at the first photo.

  Suzanne Emily Mayfield Beloved Daughter and Sister

  The headstone represented all that remained of her beautiful, wild sister. Daphne shook her head and knew why she still talked to Suzanne in their old bedroom, never in the cemetery. She leafed this top photo over the other and thought about how she did talk to her dad at his lonely grave.

  Reginald Mayfield

  A girl buried in consecrated ground, and her father, whose body lay outside the church’s plot. His headstone represented how one man had been cruelly shortchanged in life. She remembered how shortchanged she’d felt ten years ago when, in the living room below, police told her and her mother that he’d taken his own life, alone in a hotel room.

  Of course I was confused, Daphne thought, remembering how she’d wondered what her mother had or hadn’t said or done. I was twenty-one. How does a girl just accept losing her father? Then she gasped at the thought poking her mind.

  Did I hold you back, Mom?

  She booted the cat from her mother’s bedroom. “We’re sleeping on the couch, Cinder.”

  Back downstairs, Daphne stepped into the dark kitchen and inspected the clutter in the dining area at the back of the room.

  Dim illumination from the streetlights added to the sepia-like feel of nostalgia. Her mother had pulled countless socket sets, screwdrivers, a few paintbrushes, an ancient chainsaw, and other old tools of her dad’s from the garage. Different coffee cans of bolts and screws and nails and nuts each had a masking tape price tag of fifty cents. Garage sale signs, more masking tape, a pencil, and a spiral notebook listing items ended the stacks of goods on and around the table.

  “Oh, Mom,” Daphn
e breathed. Pleased and heartened for her mother’s big steps, she fingered her father’s things. There were extra picture frames, spare fixtures, an unused basketball hoop, and a lamp her dad had kept on his desk at the insurance office. There were many pieces of the past whose meanings were long gone.

  Daphne wondered if the garage sale was scheduled for the next weekend. Vic wouldn’t have Jed and Josie. She could help. Vic would come, too. He would offer to come without her having to ask, he was that kind of man. He’d always been willing to spend time with her at her mother’s house. And he’d be ready for a distraction, missing his kids.

  And she would miss them, too. She wanted Jed and Josie to be all right.

  She wanted to tell the kids good night right now. As hard as quasi-stepparenting was, not doing it was harder because she loved Vic, loved Jed, loved Josie.

  Cinderfella jumped on the table and stepped amongst the clutter, knocking one picture over. Daphne grabbed the glass frame and stowed it behind the chainsaw.

  “You are a big, naughty, klutzy cat who almost deprived my mother of a”—Daphne peered to check the masking tape price tag in the low light—“twenty-five-cent sale item. And you shouldn’t be on the table.”

  With a deep breath, Daphne beamed at her mother’s cleanup efforts. She pulled her abandoned note from her pocket, ripped it in half to get some clean paper, and tried anew.

  Mom, Can I have Dad’s old chainsaw and some of these other tools? -D

  A sharp jangle from the old-fashioned wall phone in the kitchen made Daphne gasp. She could remember standing on this faded linoleum, waiting for cookies to come out of the oven, watching Suzanne pass hours on that phone, sometimes flipping the long cord back and forth, teasing Daphne into playing jump rope games. It used to drive their mother up the wall, Suzanne letting Daphne skip over the kitchen phone cord. In all those long-passed years, the phone, like all else, had not been upgraded.

  So Daphne felt a bittersweet smile tug on her mouth as she lifted the receiver without clicking on a kitchen light. “Hello?”