Keep it together, Enza. Don’t cry in a café.
“Of course,” he said.
“Did she ever talk to you about her daughter, Martine?”
He sighed, dragging his fork through the caramel on the cheesecake.
“She did, didn’t she?”
After a beat, he said, “I figured that’s why you wanted to meet today.”
“So you knew my mother died?”
His eyes were sad. He seemed to not want to look at me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know if you knew, and I felt it wasn’t my place to tell you if you didn’t.”
“What did she tell you?”
He leaned back in his chair, his shoulders slumped. I’d wondered before if he’d read Vergie’s journals before giving them to me. Looking at him then, I saw that he must have. He didn’t seem particularly surprised by my question.
He shook his head, still avoiding my gaze. “The whole situation was just so sad.”
“Please, George. You’re the only one left who can tell me the truth.”
He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.
All around us, people were laughing and chatting about their children, their classes, their most recent bad dates. The din had grown louder since we arrived, and George had to raise his voice for me to hear him.
He glanced around quickly, as if making sure no one was eavesdropping. “Vergie came to me when the police first called her,” he said. “I drove her to that little town—I forget the name. It was a few hours from here, in the green part of Texas. Pretty country. Your mother had left several months before, and Vergie thought she was starting over in that town. They told her it was an accidental drowning.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She was heartbroken, of course. She didn’t want to believe it was an accident.”
“Did you think it was an accident?”
He shook his head. “I honestly could never make up my mind. Vergie swore your mother had grown up swimming like a fish.”
“Vergie said she was like a mermaid.”
A silence settled between us.
“We never know what anyone is capable of,” he said. “Until they show us.”
I nodded.
“But people also make unwise decisions, and accidents happen that seem completely illogical.”
Of all the things my father had said about my mother, he’d never once mentioned depression. He’d not been shy about pointing out her faults over the years, and he would almost certainly see depression as a weakness.
“Do you think she could have done it on purpose?” I asked him.
He shook his head, staring at his coffee cup. “Vergie just told me about the divorce, how hard your mother was taking it. She hated being away from you. But your mother seemed like a basically happy person. Sometimes I thought Vergie couldn’t accept that it was simply an accident. Accident implies carelessness, and she didn’t think of Martine as careless.”
“I thought my mother wanted the divorce. She left us.”
“I don’t know the particulars,” George said, his voice softer. “The way Vergie talked, your mother had become unmoored. She was searching for something, and she was restless. She stayed here for a while, and then she took off to travel by herself, out west somewhere. Vergie thought it would do her good, that she needed some time to heal after whatever happened with your father. Vergie knew your mother was hurting, but she thought she’d heal with enough time. Vergie tried to give her space, but then she was afraid that became distance.”
The café suddenly seemed too tiny, like it was collapsing in on us both.
“Was my mother on any kind of treatment?” I didn’t know much about mental illness, but I knew suicide didn’t come on unannounced. There had to be depression, right? There had to be some shift in her brain, something caused by a cataclysmic event that would set her on that trajectory.
Had my father been that cataclysmic event?
“Not that Vergie ever told me about,” he said. “That’s not something people talk about in these parts. Vergie was so protective of your mother, she probably wouldn’t have even told me such things. It’s just nobody’s business but your own.”
It made me sick to my stomach, thinking of the kind of suffering that sent my mother to the river that night.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have given you those diaries,” he said. “I thought I was doing the right thing, but maybe I wasn’t.”
“I needed to know,” I said. “No one else would have told me.”
“Vergie didn’t even tell anybody she’d died.” His voice was low. “I think she thought it would make it real if she told people, and she just didn’t want to believe it could have happened that way. She had your mother cremated, in that little town in Texas. It was just a speck on the map, so even if the story made the news, it was a story no one out here would hear. Vergie kept that secret as long as she could. She just let people around here think Martine was off in another state, out of contact.”
“It was less painful that way.”
“Yes,” he said. “The whole thing broke her heart, but it would have killed her to have people pity her the rest of her life. She told me that much—she couldn’t bear the thought of all that sympathy and judging.”
“So she never had a funeral.”
He shook his head. “We scattered the ashes in the lake behind her house, said some words for her. But that was all.”
“Thank you for telling me.”
His eyes looked glassy. “I’m sorry you had to learn about it this way. I’m sorry Vergie couldn’t tell you herself.”
“It’s better to know.” But I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
After a while, the first wave of customers left, and a new wave started arriving for the evening. George sat slumped against the back of his chair, looking smaller now despite the crisp uniform. His shirt was neatly pressed, but a size too large, the shoulder seams hanging lower than they should. His bushy gray eyebrows furrowed now when he looked at me, framing light blue eyes.
“George, do you have plans for Christmas?”
He shrugged. “I’ll probably stay at home and watch the parade. I like quiet holidays.”
“Would you like to come to my house?”
He shifted in his chair again, staring past me out the window.
“It’ll just be a few friends and close family,” I said. “I’d love to have you there.”
After a moment, his eyes shifted back to me, and he smiled. “I’d like that too. I’ll bring a dessert. Your grandmother taught me how to make her prize-winning buttermilk pie.”
“That sounds perfect,” I said, and it did.
~~~~
By the time I got back to the house an hour later, it was dusk. Jack had gone in to work at five that evening, and Kate was nowhere to be found. Her car was gone, so I figured she’d left to get her fix of the city again. I walked down to the lagoon at the edge of the yard, out onto the old dock and sat at the end of it. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, not wanting to make this phone call, but knowing I had to. Bella dashed across the yard toward me, then stopped short at the edge of the water. She held her nose to the ground, and I thought back to the last time she’d dragged things up from the yard, and what a disaster that had been. I hoped this time, as she pawed the ground, that she found nothing significant.
I dialed my father’s number and counted the rings, trying to think of what to say. When I could think of nothing, I pressed the “end” button. A few minutes later, I dialed again and did the same.
The dog whined, digging in the mud. She sneezed. Finally, I dialed again. That time my father answered, and I felt my chest tighten immediately, like I had heartburn.
“Enza.” His voice clipped. “How are you?”
“I need to ask you something.” My voice started to shake.
“I’m a little busy right now,” he said. “Can I call you back?”
“This can’t wait.” Before he could argue, I
said, “Did you know Mom died?”
There was silence on the end of the line. For a second, I thought he’d hung up on me.
“Dad? Are you there?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice low.
“Yes, what?”
There was a heavy sigh, then more silence. “I knew about your mother.”
I leaned forward, like I’d been punched, and gazed into the dark water of the lagoon. It smelled like brine and fish.
“How could you keep that from me?” I fought to keep my voice steady. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Enza,” he said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
It made me furious, the way he kept his voice so cool and even, as if this were a mild annoyance for him.
“How can you say that?” I couldn’t stop my voice from rising. “It makes all the difference. I can’t believe you would lie to me about that.”
“Enza.” I hated to hear him speak my name.
“How could you let me believe for all those years that I might see her again?”
“You told me you never wanted to see her again,” he said.
“I was an idiot teenager!” I shrieked. I looked into the water until I could see past the darkness and into my reflection. My hair was wild and frizzy from the humidity, blending into the dark of the water, and all I could think of was that river in Texas, in a town whose name no one chose to remember.
“Why wouldn’t you tell me?” My chest ached from holding back sobs. I did not want my father to hear me cry.
“She’d already hurt us so much,” he said.
“So your solution was to hurt me more?”
“Calm down,” he said. “I’m not going to discuss this if you’re screaming at me.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. My mother died, and you lied to me. You let me think she was still alive, that I might still find her.”
He sighed.
I didn’t know what I wanted him to say, but nothing he said was right.
“I thought I was doing the right thing,” he said. “Protecting you.”
“How can you be this person?” I said.
“How would telling you that have made anything any better? It would just hurt you more.”
“I hate you for this,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own.
“Enza.” His voice was cool, and his calmness made me queasy.
“Your mother was selfish and cruel to walk out on us the way she did,” he continued. “Have you forgotten how you felt when she left? How you hated her and wished her dead?”
I felt my whole body trembling. My voice cracked when at last I spoke. “Was she depressed? Did she kill herself?”
“Of course not. Her death was an accident.”
“Would you have known if she was?”
There was a long pause, and then he spoke slowly, his voice cold. “She was my wife. I think I would know.”
“Are you sure about that?”
He didn’t respond.
“I’ve changed my mind about Christmas,” I said. “Don’t come here.”
“Enza, there’s a lot you don’t know.”
“I mean it,” I said. “I don’t want you here.” His voice droned on as I pulled the phone away from my ear and ended the call. I was tired of listening to his even tone, his callous answers. I’d heard everything I needed to hear.
I lay back on the dock, feeling the cool air coming off the water. Bella’s toenails clacked on the dock as she walked over to me. She pressed her nose into my hair and lay down next to me with a sigh, as if she knew it was impossible to get me to move in the direction she wanted. Instead I stared up at the sky, watching the clouds drift across slowly, as if heavy with rain.
~~~~
Not long after, Bella let out a faint bark as Kate’s car came rumbling down the drive. The car door slammed, and I heard her calling my name. She walked down to the water to find me lying on the dock, still staring up at the sky. It was periwinkle now, darkening fast as the sun slipped farther away from us. Bella’s ears pricked forward as Kate approached.
“Why are you lying out here with a dog?” Kate asked.
I tilted my head back so I could see her. She was a silhouette in the fading light, her hair almost platinum.
“My dad’s an ass,” I said.
She frowned. “What’s happened now?”
I told her about the journal, my mother’s death, George, the phone call with my father. It seemed like it had taken place so long ago, like it couldn’t have happened in a day. This was not a series of events that should occur in one day.
Kate sat down on the dock next to me.
“Shit,” she said, sounding like the wind had been knocked out of her. “I’m really sorry, Enza. I don’t know what to say to make this better.”
“I just can’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t know which I’m madder about.”
Her eyes moved across the lake, where the sun had dipped below the tree line, leaving a wash of orange above the tops of the pines.
“It seems so impossible,” she said.
I shook my head. “I thought I wanted to know everything that happened.”
We sat in silence for a while, the only sounds coming from the waves slapping against the dock, the birds twittering across the water. Part of me hoped that if I closed my eyes, if I sat there long enough in the stillness, all of this would be revealed as a bad dream.
“Even when the truth is horrible,” she said, “isn’t it better than not knowing?”
“I used to think so.”
She stretched out next to me on the dock and draped her hand over mine.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said.
“I’m sorry it ended this way.”
Above us, the moon was beginning to brighten, already anchored high among the tallest limbs of the cypress. We lay there until the owls began calling from the darkness of the canopy, until the sky turned to violet and the first stars appeared like holes in the night.
When we finally headed back to the house, I felt something large fly within a foot of my head, its feathers silent as it flapped its broad wings. It was a blur of speckled white and gray, bound for a tall dead tree at the edge of the yard.
“What was that?” Kate asked, looking behind us.
“An owl, I think.”
I tracked its path as it continued toward the tree and lighted near the top. Owls were like ghosts, slipping through the darkness without making a sound, dodging you and disappearing into a dark part of the world before you ever knew they’d been there at all.
Chapter 9
Some mornings, when Jack was still at the station, I liked to get up early to watch the sunrise. This time of year, the sun hung low in the sky most of the day, but it came up almost directly in front of the porch swing. I could sit on the swing, sipping my coffee, and listen as the birds called up the sun. This morning, Bella was lying next to me, her head in my lap. She’d taken more of a liking to me these last few months, like she had taken me into her herd.
It was chilly this morning, causing a fog to rise from the surface of the lagoon and roll into the yard as if pushed by the waves. It was so quiet outside that I half expected to actually hear the sun popping up over the trees, like a cork pulled from a bottle.
Today, dawn broke to the sound of the screen door opening. Kate trudged outside, bundled up in her yoga pants and sweatshirt, fuzzy leopard-print slippers flopping against the floorboards.
“Hey,” she said. “You’re up.”
“You found the coffee.”
She sat in the chair next to me and said, “It’s been a long time since I saw a sunrise that wasn’t in the city.”
I scratched the dog’s ears.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“Oh, you know.”
She looked worried. “Let’s get out of here for a while. I’ve got to buy a few gifts, and I could use some company.”
She wasn’t as sly as she thought sh
e was. What she really meant was that I was the one who could use some company. Jack would be home after five, but today that seemed like a long time to sit in an empty house.
The dog whined next to me, as if she could read my thoughts.
“Keep me from spending too much on useless things,” she said. “I’ll buy you fancy coffee and beignets.”
I smiled. “But this is the time when the wild-eyed last-minute shoppers are out in droves. There are only three shopping days left.”
She sipped her coffee, staring out over the lake. “Come on. It’ll be good to get out for a bit.”
I’d already bought all my gifts, but Kate was right. The last thing I needed was to sit in this house, feeling alone, obsessing about my dead mother. As much as I tried to push those thoughts to the back of my mind, they kept rising to the surface.
“Come on,” she said, tugging on my sleeve. She grew up with brothers and liked to remind me of that with certain methods of persuasion. “Come with, come with, come with!” When I didn’t answer, she pulled harder and said, “I can do this all day, you know.”
I sighed. “OK, fine.”
“Yay!” she squealed. Bella raised her head and cocked one ear.
~~~~
Down in the French Quarter, people were buzzing around like bees in a hive. It was almost as busy as the summer, when tourists seemed to outnumber locals ten to one. Music poured out of doors as they opened, the notes ricocheting across the sidewalks. Even at Christmas, people down here moved at a slower pace, which was something I never tired of. I’d never thought of Raleigh as being that fast-paced until I’d settled in down here, and then it seemed I’d spent far too much of my life hurrying through it.
Kate pulled me into a kitchen store to get a few vital instruments for our Christmas feast. Jack had given the house a well-equipped kitchen, with tools I’d never even seen before. Since I’d learned to mash potatoes with a fork, it was clear that someone with some cooking finesse should be in charge of outfitting us. Kate, however, was even more persnickety than Jack, and she’d made a list of her most-wanted gadgets.
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