Acts of God

by Mary Morris

  I gazed around, changing the subject. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

  He made a face as if none of it mattered. “I haven’t done much at all, to tell you the truth.”

  “But you have this.…” I waved my hand around the room.

  He grinned bitterly. “I have nothing, in fact. I wanted to go to medical school. Do you remember that?”

  I shook my head. “Is that why you thought I’d be a nurse?”

  “Maybe. I wanted to make something of my life. Now I’m just running these businesses I inherited, living in this house I inherited. I’ve accomplished nothing.”

  “That’s not how it appears from the outside. It looks as if you’ve accomplished a great deal.”

  “Not what I would have liked.” Nick paused to listen to the wind. “You know what I remember about you once? You know what you did? We, me and Jeb, were playing ball and you wanted to play. We were maybe twelve or thirteen. We didn’t want you to so we decided to play rough with you. We threw the ball hard into your stomach. You caught it and threw it back just as hard. I aimed one at your head. I know it wasn’t very nice, but you caught it. Then you came right up to me, right in front of me. You threw the ball on the ground and walked away. It was like you just wanted to prove you could play with us. You wanted to show us. I always thought you were a pretty tough kid.”

  “It hurt like hell,” I said. He gave me an odd look. “Catching those balls you threw. It hurt.”

  “But you had guts. I admired that. Will you accept my apology?”

  I took a sip of my toddy. “I’ll think about it.”

  Except for the wind swirling outside it was quiet in the house. Everything was still inside and raging outside. We sat in silence for a few moments, listening to the storm. Nick reached over and touched my hand. “Now you’re here and I don’t know what to do.”

  “Don’t do anything,” I said. Then I got up. “I’m going back to bed.” Nick rose as well and walked toward me as if he were going to put his mug in the sink. Instead, he stopped right in front of me. “Tess,” he said, then, “Tessie…”

  “Go back to bed,” I told him.

  He hesitated. Then he gave me a pat on the head as if that was what he’d intended in the first place. “You too. Get some sleep.” As he walked to his room, he gave me a backward wave. When he was gone, I went into the living room and watched an eerie purplish light spread across the sky.

  24

  My secret was growing inside me. I was surprised at how big it grew, at how much room it could occupy. Whenever I saw Margaret or thought about her, I thought about the pact I’d made with my father. It seemed as if it could take up all the space that was not filled with history dates or algebra or phone numbers.

  When my mother came into my room and opened my shutters in the morning, I thought, There is something I know but I can’t tell you. My mother always wanted the truth. “Don’t tell stories,” she told me once. “Don’t tell fibs.”

  When she kissed me good night and I smelled her minty breath, I thought, There’s something I know that you don’t know.

  It wasn’t that I wanted to tell her. It was that not telling her was getting harder and harder. It wasn’t anything, of course. It hardly mattered at all. The previous summer my father had stopped to sell insurance to Clarice on a Thursday afternoon before he headed home. It was nothing more than that, and it only mattered to my father and me. It was the thing we had between us now. That was what I told myself.

  He’d never mentioned it again. It was never discussed. My father never said, “You know that thing I asked you not to tell…” It was as if he had forgotten about it. As if it was nothing to him. But it weighed on me like when you eat too much dough. I kept thinking that if I talked to him about it, he’d tell me it was all right. I could tell her now. I wanted to ask my father about it. About how long I had to keep this secret to myself. But he was hardly around anymore.

  He came home on Friday afternoon, left Monday before we were up. When he was back, he was on the roof, fixing shingles, or playing golf. He hardly noticed that his children were running wild. When Jeb was not downstairs, hanging out in the rec room, he was at the Idiot’s Circle. The Idiot’s Circle was across from Mrs. Larsen’s Stationery Store; Winslow Drugs and Faulkner’s Hardware were also across the street from it, and those store owners had complained plenty of times about the kids hanging out there in black leather jackets, smoking cigarettes and doing God knows what else.

  There were other rumors about my brother that came back to me, things that the gang whispered to me about. Trouble he got into, the fast crowd he hung out with. And talk about Jeb with girls—fast girls, girls who did things with boys behind trees, girls who boys lined up for. Things I didn’t want to think about or imagine my brother doing.

  My brother leading two lives. On weekends watching our father put drywall up in the basement, and during the week hanging out at the Idiot’s Circle. That’s where he spent his high school years, with a duck-ass haircut and tight black jeans, a black jacket, sunglasses, while Lily walked around the house moaning, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s happened to my little boy.”

  When our father came home on Friday afternoon, she shouted at him, “The boy needs his father. The kids need their parents. Can’t you stay home?”

  Sometimes I heard her cry into the phone, “It’s not about me. I can manage. It’s about the children. Do you really have to keep doing whatever it is you’re doing?”

  Sometimes Lily went after Jeb, made him come home. Or she sent me, but God help me when I rode up on my bicycle. All those boys laughing so loud, hitting Jeb in the back. “Hey, Jebbie, Miss Goody Two-Shoes says you better come home.”

  That was the nicest shout I’d get. Miss Goody Two-Shoes. Little Miss Apple Polisher. Miss Straight A’s. I was a good student, a straight-A student, because I worked. I studied hard. I worked ferociously, madly. Memorizing everything I could.

  But Jeb was the one who knew all the answers. Mr. Smarty Pants, I called him. He knew it all in his head. Right up here, he’d say and point to the old bean. He went to school without a notebook or books, just a pencil tucked behind his ear, and he sat in class and just listened. I didn’t know this because people told me. I knew it because I saw him, heading out to school; or when I was on hall patrol (which was a perk for honor roll students), I saw him sitting there, no paper or pencil in front of him, just taking in every word.

  After school he hung out at the Idiot’s Circle with the other bad boys. Jeb hung out there and got straight A’s and all the teachers would remember him. Even as Art came up through high school, they’d say, “Oh, you’re Jeb Winterstone’s kid brother.”

  Like our father, my brother was hardly home. No matter what, Lily set a place for him. Sometimes after dinner on a summer night I had to go find my brother.

  I didn’t know quite how this was, but it seemed to me that my secret had something to do with what was happening to Jeb, though I didn’t know how. But in my head I practiced saying what I wanted to say. I’d tell my mother while she was standing in the kitchen that I’d gone over to Margaret Blair’s one afternoon because of a storm. My mother would understand this. She knew I was afraid of storms, afraid of what the weather might do. She even understood how this came from a deep-seated fear, from our dinner-table talks of tornados and floods. I would tell her that I’d gone to Margaret’s because I was afraid of the storm. She would understand that. And I’d found my father there with his feet resting on the coffee table. And he’d asked me not to tell.

  In my head, I rehearsed how I’d tell her, what I’d say. But whenever I saw Lily, ladling soup, testing a roast with a fork, the blood rushing into the pan, I couldn’t. I’d see her, bent over, poking a chicken, and I’d want to tell her, but I didn’t. I’m not a tattletale. I’m someone you can trust.

  * * *

  Baton-twirling practice had begun. We met in the mornings just before eight or on Saturdays at the
football field. We worked on our figure eights, our hand-to-hands. We marched in formation. In unison we jumped in the air, released our batons, then caught them, still twirling, before they hit the ground.

  One Saturday my mother came to pick me up. I was surprised to see her, but she said I needed new clothes and she wanted to take me shopping. We took the highway because it was the most direct way to get to the shopping center at Old Orchard. “Now let’s see,” Lily said. “What do you need?”

  In the car as we drove we made a list. A pleated skirt with matching sweater, a dress for parties. Some corduroys. We went from store to store and she bought me whatever I wanted. Usually I had to decide between two things, but she said, “Just take whatever you want. Take everything.”

  I’d never seen her spend so much money at one time. I finally said to her, “Mom, it’s all right, I don’t need all this stuff.”

  “Who cares what you need? If you want it, it’s yours.”

  When we finished shopping, we carried all our packages to the coffee shop that was in the shopping center. I ordered a hamburger and a chocolate soda. My mother ordered a Coke and a salad. She smoked a cigarette, which I rarely saw her do. She sat staring across at me, blowing smoke, and I thought she wanted me to tell her something. That this was why she’d brought me here and bought me all these clothes. So I would tell her what I knew. I was gathering up the nerve when I said, “Thanks for the clothes.”

  “I want you to be beautiful, Tessie,” she said. “I want you to have everything you deserve.” Tears came to her eyes. She fanned her hand in front of her face and said it was from the smoke. Then she crushed out her cigarette and asked for the check. Gathering up our bundles, we headed for the car and drove back the same way we came.

  25

  Ted believed in vampires. Not the kind you see in late-night movies or on TV, but real vampires. By day they go to school, hold normal jobs. At night they come out and suck your blood. He used to play Dungeons & Dragons. Now it was Vampires of the Masquerade. He told me it was a cult game, but I saw him leaving the house dressed in a red cape. “Why are you doing this?” I asked him and he shook his head.

  “Vy not?”

  Lily still spits in the air to keep away the evil eye. I do it from time to time myself. But garlic and crosses? Living on human blood? When I returned from Illinois, Ted informed me he was going to live with Sabe, a woman he had met at Vampires of the Masquerade in a role-playing session. Sabe had black fingernails, a thumbtack through her tongue. When she talked she rolled it around in her mouth and sounded like someone who’d just had a stroke.

  I didn’t say to him what my mother would have said to me: “Okay, it’s your life. I did what I could.”

  I returned home to find my life in disarray, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered on the ground. Pieces were missing and what I had didn’t fit together anymore. Jade seemed to be avoiding me whenever I was in the house and Shana had left a message saying that business had slowed and she did not think she’d be needing me much over the next month.

  When I arrived, Ted was literally moving, a big carton of CDs in his arms. “Honey,” I said, “what are you doing?”

  “I’m moving, Mom, I’m going to live with Sabe.” In my mind I tried to remember who Sabe was. Blond, green eyes, small? Leggy, dark, tall? Nose ring, didn’t get up to greet me from the couch? Then it came to me—black fingernails, pierced tongue. I frowned. I had given up having long talks with Ted about his future. About how smart he was and how he should be going back to school, but suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of my son just walking out the door.

  “Ted, sit down; tell me about her.”

  With an impatient look, he put his box down. “She’s a nurse practitioner.”

  Is she a vampire? I wanted to ask. “Oh, she looked so young.”

  “Naw, she’s older than you think. She has a kid. Sonia is three.”

  “Oh, and the father, is he in the picture?”

  Ted laughed as if this were a very funny joke. “He’s definitely not in the picture. Anyway, Mom, I gotta go. We’ll have you by for dinner in a week or so. I left her number on the fridge.”

  He gave me a hug. When I checked the phone number, it was for an area code in Oregon. A pile of mail sat on my desk, all of it, I felt certain, bills, and I had no idea how I was going to pay them. Charlie owed me a little money in back support payments and I had some income still from my father’s estate. If I called Jeb, he’d send me whatever I needed, but I didn’t like to ask. Night after night I poked the papers on my desk and listened to Jade come in and go out, sometimes hollering to me, “Be back later.” Sometimes not. If I asked her what was going on, she said, “What will be will be.”

  One morning I pinned her down. “Jade, I want you to have dinner with me this evening. Can you be home by seven?” Reluctantly she gave me a nod and was out the door.

  I was straightening up that morning when the phone rang. “Tess,” a voice said, expecting me to know who he was, “How’re you doing? Listen, I’ve got this idea for you. Isn’t that house of yours famous for something—the guy who built it? The way he made it out of coastal stones?”

  “Yes, it is.” It took a moment for me to realize that I was speaking with John Martelli, my insurance agent.

  “Well, I’ve got an idea for you.”

  Two hours later John Martelli’s car with the URCOVERD license plate pulled into the driveway. From my living room I saw John fling his ponytail back, scoop up some files and head toward my house. I greeted him at the door. “Let’s walk around it,” he said.

  In silence we walked around my stone house. John looked at the foundation. He shook his head at the distance between my house and the Pacific Ocean. “Well, it’s going to be a tough one,” he told me.

  “John, what do you have in mind?”

  “How famous is this poet, Tessie?”

  I led John into my living room and sat him down in front of the complete works of Francis Cantwell Eagger. At the same time John handed me my new insurance policy with a premium I’d have to sell the house in order to pay. “John, I can’t—”

  He nodded. “I know, I know. That’s what I’m here for. What did your father say? No problems, only solutions? Okay, I’m here with a solution.”

  He gazed around the stone walls, the ocean view. He opened one of the volumes and read the first few lines of “Coastal Views.” “So he’s a pretty important guy, I guess. Well, it’s a long shot, like I said, but why don’t you try to get your house on the National Registry of Historic Houses? Then it becomes like a national treasure. It has to be protected. Like I said, it’s a long shot, but I’d give it a try.” He handed me a brochure with their number, which was in Washington. “I’ve done a little research for you.”

  “Thanks, John,” I said. “Can I offer you anything?”

  “Well,” he said slowly, his brown eyes turning dewy. “Maybe you could have dinner with me sometime.”

  I hadn’t expected him to say that. I imagined that John was in his early thirties, closer to Ted’s age than mine. “Well, I’m seeing someone right now,” I replied, wondering if I really was.

  John got up, slightly embarrassed. He flung his ponytail back again. “You know, sometime … in the future.”

  I thanked him for the brochure and his help. Pebble in the head, I told myself. After I heard the screech of his tires, I decided I needed some fresh air. I headed out along the cliffs, then wandered down to the shore, where I found a peach-colored shell I didn’t have and a small animal skull, white and polished bone. I stuck these in my pocket. Then I gazed up at my house, which was going to fall down this cliff if I didn’t do something about it. Looking at its stone walls, the way it fit so neatly into the hillside, I knew I wanted to stay here. I never wanted to leave.

  When I got back up from the beach, I made a pot of coffee and phoned the National Registry of Historic Houses. The woman who answered seemed to be eating a sandwich as we spoke. She told m
e they’d need photographs, architectural drawings, documented historic information, and an on-site inspection. She also said that the chances were slim that my house would qualify and, off the record, they had hundreds of requests every week from people who wanted their houses taken off the registry so they could remodel. I said I wasn’t planning on remodeling and I wanted it registered. The woman said she’d send me an application and wished me luck.

  Then I made a veggie casserole and I put it down in front of Jade when she came home, but she looked like a cornered animal with nowhere to go. “I’m a little lonely around here,” I told her. “Maybe we could eat together; just tonight.”

  “Sure, Mom,” she said, but she got a look in her face I’d seen many times before. For a time when Jade was little, she went everywhere with a rock. She didn’t want dolls or stuffed animals. She just wanted her rock. Charlie and I used to joke to each other that it was because of her name, but actually she didn’t know that jade was a stone until she was older. It had to go everywhere with her—beside her in the car, to the dentist, to visit Charlie’s family. If anyone tried to take it away from her, she got the look she had on her face now as she sat down to have dinner with me. Like I was going to take something away from her.

  “Honey, we’ve hardly talked. I’ve scarcely seen you since I got home. You know, I have things I’d like to tell you about. I’m sure you have things as well.” She sighed a deep sigh as she picked her way through brown rice and mushrooms. I reached across and touched her hand. “You can talk to me, you really can.”

  “Can I? I’m not sure.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “Yes, please, I want you to,” wondering if I did want her to and dreading the worst. “You know, darling, I’m on your side. I’m in your camp.”

  “Which camp is that?” Her eyes got that cold, ironic look they sometimes had. A look I’d seen in her father’s eyes as our marriage unraveled. “Summer, boot, or concentration?”