by Mary Morris
“And I want to be with you,” I said at last. Just then the phone rang. We both stared at it.
Nick hesitated to pick it up. Then he reasoned, “It could be Danielle.” But it was Margaret, calling to say that Clarice had had some kind of an attack. “What kind of attack?” I heard Nick say.
Nothing too serious, Margaret said. They didn’t know for sure. She just had a spell, a kind of fainting, but the doctors wanted to make certain it wasn’t her heart, so she was in the hospital out in Crestwood and Margaret needed to get there. “Could you be sure to meet Danielle when she comes home from school?” Margaret said.
Nick said he would be there and wait until she came home. And then she added, “Say hi to Tess for me.”
Nick looked at the phone oddly. When he hung up, he seemed perplexed. “She told me to say hello to you.” Before he went home to meet Danielle after she got out of school, he told me to come with him. “She knows about you. I think she’s all right about it.”
When we got to the house, Danielle gave me that cold stare she’d given me the first time I’d come there, carrying Vicky’s dog after we’d been stuck in the ravines. But she gave her father a hug. “Daddy, you’re home.” She said it in such a way that I knew she was thinking he’d come home to stay. “Where’s Mummy?” she asked, looking around, almost looking through me, as if I weren’t standing there. Nick told her that her mother had to go do something and she’d be back later. Danielle went and did her homework while Nick defrosted a pizza. I wanted to make them a proper dinner, but he said it would be too strange if I cooked in their kitchen.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
We ate pepperoni and cheese pizza with a small salad and Cokes in front of the television. After dinner Danielle showed Nick her homework and he patted her on the shoulder because she had gotten all her math right, which was not her strongest subject, he told me. Danielle blushed and seemed to smile and that gave me the hope that she might warm up to me with time. Then he put on some Coltrane and asked Danielle what she wanted to do until bedtime. I could see that already he was getting anxious because Margaret was taking so long. He kept glancing at the clock over the mantel. “I wish your mother would call,” he said at one point.
“Me too,” Danielle said. “Let’s play Scrabble until she gets here.”
We played for a while. I had terrible letters. Useless consonants like “V” and “W” and two “O”s. There was little I could do on the board, though Danielle was very good and she had also drawn good letters. She put down “parrot” and “compass”, but the best I could do was “who” and “vow.” Nick was distracted as he played and he kept asking Danielle for help. He looked at the clock from time to time and Danielle kept asking when her mother was coming home.
Finally Nick got up and went into the kitchen to phone the hospital in Crestwood. I could see that he was concerned about Clarice. I followed him in, ostensibly to get something to drink, and saw his face turn pale, his hand tremble as he held the phone. He asked for patient information; Clarice Blair was not in the hospital. Nor had she been there that day. He asked over and over again, “Are you sure? Can you check again?”
Then he phoned Winonah General. Then he called Clarice at her house in Crestwood. When she answered, Nick told me later, he knew. “You aren’t sick?” he said to her.
“No,” she answered, “never felt better. Why?”
When he got off the phone, he called the police. Already Danielle was hollering from the living room for him to come and finish the game, but Nick just shook his head. He put his hand over the phone, shouting, “Tell her I’ll be right there.” When he told them that he thought his wife was missing, the police suggested he come down to the station.
When he asked why, the pitch of his voice rising, they told him there had been an incident on the railroad tracks. It was an express train, the police told him. There weren’t many of those a day so she must have planned it well. Later a neighbor said that she thought she’d seen Margaret’s car parked down the street, waiting until Nick arrived at the house. The last thing Margaret did was make sure that Danielle would not come home to an empty house.
I tried to hide how stunned I was. How was this possible? I found myself shaking as he told me and then went into the bathroom and sobbed, not wanting Danielle to see me. Before Nick went to identify the body, Danielle threw her arms around his neck, demanding to know where he was going.
“I’m going to get Mommy,” he told her. Then he asked me to walk him to the car. “Would you stay here with Danielle,” he said, “until I get home?”
“Of course I will,” I said, leaning into the car.
Then he put his head on the steering wheel and began weeping, sobbing like a baby. I reached across, stroking his hair. Finally he composed himself. “How could she do this?” he said. “How could she leave a child behind?”
When he drove off, I turned and saw Danielle staring at me from the picture window of the house. When I came inside, she just stood there, glaring at me with her cold, dark eyes. “Do you want to read a book?” I asked her. “Would you like to play another game? We could play Monopoly,” I said, “or Clue. I could make us some cocoa.”
But she stood there in her little pink bathrobe, silent and morose, and I stared at this poor, motherless child who was just a decade old, the same age I’d been when I met her mother, and my heart went out to her. I could see how Margaret could do this to herself, but how could she do this to her child? When my children were small and my marriage was breaking up, I felt at times as if I could just jump off the bluffs, do myself in. But how could I leave my children behind? Now, gazing at Danielle, I thought I would raise her as my own. I could love her and my love would soften her, somehow take away her edges, make her want to curl up and read a book, listen to a story. Take the dolls down from her shelves. I’d bring her a pet, I thought. A puppy dog that she could love.
But Danielle kept looking at me in the oddest way. Then she said, “I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Oh, I know you aren’t stupid, Danielle.”
“I know that something is wrong. My mother has never done this before. She has never not come home.”
“You’re right. Something is wrong. Your father has gone to find out what it is. Do you want to wait up for him? Do you want to play a game?” I just looked at her, not sure of what to say. I kept thinking she would burst out crying. I didn’t expect she would rush into my arms, but I thought she might let me comfort her somehow. Instead she kept her icy stare on me. “We could do something,” I told her, “to pass the time until your father gets back.”
But she stood up abruptly. “I don’t want you,” she shouted at me. “I want my mother.”
She stomped off to her room as I sat in the living room, folding my face into my hands where I wept silently. At the same time I was listening, ready to rush to her side, but I didn’t hear a sound. After a few moments I went to check on her. Her light was off and she was turned to the wall. When I touched her, she was sobbing. “Danielle,” I said.
“Get away from me,” she cried.
“I’ll be in the living room,” I said, “if you want me.”
I went back to the sofa where I stretched out, listening for her. I must have drifted off because when I awoke, there was a knock at the door. I thought it would be Nick, but instead there was a man I’d never seen before. A woman stood behind him in the shadows. Though her hair had turned gray and she seemed wraithlike in the shadows, I recognized her.
“Hello, Clarice,” I said. “It’s Tess. Tess Winterstone.” I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral. I was surprised she’d had the nerve to show up, but she had. She’d stood at the back and hadn’t gone to the graveside, though Art tells me fresh flowers come to my father’s grave on the first of every month.
“I thought you might be here, Tess,” Clarice said. “Nick told me to come and look after Danielle. He has things to tend to, arrangements to make.”
&nb
sp; “Well, I could stay,” I offered, “and wait for him.” Somehow I felt that if I went now, I wouldn’t be coming back. I felt as if I had to hold on.
“He asked that we stay with Danielle. He said he’d call you in the morning.”
I nodded. “All right, Clarice. I’ll go.”
“Well, Tess, I suppose you got what you wanted, didn’t you? I suppose it’s only fair. That we should both lose what matters most to us. That it should end this way.” Clarice spoke in a bitter, unforgiving voice.
“I didn’t have anything to do with this, Clarice, and I certainly didn’t want it to happen.”
Clarice was hidden in the shadows behind the light, where I could hardly see her. I couldn’t make out her features. She was a thin, ghostly figure in the darkness. Deep, hiccuping sobs came from somewhere in her chest. She doubled over, as if she were in terrible pain, howling like an animal, and the man who’d come with her held her up. I went into the kitchen and wrote a note to Nick. I told him how sorry I was and that I would be at Vicky’s.
I gave him her number and said I wanted to be there for him and for Danielle. Folding the note three times, I stuck it under the coffeepot, where I was sure he’d see it in the morning. I told Clarice I was very sorry and she looked at me as if I were a stranger to her, not a girl she’d once begged to stay to play with her daughter.
When I left, they shut the door and pulled down all the blinds so that the house was cloaked in faint, shadowy light. I watched the house for a few moments. Then I got into my rental car and drove down the road toward the railroad trestle, made a left, and drove until I saw the police cars and the wreck.
She had killed herself just beyond the place where I liked to wander when I was a girl. At the place where the town divides itself in two, where the rich live on one side and the poor on the other. Just beyond the underpass where I used to say good-bye to her and she’d go her way and I’d go mine.
* * *
That night I waited at Vicky’s for Nick to call, but he never did. Vicky had already heard, as had the rest of the town. “It’s a very tragic thing” was all Vicky said, “especially for the child.” There was something in her voice, I could tell, that was blaming me. Even though she didn’t say it, even though she didn’t even imply it, somehow it was my fault. Though I had never so much as shoplifted a candy bar as a kid, I felt like a criminal now. I had brought this on and even as Vicky poured me a drink, then said good night, I knew something about my friendship with her—and everyone else in this town—had been altered.
In the morning when I still hadn’t heard from Nick, I called the house. Danielle answered the phone and surprised me by sounding so grown up that for a moment I took her to be her mother. “Could I speak with Nick, please?”
“He doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” she said.
“Danielle,” I said softly, “I’m so sorry about your mom. It’s me, Tess. Tell him I’m on the phone, tell him I need to talk to him.”
But she’d already hung up.
* * *
After lunch I drove over to pay a condolence call. Cars lined the driveway. When I walked in, Nick saw me, but there was a blank look to his eyes.
“She didn’t seem to even care when I told her I was moving out. She didn’t blink an eye. I can’t imagine what would have made her do that. I really can’t,” he said.
Then he told me what I hadn’t known. Margaret left no letter, but she had a cryptic note in her bag when she died. He reached into his pocket, pulled it out. It read: I waited as long as I could. “Waited for what?” he asked me, tears in his eyes. “Waited for whom? What would make her do such a thing?” he said, now breaking down in sobs.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I have no idea. I just know that I want to be there for you.”
“Then leave me alone for now,” he said. “Let me call you after the funeral.”
The funeral was held the next day at Our Lady of the Meadows, a Catholic church in Prairie Vista. I bought a black dress and sat in the back. I was ashamed and tears rolled down my cheeks. This was all my fault. I’d brought ruin on all these people. At the funeral, Danielle stared straight ahead with cold, dark eyes. I kept thinking I’d see her break down and weep, but she just stared.
Once Danielle turned and looked at the crowd that stood behind her in the church and for a moment her eyes landed on me. But there was a blankness to her stare. Nick cried on the coffin. He wept and broke down and he had to be pulled away. I stood at a distance, watching him. In the end Margaret was buried in Winonah in the cemetery near the lake, the place where she’d always wanted to be.
That afternoon I joined the mourners back at his house and Nick took me aside. “I care for you, Tess. I really do. But I’m going to need some time. Go home and in a few weeks I’ll come out and see you.”
“But I don’t want to go home. This town is my home too. I want to be with you.”
He shook his head. “Not now.”
When I returned to Vicky’s that evening, she was waiting up for me, reading the Winonah Weekly. Her slender white fingers held the paper and I thought how she did have beautiful hands, how it was right that people should pay to admire them. She passed me the newspaper. “Here. It’s all here.”
The article gave the details of Margaret’s death, said that Margaret Blair Schoenfield’s car had stopped on the railroad tracks at a well-lit crossing. It was assumed to be a suicide and that she was despondent over her failed marriage to the son of a former football star. She was survived by one child, age ten, and her husband, from whom she was estranged. I read that the engineer said he saw her coming only at the very last moment, as if she’d appeared out of nowhere, and then it was too late. He wasn’t even traveling fast because he was coming into the station, though it was not a scheduled stop. She just drove on the tracks and stayed there, he said. She didn’t move.
“May I keep this?” I asked Vicky after I’d read it through.
“Of course you can.” Vicky tore it out of the Winonah Weekly for me. “Still saving things. You haven’t changed much, have you?” She handed me the clipping and I folded it neatly, then tucked it inside my wallet.
* * *
That night I went to Paradise and Patrick was there. He sat down beside me and had a beer. “I saw you at the funeral,” he said.
I nodded, sipping my beer. “I feel terrible…” Patrick reached across, clutching my fingers. “But I saw Margaret just last week. She acted as if everything was fine. As if there were no bad feelings.” Tears started to come to my eyes; in fact, I did not understand what had happened or why. I tried to reconstruct what had happened when I’d seen Margaret that day for coffee.
What had I missed? Some gesture, some word I hadn’t quite gotten at the time? Of course it was strange that she’d given me those items that she’d saved over the years. But her manner was so natural, almost breezy. Now as I sat there, with Patrick’s fingers wrapped around mine, I was certain there was something I’d overlooked, something I just hadn’t seen.
“Tess, there was always something off about her. I don’t know what it was. Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with you.”
I just shook my head. “How could it not?”
“I don’t know,” Patrick said, “but maybe it doesn’t.”
Just then the door opened and Nick walked in with a crowd of friends. They were all quiet and subdued. When Nick saw me, he gave me a little nod, but he didn’t come my way. “Just give him some time,” Patrick said. “He’ll come around. He doesn’t know what hit him.”
“Thanks.” I patted Patrick on the hand. “That’s good advice.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Tess,” Patrick said.
When Patrick left, I stayed at the bar drinking my beer. I ordered another, but felt strange sitting there alone. I looked over at Nick, who sat with his friends, and gave him a little smile. At last he got up and came over to the bar and sat down beside me. His movements were wooden, like those of an actor un
comfortable in his role.
“Tess,” Nick said at last. “I don’t know how to say this, but I can’t see you for a while. I feel sickened by everything. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel any differently.”
“But it will pass,” I told him. I hesitated, but then I said, “We can be together now if we want.” I spoke softly, just loud enough for him to hear me. “There’s nothing to keep us apart.”
“Yes, there is,” he said, shaking his head.
“Who? What?” I asked him, my voice quivering.
I was sure he was going to say Danielle, but instead he said, “Margaret will keep us apart. That’s who.”
40
Because I keep everything, and I always have, I knew just where I’d find the yearbooks. They were in the back of the old storage closet off the garage. When I got home, I dug them out and propped them up on the table in the breakfast nook. Then I went to the index and found where her name was listed.
I spent the next few days in my breakfast nook, where Francis Eagger drank himself to death, staring at the pictures of Margaret Blair. In fact she was not in many pictures. Though it wasn’t easy in our high school to avoid being in the yearbook, she had managed fairly well. But in the few I found of her, Margaret seemed to be gazing down, the way she used to when she lived above Santini’s Liquor in Prairie Vista. She stood in the back row, off to one side, her long black hair tumbling around her face. Was she hiding? Didn’t she want to be seen?
In some she was just a blur, as if she had moved at the moment the picture was being snapped. This wouldn’t surprise me at all. Because there was something about her even then that could never be pinned down, that was always trying to get away.
