Broken Strings

by Nancy Means Wright

  She turned her head and looked at him sideways. He swallowed and bent to his paddling. “Awful,” he agreed. Was she baiting him? They were in the middle of the creek now, beyond the Branbury falls, a third of the way to Vergennes. If they could portage around the power plant and reach Vergennes, they’d have to put in before the bridge and the falls. He didn’t think she’d want to be reminded of that abandoned building she’d slept in, so he’d make sure they turned back before they reached it. She wouldn’t tell him what had happened there – if anything. He worried about her being under eighteen. Some law about sleeping together, even if consensual. He’d been in the can once, and once was enough.

  A canoe floated past and the couple in it waved. He and Chance must have looked like lovers on a fun outing. Appearances were deceiving. Who knew what either of them had to do with Marion Valentini? He was trying to forget Marion, but she kept haunting his dreams.

  “She was a real artist,” Chance asked, not letting go. “Not just marionettes but poems, too. You read any of her poems?”

  Had she read them? She looked back at him, one hand floating on the water while he steered. He thought of the overturned trash basket Sammy found. What he might’ve thrown in it, stuff he took out of his desk to get rid of.

  “You’re not answering me,” she said, taking up the paddle again, giving a strong wide thrust that spun the kayak to starboard. Determined little kid! But it was time. This was one answer he’d have to give.

  “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I read two of her poems. One she wrote for some magazine and one she gave me.” It was time now to tell the whole story, throw out the baggage that sat between them. He could see her profile. She had a slight smile on her face that said she already knew, that she’d read the poem, figured out it was an acrostic. M-A-R-I-O-N, reading downward. Marion loved the mystic, the mysterious, the paranormal. When they were in Glastonbury that time…

  “…wrote it for you, right?” she was saying. “I found it in your trash. I was looking for my jade earring. The trashcan flipped over and I picked it up off the floor.”

  “Look. It was over before she died. Before she married Cedric. It was like a schoolboy crush, you know, she was a lot older than me. She was, well…”

  “Beautiful,” Chance said, her voice sounding flat. “The beautiful older woman.”

  “Yeah, sure, but that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say she was sophisticated, wise – goddess-like, you know. She was a – a teacher. She taught me things.”

  “Sex?”

  “More than that. It’s hard to explain. Inside. In here,” he said, patting his chest.

  “In where? I can’t turn my head that easy.” Though she did and the boat rocked. A motorboat raced past and he had to steer them out of its wake.

  “The spirit. That’s what I’m trying to say. Things of the spirit. Ancient ritual, pagan rites. She’s the one got our pagan group going.”

  “You liked all that. You liked – loved her.”

  “Maybe the word’s obsessed. I was obsessed with her. Couldn’t eat, sleep, drink without thinking of her.”

  “And Marion? She love you back?”

  Did she? She said she did the one time they lay together. But afterward, it was like he was just a kid – her kid or something. She mothered him. “Not really,” he said. “Not in the way you mean. Though I didn’t know it at the time.” Which was true, he realized now. While he was obsessed with Marion, she was obsessed with her rituals, her art, the puppetry she’d learned from her father. And then when her father died and Cedric came along with his big booming personality and money to back up her puppets, she cut him off.

  “Dropped me, bang, on the cement,” he said aloud. “Never even said good-bye, never said sorry, like she never understood how I really felt. I was hurt. I was – ”

  “Devastated,” she said. “I know. I know how it feels to be dumped. I got dumped once in ninth grade – before I got here. It hurt. Now I look back and think what an ass that kid was, big bruising sophomore. What an ass I was.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He’d hated Marion for cutting him off like that. He was crushed, stomped on, betrayed. Hated her.

  They were quiet for a few minutes. He could hear the wash and rush of water as they paddled. Theirs was the only boat in this part of the creek. It was October, and there was a wind chill in the air. It felt like they’d been paddling a thousand miles. Like he’d just laid his whole life in front of her. Was washing it away into the creek. Some kind of exorcism. He breathed in the fresh air, the fish, the fallen red and gold leaves that floated out almost into the middle.

  “So how come she had to die?” Chance asked.

  Her question hit him in the gut. He couldn’t answer. The favor Sammy had asked, what she said he owed her for, came into his head in all its awful impossibility. “Let’s keep paddling till we reach Weybridge, and then we can portage and go on up the river till we reach the lake.”

  “I’ve got homework,” she said. “Fay’s writing a new end to the play she wants me to read. She’ll be home any minute. So let’s turn around now, okay?” Already she was pulling back on her paddle, the water resisting but the boat slowly reversing its course.

  He knew she was right, they had to turn back. There was no running away now. The past had caught him by the seat of his pants, and was holding him fast.

  * * *

  Fay was so glad to see the little triumvirate of goats that she hugged them all. First together where they stood in a cluster, and then separately, while Willard hunkered beside her and laughed. He’d driven up to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Burlington where the ambulance had taken her after her accident, then released her when the medics found only bruises and bumps. She’d promised to see her primary doctor if the headache persisted. For now, she figured, it was mostly stress and shock. And anger at the man responsible for the accident.

  “Come on in the house,” Willard said. “We’ll get you some supper.” When she murmured something about having to feed the goats, he told her it had been taken care of. “When you didn’t come home, I milked and fed them.” He didn’t tell her he’d been worried about her, but she saw the furrow between his brows. She let him lead her back to the house.

  After that it was the usual chaos. Apple and Beets arguing, Glenna wanting her ear about someone called Ishtar – who was Ishtar? Ethan needing money for a new horror film at the local movie house. Again. He was always out of cash. “Okay, okay, get my purse,” she shouted above the brouhaha.

  Then they all remembered that she’d had an accident, and hurled a dozen questions at her. She said she’d tell the story if they’d all stop talking because her head was full of airplanes taking off and landing.

  She described the meeting with the skull artist and its aftermath, the pickup’s gyrations on the way home, the overturn. “And then my cell phone smacked me in the temple.”

  “That pickup of yours had an overhaul just last month,” Glenna said as if to challenge her story of slashed tires.

  “It was the two front ones. They had tiny holes in them. They flattened after I’d driven a half hour or so.” She didn’t say why they had holes, she didn’t want to create a new barrage of questions. Skull Artist had punctured them, she bet, while she was in the café. There was an odd look on Willard’s face.

  “The truck is up in Burlington now,” he told the group. “Where it was towed. It was banged up, but can be repaired. I’ll take care of it,” he told Fay. “Don’t you worry now.”

  “I won’t,” she said. Though of course she would.

  After Glenna’s spaghetti supper, she called The Permanent Solution but got the answering machine. “Here’s what I need to know,” she told the machine. “Do you have a Samantha on the books? Could the owner have gotten the spots reversed? A blue circle around a brown eye instead of a brown spot in the blue eye?” In which case, she thought, Sammy aka Honeysuckle might be next in line after Cedric for the Valentini fortune.

  If,
that is, it was a fortune. And if Dominick Valentini had put his mistress into his will. And how did Skull Man fit in?

  And what about Billy? she thought as she sat in a warm bath, slowly soaping herself with the soap she’d made from palm and olive oils, basil, and fresh goat’s milk. Who was Sammy’s half-brother anyway? What had he been doing up until he met Chance?

  After the bath she took all the questions into bed with her. A writer friend had once told her that if you put a plot question into your head just before falling asleep you might find answers upon waking in the morning. Something about the great unconscious mulling them over.

  It was worth a try. Though she was such an insomniac these days.

  And here was Willard at her bedside with a glass of water and two round pink pills in the palm of his hand, his face as pink as the pills. “Doctor said to take these before bed, remember? They’ll help you sleep.”

  “Make me dream?”

  “That, too,” he said as she swallowed the pills. He kissed her forehead and she forgot about the headache. She was too exhausted to thank him for coming to her rescue, for being there, for being himself, for being… The thought was lost in a yawn that enveloped her body. She barely heard the bedroom door shut before she gave into sweet sleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kindling Thoughts in the Kitchen

  Tuesday, October 9

  Billy wasn’t home when Chance squeezed in through the back window for the breakfast he’d promised before they parted Monday night. A note on his refrigerator read Back soon, make coffee. The red button was blinking on his answering machine. And under the front door was an envelope with Billy’s name on it. The envelope was sealed, so she threw it on the coffee table. If it was Sammy’s note she didn’t care. Sammy was a half-sister, the caseworker had said. And she’d been a foster kid, Chance had to remember that. She’d try to be civil to the woman when she went to the Co-op. With Chance, first impressions lingered, a bad trait she couldn’t seem to change.

  At this point she wasn’t even thinking of Marion or his affair with her. She was more concerned right now with those holes in Fay’s tires. Fay must’ve picked up a couple nails, she told a worried Apple, but the smart-ass kid said, “Fay doesn’t think so.”

  Chance plugged in the coffee pot. She didn’t drink the stuff herself, but Billy was a caffeine addict. She was almost ready to leave for class when he walked in.

  “Sorry, I had to…” Billy saw the envelope on the table and snatched it up.

  “Can’t say hello? Where’ve you – ” She broke off. He was reading the note. She held out her hand. “Can I?”

  “No.” He ripped it in half, stuck it in his pants pocket. “From the landlord, that’s all,” he said. “Wanting to raise the rent. I can’t afford that.”

  “Outrageous,” she said, though she didn’t believe him. “So what is it, Billy? I thought after we talked yesterday, you weren’t going to keep stuff from me anymore. We were going to talk it out together, right?”

  After they’d stowed the kayak, come back to the apartment for a quick glass of Woodchuck and talked out the Marion question: how he was “obsessed-it-wasn’t-love-he-never-really-knew-her. No more secrets.

  And already Billy had one. Something bad, too, from the look of it. She could see he was nervous, spilling coffee on the carpet. Muttering like it was the mug’s fault for making him do it. She poured him a second mugful that he grabbed with both hands.

  “Billy, you hear what I said just now? About talking stuff over? So what was in that note, huh? What?”

  “I-I can’t tell you what it is, I promised – nothing to do with you and me, just, well, something I got into with some friends. I mean I thought they were friends.”

  Gambling, she thought. He had some Abenaki blood like her, he’d said once. She’d been reading about casinos, the reason they didn’t want to give Abenaki their full rights. The state legislature was afraid they’d put a casino smack in the middle of Vermont and people running up to play the machines. “You lost money gambling or something?” she asked, and he looked at her, surprised, and then nodded.

  “How much, Billy?”

  “A lot,” he said. “But I’m quitting. I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. Let’s kill the subject. I’ll do waffles, how’s that?” He put on a smile, the old grin, those eyes, the color of the sea. And just as unfathomable. How little she really knew about him. She sighed, and looked at her watch. Already she was late for bio class, there was no time for waffles. She’d grab a bagel on the way.

  He wasn’t even upset she was leaving. That note was obviously reading itself out loud in his head. Maybe it wasn’t a gambling debt at all, maybe it was something worse.

  “See ya,” she said, and squeezed his arm. But he didn’t seem to notice.

  She would come back this afternoon while his band was rehearsing. She would read the note.

  * * *

  A woman with a gray-black braid was getting out of an ancient pickup, more ancient even than her own. No, Fay didn’t have a truck now, did she? She was renting a gas guzzler, compliments of the insurance company while they determined whose fault it was.

  “It’s Ishtar,” said Glenna, coming up behind Fay at the window. It was a cloudy, chilly day. October could be fickle: warm one day, freezing the next. Leaves were in full orange-red bloom, a last chance in the sun before they shredded and fell to the ground. The mountains were a bluish purple. That good earthy smell filling her nose.

  “Ishtar,” Fay repeated. “How do you know her name, Glenna?”

  “If you’d concentrate on things these days, you’d remember.” Glenna was looking smug. She loved it when anyone else forgot things. “I told you about it. I went to the Round Robin with her raincoat, to find her.”

  Fay remembered now. It was just that her brain these days was trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and had put the raincoat in the trivia pile. Wrongly so, perhaps. She opened the door, but the woman just stood there on the bottom step.

  “I came for my coat,” Ishtar said. “Someone left a note with this address.”

  “That was me,” Glenna said. “Come on in while I get it. We got a lot of kids in the house, things disappear.”

  The woman stopped just inside the door and looked back at it as if determining an escape route. She was wearing a black wool vintage coat over something purple. Her shoes looked worn but sturdy. Her handsome, strong-boned face matched her shoes. It was clear from the stubborn set of her lips that she wasn’t going to move away from the door.

  “You’re Marion’s mother,” Fay said, and the woman’s eyes widened, but she didn’t deny it. When Glenna appeared with the raincoat, Fay motioned her back. She had questions to ask. “You know Marion didn’t take her own life,” she began.

  “Of course not,” the woman snapped. “She loved her work. She loved life. Why would she even think of ending it?”

  “I worked with her almost a year. And I’d like to talk to you.” Fay backed up a foot, hoping the woman would follow to a chair. Ishtar was looking uncertain, like a cat you try to attract with a saucer of tuna but any minute it might bolt.

  “Coffee?” Glenna offered, not wanting to relinquish authority. Ishtar was her find. Ishtar shook her head. “No, thank you.” But she didn’t leave.

  “Do you mind if I do?” Glenna sat down with a cup.

  Fay remained standing with Ishtar, went through the obligatory small talk, talked her way toward Cedric. “He’s been harassed, you know, he thinks someone’s after him. First a bomb in his back yard, then someone almost killed his spaniel with a dish of chocolates. He has the house on the market but don’t worry, the cops won’t let him leave. He’s next in line to inherit, I expect.” The woman’s eyes clouded. “I never once set foot in that house. Cedric wouldn’t have it. Marion wanted me to come. She was the one found me, you know, her birth mother. She went poking in her father’s papers.”

  “How would the father um, Dominick –
know?” Fay asked. “Adoption agencies are notoriously close-mouthed. They don’t divulge these things. Unless Dominick…” A crazy thought occurred to her. “Marion was his love child?” His chance child? She recalled her mother using that intriguing phrase.

  Ishtar blew out a breath. She didn’t confirm or deny it. The elderly woman kept her stance, her spine straight as a pillar. “Gloria never acknowledged it,” Ishtar said, “though she knew. I don’t think she’d have agreed to the adoption if it hadn’t been his child. Blackmail perhaps. But Dominick was clever with his liaisons. Especially with a black woman.”

  “His child,” Fay mouthed – she heard Glenna whistle. But Ishtar was still talking. She was leaning against the kitchen wall, still close to the door.

  “We met in Manchester. Once, when I begged, he let me in the house to see Marion. Gloria ushered me out with a table knife to my back. The child was just three years old then. I couldn’t touch her. My baby.”

  “Cruel!” Fay was horrified. But this is the way of adoption, she thought. Ishtar gave Marion away. Or did Dominick coerce her? Bribe her?

  “I vowed I’d do the same to Gloria one day,” Ishtar said, making a small fist. “Dominick never loved her, she wove him into her web, that’s all.”

  Did you do to the same to Gloria? Fay wanted to ask, but held her tongue. Instead, she said, “Cedric wouldn’t let you and Marion meet?”

  “No. He was ashamed of me. Me, in my thrift shop clothing. Two shades darker than my daughter. All I could do was keep track of her from a distance.”

  “Bastard,” Glenna murmured, and slapped her cup into its saucer. Ishtar nodded.

  “All that didn’t upset Marion?” Fay asked. “I can’t imagine her accepting that kind of prejudice from Cedric.”

  “Of course she didn’t like it! But she was in love with the man back then – though it was something she grew out of after a few years – she told me that. He was good to her but a womanizer like her father. Some women fall for the same types over and over. Like me, with two husbands after Dominick. But that’s another story.” Ishtar pushed her body away from the wall and took a step toward the door.