As he put his arm around her and walked her back to the kitchen, the horrific pang that had come to my leg when he had uttered the name caused it to melt beneath me, and I slid down onto the steps in a crumpled position. He was undoubtedly planning to make her a cup of tea to ease her worries about me. My face twitched as I thought it, and I wondered if he would give her peppermint like my mother used to drink: after all, he had given her my mother's nickname, too.
I feigned tiredness to avoid eating lunch with them, but could hardly do the same at dinner. When Melinda knocked upon the door and poked her head inside with one of her wide-mouthed smiles, I was sitting on the floor with my head bent low to the carpet where I had spent the entirety of the afternoon listening for the sound of my father unlocking the office door. He had done so shortly after three; I just had to wait for the house to empty enough to sneak down there.
“We're having dinner now, Enim, if you'd like to come down.”
“No thanks.”
I didn't bother to straighten from my half-laying position. Her opinion of me had already been formed and confirmed, and despite the way her cheeks sucked in every time that she looked at me as though she had spotted something rotten beneath the foundation, I didn't care to attempt to alter it.
“You haven't eaten all day, though,” she said.
“Really?”
My feigned politeness was ruined by the definite note of insolence in my voice, and her mouth wrinkled into a frown.
“Why don't you come downstairs?”
“I'm not hungry.”
“You must be. You haven't eaten since you arrived.” She hesitated, clearly taken aback by my tone. “I can make you anything you'd like.”
“Except coffee, evidently.”
“I … I'm sure we could get you some coffee. I can send Oliver over to the neighbor's to ask. Would you come down and eat then?”
“I don't think so.”
Her mouth wriggled as she surveyed me.
“I … I really wish you'd come down, Enim.”
“Do you?”
“I – I do.”
“Right. Only, it doesn't seem that way.”
“Well, we've hardly gotten to know one another yet. It's always a bit difficult to get adjusted to new people in our lives.”
“Right. I don't even know what I'm supposed to call you.”
“What do you mean? I – 'Melinda' is fine.”
“Melinda,” I repeated with distaste. “It's a bit of a mouthful.”
“Oh, well, it's my name, so ...”
“You don't have a nickname? Something shorter?”
She eyed me distrustfully and I slowly sat up, well aware that she didn't have to know what I was hinting at to recognize the accusation in my tone. I raised my eyebrow as she continued to stare at me, and her arms crossed over her chest.
“What are you saying, Enim?”
“Nothing. I just thought you must have had a nickname; most people do.”
“And what type of nickname are you implying that I have?”
“Something shorter than 'Melinda.'”
“I wish that you'd join us for dinner, Enim,” she said again, but when I gave no response she sighed and left the room.
It only took another moment after she had returned to the kitchen for a chair to screech against the wood and my father's footsteps sounded on the stairs. He opened the door that his wife had just closed and looked in at where I sat on the rug.
“Enim, come downstairs.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“What is this?” he asked. “You fly across the world under the pretense of visiting me, and then you refuse to come out of this room?”
The sunlight was failing in the sky as the hour grew later, and I squinted over at where he stood. I had been wrong in my thinking when I had first seen him in the doorway of the house: he did look different. His hair was the same iron-gray that it had turned years ago, and his features were thick and strong and turned into a frown like always, and his shoulders were broad and his stance was tall, but he wasn't who I remembered at all. He was as much of a stranger as the family sitting around the table in the room below, and I had no more desire to get to know him than I did any of them.
“What did you say to Melinda?” he asked. “You upset her.”
“Did I?”
“You did, and I'd like to know how. What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just told her I wasn't hungry; maybe she thought that I was implying that she can't cook.”
“Melinda's not overly-sensitive, Enim, and she didn't think you implied anything. You clearly said something to her.”
His voice was rigid, but I could detect the fear skimming underneath it. He was worried about the myriad of things that he hadn't told her that I could easily let out into the open air.
“I asked her if she had a nickname,” I said with a shrug. “'Melinda' sounds a bit forced, don't you think?”
Whereas she hadn't made the connection at the question, my father did immediately. His mouth twitched as he tried to keep his expression hard, and he raised his chin as he continued to look down at me.
“Enim, the name is a coincidence,” he said quietly.
“Is it? That's funny, because I would have thought there were plenty of alternatives to 'Melinda' other than 'Lynn.'”
“You're grasping at reasons to dislike her, Enim, and to blame me for moving on. I know that that's what this is – I know that you're upset.”
“You don't know anything – least of all how I feel.”
“Why are you here, Enim? What was the point of this visit?”
“To fuck up your life,” I said. “That's what you think, isn't it?”
“Stop pitying yourself: I thought nothing of the sort.”
“You were never going to come back to New England, were you?” I cut in, pushing myself up straighter as I realized it. “That whole thing about being transferred was just another story, wasn't it? You were never going to come back to Connecticut – not when you had your new family here –”
“I was! I would have! You told me to leave, in case you've forgotten –”
“You got married days afterwards! Don't tell me that was a coincidence, too! That you hadn't already planned the whole thing out beforehand –”
“No, I had,” he said sharply. “I had asked Melinda to marry me months earlier. We were going to postpone it after your – after what happened – but then there was no point.”
“Months earlier? Before Mom died, you mean? So what was your plan, then? To get remarried here while you were still married there?”
“I wouldn't have still been married there – not by that point.”
“Of course you would've – she was still alive! You couldn't have known she was going to die, not when Karl refused to pull the plug –”
“He did pull the plug.”
My hand slipped against the carpet and I jerked back, staring up at him in surprise.
“What?” I shook my head, certain that I had heard him wrong. “No, Karl was – Karl wouldn't've done that. He – you were the one who wanted to do it: he refused.”
“How do you think she died, Enim?” my father asked. “Natural causes? Heart failure? He made the decision sometime after Christmas. He knew by then that she'd never get better.”
“But … no, that's not … he said ...”
“Karl says a lot of things – always with some plan of action to benefit himself in mind. You'd do well to believe few of them.”
He cleared his throat and straightened his collar, looking much more composed now that he had said it aloud. On the contrary, every part of me was squirming inwardly and I couldn't focus on what was being said.
“I'm giving you one more chance, Enim: either you start acting normal, or I'm driving you back to the airport. You can sleep on it.”
He shut the door loudly behind him. When he had gone, I tried to stand but found that my leg had turned to rubber beneath me. Dropping back to
the floor, I shut my mouth and swallowed forcefully as a feeling of nausea came over me, wishing that I could swallow my tongue and teeth as well to clench down on my stomach and bite it in half. My hands were shaking and my skin was pricked and covered in sweat, but I didn't know if it was from the withdrawal from the medication or the realization that I had just heard.
He had let her die. All of those months of hoarding her away from the world under the pretense of taking care of her regardless of what the doctors said and my father asked, and he had chosen to end it all anyhow. I ran back over the conversation that I had overheard between him and his colleague shortly after Christmas, trying to remember if there had been anything other than resoluteness in his tone when he had refused to adhere to my father's request to take her off the life-support, but I could find none. My heart hastened in an irregular pattern as I continued to search for a reason as to why he had gone through with it, but when it settled on the only plausible answer, it did nothing to ease my mind. He hadn't taken my mother off life-support because he had grown tired of taking care of her: he had done it because he had grown tired of taking care of me.
Ch. 8
Melinda sent her children out into the yard to play the following morning rather than allowing them to go up to their rooms. I stood at the window beneath the balloon curtains and watched as they played on the swing set. As Emily and Oliver competed to see who could swing higher, Ava crouched by the bottom of the slide to play with something too small to see.
I descended the stairs and crept down the hallway to my father's office, trying the door once again but finding that he had locked it again. I should have gone down the night before, but I hadn't been able to tug myself away from the guilt lingering from the conversation about my mother in order to do so. Pulling my hand away, I crossed to the kitchen where Melinda was putting dishes away. She must have had taken off from work to ensure that I wasn't left in the house by myself. I shook my head at her back as she replaced the bowls in the cabinet. I was my father's problem: he should have been the one to alter his schedule.
“Oh – Enim.” She jumped as she caught sight of me and nearly dropped the glasses in her hand. Quickly righting herself, she stowed them on the shelf and turned to face me, pressing her hand to her heart as she calmed it. “I didn't see you there.”
“Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you.”
“No, no … that's alright.” She gave me one of her wide-mouthed smiles upon hearing politeness in my voice rather than resentment and took a step towards me. “I was just lost in thought; it's not your fault.”
I pulled myself from the doorway and crossed over to the counter.
“Sorry I missed breakfast. I guess I overslept.”
“Oh, that's alright,” she said, smiling again and reaching for the last of the silverware to put away. “It's good that you're catching up on your sleep. Traveling can take so much out of you.”
“Right.”
“Well, there's plenty to eat, if you'd like. We have some pastries left over, and some cereal. Or I could make you some eggs, if you prefer ...”
She trailed off as I looked none-too-pleased with any of the choices, and I straightened a bit in an attempt to counter my expression. I glanced around the room to where the sickly-sweet baked goods were kept beneath a glass dome on the counter, knowing that I should have eaten something but not remotely up to stomaching anything that she had offered.
“I … I suppose some toast would be nice,” I said at last. “If – if that's alright.”
“Of course.” She opened one of the drawers and pulled out a loaf of multi-grain bread and popped a couple of slices into the toaster, looking pleased that I had finally consented to eat something. “And I had Dan buy some coffee for you, if you'd like – it's instant, I'm afraid, since we don't have a machine, but I thought it would be better than nothing ...”
“That's great,” I said. “I … thank you.”
“Oh, you're very welcome. Let me just get the hot water – I think there's still some left over from the tea ...”
She pulled over the container of coffee and squinted at the back to see how much to put into the cup, seemingly glad for an excuse to keep moving. Taking a plate from the cabinet, she popped up the toast and then reached for a spoon to stir the coffee with, her eyes shifting back and forth between the two without pausing on me.
“There you go.”
She set them on the counter in from of me and I nodded in thanks; it was too difficult to say the actual words again.
“So how do you like Holland so far?” she asked.
I took a bite of the toast. It was filled with too many seeds for my liking, reminiscent of the bread they had served at Bickerby, though at least it was evenly toasted. I chewed for a moment before answering.
“It's nice.”
“Yes, though I'm sure you haven't seen too much of it, yet. Are there any attractions you were hoping to see during your visit?”
I took another bite of the toast before picking up the coffee cup and taking a sip, unable to decide which taste was more unpleasant on my tongue.
“Not especially, no.”
“No? Nothing you're looking for?” she asked. “I remember when I first came here I wanted to see the palace – it's quite a sight. But there are other attractions, too – the Anne Frank House, and an art museum … Rembrandt, I think. Do you know him?”
“Personally?” I said before quickly remembering myself and adding, “No, I don't really know much about art.”
Melinda nodded, the smile still slightly present on her face as she overlooked the sarcasm.
“No, neither do I. Rembrant's not really my taste, anyhow … A bit too dark, I'm afraid.”
I nodded as though agreeing, though I suddenly had the feeling that I would like him quite a bit.
“Well, I don't think I'll be doing much sight-seeing,” I said. “The only thing I'm really looking for is here.”
As Melinda looked momentarily startled, I was frightened that she would realize what my admission meant, but then a smile came over her face that was less intrusive to her features than the usual one.
“Well, I'm sure that your father will be happy to hear that, Enim.”
“Right, yeah,” I said. I fiddled with the uneaten crusts of the toast and looked into the now-empty coffee cup to check if there was a drop left, trying to think of a way to pose my next question while she wasn't quite as wary of me as usual. Setting it back down, I kept my fingers poised on the rim as I cleared my throat. “Actually, speaking of my father, I was wondering … Does he always keep his office locked?”
She turned her head to the side as her expression turned muddled, her eyes still fixed on me.
“I … Why do you ask?”
“No reason; I was just wondering.”
“Why would you wonder if he always keeps his office locked?”
I could tell that I hadn't succeeded in asking the question correctly. Her guard had returned as quickly as it had previously fallen, though this time I knew that asking her to make me another cup of coffee wouldn't lower it again.
“I just wondered,” I said again. “I'm curious.”
“Well, it'll always be locked,” she said, taking my plate to brush off into the trash before putting it in the dishwasher. “Dan's very private.”
“Private, right.”
“If there's something you'd like, you can ask him,” she continued, giving me a disapproving look.
“Right.”
She noted the way that my voice had turned sour and her mouth shifted accordingly.
“I think it would be best if you didn't look through anyone's things while you're here, Enim – just like we wouldn't look through your things. That sounds fair, doesn't it?”
She was using the same voice on me that I was certain she used on her three young children, acting as though by doing so I would take her suggestion without question. I nodded and stood to leave, no longer feeling the need to feign politeness by e
ngaging in pointless conversation. As I limped to the doorway, though, she called me back.
“And Enim?” she said. I turned back to her, my face stony. “Please don't speak to my children without me present anymore.”
My hands clenched.
“Of course, Melinda.”
I turned from the room and crossed back to the stairs, glaring at the office door as I went. If she would have just left the house, then I could have tried to pick the lock. I had seen Jack do it a number of times before and was certain that it wouldn't be half as difficult as the locks at Bickerby were. If he had been there he would have come up with a dozen ways to get into it on the spot; though if he was there, I reminded myself, there would be no need to get into it anyhow. I shook my head as I considered what my father was hiding inside and the sudden urge to ram my shoulder into it and splinter the wood came over me. The sooner that I found the message from Jack, the sooner that I would never have to be near the house’s residents again.
I was halfway up the stairs when I paused, a sudden thought coming to my mind. My father only locked the door to the office when I was there, not his children, so if he was hiding something it wouldn't be something that he secreted from them, too. I turned and hurried back down the stairs and out into the yard, careful to keep my footsteps light and shut the back door softly behind me so that his wife didn't hear. Ava was still playing alone next to the slide. I crossed the yard towards her and bent down by her side.
“Hi, Ava.”
She looked up from where she was scraping the dirt with a trowel, her wide eyes surprised by the company. Her brother and sister had begun a new game together and didn't seem to notice me there.
“Hi, Enim.”
“What're you doing?”
“Looking for treasure.”
I nodded at the small pit in front of her, thinking that she would have more luck finding any by pawing through her mother's jewelry box.
“Me, too,” I said.
“I have another shovel, if you'd like,” she said, reaching behind her to retrieve a plastic yellow scoop. “We can look together.”
Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2) Page 11
