After they left the Joyce Kilmer rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, left it in a hurry without getting the hot dog Zee had promised, Maggie started to make a mental note of where they were.
“I didn’t have time to wait in line,” Zee’d snapped.
Between the rest stop and the exit to the Garden State Parkway, Zee’s driving became erratic. Once she slowed down in the left-hand lane so the cars behind her honked. I hate impatient drivers, she said, pulling over to the far right lane, hugging the back of the car in front of her, switching to the middle lane and driving what felt to Maggie like too fast.
“I’m sorry about the hot dog,” Zee said. “We need to be there by six.”
“We need to be where?” Maggie asked, knowing she should have kept silent.
“Where we’re going,” Zee said.
North in New York State. That’s the most Maggie knew and was afraid to ask anything else.
If she leaned back in her seat, pretending to look out the front window, she had a peripheral view of Zee’s profile, of her jaw moving as if she were grinding her teeth. Maggie made a note of that too, gathering observations in case she had to tell someone, maybe at a gas station—they would have to stop for gas sometime—her mother would be the one she’d call. Or Uncle Reuben.
Zee was holding the steering wheel in a death grip—those were the words that passed through Maggie’s mind—in a death grip, so she must have read that line in a book.
When they stopped for gas, if they stopped for gas before they got to where they were going as Zee had described it, she would call Lucy or Reuben collect. Explain to Zee that she was going to the restroom, find a pay phone out of sight, call her mother to tell her where they were located, just in case, headed north on Route 87 in New York. Nothing to be exactly alarmed about. She didn’t want to tell on Zee.
Just beyond the exit to Woodstock, New York, Zee started to pull off her necklaces. Actually tear them off, breaking the chains, beads scattering in her lap, tiny red and blue and green dots, pulling on a heavy silver chocker, the blue veins in her neck quivering.
“These things are driving me crazy,” she said, brushing the beads off her lap. “They’re suffocating.”
Maggie fixed her eyes on the road. They had scarely spoken since the Joyce Kilmer rest stop.
“I’m not okay if that’s what you are wondering,” Zee said finally. “And that is what you were wondering, I can tell, looking at me out of the corner of your eyes. I’m sick. I’m sick to death.”
THE MALLORYS HAD been the ones to give the going-away party for their next-door neighbors in the row house where they lived in West Philadelphia where Adam was in law school at Penn. Every time it was the Mallorys who gave the parties, and they were high-spirited, noisy parties with chips for dinner, wine and beer chilling in an old barrel in the backyard, rock and roll on the stereo. Dancing on the tiny deck. Everyone ate very little and drank too much but they were young and in graduate school without responsibilities beyond themselves, a few married but none with children.
Only Adam and Zee Mallory had a child, who on this summer evening the first of August, 1962, was two days short of her first birthday and walking. She had started walking at nine months old, zipping around the apartment on her plump bare feet, and now at almost one, she spoke in fractured sentences. Give Mama kiss. Say bye bye bye bye to Daddy. More ice cream. Like that.
Amazing, their friends said, and the Mallorys had agreed.
Zee was grilling the hamburgers, the stereo box in the open window, Adam dancing with a woman she didn’t know. Two doors down, someone shouted for quiet.
It’s after ten. People are sleeping, a man’s voice said.
After ten registered with Zee. Late to be serving dinner, too late for Miranda to still be up.
ZEE WAS FEELING peculiar when she pulled into the Joyce Kilmer rest stop. Different from the nightmares and nerves and morning sweats of the last few weeks, the way Adam had been when he came back from Viet Nam. Now it was as if she were dissolving into someone else, as if she knew that the feel of her body, the hum of her brain, the rush of blood through her veins was in the process of disappearing. Soon to be gone, a stranger in her place.
She walked through the glass doors of the rest stop into the wide, gaping space of the cafeteria and shops and restrooms, people watching her as she walked by, a man standing by the ice cream kiosk making assumptions. She could feel his eyes on her back.
She needed to take control. Buy a Pepsi, wash her face with cold water, check the size of her pupils in the mirror of the ladies’. Her mother had told her that Dr. Richards had determined her first cousin June had gone crazy by looking at her pupils with a flashlight. What did Dr. Richards see in June’s pupils? Zee had asked.
In the cubicle in the ladies’, she sat on the toilet seat, put her head in her hands, closed her eyes, pressed her palms hard against her eyeballs to erase the colors flashing across her vision.
“Watch out!” she said aloud, and a voice from somewhere in the ladies’ replied, “Watch out?”
Had she actually said Watch out or had she heard it from somewhere else the way she had been hearing things, in the last week—a rat-a-tat-tat in her head as if there were nails hammering in her brain and one morning waking, she’d heard “Watch out” called right into her ear. Watch out, and she thought it was Adam speaking or one of the boys but the sound had come from inside her head.
She stepped out of the cubicle where a woman putting on her lipstick in the mirror asked, Was that you who said watch out?
“No, it wasn’t me,” Zee said softly, not to call attention although she was urgent to hit the woman right in the lips so her bright red lipstick would smudge like blood across her face.
“You never know,” the woman said.
“You never know what?” Zee asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m not looking at you. I’m putting on lipstick and looking at myself,” the woman said. She had a large nose like a man’s and eyes set too close together.
“Don’t follow my car or I’ll call the police,” Zee said, squinting as she passed the mirror.
She walked from the ladies’ through the cafeteria quickly before the space expanded beyond her and she couldn’t get out. She didn’t have time to buy a Pepsi or the hot dog Maggie had requested. The place was too large. She wouldn’t be able to get to the car unless she hurried and the woman in the ladies’ might already be behind her. She didn’t look back, running through the cafeteria, through the glass doors, across the parking lot to the car where Maggie was waiting.
“Are you okay?” Maggie asked when Zee got back in the car.
“I’m fine,” Zee said, pulling onto the highway. “But a woman in the ladies’ room was watching me. She looked under the cubicle at me while I was peeing and I didn’t have time to get a hot dog or a Pepsi because of what was happening to the building. Growing, you know, like cabbage.”
She would be fine if she could just get to Vermont—maybe not entirely fine but better than she felt with this dislocation in her brain, the sense she had that her brain itself was moving out of her skull.
She needed to go about this trip in an orderly fashion, I go about my daily life in an orderly fashion, her mother would say to her. Route 87 North, two hours to Albany, and then the turnoff for Route 7 in Vermont, two hours from Albany/Rensselaer through Bennington, Vermont, and east through the Green Mountain National Forest. Four hours plus and she’d be home.
“How are you sick?” Maggie asked.
“I’m not sick. I didn’t say I was sick,” Zee said. “I said I wanted to kill the woman in the ladies’ room.”
NELL FRANK ANSWERED the phone when Lucy called Reuben in Cape Cod. Ten at night. He might have gone to bed already but Lucy didn’t consider the circumstances of their lives. She knew exactly what she was doing.
“My dad’s here but they’re having a dinner party,” Nell said, a raspy voice, a kind of New Jersey accent.
Lucy had never met Nell, never heard her speak. “Who can I say is calling?”
“Lucy Painter.”
“Lucy Painter’s on the phone, Dad.”
Maybe the accent was Brooklyn where Reuben had grown up. He had an accent.
“He can’t talk now,” Nell said. “He’ll call you back.”
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said evenly with a cool certainty. “I need to speak to him now.”
The now had a force to it and the girl, Nell, responded.
“She can’t wait, she says,” Nell called, her hand evidently not covering the receiver.
There was a rustle in the background, the sound of voices, of laughter—high-pitched—that would be Elaine—the shuffle of footsteps, and Reuben.
“Hello?”
“I need for you to come to Washington on Monday, before you go back to work,” Lucy said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His voice took on a favored severity. “Please be clear.”
“Together we are telling our children that you are their father,” she said. “Is that clear?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone and Lucy imagined him leaning against the wall, his face assuming that expression of pain which concealed irritation that his life had been interrupted at just the wrong moment.
“I can’t.”
“You can,” Lucy said, a force field of energy expanding in her chest, a certainty that Reuben would come because she had insisted.
It was simple and clear.
“Why now?” he asked, and replaced the receiver on the cradle.
Lucy barely heard the click.
She went to the kitchen, turned on water for tea. In the window across the yard, she could see August in the kitchen reading his manuscript, Gabriel on the couch, his palms together resting against his lips, his legs drawn up, curled and sleeping like the picture of an elf.
She wouldn’t sleep but she went upstairs and climbed into the bed with Felix, watching the shadows of the trees trembling in the light wind as night turned very slowly to dawn.
In daylight on Saturday morning, she would go after Maggie until she found her.
Eighteen
IT WAS STILL light when they crossed the town line into Cavendish, an orange sun setting in the west over the hills, a still whiteness about the town as if it had been stopped on the clock midlife, its citizens arrested in time. In the distance, a pale quarter-moon hung like an ornament above the steeple of the Episcopal church, a postcard replica of New England churches—Here’s the church, and here’s the steeple / Open the door and see all the people. A game that Zee used to play with Miranda, lacing her tiny fingers, closing the fists, the thumbs as doors, the forefingers as the steeple, and when the doors open, the fingers are the people. Here’s the church . . . she could hear her own voice loud as bells crashing in her ear.
Zee drove down Main Street and right on Oxford, her heart beating so hard that she thought its shape must be showing through her T-shirt. Any moment now, it would jump out of her chest and land bloody and beating on her lap.
Straight on Main past the church, right on Oxford.
Zee had needed to know the facts about Cavendish, committed them to memory when first the village came into her life: a town probably named for William Cavendish, the fourth Duke of Devonshire, the land was granted by authority of the British government in the 1700s. In 1781, Salmon Dutton came to the new town of Cavendish from Massachusetts and his home in the lower Black River Valley had been preserved as the Shelburne Museum. A tourist attraction. He had given the money to build the Cavendish Academy half a mile from the frame white Victorian located behind a stand of pine trees, at the end of an unpaved road, where the sign The Children’s Home was small and only visible once you got to the building itself. Cavendish: census 1,470 and falling. Somehow in Zee’s mind, the fewer people settling in Cavendish, the safer it was for children.
Maggie said nothing as they crossed the town line, although it was clear they had arrived where they were going.
“We’re here,” Zee said, and her voice had taken on an icy calm. “Pretty, isn’t it, Miranda?”
It was the second time since they crossed the line from New York State into Vermont that Zee had called Maggie Miranda.
“Yes, very,” Maggie said.
They had not stopped for gas since New Jersey so she had no opportunity to contact her mother. She would wait until they were someplace and had to stop or the car ran out of gas, as it had done once with her mother in the winter and they’d had to walk in the freezing cold to a filling station for help, Felix screaming all the way.
Maggie had a picture of where they were, had followed the routes carefully, making a note of the geography, and figured that if anything happened—whatever that might be—she could run.
“I’ll tell you everything I know about Cavendish,” Zee said calmly, repeating all the minor facts she had committed to memory. “The Children’s Home is a beautiful old house with a lot of land for running around and sheep—there are sheep too, little innocent lambs of God who on their woolly coat / so bravely bore the punishment of each wee wicked goat. Something like that. You’ll like it here.”
It was further down Oxford Street than Zee had remembered and since there was no sign, difficult to find a road at dusk. Zee strained her eyes and then by some miracle, she thought, there was the line of pine trees and the narrow road on the right that led uphill to the Children’s Home where Miranda would live until she was no longer a child. Zee turned right, up the hill, and pulled to a stop in a parking space next to the home, which was only the size of an ordinary middle-class home high on a hill so the lights of the town were visible.
Zelda!
Zee turned from the grill, left the hamburgers to burn, following the sound of alarm in Adam’s voice. She pressed forward, catching sight of the top of Adam’s head above the party crowd. He was no longer dancing but calling Zee’s name again and again. The crowd was too dense for her to see what was happening but people were turning their heads, turning towards Adam, pressing forward. Someone screamed Watch out! Zee pushed through and people spread, parting to make a path so she finally had a view of her husband in his new silver blue shirt bent over the barrel of ice, the wine and beer almost gone. His arms were submerged in melted ice, and before she reached him, her knees gave and she fell to the ground and couldn’t watch him lift Miranda over his shoulder, slapping her on her back crying HELP in a voice so plaintive it would never leave.
The lights had gone on the front porch of the Children’s Home and someone—it appeared to be a woman in jeans and a baseball cap—had opened the door.
Zee turned off the engine and watched the woman walking down the steps towards the car with suspicion.
“I have never seen this woman before in my life,” she said, opening the car door, stepping out. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” she said to Maggie. “I promise. Don’t worry. You’re not in any danger.”
She shut the door.
“Hi,” the woman in the baseball cap said. “Can I help you?”
“Who are you?” Zee asked.
“I’m Laura,” she said, more of a girl than a woman, a splash of freckles across her face, an easy smile. “I’m on night duty here.”
“Night duty? I thought there were doctors.”
“There is a doctor in town and a nurse on duty and the rest of us like me on night duty.”
“I need to see a doctor.”
“I don’t think it’s possible,” the girl, Laura, said. “Maybe you can wait and I’ll get someone.”
“No, no. I’m here for a reason and I need to check your credentials before I tell you the reason.”
“My credentials?” the girl asked. “I don’t understand.”
“Get the nurse. Get someone who speaks English.”
The girl hurried across the grass, up the steps, through the door, and almost immediately she was returning with another woman, tall, reedy, in hiking
boots and overalls. Short curly gray hair. Something familiar about the woman, Zee thought.
“Mrs. Mallory?” the woman said. “Hello. How nice to see you. We didn’t know you were coming.”
“You don’t know me,” Zee said. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“We have met each other. I’m the nurse Angela Brice and you are Miranda’s mother. I haven’t seen you in a couple of years.”
“Miranda is in the car,” Zee said, air caught in her throat. “There. Look in the car. She’s perfectly fine. Nothing the matter with her. Open the car door and look.”
It was dusk, a soft, cool evening in Vermont with starlight but in the distance. She opened the door.
“Hi,” Maggie said. “I’m Maggie.”
“Hello, Maggie,” the nurse said. “I’m Angela, the nurse at the Home.” She leaned in the car and spoke quietly. “Is Mrs. Mallory all right?”
“I think she’s not so well today,” Maggie said, starting to get out of the car.
But her legs were too heavy. She wanted to sleep, in the car in the dark with the door closed and the windows shut and the nurse guarding her so nothing could happen.
Zee took hold of the girl, Laura, holding the collar of her red flannel shirt.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Zee said in her face. “I suppose everyone has told you it was my fault but they are wrong.”
LUCY WAS SITTING on the front porch when Adam arrived home from the beach with the twins. She had been there since dawn, Felix still sleeping, the front door opened so she could hear him if he called. August had said she should call the police if Zee didn’t come back with Maggie by morning, and she had called them early before dawn, sitting in the kitchen with the officers, telling them what she knew, that Maggie had left with Zee, that she had left a note for Felix, that they were driving Adam Mallory’s car—Lane gave her the information about the car—a blue Toyota Camry two-door D.C. plates. Zee had not asked permission to take Maggie away and her daughter was a minor, only eleven. The police took down the information and stood up to leave.
You Are the Love of My Life Page 24
