Parked at last in Helen’s driveway, Alma goes around to the sliding glass doors in back that stay unlocked all the time and finds Helen in a chair next to them in the weak winter sun. She gestures Alma inside without her usual greetings and inquiries. “You’ve been out there? Did you see him?”
Alma sits down in the chair next to Helen’s. She nods.
“And is he coming back?”
Alma takes a deep breath and shakes her head. She leans over to take Helen’s hand. “No. He’s not coming back.” She tries to invest her words with all the meaning they must carry, but Helen’s eyes show no comprehension.
“How can he not come back at a time like this? He knows—I can’t—” Helen makes a helpless gesture and stops talking, her hand picking at the afghan on her legs. Her eyes fix on Alma, who realizes that Helen’s usually tidy hair is coming out of its braid, and her shoes are unlaced. Why didn’t Walt buy her slip-ons? Alma asks herself first, then becomes aware, looking at Helen and her surroundings, of an unfolded basket of laundry at the bottom of the steps and the smell of the litterbox.
Alma puts the bookmark in Helen’s Bible, sets it on the coffee table, and kneels to tie her laces. “Where’s your hairbrush?” she asks.
“Upstairs in the bathroom, on the vanity.” Helen gestures. Alma jogs up the stairs, wondering how Helen manages to get up and down on her own. In the master bedroom, the bed isn’t properly made—a very un-Helen-like omission—but shows only a small disturbance on one side, as if she’s tried to slip in and out without mussing the covers too much.
Alma straightens the bed. In another moment, she’s back down with the brush, smoothing Helen’s hair back, reweaving the long braid. Standing out of Helen’s view helps Alma gather herself for what she’s decided to do.
“Vicky didn’t have a very happy adolescence with you and Walt, did she?” Alma asks. In spite of the shell now before her, she cannot afford to see Helen as only an object of pity. The abuse that devastated her sister’s life and ended in her murder began in Helen’s house, where Alma left Vicky for safekeeping.
Helen’s almost transparent hands lift to temple in front of her. She turns her head to gaze out the glass doors toward the squirrel examining the snow-covered deck. “Well no, I suppose not, but nobody has a happy adolescence. After what happened, I don’t think we can be too surprised that she went off the tracks.”
“After our parents died, you mean?” Alma’s hands keep moving, finishing the braid, knotting the elastic, brushing out the tail.
“Yes.” Helen’s response hangs in the air, as if there’s more to say but she won’t let it out.
“What about what happened at your house?” Alma sets the brush on the side table. The little clunk is loud in the quiet.
“What happened at my house? What do you mean?” Helen’s confusion is feigned, Alma is sure. She doesn’t try to turn to get a look at Alma’s face, but they can see each other in the glass, frozen reflections of blank stares. Helen holds her posture, staring out the window, allowing no movement—lying with her body. Alma knows that one.
Alma pauses and grips the back of Helen’s chair. It’s the cruelest possible thing, what she’s about to do, if Helen really knows nothing. If she’s somehow unaware, Helen ought to be left with whatever happy memories she might have, whatever ghost of kindness Walt may have left. She can’t have long to live, a few years at most. But something pitiless is working in Alma, maybe Vicky’s ghost at her shoulder. Helen has to have known, she tells herself, and because she failed to spare Vicky, Alma will not spare her now. She looks at Helen’s stiff back, which waits for Alma’s words, dares her to say them, and Alma finds at last that she has no heart now to forgive Helen. That part of her compassion lies dead and frozen like her sister’s bruised cheek in some mortuary freezer, awaiting the spring thaw.
Alma squares her shoulders and smoothes Helen’s braid against her back with one hand. She comes around the chair so that she’ll be able to see Helen’s face. Standing between her aunt and that damned squirrel she considers so important, Alma clasps her hands behind her back and speaks.
“Walt abused her, starting after Mom and Dad died. Brittany was his. Then he raped her again three months ago, and that’s why she was pregnant again when she died.” It’s like pulling a knife out of a fresh wound, worse than the pain when she first heard the words. Get it out. Say everything.
Whatever Alma expected, Helen’s expression isn’t it. Her face changes so quickly from puzzlement to a mask of contempt that Alma can hardly accept the change. There is no shadow of surprise or shock, just this stunning transformation. Helen looks like a different person—hardly a person at all, but a dark and angry apparition. Alma recoils, bumping into the glass door and falling against it as her legs give way.
Helen leans forward with hostile energy. “She said that, did she? I was glad to have her out of my house, that little slut and her nasty slurs. She deserved what she got. She deserved it. She’d been looking for a bad end for years and finally it came for her.” Helen pushes herself out of her chair to stand over Alma, who has slid down the glass to sit with her knees hunched in front of her. “I would have kept quiet. You didn’t need to hear the truth about your sister. Nobody needs to hear that sort of thing. But if you’re going to come into this house with her lies, you’re going to hear, all right. She was nothing but a no-good piece of white trash and we’re lucky she’s gone, all of us. And you, you’re just the same. Drying up, no husband, no children, just whoring it out there with one man after another. Trash.” Spit collects around the edges of Helen’s mouth.
“She told you—” Alma chokes out. She can’t decide if it’s worse to know how much Helen knew or to slam that door for good, but something in her is calling out for answers, whether she’s prepared to hear them or not.
“Oh, I heard it all,” Helen spits out. “She liked to tell me her sick little stories, blaming Walt for getting her pregnant when she slept around with every man in town. She taunted me with it. But I knew what she was—a liar and a whore.”
“A liar?” Alma clutches at the cramp in her stomach. The words hit her like physical blows. “He raped her. She was sixteen when Brittany was born. How can you say—”
“Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? Everything was always somebody else’s fault. Then she came here one night several months ago, talking about bringing charges and claiming child support. Walt took her out to the garage to talk some sense into her. Then later he told me he’d heard from her, she was pregnant again, and I just knew she’d start the same lies about him.” Helen uses chairbacks—carefully placed, Alma now realizes—for support as she walks to the small coat closet behind the front door. Before reaching in, she pauses and turns back to Alma, who is still sitting half collapsed against the sliding doors, staring after her in shock.
“What are you doing?” Alma asks.
Helen’s voice projects across the vaulted living room. “I have to show you something. I want you to defend me.”
“Defend you?” Alma’s legs are sprawled at painful angles. She can’t seem to untangle them, and she can’t understand what Helen’s talking about.
“Yes. You’re the only one who will understand what I had to do. You know what she was. You’ll be my lawyer.”
“What are you talking about, defend you? What did you do?”
Helen reaches to the back of a closet shelf and pulls out a soft, wadded object. With a sigh, she straightens herself against the frame of the closet, then walks back to Alma. As Helen approaches, Alma sees more clearly what she holds in her hands: a gray wool scarf. Helen stops, standing over her, and drops the scarf in her lap. Its folds are stained with something dark that can only be blood.
“Oh dear God,” Alma croaks. “You. No.” One hand flies to her mouth. With the other, she braces herself on the carpet. She looks around the room, working at breathing. Helen stands unmoving, her feeble, knotted hands at the height of Alma’s head.
“ ‘Anger assists hand
s however weak,’ ” Alma recites, fixing her eyes on her aunt’s vengeful features. The words rise out of some black gulf of memory, some dozy afternoon Latin class at Bryn Mawr, offering an explanation her conscious mind can’t yet accept. Alma knows that Helen’s passivity hides the same thing that led the wagons westward, the same nerve and sense of duty that drove her great-great-grandmother away from the fire on cold winter nights to midwife new mothers up and down the valley, riding into bitter storms on a great draft horse, never failing, never brought down by the fear and fatigue that rode with her every mile. The years of deprivation and isolation made the women like winter aspens—bare of ornament, stark, giving the appearance of death, yet green and resilient at the core, and tied to the place and the people with a vast network of unseen roots. Eternal. The men have always been strong, but the women have been steel.
She’s half afraid that Helen will somehow manage to hold her down and use the scarf on her. Hard-wired instincts for self-defense buzz like fried circuits. “How?” she asks in the same strangled tone.
“Oh, it wasn’t hard,” Helen says, her voice steady, lacking inflection. “Brittany called that night, another one of these helpless princess calls, oh come save us, Mommy wandered out in the cold. Walt would have gone, of course. She had him wrapped around her finger. But I thought, this can’t go on. There will be this new baby and it will never be over, they’ll have their claws in us forever. So when he went back to sleep, I drove down there to find her.”
Alma clutches the scarf against her chest with one arm. The fabric is stiff with more than blood, as if wrapped around something. Alma shifts a few feet farther from Helen, seeking for logic, a way to dissuade Helen from the story she’s telling.
“But you’re— How did you—”
“I’m so weak, you mean?” With effort, Helen draws herself to her full height, staring down at Alma. “I had strength enough for this. It didn’t take long. And wasn’t I clever to take the lease too? I bet they’re hot on the trail of that landman by now.”
Helen, who can hardly lift a forkful of broccoli? Alma can’t believe it. “You’re lying,” she attempts. “You’re lying to protect Walt.” Anything would be easier than this. And why not? Helen is dying. Then Alma realizes that she hasn’t yet told Helen the news that seemed so all-important just a few minutes earlier. “I went out to the cabin this morning,” she begins.
“Did you talk to Walt?” Helen lowers herself back into her chair, showing the strain.
“No. He wasn’t at the cabin.”
“Not at the cabin? But where could he be? It’s too cold to camp and it’s not hunting season.” Helen’s voice is back in its normal register, conversational. This is even more chilling than that awful, vengeful face she showed a few minutes ago.
“I hiked out to his tall stand.”
“And he wasn’t there either?” Helen’s voice rises on a note of panic. The terrifying show of strength and anger was fleeting. Helen is small again, diminished by the thought of Walt disappearing.
“He was.” Alma grips the scarf tightly and finally gets her feet under her.
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” Helen slumps a little against the chair. Her relief makes her face less fearsome. “When is he coming back?”
Alma doesn’t want to see Helen’s reaction to the next words. Delivering them gives her no pleasure. “Helen, I found his body.”
Helen’s hands on the chair arms grow rigid and her face lengthens. Instinctively Alma takes another step back, feeling for the door latch with one hand, but abruptly, Helen begins to wail. It starts high-pitched, emitting straight from Helen’s lungs like a ghost sound, ventriloquized from some spirit in the room. The sound surrounds Alma, dropping to a low, chilling register that ought to frost glass, she thinks. All Alma can do is hold still, keep her feet steady on the floor, and try not to distract Helen as this emanation moves through her, hollowing out the space between them until Helen’s eyes open and she gazes up at Alma with a sort of bereft innocence.
“Who did this?” Helen asks in a hiss.
“The police think it was a suicide,” Alma says. “He fell from the stand.” She has one hand on the door handle.
Helen has enough strength left to bark a laugh. “My Walt would never commit suicide. A person who takes his life will be in the telestial kingdom throughout all eternity. It’s a terrible sin.”
A terrible sin. With more effort than it ought to take, Alma rolls the door along its track. The rush of cold air feels good. She is exhausted. “Believe whatever you want. It doesn’t matter now.”
“He would never do that. It has to be—it’s you. You did it. You took him by surprise somehow.” The vengeful look is creeping back.
Alma puts one foot outside the door. “No, Helen. I didn’t kill him. It must have been an accident. That stand was way too high.”
This thought gives Helen pause. “It’s the judgment of the Lord upon me,” she says at last, reaching out with both hands to pull the Bible back from the table into her lap, all her angry strength dissipated. “What I told you—”
“You asked me to represent you.” Alma hears the echo of her own voice as she acknowledges the significance of their conversation. “Everything you told me is privileged.”
Helen smiles, but her eyes fix Alma coldly. “I thought so.” Helen leans back against the chair and shuts her eyes. “I learned a thing or two doing prison ministry. Now get out.”
“I’ll send someone to look in on you,” Alma says as she pulls shut the sliding door, unable to take her eyes off Helen, half afraid to. She staggers down the back steps and around to her car, the scarf clutched in her hand. It’s wrapped around something else. Alma can hardly force her hand to touch the scarf, to pull it back to reveal the lease, with Vicky’s insectile handwriting all over it.
For perhaps the first time in fifteen years, Alma doesn’t know where to go. She drives away from the heights, circling a few times in the suburban maze, dazed and unwilling to face another human being. In the back of her mind is a nagging memory, something Chance said about teaching an agribusiness seminar at the college. Was it Tuesday afternoons or Thursday? At last she finds herself at MSU-B, pulling into the small faculty parking lot behind the business building, and there’s Chance’s Silverado, collecting a light snow at the back corner of the lot. Night is falling. Class must be over soon. Alma pulls in next to the pickup, shuts off the car, and pulls her coat around her.
“Alma! Alma!” She startles awake with a small shriek to Chance calling her name, knocking hard on the window as if he’s already tried knocking softly. “Open up!”
Her arm is very heavy as she pulls at the latch to let the door fall open.
“Are you okay?” Chance pulls the door farther open and leans in to get a better look at her. “I was shouting at you several minutes to wake you up. You’re— Alma, you’re freezing cold. How long have you been here?”
She shakes her head and shuts her eyes. “I don’t know.”
Chance reaches across to unbuckle her seat belt. “Come on, get up. We’ll go get you something hot to drink. Come on.”
At Chance’s insistence, Alma unfolds herself and climbs out, stumbling, hands and feet numb from cold, then lets Chance hoist her into the pickup. He tosses her purse and keys up to her. The pickup is cold too, so Chance pulls an old Pendleton blanket from behind the seat and tucks it around her legs. Five minutes later in the drive-through lane at the Itching Post—because of course, her wandering mind is telling her, this is Billings and there’s a drive-through lane even at the gym—he orders her a chamomile tea and folds her hands around it. Then Pete’s voice is at the window.
“What’s going on?” she hears her brother say, his face blocked by the big side mirror. “Is she okay?” She’s missed whatever Chance said to Pete.
“She’s right here.” Chance leans back to let Pete see Alma. “She came by the college. I’m going to get her home. I just wanted you to know she’s all right.”
Pete leans out the window to take a good look at Alma, bundled in the striped blanket, barely able to raise her eyes to his. “You don’t look all right,” he says with a suspicious sidelong look at Chance. “You want to come inside? I’m short-staffed. I’ve got nobody to cover the till.”
Alma can only give a small, forlorn headshake. Pete swears and fixes a fierce glare on Chance. “You take good care of her, you hear me?”
“I will,” Chance answers with his most sincere nod.
“Okay then.” Pete stares at her another long moment, then withdraws and slams shut the little service window. Chance’s shoulders relax and he puts the pickup back in gear.
“Do you want to tell me?” he asks once they’re parked out front, the diesel engine finally pouring out heat.
Swaddled in the blanket, Alma breathes in the fragrant chamomile steam and wags her head a tiny bit. No.
“Did you find Walt?”
Alma nods. Yes.
“Alive?”
Alma shakes her head. No.
She hears Chance inhale and exhale. “I had that feeling.” He pulls off his cap as the cab starts to warm up. “How did Helen take it?”
Sleep and cold have allowed Alma to push everything out of her mind but a primal urge to get warm. Now that she’s awake and the tea is thawing her hands and nose, Helen’s name cracks open her mind like falling through ice. Alma is with Vicky again, bloodied after a hard fall on ice, reeling, drunk, and the face that bends near hers, the rescuer, the comforter, the mother, is instead the merciless specter of death. She drops the tea, throws her hands to her face, and begins to sob. Chance scrambles to grab the covered cup and shove it in a cupholder. He puts a hand on her shoulder and lets the sobs play out. When she calms enough to start hiccupping, he says: “Okay if I take you home?”
Alma nods, wiping at her nose and eyes with a gloved hand. As the pickup pulls out into traffic, she curls up under the blanket, unable to keep her eyes open.
When next she wakes, Chance is shaking her shoulder. She’s been asleep on the seat of the pickup with her head propped uncomfortably on the console. She sits up and sees Ed and Jayne’s house.
The Home Place: A Novel Page 27
