by Nelle Davy
And then one day we pushed her too far. I don’t even remember what had caused it, but I do remember that Claudia had punched me in the face and, reeling, I picked up the only thing available, which was a china figurine of a shepherdess, and hurled it at her head. It caught her temple before ricocheting off the wall, snapping the head off. Claudia started bleeding, there was complete confusion, my mother came running in amongst all our shouts and cries and then stopped dead in the middle of the room.
We didn’t notice the look on her face at first. We simply crowded around her, reaching out for comfort, but she suddenly thrust up her hands as a barrier and immediately we shut up. She knelt down on the floor and picked up the head of the figurine, which had bounced and rolled away from the body, and cradled it in her hands. She didn’t speak but she did start to shake her head, and the more she shook it the more her face crumpled. Claudia and I started backing away from her, watching her body as it began to tremble. The final eruption of her sobs only came when we had fled up the stairs to our rooms.
My grandmother came over to the house an hour later. It was Ava who called her. She swept into my room, still wearing her gardening gloves, and pulled me up into a standing position from my bed by my arm.
“Let me look at you,” she said, turning my head this way and that by my chin. She drew herself up. “I’ve seen your sister. She’ll live. Now I’m going to ask you the same thing I asked her. Do you want to destroy what’s left of your mother?”
I think I was so shocked I swayed, because she caught me by my shoulders and shook me so my mouth fell open.
“Then I suggest you start behaving yourself, my girl. Your father would whip both you and your sister for today’s little performance. That figurine was an anniversary present from your father—the last anniversary, might I add, that they had together before his death, God rest—and you and your sister broke it over some bratty argument. You were brought up near a barn not in one. Remember that.” She sighed. “I’ve heard about the behavior of your sister. I’ll be dealing with her, don’t you worry, but if you provoke her again you’ll have me on your tail, understood?” I nodded and then, apparently satisfied, she turned to leave.
“No supper,” she said as she reached the door.
I don’t know what she said to Claudia but after that, for a long while, Claudia began to have visits up at the house with our grandmother. I don’t know what happened there, Ava and I were not permitted to join her, but every Wednesday between five and six o’clock, she would go there to see her. Whatever occurred there must have had an effect on her because over time we stopped fighting as much as we used to. Not completely, mind you, but she began to ignore me and so in acknowledgment I left her alone. In a way I guess that was when Ava and I really began to bond. Claudia didn’t really seem to want to spend too much time with us after those visits. I used to think she hated us, but maybe it was just because she didn’t trust herself to confide in us or us to understand what was happening to her. I didn’t ask. We didn’t have that kind of relationship.
I lay awake all night, thinking. When I dressed myself in the morning it was with that strange drugged feeling of seeing the dawn from the wrong side. Claudia came for me again. She stayed in the car waiting while I gathered my things and made to leave. Jane stood at the door to see me off. We didn’t speak.
She drove slower this time and as we pulled up to the forked road I stiffened but she kept driving. Rows on rows of green trees lined the drive so that the road looked like a long hollow in a wood, and then as it curved to the right they parted and with a slam that stifled the air under my heart, I saw the tall white house on the mound and heard the crunch of the gravel as we veered off the road into the drive. The car was relentless as it moved underneath the sign, which as I swung around to look at it was still standing tall, still proud to bear Aurelia’s name, still thinking it was a name worth bearing.
At the bottom of the drive she stopped the car, turned off the engine and we sat there in silence. The grass was yellow and threadbare, the drive unkempt and knotted with patches of crabgrass, the flower beds once so carefully tended, now withered to nothing. Only the house seemed to have remained at least relatively untouched, but we could see the windows boarded up with mottled planks of honey-colored pine and dark oak making it still seem dejected, ailing, unlived-in and empty.
And what did I feel when I saw the place that has haunted me for over a decade? A place I have loathed and loved and longed for in turn? Instantly I regretted everything. I was so sorry, so much more sorry than I thought I would ever be. Aurelia was gone, a husk now of its former self, a gaping wound of the Hathaways. We were gone, our time was truly over and nothing had ever brought it more home to me than seeing the place we had built and near worshipped now nothing but a desiccated waste.
I looked over at Claudia and knew from her expression that she was thinking the same thing. What would Lavinia say, I wondered, if she could see it now and know what all her planning and scheming had come to? It seemed to me standing there that the one truth we had never been able to acknowledge until now was that the farm was never really ours, it wasn’t even our grandfather’s, it was always hers and without her, it was nothing. I bit my lip until I felt the skin crack. As if she could sense it, or perhaps was feeling the same, Claudia suddenly moved and switched on the engine and turned the car down the lanes toward our old house.
“I just wanted to see it,” she said huskily, almost apologetically. “I just wanted to know.”
Chapter 12
I THINK I wonder far too much what our lives would have been like had our father lived. I often think that had he been alive so many things that happened would not have, and so many things that should have done, finally would. Since the day he died my life has split into two, the one I should have had with him and the one I eventually ended up with.
When I was around the age of nine I began to grow restless. I was constantly fidgeting, picking things up, putting things down and my school work began to suffer because I could not concentrate in class. My school counselor had stopped seeing me three months after my father’s death but at this latest development she resumed her sessions with me. My mother was frantic with worry. There was no immediate negativity in my social behavior, but it became clear to her that I was not happy…but not in a way that I could express. And then during one particularly heated conversation when I was slumped over the kitchen table, my arm flung across my school books, my mother asked me, “What would your father say if he saw you now?” and I told her, “I don’t know. I don’t really even remember what he looks like.”
It wasn’t that we did not have photographs of him, because they were everywhere, but the fact was when I closed my eyes at night and conjured the faces of the people I knew so well, my father’s was a pink fleshed void. I could not see the features that were so entrenched in my own. I could not picture him, I was starting to forget.
My mother’s lip trembled and then without a word she left the room. Two days later, when it was the weekend, I woke up to find Jude sitting at the edge of my bed.
“Merey, do you know what time it is? Why aren’t you dressed for breakfast?” he asked me. He was wearing this pale blue shirt and the sunlight made a halo around his head so that in the blurry haze of midsleep he seemed to be this soft, welcoming apparition.
“I get tired a lot lately,” I answered.
“I have something for you, but I need you to get up in order to see it.”
I moaned and then pushed myself upright. He brought out from the side of the bed a white bag with pink tissue paper. I took it and opened it, laying the items out on my bedsheet. It was a piece of soft brown dirt that took my fingerprint as I pressed it in my hands and a bunch of strange brown carving tools. But strangest of all was a picture of my father that I knew from memory used to reside in a brown leather photo album, now in a photo frame.
“Do you know why we remember things, Merey?” he asked me. “Familiarity. The repetit
ion of seeing them or feeling them makes them ingrained in our minds. I think you need a little of that familiarity.” He took the clay. “I am going to show you how to use this—” and then he picked up the brown carving tools “—and use these. And after this, you will be able to see your father every time you want, with or without a photograph.”
I don’t think he knew what he started in me that day. What it would lead to in my life—my love of form, of yielding the most wondrous of objects from a piece of clay. Or what it would it do to my memory. Because he was right. After that day I could picture my father and every last feature on his face down to the smallest detail. Except now he comes like the rest of them without warning or invitation. They have taken form and now they can control it themselves and now I shut my eyes so I can block them out, even when I feel their cold breath on my face.
Jude once told me why his mother had named him after the patron saint of lost causes. I had thought initially that she was mean.
“No, no,” he said, laughing. “It’s a good thing. She meant that she wanted me to have hope in my life, that when things go wrong, really wrong, there’s always a way out if you try hard enough.”
“She could have just called you Hope,” I’d said. “There’s a girl in my class called that and her sister is called Prudence, which means sensible. That’s kind of dull, though, I prefer Hope.”
“Well my mom didn’t want to make life too hard for me, Merey,” he’d said wryly.
I loved Jude so quickly after he arrived. He made the gap in my life that was left by my father’s death less of a violent chasm and more of deep crack that ran across every milestone event in my childhood. God, I was so thin and gangly then that he used to pick me up and swing me around and I’d use him like a climbing frame. I loved him like a brother, like—my mother said half-mournfully—I would have my own father had he lived.
I cannot think of him even now, even after all I know, without smiling.
What made me love him the most, though, when I was young, was how devoted he was to Charles. He adored him and I realize now looking back that Jude always paid the most attention to a person when they appeared to be vulnerable. He looked out for the needy, the weak, and obsessively stepped into the role of being their personal hero. From the blue bird with a broken wing that he nursed and sang to and loved as he gently cajoled it back to health, to my thirteen-year-old cousin whose mind had stopped at seven years old and who found in this man, who had appeared into our lives as if from a dream, a feeling of adoration and trust that he had never seen displayed in any other adult male.
To see them together, to remember that, is a joy. Because there was so much love between them—Jude’s patience, Charles’s delight at the simple affection he received from him, the gentleness and protective circle of strength that this man built around my cousin made him flourish, made him special, made him wanted in a way I had always taken for granted with my own parents.
Their favorite game in the summer was to play soldiers. They used to have these fluorescent-colored water guns that sprayed long streaks of liquid that melted on the grass amid shrieks of excitement and whoops of laughter. Georgia-May would watch them as we lay on blankets, soaking the heat into our skin, arms slung over our eyes if we forgot our sunglasses so that there would be a long red burn along the path from our elbow to our wrist. Sometimes Ava and I would join in with Jude and Charles. We would be the airplanes, our arms flung out in a seesaw, cutting through the shoots of water in our pink and yellow bathing suits.
Claudia would just lie on the blanket in her two-piece, which at the age of fourteen she was vainly trying to fill, desperately pretending to ignore us, until she could take it no longer and, muttering, swiped up the blanket and stalked past us into the house, her mouth jutting out in a furious pout of barely concealed outrage.
Mom rolled her eyes as she slapped her feet on the porch steps into the kitchen. Jude shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
When Ava and I went in to get some iced tea, she sat at the table flicking through a magazine.
“Clo, why don’t you come back outside?” asked Ava as I tried to steady the jug and pour the drink into the glasses and not on the floor.
“’Cause you’re making too much fucking noise,” she spat, though she dipped her voice several octaves below normal on “fucking,” as the door was still open.
“We’re just playing,” I shot back. “Jesus, like you’re so above it.”
“Actually I am, thank you. It’s called being grown up.” She flicked another page over in eminent disdain.
“Well, Jude’s like way more older than you and he’s not above it,” I said over the clang of pulling a tray from the cupboard.
“Oh, please—you’re so stupid, Meredith. He’s only doing it ’cause Charles is a retard.” She leaned forward and sneered at me before smoothing her hair back up into a ponytail.
“Mom better not catch you using that word, Clo,” said Ava quietly.
“You’re just pissed because he won’t look at you no matter how skimpy your bathing suit is,” I spat.
“Like I’d even want him to. His last girlfriend was probably a mongoloid or something.”
“Claudia,” breathed Ava, throwing a glance over her shoulder.
“Look, he’s not some saint. Do you really think he’d give that—” and she snapped her fingers “—for Charles if he wasn’t different? If God came down and made him all better the next day, give it a week and Jude would get bored and lose all interest and then maybe I’d get some goddamn peace whenever I wanted to fucking sunbathe.”
And with that, her eyes following our astonished expressions, she walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
It’s funny I remember that now, because I have wondered over time if maybe Claudia had a point. I realize that even though Jude would often set himself up as the protector for the meek, he never once reached out to Claudia. He never sensed her pain or her anger, which is in every memory I have of her since the day our father died. To him, she was just this arrogant, irascible teen, which she was, but that was all he ever saw or would see. I know now that even though Jude was good, he wasn’t always very smart, at least not when it came to people.
Once when I was at art college I had to present a piece that was personal to me. My tutor said that it should reflect some aspect of my past or home. He said he wanted me to do this because he didn’t feel that my sculptures, while technically good, had anything really to say. He wanted me to get in touch with my emotions.
I struggled and struggled. At one point I remember drafting this incredibly long letter to my tutor telling him that I simply could not do what he was asking. In the end though, after two aborted attempts, one miniature emotional meltdown and another long middle of the night draft, I came up with my piece.
My tutor held it in his hands and turned it slowly so he could drink it in, a quizzical look on his face. It was of three girls in various poses, either reading, staring into space or lying down with an arm over their face.
“What is it trying to say?” he asked eventually.
“Nothing,” I answered, “it just is.”
“But are they friends? Are they related? Have they had an argument? Who are they?”
Even now I don’t think I know. My whole life I have always had my sisters. That is the luxury of being the youngest. And so, of course I took their presence for granted and so allowed myself to be irritated by them. Ava least of all, but from the moment she hit puberty Claudia and I were at constant loggerheads. Though we never allowed our mutual resentments of each other to spill over quite into the unbridled fray we had exhibited after our father’s death, our relationship was one of constant war and the need not to be beaten.
Even when I could empathize with her, I never took her side, and with Ava’s strange and increasingly withdrawn behavior during that period, our mother often wanted to tear her hair out.
From the age of fourteen Claudia became a beauty, there was no deny
ing it, though I was seething with jealousy. Thank goodness I was still in elementary school so I did not have to see how boys fawned over her, but there were always phone calls from various classmates, notes she would accidentally-on-purpose drop on the floor or in the hall so she could present us with the latest in her long line of conquests. Often though she found them absurd and would read them out to us in a sopping voice and with a cynical rolling of her eyes, which would make us howl at the absurdity of this perfect stranger and his foolish love.
Mom would rage at Claudia about her clothes, she was almost a cliché of a teenager on that point, from her ridiculous hemlines, to her overzealous use of makeup. She was so confident, so self-assured, that she was frightening. Though I had waged a war with her ever since I could remember, if I was ever really in trouble, ever really afraid and in need of someone to fight in my corner it was Claudia I went to, though I know it made our mother worry.
During that period after Jude had already been here over a year, I remember how close he and my mother were. She would rage at Claudia and there would be the raising of voices and the banging of doors, and the next minute she would quietly go into the kitchen and close the door and I would hear her from the doorway on the phone to him, gently pouring out her fears and inadequacies. I suppose now that I look back on it, my mother was so alone. She was always strong for everyone, but with my father gone there was no one there to be strong for her and Jude was the only real friend she had on the farm who she could talk to. Georgia-May had her own problems and Piper, while sympathetic, was not exactly nonpartisan. Perhaps because she saw how well Charles and I had responded under Jude’s care and help, she believed the same result would happen for Claudia if she confided in him, but if anything it had the opposite effect.
