by Nelle Davy
We made our way cautiously through the house, not touching anything, just peering round corners, keeping our steps small, careful not to disturb even the air.
“What? Slow down. I don’t understand— Lavin— No I…Are you serious? Are you sure? It—it can’t be, there must be some mistake....”
I came to the entrance of the kitchen.
“What’s going on?” I asked Ava, who shook her head as she stared at Mom.
“I’ll be right over,” said Mom, sinking against the wall as she bent over herself. “Did you call the police?”
“It’s so neat, isn’t it?” said Claudia from behind me.
“Yeah,” I answered. “Ava packed everything up after Mom died… I don’t think the place has been touched since.”
I went into the kitchen and, as if to prove my point, opened up the cutlery drawer. Woodlice scuttled over the knives and forks.
“Hmm.” Claudia cleared her throat. “Where did she put everything?”
“I don’t know—the attic I guess.”
I looked around. The furniture was covered in great white dust sheets. I suddenly had a vision of Ava, coming back here after the burial, how she would have ransacked the place, cleaning, tidying, locking it up for a slow and quiet death. She had had to come back alone. Claudia and I hadn’t helped. Hadn’t wanted to. And I had not been able to understand how she could still come back. I had seen it as proof of her lies and by default, of my innocence.
Claudia went up the stairs and I followed her. The hallway was as bare as downstairs but the doors were all closed. Her room had been at the end on the far right next to the bathroom, which she had hogged for ages every day before school. That had been one of the major adjustments we had had to make when she had gone. Ava and I would line up outside the door before realizing that she was not there.
When she got off the phone, she hugged her face in her hands and then slowly drifted her fingers down to cover her mouth. And then she saw us.
“What the hell are you doing there—get back to bed right this instant. Go on.” She came at us, waving her hands forward, her snappish manner making us flee into our rooms as she continued to shout at us from behind.
“But what’s going on?” I protested as she pushed me into my room with Ava, herding us out of sight.
“Just get in there and not one peep out of you for the rest of the night. Not one or so help me God I’ll take a switch to you both!” And she slammed the door behind her.
We stood there staring at the door, listening to the sounds of her running into her room and the violent thuds of movement that seeped through the walls.
Suddenly Ava turned away from the door to face me.
“Where’s Clo?” she asked.
I watched from the stairwell as Claudia made her way across the landing to her room and stood before the door. I waited on the second step.
She cradled the handle in her fingers and then there was the sound of the latch being released and it swung open.
We heard her leave. We waited a few minutes and then we came out of my room and hovered at the top of the staircase. “Look,” said Ava, pointing over my shoulder and I saw that the door to Clo’s room was ajar. I went inside and looked around. Her bed hadn’t been slept in.
“Do you think she’s hurt?” asked Ava. “Do you think…?”
“Shut up,” I said.
Claudia disappeared inside her room and I made my way up the stairs to join her. The pale pink of her wallpaper with the small white daisies winding their way down in chains was covered in patches of brown mold and everything was draped in the same dust sheets as downstairs except her bed, which had been stripped except the mattress and a knot of pillows piled in the middle.
She crossed the room and opened up the window, letting air circulate into the room that had not breathed since she was sixteen years old.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ventured.
“No, not anymore,” she said with her back to me still facing the window. “I never thought I’d see this room again. If Mom had her way I never would.”
“Mom did what she thought was right,” I said, suddenly overly conscious of my voice.
“No—she did what was cruelest.”
“You’re blaming the wrong person, Clo,” I said gently, and then she threw a glance at me over her shoulder and something there reminded me of how we used to be, how once there had been more than just blood between us. She summoned a smile that died as soon as it reached her lips.
“So did Mom.”
Two weeks before my mother received a phone call in the middle of the night, my grandmother learned something quite by accident, and so tugged at a thread that would send my sister to live with the aunt and uncle of my mother in Massachusetts for the rest of her teenage life.
And this would not have occurred but for two events: My mother had gone out of town on a holiday with Jane for the weekend to camp in the Driftless Area in northeastern Iowa, and my sister had taken the opportunity to get drunk.
I can trace it all back to that night because of what my grandmother would later tell me. Have to tell me.
I had been at a sleepover. It was at the home of Mary-Louise Draper. I remember how her room had lilac-painted walls with pictures of white clouds on the ceiling and I had envied her collection of snow globes that her dad bought her from all over America because he was a salesman. I had particularly coveted one from New York, with its Empire State Building shining beneath the flurry of glitter when I shook the dome. As we lay in our sleeping bags on the floor, in a place of encroaching darkness, I thought how I would love to sleep in a city whose amber-colored lights sparkled in the night just like that one.
Ava had stayed at home. Claudia was supposed to be watching her but my eldest sister had other ideas, the main one consisting of her invading our father’s liquor cabinet. I say it was Dad’s because Mom never drank save for Christmas and weddings and even then all she had was one glass of champagne, which she would sip and leave half-full. However that night, Claudia had decided that the best way of putting our mother’s absence to use was to devour the entirety of the cabinet’s contents.
Which she did, in her room, dancing to the radio, pouring Ava shots that she then drank herself anyway when Ava sniffed at the glasses and left them on her dresser. Claudia then gave them both a makeover, which our mother would have scrubbed off her face with holy water had she been home.
Claudia pouted and preened and sang and garbled her way through her drunkenness. Evidently alcohol made her loquacious: moved her from a surly try-hard to an overtalkative desperate. I’m sorry I missed the transformation. I would have taken the opportunity to tease out her secrets and then when she was sober used them to goad her. My sister’s temperament was like a dartboard when we were younger and nothing gave me more pleasure than hitting the bull’s-eye.
But I was not there. Ava was.
Somewhere between her descent into inebriation and Ava’s exhaustion, Claudia eventually was left to her own devices. This was sometime after a quarter to one in the morning. Until then Claudia was safe from herself.
“I found her by the stone well sobbing, howling like some animal. Oh, you never saw your sister like that—no, you didn’t. Such hate, such anger—I knew what that felt like more than anyone, but when she realized I was there she tried to shut herself up. Stuffed her fist into her mouth, glaring at me for being there—for seeing her in her weakness. She always was about the presentation. Do you remember when she got sick at the Fourth of July fair and threw up on her dress and then slapped Piper for taking her to her mother? ‘I don’t want anyone to see!’ Do you remember?”
“Yes, I remember,” I said, the book I had been reading to her open in my hands.
“And I could see then that she wanted to slap me for just being there. She was humiliated for being so exposed. If she had been my child I would have trained her better, but then even I have had my moments. I suppose. And to be fair to your sister, I
was just another wave in a torrent of bad luck she’d had that evening.”
She looked over at me and gave a knowing look and I realized that what she was telling me was a story that somehow I already knew.
“She’d been drinking—she stank of whiskey and Jude had been there. I could see before she even told me. He’d stubbed out one of those Virginia Slims he used to smoke. I could smell it on her. She’d made a fool out of herself over him, of course, and he’d rejected her. What was worse was he was kind about it. She told me he had tried to hug her afterward, even suggested they could be friends. Foolish boy.”
She stopped when she saw how I was looking.
“Oh, what, couldn’t you guess? You didn’t think your mother would send her away if she had been innocent, do you? For God’s sake, Meredith.”
“I don’t want to hear any more,” I said, standing. “I never wanted to be part of this and I only ever did it because you—”
“You did it because you were curious. And you didn’t mind when it was about your aunt and uncle, did you? But now that it’s closer to home you’re developing a conscience? It’s that fickleness of character that will get you in the end, Meredith. Some things you can’t turn back from and change your mind about. Why do none of my family ever have the courage of their convictions like I did?”
“Did Claudia?” I shot back.
“Claudia had fear and pride—that served well enough. You know, it had quite escaped me, her crush on that man. I started to feel then that I was truly getting old. But I think now, it was only because I wasn’t meant to know it until I was meant to know it, if you understand my meaning. And that’s how I know that what I have always done was right, Meredith. It was all for a greater good.” She lifted her head from her pillow in her urgency, her eyes boring into mine.
“I knew then how I would do it and that she would help me, and she did help me. Don’t be fooled into thinking she was just some ignorant puppet. After all, she never stepped out of character, did she?” She leaned back into the sheets and sighed. The world was listening because just then a stray wind rippled the curtains and mirrored her breath.
“Hatred—it always comes down to that, doesn’t it? But I’ve found that it’s always at its most potent when it’s laced with love.”
My sister got drunk and went out looking for Jude. She found him by the well and there she tried to kiss him, but he did not reciprocate. He gently but firmly told her that nothing like that would ever happen between them and that he was sorry. She had slapped him across the face and tried to attack him but he had held her by her wrists and tried to calm her down before the tears came.
And then my grandmother, on one of her regular late-night walks, had found her slumped against the well.
And then two weeks later, we got a phone call.
On the second of March in 1986 at two-thirty in the morning, the police were summoned to Aurelia, the home of Abraham Hathaway and his wife Lavinia. They were there to investigate a claim of attempted rape. The victim was their sixteen-year-old granddaughter; the accused, her thirty-three-year-old second cousin. The attack was alleged to have taken place on their farm between the hours of 11:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. The victim had been so hysterical it had taken them two hours to calm her enough for her to give a statement. Her mother, who lived half a mile away, had been unaware of her daughter’s whereabouts until she was notified by her mother-in-law, who had found her near the barn when she had been on one of her regular late-night walks. After half an hour of gentle preliminary queries the victim was taken to the police station to give a formal statement and then to the hospital for an examination. She returned home just after six that morning. Her alleged attacker was remanded in a custodial cell pending further questioning.
Twenty-four hours later he was released on bail.
Three days later the victim and her family requested that all charges be dropped. They did not give a reason, but when told the matter was now one for the state, the victim withdrew her statement and the police were forced to let the matter go and the suspect walk.
They did not look on this kindly.
We stayed up waiting for them to come home that night, Ava and I. We lay in Ava’s room and heard the front door go at six-thirty. There were no voices, but there were noises in the kitchen and over that, the sound of Claudia’s steps on the staircase as she went into her room. I lay there beside Ava, tense, desperate. And then I threw back the covers and ran as soundlessly as I could out of the room. I stopped at the landing, pausing to look over the rail for my mother. Ava opened the door to her bedroom, but then I ran down the hall and grabbed at the handle of Claudia’s room, pushing it open with such force that as I stepped inside and hastily shut it behind me, she had already given a half-shout of surprise.
“Shh,” I said, putting my hands up to stop her. She stood there before her closet, her hair messy and fallen about her face, her lip cut, her eyes rimmed with red and her face streaked with dirt. She was wearing a large brown jacket, that looked like it belonged to a hobo.
“What are you wearing?” I moved to touch her.
“Get away from me,” she said, whipping herself out of reach.
I stared at her, uncomprehending.
“Get out of here,” she said, drawing herself up, “or I swear there’ll be trouble.”
I took her in. She clutched the jacket tighter. Her hands looked raw and bruised. Her eyes bore into me, her teeth were slightly bared over her lip. She looked feral.
I backed away from her and stole quietly out of the room.
That day when we came home from school, my sister and I were taken to stay with Jane.
“Is this about what’s happened to Claudia?” Ava asked when after two hours of TV and no phone call from our mother, Jane started laying out three places on the table for dinner.
“Your mother just thinks it best if you were to stay with me tonight.”
“Is she hurt or something?” Ava asked, standing in the doorway. Jane hovered above, laid down a fork and then gave a small shrug.
“She’ll be fine.”
“Why won’t anyone tell us anything? She’s our sister, we have a right to know,” I asked angrily.
Jane moved and busied herself over the stove.
“Your mother knows better than you both what’s best for you. Now don’t make things harder for her. Just behave. Come and help me with the vegetables.”
I stood there for a minute and then turned on my heel.
“I’m not hungry,” I said and went back into the living room and turned the TV set on again.
I could see Jane from the corner of my eye throw Ava a pleading look for compliance. But Ava knew where her loyalty was, so she came and joined me on the sofa. Jane sighed and returned to the kitchen and Ava and I refused to join her, until finally it was for time for bed and we went up to our rooms in silence. Our stomachs groaned from hunger well into the early hours of the morning.
The next day after school, our mother picked us up and we were relieved when we saw her small yellow car waiting for us, though her face when we got in, instantly silenced all the questions I had been dwelling on the night before. When we arrived home Claudia was in the garden, curled up on a swing chair. Ava and I hovered by the kitchen, but Mom caught us both by the shoulders and turned us around to face her.
“I want you to leave your sister alone, do you hear?” she said in a whisper. “You’re not to question her about anything.”
“Okay,” I managed to say.
“Now go get ready for chores. There’s a lot to do around here.”
And then came dinner, possibly the worst meal I’d ever eaten at our house. Claudia sat at the head of the table silently watching our mother choke down every mouthful, while Mom kept her gaze firmly on her plate and away from her eldest, who was eyeing every movement of hers like a bird of prey waiting to swoop. Ava and I sat across from each other, daring to give furtive looks to these people locked in a silent battle that was ragin
g across the macaroni and cheese we willed to go down our throats.
“Finish your food,” Mom said when Ava moved her fork into the center of her plate.
Ava looked at her, her eyes wide.
“I’m serious. We don’t waste food in this house. Finish.”
And we did, right down to the last stone-cold mouthful…in silence.
“Your mother knew.”
The next week, when it was my turn to nurse her, I came in and shut the door bearing The Blithedale Romance under my arm. As soon as I came in and sat down, before I even had a chance to open the book, she said, “She knew all along. I found out she went to see Jude after he was released on bail.”
“If you start on this again…” I warned.
“She confronted Claudia in front of me—she didn’t have the guts to accuse me outright. Truth be told, I don’t think she quite realized my part in it. She thought your sister had thought up the rape allegation and the plan all by herself and that I had known but not confessed because I had wanted to get rid of Jude. It was that night when you came to the house with Ava looking for us—you had been afraid because your mother and sister had had that terrific argument, remember?”
Remember? There was a crack in the plaster on the kitchen wall from when Claudia had thrown a chair at Mom’s head. Ava had cowered in the living room and thrown up all over the floor at their screams. I ran into the kitchen between them, their hands batting me away as they tried to get at each other amongst the cacophony of rebukes and accusations. My mother wild with rage; my sister incandescent with righteous indignation.
“Did you do it?” Mom had screamed. “Did you do it?”
“It only took your mother two days to accuse your sister, but she suspected from the start. The night she came over to the house the way she looked at her I knew that she was not fooled, nor would she be. No one knows someone like a mother knows their child. And she knew and she was so disappointed.”
