by Nelle Davy
“Goodbye then,” she said.
“Yeah…” And I’m ashamed to say my voice broke and I looked down at the floor and saw the heels of her boots move away and, as I looked up willing something, anything, to come forward, the door closed and she was gone.
I stood there in the doorway, listening to the machinations of the car start up, and the roar, and then the dying breath of the engine as she drove away. And just like that, I was all that was left.
But still I was not alone.
So how did it come to this?
They all died, of course.
Death came to visit Aurelia in 1991 and his stay there was incredibly productive. He pitched up his scythe and put up his feet and settled into the white house for what would be an energetic sabbatical. The first person he took was my uncle and then two months after that he turned his gaze onto Piper. His gift to her was cancer, ovarian and rapid. By a twist of irony, the person who nursed her through her death was my grandmother. She gave to that woman who had been her lifelong adversary, every last piece of comfort and respite that she could; every waking hour was devoted to her care, until one night she sent for each of us to come into the room where Piper lay and say our goodbyes and the rattling sack of bones there breathed for the last time. My grandmother cried when Piper died, actually burst into tears when she placed a hand on her chest and a mirror under her mouth, and there was no shadow of air on the glass.
It was the strangest sight I had ever seen, watching Lavinia cry. Her body was wracked with sobs, her eyes bleary and red, her howls erupting with a force that even her wringing hands could not stifle. She did not cry when her sons died, she did not cry when her own husband would die, but for Piper, whom she had treated as an enemy for over forty-five years, she cried. I don’t know why. That was one of the few things she would never tell me.
So Piper went first, four months after Ethan’s death, the day before Valentine’s Day, and then in May of the following year, my grandfather died peacefully in his sleep of a stroke. He just did not wake. Even though the blood vessels in his brain had burst, causing a sharp slice of agonizing, white-lightning pain, it was a mere moment before whatever void there was opened up and swallowed his soul whole. He died next to my grandmother and she only realized what was wrong when she turned over in the morning and saw how peaceful he looked. She lay with him for half an hour before she told anyone. She called us all to the house and broke the news in the living room while the coroner came to take the body. I remember how they wheeled him past us in the black mortuary bag. Ava whimpered. Cal Jr. got up from where he sat beside her and shut the living room door.
It was warm the day we buried my grandfather. Uncomfortably, unseasonably warm so that my black dress stuck to my back with sweat. There was no breeze, just unremitting sunlight beating down on the assembled mourners as the same priest who had conducted Piper and Ethan’s funeral droned on above our heads. I sat between my mother and Ava, my eyes unable to tear themselves away from the lacquered oak coffin. He was in there. Open it up and you would see him, see the dark blue suit that he only ever wore on formal occasions because he hated wearing suits. He was always tugging at the shirt collars, stretching his neck, or slipping his finger into the knot of his tie. My grandmother had chosen it. She had pressed and ironed it herself before she dressed him.
Get up, I thought. Get up and take it off. Get into your pants or jeans. In this heat the earth will cook you.
When he was lowered into the ground, my family and I stood up and one after another threw a handful of earth down onto the coffin. As I did so I felt like my life seemed to be the thing that filled in the gap between funerals. How many times had I done this now? My grandmother scooped the dirt in her hand, releasing it in a slow pour; my mother threw hers with a gentle toss while Ava repeated her delicate gesture and then it was my cousin’s turn. Only the five of us now, when once…when once…
His actions were slow but controlled. He turned to the bowl of earth on the stand, he lifted a chunk of it into his palm, shaking his wrist to get the measure of it. Then he stood on the lip of the grave and, tightening his fist, crouched down and flung the earth onto the coffin so that it fell in a rain of dirt landing with a splatter onto the gold-embossed plaque.
The priest faltered in his speech but only for a moment, while his eyes found those of my grandmother’s and the hands holding his bible clasped the spine. None of us looked at each other. We stood back as the diggers gently covered my grandfather in the dust of Aurelia. Our faces were masks that betrayed nothing to the other mourners.
My grandfather’s will was read at the wake. We retired to his study after he was buried and it was there that we discovered Cal Jr. was to be the main beneficiary of Aurelia and all its assets, after the death of my grandmother. When we learned the news my grandmother smiled at him. He turned his head and looked out the window.
And then all that was left was Lavinia, but Death had a different plan in mind for her. She would die, but not quickly. Hers would be piece by piece, starting with her mind.
It started with a small thing. Her utter lack of emotion in the weeks after the death of her husband. She had lost her son, husband and sister in-law in the space of a year and a half and yet she was surprisingly cavalier. People attributed this to either coldness or stoicism, but this can-do attitude was less a conscious decision than an inability to do anything else.
And then gradually, so slowly it was almost a tease, she began to forget things. Small things: appointments she had made, that she had run out of a particular food or ingredient at home, names at the tip of her tongue but never quite able to spill over. She attributed it to getting old. She was old. And then she started to write things down whenever she could, but then she would forget where she had kept them, these bits of paper, so she kept a book. But she would forget at the end of phone calls or conversations what it was she needed to write down in the first place and she knew then that something had permanently unraveled within her like caught thread.
So she made an appointment and she saw a doctor and she came home and realized that her time had finally come. She had been diagnosed with a particularly aggressive strain of Alzheimer’s and she had a year before she would come undone. She tasted the bitterness of her impending death and the manner in which it would come and it was then and there as she sat in her living room and gazed at the polished crystal and woods that she made up her mind.
No, there was no violent death for my grandmother. She would not have feared it if there had been. Hers was more torturous: she would waltz with death through dementia, as her brain slowly degenerated, taking her body with it. She would lose her memory and then her language and her speech until she was a living shell with everything she was and everything she knew gone.
And this was what stayed with her for a whole year.
When the disease began to take hold of her, my mother, my sister and I began to take turns to nurse my grandmother. My cousin was too busy on the farm to be able to help and in any case Cal Jr. didn’t have it in him. We were all that remained then, and I remember how lonely that feeling was. From having a home with grandparents, cousins and aunts, we were reduced to just the five of us. Yet Aurelia remained unchanged. The farm was still as great and as prosperous as it had ever been; it had expanded while we, its inhabitants, had shrunk.
We moved into my grandparents’ house. I was seventeen and filling out college applications. Ava had already graduated high school and had enrolled at Duke University, but she had deferred for a year while I was still at home and our grandmother was sick. She hadn’t wanted to go at all by then. She had wanted to stay and train in the local community college as a midwife. She loved babies: with them she was utterly at home. The day we had to move into our grandmother’s house, I had come out of the shower and found her in her bedroom shaking. She was sitting in the middle holding her duvet up to her mouth. I sat with her and positioned my wet head next to hers and held her. We never said a word, we didn�
�t need to. Our mother had tried to tell us how temporary this was and how necessary, with Cal Jr. living up in the house all alone, unable to care for our grandmother, whose condition was worsening all the time.
“We’re still a family,” she’d said. “This is just what families do.”
We moved in on a Wednesday and Ava smiled when she crossed the threshold. No one would have known there was anything wrong. Funny, but now that I think about it, that moment up in her bedroom was the last act of kinship between us in our home. We would never return to it the way we had left.
Ava got a job in town at a diner to keep her occupied, because Mom insisted it wasn’t good for her to stay in the house all day. Cal Jr. had been furious. He had berated Mom for tarnishing our family name—making one of us work in a common diner as if we were desperate and needy. Mom hadn’t lifted her eyes from her plate when she’d told him that despite him being the head of the family’s finances, she was still head of her own household and he had no right or sway over what her daughters did. He hadn’t liked that one bit. In a way, though, he had been right to be concerned, because it was only then that I began to really understand the change in my family’s stature after Ava took that job. For the first time I began to read in other people’s faces not the awe and respect I had known, but now a trace of discomfort. When I would first go in to see Ava where she worked, I would notice the regulars and how awkward they were about giving her orders for food and how they wouldn’t meet her eye when she stretched over them to pour coffee or clear away plates. I would sit at the red-topped counter and I realized what was in their minds when she moved away. It was the same question I saw on the faces of my classmates and teachers every single day at school. Are you okay? What’s happening up there?
But there was no one outside ourselves we could trust to tell.
So Ava worked, our mother nursed and I helped while Cal Jr. supported all of us, and honestly, this mock unit we had built worked. We became a family out of the embers of a once greater one. We took up the mantle and we succeeded, and would have even been happy but for two things.
The first began one day when my grandmother was crying out and as there was no one around but me I went into her room and she turned to me as I opened the door.
“It’s you, then,” she said.
“Yes, Grandma, what is it?” I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.
“Water,” she said simply.
So I poured her a glass from the jug and helped her to drink it.
“You don’t look a bit like your father, not a bit. You’re nothing like us,” she said suddenly. I had trained myself not to listen to her words as if they were truths anymore. Mom kept telling us how she wasn’t herself, that her mind was unraveling and taking her body with it, but all the same I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps now more than ever what she uttered was more herself than we wanted to realize, because this was her unrestrained, untempered and ungoverned. I saw her mind as a sack of fluid held together by a band that was slowly losing its shape until one day it would simply burst and pour away, but that did not mean that its contents were altered just because its frame was rotten. However, I kept these thoughts to myself. It would not have helped anyone to hear them.
“You were never like us, were you? I used to say that the tree of the Hathaways gives two kinds of fruit. Sweet and sour. Your father was sweet, your uncle and aunt sour. Your sister Claudia was sour, Ava was sweet, but you, you were never anything. You didn’t fit.” She stopped and looked down. “I liked that.”
I wiped my hands on my jeans and then smoothed the bed covers over her.
“You never loved me, did you?” she asked. In my shock I met her eyes as I leaned over her to adjust her pillows and she smiled. “I never loved you, either. But I didn’t hate you and that’s more than can be said for some in our family.”
Briefly I stood there and then moved away.
“Merey, do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re my grandmother.”
“Because I don’t want to forget,” she said, a whimper creeping into her voice. “I don’t want to forget…” As her voice trailed off then her eyes sharpened into focus on me.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked again.
“Yes, Grandma,” I repeated slowly. Her mouth twisted into a sneer.
“Your name is Lavinia Hathaway,” I said. “You live on a farm in Iowa—you were married and had two sons. Your youngest son was my father. I know who you are.”
“That wasn’t my name.” She leaned forward and smiled. “That’s not my name.” And she giggled, holding her hands up to her mouth. “That’s not my name,” she repeated, laughing. “It’s not my name.”
“It is your name.”
“No, no, it wasn’t.” She leaned back with a huge grin and then her eyes found the curtain and something shifted and slowly the expression drained from her face.
I took my moment and left. When I shut the door, I leaned against it for a minute, utterly bemused, but I dismissed it because I mistook a moment of clarity for one of confusion.
But she did not forget, and the next time we were alone she asked me again what her name was and again I told her what I knew and it was then she grew angry and threw a glass at my head and she hissed at me, “Stupid girl, that’s not my name. It’s not my goddamn name.” And because I was confused and shocked I asked her, I asked her what was her name.
I opened the door and let the devil in.
Sometimes I have wondered over the years if a person’s ability to feed their secrets into another isn’t perhaps a way of bleeding their soul into yours. You become a hollow vessel in which they slowly fill you with their lives, so that their memories seep into your thoughts and dreams. I cannot tell you the amount of dreams I have had of a girl in a gingham pinafore, or a woman walking the dusty roads to her car holding her jaw slowly swelling under her hand, or of a redhaired girl I’ve never met but whom I look on with hate and fear.
Since I went to the farm with Claudia, I’ve begun to dream again. I am walking the road that takes me to the farm. It is night. The road is silvered by the moon that dips behind clouds so that in fits and starts the road is obscured to me, but still I keep walking. I find myself back at the entrance, at the sign in curlicue black lettering, which I cannot read but whose ends look like tails swinging in the dark, and I make my way up the gravel path, winding my footsteps to a house so white it shines. The lights blaze from the windows, the open air carries voices from inside, stray breaths of conversation, raised voices, shouts of laughter. I stand before it, waiting. And then there is the sound of twigs being snapped into the earth and I hear his voice.
“Say it.”
I woke up panting, not screaming. It was still late and the room was black and white, which only compounded my brief but bright fear that I was still there, still back in a world I had no wish to be in and yet, unlike this one, was one of color.
Chapter 15
I RENTED A car, packed up the boxes and sat down to the plate of scrambled eggs Jane had made me.
Over the rim of her coffee cup she asks, “Are you sure you want to leave today?”
“It’s time to go back,” I say softly.
“I’ll let you know what happens. With the farm, I mean,” she offers.
“Don’t bother—I don’t want to know. It’s done.”
“Is it?”
I look up from my plate and my fork hovers.
“Your mother’s heart would break if she saw what you two had become.” Jane sets down her cup and folds her hands into her lap. “It will never be done until you make peace.”
“Peace,” I mutter. I put down my fork. “Jane, do you know what happened the night before I left for college?”
She shifts in her seat.
“No,” she says, “but I know how it broke your mother to see what had happened to you.”
I shake my head. “Ava never told Mom what happened and I am glad, because I thin
k it would have destroyed her if she had had to stop loving yet another daughter. Peace—peace is for those who can redeem what they did. And I can’t. I cannot ever undo what happened and nothing good can ever come out of it.”
That shook her. She blinks, her face a mask, but I could see then her mind was racing.
“Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. And I know it was Ava who called ahead before I came here and that’s why you had the room ready—”
“I didn’t—”
“You didn’t have to, I figured it out when I got here. I had no idea I was still that predictable.” I push my plate forward and stand up.
“You all used to be so happy,” she says mournfully.
I can feel myself smile.
“We didn’t know each other back then.”
I drove for miles with the boxes carrying my family’s life in the back. My cousin drove with me in the car, lighting up cigarette after cigarette but never speaking. I did not need him to, his company was enough.
And now—
And now—
I had said we were happy but for two things, hadn’t I? And the second, the second was—
Ava, I did not know—I didn’t.
I did not know what I was seeing.
A few hours later, I happened to pass a wedding. The people spilled out of the church, swiftly followed by the stark white and black of the bride and groom. The guests threw confetti in the air above their heads and it rippled in an array of delicate peaches and pinks. The bride bent her head and her smile shone on the roses in her hand while her new husband kissed her hair.
Their happiness was radiant.
“Do you know where my mother is buried?” asked Cal Jr. beside me.
“No, Cal, I don’t.”
“No…” He scratched his finger on the window pane. “Me, neither.”
One night as I rested at a motel, I dreamed the dream again. I was standing at the foot of the mound but I did not go in. I heard the noise and his voice behind me and I began to shake but I did not move. The cloud slipped behind the moon, wide and bright like a silver dollar.
