“You shouldn’t leave the front door unlocked like that. Anybody could’ve come in here.” Caroline took a sip from her cup.
Stunned, Marielle rummaged for a suitable reply, but Caroline spoke again before she could respond.
“I remember these cups. My mother got them the summer before my father died.”
Marielle said nothing as she watched Caroline set the teacup carefully down on its saucer.
“So how long have you and Carson been married?” Caroline looked up at Marielle, but her hand was still on the cup. She was stroking its question-mark handle.
“A couple of months.”
“And you’re living here? You and Carson and the kids are living here?”
Marielle took another sip of her tea. “Yes. We’re living here.” She set the cup down. It made a tender clinking sound.
“Why?”
“I … I beg your pardon?”
“Why on earth are you living here?”
None of your business, thank you, came quickly to her mind, and Marielle squelched it before it spewed itself out her mouth. She wondered what Carson would say. He had never described Caroline as being overly blunt. Perhaps he didn’t know. He had only seen her a couple of times in the ten years he was married to Sara. Perhaps this was a side of her he hadn’t had time to see.
“We decided it was the best arrangement for the children right now. And for Adelaide,” Marielle replied coolly, amazement giving way to annoyance.
Caroline shrugged and took another sip of tea. “Best,” she echoed as she set the cup down. Then she looked up at Marielle, folding her hands under her chin on upturned elbows. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
Neither are you, Marielle wanted to say. “I’m from Phoenix.”
Caroline opened her mouth, as if ready with a quip about Marielle’s very non-Southern hometown, but then she closed it. Softness fell across her facial features. When she opened her mouth again, her voice was gentle.
“Never made it to Phoenix,” she murmured. “Been to the Grand Canyon, though. I went there thinking you could jump off the edge of it. Turns out it’s not that easy.”
Marielle waited in silence. She could think of nothing to say in response.
Caroline unfolded her hands and placed them in her lap. Her gaze fell on the cup in front of her. “I suppose my mother told you all about me.”
“A little.”
Caroline looked up. “There are reasons why I left. Reasons why I stayed away.”
Marielle shrugged. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”
“But you’re raising my grandchildren so I would like you to know.”
Caroline’s frankness, which had angered her moments earlier, now made Marielle uncomfortable.
“That’s okay. You don’t even know me,” Marielle said.
“And you don’t know me either.”
Caroline sounded just like Adelaide.
“I made a lot of really bad choices when I was younger,” she continued. “And I got myself into situations I couldn’t get out of. I wasn’t well, and I chose all the wrong ways to remedy that. I know what people think of me, and I can guess what you probably think, but Sara was better off here with my mother than she ever would have been with me.”
A sudden boldness came over Marielle. “How do you know she was better off without you? You weren’t even here.”
Caroline stared at her. “Did you know Sara? Were you a friend of hers?”
Marielle thought of the journals hidden upstairs in her bedroom. “No. I just don’t see how you could know she was better off without you.”
“Because I was a terrible mother. I was an alcoholic and addicted to painkillers and who-knows-what-else. I heard voices in my head. I slept with whoever kept me warm and fed, and I couldn’t keep a job or a roof over our heads. I was a pathetic excuse for a mother. That’s how I know. If I had stayed here, she would’ve ended up hating me, or I would’ve ended up dead. I … I was a different person back then.”
“But what about your grandchildren?” Marielle asked, aware of a sudden swell of maternal concern regarding Hudson and Brette.
“What about my grandchildren?”
“Doesn’t it bother you that they don’t even know you?”
Caroline sat back in her chair. “Well, until recently, I didn’t want them to.” She turned to look out the alcove windows. The rain had lessened to a gentle shower, and the glass glittered. “But now I do. I’ve … I’ve had an experience. A resurrection—for lack of a better word. I don’t expect my mother or Carson or anyone else to understand. But I feel different. And I’m under the care of a doctor and am taking medication the way I’m supposed to—that’s a first. I feel … whole. For the first time in my life I don’t feel like a fragment of a person.”
“Is … is that why you came back?” Marielle asked.
Caroline turned to face her. “I want to see my grandchildren. They’re still young. There’s still time for me to get to know them and for them to get to know me. It’s too late for me to be a mother to Sara but it’s not too late for me to be a grandmother to Hudson and Brette.”
“So … you’re here to stay?” Marielle’s thoughts flew to sharing her home with not just a ninety-year-old matriarch but now the matriarch’s sixty-something renegade daughter. And maybe a ghost …
“No,” Caroline answered. “Not to stay. I have no desire to live in this house.” She shook her head. “Not this house.”
Marielle waited for Caroline to offer some kind of explanation for her feelings toward Holly Oak. But Caroline said nothing else. And Marielle didn’t quite know how to ask if it was because Caroline believed the house was haunted. It seemed a juvenile thing to say, like asking Caroline if she believed in the tooth fairy.
The two women sat quietly for a moment.
“I’m sorry the children aren’t here,” Marielle finally said.
Caroline inhaled, a cleansing breath perhaps. “Maybe it will be better this way. I can use the time to make some sort of peace with my mother before they come home. That is, if you will allow me to stay here until then. I promise not to stay more than a week after they come home.”
“Of course. You have somewhere else to go?”
“I’ll be living with a friend in Bethesda for a while. Until I can get my own place. Never had my own place before. But I’d like to visit Holly Oak from time to time. And come for Thanksgiving and Christmas—if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” Marielle said. “This is more your home than mine.”
Caroline cocked her head, as if to consider deeply what Marielle had just said. A question or comment seemed to form on her lips, and then it slipped away.
“Would you like to come with Carson and me when we go to the hospital to pick up Adelaide tomorrow?” Marielle asked.
Caroline shook her head. “I think I’ll just wait here. You can tell her I’m here. I’d rather she knew and didn’t faint dead away at the sight of me and break something else.”
Marielle smiled. “Sure. Carson’s hoping to be home by eleven o’clock, and then we’re going to go get her.”
“Carson. Nice guy. I always liked him.” Caroline stood. “I’m very tired, Marielle. In a lot of ways. If you don’t mind, I think I will go on upstairs and go to bed. It’s been a long day.”
Marielle stood also. “I don’t even know which room was yours.”
Caroline laughed weakly. “It looks like you’re in it. I peeked on my way down. It has the master bedroom look about it. And your wedding photo on the dresser.”
“I’m sorry, Caroline. Adelaide said it had been Sus—” Marielle stopped, Susannah’s name frozen on her tongue.
Caroline narrowed her eyes a bit. “Susannah’s room. So you’ve heard about Susannah.”
Marielle nodded.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told about this house and about Susannah Page but you should just know, Marielle, that things aren’t always what they seem. Tha
nks for the tea.” Caroline turned and started out of the kitchen. “I’ll be happy to sleep in Sara’s room—your guest room.”
n the sterile quiet of her hospital room, Adelaide dreamed of her great-grandmother. It was a dream she’d dreamed before, many times, though it had been years since the last time and more than eight decades since the first. The setting of the dream was always the same, Susannah’s eighty-fifth birthday, a real event.
And then the dream would morph into something unreal.
On the day of Susannah’s eighty-fifth birthday, Adelaide had been eight.
Her great-grandmother had not wanted to be fussed over or to have a multitude of well-wishers traipsing inside Holly Oak. She agreed to a small gathering in the garden with just close family and friends. Adelaide could still taste the tang of raspberry lemonade on her tongue, even eight decades later. She had never had it before.
Late in the afternoon, her great-grandmother had sent Adelaide into the parlor to fetch a shawl, and when she returned with it, Susannah thanked her and then murmured, “I do believe I am not long for this world, Adelaide Rose.”
Adelaide hadn’t known what she meant.
Susannah leaned close to her. “I can’t say that around your grandmother and mother. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear a lot of things. The thing about you, Adelaide, is you are too young to understand about the echoes in this house and too young to want to. I want you to remember this, child: I did everything I could. I did everything I could. Someday when you want to know the truth, you’ll find it beneath you. Under your feet. You walk upon it. We all do.”
Adelaide had stood transfixed, pondering her great-grandmother’s strange words. She remembered looking down at the paving stones at her feet. Then she opened her mouth to ask her great-grandmother what she meant, but a trio of guests intruded upon them to say their good-byes. Susannah looked at Adelaide and laid a finger to her lips.
That was the last conversation Adelaide had with her great-grandmother.
The next morning, an hour after a brilliant April sunrise, Adelaide found her great-grandmother dead in the wingback chair in her room, having passed from one life to the next in those stray moments between sleep and consciousness. Adelaide did not know Susannah was dead. She thought her great-grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair again. She went downstairs and told her mother Nana wouldn’t wake up for breakfast.
After the funeral, and for many months afterward, Adelaide dreamed of finding Susannah alive in her chair and hearing her great-grandmother repeating those odd words from the party.
Sometimes she would dream of finding Susannah in her chair in the parlor or in the garden or in the slave’s quarters that Susannah said had been Tessie’s room. Her great-grandmother would always be in her nightgown, the one Adelaide found her dead in, but she would always be warm and alive and talking. Not cold and stiff and silent like Adelaide had found her.
And she would always repeat the message.
I did what I could.
The answers are beneath you.
After awhile the dream faded away, and Adelaide would only experience it again if someone mentioned Susannah’s name or if she lingered too long on the stairs and caught her great-grandmother’s young eye at the portrait near the landing.
But it had been twenty years since Adelaide had had that dream.
Until she had it again at the hospital.
She dreamed Susannah was sitting in her wingback chair in her bedroom as Adelaide remembered it, her white floss hair tumbling down her shoulders like a bridal veil. Susannah’s hands were folded in her lap, and her head was bowed as if in prayer. Adelaide couldn’t make out her great-grandmother’s facial features; it was as though a sheet of water, like the backside of a waterfall, separated them. Adelaide took a step closer and was instantly aware that every part of her body ached, and her left arm felt as though a vice encircled it. She looked down at her misshaped wrist, its unnatural curl. It was broken. Anger soared inside her, and she looked up at her great-grandmother.
“Haven’t I suffered enough for you?” she heard herself rasping. “Haven’t we all suffered enough?”
The sheet of water fell away, and her great-grandmother raised her head. But instead of seeing the old woman of eighty-five, Adelaide was looking into the eyes of the young Susannah whose portrait hung at the top of the stairs. This Susannah now reached for Adelaide, grabbed her broken wrist and squeezed, clamping down on the vice with all her might. Adelaide crumpled to the floor in anguish, screaming for help, but hearing only a muffled wheeze coming from her mouth.
And then she awoke.
She was aware first that she was not back at Holly Oak; she was in a hospital bed. No one was squeezing her broken wrist; it was pulsating with pain of its own accord. She turned to the window and grimaced as pain rippled through her. The rain had stopped, and washed sunlight was sliding through blinds that no one had closed from the night before.
Her arm felt like it was on fire.
The privacy curtain was suddenly wrenched open, the metal rings scraping across the pole like nails shaken in a tin can. A smiling, black-haired nurse appeared with a breakfast tray.
“And how are we feeling today, Mrs. McClane?” the woman said.
“Like I’ve been thrown down the stairs by an angry ghost,” Adelaide muttered.
And the nurse threw back her head and laughed.
The doctor had been by and pronounced her well enough to go home by the time Carson and Marielle arrived at noon. She was sitting in the chair in her room waiting for them, with her tulips in her lap—balanced with her good arm—in the clothes she had arrived in the day before. Her left arm hung in a sling—navy blue with white trim. And her head was a bit mushy from the painkiller the nurse had given her.
“You didn’t both have to come,” she said when they walked into her room.
“Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday, Mimi.” Carson bent over her and kissed her forehead, “Really sorry.”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything if you had been.” But Adelaide immediately wondered if she was mistaken. If Carson had been there, Marielle wouldn’t have been snooping around in the studio. And if Marielle hadn’t been in the studio, Adelaide wouldn’t have been on the stairs wondering what Marielle was doing.
“Sleep okay?” Marielle asked.
“Until the drugs wore off.” Adelaide put out her arm, and Carson helped her out of the chair.
“They’re going to want you to ride down to the car in a wheelchair, Mimi,” Carson said.
“Nonsense. I broke a wrist, not a leg.”
“But they—”
“All right, all right.” Adelaide sat back down in the chair. “Do you have the prescriptions for the pharmacy?”
“Got them right here.” Carson patted his shirt pocket. “We can stop by Goolrick’s on the way home. And I’ve got your post-op instructions too. You’re all set. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you.”
“I’m not worried. Why should I be worried? It’s just a broken wrist.”
Carson looked at Marielle, and an unspoken comment passed between them. Something was up. Something they weren’t telling her.
“It is just a broken wrist, right?” She looked from one to the other.
“Yes. Only a broken wrist,” Marielle said quickly.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“There’s something we need to tell you, Mimi,” Carson’s voice was laced with concern.
“What? Is it one of the children? Did something happen to one of the children?”
“No. Nothing like that.” Carson replied quickly. “It’s Caroline. She’s back.”
The air in the room seemed to thicken. “What did you say?” Adelaide whispered.
“Caroline’s home.”
The police hadn’t looked for Caroline the day she ran away. She had been just a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, nearly the age when leaving home was a celebratory event accompanied
by mortarboard tassels and shopping for dorm furniture.
Nearly a year had passed before Adelaide got a phone call from her.
“I just wanted you to know I’m okay,” Caroline had said, sounding very far away.
“Please come home.” Adelaide replied, keeping her emotions in check.
“No.” The response had been swift. Rehearsed, perhaps.
“Caroline. Whatever it is that you’ve done, I don’t care. I just want—”
“Whatever I have done?” A whooshing sound filled the space behind her daughter’s voice, barely masking her indignation. Her daughter was calling from a pay phone on a busy street. Adelaide could still feel the knife blade of her daughter’s quick reproof.
“You’re saying it’s my fault you don’t want to come home?” Adelaide had asked.
Caroline had paused for just a moment. When she spoke, her voice was hot with anger. “What is with you and that house and someone having to be at fault for everything?” Her daughter swore, and Adelaide closed her eyes against the sound of those ugly words.
“I just … I don’t understand, Caroline!” she had blurted, anger now fusing her words together.
“You know what, Mother? Neither do I. I gotta go.”
“Caroline! Please. You need help! You need a doctor.”
“Good-bye.”
“Please! Call me again, will you?”
But Caroline had hung up without promising anything.
She called again, a couple of times. Showed up a few times in her early twenties. Never promising anything.
Except when she was twenty-six and arrived at Holly Oak with a baby named Sara.
She had promised something then.
“I won’t ask you to give her back to me,” Caroline had said, after she asked Adelaide to take Sara. “I’ll sign whatever papers I have to. I promise I won’t ask you to give her back.”
And she didn’t.
It surprised Adelaide how little Caroline had changed physically in the nearly fifty years her daughter had been in and mostly out of her life. The shape of her nose—Charles’s—and the plucky swell of her cheekbones—Adelaide’s—and the silvery blue hue of her eyes—Caroline’s own—were time-stopping icons of the past. Only the lines in Caroline’s skin, the steel-gray strands in her hair, and Adelaide’s own sense of impending mortality suggested decades had swept past them both.
A Sound Among the Trees Page 14
