A Sound Among the Trees

by Susan Meissner

  When Adelaide arrived home from the hospital, her daughter was waiting for her in the garden, sipping a glass of sweet tea and reading from a slim volume, the title of which Adelaide could not see. The book looked old and treasured. Caroline set the book down on the glass-topped table in front of her when Adelaide stepped out onto the patio.

  “Hello, Mother.” Caroline rose from her chair and came to her, hesitant for only a moment. Then she put her hands on Adelaide’s shoulders, as if in benediction, leaned in, and kissed her on the nonbandaged side of her forehead.

  “Caroline.” Her daughter’s name fell off her lips more in wonder than greeting. Caroline seemed not to notice the difference. Caroline touched the strap of the sling over Adelaide’s shoulder and followed it down to the hammock of cloth that kept her arm close to her heart.

  “Are you in much pain?” Caroline said, her brows knitted in concern.

  The irony of those five words caught Adelaide at a strange place, and she nearly laughed out loud. Come now, Caroline. I live at Holly Oak. She shook her head. “Not too bad. Doctor says I should recover well. No sewing for a while, though. Pearl is going to help me finish an order I’m working on.”

  Caroline laughed lightly. “Pearl. So there goes any hope of a quiet homecoming for me.”

  Several awkward seconds of silence followed. Adelaide had a million questions on her mind but found herself unable to give voice to any of them.

  Caroline raised her gaze. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t call first.”

  “I’ve never minded before, Caroline. I wouldn’t start now.” Her response sounded caustic and she immediately regretted saying it. But Caroline smiled, laughed a little.

  “It’s so good to see you, Mother,” she said. “Want to sit a bit?” Caroline pulled out a chair, and Adelaide settled into it. “Want anything from the kitchen?” Caroline asked.

  “No, thank you.”

  Caroline retook her seat and crossed her legs at the ankles. She wore a gauzy tan skirt that fell about her legs and skimmed the surface of the patio stones. Her blue tank top was studded with cloudy rhinestones in a floral pattern, some missing. At her neck was a gold cross, small but sparkling. New. Caroline looked completely comfortable and content. Adelaide couldn’t remember the last time Caroline looked that way. She tried, but she couldn’t.

  “Is it true?” Adelaide said, suddenly overcome with emotion. “Is it over?”

  The words came out wrong. Marielle had told her everything Caroline had said, about wanting to know her grandchildren, about having a real address in Bethesda, about finally being under the care of a doctor, about having had some kind of cleansing revelation. Adelaide meant to ask something like, “Are you really home for good?” but Caroline seemed to know what she meant.

  “Yes.” Caroline’s one-word reply, weighted by the years, was whispered across the table, heavy despite its softness. “I’m home.”

  Adelaide closed her eyes, needing a few seconds of solitude to attempt to embrace the thing she had always wanted. For a moment she felt stripped of sensation, as if the impact of finally having Caroline home had sent her crashing into an abysslike void. The pulsing pain of her broken wrist was the rhythmic meter that ticked like a metronome, reeling her back in.

  When she opened her eyes, Caroline was still calmly sitting in her chair, her hands folded in front of her, her skirt the only thing moving as a summer breeze kicked its hem.

  “You’re different,” Adelaide said.

  “Yes.”

  Adelaide’s aching head was suddenly filled with the images of Caroline’s random past visits home. Strung out, broke, homeless, angry, a child in her arms, needle tracks in her arms, nothing in her arms.

  “What happened to you?” Adelaide murmured. “You’re not … not the same.”

  Caroline looked away for just a moment, searching for the right words, perhaps. “I guess you could say I came to the end. The very end of it all. I didn’t know there was a door at the end, but there is. And somehow in that dark nothingness I fell against that door, and it opened for me. A nun came to visit me in the hospital. She invited me to spend a few months at a place where people like me, people who fall against the last door on earth, find out how to crawl through it.”

  “Hospital?” Adelaide echoed, but Caroline raised a hand to whisk the question away. To whisk all of Adelaide’s questions away.

  “I’m not the person I was when I left here all those years ago. And I’m really sorry for everything I put you through, Mother. Truly sorry. I hope you can forgive me, even just a little.”

  Adelaide felt tears slipping down her ancient cheeks. She wanted to say yes, but her lips would not obey. Caroline went on.

  “I can’t get back the years I threw away. I can’t … I can’t make it up to Sara. I know that. And I’ve forgiven myself for that, but I want to make it up to my grandchildren. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I am asking you to let me have the opportunity to be a grandmother to them. And a daughter to you. Please.”

  “I never thought this day would come. I stopped hoping it would,” Adelaide said, again closing her eyes to somehow lessen the sensory overload.

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry, Mother.”

  Adelaide opened her eyes and wiped away her tears with her good hand. Caroline’s eyes were dry, her face composed, as though she was used to being a different person.

  “How long … how long have you been well?” Adelaide asked.

  “Two years.”

  A stab of surprise made Adelaide flinch in her chair. “Two years?”

  “I had to be sure. I had to be sure the change was real. I was too used to the counterfeit.” Caroline’s voice was as calm and gentle as the moment Adelaide had stepped out on the patio. “The last thing on earth I wanted to do was to come home thinking I was finally free, only to find out I had fooled myself into thinking there was hope for someone like me. I had to be sure it was true, that there was hope for someone like me. And that I had found it.”

  Adelaide reached her good hand across the table, and Caroline took hold of it. “Stay here,” Adelaide pleaded. “Don’t go back to Bethesda.”

  Caroline shook her head slowly. “No.”

  “But we have plenty of room—”

  “I will stay for a month. Until the children get back from New York and then another week after that, but then I’m going back. I’ll be back to visit often; I promise you that. But I can’t live here.” She let go of Adelaide’s hand.

  “Why not?” But Adelaide knew why. Holly Oak was a house of ghosts, of regrets.

  Caroline didn’t answer. Instead she leaned forward in her chair, moved the book out of her way, and crossed her arms on the table, easy and unrushed. “Why did Carson stay here after he remarried?”

  “What?”

  “I need to know why Carson and Marielle are here. Why aren’t they in their own place? Are you not well? Is that why they are here?”

  Adelaide again flinched in her chair. For a second she couldn’t quite remember why Carson and Marielle lived there. Then clarity fell over her. “They thought it would be best for the children. And they thought I was too elderly to live here alone.”

  “They?”

  “Carson and Marielle.”

  “And is that what you think? That it’s best for the children?”

  “This was their mother’s home,” Adelaide let the little verbal barb fly across the table.

  Caroline didn’t so much as flinch. “Yes, of course, this was Sara’s home. But it’s not Sara’s home any longer.”

  Adelaide’s head and arm began to throb in a dancing ache. “They made the decision to stay here with me in this house. I didn’t ask them to.”

  “I see.” Caroline looked away again, past the little grove of trees at the west edge of the garden.

  Adelaide wordlessly sought her daughter’s gaze. But it was several long moments before Caroline turned from the trees that marked Holly Oak’s boun
daries.

  “She seems like a lovely woman,” Caroline said.

  Adelaide suddenly was bone-weary. “Yes, she is … Do you suppose we could go in now? I think I need to rest.”

  Caroline rose to her feet. “Of course.” She reached for the book to put under her arm. As Caroline helped Adelaide out of the chair, she caught a glimpse of the title. The book was a psalter.

  Caroline had been reading the Psalms.

  arielle stood at the door to her makeshift office off the kitchen, her gaze on the half of the studio that she could see from her vantage point. Morning sunlight played on the vines that grew up the sides. For the third time in as many days, she pondered taking Sara’s journals out of their hiding place in her closet and returning them to the box where she found them. Knowing they were hidden in her closet was setting her on edge, making her feel like the house was somehow folding itself in around her. She didn’t like it.

  Perhaps when she went to feed the rabbit she would take them and put them back. After Carson left for work. She would need to get the key out of his study …

  Carson had seemed only slightly taken aback when she told him she’d been in the studio when Adelaide fell. She hadn’t told him she’d been in there for a couple of hours, and apparently Adelaide hadn’t said anything to Carson about how long Marielle had been gone. Surely if Adelaide had mentioned it in passing, Carson would wonder what Marielle found so interesting in the dregs of Sara’s creativity. And Carson seemed to care only what prompted Marielle to take a peek inside the studio, not what prompted Adelaide to be on the stairs when she fell.

  Marielle had simply told Carson she wanted to see inside it.

  A touch on her shoulder made her jump. Carson had come up behind her. He had a cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Carson! I didn’t hear you!”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” He said it kindly, but his gaze was on the studio, where hers had been. “Big plans today?”

  “Sort of. Pearl is coming over. Caroline and Pearl and I are going to try to help Adelaide finish up those uniforms today.”

  Carson pulled his gaze from the studio, and he smiled at her. “You didn’t tell me you could sew.”

  “I can’t. Pearl thinks it’s positively criminal. I barely know how to thread a needle. Caroline said she would show me how to hem and sew on buttons. I guess I can be taught how to do that.”

  “Caroline? Really?”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve never pictured Caroline as having been around a sewing machine much either,” he said. “Not that I’m comparing her to you.” He took a sip of his coffee.

  Marielle smiled. “Apparently that was one of the many jobs she had over the years. She worked for a designer in the garment district in Los Angeles. He taught her.”

  “He taught her to sew?” Carson sounded incredulous.

  “Well, I don’t think that’s exactly what he hired her for.” Marielle turned from the window, away from the view of the old slaves’ quarters. “I didn’t ask her to elaborate.”

  Carson studied her for a few moments. “So are you okay with Caroline being here?”

  She shrugged. “This is her home.”

  He moved closer and touched her cheek. “It’s your home, too.”

  “I suppose.” It was out of her mouth before she could think it through. The two words surprised them both.

  “You’re not feeling like this is your home?” Carson’s voice was laced with part surprise and part something else. Disappointment?

  “It’s … it’s a little harder than I thought it would be. There are just a lot of reminders of former lives here. Sometimes it’s hard to compete with them.”

  Carson set his coffee cup down on her desk and held his arms out to her. Marielle let herself be folded into them. “It’s an old house,” he cooed. “Old houses can feel that way, I think. But we’re putting our own imprint on this house—you and me and the kids. There will be reminders of us here someday.” He kissed the top of her head. “Caroline has made it clear she doesn’t want to live here, and Adelaide is getting on in years. In a little while it will be just the four of us.”

  She lifted her head to look at him and frowned. “Just the four of us?”

  He blinked, wide eyed, and then laughed. “Well, sure. Just the four of us. You’re not telling me we should be counting the ghost too, do you?”

  “I didn’t mean ghosts, Carson. I meant children. Our children. Yours and mine.”

  The smile on his face vanished and then returned a second later. He kissed her again. “Of course. I didn’t mean … I wasn’t suggesting there would only be the four of us … I only meant. Oh, for Pete’s sake, I need to stop. I’m making it worse.” He squeezed her affectionately. “Of course someday there will be more than just the four of us.”

  Marielle turned her head back to the window, to the outline of the studio at the far end of her view. She felt Carson lift his head and follow her gaze. For several moments they stood there in silence, looking at the same structure.

  “I guess you want to start cleaning it out?” he murmured.

  “Don’t you?” she asked.

  He leaned his head against hers. “Yes.”

  “I think we should do it while the children are in New York. I was thinking we could make the studio into a playroom for them. A surprise for when they get home.”

  “We?”

  She turned to face him. “I think we should clean it out together.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, though not exactly in agreement.

  “This weekend, maybe?” she said.

  He grabbed his coffee cup. “Sounds like a plan.” He kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Gotta go.”

  Carson turned and left. Marielle stood there a moment longer before heading upstairs to shower and dress. She didn’t contemplate long Carson’s not being one hundred percent on board with the plan to clean out the studio together because there was something more pressing to think about. Saturday was only three days away. She had three days to decide what to do with Sara’s journals.

  Leave them hidden or put them back. Leave them hidden or let them be found.

  By ten o’clock that morning, Marielle and Caroline had moved the long table into the family room and brought in Adelaide’s sewing machine and notions baskets. They had also spread out the uniform pieces, all in varying stages of completion. Adelaide said the old drawing room would give them all more room to move about, but Marielle wondered if there was another reason they weren’t going to be sewing in the parlor.

  Her ponderings were proven correct the moment Pearl stepped into Holly Oak’s foyer at ten thirty, her arms full of cake, a sewing basket, and past issues of Southern Living. “We’re not in the parlor, are we?” she asked as Marielle welcomed her inside. Marielle told her they’d be working in the old drawing room.

  “Oh, thank heaven! Lordamercy, I almost didn’t come!” She handed the magazines to Marielle. “These are for Adelaide, sweetie, so she doesn’t go plum crazy with boredom watching us sew. Where’s the injured little darling?”

  Pearl swept past Marielle into the family room, where Adelaide and Caroline sat on a leather sofa. Caroline had her legs tucked up underneath her, and Adelaide had a couple of bed pillows under her arm. Marielle followed her inside. Pearl set the cake and the basket on the long table and then dashed over to Adelaide with barely a nod to Caroline. “Oh, my dear. And how are we doing today?”

  “We’re doing fine, Pearl.”

  “Oh, lovely. I brought my Southern Livings for you, dear. I cut out the recipes, of course, but you don’t like entertaining anyway so you won’t miss them.” She turned to Caroline. “Hello there. I am Pearl Sibley, Adelaide’s oldest and dearest—well, not oldest because I’m only seventy-nine, but—”

  Pearl clamped her mouth shut. When she opened it again, one word fell out. “Caroline.”

  “Hello, Pearl,” Caroline said with a gentle nod of her head.

  “Lordamerc
y. It’s Caroline.” Pearl turned to Marielle, who stood a few feet behind her. “Marielle, it’s Caroline.”

  “Yes. We’ve met.” Marielle said.

  Pearl turned to face the couch again. “My stars! Caroline!” She rushed forward and pulled Caroline to her feet to embrace her. Then she stepped back with her hands on Caroline’s shoulders. “Look at you! Why, you don’t look a day over fifty. Maybe fifty-five. You know, I saw you at poor Sara’s funeral, and I thought to myself, that girl is finally looking her age. But not today. Why, today you look near radiant. Doesn’t she, Adelaide?”

  Adelaide opened her mouth—to agree or disagree, it was impossible for Marielle to tell. Pearl went on before Adelaide could speak.

  “Are you here for more than a day? Because if you are here for more than a day, you should come to my jewelry party Friday night. That’s in two days. Marielle, you should come too. You should both come. Adelaide, dear, I’d ask you but I know you’ll just say no.”

  “Yes, I’m here for more than a day, but I’m not sure I’m ready for a jewelry party yet. Thank you for the invitation, though. That’s very kind.” Caroline sat back down on the couch.

  “Well, this is just splendid! Will you be sewing with us, Caroline? I think it would be so much fun if you did. I’ve been brushing up the last few days on my Singer. Like getting back on a bike.”

  “Yes, I thought I might.”

  “Goody. I am sure there is something we can find for you to do, isn’t there, Adelaide?”

  “Caroline has actually done quite a bit of sewing, Pearl. I don’t think we will have any trouble finding something for her to do.” Adelaide sat forward on the couch, and Marielle moved to help her stand. “Now then. Let me show you girls what needs to be done. We need to move Pearl’s caramel cake into the kitchen, though.”