A Stranger's House (38 page)

“The reason these shapes of me stop here,” Grady said, still looking at the wall, one finger now tracing the jagged outline, “is because this is when Grandpa Clark sent him away.” Then the hand stopped dead, and the finger folded in on itself, and Grady began to cry.

“And my mother is Grandpa Clark's daughter,” he cried. “Martin's cousin. He got her pregnant. She was nothing. A cocktease. She was worthless. Because of her father.” He tried to stop crying, sniffed and caught his breath. He said, “That's what's funny, because all
of this is his fault Everything. And there's nothing I can tell you about him, because he's evil, and there's nothing to say beyond that.” He paused, took in a breath. “What can you say to that? What makes a man evil? That man? I don't know, and I
lived
with him, I
knew
him. So what can you expect to know about him? Just that he did all this, and now he's sold this house to you, and now it's yours and he's washed his hands of it, and that I'm glad he's as good as dead up there in Maplewood right now. As good as dead, and that makes me happy.”

He paused, his face near the wall, his eyes now closed. “We used to come up here all the time, Daddy and me, not just three times a year. Not just that. But plenty of times we came here. Now that's gone. That's over.”

He gave out a huge breath, his shoulders falling, his head falling, but then he stood up again, and I pushed even harder against the wall, wanted to vanish into it.

“
I am not ashamed!”
he shouted. “
I am not!”
and he was at the window, looking out.

He turned to me, and I looked away as soon as our eyes met. He said, “Where is he? Where did he go?”

I whispered, “I don't know,” thankful, thankful that he had heard, that I would not have to repeat my words, because I did not want to speak again, ever. He rushed past me, cold air following after him as he banged down the stairs, opened the door, and left. I listened, waited, tensed up even more for the slam of that door, but it did not come. The door stood open downstairs.

I did not know what to do. I did not, and thought then, finally, undeniably, that I had followed my mother, aware of all things now, and unable to do anything. I had fallen, entered her deserted and lonely domain, what I had fought against all my life finally here, the fear, that paralysis all in a moment, hope dead in me, my brain finally acclimated to that thought, and I fell to my knees, slipped down the wall, my hands to my face, covering it, hiding it from space around me, the gray of snowfall, the dead-white sheen of air. I could do nothing for Sandra, having already lost her, I'd chosen to ignore Mr. Gadsen, when all he'd wanted was to apologize; I could do nothing for Martin or Grady, both of them lost to some ghost of dead love and the remembrance of hate; and I could do
nothing for Tom, could bear no children, could no longer love him without thinking of the loss that was no loss, the children that were not to be children. There was nothing, and I lay on my side, curled myself into a ball on the cold linoleum floor, pulled myself into myself as tightly as I could, and I cried.

“Martin!” Grady shouted outside, out in the snow, his voice muffled, cloaked by that white.

I opened my eyes, the ceiling above me slowly spinning.

“Martin!” I heard again, faintly, farther away, but with that distant word, that name, a son's call for his father, I heard somehow my own father; I heard in the pitch and timbre my father's call to me the day I had stood at the chain-link fence, heard in Grady's voice desperation and hope and love all at once, and I knew for a moment, an instant, the hope and fear in him, a boy outside in the snow, searching for his lost father.

I saw that Grady was me, a child of lost parents, stuck here and floundering, the color of his voice, that last call to his father, the hue of looking and loss, just as I'd listened for my father for so long.

“Martin?” Grady called out, this time even fainter, quieter, his father's name now made into a question, the inflection a fear, and I felt again my mother's fear, and saw her the day she had moved the cot into the kitchen, a day only two weeks before she died, as though settling herself into the innermost corner of her house and surrounding herself with the photos, she would somehow make working her way down to dying easier: the house was empty save for this one small room. That day I had asked her why, why she would not leave the house, hoping finally for some small answer from her, though I'd given up on waiting to hear any truth from her other than the one I'd been given the day I'd come home with my new word. The truth that she was comfortable in her fear.

She had taken my hand in hers, brought it to her cheek, let the back of my hand gently touch her skin, skin as soft as a mother's face can be. But she said nothing. There were only her eyes, and in them the same old fear, the certainty of loss too much to bear.

And finally I knew her, my bones grown cold now, the floor against my face frozen and dirty. I understood her for the only moment I had in my life, though now she was dead. I
knew
her, knew in the
sound of Grady's voice my mother's fear, the death of hope in her, because Grady had turned his father's name into a question.

Then, for what I knew somehow was the last time, I heard “Martin!” and with that one, small, insignificant word, the ceiling still spinning above me, the snow still falling outside, the shapes against the wall still dead but still in motion, I finally saw what it was my father had tried to show me all along, what my father's words meant coming to me after his death: it was
my name
I'd heard. Claire Shaw. That was me. Who I was. The name I'd been given by my parents when I was born. It was
my name.
All he'd ever wanted me to do, I knew then, was to know by my name that I was alive: tying my shoes, he'd only wanted me to learn to do it myself; walking me across Route 9, he'd only wanted me to learn to judge when to cross it myself; speaking my name that day when the bomber crossed the sky, and now, here against a cold floor, my hands clenched in fists of fear, he'd only wanted me to live. That was all.

I took in a deep breath, and I tried to hold onto my mother, to my father, tried to keep my understanding of them, the glimpse of them and who they were and what they'd tried to teach me, the opposite tacks they'd taken—my father's courage, my mother's fear—but then their images, their voices in Grady's voice, disappeared, and I was once again alone in the room.

But now it was a different room. It was a different room, though nothing had changed: the paneling was heaped on the floor, the air cold, the outlines of Grady and Martin still there on the wall. But it was different. Only that.

Slowly, carefully, I brought up my left hand, the hand with the scar, from where it had been in a fist in my lap, and I looked at it I looked first at the palm, then at the top, and the red adhesions. I looked at my fingers, at my long, slender fingers. My father's fingers, I saw, fingers much like those with which he'd tied my shoes, and with that hand I touched my hair, felt how fine it was, and I pulled a strand away from my head and down in front of my eyes, where I could see my father's hair, the same brunette color, the same texture. And I thought of my mouth and my cheeks and my eyes, those features my mother's, but
my
mouth and cheeks and eyes. These were what they'd given me at conception, I saw, pieces of
themselves, pieces of them already here with me, here all along.

I blinked. I took in another breath, felt the cold ache of it inside me, and then, with whatever small strength I had in me, whatever synapses and neurons and axons and dendrites, each cell snapping to the next and on and on until my muscles took hold of bone, pulled one against another, I got to my knees, my hands on the floor, and I was sitting on my legs, and then I was standing, and I, too, was moving toward that window as if it were some source of comfort, some way out.

When I got there, I put my hands to it, my face near it. Here, here was evidence of my own life, of me living: my breath, pearl-white fog condensed on glass. My breaths were real. I was alive.

I looked out the window, saw what Grady and Martin had seen: the world outside, dusted with the simple gift from God of a light blanket of snow.

“Martin!” I heard again, way off somewhere, and I saw Grady. He was at the barn. He stood before it, back in those woods, back where I'd known I would be swallowed up, but now I knew nothing could happen. They were only woods, and the barn was only a broken-down structure where, many years ago, a woman had succumbed to hate. It was only a place now, snow on its roof, black holes here and there in the roof where boards were broken out, and through which snow fell.

I turned from the window and went through the room and down the stairs. I opened the stove door and put in paper, pine needles, kindling, and I struck a match, lit the paper inside. I watched the fire build for a few moments, and then put into it the biggest pieces of wood I thought the small flame might be able to stand until I got back. Until we got back.

Martin's coat still lay on the sawhorse, and I picked it up, held it under my arm. I turned to the open door, where snow had blown in, making its way out onto the floor like spilled flour, and I thought of an officer in the living room of my mother's house, thought of those images of my father's death I had created—the glass like green jewels, my father glancing at his watch—so that I could see my father's death, be there; and I realized that Grady's story of Martin's birth, and those details he had chosen—the brother tearing through woods to the sugar house, the hobo stoking the fire, then him, with
that piece of oak raised above his head, ready to crush Clark's skull—were only the same sorts of creations I'd made: embellishments, embroidering upon simple facts until the story lived in us, breathed, and kept us remembering, fiction becoming more real than any truth of the matter could ever be. Grady was me. Except that his father, his own blood, was still alive. He still had Martin.

I stepped out into the snow, and pulled the door closed behind me.

I stood before the barn. I was looking up at it, my hands in front of me, snow collecting on my shoulders and arms and hair, and I looked down. On the ground before me were two sets of footprints leading into the barn, one set crisp, new, the other dull with snow, only soft indentations.

I paused a moment, and I went in.

It was dark inside, near pitch black, the holes in the roof giving the only small light. I looked up to the rafters a moment, to the light up there, and I wondered which beam Martin had found her hanging from, his mother given up to the hate of a brother. I wondered, too, what Martin could have thought, could have known, a retarded child finding his dead mother, and then I realized I already knew: like any child, he would have felt love, and loss.

“There,” I heard Martin whisper, and I turned. My eyes had almost adjusted to the dark, and there, there in the corner of the barn, huddled up next to each other and against the cold, sat Martin and Grady: Grady silent, eyes closed, arms around his father's shoulders, Martin looking up at the rafters, pointing to one of them, his body shivering in the cold.

I walked over to them, and I knelt before them, put Martin's coat across his chest and over his shoulders.

I said, “Come. Come on. Let's go back inside.”

 

By the time we got to the Friendly's parking lot, the snow had stopped.

I had made the two of them share with me the coffee once inside the house, the front room now warmed by the fire I had made, and I told them we were going back home. Neither one fought me; they only nodded, took last sips of the coffee, and then we put out the fire, tamped it down and out.

They both sat in the back seat on the way out, the two of them nestled next to each other. I could see them in my rearview mirror, could see them watching first Chesterfield pass us, then Williamsburg and the General Store, the store as always choked with customers, a place where one day next week I knew I would be, buying the wreath I wanted, the one that would be placed on the front door, on that gray and weatherbeaten wood, a wreath that would signal the place as being our home.

And a Christmas tree. Tom and I would buy a Christmas tree for the house, I knew then, place it in the front room and decorate it, no matter what the walls looked like, no matter what condition the floors were in. We would put up a Christmas tree, and some time after New Year's we would cut it up, bum it in the stove to help warm our house, our home. We would burn it,
use
it, instead of leaning it against the foundation and forgetting it.

We passed the white fairways in Leeds, and came into Florence, the two strips of black pavement in the snow growing wider until
here, at the Friendly's, the road had been plowed already, the black-top merely wet, snow already melting.

I moved to climb out of the car, but Grady reached up from behind me and touched my shoulder.