All Things Cease to Appear (51 page)

Franny nods.

Good. That’s my girl.

They step into the foyer and stand there a moment, taking it in. It’s not so bad, she thinks, relieved. The floors are pretty. The light.

They want to redo the whole place, of course. Nobody’s ever satisfied, but don’t get me started. Anyway, they’ve got real money, so we’re not complaining and they got a very good deal. It’s fair and square all the way around.

Franny shudders. It’s cold in here.

That dampness is to be expected. We’ll get the oil company in. There’s this woodstove, which helps. And the fireplace. I’ll have some wood delivered this afternoon.

All right. Thank you.

She follows Mary into the living room, which fills with sunlight like it’s saying hello.

I never could understand why your father didn’t take this piano.

Franny runs her hand over the keys. I think my mother played.

Yes, she did. Sometimes I’d pull up and hear it, Chopin, I think. It happens to be a very nice piano.

It is nice. Franny decides to keep it, but have it moved where? Not her apartment, obviously. She looks around the room. The air is damp and smells of woodsmoke and ash. There’s an old couch with a busted cushion that’s become home to some mice. With difficulty, she opens a closet, the door stuttering on the uneven floor, and a marble rolls out and comes to a stop at her feet. She picks it up and holds it out for Mary to see, a glass marble with swirls of yellow and copper running through it. It’s pretty, isn’t it?

Finders, keepers, Mary says.

She puts it in her pocket. Somehow she knows it’s hers. She remembers a boy, crouching on the floor and shooting marbles across the room. She remembers his legs mostly, and other sets, too—all boys’ legs. She almost recalls they’d made her laugh and wonders if she has ever laughed at all since. Of course she has, she tells herself. She had a perfectly happy childhood.

As you can see, you’ve got your work cut out for you. I was going to suggest a dumpster.

Okay, she says, suddenly angry that her father never bothered to do it himself. Good idea.

Mary takes a small pad of paper out of her bag and starts making a list. If I don’t write it down, it’s gone.

No kidding, Franny says, but in fact it was her exacting memory that got her through medical school. And it’s why not remembering that day, here with her mother, is all the more frustrating. She and the killer were both
right in this house.

Her brain must have registered at least an image. It’s in there, she knows, it’s in her head, she just can’t get to it. In college, a girl she’d confided in suggested a hypnotist. Franny refused and, for reasons she couldn’t articulate at the time, never spoke to the girl again.

Your mother had great parties in here, Mary says. This room would be jammed with people. They had all kinds of interesting friends. And in that room there—it was your father’s study—people would be up all night, talking art, politics, solving the problems of the world, until they staggered out in the morning. Mary shakes her head. People knew how to drink in those days.

The walls of her father’s study are a chalky green, lined with empty bookshelves that once, she knew, would’ve been full of art books. He was teaching then, and writing a book on the Hudson River painters that he never finished.

Once, when she was about five, he took her to the city, to an exhibit at the MoMA. He stood in front of a Rothko for what seemed like forever while she tried to amuse herself. She remembers tugging on his jacket, and when he looked down at her his face was wet with tears.

She doesn’t want to think about her father. And certainly not about the room just overhead, where her mother was killed with an ax. She isn’t the type to psychoanalyze herself—even during her psych rotation in medical school she’d stuck to the hard evidence rather than succumb to the culture’s obsession with subtext—but for the first time it seems obvious that her decision to study medicine and choose the most grueling, alienating specialty was a direct reaction to the fact that she hadn’t been able to save her mother, and that the most powerful motivating factor in making those choices was guilt.

You okay? Mary asks softly. Shall we go upstairs?

Yes, let’s go.

The stairs are narrow, steep. She remembers her small hand moving up the banister. Breathing heavily, Mary labors up the stairs behind her. On another occasion Franny might suggest a cardiologist, but not today.

You get to be my age, Mary says, stopping to rest on the landing, it’s awful. She glances out the window. But I never get tired of these views.

When she was a child here the window had been too high for Franny even on tippy toes, so it’s with some degree of accomplishment that she looks out now and helps herself to the expansive view of the barns, the ridge, the distant woods.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

Yes, it is, she says, a little sad that she hadn’t grown up here. It could have been a good life. Instead of one suburban street after another, each house a version of the others, with rooms that were suitable yet uninspired, anonymous as those in a motel.

They head down the narrow hall. Here the house seems smaller, modest, with just three rooms upstairs: her parents’ on the right, the largest room in the house, and hers and another small room on the left. Mary says it was her mother’s sewing room, but it might’ve been a nursery down the road if she’d lived. Franny had been a little kid who’d hoped so much for a sister. Later, her father had remarried, but the new wife didn’t want a child of her own. She was an ex-nun, a kind yet elusive woman who insisted that Franny should attend Catholic schools. While other kids were riding bikes or hanging out at the mall, Franny was working in a soup kitchen. Her stepmother, she thinks now, was probably the reason she’d been an A student. Looking back, she understands the marriage was strained; it only lasted a few years.

This was your room, Mary says.

It’s smaller than the one in her vague memories, with little pink ponies stenciled on the walls. There was a tenant who had a daughter, Mary explains. There’s a twin bed, a small white dresser; otherwise the room is bare. The window, she thinks, the bright light—that’s the first thing she recalls. And the enormous white expanse of the door across the hall, pounding on it with her little fists. Had she woken from a nap?

We don’t have to go in if you’re not ready.

I’m fine, she says
. It’s about time.

The room is dark; the shades pulled. Mary hurries to open them, as if Franny’s just another prospective buyer. Even with the daylight it seems dark, she thinks. They stand there taking it in. This is weird, she admits. Hard.

I’m sure it is. Do you remember it any?

Not very well, she says, but that’s not entirely true. There was the Persian carpet, the rickety antique headboard that smacked against the wall whenever she jumped on the bed, the bookshelves where her mother kept her books—all poetry, still here, amazingly. She has a hazy memory of taking the books off the shelves and scattering them across the floor like stones on a river. The bed is made up with a spread. There’s a dresser and an armoire, both antiques. The wallpaper is faded, and an old wing chair sits by the window, covered in sun-bleached toile.

They stand there looking at the bed. The last time Franny saw her mother, she was right there. She closes her eyes, refusing to picture it. Is that the same—

Heavens, no, Mary says. That’s a brand-new bed. The quilt, too—I bought it at Walmart. She wouldn’t have approved. Your mother was a purist.

Really?

She liked things that were real, authentic.

Authentic, Franny repeats, intrigued by the idea. Something she’s never actually thought about.

After another couple moments Mary says, Why don’t we get some fresh air? As if out of habit, she pulls the shades back down, and everything goes soft. The room is like a tomb and they’re both glad to leave it, the door closing behind them.

When they’re back outside, Mary gets something out of her car, a basket of cookies. I almost forgot. These are for you. Made them this morning.

That was so nice, Mary. Thank you. She gives her a hug.

You look like you could use a cookie or two. I imagine you doctors don’t get much time to eat?

We don’t have time for much of anything.

You call me, Mary tells her. Anything you need, understand? I’m going to be checking up on you.

I’ll be fine, she says, a little embarrassed, not used to people fussing over her.

It’s time to put this place behind you, Franny. You’re not the only one. We both need to. We’ll do it together, all right?

Franny hugs her again, more for Mary’s sake than her own, and when they break apart she sees Mary’s tears.

Mary shakes her head, flustered. Don’t mind me. She blows her nose into a handkerchief and wipes her eyes, annoyed with herself.

Hey, it’s okay. I’m used to this kind of thing.

Mary digs around in her purse and takes out a compact and inspects her face in the mirror, wiping the creases around her eyes where her mascara has smeared. For God’s sake, look at me.

You look fine.

I used to be somewhat presentable, she says. If you can believe that.

Of course I do. You’re presentable now. More than presentable.

I just wish things weren’t always so difficult. Don’t you?

Franny nods. I don’t know why they are.

Maybe God’s trying to tell us something. I wish He’d stop sometimes.

He might’ve given up on us by now, Franny says.

I sure hope not. We need all the help we can get. She walks back to her car and opens the door. Life’s hard, that’s all there is to it. And this place, this old farm, is a testament to that.

She gets in, starts the engine and rolls down the window. I’ll go ahead and order that dumpster and get the Hale boys over here to help you. I guess you don’t recognize that name, do you?

Franny shakes her head.

This was the Hale farm back before your folks bought it. Those boys used to look after you. Cole and Eddy? ’Course, Eddy’s off in Los Angeles. A trumpet player. I hear he’s pretty famous. It’s just Cole and poor Wade now.

Huh, I don’t remember them, Franny says, though they’ve been there, inside her head, all this time. Dark, blurry shapes. The sound of that horn.

They’ve sure had their share. We all have. But Cole, he’s done well for himself. Almost every house in this town has his mark on it. It’s his eyes, I think, because they’re so blue. Women take one look at him and pull out their checkbooks. His little girl has the same blue eyes, just like all the Hales. She and my granddaughter are good friends. It’s something, isn’t it? Like that expression—what goes around?

Comes around, Franny says, and smiles.

Well, I’ll get going. Don’t forget, I’m just a phone call away. Even for something small.

Franny watches Mary’s car until it disappears down the road. She holds herself tight against the chill in the air. She looks across the empty fields, the barns, the black trees. A mood of isolation.

Then she turns, as though someone has called her name from that window on the second floor, her mother’s room.

The shades are up now. The room brimming with light.

—

SHE DRIVES
into town to buy some beer. Not that she likes to drink, it’s merely medicinal. She will have to get drunk in order to sleep. On second thought, maybe vodka, her old standby. Given the chance, she might have succumbed to alcohol. There’d been a brief unraveling in boarding school, when she’d been made to see a shrink. In college she figured out how to drink and get A’s, but medical school put an end to it. You had to be on every minute. You had to be ready, clear.

The town has a strange, frozen-in-time quality. Driving past the church, she sees a priest opening the gate, a white-haired man in a thick wool scarf who’s pulling on his overcoat and talking—consolingly, she imagines—to an old woman in a plastic kerchief there on the sidewalk. It’s windy, the treetops moving wildly, battering the sunlight around. There’s a small movie theater, a doughnut shop, a café.

The liquor store is at the end of the block. The place is empty, unlit, streaming with dusty sunlight. As she peruses the shelves, a mackerel-colored cat circles her ankles. The large window in front, covered with a see-through yellow shade, makes the street beyond look like an old-fashioned sepia-toned photograph. The man behind the counter coughs and says, Let me know if you need anything, then goes back to scribbling in his ledger. When checking out, she is surprised to see that he’s writing a poem, an abacus of words that add up to something. She sees the words
beguile, thrush;
she studies his face as he rings her up.

Next door, at the market, she buys a sandwich and a bag of chips that she eats in the car, stuffing her face, looking through the windshield at the sky. Anonymous, she thinks, a stranger in a strange town. The sky is different here. Something about the clouds, how the sun pushes through.

—

BACK IN THE KITCHEN,
she searches the cabinets, but there are no glasses, only jars. You’ll do, she says to an old pickle jar, then fills it halfway and dumps in some ice. The vodka gives her strength to begin the closet, a whole dark world unto itself. A city of toppling boxes. Mostly junk—tattered clothes, round-soled shoes, broken appliances, a prehistoric vacuum. Like treasure, she finds a shoebox full of photographs. As much as this delights her, it’s disturbing that they’re here. A history left behind, she thinks, partially her own. Her mother’s last few months in the world.

How cruel that her father hadn’t bothered to take them, had never understood their importance. She deals them out like tarot cards, snapping them down, thinking: This is your past, it can’t be helped; this is your future, the only way into the rest of your life.

Brittle, yellow with age, the snapshots are quiltlike patches of a larger story. Most of the pictures are of her, a busy toddler in a sunny house. Playing with wooden spoons, pots and pans, naked save for underpants in the summer grass, a garden of black-eyed Susans behind. Sitting on a baby chair blowing bubbles. Chasing a kitty. Pulling a wooden dog on a string. It does her good to see that she was happy here, loved. She’d never known how to envision this part of her childhood, because her father hadn’t bothered to enlighten her.