Dark Terrors 3 (13 page)

‘It was a chilly fall day like this,’ Aunt Maureen continued, and as though to illustrate pulled her navy blue sweater tight around her and crossed her arms over it.

Cecelia caught her breath. Her mother used to make a habitual gesture like that. It had been a bright pink sweater with embroidery on the collar, and she’d pull it snug around her just like that and cross her arms, tucking her hands in. The memory, which had been buried until this moment and had the feel of very early childhood, pierced and hummed like an arrow that had hit its mark, as though it meant something.

The air wasn’t moving, but in it was the anticipation of chill golden wind and sleet. The grey-gold sun through layers of hardwood leaves, compressed this late in a Michigan October, had a metallic sheen, a wet-metal taste. Cecelia fumbled for a comment so Aunt Maureen wouldn’t think she
wasn’t interested. In truth, she wasn’t particularly interested in Aunt Libby’s death and funeral, but she didn’t want Aunt Maureen to stop talking to her.

‘I stood up here on this very hill and I watched Libby’s funeral come towards me—’ Cecelia looked where she was pointing, at the winding dirt road below them and beyond. There, in fact, she caught sight of an oncoming funeral procession, a boxy black hearse, one other dark car nearly as tall at the hump as it was long, and - oddly, she thought, though she couldn’t quite have said why it was odd - several pedestrians.

The road was apparently much further below them than she’d realized, for the figures stayed tiny, movements blurred by distance and perspective. She blinked, glanced at her aunt beside her, looked back. The sad little parade of miniatures was no closer, although it was still in forward motion.

* * * *

Uncle Clyde’s flesh was mostly pale pink, darker pink in some places Libby could not think about, and smooth, hairless. If he’d been hirsute, darker-skinned, or covered with warts, she’d have found his body no more nor less revolting.

When she was little and Uncle Clyde would come to get her, she’d sometimes open his shirt and feel around for his nipples, like little stones in the ocean of his soft smooth flesh. Then he’d whisper to her, or say out loud if he was sure they were alone, ‘You like this, too, don’t you, sweetie? You
like
your Uncle Clyde.’

Libby did like how his nipples felt under her fingertips. They gave her something to fasten her thoughts on to. Sometimes, too, she’d imagine that she could slit him open by tracing a line from one of those hard pinkish-brown dots to the other and his pink heart would tumble out into her hand. That never happened.

All the women in the family knew about Uncle Clyde. As girls grew up, they learned what to say about him. ‘Oh, that’s just Clyde,’ Grandma said nervously the single time Libby - thirteen years old, scrubbing clothes on the washboard in the
big black tub - told her about the kisses he stole from her in the pantry, which was not the worst she had to tell. Her little sister Helen was peeling potatoes on the back porch, out of sight but not out of earshot, and Maureen, crawling, was under everybody’s feet, with Mama eight months dead.

‘Clyde is a good man,’ she was instructed sternly. ‘Clyde is a man of God,’ and Libby, observing, could see that this was true. Uncle Clyde performed many acts of charity. He was a good husband, a good father, a good neighbour. Everybody loved Uncle Clyde. For a little while, she tried it on, like somebody else’s frock, feeling chosen.

‘He does it to me, too,’ Helen informed her from the other edge of the billowing sheet as they changed his bed the next Monday morning. ‘Maureen’s next, you know,’ and that was when, for the first time in her life but by no means the last, Libby was aware of making up her mind to do something hard, something she was afraid to do. She would tell her father, Helen’s father, too, and Maureen’s, a man newly bereft of his wife and Uncle Clyde’s brother. She would tell. Frightened as she was, full of dread as she was, her resolution buoyed her, made her feel grown-up and strong, gave her something better to fasten her thoughts on to.

Walking home from school the next day, worrying about telling, worrying about the English exam on Friday and about the ink stain on her skirt, she smelled something funny. Ever since she was little she didn’t like going past that big old tree in front of the grocery store, because it had a knob on it that looked for all the world like somebody hiding, waiting to jump out and grab her. This time when she hurried past it, there was an odour, vaguely bitter, wrongly sweet, and then a man was walking beside her.

Libby did her best to edge away. The man said in a pleasant voice, ‘I won’t hurt you, Libby,’ which made her even more afraid.

‘How do you know my name?’

He was nicely dressed. His hands were in his pockets. That bittersweet smell seemed to be coming from him, although it
was so faint she couldn’t be sure. ‘You know,’ he said in a tone so friendly it was threatening, ‘if you tell your father what you’ve been doing with Uncle Clyde you’ll cause a great deal of trouble in the family. Your father is suffering already because of your mother’s death.’

Tears hurt Libby’s throat at the mention of her mother. Confused, she found herself puzzling over how this stranger knew about that, rather than, she realized later, the greater mystery of how he could know about Uncle Clyde and that she’d decided to tell. Maybe he was a family friend. Maybe he’d been at the funeral. She thought his voice did sound familiar.

‘Your father cries at night.’ From the angle of his voice he might have been looking gently down at her, although she could hardly see him beside her. ‘Did you know that, Libby?’ The thought of Papa’s sorrow was worse than her own. ‘If you tell him, you will only give him more to cry about.’

Libby didn’t know what to think. She stayed silent.

‘You don’t
have
to say anything. You’re almost grown up now. Uncle Clyde won’t bother you any more. He doesn’t like grown-up women.’

‘My sisters—’

‘Helen can take care of herself. She’s growing up, too. And you don’t know he’ll start with Maureen. You don’t know that.’ He patted her shoulder. ‘You’re a good girl, Libby. I trust you to do the right thing.’

He was gone, the after-image of too-bright light fading away, and Libby was left to ponder, fist to her throat, whether what he’d said was wholly or partially true or not true at all.

* * * *

Aunt Maureen didn’t seem especially aware of the procession below them. ‘Can you imagine?’ Her voice was crisp and controlled; Cecelia had never heard it otherwise. But she was hugging herself. ‘You’d think Libby had lived on this earth an entire lifetime and never made a difference to anybody.’

‘She made a difference to Frances,’ Cecelia protested. A cousin fully a generation older, Aunt Libby’s only child,
Frances had died a long time ago, Cecelia thought from complications of morbid obesity. Cecelia had hardly known her; it was difficult to comprehend what connection there’d ever been between them, other than the blood-arch, mostly abstract, of their mothers’ sisterhood. ‘Anyway, do you think that’s possible? Not to make a difference to
anybody?’

Aunt Maureen shot her a look. Cecelia didn’t want to seem rude, but she did want to understand what Aunt Maureen was saying. Such questions - whether or not people made a difference as they passed through this world; how to tell whether that was so - had lately come to be of considerable importance to her.

Twenty-five years old that autumn, she was feeling less and less substantial. She and Ray, whom she supposed she would marry when he came home from the war, had seemed scarcely to touch even when they were seeing each other every Saturday night, and her weekly letters to him now might have been written to anyone; if he did not come home, perish the thought, she would mourn what might have been between them more than what was, and she feared she might live to mourn that anyway. Her job with the insurance company, though she was skilled at it, sustained her in no way other than financial. No one with whom she came into contact in the course of a day was likely to remember her once their specific business with each other was done, nor would she remember them. Certainly, if she were to die today, none of them would come to her funeral.

Aunt Maureen, gazing off over the gilt vista through which Cecelia was still watching the funeral procession move like a model train through a toy landscape, proceeded deliberately. At this point, Cecelia dimly understood that the story was in some way hers, too, if only because she was here, in this place and time, with this purposeful woman who had something to tell her.

The story became more and more hers, too, because it wasn’t given to her all of a piece. She had to work for it, put forth something of herself in order to receive it; she could not
simply listen passively. As parts of the tale emerged, tales unto themselves, Cecelia was required to interpret, to fill in spaces, to arrange and rearrange incidents and the interstices among incidents so they made sense and then, given more, made sense again.

Later, she would not be sure what Aunt Maureen had actually told her or in what order, what context. Now and then throughout her long life, images and information from that day would present themselves to her - the light’s particular glint; the yearning (and it was to be the last of it, really) for Aunt Maureen to tell her what she knew, give her what she had, love her; the chill of unease as imagination played over what might be underground in this place, what the embedded grave markers might be taken to signify. Each time these things would seem to mean something slightly different, something cumulative or stripped down or newly nuanced.

On the train ride home, for instance, she would puzzle over the relative position of the embroidered pink sweater in her own life, the movement of it and the truncation of movement as its wearer repeatedly pulled it snug. The realization would descend on her, stopping her breath for a moment, that it must not have been Helen she remembered doing that but Libby.

* * * *

William Bradley was earnest, decent, rather dull-witted. He loved her, he insisted gamely; he could love her. Libby did not believe that, though it was kind of him to say so, and it would not have persuaded her if she had. ‘I can’t marry you,’ she said to him. ‘I’m crazy. Everybody knows that. Don’t you know that?’

‘I have a duty to our child.’ The words were resolute, but clearly he was appalled to be saying ‘our’ to her about anything, let alone a child, and already grateful that he would not be bound to say it much longer.

‘I’ll do what’s right,’ Libby promised. ‘Send money.’

‘Kill the child.’

It was not, of course, William Bradley who suggested such
a thing. There was an actual voice but no visible source for it, and, more than hearing it, Libby felt the voice in her hollow bones. There was a bittersweet fragrance, too, that clung to the skin between the bones of her fingers as they stretched around the baby’s tiny neck. She clenched her fists in refusal. ‘No.’

‘What sort of life will this child have?’ She had to admit it was a reasonable question. ‘You sent young Mr Bradley away. You’re crazy. You said so yourself. You barely managed to raise Frances, and look at her.’

‘I won’t do it.’

‘It would be easier on everybody. On you, too.’

‘No.’ Libby took a deep, steadying, bittersweet breath, and freed her hands from her baby’s throat to push his voice and his insinuating odour away.

* * * *

On that melancholy golden October afternoon in 1942 - soon to be grey and doleful November, another season altogether - Aunt Maureen asserted, as though satisfied that she’d worked it all out in her head, that Frances had died soon after Libby because she hadn’t known how to live without her mother. ‘A grown woman, you’d have thought she was an orphan,’ which prompted Cecelia to ask about Frances’s father. Who was he? What had happened to him? It amazed her that she’d apparently never wondered about him before; she thought that could not be true, but she had no memory either of her own curiosity in this regard or of any answers forthcoming or withheld.

It also caused her to think about her own father, but her thoughts, having nothing much to snag on to, didn’t stay long with him. Cecelia believed her relationship with her father to be uncomplicated. Easily, they loved each other. She supposed they could be considered neither close nor distant. He mourned her mother now, as did she, but simply, cleanly.