Digging Out (7 page)

“We haven’t spoken to her in years.” It must have been close to
nine years ago that Marc did
The Yellow Door.
Why in the world would Gabriella think Marc had provided for her in his will?

I start to backtrack: Marc had gone to Brazil for the first time the summer before Hannah was conceived. Dafydd was at tennis camp, I was teaching that poetry workshop in Vermont. Marc had planned a month in Rio de Janeiro around our schedules to record an album of Brazilian jazz as well as the title song for
The Yellow Door.

“I don’t know what this is about, Ed.”

“Alys, I feel terrible being caught in the middle. I feel awful that I am the one who has to bring this to your attention. But I’ve no choice.”

Around the edge of my mind, I hear Beti’s long-ago whispered warning about Marc and me spending time apart and how dangerous she thought it was. How many times had Marc gone to Brazil since his first trip? Dozens. He’d done several Brazilian albums. So it was two, maybe three times a year. Oh shit, maybe it was more.

“What did she say?”

“She said Marc told her that, if anything ever happened to him, she should call me. That I would see to it that she was looked after. She has a lawyer in Rio that feels she is due something. I didn’t know what to say, Alys, or how to handle it. I thought perhaps you might be able to direct me. I told her I’d get back to her.”

I am sliding, my mind swirling down.

It is routine now. At around two a.m., Hannah gets into bed with me. Tonight I hear her padding up the stairs. In her long white nightgown, she stands ghostlike for a moment at Marc’s side of the bed. Although the light is not on, I am awake.

“Get in, Hannah,” I say quietly. Her hands and feet are cold. She moves close to me and puts them under mine.

“Is it okay?” she asks. “Is it okay that I’m here?” She knows I don’t sleep very well and she worries she is disturbing me. Since the phone call from Ed, I have been displaced, short-tempered, confused and angry though I am not sure with whom I am angry. Hannah has picked up on all of it.

“Fine,” I say. I am glad she is here to fill the empty spot. I rub her back until I hear the soft, even breathing that lets me know she is asleep. In the morning, as always, she asks, “How in the world did I get in here?”

I say, “You walked.”

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s okay. I like it that you show up in the middle of the night. You’re always welcome.”

She smiles and says, “You’re always welcome in my bed, too.”

“Thanks,” I say.

I think about how young she is to be going through all of this. Just eight. I remember the lonely, terror-filled nights for me at eight. I am glad to be here for her. I am glad to be able to comfort her, remembering how my own mam couldn’t comfort me.

“I’m sure I don’t know what Ms. Purdue is on about,” I tell Ed when we speak again.

“What do you want me to say to her?” he asks.

“Just tell her … tell her you didn’t get ahold of me.”

Trying to remember exactly how many times and how long Marc stayed in Brazil, I look over his calendar, go over his receipts for the last two years.

After the first trip when Gabriella recorded “And Then There Was Love,” Marc hadn’t mentioned her. Was that good or bad? Had he nothing to hide or everything?

I call Phillipe. “Something rather unusual has come up. I wonder if you might know why Gabriella Purdue would be calling Ed Meyers?”

“Ah,” Phillipe says. And then nothing.

Shit.

“Are you in touch with her?” I try to sound casual.

“Well”—he pauses—“yes, I am.”

“So?”

“I, ah, don’t know what to say,” Phillipe stutters.

“Have you spoken to her recently?”

“I have.”

“So?”

“Well I called her, of course, to let her know about Marc’s—”

“Oh,” I say too quickly. I am cold. That same death-defying cold that I’ve known since childhood. The blood gone from my fingers. Dizzy. “When was that?”

“Several months now. I don’t remember exactly. Not long after it happened, I guess.”

“Oh.” The light in the room seems darker. Sucked down, I hold on to the arm of a chair as I slip into it. “Were Marc and Gabriella in touch?”

“I think they were,” Phillipe says. Now I can tell for sure Phillipe knows more than he is saying.

“So?” I ask again.

“So
what,
Alys?” Phillipe answers almost angrily.

“So why did she call Ed Meyers, Phillipe? What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me?”

“Aly-ese.” I hate his goddamned French arrogance, his phony-baloney French bullshit. I’ve never trusted him. I asked Marc a million times what he saw in Phillipe.

“He’s a class act,” Marc had said. “And a good musician and my friend.”

“Shit!” I scream into the phone, suddenly seeing it all.

“Aly-ese, I don’t want to get involved in this. I can’t.”

“What do you mean you don’t want to get involved? You’re obviously already involved and Marc’s not here now, in case you haven’t noticed. It’s just you and me and now Ed Meyers. So you better tell me. Do you hear me, Phillipe? What is it exactly you’re afraid to get involved with, Phillipe? What was it between Gabriella and Marc?”

Phillipe doesn’t answer.

“Come on, Phillipe. What does she have on Marc? Tell me why Gabriella is calling
my
business manager. Why does she think Marc provided for her in his will?”

And then I ask the question I’ve been afraid of. “Was he having an affair with her?”

Silence on the other end.

“Phillipe, answer me!”

“They have a child together, Alys. Gabby and Marc have a child Hannah’s age,” he says in a resigned voice. “Maybe she’s a little younger.”

A
BERFAN,
W
ALES
O
CTOBER 13, 1972

M
am calls me home from Hallie’s. I hear the bell loud and clear. We are in the middle of playing dress-up in Hallie’s attic, our favorite game. Hallie’s long blond hair is pulled back, and on top of her head is a crown we made with aluminum paper and hair grips. She has a white petticoat pulled up under her arms, and she is wearing her mam’s red high heels. The petticoat keeps falling down because she doesn’t have bosoms. Hallie says she’s glad. “If you have bosoms, you can’t sleep on your tummy. Can you imagine? I could never fall asleep on my back.” Finally we hike her petticoat up with a tie from an old bathrobe.

I have on a pink tutu that is kind of small on me. And of course my hair is in a tight bun. I even have pink tights. We are pretending to be famous Russian ballet dancers, which is what we are going to be when we grow up. We have made a pact. We are going to live in Moscow and dance in Red Square.

I love playing at Hallie’s house because her mam never bothers us. She lets us alone for hours. Sometimes she’ll even set a snack outside the door for us: milky tea, Marmite and butter spread on sweet biscuits. Only a whisper through a crack in the door to tell us she’s brought it up.

Hallie’s mam and da never holler at each other. In fact, they are lovey-dovey, kissing all the time. Niko, Hallie’s brother, is still really little. He stays out of our way mostly. Maybe once or twice a visit, he will crawl up the stairs and push the door open. We see him stick his head round, but he never says anything. He is just two.

Hallie lives down the row, three houses away from mine. When my mam wants me home she rings the bell. It is my gram’s bell from when she was a little girl, the same one her mam used to call her home, a large bell with a black wooden handle. It is so loud you can hear it down the road.

I love when Gram tells me the story of her mam, Great-gram, and how she used to live on a farm way up in the high country, North Wales. Real farm people, they were.

“They had so many sheep on their hillside, lambs in the spring of course, covering everywhere like white tulips. They needed two sheepdogs to fetch them in at night. And huge mountains, not measly hills like we have here. In the winter they are always covered in heavy snow. One time, my da took me up to spend the whole summer with his people. Left me there all on my own. They are the ones taught me how to milk a goat and dig a potato. I’d be out first thing in the morning till last thing at night, the stars lighting my way home. I remember that summer as if it was last week. The wildflowers were over my head and I used to lie down in them and watch the clouds scudding across the blue like it was the ocean.”

The way Gram’s parents met is my favorite story, and I make Gram tell me again and again.

“Great-granda was with his da. They’d come up the mountain to try and round up some men to work the new mines in the valley here. Great-granda was coming out of the pub the evening they arrived. He was tall and handsome, a strut to his walk.”

I love this part. Gram’s voice gets real deep when she gets to this part in the story.

“He almost bumped headlong into Great-gram. Imagine it. She was walking home from a friend’s house in a fluffy pink dress, her hair piled high on her head. It was love at first sight for both of them. The bad news was, three days later, Great-granda had to go back to Mer-ythr. Great-gram tried to talk him into staying, but he was already working in the mine here and couldn’t.”

So Great-gram wrote long romantic letters to Great-granda every single solitary day for months, getting answers back each day.

“And I guess when you are in love the way they were in love, after a while letters, even long poetic letters, just aren’t enough. She couldn’t stand being without him a moment longer. So, without
telling a soul, she took a horse from the barn, saddled it up and, with only a change of clothes, food for one day and her Bible, rode off through the mountains, telling herself it would only be for a fortnight. But fourteen days later she wrote her parents, telling them she was staying in Merythr Tydfil for good.” Cram gets a faraway look in her eyes when she tells the story.

“So you see, girl, farming’s in my blood,” Gram says, pointing at the lush earth she calls her “Victory Garden” of tomatoes.

And I know my granda must still be in her blood, too. Because even though he’s been gone for fifteen years, Gram still says, “It’ll always be him and only him that I love.”

I don’t know much about Mam’s family. Except that her mam had died early on of tuberculosis and her da had remarried and Mam never much liked her stepmother. She didn’t talk about them much and we never saw them. I have her mam’s hair, she says. Unruly and dark.

By the time I get home from Hallie’s, there is a crowd in the kitchen. My older brother and Mam, Gram and Da. Auntie Beryl is there, too, in one of her wild full skirts and her jangling earrings, gypsylike, her curly red hair tied back in a scarf. I love it when she comes down the valley for a visit. It isn’t often enough for my liking. I’d be happy seeing Auntie Beryl every day, and I know Gram would be, too. But that isn’t possible since Auntie Beryl lives way up in the Brecon Beacons and doesn’t drive. She takes a coach everywhere.

Gram and Beryl have been friends since they were my age, best friends like Hallie and me. When they want to tell secrets they speak to each other in Welsh, both having learned it when they were little.

“It’s a sadness not to be able to speak it round the house nor in the village now, regular like. Back home, we all spoke Welsh.”

And that’s not all. Gram tells how Auntie Beryl’s family had a whole flock of sheep when the two of them were little. And Gram always says she was needing that kind of wilderness, and so whenever she was around they let her help herd those little lambs. Auntie Beryl sold the sheep and the farm after her parents died, and moved up the valley because of a broken heart. Gram never actually says how it got broke, but I think it was something having to do with a man.

When I come in, I can hear the whole group of them arguing in the kitchen. It seems they are always arguing these days, especially my brother, Parry. Used to be whenever you saw Parry he’d be quietly
drawing up a storm, or painting a portrait. Now he’s hardly home for meals and his papers and canvas lie in a pile. Auntie Beryl and Gram are both unhappy Parry gave up the offer for art school.

“It’s a real shame, ‘tis,” Gram says. “Don’t like him joining up in that weary work down the mine one bit. Don’t care what Arthur says. It’s dark and depressing and it will bleed Parry’s spirit. I’m sure of it. No talking to either Arthur or Parry, though.”

“Sell his paintings, he should. Not his heart,” Auntie Beryl agrees.

“I’m not that good, Beryl. It’ll wait. Seems to be more important matters at the moment than watercolors,” Parry tells her.

I can see Parry now, pushing his fingers through his thick yellow hair. “Why is it you won’t listen to reason, Da?” He is pacing round the kitchen and seems frantic, like Hallie’s kitty gets when we manage to trap him in some corner, the way the kitty turns his head round and round and then back again, looking for some way out, but not finding one.

I miss the old Parry, walking me and Hallie to school every day, having time to do that. He doesn’t tickle me or play hide-and-seek. He doesn’t even smile much anymore, either. Yesterday when I asked him to twirl me, he was stiff.

Right now he’s on about another slag heap that was supposed to have slipped up the Rhondda in the forties.

“You read it killed a child. And more recently, what about that other slide up there? When it slid, the force of it took down the skating rink. What makes anyone think you can pile slag so high near where folks gather, and it’ll be a safe hill of coal trash? Coal slag piled that high is dangerous no matter where it’s piled. Jesus, Da, you can still see the gap ‘tween the buildings on the main road,” Parry says, shaking his head like that might clear everything up. “This isn’t like you. Mam promises you’re a man of reason. So come on now, Da. Show us some reason!”