Lark and Termite (23 page)

“We’re OK, Lark,” Solly says, “we’re OK.”

“No, he fell. He’s in the water. He’s down there, I saw him fall.”

Solly pulls Termite against him and feels for the oar in the bottom of the boat. “No, I’ve got him, Lark. Look, he’s right here.” The motor has cut out and he steadies us with the oar against the dark edge of the tree, turning past us now on the other side of the boat.

“Look, Solly. There, where the water is pale.”

“It’s mud, Lark, stirred up by that dead tree dragging its limbs.”

I’m kneeling then, holding to the bow of the boat. “He was sitting right there, when you came for us.”

“Lark, for Christ’s sake, stay still, before you turn us over.” Solly balances the oar in one hand, pushes gently, gently against the flung skeletal limbs of the tree, launches us into the sweep of the water. The tree rolls slowly in response, caught in some drag, and catches, stationary as an island. The current carries us past. “Lark, there was just me in the boat. I didn’t bring anyone else. Here, take my hand. Listen to me. Everything looks strange. You’ve been in the attic in the dark all night, with the water rising. You haven’t slept. You’re seeing things.”

“Where’s Nonie?”

“She’s in the Armory shelter, with Elise. They took Gladdy home in the car, then they couldn’t get to Elise’s and they couldn’t get over here. Charlie stayed at the restaurant. That part of town never floods, so they’re using his place to feed Civil Defense and anyone who’s helping out. We have a little way to go through the high water. Keep Termite close and put this blanket around you both.”

I pull Termite against me and close my eyes. The boat turns gently, turns away. I feel Solly touch me as he stows the oar, takes his place. I feel him sit, pull the choke cord of the motor once, twice, before it sputters and revs. The throb of the motor takes hold and we’re moving. I feel Stamble in the immense weight of the water, holding and moving the flood with his pale hands as though he wanted and willed it: smithereens.

“Lark, look at me. You all right? Did something happen, before I got to you?”

“It was yesterday,” I tell Solly.

“What was yesterday?”

“Termite’s birthday. I found our birth certificates last night in the boxes. Yesterday, on his birthday.”

“That’s good,” Solly says, “to know on his birthday. What better day to know? Like a present.”

He waits for me to say more, but I don’t, and he doesn’t ask. He turns and cuts the motor to a low rumble and steers us slowly, into the band of light cast through the fog. The boat rocks in sudden eddies, over submersions dragging in the current, and the water pushing back. I can see the rise of Main Street in front of us, where the water stops, as though across a wide, rolling lake, and then the fog closes up.

Nonie

Charlie insisted we go home. He sent us off with instructions to stay in our houses until the storm blew out. Elise lives at the top of a hill, and Gladdy’s part of town seldom floods despite her own wet basement, but I was anxious. Gladdy demanded Charlie take her home himself and wouldn’t get into Elise’s car. We threatened to leave her at Civil Defense, which is what Charlie calls the restaurant when Flood Relief moves in. Finally we pile her in the backseat with two cloth bags of food, bags that won’t break if they get wet. Gladdy sits between them, simmering with insult.

“I should think he could spare a moment,” she says. “I’ve given my life to him, but there’s no point saying so.”

“I suppose you have, Gladdy,” Elise answers, “and so have certain others. I’d say you and Noreen have that in common.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her mouth snaps shut, but she can’t resist saying exactly what she’s thinking. There’s a bitter warble in her voice. “How dare you speak to me so! That I should be put in such a position! You’re a clerk!”

“I am indeed,” Elise says. “And you’re the retired owner of a greasy spoon in a shrinking town no one even drives through.” She pauses, angry as I’ve ever seen her, but she keeps her voice deliberate and steely. “I’m sure it does get lonely for you in that big house. Charlie’s not there much, after all.” She pulls to the curb in front of the house with a lurch, switches off the engine and windshield wipers abruptly. The car is instantly awash in deluge. “Still, Gladdy,” she says in the enclosure of the downpour, “you’ve got the leftovers, and Noreen to help you carry them.”

We sit enveloped in the pounding of the rain. Water pummels the metallic shell of the car and cascades in falls over the windows while Gladdy flails from one side of the backseat to the other, feeling for the door handles. “Gladdy,” I tell her, “stay where you are.” Then I try to quiet my voice. “You may need this food, and you’ll need help getting up the steps in this rain.”

The big door of Elise’s car swings open with a crack and I’m instantly drenched. The slap of cold and wet is almost a relief. Sheltering myself is too much effort, but Charlie’s big umbrella will very nearly keep his mother dry, along with her cloth bags of food. I grip the straps of the bags in one hand, the handle of the umbrella clutched to my side, and reach into the car for Gladdy, haul her to her feet in the arc of refuge available. She’s fairly shaking with rage as I steer her toward the house. I remember how hard it was snowing the Christmas before Charlie’s father died, the one time Charlie brought me to a family holiday dinner, or any family dinner, for that matter. Winfield was a different town then, twenty-five years ago. Main Street was strung with lights to within a block of Gladdy’s house. Her parlor and dining room were ablaze with Christmas trees and greenery and candles, the long table set with crystal, but not for me. She put on her martyr’s face, made it clear she was suffering my presence. Once I got up to help her in the kitchen, but Charlie’s father stood with me, put a hand on my shoulder. I should sit back down, he said, with them. Charlie and I loved each other and that was what mattered. He seemed embarrassed for Gladdy, and he was dead by spring.

“How dare you!” Gladdy is muttering. “How dare any of you!”

“Gladdy,” I say, “if you don’t want to be spoken to, don’t speak.”

She’s fumbling with the keys, but I have to put the bags down and help her, lay the umbrella to the side. Wind blows the rain in crazy sideways sheets. We nearly fall into the house and Gladdy sails on into the kitchen, leaving me to follow her with the heavy satchels. By now I’m simply weary. I don’t know how Charlie stands her, stands this house. I resolve to take him in before it’s too late, before his heart condition kills him and he’s never lived with any other woman, none but Lola and me together, for less than a year, almost twenty years ago. Gladdy’s harangued him all his life, disappointed, disapproving. She’s standing at her open basement door when I get to the kitchen, peering down the steps. Then she turns and glares at me as though it’s my fault her basement is filling. “The two of you!” she says, furious, nearly sputtering.

I think she means Charlie. “Yes,” I say, in confirmation.

“Harpies!” she shrieks back, in apparent reference to Elise and myself.

I put the bags of food on the kitchen table. “Charlie asked us to bring you home, and we did,” I say. “I’m leaving now.” But she’s advancing on me, shaking with anger, red in the face. I wonder if she’s going to have a stroke, or disappear in a puff of smoke. No, that would be too easy.

“You know what your sister was, and you’re not much else!” She’s hitting me with the pointed fingers of one hand, every two words, then thudding her fists on my chest. “You! Divorced twice, godless. And they say she was a whore, a prostitute! That child might have been fathered by anyone. I’ll never believe she’s Charlie’s child!”

I stop giving way and move toward her, force her back. Of course. She’s talking about Lola and me. And Lark. Truly, especially Lark. To Gladdy, we’re the world. “For God’s sake, Gladdy, look at her. Don’t you see him?”

“No! I don’t see my son in any of you!” She’s screaming now. “And that boy that crippled, idiot boy! He should be in a home!”

“He’s in a home, Gladdy, my home. And you’re not good enough to stand in the same room with him, or breathe the same air!”

She’s on me then, both fists, pounding at me like an angry child. “You should have gone away and stayed away! You’ve taken him, and the business. You want everything but you’ll never get it, not legally. I’ve seen to it, do you hear me? The idea that he’d give everything,
anything,
to
you
—”

I try to push her away but she pulls me toward her, grabbing with both hands at my arm, my wrist. “Give it to me!” The sound of the rain pulses against the house like surf and she’s got us just in front of her open basement door, the dim steps behind her. Water rising in her basement babbles like a brook, like the cascade of a busted pipe. She clasps my watch with her fingers, ripping at it, pulling with her entire weight, and the band snaps in her hands. There’s a slow-motion instant in which her eyes widen, and mine do, and she falls backward hard, away from me, into the dark.

I can’t see down the steps, and I can’t move. The air itself seems to shift, come together seamlessly in the space she moved. I step to the sill of the basement door. The cord of the naked bulb over my head is still swinging, and I pull on the light, my fingers muffled in the damp cuff of my sweater. Gladdy lies facedown, askew across the steps, her neck at a sharp angle against the concrete basement wall, her head at the edge of a shine of water. She fell headfirst, twisting like a diver, as though to see where she was going. I can’t see her face, only the back of her, in her clothes damp from the rain, and her sling-back shoes, with their little heels pointing up. She looks broken and small, used up as the scratched bottoms of her shoes. Exposed. Now the cord hangs still. I pull it, my hand mittened in my sweater, and she’s in the dark.

I back up, into the table, fold my arms around myself, and breathe. One deep breath, two. I don’t touch anything. The room floats in the sound of the rain and the flow of the water, a sacrament I never would have believed. How strange that Gladdy would instruct me about endings. All these years, I tried not to hear or see her. She’s alone, so alone in this house, but the water will rise and ease her in. She won’t lie there long. I realize I’m sobbing, choking on long, deep sobs that won’t stop.

G
laddy’s front door opens like a door to the rest of the world. Charlie’s umbrella blows across the porch and back, skittering fast as the wind fills and turns it. I realize I can’t move my wrist and step into the storm, feeling with my other hand for the wrought-iron stair rail Gladdy gripped hard every day, the way she gripped everything. Beyond six concrete steps and across the narrow sidewalk, Elise’s car sits directly in front of me, vague headlights casting short glows in the pounding rain.

“What took you so long?” Elise has cracked the window to take the smoke of her cigarette, but the car is dense with tobacco scent and moisture, and the smell of the food Charlie packed. Elise takes a closer look at me. “You’re crying. What’s wrong? What did she say to you?”

“I hurt my wrist.”

“How?” She leans across to me.

“Gladdy ripped my watch off. It broke.”

“What broke? The watch? She took your watch? Well, Jesus. Let’s go back in there and get it.”

“Just go, Elise.”

“Look at your wrist, it’s all scratched. I’m not letting her get away with this. You stay here. I’ll go back and get that watch.”

“Elise, it doesn’t matter now. I’m worried about the kids. We’ll be lucky to get through before they close the roads. This is bad. The house will flood. Lark will have to get them into the attic. Go, please.”

She starts the car, protesting. “That woman is unbelievable. Why are people like her alive?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know why anyone is alive. She’s Lark’s grandmother, and never enjoyed her, never cared.” I see Lark, years ago, turning circles in the yard in her ballerina costume, holding Termite in her arms, and him looking back at her with his blur of a smile. “Such a loss.”

“Loss for who?”

Gladdy, I want to say, but I can’t speak. I don’t see Gladdy, crumpled on her narrow basement steps. I see Lola, her long, slim body when I last saw her, on a hospital bed in a white silk nightgown, after Lark was born. She lay on her side on the white sheets, like an offering, the baby cradled in one arm. It wasn’t an easy birth, and when she looked at me her freckles stood out in her white face. Everything was white: the room, the tightly made bed, the swaddled infant I never touched, Lola, her nightgown that was like a child’s dress. She looked stunned and alight, unfocused by transformation, happiness, exhaustion. Someday you’ll forgive me, she said.

Maybe I do. Surely that’s why I’m still crying, quietly, the way Lola cried.

“What happened back there, Noreen?” Elise looks steadily into the rain, gripping the steering wheel. She doesn’t wait for an answer and I realize she doesn’t want one. “Thank God there’s nobody out here but us. Do you hear me? Nobody.”

“No,” I say. And nobody was with Lola. Someone covered her later, picked her up, but it wasn’t me. I wasn’t with her when she died. I know she lay on a sidewalk by the police station, a few blocks from Onslow’s club, so the reports wouldn’t mention his business, and strangers made the phone calls. She’d gone to Louisville and the people she knew, got her baby that much closer to home, to me. She’d been there a week, just long enough to make sure they knew how to take care of him, and to leave the instructions she’d typed. A soldier who’d contacted her, a friend of her husband’s, was to bring the baby to Winfield. She used the little derringer her husband had left with her. For her protection, he said, and that was how she used it: to protect herself from further harm.

“Can you move your wrist?” Elise asks me.

I circle my wrist with my other hand, at the bruised laceration where the watch ripped apart across my skin. The streets are a blur. Elise’s big Ford keeps moving, but I can hear water under the wheels, arcs of spray flying up. We can’t see buildings, trees, the sides of the road, only wavy shapes changing as we pass. Smears of color collide and separate beyond the sheeting distortion of the rain, clearing and filling, all the edges pouring off.

“It’s just a sprain,” I tell her.

We ease past the intersection, and suddenly we’re driving through shallow water.

“I don’t know, Noreen. Lumber Street will be flooded. I’ll try to get across, but I don’t think I can get you home.”

Home. Later they brought me the gun, small, not as big as a man’s hand, cleaned of any traces, and the folded flag from the military service months earlier, a service I didn’t attend. I never saw that house in Florida. Only photographs. Pickets of a backyard fence. A mailbox covered all over with glued seashells. That scrawny palm tree. Lola never lied, if anyone asked. She could only tell the truth. Even about Charlie. Everything was in plain sight, if anyone cared to look. I wanted to throw the gun in the river with her ashes, but I kept it with the flag the army sent. She had the flag in her arms that day, folded tight, encased in the same plastic someone wiped clean. “Soldier’s Widow a Suicide” was how newspapers in Louisville reported it: a war story. She protected that flag. Later I put the gun inside it, tucked into the thick fabric. I hid them both in one of the boxes Gladdy sent from Florida, the only one I ever opened, to fasten them both inside. Gladdy went through the Coral Gables house, had any vestige of Lola removed by professionals. Articles of any worth, she said, came to me, and the rest went to Goodwill. I didn’t care. I was Gladdy’s willing partner in putting away Lola’s life: no photographs, I told her, no personal effects. I wish I’d never seen the gun, never touched it. I wish it was in the river, a flicker of silver scudding along a stirred mud bottom, sidled in a current, miles and years from here.

Elise is still driving, but I feel the car eddy and shift in the rising water. It’s as though we’re in the river, or the river’s come after us.

That soldier, a Sergeant Tompkins, came in uniform, with his Korean wife. They’d gone to see Lola in Coral Gables. They were nearly strangers to her, but she requested they bring Termite. They brought her note too, her instructions to all of us, and the urn of her ashes to scatter at the river. The note said she wanted to vanish, like he vanished. She couldn’t take the baby with her, she said, he was beautiful and calm, he knew things, and he was all she had for Lark. He was Lark’s baby, she said, as Lark was mine. Please, for Lark’s sake, would I care for him until Lark could. At the time, I was so angry. I scattered the ashes in sight of the bridge, put my hand into them and threw them out across the water, while the soldier held the baby. His wife, so slight she seemed a child herself, held the tightly folded flag and chanted words in Korean. I was glad she did, because I had no words. Later, in my own kitchen sink, I burned Lola’s instructions. For Lark’s sake. Ridiculous and sad, I told myself. Lark was a nine-year-old child! Termite’s age, I realize, the age he is now.