Sweetwater Creek (31 page)

Emily fell silent. The silence seemed to spin out for a very long time. Downstairs she could faintly hear the idiot muttering of the television set in the den. At last Jenny Raiford turned to look at her. Her face was bleached white, and her nose and mouth were pinched, and her voice shook with fury.

“What in the name of God was that girl
thinking
?” she whispered, as if she could not get enough air into her lungs. “How could she dump all that…
dirtiness,
that
ugliness,
on you. You were
twelve
,
for Christ’s sake! You don’t tell a child that…filth. You don’t tell
anybody,
unless there’s something really wrong with you, something just left out of you…”

“I’m not a child,” was all Emily could think to say. Somehow she had never imagined that the story could generate such anger. Pity, she had thought, pity for both her and Lulu.

“I’m sorry, Lulu,” she whispered.

“No,” her aunt said slowly. “No, you’re not. In fact, you’re far less of a child than you should be. But you’re not grown-up, either. It should be years and years before you have to handle that kind of thing—if ever. Just hearing about it, not to mention seeing it—And then blowing off your birthday party. And begging you not to tell anybody about the drinking! I can’t wish her ill, but I’m glad she’s gone from here. There’s no telling how badly she would have damaged you—and everybody else in this house if she’d stayed.”

Emily began to shake her head, and Jenny came to sit once more on the side of her bed. This time she did not touch Emily, though. She simply sat, listening, an empty vessel to be filled up.

“It wasn’t like that,” Emily said heatedly. “She told me because she wanted me to understand why she got drunk. She needed me to help her not do it again. She’d been fighting it so hard, ever since she came. Her own folks wouldn’t listen to her, and she didn’t think she could tell her grandmother because she thought it would hurt her too badly to know. And I
did
help her, Aunt Jenny! I stayed with her every minute after that, until that awful man came. If you’d seen her when he came in, seen her face, you’d understand. She couldn’t help…what he did to her.”

“Probably not,” her aunt said after a long moment. “She’s not the first, and she won’t be the last. It’s an obsession, sick and addictive. But she
could
help dragging you into it. What did she think a twelve-year-old could do to help her when she couldn’t help herself? That’s what I’ll never forgive, never.”

“What was she supposed to do?” Emily said desperately. She needed, above all things, to make her aunt understand.

“She’d have died if Elvis hadn’t come and gotten me. She was choking. I couldn’t just leave her….”

“No, baby. You did just the right thing. But there were a lot of things she could have done beside drag you into her mess. She could have simply thanked you, when she sobered up, and gone on about her business. She could have trained more dogs. Or for God’s sake, she could have gone home and faced her parents and stopped bewitching this family. You’re all just so…
vulnerable
to that kind of glitter and glamor. You’ve never seen it, and your father hasn’t in so long that he’s forgotten how seductive it is. She played on that. I watched her do it. Cleta saw it, too. We should have done something.”

“You make her sound like a witch of some kind. She wasn’t—she isn’t. She made us laugh, she cared about us, we were all together for the first time I can remember—and she needed me. We went everywhere together, we talked about everything. She never once treated me like a child.”

“Well, she should have,” Jenny Raiford snapped. “You were twelve years old, no matter how smart and supportive you were to her. You should be young for a long time yet. Nobody has the right to take that away from you. But then, nobody’s ever really let you be young, have they? Not in this house. They just…leave you. Of course you adored her. Who else has ever really talked to you?”

“I talk to Cleta,” Emily mumbled. “I talk to Buddy all the time; he talks to me, too. So does Elvis….”

Her aunt reached out and pulled Emily to her. Emily could feel her lips making words on her cheek, her breath on her neck.

“Baby, what kind of life is it if your only friends are a dead boy and a dog?”

They were quiet. Jenny rocked her back and forth, back and forth. A slow warmth began to seep into Emily; she felt nearly boneless with it.

Then Jenny said, “Tell me about the poetry.”

Emily did, feeling her face flame with joy, her voice thicken with it. The engulfing fever came back.

“Lulu’s grandmother sent me the book,” she said. “She said that poetry gives you something that knows who you are; she said if you have it you’re never truly alone. And it’s true, Aunt Jenny; I’ve read it and read it, all this weekend, and I haven’t even known I was here by myself!”

“Let me see this book,” Jenny said. Emily handed it to her. After a long time her aunt lifted her head from the pages and looked at her. The pinched whiteness was back.

“What kind of people
are
these Foxworths? It’s shattering poetry, but Emily, all this dark, all this death, all this love melting you down business. This family has laid way too much on you. And that painting! It’s stunning, of course, but in a thirteen-year-old’s bedroom? My God. I really thought better of old Mrs. Foxworth.”

“Do you know her?”

“Yes, a little. I heard all about her from Buddy; he adored her. I met her once, when I went to pick him up from his lesson. And I know you liked her, when you met her at her birthday party, but still…”

Emily started to tell her about firing the Purdey, but then she did not. She did not think there was any way she could make her aunt understand. And she thought that Buddy would want it to be just between them, their private covenant.

She showed Jenny the note that had come with the books and the painting. After she read it, Jenny laid it aside and smiled, slightly. “I guess she understands more than I thought,” she said. “She knows you almost like she did Buddy. And she obviously loves her granddaughter. She must be hurting badly now. Why couldn’t Lulu have told her all this? Surely she would have understood, even if the other Foxworths didn’t.”

“Lulu said it would kill her.”

“So it would kill her grandmother, but not hurt you in the least. Good thinking.”

Emily laid her head back on her aunt’s shoulder, and Jenny held her lightly.

“Do you think she’s dead?” Emily said finally.

“No,” Jenny said. “But I don’t think we’ll ever know where she is unless the Foxworths tell us, and people like that don’t talk about their failures.”

“Do you think they know where she is?”

“Oh, yes. Somebody always knows where everybody is. There are a million ways to find people. If she was dead, everybody would know; you couldn’t hide it. But I’ll bet that’s all anybody
would
know.”

Emily whispered into the linen of her aunt’s jacket, “Do you know where my mother is? Does Daddy?”

“I think he does, yes,” her aunt said into Emily’s hair. “But I truly don’t. I only know that she’s almost certainly alive.”

Pain lanced through Emily. A dead mother couldn’t come back to you. A live one could—if she wanted to.

“Have you ever asked Daddy?”

“No. He’d tell me, I think, but I just haven’t. She left more than just you all when she walked out that door.”

“Well, will you? Ask him, I mean? So I’d know…”

“No, love. That’s for you to do.”

“Aunt Jenny, I can’t!”

“Probably not yet. You’ll know when you can. Don’t go asking for any more pain than you’ve already got, Emily. And your father doesn’t need any more right now, either. He’s lost the same three people you have.”

“Do you think…that he loved her?”

It was a long time before her aunt answered. She rocked Emily absently, stroking her hair.

“No. I think he loved how she made him feel—a whole other person, one who could run with the big dogs. She gave him all that for a little while and then she took it away. You need to think about him now, Emily.”

“Why? He doesn’t think about me.”

“Then reach out to him. You don’t have to wait for him to do it. Make the first move. You’re old enough to do that now, anyway.”

“What if he doesn’t answer?”

“Oh, Emily,” Jenny Raiford sighed. “You’ll never know if you don’t try, will you?”

“What should I do?”

“You’ll think of something. You’ll think of just the right thing. Just let it come. You need to get to bed now. I want to talk to your father.”

“Will you come back and see me?”

“Try and stop me,” her aunt said.

“Aunt Jenny,” Emily said. “Should I call her grandmother? She’d tell me about Lulu, if she knows. I know she would.”

“No,” Jenny Raiford said after a moment. “Let me do it. I suppose she’s in the phone book….”

“Yes, she is,” Emily said. “She told me so the night of her party. She said to call her if I ever thought Lulu was in trouble.”

She felt tears start in her dry, hot eyes.

“It’s not your problem, baby,” her aunt said, kissing her forehead. “It never was. Go to bed. Tomorrow’s a school day.”

She got up from Emily’s bed and let herself softly out of the room.

The sheer, familiar banality of the words poured over Emily like warm water. She felt drowsy, soft throughout, only half-sentient, as a close-wrapped infant might. Safe.

“I’m thirteen years old, and tomorrow is a school day,” she whispered, and sank back into her pillows.

Elvis bounded joyfully up the stairs and onto her bed, shaking it, smelling of wet earth and kibble, turning around twice, burrowing into her side. Girl and dog were asleep before Jenny Raiford’s footsteps had faded down the stairs.

JENNY RAIFORD CAME BACK
to stay at Sweetwater the next weekend. She would keep her job at the medical center, but would live in the room she had had before: Buddy’s room.

“Will you miss your house and your roommate?” Emily asked.

“No. The house backs up to the airport runway and my roommate leaves hair in the sink.”

“What about your boyfriend?”

“He leaves hair in the sink, too.”

“Are you going to leave again?”

“Not until you personally run me off,” her aunt said.

Ever since the weekend before, when she had poured all of the debris of Lulu’s time with them into her aunt’s ears, Emily had felt light and fragile, hollowed out, as if she was getting over a long illness. It was not an unpleasant feeling. Often, out in the last of the March wind, she felt that she might simply be picked up on its green breast and borne out over the marshes, to the river and the sea.

On the Saturday that Jenny came, Emily got up early and put on her oldest jeans and took her oyster glove and knife and rowed the johnboat across the river to the high bank where millions upon millions of sweet, fat oysters clung. She brought them back and shucked them, and studied the book of receipts Lulu’s grandmother had sent her, and carefully rolled out a rich pastry on the old marble board Cleta used. She stuffed the pie with layer after layer of oysters, adding butter and sherry and a little mace, and laid on the top crust, and set the pie to season on the porch. Cleta always did that. Emily had no idea why.

That night, as they had sherry before the fire in the library, she put the pie into the oven, and brought it, steaming and golden, to the table as they sat down to dinner. It was by no means a Lulu dinner; those were gone now from this house. But it was pleasant and serene, with Aunt Jenny’s silver candlesticks holding white tapers, and, for the occasion, their grandmother’s Haviland. Jenny brought white wine that tasted like flowers, and when the pie was cut, the fragrant steam clouded the breakfast room like warm, living breath.

Her father took a bite.

“This is wonderful,” he said. “You’ve never made it before, have you, Jenny?”

“No, and I didn’t this time,” Jenny said. “Emily did the whole thing, from gathering and shucking the oysters to making the pastry. It’s a very old receipt, I think.”

Walter’s eyes rested on his daughter. They were very blue in the candlelight gloom.

“It’s beyond good, Emmy,” he said. “Is this the girl who couldn’t mix a batch of puppy kibble last year?”

“The same,” Emily said, smiling at his smile. For one of the first times she could remember, it felt focused entirely on her.

“It’s an old family receipt.”

“Whose family?” he said grinning.

“Ours, of course,” Emily said, and her father laughed aloud.

“Of course,” he said.

The next morning, Sunday, Emily and Jenny Raiford walked down to the dock over the marshes, to the river. Spring had surged over the Lowcountry like a tidal wave during the past week, as it often did, and the entire world shone and sang with it. The sun was mellow still; the great heat would soon follow, but not yet. The greening marshes rippled like a silver-green sea, down to the water and off to the horizon beyond it. Every bird Emily could name and many she could not warbled and whisked in the undergrowth and live oaks. Leaves on every plant shone transparent, as if lit from behind by candles. The air smelled giddily of the sea and the marsh and the living creatures newly back, and powerfully of pluff mud. It was a day to make you silly; the new class of puppies had been manic with spring that morning, and for once Elvis did not chastise them, but rolled on his back in the new grass and let them tumble over him. Now he lay between Jenny and Emily, nose on paws, the sun burning his coat to red coals.

They sat in blissful silence for a while in the sun, and then Jenny said, “Emily, I have to tell you something sad. I called old Mrs. Foxworth at Maybud this week, and a woman answered and said that she had had a stroke and died just days before. It must have been right after she sent the book and painting to you. I asked if they had heard from Lulu, but she said she couldn’t really say, and hung up. I’m sorry, sweetie.”

Emily’s eyes filled with tears, and she felt real grief. But it was a simple grief, a very young girl’s grief. She thought that she had used up her small store of tearing complex anguish on Lulu. It was very like Grand not to require it of her.

Her father often watched her in those spring days, while she was training the newest puppies. He stood leaning on the fence to the puppy ring with his hands in his pockets. Often, Elvis sat beside him, leaning against his leg. Emily remembered how he had stood just like that at Christmas, watching Lulu as she bewitched his plantation into Camelot.

“How’m I doing?” she would call to him.

“Better than anybody,” he called back.

Often, when she came home from school that spring, her father and her aunt would be sitting on the front porch, drinking iced tea and rocking in the old chairs.

On one of those soft days, her father said, “You’ve gotten really tall and skinny, haven’t you? When did that happen? You look a lot like Jenny. Did you know that?”

“Sort of,” Emily said. She knew she did. She had only to look in her mirror.

“Yes, sort of,” her father said. “I guess you really look more like…you.”

In those first days that her aunt was back, Emily would lie in bed at night, listening for the nearly forgotten sound of laughter from downstairs. She heard it at the very end of April, just before sleep, all of a piece with the liquid gurgle of the quiet river and the spring-teased tree frogs. In her sleep, she smiled.

“I’m going to give the salutatorian’s address at graduation,” she said shyly at dinner one night in early May. It was still light outside, the green twilight of a Lowcountry spring, and the smell of mimosa and the breath of the river was intoxicating. Emily hardly knew how to talk about the address; it had surprised her profoundly when her student advisor gave her the news. She did not think her grades had been very good this quarter, and had absolutely no idea what a salutatorian saluted.

“It’s not a very big deal,” she said into the congratulatory outcry at the table. “Valedictorian is the big thing. You have to have sky-high grades for that.”

“But this is because of your grades, too, isn’t it?” her aunt said, looking candlelit herself in the light from the tapers.

“Well, Emmybug,” her father said, leaning back and smiling hugely. “So far as I know, it’s the first speech anybody in this family has ever given. We’ll pack the house to hear you.”

“Oh, don’t,” she said faintly. “I may refuse it and let it go on to the next person on the list. I don’t know how to talk to anybody but dogs.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Jenny said. “We’ll bring Elvis and you can talk to him. But talk you’re going to. Emily, we are so proud!”

“It’s hard to believe you’ll be starting high school,” her father said later. They were sitting on the front porch, watching a great yellow moon slip shyly up the sky over the river. “Feeling loved, the moon loves to be looked at…”

“So will it be Hammond, or what? I don’t even know where the high schools are around here. Some father of the graduate I am.”

“Maybe,” Emily said. “Or there’s a new magnet school over on John’s Island. My advisor says I could probably go there. I don’t know. I don’t have to decide yet.”

“Nope,” her father said, giving the swing a push and setting it creaking and soaring. “Got all summer.”

A week after that, Walt Junior came in with news about Lulu.

“Spencer Hardin’s older sister, the one that lives in New York, said she saw Lulu sitting in a lounge at Kennedy Airport. She was a wreck, Spencer said—thin as a skeleton, dirty and straggle-haired, and she was lying on the floor with her head on her luggage. She was asleep or drunk, or high—something anyway; she looked dead. It was in one of those lounges where you wait to go overseas; she was at a gate to some flight to Africa or Egypt or somewhere.”

Tangier, Emily thought. Lulu had always wanted to go there. She said everything was the color of soft heat; you’d never be cold there.

She got up from the table and went upstairs to her room. Out her back windows she could see the lighted square of the apartment over the barn that had been Lulu’s; a sallow young couple who were promising trainers had it now. Emily closed her eyes and thought of white walls and gauzy blowing bed curtains and Lulu’s sheaf of fragrant gilt hair, falling across her tanned cheek; she smelled French lavender soap and sweet new wood shavings from the barn downstairs, and heard Lulu’s lazy laughter.

Tears squeezed out from under her eyelashes.

“Oh, Lulu,” she whispered. “Be warm.”

Two days later, on an afternoon of thunderstorms rolling in from the west, and flying greenish clouds, Emily found a letter lying on her bed after school. It was heavy, a thick, creamy envelope with Charlotte Hall engraved on its upper left-hand corner. Emily’s heart began to thud, violently. She put the envelope down and changed her clothes and went out to the puppy ring. When she got back it was, of course, still there.

“Dear Miss Parmenter,” it began. After that the elegant roman typeface blurred in and out, but a few paragraphs came clear:

Emily folded the letter into a very small square. She did not tell her father or her aunt about it. But she carried it with her every day in her pocket or tucked into her bra. It felt alternately burning hot and icy cold there. The end of school approached, and still Emily told no one about the letter except Elvis, who said, “Will this change things?” and Buddy, who said nothing.

At night she slept with the letter under her pillow and had strange, endless dreams about water and docks and boats moored at docks. One of the boats was the beautiful schooner she had seen in a dream last fall, fully rigged and tugging at its moorings in the river wind. This time, though, there was no one on board. But a pile of tagged luggage stood on its shining teak deck. She could not read the tags on the luggage, and rolled over restlessly and fell deeper into sleep.

A week before graduation, with the commencement address still lying immense and unborn in Emily’s head, the first wave of the huge, sapping heat fell down over the Lowcountry out of a whitened sky. Everything and everyone moved slowly and ponderously; even time seemed to seep away drop by infinitesimal drop. Walter Parmenter and the boys stopped work with the intermediate dogs down by the river at noon, and Walter came most afternoons to watch Emily with the new puppies. The ring was shaded by a giant live oak, and sometimes her father sat cross-legged on the grass under it or leaned back against its great baroque trunk. Almost always, now, Elvis sat or lay beside him, eyes quiet and steady on Emily.

On the second day of the heat Emily was just taking the puppies back into the barn to their mothers when Elvis began a staccato fusillade of barking. It was not admonitory or protective; Emily could only think that these were barks of joy.

She left the ring and went over to where Elvis and her father waited. Elvis was running forward for a small distance, and then back to them, looking up at Emily. Barking, barking.

“He wants us to follow him,” Emily said to her father.

“Where?”

“I don’t know. He always knows, though.”

Her father got to his feet and wiped sweat from his forehead. In the full sun he was brown and lean, and the silver-blond hair blazed. Emily’s heart contracted.

“He’s not old,” she thought. “Why did I used to think he was old?”

“Lead on,” he said to Elvis, and the man and the girl set out beside the Boykin, dancing like a dervish in his eagerness.

He bounded straight across the blinding field and into the trees where the maritime forest began, ending ultimately at the dolphin slide on Sweetwater Creek.

“I know where he’s going,” Emily said suddenly, laughing aloud. “Come on, Daddy. We’ll be late!”

Walter Parmenter shook his head, but lengthened his stride to match his daughter’s. Soon they were deep in green shadow, the air near-solid with heat and steaming vegetation and the drone of insects. Elvis ran ahead like a bronze bullet, his curly ears streaming back in his own breeze.

They burst out of the forest and onto the bluff that looked down into the creek. The tide was near out, and the blue ribbon of water cutting the great sea of cordgrass hardly moved. Out over the creek, from the branches of the fallen oak, something large dropped into the water, and something else croaked. Emily had a moment’s sick, kaleidoscopic image of spoiled-fruit flesh and dying firelight; smelled the amniotic smell of sex and the stench of vomit and the sour breath of dying woodsmoke; felt the shape of the great blackness boiling behind her. And then all of it was gone. There was only heat and stillness and the little sullen lap of the retreating tide.