She kissed her mother and Rowan heard her say, “I’m glad I came. And I’m staying.” Her grandmother’s eyes opened at that, but it was Rowan she looked at. There was something unsettling in her gaze. Rowan wondered what it was that she and her mom weren’t getting.
Just before Izzy closed the door on Audra, she poked her head back inside and cleared her throat delicately until Audra opened her eyes.
“I’ll take good care of the girls,” Izzy said.
“Leave. Them. Be.”
Izzy smiled gently, and with just a touch of the true friend she used to be, said, “It’s not just up to me.”
FOUR
I
T WAS NIGHTTIME IN
H
AVEN
W
OODS
. Lights had popped on inside living rooms, glowing through freshly hung summer drapes. TV sets were tuned to
CSI
and
House
, the hour-longs of prime time. Streetlamps illuminated roofs and cast a shadow over broad lawns—tidy, green, the sort of lawns that would feel good on bare feet in a month or so. All the cars in the driveways were SUVs and minivans.
Izzy Riley drove courteously behind the junior Wittmores until they reached Audra’s dark house. She waited in the car while they found the key under the pot of pansies on the front porch, and then gave them a cheery wave as they stepped inside, glad they could not see the expression on her face. Izzy was weary.
At home she turned out the light she had left burning in the foyer and climbed slowly up the stairs to her bedroom, Tansy at her heels. At one time it had been her and Roger’s bedroom, but Roger had been dead about five years. Heart attack
(or something)
Sometimes she missed him, sometimes she didn’t.
She stepped out of her shoes, then dropped them into her closet and stripped to her bra and panties. She put on her robe. The cat jumped on the bed, used to the ritual, and curled up. Tansy would sleep a few hours and then wake to do whatever dirty work cats did in the dark, via the pet door.
It had been a hard day. Margaret’s funeral had been difficult. They had been friends for many, many years—good friends—before she started to piss her off, then topped it with a betrayal that got them all in trouble. But it wasn’t worth thinking about anymore. The point was to move forward.
Izzy sat at her dressing table and creamed off her makeup. Her skin was very good, very receptive to repair. The girl at the MAC counter had said so. Izzy smiled as she remembered the girl at the MAC counter. A silly, silly bitch.
You look just wonderful for your age
, the silly bitch had said.
Izzy had reacted hardly at all to the comment and, in fact, she had bought many more products than she had ever planned to buy, or certainly to use, and had thanked the girl with a nice, wide smile.
Oh, thank you, dear, you’ve just been such a love
.
The MAC products were sitting on her dressing table. She quite liked the eye pencil.
When Izzy dropped in at the MAC kiosk a week or so later, she asked about the girl and was told that she had quit. For personal reasons.
I’ll bet
. Taking pains to appear concerned, Izzy gently asked what had happened, and the girl leaned in and whispered,
I’m not supposed to tell but … her face, something horrible happened to
—but then the counter manager had come around and she couldn’t finish, which was such a shame. But she bet the girl’s face was … well,
just awful
.
A cup of cold tea she’d forgotten about had formed a skin, but she didn’t have the energy to carry it down to the kitchen. There was still a counter and sink full of dishes down there she needed to clean up after the wake …
She imagined Audra in her hospital bed, unable to sleep for worry about what Izzy was doing with her precious daughter and her precious daughter’s daughter. It would be good for her, that kind of worrying, a proper penance. Marla would call it karma. But that wasn’t really what karma was. Karma was a more complicated comeuppance. This was more like Jainism … all Audra’s doing. Marla wouldn’t know about that, nor would that crowd of hers. They weren’t readers, those girls.
A book lay invitingly open on the bed: Carol Karlsen’s history of New England. She’d only just started it and it hadn’t quite grabbed her yet. The good stuff, she suspected, happened around the late 1600
S
, so to speak.
In the privacy of her bedroom she let herself admit that it had been a difficult day. It was unfathomable, really, that Chick had crawled into bed and lit herself on fire. How was that even possible? How
could
she?
She would have a shower and then take the teacup down to the kitchen and make herself a fresh cup. Sleep, she knew, would be reluctant to come. Memories had been unavoidable all day. They’d been such a close-knit gang once, the whole lot of them. The husbands too. When they’d all been young and the children had been at home
hey Mom, I need five bucks
and they’d spent whole weekends together at each other’s houses. Drinks and cards and
what’s this scar here, Iz?
backyard barbecues.
When she forced herself to think it through from Margaret’s point of view, she guessed she understood it well enough. Margaret was a (foolish) romantic, unfashionably in love with her husband, enough to take a great risk, make a great sacrifice. Audra had got caught in that (foolish) romanticism.
Over the past year things had been changing. She couldn’t put her finger on it; it was sort of a constant loose feeling, like a button hanging by a thread, a wobbly heel on a shoe, a pot handle shifting. Their solid group was wiggling and slipping, and that was what was wrong. They had to stick together, they had to maintain. Margaret had broken the rules. It was good, in a way, that she was dead.
Stupid, stupid woman.
a stupid woman gets what she deserves
Her grandmother used to say that all the time. It was all spinning out of control. If she closed her eyes and concentrated she would be able to feel it, as if the very room were spinning, centrifugal force tugging them apart.
Why did Margaret think she was so special? They’d all lost somebody. They’d all had to pay.
She’d been trying to think of the word since the hospital, and it suddenly came to her.
Menarche
. A girl’s introduction into womanhood. So powerful, that moment in a girl’s life, the transition from useless girl into woman. She smiled, remembering the girl’s shocked face when she asked whether she was bleeding yet …
The fact that Rowan had not yet entered into menarche was a blessing that would save them all. She wanted to applaud her own cleverness, the serendipity of it all. She would be sure to remind Audra of that.
Izzy stood up then, securely tied the robe around her waist and walked down the hall to the closed door. The door that was always closed, except when she opened it.
It was dark inside David’s room, the blinds drawn and the lights off, but she could find every item in the room by memory. She turned the light on anyway. In a cruel, sharp electric gasp, the room laid itself open for her.
It was all as it had been, right down to the forgotten pair of socks at the end of the bed where a sixteen-year-old boy had dropped them. The side table still held a copy of
East of Eden
, the bookmark a dragon slyly watching a tiny knight at his feet
be careful in the company of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup
, and four small chunks of agate and a watch, the battery long dead, reading 12:10, whether day or night unknown.
If she opened the closet door there would be his clothes still hanging, and in the dresser, underwear, T-shirts, the many and varied bits and pieces of soccer, baseball, football, basketball uniforms: gold and purple socks, satin shorts in blue with white stripes up the leg, jerseys in electric yellow and green, numbers stencilled onto everything: 11, 15, 67.
The air in the room was bruised with time, filled with a heavy sadness that had once been a sharp, bleeding pain.
Izzy sat on the bed and the springs squeaked. She leaned back and spread herself over it. Closed her eyes. Tried to find him in the room.
Mom you’re the best
I’m going to Lonnie’s
Mom, I’m late for practice
“I look wonderful for my age,” she said into the empty room. The words caught and held in the heavy air, fading slowly. She kept her body still to keep the springs quiet. When she shifted they cried out … awful. Like David that day. So she stayed very still, except for two times when she moved just to hear that noise, like a tongue that can’t stay out of the rotten tooth.
what’s this scar, Iz?
She tucked her hands under his pillow and felt there a soft, worn T-shirt. Without looking she knew what it said.
HAVEN WOODS SENIOR BOYS CHAMPS
1997. She tugged out a corner of it and held it under her nose. If she tried very, very hard, she could still smell him.
He smelled like time.
She would dream of him tonight, as she did every now and then. In her dreams he was always as he had been that day, her beautiful golden son, her sun.
The others had lost husbands. She’d lost her
son
. They did not know pain the way she did.
All would soon be made right. The daughters were here, and that would balance things out. Legacy. Blood relatives.
Most important, of course, blood.
FIVE
G
LASS WIND CHIMES HUNG
from a cord on her grandmother’s front porch. The pieces were all different colours, very pretty, and when Rowan pushed, they swung lazily in an arc. Three, four swings and they settled to a stop. When they became still, Rowan pushed them again.
It was weird not to be at school. She tried to just enjoy the fact, but she couldn’t help looking at her watch once in awhile and wondering where everyone was. There was a funny feeling attached to it, like the way it felt when you stood at the top of the circle stairs in Convocation Hall and leaned over the rail. You could see all the way down to the lobby, the black railing against the white marble floor spinning and spinning. If you looked too long it felt a little like you might fall. That was sort of how it felt not to be at school
(when you knew you should be)
For instance, they had math at ten, which was second period. Sister Persephone had tufts of hair growing out of her chin that she clearly tried to shave; they would disappear and then reappear looking like someone’s dad’s five o’clock shadow. Otherwise she was nice. When someone answered a particularly difficult question correctly, she would always say, “Aren’t you one of God’s special thinkers.”
Rowan sighed. She was bored, and totally surprised by the boredom and its accompanying thought:
even school would be better than this
. Her mom had just got back from the hospital and didn’t want to say how her grandmother was doing. Rowan had asked if they could
please go somewhere
and Paula barely even looked at her. She said they would walk the dog later. Every now and then Rowan could hear her moving around inside the house.
The weather was beautiful, more summer than spring, and the sun had been shining all morning. That was all there was to look at here. The sky and the porch and the street. Everywhere Ro looked there was a house. There were no buildings, no parking lots, no chain-link fences, no 7-Eleven store, no
(no gang of boys squatting in a tight circle on the steps of the apartment block across the street)
hey little girl c’mere I’ll teach ya some school
no city at all. Just houses. All exhaustingly quiet, the people invisible.
Across the street a brown car was parked in the driveway, which sloped upwards towards the house, and so it seemed almost that the car was part of a display.
Check out my car
. Two white cars were parked side by side in the driveways of nearly identical houses just up the street. Those were all the cars.
Except for their second-hand Mazda with the rusted wheel wells, which her mom had bought with her severance cheque from the bar. It too was parked in the driveway on a slight incline. She supposed that, to people in the houses across the street, it looked as if their (piece of shit) car was on display.
check out my pieceofshit
aren’t you one of God’s special thinkers
Nothing on the street moved. It was dead.
Rowan gave the wind chimes one last swat and then sat down hard on the top step of the porch beside the big, hairy dog. She put her hand on his head and gave him a gentle scratch, and his tail thumped on the wooden floor.
Thump thump thump
. Then it stopped. The dog was good.
His muzzle was flecked with coarse grey (like Sister Persephone’s chin hairs) and the tips of his ears were also grey. He smelled. It took him several minutes to get up from his lying-down position, and as he struggled up he grunted like an old man. But it had been love at first sight all the same.
She scratched his head some more, tenderly. The dog thumped his tail some more, but he did not raise his head to look at her. Her mom said he was a mutt, but that he had some collie in him and probably some shepherd, which was why he was so big and hairy. His face was broad and kind and over each eye he had a small patch of black, like eyebrows. This furthered his old-man appearance, and also made him look intelligent, like a cartoon dog who might wear glasses. Another one of God’s special thinkers.
She hadn’t been able to sleep last night in her mom’s old room. Sometime in the middle of the night she’d been woken by a
tap-tap-tap
at the window. She’d tried to sleep through it the way she slept through the sirens and yelling on the streets at home, but it didn’t work. Everything else was so
quiet
.
Except for the intermittent
tap-tap-tap
.
Half asleep, she’d gotten up to look. Too tired to really be frightened, she nevertheless felt something just as she pulled the curtain aside to look out
(even though the real threats were not in places like Haven Woods but in gangs of boys who sat on apartment-block steps in the city)
hey little girl c’mere I’ll teach you school
A cat was on the porch railing, digging its claws into the wood. It stopped when Ro opened the curtains, and peered at her for a second with its yellow eyes. Then it cleaned a paw and jumped down to where Ro couldn’t see it. A cat. It had freaked her out. She’d crawled in with her mother.
“Who’s got a cat?” she asked the dog. “Do you have a cat? Are you a good boy?” Tex thumped his tail.
Rowan lay back on the porch, one arm draped across the old dog, her feet on the steps. A little breeze came up from somewhere and the chimes over her head swung and tinkled. The dog stuck out his tongue and licked her hand.
She wished her mother would hurry (the
F-word)
up so they could walk the dog.
From somewhere down the street she heard a car coming, slowly, slowly.
The suburbs were deadly boring. And there were too many cats.
Paula let water run into the kitchen sink over the tiny pile of dishes. A teacup, her and Ro’s breakfast things, some cutlery. She didn’t have to do them, but wanted the distraction. It was easier to think when she was busy.
She’d gone to visit her mother right after breakfast. She’d tried to talk Ro into going, but her daughter had not slept well. When Paula shook her awake for breakfast, she’d rolled over with a groan, mumbling a sleepy
not yet
. She’d decided to let her sleep. Kid was likely as stressed as she was.
So she’d gone alone, hoping to talk to the doctor and to have a longer, private visit with her mother. It was not to be.
There hadn’t been anyone at the reception desk in the lobby, and when she got to the second floor, it was just as deserted as it had been yesterday, except for Tula at the nurses’ station. The minute the elevator doors opened, the woman was on her like ugly on an ape. She followed her to her mother’s room, jabbering the whole time, barely taking a breath so that Paula could answer her.
She followed her right into her mother’s room. “Oh, I just have to take her vitals, you know. Might as well do it now,” she’d said and grabbed her mother’s arm to take her pulse before Paula could even say hello.
Tula fumbled the blood pressure cuff around her mother’s arm—which seemed very thin to Paula—and never took her eyes off them. When she was done, she fussed with the curtains and sheets. When subtle hints didn’t work, Paula finally asked Tula if she would please go and find the doctor. She eventually said she would, and on her way out propped the door open.
Paula had made the obvious joke to her mother. “Well, I thought she’d never leave.”
But Audra hadn’t even smiled. As soon as Tula’s footsteps had faded, she’d insisted again, “Paula, you can’t stay long in Haven Woods.”
She’d protested, said they would stay as long as Audra was in the hospital. But now they could hear the murmur of Tula’s voice, probably on the phone at the nurses’ station.
Her mother had said, “There isn’t time to explain,” and “I’m fine, I’ll be fine—”
And then Tula was back.
Paula had asked for a few more minutes alone with her mother, her voice as sweet as pie, but Tula had said, “I’m afraid your mother has to rest. Doctor’s orders.”
“Where is he, then?” Paula had asked, exasperated. “Why can’t I talk to him myself? And when is he going to check on my mom?”
But Tula had insisted that he couldn’t be reached for the rest of the day, and then she stood there like a statue. So Paula wrote her name and her mother’s home phone number on a piece of paper for Tula to give to the doctor when she saw him next. Underlined twice was
I must speak to you
. Tula shoved it in her pocket.
And then her mother had said she did need to rest, and there was nothing for Paula to do but leave. She pecked Audra on the cheek and gave her hand a gentle squeeze and it was over. The visit had lasted less than twenty minutes. She had a firm impression that not only Tula but her mother also had wanted her to leave.
As she’d headed back to her car, she didn’t know whether to feel put out or hurt or panicked that everyone was being so evasive. Maybe her mother was more ill than she let on. Terrible words dashed in and out of her head, the stiffness in her mother’s joints becoming some kind of paralysis, the drooping eyes and difficulty with speech becoming a stroke. And when she thought of the raspy throat, the worst crossed her mind.
Cancer
.
Paula stuck her hands into the soapy water with a vengeance and fiercely scrubbed dishes that hardly needed it, unable to keep her mind off the fact that something just wasn’t right. Not just her mother being ill, but something else altogether.
A car stopped in front of the house, not parking in the driveway behind her mom’s
(pieceofshit)
car but just pulling up to the curb. A woman got out; she was wearing big sunglasses, and as she rounded the car to the sidewalk, she pushed them up on her head just like a celebrity. Her hair was long and dark and she wore a little lavender suit. It was like something women wore on TV. Stylish.
She was smiling at Rowan, and though her teeth were blindingly white and really even, there was some quality in the smile that distracted from her beauty, something that to Rowan looked …
hungry
.
As she came up the walk, the woman’s eyes were on Rowan, the whole time the smile plastered there
(like the smiles on the two church women who sometimes came to their apartment door on Sundays, smiling just like that and holding out booklets with titles like
God Misses You
and
Won’t You Come Home to God?)
The woman stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.
have you found Jebus Mrs. Wittmore?
When she spoke, her voice was musical, warm and rich, like …
barbecue
.
“Well, hel-lo!” The woman actually winked. “You must be Rowan.” A (musical) laugh spilled out of her perfectly pink lips. “You look just like your mother.” The syllables of
your mother
were drawn out. The woman kept smiling, the smile practically stuck there, for a full half-minute. It didn’t reach her eyes. Briefly those eyes flicked over Rowan’s whole self, from hair to toes, and then back up to her face.
“You look like … your mother,” she said again, and finally she lost the smile.
Rowan didn’t know what response she should make to that sort of declaration, especially said twice. Obviously this woman wanted her to say something. So finally she said, “Oh.” At her feet Old Tex had begun his lurching rise. Beneath the grunts and groans Rowan thought she heard him growl. She put her hand on his head when he was all the way up.
“You’re going to be a real beauty,” the woman said, the words tumbling from her pink lips that showed her perfect white teeth, and this time Tex really did growl, though so quietly probably only Ro heard it. She scratched behind his ear.
“Rowan. Such a pretty name. Do you know what it means?”
“It’s a tree,” Rowan said. The dog pushed his head against her hand.
state yer bidness stranger
“That’s right!” the woman said.
Weirdo number two
. “Um, can I help you?”
“I’m an old friend of your mom’s. I was her best friend in school. Her very
best
friend.”
“Oh.”
The woman continued to smile, the sun glinting off the sunglasses propped on her head.
And?
As if she’d heard Rowan’s thought, she purred, “I’m just dying to say hello.” She looked up at the house, and just the tiniest hint of a frown wrinkled her otherwise perfect forehead.
Rowan decided she disliked this woman, even if she didn’t really know why. “I’ll get her. She’s just in the kitchen.”
“No!” the woman said, and laughed again. “Let me do it.” She bent low, swooping like a bird, and scooped up a handful of gravel from beside the walk. It was an oddly elegant gesture. She winked again at Rowan. Taking a couple of steps closer to the house, she made a pretty show of picking out a tiny stone from her palm, lined up and tossed it at the door. It hit the window with a glassy
ping
. She giggled like a kid, and for a second Rowan warmed to her.
There was no response from inside.
Her mother’s
best friend
shook her head and picked out another pebble. She tossed it as expertly as the first. It too hit the window. Louder this time.
Rowan started to say, “I’ll just get—”
And then the door pushed open and her mother came out in her T-shirt and scruffy jeans, her face screwed into an annoyed frown.
“Rowan, what the heck—”
Rowan pointed at the woman on the sidewalk. “It was her.”
Paula looked at the
best friend
completely blankly, and then her head made a shocked dip of recognition.
“Paula Wittmore, as I live and breathe,” the woman said, hands on her hips now.
The screen door swung shut behind Paula with a slam. Old Tex jumped and lowered his head. Rowan stroked his neck.
It’s okay
.
“Oh, my god!” Paula was off the porch at a run and threw her arms around the dark-haired woman. “Marla! Marla Riley! Look at you! Cripes—it can’t be Riley, though? You must be married.”
“Married.” Marla grinned and wiggled a huge ring on her left hand. “But I’m hyphenated, very chic: Riley-Moore.” She pulled Paula into another hug, then held her at arm’s length. “I have to take a good look at you.”