Suddenly, Bette knew why she was here.
Jill
May 6, Halcyon House
T
HE NEXT DAY
, after she got Whens off to school, Jill went up to her tower room.
She had not been here in several years. All the big-leaved tropical plants she had cared for had died slow deaths. Webs festooned the corners, spangled with desiccated victims.
She struggled with the sash of one tall window until it finally gave way and opened. Two men, one white and one black, jogged past. The black man, who had a beard and moved in a slow, easy lope, gazed at the house a long time, then saw her, and waved.
She waved back and dropped into a chair covered with old clothes. During most of the sixties, when this was her retreat, her lair, her art studio, her mother had run a Montessori school in the back room downstairs and was absent every few months on what she and Sam told them were “education seminars.” Brian and Megan had not lived through those same years.
How could one possibly atone for such an act? She couldn’t return those lost years.
Everyone’s memory was unique, anyway, she told herself, but that didn’t help much. Neither did “Maybe things are better for everyone than they would have been otherwise,” or “Everyone has regrets,” her therapist’s favorite. Sitting back in her chair, she thought about the world at large: Yes, it was demonstrably better. It was a game of averages. Kind of like quantum mechanics. Taken as a whole, events were predictable. But singly, quanta—packages of light—were not.
Jill absently picked up a piece of cloth from the pile on which she sat and ran it through her fingers, feeling its texture: thin, but striped with a slightly more dense ribbing. She had made bell-bottom pants out of this fabric in—
1967.
She held up the pants. Apparently, she had been impossibly skinny. Though she was thin now, she could not possibly wear them.
She closed her eyes and let the spring-scented breeze play across her face. Warming asphalt, cool scent of water from the creek, fresh-cut grass.
The Summer of Love, they had called it. Walking the streets of Georgetown, you caught the sweet scent of marijuana and hashish wafting from upstairs apartments, could duck into hole-in-the-wall head shops, walls aglow with black-light posters. There had been a frontier of the unknown then, like a new horizon, a time when everyone thought that the future would be very, very different.
Well, it certainly was.
Besides, those years had never happened. Not here. There had been no Summer of Love, no Vietnam War, no student protests.
But where were those years?
Her mother had a clapping exercise that she did with the children to show them how the parts of language functioned. “Clap!” (Lots of clapping.) “Stop clapping.” Silence. “Where has the clapping gone?”
Those were the verbs, symbolized by a red circle.
Nouns, however, symbolized by a black triangle, did not vanish. They filled the room: floor, table, chair.
Those years had vanished, like verbs.
But, then, why were these pants here? Huh. Some of the nouns were left. Sturdy old things. She tossed the pants aside and returned to the window.
A little boy playing in the yard across the street looked up at her and screamed, “A ghost! Mommy!” He ran crying inside his house.
Jill, grinning, hurried downstairs, ran across the street, and met the boy’s mother as she came out of her front door, carrying the child.
The neighbor’s house was a well-maintained American Foursquare, with dusty-yellow brick and delphinium-blue trim. They shook hands and the woman said, “Emmie Weatherton. I’m sorry. Terence, you’re too heavy to carry.” She set the boy down. “The kids have said for years that ghosts live there.” She laughed. “I’m glad to see a real person in the house again.” Terence tried to hide behind his mother.
They shook hands. “Jill Dance. I grew up here.”
“I work at the Library of Congress, so I’m usually not home during the day.” Emmie’s fine-featured face was ebony, and she was tall and thin. “My au pair is here, though.” She gestured toward a white woman who waved from inside the window. “Her name is Jenny. Terence, say hi to Jill. Shake hands.”
Jill squatted down. “Terence? My name is Jill.”
He regarded her with suspicion. Jill said, “I have a little boy named Whens. He should be home soon. Maybe you can come over and play. We have a new swing set in the backyard.”
“I have a sandbox. With lots of Spacies. They live in tunnels on Mars.”
“Sounds perfect!” Jill rose. She and Emmie smiled at each other. “Drop by some time for coffee,” said Jill.
A breeze fluttered the leaves of the huge oaks in Emmie’s front yard. The two joggers Jill had seen earlier rounded the corner again, looking as if they were definitely on their last lap. Emmie saw them and waved them into the yard. “Are you two trying to kill yourselves? Let me introduce you to our new neighbor, Jill—”
“Dance.” Jill held out her hand.
“Will Jacobson,” said the pink-faced man, mopping his face and hands with the tail of his T-shirt before shaking hands with Jill. His pale hair was plastered to his head by sweat. “I live two streets over, next door to Dan.”
“Daniel Kandell,” said the other man, holding out his hand. “Did I see you up in the turret window?”
“That was me.”
Daniel took Jill’s hand, grasped it quickly, and released it. “You’re moving in?”
“Moving back in. It’s my family’s house.”
As he looked across the street, hands on his hips, she studied him.
He was a large man, about five-eleven, and in better shape than Will. His legs and shoulders were not those of a bodybuilding fanatic, but looked solid and strong. Smile creases radiated from the corners of his brown eyes, but right now his expression was serious, appraising, as if he were collecting information, engaging in reverie, and coming to interesting conclusions simultaneously, nodding as he thought. He kept his hair short and his beard, with barely discernable gray, professional looking, had no odd stylistic spaces or weirdly shaped patches. She couldn’t tell how old he was. Forty-five? Fifty?
He realized she was looking at him, and smiled at her so quickly that she wondered if she had imagined the seriousness of his expression as he’d examined the house. “How old is it?”
“Built in the early nineteen hundreds. It, um, needs a little work.”
He laughed. “I hope you’re independently wealthy.”
Will began jogging in place. “I’m stiffening up. I’ll either have to call an ambulance or get going.”
“Nice to meet you.” The two men waved and continued their run; Jill saw Daniel look over at the house once again.
She took leave of Emmie and crossed back to her house, thinking,
Why are those pants still here? And the house; my brother and sister?
What part of that life is gone, and what remains?
* * *
She was surprised to see Brian drive up in his unrepentant gas-guzzling truck as she climbed the stairs to the porch. She ran back down and met him on the sidewalk.
“Howdy, stranger,” she said, and hugged him. “Come on inside.”
Brian stepped into the foyer. “Hi, Manfred.” He patted Manfred as he looked around. “Wow. You’ve really cleaned it up.”
“Yeah. And the whole house looks as good as this.” They both laughed. “Want something to drink?”
“Some iced tea would be good.”
Of course she had some. All of them were iced tea fiends, even in winter. The tea had to be loose, preferably purchased from a certain teashop in Georgetown, perfectly steeped, with only lemon.
“Do you remember when you spit out your iced tea at Hogate’s because it had sugar in it?” she asked, setting their glasses on the table.
“Ugh, yes.” He frowned. “An awful surprise to spring on somebody.” He looked at his glass with suspicion. “Why did you have to remind me?”
They sat with their elbows on the kitchen table, sipping tea. The windows were open, and a breeze ruffled the curtains. “It’s kind of nice here,” Brian said.
“How’s business?”
“Oh, going great guns. We just landed a new contract.”
“And the kids?”
“Fine.”
“You’re all going to have to come over for dinner. Maybe this Sunday afternoon?”
“I’ll ask Cindy. Sounds good to me.” He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Jill, I’m kind of worried about you and Stevie living here alone.”
“Call him Stevie and see what happens.”
“That’s another thing.”
She shrugged. “We’re fine. Especially with Manfred.”
“She’s just a big creampuff.”
“Yeah, but she sounds like a raging boar and can push people over with one paw.”
“Do you have a gun?”
“With a kid in the house? They are illegal. And, as you know, this is a very safe neighborhood. What are you really worried about, Brian?”
He stood up, loosened his tie, rubbed his hair so that it stood up. He looked out the kitchen window and she let him look. He had to say it himself. He took down one of their mother’s old, and little used, cookbooks from a nook and flipped through it.
Finally he turned to her and said, “Why don’t you move in with us? I’ve talked about it with Cindy and she thinks it’s a great idea.”
“Sure, she does.” Jill grinned. “You’ve got plenty of room. I could sleep on the coffee table. And I could help with the kids?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“So?”
“You’re just too fragile.”
“Fragile?” She jumped up and lifted the heavy wooden kitchen chair over her head. “Want to step outside, buster?”
Say it,
she thought,
say it
.
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Crazy!” He finally yelled. “Crazy!”
She set the chair down and plopped back into it. “That’s progress. Sure. I know you and Megan think that I’m nuts and want to keep an eye on me.” She took a sip of tea. “If you’re that worried, there are a few extra floors you guys could use here.”
“That’s not it, Jill. This is the worst place you could possibly live. You’re just dwelling on the past—in the past.”
“I’m sure I am,” she said soberly, thinking,
several
pasts, actually. “But what’s wrong with that?”
“You can go back to work if you want?”
“I’m not just mooning around the house twenty-four hours a day, if that’s what you mean, and going mad, mad, completely mad. I’ve been moving in. I’m going back to the Bank in a few days, full-time; I’ve been working part-time. I’m managing the store again, and I’ll work there two evenings a week and maybe Saturday mornings, depending on whether Elmore has Whens.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little too
much
work?”
“You’re clearly one of those people who are never pleased. How much do you work, Mr. Take-It-Easy? Eighty hours a week?”
“Oh, only about sixty.”
“That means it must be at least seventy, and look at what a nervous wreck you are. Besides, we’re letting this valuable house go to rack and ruin. I have to get it back in shape. Dad might come back…”
“And that’s another thing! You wouldn’t let us look for him when we could, not for nearly long enough.”
“That’s not true. You could have stayed there. I was just … too … I don’t know.”
Too sad. Too responsible
.
“Too what, Jill? You just plain flipped out, back in Germany. Kind of like you did last month.”
“Good grief, Brian, that’s a very rude way to talk to a fragile woman. You didn’t do much better. If you recall.”
“It’s not funny. Now we all have kids, jobs—it would be much more difficult. If—well, we just need to know what happened to them. I think it’s driving us all crazy.”
She thought,
Yup, that’s probably true
. A horn honked outside. “That’s the van.”
“Lucky you. Saved by the horn,” he muttered, and followed her to the front door and outside, knocking aside the head-high hydrangea blossoms bowed across the bottom of the stairs.
Whens leaped from the open van door. “Uncle Brian!”
Brian picked him up and swung him around. “Your pack is bigger than you are! How do you like your new house?”
Whens responded by climbing onto Manfred’s back. “Giddyup, doggie.”
Jill glared at him. “Get off her back right now!”
“She said that she wanted to pretend that she was a horse.”
“I doubt it. Sit!” Manfred sat down. Whens slid from her back. “Listen, after dinner, Daddy is going to pick you up.”
Brian said, “Got to get back to work. See you soon, Stevie.”
“My name is WHENS!”
As Brian drove off, Whens frowned. “I don’t want to go to Daddy’s. I hate that lady.”
He screwed his face into such a fierce scowl that Jill had to choke back laughter. “What lady?”
“The Lavender Lady. She’s there all the time.”
Jill thought carefully, unsurprised, trying to decide what to say. Her name was Tracy, and she really did wear a dense fog of what was probably incredibly expensive perfume. Of course, she was a lawyer who worked at Elmore’s dream firm, and much more aligned to Elmore’s worldview. Jill felt an odd rush of relief. Jill cared deeply about Elmore, but the last few months had burned away the gloss of misplaced optimism that had sustained her for so many years. Maybe Tracy could help him come to terms with himself better than she had. “How do you feel about that?”
“
You
need to be there. Not her. She won’t let me into the room at night. She locks the door.”
Whens was used to running to their bedroom at the least glimpse of his many nighttime monsters.
“And?”
“And I don’t like it! I get scared.”
“Did you tell Daddy?”
“I banged on the door! I cried and screamed! They wouldn’t open the door. I heard her laughing! I went back and cried and cried into my pillow. I made it very, very wet.” His face grew solemn. “I knew that when Daddy looked at the pillow, he’d know how sad I was. But by morning it was all dried out.” He slumped to the ground, leaned against his pack, and sighed. “I should have poured a glass of water on it.”
Jill succeeded at not laughing. “I’m sorry, sweetie. It upsets me that you’re afraid at night. I will give you a phone, and you call me any time you wake up.”