A Sound Among the Trees (20 page)

And then the dream would morph into something unreal.

On the day of Susannah’s eighty-fifth birthday, Adelaide had been eight.

Her great-grandmother had not wanted to be fussed over or to have a multitude of well-wishers traipsing inside Holly Oak. She agreed to a small gathering in the garden with just close family and friends. Adelaide could still taste the tang of raspberry lemonade on her tongue, even eight decades later. She had never had it before.

Late in the afternoon, her great-grandmother had sent Adelaide into the parlor to fetch a shawl, and when she returned with it, Susannah thanked her and then murmured, “I do believe I am not long for this world, Adelaide Rose.”

Adelaide hadn’t known what she meant.

Susannah leaned close to her. “I can’t say that around your grandmother and mother. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear a lot of things. The thing about you, Adelaide, is you are too young to understand about the echoes in this house and too young to want to. I want you to remember this, child: I did everything I could. I did everything I
could. Someday when you want to know the truth, you’ll find it beneath you. Under your feet. You walk upon it. We all do.”

Adelaide had stood transfixed, pondering her great-grandmother’s strange words. She remembered looking down at the paving stones at her feet. Then she opened her mouth to ask her great-grandmother what she meant, but a trio of guests intruded upon them to say their good-byes. Susannah looked at Adelaide and laid a finger to her lips.

That was the last conversation Adelaide had with her great-grandmother.

The next morning, an hour after a brilliant April sunrise, Adelaide found her great-grandmother dead in the wingback chair in her room, having passed from one life to the next in those stray moments between sleep and consciousness. Adelaide did not know Susannah was dead. She thought her great-grandmother had fallen asleep in her chair again. She went downstairs and told her mother Nana wouldn’t wake up for breakfast.

After the funeral, and for many months afterward, Adelaide dreamed of finding Susannah alive in her chair and hearing her great-grandmother repeating those odd words from the party.

Sometimes she would dream of finding Susannah in her chair in the parlor or in the garden or in the slave’s quarters that Susannah said had been Tessie’s room. Her great-grandmother would always be in her nightgown, the one Adelaide found her dead in, but she would always be warm and alive and talking. Not cold and stiff and silent like Adelaide had found her.

And she would always repeat the message.

I did what I could
.

The answers are beneath you
.

After awhile the dream faded away, and Adelaide would only experience it again if someone mentioned Susannah’s name or if she lingered too long on the stairs and caught her great-grandmother’s young eye at the portrait near the landing.

But it had been twenty years since Adelaide had had that dream.

Until she had it again at the hospital.

She dreamed Susannah was sitting in her wingback chair in her bedroom as Adelaide remembered it, her white floss hair tumbling down her shoulders like a bridal veil. Susannah’s hands were folded in her lap, and her head was bowed as if in prayer. Adelaide couldn’t make out her great-grandmother’s facial features; it was as though a sheet of water, like the backside of a waterfall, separated them. Adelaide took a step closer and was instantly aware that every part of her body ached, and her left arm felt as though a vice encircled it. She looked down at her misshaped wrist, its unnatural curl. It was broken. Anger soared inside her, and she looked up at her great-grandmother.

“Haven’t I suffered enough for you?” she heard herself rasping. “Haven’t we all suffered enough?”

The sheet of water fell away, and her great-grandmother raised her head. But instead of seeing the old woman of eighty-five, Adelaide was looking into the eyes of the young Susannah whose portrait hung at the top of the stairs. This Susannah now reached for Adelaide, grabbed her broken wrist and squeezed, clamping down on the vice with all her might. Adelaide crumpled to the floor in anguish, screaming for help, but hearing only a muffled wheeze coming from her mouth.

And then she awoke.

She was aware first that she was not back at Holly Oak; she was in a hospital bed. No one was squeezing her broken wrist; it was pulsating with pain of its own accord. She turned to the window and grimaced as pain rippled through her. The rain had stopped, and washed sunlight was sliding through blinds that no one had closed from the night before.

Her arm felt like it was on fire.

The privacy curtain was suddenly wrenched open, the metal rings scraping across the pole like nails shaken in a tin can. A smiling, black-haired nurse appeared with a breakfast tray.

“And how are we feeling today, Mrs. McClane?” the woman said.

“Like I’ve been thrown down the stairs by an angry ghost,” Adelaide muttered.

And the nurse threw back her head and laughed.

The doctor had been by and pronounced her well enough to go home by the time Carson and Marielle arrived at noon. She was sitting in the chair in her room waiting for them, with her tulips in her lap—balanced with her good arm—in the clothes she had arrived in the day before. Her left arm hung in a sling—navy blue with white trim. And her head was a bit mushy from the painkiller the nurse had given her.

“You didn’t both have to come,” she said when they walked into her room.

“Sorry I wasn’t here yesterday, Mimi.” Carson bent over her and kissed her forehead, “Really sorry.”

“It wouldn’t have changed anything if you had been.” But Adelaide immediately wondered if she was mistaken. If Carson had been there, Marielle wouldn’t have been snooping around in the studio. And if Marielle hadn’t been in the studio, Adelaide wouldn’t have been on the stairs wondering what Marielle was doing.

“Sleep okay?” Marielle asked.

“Until the drugs wore off.” Adelaide put out her arm, and Carson helped her out of the chair.

“They’re going to want you to ride down to the car in a wheelchair, Mimi,” Carson said.

“Nonsense. I broke a wrist, not a leg.”

“But they—”

“All right, all right.” Adelaide sat back down in the chair. “Do you have the prescriptions for the pharmacy?”

“Got them right here.” Carson patted his shirt pocket. “We can stop by Goolrick’s on the way home. And I’ve got your post-op instructions too. You’re all set. Don’t worry. We’ll take good care of you.”

“I’m not worried. Why should I be worried? It’s just a broken wrist.”

Carson looked at Marielle, and an unspoken comment passed between them. Something was up. Something they weren’t telling her.

“It is just a broken wrist, right?” She looked from one to the other.

“Yes. Only a broken wrist,” Marielle said quickly.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“There’s something we need to tell you, Mimi,” Carson’s voice was laced with concern.

“What? Is it one of the children? Did something happen to one of the children?”

“No. Nothing like that.” Carson replied quickly. “It’s Caroline. She’s back.”

The air in the room seemed to thicken. “What did you say?” Adelaide whispered.

“Caroline’s home.”

The police hadn’t looked for Caroline the day she ran away. She had been just a few weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, nearly the age when leaving home was a celebratory event accompanied by mortarboard tassels and shopping for dorm furniture.

Nearly a year had passed before Adelaide got a phone call from her.

“I just wanted you to know I’m okay,” Caroline had said, sounding very far away.

“Please come home.” Adelaide replied, keeping her emotions in check.

“No.” The response had been swift. Rehearsed, perhaps.

“Caroline. Whatever it is that you’ve done, I don’t care. I just want—”

“Whatever
I
have done?” A whooshing sound filled the space behind her daughter’s voice, barely masking her indignation. Her daughter was calling from a pay phone on a busy street. Adelaide could still feel the knife blade of her daughter’s quick reproof.

“You’re saying it’s
my
fault you don’t want to come home?” Adelaide had asked.

Caroline had paused for just a moment. When she spoke, her voice was hot with anger. “What is with you and that house and someone having to be at fault for everything?” Her daughter swore, and Adelaide closed her eyes against the sound of those ugly words.

“I just … I don’t understand, Caroline!” she had blurted, anger now fusing her words together.

“You know what, Mother? Neither do I. I gotta go.”

“Caroline! Please. You need help! You need a doctor.”

“Good-bye.”

“Please! Call me again, will you?”

But Caroline had hung up without promising anything.

She called again, a couple of times. Showed up a few times in her early twenties. Never promising anything.

Except when she was twenty-six and arrived at Holly Oak with a baby named Sara.

She had promised something then.

“I won’t ask you to give her back to me,” Caroline had said, after she asked Adelaide to take Sara. “I’ll sign whatever papers I have to. I promise I won’t ask you to give her back.”

And she didn’t.

It surprised Adelaide how little Caroline had changed physically in the nearly fifty years her daughter had been in and mostly out of her life. The shape of her nose—Charles’s—and the plucky swell of her cheekbones—Adelaide’s—and the silvery blue hue of her eyes—Caroline’s own—were time-stopping icons of the past. Only the lines in Caroline’s skin, the steel-gray strands in her hair, and Adelaide’s own sense of impending mortality suggested decades had swept past them both.

When Adelaide arrived home from the hospital, her daughter was waiting for her in the garden, sipping a glass of sweet tea and reading from a slim volume, the title of which Adelaide could not see. The book looked old and treasured. Caroline set the book down on the glass-topped table in front of her when Adelaide stepped out onto the patio.

“Hello, Mother.” Caroline rose from her chair and came to her, hesitant for only a moment. Then she put her hands on Adelaide’s shoulders, as if in benediction, leaned in, and kissed her on the nonbandaged side of her forehead.

“Caroline.” Her daughter’s name fell off her lips more in wonder than greeting. Caroline seemed not to notice the difference. Caroline touched the strap of the sling over Adelaide’s shoulder and followed it down to the hammock of cloth that kept her arm close to her heart.

“Are you in much pain?” Caroline said, her brows knitted in concern.

The irony of those five words caught Adelaide at a strange place, and she nearly laughed out loud.
Come now, Caroline. I live at Holly Oak
. She shook her head. “Not too bad. Doctor says I should recover well. No sewing for a while, though. Pearl is going to help me finish an order I’m working on.”

Caroline laughed lightly. “Pearl. So there goes any hope of a quiet homecoming for me.”

Several awkward seconds of silence followed. Adelaide had a million questions on her mind but found herself unable to give voice to any of them.