A Sound Among the Trees (41 page)

Nathaniel does not know his father was mortally wounded at Gettysburg. I have written to his mother in Savannah and offered my condolences. I told her Nathaniel’s recovery will be long and that perhaps when the war is over, he and I and Annabel will take a train to visit her. But I can’t envision that day yet. I can only see the day that I am living at the moment. And I do not see myself ever leaving Holly Oak for good
.

This page is filling with the last of the ink, sweet cousin. You have been the dearest of companions these last three years. Someday I hope to share with you how you saw me through my darkest moments. And how writing to you has given me hope for the days ahead, which are still clouded in mist
.

I am indeed living out the harvest of my choices here at Holly Oak. But I think it will be the very thing that will save me in the end. This is why God did not take Nathaniel on the battlefield when He so easily could have. He brought Nathaniel, an empty vessel, back to Holly Oak, where I, too, have become an empty vessel
.

This place shall be my redemption. And what redeems us, saves us, does it not?

Yours always, my dear cousin
,

Susannah Page

Part Five
HOLLY OAK

delaide awoke with a start and a scorching pain in her arm. The morning sun was brilliant through her half-closed curtains.

She had overslept.

She rose slowly out of bed, swung her legs to the side, and waited as the room settled. The pain medication that helped her sleep at night made her feel like a daft idiot in the morning. And thirsty as a refugee in the desert. She needed water, with ice.

Adelaide fumbled one-handed with a pair of elastic-waist pants and a pullover top and made her way barefooted down the stairs, holding carefully to the rail with her right hand. “Leave me alone, Susannah,” she whispered, only half in jest as she rounded the landing and continued down. “I need a glass of water, for pity’s sake.”

There was no sound in the house. She stood in the entryway and listened, but she could not detect any signs of human life. She poked her head in the drawing room. The long table was still there. The boxes of uniforms sat ready to be mailed on Monday morning. But the room was empty. She shuffled to the kitchen and filled a glass of water, drinking it down in one long swallow. She set the cup in the sink and poked her head in Marielle’s little office. Empty as well.

Marielle and Caroline must already be working on the studio, she thought, and she grabbed a sweater off a hook by the kitchen door, slipped on her garden clogs, and stepped outside. A blast of warm air met her, so
she tossed the sweater back onto a kitchen chair. The day was already on its way to becoming blistering. As she walked across the patio, she wondered if Carson was truly ready for the studio to be emptied of the last of its treasures. He said he was, but she had watched him prepare to leave for his weekend trip to Houston. She had watched him linger over saying good-bye to Marielle, his head turned toward the garden and what lay at the edge of it. It was as if he were saying good-bye to other things than just Marielle. It was probably best. There was nothing beautiful left in the studio. All the pretty things were long gone.

The knoll down to the studio beckoned, but her aching body was protesting. She would probably need a cane to get down the hill. She had one in the hall closet, and she frowned at the thought of going back inside to get it.

Then Caroline appeared at the entrance to the studio. Her daughter looked up from the trash cans that were stationed at the studio entrance like bodyguards.

“Mother, what is it?” she called up to her.

“I just got a little lonely inside. Too quiet.”

“Stay there. I’ll come for you.”

A moment later Caroline was helping her negotiate the slope of the grass. At the entrance to the studio, Adelaide peeked inside the trash cans.

“None of it is worth saving, Mother. You’ll have to trust me,” Caroline said.

Adelaide turned to look inside the studio. Already it looked foreign to her. The shelves and tables were empty. “Where’s Marielle?”

“She graciously allowed me the opportunity to do this alone.”

“I wish you could’ve seen the studio when Sara worked in it,” Adelaide said thoughtfully. “It was so colorful inside. So full of … beauty. It’s such a shame what time has done to it.”

“I did see it once.”

Adelaide turned to her. “Oh yes. I guess you did. Before Brette was born. You were on your way to … Where was it?”

Caroline wiped at a cobweb on her collar. “Doesn’t matter now.”

“Somewhere in Canada, wasn’t it?”

Caroline shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t remember.”

A torn canvas poked out of a trash can, and Adelaide stroked its rough edge. Half of a giraffe had been drawn on it. Sara hadn’t added any spots yet. It looked like an alien creature. “I wish things had turned out differently. It doesn’t seem right that you never got to know her. I wish …”

“ ‘If wishes were horses, beggars—’ ”

“ ‘—would ride,’ yes. You remember me saying that?”

Caroline smiled. “You said it a lot.”

“You had a lot of wishes.”

“I suppose I did.”

Adelaide turned again to the studio, to the last fragments of Sara’s strange creativity. A pull at her heart made her grasp at her shirt. “I tried to do right by her, honestly, I did. When she was little, she would ask about you, you know. Often. She would ask about her father too. She wanted to know who he was and where he was. I had to make up stories. I didn’t know how to tell her the truth.”

“She figured it out, Mother. When I came to visit the summer she turned twelve. She had figured it out. She knew I didn’t know who her father was, and she knew I wasn’t well. The stories made you feel better, and that was important to her. So she let you keep telling them.”

Adelaide turned back around and leaned against the exterior wall, closing her eyes to the image of Sara pretending she believed the excuses Adelaide made up and remembering how she wished she could also believe them. “We were always trying to make restitution for each other, weren’t we?” she said a moment later.

Caroline picked up a broken piece of pottery and chucked it into the trash can. “Most of the time it’s best to clean up your own messes. Who are you really helping when you try to fix something you didn’t break?”

Adelaide looked at her daughter, unsure what Caroline was intimating. It sounded like an accusation of some kind. Against her. “What are you saying, Caroline?”

“I think you know.”

An old wound slowly reopened, and Adelaide tasted anger on her tongue. How could Caroline even hint that she had butted into Caroline’s messes, unwanted? “You brought your infant daughter to me and asked me to raise her and love her and care for her. To fix your mistake. And that’s exactly what I did. It wasn’t like you gave me much of a choice! And now you lecture me on cleaning up your own messes?”

“I wasn’t lecturing. Just stating the obvious. I should’ve cleaned up my own messes. I missed out on everything. I missed out on loving my daughter, and I’m going to have to live with that. Me. Just me. You don’t have to carry that weight. No one does but me.”

Adelaide raised her good arm and pointed a finger at Caroline. “You’re wrong. I have always had to shoulder your burdens. Always!”

“Yes, I know you did, but you chose to. You’ve chosen to bear the weight of everything and everyone who has ever lived here.”

Anger rippled through Adelaide, so intense it made her cough. “That’s what mothers do! But how would you know anything about that?” The words flew out her mouth like an arrow; they stung her lips and she clasped a hand to her mouth. For several moments there was silence between them. Adelaide waited for Caroline to spin on her heel and storm back into the house to gather her things and leave. She was already picturing the last of her years stretching into the mist with no word from Caroline ever again when her daughter spoke.

“You’re right,” Caroline said. “I don’t know much about being someone’s
mother. But I’m not talking about holding on to your children’s burdens; I’m talking about letting go of things that do not belong to you.”

Her daughter’s calm voice frightened her. Caroline stood with dusty hands and smudges on her face and webs clinging to the silvery brown braid down her back as if they were at a garden party making small talk.

“What is it you want to say, Caroline?”

Caroline looked up toward the house and then back again. “I want you to tell them to go.”

“I beg your pardon? Tell who to go?”

“Carson and Marielle and the kids. You need to tell them to go.”

She could not believe what she was hearing. “I could never do that. This is their home!”

“No. This house is not a home. It is a mausoleum. You’ve made it a crypt, Mother. You didn’t mean to, but you did. I couldn’t see it before. I wasn’t well enough to see it before. But I see it now as clear as day. You’re the one who can’t let go of the past. You’re the one with regrets. Not Susannah. Not this house. You.”

Adelaide staggered back against the wall of the studio as if stricken. “How dare you say that to me?”

“Because it’s true,” Caroline said gently. “You needed a reason to explain all the bad things that have happened to you. The house became your reason. You found your great-grandmother dead in her chair after she told you things that didn’t make any sense, and that became the image on which you pinned everything. The house and its terrible grudge. A grudge you couldn’t understand because you were too young and then would never understand because you didn’t know about the other letters. If I had known what you had become, I would have shown you long before this. I had no idea. I was too ill to see it. Susannah doesn’t haunt this house, Mother. You do.”

Adelaide felt lightheaded. Terribly old. Fragile. “Other letters …”

“Yes. Other letters. Susannah wrote other letters. Letters she never sent to her cousin. She never sent them to anyone. They’ve been here the whole time. Hidden in the cellar.”

The cellar.

You walk upon it. We all do
.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Adelaide breathed.

“I know you don’t. But you will. Marielle is reading them right now. And when she is done I want you to read them. And then when Carson gets home tomorrow I want you to tell him to take his family and leave.”

“I … I can’t do that!”

“You have to. You have turned Carson into a shadow of what you are. Addicted to the echoes of his past, just like you. You let him choose to live in this funeral parlor of a house where his first wife died, and you let him keep her picture on the stairs with all the other ghosts, and for heaven’s sake, you never insisted he clean up Sara’s studio. Then he asks to bring Marielle here, and you just let him? Do you know you almost had Marielle believing Susannah was out to get her?”

“But Susannah …”

“Was innocent! She was innocent. Come up to the house, Mother. Read the letters. And then, by God, you will unbind Carson and Marielle and Sara’s children from this house and let them go.”

An instant image of every room at Holly Oak being empty and silent pushed itself to the forefront of her mind, and her body trembled at the thought. “You would have me live here alone?” Adelaide didn’t recognize the childlike timbre of her voice.

Caroline hesitated before reaching out her hand and laying it on Adelaide’s good arm. “Isn’t it time you gave it a try? You’ve never let yourself enjoy this house with just you inside it. Just you and no one else. Never.”

Adelaide turned her head to look at Holly Oak at the top of the sloping lawn, its windows glistening in the morning sun. A tiny fissure seemed
to crack across the fear that gripped her, like a valve letting off pressure—a tiny stream of it.

She trembled slightly, and her broken wrist sent an aching reminder to her brain that she was presently unable to entertain such a heady thought as enjoying her house with just her inside it.

“I can’t even tie a shoelace right now,” she said as she turned back around.

“No, but soon you will,” Caroline said. “And until you can, I will stay here with you.”

arielle sat on the edge of her bed after she had read the last letter, in awe. Susannah Page was nothing like what Adelaide or Eldora had imagined her to be. She had simply been a young woman in love, a young woman who loved to the point of sacrifice. It was impossible that Susannah haunted the house in search of absolution. She already had that, and in Susannah’s eyes it was the house that had given it to her, not kept it from her. Eldora Meeks was wrong.