A Sound Among the Trees (5 page)

“Having a good time?” he murmured.

She laughed lightly. “Until we started talking about ghosts.”

He squeezed her shoulders as they began to stroll slowly back to the other side of the house and the reception. “Don’t pay any attention to Pearl and her stories. She’s just a funny old lady with an overactive imagination. There are no ghosts inside that house, I assure you.”

“Does Adelaide believe there’s a ghost?”

Carson took several steps in silence. “No,” he finally said.

“You hesitated.”

Carson shrugged. “She has kind of an eerie respect for this house. It’s kind of quirky sometimes.”

Marielle had only spent scattered moments in Adelaide’s presence in the week since she and Carson and the children had returned from Phoenix. Not enough to know what Carson was alluding to.

“What do you mean by quirky?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing, I guess. Anyway, she’s pretty quick to brush off Pearl’s stories. Pearl’s kind of, well, she’s a bit dramatic and silly sometimes. It surprises me that she and Mimi are such good friends. Mimi’s not that way at all. I guess sometimes opposites do attract …” He broke off and cracked a lopsided grin. “Hey. Weren’t you the one who wanted to talk about something else? You were having a lovely time until the subject of ghosts came up, right? Mimi did okay with the planning?”

Marielle let her question fall away. “It’s been a lovely reception. She did a wonderful job.”

“Didn’t she, though? I originally thought she’d rather we had the reception at one of the hotel ballrooms or the country club or even the church because—” He stopped abruptly, seeming to nearly choke on his words. He shot a look toward her.

“Because you had your reception with Sara here,” Marielle finished for him.

“Marielle, I’m sorry. I can’t believe I said that.”

“We agreed not to eggshell this, right? You had your reception with Sara here. I’m sure it was lovely too.”

He inhaled and exhaled audibly. “Yes. It was. And it was a long time ago.”

“But a lot of these same people came to it, I suppose.”

“Some. Yes.”

The back of Holly Oak loomed over them as they turned at the northwest corner of the house. Marielle felt its shadow fall over them.

Her thoughts carried her to the conversation she and Carson had after he proposed and she accepted. They had met up in DC—their second in-person meeting—and then driven to Fredericksburg the next day so that she could meet Hudson and Brette. Marielle had been awed by the house’s age and size, and she’d remarked to him what a beautiful house it was. As they stood at the window on the second floor landing overlooking the south-side garden and patio, he asked if she would be okay with living at Holly Oak after their wedding. He’d said the house would be jointly owned in trust by his children at Adelaide’s passing and that since they had never lived anywhere else, he was reluctant to move them. Her first thought was one of caution.

“You don’t want us to have our own place?”

“We kind of will have our own place. It’s a big house, Marielle. And Mimi’s almost ninety. We can keep the maid service I hired if you want, or I’ll let them go. Whatever you want. The kitchen can be all yours. Mimi makes all her own meals anyway.”

She had stared at the bedroom doors that flanked her on all sides.

“Which room did you and Sara share?” she had asked.

Carson had turned his head toward a door at the southwest corner. “It’s just a guest room now.”

And then he’d told her she would never even have to go into that room if she didn’t want to. There were plenty of bedrooms on the second floor and even one on the third floor where the kids slept.

“Do you ever go in that room?” she asked.

He had paused for just a second. “I used to. But I don’t anymore.”

The resolve in his voice moved her. She said yes, that she was okay with it. Now as they walked in Holly Oak’s shadow, a trickle of doubt ribboned through her for the third time that day.

“So, this is still what you think we should do, right? Live here? In this house?” she asked.

Carson glanced up at the house’s massive backside before turning to face the lawn that stretched ahead of them. Hudson and Brette, twenty-some feet away, were sitting on the steps to the old slaves’ quarters, the rabbit sandwiched in between them. He tightened his arm around Marielle’s waist as if he’d started to fall and was catching himself. “I don’t want to be afraid to live here. I don’t want to think that I can’t be with you. Here.”

“I know what you
don’t
want; I’m just a little … I mean, I know it’s only been a week, but … I wonder if maybe we’re asking too much of ourselves.”

“It’s going to be fine. We’re going to be fine. You and I …”

But his voice fell away, and he did not finish his thought.

This time, Marielle did not attempt to finish it for him. She had no idea what it was he had started to say.

Brette raised her head from where she sat with her skirted knees up against her chest. Rising from the steps, she ran toward them. Marielle couldn’t tell if the little girl was running toward her, toward Carson, or toward the in-between place that separated them.

Marielle hadn’t planned to correspond with anyone on her online dating account who didn’t already live in the southwest. It was the fourth time in five years Marielle was giving online dating a try, and she had formulated
several deal-breaker rules that she’d promised herself she would not renege on. No one younger than she by more than five years. No one recently divorced. No one who didn’t call back when they said they would. No one who called her Mary Ellen. No one who wanted to meet up at a cocktail lounge in a hotel lobby. No one who didn’t live within a couple of hours’ drive. Experience had taught her that a few ground rules were a good thing.

When a glitch deposited a Virginia man’s profile into her inbox, Marielle had been a mere keystroke away from deleting it when she saw that Carson Bishop didn’t like chocolate. At all.

Having never met a person who also did not like chocolate, she perused the rest of his profile and discovered he also didn’t like roller coasters or tight spaces or shellfish. Marielle’s first correspondence to Carson was a simple e-mail quipping that she had begun to believe she was the only person on the planet who didn’t like Hershey’s on the half shell. She had no intention of continuing to e-mail him. She told him plainly in her e-mail that it was too bad he did not live closer as she might’ve pursued a friendship with him.

When he e-mailed back commenting that he too wished she lived closer, a tiny fissure formed in her tightly constructed parameters. She e-mailed him back.

And the electronic conversation continued.

She learned Carson was forty and the widowed father of a son and daughter. His wife, Sara, had died four years earlier from complications of an ectopic pregnancy. He was a systems engineer for a defense contractor in DC and lived with his kids and their great-grandmother in a one-hundred-sixty-year-old mansion in Fredericksburg’s oldest neighborhood.

A graduate of William and Mary as well as Virginia Tech, he liked live stage over film, Tim Hortons coffee when he could get it, playing tennis, and the color green. Raised Methodist. Wore his sandy brown hair cut short and rimless glasses. Loved to watch old movies and hang out with his
kids. Unskilled at instigating a relationship with a woman, his friends at work had spent the last year coercing him to try online dating. He hadn’t yet corresponded with anyone he’d been matched with. Marielle was the first person to respond to his profile that he had replied back to.

He’d confided in her because she was safe. She was too far away to worry about having to meet in person right away or take out on a date. It had been a long time since he’d been on a date. She had found his vulnerability strangely endearing.

After eight weeks of e-mails and then dozens of phone calls, Marielle began to feel like their random meeting online hadn’t been random at all.

“I know I haven’t even met him yet, but I think I’m falling in love with him,” she told her mother. “He’s not like the other guys I’ve dated. He’s always more interested in finding out how my day was than he is telling me about his. He calls me when he says he’s going to call, he laughs at my jokes, he asks about you and Dad. He … he just makes me feel like I’m important.”

“But … what if you meet him and there are just … no sparks?” her mother had cautioned.

In the last decade Marielle had learned to mistrust relationships that started out with fireworks like the Fourth of July and then fizzled on any ordinary gray day in November. She could already tell there was something different about her attraction for Carson. He made her feel relaxed and peaceful. There was no pounding
kaboom
. No eye-popping dazzle. It felt very natural. And she liked it.

“I’m not worried about that,” she’d answered.

Her mother had paused for a moment before adding, “You do know there aren’t any deserts in Virginia.”

Marielle had nodded. She loved the desert.

But the desert was not a lover.

he last of the wedding presents—a tall, lead crystal water pitcher that stood atop a crush of white tissue paper—lay open on Marielle’s lap. The cut glass caught sunlight at odd angles and splashed prisms in all directions onto the garden’s patio stones. Adelaide poked at a miraged rainbow drop with her foot, and Hudson, sitting next to her, laughed and stomped on the one nearest him.

“It’s beautiful, thank you.” Marielle beamed toward Pearl, who sat one table away in the shade with the rest of the Blue-Haired Old Ladies. Most of the guests hadn’t stayed for the opening of the presents, just family and close friends. But the Ladies had.

“I know Adelaide’s got dozens of water pitchers, but you need one of your own!” Pearl seemed quite pleased with herself.

Hudson leaned toward his great-grandmother. “Does she, Mimi?” he whispered. “Does she need one of her own?”

Adelaide peered at him. “Let Pearl have her little delusions,” she whispered back.

“What?”

“I’m not sharing my water pitchers.”

Hudson’s mouth broke into a slow grin. “You’re teasing me.”

“It’s been a long day.”

“It’s been a
boring
day. I’m bored.” Hudson looked to the table of opened presents, the remains of the cake, the empty champagne bottles. “We’re done now, right?”

Adelaide rubbed a callous on her finger, formed by sewing brass buttons and golden braid for years on end. “Depends on what you mean by ‘done.’ ”

“I mean, I can go now, right? That’s what I mean.”

Adelaide regarded her great-grandson, studied his face. People said he favored Adelaide’s side, that he had Sara’s eyes, Caroline’s chin, and her nose. She saw the resemblance—who couldn’t?—and it pleased her. She resisted the urge to lay a wrinkled hand on his head—he hated that—to feel the comfort in his boyness. There hadn’t been a boy born at Holly Oak until Hudson since 1863. Adelaide’s gaze rose instinctively to Brette, who sat across from her, practically on Marielle’s mother’s lap, toying with the woman’s charm bracelet. The child was drunk on grandmotherly attention from a woman whose only grandchild to that point was a chatty boy with a vacuum cleaner name.

Adelaide wasn’t sure what the future held for Brette. Hudson’s arrival hadn’t kept Sara alive, hadn’t brought Caroline crawling back. Hudson would surely, if not eventually, usher in something new, but that wouldn’t change what had happened before. Nothing could do that.

“I know what you mean, Hudson,” she murmured. “But we have guests. And it would not be fair to Kirby for you to disappear into the house and leave him here in the garden.”

Adelaide motioned with her head to where Kirby sat next to his parents on the opposite side of the tables of spectators. He was thumbing through a large, colorful cookbook—one of the gifts. The bow tie he had on earlier was now peeking out of his front pants pocket.

“He won’t care, Mimi. He thinks I’m a kid.”

“You are.”

“He thinks he’s older than me.”

“He is older than you.”

“He won’t care.”

“If you are going into the house to play a game or to watch the
television you will need to ask that boy who thinks he is older than you if he would like to join you.”