Read A Sound Among the Trees Online

Authors: Susan Meissner

A Sound Among the Trees (9 page)

BOOK: A Sound Among the Trees
6.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

She did love them.

She loved them.

But loving them didn’t mean she couldn’t love other things. Like a
job. Like having a purpose outside of the house. Carson had told her he would help her find a new job if she wanted, and she’d said she was fine for now just spending time getting to know the children. Besides, there weren’t desert conservation groups in Fredericksburg needing grant writers. She was going to have to reinvent herself careerwise, and there was enough reinventing going on in her life already …

“Marielle! I said I can’t snap this.”

Brette was kneeling in front of her, an arm outstretched with a half-clothed doll in her hand.

“Sorry.” Marielle took the doll and snapped the tight bodice. “There you go.”

“She’s going on her honeymoon. Like we did.” Brette jammed the doll, alone, into a blue plastic sports car.

“Where’s her groom?” Marielle asked.

Brette looked about the room, littered with Barbie clothes, plastic furniture, and four or five additional blond-headed female dolls. “I don’t know where he is.” She turned back to the doll in the car. “She doesn’t need him. She can go on her honeymoon by herself.”

Marielle watched as Brette zoomed the car around the oval rug in her room, running over little shoes and purses and plastic dishes. A few popped into the air and fell back down like jacks. As Brette pushed the car around the room, Marielle began to wonder how hard it would be to freelance out of the house. Set up a grant-writing business and work out of the room off the kitchen, perhaps? Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to diversify after all. There had to be plenty of nonprofits on the East Coast that needed contracted grant writers; she didn’t have to solely work on environmental projects. Maybe she could do a little copyediting or proposal writing …

“Now she’s at Disney World!” Brette lifted the doll out of the car, held her high for a moment, and then lowered her to the floor. She turned to Marielle. “Want to see my mom’s Barbie clothes? I have them. Mimi gave them to me.”

The word
mom
pulled Marielle’s attention back to Brette. “Sure,” she replied, mentally massaging away the poking reminder that she wasn’t the girl’s first mother. Her only.

Brette hopped up to her feet and opened her closet. She withdrew a vintage cosmetic case, upholstered in pink vinyl with a black handle, and sat back down with it. “They kind of smell. They’re old.”

The girl opened the case and began to pull out tiny outfits, purses, and hats, releasing an odor of aged fabric. Marielle recognized a few pieces from her own childhood Barbie collection. The chef’s apron with its tiny black-checked potholders, the pink ballerina tutu with the white diamond-shaped sparkles, the black lamé sheath.

“And look!” Brette said. “Her bride dress.”

Brette pulled out a white lacy concoction that frothed tulle and acetate. She handed it to Marielle.

“Wow. These are all lovely.”

“They were my mom’s,” Brette said again, and Marielle nodded.

“Did you know my mom?” the girl asked, her head cocked in doubt.

“No. I didn’t.”

“I don’t remember her. But we have movies. Sometimes I like to watch them.”

Marielle smoothed out the wrinkles in the tiny wedding dress. “That sounds like a great way to remember her.”

Brette stared at her. “Do you want to watch them sometime?”

Marielle blinked. A dozen indescribable responses, minuscule and lacking definition, pinged in her head. “Um. Maybe. Sometime.”

“My mommy had blond hair.”

“Like you,” Marielle said stiffly.

“Yours is brown.”

“Yes.”

“But I like it.”

Marielle instinctively reached for her, and Brette climbed in her lap. “I’m glad.”

Brette lay her head against Marielle’s chest, and for several seconds neither one said anything.

For a moment, the room felt right. The moments-ago urgency to set up a business, to fit in, to not count the weeks, drifted a bit, gave up some of its weight. With the little girl in her lap, warm against her skin, Marielle sensed a tender weakening inside. Not just inside her. But inside everything—inside the air around them, the wood floors, the plaster walls that had been painted over and over and over. As if a tumbler had moved into place, just one of many inside a very old lock.

She leaned her chin on Brette’s head, silently reassuring herself that soon she would not be counting the weeks. Soon she would use her own dishes in the kitchen. Soon her portraits would be done and her own wedding picture would hang on the wall. And then a day would come, maybe next year, when she would forget she had been counting weeks, and perhaps they would be a family of five then, and Adelaide’s secrets about curses and record players and ghosts would not matter anymore, and she would not have to convince herself that she loved Carson enough to have married him and his past.

She could see the tip of that future day as she sat with Brette snug in her embrace.

Brette sighed against her. Marielle kissed the top of her head.

“Sometimes I want to call you Mommy,” Brette said.

Marielle nodded.

“But sometimes I don’t.”

The front door opened downstairs. Carson was home.

Brette jumped off her lap and dashed to the door and then the stairs. Marielle stood slowly, and the little wedding dress floated to the floor.

fingernail moon sliced the twilight sky as Adelaide looked out one of the utility room’s windows. On either side of her, shelves filled with canned beans, jars of pickles, and unopened bottles of salad dressing shone in a mix of twilight and incandescence from the single bulb above her. Boxes of juice drinks and spray bottles of sunscreen lay in easy reach on other shelves, along with plastic crates of balls, croquet mallets, and squirt guns. Rolls of paper towels, boxes of cereal, cans of bug spray, and an assortment of flashlights, old phone books, and Christmas lawn ornaments crowded other shelves. A mishmash of empty boxes and bags of foam peanuts and stacks of shopping bags with cord handles swarmed in the corner by a door to the outside that no one ever used. It had been called a utility room since Adelaide was little, but it was more a place to put things until you needed them. A waiting room, really.

Before the Civil War, the room off the kitchen was known simply as Cook’s room. Susannah’s grandfather Eldon Pembroke, who built Holly Oak the summer of 1850, had been a slave owner like most Virginia landowners and kept a contingent of slaves at the house in town while the rest lived at his sheep farm and shearing barns outside of town. The house-workers slept in the slaves’ quarters at the edge of the garden, with the exception of Cook, whose name no one remembered because no one had called her by her name.

By the time Adelaide was born in 1921, her father—a science teacher
at the local high school and a World War I veteran—had renamed it the utility room after having recently spent eighteen months in trenches, longing for a place to store things you might need later.

Three decades after that, when Adelaide’s husband, Charles, financed the house’s first major renovation, the utility room was shortened by several feet to enlarge the kitchen. A long row of windows was set into the south-facing wall so that Adelaide’s mother could tend her collection of needy, fur-leafed African violets. New shelves and cabinets replaced sagging boards and cubbies. Tile was laid over a new cement floor. A couple of decades after that, when Adelaide’s mother was finally placed in a home for people who can no longer remember that fire can burn down a house or that the river can drown you, the violets died and the room became solely a depository of things waiting for their shot at usefulness.

Now Adelaide stood in the center of it with Carson at her side. Marielle was upstairs getting the children ready for bed. “It’s been a long time since this room has been gone through,” Adelaide said.

“I know. I’ve been meaning to take care of it since … well, since before … a long time,” Carson replied.

She turned to him. “I thought you were finished with stumbling over that,” she said.

He smiled halfheartedly. “Sometimes I forget I’m finished with it.”

She watched Carson look about the room, assessing the work ahead of him to clear it of clutter so that Marielle could have it as an office space. Assessing other things too, perhaps.

After four years they had both reached a point where Sara’s absence seemed normal instead of a cruel deviation. Carson’s marrying Marielle had reminded them both what normal used to be and was no longer.

“Sometimes I forget I am finished with it too, Carson,” she said.

He moved his shoulders as if to shake off the momentary weakness. “It shouldn’t take me long to clear this junk out of here. Half of this stuff
can go out in the garage. And if Marielle rearranges the pantry, we can move the extra food in there and maybe stop stockpiling so much of it. This will be a nice room for her to work in, actually, once we get that stuff cleared away from the windows and open it up a bit. She can bring her laptop in here and some of her books and her photographs of the desert. It will be nice.” Carson nodded his head as if in agreement with someone.

Adelaide pursed her lips together, picturing Marielle clacking away at her laptop while Brette and Hudson hung about the parlor doors, bored.

“What about the children? What are they supposed to do when she’s in here?” she asked.

“This really isn’t any different than when Sara set up the art studio in the old slaves’ quarters, Mimi. Same thing, really. And Hudson was younger than Brette is now when she started working in there.”

Carson had a point. But something about Marielle having an office in Holly Oak for a purpose that had nothing to do with Holly Oak needled her. She didn’t know why. “They will come to me if they get restless.”

Carson shook his head. “You won’t have to do anything. Marielle will be right here in the house. The kids don’t need her every waking minute. Besides, when they go to my parents’ house for those three weeks, Marielle is going to need something to do. Something that she’s familiar with and knows. It’s … it’s not been easy for her. She’s …” His voice fell away.

“I know it’s not been easy.”

He swiveled his head to face her. “Has she said anything to you? Did she say something?”

“No, she hasn’t. But I’m not blind, Carson. She relinquished a lot to marry you. I know that. I’m sure you do too.”

Carson said nothing. A flicker of pain moved across his face. “Marielle loves me. And I love her.”

“I didn’t say she doesn’t love you; I said she relinquished a lot to marry you. She gave up her home, her job, her friends, her independence. And
you made her an instant mother; don’t forget that. And then you plunked her down into the house you shared with Sara. This house of ghosts.”

“Don’t start on the whole ghost thing, please.” Carson picked up an empty box and began to toss random items inside it: rain boots, a jump rope, citronella candles, and a faded box of rose food. “The last thing Marielle needs to hear now is that you
do
think there are ghosts in this house.”

“But what is a ghost exactly, if not a startling shimmer of the past that you still see from time to time? I’ve been thinking about this. A ghost doesn’t have to be a person. Pearl doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

Carson threw a bottle of car-wash detergent into the box. “I don’t want to talk about this. Marielle will be back down here any minute to tell me the kids are ready for bed. All this ghost talk of Pearl’s is only making it harder for Marielle to feel at home here. I wish she’d stop. It’s unsettling for Marielle.”

Adelaide sighed. “Yes, I am sure it is. All of it.”

Carson dropped a whiffle ball into the box and looked at her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Adelaide grabbed a couple of boxes of cereal to take to the pantry in the kitchen. “I think we all have our ghosts, in some shape or form. How can we not?”

“Ghosts and memories are not the same thing,” Carson said quietly as he taped the box shut. “Memories are things we get to keep. I’m not going to forget I loved Sara. Marielle and I talked about this, before I ever proposed to her. She doesn’t expect me to forget I loved her. I don’t feel about Sara the way you feel about this house or the way Pearl feels about your great-grandmother. Sara isn’t a ghost. Give me those.” He reached for the cereal boxes.

“I can help empty this room,” Adelaide said.

“You don’t have to. Marielle and I can do this. I think it will be good for her and me to finish this together. Besides, you’re missing
Jeopardy.

She handed him the boxes, and he took them, turning swiftly away from her.

“I’m sorry I said that,” she said.

“Said what?”

“Well, whatever I said that made you say what you just said.”

He put the cereal boxes into an empty Rubbermaid tote. “That you’re missing
Jeopardy
?”

She smiled.

Carson peeked over his shoulder at her and grinned easily.

“I mean, about all of us hanging on to our ghosts,” Adelaide said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I miss Sara too.”

Carson reached for two boxes of graham crackers and said nothing as he placed them in the tote on top of the cereal.

BOOK: A Sound Among the Trees
6.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Borderline by Nevada Barr
Emyr's Smile by Amy Rae Durreson
Femme Noir by Clara Nipper
Blue Moon by Jill Marie Landis
A Shore Thing by Julie Carobini
So Much More by Adams, Elizabeth
Midnight Sacrifice by Melinda Leigh