Acts of God (31 page)

I rented a car at the airport and drove right to Prairie Vista. Nick had already unpacked the little he'd brought with him. Just enough dishes and silverware, sheets and towels to get him through the next few months. Yet there was something cheery and hopeful about the almost barren apartment, and Nick looked as happy as I'd ever seen him when I rang the buzzer. I walked up the dreary stairwell, and he greeted me at the top. “Come check out my new bachelor pad,” he said. It was a convenience, he explained, just across the street from the office. “I'll just be here a month or two,” he assured me.

Nick had decided he would sell the big house by the lake. He didn't need it, he said. “Besides,” he told me, “it was never really mine. Not really.”

He'd buy Margaret and Danielle a town house and he'd take an apartment for himself in the city. I noticed, I couldn't help but notice, that when he said this, he made no mention of our being together. But he was distracted and kept saying it was just a temporary move into the apartment across from the repair shop.

Besides, the neighborhood had changed over the years. It had changed so much that residents complained that the repair shop shouldn't be there anymore and if it wasn't the business of one of the town's most celebrated residents, they would have forced it out, though some of the newcomers didn't know who Cy Schoenfield, the great quarterback, was. Or if they did, they didn't care.

Nick had furnished the apartment with furniture loans from friends and a mattress from Dial-a-Bed. It was just for now, he kept saying. I helped him shove a dresser against the wall. Put the bed so that it faced the sunny windows. After we moved the bed, we made love, on top of the sheets, the sun pouring in. Afterward we just lay there. It was a warm, lazy afternoon and I thought we would stay there forever. I was pretty clear about what I was going to do and Nick and I had been lying in bed discussing it. If there had ever been a moment of decision in my life, it was now. In a month or so I would come home for an extended stay. If all went well, by next spring I'd put my house on the market. “I want you to be with me,” Nick said, stroking my head. “We're going to make that happen.…”

“And I want to be with you,” I said at last. Just then the phone rang. We both stared at it.

Nick hesitated to pick it up. Then he reasoned, “It could be Danielle.” But it was Margaret, calling to say that Clarice had had some kind of an attack. “What kind of attack?” I heard Nick say.

Nothing too serious, Margaret said. They didn't know for sure. She just had a spell, a kind of fainting, but the doctors wanted to make certain it wasn't her heart, so she was in the hospital out in Crestwood and Margaret needed to get there. “Could you be sure to meet Danielle when she comes home from school?” Margaret said.

Nick said he would be there and wait until she came home. And then she added, “Say hi to Tess for me.”

Nick looked at the phone oddly. When he hung up, he seemed perplexed. “She told me to say hello to you.” Before he went home to meet Danielle after she got out of school, he told me to come with him. “She knows about you. I think she's all right about it.”

When we got to the house, Danielle gave me that cold stare she'd given me the first time I'd come there, carrying Vicky's dog after we'd been stuck in the ravines. But she gave her father a hug. “Daddy, you're home.” She said it in such a way that I knew she was thinking he'd come home to stay. “Where's Mummy?” she asked, looking around, almost looking through me, as if I weren't standing there. Nick told her that her mother had to go do something and she'd be back later. Danielle went and did her homework while Nick defrosted a pizza. I wanted to make them a proper dinner, but he said it would be too strange if I cooked in their kitchen.

“Yes, I suppose you're right.”

We ate pepperoni and cheese pizza with a small salad and Cokes in front of the television. After dinner Danielle showed Nick her homework and he patted her on the shoulder because she had gotten all her math right, which was not her strongest subject, he told me. Danielle blushed and seemed to smile and that gave me the hope that she might warm up to me with time. Then he put on some Coltrane and asked Danielle what she wanted to do until bedtime. I could see that already he was getting anxious because Margaret was taking so long. He kept glancing at the clock over the mantel. “I wish your mother would call,” he said at one point.

“Me too,” Danielle said. “Let's play Scrabble until she gets here.”

We played for a while. I had terrible letters. Useless consonants like “V” and “W” and two “O”s. There was little I could do on the board, though Danielle was very good and she had also drawn good letters. She put down “parrot” and “compass”, but the best I could do was “who” and “vow.” Nick was distracted as he played and he kept asking Danielle for help. He looked at the clock from time to time and Danielle kept asking when her mother was coming home.

Finally Nick got up and went into the kitchen to phone the hospital in Crestwood. I could see that he was concerned about Clarice. I followed him in, ostensibly to get something to drink, and saw his face turn pale, his hand tremble as he held the phone. He asked for patient information; Clarice Blair was not in the hospital. Nor had she been there that day. He asked over and over again, “Are you sure? Can you check again?”

Then he phoned Winonah General. Then he called Clarice at her house in Crestwood. When she answered, Nick told me later, he knew. “You aren't sick?” he said to her.

“No,” she answered, “never felt better. Why?”

When he got off the phone, he called the police. Already Danielle was hollering from the living room for him to come and finish the game, but Nick just shook his head. He put his hand over the phone, shouting, “Tell her I'll be right there.” When he told them that he thought his wife was missing, the police suggested he come down to the station.

When he asked why, the pitch of his voice rising, they told him there had been an incident on the railroad tracks. It was an express train, the police told him. There weren't many of those a day so she must have planned it well. Later a neighbor said that she thought she'd seen Margaret's car parked down the street, waiting until Nick arrived at the house. The last thing Margaret did was make sure that Danielle would not come home to an empty house.

I tried to hide how stunned I was. How was this possible? I found myself shaking as he told me and then went into the bathroom and sobbed, not wanting Danielle to see me. Before Nick went to identify the body, Danielle threw her arms around his neck, demanding to know where he was going.

“I'm going to get Mommy,” he told her. Then he asked me to walk him to the car. “Would you stay here with Danielle,” he said, “until I get home?”

“Of course I will,” I said, leaning into the car.

Then he put his head on the steering wheel and began weeping, sobbing like a baby. I reached across, stroking his hair. Finally he composed himself. “How could she do this?” he said. “How could she leave a child behind?”

When he drove off, I turned and saw Danielle staring at me from the picture window of the house. When I came inside, she just stood there, glaring at me with her cold, dark eyes. “Do you want to read a book?” I asked her. “Would you like to play another game? We could play Monopoly,” I said, “or Clue. I could make us some cocoa.”

But she stood there in her little pink bathrobe, silent and morose, and I stared at this poor, motherless child who was just a decade old, the same age I'd been when I met her mother, and my heart went out to her. I could see how Margaret could do this to herself, but how could she do this to her child? When my children were small and my marriage was breaking up, I felt at times as if I could just jump off the bluffs, do myself in. But how could I leave my children behind? Now, gazing at Danielle, I thought I would raise her as my own. I could love her and my love would soften her, somehow take away her edges, make her want to curl up and read a book, listen to a story. Take the dolls down from her shelves. I'd bring her a pet, I thought. A puppy dog that she could love.

But Danielle kept looking at me in the oddest way. Then she said, “I'm not stupid, you know.”

“Oh, I know you aren't stupid, Danielle.”

“I know that something is wrong. My mother has never done this before. She has never not come home.”

“You're right. Something is wrong. Your father has gone to find out what it is. Do you want to wait up for him? Do you want to play a game?” I just looked at her, not sure of what to say. I kept thinking she would burst out crying. I didn't expect she would rush into my arms, but I thought she might let me comfort her somehow. Instead she kept her icy stare on me. “We could do something,” I told her, “to pass the time until your father gets back.”

But she stood up abruptly. “I don't want you,” she shouted at me. “I want my mother.”

She stomped off to her room as I sat in the living room, folding my face into my hands where I wept silently. At the same time I was listening, ready to rush to her side, but I didn't hear a sound. After a few moments I went to check on her. Her light was off and she was turned to the wall. When I touched her, she was sobbing. “Danielle,” I said.

“Get away from me,” she cried.

“I'll be in the living room,” I said, “if you want me.”

I went back to the sofa where I stretched out, listening for her. I must have drifted off because when I awoke, there was a knock at the door. I thought it would be Nick, but instead there was a man I'd never seen before. A woman stood behind him in the shadows. Though her hair had turned gray and she seemed wraithlike in the shadows, I recognized her.

“Hello, Clarice,” I said. “It's Tess. Tess Winterstone.” I hadn't seen her since my father's funeral. I was surprised she'd had the nerve to show up, but she had. She'd stood at the back and hadn't gone to the graveside, though Art tells me fresh flowers come to my father's grave on the first of every month.

“I thought you might be here, Tess,” Clarice said. “Nick told me to come and look after Danielle. He has things to tend to, arrangements to make.”

“Well, I could stay,” I offered, “and wait for him.” Somehow I felt that if I went now, I wouldn't be coming back. I felt as if I had to hold on.

“He asked that we stay with Danielle. He said he'd call you in the morning.”

I nodded. “All right, Clarice. I'll go.”

“Well, Tess, I suppose you got what you wanted, didn't you? I suppose it's only fair. That we should both lose what matters most to us. That it should end this way.” Clarice spoke in a bitter, unforgiving voice.

“I didn't have anything to do with this, Clarice, and I certainly didn't want it to happen.”

Clarice was hidden in the shadows behind the light, where I could hardly see her. I couldn't make out her features. She was a thin, ghostly figure in the darkness. Deep, hiccuping sobs came from somewhere in her chest. She doubled over, as if she were in terrible pain, howling like an animal, and the man who'd come with her held her up. I went into the kitchen and wrote a note to Nick. I told him how sorry I was and that I would be at Vicky's.

I gave him her number and said I wanted to be there for him and for Danielle. Folding the note three times, I stuck it under the coffeepot, where I was sure he'd see it in the morning. I told Clarice I was very sorry and she looked at me as if I were a stranger to her, not a girl she'd once begged to stay to play with her daughter.

When I left, they shut the door and pulled down all the blinds so that the house was cloaked in faint, shadowy light. I watched the house for a few moments. Then I got into my rental car and drove down the road toward the railroad trestle, made a left, and drove until I saw the police cars and the wreck.

She had killed herself just beyond the place where I liked to wander when I was a girl. At the place where the town divides itself in two, where the rich live on one side and the poor on the other. Just beyond the underpass where I used to say good-bye to her and she'd go her way and I'd go mine.

*   *   *

That night I waited at Vicky's for Nick to call, but he never did. Vicky had already heard, as had the rest of the town. “It's a very tragic thing” was all Vicky said, “especially for the child.” There was something in her voice, I could tell, that was blaming me. Even though she didn't say it, even though she didn't even imply it, somehow it was my fault. Though I had never so much as shoplifted a candy bar as a kid, I felt like a criminal now. I had brought this on and even as Vicky poured me a drink, then said good night, I knew something about my friendship with her—and everyone else in this town—had been altered.

In the morning when I still hadn't heard from Nick, I called the house. Danielle answered the phone and surprised me by sounding so grown up that for a moment I took her to be her mother. “Could I speak with Nick, please?”

“He doesn't want to talk to anyone,” she said.

“Danielle,” I said softly, “I'm so sorry about your mom. It's me, Tess. Tell him I'm on the phone, tell him I need to talk to him.”

But she'd already hung up.

*   *   *

After lunch I drove over to pay a condolence call. Cars lined the driveway. When I walked in, Nick saw me, but there was a blank look to his eyes.

“She didn't seem to even care when I told her I was moving out. She didn't blink an eye. I can't imagine what would have made her do that. I really can't,” he said.

Then he told me what I hadn't known. Margaret left no letter, but she had a cryptic note in her bag when she died. He reached into his pocket, pulled it out. It read:
I waited as long as I could.
“Waited for what?” he asked me, tears in his eyes. “Waited for whom? What would make her do such a thing?” he said, now breaking down in sobs.