Crossing the Tracks (9781416997054) (24 page)

We shift in our chairs. Dr. Nesbitt clears his throat, swallows, and proceeds to the “Medical Particulars” section. On the line that begins “I hereby certify,” he prints:

Cecil Deets—deceased.

“Deader 'n hell,” the sheriff remarks with a sigh.

“Beautifully put,” Olive says as the officer folds the form into his pocket. After he leaves she remarks, “Cecil could put two and two together. He'd been stalking all of us since Dot left. He knew that when the Sheriff and Avery were at Newt's, he could come hunting her.”

Olive wipes her mouth with a gray hankie. “Demonic doesn't mean dumb.” She looks from Dr. Nesbitt to his mother to me and proceeds cautiously with her next remark. “And
dead
doesn't always mean
gone
.”

“Oh no, Olive!” I say. “Cecil is
gone
.”

“But the dog… ,” Olive says, “is
invisible
now. Not gone.”

Mrs. Nesbitt sighs, her voice weary. “Forgive me, Olive, but I can't hear about your dog problems right now.”

“I am not speaking of
my
dog difficulties. I am telling you that Marie is not gone unless you make her so.” There is fierceness and kindness in Olive's face. “Dead and gone versus a spirit—there is a difference. It's a choice we make with loved ones who've passed.”

Olive looks toward the door and smiles slightly, as though she has seen Marie trot through it.

I climb from our car and walk across the yard deter
mined to avoid the broken liquor bottle, the ruts and tracks, the flashlight left on the porch. But of course I do look at
them and, hardest of all, the moment I step in my room I stare at Marie's lumpy blue blanket on the floor. My mind flashes to Atchison, to Daddy's slippers—how they also held his shape.

My sheets and pillow are a rumpled mess. I grab Rosie and sit on the rug by Marie's bed. There's dog hair and the curve of her back pressed in it. I fill my nose with her scent.

Everything is so still, so unbearably quiet and empty. My stomach knots around the raw pain of missing her. I think of her stumpy tail, her habit of getting stepped on, her fierce love and protection of us.

“Marie?” I whisper. “Are you all right?”

I sit a while, watch my goddesses watching me. I smell coffee brewing, hear the telephone ring for the third time since we've been home.

I run my finger around the blanket's bound edge. “I love you.”

My back aches. I stand and stretch, not knowing what to do with myself. By the wall a tiny movement catches my eye. I bend down. A furry, silver-brown spider is building her web between my bedpost and the window. It's in an odd spot and the design isn't perfect. The tiny silk ropes are crooked. It is more a loopy oval than a circle, but the spider just keeps spinning back and forth as naturally as can be, knitting her new home in the air.

I wake up mad.

Rage at Cecil—that walking, talking accident of a human—mixes with other rough feelings, especially the ones about Daddy.

I could pull that trigger a thousand times more. I grip my pillow and sob.

I don't try to make myself stop crying anymore, Daddy. That rule of yours was stupid.

People don't have all the time in the world either.

You were wrong about that, too.

You were wrong about lots of things:
Iris, you can't draw.…You should project yourself more.… Shoes make the
woman.…

You were wrong to say “I love you” and not mean it.

It wasn't fair of you to make me hold my coughs. No little girl should have to stifle a cough!

“I am going to let what's true inside me out, or I'll end up like you, a suede salesman with no insides at all!” I yell. I march outside to the bench, ragged feelings crashing in me.

Oak-branch reflections slice like black cracks across the sunny birdbath water. I cry hard, my fists in my lap. I can't stand that Marie isn't here.

I rock and hug myself for the longest time.

I know I have lots of dusting to do in my cellar of ghosts. But I have a plan now. If even one more ghost dares to show up, I'll do exactly what Pansy said:
Never ever let him in.

September 30, 1926

Dear Miss Baldwin,

1t has been my challenge and pleasure to capture the essence of your eyes on paper. 1 used the recent photograph as a guide and shaded them
with the intelligence and grace Julia and Avery find in you.

I pause, lower the note to my lap. My cheeks burn. What on earth have the Nesbitts said?

The young man about to receive them should be warned of their potency—but then, if he has looked into your eyes once, he already knows. 1t's a wonder he can do much else!

Please find the drawing enclosed. When you gaze into it 1 do so hope you see longing and strength and passion looking back.

We will meet when 1 visit Wellsford this winter. 1 do so miss my teasing with Julia—the last goddess left on earth—and, of course, her son—my inspiration.

Life paints each of us with a different
stroke.

Warmly,

Marsden White

I reread the letter, study the last line—a perfect vine of black ink across the page.

I slide the sketch paper from the envelope. It is thick stock and only as big as my hand. The tissue falls away. I take a breath and look into my eyes.

Someone whole and loved looks back.

I tilt my head to absorb the drawing. My eyes look lit from the inside, glowing.

I blink once, twice—just the way I used to with Mama. And somewhere inside me, Mama blinks back.

“I am whole and loved,” I tell her. “
We
are whole… and loved.”

In the parlor I study the portrait of Mrs. Nesbitt that Marsden painted after her son died. You cannot see her eyes. They are lost in shadow. She has told me, “I could not look at myself then. I was too weak and empty, too unbearably sad.”

I think how brave she was to have it painted with all her pain showing. How she must have trusted him. His signature, a rosy sweep in the corner, is confident and strong. Maybe their time together was just right. He painted her sadness without telling her what to feel or do about it, without any answers or advice.

In my room I smooth my coverlet and place the drawing in the middle of my bed. I arrange Leroy's hands on either side. I gather my hair and lift it, let it fall a bit at a time against my back, study the picture arrangement.

It isn't right.

I move the drawings. Put my eyes at the top, then below.

No.

“They don't go together yet—too many bits and pieces,” I tell the bedspread.

I get my stationery and pen. I know what's missing.

September 30, 1926

Dear Leroy,

Come for my birthday or sooner. Go with us to visit Kansas City.

The drawings of your hands are everything but warm enough.

Iris

P.S. I have a present for you.…

Dr. Nesbitt puts my letter to Leroy in his breast pocket, then steps around the shotgun and out to his car. He is
going by the post office for me and then to work.

Although I hear Cecil's death car a hundred times a day, the real threat of him is over. The Nesbitts and Olive and I have talked and talked about the events of that night—Marie, our teamwork, the what-ifs. It's good to do. Helps calm our nerves. Helps us move on.

Dr. Nesbitt has already advertised for a new tenant to rent our land, but none of us knows what to do with Cecil's haunted monument of a house less than a mile away.

“We can't tear it down yet, even though it's on our property,” Dr. Nesbitt says at the table later that evening. Olive is over for supper.

“Why not?” Mrs. Nesbitt says, with an air of not being bullied by anything Deets.

“Technically Pansy and Dot are the next of kin and they have the right to what's in it,” he says.

“Only rats and rot,” Olive remarks after a stiff sip of brandy. Her eyes narrow. “Who says they need to know of Cecil's passing? Why would they care?”

“But Olive…”

Olive sits like she's holding court and takes a deep breath. “Lest you forget, I alone know the accurate address of the sister, and I alone may or may not correctly offer it to the authorities when their first attempt at notification comes back in the returned mail as surely it will.” Olive swipes her mouth. “And we all know that the sister may very well not know where Pansy and Dot are anyway. In fact, I sincerely hope she does not.”

“Because… ?” Dr. Nesbitt asks.

“Because a hundred years from now would still be a hair too soon to see those two again. Don't get me wrong. I am glad we did it. But enough mayhem and tongue-swallowing terror!” She fans her nose. “They can live without a collection of Cecil's crusty, frayed undergarments.” Olive demonstrates her disdain for Cecil's undershorts by dropping her napkin.

Mrs. Nesbitt lowers her fork and looks toward the ceiling.

Olive charges on. “His hemorrhoids, his rusted pots and pans, his rodent infested flour and sugar sacks, his…”

“Amen,” Dr. Nesbitt says.

Olive raps her index finger on the table. “He was nothing but a poisonous serpent, slithering where he shouldn't.”

“Amen again!” Dr. Nesbitt says, with a note of
okay, that's enough
.

“Ah… yes.” Olive softens and dabs her eyes with her favorite hankie, the one she refers to as Old Dainty.

After Dr. Nesbitt drives Olive home, he jokes as he comes in the kitchen, “It is amazing how Olive can ruin a meal even without cooking it.”

I lie in bed, trying hard to think of something besides
Leroy's hands. I am dying for him to get here and then go with us to Kansas City to see Celeste's store and celebrate my birthday. So much life has poured in and out of me this year, I can barely remember my old self. As Mrs. Nesbitt put it, “A hundred new Irises have bloomed this summer!”

Three early birthday presents from the Nesbitts are on my dresser: applications for college. “Seeds,” Mrs. Nesbitt called them. “Someday,” she added when she saw the stricken look on my face. “
Someday
you will go on to school, Iris.”

But I could only stutter, and she knew why. Because “someday” sounded like “after I die.”

“Don't worry. I'll not abandon Henry. He's not ready to retire,” she said. “But this is a
farm
, after all. So I can plant all the seeds I want!”

But before anything else, before I turn sixteen or go to college or even feed the chickens, I have two things to finish. The first is the compartment in Mama's secretary I've been avoiding. What's in there will rouse Daddy's ghost.

It's early. I raise the parlor shades and sit at Mama's
desk wrapped in my old chenille robe. Something inside rattles like a box full of pulled teeth when I slide the compartment open. I fish out a lumpy envelope with a scrap of brittle newspaper clipped to the outside: Mama's obituary.

Anna Jane Kohler Baldwin

aged 31, died Monday at

Holcomb Sanatorium. She is

survived by her husband

Charles Winn Baldwin and

a daughter. Funeral arrangements

courtesy of Lundgrun

Funeral Parlor, Atchison.

Just like Daddy—all business. I turn the clipping over. He reduced Mama's life story to something smaller than the foot powder advertisement on the back. Nothing about
her
, or her parents, or where she was born. Does Anna Baldwin's daughter have a name, Daddy, or did you forget that too? I'm surprised you didn't mention the store:
Anna's husband is the proprietor of the popular Baldwin Shoes.

Mrs. Nesbitt sits above me in her portrait—achingly beautiful, heartbreakingly real. That's what I want, an oil painting of Mama by someone who knew her, loved her. Not stiff and posed, but shimmering with her feelings.