Home Another Way (10 page)
Beth fumbled briefly with her zipper, slipped off her ski jacket, and, drawing a wobbly breath, began to sing. Her voice wasn’t striking, but there was a poignancy to it, and a delicate vibrato tinkled like a sterling jewel box—the kind with the spinning ballerina in the lid.
I’d always wanted one of those, but my grandmother thought dancing was one of Satan’s most clever seductions.
I played the melody along with Beth until she began the second verse, and then dropped to the harmony line, folding my notes around hers. The tune reeked of pews and padded kneelers, so I improvised the remaining verses—some double stops here, a few trills there, a handful of gaudy flourishes. By the end, however, Beth tired, sucking quick, coarse breaths between syllables, her words full of holes. She shrugged. “I ran out of steam, I guess. Can I have a drink?”
“I’ll put a cadenza in the middle, between the third and fourth verses. It’ll give you a chance to rest.”
“What’s that?”
“Basically, a chance for me to show off. Diet Coke okay?”
“Thanks,” she said. “Please don’t tell my mother what I’m singing. It’s sort of a gift for her, one of her favorite hymns.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
She popped the metal tab, soda can opening with a hiss. Foam oozed between her fingers, onto the counter. “And don’t tell Jack. He’s horrible at keeping secrets. Not that he doesn’t try, but he can’t tell even a tiny fib. If Mom questions him and he knows, his face will give it all away.”
“I don’t think that will be an issue. I haven’t seen your brother in days.” Since Friday night, but who kept track of such things? “How is he?”
“Busy. Always busy. I couldn’t do it. Last year, for his birthday, I tried to get him a day to sleep in, asking everyone not to bother him until at least noon. I think his first phone call came at seven-thirty, which is about two hours later than usual.” She laughed, but added, “I’m sure if you needed to talk or something, he’d be here.”
“I’m fine.” I sponged up the wayward soda.
Beth picked up her coat. “Do you think we could practice again sometime? I know you’ll be busy now with work, but—”
“Work?”
“For Doc. Was I not supposed to know? It seemed common knowledge around town.”
“Right. This very wonderful, very small town,” I said, tossing the dishrag at the sink. It somersaulted off the edge, to the floor.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“I certainly hope not.” I set the violin in the case, but did not close the lid. “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday nights. Be here at seven, unless you have a hot date.” Immediately, I wished I could reach out to snatch my words and stuff them back into my mouth.
Beth, however, seemed unfazed. “Not hardly,” she said, struggling a bit to get her coat on. Her left arm moved stiffly, heavy almost, as if an invisible weight hung from her fingertips and she was too weak to lift it. “See you Friday, then.”
I picked up the dishrag and went to dump the half- empty can of soda down the sink. But my Diet Coke supply was dwindling, only eight left, so I poured the warm liquid into a glass and drank it. The gas ballooned in my throat. I belched.
The violin stared at me from its perch on the back of the couch, f-hole eyes dark, squinty. I went to it, ran my fingers across the strings. They moaned softly, beckoning me to pick up the instrument, to cradle it, play it. But I couldn’t. Not tonight. I’d had too much life this week.
Beth dropped her wet boots on the doormat and found her mother in the overstuffed tapestry chair, pillows stuffed around her hips and spine, knitting a sweater sleeve.
“How did it go?” Maggie asked.
“Good. Very good, actually.”
“Are you going to tell me yet?”
“No, it’s a surprise. You’ll find out Christmas Eve.” Beth kissed her mother’s forehead. “Good night.”
In stocking feet, she skated down the hallway on the freshly polished oak floor. A prick of static ignited between the metal doorknob and her fingers as she went into her bedroom, still decorated with her girlhood eyelet canopy and pink walls.
Beth had thought about getting a place of her own, some postage-stamp apartment in one of the surrounding hamlets. But Jonah was her insulation, her swaddling cloth. And she could never leave her mother alone in this hulking Victorian. She would grow old here, caring for Maggie when the arthritis drove her to bed, and occasionally renting a room to wandering leaf-peekers. Perhaps one day she’d be known as the Spinster of the Inn, the one who left her Christmas lights up all year, and a dead balsam wreath on the door well into August.
Beth changed to her nightgown. When the bandages were first removed, she had put on her clothes in the dark, fumbling at her buttons and sometimes finding her underwear on backwards. With the tags sewn into the side seam, she could never remember if they went on the right or left.
She had showered with the lights out, too, wearing bath gloves to wash, not wanting to feel how her skin puckered and folded like a pile of dirty towels kicked in a corner.
Hiding, she soon found, was exhausting. She grew tired of wearing turtlenecks on summer days, and darting behind trees to avoid being seen by passing cars during her evening walks. She had woke on the morning of her eighteenth birthday to an overcast sky, and realized, with both shame and repentance, that God didn’t spare her life so she could live as if she were dead. She dressed with the shades up, ate a stack of warm peach pancakes, and drove to the diner to apply for a job.
Now, more than a year since that epiphany, she could no longer close her eyes and picture herself before the fire. There were things, however, she couldn’t forget. The peppery stench of charred nose hair. The sight of her skin curling in ribbons from her arm. The daily burn baths, when the nurses scoured her body, their hands steel wool on silk, washing away dead flesh and infection. She would wail and moan, sometimes vomiting from the pain, her morphine drip as effective as orange juice. Later, lying in her hospital bed swathed in fresh gossamer dressings, she’d listen to the shrieks of the other patients, and be grateful it wasn’t her.
Beth remembered, too, the stretches of sleepless nights as she healed, when the itchiness grew so unbearable she would bite her tongue until it bled. Maggie would stay awake with her, slathering antihistamine lotion over her skin and singing old-time hymns, one after another, always ending with “It Is Well With My Soul.” She grew to hate the song, imagining its author, Horatio Spafford, and his ironclad faith, scribbling those words while sailing over the watery grave of his drowned children merely days after their deaths.
She had hated herself, too, for her inability to muster even a crumb of his conviction. But now she could say with sincerity that things were well. Not perfect. Well. How she wanted to prove that at the pageant, to have people listen not just to her words—Spafford’s words—but to the peace infused into them. She wasn’t that scared little burned girl anymore.
Burrowing into the freshly changed sheets, Beth inhaled deeply. She loved clean linens, all crispy against her, smelling white and sunny, even though it was too cold to hang them on the line. Her mother added lavender oil to the wash, and herbal fabric softener. Beth never remembered to throw in a dryer sheet. She hoped she wouldn’t be taking over duties at the inn anytime soon. Maggie was a much better housekeeper.
I had no reason to be awake at eight-thirty on a Sunday morning, but I was, tossing and sighing, too hot with the sleeping bag zipped to my neck, too cold with my limbs sticking outside of it. The couch, short and unforgiving, forced my body into odd contortions, and I often woke with my head hanging off the cushions, or my arms folded under me, crushed and numb.
I could not bring myself to sleep in Luke’s bed.
The knock came just as I kicked off the blankets again, three short raps at the front door. It had to be Jack. He couldn’t see me like this, hair snarled around my shoulders, drool crusted in the corners of my mouth. “One minute,” I shouted at the door, snatching yesterday’s jeans from the floor and running into the bathroom.
I splashed a couple handfuls of icy water on my face to shrink my sleep-swollen nose. Dragged a brush through my hair, and swirled Listerine over my tongue while dabbing on a bit of eye shadow. And lip gloss. I dropped the blush in the toilet while fumbling to open the little case, so I pinched my cheeks for color. Jeans, sweater. Done.
“I’m coming,” I called again, and fluffed my hair before opening the door.
“Morning,” Doc said. “Did I wake you?”
I deflated. “Yeah. You did.”
“Well, you’re dressed now. Get your boots on,” he told me. “I have another job for you.”
“It’s Sunday morning.”
“You have someplace to be?”
I tied my boots on over two pairs of socks, pulled on a second sweater, and cocooned into the rest of my outdoor survival gear. Doc sped off in his toasty warm Jeep, and I followed him, truck still an icebox.
We stopped in front of a house set into a hill, with nine terraced steps up to a dilapidated screened porch. Memory Jones answered the door.
“Doc? It’s Sunday, ain’t it? We don’t got nothing going on today.”
“We’re here because it is Sunday. You know Sarah. She’s going to sit with Robert so you can get to church.”
Memory’s grin stretched across her flabby face, thin-lipped and shimmering with teeth. “Well, paint me pink and call me a ballerina. Come in, come in. I got oatmeal in the pot, still warm, if ya want some.”
The hallway stunk of Clorox and pine cleaner, and something else, something bitter. Ammonia, perhaps, or vinegar. I tried to breathe through my mouth.
“Go get dressed,” Doc said. “I’ll make the introductions.”
Memory swished around a corner, nightgown flapping at her ankles. I followed Doc into another room, with a couch, coffee table, and hospital bed. “Sarah, this is Robert, Memory’s son.”
The man in the bed didn’t move. Slack-jawed, with his neck crooked backward and his arms pulled into his chest, he looked like a fossilized dinosaur, one just excavated from a prehistoric tar pit, all papery skin over bone.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.
“He’s in a minimally conscious state due to traumatic brain injury.”
Memory lumbered in then, dressed in what I assumed was her Sunday best—a long-sleeved gray tent with a black turtleneck beneath it. Red thermal underwear stuck to her legs, fire hydrants in galoshes.
“Sweet boy, I’m off to church. Sarah here’s real nice, and she’ll stay with you ’til I’m back.” She kissed Robert on the cheek, seemingly oblivious to his gutter breath, which I could smell across the room. “He likes to be read to. There’s some of his favorites. And I always turn on the Gospel Grace show at ten. Radio’s already tuned in.”
She left, battered Bible under her arm, covers held together with rubber bands. Doc started out, too, but I grabbed the end of his scarf. “You can’t leave me here with him,” I said.
“Relax. All you have to do is sit for an hour or so,” he said, and was gone.
So I sat, listening to Robert gurgle and smack, wondering if I should at least wipe the growing puddle of saliva from the front of his shirt. At ten, I turned the radio on, and listened to the scratchy hollering of some preacher about his good friend, JEE-zuss. Robert opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling, his tongue flopping about like an epileptic eel.
I went to use the bathroom. It was shockingly clean, white, except for permanent mineral stains in the sink and bowl. A showerhead protruded from one wall, but there was no tub, just a drain in the tile floor. Memory bought the cheap toilet tissue, wafer-thin and gritty. I pressed the flusher handle. Nothing happened.
Returning to the living room, I plowed into Memory.
“Your toilet won’t flush,” I said.
“That little chain busted a couple months back. You gotta stick your hand in the tank and pull up the flapper thing.” She laughed, I think at me, as my face puckered with disgust. “I’ll do it. You’re a guest. Can’t have my guest getting their elbows wet. That ain’t hospitable. No, it ain’t.”
“Well, okay. Thanks. I’m going now.”
“Wait one minute. I sure ain’t gonna let you off without feeding you. I got mac and cheese loaf, sliced thin, and a jar of mayo. Bread, too.”
“I really need to go.”
“Well, then, I’ll make sure to double stuff you on Thursday.”
“Thursday?”
“Thanksgiving, girl. You don’t got nowhere else to be, right?”
I opened my mouth, but no excuse came out.
“Good,” Memory said. “See you here at two.”
I made the local rounds Tuesday, checking in on Doc’s patients and spending five, maybe six minutes with them, saving Zuriel for last. On my way through her house to find her, I peered into doorways; the rooms were empty, mostly, with an occasional chair or dresser pushed against a wall and filmy with dust.
“Zuriel.” I found her in a back room, the largest room, settled in a bentwood rocker, cockled hands nimbly tatting a doily.
“Oh, Sarah, I’m so glad you came. How are you?”
Her voice glided around me, and she waited for my reply, sightless eyes on my face. “I’m fine,” I said.
Zuriel let out a long, light breath. “I have faith you’ll mean those words one day,” she said. “Please, sit.”
I did, in the rocker next to her.
“My grandson made these chairs. Comfortable, aren’t they?”
“Yes.” And they were. The back slats contoured to me, as if the seat was designed for the curves of my spine only.
Furniture cramped this large room, unlike the others.
Zuriel spent most of her time here, I could tell. A handmade bed with a log headboard filled one corner, and a matching wardrobe stood in another. Next to my chair was a curiously shaped piano, flat-topped and nearly square. It had been there a long time, as the floor buckled under the carved legs. But it did not belong in this place, with its exotic, tiger-grained wood and filigree music desk. I picked at the keys, producing several delicate notes reminiscent of a Mozart pianoforte.
“Do you play?” Zuriel asked.
