Keeping Secrets (34 page)

“Jesse,” she screamed, “put me down. I’m going to throw up.”

“Don’t do it,” he warned.

“Then you stop!” she shrieked.

“What’ll you give me to stop?”

“Haven’t I already given you enough? What do you want?”

“I want you to—”

But Emma never knew what Jesse was going to say, because the phone rang.

“Saved by the bell,” he said instead.

Jesse brought her her terry-cloth robe as the conversation went on. She nodded in thanks. She was freezing, naked, her feet bare on the cold dining room floor. The inside of their house never warmed beneath the redwood shade, not even in early August. He listened to her side of the conversation.

“What do you want me to do?

“Well, what did the doctor say?

“You didn’t take him yet?

“Then how do you know?

“Rosalie, this isn’t a time to be so cheap. There must be a psychiatrist over in Cypress.

“Oh, I forgot.

“I guess you’re right.

“Okay, okay. Try to calm down. I
know
it’s hard. Just keep him as quiet as you can until I get there.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to call the airlines.
Today
if I can. I’ll be there soon.”

She hung up and turned to Jesse, “My daddy’s gone crazy,” she said. “I’ve got to fly home.”

14

West Cypress

Emma hadn’t been able to get on a plane that day and had hardly slept at all that evening. What
was
wrong with her daddy? she worried. She’d been trying to read to take her mind off the question, but her book rested face down in her lap.

She checked her left hand one last time. Yes, she’d remembered to take off her wide gold wedding ring as she did every time she went south. She’d left it atop her chest of drawers at home. She rubbed at her finger. The fat woman in the seat beside her gave her a look and Emma tried to be still. At least she wasn’t tan, otherwise she’d have had to wear a cigar band on her hand and have told Rosalie it was the latest thing in California. The naked spot felt numb. Well, thank goodness she’d paid attention to one thing Rosalie had drummed into her, to protect her fair skin. It had never crossed Rosalie’s mind to warn her against
marrying
a dark complexion.

“To your left is the city of Shreveport,” said the pilot in that comforting good-old-boy voice that Emma thought they must be taught in flying school. “We’ll be landing in Cypress in fifteen minutes. Take your seats, please, and fasten your seat belts.”

Fifteen minutes from Shreveport to Cypress. She thought of all the times she’d driven the distance on old Highway 80, three and a half hours of two-lane winding road.

She looked out the window at the gentle pine-covered hills. Somewhere down there was where she and her step-cousin J.D. had rolled together on a dark-blue blanket in a cotton field by the edge of a bayou.

Good Lord, that seemed like a long time ago. How many years was it? She subtracted. Thirteen—an unlucky number. Well, Lady Luck surely hadn’t sat on J.D.’s shoulder. Emma still couldn’t get over it, though it must have been five, six years ago when Rosalie had written her about his accident and sent the newspaper clipping.

J.D. had become the sheriff of West Pettibone Parish. She could just see him, growing fat and sassy with power. “Hey, Bubba, you want to run over to the 7-Eleven and get me an RC Cola?” He
looked
fat in the picture in the paper, no longer the sleek long-limbed boy she remembered.

He’d learned to fly. His mother, Aunt Nancy, must have been so proud of him. He was on his way to Arkansas to pick up a prisoner who’d broken out of the West Pettibone jail. J.D. must have been hot for that one; the nerve of that peckerwood, making him look like a fool. Sheriff J.D. Tarley had been flying his little plane over a silver Arkansas lake, just as pretty a fishing hole as you ever hoped to see, when suddenly something went wrong. There was a quick boom, then a flash of crimson, and
splat
. The lake put the fire out. Once the water settled, little blue and silver fishes swam up to stare goggled-eyed at the man inside, his inky ringlets floating gently, gently.

Rosalie had written that she and Jake had climbed into the car and driven up to Pearl Bank for the funeral. They hadn’t been there since before Rosalie and Nancy’s mother, Miss Virgie, had died. Rosalie hadn’t seen her sister Nancy since then, either, not since all that hullabaloo over the double, no, triple funeral. Well, she hadn’t seen her to speak, anyway.

“There was that once,” Rosalie had told her on the phone when Emma called to talk after the news of J.D.’s death. “I was standing there in the Dollar Store with my hand on a pair of pale-green polyester pants, thinking how high they were. I could make them for half the price. I was just about to head back to the piece goods to see what remnants they had on sale, when I looked up, and there she was—Nancy, just as big as life and twice as mean. Mean as ever! Do you think she spoke to me? Well, stop wondering, she didn’t. She looked me straight in the eye, and I looked her back, and then she let go of the other leg of the pants I was holding and turned on her heel and stomped off. Disappeared in between the pots and pans and the hair dryers.”

But nonetheless Rosalie had felt that she ought to go up to Pearl Bank to pay her respects. After all, J.D. was her nephew and an important man too.

So she did. She and Jake had driven straight to the church where J.D.’s widow Maylene’s father was preaching the funeral. Afterward, Rosalie had gone up to Nancy.

“I hugged her neck,” she told Emma. “Then we got in the car and drove back home.”

“You didn’t say anything?”

“Well, yes.” Rosalie paused a moment thinking till she remembered that the long distance was burning up money. “Yes, I said, ‘I’m sorry. About J.D., I mean.’ Because I didn’t want her to think I was sorry about anything else, that I was apologizing.”

God, Emma thought, nothing ever changed in West Cypress. Well, she was almost there now. Below was the winding brown snake of the Coupitaw lined with thick green trees. Home.

What
was
wrong with her daddy? Emma wondered for the four hundredth time since the call last night. It was hard to know what anything meant when Rosalie told it. Once she had diagnosed Jake’s appendicitis as indigestion. He’d almost died before they got help. But usually her diagnoses went the other way, on the side of overstatement. And her idea of treatment! Rosalie was of the go-ahead-and-get-it-over-with school.

Like when Emma was twelve and it looked as though she was going to spend the entire summer in a dentist’s chair, Rosalie had said, “I don’t know why you don’t go ahead and get them all pulled out. Get yourself some dentures like mine. With teeth it’s just going to be bridges, crowns, one thing after another. Might as well go ahead and get it over with.”

Emma had burst into tears. She could just see herself in the eighth grade with false teeth. “Isn’t life just one thing after another, Momma?” she’d wailed. “I’d might as well go ahead and shoot myself in the head and get life over with, too.”

Rosalie had backed off and admitted that Emma had a point there, and she had begrudgingly paid the dentist. “But it’ll all have to be done over again,” she’d said. “Just you wait and see. They don’t know what they’re doing, any of them. They’re just after your money.”

That was the same thing she’d said about veterinarians too when Emma’s one and only dog, Skipper, had had terrible eczema. Rosalie had said it was no use fooling with it, she’d seen it before, and had had him put to sleep.

Emma wondered whether Rosalie was thinking Jake’s case was hopeless and was contemplating putting him to sleep, too.

He must be pretty bad off if Rosalie didn’t think she could fix what ailed him with a little Mercurochrome, vinegar and hot saltwater. She always said most doctors didn’t know any more than she did anyway. She remembered more than a body would think from her year of nurse’s training. And most of what ailed folks just called for a little common sense. No use traipsing off to a doctor’s office to sit and wait to hand him your hard-earned money. You could sit at home and wait in your own living room. Most things got well by themselves anyway, or you died, without your spending a cent.

Rosalie, crazy as a bessybug, Emma thought, but you couldn’t say she was boring. For, as the years passed, Emma had developed a bit of a sense of humor about her stepmother. Not, however, that she’d embraced her to her bosom. But every summer she flew to West Cypress to spend a week, to say hello, because that was what she felt she ought to do. Like Jesse, she still wished that her folks were like everybody else’s—which to her mind meant Robert Young and Jane Wyatt on “Father Knows Best.” But they weren’t. So she tried to be grown-up and make the most of it. Or at least, that’s how her visits always started out.

“Honey?” The fat woman in the blue hat sitting next to Emma suddenly patted her on the arm.

“Yes, ma’am?” God, Emma thought as she heard herself. Just let me fly over the South, haven’t even touched ground yet, and I get mush-mouthed and full of Southern manners. At least that kept the locals from staring at her, though this old gal was doing a pretty good job of it.

“You just hold on to my hand when we land, and I’ll pray for both of us. Everything’s gonna be all right, I promise.”

“Are you scared, ma’am? There’s really nothing to be frightened of. The percentages are much higher that you’ll die in a car wreck,” Emma answered.

“Why, no!” The woman drew herself up, her chest heaving like a sack of flour that had been dropped. “I’m not scared. But aren’t you?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

“That book.” The woman pointed at the paperback on Emma’s lap. She’d been trying to finish it since the Fourth of July, but what with one thing and another, she hadn’t been able to. Across a picture of a woman’s torso with her dress half unzipped marched the title in bold black letters:
Fear of Flying
.

Emma laughed. “This is a novel,” she said. “It’s about…” She hesitated, realizing she couldn’t very well explain the protagonist Amanda Wing’s sexual exploits and the zipless fuck. “It’s not really about being afraid of flying.”

“Well, I wondered.” The woman sniffed. “With that cover.” And she turned away and closed her eyes as the plane came in for a landing. She prayed, but only for herself.

I’m home, Emma thought. Help me, Lord, Jehovah, can anybody hear me? I’m home.

* * *

Rosalie was waiting for her at the airport, had been there half an hour early as she always was, pacing and craning her neck to look up through the plate glass window at the sky.

She hoped she could get Emma to stay the rest of the summer. That would be a nice visit. And God knows she could use the help.

But she knew Emma probably wouldn’t. She was always fidgety, nervous as a witch. Always kept at least a thousand miles between herself and West Cypress, and then when she did come home she wasn’t in the house five minutes before she was on the phone, laughing and talking, calling up friends and making arrangements to run off here and there. Just like when she was a teenager, in and out.

Well, this time would have to be different.

“Flight 106 from Dallas will be landing in just a few minutes,” said a voice from somewhere out of the ceiling.

Rosalie turned from the plate glass window to the seat where she’d left Jake. Behind thick glasses his blue eyes were swimming.

“That’s Emma’s plane,” Rosalie said.

“No, not Dallas. She lives in California.” There he was, being crabby again.

Why did Jake always have to cross her? Most of the time he didn’t know what he was talking about—not that this craziness had made
that
any different; he never had.

“She changed planes in Dallas, Jake.” She used the same tone of voice she’d used with those generations of junior-high-school children who always thought they knew everything. “Miz Fine, pay a fine,” they’d sung behind her back, down the hall.

“Oh,” Jake said and then shook his head. He looked down at the floor sadly. There’d been the time he would have gone on with it, yelled at her right out here in public. But recently most of the spunk had gone out of him.

Rosalie felt sorry for him now. God knows he hadn’t been an easy man to live with all these years, what with his moods, his bursts of temper, long silences—and his laziness. And all that talk of faraway places, as if they were made of money, as if West Cypress weren’t good enough for him. That’s where Emma had gotten her restless ways. Atlanta, New York, California. Lord only knew where she’d light next. Though you could be sure it wasn’t going to be here. Rosalie was surprised Emma’d even agreed to come this time, since she’d already done her annual week in June. That was probably how she thought about it, “doing a week,” as if she were serving time. But she’d come for Jake. She’d always loved her daddy. Rosalie scrabbled in her black plastic purse for a tissue and wiped her eyes. That was her lot, wasn’t it, to never be appreciated.

Well, it was high time Emma came and helped out. She needed her now. Jake was about to drive her round the bend.

She’d known for a long time something was coming on. For ages he’d been pulling all the curtains at night, peeking around them into the backyard like there was something out there.