Leaving Eden (18 page)

When it was over, the preacher announced that Mrs. Reynolds had invited everyone back to the family’s home for libations. I couldn’t imagine how they expected to fit everyone in, but later Raylene told me they’d set up a tent and that caterers brought in all the way from Lynchburg did the food. I went directly home. I stripped off my new clothes and put on one of my daddy’s old shirts and sat on the glider, trying to figure out the puzzle of life. The summer she’d passed I heard Mama tell Martha Lee that life was short. “Even if you get the full measure of years, it’s brief,” she’d said. “Why don’t we know that? Why do we waste time?” Sitting on the glider, I thought about Mr. Reynolds and how he must have thought he was going to live to see Spy graduate and become a lawyer and take over the business. And Mama—what had she believed she’d live to see? And the people buried beneath a tunnel in Lynchburg? What would they do different if they had the chance? “Regret,” Mama’d said to Martha Lee, “regret is a pitiful thing, and I don’t know which is worse, regret for what you’ve done or remorse for all the things you never got to do.” “You can’t live life backwards,” Martha Lee’d told her. “Best we can do is go forward, doing what makes sense at the time.”

I thought they were both right. Then and there, still holding the memory of Mr. Reynolds’s funeral and Mama’s words about regret being a pitiful thing, I decided to move forward. You might not believe this, but I marched straight to the phone and dialed the Lynchburg airport. When she asked, I told the lady my departure was Wednesday. That would give me enough time to get prepared. And I wanted to go to the Kurl one more time. I wanted to say good-bye, even if Raylene didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I believed a person should always say her good-byes when she had a chance. Just in case. The reservations lady said if I wasn’t charging the ticket on a card, I’d have to pick it up within twenty-four hours, and I told her no problem. I knew where I’d get the money, and it didn’t seem wrong. Not one bit. Life was so short, you had to grab what you wanted. You had to move forward. I started packing that night. I didn’t have much to take. My stuff didn’t begin to fill Mama’s gray suitcase. I had just the clothes Martha Lee had bought me, my
Glamour Day
photos, my rule book, Mama’s red sweater and her Hollywood scrapbook. I put in the postcards she’d sent me, too, and the envelope I’d taken from Martha Lee with the mystifying pictures of Mama and the paper with the address and phone number of Sasha, whoever she was. I’d tried to call the number Mama’d put down but had just gotten a recording telling me that number had been disconnected at the party’s request. Then I’d called the information operator, but she’d said the only listing they had for a Sasha Upton on Mississippi Street was unlisted. I figured I’d just have to look her up when I got there.

The other thing I planned to do when I arrived in L.A. was to go see all the places Mama’d written about: the sidewalk with the handprints of the stars; the Hollywood sign the actress had jumped off; Paramount Studios. I figured I’d go to the studio since someone there might remember Mama and that would help me get started. Then, in the back of my rule book, I copied my Uncle Grayson’s number. And Goody’s number in Florida, too, in case I had a real emergency, though I’d have to be close to dead to call her. I was finishing up when I heard my daddy’s truck pull in.

I shoved the suitcase back in the closet and listened while he came up the steps. No stumbling or falling. Still, I held my breath. You could have knocked me over with a sneeze when he stopped at my door. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi.” I wondered if somehow he could tell my plans, if my face revealed my thoughts.

“You okay?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How was the funeral?”

“Crowded,” I said. “And hot.” It was weird, talking to him like this, and it made me about crazy with wondering what was wrong.

“I’ll bet,” he said. “No telling how long this dry spell will last.” He came in my room and sat down on the foot of my bed. He’d had a few, I could smell the beer, but he wasn’t drunk.

“They had to set up extra chairs,” I said.

He leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Guess he was an important man,” he said. My daddy never spoke ill of anyone, even Goody; in that way he was like Mama, but the funny way he stressed
important
told me he hadn’t liked Mr. Reynolds.

“There was a bagpipe,” I told him.

He looked up, surprised. “A piper?”

“Uh-huh.”

He shook his head. “Nothing like a pipe,” he said. “They can crack a grown man’s heart in half.”

“I know,” I said. “It kind of hurt to listen.”

“I knew a man once who played. Friend of my daddy’s. Your Granddaddy Brock.”

“Really?” My daddy never talked about his mama and daddy, who’d died before I was born.

“You know, he played the fiddle.”

“Who?” It was weird, having a real conversation like normal people, but nice, too. It reminded me of when he’d take me to the mill and explain about the different grains, real patient, even when I couldn’t tell the difference. “Who played the fiddle?”

“Your granddaddy. He could make a cat dance just with the pleasure of hearing him play.” He stood up. “It’s getting late. Best you be getting some sleep.”

I didn’t want him to go.

At the door, he looked directly at me. “You’re getting tall, girl,” he said, and shook his head like he was trying to remember something.

I looked over toward the closet where I’d hid Mama’s suitcase. Up to then I hadn’t given a thought as to how it would be to leave my daddy. It seemed he’d pretty much forgotten I existed. It was peculiar him coming in that way, suddenly behaving like a father, acting like he liked me, now that I was preparing to leave. It made me sad, like the music of the pipes. But if I was going to be having regrets, I’d rather they be ’cause I’d gone rather than ’cause I’d stayed.

I was dreaming of my Granddaddy Brock, at least I guess it was him. He looked a little like my daddy, but he was old and he was playing a fiddle and there was a cat dancing a jig. It was dressed in a little suit, like this picture I had in a book when I was a little girl. Someone was calling my granddaddy and whistling for him and they kept it up and I was sorry because I didn’t want him to stop the music. Then I woke up. There was a sound at the window, the old willow I thought, and turned over, wondering if I could settle back in the dream of my granddaddy, like sometimes you can if you don’t wake too much, but the noise came again. It wasn’t the willow, it was someone scratching at the screen and whispering my name.

I held still, barely breathing.

“Tallie? It’s me. Spy.”

“Spy?” It was a night for big surprises. First my daddy, coming home and talking to me regular-like, then Spy showing up at my window. “What’re you doing here?” I whispered back.

“Can you come out?”

“Now?” I was wearing nothing but my daddy’s old shirt.

“Yeah.”

“In a sec,” I said.

“I’ll wait,” he said. “On the porch.”

I brushed my hair and put on the clothes I’d worn to the funeral. It seemed like a million years ago I’d sat in the church and heard the bagpipes and squeezed next to Mrs. Purvis so I could get a better look at Spy.

When I went outside, he was sitting on the glider. I looked around but the Camaro wasn’t in the drive or anywhere as far as I could see. “How’d you get here?”

“Walked.”

“You walked? From your house?”

“Yeah,” he said, like it was normal to walk five miles in the middle of the night and scratch at someone’s screen until you woke someone you hadn’t seen in days and who you’d acted like you never wanted to see again as long as you lived.

“I was there today,” I told him. “At the funeral, I mean.”

“A Dreck Girl production,” he said, his voice tight and mean.

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I shut up. I was filled with a million questions, but I didn’t ask one. I figured if he came all this way, he must have something on his mind and I’d let him tell me in his own fashion.

We sat on the glider and stared out into the night. Whatever brought him to my window, he wasn’t in any hurry to get around to it. I was real conscious of him sitting so close, and it was a mixed-up feeling, sort of comfortable, like we were friends, but nervous, too, with that electric feeling he always caused in my stomach. I wondered if he could hear my heart beating. Fireflies flickered over the grass. I told him what my mama’d said, about them being a kind of beetle and how beetles signified change. Sitting next to him in the dark, I was seized by a feeling I couldn’t name and I told him a secret I hadn’t told anyone. Not Rula or Martha Lee or Goody. I told him about burying the Queen of Cures that Allie Rucker had given me. But that wasn’t the real secret. The real secret was something close to a miracle, ’cause there was no other explanation for how it had occurred. The real secret was that the spring after Mama died, in the
exact
spot I’d buried that mess of seeds and bark Allie called a Cure, in that
exact
spot, a butterfly bush appeared. I’m not making that up. Honestly. In the exact same spot. I thought Spy might laugh or think I was making it up, but he didn’t.

“You miss your mama?” he asked.

“Every day,” I said. “I guess you’ll be missing your daddy, too.”

He didn’t answer, just stared out at the dark. I wished there was a moon, something to give a little light on his face, something so I could get a hint of what he was thinking.

Then he turned and put his hands on my shoulders and pulled me to him. The electric feeling shot straight through me, so strong that, if I’d been a lamp, I would have lit up like neon. Then he kissed me and there was hunger near desperation in that kiss and it roused something answering in me, something I hadn’t even known was there, but that had been building all day, starting with the bagpipe music and the knowledge that everyone died, even me someday. He kissed me long and deep and it was nowhere near enough. The feelings ran so fierce, I thought it must mean we were made for each other.

Of course, now I know that being around death always makes you hunger for life, makes you reach for it however and wherever you can find it, but that night I thought it was magic reserved for us. He pushed me back on the glider and I welcomed the weight of him, welcomed the astonishing hardness of him, knowing what it was and that it came from wanting me. When he slipped his hand beneath me, I shifted my hips to make it easy. My body rose to meet his in a rhythm that flowed as natural as the water in a stream.

He pulled back and looked down at me. “Is your daddy home?” he whispered.

“Sleeping.”

“Can we go in?” he said. “Your bed?”

I didn’t hesitate one instant. I figured before it was my time to pass, I’d be answering for plenty of regrets and I’d have my share of sorrows, but that night I didn’t think there was one thing about being with Spy that I could live long enough to regret. Not if I lived to be twice as old as Easter Davis.

Tallie’s Book

Always say good-bye when you have the
chance.

Regret is a pitiful thing.

Being around death makes you hunger
for life.

Magical things rise up out of unlikely
beginnings.

A boy who looks like a pirate can have a
choir singer’s soul.

eighteen

In the morning, Spy was gone and for one moment, before I fully woke, I truly believed that everything had been a dream, that his coming to me had no more happened than my Granddaddy Brock’d played a fiddle and a cat dressed in green velvet had danced a jig.

But dreams didn’t leave your body aching and sore, or the smell of a man on your skin. For sure dreams didn’t leave blood on your sheets. Proof I was no longer a virgin, which was supposed to be some big deal or something. Truth was, I was happy to be done with it. I mean, virgin sounded stupid. Like a disease you needed to get over. Spy had been my cure.

My daddy was in the kitchen, whistling and making coffee. I was absolutely not ready to face him and I decided to stay right where I was until he left for the mill. I believed that all that had occurred in the night must show clear on my face, show as openly as a birthmark, like one of those port-wine stains Willie Purvis had, so dark, it made you avert your gaze.

While I was waiting for Daddy to leave, I replayed the night from the beginning, running it through my mind like a Technicolor movie, starting from the instant when I woke to Spy calling at my window. I saw myself get out of bed, unpack my new skirt and shirt from Mama’s gray suitcase, then slip out to the porch. I saw Spy and me sitting on the glider, listening to the cicadas, watching the signals of fireflies. I remember telling him the secret of the butterfly bush. And I recalled that first hungry kiss, which just remembering made my belly heat up. I remembered how right it felt. All of it. I thought of how I’d led Spy inside, to my room, my bed.

In the clear light of morning, it seemed impossible— crazy—that we’d have used my bed, that we’d head there without the least concern or fear that my daddy’d wake and find us. There was only the urgent need. Nothing else. My daddy could have been sitting in the front room with a shotgun laid ’cross his lap and it wouldn’t have prevented me from bringing Spy to my bed. I was pure amazed to find myself capable of such desire. That’s what I remembered most, the deep, insistent desire and the fiery need to meet it. Spy’d undressed me. (My skirt and shirt were still pooled on the floor, exactly where he’d dropped them.) I remembered the sharp, quick sound of his breath— nearly a sob—when his fingers touched my skin, my breasts and belly, and then his whispered
Jesus.
I’d started to undress him, too, but I was too slow. He was faster with the buttons and belt and zipper. I’d longed for a moon, even a crescent, so there’d be light. In the shadows, our fingers had become our eyes. I recalled the electric jolt when skin touched skin, our bodies sweat-soaked from desire as much as heavy summer heat. I remembered the salty taste of kisses, and the way our bodies moved, without thought, in natural rhythm, like they’d been made for just that. Exactly that. And maybe they had. More than walking or working or playing or praying, maybe
that
was what we’d been born for. I’d made cat noises, little moans I didn’t even know I was making till Spy’d whispered in my ear
Shhhh, Shhhh, Shhhhh,
but I was beyond caution. Then his hand over my lips, gently muting my cries. Urgency drove us, drove me, so that nothing could stop me, not even the shock of that first cutting pain when he, grown harder than you’d imagine possible, entered me, and our bodies carried us forward, soaked and slippery with sweat.

I remembered Spy holding me and then I must have fallen off to sleep. I woke to someone’s touch and I’d believed it was my mama. Oh, the pure joy of it. Of knowing she was there, holding me, rocking me, stroking me, telling me how sweet I was. I was so happy to have her back, so joyful her passing had only been a wicked dream. Then I woke fully and saw it was Spy, not Mama, and I felt a confusion of sorrow and joy. We kissed again, slower and more deliberate at first, with me still filled with the waking grief of knowing Mama was truly gone. I’d felt an answering heartache in Spy, as surely as if he’d spoken it aloud, and I believed he was thinking of his daddy. And of Sarah. It was like we were taking all the sorrow we’d ever borne and were pouring it into each other, trying to make something else of it. Something good. There was more I half recalled, not trusting memory. Had I licked tears from Spy’s cheeks? Had he really wept? Or was it sweat? Or had I dreamed that, too, like Granddaddy and the cat?

Guitar music floated in from the kitchen. Daddy’d turned on the radio, and I was wondering if he was ever going to get going for the mill. I was desperate to pee. I was hungry, too, like I hadn’t seen food in days. Then I smelled the nutty, burnt smell of butter frying in the skillet and knew he was making pancakes. That’s how I remembered it was Sunday and he wouldn’t be heading off to the mill. I got up and stripped the stained sheet off the bed. I’d have to soak it in vinegar water later. I left the pillow slip on my pillow. It still smelled of Spy, his aftershave and sweat. Then I saw the rhinestone hair clip sitting on my dresser top. I picked it up and held it, the edges of the little stones digging in my palm. It was proof Spy’d really been there, as if I needed more beyond the stained sheet and my sore body. I took out Mama’s suitcase and put the clip inside, so I’d have it with me. It was all I had of Spy to take, all I had to remind me of our night, and I was glad for it. In the bathroom, it stung when I peed, a fleeting reminder.

“Another hot one,” Daddy said in the kitchen. He smiled at me, and I caught my breath, but he didn’t notice anything after all. He told me the weatherman was predicting it’d go over a hundred. If the farmers lost the crops, it would hurt the mill. He said other things, too, but I wasn’t paying attention. Ronnie Milsap was on the radio. Later, I remembered that ’cause he was singing “Daydreams About Night Things,” and it seemed the perfect song for that morning. I wondered if somewhere Spy was listening to it, too. I hoped so. It was funny, the way I was calm thinking about him, not like the girls at school, who’d gather in the girls’ room and go on and on about some boy they’d gone parking with the night before. They’d carry on like it was some disaster, holding conferences about whether they would dare phone the boy if he didn’t call. Elizabeth Talmadge would be combing her hair and giving out advice, she who never in her life had to wait for any boy to call her. Ronnie Milsap stopped singing and a man came on with a bulletin, but I was still lost in a reverie of Spy. Daddy went over and turned up the volume and that was when I finally listened. “An arrest had been made in the murder of an Eden man,” the man said. “The son of prominent businessman George Reynolds has confessed to the fatal shooting.”

He promised more news to come, but I didn’t—couldn’t— listen fully. I felt like a yard dog sideswiped by a truck, lying in a ditch too stunned to move or to rise and see if walking was a possibility. I must have made a sound, said something, ’cause Daddy said, “You know the boy?” Of course he knew I did. Everyone knew everyone in Eden. I nodded. The part of me that could think—the little part that seemed to be standing apart—wondered what my daddy’d say if he knew Spy had been in his house, in my bed. The other part wasn’t thinking, it was just saying over and over that it was all a mistake. Boys like Spy didn’t kill their daddies. They just didn’t.

The pancakes stuck in my throat like sawdust, and after a while I gave up even trying to eat. In my bedroom, I buried my head in my pillow, inhaling Spy. He couldn’t have done it, I told myself. Couldn’t have done it. I cleaned up the sheet and pinned it on the line. I washed my skirt and top and hung those out, too.

Finally I headed out. “I’ll be back,” I yelled, slipping away before he could ask where I was going. I rode the Raleigh straight downtown. It was a zoo there. I swear it was worse than right after Mr. Reynolds died. Reporters and cameramen were swarming the streets, taking over the diner and standing outside the courthouse, even though it was Sunday and the place was shut up tight. I headed for Wayland’s and ordered a cherry Coke. The reporters were talking a mile a minute and I listened hard, trying to sort fact from pure rumor and there was plenty of that, no surprise. Rumors were spreading through the place like spilt milk on linoleum. You wouldn’t believe some of the things they were saying. One reporter said Spy was a student at Washington and Lee, reporting it like gospel, and then another said, no, he was enrolled at Liberty University, a Bible student. It almost made me laugh. The only thing they all agreed on was that Spy’d confessed. They’d gotten that directly from Sheriff Craw. The sheriff said Spy’d even turned over the gun, case closed. The lady who was sure Spy went to Washington and Lee said she’d heard Spy was protecting his mama.

“The son’s covering for the wife,” she said. She had a nasty, nasal voice.

“No way,” said the man who’d made Spy a Bible student. He had greasy hair and a bad case of dandruff. “The boy did it. Open and closed.”

“I don’t think so,” said the nasty lady. “I say it was the wife. She killed the husband and got the boy to take the rap.”

“Didn’t happen,” the man said.

“Motive,” the lady said flatly. “That’s why I think it’s the wife. What would the son’s motive be?”

“Who knows,” the man said. “Probably drugs.”

They acted like they were talking about people in a movie or something, and I hated them, even if hating was a sin.

“My money’s still on the wife,” the lady said.

“How much?” said the man.

“Ten bucks.”

“You’re on.” They actually bet on it, shaking hands and everything.

You’re wrong, I wanted to shout. You’re stupid and you’re wrong and you have dandruff all over your shoulders. I didn’t care what the hell they said. Not one damn thing about it made sense. I recalled Spy’s hands on me, stroking my back, caressing every part of me. I tried to imagine those same hands pointing a gun at his daddy’s head, pulling the trigger. It seemed impossible. Even knowing he had a gun, even remembering the night up on the Blue Ridge when he’d fired it, I couldn’t believe Spy’d really shot his daddy.

On the way out of the diner, I pretended to stumble and bumped the table where the stupid reporters sat, spilling their coffee.

“Fuck,” the lady said right out loud, brushing furiously at her skirt with a handful of napkins.

“Sorry,” I said in a perfect imitation of Elizabeth Talmadge, a tone that said I wasn’t sorry in the least. I didn’t just want to get away from Wayland’s, I wanted to run from Eden, too. I needed to escape and I didn’t think I could wait until Wednesday. You might think with all that was going on—Spy and me making love, his confessing to his father’s murder—all that would make me want to stick around, but in some way I couldn’t explain, it made me want to go more than ever. My chest felt tight, like I wasn’t getting enough air. It was like everything was closing down, like I could suddenly see my whole life playing out in front of me. If I didn’t escape, I’d go to the cosmetology school in Lynchburg and then work for Raylene and we wouldn’t talk about it but there’d be an understanding that someday I’d take the shop over from her, like she had from Lenora. Jeez, I’d probably end up marrying someone like Wiley Bettis.

I thought about Mama heading to L.A. and Goody going all the way to Florida after my granddaddy died. In science class, Mr. Brown told us that genes determined the color hair you got and the color of your eyes and height and things like that. Everything, he said, was determined by genes. So I had to wonder if our family carried an Escape Gene and if so, was it a dominant gene, one that twisted our hearts into always wanting something more. Just as another family might have girls with curly hair, I wondered if the women in my family were born wanting to escape. Goody wanted to get away to Florida, and before that, she drove my granddaddy to becoming a doctor so she could avoid the life of a store clerk’s wife. Mama wanted to go to Hollywood and be a star so she could live the life she was truly fated to live. And I wanted to become famous, too, and flee a future that went no farther than cosmetology school in Lynchburg.

Maybe it wasn’t exactly an Escape Gene we had. Maybe we had the chromosome for Wanting so that we were always desiring something more, confusing our lives by longing for something other than what life handed out. As Mama would say, we were capable of imagination, and imagination—the power to dream—could make you discontent. Mama said once we’re denied something, we want it even more, like the denying was what held the power. For years I’d been wanting Spy Reynolds, but now that we’d made love—and I didn’t regret one moment of it—the terrible desire had eased.

Still, I wanted to talk with him. I owed him that before I left. With my daddy off from the mill, I knew I couldn’t use the phone at home, so I headed over to the Cash Store. In the pay booth, I dropped in my dime and waited, expecting to get the machine with the “leave your number and name” message, but on the second ring, Mrs. Reynolds picked up. I wasn’t prepared, and she had to say hello twice before I managed to ask for Spy. “Who is calling?” she demanded. She said that in a precise way, three clipped and separate words, unlike her normal tone. I remembered how shrunken she’d seemed at the funeral, leaning on Spy, and what Rula’d said about her at Sarah’s funeral, grasping at hands and not letting go, talking of how her beautiful angel’d gone to heaven. Now her voice sounded as hard and shiny as a sheet of steel.
Who is calling?
I remembered what the reporter said about her being the one to kill Mr. Reynolds. For the first time I believed it could be true. Someone with a voice that’d cut through stone would be capable of anything. “It’s Tallie,” I said. “Tallie Brock.” I was hoping she’d remember me from when I used to swim with Sarah. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice brittle as baled hay. “Spaulding isn’t taking any calls.” She hung up before I could say more. For the moment, it calmed me, knowing he was at home, that at least he wasn’t sitting in the county jail.

Daddy was asleep when I got home. He was sprawled on the sofa in the front room, TV blaring out some ballgame. There were empty beer cans on the floor. The dirty dishes were still on the kitchen table. Wednesday, I thought, I’m out of here on Wednesday.