Mrs. Kimble (20 page)

At the end of the drive they went right. Charlie glanced back at the big house, the dark window where his father and Joan were sleeping. The ocean thundered; the path of crushed seashells glowed under the swollen moon. He paused for a last look at the baby blue Cadillac. Then he turned his back on the house.

T
HEY WALKED
a long time, down winding streets dotted with fancy houses, then along a stretch of highway. In the distance the ocean breathed, like a large animal sighing in its sleep.

“Are we almost there?” Jody asked.

“Almost.” It might have been true; he didn’t know one way or the other. Charlie shifted the suitcase from one hand to the other. His shoulders ached from carrying it, as though someone had tried to tug his arms from their sockets. He looked up at the sky. The moon had disappeared; a gauzy film covered everything, heavy and damp.

“It’s raining,” said Jody.

A drop landed on his face, warm as a tear.

“Is not,” he said.

The air smelled of pavement; a moment later lightning streaked across the sky. Then the heavens opened.

“Now what?” Jody wailed.

“Keep going,” said Charlie.

I
T WAS
after midnight when they found the bus station. “Go sit down,” he told his sister. Then he approached the counter. Behind it a man lounged in his chair, reading a newspaper.

“I want to buy some tickets,” said Charlie.

The man put down his paper and looked around. “Where are your parents?”

“My mama’s not here,” said Charlie. “She’s sick.”

“What about your dad?”

“He’s dead.”

The man frowned. “Where are you headed, son?”

“Montford, Virginia.”

“Virginia. Why would a boy be going to Virginia in the middle of the night?”

Charlie squirmed. His wet T-shirt was plastered against his back. “To see my grandma.”

“All by yourself?”

“Me and my sister.”

The man glanced over Charlie’s shoulder. “Does your grandma know you’re coming?”

“No.” Charlie handed the man his sixty dollars. “It’s a surprise.”

The man took his money. “Well, there’s no bus until six in the morning.”

“That’s okay,” said Charlie. “We’ll wait.”

J
OAN SLEPT
late that morning; when she awoke Ken had already left for his run. She stood at the window watching him, the August sun warm on her face. He ran along the water’s edge, the low tide erasing his footprints, wiping away all trace of him. He
lied, she thought. Someday, perhaps, she would forgive him. In the meantime she had the children.

She wrapped herself in a robe and headed downstairs. “Rosa,” she called out, “could you make Charlie and Jody some waffles?” It had been her favorite breakfast as a child, hers and Ben’s. She ought to have recalled that sooner. It’s not so difficult, she thought. She’d been a kid once herself; all she had to do was remember.

Rosa appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “How many waffles?”

“I’m not sure. Charlie has a big appetite.” Joan turned and headed back upstairs. “Let me see if they’re hungry.”

She tapped at the bedroom door. “Jody! Charlie, are you awake?”

T
HEY SAT
at the front of the bus, the engine grinding beneath them. Charlie shivered in his damp T-shirt, wishing for a sweater. He’d abandoned the suitcase, left it in someone’s front yard when it became too heavy to carry. He knew, but didn’t care, that his mother would be angry. He thought of his room, his own bed. Once he was home she could yell at him all she wanted.

He glanced over at his sister, asleep in the seat beside him. She had no more sense than a baby; he had to watch her every minute. When he came back from the ticket counter, she was talking to a man who’d given her a quarter. She’d told him all about the big pink house, the swimming pool, the stuffed alligator Joan had given her as a present. “You dope,” Charlie hissed when the man went away. Their mother had warned them about talking to strangers.

Charlie closed his eyes. He’d stayed awake all night in the hard plastic chair, listening to Jody snore, worrying about the twenty
dollars he had left in his pocket; and now that they were safe inside the bus, he couldn’t fall asleep. Through the window he watched the sky lighten, the morning clear and streaked with pink.

I’ll sleep when we get home, he thought.

K
ineahora.

The Burdine’s truck came promptly at nine. Joan stood in the doorway of the bedroom, watching the men separate the bunk beds where Jody and Charlie had slept. She did not cry as the men struggled down the spiral staircase and loaded the beds into the truck. She signed the clipboard they offered and handed them each a twenty. The truck backed out of the driveway and disappeared down the road.

She sat in the empty room, smoking. The bright new wallpaper looked garish in the bare light. She’d already returned the curtains to the store.

A week had passed since the children ran away. She’d been in tears when Ken came back from his run. “Call the police,” she said. “Tell them it’s an emergency.” He’d insisted on looking for them himself; an hour later he’d called her from the bus station. A clerk there had sold a little boy two tickets to Virginia.

“Can we go after them?” she said.

“No,” said Ken. “I’ll have to call their mother.”

He made the call in private, from his office. Joan didn’t object. She’d stopped caring whether Ken spoke with his ex-wife, what the two of them said to each other. None of it matters, she thought. Just let the children be safe. It occurred to her that she was praying. The next day Ken told her that Charlie and Jody had arrived in Virginia. Joan, once again, was alone with her husband.

Destiny, she’d learned, was written in the heavens; a person couldn’t take what the universe didn’t wish to give. Her own child had been taken away; in her pain she had tried to take someone else’s. A perverse act, malignant in its selfishness. One that God would not permit.

She never told Ken what his son had said, never confronted him about being a minister. He had lied to her about the deepest thing; their marriage was founded on a lie. But she had lost everything else. He was all she had.

She found the lump in bed one night as he lay sleeping beside her. She wasn’t surprised. She’d been waiting for it all along.

T
hey met by accident on a snowy day in January, a dark afternoon when the street lamps came on at three o’clock. To Dinah Whitacre, who did not believe in accidents, their meeting seemed fated. Their paths had already intersected once—years before, in Richmond, when she was just a girl. For it to happen a second time required an alignment of large forces, a rare convergence of time and weather and traffic. To call it a coincidence seemed ludicrous.

The bus was late that morning, and crowded. Dinah crammed into a seat in the back, her thick down jacket insulating her from the strange bodies on either side. Next to her a stout man folded the
Post,
elbowing her puffy side. Over his shoulder she scanned the headlines: “Record Snowfall Pummels East Coast.”

The bus stopped at a red light; on both sides the avenue was glutted with cars. She glanced at her watch. In a few minutes the first lunch customers would arrive. In four years she’d never been late for work; her punctuality had won her the approval of the chef, who was not easily pleased.

The light changed; the bus lurched forward. Just then a second bus appeared at the cross street; a moment later it slid, spinning, into the intersection. Brakes squealed; Dinah was thrown forward against the seat ahead of her. At the front of the bus a baby wailed.

“Is everybody all right?” the driver shouted.

Debris littered the aisle: pocketbooks, bag lunches, an open briefcase spilling papers across the floor. A small crowd had formed on the sidewalk. In the distance a siren screamed. She slid out of her seat, legs trembling, and stepped across the clutter in the aisle. Around her passengers grumbled, swore, rubbed their necks. She reached the front of the bus.

“Let me out,” she told the driver, a broad man in uniform.

He stared at her face. “You sure you’re okay?”

It’s a birthmark,
she wanted to say.
I’ve had it my whole life. You don’t get a birthmark in a bus accident.

“I’m fine,” she said.

He pulled a lever to open the doors. She hurried down the steps and into the street. Running was impossible in her chef’s clogs; she walked as fast as she could, careful not to slip on the icy sidewalk. The low sky was moist and dark: more snow on the way.

The restaurant, Emile’s, sat at the corner of two busy streets, its front windows glowing under a blue awning. Behind it the alley had just been plowed; a wall of dirty snow blocked the rear door of the restaurant. Stamping her feet, she went in through the front door, something she hadn’t done in years.

The dining room was half full; customers occupied the prime tables at the windows. The hostess looked up from her podium. She was a slim, dark-haired girl with beautiful skin.

“Jesus,” she said. “What happened to you?”

Dinah peeled off her jacket. “What do you mean?”

“Your mouth,” said the hostess.

Dinah touched her lip, sticky with blood. “The bus crashed,” she said, blotting her mouth with a glove.

At the window a customer looked up from his menu, a very thin man in a dark suit. He had a long face and brilliant blue eyes. Dinah met his gaze and he nodded, a slight inclination of his bald head. There was something familiar in his face.

“You’d better go back. Emile is worried about you.” The hostess smiled, showing perfect teeth. “He figured if you were late something horrible must have happened.”

Dinah went through the swinging doors, pulling off her down jacket. Underneath, her white coat was wrinkled, her neckerchief slightly askew. In the kitchen the four line cooks were already in place. The prep cook chopped an onion loudly, a precise, mechanical sound.

“Here she is,” said the sous-chef. “We were starting to wonder.”

“Sorry I’m late.” Dinah looked Emile in the eye but didn’t explain. Nothing made him angrier than an excuse.

“Go wash your face,” he said. He took a plate from the line and stuck a fork into the gratin; he was meticulous about tasting the food.

In the staff washroom she rinsed her mouth, glad she hadn’t bothered with makeup. She rarely made the effort to cover her birthmark; everyone at Emile’s knew what she looked like. She thought of the customer in the dark suit, whose eyes had held hers a second too long across the room. Nothing new there: she’d always gotten noticed. In the street, in the grocery store, children gaped and pointed. “Don’t stare,” their parents whispered, not realizing they were staring too. But this man’s look was different, as if he recognized her. It seemed unlikely. She spent fourteen hours a
day in Emile’s kitchen. After five years in Washington she knew almost no one.

She dried her face and went back to the dining room, where the hostess stood chatting with the bartender.

“There was a man sitting alone.” She pointed to the table by the window. “In the first seating. Did he have a reservation?”

The hostess frowned, rippling her smooth forehead. “I can check.”

Dinah followed her to the podium. The hostess reached for her reservation book, traced down the page with a perfect red finger-nail. Her skin was as pale as milk. She must live on vanilla ice cream, Dinah thought; rounds of Camembert, crème anglaise.

“A little old for you, isn’t he?” said the hostess.

Dinah colored. “It’s not that. He looked familiar, that’s all.”

“Here it is,” said the hostess. “He comes in now and then for lunch. His name is Ken Kimble.”

S
HE LEFT
Emile’s at one-thirty in the morning. It was snowing as she walked down the avenue toward the bus stop, large wet flakes that melted the instant they touched her skin. She boarded the bus at the corner and sank into a seat, thinking of Reverend Kimble.

She hadn’t thought of him in years. As a teenager she’d baby-sat for him and his wife. She’d doted on their redheaded children—Charlie especially—but it was her crush on the reverend that kept her coming back. At the time, he was like no one she’d ever known: a grown man, but as different from her stern father and stodgy uncles as he could be. Her father wore half glasses and suspenders, black wing tips and starched white shirts; the world he
lived in was black and white, a dour place devoid of surprises. Reverend Kimble seemed to live in glorious color. She remembered his bright ties, his crazy patterned shirts. He kept his hair longer than other men—in back it touched his shirt collar—and in the winter he wore turtlenecks and a suede jacket.

He was the only adult she knew who cared about music. Driving her home at the end of the evening, he’d hum softly with the radio. His favorites were the same as hers: the Byrds, the Beatles, Joni Mitchell. He never bothered her with meaningless questions about school or teachers, as adults usually did. When he spoke it was about real things: the war, the upcoming election, the injustice of the draft. He expected her to have opinions and listened carefully to what she said. Sitting in the car next to him she’d felt perfectly comfortable—her pretty side exposed, her birthmark hidden by the dark.

The mark began at her temple, a purple stain that washed over her right eye and cheekbone and ended at her jaw. Her whole life it had been the size of her hand; as her hand grew, so did the purple stain. As a girl she’d spent hours examining it in the mirror: the gradations of color, the odd topography. She’d had a jigsaw puzzle as a child, a map of the United States; her birthmark was the exact shape of Minnesota, its jagged eastern border cutting across her right cheek. Back then there was no concealing it; her mother wouldn’t let her wear makeup. “It’s not natural,” she’d once told Dinah. “We all go through life with the face God gave us.” It was the only time in Dinah’s memory that an adult had mentioned the mark. Her parents treated it as a secret; teachers and neighbors avoided looking her in the face.

Only Reverend Kimble was willing to admit it was there. Once, driving her home from baby-sitting, he’d asked her about it. He
had pulled into her parents’ driveway; as she reached for her door handle, he stopped her. “Wait,” he said, his hand on her shoulder. He had never touched her before.

“Where did it come from?” Lightly he touched her cheek. “Have you always had it?”

“Yes.” She couldn’t look at him; her skin burned beneath his fingers.

“Don’t let it bother you so much,” he said. “You can get it taken care of someday.”

She had never heard of such a thing.

“There are doctors who specialize in cosmetic problems,” he explained. “Plastic surgeons.” He smiled; he seemed amused by her ignorance.

“My mother would never let me,” she said.

“You’ll be eighteen in a few years. Then you can do as you please.”

Her voice quavered. “Is it expensive?”

He shrugged. “Whatever the cost, it would be worth it. You’re a beautiful girl.”

His words stayed with her for years. Each night as she lay waiting for sleep, she tried to re-create the evening in her mind—the tone of his voice, his hand on her shoulder. Soon the memory was worn as an old photograph, the edges fuzzy from frequent handling; she worried that she’d gotten the words wrong, forgotten some nuance of his face or voice. Finally she wondered if she’d made the whole thing up.

Dinah stared out the bus window: snow melting on the slick pavement, streetlights reflected in the wet. She’d been stunned to learn he’d left his wife and children; but in a way it made sense. She
had never understood what he saw in his wife, who was very much like Dinah’s mother, a woman who wore pin curls and said things like “Oh my stars.” Once, when she was baby-sitting, Dinah had rifled through the drawers in the Kimbles’ bedroom. Mrs. Kimble wore the same kind of underwear Dinah’s mother did: hideous brassieres with pointed cups and thick straps, nylon panties as big as grocery sacks. With shaking hands Dinah had opened the smaller bureau, the one that held Reverend Kimble’s clothes. His underwear was neatly folded, colorful briefs in thin cotton.

Her parents had never told her where Reverend Kimble went; she overheard them talking one night after she’d been excused from the table.

“It isn’t your fault,” her mother had said.

“Tell that to the Snells,” said her father. “The girl is nineteen years old. They didn’t send their daughter to a Christian college to have her run off with the chaplain.”

“What kind of a girl is she? The Snell girl. What kind of a girl would do that?”

“A troublemaker. Worked up about the war. A hippie kind of girl.”

After that it had all made sense. The reverend had left his wife and children, it was true, but there was a good reason: he had fallen in love. Not only that, he’d chosen someone not much older than Dinah; a girl who stood for all the same things she privately believed. You could almost say he’d picked someone just like her.

Dinah got off the bus and climbed the hill. She’d lived in Glover Park for three years. It had once been a genteel neighborhood, the brick row houses owned by middle-class families who’d lived there for generations. Now those families were gone, the houses divided
into small apartments. The tenants were mostly young and poor, a transient mix of students and dropouts. Burglaries were common; at least once a week she was awakened by sirens.

She gathered the mail and climbed the stairs to her apartment. She’d bought the house for virtually nothing; she paid her mortgage by renting the first floor to two Georgetown medical residents, an Indian couple named Ann and Dillip Patel. At the top of the stairs she fumbled with a second set of locks. The house had been burglarized twice in two years; after each break-in she’d added an extra lock to the door. Inside, she undressed and stepped into the shower. Though she wore it in a tight chignon, her long hair absorbed the kitchen smells; unless she washed it first she’d be unable to sleep.

She wrapped her hair in a towel and sat at the kitchen table to sort through the mail. She found the invitation among a stack of bills and magazines. The Calvary High School five-year class reunion, to be held in the school cafeteria the first of June. The envelope had been mailed to her parents’ address in Richmond; her mother must have forwarded it. Oh, Mother, she thought. Don’t you ever learn?

She worked her way to the bottom of the stack, putting aside the electric bill. Finally she stood and lit the gas stove. For a moment she held the invitation to the burner. Then she dropped it, flaming, into the sink.

In the bedroom she slipped between the cold sheets. The wind howled outside, a lonely sound; she sensed movement in the rooms beneath her. Dinah rarely saw the Patels; she knew them only through their noises—dish washing, laughter, the low hum of the radio. She was grateful for their presence below her, a buffer between her and the street.

Her aching back released into the mattress. Beneath her the noises grew louder. She heard them several times a week: a soft whimpering, like an animal’s cry; the rumble of a deeper voice. Dinah held her breath. She waited for the usual cadence, the rhythmic thud of the headboard against the wall. Dillip was slender and soft-spoken; she imagined he would be very gentle.

The sounds quickened. Dinah closed her eyes and thought of Dillip’s skin, the hard muscles of his legs—in the summer he rode his bicycle in terry-cloth shorts. He was studying to be an obstetrician; he would know her body better than she did herself.

A small cry, a sudden silence. Dinah imagined the heat of his mouth, his hands on her face, loving and uncritical; hands that ushered newborn babies into life. She closed her eyes. Outside, snow floated down from heaven. Somewhere, not far away, Reverend Kimble was sleeping.