Rock of Ages (31 page)

“Forsythia.”

The older woman eases herself into the chair. She looks tired.

“I've just been to see Leeza and the baby,” she says. “She's a beautiful child, but then, I never did see a baby I didn't want to eat up with a spoon.”

She seems almost as happy as Georgia herself over the baby's name.

“And that little Leeza,” she adds, “I just think she is going to be the best mother. She just seems so easy with the baby, even now.”

Georgia admits that Leeza probably will handle her first child a hell of a lot better than she handled Justin. It occurs to her that Leeza has the gift of being able to put someone else's life before hers, without even resenting it. Georgia knows that her son's girlfriend could go on to college, could make a career for herself, but if she doesn't, she probably will be content with what she has right now.

It is not a talent, she thinks, to be taken lightly.

The two of them sit there, both of them resting, for a few minutes, saying little.

“That was really something you did,” Forsythia says at last.

“That's what I hear. All I did was get myself half-killed.”

Forsythia waves her off.

“You did what nobody ever does. Or almost nobody. You risked your life to do what you thought was right. I wouldn't have wanted you to take the chance you did, and I don't know what possessed you to go to that … that maniac's house like that in the middle of the night. Somebody surely was watching over you.”

You'd never guess who, Georgia thinks.

It turns out that the same sheriff's department that couldn't keep from telling Pooh Blackwell about Georgia's suspicions also couldn't stifle itself when it came to the details of her abduction, withholding information only from the
Port Campbell Post
. And almost no one on the east side of Scots County was more than one degree of separation from somebody wearing a badge.

“You know how it is in a little place like this,” Forsythia says. “Or, maybe you don't, or you've forgotten. But everybody here thought, without saying it, that Pooh and maybe William had something to do with what happened to Jenny. But you have to live, you have to get along. That's what we all tell ourselves. Don't make any enemies.

“We were cowards.”

Georgia tells her that isn't so, but Forsythia talks over her.

“I went over there to talk to Kenny, to see what in the world happened. He was so torn up about it, Georgia. He blames himself for, you know, the rape and all.” She struggles with the word, as if it is the worst profanity. “I told him that everybody knew he would have gone with you, or stopped you, if he had known what you had in mind.

“But he did show me the notebooks.”

“He what?!”

Georgia tries to sit up in bed and pays a price in pain, falling back with a groan.

“Godalmighty, can't anybody keep anything to himself around here?”

“It's all right,” Forsythia tells her, patting her wrist, still bruised from the I.V. needles. “He knows I can keep a secret. He read them, and I guess he felt like he had to show someone else what you had done.

“It made me cry, seeing how lonely and afraid she was, what she was living with, and I'll always blame myself for not doing something.”

“Me too,” Georgia says.

“We talked just about every day, and she never once mentioned that she was keeping a journal. I knew the Blackwells made her uneasy, but I guess I just didn't want to know how bad things had gotten.”

Forsythia pauses, then presses on.

“Kenny and I both have a pretty good idea, reading those diaries, that you didn't just find them in the front yard. You went inside that house, didn't you?”

“Maybe I'd better take the fifth on that one, Forsythia.”

“Well,” she says, “maybe someday you'll tell me where you found them, and how you knew where to look.”

“Maybe,” Georgia says. “Maybe someday.”

The older woman doesn't appear to have the energy to stand up, let alone drive the seven miles to her home.

“Forsythia,” Georgia tells her, “you look worn out. You shouldn't be on the highway tonight. Why don't you just put your feet up and stay right here? You've already spent two nights in that big recliner, so I know you can sleep in it. I'm worn out, but you look like you need a rest worse than I do. And I could use the company, to tell you the truth.”

To Georgia's amazement, Forsythia offers only a feeble demurrer, one that is easily overridden.

“Well,” she says, “maybe I will close my eyes for a few minutes here, if you think the nurses won't throw me out.”

“They'd better not try.”

“Yes,” Forsythia says, laughing a little. “I doubt they would want to tangle with you.”

Forsythia avails herself of Georgia's bathroom, then helps Georgia get to the toilet and back.

Then the two of them lie there, Georgia in her hospital bed, her old teacher propped up in the recliner. A nurse finally comes and delivers the pain pill. She objects to Forsythia, but Georgia tells her that her friend is staying, “period.”

“Well,” Forsythia says, “good night, Georgia. Merry Christmas.”

Yes, Georgia thinks, drifting away. It is.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

January 2, 2000

Georgia has yielded to consensus and allowed that they all have passed into a new century. She is tired of pointing out the illogic of it, of insisting that it won't really be the 21
^st
century for another year, maybe even longer if you make allowances for the vagaries of the Julian calendar.

“Mom,” Justin told her, “we're going to form a new society, Leeza and I. It's called ‘We know better, but we don't care.'”

The world was not brought to its knees by computers or terrorists yesterday. They all watched on New Year's Eve as it seamlessly became 2000 in Australia and China and Egypt, and then Europe.

Georgia spends most of her non-sleeping day sitting up now, and a physical therapist comes by to torture her for a couple of hours each morning. Her memory seems to be returning, she has an appointment with an oral surgeon on Tuesday, and she'll have to have the nose re-broken and set next week. Somewhere down the road: plastic surgery. It hurts her to move about much, and she hasn't yet trusted herself to hold Georgia Noel, as much as she wants to.

On Monday, two days after Christmas, they all came home. Leeza left the hospital carrying her two-day-old baby, with Justin walking alongside as if he could protect his new daughter from anything life might send her way. Kenny pushed Georgia's wheelchair to the pickup area, then all but carried her into the van. He and Justin were in the front seats, three generations of women in the back, all looking a little worse for the wear.

Justin and Leeza, who never did get around to fully preparing the baby's room, had to further deal with a disabled 52-year-old who, instead of an asset, had become a liability.

Kenny saved them, cooking meals, going out on errands three times that day as the others remembered things they absolutely had to have and helping deal with the crowds of well-wishers. It seemed half of East Geddie dropped by at one time or another. At the end of the day, he told Justin he thought it might be easier all around if he just moved into a spare room at the McCain house for a while, and nobody tried to stop him.

Georgia had never truly bonded with her bed at the farmhouse. It wasn't as firm as the one she left in Montclair, and it was smaller. After two weeks in a hospital room, though, she thought it was the best one she had ever slept on.

She didn't wake up until almost 9 on Tuesday morning. She was still trying to get dressed, dreading the ordeal of giving herself a bath later, and the first visit from the therapist, when Justin knocked and told her she had a call.

It was David Sheets.

He wondered if he might come out to the farm. He had something rather serious to discuss with her.

“Can you make it after noon?” she asked. “I think it'll take me that long to get dressed.”

He said he could be there at 2.

Kenny and Justin sat in on the meeting, too. David Sheets used a language understood best by lawyers, but finally the three of them figured out what he was saying: William Blackwell did not want Jenny McLaurin's house. He wanted to give it to her next of kin.

“Which,” Georgia said, “would be me?”

The lawyer nodded.

Georgia shook her head.

“Is there anything that I, ah, need to sign or anything?”

“Not right now. Probably later. But my client wanted me to tell you that you are welcome to take over the property whenever you want. He is prepared to turn it over to you, free and simple.”

He never mentioned William's or Pooh's name, and when he left, even the former Dwayne Sheets expressed his sorrow and dismay over what had happened to her, and told her she was a strong woman in such a way that she was sure he must know the story, too.

When Kenny and Justin drove over to the house later, they found that everything of Pooh Blackwell's had been removed, leaving it on the bare side but at least more or less clean. It smelled of ammonia and Comet. Georgia wondered if the quiet, put-upon woman she had met that afternoon at William's had been dispatched to obliterate her dead son's scent.

Georgia thought she might have to re-employ her erstwhile real-estate agent. But then she had a better idea.

When Forsythia stopped by two days later, Georgia told her what she had in mind.

One of the many problems facing Geddie Presbyterian Church was the manse. It had been built on the cheap shortly after World War II, and it was only a small exaggeration when one of the deacons told Georgia, back in November, that it was falling down.

Hardly a month went by that the Reverend Weeks or his wife didn't complain, mildly but firmly, about some aspect of the house. The roof leaked. The oil furnace was in its dotage and had once covered all the Weekses' belongings in a fine patina of soot. It needed painting, although it had last been painted just three years ago. It was too small; the belief among the older churchgoers was that, once Mrs. Weeks got pregnant again, they would be looking for another church, one with a manse that could hold a growing family.

It had been given to the congregation by an old and relatively well-off widower more than 30 years ago. The more mean-spirited members said he gave it away when it couldn't be rented any more. It also was located well out of town, halfway to Port Campbell.

“So,” Georgia said, “I was thinking, if William Blackwell really is serious about giving the house back, what better way to use it? I mean, the church did a whole lot more for Jenny than I ever did.”

Forsythia shook her head.

“You ought to hang on to what you've got, Georgia,” she said. “Everybody around here thought it was very civil of you not to fight it when your daddy gave most of his land away to Kenny and the Geddies in his will. This time, you ought to do something for you. If you don't want to rent it, sell it. Keep the money. There'll be a time when you'll need it. Believe me.”

“So,” Georgia said, smiling as much as her face would allow, “you don't think I'm being selfish enough? I can't seem to hit a happy medium.”

Forsythia frowned and spoke slowly, the way she might have explained something to one of her more challenged students.

“I'm just saying, only rich people can afford to give away houses. And you are not rich.”

But Georgia had already thought it through. She knew she should be at some kind of ebb, a mental wreck to match her physical state. Somehow, though, it hadn't worked that way. She could see, once the painkillers wore off and she considered what was before her, that she could do whatever came next, that she could teach college English standing on her head until she was 80 if she had to, that she could go back to Montclair, get her own house in order literally and figuratively, that she could go on.

She didn't think it was as simple as the old joke about paying someone to beat you because it felt so good when they stopped, but she did feel, without any evidence to back it up, that the storm had passed, that she had a good and long life in front of her, one she was surprisingly eager to encounter.

And she knew, as surely as if her late father had come and whispered it in her ear, that she would never need Jenny McLaurin's spacious, well-kept house.

“My mind is made up,” she told Forsythia. “This is what I want to do. Jenny would love it, too.”

Her old teacher patted her on the knee and told her to sleep on it, that William Blackwell might change his mind anyhow. It wasn't like any Blackwell she had ever known to give rather than take.

“I'll mention it to some folks,” she said as she was turning to walk down the steep back porch steps.

Friday, New Year's Eve, was the day she found out about the ring.

Wade Hairr himself came by, accompanied by a deputy. They, Georgia, and Kenny sat in the living room where, after inquiring about her health and expressing his sympathy, her old classmate reached into his pocket and produced a small, dark-blue box. He leaned forward and handed it to Georgia.

“It showed up in one of the pawn shops west of town,” he explained. “We got to looking around, and one of the deputies, Eldridge here, came across it.”

“I saw the initials,” Eldridge said proudly, then looked down as if he had overstepped his boundaries.

Georgia took the ring out and examined it.

“Yes,” she said, after a pause. “This is the one. I remember. I'm sure of it.”

“It was sold on,” he checks his notes, “October 23
^rd
. The man who sold it gave what apparently was a false name. When I showed the clerk Pooh Blackwell's picture, he said it was him.”

He said it in a self-satisfied tone, as if he had thought of looking for the missing ring himself.