Skylight Confessions (9 page)

Around her neck there was a string of black pearls that looked nothing like the necklace he'd left under the hedge.

"They're the same ones," Arlie told him. "They turn colors."

"Really? Magic?"

"Radiation. I think they soak up whatever is inside me."

George lifted her out of bed. She weighed nothing. She smelled like illness and soap. The pearls looked like strange black marbles.

"Will we fly?" Arlyn asked.

"Possibly," George answered.

He grabbed a blanket and folded it around her, then carried her down the stairs. Jasmine was in the kitchen, fixing herself some tea.

"Diana will be back with the children in half an hour," Jasmine warned. "Who told you you could take her outside?"

"She wants me to." George opened the back door.

Jasmine came over. "I don't know about this," she said. "She gets chilled so easily."

"It's what she wants," George said.

The nurse didn't stop George from taking Arlie into the bright light of the backyard. The water pumps were chugging; the tile men finishing up the rim of the pool were shouting to each other.

George went up to the pool man in charge.

"Shut off the water and get out of here," he said.

The pool man looked at Arlie, then shouted to his men. The pool was nearly full. No problem. They could come back another day.

"Get out of here," George told the tile men. Tiles from Italy sat in a pile. A few were chipped, most were perfect. The tile men didn't speak English. George kicked an empty box in their direction.

"Go!" he shouted. He stomped his feet like a bull. "Leave!"

George Snow looked like a crazy man carrying a ghost. The tile men were afraid of blackbirds and ghosts at the workplace. Bad luck and accidents, that's what such things meant. Crazy men were even worse. Bad luck all around.

While the workmen were packing up, George took Arlyn out to the lawn.

"Faster," she said. "Fly me there."

He ran, then spun in a circle.

Arlyn laughed. "Not that fast."

She was out of breath. George stopped. He dropped the blanket on the grass, then set Arlie down and rolled the blanket back to cover her, like a cocoon. He heard shouting, but he ignored everything except Arlie's face. It was John Moody doing the yelling, home early, chastising the workmen, who were supposed to be finishing the pool that week. When John heard they'd been ordered to stop by the fellow on the lawn, he approached George Snow. John figured George must be one of the pool men. How dare he hold up the work?

"I want you off this property," John told him.

"Do you?" George said.

"Don't come back looking for a paycheck."

George got up from the grass. The clouds were flying overhead.

When John Moody was close enough, George punched him straight in the face.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" John was bleeding heavily from his nose. The grass under his feet had turned red. "Don't think I won't call the police. I'll have you arrested right now. The cops will be here before you have time to get away, you son of a bitch."

George walked over to John and grabbed him. "You had a fucking pool put in while she's dying. All she can hear all day long are the bulldozers. Every noise goes right through her. Is that how you take care of her?"

John Moody saw the blanket on the grass then. Something small was wrapped inside. It was Arlie. His wife. John looked at George carefully. Now he recognized him. The window washer.

"I'm going to be here every day," George Snow said. "And you're not going to call the police or anyone else."

George Snow looked dangerous, insane. John understood why he'd never noticed him working on the pool before. He was someone who didn't belong.

"George," Arlyn said faintly. "Make him go away."

"There's nothing you can do to me," George told John Moody. "I have nothing to lose."

"Okay," John agreed. He did not wish to be punched in the face again.

"I mean it!" George said.

"Look, if she wants you here, you'll be here."

George went back to Arlie. He lay down beside her, feeling the prickly grass through his shirt.

"Did you kill him?" Arlie said. A whisper. George laughed.

"Nope." Arlie closed her eyes. "Closer," she said.

George moved as close to her as he dared, afraid he might hurt her.

"Did you see the baby?" Arlie's voice was so weak it seemed to be coming from another planet. "You don't have to talk."

"I named her for you. You understand, George, why I didn't tell you."

"It doesn't matter." George felt as though he'd never understood anything in his life, least of all what was happening to Arlie. He felt like jumping off a building, stopping time. Instead, he looked at a blade of grass. He looked into Arlie's cloudy eyes.

"Don't fight for her, George. I want her raised with her brother. I want her to be happy. I'm sorry if I hurt you by not telling you. I wanted everything to be simple, but it's not."

"It's all right, Arlie. Stop worrying."

"Do you think she'll remember me? She won't have either of us now."

"Maybe it's more important for us to remember her." Arlyn laughed. "You're a funny man." "Hilarious," George Snow said.

The sun had shifted and shadows were pooling, so George lifted Arlyn and carried her back into the house. There was the mother-in-law at the table, looking at him with frightened eyes.

And the baby in the stroller. Seven months old. Blond. His little girl. She would grow up here and have everything. Except her mother.

George carried Arlyn upstairs and put her into the bed, then backed out so Jasmine could bathe her and dole out her medicine.

The mother-in-law had come up behind him. She looked worried.

"You don't work on the pool," she said.

George felt as though he could tear someone apart. "I'm Blanca's father," he said.

"What are you going to do?" Diana Moody asked.

"I'm going to come here every day," George Snow said. "I won't be in your way."

"I mean after that. When Arlie is gone."

George Snow looked at Diana.

"John doesn't have to know anything," Diana said.

"He's not my concern."

"No." Diana understood. "He doesn't have to be."

Diana had known there was someone else. One night when Arlyn was in horrible pain, Diana had sat on the bed rubbing her back. It was then Arlie had told her mother-in-law she'd done something wrong; she admitted that Blanca wasn't John's child.

She didn't even regret it; inside her marriage, she'd been dying of loneliness.

"I understand," Diana had said to her daughter-in-law. She herself had been lonely in her own marriage. "What's done is done. Now you have a beautiful daughter, so it's all for the best."

Afterward Diana couldn't help studying the baby, her blond hair, her dark eyes, her singular features, so unlike

John or Arlie. She had known Blanca's father as soon as she saw him. So now she asked the hard question.

"What are you going to do about Blanca?"

"After Arlie's gone I'm going to drink myself to death. So you don't have to worry about me stealing the baby."

Diana Moody put a hand on his arm, which was a terrible mistake. He started to cry. How embarrassing to be embraced by a woman you didn't know, a woman old enough to be your mother; even worse to be grateful that someone was telling you everything would be all right, that time would heal, even if every word she said was a lie.

ONE AFTERNOON, WHEN THE SKY WAS CLEAR AND THE weather was hot, Arlie called her mother-in-law into her room and asked her to buy a cemetery plot.

"Oh, I couldn't," Diana said. "That's for your husband to do."

"I can't ask John."

John Moody had become somewhat unwound. He couldn't be around sickness, he said. He was no good with it, no good to anyone. Several times Diana had gone downstairs for a drink of water or a Tylenol in the middle of the night and had caught him out on the lawn, walking home in the wet grass. When she'd switched on the porch light, John had blinked in the glare, stunned and guilty, but not guilty enough to stop sneaking to his neighbor's house in the evenings. Sometimes he spent all night. Diana gave her son the benefit of the doubt. Surely, this nonsense with the neighbor started after Arlie took ill. Marriage was complicated, after all; Diana Moody understood that. Maybe John was reacting to that George Snow fellow coming by every day. Anyway, John was not adept at grief or at showing compassion. The truth was, he was not someone you'd ask to buy a cemetery plot.

"I trust you to do this for me. Find me someplace where there's a big tree," Arlie told Diana. "So I can fly away from the top branches."

Diana asked Jasmine to watch the children. She put on her good black suit and her gold necklace and earrings and she wore a hat that she saved for special occasions. She drove out to the cemetery, stopping to ask directions at the gas station. The life she'd led here once seemed like a dream. The lanes here in Connecticut were winding, green, shadowy. There were fields with stone walls she'd never noticed when she lived here; she'd been so busy with her life, although, frankly, the meaning of that life escaped her now. Dinner parties, tennis, her son, her husband. Not even the time to look at the stone walls, built a century earlier when cows roamed the pastures.

When Diana reached the cemetery she parked and went in. It was the oldest cemetery in town, Archangel. Diana had scheduled an appointment and a Mr. Hansen was waiting for her in the chapel. He was very compassionate, and he offered to drive to the site, but Diana said she would follow along in her own car.

"Single or family?" Mr. Hansen asked.

Diana could not bear to think of Arlie out there all by herself.

"Family."

As she drove behind Mr. Hansen's van to the far side of the cemetery, she heard rustling in the back of the car. She hoped a bird hadn't flown in through the open window. She looked in the rearview mirror. Someone was under the blanket she kept in the car for the baby. If a carjacker had suddenly leapt up, insisting she drive to the Mojave, Diana would have been grateful.
I
will,
she would have said.
You bet. I'll drive forever if I can just get out of this
mess.

"Who's there?" Diana said in her sternest voice. Probably not the best tone to take with a carjacker, but clearly the right way to get her grandson to sit up and reveal himself.

"Sam Moody," Diana said. "What on earth are you doing here?"

"I wanted to see where you were going," the child said. The funeral director's van was slowing down. Diana was pleased to see lots of big trees. Oak, cedar, ash. "The boneyard," Sam said.

He really was an odd little boy. Was it possible not to like your own grandchild?

"The cemetery," Diana corrected.

"I know what happens to things when they die," Sam said. "Dust and bones."

"There's more. There's a spirit." Diana felt sick to her stomach.

The heat, perhaps, and all this bad luck.

"Yeah, right," Sam said. "That's a load of crap." They had come to a stop. "Nice trees," he noted. "Can I climb one?"

"Absolutely not." The funeral director was motioning to Diana.

She did have to keep the child in line. "Maybe if you're good."

Diana and the boy got out of the car and walked over the grass.

They reached a cool, green spot with six plots. "Fine," Diana said to Hansen. "I'll take it."

Sam went to the center of the empty circle beneath a huge sycamore tree. He lay down and gazed through the leaves. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

"Good choice," he said. "It's peaceful."

His voice was childish and reedy and Diana hated herself for not liking him all these years.

"Climb the tree," she said. "But not too high."

Sam leapt from the grass, whooping with joy.

"That might be dangerous," Mr. Hansen advised. Sam was throwing himself onto the lowest branch, not a particularly strong branch from the looks of it. Not a particularly agile child, either.

"I'm buying burial plots," Diana said. "His mother's dying. Let him enjoy himself."

"I suppose," Mr. Hansen said.

"In your line of work, you must value life enormously," Diana said.

"No more than anyone else," Mr. Hansen said.

They stopped at the ice-cream shop on the way home. Diana had a vanilla cone. Sam had a Tumbalina — it was even bigger than the sundae his mother sometimes allowed him. Six kinds of ice cream, butterscotch, hot fudge, and strawberry sauce. All that ice cream made Sam sick; he threw up in the washroom, then was ready to go. He used to think his grandmother was a witch. She was old and she didn't seem to like him and she had spindly fingers with big knuckles. Whenever she spent the night in the guest room, he would check under her bed after she'd left, looking for bones and poison. Now he was so tired he let her hold his hand on the way to the car, even though he didn't like to be touched by people who weren't his mother. He supposed a witch's touch was all right, it probably washed right off in the bathtub. Or maybe she was a good witch who could reverse time and make his mother well again.

"Can you fix my mother?" he asked on the way home.

"Unfortunately, I can't," Diana said.

She was honest. Sam had to give her that. When they pulled into the drive, that man's truck was there. There was a collie sitting in the passenger seat, sticking his head out the window and woofing.

"Who owns that dog?" Sam asked. He knew a big man sat by his mother's bedside every day but he didn't know that man's name or what he was doing there. He looked a lot like the man who used to wash the windows.

"A friend of the family," Diana said.

Sam didn't understand; he was a part of the family and he wasn't friends with the man with the truck. They went inside. Jasmine was in the kitchen with Blanca, feeding the baby some cereal.

When she saw Sam, Blanca let out a chortle.

"Baby baby stick your head in gravy," Sam said cheerfully.

Blanca laughed so hard cereal came out her nose.