Whitefern (26 page)

He sighed deeply and looked pathetically weak, wobbling and struggling to come up with a good response. “I did what had to be done,” he said. “And yes, it was a clever plan, and I am proud of how well it was executed. Now, stop this indignation. You have a child to raise, and the world believes she's yours. You have a family. You should be thanking me.”

“Thanking you? I have a family? Yes, I have a family, a family born of lies and deceit.”

“That's not unusual for you, Audrina, or for Whitefern,” he said, smiling. “Look at what your father planned and how well he planned it. Everyone in this house, including your own mother, followed his design. It was all a lie. They even had me and my mother believing it. To go as far as to install an empty grave with a tombstone . . . Don't try to make it look like your family was any better than I am.”

“You're right, Arden. This home is hospitable to lies, but I don't intend for them to go on.”

“So what are you going to do? Tell everyone Adelle is really Sylvia's baby? We both thought that would hurt the child and how she will be perceived.”

“She'll remain our child, Sylvia's and mine,” I said. “But someday she'll know the truth.” I straightened my shoulders, just the way Papa would when he was going to make one of his definitive proposals. “I think it would be best if you left Whitefern, Arden. I don't want to share meals with you, much less my bed.” I started to walk away, then stopped. “And as far as the company goes, it will remain as it is—in my control.”

“What?”

“Go sleep in one of the downstairs bedrooms tonight,” I told him.

“Like hell I will. And I won't leave here, either. You'll do what I say with those legal documents,” he vowed, shaking his fist at me. “I'm your husband. You'll obey your husband.”

“I won't,” I said. “In fact, I'll be calling Mr. Johnson tomorrow and advising him of the same, so he'll know that if you try to forge anything, it will be a crime that he will be associated with, too. Good night.” I started up the stairway.

“Audrina!” he screamed. “You're part of this. You can't escape it by sending me away or going to sleep or rocking in that damn chair!”

I ignored him and kept going.

“Audrina!” he shouted from the foot of the stairway. “Don't you dare walk away from me!”

Sylvia came out of her room and hurried to the
stairs. “Adelle is crying,” she said, looking down at me and at Arden. “She heard the screaming.”

“Yes. Well, she won't have to hear it much longer. Arden is going to move out,” I said.

“Damn you!” he screamed. He rushed up the stairs. “You won't tell me what to do. And you will sign those papers.”

I was nearly to the top.

He lunged at me and grabbed my arm. “I'm Papa here! I'm Papa!” he bellowed. He shook me hard.

“Stop hurting Audrina,” Sylvia ordered. She sounded just like Momma telling Papa to stop hurting me or Vera.

Arden let go of my left arm to push her away from us, and I turned, freeing myself from his right hand. Before he could reach out to grab me again, Sylvia came forward with her arms out and pushed at his shoulder.

He tottered, looked at us both with surprise, and fell backward, his arms flailing out, his hands grasping air as he dropped onto his back and then flipped over, his legs flying over his torso and giving his body the momentum to flip again, this time coming down hard, his neck hitting squarely on the edge of a step. His body slid a little and stopped.

He didn't move or cry.

Sylvia and I didn't move, either.

“Arden fell,” she said.

I held out my hand to keep her from following me and walked down to him slowly. As I approached, I was experiencing déjà vu. This was how I had approached Aunt Ellsbeth's body when she had fallen down the
stairs.
She's not dead
, I'd kept telling myself,
not dead,
not dead, only hurt
. She had been facedown, and I'd had to turn her body to look at her face. I remembered her head had lolled, unnaturally loose, and I had shaken her to wake her up, but she never did.

Arden was lying faceup. His eyes were wide open, already two orbs of lifeless glass. He had carried his expression of surprise all the way down and died with it. I knelt beside him and felt for a pulse nevertheless. There was none.

“Is he hurt?” Sylvia asked.

“Go look after Adelle,” I said. I could hear the baby crying. It was the loudest she had cried yet. Maybe she sensed that her real father was gone. “Go on, Sylvia.”

“Yes,” she said, and walked back up and to her room. “Adelle . . .”

I stood and looked down at Arden. Perhaps I was in shock, because I didn't cry. I should have cried. I should have been screaming his name and begging him to be alive. Memories of how kind and loving he had been to me when I was young and just emerging from Whitefern were pushing away the anger and disappointment I had just felt. There had been wonderful smiles and laughter between us, too. They didn't want to be buried.

I sat on a higher step and continued to gaze at him. Sylvia came to the top of the stairs again, this time with Adelle in her arms. The baby was no longer crying.

“Did I hurt him?” she asked.

“No, Sylvia. He hurt himself.”

I looked around at the dark house. Whitefern had done it again, I thought. Whitefern had exacted its revenge. The ghosts were gathered, whispering to one another and looking at Arden.

Papa
, I thought.
Where are you?

He was here; he was with us. I stood up again and stepped around Arden's body.

“Where are you going, Audrina?” Sylvia asked.

“To warm Adelle's bottle. Then I have to call an ambulance for Arden. You can wait in your room.”

“I can warm the bottle,” she said.

“No, I don't want you or the baby down here until this is over,” I said. “Just wait in your room. Please, Sylvia.”

“I'll sit in the rocking chair,” she said. She said it as if that would make everything better again.

“Yes, go sit in the rocking chair,” I told her, and went to put on lights in the house.

I called for the ambulance. Then I went up and handed Sylvia the bottle and let her feed Adelle while she held her in the rocking chair. It had never seemed more appropriate.

“Sylvia, the ambulance is coming, and with it will be policemen who will want to know what happened to Arden,” I began.

“I pushed him,” she said.

“No. You reached out to help him because you saw he was going to fall backward. Just like you helped Papa, remember?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling.

“Arden drank too much alcohol, Sylvia. It made him dizzy. That's what happened, okay?”

She nodded and went about feeding Adelle. I could only hope that she would remember what I had told her to say. It would obviously be so much easier than having to explain why we had argued, how Arden had come up after me, and how Sylvia had instinctively come to my defense.

Less than half an hour later, the ambulance arrived, with a police patrol car behind it. The paramedics rushed in when I opened the door and pointed to Arden.

The two policemen looked terribly suspicious. How could I blame them? Another death at Whitefern was surely at the forefront of their thoughts.

One of the paramedics confirmed that Arden was dead. “Looks like a broken neck,” he said.

“Don't move the body yet,” the taller of the two policemen ordered. “We have a detective on the way.” He turned to me. I was standing with my hands clasped and resting on my breasts. I was sure I appeared to be in shock. I felt I still really was.

“Can you tell us what happened here?” the shorter policeman asked.

“We were going to bed,” I said. “My husband had been out to dinner with some clients. I think he had too much to drink at dinner, but he drank some more brandy when he got home. I pleaded with him to stop drinking and just go to bed, and finally we set out to do so. He was walking behind me. I thought he was okay. My sister came out. She's watching the baby
in her room for me right now. She was the one who screamed that Arden was losing his balance. I turned. She reached past me to grab him, but he fell back and flipped over and over, until he landed like this.”

Neither of them spoke. I gasped and tottered.

The shorter officer put his arm around my waist. “Hey, you'd better sit down.”

“Yes, thank you,” I said, and let him help me to the sofa, where the soft light had remained on. He went to get me a glass of water.

When the detective arrived, they told him what I had said, and then he asked to speak with Sylvia.

“My sister was born prematurely and had early development problems,” I explained. “She's never been to a formal school, and she's what they call mentally challenged.”

He nodded. He looked like he knew about us. When they had removed Arden's body, I went up to get Sylvia. Adelle was asleep again, so I asked the detective to come up. I thought it would be better anyway to have her questioned away from the stairway.

“Sorry to bother you,” he told Sylvia, “but can you remember what happened to your . . .”

“Brother-in-law,” I interjected quickly. “She's not clear on relationships.”

He nodded. “Sure. Can you remember anything, Sylvia?”

“I remember things,” she said with what sounded like indignation.

“On the stairway. What happened to him?”

“He fell backward,” she said. “I tried to help him like I helped Papa, but I couldn't reach him . . . I was right behind Papa. I didn't have to reach him.”

“She once kept my father from falling,” I explained. “We made a big deal of it. I'm sure you understand.”

“Yeah, sure.” He looked at Sylvia again and realized she wasn't going to be much of a witness. “Okay. There'll be an autopsy, and we'll be in touch. My deepest sympathies, Mrs. Lowe.”

“Thank you.”

He nodded at Sylvia.

“Adelle is sleeping,” she told him, as if she expected he would want to ask the baby questions, too.

He looked at me, his eyes like exclamation points.

“It's how she is,” I said.

“Right. I'll call you,” he told me, and left.

The silence that followed after everyone had left was the deepest silence in Whitefern that I could remember. I didn't imagine I would be able to fall asleep, so I didn't go to our bedroom, and I didn't lie beside Sylvia on her bed.

Instead, I returned to Momma's sofa, where I sat until the wee hours of the morning. Sometime before the sun rose, I did fall asleep. Sylvia woke me to tell me it was time for breakfast. She stood there holding the baby and looking at me.

“Yes,” I said. I rose slowly, telling myself it was best to eat something. There would be so much to do now, so many people to talk to and repeat the same explanation.

“Is Arden coming back for breakfast?” she asked.

“No, Sylvia,” I said. “Arden's never coming back.”

She nodded, looking like she just wanted to hear it confirmed.

“Arden has passed away, just like Papa did,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Papa told me.”

Epilogue

It was a day without clouds when we buried Arden next to his mother, Billie, in the Whitefern Cemetery, exactly the wrong weather for a funeral. Everyone and everything looked too bright and alive. Arden's and Billie's graves weren't far from my parents' graves and those of Aunt Ellsbeth and Vera. Many of our company's clients and all the employees attended the service. Mrs. Crown looked devastated, as devastated as a lover of the deceased might. She cried harder than I did and needed more comfort than I did.

Sylvia stood beside me, clinging to Adelle. Onlookers thought it was one of the saddest and yet sweetest scenes they had ever witnessed. Afterward, as I had promised Sylvia many times, I took her over to Papa's grave. She read the tombstone and looked at the grave and shook her head.

“Papa's not down there, Audrina,” she insisted.

“Maybe he isn't,” I said, keeping my eyes on the headstone.

I had struggled through most of the day. I had
barely slept during the previous nights. I hadn't touched any of Arden's things yet. I intended to donate as many of them as I could to charity. In fact, nothing at all looked different in our home. Whitefern was invulnerable. The shadows in every corner were still there; the whispers I heard on the stairs continued. Some of the old clocks had stopped ticking, but I didn't remove them. The grandfather clocks in the halls still chimed, but I ignored them. Arden had hated them, along with the cuckoos in the wooden Swiss clocks. Now that I thought about it, he had hated anything and everything that related to my family. He had wanted to remake it all in his name.

We didn't have any sort of formal gathering after the funeral, the way we had for Papa's. Some people stopped by during the following days, people like Mrs. Haider and a few of the employees I knew. Mrs. Crown did not visit. For now, I agreed with Mr. Johnson to permit Arden's top assistant, Nick Masters, to run the firm. It took me a while to delve into real-world matters.

Arden's absence didn't appear to bother Sylvia very much. She was far too occupied with Adelle and, along with me, caring for the house. Occasionally, she would pause and look like she was about to ask after him, but then she would shake her head slightly and nod as though she really was hearing Papa.

Time closed wounds, but it couldn't prevent scars. There were so many at Whitefern. I could say we had a garden of them. Fall was rushing in. When we took walks, now with the new carriage we had bought for
Adelle, I could sense winter's eagerness. Leaves were falling faster; birds were starting to head farther south. A darker shade of blue seeped into the afternoon skies, and nights were beginning to drop with heavier darkness around us.

One evening after dinner, while Sylvia was looking after Adelle and playing some records on Momma's old phonograph, which Arden had once tried to sell as an antique, I went out and walked far enough away from the front of the house that when I looked back, I could see the entire house silhouetted against the stars.

I had been toying with the idea of selling Whitefern. We would sell the brokerage, and Sylvia, Adelle, and I would move away, to a place where no one knew us, the Whiteferns, the Adares, or the Lowes. It was a way to be reborn, I thought.

Could I do this? Could I finally leave the past, or would the voices follow us no matter where we went? It was an enormous challenge for me, even to consider it. Once, years ago, when I had tried to leave with Sylvia, she had revolted against it, and I'd had to stay. Would she revolt again? If anything, she was probably even more attached to Whitefern. It was here that she was comforted by Papa's voice.

It was impossible, I thought. Whitefern had a grip on us that even death could not break. Slowly, I walked back to the house, feeling like I was being chastised for the very thought of leaving it.

Sylvia was in the living room, cradling Adelle in her arms and dancing to one of Momma's favorite
tunes. She paused when she saw me. Adelle looked comfortable and happy in her arms.

I walked to them slowly, smiling, and put my arms around Sylvia. Adelle was between us, looking up at both of us.

And we three began to dance again.