“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You just know. The way I knew after we talked in the sandwich shop that I could trust you.”
She took him in, his intense eyes, his hands, clasped now, on the tabletop, and she didn’t so much decide to trust him as realize that she already did.
“All right, then,” she said, nodding and walking back to her chair. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”
He called it a relocation system, a neutral and technical term for what sounded to Edith like a manifestly human, risky, and emotion-fraught enterprise.
“Most people think that what happens between a husband and wife in a private home, no matter how unjust or dangerous, is nobody’s business but theirs. But I make it my business,” he said, his tone turning hard, and for a moment, his affable exterior parted like a curtain so that Edith caught a glimpse of the person underneath, powerful and shrewd and used to getting his way. You don’t afford a suit like that by being nice, she thought.
George’s explanation was full of holes. He said that he identified women whose husbands were hurting them, but he wouldn’t say how or where he found them. He told her that he had people in place—scattered in many different places—some of whom drove the women from point to point, some of whom gave them safe places to stay, usually for one night, but he declined to say who the people were.
“Where do they end up, these women?” Edith asked.
“Elsewhere,” he said, his face inscrutable. “And safe.”
“But don’t their families look for them?”
“Of course. Sometimes, the police get involved. The women who have children take them if they possibly can, so by some lights, they’re kidnappers. So far, though, and I try to keep track of those we’ve relocated for at least a year, so far no one’s ever been found.”
“They leave everything behind?”
“Everything. Their names, their families, their jobs, their homes. Once they get where they’re going, we furnish them with new ones.”
“New families?”
George smiled a brittle smile. “No. I would imagine that after enough time goes by, they might contact family members whom they trust, their parents or brothers and sisters. They shouldn’t. We advise them not to. It’s a terrible idea. But I would imagine some do.”
“There’s something ruthless about this. And about you,” Edith said.
“There’s a ruthlessness to any kind of mission,” said George, shrugging. “We get them away from their bastard husbands who could end up killing them. Is there a price to pay? I don’t doubt that there is. But that’s not my concern.”
A shiver ran through Edith. To leave everything, everyone behind. She had no one to leave, except John, but she had her house. She looked around at the walls, the photographs, at the house that Joseph had given her, traces of him in every corner, in the very air. She knew she could never leave it.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” said George. “But not everyone is happy in their homes. For the women we relocate, their houses have become prisons.”
“Am I right in assuming that you want this house, my house, to be a stopping point in your relocation system?”
“It’s in a useful location. Your neighbors are used to strangers coming and going. You are a private person with few real ties to your community. You have nursing skills.”
Edith startled at this. “Nursing skills?”
“Some of the women have injuries, of course,” he explained, coolly. “Occasionally, the children do, too.”
Of course that would be true. She nodded.
“I won’t lie,” he said, briskly. “What I’m asking you to do is risky. But you are just a cog in the wheel. You’ll be given as little information as possible. First names only. Everything happens late at night or in the very early morning, before sunrise. You won’t know who drives them here or who picks them up. You won’t even see the car. I noted a blank spot between houses at the end of your street. No streetlights, no buildings. The car will drop them there, and, if possible, they will walk through the backyards, along the canal, and enter through your back door. No local people will be involved, and the women themselves come from far away. You won’t know where, and you will never know where they go once they leave here. There shouldn’t be a need to reach me, but, just in case, I will give you a number to call. A woman will answer at any hour of the day or night. You’ll leave a message, and I will call you back. But again, this should not be necessary. This is a fine-tuned operation. If you do your part correctly, it will all go like clockwork.”
“What makes you think I’ll do this?”
“Your mind gets restless, isn’t that what you said? I sense that you’re a woman who would like to be part of something bigger than running a little place for tourists.” He shrugged. “And don’t worry, you’ll be repaid for any expenses you might accrue. Extra food, medical supplies. If you insist on it, I can even pay you a regular stipend, although most people act purely out of a desire to help.”
His imperious attitude and his smug certainty that she would jump at the chance to be part of his plan annoyed her so much that she was tempted to say no just to prove him wrong. But he wasn’t wrong. Edith heard Joseph’s voice as distinctly as if he were sitting next to her: You must promise to give yourself entirely to someone or something because that’s who you are. You are a genius at devoting yourself; it’s what makes you happiest.
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” said George.
“I don’t need to,” said Edith. “I’m in.”
Two weeks later, on December 19, 1953, a woman’s voice—neutral, almost machinelike—on the phone told Edith that the first woman, Margaret, would arrive that night, and, just after midnight, she knocked on Edith’s back door. Shockingly young, possibly not yet out of her teens, with a gray wool coat that was much too big for her, clutching a cheap valise that Edith knew was probably full of things she’d only recently been given that did not quite feel like hers (George had said that many of the women left in a hurry, empty-handed), and an old, yellowing bruise on her cheekbone, Margaret stared at Edith with the wide, frightened, bewildered eyes of an injured animal, and on an impulse, even though she was not usually quick to touch people, especially strangers, Edith took the girl’s free hand in both of hers, murmured, “Oh, sweet child,” and pulled her gently into the house.
Edith would learn that some of the women—and, occasionally, heartbreakingly, some of the children—could not bear to be handled, flinching or pulling away at the slightest touch; some recoiled when she offered words of sympathy; some could not, especially upon first arriving, even meet her eyes. She would learn to move slowly around them, to change their bandages without comment, to offer them food with the efficiency of a waitress in a restaurant, and to wait for a sign—a hand reaching out, a cautious smile, the offering up of a small, personal fact (“My mother has a clock like that one;” “I wish I hadn’t left the book I was reading sitting on my nightstand. Can you imagine, fretting about a book at a time like this?”)—that they wanted a more human connection. She would learn to take her cues from them. But that night, almost before she had stepped across the threshold, Margaret fell into Edith’s arms and clung, her thin shoulders quaking with near-silent weeping.
Because there were no other guests at Blue Sky House, Edith walked Margaret into the living room. When Margaret stopped crying and dropped, exhausted, into the chair Edith offered her, she said, staring into the fire, “He didn’t even hit me that often, only when he got really jealous. But it was always in the face. And once you get hit in the face, you’re always waiting for it to happen again. Your body gets so tired from bracing itself for the next blow, and it gets so you can’t sleep and your mind can’t focus on regular things anymore. Even more than the hitting, it was the waiting that got to me.”
For a couple of minutes, the crackle and hiss of the fire was the only sound. Then, Margaret turned to Edith with a wry and weary smile. “Well, I always
did want to get out of Roanoke,” she said, “and here I am.”
Over time, Edith would find that, just like Margaret, despite their instructions to hide their history, most of the women would tell her where they’d come from, would let slip a tiny piece of what they’d left behind. She understood this impulse, this laying claim to a past. It was as if they were saying, Despite my vanishing act, I am not a ghost; I am real, a flesh and blood woman, with a story that belongs to me.
After Margaret had gone to bed in the little downstairs bedroom, Edith got out a notebook and performed, for the first time, an act that would become a habit: documenting this woman’s brief stopover in her own life, setting down, for no one’s eyes but her own, a record of this person who would disappear. She knew as she wrote that it wasn’t wise, that George would be angry if he found out, but she couldn’t shake the conviction that everyone whose life brushed against her own should leave a trace, even if it was just a few, scant, cryptic lines on a page.
In careful, precise printing, she wrote the date, followed by this: Margaret. Roan. Cont chk. Auburn hair, pale, skinny inside her big wool coat, freckles like sprinkled nutmeg across her nose.
Chapter Sixteen
Clare
The night I found Edith and Joseph’s marriage certificate, his obituary, and her photographs, Zach called me. Even though it was nearly three in the morning, I was still awake, or partly awake, floating, under the blue sky of Edith’s ceiling, in a hazy state not only between wakefulness and sleep but between my present and Edith’s past. In this dreamy space, it was oddly easy to feel that Edith was close by, not like a ghost or a guardian angel, but physically under the same roof as me, the way, when I was a kid, I would lie in bed and know that my mother was in the house, feel the peace of that knowledge in my bones, even if I couldn’t hear or see her.
Even the buzzing of the phone against the bedside table didn’t yank me out of this calm, Edith-is-near state, which is maybe why, when I saw who was calling, I didn’t ignore it as I usually would have, nor did my heart start galloping like a spooked horse; I just answered.
“Zach, it’s really late,” I said, quietly, firmly, just as Edith would have.
“I know,” he said. His voice was a little high, a little loud and excited, but, happily, he wasn’t crying and didn’t sound drunk. “I’m sorry. I just—today when I was walking through the park on my way home, I saw this girl, maybe eight years old, walking with her dad, and she was in a costume. This straw hat, maybe a boater it’s called? With braids that might have been attached to the hat or maybe she had a wig on or maybe they were real, but anyway, red braids, pretty convincing, and this sort of pinafore dress, and these button boots, and I flashed back to that miniseries you made me watch—I mean, yes, you made me, but then I actually enjoyed it a lot—the one based on those books you loved as a kid, and I walked up to her and said, ‘Excuse me but are you . . . ’”—he paused, waiting.
“Anne of Green Gables,” I said, finishing his thought.
“Yes! And she said she was, and then added, ‘Thank you for noticing,’ in this very solemn voice, and I said, ‘Are you in a play?’ and she said, ‘No,’ politely but also like she was a little miffed at my question, and her dad smiled and said, ‘Yesterday was her birthday, and all she wanted was an Anne of Green Gables outfit, a real one, not a ready-made costume with Velcro up the back. So she got this. If she ever takes it off, it’ll be a miracle. This kid lives and breathes those books.’ And the thing is, the truly amazing thing, Clare, and don’t think I’m crazy, but her voice was totally a kid version of yours, and her eyes, they were your eyes, big, brown, same shape, eyelashes, expression, everything. And if you remember, you said the same thing to me about those books, the exact same phrase, that you lived and breathed them. So I took it, I took her, this amazing kid who looked like she’d just time traveled from the turn of the century, as a sign.”
He paused, audibly winded.
“A sign that you should call me at three in the morning?” I said, not mad, still channeling Edith’s firm, kind, implacable calm.
“Yeah, sorry about the timing, but it took me a long time to get my nerve up to talk to you about this, and I wanted to call before my nerve stopped being up, which would probably have happened sooner or later.”
“I see,” I said. “Well, you’re talking to me now. What would you like to say?”
I sat up, leaning against the headboard of the bed, and waited for him to answer, totally and surprisingly unracked by dread or anxiety.
“Let me come see you,” he said. “I can get on a plane tomorrow. I just feel strongly that we need to sit in the same room—or maybe take a long walk—and have a conversation. No yelling, no accusations or insults—and I’m obviously referring to me here, not you, since I’m pretty sure you haven’t raised your voice even once throughout this whole ordeal—we’ll just be two adults talking. How does that sound?”
I waited for the impulse to run for the hills to hit me, but it didn’t.
“It sounds—very civilized,” I said, truthfully.
“Doesn’t it?”
“What were you thinking we should talk about?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But I think we should talk, now that we’ve let go of all the anger. At least, I have. I hope you have, too.”
“I’m glad you have. And I don’t honestly think I had any to let go of. Lots of other emotions, I guess, but not anger.”
“Good! Then it’s all settled!”
He sounded happy. More than happy. Jubilant.
“My flight arrives at 10:25 a.m., so I can be at your parents’ house by 11:30 tomorrow morning. You want to go to lunch? Or I could bring lunch? You know what? I checked the weather and it’s supposed to be nice. So how about a picnic? What do you think?”
His jubilation rose with every word, so that by the end of this he was almost singing.
“Hold on,” I said. “Your flight? You don’t mean you already have a ticket?”
“Yeah, I do. Come on, I knew you’d do this for me; it’s how you are.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but I didn’t demand to know, as I might have done a few months ago. I didn’t even feel particularly curious about it. Whatever insights Zach had, or thought he had, about my character, correct or not, they belonged to him. I didn’t begrudge him them, but I also didn’t need them anymore.
“But still, I might not have actually bought the ticket,” he went on, “I just—I don’t know, when I saw that little girl, that clinched it. I took a leap of faith.”
Buying a nonrefundable airplane ticket because you saw a brown-eyed girl in a boater hat at the park seemed like a dubious decision, even for a hard-core Anne fan like me, and for a moment, I worried about Zach’s mental state. But then I reminded myself—and I knew this from my own experience—that if you went out into the world looking for a sign that you should do something, a go-ahead from the great beyond or wherever, you were highly likely to find one.
There was a time, even after our breakup, when I would’ve so dreaded bursting his bubble that I would have told him okay, hung up the phone, and jumped in the car to drive home. But there, in Edith’s house, I could instead say, “Zach, I think we should get together and talk sometime. But I can’t tomorrow.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” he said.
“I can’t tomorrow.”
“You’re, what? Busy?” An edge entered his tone. Whether it was an edge of hurt or anger, I couldn’t tell yet, but I knew I’d find out soon enough.
“I am, actually. I’m sorry, but I really am.”
“Clare, this is important. And it’s all planned.”
“I know, and I wish you’d talked to me about it before you made those plans. Because tomorrow doesn’t work. Another day would, I’m sure, but not tomorrow.”
In the pause that followed, I could hear Zach taking deep breaths, trying to steady himself, something I knew didn’t come easily to him. He tried, he always tr
ied so hard to do the right thing. I wished he had the spirit of Edith there to help him; he might have needed her even more than I did.
“Look,” he said, finally, “I’m coming anyway. I have the ticket, right? And I don’t need to come in the morning. I’ll check into my hotel, and you can call me whenever you’re finished with whatever you’re doing. Or whenever you have a break in your busyness. Tomorrow night, even; it doesn’t matter how late. Okay?”
“Zach, coming is just not a good idea.”
“Why? You can’t squeeze me in? What if it were Hildy? You’d probably drop everything if it were Hildy. Can’t you do that for me?”
“I can’t. I couldn’t if it were Hildy or anyone. Because I’m not home right now.”
“You’re away? Like for a few days or something?”
“Yes, I’m away.”
“On vacation?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Sort of? What is that supposed to mean?” With each word, his voice rose in both volume and pitch. I held the phone a couple of inches away from my ear. “Where the hell are you, Clare?”
No way in the world was I telling him.
“It doesn’t matter. I’m just away for a while.”
“Wait, wait, wait. You’re saying you won’t tell me where you are?”
“I really just need some time by myself.”
“Bullshit,” he spat. “If you were alone, you’d say where you are. Who is he?”
So much for letting go of anger.
“I’m not with anyone, Zach.”
“God, it’s not Dev. Tell me it’s not goddamn Dev.”
“I think I should go now.”
“Seriously, Clare? Your high school boyfriend? That’s your rebound guy? You know that’s pathetic, right?”
“I’m hanging up now, Zach. Please don’t call me again.”
“Don’t you fucking tell me what to do!”
He was shouting. Zach’s shouting had always shaken me; there was a note of something wild in it that reverberated all up and down my internal fault lines. But not this time. This time, without saying good-bye or a single other word to him, I hung up, then went to my phone settings, turned off vibrate, put the phone down on the table, fluffed my pillow into just the right shape, and went to sleep.