Edith’s chest tightened and she grabbed onto the arms of her wooden chair.
“Don’t do it,” said May. “Whatever you’re second-guessing yourself about, just don’t.”
“I had to try to bring her here,” Edith said, gasping. “She insisted. But there was a time when we stopped and I slept because I was just so tired that nothing felt real or made sense, and when I woke up, I knew, I knew she had taken a turn for the worse, the much, much worse, and I shouldn’t have slept or I should’ve taken her to a hospital right then and—”
May held up her hand. “Stop. You should have done just what you did.”
“But—”
“She deserved her chance at freedom and a good life. And she may get it, yet. She’s young and has got good doctors and has her baby to live for. Sarah shot her husband to save her baby’s life and her own. Any woman who can do that has a fighting chance at the very least.”
“She can’t die. She just can’t.”
May reached out and moved a lock of Edith’s damp hair off her cheek, a brusque, tender act that made Edith, for the first time since she was a little child, miss her mother, of whom she had not a single clear memory.
“Don’t let yourself get worked up,” said May. “It isn’t good for you.”
Impulsively, Edith took May’s hand. “May, I promised Sarah that if anything happened to her, I would make sure Steven ended up with good people. I swore he would never live with her husband’s family. She said they were fiends.”
“Then Steven will be raised by her husband’s family over my dead body,” said May. She stated it like a simple fact, and Edith thought that it was the very absence of malice in her voice that made her fearsome.
“Over mine, too,” said Edith. “But I might have to leave before—before we know if Sarah will get well. As soon as I get word from back home that it’s safe, I’ll need to go back. If I stay away too long, people will begin to wonder about me.”
“Wherever you are, Thomas and I will make sure you keep your promise to Sarah. You have my word on that.”
Edith smiled. “You remind me of my friend John, who brought Sarah and Steven to me. The way you keep so calm and certain, as if there’s a peaceful river running through you.”
May smiled back. “Oh, but really it’s fierce and wild. It’s all I can do to keep it in check. I’ll bet John’s river is that way, too.”
The next morning, when Edith came downstairs, May told her that Thomas was bringing Sarah and Steven home.
“Oh, but that’s wonderful,” said Edith, confused by May’s grave expression.
“No,” said May. “She’s still very, very sick. Thomas said she had no business being anywhere but a hospital.”
“Why then?”
“One of the student nurses who doesn’t know about what we do accidentally entered Sarah’s room with a tray of food, despite the quarantine sign. Thomas and another nurse, one of ours, were in there with Sarah. They had forgotten to lock the door, you see. It’s hard to do everything right when you’re exhausted, and that quarantine sign should’ve been enough, but it wasn’t.”
“Oh, no,” said Edith.
“It may well be nothing. Thomas said the student nurse just blushed and stammered an apology and left, but even so, he thought it best to bring Sarah home.”
Later that morning, Thomas carried her into the house in his arms, stepping gingerly, jarring her as little as possible, but Sarah’s face was gray with pain, and she winced with every step. Still, Edith believed she looked a little bit better than she’d looked during the drive to Canada, more lucid. When her eyes met Edith’s, she moved her mouth, and although no sound came out, Edith knew Sarah was saying thank you.
Thomas took Sarah into the downstairs bedroom just off the living room, a room more like a closet, windowless, and too small to contain more than a bed and a leather armchair. May had made up the bed and set a crib for Steven in her own bedroom. Thomas would spend nights in the armchair, keeping watch.
After Sarah fell asleep, Thomas came into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and his mother brought him a plate of food. In the daylight, his face was drawn, exhausted, but still remarkably boyish; Edith thought that if he was out of his twenties, it wasn’t by much.
But when he spoke, he sounded like an old man: “I wish to God I hadn’t had to bring her here. I wish to God.”
* * *
Two days passed without any word from John.
“I’m sure a letter is on the way,” said May. “Don’t worry.”
“I won’t,” said Edith.
Even so, that night, Edith did worry, and the worry sent her mind darting like a dragonfly, unable to settle. Because sleep was impossible, she drew on the robe May had lent her and went down the back stairs in the dark, her feet feeling their way on the worn, silken wood, her hand holding firmly to the banister. When she got to the kitchen, she gasped at the transformation night had wrought on the cozy room. Moonlight spilled like mercury through the black branches of the maple tree outside the window, figuring crazy shadows on the walls and on the strawberry-print tablecloth, shadows that writhed and rippled as the wind blew. The linoleum gleamed like steel and burned the soles of her bare feet with cold. Edith felt heavy and dark in the middle of the mutable, quicksilvered room, like a rock on the bed of a flowing stream, and, as she stood there, she was filled with the presentiment that something was about to happen, something frightening, that she was about to be tumbled loose by a current and carried away.
You’re ridiculous, she scolded herself, you’re safe here in this house, and, as noiselessly as she could so as not to wake Thomas or Sarah or the baby, she began to open cupboards, searching for a water glass, but before she found one, she heard, from outside the kitchen windows, what she instinctively recognized as the crunch of footsteps on frozen grass, and panic gripped her.
They’ve found us, she thought bleakly. We’re caught; all that driving was for nothing; oh, poor Sarah, poor Steven, poor little baby.
The silhouette of a man in a hat materialized at the kitchen door, and then he was turning a key in the lock, and then he was pushing the door open, and then he was standing in the kitchen staring at her and saying, “Jesus Christ, you nearly scared me to death.”
George.
“Oh, George,” she whispered, pressing her hand to her heart. “Thank God it’s only you.”
“Don’t thank God, yet,” he said, grimly, and switched on the kitchen light.
Her vision swam in the flood of brightness, and she lifted a hand to her eyes to shade them. When she took her hand away, George was looking at her with a strange mixture of surprise and confusion, as if he’d expected someone else entirely. Under his gaze, she felt naked and intensely conscious of the fact that she hadn’t set eyes on him since the morning after the night they’d made love for the final time. Reflexively, she pulled the robe more tightly around her.
“Edith,” he said, softly.
She lifted her hand to ward him off, but he didn’t move in her direction. He just stood.
“Turn off the light,” she said. “And please keep your voice low. Thomas sleeps in a chair in the downstairs bedroom where Sarah stays. We don’t want to wake him, poor man. Or Sarah.”
George turned off the light, and the two of them stood in the moon-drenched kitchen, waiting for their eyes to adjust, for the other to come into focus.
“What did you mean by that?” Edith asked.
“By what?”
“‘Don’t thank God, yet.’”
In the moonlight, Edith watched his face go from soft to hard.
“John Blanchard is in police custody,” he said.
“John?” said Edith. Light-headed, she pulled out a kitchen chair, almost toppling it over, and fell into it like a sack. “For what?”
“What else? Helping a murderess and kidnapper to escape.”
“How?”
“You were seen, the two of you. In your house. With Sarah.”
/> Edith raked her fingers into her hair and shut her eyes. “Oh, no.”
“You should have sent him away as soon as he showed up with her and the baby,” George said, coldly.
Edith opened her eyes and stared at George Graham, trying to balance all the contradictory parts of this man who had spent money and years making women and children safe and yet who could dismiss Sarah and Steven as if they were nothing.
Finally, she said, “You never see their faces, do you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Or hear their voices. You don’t know the color of their hair or how they jump at noises or flinch when they’re touched. They aren’t real to you. They aren’t even stories, are they? They’re what? Names on your list? Tally marks?”
“You’re talking nonsense.”
“But your own story, you keep that one close, don’t you? And all the characters in it are flesh and blood.”
George turned his face away.
“I’ll bet you remember the color of that minister’s hair, the one who sent your mother away when she came to him for help.”
“Enough,” he said, through tight lips.
“You didn’t see Sarah, the shape she was in, and with a newborn baby. No one could have sent them away.”
“I take your point, Edith,” said George. “And still here we are. John caught like a rat in a trap. Your house compromised forever, useless to all those women who need help. And you and Sarah—” He broke off.
Edith reached up and rubbed her temples, tried to clear her head. She said, “They’ll come after us, won’t they? Sarah and Steven and me.”
“They’re already looking,” said George, and then asked, sharply, “did you tell Blanchard where you were going?”
She nodded.
“Good,” he said.
She lifted her head. “Good?”
“Yes. I don’t know the man, but he seems to be the noble type. I’m sure he’ll do what he can to steer the authorities in all the wrong directions.”
“You’re right,” said Edith. “John’s not a liar by nature, but he will lie to help us.”
She imagined John, her friend, the most decent, innately kind person she knew, locked in a cage like an animal.
“Good.”
“But I’ll have to go home eventually,” said Edith.
George sat down at the table with her and she watched him look at her, taking her in, his eyes growing distant and thoughtful, and then, after a few moments, something shifted, snapped into place, and Edith understood that she had just seen him make a decision.
“If you go home,” he said, “you will be arrested and will almost certainly go to prison. At some point, you will be given a choice: tell them Sarah’s whereabouts and be granted some sort of leniency or refuse to tell them, in which case . . .” He shrugged.
That shrug made her want to slap him. How easy it would be to allow herself to hate him, to turn him, in her mind, from a man into a monster. But what good would that do? And anyway, it would be a lie. Edith thought of Sarah’s husband. It was possible that there were monsters afoot in this world, but she knew that George Graham was not one of them.
“Ordinarily, if you left now, you wouldn’t know where Sarah and Steven were because, before you’d even arrived at home, they would have been transported from here to their next place,” said George. “But moving Sarah in her condition is obviously impossible. She and Steven will be here for weeks, maybe longer.”
“I would never tell them where she was,” Edith said.
“You’d be surprised at what you might do if you were facing a long prison sentence,” he said. “So going back wouldn’t just be disastrous for you; it could put Sarah and Steven in danger, as well.”
“I wouldn’t betray them.”
He seemed not to have heard her. “I’m sure John Blanchard will buy you some time. There’s no need to leave right away, but you can’t stay here forever. Neither can Sarah and Steven. When the police realize they’ve been misled, they’ll eventually start looking in the proper direction. You had to have stopped places on the way; people saw your car.”
She remembered the gas station attendant, politely listening to her exhausted ramblings. She nodded.
“Who knows? It’s possible that they’ll never trace you or Sarah to this house. It helps that you’re in another country now. But they might find you,” said George.
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Stay until you—until you’re ready and all the plans are in place. And then let me relocate you.”
Edith fell back in her chair, stunned.
“You mean never go back?”
“I’ve done it for many women, as you know. And I’ll be honest, fugitive life is hard. You will spend years looking over your shoulder. Some of the women, especially the ones with children, even regret their decision to leave; although so far, none have been desperate enough to go back.”
She shook her head.
“But my life. My entire life is back in Antioch. I have nothing else anywhere else. No family. No real friends. No work. My clothes, my cameras, my boxes of important things, I’ve brought none of that with me here.”
Confused and frightened, she thought that if only she explained her situation as clearly as possible, he would see that she had to go back.
“Edith, don’t you understand that life as you’ve known it ended the moment you took Sarah and her baby into your house?” said George, quietly.
“John’s life, too. How can I let him take responsibility for everything?”
“It can’t be helped.” Edith heard a note of regret in his voice.
“You help him,” she said. “Whatever I do, wherever I end up, you help John however you can. Will you do that?”
“Yes,” said George.
She nodded. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“And what about my house? It’s more than a house to me.” It’s Joseph. All that I have of Joseph.
George sighed. “I can do whatever you want me to do about your house. Sell it or—”
“No!” said Edith, forgetting to whisper. She lowered her voice. “Never.”
“As you wish. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Please don’t speak as if I’ve decided.”
Edith’s hands lay palms down on the table. George reached out as if to hold one of them, but then just set his own hand on the table between the two of hers.
“Edith, you were wrong about me. Those women are real to me, all of them, even though most of them I never see.”
Edith scanned his face, and noticed, for the first time, how tired he looked.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she said. “It was unfair.”
“You’re real to me,” said George, quietly. “I know the color of your hair, and I want you to have a life. Let me help you.”
Edith sat still, struggling to absorb what was happening, but then she heard May moving around on the floor over their heads. At any moment, she might come down the stairs.
“Think it over. Take your time,” said George. “I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. And when you’ve decided, I will put it all in motion.”
The full meaning of what they had been saying to each other hit her all at once, and the world seemed to spin.
Edith had written down the names of the bruised and hollow-eyed and homeless, but who would make a record of her name and where she’d been? Who would catalog her injuries, document the tilt of her black brows, her laugh, her two hands cradling a coffee cup or knotting back her wayward, wind-tangled hair?
Nothing is decided, she reminded herself, nothing. But when she closed her eyes and tried to hold on, to her house, her canoes, her kitchen table, her boxes, her blue ceiling, Joseph’s photographs; when she tried to reach her hands around all of it, it was as if every solid, holy thing she’d ever loved had turned to water and was already pouring through her fingers and rushing away, away, away.
> Chapter Twenty-Four
Clare
Compared to Edith’s boxes, the box my mother held out to me was pretty drab, no golden, swirl-grained oak or fragrant cedar or mahogany shiny as a mirror, no black lacquer tops or velvet linings: just rubber-band-colored, fireproof metal with a round lock on top, the key stuck inside it. But this had been my summer of finding truth in locked boxes, and this one just might be the last, so I took it from my mother’s hands with the care and respect you’d offer any holy grail, any sanctuarium. I set it on the coffee table in my parents’ living room, and all of us gathered around: my mother, Gordon, Cornelia—who was in town dropping off her children at her parents’ house for a week of, as she put it, “unfettered joy, limitless pie, and irreversible spoiling”—Dev, whom I had picked up on the way down, and I.
And slipping in at the last minute to look over my shoulder, tall, slim, dark-eyed, handsome, dead for more than ten years, and invisible to everyone but me, was my father, Martin Grace.
My parents had divorced when I was a toddler, and while my father was alive, until the day he left for London, where he died in a car accident, whenever I was with him, I was the one who felt invisible. He wasn’t mean. On my rare visits with him, he joked and teased and bought me things. He called me “Clare-o the Sparrow.” He just didn’t love me, and I knew it, and once he had died, I knew he never would. That could have been the end of our story, but then, one day, when I was twelve and won a writing award in school, I realized that even if he’d never loved me, I could love him. And that’s when I began to edit him in. That night, when I stood on the stage in the school auditorium, receiving my award, I found an empty seat in the audience, near the back but close enough for him to see my face, and I put him into it. Hello, I told him in my head, I’m glad you’re here. Dances, Christmas dinners, my high school graduation, even at my rehearsal dinner, he was there, a slender presence, half in shadow, stopping by just long enough to absorb the small allotment of love I beamed in his direction and then disappearing like a trick of light.