They were married on the edge of East China, in the parlor of Richard’s parents’ house. It was July and orange lilies were blooming everywhere, even beneath the huge pine trees where the shadows were deep green. Richard’s mother, Helen, cried from the beginning of the ceremony to the very end. The only guest was a high-school friend of Richard’s, a boy named Buddy who was so nervous about his duties as best man that he nearly fainted during the justice of the peace’s speech about fidelity.
After the ceremony Helen took Lila aside in the kitchen and she held her hand. “I hope you understand that no one in town will ever speak to you again,” she told her new daughter-in-law.
In fact, Lila’s own great-aunt had asked her to leave the house as soon as she was told about the marriage, and Lila had spent the last week and a half at a motel in Riverhead. But after losing both her child and her parents the disapproval of neighbors was meaningless.
“Richard’s the only person I need,” Lila told her mother-in-law as she reached up into a cabinet for some plates. There was a luncheon following the ceremony, but with the exception of the still shaky Buddy, there were no guests.
“Just wait,” Helen said ominously. She took a tub of potato salad from the refrigerator, then sat down at the kitchen table, as if the weight of the potato salad was too much for her. “You’ll be the object of every conversation in town. They’ll find out every piece of gossip about you and spread it all over the Island.”
The screen door was open and they could hear the sound of bees. Lila stood still and held the china plates to her chest. She had not stopped to think about her past resurfacing out here in East China; she had not even thought how she would explain the scars on her wrists when she undressed in front of Richard that night.
“Don’t get me wrong—I’m not complaining,” Helen said. “But my life hasn’t been easy. What saves me is I’m in love with my husband. But sometimes,” she admitted, “I’d like to hear another person’s voice.”
Lila was no longer listening to her mother-in-law. She was sure that if Richard ever found out about her past he would leave her, and she vowed then and there never to let him know about her baby. She came to him without a past, as if she herself had been born on the day she first saw him.
Richard’s father, the Red Man who was gossiped about in so many living rooms and parlors, came into the kitchen for champagne and glasses. He was the same height as his son, although Richard was convinced that his father was several inches taller. No one in town cared, but his name was Jason Grey, and when he saw how sad his wife and new daughter-in-law looked he popped the champagne cork right there in the kitchen and the sudden noise and gush of dry champagne made both women gasp and then laugh out loud.
That night Lila and Richard moved in to the bedroom on the second floor. Jason Grey had put up new wallpaper, and Richard had refinished the pine bed. But even after the lights were turned out, Lila refused to get undressed. It was impossible to see any stars through the pine boughs outside the bedroom window, but somehow the moonlight managed to get through. The room was so well lit Lila was certain that the moment she took off her clothes, Richard would be blinded by the scars on her wrists.
As Lila stood by the window, Richard sat down at the foot of the bed and took off his boots. He was so much in love that he was actually afraid to blink, even once, as if Lila might just disappear. Lila’s back was turned to him, and in the moonlight Richard could see that her posture was as straight as wire. All of a sudden she seemed shy, and because she was, after all, a new bride who had just moved into her in-laws’ house and because she had promised herself to a man who was really still a stranger, Richard felt his heart go out to her. In that moment he fell even more deeply in love.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said softly. “Since we’re married and we’ve got the rest of our lives together, we don’t have to make love yet if you don’t want to.”
Lila wanted to more than anything. She knew that she was about to cry, and she couldn’t imagine an explanation that would satisfy her new husband once he saw that she had tried to take her own life. Because she did not know what else to do, Lila quickly unbuttoned her white dress, let it slip to the floor, then stepped out of it. She held up her hands, wrists together like a hostage. She had not yet unpacked her suitcase, and if Richard insisted she tell him about her past, she had decided she would have to leave him.
When Richard came over to her and held her, Lila closed her eyes and arched her neck, as if getting ready for some great pain.
“I can’t believe how beautiful you are,” Richard said.
Lila opened her eyes and backed away. Just then she wondered if she hadn’t married a fool.
“You’re not looking at me,” Lila said sharply.
Richard bent down and kissed her. “Oh, yes I am,” he said.
Lila pushed him away and she raised her hands until her wrists were directly in front of his eyes. The jagged lines along her wrists grew whiter and whiter; no one in his right mind could ignore them.
“Look at me,” Lila urged her husband.
Richard had spent his whole life in the odd circumstance of being both well loved and lonely. His parents were so much in love that no matter how deeply they cared for him, Richard was somehow excluded. He didn’t care if he was considered an outcast in East China, all he needed was one person, someone of his own. Now that he had found Lila, he didn’t intend to lose her, even if the scars that she now showed him meant he had gotten a little more than he’d bargained for. Richard Grey wasn’t a fool, and he certainly knew something about death. When he was ten he accidentally saw a man kill himself. It was out in the woods behind the deserted army barracks used as a camp for migrant workers. Richard had been born in the barracks, and even after his parents had bought the gas station and moved into the house they still lived in, Richard felt drawn to the migrant camp, if only because there seemed to be more deer there than anywhere else in East China.
He was in the woods, late in October, sitting motionless so that he would not frighten off any deer, when he saw a migrant worker walk into a clearing in the woods with a shotgun in his hands. Richard assumed that this man was an out-of-season hunter searching for deer. But then, quite suddenly, the migrant turned the gun on himself and fired.
Even after he had run for miles, Richard could still hear the shot. And when he had to go to the district attorney’s office to testify to what he had seen, Richard humiliated himself by crying in public when he was questioned. Afterward he couldn’t seem to make himself go into the woods; he stood at the edge of the backyard where the lawn disappeared into brambles and pines, unable to take another step.
And then one day Jason Grey came out to the yard.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to Richard. He pushed some brambles aside, stepped into the woods, and signaled to his son.
Richard swallowed hard, but he followed. It was darker in the woods than he’d remembered, and each time a branch broke under his father’s boots, Richard shuddered. It didn’t take long for him to realize that his father was leading him right back to the exact spot where the migrant worker had shot off his head.
“Come on,” Jason Grey said when he noticed that his son had stopped walking. “What’s keeping you?”
In the shadows of the pine trees, his father suddenly seemed like a stranger. “You can’t make me go there,” Richard said.
Jason walked back to him. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a cigarette. “I guess you’re wondering what made him do it,” he said.
“I don’t care,” Richard said.
Jason Grey inhaled on his cigarette and then coughed, and his cough made Richard ache with the sudden knowledge that one day his father would be old and sick.
“If we wanted to,” Jason Grey said, “we could find out everything about that man who shot himself. We could find out how much money he owed, and if his wife had left him for somebody else. But we’d never really know what went on in his mind.
It’s not our right to know what goes on in another man’s mind. But whatever it was, we know one thing for sure—he just couldn’t fight it any more. And that’s his right, too.” Jason finished his cigarette and motioned to his son. “Come on,” he said.
Together they walked the rest of the way to the clearing. The few leaves left on the trees had turned yellow, and when the sunlight filtered through them the air seemed to shine. Richard felt the urge to grab his father’s hand; instead he stood in the clearing and watched the yellow light.
“People have private places in their minds,” Jason Grey said. “That doesn’t mean they’re crazy. It doesn’t even mean they’re cowards if they run from something awful.”
They could hear leaves falling. Jason Grey stared straight ahead, but he reached down and took his son’s hand.
“You just remember there’s a big difference between not being able to fight it anymore and feeling like you’re all alone sometimes,” he said.
“Even when you’re married?” Richard had asked, surprised that his father knew so much about being alone.
Jason Grey couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “Especially then,” he had said.
On his wedding night, Richard knew exactly what his father had been talking about. There was a private place in Lila’s mind that was somehow the same as that migrant worker with the shotgun. But if anything, this made Lila seem more precious. When Richard touched the white scars on Lila’s wrist he was dazzled by hope—it was as if Lila had died and come back to him, and he held her tight for a moment, before he stepped away.
“I am looking at you,” Richard said. “And all I see is my wife.”
The rest of that summer seemed to last forever; the air smelled like strawberries and the sunlight was unusually thick. Helen was delighted to have another woman in the house, and she taught Lila all her secret recipes, for cabbage soup and jam cake and sweet potato pie. Just before supper Lila always went outside to wait on the lawn for Richard and Jason Grey to come home from work. At that time of day the sky was deep blue, and under that sky Lila felt brand new. For a brief time she was a woman without a history—even her dreams were filled with ordinary things, fireflies and pearl-edged clouds, and teapots made out of copper. She didn’t question her good luck—she didn’t dare to. All she knew was that someone had fallen in love with her, and, amazingly enough, that was all she needed.
But when autumn came, something changed. At night, after they had made love and Richard had fallen asleep, Lila found herself shivering with fear. She was certain that she would lose Richard: one day when she went out to wait for him Jason Grey’s Chrysler would pull up in the driveway and only her father-in-law would get out. She began to dream about her past; her womb tightened as it had for days after her baby had been born, and the contractions kept her up all night and made her afraid to sleep in the same bed as her husband.
One night, Richard woke up sometime near dawn to find Lila huddled on the floor. He started to get out of bed, but Lila held up her hand, warning him to stop.
“Don’t come near me,” she said, and the coldness of her own voice filled her with grief.
“Come back to bed,” Richard said quietly.
“If you really knew me you would never love me,” Lila told him.
“If you’re referring to the fact that you once tried suicide, I know that and I don’t care,” Richard said.
Lila threw back her head and laughed, and the sound went right through Richard.
“Come back to bed,” he urged.
“You really think you know me,” Lila said contemptuously.
Richard could tell that after only a few months of marriage Lila was drifting away from him, and for the first time he raised his voice to her.
“Then go ahead and tell me the reason why you tried to kill yourself. You obviously want to tell me, so you go right ahead. Tell me.”
“I don’t want to,” Lila said in a small voice.
“Then don’t,” Richard said. “But either do it and get it over with or let it go, because we can’t keep on this way, Lila.”
Lila got back into bed and put her arms around him.
“I thought when I met you you said you could read the future,” Richard said.
“I said tea leaves,” Lila whispered. “That’s all.”
“Well, I can see into the future,” Richard told her. “You might as well stop fighting it, because we’re going to be together for a very long time.”
Lila wished she could believe him, but by the time winter came she was convinced that if they stayed in New York State they had no future at all. Someone in East China might manage to find out the truth about her; someone might tell Richard. She felt as if the past were right on her heels, and it got so bad that whenever she went into town to shop for groceries with her mother-in-law she wondered if perhaps the doctor had arranged for a couple in East China to adopt her baby. It became impossible for her to look at a child of any age; she swore her breasts were filling with milk again—at night they ached so badly that she had to sleep on her back. As her own child’s birthday grew near, Lila thought she might be going mad. Every night the sky was orange and black, and the days were as gray as stone. She grew more certain that if she stayed in East China through the winter something terrible would happen. She began to talk about leaving, but Richard imagined that what she wanted was a house of their own. He promised that in less than a year they’d find a house with a view of Long Island Sound and move out. But then one day when it was cold enough to make her shiver and remember the ice storm, Lila walked to the gas station to take Richard and Jason a Thermos of hot coffee and some lunch. There was a car idling by the gas pumps; in the passenger seat was a little girl. The girl’s mother had gone into the office to ask Richard for directions and a map, and when she came back out she found Lila with both her hands on the passenger window, weeping as she stared inside.
Lila forced herself not to run after the car. It hadn’t mattered that the child wasn’t hers, Lila wanted her. She’d had the terrible urge to get behind the wheel of the car and kidnap her, and if the child’s mother hadn’t come out of the office when she did Lila might have already been driving west. She would have turned the radio on to a low volume, and the heat up to high, and the little girl would have been right beside her, her sleepy breath filling the car with a deliciously sweet odor.
That was when Lila decided that California was the answer. Once, she had imagined that she and Stephen would go there together and live high above Hollywood, in the hills. Now all she wanted was a place to start over, a place so free of history that the past barely existed. She started talking about going west that evening at supper, and once she started talking she couldn’t seem to stop, not even after the others had put down their forks and turned to look at her.
“Are you and Richard planning to leave New York?” Helen asked in a frightened voice. For the first time she began to know the dangers of having a daughter-in-law.
“No,” Richard told her, although he realized that something was about to happen. “We’re not planning anything,” he told his mother.
Helen was relieved, but when Richard glanced over at his father he didn’t look quite sure of himself, and Jason Grey could tell that his son wouldn’t be in East China much longer.
Every night Lila begged him to leave. She talked about palm trees and pelicans until Richard began to dream about the Pacific Ocean. In his dreams the ocean was amazingly green, like a thin piece of jade held up to the sun, and blue-eyed pelicans dove into the waves. One night when the snow was falling and Lila was turned away from him, Richard sat up in bed.
“All right,” he told his wife. “We’ll go to California.”
Lila kissed him until his cheeks and his eyelids were wet.
“But you’re the one who has to tell my mother,” Richard said.
Lila backed away. “You’re her son,” she said. “You tell her.”
“You’re the one who wants to leave. You tel
l her.”
Richard put his arms around Lila and pulled her close.
“You don’t understand,” he told her. “I’m her only child and as far as she’s concerned she’ll be losing me forever.”
Richard felt his wife move away from him, even though she was still in his arms.
“I understand perfectly,” Lila said coolly. “And if you’re too afraid to tell her, I will.”
But that night Helen was already being told. Jason Grey turned to her in their bed and asked, “How would you like for it to be just you and me again?”
“You and me?” Helen said, confused. Then she realized what Jason meant. “Oh,” she said, and she started to cry.
“All you had to do was say no,” Jason teased her.
“What makes you so sure they’re leaving?” Helen asked.
“I’m sure,” Jason said. “They just don’t know how to tell us.”
“Well, if that’s what they’ve decided,” Helen said, still crying, “I can think of a lot worse things than being left here with you.”
Helen might be losing her son, but she didn’t intend to make it easy for Lila to take him away. First of all, she was sweet as pie—every time Lila began to talk about California Helen offered her a wool sweater that just didn’t suit her anymore, or a new recipe, or a piece of china, until—piece by piece—Lila had an entire service for eight stored in a cardboard box in the attic. Every day Lila swore she would tell her mother-in-law about their plans, and every day she put it off. Richard unpacked their suitcases, convinced that Lila’s obsession with California had been nothing more than a reaction to a particularly cold winter. But when Lila stopped talking about leaving it wasn’t because she wanted it any less.