“Used to what?” I said, bridling.
He laughed. “Smoking.”
“Oh.” I looked at the cigarette.
“You don’t have to deal with anyone you don’t want to. You don’t have to tell anybody anything.”
“You don’t know Drew.” I ground the cigarette out in the ashtray.
“I do know one thing,” he said, tossing the orange back and forth from hand to hand. “Whatever this is between us, Cassie, it’s very simple. It’s you and me. And they can talk about it if they want to, but it doesn’t matter. What they say—what anyone says—doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“We live in the world, Troy. Maybe if we were on a desert island somewhere—”
“Cancún”
“—but we’re not. Your family, my dad—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Troy—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I searched his face. “I wish I could believe that.”
“Come to the city with me,” he said suddenly, tossing me the orange.
I missed and it rolled off the porch. “What?”
“Come to Atlanta.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Ralph and I have a big place, you can live with us. We can find you a studio. You can get a job if you want, or we can get by on what I’m making for a while—”
“Troy, please.”
“What?”
“Don’t you think this is a little soon? We don’t even know each other.”
“How can we get to know each other if we’re always hiding out?”
“But—”
“None of this bullshit means anything there, Cassie. Come with me.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“Give me one good reason why not.”
“This house,” I said. “I came here for this house. That’s why I’m here.”
“The house is that important to you?”
I looked out over the railing. Blue was sniffing around in the grass. “I’d feel like I was running away.”
“From what?”
I closed my eyes.
“Running away from what?” His voice was quiet, insistent. After a moment I turned to face him. “I came down here to figure things out. And with everything that’s happened—finding that box, learning about Bryce Davies—I need some time to sort it all through.”
“How long do you think you’ll need?”
“I don’t know. How can you know these things?”
He rubbed his forehead with the fingers of one hand. “Well, do you have any idea how you feel about me?”
My silence stretched between us. “I—I don’t know yet,” I said at last.
He looked out toward the line of trees beyond the drive. “All right, then, I guess,” he said. “Okay.”
Standing on the front porch with Blue, I hugged my elbows. Troy sat in the jeep toying with the steering wheel, then he turned the key and revved the engine. I went down the steps to say goodbye. I think you’re a part of me I’m missing.
He put the jeep in reverse, watching me. “Take care,” he said softly. “You know where to find me.”
After he left, I put on jeans and sneakers and went walking with Blue through the field behind the house, to the wooded area below. The trees and bushes were thick and brambled, and I tried in vain to find a clear pathway through them. Finally I stopped and stood very still, obeying my Girl Scout instincts, and heard what I was listening for: the dull roar of water.
We made our way down a slope through the woods, toward the sound. As the trees thinned at the bottom we were suddenly confronted with a ten-foot chain-link fence. Old rusty signs—KEEP OUT, NO TRESPASSING—were posted at intervals along the way. We followed the fence for some distance, eventually coming upon a gate bolted with a large, heavy lock.
I threaded my fingers through the holes and pressed my face to the fence. There was no water in sight. For a moment I considered climbing over, but then, sagging against the fence, I realized that I didn’t need to see the water—it was enough to know that it was there. I turned around and started back through the trees, Blue trotting behind.
When I reached the field in back of the house, I stood in the grass listening to the crickets, the singing birds, somebody mowing in the distance, the hum of a small plane overhead. Blue barked and scrabbled after some animal. I stretched my arms over my head and looked up at the blue, blue sky and the tiny plane carving a path through it.
Once Bryce was gone I thought he might be mine again, that it might be like it was in the beginning when he was only mine. But he pushed me away more than ever; he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t listen. I’d find him hunched over, crying in the bathroom, and I’d try to comfort him, and he’d tell me to go away and leave him alone. He’d sit on the porch for hours just staring off at the sky, and when I’d come over beside him he’d act like I wasn’t there. And then that night, that awful night, I’d had enough, I just couldn’t take any more, and I grabbed his arms and said, “Tell me! What can I do to make you love me again?” and he stood there in the bedroom staring at me with dull eyes and said, “I loved her so much I don’t care if I die.”
I reeled back as if I’d been hit. And then I struck him across the face as hard as I could and told him to get out of the house, to get out and never come back. He looked at me with tears running down his face and said, “You did it on purpose, didn’t you? You knew and you did it on purpose.” He sank down on the bed sobbing, and it was terrible, a noise like a donkey braying, and he was shouting, “You killed her! You knew, so you killed her!” and I just stood like a statue in the middle of the floor. After an eternity I said, “And what if I did, Amory? What if I did?”
He gave me a look verging on pure hatred and got up and left the room. I heard him ask Ellen for the keys, and then I heard him drive off in the bus. I knew he was going to get drunk; it was the only logical thing for him to do. As soon as he left I started shaking, and I couldn’t stop. I knew that Ellen must have heard everything, and I couldn’t bear to face her. So on the last night of her life, with the two of us in the house alone, I never saw her, never left my room until I heard Amory drive up and honk, yelling that he’d take her where she needed to go. I heard the door slam and then the bump of tires, careless and fast, down that long grassy drive.
After that there was the sorting, the notifying, the clearing out. Her belongings were a ghost town, left behind to rot. I burned most everything; I couldn’t stand to have her stuff in the house knowing she’d never be back to get it. But when I found her diary I locked it in the box with the letters, the newspaper clippings of the drowning, the obituaries, the photo in the paper of the bus smashed to pieces. The diary seemed like a piece of her soul.
I hid the key, as I always did, on a little ledge underneath the bed frame, and I put the box in our closet. It stayed there for months on the top shelf, all my secrets gathering dust. But one evening I was up in the bedroom by myself, and I was thinking of Ellen and crying a little, and I remembered the diary and wanted to read it again. I located the key and then reached for the box. It was gone. It simply wasn’t there. I searched the closet, under the bed, inside the armoire where he hung his suits.
Amory was sitting out on the porch reading the paper, so I crept down the stairs very quietly and scoured the kitchen cupboards, the closet in the hall, behind the couch and chairs and a chest of drawers in the living room. I went down to the cellar and pawed around behind jars of preserves and pickled tomatoes. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Standing there with the single dim bulb swaying over my head, its pull-chain rattling, I felt as naked and exposed as it was. I suddenly became deathly afraid of going upstairs. I wondered how long I might be able to stay down here, living off canned beans and peaches.
I heard the screen door slam shut and Amory trudge into the kitchen. His footsteps paused at the open cellar door.
“Hello?” he called. “Clyde, you down there?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Hello?” He waited a moment and then clicked off the light.
I groped for the chain in the dark and turned it on again.
“Something wrong with you?” he said.
I looked at the swaying bulb and reached up to stop the motion, burning the tips of my fingers. “Where is it?”
“What?” He started down the stairs.
“Where is that box?”
He paused, and our eyes locked. “I can’t tell you that,” he said.
“It’s mine.”
“You will never know.”
Both of us were silent for a moment. I could hear him breathing, hard and slow. I looked into his face, and for the first time I saw pain etched across it as clearly as the path of a scalpel across flesh. Then he turned and went back upstairs, his shoulders slumped forward like an old man’s.
I stood in the cellar until there was no reason to stand there anymore. When I came up he was already in bed. I went out and sat on the porch in the early summer heat, watching the fireflies flicker above the velvety soft darkness of the grass.
It was Thursday afternoon and I was out in the field behind the house, digging holes for cement-block foundations. For several days, ever since Troy left, I’d been putting together the large hollow figures that would populate the field. One of them was almost fully assembled; she stood like a sentry in the dining room, guarding the smaller pieces still scattered on plastic squares. I’d been cutting little indentations in the separate pieces so that they’d fit together smoothly and could be taken apart without much trouble. But before I could move any of them outside, I needed to finish the foundations and let them settle.
As I knelt in the grass, fortifying the inside of a shallow hole with packed dirt, I heard Alice’s car coming over the ridge. So few people came to visit that I could recognize the hum and clatter of each vehicle. I stood up, brushing dirt off my knees. “Back here, Alice!” I called. A moment later she appeared, with an amused expression on her face and Elaine right behind her, teetering on high heels and clutching a piece of paper. Blue circled them, wagging his tail and panting.
“She insisted on me coming—,” Alice began.
“Young lady!” shrieked Elaine, shaking the paper in the air and walking toward me as fast as she could. She tripped on a small rock and her knee buckled, but she struggled to keep her balance. “I would never have believed it! Never! First it was May Ford tried to tell me she saw the two of you together, and I said, ‘May, darlin’, I think you must be mistaken, that’s impossible, he’s been living in Atlanta since June and hasn’t even been back to visit.’”
Alice smiled at me. “Her friend Bernadette saw you and Troy getting cozy downtown the other day and was so kind as to drop Mother a note about it,” she explained.
“May Ford is one thing,” Elaine went on. “Nobody believes her. But to hear it in writing from Bernadette—” She brandished the paper in my face. “Can you even begin to imagine my embarrassment? What greater humiliation than to be informed by a neighbor that my own son is not only back in town, but he’s sneaking around with—with—” She lifted her arm and pointed at me. “Oh! I can’t even think of a word to describe you! And to think I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. When they said, ‘Don’t trust her, she’ll take what she can get,’ I just replied, ‘Judge not, that ye shall not be judged.’
“I fed you in my house. I brought you a casserole—and even a pie! You ungrateful little—” She bunched her fists and jammed them down at her sides, as if she were afraid she might strike. “And all that time you were”—red splotches showed through her impeccable makeup and down her neck, and her mouth was contorted with rage—”whoring! That’s what you were! There, I said it.” She put her hands over her face and started to cry.
Alice shrugged and rolled her eyes. “Oh, Mother, they aren’t hurting anybody. And besides, there’s nobody around here who should be throwing stones.”
“Well, it just makes sense that you would say that, Alice Marie,” Elaine sobbed, her voice rising shrilly. “Running all over east Tennessee with some sex-starved Knoxville banker when it’s as plain as the nose on my face that he’s nothing but a big dead end.” With the back of her index finger she dabbed at the rivulets of mascara streaming down her face. “At least you’re not breaking God’s laws.”
“Mother,” Alice sighed. “They aren’t breaking any laws, God’s or otherwise. They’re not even related. Don’t you think we should calm down and be rational about this?”
“DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN! I AM CALM!” Elaine screeched.“Just wait until Mother hears about this. It will break her heart.”
“Oh, lordy, you’re not going to tell Clyde,” Alice groaned.
“And do you think I have a choice? At the very least she should know what kind of—” She slowly wiped her nose with her hand and tottered over to me. “You know,” she said, standing very close, “your mother had a wild streak in her too. And then she went up there and married that hippie. That—that—Jewish hippie. Now that I think about it, I guess I’m not surprised at all.”
“You’re not surprised at what?” I asked.
“At how you turned out.”
I stuck my trowel in the ground. “Look, Elaine,” I said. “What do you want?”
“I want to know why you really came down here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“From the moment I laid eyes on you, I knew you’d be trouble. Running all over the place digging up dirt anywhere you could find it, playing people against each other, upsetting Clyde—”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Do you deny it?”
I took a deep breath. “Elaine—”
“I know why you came down here, Cassandra Simon,” she said in a quiet voice. “You came down here to destroy this family.”
Alice was shaking her head, a hand over her mouth.
“I didn’t have to come down here to do that,” I said. “You were doing just fine without me.” I stepped around her and headed for the back door, Blue at my heels.
Once inside, I stood trembling in the middle of the kitchen floor. After a moment I could hear Alice speaking in low tones to Elaine, and then the crunch of gravel and the slamming of car doors and the roar of the engine, and finally the muffled vibration of tires down the drive.
I stroked Blue’s head and scratched his ears. “You ain’t never been blue,” I whispered, “till you’ve had that mood indigo.” I held his muzzle and looked into his liquid black eyes. Then I went upstairs to get ready for work.
The night was dark and quiet and clouded over. Every now and then I could see a sliver of moon. I knew she wasn’t home, because Elaine had told me she worked Thursdays at that low-life bar that clings to the edge of town like a tick on a dog.
Before I left the house I put on black pants and one of Horace’s old sweatshirts and the big-heeled sneakers Elaine bought when she was trying to convince me to get some exercise. Looking at myself in the mirror, I felt like some batty contestant in the Senior Olympics they show on TV. I waited until nine o’clock, when most of the neighbors would have settled down for the night. From the front window I could see that the street was calm and empty. I let a few more minutes pass to be sure. I didn’t want to take any chances. The neighbors all knew that I was usually in bed by nine-thirty at the latest, so they’d suspect something was up if they saw me leaving the house at that hour.
From a drawer in the kitchen I got my big red flashlight, the one Horace had given me in case of blackouts, and then I went out to the garage and started the car. All of a sudden I felt a strange tingling mix of excitement and fear. I’d had so much time to search, to imagine; I had dug through my memory like I was mining for gold. I’d decided it was best to be systematic: I would start in the cellar and work my way up, room by room. I figured it wouldn’t take me long to find where she’d hidden it. I know that old house as well as I know my own mind.
I coasted down Red Pond Road with the lights off until I reached the corner of Webb, where I figured I was safe. My hands were shaking. I hadn’t had my license all that long, and I still wasn’t comfortable driving at night. I’d never driven to the old house myself; I hadn’t even seen it since we moved out all those years ago. The road felt unfamiliar—I couldn’t remember where to slow down for curves, where to accelerate for hills. I crept along cautiously, as if on tiptoe.
And yet I recognized the old drive right away. As I made my way up over the ridge, the house appeared in a dim arc of moonlight, and my heart leapt. It looked small and still, shabbier even than I remembered. When I got closer I could see wild grass growing where planted flowers used to be. The porch sagged; paint was peeling from the eaves. Seeing it this way sent a pain through me. I stopped the car by the side of the porch, cut the engine, and retied my shoelaces while I tried to gather my thoughts. I left the keys in the ignition and started to get out.
All of a sudden out of nowhere came this black dog, barking and leaping against my door, scaring me to death. I yanked the door shut, my heart racing. After what seemed like hours the dog sat down, cocked its ears at me, and began to wag its tail, and I could see that it was still a puppy. I rolled down the window a bit and said, “Good dog.” I opened the door. “Nice dog,” I said, but it jumped up and I pulled the door shut again. It sat down again. Mustering my courage, I cracked the door and stuck out the top of one sneakered foot. It sniffed the new leather and looked up at me. I got out gradually, one leg at a time, and it came toward me, sticking its wet nose in my lap. I patted it on the head. “Good doggy. Quiet doggy.” It followed me up the creaking front steps to the door, which was unlocked, and then inside.
The house was a different place than I remembered. It smelled like the yard, like mud and wood and old dying leaves. Standing in the front hall—my hall—I shined the flashlight into the living room on one side, then the kitchen on the other. Every window seemed to be open; cheap muslin curtains flapped inward like ghosts dancing toward me in the dark. The living room looked bare. The dog was wagging its tail and kept brushing against my knees.