Any Bitter Thing (39 page)

Her mother did not smile or sigh. She held me in her sights. “You plan to find him?”

I glanced at Mariette, then nodded uncertainly.

Mrs. Blanchard’s eyes closed. “Then I have a story.”

Bad news usually arrives ugly. A jangling telephone, ugly in the evening quiet. A doctor’s voice in a bright and ugly room. There is no elegance in bad news. It thumps you on the forehead, causes physical pain, hurts your ears.

Mrs. Blanchard’s news did not sound like that. With her supple throat and Franco accent, she released her kept secrets like a flight of doves, a steady, gradual rushing. Her voice, though grave, possessed a natural music that let the story she told us arrive in waves, the impact of the words landing just behind the words, a time-delay that made for a confusion of the senses.
What?
we asked, over and over, our comprehension arriving late by several beats.

Mariette and I were wedged together on a loveseat, mouths partly opened, coats still on, positioned an arm’s length from the stuffed chair in which her mother sat with her ankles crossed, head erect, full mouth moving, words winging out.
What?
we kept saying, but she repeated nothing, moving on in the same undulating tones that had once animated our bedtime stories.

She reached for an unreachable man and was mistaken for a child. She felled her husband with the nearest weapon, a shovel for digging up gardens. She called on the man she loved to dig a grave and save her.

What?

I groped for Mariette’s hand; our fingers twined. Her mother was explaining, calmly and without apparent apology, that the vessel we’d been sailing twenty-one years ago had capsized and that she’d claimed the only seat in the lifeboat.

I turned to Mariette, either to offer comfort, or receive it. She stood up, her mouth slack and foundering.

Mrs. Blanchard regarded us wanly, her eyes wounded but dry. “You girls don’t know what it is to live with a man who owns you.”

The dog, who had been sitting next to his mistress in a fog of inattention, suddenly took note of a barometric drop in emotional pressure and headed for a corner of the den. Mariette sprang up and spun toward the door, then slumped into a different chair, then stood up and began to move again, like an animal zigzagging to confuse its predator. It was hard to watch. Remorse
washed over me. If not for me and my voices from the dead, my friend would never have had to know this. Ray Blanchard could have roamed her world alive for as long as she cared to accommodate him. She shook her head, slowly, beseechingly, side to side to side, eyes wide and fixed, trying to un-know. Overwhelmed and out of options, she fell still, hands covering her mouth, the rest of her face a puckered mess.

“My only girl,” her mother said. “I’m sorry.”

Mariette groaned, a bone-deep guttering. She lunged into the kitchen and her mother followed, lamenting in a soft, rapid French. Mariette banged the door open, and vanished down the stairs.

Mrs. Blanchard clutched the fridge for balance. She lifted her head, slow as a dying animal, until her gaze rested on me.

“I don’t believe you,” I said to her. “I won’t believe he helped you.”

“I wish I could say it was a lie.”

“You see this?” I pulled the scrap of paper from my pocket. “He lives in Ohio. I have his phone number right here. I could ask him myself.”

“He is married,” she said evenly. “Her name is Frannie. She has a son, twelve years old. He works in a place for men more broken than he is.”

The concussion of words hurt my face, and I squinted against it. “Is that true?

She nodded, her face finally taking on the vividness of a living thing.

“You knew he was out there? The whole time?”

She nodded again. “He was in your hospital room. You were not wrong.”

“Then it was you who called him?”

“He brought you the sacrament,” she said. “Drew would not send for a priest.”

“Why would Drew send for a priest? I hadn’t been to church in years.”

Her eyes were such a deep fallish brown, the color of crushable leaves; I could imagine my uncle falling in love with her. “You regret that he came?” she asked.

“No.” My head boiled with news. “Were you in touch? All these years?”

“More, at first. But then only on big days. When you finished at your little school. When you graduated from the college. When you girls came back to Hinton. The day after your marriage ceremony. Then the last time, after the accident.”

Her body seemed old to me all of a sudden, a certain eroded quality in her stance that I hadn’t noticed before, as if she’d been defying a hard tide, each crash of wave making off with a cell or two until finally the difference showed in her bearing.

“He’s married?” I asked woodenly.

“Five years.” She tried to smile and failed. “Just like you.”

Mrs. Blanchard’s kitchen felt like a place afloat. Weirdly, I braced myself for the bad news I had already received. Maybe she would tell the story again, adjusting the details in minute ways—a shift in chronology, words dropped from dialogue—microscopic changes to make the story hold.

I waited. The story stood, unamended. I was thinking of the packages she sent to me at Sacred Heart—soft things: molasses cookies, hand-knitted mittens—once monthly, without fail.

“I don’t know,” I stammered, “I don’t know how you could do this to me. You let Celie drive in there and take me. You were standing right there in the yard.” I reached out and cradled her face with one hand. “You knew the truth and said nothing. He did
nothing
to me and you knew it.
This
face was the last face I saw.” I squeezed as hard as I could, surprised by her unyielding bones, her tightly gritted teeth. “I was one of your little chickens, remember?”

She winced but did not resist me. I let go, confused to find the same Mrs. Blanchard, the same graying, doe-eyed Mrs. Blanchard, Mariette’s mother then and now, her hands still leathered from that long-ago stitching. “And how do I give away the truth, Lizzy?” she said, her voice beginning to unravel. “How do I explain? It was not a child in his bed, it was me, and I love him, and such a coincidence that my husband has disappeared from the face of this Earth?” Her eyes went flat now, and her face, too—flat with all those stifled years. “No, I did not take that chance.”

“And neither did he.”

“He would lose you if I gave away the truth, and he would lose you if I kept it for myself.” She sounded as vacant as a winter field. “How would they let you stay with him if they know that he buried a man and threw his truck in the water?” She knotted her hands together. “So I kept the truth to myself. I chose my children.”

“And he chose you.” The shock of this stole my breath. Her arms lifted—the most embedded motherly gesture—but I made another sound, and she flinched from me. “You killed your children’s father,” I said. “He should have exposed you no matter what he had to lose. Was he that much in love?”

In her scoured kitchen my friend’s mother stared like a trapped rabbit—or like the owl sweeping down for the kill, it was hard to say which. “He was a priest, Lizzy,” she said slowly. “I made my confession.”

I let this sink in. “of course you did.”

She said nothing.

“So,” I said. “Absolution. In the privacy of the sacrament.” I remembered First Fridays, confessing to Father Mike—
I lied once; I disobeyed twice
—and how he handed out my penance of three Hail Marys, pretending not to recognize me. I looked at Mrs. Blanchard. “What was your penance?”

“This,” she said. She was crying now, noiseless and delicate.

“And his?” I demanded. Blood sludged through my limbs, thick and logy, as if my body were slowing to a stop from the inside out. Soon I would lose the power of speech.

“His? Oh, Lizzy. He nearly died of missing you.” She swiped at her eyes. “When you see him,” she said, “I hope you will be kind.” A moment passed. “You were so young. We hoped time would erase him.”

“Then you underestimated both me, and time.”

When she spoke again I could barely hear her. “I would have taken you myself, Lizzy. I offered to those people, let me take her. But they said no, you had to go with family.”

When I didn’t—couldn’t—answer, she said, “Mariette needs you, Lizzy. Go to your friend.”

I obeyed, leaving her—in slow motion, it seemed, down the steps one at a time, every movement reminiscent of the aftermath of accident. Mariette sat crumpled on the curb, crying. When she saw me she shot up, seemed to come to, then began frantically looking around, checking her car, then mine,
where’s Paulie where’s Paulie where’s Paulie oh my God some-one ‘s taken Paulie
, as I drew her toward me,
he’s okay, Charlie took him, he’s fine, he’s safe, get in Mariette get in
and she got in, her tongue so garbled by grief it was impossible to understand anything she was saying until she threw back her head, sucked up all her breath, and released one perfectly intelligible word: “Home.”

I knew what she meant, and took her there.

A hundred yards straight in. Past the parish hall, past the church. Into the turnaround, where I parked a few feet from the rectory porch. Mariette sprang from the car and thundered down the
grown-over shortcut, crashing through the underbrush and shying at the end where the farmhouse came into full view.

Another family lived there now. Somebody else’s clothes on the line, drawers stuffed with somebody else’s mismatched spoons and half-burned candles. No one appeared to be home. Two children’s bicycles had been stashed on the porch. The tire swing Father Mike put up—with Ray Blanchard, one blistering August morning, when Mariette and I were four years old—looked like the aftermath of a hanging, nothing left but a tatter of rope flapping from the limb of an exhausted maple.

“Here,” Mariette said when I caught up with her. She was off the path, kicking away needles and rotting leaves—her father was here somewhere. I glanced around at the barely discernible spots where we’d impersonated dying Indians, the boulder where we played King of the Hill. Mariette knelt down and ran her hands over the damp, cold ground. “Here,” she said, out of breath. “Has to be. Where she told us not to play, remember?” I experienced a frisson of presence, realizing that far beneath us the ground was still warm.

She pointed to her old house, her old bedroom window. “I was up there,” she said. “They were in the dooryard. I thought they were tending the moon garden. But something seemed off. They were hugging. It was something secret.”

I crouched next to her, keeping one hand on her back. “I didn’t see Papa,” she said. “Just them. Together in the moon-light.” She paused for a few moments, getting her breath. “The way they were looking at each other, I knew I wasn’t supposed to see. He was pleading, or praying. She was in her housecoat. Then he looked up, and I ran back to my bed. Papa never came back, but Lizzy, how would I ever make such a connection? How in a million years? After a while it started to seem like something I dreamed.”

I petted her back. “She must have been so afraid of him”

“I wasn’t afraid of him at all.” She pressed her forehead reverently to the ground. “She’s my mother, Lizzy. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Ladies?” came a voice from behind us. The priest—the same priest whose Mass Drew and I had attended only a day earlier—stood in the path. He leaned down as if to hear our confession. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes, Father,” I said, helping Mariette up.

“Can I—can I help you then?”

“I don’t think so,” I told him, but I went with him anyway. Taking Mariette with me, I followed him into the rectory. I touched the door post, the coat rack, the deacon’s bench that once served as a repository for our winter hats. I touched everything I could reach as the nervous priest led us into the parlor, which still held my mother’s breakfront, unchanged. Same beloved books on the lower shelves, same bric-a-brac on the higher ones. My mother’s silver jam server, a commemorative plate from Ste. Anne de Beaupré in Quebec, six crystal champagne flutes, a set of pink teacups, a deck of playing cards with
PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
printed on their backs. The glass doors had been shut for two decades, the key buried somewhere along Interstate 95, where I flung it from the back seat of Celie’s car on the day I was taken away. No one had since mustered the imagination to pry open the doors. Our things had simply waited here, unmoved, part of the parcel of house and land checked into and out of every few years by a new priest with no taste. The furniture, though much of it had been replaced, occupied exactly the same space on the blueprint—chair where a chair was, sofa where a sofa was, different pictures hanging in the same places. I checked to see if Mariette had taken note, but her eyes had gone distant and glassy. She crossed her arms over her middle and stared at the floor.