Enright Family Collection (73 page)

He walked back to the house and walked around outside, never thinking to knock on the door. He peered into the barn and walked around it one more time. He had rambled around the property for nearly an hour before he permitted himself to acknowledge what he had really come there for.

For a long, hard moment, Ben stood before the carriage house he and his mother had once called home.

His fingers unconsciously took the key ring from his pocket as he looked up at the second floor of the old stone and clapboard building, and his thumb and forefinger slowly rubbed the old metal key he’d never been able to bring himself to throw away. He touched the door, as if testing to see if it was real, then slid the key into the lock, wondering why he was not surprised to find that Delia had never had the lock changed. He pushed the door open and stepped inside quickly, lest he lose his nerve, and went up the steps.

Everything about it was familiar, and if he closed his
eyes, he might be fourteen again, or twelve. The smell was the same, a savory, herbal smell, and for a moment it overwhelmed him and stopped him where he stood. When he could, he poked into the kitchen to see if any of his mother’s bunches of rosemary and coriander still hung from the window sashes. Entering the room Maureen had loved so much was like a walk back through time. Nothing had changed. From the wallpaper—now slightly faded—to the collection of small colored bottles on the wide window ledges, nothing had changed. It squeezed his heart until he thought it would rupture inside his chest, and he turned into the living room. There, too, the furniture remained the same. An old magazine—
House & Garden
—dated March 1981, sat on the end table, and an old blue sweater was folded neatly on the arm of the sofa. Numbly he followed the short hall to his mother’s bedroom and stood in the doorway.

The first thing he noticed was that the charcoal drawing he had made of Maureen—a passable likeness, considering his young age at the time—still hung on the wall above the room’s small corner fireplace. The pale yellow bedspread with the pink and blue flowers was still on the bed, along with a small square pillow she had made one year when she had taken a sewing course at the local community college. She had never made anything else. Having decided that she lacked both the skill and the patience to become accomplished at the pastime, she had plunked the pillow down on her bed after the last class and told Ben dryly, “Next semester, I think I’ll try karate.”

Ben sat on the edge of the bed and lifted the pillow. It was floral and had a deep eyelet ruffle, and felt weightless in his two hands. It occurred to him then that he was sitting in the exact spot he had been when his mother had told him that she was dying.

It had been winter and the first real snow of the year had begun to fall that afternoon. She had been to the doctor earlier in the day, and the week before she had
been in the hospital for yet another round of tests. He had known that she was sick, but the thought that she could be seriously ill was not within the realm of possibility in his fourteen-year-old mind. He had come into her room—this room—to tell her that he and Nick were going sledding on the big hill across the road.

Maureen had been standing at the window, the fingers of one hand splayed against the glass as if to touch the snowflakes as they fell. The room was so quiet, that in retrospect, he had thought that his words had seemed to boom forth from his mouth in cartoon balloons to hang over his head. When she turned to him, he had stopped in mid-sentence. Maureen’s face was wet with tears, her eyes big and frightened. And without even asking, he had known.

“No, Mom, you can’t,” he had whispered, suddenly terrified.

He sat on the edge of her bed because he had suddenly become as weak as a baby and he felt that an enormous boulder had smacked him in the chest and knocked him down.

“I’m afraid I’m not very good at this,” she told him. “You know, as a parent, you would like to think that if the time ever came that you had to have this conversation with your child, you would be strong and calm. But I can’t seem to stop crying, Ben. I don’t want to leave you. I’m not ready, and that’s the simple fact.”

And he and his mother had cried together for what seemed to be hours, holding each other, both giving and taking what comfort there was to found. It had been the last time she had been solely his, the last time the two of them would have only each other to hold on to. By the time the weekend had come and gone, they had stood together on the front steps of her father’s house, and from that day on he had had to share the rest of her days with so many others . . . his grandfather, her doctor. The private duty nurses who tended to her twenty-four hours each day. Old schoolfriends, tracked down by Delaney. Anyone and everyone, it seemed, who had ever known
and cared for her had come by, so that from the day they had arrived at Delaney’s big house in Connecticut, Ben and his mother were never alone. Even as she lay dying, he had had to share her. He had wanted to sit on her bed and cry with her, and hold her like they had held each other on that day when he had learned the truth about her illness. But the nurses wouldn’t leave her alone while she still breathed. Unable to share publicly his grief, his pain, which had been, for him, something to be shared only with her, he had not cried again, nor since.

The funeral had been planned by Delaney, and before Ben had known what had happened, Maureen had been laid to rest beside her mother, there, in the family plot in Connecticut. Unable to go back into that house, now that she was gone, Ben had called a cab from the kitchen of his grandfather’s house, and stuffing all of his savings into his pockets, took a train to Philadelphia, and from there, one to West Chester. He had hitched a ride to Westboro, then walked the rest of the way to Delia’s, where, he had felt certain, he would awaken in his room in the carriage house to find that everything that had happened over the past five months had really been part of a long and very complicated nightmare that would, surely, end as soon as he got home. His mother would be waiting for him, and she would tell him that none of it had been real. Even now, as he sat on the bed, he could feel the same terror that had seized him that night, when he realized that it had not been a dream. If Maureen was not there, at the carriage house, then she was
not
at all. As if in a daze, Ben had locked the door and turned away.

Delia had met him halfway across the yard. His grandfather was on the way to pick him up and take him back, she had told him. She had tried to put an arm around him, but he had pushed her away. If Maureen had left this place, then he would leave, too.

And so he had made the long silent ride back to Connecticut in the front seat of his grandfather’s Lincoln, and he had closed the door on his old life as quietly
as they had closed the lid on his mother’s shiny wooden coffin.

The past closed around him so tightly that he felt he was suffocating, and a very long moment passed before Ben had identified the water running down his cheeks as tears. They had been streaming down his face, falling onto the front of his shirt and soaking it without his even realizing he’d been crying. At once embarrassed and yet somehow relieved, he searched his pockets for a handkerchief to dry his face. As a boy who had not been quite a man when his mother had left him, he had not known how to deal with his grief, and so he had simply buried it. Now, back in this place, it welled up, and the tears he had been unable to shed for so long, now spilled over.

For just a moment he had felt Maureen’s arms around him, and he felt both cleansed and at peace. The flood stopped then, and the pain that had pushed against his chest with such force began to ease. He leaned one hand on the bedside table to push himself up, and something small and sharp poked into his hand. A small stud earring, three colored stones on small gold-tone wires, pushed into the flesh of his palm. He turned it over and smiled. The stones were glass, but he had hoped that his mother wouldn’t notice when he had given them to her for what had turned out to be her last birthday. He stared at the earring for a very long time before slipping it into his pocket.

“Thanks, Mom,” he whispered.

A noise from the hallway drew his attention, and he looked up to see Delia Enright standing in the doorway.

“Welcome home,” she softly.

“Thank you” were the only words he could manage to speak.

“What do you think?” She waved her hand around, as if to take in the entire apartment. “Is it as you remembered?”

“Nothing’s changed.”

Delia took a few steps into the room, and touched the wall. “Maureen picked out this wallpaper. She loved
these little daisies. They were her favorite flowers, remember? I just couldn’t bear to have it taken down.” She traced one of the small flowers with the finger of one hand. “She picked out the furniture—I couldn’t bring myself to take any of it out. Your mother was the sister I never had, Ben. In the end, I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else living here, so no one has. I moved my writing studio to the first floor.” She did not say
to be close to Maureen,
but Ben thought that was what she meant. “But other than that, nothing has been touched since the day you left for your grandfather’s house.”

“I have to admit, that was a bit of a shock, seeing everything just as it was.”

“Was it as difficult as you thought it would be?”

“Nothing ever is.” He smiled wryly.

“Ah, true. Fear, unchecked, is a fearsome thing indeed.”

“I feel so foolish now, having stayed away for so long. . . .” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Delia, if I’ve hurt you over the years.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me, Ben. There’s no one you’ve hurt more than you hurt yourself. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to have done something that would have comforted you. I think we all were in shock for a while after your mother’s death, we all loved her so much, Ben. But I understand why you felt you could not come here.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “You and Maureen had always been together. Losing her at any age would have been tough. At fourteen, it must have been devastating.”

“You’re not angry with me?”

She dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “You were a child. Now you’re a man. And you have, after all, come back.”

“Not of my choosing,” he told her. “I’m afraid it was my grandfather who forced my hand.”

“Then bless the man. But whatever it took, Ben, doesn’t matter. The fact is that you’re here.”

“For a minute I felt that my mom was here, too,” he said softly.

“Oh, I’m not surprised.” Delia grinned. “Sometimes when I’m downstairs in my writing studio, I think I hear her footsteps up here. Of course, it’s probably just squirrels on the roof or some such. But I prefer to think that she is nearby. It comforts me.”

He slipped his fingers into his pocket and twisted the earring around and around.

“So. How long will you be staying?” Delia asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I thought Zoey said you’d be here for a while?”

“I’ll be here as long as my grandfather needs me.”

Ben walked to the window and looked out into the view of pine trees just feet from the window. Even through the glass he could smell the clean sharp scent.

“Smell the pine, Ben?”
Maureen had thrown the windows up in a grand gesture on the day they had moved into the carriage house.
“There is nothing I love more than the smell of pine trees!”

Sensing his distraction, Delia started toward the door. “Feel free to spend as much time here as you like, Ben. When you’re done, come have tea with me. I think there’s some pineapple upside-down cake in the pantry.”

“You make it yourself, Delia?” He turned and asked, a weary smile tilting the corners of his mouth, remembering another day, when Delia had ventured to bake just such a cake. It had been a terrible cake, and he and Nick had secretly fed it to the ducks on the pond behind the house. It had been a lifetime ago, or so it seemed.

Delia laughed out loud, remembering, too.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Delia,” he said quietly, meaning it.

“As are you, my boy. As are you.”

Chapter
14
 

Having slowed down to the posted speed limit of twenty-five miles an hour, Ben coasted into the town of Brady’s Mill. At the lake he pulled over to the side of the road to check the map. That had been a left turn back there, hadn’t it?

Satisfied that he was, in fact, in the right town, he eased back onto the two-lane road. The first right past the lake should be Skeeters Pond Road, and it was. He slowed even more to check the numbers and names on the mailboxes as he passed by. At the mailbox with the ivy and hand-painted daisies and the number 27 and the name
Enright
painted in blue, he paused. This would be the one.

He drove slowly up the driveway, then stopped behind a small red sports car with an HMP parking sticker on the rear driver’s side window. A rake leaned against the wall of the garage, and a wheelbarrow piled high with dried leaves stood next to it. Ben turned off his engine, leaned across the seat to grab the peace offering of two dozen peach-colored roses mixed with some white, ethereal baby’s breath and got out of the car, pausing for
just a moment to observe his surroundings. The lawn that reached out beyond the house was wide and deep and green, bisected by a thick grape arbor that formed a sort of wall. In the distance, woods just beginning to green up for the new season fanned out as far as the eye could see. The air was fresh and crisp, cooler now than it had been earlier in the day. The serenity of the late afternoon tableau was disturbed only by an indistinguishable sound from beyond the arbor. Ben poked his head through the gate to see, expecting to find Zoey on the other side.