The Legacy of Eden (30 page)

I did not burn these letters.

I buried them under the floorboards of our attic, convinced I would never see them again.

And then years later I would change my mind and take them out of the ground.

And me, the nonbeliever, would exorcize the ghost of Claudia’s childhood.

My house was filled with photographs. My father loved them, loved taking them, loved showing them off, and after he died my mother maintained this hobby of his as a sort of memorial to a passion he would have continued had he lived. When you walked into my house, on the right-hand side of the wall was a row of black-and-white photographs in dark wood frames: my father in the field with his brother beside him staring off to the right and his father standing over him with his hand on his shoulder. I remember my father was squinting into the camera because the sun was in his eye. After that was a picture of him and my mother on their wedding day, his blond head bent over her veiled dark one with her smiling up to the camera. Then came pictures of him and my sisters up at the main house: Claudia’s first birthday in the large dining room, sitting on my grandfather’s knee before a pink-and-white iced cake; Ava on a white bed in a cotton baby dress laughing at an invisible photographer; me in Piper’s arms watching my sisters and Charles play; my grandmother and grandfather walking through the rose garden, my grandmother a few steps ahead. As the walls led up the staircase you could see us grow up and get color from our original beginnings of black and white, but though the people and the expressions changed, the setting was always the same. It was always on the farm. The one constant was Aurelia.

After the New Year’s Eve party, my mother put up a large photograph that would rest above the staircase as you turned left down to the bedrooms. It was on a starched white background with a bronzed gold frame. It was taken half an hour before the guests started to arrive. Piper had insisted.

“All of you, all together,” she’d said, using her hands to bat us all out to the front of the house, while we genially grumbled and fidgeted about standing out in the cold, caught up in a mixture of both excitement and trepidation. My grandfather let me go through the door in front of him and smiled. It was a nervous twitch of the lips and he sighed. I ran my hand down his arm in comfort.

That’s me in the middle. Claudia is to the left in the soft blue gauze gown she had finally agreed to wear, even though the hemline was about an inch longer than she would have liked. Ava is behind Charles to the right-hand side of Cal Jr. in white. My mother is standing next to Jude holding his arm with Georgia-May on the other side and in front with her husband is my grandmother in that emerald-green silk she so loved with the pearls my grandfather had bought her for Christmas a week before. And then Ethan, standing on the top of the porch landing in his suit, leaning against the white column. He was drunk, but not too much for him. He is almost upright.

Those photographs were more than just a depiction of our lives and history; they were a testament to our home. And that was what was drummed into me every day, every moment of my childhood: this is who you are; this is where you are from.

This is all there is.

This is what should have happened.

Jude would have aided my grandfather in selling the farm. It would have been a shock to all of us, as for my entire life certainly, I was raised with the unshrinking belief that whatever happened or whatever changed, the one constant was my home.

I wonder how I would have felt? Terrified, upset probably, but in a small way relieved? Would I have seen it as an opportunity to break away, to start afresh? Maybe we would have left Iowa, maybe we would have gone back to New York where my parents first lived and where I would eventually have ended up.

Perhaps my mother would have married again. Perhaps Jude would have…

But maybe that’s just fanciful.

Cal Jr. would have had to make a life of his own. Maybe he would have gone and found his mother, maybe he tried to do that anyway and failed. I never did learn of what happened to Julia and neither, I think, did my grandmother. She was gone, and that was all that mattered to her.

Piper could have got a small house with a nice garden and lived out her retirement. What happened with Ethan would have happened anyway but perhaps Georgia-May would have had the courage to leave sooner.

Strange all of this, all this wonder. We might have been free.

But she would have languished. She would have been devoured by a bitterness whose dark flame would have entered the rags of her soul and consumed it. It might have killed her, emotionally it certainly would have. And never as long as she continued to live, would she have forgiven any of them.

How could they? She would have raged, how could they do this to her?

For in the end, it was all for her, wasn’t it?

It started with the phone ringing after we had all gone to sleep. The sound woke us from our beds, made us turn our heads from our pillows and stare at the alarm clock in disbelief. Could that really be the time? Who could be calling? Was something—

Finally my mother went down into the hall and lifted the phone off the receiver. “Hello,” she said. Ava and I tentatively made our way to the top of the stairs. We were not afraid; we did not know.

“What did you say?”

The door was unlocked when Claudia and I went inside the house we had been raised in. It slid open with no noise as we surveyed the powder-blue-and-white paint of the hallway, the wood of the floors under their sheen of dust and the white steps of the staircase. It was eerie how silent everything was, how still intact—as if the place had been waiting for us. For a minute neither of us would step inside.

I looked over at Claudia and saw that she was trembling. I smoothed a hand down her arm. She jumped and stared at me—frightened? Was that what I saw?

“I will if you will,” I said, gesturing.

Even though it had been over ten years, there were still faded squares lining up the walls where those photographs of us had once hung, where paintings that were my mother’s favorites had been placed over small tables bearing an array of ornaments and china figurines that she had so loved in her lifetime.

We made our way cautiously through the house, not touching anything, just peering round corners, keeping our steps small, careful not to disturb even the air.

“What? Slow down. I don’t understand— Lavin— No I…Are you serious? Are you sure? It—it can’t be, there must be some mistake....”

I came to the entrance of the kitchen.

“What’s going on?” I asked Ava, who shook her head as she stared at Mom.

“I’ll be right over,” said Mom, sinking against the wall as she bent over herself. “Did you call the police?”

“It’s so neat, isn’t it?” said Claudia from behind me.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Ava packed everything up after Mom died… I don’t think the place has been touched since.”

I went into the kitchen and, as if to prove my point, opened up the cutlery drawer. Woodlice scuttled over the knives and forks.

“Hmm.” Claudia cleared her throat. “Where did she put everything?”

“I don’t know—the attic I guess.”

I looked around. The furniture was covered in great white dust sheets. I suddenly had a vision of Ava, coming back here after the burial, how she would have ransacked the place, cleaning, tidying, locking it up for a slow and quiet death. She had had to come back alone. Claudia and I hadn’t helped. Hadn’t wanted to. And I had not been able to understand how she could still come back. I had seen it as proof of her lies and by default, of my innocence.

Claudia went up the stairs and I followed her. The hallway was as bare as downstairs but the doors were all closed. Her room had been at the end on the far right next to the bathroom, which she had hogged for ages every day before school. That had been one of the major adjustments we had had to make when she had gone. Ava and I would line up outside the door before realizing that she was not there.

When she got off the phone, she hugged her face in her hands and then slowly drifted her fingers down to cover her mouth. And then she saw us.

“What the hell are you doing there—get back to bed right this instant. Go on.” She came at us, waving her hands forward, her snappish manner making us flee into our rooms as she continued to shout at us from behind.

“But what’s going on?” I protested as she pushed me into my room with Ava, herding us out of sight.

“Just get in there and not one peep out of you for the rest of the night. Not one or so help me God I’ll take a switch to you both!” And she slammed the door behind her.

We stood there staring at the door, listening to the sounds of her running into her room and the violent thuds of movement that seeped through the walls.

Suddenly Ava turned away from the door to face me.

“Where’s Clo?” she asked.

I watched from the stairwell as Claudia made her way across the landing to her room and stood before the door. I waited on the second step.

She cradled the handle in her fingers and then there was the sound of the latch being released and it swung open.

We heard her leave. We waited a few minutes and then we came out of my room and hovered at the top of the staircase. “Look,” said Ava, pointing over my shoulder and I saw that the door to Clo’s room was ajar. I went inside and looked around. Her bed hadn’t been slept in.

“Do you think she’s hurt?” asked Ava. “Do you think…?”

“Shut up,” I said.

Claudia disappeared inside her room and I made my way up the stairs to join her. The pale pink of her wallpaper with the small white daisies winding their way down in chains was covered in patches of brown mold and everything was draped in the same dust sheets as downstairs except her bed, which had been stripped except the mattress and a knot of pillows piled in the middle.

She crossed the room and opened up the window, letting air circulate into the room that had not breathed since she was sixteen years old.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ventured.

“No, not anymore,” she said with her back to me still facing the window. “I never thought I’d see this room again. If Mom had her way I never would.”

“Mom did what she thought was right,” I said, suddenly overly conscious of my voice.

“No—she did what was cruelest.”

“You’re blaming the wrong person, Clo,” I said gently, and then she threw a glance at me over her shoulder and something there reminded me of how we used to be, how once there had been more than just blood between us. She summoned a smile that died as soon as it reached her lips.

“So did Mom.”

Two weeks before my mother received a phone call in the middle of the night, my grandmother learned something quite by accident, and so tugged at a thread that would send my sister to live with the aunt and uncle of my mother in Massachusetts for the rest of her teenage life.

And this would not have occurred but for two events: My mother had gone out of town on a holiday with Jane for the weekend to camp in the Driftless Area in northeastern Iowa, and my sister had taken the opportunity to get drunk.

I can trace it all back to that night because of what my grandmother would later tell me. Have to tell me.

I had been at a sleepover. It was at the home of Mary-Louise Draper. I remember how her room had lilac-painted walls with pictures of white clouds on the ceiling and I had envied her collection of snow globes that her dad bought her from all over America because he was a salesman. I had particularly coveted one from New York, with its Empire State Building shining beneath the flurry of glitter when I shook the dome. As we lay in our sleeping bags on the floor, in a place of encroaching darkness, I thought how I would love to sleep in a city whose amber-colored lights sparkled in the night just like that one.

Ava had stayed at home. Claudia was supposed to be watching her but my eldest sister had other ideas, the main one consisting of her invading our father’s liquor cabinet. I say it was Dad’s because Mom never drank save for Christmas and weddings and even then all she had was one glass of champagne, which she would sip and leave half-full. However that night, Claudia had decided that the best way of putting our mother’s absence to use was to devour the entirety of the cabinet’s contents.

Which she did, in her room, dancing to the radio, pouring Ava shots that she then drank herself anyway when Ava sniffed at the glasses and left them on her dresser. Claudia then gave them both a makeover, which our mother would have scrubbed off her face with holy water had she been home.

Claudia pouted and preened and sang and garbled her way through her drunkenness. Evidently alcohol made her loquacious: moved her from a surly try-hard to an overtalkative desperate. I’m sorry I missed the transformation. I would have taken the opportunity to tease out her secrets and then when she was sober used them to goad her. My sister’s temperament was like a dartboard when we were younger and nothing gave me more pleasure than hitting the bull’s-eye.

But I was not there. Ava was.

Somewhere between her descent into inebriation and Ava’s exhaustion, Claudia eventually was left to her own devices. This was sometime after a quarter to one in the morning. Until then Claudia was safe from herself.