The Legacy of Eden (33 page)

But there was no one outside ourselves we could trust to tell.

So Ava worked, our mother nursed and I helped while Cal Jr. supported all of us, and honestly, this mock unit we had built worked. We became a family out of the embers of a once greater one. We took up the mantle and we succeeded, and would have even been happy but for two things.

The first began one day when my grandmother was crying out and as there was no one around but me I went into her room and she turned to me as I opened the door.

“It’s you, then,” she said.

“Yes, Grandma, what is it?” I stepped inside and shut the door behind me.

“Water,” she said simply.

So I poured her a glass from the jug and helped her to drink it.

“You don’t look a bit like your father, not a bit. You’re nothing like us,” she said suddenly. I had trained myself not to listen to her words as if they were truths anymore. Mom kept telling us how she wasn’t herself, that her mind was unraveling and taking her body with it, but all the same I couldn’t help but feel that perhaps now more than ever what she uttered was more herself than we wanted to realize, because this was her unrestrained, untempered and ungoverned. I saw her mind as a sack of fluid held together by a band that was slowly losing its shape until one day it would simply burst and pour away, but that did not mean that its contents were altered just because its frame was rotten. However, I kept these thoughts to myself. It would not have helped anyone to hear them.

“You were never like us, were you? I used to say that the tree of the Hathaways gives two kinds of fruit. Sweet and sour. Your father was sweet, your uncle and aunt sour. Your sister Claudia was sour, Ava was sweet, but you, you were never anything. You didn’t fit.” She stopped and looked down. “I liked that.”

I wiped my hands on my jeans and then smoothed the bed covers over her.

“You never loved me, did you?” she asked. In my shock I met her eyes as I leaned over her to adjust her pillows and she smiled. “I never loved you, either. But I didn’t hate you and that’s more than can be said for some in our family.”

Briefly I stood there and then moved away.

“Merey, do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I said. “You’re my grandmother.”

“Because I don’t want to forget,” she said, a whimper creeping into her voice. “I don’t want to forget…” As her voice trailed off then her eyes sharpened into focus on me.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked again.

“Yes, Grandma,” I repeated slowly. Her mouth twisted into a sneer.

“Your name is Lavinia Hathaway,” I said. “You live on a farm in Iowa—you were married and had two sons. Your youngest son was my father. I know who you are.”

“That wasn’t my name.” She leaned forward and smiled. “That’s not my name.” And she giggled, holding her hands up to her mouth. “That’s not my name,” she repeated, laughing. “It’s not my name.”

“It is your name.”

“No, no, it wasn’t.” She leaned back with a huge grin and then her eyes found the curtain and something shifted and slowly the expression drained from her face.

I took my moment and left. When I shut the door, I leaned against it for a minute, utterly bemused, but I dismissed it because I mistook a moment of clarity for one of confusion.

But she did not forget, and the next time we were alone she asked me again what her name was and again I told her what I knew and it was then she grew angry and threw a glass at my head and she hissed at me, “Stupid girl, that’s not my name. It’s not my goddamn name.” And because I was confused and shocked I asked her, I asked her what was her name.

I opened the door and let the devil in.

Sometimes I have wondered over the years if a person’s ability to feed their secrets into another isn’t perhaps a way of bleeding their soul into yours. You become a hollow vessel in which they slowly fill you with their lives, so that their memories seep into your thoughts and dreams. I cannot tell you the amount of dreams I have had of a girl in a gingham pinafore, or a woman walking the dusty roads to her car holding her jaw slowly swelling under her hand, or of a redhaired girl I’ve never met but whom I look on with hate and fear.

Since I went to the farm with Claudia, I’ve begun to dream again. I am walking the road that takes me to the farm. It is night. The road is silvered by the moon that dips behind clouds so that in fits and starts the road is obscured to me, but still I keep walking. I find myself back at the entrance, at the sign in curlicue black lettering, which I cannot read but whose ends look like tails swinging in the dark, and I make my way up the gravel path, winding my footsteps to a house so white it shines. The lights blaze from the windows, the open air carries voices from inside, stray breaths of conversation, raised voices, shouts of laughter. I stand before it, waiting. And then there is the sound of twigs being snapped into the earth and I hear his voice.

“Say it.”

I woke up panting, not screaming. It was still late and the room was black and white, which only compounded my brief but bright fear that I was still there, still back in a world I had no wish to be in and yet, unlike this one, was one of color.

Chapter 15

I RENTED A car, packed up the boxes and sat down to the plate of scrambled eggs Jane had made me.

Over the rim of her coffee cup she asks, “Are you sure you want to leave today?”

“It’s time to go back,” I say softly.

“I’ll let you know what happens. With the farm, I mean,” she offers.

“Don’t bother—I don’t want to know. It’s done.”

“Is it?”

I look up from my plate and my fork hovers.

“Your mother’s heart would break if she saw what you two had become.” Jane sets down her cup and folds her hands into her lap. “It will never be done until you make peace.”

“Peace,” I mutter. I put down my fork. “Jane, do you know what happened the night before I left for college?”

She shifts in her seat.

“No,” she says, “but I know how it broke your mother to see what had happened to you.”

I shake my head. “Ava never told Mom what happened and I am glad, because I think it would have destroyed her if she had had to stop loving yet another daughter. Peace—peace is for those who can redeem what they did. And I can’t. I cannot ever undo what happened and nothing good can ever come out of it.”

That shook her. She blinks, her face a mask, but I could see then her mind was racing.

“Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. And I know it was Ava who called ahead before I came here and that’s why you had the room ready—”

“I didn’t—”

“You didn’t have to, I figured it out when I got here. I had no idea I was still that predictable.” I push my plate forward and stand up.

“You all used to be so happy,” she says mournfully.

I can feel myself smile.

“We didn’t know each other back then.”

I drove for miles with the boxes carrying my family’s life in the back. My cousin drove with me in the car, lighting up cigarette after cigarette but never speaking. I did not need him to, his company was enough.

And now—

And now—

I had said we were happy but for two things, hadn’t I? And the second, the second was—

Ava, I did not know—I didn’t.

I did not know what I was seeing.

A few hours later, I happened to pass a wedding. The people spilled out of the church, swiftly followed by the stark white and black of the bride and groom. The guests threw confetti in the air above their heads and it rippled in an array of delicate peaches and pinks. The bride bent her head and her smile shone on the roses in her hand while her new husband kissed her hair.

Their happiness was radiant.

“Do you know where my mother is buried?” asked Cal Jr. beside me.

“No, Cal, I don’t.”

“No…” He scratched his finger on the window pane. “Me, neither.”

One night as I rested at a motel, I dreamed the dream again. I was standing at the foot of the mound but I did not go in. I heard the noise and his voice behind me and I began to shake but I did not move. The cloud slipped behind the moon, wide and bright like a silver dollar.

Like the silver dollar my father used to have when I was a child, which he would roll over the back of his fingers for my delight.

Cal Jr. stood before me, smiling.

“Say it and I’ll bring the moon down for you.”

We faced each other. I couldn’t see her but I knew she was there somewhere listening. I wanted to be brave but I am not. I never was.

So I said it.

And he plucked down the moon and I saw that it was only ever just a silver dollar.

I am sitting in Cathy’s, a little restaurant with checkered cloths on dark wooden tables and candles that throw up shadows that melt against the oaks of the restaurant’s décor. I am in Ohio, specifically, Raynsville, Ohio, which is a little to the south of the state. It’s been a long drive—just over two days and I am tired. I am sitting at a table to the back of the place behind a gauze of tapestry in blue. Nothing matches here, but the wait staff leave you alone and they refill your coffee without preamble or questions.

I’ve been here about half an hour. I scour the menu listlessly, but I don’t want to eat. The table next to me has a couple who are picking at their salad. They have barely spoken to each other since they sat down and I think to myself, why do they do it? Why would they come outside among people like me, who watch their movements and lack of touch or communication and know how unhappy they are with each other? Why don’t they hide it? Or do they just not care anymore? Do they want someone to see, someone to notice and tell them, yes, we know it, too, you’re not making it up? Is that what they seek—acknowledgment because they cannot even get a hello from each other?

The woman stops eating and looks me in the eye. She’s caught me staring. I shift my gaze.

Camel-colored coat, dark jeans, the tail of a white shirt.

“Do you mind that I’m going to NYU?” I said as we packed.

“No, I don’t mind,” she lied as she folded my sweaters.

“Ava, it’s summer, it’s like a hundred degrees out there,” I said, snatching the blue sweater out of her hands.

“Yeah, and it’ll be minus a hundred in the winter.”

I shot her a look.

“I’ll be home before then, Ava, to get some more clothes.”

“I don’t think you will,” she said and her ponytail flopped over her shoulder as she leaned down over the suitcase.

“Of course I will,” I said, hurt.

She opened her mouth to reply and then stopped.

“Nothing will change.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “This is still my home.”

“Then why do you want to go so far away?”

I couldn’t answer. She shook her head and resumed folding.

“Don’t you want to go away?” I ventured.

“All the time.”

“Then why don’t you?”

She stopped and stared ahead and for a second there I remembered that she was the elder one.

“Meredith, you can’t always get what you want.”

I shook my head, I was pissed.

“Then maybe you just don’t want it enough.”

I stand up when I see her, but she sits down without even looking at me and takes her bag off and slings it on the back of her chair. Her hair is in a loose bun and she hasn’t taken off her hospital ID badge. She gives me a quick glance and then motions to the waitress and asks for some coffee with cream.

A cup and small jug are set down before her quickly.

“Would you like a menu?” the waitress asks.

She catches my eye and I drag mine away from her face.

“Not right now,” I answer for her.

She cradles the cup in her hands. I look around the room before clearing my throat. She brings the cup to her lips and I see the flash of her wedding band. I swallow. I hadn’t been at her wedding.

“So,” she says, finally looking at me.

It had been Ava who had insisted on organizing a goodbye party even though there was only the five of us there. She had cooked and baked all evening, filling the kitchen with the smells of freshly baked cakes and meat. It had been Ava who had hung up the streamers around the house and decorated the table with candles and set out the fine china.

“Ava, I don’t want all of this,” I’d said, gazing at the ribbons of yellow and pink around the porch.

“Shut up and help, would you?”

I knew she was overcompensating; it was her way of burying her pain, but it only made it more acute for me. I could see her impending loneliness and I wanted to tell her that I didn’t need to go, that I was happy to stay with her. But I wasn’t. I felt like if I didn’t go now, I never would.

“How was it?” she asks, staring at her cup.

“It was, um…” I clear my throat again. “It was hard.”

“Different?”

“Yeah…” My voice comes out in a strangled gasp. I cough. “Um, Uncle Ethan’s house is gone. He demolished it.”

“But Mom’s was okay?” she says, suddenly urgent. I’m surprised that she cares. It must show because her face hardens.

“Yeah, it was fine. We, uh, we found everything that you boxed away. Thanks.”

There is a silence.

“Yeah, it was pretty impressive how I put everything we owned away, alone, after our mother’s funeral while you and Claudia were busy…busy doing what exactly?” She shrugs, holding my eye. “Important things I’m sure.”

“Yeah, well where were you this time around?” I hiss at her. “Where were you?” And then I glance around. I see the woman with her salad look at us quickly before turning back to her husband and breaking into conversation at the hostility of my gaze. I turn back to the table. Her face is impassive.

“It’s gone,” I say softly. “It’s finally gone. We’ll never see it again.”

She arches an eyebrow and looks at her cup.

“I see it all the time.”

I feel my eyes widen.

“I used to, feel—feel like I was still there,” she says softly. “For years I would dream about it. I would turn corners on the street and see Dad or Charles. Once I even thought I—” She breaks and I think, I’ll tell her that the same thing happens to me, about my dreams, my visions. I’m not mad, I’m not alone.

Mom had raised her glass as a toast to me, the five of us sitting around the table. Everyone had lifted their glass except Grandma, who was staring at the lick of flame on the candle.

“To my beautiful, talented, youngest child who is leaving us to go back to the place where I met your father and married him. I hope that you get everything you seek and are fulfilled and happy and that you go there knowing that you are coveted and loved.” She paused. “And missed. To Meredith.”

“To Meredith,” Cal Jr. and Ava echoed.

Mom gave me a knowing look. “Time to grow up, Merey.”

“I don’t really get why you called me,” she says suddenly. “I mean why drive all the way up here to give me a bunch of stuff you know I don’t want or need? Force my hand like this by threatening to come to my home if I don’t see you? Is that how this is going to work from now on for you?”

“I wasn’t threaten—”

“Because that isn’t how it’s going to work with me, Meredith. If you think you can just…turn up whenev—”

“I don’t— I—I wasn’t trying to—”

“I will not have you demanding anything from me, or making demands on my time—not you, you don’t have that right anymore....”

“I’m sorry—” I suddenly break down “—I’m so sorry. I didn’t…”

“Well, you know what, Meredith, that isn’t really—”

“I didn’t know that night, I didn’t know. I heard you and I thought, I thought…” Her mouth drops and a wave of comprehension floods her features but I cannot stop.

“I thought that you wanted to. That you meant it because how you were around each other and I mean, I think, the two of you were always…and I know, I know, I know now that that wasn’t but I didn’t know it then. I mean you never told any of us, you never said…”

She straightens in her chair and sets her cup down. “I don’t want to talk about this here.”

“Well, I have to. I have to talk about it.”

“This isn’t appropriate.”

I look at her incredulous, desperate. “I don’t care.”

She meets my eyes and her mouth thins.

“Going back there, seeing what he had done to the place, I always thought the best thing for us would be to get away from there, but we’ll never get away. It’s in our blood. There’s no escape. I’ve tried to pretend, I’ve tried to forget, but I can’t.”

“Forget what?” she asks coldly. “Forget who? You seem to be confused about what it is you’re talking about.”

“The night in the rose garden…”

She raises a hand. “I told you I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Please…?”

“You need me to help you through it? You want me to hold your hand and tell you it’s all okay? I don’t think so. You went back there—you chose to go back—and whatever issues that raised for you is on you. You’re not my problem. I’ve had more than my fair share of the place.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there when Mom died.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, you said before.”

“I just couldn’t stand to see you. I couldn’t stand being there, back there with you after…” My teeth chatter against my lip. “I didn’t want to believe you and it was easier because the alternative meant that what I did, what I didn’t do was…that it made me—and I couldn’t face that, I just couldn’t, I couldn’t.”

She stands up. “I’m leaving.”

I grab for her hand but she is already going.

“No,” she says and shrugs my hand away. “I told you to stop.”

“Hey,” I hear a waitress shout as we both stalk out of the restaurant. “Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

“This looks like shit.”

Mom put down her glass and stared at my grandmother.

“Shit,” she said in a croak. “You’re all eating shit.”

“Lavinia, you’re tired, you should go to bed.”

My grandmother arched her neck and called out to the hall, “Cal, get in here and take this shit away.”