The Memento (6 page)

There seemed no words I could speak to comfort Loretta but I was compelled to try. I cleared my throat, but her eyes popped open then, the grief swallowed back down for the time being.

“Well, there is nothing to be done, Fancy. She’s back drinking. She hid it well this time, but now we know. Marilyn will die of the drink. She’s already drowning in sin. Terrible things happened to her but she refuses any help. She has turned from the Lord. I’m sorry to tell you but it’s the way it will be. We should not speak of John Lee. It’s not right to speak of a dead child like she did.” She squeezed my shoulder. She was satisfied Ma had not told me everything, and she didn’t invite me to speak further of it.

Loretta enjoyed nothing more than stories about the good old days but she was never one for talking about the bad times. Until that summer she had always been private that way. She was sentimental about cooking and baking and sewing. She went out to her prayer group every week, talking about good deeds. She was true and loyal and ever steady.

As we approached the village Art started singing some French song he learned from his father,
Demain s’il fait beau, j’irons au
grand-père
. Normally his singing calmed me but right then those words brought me back to the car. He kept going and I got more and more anxious. The more he sang the more I thought of Grampie and his songs, and Ma and her strange lullabies. Loretta started discussing Marigold’s favourite baked desserts in a very serious tone and finally I’d had enough. The endless stream of their ridiculous talk and the stink of carcass had contaminated any chance my birthday had of being salvaged.

“What was Ma talking about today being my twelfth birthday and Grampie having special powers?” I inquired from the back, my voice loud and angry. Art stopped singing.

Loretta didn’t turn around. “We’ll talk about that at home, Fancy. Not another word.” She had never used such a threatening tone before. I didn’t dare disobey.

We passed the village and a salty breeze was blowing in over the water as it came into the harbour at high tide. Lupin Cove was quiet and still most of the time, no bustle about, and if you didn’t know schooners had once docked there long ago in the age of sail there was nothing to give you even a peek into that time. The village was faded, like it still is now, hardly anyone about, as though they’d all closed their doors and left one day, never to return, just as it was up at Petal’s End. Only those who knew the history could picture it. The wind ruffled the water like lace at the edge of a bedsheet. There was a thin fog coming in with the tide, coming so quickly that when I looked up the island was gone.

We dropped Art off at home. “You take care of Yvette, Mister Man, and we’ll see you tomorrow.” Loretta gave him a wave.

Art looked at me but I closed my eyes and kept them shut. I didn’t know who to trust any more. It was like they was all in on it. In the quiet of Lupin Cove my heart was a pounding drum, and the thoughts in my head fast charging, all them memories of Grampie painting, them people looking out of his portraits and on the walls of the Tea House, John Lee’s cup sitting on the shelf. Did
Grampie ever hold that cup or sip out of it? I couldn’t do as Loretta said and remember Ma when she was well for she was scarcely so while I was with her.

We drove up the road. Without lifting an eyelid I could feel the turn as my body rolled into the car door. I had no use for my eyes right then, just as I don’t need them now to know you’re still listening to me. Petal’s End was home to me, as frightful as some folks thought the vast house was, way off on the mountain in the forest by the bay. Things smelled familiar. I thought of how I missed the Tea House, Grampie’s fresh-baked bread, the sharp thick odour of his oil paints and turpentine, the scent of the wood stove in the winter. I felt sick to my stomach with longing. I pushed Grampie and our lives together out of my mind and sat in the back of the vintage Rolls-Royce, feeling the car moving through the imposing wrought-iron gates and by the huge chestnut trees in front of the stone walls like guards, driving over each and every bump of the long lane. Them raging words of Ma’s scrambled in my ears, the foul valley air lodged in my nostrils. Finally we plunged into the deep piney woods Petal’s End Road ran through. Off in the forest there were broken pieces of marble, statues that had long ago fallen over and broken. The pieces would glow white at dusk, as though they might pick themselves up and put themselves back together when the moon came out. Petal’s End wasn’t on no modern maps.

They built Petal’s End back behind the forest and away from the water to keep it sheltered from the winter winds, but that didn’t stop the fog from creeping out from the forest. It kept the world away, and that was how the Parkers liked it, especially after Charlie killed himself. They liked privacy for personal matters and publicity for public matters. Charles Parker VI. The newspaper called him “The Scion” when he died. Charlie Parker, as he was known to those of us at Petal’s End. Charlie was a small man, fragile and reed thin, and he liked gardens and roses, dancing, and beautiful
women and men. He was nothing but a disappointment to his big, strapping military father.

A long time ago the first Lord Parker had come across the water from the Old World. Petal’s End was created—a thousand acres of forest and farmland, and even an island in the bay with massive four-hundred-foot vertical cliffs, part of the ancient basalt headlands. On an antique map of the estate hanging in the grand library it was marked Parker Island but it was only spoke of as
the island
. They had a lighthouse there and a family who kept the light and had a small farm on the island top. The Parkers went over for the occasional summer picnics and whale-watching trips. Lord Parker wasn’t born a lord, as the story goes. His people made money and then he bought himself a title. By the time I was a child the Parker family was already fading into history and stories, and Petal’s End was a mystery set back behind the woodland, the island a place where no one went, the lighthouse burned down and replaced by an automated one. The Parkers had another grand house in the city where they did most of their business. When the grandfather was grown and had become Colonel Parker, he went back to the Old World doing who knows what and he brought back Marigold, a young woman who liked dancing and singing and strolling in the gardens and spending her time with artists and at galas. The Colonel was much older than her and he wanted a proper wife. Marigold was built to last, he would say, pretty and dainty and durable just like fine bone china. Grampie said she was from a family of aristocrats with no money but an endless supply of prestige. Marigold didn’t have any idea what she was getting into, coming across the ocean, but once she was here, she rose to the occasion and never went back.

As we drove into the estate I felt sick to my stomach and tried to conjure up soothing thoughts about my life at Petal’s End. Loretta and I were accustomed to the quiet. In the winter Hector would
come and plow out the lane, and we’d stay in the back part of the house with the wood stove going. On stormy days I’d read and write and stitch. Sometimes in the summer I’d creep into the big house and play the piano. Pomeline Parker, the Colonel’s eldest granddaughter, had given me piano and singing lessons until they stopped coming out. The piano was kept in tune and it seemed that I should make an effort to play in case one day Pomeline did come back. There were times when I played and the air in the gardens would lift up and ripple and swirl, as though a fine lady had walked by with perfume, and a slight shiver would go up my spine and down my arms right into my fingertips that would be icy on the ivory. Fear shook me, and I forced myself to look, just as I had at Ma’s that night, but it was only ever the breeze blowing the curtain, and the sun casting a shadow in from the beauty bush growing near the window. I remember laughing at how superstitious I was, just like Marigold and her hobgobblies.

The Colonel died when I was five, the year before his only child did. We think the Colonel got mauled by a bear. It was his own fault, having a bear as a pet. They said it was Marigold’s fault. If she’d let him keep his raptor birds he wouldn’t have had a need for playing with a bear. He had a wildcat too, not so big, and in tree branches it looked almost like a house cat. But it weren’t no house cat. That was clear when it leapt down and chased a guest through the meadow, hissing and making an unearthly noise not like any normal meow. It came in a big crate off an airplane from somewhere far away. When the Colonel was found dead his throat was chewed and they never knew if the bear or the cat did it.

Charlie, the heir, he died playing with a rope. It was just the ladies left, Marigold and her daughter-in-law, Estelle, and the two granddaughters, Pomeline and Jenny. Pomeline was sent off to boarding school but she was home every summer. Jenny was home-schooled and they went through at least two teachers a year and not one would come to Petal’s End. Most of what she
learned was from her grandmother. Marigold had a stroke a few years after Charlie died. Loretta said the depression that blossomed in her after losing her only child caused it. It shocked her system, made everything constrict. After his death her hands were permanently clenched together and hung so low it seemed she had been forced to carry a stone about for the rest of her days. And so the family stopped coming.

Estelle had never come any more than she had to. She was a nurse a long time ago, and they say she married Charlie for his fortune, but when he died the whole lot went to his mother. Then she hated Petal’s End and the country more than ever. Estelle kept thin with coffee and cigarettes. She had been pretty once upon a time, and her looks lived on in Pomeline.

They brought Marigold out once, in a wheelchair. It was like half of her face was stuck in a leer and the other half was stuck in anguish. Marigold seemed to shrink, the way the elderly do, getting shorter, like the earth itself in her precious garden had reached up one fine summer morning and curled fingers round her ankles and started tugging her down. Dainty don’t always hold up to aging. Jenny and Pomeline and the doctor carted Marigold about, out in Evermore, and she looked around, smirking at half of it, raging at the other.

The bumpy lane, the thought of the Parkers and their tragedies, my birthday ruined—the entirety of the day made the bile rise in my throat and I gagged. In a daze, I heard Loretta tell Hector to stop. He slammed on the brakes and my stomach lurched as I pushed the door open and threw up all over the wildflowers growing at the edge of the forest by the road, the bitterness spewing forth. Sweat dripping down my temples and Loretta rubbing my back. Exhaust fumes made me throw up again and Loretta told Hector to shut the engine off. All went quiet except for a draught that came right up and tickled the leaves. My hands went clammy. A bird called out, a red bird, its trill long and
clear, and Loretta and I both watched it fly down and perch on a low branch gazing at us.

“It’s Grampie,” I said. Loretta’s eyes got great big and she said I was exhausted by the horrible shock to my system with Ma coming by. The bird sat on the branch and sang. Loretta shooed it but it took no notice of her. A surge of great hurt flooded over me. Was it Grampie in the bird? I do not know, but it sang out once more and flew down the lane, as though we were to follow, as though there was no turning back. I wiped my mouth on the hankie Loretta passed me and pulled the car door closed.

We came out of the lane in sight of the house and the stark sunlight made me squint. There was a row of laburnum trees off to the south, just starting to bloom and hang with their poisonous golden chain blossoms—we were not allowed to climb those trees. I fixed my eyes on the yellow flowers as the vehicles from the Briar Patch headed out in a convoy. The Parkers had hired the garden centre to do all the gardening and lawn mowing. They came five days a week in their trucks and vans, wearing their uniforms and hats and tool belts, waving and smiling but never making much chitchat, maybe warned to keep to themselves and ask no questions. Art was the only one who spent much time with them. The Happy Helpers came as well, a cleaning service, with two vanloads of girls in uniforms, whispering to themselves, biting their tongues. They’d been warned too, it seemed. They also came five days a week, as though the Parkers were in full-time residence, when really it was just a big empty house and sprawling grounds, waiting for a party that never started, for guests that never arrived, a family who was missing.

Hector parked at the carriage house. He ran around but Loretta was already getting out. He held the door for me. “Miss Fancy Mosher,” he said, holding out his hand. I put my hand in his and as he pulled me out he gave me a tight squeeze. “Don’t you worry. You forget about your Ma. You’re a big girl now.”

Loretta nodded at Hector. “Thank you, Hector. You are helpful in an emergency, I’ll say that. Fancy, you need to relax. Come along to the house. We’ll have some birthday cake and lemonade later. Hector, make sure you put the car back, and don’t go disappearing. There’s cookies and I will put on some tea, if you want, and you can come help yourself.”