The Violet Hour: A Novel (19 page)

She considered his body before speaking. In his baseball cap, he seemed to be the same man she’d forgotten, if older, and perhaps more freckled, too. It surprised her how easy it was to look at him again. There was his face: the warrior nose cascading into a plateau of iron cheek; the darkly arched brows shading the piercing whites of the eyes; the waxen, perpetually unshaven jaw sprouting dozens of tiny black hairs—all of it familiar. So much time had passed that nothing seemed to have changed. There were just two days in her entire life: the day they’d separated, and today.

The moment was so extraordinary, and so emotionally uncertain, she could do little more than confirm the facts. “You’re here,” she said.

He took off his cap and ruffled his flattened hair with his palm. “Mary told me.”

“She told you to come?”

“No, she told me what happened. Coming here seemed like the right thing to do.”

The blazing afternoon sun had shifted from behind an obstruction of some kind, casting sudden light over Abe’s head and making it difficult for Cassandra to read his expression in the glare. She leaned forward to duck the beams, resting her forearms on the banister. Not that he’d ever been easy to read. He stood now with his arms folded across his chest, right hand still bunching his cap.

“The wake’s tomorrow.”

“I know,” he said, solemnly, before his eyes drifted away from hers, coming to rest on the multicolored Chinese vase that sat on the narrow entryway table beside him.

“I’ve always liked that thing,” she said. “Even though it’s just a cheap replica. It’s the one piece in the house I’d take with me if I had the choice.”

“Yes,” Abe said. “I think you’ve told me that before.”

Cassandra started at this mention of
before,
an embarrassing era she suddenly realized she’d been lucky to escape. It was like being reminded that she’d been a teenager once, and had done all the same careless, fun-crazed things that made her balk when she heard about Gail’s youngest son doing them now. She gripped the banister with both hands. Below her, Abe was looking at the vase, his profile inscrutable as he studied the central tableau of little people gathered for a wedding in colorful robes.

“So what’s your plan?” she asked him, her tone neutral but direct.

He turned back. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve got a hotel.”

She couldn’t believe how not-angry they were, how unmoved by their reunion. Standing there, at the bottom of the stairs, was a man Cassandra had loved, then hated, and to whom she now had nothing to say. There was a damning line that described this situation. Who had said it? The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference. Had he flown all the way across the country simply to give her his dispassionate condolences and be gone?

“My father—” she began.

His chin jerked and he began nodding soberly, as though remembering the reason he’d come. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. He could’ve gone on, but out of some mercy, he didn’t. Instead he looked up at her, expectantly.

“It’s strange,” she said. “I’m not as upset as I should be.”

And then he did something odd. He sighed, and scrunched his shoulders, and said, “Me neither.” It took her a moment to understand that he was talking about something else entirely—about them
and their tragedy, which wasn’t the point of this day at all. “I haven’t been angry with you in a long time.”

She felt stung; she hadn’t been expecting criticism.

“Well,” she said, pulling her body backward with great effort, even now not angry, just resigned. “Maybe we’ll have more to say to each other when we are.”

He gave a nod as though he hadn’t quite parsed her meaning, but expected to at any minute, and watched as she bravely made her way down the stairs, one hand on the banister for support, the other swinging erratically by her side. She passed within a charged arm’s length of his body, and proceeded on to the kitchen, where she could hear someone—she hoped her sister—making room for further well-meaning platters in the fridge. She was proud of herself for not retreating to her bedroom, which still bore all the time-oiled books and pink-glazed furnishings of her childhood, and where she would’ve immediately felt imprisoned, unable to know when Abe had gone and the coast was clear.

The kitchen, at least, was exactly as she had foreseen. It smelled of roasted onions and earnest deli meats. Mary’s butt, clad perkily in berry-red vacation shorts, mooned from the open refrigerator, which was filled to the light fixture with a smorgasbord of foil-wrapped offerings.

“Well,” Cassandra said, drawing Mary out of the land of casseroles.

“How’d it go?” Beneath her party-line cheer, Mary’s voice was penitent. When she’d phoned Abe, she was basically pressuring him to fly out. It was just what you did when your wife lost a parent, whether you were still married to her or not. Fortified with the righteousness of her own grief, and convinced that her sister and ex-brother-in-law needed a kick in the pants to start treating each other properly again, she saw nothing questionable in her call.

It was only when she answered the door and saw him standing there, looking tanned, certain, and at the same time entirely unresolved, and then, moments later, the scrim of horror that crossed
Cassandra’s face when she told her who was there, that she recognized the truly combustible nature of the situation she’d helped create. She had forgotten what a disaster her sister’s marriage had become, and how poor some people were at hauling themselves up from the wreckage and getting back onto land. Mary was a fixer, a teacher for whom no task was too large that it couldn’t be accomplished in discrete, rational stages. But some people, when they encountered their own messes, just sank further, were better off cutting losses and moving shop than trying to salvage and piece back together whatever random parts they found lying around. Perhaps, she thought grimly, her sister was one of those.

“Is it too early for a drink?” Cassandra asked. She was no longer in the mood to beat around the bush. It was only now, in the fragrant whir of an overstuffed suburban kitchen, that she realized how strenuously she’d been holding herself back, taking care to say much less than she felt, while suggesting much, much more. Her few minutes with Abe had exhausted her.

“It’s afternoon, isn’t it?” Mary disapproved of almost everything, but would never deny an adult her alcohol. She reached into the packed fridge. “Fancy some screw-top chardonnay?”

“How’d you guess?” Cassandra collapsed in the breakfast nook, happy to keep trading questions that required no answer.

Mary set a glass on the table and filled it, the pale gold wine hissing icily against the bowl. “I think Estella has a crush on Kyle,” she said, sitting down across from her sister.

Cassandra’s first sip went straight to her head. Somehow she’d failed to eat lunch. “What makes you say that?”

“Mother’s intuition. I keep catching her staring at him. This morning I winked at her,” she said, winking, “and she blushed.”

“Maybe she’s just interested in theater.” Cassandra winked back and took another sip. She was starting to feel, if not good, then at least a little bit better.

“Don’t you like him? For Elizabeth, I mean. Or whatever.” Another wink.

“Of course! He’s serious for an actor. And I think he’s serious about her, too. I don’t know if they’ll get
married,
necessarily, but they might.”

Mary considered this. “I guess it couldn’t hurt her to wait until she’s a little older. Make sure she really knows what she wants.” Her voice wavered with a dreamy authority, as though she were recalling being twenty-six, reliable and fun, with a lifetime of sensible choices ahead of her. Mary herself had been an over-thirty bride.

“But the hurricane damage looks as bad as everyone feared,” she said now, abruptly. They’d hardly gotten going on Elizabeth; Cassandra hadn’t expected to change subjects so soon. “They’re calling it apocalyptic.”

“Katrina?” Cassandra was disoriented but decided to go along. She was pleased to have remembered the name. It was something from the world, something outside herself.

“Huge sections of New Orleans underwater. Can you imagine?”

Cassandra shook her head. She could not, though of course it was not her job to imagine. It was someone else’s job, someone in Louisiana or just down the road in Washington, probably a whole belted, boot-wearing brigade of someones with hard hats and master’s degrees in engineering and the trust of the people at their backs. This time, though, they had failed. She went under for another, longer sip and came up feeling more disoriented than before.

Mary went on as if reading her mind. “You know, most of it was below sea level from the start, the poor neighborhoods especially. So there’s going to be a lot of finger pointing. We had no excuse not to be ready for this.” She was growing indignant, convincing herself as she spoke. “
No
excuse at all.”

She was right, of course. And she was doing her best to distract her sister from the subject of marriage, which she knew left a bad taste in her mouth. But in introducing a new flavor made mostly of guilt and blame, she brought Cassandra straight back to the episode minutes prior that she was still trying to escape. Her disaster was personal, not at all the same order of magnitude as the devastation in the Gulf, but
the comparison only heightened her pain and made it impossible to appreciate the massive human tragedy she knew was mushrooming just out of sight.

The fact was, she had no excuse either. Abe had turned up at her parents’ house and she’d received him neutrally, though she’d been preparing for the moment for years. She’d always known they’d speak again. But today—God, today—today she was drained from grief. He’d come upon her at her saddest moment, when she ought to have been thinking of her father and no one else; he’d come in and he’d taken her unaware. There were many better ways to respond than the way she’d responded just then. She ought to have been able to tell him precisely how he’d hurt her, in words even he couldn’t refuse to understand. Or at the very least, she ought to have been able to tell him generally how she’d felt when he left: that he’d broken a vow more sacred than the one she’d broken, that you just don’t leave a person in silence, no matter how unfaithful they’ve been. But at the crucial juncture, she hadn’t been able to muster any of it. She’d failed to find words either specific or general that would do herself the justice she felt she deserved. He’d given her eight years to rehearse. Had she needed nine? Then would she have gotten it right?

“Cassandra.” Dorothy Chamberlain’s voice snapped her out of herself. She was standing like a baroness in a ruffled blouse, her hand on the back of an equally assertive-looking senior citizen in a tennis visor and whites. “Joanne Hickory just wanted you to know what a gem you have for a daughter.” She nodded at Mary, who joined the two older women in smiling significantly at Cassandra. “She met her just now on the porch and she—well, I’ll let Jo tell it.”

“Elizabeth?” Cassandra said. At that moment she wanted, more than ever, to have her daughter near.

“She’s just lovely,” Joanne said. “Polite. Smart as a whip. I know mothers always want to hear nice things about their daughters . . . My deepest condolences, by the way. Howard was a wonderful man.”

“Thank you,” Cassandra said, at once impatient and ashamed to be impatient with this smiling, genuine stranger, who was starting to look a bit rattled.

“Go on, Jo,” Dorothy said.

“Well, I had lost an earring, a diamond stud Lou—that’s my husband—had given me, and I noticed it just as I reached the door out there. Of course, I could have lost it in the car or back at home somewhere, but you know what it’s like when an earring goes missing. You immediately start looking all around you. So then who comes up but your daughter, and even though she was clearly in a bit of a hurry, she sees my distress and immediately crouches down to help. ‘What are we looking for?’ she asks, so calm, as though she’d been sent especially to assist me. She found it in a matter of seconds, under the rim of a planter, where I just know my eyes never would have seen it.”

“Do you know where she went?” Cassandra asked.

“No, I . . . no, she didn’t mention it.”

“I’m sorry.” Cassandra stood suddenly. “Do you mind?” She pressed past them in the doorway, catching a mighty whiff of old-lady powder and sunscreen. Under her visor, Joanne’s face caved in embarrassment and she began making meek little clucks of apology.

“No,
I’m
sorry,” Cassandra said, squeezing her hand, remembering her bereavement decorum. “Thank you very much for sharing that story with me. I’m a lucky mother.”

She stepped out onto the front porch, where her father had liked to stand before a funeral, so that his dignified, comforting form would be the first thing the mourners saw when they arrived. Elizabeth was nowhere in sight, all the cars still safely in the driveway. Perhaps she and Kyle—she hadn’t thought until now of Kyle—had he gone with her? Surely Joanne would’ve mentioned him if he’d been there; he was not a person who went unnoticed. Perhaps she was heading out to meet him, the two of them together on a walk. She supposed that could be fortifying. Anything could be fortifying after so many hours in this creepy house.

She glanced around, taking in the passersby, most in sleeveless shirts and sandals, some still in suffocating suits, and wondered which way they’d gone. Her eyes came to rest on a figure at the end of the walk—blobby, large and pale, as though it were still gestating, still coming into form. It was the strange boy. He was back, standing frozen like some kind of ghost. The second time in two days, and right on the heels of her ghostly ex-husband. How peculiar. Had he come to pay his respects?

“Come in!” Cassandra called. “You can come in if you like.”

The boy shook his head, as though all he’d wanted was to be noticed, and having achieved this, was ready to head home. Arms hanging rhythmlessly, he went off down the sidewalk toward the subway, pausing at the corner to look back. “I’m sorry for your loss!” he shouted, through cupped hands, and crossed the street when the pedestrian sign flashed
WALK
.