A Long Time Gone (17 page)

Vivien Walker Moise

INDIAN
MOUND,
MISSIS
SIPPI
APRIL
2013

I
was up and dressed by nine o'clock, ready for the trip to see Mathilda. Cora was scheduled to work at the school's media center, so it would just be me, Carol Lynne, and Chloe. Chloe had stubbornly insisted that she be left behind to look for more bones in the yard, which was exactly why I told her she needed to come with us.

I wasn't surprised to find their rooms empty, as the two of them had somehow gravitated into the habit of eating breakfast together and then walking outside so Chloe could report with excessive drama and adjectives the suspicious-looking places on the property where she and my mother thought other bodies might be buried. On one of their jaunts, they'd hauled the broken chair swing to the porch and re-placed Bootsie's green garden chairs in their original spots. I'd sometimes find them sitting in the barren garden, making me feel like I was the only one not seeing any plants.

I was halfway through the kitchen's screen door when my cell phone rang. I dug it out of my purse and stared at it while it rang two more times.
Slam
. The door slipped through my fingers, the vibration echoing in the still morning air.

“Hello?” I said, barely recognizing the confidence in my voice.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?”

“Hello, Mark. It's good to hear from you.” It took all my control to keep my words from quavering.

“I'm
this
close to calling the police and having you arrested. You'd better have a very good reason why my daughter is with you in Pig Swallow, Mississippi.”

I frowned for a moment, wondering how he and Chloe had coordinated their geographical slurs. “Because she was lonely without you there. School was out and all of her friends were gone. She just showed up—I obeyed the court order and haven't had any prior contact with her. I promise.”

“Good. Then you can just put her on a plane to LA and I'll have Imelda pick her up. Then I won't have to call the police.”

I took a deep breath, trying to quell the panic flushing through me. “Please, Mark. Let her stay. At least until the end of your honeymoon. She's getting along fine here. I'll put her in school, or homeschool her, if that's what you'd prefer. I know a retired English teacher, and she could help me.” I bit my lip, mentally apologizing to Cora for such a presumption.

“You still taking the pills?”

She's a drug addict.
The words flung across the table in his lawyer's office still stung with enough force to steal my breath. I closed my eyes, feeling for a moment as if I were standing on a boat with the water moving beneath me. I'd hated the ocean, hated the blue of it, if only because it wasn't muddy brown, hated the wild waves that pushed you out to deeper water. Mark had forced me to learn how to sail, said it was good for me to get over my fear. But I'd despised it. I remembered that now, the memory of the rolling water making me feel reckless and desperate. Before I even realized what I was thinking, I said, “I'll stop. Today. If you'll just let her stay, I'll stop.”

“You know you can't, Vivien. How many times have you tried before and you failed? Chloe doesn't need a drug addict taking care of her.”

Or a father who can't be bothered to call her.
I forced myself to keep calm. “Please, Mark. I promise this time is for real. And if I fail, I'll send her back to LA.”

“Why, Vivi? Why are you so desperate to keep her?”

I remembered something Bootsie had said to me a long, long time ago:
Everybody needs to know that they're number one on somebody's list. You and Tommy are my number one. When you're lost or alone and all give out from the road behind you or in front of you, remember that.

I saw Chloe as the clingy five-year-old afraid to be left alone, and the eight-year-old who was afraid of thunder but who loved the rain, and the eleven-year-old who cried with me each time we watched our favorite movie,
My Dog Skip.
I didn't know how or when it had happened, but she was number one on my list. Not because there was nobody else who'd put her on the top or their list or even because every time I looked at her I saw the abandoned and bitter child I'd been, but because she'd somehow managed to make me feel as if she belonged there. I wasn't sure where I numbered on her list, but that didn't matter.

“Because I care deeply for her,” I said, unable to translate my complicated feelings for Chloe into words he could understand.

He snorted into the phone. “The only thing you care about is your pills.”

I put my hand over my mouth, holding in my scream. Because deep down I feared that he was right.

I heard a woman's voice in the background, and then Mark's muffled voice as he said something away from the phone. When he came back, he said, “My beautiful new wife has put me in a generous mood, so I'm willing to bend a little bit.” He paused, as if he hadn't already decided what he was going to say. “Chloe can stay with you until I get back—which will be May fifteenth. We might extend our trip for a bit to see some of Europe and the Riviera, but we can play that by ear. I guess I'm going to have to deal with calling her school, but you're in charge of getting everything else sorted out. Try not to bother me too much if you need my signature on anything. And I want to hear from your doctor, who will be giving you daily drug tests and reporting back to my office, where they will inform me if there's any problems—and that needs to start right away. The first positive test, Chloe gets on a plane.”

My hand was clenched so hard my fingernails bit into my palms. “Why do you care that I quit, Mark?”

“I don't. I just know you can't do it.”

The woman's voice came from the background again and I just stood there and shook, waiting for him to speak. “Do we have a deal?”

“Yes,” I managed.

“Good,” he said.

“Do you want to speak with Chloe? I can go get her—it'll only take a minute. . . .”

I could tell from the air on the line that he was already gone.

I poured a cup of black coffee from the pot—probably made before dawn by Tommy—and drank it, not caring that it was cold but needing caffeine to wake me up and mask my need to run back upstairs and hide under the covers.

I found Chloe and Carol Lynne after some searching on top of the Indian mound that had been a part of the landscape long before the Walkers had claimed this parcel of land. A reminder of the native Indians who'd once inhabited this corner of the world, what was left of their civilizations remained in the small flat-topped hills that dotted the landscape like humps on a camel.

Over the years, student groups from several universities had come out with more and more sophisticated equipment to see if there were any artifacts that should be salvaged from our mound. But it was clear that anything of value had long since been removed or eroded away. It was called the Walker Mound, but I'd never been able to find any pride in claiming something that was all about a way of life that had been erased from the earth and wasn't coming back. It was a monument to loss, and we had enough of those in the world already, some of us still living and breathing.

They were lying on the ground with their eyes closed, facing the sky, their heads touching like Siamese twins. I was fidgety and annoyed at having had to look for them and walked with heavy footsteps.

“Shhh,” said Chloe without opening her eyes. “We're trying to listen to what the earth is saying.”

I rolled my eyes. “It's saying that we should have left half an hour ago, and that you'd better be in the car in the next five minutes or we're not going.”

My mother didn't open her eyes. “Did you hear that, JoEllen? Did you hear the rumble?”

Chloe's eyes were shut tightly. “No, because Vivien was talking.”

A soft smile lifted Carol Lynne's cheeks. “Vivien doesn't like to do
this, unless she thinks she might get a tan on her legs. I could never get her to lie still long enough, like she had ants in her pants. Always too busy thinking about what comes next.”

Chloe snickered. “‘Ants in her pants'?”

My mother started snickering, too, and soon they were both howling together, like the image of me with insects in my pants was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. Despite myself, my cheek trembled until it lifted in a quasi-smile. But then I remembered lying out here with my mother when I was no more than five, and Bootsie coming out to say that Carol Lynne had a phone call, and that some boy with a Yankee accent was waiting to speak with her. She'd left her sandals and I'd waited for a long time for her to come back. When Bootsie had come to get me for supper and told me that Carol Lynne had left again, I'd run with the sandals and thrown them as hard as I could into the swamp.

I pressed my fingers to my temples, feeling the beginnings of another headache. “Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”

Carol Lynne stopped laughing. “Where are we going?”

“To see Mathilda.”

Her skin furrowed between her brows. “Did she move?”

Chloe stood, then offered her hand to Carol Lynne. “I haven't met her yet. That's why we're going.”

I watched as my mother took Chloe's hand and rolled to a stand with the agility of a child. I felt an odd pang as she smiled at Chloe and I turned away, trying to remember the last time my mother had smiled at me.

As I opened the passenger door of my car and moved the front seat for Chloe to crawl in the back, Carol Lynne looked over at the old Cadillac that was splattered with dried mud and covered in dust. “Is Bootsie coming with us?”

My temples thrummed and I opened my mouth to tell her where Bootsie really was when Chloe cut me off.

“We'll meet her later.” She slid into the car, then pulled down the back of the front seat so Carol Lynne could get in.

My mother stared at the seat, her brows knitted. “Where are we going?”

“To see Mathilda. She moved, so we're going to visit her.” The words slid from Chloe's mouth with ease.

I met Chloe's eyes in the rearview mirror. Either she was a better liar than a twelve-year-old should be, or she was much more compassionate than anybody had ever given her credit for.

I had to remind Carol Lynne to close the door and put on her seat belt, which she did without argument. I flipped on the radio where it was set on the sixties satellite radio station that I'd been listening to for most of my drive from LA. I hadn't liked sixties music until I was in high school, when Tripp would drive me to school. He'd always had eclectic music tastes, liked most everything except for whatever was currently popular, and I had to endure listening to everything from forties big-band music, the blues, to sixties music and pretty much all types in between. I'd hate to admit to him now that after all that time when I'd scorned his music, the first three presets on my car radio were the sixties, forties, and blues stations.

The Fifth Dimension was belting out “Aquarius.” I was about to flip it off, figuring music wasn't the best thing for my impending headache, when my mother started singing along. She had a clear, strong voice, perfect for the vocals of the song. And she remembered every single word.

I glanced at Chloe in the mirror again, wondering why she hadn't reached forward and changed the station to modern hits. I hadn't been allowed to listen to my own music in my car since Chloe had started first grade.

Instead, she opened her mouth and joined my mother in singing the refrain. A horn honked and I had to swerve out of the lane of opposing traffic, narrowly missing an oncoming car.

“How do you know that song?” I asked, forgetting my headache for a moment.

She rolled her eyes. “Hailey was in a production of
Hair
at the community theater last summer, remember? She made me watch it six times. I know every word by heart.”

My mother continued singing and Chloe joined her, and eventually I did, too, just so I wouldn't feel left out.

Cora had given me directions to Sunset Acres, and like every business near Indian Mound, it was off of Highway 82. The fields, now
accessorized with bright red or green mechanical planters that stretched across eight rows of earth, gradually gave way to strips of fast-food restaurants and chain motels. Not a lot had changed since I'd last been here, maybe one neon sign being exchanged for another, and it certainly hadn't gotten any prettier. But there was something comforting in it, too, like the scarred surface of a favorite antique chest.

The song had ended and I felt Chloe's silence as she stared out at the urban landscape of midcentury homes with new roofs and old doors with three diamond-shaped windows in a diagonal across the front. People sat in lawn chairs on porches or yards and waved as we drove by. Carol Lynne and I waved back on instinct, and I didn't even think about it until Chloe asked, “Who was that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then why did you wave?”

I shrugged. “I don't know. To be friendly, I guess. It's just what you do.”

She raised her eyebrows as if the world had suddenly gone crazy, then returned her stare out the window.

Despite its name, Sunset Acres was a two-story brick building surrounded by a small square of asphalt parking lot with a slightly hipped roof that resembled an old motor lodge, but without the neon
VACANCY
sign. Cora had already warned me that it wasn't much to look at, but the staff inside more than made up for any aesthetic disadvantage.

We signed in at a front desk before being directed to an elevator. The furnishings were sparse and slightly shabby, but the white laminate floors gleamed with polish, the walls dotted with brightly framed depictions of flowers and landscapes. Examining one closely, I saw that it looked like a paint-by-numbers piece, but I chose not to judge, realizing they'd probably been made by a resident.