A Long Time Gone (5 page)

He moved to the side of the table, where a folded blue tarp had been placed on the floor, and began unraveling it on top of the unmarked bags and small boxes on the trestle table. That's when I noticed the stacks of corrugated boxes of all sizes leaning up against the side of the table and beneath it, all of them darkened with random water splotches. It was so much worse than I'd originally thought, and for one brief moment I really wanted to care.

“I've got to go,” he said. “The water's gone down a bit, so I'm going to ride out over the fields and see how they're doing. Luckily we haven't started the planting yet, but I'm hoping the water's not too high that we've got to delay.

My brain felt sluggish, as if muddy water were running through it, too. “Can Carol Lynne take care of herself? Is she okay in the house without somebody there?”

Tommy tucked the tarp around the edges of the table and stepped
back, the look on his face reminding me of the time I'd put bubble gum in my hair to see if it would stick and Bootsie had to cut it as short as a boy's. “No. Not really. I've hired Cora Smith—Mathilda's granddaughter—to do some light housekeeping and look after her. She used to come and help Mathilda some. Mama calls her Mathilda, and Cora doesn't mind. I thought that was a good sign.” He glanced at his watch. “Mama usually sleeps until noon, and Cora gets here a bit earlier to get her to eat something and to make sure Mama doesn't leave in Bootsie's Cadillac.”

I followed him down the stairs, a sense of urgency bursting through my numbness. “But isn't there some sort of therapy she can be doing? Like crossword puzzles or something?”

He turned around to look at me, and for the first time I saw how tired he was, how the dark circles under his eyes looked purple on his pale skin. “Have you ever known Mama to do a crossword puzzle? Me neither, but you're welcome to give it a try. Most of the time she's fixin' to leave, her bags all packed, and the rest of the time she's channeling Bootsie, about to give a big party. I've given up trying to make sense of it. Cora's good with her—has all the patience in the world.”

He grabbed a baseball cap off a hook by the door and stepped outside. I rushed to catch up, trying to keep my thoughts from wandering too far before I asked the question I needed to. “But does she . . . I mean, she knows who we are, right?”

“Yeah, she does. She recognized you yesterday, although it was like she thought you were still in high school and had just been gone since morning.”

I turned my head for a moment, seeing that the men were leaving, presumably to grab something to eat. I wondered if Tripp had a wife to go home to, and if she made him lunch. I'd done that in the early years of my marriage, at least until Mark stopped coming home for lunch and went directly from his plastic surgery practice to the golf course, and Chloe accused me of making her fat.

Focusing on Tommy again, I said, “But does she remember enough to tell us that she's sorry?”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his keys and began to jangle them impatiently. “For what?”

“For ruining our lives.”

He stared back at me, the keys quiet in his hands. “I think she left
that up to us.” He slid the baseball cap back on his head and began walking down the muddy drive. Over his shoulder he called, “I'll be back around six for supper.”

I made to follow him, then stopped, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw Carol Lynne, wearing familiar bell-bottomed jeans and a loose floral blouse with a drawstring tie at the neck. Her hair was down around her shoulders, thick and heavy and still the bright strawberry blond of my memory. People had always told me how much I looked like her, and I'd hated it, wanting to believe that she and I had nothing in common. But she was sixty-seven now and barely looked older than fifty. Maybe there was one good thing I'd inherited from her.

She stood inside the caution tape, her bare toes stuck into the mud on the edge of the hole. It had been dug wider in the search for more bones and any other clues, the digging instruments laid out on a square cloth just like a surgeon's instruments before an operation. More of the skeleton was exposed now, including what looked like part of a rib cage with some sort of filthy fabric still clinging to it. I looked away, not wanting to see anything that made it more real to me, made me imagine the bones as a person walking around above the ground.

Crows cried from one of the nearby pine trees, but I didn't look up. I moved to stand next to my mother, keeping my eyes averted from whatever lay in the ground just a few feet away. I tried to think about all the things I'd wanted to say to her, about all the hurts and pain her abandonment had laid at my feet as a child. How there are things you never forget no matter how far from home you run. I trembled with the anticipation of unburdening myself of all the pent-up emotions I'd carried for so long. She'd have to remember then; the force of my emotions would make her remember.

“I think she never left.”

The unexpectedness of my mother's voice startled me. “What?”

With one pale, slender finger, she pointed at the exposed bones. “She never had a chance to come back because she never left.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant, but her shoulders had begun to shake, and to my horror and embarrassment she started to cry in great heaving sobs. I watched her, unsure of what to do. And then she put her head on my shoulder and I had no choice but to put my arm around her.

But I kept my head turned so I couldn't see her cry, seeing instead crows flying out across the wide, flat fields. I closed my eyes to block out the image, smelling the wet earth and hearing my mother's sobs and the fading sound of the crows.
I've been a long time gone.

I pulled my mother away and back under the yellow tape, then led her to the house. I settled her on the family room sofa to wait for Cora before flipping on what I remembered had been her favorite soap opera. Then I retreated to my room and took another pill, wondering if I would have enough to get me through until I figured out what I was supposed to do next.

Carol Lynne Walker Moise

INDIAN
MOUND
, MISSISSIPPI
AUGUST 5, 1962

Dear Diary,

Today is my seventeenth birthday. I think it's ironic that the day I get my first diary is the same day Marilyn Monroe dies. She was my idol. I have her pictures taped up inside my closet door where Bootsie can't see them and make me take them down because she thinks it's tacky to put magazine pictures on my walls. Mathilda knows they're there, but she's good at keeping secrets.

I've decided that I'm going to smoke my first cigarette today. I'm seventeen and it's time to start acting like a grown-up. It's a real gully washer outside, but I've got all the windows open. I figure it's a lot easier explaining why the windowsills and floors are wet than why Bootsie might smell smoke.

Bootsie is my mama, but everybody calls her Bootsie, including me. She ran away from home when I was a baby, leaving me with my daddy, who'd gone crazy in the war, and my daddy's parents to take care of both of us. The war gave Daddy a bad case of nerves, making him shake all the time and not sleep much. The doctor visited a lot to give him medicine, but most of the time Daddy lay in his bed and screamed like the devil himself
was in his head. And then one day it was quiet and he was gone. Everybody said it was a blessing, but I didn't. It was wasteful, just like throwing out a piece of aluminum foil that's only been used once. I didn't cry at his funeral because I couldn't. I'd never even known him, really. I guess if you have to lose a parent, the real blessing is that you didn't know them enough to miss them.

By the time Bootsie came back and we moved back into the yellow house, Daddy was dead and I was six and it was too late to start calling her Mama. I almost think she'd prefer me to call her Jackie, since it's pictures of Jackie Kennedy she'd be sticking all over her walls if she didn't think that was tacky. She dresses like her—even got one of those stupid-looking pillbox hats—and got her hair cut with a little flip at the bottom and a big puff on top. She's even talking about dying her red hair dark. People always tell me how beautiful she is, and how her face looks like one of those new Barbie dolls. Mathilda says that all the women in my family are beautiful, but that it takes us a while to grow into it. I'm not sure what she means, and I'm still waiting to grow into mine. I want one of those new Jackie Kennedy haircuts, too, but Bootsie wants me to keep my hair in a ponytail like a little girl. If she had her way, I'd never grow up.

I'm going to try a cigarette now. Brigitte Bardot looks so sophisticated when she smokes. I want to look like that—like I belong in some café in Rome or Paris or anyplace that's not Indian Mound, Mississippi. I'll be right back. . . .

Mathilda walked in while I was coughing on my first cigarette. She brought me one of Bootsie's ashtrays she uses for bridge club days and told me not to get ashes on the furniture or the bed and then she left. I know she won't rat on me. Like I said before, she's really good at keeping secrets.

Vivien Walker Moise

INDIAN
MOUND,
MISSISSIPPI
APR
IL
2013

I
awoke to the smell of chicken frying, and for a moment I thought I'd been transported back in time, with Mathilda and Bootsie in the kitchen and Emmett in the fields, Tommy in his bedroom taking apart old clocks, and my mother somewhere far away. I opened my eyes, registering my suitcase and the bottle of pills on the table next to me, and I knew with a sinking feeling that I could never go back to that place.

When the bedside clock came into focus, I realized that I'd slept for most of the afternoon and that it was almost suppertime. I quickly washed my face and hands, then made my way slowly down to the kitchen. I studied the family pictures that filled the upstairs hall and stairway, their order and placement as random as the architecture of the house. The painted portraits of the first Walkers were hung in the living and dining rooms, filling all the wall space so that by the time the camera was invented, those family photographs were framed and hung in the hallways and stairwell. Sepia and black-and-white photos of people whose names I could never remember stared vaguely at me from wallpapered walls that had not changed since the fifties. I paused at one
of the first color photographs, hung in a place of honor over the demilune table in the foyer—my mother's high school yearbook photo from 1963. She looked so normal to me, even with her bubble hairdo and thick eyeliner. Not at all like the kind of teenager who would “turn on, tune in, and drop out” and end up in a commune in California with two children whose fathers were either unknown to her or simply forgotten.

My senior year in high school I'd pulled out my mother's yearbook in the downstairs library, just to see, and read her senior quote.
There is a time for departure even when there is no certain place to go.
It was the same Tennessee Williams quote I'd already turned in for my own senior page. Tripp was on the yearbook committee and had switched it out with another quote I no longer even remembered.

I paused by the entranceway into the dining room, with its tall, corniced walls and mullioned windows—the windows an addition to the house by an ancestor who favored the Gothic style. My mother, wearing the same vintage dress I'd seen earlier, but with worn house slippers instead of heels, flitted around the table, setting it with the family china, crystal, and silver, just like in the days when Bootsie entertained.

She didn't see me and I quickly slipped away to the kitchen, unwilling to be drawn into my mother's drama. I'd already spent a lifetime avoiding it, and I wasn't ready to be sucked in right now when my own life had enough drama of its own.

A trim black woman with just a hint of gray at her temples stood at the circa-1970s avocado green stove wearing an apron over crisp khakis and a navy blue knit top. She had smooth, almost unwrinkled skin, making her look like she might be in her thirties or forties, but I figured if she was Mathilda's granddaughter she must be in her mid-sixties. She turned to me with a wide smile.

“You must be Vivien. I'm Cora Smith. I'd shake your hand, but they're covered in flour.” She moved her elbows in greeting, both of her hands fully immersed in a bowl of flour and seasonings as she coated chicken parts.

“It's nice to meet you,” I said, staring at a serving platter full of fried chicken as my stomach grumbled. I'd not tasted anything fried in a long time. Mark had originally been charmed by my Southern
cooking, until he'd gained a couple of pounds and forbidden everything with taste from our table and hired a microbiotic chef.

When nobody was looking, I'd break the rules for Chloe in a misguided attempt to make her happy, having never encountered a more miserable child in my whole life, except for me on those days when my mother announced yet another departure. I think that's why I was drawn to her, as if my own abandonment would give me the secret to making her happy. I'd been stupid to think I could. But that hadn't stopped me from trying.

“There've been a few phone calls from the local press, wanting to know about what's going on outside in your yard. I took down their information on the pad by the phone in the front hall and told them that they'd have to wait to speak with you or Tommy.” She glanced up at me. “Tommy called to tell me you'd be here, but he had to go before I could ask him about the tree and the yellow tape. I was hoping you could shed some light on the subject so I'd have something to tell your mama. She keeps looking out the window and seeing the tree and asking me what happened.”

I recalled the image of my mother standing on the edge of the gaping hole. My mouth went dry, and I fumbled with the cabinets until I found the one with glasses—right next to where they'd once been kept. I took a moment filling my glass from the tap and drank some of it before I could speak.

“Lightning hit the old cypress tree, exposing the roots. It uncovered some bones that look like they've been there awhile.”

Cora stopped her dipping and rolling. “Bones? As in human bones?”

I nodded. “The coroner has been here and he's working on removing the remains, but they'll probably be digging around the tree for a while longer to see if they can find any clues as to the woman's identity.”

“They know it's a female?”

I stared at her for a moment, wondering why I'd said that. I quickly shook my head. “No. I was just thinking about what Carol Lynne said to me earlier today. Something about ‘her' not coming back because she never left.”

A small smile of understanding crossed Cora's face before she returned to her task. “I'm sorry about your mama. It's a hard thing to watch the person you knew become a stranger.”

My hand gripped my glass tightly. “Well, then, I guess it should be easier, because she's always been a stranger to me.” I set down my glass by the sink. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

After an appraising look, Cora indicated the refrigerator with her chin. “I have a salad and some homemade buttermilk dressing in there, and over there on the counter I've got a couple of tomatoes from my garden. If you could chop them up and then mix everything in the salad that would be great.”

Memories rumbled in the back of my brain, a sort of switch on my autopilot as I set about the familiar movements of preparing a meal. There was something comforting in the familiarity of it, like becoming reacquainted with a favorite doll you'd long forgotten.

“Have you been working here long?” I asked as I opened a drawer in search of a serrated knife. Sometime over the last nine years, somebody had rearranged the entire kitchen.

“Just since Miss Bootsie passed. Tommy needed some help with your mama, and I'd recently retired from teaching—I was an English teacher at the high school for over thirty years. My children are both in Jackson and I don't have any grandbabies yet, so I figured why not. I couldn't see myself hanging around my empty house all day. I'd rather be useful.”

“I'm thinking we probably met, but I'm sorry if I don't remember,” I said, keeping the refrigerator door open with my knee while I balanced a jar of dressing and the large salad bowl.

She continued to coat the chicken without looking up at me. “It's been a while, so I didn't expect you to recognize me. I was busy raising my own kids when you lived here, but I sometimes helped my grandmother Mathilda. She didn't retire until right after you left. She was ninety-five, although she sure acted like she was twenty years younger. It was her eyesight in the end. Could hardly see her hand in front of her face, even though her glasses were like the bottom of Coke bottles. She broke the antique soup tureen that used to sit in the middle of the dining room table. Even though Bootsie said it was all right and just an accident, we decided it was time. Just about broke both those women's hearts. They were close. Hard for them to be separated.”

She began to place the chicken in the skillet, and we were silent for a moment as the grease splattered and popped. After she replaced the lid
on the pan, she said, “Grandma used to tell me stories about how sweet you were. How you used to help with the polishing and dusting when her arthritis was acting up. And she loved the little stories you would write and then read to her. She said you were pretty good. She always thought you'd be a big writer someday. Or a movie star. You had that ‘sparkle' is what she called it.”

I kept my back to her as I sliced through a tomato, the juice bleeding onto the orange laminate countertop. I was glad she couldn't see my face and recognize my embarrassment, or my need for another pill. The cushion from the last one was wearing thin—thin enough that Cora's words had struck like arrows to a target. My throat thickened as I waited for Cora to remind me that I'd left Mathilda behind, too. Like Bootsie, Mathilda had been one of the best parts of my childhood, a reminder that even without a mother I was worthy of love.

Clearing my throat, I said, “Are we expecting company? I saw that Carol Lynne is setting the dining room table.”

Cora's eyebrows shot up as she lowered the heat on the skillet. “She does that sometimes, even when it's just Tommy and her and me. Bootsie loved using the dining room and the good china and silver, and since she passed, your mama will do that sometimes. Like she's a teenager again and Bootsie has asked her to set the table.” She was silent for a moment. “Losing Bootsie was hard on all of us, but especially her. I don't care how old you get: Losing your mama is the worst kind of thing. It's like burying your childhood.”

I wanted to tell her that she was wrong. That if I'd returned home and found out that Carol Lynne was already dead, I don't think I would have missed her at all.

I focused on tossing the salad, the red of the tomato blurring into the green lettuce, the edge of the salad tongs fading into the side of the bowl. I blinked, surprised to find my eyes wet. I was about to ask her where she'd like me to put the salad, when the doorbell chimed at the same time the phone began to ring.

Cora was already washing her hands in the sink. “I'll grab the phone if you'll see who's at the door.”

I nodded and made my way to the front foyer, pausing momentarily at the dining room, where my mother stood in front of the fireplace. She was staring at a photograph on the mantel, a crystal glass in each
hand, as if she'd been in the middle of placing them on the table and then forgotten what she was doing.

She didn't turn around as I walked past the doorway to the massive front door that somebody in the past one hundred and fifty years had had shipped over from Ireland. It had once graced a now-demolished castle, and looked as out of place on the house as the mullioned windows in the dining room and the Tiffany glass fan window over the door. But I always thought that it also gave the house an “I don't care what you think” kind of attitude. Much like the people who'd inhabited the house, for better or worse.

I unlocked the front door and pulled it open, the hinges squeaking loudly as if the front door hadn't been used in a long while.

“Looks like you could use some WD-40,” Tripp said. He'd removed the tie he'd worn earlier, and his hands were jammed into his pockets, reminding me so much of the little boy I'd grown up with—minus the frogs and worms inside the pockets, I hoped—that I had to smile.

“Bootsie always kept a can under the sink. I'll go check later.” I stepped back to allow him into the foyer. “It's kind of late for official business, isn't it? I'm assuming that's why you're here, since you're using the front door.”

“Tommy called me and asked me for supper. Thought it would be good to talk about a few things. Seems the sheriff already interviewed him, but when he came to the house your mother told him that you were at school and sent him away. He told me to let you know that he'll be back tomorrow morning at nine o'clock to ask you some questions.” He jiggled loose change in his pocket. “And I'm using the front door because you're here. You've been living in California so long that I figure you'd forgotten that friends and family pop in through the kitchen door without knocking.”

I closed the door behind me, my hand clutching the knob. “How did you know I was in California?”

“Your postcard. The one you mailed from Los Angeles to let me know you'd arrived safely, and you asked me to let Bootsie, Emmett, and Tommy know.”

“Oh,” I said, pushing myself away from the door. I'd forgotten about that postcard until now. I couldn't remember the picture on the front, only the feeling of surprise that I was so far from home. And the
weight of the memory of my mother's face as I'd left, an unexpected mixture of grief and disappointment. “Nobody else is expecting you for supper?”

A corner of his mouth lifted. “No wife or a girlfriend waiting for me with supper on the table, if that's what you're asking.”

“I wasn't.” I closed my eyes, sinking into the warm, fuzzy cocoon that had become my brain, and walked past him without looking up. “I was in the kitchen helping Cora. Supper's almost ready.”

My mother stood outside the dining room, still holding the two glasses by their stems. She didn't seem surprised to see Tripp or me, as if we'd both just stepped out of the house for a moment and returned.

“Are we having a party tonight?” she asked.

Tripp peered into the dining room, where all the silverware and linen napkins had been placed in their appropriate spots. “Looks like it. Let me help you with those.” He took the glasses from her and put them on the table.

She turned to watch him, her gaze straying to the window, where the tree and yellow tape were visible. “The tree fell.”

“Yes, ma'am. It was hit by lightning in the storm last night.”

“The storm?” Her brow wrinkled.