Amy and Isabelle (43 page)

Amy had watched her mother’s face intently, watched the couch intently, the window, the chair, and in the long silence that now followed, her eyes moved more and more quickly around the room before they landed once more on Isabelle. “Mom,” the girl finally said, her eyes, her face, her mouth, widening with comprehension, “Mom, I’m
related
to people out there.”

Chapter

25

THE TUESDAY AFTER Labor Day was chilly, almost downright cold. The women in the office room worked quietly and steadily, tugging at the edges of their cardigans. In the lunchroom they lingered over coffee or cups of tea, idly fingering the remains of their lunch-bag wrappings. Lenora Snibbens, looking pleasant and mature in her navy-blue turtleneck, asked Rosie Tanguay what spices she used in making beef stew.

“Salt and pepper,” Rosie said. “Never anything but salt and pepper.”

Lenora nodded, but really she was indifferent; her question had simply been to signify the ending to a feud. Everyone understood, and pretty much felt the same desire for peace in the office room now, for Dottie Brown had let it be known quietly the week before that her husband, after twenty-eight years of marriage, had left her for a younger woman, and that she would not be discussing it further. The women were respectful. Those who wished to talk this over did so in the evenings on their telephones; during the day they worked quietly. Dottie’s misfortune made them glad for whatever blessings their own lives might hold.

Isabelle Goodrow’s desk remained tidy and untouched, the chair tucked under. She had taken some vacation time, that was all anyone
knew. Although when someone mentioned how the body of that girl, Debby Kay Dorne, up there in Hennecock, had been discovered in the trunk of some car in a field by a couple of teenagers, Dottie Brown and Fat Bev were careful not to glance at each other.

“I wish they’d find the guy who did it, and arrest him,” said Rosie Tanguay, shaking her head.

“String him up by his toenails,” Arlene Tucker said.

“Can’t they get the fingerprints?” Rosie asked, tugging on the tea-bag string in the mug she held. “Or trace the license plate?”

“Fingerprints don’t last for months,” Fat Bev said. “Not outside, like that. And the car belonged to the old farmer who’s owned those fields for years. Elvin Merrick. He’s always got some old car lying around out there. They say one part of his land’s practically a dump.”

“He got a ticket for that. Did you see that in the paper?”

Bev nodded. “But they’ll find whoever did it,” she said. “These days they can track down fiber and match it to some carpet in a whole nother state.”

“It’s amazing what they can do these days,” Dottie Brown agreed.

(Although in fact this case would never be solved; no one in the years to come would ever find out who killed Debby Kay Dorne.)

“ ‘Member when Timmy Thompson found a body in his barn?” Arlene Tucker asked. “Must’ve been twenty years ago at least.” Some remembered, most did not. But everyone remembered when the bank had been robbed seven, no eight, years ago November. Patty Valentine had been tied up and gagged and stuffed in the vault; it was hours before she got out. After that Patty taught Sunday school. Every year she told the class of seven-year-olds how she had been tied up with a gun pointed straight in her face, how she had prayed inside the vault, and how it was the praying that got her out. The class would be told to draw a picture of praying hands. One year a little girl went home and had nightmares and her father complained to Reverend Barnes and the Reverend spoke to Patty, and somewhere in the course of this, Patty became upset and told Reverend Barnes to “
f
himself,” and then she didn’t teach Sunday school anymore.

“That part of the story is hard to believe,” said Rosie Tanguay. “Nobody speaks that way to a minister.”

“Oh, but Patty’s crazy,” said Arlene, whose firsthand knowledge of all
this was supposed to stem from the fact she was friends with the mother of the little girl.

“Reverend Barnes’s wife is a little nutty herself,” someone said, and others nodded at this. “Annual clothes drive every year, all the rich ladies from Oyster Point donate their clothes to the Episcopal church, and a few days later you see Mrs. Barnes walking around wearing the best things.”

Lenora Snibbens nodded. “Whatever fits her, I guess.”

This was common knowledge and not of much interest; the goings-on of the Episcopal church seemed fairly removed from the office room, from Shirley Falls in general—it was the Catholic church and the Congregational church that dominated the town. (Although in twenty years’ time, the daughter of Reverend Barnes would accuse him of doing to her, in childhood, unspeakable things, and then there would be a great deal of gossip, Reverend Barnes subsequently losing a number of congregants, and retiring a bit early.) Anyway, no one much minded today when the buzzer rang and it was time to return to their desks.

In the far corner Fat Bev and Dottie worked quietly, Bev keeping a cautious eye on her friend, ready to murmur a word of support when she saw tears brim up in Dottie’s eyes. “Hang in there, Dot,” she said now. “It’ll get better. Time helps. Time always helps.”

Dottie smiled. “The way to eat an elephant,” she said. “But I got some indigestion with this one, I can tell you.”

“Sure you do.” Bev shook her head in sympathy. “Let’s call Isabelle. See what she’s up to today.”

But Isabelle wasn’t home. She had taken Amy to get her hair trimmed. “Shaped,” Isabelle was telling the woman at Ansonia’s Hair Salon, “just see if it can’t be shaped a bit.” The woman nodded silently and steered Amy toward the back to get shampooed, while Isabelle sat up front flipping through magazines she found there. In two days Amy would start school again; they were going shopping for clothes after her hair was done. Meanwhile Isabelle held an open magazine on her lap and stared out the window at the people walking by. It always seemed to her odd to be out in the world on a workday; it surprised her each time to see how much life went on outside the office room: people walking into the bank, holding closed their sweaters or jackets on this chilly
day; two mothers pushing strollers down the sidewalk; a man stopping to check in his pocket for a slip of paper that he glanced at before starting to walk again. Where were these people headed? What were their different lives like?

Amy, draped in a plastic cape, was staring straight ahead in the mirror while the woman clipped away. Still wet, her hair looked dark and short, but when the blow-dryer whirred Isabelle could see Amy’s hair begin to fluff out in a curved shape below her ears, the different shades of blond and gold appearing again. She was gratified to notice the momentary pleasure in the girl’s face. The new hairstyle made her look grown-up; startling to see the girlishness gone. The hairdresser, pleased with the outcome, said, “Let’s just put a touch of makeup on.”

“Oh, go ahead,” Isabelle called out from her chair, seeing Amy’s reticence and knowing that it of course stemmed from the imagined disapproval of her mother. Isabelle smiled and nodded again, then looked out the window once more. Awful to think she was a disapproving mother. Awful to wonder—had she always frightened Amy? Is that why the girl had grown up so fearful, always ducking her head? It was bewildering to Isabelle. Bewildering that you could harm a child without even knowing, thinking all the while you were being careful, conscientious. But it was a terrible feeling. More terrible than having Avery Clark forget to come to her house. Knowing that her child had grown up frightened. Except it was cockeyed, all backwards, because, thought Isabelle, glancing back at her daughter,
I’ve been frightened of you
.

Oh, it was sad. It wasn’t right. Her own mother had been frightened too. (Isabelle’s foot was bobbing quickly, in tiny little jerks.) All the love in the world couldn’t prevent the awful truth: You passed on who you were.

Isabelle put the magazine back in the rack.
Dear Evelyn
, she composed in her head.
Many years have passed, and I hope this letter finds you in good health. May I apologize for once again intruding in your life …

She looked up, startled at the young woman standing before her, tall and unfamiliar, eyes blinking slowly once, twice. “Okay, Mom,” Amy said. “I’m done.”

They were shy with each other, uncertain, as they moved down the sidewalk. A nippy wind from the river lifted Isabelle’s skirt for a moment as they stood gazing in the window of a shoe store. “They’re kind
of expensive,” Amy said, as her mother indicated a pair in front of them.

“It’s all right,” Isabelle answered. “Try them on at least.”

The store was carpeted and empty, quiet as a church. The salesman bowed slightly and disappeared into the back to find a pair in Amy’s size.

“But do you think she would have told them about me?” Amy blurted out in a whisper, sitting down next to Isabelle. “I know you don’t know, but do you
think
she did?”

So it was this that had been on her mind, these busy thoughts about Jake Cunningham’s kids. “Honey, I don’t know.” Isabelle felt she had to whisper too. “I was a child the last time I saw that woman. I don’t know enough about her to know what she would do. I don’t know anything about her at all, really.”

“But you’ll write?”

“Yes, soon.” And then as the salesman returned, “Tonight.”

The man kneeled before Amy as he slipped the shoes on her feet; and then later, when he took them in their box up front to the register, Amy said, “The girl’s name was Callie?”

“Yes, short for Catherine, I believe.”

“Callie Cunningham,” said Amy, running her fingers through her newly shaped hair. “Boy, that’s just so cute.”

ISABELLE REWROTE THE letter many times that night, and mailed it the next day. After that there was nothing to do but wait. A terrible thing to wait for a letter; each day formed around the morning of hopefulness and the evening’s fog of disappointment. It was a wound, the disappointment, inflicted every afternoon at the same time. The scant containings of a mailbox pulled open by Amy on her way up the driveway from school provided only a bill or two, a reminder from the dentist that Isabelle needed a cleaning. How dreary the world was when all that greeted one was the promise of a new set of luggage if you filled out a certain sweepstake form. How oddly silent this kind of rejection, a simple emptiness of space, a persistent arrival of quiet, a disk of “nothingness” surrounded by vapors of speculation. Perhaps Evelyn Cunningham didn’t live there anymore. (But the letter would be returned—Isabelle’s return address was there on the envelope.) Perhaps
the letter got lost in a post office or on the street, or was collecting dust right now beneath some Californian stairwell.

They stopped mentioning it after a while.

It rained a lot that fall. The rains were harsh and strong and steady, as though in a hurry to make up for the long pause of the stultifying summer. Now the river seemed immense, churning, roiling, thundering over the slabs of granite, its muddy darkness rushing beneath the bridge. It was tempting to stand and watch, and sometimes on the morning after a heavy rain a pedestrian or two could be seen leaning over the railing on the sidewalk of the bridge, staring down, as though mesmerized by the power of this river.

Isabelle, driving over the bridge on her way to work, would wonder fleetingly if the person was thinking of jumping. Even knowing that such a thing was unlikely (only once while she had been living in Shirley Falls had a person jumped off the bridge, a poor drunken man, late one night), she would watch for a moment in her rearview mirror, for Isabelle’s habit of expecting disaster had not left her—nor would it ever, entirely. No, Isabelle was still Isabelle.

And yet she was different, of course. She had to be: there were people in Shirley Falls now—Bev, Dottie, Amy—who knew that she had never been married, that she had become pregnant at the age of seventeen by her father’s best friend. It was like removing some dark undergarment that had been pressed to her middle for years; she felt exposed, but cleaner. Both Dottie and Bev, and Amy as well, had said they wouldn’t tell anyone, but Isabelle had only responded, “That’s up to you.” She didn’t want them bearing the burden of secretiveness—although she could not help wondering who, if anyone, they had told. Still, it was amazing after years of sitting tightly on this shame, how little she cared now if other people knew. Partly because Dottie and Bev, and even Amy, had not seemed to judge her the way she thought they would, but mostly Isabelle had other things on her mind.

Like Amy. She hurt for Amy. It was searing, at times terrible, when she saw the quiet anxiety in Amy’s eyes. Having spent the long hot summer reeling from Amy’s betrayal, Isabelle entered the shortened days of autumn with a sickening sense sometimes that Amy had only narrowly missed some very grave danger, and that far from Amy’s having “betrayed” Isabelle, it was closer to the truth the other way around. The
memory of the evening she had cut off Amy’s hair rose in her mind at times now with an increased sense of dismay; that she had done it was irrevocable, and it was the starkness of that fact which bothered her the most.
What we do matters
is a thought Isabelle had again and again, as though just now, well into adult years, she was figuring this out.

But there were times, too, when Amy’s face was clear, her eyes steady in their gaze, the new hair shaped around her chin, and Isabelle caught a glimpse of who Amy might become, who she might already be, and it was reassuring, comforting.

And then of course there was Avery Clark, and of course that was weird. He had not mentioned again the forgotten invitation, and she had no idea if he thought of it. But when he returned to work after being laid up with a bad cold toward the end of September, Isabelle brought him a basket of oranges.

“Look at that,” Avery said, when she put the basket down on his desk. “Isn’t that nice.” His nose was flaky, and very red.

“Well,” said Isabelle. “I thought you could use the vitamin C.”