For Love (33 page)

Lottie lets the pen lie on her lap. She looks for a long time at her mother. ‘I wish I could help you, Mother,’ she says finally.

‘I want my Charlotte,’ the old woman says expressionlessly, not looking at her.

‘I know,’ Lottie says. She has an impulse to touch her mother again, but she doesn’t. She feels intimately chastised by all this. She is, after all, a stranger, isn’t
she? with no such rights. ‘I know,’ she says again.

And they sit that way, silently, until the nurse comes to get her mother for lunch. The old woman’s eyes have closed again, her head has jerked and dropped. Lottie has watched her draw
away into sleep, has thought about leaving but somehow hasn’t. She’s sat in the little square room with the two beds, the two chairs, and listened to the puff and mutter of her
mother’s dogged, regular breathing.

Now she follows the nurse’s aide and her shuffling mother down the hall. The nurse’s aide, a teenager, holds her mother’s hand comfortably, as though they were schoolgirl
friends. She calls her ‘Ella’ and tells her the menu slowly and in great detail. She is so thorough that Lottie thinks of her as a kind of parody of a pretentious waiter explaining the
day’s preparations in some snazzy restaurant. Her mother gives no indication of hearing her, but she moves along without protest.

When Lottie says goodbye, the nurse’s aide smiles and says a loud, seemingly corporate goodbye back, but Lottie’s mother says nothing. She doesn’t look at Lottie either.

It isn’t until Lottie steps outside and the damp air brings her the odor of the sea, of grass, that she realizes how heavy the smells of Lysol and wax, of floral air perfume, in the home
were. Walking back to the car, she is most aware of simple relief: to be out here, in this mild air, not that; to be free, to be free of her mother. Not to be the one who will visit her again next
Saturday and the Saturday after that.
Never,
she thinks. Never again.

And then she is overwhelmed by a sense of loss that includes her father too, the few treasured images she has of him, the thought that she might, one day, have understood from her mother, from
Cam, something about who he was. Her face tightens, she breathe slowly until she’s in control of herself. Okay? Okay.

And then the question: Where to?

Home again, home again, she supposes. Such as it is.

Her pretend home. Her mother’s real one.

The pretend Charlotte, the fake, goes to the real home. She smiles grimly and starts the car. ‘The real Lottie goes to her pretend home,’ she says. She drives on the narrow, curving
roads, pondering the layers of confusion of real and imaginary. And what about being the unrecognized Charlotte taking dictation for an imaginary Charlotte whom
she
can’t imagine; from
a mother she knows is her own mother, but who has lost her motherness – if she ever had it – when she lost the ability to know ‘Charlotte’? Who is her mother anymore? As Cam
asked in a different way, she thinks, when he asked what there was to forgive anymore.

It makes Lottie think of Jack, of course, of Jack and Evelyn. The question of who she was when she wasn’t his old Evelyn anymore, but was still there, still alive, and needed him and
wanted his love and attention. Did he love Evelyn then? Or someone else? And if this Evelyn loved Jack, without being able really to know a Jack anymore, who was it that she loved? Who was it that
made her cry out in joy – that Evelyn with cropped dark hair, drunkenly tilted in her wheelchair – when ‘Jack’ came home each night?

And who is it that Jack loves now that that Evelyn is dead? Not her, surely, but perhaps some ancient Evelyn who contains a long-ago Jack too? The way her mother’s idea of
‘Charlotte’ contains everything lost to her: home, herself, memories of her husband, Cameron, Lottie — maybe even the happy thought of booze, the little jelly jars, the sticky
circles they left everywhere.

What becomes of love when it stretches this way, to hold so much loss?

When Lottie held her mother, touched her, she felt for a few seconds what it might be like to love her as she is, she pitied her so. As she drives along, thinking of this, she feels she
understands, perhaps, fractionally, what Jack talked about when he said he learned by holding Evelyn, by touching her, how to love her again in a different way. Lottie thinks perhaps she could be
that kind of person too — it seems possible to her momentarily that she could learn to love that way, to reshape herself and her feelings.

But then she thinks of her relief when she got free, of her hunger to be gone. That mean eagerness to be solitary, insular, that rises again and again and again in her life.

She’s on the expressway by now, approaching Boston; and she decides abruptly to get off at East Berkeley Street, to check Cameron’s apartment once more on her way home. She signals
and exits. She circles back to Cameron’s building and parks.

She rounds the corner and goes into Cam’s dark entryway. She begins the long climb up the concrete stairs again. Behind the door on the second floor a woman is crying steadily, a hopeless
drone of despair that recognizes no possibility of comfort. Lottie stops momentarily, her own throat clotting. She remembers abruptly a little boy she saw on the train in Chicago one day, crying
like this. He was black, he was maybe two and a half or three, and he was with his mother, who couldn’t have been more than a child herself, seventeen or eighteen. He was sitting on her lap,
and as Lottie watched, he began, simply, to cry. His mother was wearing a Walkman so she couldn’t hear him — not that he made much noise over the clatter of the train anyway. But Lottie
watched as the tears landed on the girl’s hand, as she lifted it and looked at the drops; then she wiped the wet off on her jeans and looked out the window. She never bent to the little boy,
she never said anything to him. And after five minutes or so, he stopped. He just stopped crying. Lottie had thought at the time she had rarely seen anything so terrible in her life; and the sound
of this crying, which follows her as she climbs the stairs, brings the memory of it back to her. She has to stand for a minute or so outside Cameron’s door to compose herself before she
knocks.

She knocks several times, louder each time. There’s no response, so once again she goes down the hall and gets the key. She lets herself in and again, absurdly, checks everywhere in the
apartment for him, in case – she supposes this has to be the reason – Cam is hiding from her.

As she’s standing in the bedroom doorway, the telephone rings. It knocks her heart, and she’s almost breathless as she picks it up.

‘Yes?’ she says. ‘This is Cameron Reed’s residence.’

There’s a startled silence. Then: ‘Is Mr Reed there?’ It’s a woman’s voice, a woman probably around her age. Not Elizabeth.

‘No. He’s not right now. Could I –’ she reached for the pad and pen by the answering machine – ‘could I take a message?’

‘Well. Actually. When will he be in, do you think? When do you expect him?’ The voice is cultivated, very New Englandy.

‘I can’t really say. I . . . This is his sister, and I don’t really know his schedule that well. I could leave him a note.’

‘No. I think I’d rather not do that.’

Lottie waits, but the woman offers nothing else. Finally Lottie says, ‘Well, I’m sorry not to be more helpful.’

The woman says, ‘I have this other number for him. Maybe his work number? Do you think he might be there?’

‘He might. It’s probably his store. He owns a bookstore. But he wasn’t there earlier today. I’m not sure where he is at the moment, actually. He’s had a kind of . .
. crisis in his life. But you could try there, certainly.’

She can hear the woman sigh. She says, ‘You’re his sister?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you know about . . . this accident he was involved in?’

‘Yes. Who is this, please?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m Dorothea Laver. I’m Jessica Laver’s mother. You know, the girl . . .’ She trails off.

Lottie experiences a sense of helpless shock that seizes her speech for a moment. Then she says, ‘Oh. I am sorry. I’d met Jessica. I was just so . . . so sorry to learn about her
death.’

‘Well. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. But you know, I was calling . . . You see, Mr Reed had told the police I might call. I wanted just to talk to him, to ask him a few
things.’

‘Yes, I talked to the police too, when they were trying to reach him, and they told me you might. Call Cameron.’ Lottie’s talking too fast. She’d do anything to help.

‘Did your brother . . . ? Did Mr Reed, by any chance, talk to you about it? About the accident?’

‘No. I haven’t . . . actually –’ she slows herself down, willfully – ‘had time to talk to him at any length about it.’

‘I see.’ Lottie can hear the woman’s controlled breathing for a few seconds. ‘Well . . . I don’t mean to be ghoulish, to make him dwell on it, or anything. Or to
intrude on what must be very hard for him too. Just that it’s, of course, it’s much on my mind. I felt I needed to know . . . how it was for Jessica. And he was the only one with her,
you know. And he did say. To the police. He wouldn’t mind.’

‘No, I know that.’ Lottie is astonished at the woman’s politeness, her graceful composure. Her concern for Cam and his privacy. Perhaps it’s a form of shock, she thinks.
It makes Lottie pity her even more than tears would.

‘Well, maybe . . . you could tell him I called. I would appreciate that. And maybe I will leave him my number. It’s . . . do you have a pen?’

‘Yes. I’ve got one.’

She dictated the number, and Lottie wrote it down. ‘And please, be sure to say that I don’t blame him. That I understand completely that Jessica . . . well, perhaps you don’t
know this part, but she’d had a lot to drink, I’m afraid. That it was . . . that while it wasn’t her fault, exactly . . .’

‘Oh no!’ Lottie cries. She feels undone at this. It’s too much.

‘But, genuinely, an accident. And I know that. I want to assure your brother I understand that. I simply don’t hold him responsible, and that won’t be any part of our
conversation.’

‘I’ll tell him that.’

But Jessica’s mother seems to want to go on, to keep talking. ‘Apparently she had a crush, I guess you’d say, on some boy in the neighborhood. Elizabeth – Mrs Butterfield
– do you know her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Elizabeth said she thought it was possible Jessica was going down the street, maybe going to see him. She’d been writing a letter about him, to a friend, a letter we found in her
room. So you see. And I had just wanted to ask Mr Reed, to ask your brother, if he could tell. What she was doing out there. And to be sure she didn’t have any . . .’ Her voice pinched
down. ‘Well. Pain.’ She cleared her throat.

‘I understand. I’ll leave him your number. I’ll tell him all this.’

‘You’re very kind.’

‘No. No, not at all.’

‘Well, thank you, then.’

‘Of course.’

Lottie sits for a while on the bed. She’s heartstruck for Jessica’s mother; but, after several minutes, suddenly nearly breathless with anger too, at Elizabeth. For lying, for
offering Ryan to this woman as the reason for Jessica’s death.
He was not,
she wants to say.

But of course, she wouldn’t have said that. She won’t. How could she? And what would it matter to Dorothea Laver anyway? Maybe it’s better, actually, for her to believe
Elizabeth, that Jessica was outside because of her crush on Ryan, rather than to know that she was there at Elizabeth’s bidding, carrying her tawdry message to Cam.

Suddenly it all seems so useless, so horrible. And Lottie is aware again, as she’s been able to be only sporadically, that someone has died, that Jessica is dead.

She feels angry again at Cameron too. All this should be central to him. He should be helping this woman. Where is he? She writes a quick note on the pad and sets it down by the machine on the
bedside table. She looks for a moment at the machine, turned off now, the dark dead eye of the message signal. She reaches over abruptly and flicks it on. The dot lights up, ruby. It begins to
blink steadily. After a few seconds, she pushes the button for messages. The tape winds back for a long time, then clicks several times and begins. It’s Elizabeth’s voice, sounding hard
and urgent. ‘Cameron. Cameron, this is Elizabeth. I just want to say to you—’

Cameron breaks in: ‘I’m here. It’s me, Elizabeth.’

There’s a sharp intake of breath. Then: ‘You shit!’ Her voice is low but holds great rage. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘I knew you saw me.’ Cam’s voice is oddly buoyant – a kind of bitter exultance.

‘Of course I saw you. Of course I goddam well saw you. I’m just thankful Lawrence didn’t. What is wrong with you? How could you do such a thing?’

‘I just wanted to see it. You with him. To make myself look at it.’

‘At us in bed?’

Lottie leans forward, toward the machine. Her heart is pounding.

‘You with him, yes.’

‘What, you didn’t believe me? You couldn’t take my word? What is it with you? I can’t believe it. I just find you . . . You are preposterous.’

‘Am I?’ His voice loops higher. ‘I don’t think so, Elizabeth. I don’t think I’m the preposterous one. Not at all.’

Elizabeth’s voice, too, has risen, and now it drops again. She’s nearly whispering. ‘Look, I wrote you. I told you. I explained everything. It’s done. It’s
over.’

Where was she, saying this? Lottie wonders. In the little hallway with the telephone table off the kitchen? Upstairs somewhere?

‘I was concerned about you,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I was very, very nice. But I will not have you sneaking around my mother’s house in the dead of night, do you get it?
That’s beyond the pale. Do you understand me?’

There’s a silence. Lottie can hear Elizabeth’s shallow, fast breathing. Her own mouth has dropped open.

‘That’s not a good way to talk to me, Elizabeth.’ Cam has made his voice calm again, but Lottie can hear the strain in it.

‘How do you expect me to talk to you? There’s no other way to talk to you.’

‘We need to talk reasonably.’

‘We could, if you knew how.’