Sweetwater Creek (12 page)

(“Oh, honey in the rock.”)

She reached the barn and slammed the big double doors open and went in, blinking in the sudden musty darkness. It smelled of hay, even though no horses had lived in it for a very long time. Hay and dust and pungent smells of the medicines kept there for the dogs, and clean, dry pine straw for their beds. The only smell that was missing was the one she had come running for: the sweet smell of young dog with sun and dust caught in his blazing curly hair.

Emily walked slowly to the far end of the barn, where the old salt tray had been. Where she had left Elvis. In the mote-dancing slants of sunlight from the gap in the back door, she could see clearly. Elvis was not in the barn.

He would never leave where I left him, she thought numbly. She’s got him. She came in here and got him and took him up to that fucking apartment, and she’s locked him in with her.

“Fuck is not cute for almost-teenagers,” Buddy said, far down.

“You laughed the first time I said it.”

“Yeah, but you were eight years old.”

“I don’t care. I’m going up there and get him, and I’m going to tell her to leave my dog the hell alone. Let her buy herself a dog if she wants one. She could buy this whole damned kennel without blinking an eye.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“I DON’T CARE!”

She ran back out into the sunlight, borne on fury, and clumped up the steps to Lulu’s apartment. The door was closed, but she did not care about that, either. She jerked it open.

She took a step into the room, and then stopped. She saw an insane kaleidoscope of images: drifting, filmy white hangings; a small forest of green plants; a bookcase wall full of books and sound equipment; a rolled-up rug and a pile of bright pillows tossed in a corner beside a small coral slipper chair, turned to the wall; a narrow, pretty painted bed. Lulu sat on the bed, her knees drawn up to her chin, rocking back and forth as though wounded in the stomach. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her mouth was open in a square retching rictus of pain, like a crying child’s. But she was not crying, merely rocking silently back and forth. Rocking, rocking—with her arms around Elvis. He sat still in her embrace, his muzzle pressed into her shoulder. When she rocked, he rocked with her. When Emily came into the room he raised his head and whined softly, but he did not move. Lulu didn’t, either.

Emily went back down the stairs and out into the sunlight, walking slowly and stiffly so that she would not fall into the abyss that had opened in the earth. She was not surprised. She knew somehow that she had always known it was there, but she had never seen it because until now she had had companions to shield her. Buddy, for as long as he could. Elvis, always.

Nobody now. She could feel a rattling, too-cool breath on the back of her neck, and from the depth of the abyss, cold wind, blowing upward. From the sky above her, only endless, empty iron-blue space.

“This is what it is to be alone,” Emily thought, putting one foot precisely in front of the other on the narrow bridge over blackness. Her heart slammed with terror, rang like a hollow bell with loss. “Buddy, where are you?” she whispered. He did not answer.

When she reached the front screened door, there was a note stuck on it with a Band-aid, from her aunt:

“Your father and I have gone over to Edisto Beach to pick up the boys. Their car broke down, and nobody was around to give them a ride. I’m sorry not to be home when you get back. I thought I should take the opportunity to have another talk with your dad. I know he hurt you today. Take a nap and we’ll work it out when I get home. Cut him whatever slack you can, Emily. He really does not understand.”

“I will cut him no slack,” Emily thought, going quietly up the stairs to her room. She walked steadily and mechanically, one foot in front of the other. “I will cut him no slack ever again. I will not cut Miss Gotrocks Foxworth any, either. I don’t care what’s the matter with her. They sure as hell don’t cut me any. He’s got my future all tied up neat, or thinks he has. And she’s got my dog. So we will not work it out. Not this time. I’m not going through all that stupid hiding and preaching and he said, she said. He’s not going to give me any more rules. I’m going to pretend it never happened. I won’t talk about it even if he tries to, even if Aunt Jenny tries to make him. I’m going to be quiet and polite, and simply ignore him when I can. It’s only for a few more years. If I have to be alone, I’ll just learn to be. Lots of people do. And I’ll get my dog back. And I’ll get rid of Lulu. Nobody stays forever. Nobody.”

Calm certainty and a feeling of strength and competence rose from some cell deep inside that she had never known she had, and walked with her into her room. It stayed with her while she pulled the long curtains against the glare off the river and skinned out of her loathsome lady clothes and put on the worn old G
OD
I
S
D
OG
S
PELLED
B
ACKWARD
T-shirt. It sank with her onto her bed.

And then the calm whirled away into the abyss, and Emily fell after it. Turning and turning, falling and falling. Into darkness deeper and emptier than she could ever have imagined. Her mouth full of wind, her heart jolting slower and slower.

She grabbed her pillow in both arms and pressed her face into it and scrubbed it back and forth, smelling sweet soap and sunshine from the line outside. And she erupted into the hardest weeping she had ever known. It tore her throat and flooded her lungs with salt. For a long time she could not breathe, and when she finally could, she sobbed and gasped and wailed and howled aloud, but only the old down pillow received the grief.

“I want my mother,” Emily cried over and over again. “I want my mother!”

It is true that you can literally cry yourself to sleep, and Emily did, into a sleep so profound and sucking that she did not move for more than two hours, and when she did, the muscles of her legs and arms ached. She lay, cradled in clinging drowsiness, feeling at her side and into her neck a soft, heavy warmth that soothed and comforted, promised safety, promised cherishing.

Half mired in sleep, Emily smiled.

“Mother…”

Elvis.

Emily woke fully, and reached for him. She felt his wet nose in her ear.

“Thank you for coming back,” she whispered to him, her anger at him gone on the flood of tears.

An hour later, as the brilliance was seeping out of the day and a cool dusk was coming in, Emily stood at her bedroom door, bathed and dressed in soft, faded-to-white blue jeans and a new pink T-shirt, the damped-down fire of her hair pulled back into a pony tail. Elvis sat at her side, panting happily and thumping his stumpy tail on the floor.

“Remember,” she whispered to him. “None of it happened. He doesn’t matter to us anymore. We’ll be very polite because it’s the easiest thing to do, and in a few more summers we’ll be gone. You think of a place you’d like to live, and I will, too.”

And she went out into the twilit hall and down the stairs to dinner. They were standing on the last step, girl and dog, when there was a light rapping on the screen door. Walter Parmenter came out of the kitchen to answer it. Lulu Foxworth stood there, dressed in sleeveless white, her silver hair a waterfall straight to her bronze shoulders, her cheeks hectic with spots of color over the tan. Her eyes glittered and her lips, without lipstick, were curved up in a child’s tentative smile. Her lavender scent curled through the screen into the foyer.

“Does the invitation to dinner still stand?” she said.

LATER THAT YEAR
, Emily told Lulu that when she saw her walk into the foyer on that first night, in her candlelight white, her first thought had been, “Oh, great. The dinner from hell. Well, at least I can tell Elvis about it, and Buddy. And there don’t have to be any more of them.”

“I bet you hated me,” Lulu said comfortably when Emily told her this.

“No, I just…yes. I did,” Emily said.

“I don’t blame you,” Lulu smiled. She was smiling a lot more by then. “I must have seemed like a cuckoo in the nest.”

Emily looked at her inquiringly.

“It’s a nasty habit of cuckoos to lay their eggs in other birds’ nests so they’ll have to raise the babies. And when the eggs hatch, it’s obvious that the babies are strange and alien, and don’t belong. But the mother birds raise them, anyway. It’s like…a stranger coming into the middle of your family and taking everything.”

Emily shivered. It was, for some reason, an eerie thought. It made her think, for the first time in months, of changelings.

“You don’t seem like that now,” she said to Lulu. “You seem just like a big sister.”

“You don’t need a big sister,” Lulu said. “Way too bossy and judgmental. You need a friend. I’d much rather be that.”

“Okay,” Emily muttered shyly. “Only I don’t know why, when you have so many others. And they’re all your age. I’m just a kid.”

“You know things most adults don’t ever even think of. You care about the same things I do. That’s a lot of what a friend really is. And you’re strong. I felt that the minute I met you. You don’t know how much I’ve needed that this summer. And you share your world, and you don’t judge. Those are very grown-up things, Emily. I can’t name one of my so-called friends who has them all.”

“I’m not strong,” Emily thought. “I’ve never been strong. Don’t even say it. Don’t expect it. It scares me.”

But no matter what anyone else said about suitability and don’t-bother-Lulu-all-the-time, she knew she had a friend in Lulu Foxworth. It did not matter why.

It began, tenuously and falteringly, at that first dinner that Lulu shared with them. Despite Walter’s hovering heartiness, and the twins’ preening (Lulu said long after that they were pumping testosterone out into the air, like fog) and her own sullen silence, a small, tough rootling was planted that night, and it clung tenaciously to its life. Before she left, Lulu had all the Parmenters laughing, even, unwillingly, Emily. Lulu in her storyteller mode was irresistible. She might have been the Sybil appointed by the tribe to sit by the fire in the mouth of the cave and tell them, without frightening them in the least, about the world outside the cave. Soon they were clamoring for more, for the Sybil’s stories both explained the unexplainable and defanged it with laughter.

So it was with Lulu Foxworth.

When she first came in and sat down with them in the little breakfast room, she was hectically flushed, as if she might have a fever, and her eyes glittered, and she was trembling all over, a fine, almost unnoticeable tremor. But in a way it was all charming; no one had ever seen Lulu this animated and the tremor made it seem as if she was so eager to please them all that it made her anxious.

She sat by Jenny Raiford, with Walter on her left, and she lit the dim little room like a fire. Beside her, Jenny looked, as usual, elegant and as fine-drawn as a young doe, but oddly muted, as if she had been outlined in sepia.

Walter Parmenter, in his swelling pride and fatuity, looked like a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Or at least, he did in Emily’s mortified eyes. The boys looked, simply, like squat cave drawings. Across the table from Lulu Foxworth, Emily suffered over her farcical family.

Aunt Jenny had made shrimp and grits because the twins had been down to the pier at Folly Beach and brought home a dripping croaker sack of the sweet brine shrimp of the Lowcountry. Walter Parmenter apologized for serving his guest such pedestrian fare, but Lulu, catching the swift arrow of hurt in Jenny’s eyes, said, “There’s nothing that says ‘home’ to me like shrimp and grits. Our old cook Lutetia made it every Saturday and holiday morning, at home and at Maybud, and if you didn’t like it, that was just tough. I loved it, but it wasn’t as good as yours is, Mrs. Raiford. What’s different? I can’t quite tell….”

“Call me Jenny,” Jenny Raiford said. “I start with fresh shrimp and John’s Island tomatoes, when I can, and make a sauce instead of using ketchup, and I throw in a little of whatever’s growing in my herb garden. Right now it’s thyme and cilantro. I don’t think anybody but me likes the cilantro, but the cook gets to choose.”

“Well, I love it,” Lulu said. “All I ever knew how to make it with was ketchup, because that’s what Lutetia used. One winter when we were all about in the ninth grade at Charlotte Hall our mothers were playing bridge at the Yacht Club and decided that we should all learn to cook. I think we were all bored and driving them crazy. So they hired the cook from the Yacht Club whose shrimp and grits was widely admired and got her to meet in one or another of our kitchens after school one day a week all that winter, and she showed us how to make real Lowcountry dishes. Or so she said. Shrimp and grits was the first. We all had to make our own batch—I remember it was at our house on Legare—and we used every pot and pan in the kitchen, and it looked like a slaughterhouse when we were through because of all the ketchup mess.

“The deal was that the Yacht Club would put our shrimp and grits on the menu for the next Sunday brunch, and so the cook went off with a potful on the Friday before that Sunday, and our mothers called everybody they knew to come and eat the shrimp and grits that their charming little Charlotte Hall girls had made. And since Charleston is nothing if not supportive of its clans, and since everybody is related to everybody else in town, the dining room was packed.”

“I’ll bet it was a great success,” Walter said, nodding appreciatively. “I’ve been telling Emily right along she should learn some classic Charleston specialties. Maybe you could give her a little lesson.”

Lulu smiled at him, and then at Emily, and, incredibly, winked. It was just the brush of a fan of gold-tipped lashes very briefly on her cheek, and Emily did not know if anyone else saw it, but she did.

“I’m not sure I’m quite the right person, Mr. Parmenter,” Lulu smiled. “We’d swacked the sauce with as much gin as we could steal from our parents’ liquor cabinets, and everybody commented on how unusual and tasty it was. Of course, half of them couldn’t walk when they got up. Mrs. Burton Triplett Sr. fell down the front steps and lay there laughing like a hyena, and she was ninety-three at the time. All of us were under house arrest for the rest of the semester. The cooking lessons were hastily abandoned, and the next siege we underwent was bridge. On the whole, I liked the cooking better.”

The Parmenters all burst into laughter, even Emily. Walter looked faintly scandalized, but he laughed, too. Apparently not all Charleston debutantes were perfect wives-in-training.

It was that night that Emily sensed that Lulu Foxworth might become an ally.

They stayed late at the table, later than Emily could ever remember. Usually they were up and away by seven o’clock for the mandatory hour of TV togetherness that Jenny had instituted. But on this night it was near nine before Jenny rose, interrupting another gale of laughter at one of Lulu’s downtown dialogues, as she came to call them.

“Lulu, dear, this crowd could and would sit here and monopolize you all night, but I know how early you and Emily get up, and we must not keep you any longer,” she said, smiling.

Lulu clapped a hand over her mouth.

“You know, the one thing I hate most about Southern women is how they run on, and here I am doing it,” she said. “I am
so
embarrassed. I guess it’s because you’re all such good listeners, and nobody in my crowd pays any attention to me. They just say, ‘Oh, well, that’s just Lulu.’ So I appreciate your indulgence and I promise not to hold you captive ever again.”

“We’re willing captives,” Jenny said. “We’ll do it again anytime you want to. We’ve all learned more about old Charleston in two hours than we have in all our lives. Next time we’ll just start earlier.”

“Oh,” Lulu said ruefully. “I hope there is a next time.”

A chorus of Parmenter voices assured her there would be.

“I hope we can make it a regular affair,” Walter said, beaming at her. And then, turning to Emily, “You listen to Lulu. You can learn all you need to know about the kind of life I want for you from her. You can learn to be a lady.”

Emily felt her cheeks heat. Anger flared up again. Anger at her father, anger at Lulu.

“I’m not a lady,” she said, not looking at anyone. “I’m a river-swamp kid with dirty shoes.”

“You’ve got the makings of something better than a lady,” Lulu said seriously to Emily. “You’ve got the makings of a terrific woman. That’s something I just know. But you’re right about one thing. You sure have got dirty shoes. So have I, for that matter. Would you do me the honor of walking me home in your dirty shoes? I’d like to see what you think of my nest, as my mother insists on calling it.”

The anger faded. Liking stood trembling off at the edge of Emily’s consciousness, waiting to creep in.

“Sure,” she said nonchalantly. “Can Elvis come?”

He was nowhere to be found. But when they had walked through the warm, mothy darkness to the pool of dim light that illumined the entrance to the barn’s staircase, Elvis was waiting for them, thumping his tail and grinning.

“What are you doing here?” Emily asked him, not at all pleased to see him back at the fringe of Lulu’s domain.

“He knows where you are all the time,” Lulu said. “I’ve noticed that. I’ll see him get up and start off in one direction or another, and in a minute, there you are. It’s uncanny. Have you been casting spells on dogs, Emily?”

“He’s always just kind of done that,” Emily said, scratching Elvis’s ears. “It’s like he’s sort of my brother or something.”

“Good brother to have,” Lulu said. “Elvis makes three; you’re lucky. I’m an only child. I think I would have loved having a brother.”

“I had four, counting Elvis. And you would have loved having Buddy. And he’d like you, too,” she thought, to her surprise.

But she said nothing. She wasn’t ready to share Buddy with Lulu Foxworth.

They groped their way up the old staircase. It needed a much stronger light, Emily noticed. For some reason, the knowledge shamed her. Lulu could not have been used to such negligence. She would tell Jenny; Jenny would see to it.

At the top of the staircase Lulu unlocked the newly glossy door and pushed it open.

“Ta-daaa!” she said.

Emily walked into the apartment and stood still, at first unable to process it. Under this strange new vision of fluttering white and shining bare wood and small flares of color and rioting green, she kept seeing the old apartment, weeping cobwebs over its decaying bones.

“Wow!” Emily said inadequately.

Lulu smiled at her. “Wow is right. At least it’s better now that I’ve sort of edited my mother’s version of it. Come on in.”

They moved into the big room that served as a bed–sitting room. Behind them Elvis whined, but did not come in until Emily said, “Oh, come on in. You’ve already…”

She did not finish. She did not want Lulu to know that she had seen Elvis here earlier in the day, a willing receptacle for her unknowable anguish.

Elvis came in and lay down on the small white rug beside the bed and laid his head on his crossed paws. Home, his position said.

“No, it’s not,” Emily thought to him.

He thumped his tail again.
I know.

Only one lamp was lit in the big room, on a low table beside the pretty little painted bed. The French one, Emily thought, remembering what Lulu’s mother had said on the day she had first seen the room. It’s like a kid’s drawing of flowers and vines. I’ve seen better than that at Wal-Mart. I could do that.

The narrow bed had an iron canopy, and clouds of what looked to be mosquito netting puddled on the polished cypress floor. A plain white cotton bedspread covered it, and there was only one pillow, also white. At the foot was folded a quilt, so faded with age that you could hardly make out its pattern of tiny blue flowers. Beside it, on the floor, a sumptuous drift of white fleece served as a rug, sheepskin perhaps, Emily thought. She had never seen a sheepskin rug. Sheep and warmth were not Lowcountry prerequisites. The rug was the only thing in the room that spoke of privilege. Even with only a narrow circle of light from the lamp, you could see that the room was as plain as a nun’s cell.

And yet…it was not. It drew you in like quicksand, promising peace and rest and dreamless sleep. A bank of tall green plants forested the wall behind the bed, and with the netting, nights here must be like sleeping in a toothless jungle. Old embroidered pillows were piled on a low sofa, which was covered with what looked to be another age-bleached quilt. The deep, small-paned windows, open now, were uncurtained, letting in moonlight or sunlight or stormlight or whatever flooded the marshes. There were a few plants in rough terra cotta pots on the windowsills, herbs, Emily thought. Aunt Jenny had similar ones in her garden. A plain wooden bookshelf covered the wall opposite the bed, crammed untidily with books. Emily’s chest tightened. Buddy had had one in his room that might have been this one’s twin. There was a little radio, a small cassette player, and a battered laptop on one of the shelves. These, plus a deep armchair and ottoman under the window, partly covered by a length of batik the colors of desert sand and adobe walls, were the only other significant furnishings in the room. Emily wondered where the raj procession of furnishings had gone.

On the last unadorned wall a large painting burned like a wildfire, turning the nun’s cell into something else entirely, something sensuous and half-hidden and throbbing with primal life. In it a jaguar unlike any that had ever padded the earth prowled through a fever dream of tropical foliage. Blood-red pyramids were silhouetted against an empty, murderous blue sky, and over them old, terrible birds wheeled and dove. A squat brown man held up a stone vessel to the sky, a vessel dripping red. Emily felt a surge of fear and heat and a fierce joy start deep in her stomach and spread out all over her. Overwhelming. Terrifying. Sweet. She turned to look at Lulu, almost expecting to see, instead of the thin golden blade of a girl she knew, a dark, half-naked priestess, chanting. The painting was totally unlike the trembling girl who had come to them, or this stark Mediterranean-washed room. And yet again…it was right. Emily thought of Lulu’s whisper she had only half heard on that first day that the Foxworths came. “Penitential.” If that was so, then here was the altar at which the penitent would kneel.