Sweetwater Creek (21 page)

Lulu turned her head back toward Emily. She seemed to really see her for the first time since she had wakened. The swimming blue eyes focused.

“For God’s sake, what am I thinking of? I can’t tell you this stuff. You’re not even thirteen years old. I shouldn’t tell anybody, but especially not you. With any luck you may never have to know about stuff like this. I ought to just get out of here and take my dirt with me, before I ruin you. I’ve done enough to you this summer.”

“I know about things like that,” Emily said. “There’s stuff written on the walls in the bathrooms at school that you wouldn’t believe. Pictures, too. I know what it means. And I’ve heard the boys talking when they didn’t know I was around. I know what people do—”

“No, you don’t,” Lulu said. Her voice had a little more energy now; the fishlike gasping had gone from her throat. Fresh tears started in her eyes.

“You don’t have any idea on earth about what we did, he and I. I didn’t know about it until I met him. I didn’t know stuff like that existed. There wasn’t anything he didn’t do to me, and I went back for more, and sometimes I begged him for it. At first I was so ashamed that I thought I would die, and then it got so that nothing mattered except that I see him again, be with him again. I knew what I had turned into and I didn’t care.”

Emily sat motionless, not speaking. She was nauseated. This was beyond embarrassment. This was a look into the terrible blackness that she had always known lay beyond the everyday world, but so far had never really surfaced, like a great black malformed shark that hovered always just below consciousness. She had never spoken of it, not even to Buddy. It shamed her in some obscure way that it hung inside her. She had always thought she was the only one in the world who harbored such a shark, but now Lulu was pulling another up from her own depths for Emily to see.

“I want somebody to take care of me,” Emily thought, the thought leaden with grief. “I want Buddy. I want my mother.”

Neither would come, of course, so she simply sat still and waited for Lulu to boat her monstrous fish.

“His family kept a little apartment in Charlottesville for when they visited him,” Lulu went on, her voice dead. “We’d go there. Every Friday I’d sign out and he’d pick me up just off campus and we’d go straight there. Most of the time we didn’t come out until early Monday morning, in time for me to make my first class. He kept a little food there, and a lot of liquor. Other things, too. He made me try them all. But it was only the liquor that took hold of me, that became an addiction. The liquor and him. During the week, while I went about my business like I always had, I was burning inside, dying for the minute that he would open the car door so I could climb in. The minute that he would look at me and touch me. The miraculous thing was that neither of us let our schoolwork go. I was hanging on by my teeth and nails, bleeding to death inside trying to maintain that normalcy. But what we were doing didn’t seem to affect him at all, not the liquor, not the drugs, not the…other stuff. He could go right back to UVA and ace another law exam, write another brilliant paper, visit other girls in their big river houses, charm their parents just like he did mine. I knew about the other girls. Southern schools are linked up like jungle drums. It didn’t matter, as long as I had those weekends. Later we started just staying on, two or three days longer after the weekend. I don’t know what he told his parents, or how he handled it with school. I told mine I was involved with so many extracurricular things that I really needed a blanket permission for all the times I had to go off campus. I think if I hadn’t just…stopped it, I would eventually have never left that horrible little apartment. I would have died there.”

“But you didn’t,” Emily said, just to toss something into the deadly silence. It seemed important that Lulu not sense her revulsion.

“No. I didn’t. One morning after we had been there for four days and had drunk I don’t know how much liquor and taken God knows how much of what, he got dressed and went out to class without even looking back at me, and I dragged myself to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. It was like seeing what I had become for the first time. I saw this degraded, dehydrated, yellow-pale, bruised and starved zombie woman whose eyes even then burned for the time he would come back, and behind her I could barely see what I had been when I met him. All that health and vitality and laughter and up-yours attitude. All that intelligence. That was what had gone out of me the first night I met him. The intelligence.

“And I knew that if I saw him even one more time I would die. I hitched a ride back to school and told everybody that I had the flu and to leave me alone, and I locked myself in and I sweated it out. It was beyond horrible. I wouldn’t put a rabid animal through that. I couldn’t do it again. It would kill me; it nearly did. I can hardly talk about it, even now. But one morning I looked in the mirror again and saw the ghost of that other girl, plainer this time, and I knew that I had to get totally away from him or he would find me and it would start all over again. So I called Mother and said I had been sick so long, and was so run down, that I needed to come home, and she came and got me, and the whole time I was home I was locked in my bedroom trying not to sneak a drink or pick up the phone and call him. She thought I was ‘resting up for the season.’ The goddamned Charleston season at Christmas, with all these balls and parties and luncheons and teas and houseparties. All the liquor. Endless, endless. I knew he would be at a lot of those parties, because the South is a tiny little world and he was a prince of it.

“I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t come out here with them and seen the dogs, and seen that maybe out here I could get back my sense of self-worth again. It was just such a clean, sweet, slow world. And it was good; if I worked as hard as I could all day with you and the dogs, and spent what time I could with you all at night so I wouldn’t be alone with that bottle sitting out here, I could remember how it felt to be me and start to find my way back.”

“Scheherazade,” Emily thought. “Cleta was right. She saw it first. Aunt Jenny saw it, too. She was doing a performance for us every night, so that we’d want her back the next night. So she wouldn’t have to die. And all the time we thought it was us she liked so much. I’ll never listen to her tell one of those stupid Charleston stories again. I’ll never sit at a table with her again. And she sure as hell will never borrow Elvis again. Let her find somebody else to clutch on to.”

As if she caught the thought, Lulu reached a trembling hand out to Emily.

“You all taught me how to start living again,” she whispered. “You all saved me in as real a way as there is. I’ve come to love you for that. All of you, and you most of all. You and the dogs are the best thing in my life now. If I have to go I’ll die very soon. I’m not strong enough yet. When it comes to him, I may never be. It’s as sick an addiction as there is in the world. Way worse than the liquor, though that’s bad enough.”

Emily made no move to take her hand, and Lulu dropped it and looked away again.

“I’ve ruined it all now, haven’t I?” she said faintly. “I can’t stay and take the chance of putting you through this again. I can’t look at Walter and know that he knows. But I can’t go home either; Mother would have him at the house before I could blink an eye. I thought I was safe here. But now he knows where I am. You aren’t ever really safe, are you?”

Emily knew this fear; the black terror of a freefall into nothing. It had been born in her with the sound of the door closing behind her mother. Tears burned her nose.

She reached over and picked Lulu’s hand up in hers. The girl in the bed seemed a wasted child.

“We just won’t let him come, then,” she said. “If he shows up, Daddy and the boys will just run him off—”

“They can’t know!” Lulu’s face contorted with anguish.

“Then the dogs and I won’t let him,” Emily said. “I’ll be with you all day when we work the dogs, and I’ll stay with you at night. Elvis and I will just spend the nights out here. We can tell everybody we’re reading late. Or you can tell them that you’re teaching me to be a lady…”

A specter of Lulu’s old smile flitted across her corpse’s face.

“Even Yancey couldn’t get past you and the dogs,” she said.

“Yancey? What kind of name is that?” Emily said belligerently. That sick, spoiled prince was not going to get by her.

“Yancey Byrd. It’s the kind of name that opens doors all over the United States.”

“Well, it’s not going to open this one,” Emily said, and went over to sit on the side of Lulu’s bed. Elvis grinned at her and licked her arm.

“Oh, God, I’m hiding behind a twelve-year-old girl and a spaniel,” Lulu said, beginning to cry again. “I can’t do this to you. I can’t let you do this for me…”

“Hush,” Emily said, brushing the wet gilt hair off Lulu’s wasted face. “Hush. It’s going to be all right.”

Deep down in her memory the words surfaced, glinting: someone had said that to her once, someone with a soft, slow voice. She could not remember if things had been all right, but the words had been a powerful amulet ever since.

“Everything’s going to be all right,” she said, making a gift of the words to Lulu.

In the brightening day, Lulu turned over in the linen sheets and slid back into sleep.

LULU CAME OUT
to the dog ring late that afternoon while Emily was finishing up the “sits” and “stays” for a new class of youngsters. They were a beautiful lot, born of pretty-faced Phoebe and sired by Elijah, Elvis’s father, known at Sweetwater as “The Hunk.” Elvis invariably sat quietly at the gate to the ring, watching as the young spaniels received the rules of their calling. He seldom moved, but once in a while, when a fractious baby romped away from the group, or a timid one hung back, he gave a short, gruff bark. The miscreants usually fell sweetly into line.

“I don’t need to be here at all,” Emily was saying to Elvis, who grinned and cocked his red head. “Why don’t you just take over?”

“He’d put us both out of a job in no time,” Lulu said, coming into the ring to stand beside Emily.

Emily looked at Lulu obliquely from under her lashes, dreading what she might see. The dread morphed swiftly into amazement and relief. Lulu stood smiling in the slanting sunlight, fresh in pressed white shorts and clean T-shirt, her skin scrubbed and shining. Her gilt hair was still damp, and she smelled of shampoo and the French lavender soap she used. Her eyes were clear and there seemed to be no more tremor in her hands. Elvis left his post by the gate and trotted over to her and bumped her leg with his head, looking up at her, tail flailing. The puppies, sensing release from their duties, swarmed over her shoes and worried the laces of her sneakers with their little needle teeth.

“Hi, guys,” she said, stooping to pick up an armful of wriggling puppy. “I hope you behave better than this for your aunt Emily. Otherwise you’ll turn into bench dogs and never see a marsh or a boat.”

Emily smiled at her in simple relief. Lulu had set the tone of the afternoon, and it was, after all, okay. More than okay. Her smile widened. Bench dogs, in a hunting dog’s world, were the pampered, effete creatures of the show ring, objects of scorn among the breeders and hunters of the Lowcountry.

“Not a chance,” she said. “If I don’t beat manners into them, Elvis will.”

The sun slanted lower now, in the dying of the summer, but it still bit into forearms and bare legs and dampened collars and underarms with sweat. After they had cleaned the dust from the puppies and deposited them back with their mothers, Lulu looked at Emily, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

“Let’s go see the dolphins,” she said. “There’s time before dinner.”

“It’s too late for them,” Emily said. “I’ve never seen them this late.”

“I think they’ll be there,” Lulu said, smiling at her. “I dreamed they were.”

They cut across the field and into the creek woods, which lay hot and still and silent at this hour, only a few autumnstunned bees droning, a few grasshoppers burring in the tall grass. The air smelled of dust and drying pluff mud. The mud hardly ever worked up a really lush, rich stench in this dreaming, suspended time between seasons. Everything would sleep, dry and warm, until nightfall.

When they reached Sweetwater Creek and the dolphin slide, Emily was surprised to see that the grooves in the little beach’s mud were still slick and damp.

“You dreamed right,” she said, and Lulu smiled.

They lay on their stomachs in the heat-curled ferns on the little bluff, not speaking, almost drowsing, waiting for the tide to retreat a bit further. Already the green cordgrass at the creek’s edge loomed high over the emptying sand bed, and the sea of green stretching to the western horizon was gilded with the dying light. When the dolphins burst into the creek they started up out of a drifting half-sleep. Lulu sat up straight, eyes spilling light. In a heartbeat the somnolent creek was full of splashing and murky storms of creek water. The big, shining fish made their usual choreographed wave, which surged onto the beach, but this time only a few frantic mullet were cast up before them. It was too late in the season for mullet. Most had left their holes and gone back to the sea.

But the dolphins followed the thrashing few up onto the sand, lying close-packed on their sides, as they always did, and picked off the fish one by one, in a lightning carnage. The one huge, cold black eye that was visible on all of them seemed to stare up at Emily and Lulu. The mandarin grins stayed in place even as mullet slid through them and vanished.

In a few seconds the wild, boiling water subsided and the dolphins ghosted away. But one stayed behind, lying on its side in the sand, its silvery duct-tape hide flashing with sunlight. It lay still, looking at them, smiling.

“Is he hurt, do you think?” Emily said. “I never saw one do that before.”

Lulu got up very slowly from the creek bank and climbed, nearly soundlessly, down to the beach. Still the dolphin lay there on its side. Without the rest of its ballet around it, in the transparent brown water, it looked enormous, as big as a whale. Slowly, slowly Lulu knelt on the sand beside it and reached out and touched the shining hide. The dolphin stayed still, grinning up at her, and then gave a huge heave and writhed backward into the creek and slid away. They stared after it in silence. From the bank, Elvis, who had been watching as motionless as a spaniel in a breed book, erupted off the bluff and down to the beach barking joyfully and launched himself in his beautiful copper arc into the water. Wet head up, he paddled strongly after the retreating fish until it had slipped deep into the dark, running depths and disappeared toward the sea. He grinned his doggy grin and swam back and scrambled up to them. He shook creek water in a glinting spray, and then sat down beside Emily, smiling up at her, panting.

“I was born for this,” the golden eyes said to her.

Emily hugged him and looked over at Lulu. She sat still, staring at the empty creek, tears on her tanned cheeks, smiling.

“It really is going to be all right, isn’t it?” she said softly. “First you said it would, and then the dolphins did, and now Elvis. Who could want more assurance than that?”

“Well, of course it is,” Emily said briskly. “I wonder why they came? Most of the mullet left a week ago.”

“To say good-bye,” Lulu said. “They came to see if we needed them anymore, and if we didn’t, to say good-bye.”

After that, they never spoke of the terrible night, not even obliquely. Emily thought about it, though. It was not that either one of them was embarrassed, it was just…over. It was as if some huge tectonic shift had taken place in the long dark, and Sweetwater was now an island of safety, moated around with magic. It’s going to be all right—As if, somewhere in that warm night, a great and formal shifting had taken place, and Emily had come into her power. Emily, the keeper of the moat. Emily the abbess, and Lulu the supplicant.

If Lulu sensed this, she never indicated it to Emily. Lying half-asleep late that night of the dolphins, Emily thought, “I didn’t know you could grow up in one night, but I did. And it wasn’t hard at all.”

At dinner that night, in the circle of Aunt Jenny’s candlelight, Emily picked at chicken and dumplings and probed her new grown-up thoughts. She seethed with impatience. Her father and brothers and aunt seemed silly children. She did not talk about the party the night before, even though Jenny Raiford urged her.

“Come on, Emmybug,” she said, smiling. “It’s the closest I’m ever likely to get to a to-do like that. Tell us about it.”

Around the table Walter and the boys looked at her, waiting. Tonight she might be just Emily, in jeans and clogs, her hair skinned back in its ponytail. But last night she had been something else altogether, a changeling in their nest, a strange, exotic girl who looked like a painting of their beautiful mother and went to parties in the legendary great houses of the Lowcountry. It was that girl they wanted to speak.

But Emily would not. It was too big and too life-changing, and she had no words for it and no wish to share it with anyone but Lulu.

“It was okay. It was nice,” she said, not looking up from her plate.

“It was more than that,” Lulu said. She sat in her usual place on Walter’s left, and she wore her usual cotton skirt and tank top, but to Emily she seemed to burn with an eerie swamp light. She wondered if the others saw it.

“It was a wonderful party and she was the belle of the ball,” Lulu went on. “She looked just gorgeous, and Grand adored her. She wants Emily to come and visit her again as often as she can. She says I can come along if I’ll be quiet and let Emily and her talk.”

Emily did not raise her head, but across the table she felt her aunt Jenny’s long, appraising look and the force of her father’s beaming pleasure.

“Well, at least I know what turns him on,” she thought. “All I’ve got to do is dress up like Mother and go to a damned party. Just like she did.”

“I’ve asked Emily to spend the nights with me for a while,” Lulu said. “There’s plenty of room—the bed’s a trundle—and I’ve got tons of books I want her to read and lots of music I think she should listen to. She’s been letting all that go for too long. We’ll probably be up late most nights, so I thought it would be easier if she stays there.”

There was a small silence. Emily looked sidewise at her father.

“Maybe I’ll even let her give me lady lessons,” she said.

“Well, I think it’s a fine idea,” Walter said heartily. “Just don’t let her get in your way, Lulu.”

“No problem with that,” Lulu said.

There was another silence, and then Lulu said, “Let us do the dishes tonight, Mrs. Raiford. We haven’t done them in ages. You put your feet up and watch TV with Walter.”

“Not tonight,” Jenny said. “You both had a late night last night. You can help another time.”

She got up and went into the kitchen. No one looked after her but Lulu. Lulu looked for a long moment. Then she looked back at the table and the talk swirled on. In the candlelight, she talked and talked and talked and they listened.

That night Emily slept in her bedroom for the last time. She would move her things to Lulu’s apartment the next day. For a long time she could not sleep, whether from the residue of the night before or from the sense of great change pressing her down, she could not tell. Elvis lay snugged tightly into the curve of her side, twitching every now and then in some doggy dream, and once whining. When Emily stroked him softly he sighed and subsided, wriggling a little to find a comfortable place. After that he hardly moved.

Outside her curtained window the moon hung huge and white and swollen with the coming autumn, and made the familiar shapes of Emily’s bedroom furniture stand out in bas-relief. Emily stared at them for a long time. Ever since she could remember they had been the landscape and boundaries of her nights; she could have found her way around the room if all her senses except touch were gone. Tonight they folded her in like a blanket. She moved restlessly in her bed and wondered what the night world in Lulu’s apartment would be like. Drifting white with moonlight and the gauzy drapings and the whitewashed walls, of course, but there were bound to be other things that would become her dark-time totems, her polestars. The wall of books, of course, so like the one in Buddy’s room, and the delicate camel’s back of the little sofa, and the spidery French writing desk under one window. They would, she thought, become comforting friends to share her nights, as her own things were. And then she thought of the great, savage painting that at once discomforted her and drew her eyes like wildfire. She hoped that her bed faced away from those wheeling black birds, and the great pyramid and the cold cobalt bowl of the sky. From the brown man with his red hands uplifted. She thought that if she got up in the nights those hands might reach for her.

“Don’t be silly,” she thought. “You loved that painting from the first time you saw it. Lulu loves it. Her grandmother does, too.”

But not at night, a deeper part of herself said. As cloistered as they were in the little apartment above the barn, they would not be protected from the red-armed priest and the diving birds. These were part of the room itself. They were shut in with them by the moat.

Then she thought of the familiar sounds of the kennels, and the droning cicadas off in the woods, and the ticking of warm rain on the barn roof, and Lulu’s soft, even breathing, and most of all, Elvis’s warmth against her. Elvis would let nothing touch her in the night.

Nevertheless, she felt a sudden stab of anxiety. She wanted to stay in this haven that was the only one she remembered.

“Do I have to give her everything?” she thought. And then: “Buddy?” reaching down to him, as she often had over the past summer. “Where are you? I need to talk to you.”

He did not answer. She had the sudden thought that perhaps he might not like Lulu’s apartment, would not come to her there; that the violence in which the past night had ended, and the new assurance that filled her, had stopped his voice.

“Maybe he thinks I don’t need him anymore,” she thought. “But I do. He keeps me safe, just like Elvis does. If he doesn’t come back I’m not going to stay out there. I’m not giving her Buddy, too.”

In the moony dark Elvis licked her hand drowsily. The childish doubts receded like the creek at dead low tide, and the new, grown-up Emily stretched her arms and legs under the familiar flowered top sheet.

“She needs me,” the new Emily thought. “Only I am helping her. Only I can. I can come back here later, if I want to.”

Turning into sleep, she did not, as she usually did at this time of night, hear her father and her aunt talking. There was no sound whatsoever. Emily listened for another minute, and then, finally, slept.

She moved a few things out to the apartment the next morning, but did not go there when their last session with the puppies was over. She went back to her house, waiting dimly to see if anyone was going to say good-bye to her. But there was no one about. Her father and the boys had taken four of the new puppies to be neutered, and though she could hear her aunt moving around the kitchen, she did not go in search of her and Jenny did not come out. Emily stumped upstairs pettishly, thinking that everyone had just assumed she was gone from the house and moved on about their business. This hour after the day’s work, when she had showered and changed, had always been her time with Jenny Raiford.