The Garden Path (36 page)

Thinking, she didn't answer. Were his words a shy declaration? And was she a heartless woman, to be pondering that instead of her mother's bloody deed? It was the baby, it was the maternal instinct, she told herself, then looked at Duke's oddly bony wrists, his square hands on the wheel, and knew it was something else besides that. Tenderness for Duke filled her heart, suddenly, and at the same moment she saw Ivan's face smiling at her, his teeth so white, his beard so dark—false smile, true smile, it had never mattered. She remembered how she had thought of sticking a knife into him, and thought of her mother in a pool of blood. “Duke,” she said suddenly. “Will you marry me? After I divorce Ivan?”

There was a long pause, during which she considered opening the car door and throwing herself out on Route 95. She held back tears, and more words, waiting.
This is the end
, she thought wildly.
What does it all matter
?

Duke spoke finally. “I'm going to say something so sappy and awful it's going to make you sick, Susannah.”
Don't say it
, she thought, and pressed her palms to her temples. “I'm still in love with my wife. She's been dead two years, and I still dream about her. I dream she's still alive, and when I wake up and she isn't I wish I were dead, and I think if it wasn't for the twins I would be, Susannah. I can understand the gun.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, and put her hands over her eyes and bent over and began to cry.

He touched her shoulder. “I'm sorry, too, Susannah. Don't cry. I'm sorry.” The car swerved, and she looked up, rubbed at her eyes, but he had pulled over to the side, stopped the car, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly, in the bucket seats. There were tears in his eyes, too. “Stay with me, Susannah. You can stay as long as you want. Stay forever. I'll take care of you and the baby and everything. You can write your stories.” Her ear was against his cheek; his voice buzzed like a radio. “It's just that I don't have a lot to give.”

They sat in silence for a while. She stopped crying. It was very hot in the car with the windows closed against the rain. She imagined cars passing them, the commuter traffic beginning, people seeing them with their arms around each other, people smiling or envious thinking:
Lovers
. She sat up straight, ran her fingers through her hair, wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Enough of this,” she said.

He touched her cheek with his rough hand. “Susannah,” he said, and it seemed to her that he looked at her with love. And yet he said he had nothing to give.
I'm always crying, and I'm always wrong
, she thought. She smiled, trying for jauntiness, and reached for her coffee. “For years I didn't cry,” she said. “Ever. My father discouraged it. I got good at not crying.”

“I thought the first thing everyone learned in California was not to repress things,” Duke said, smiling back, and put the car in gear. They slipped back on the highway.

“Maybe I never had anything much to cry about before.”

“I'm sorry, Susannah.”

“Oh, don't keep
saying
it.” He looked even sorrier, and she regretted her words. “Now
I'm
sorry,” she said, and they both laughed. She looked at him, and saw Margie, with gold stars in her ears. “Life is but a paltry thing,” she said. He glanced over at her, raising his eyebrows. “A tattered something, I forget. It's a quote.”
You always forget
, came Ivan's voice. The coffee was lukewarm and tasted of the plastic mug.

At the hospital there was no place to park, even at that hour of the morning. There was a parking lot, not open yet. Duke drove around, swearing, and finally dropped her off at the entrance. “I'll find a spot and be back,” he said.

“What a pain in the neck this is for you.”

“Let's make a deal. I'll stop apologizing if you will.”

Love means never having to say you're sorry
, she thought;
that dumb movie
. She almost said it, a joke, but she couldn't say
love
. She wondered if he thought it, too, and kept it back. “Okay,” she said, kissed his cheek, and got out.

At the main desk they gave her a pass, and she went upstairs in the elevator with a woman about her age in a wheelchair pushed by a man in a light blue suit—dressed up for the occasion. The woman smiled and smiled, as still as if she was sitting for her portrait, her hands limp in her lap. No one spoke.

On the fifth floor Peter was waiting in a chair by the elevators. He hugged her tight. “Am I glad to see you,” he said. He looked dapper and fresh except for brown circles under his eyes. “I've read all their
Time
magazines and drunk their wretched coffee and talked to their bloody psychiatrists all night. One of them keeps asking me about her childhood, and the other one thinks she might be allergic to dairy products. Dairy products! Jesus! She decided to shoot herself because she had a milkshake and a grilled cheese for lunch.”

“How is she, Peter?”

“Sleeping like a baby. She's fine—physically, I mean. It really did scarcely any damage, considering.” His buoyance drained away as he talked, and when they reached the door of Rosie's room, down a corridor where the chemical stink of medicine was strong, he stopped and looked at her with his mournful eyes. “But I'll tell you, Susannah—I don't look forward to her waking up. I mean—” He waved a hand. “Not that I don't want her to wake up, I just—”

“I know what you mean. I dread it, too. And I don't know what she wants from me.” But I do, she thought as they went in: absolution, as if she were a priest. “You won't leave, will you, Peter?” she asked. “I know you're tired, but I don't want to be alone with her. I don't even
know
her.”

He looked amused. “I'll stay, Sister Sue. Curiosity would keep me here if nothing else. And the chance to be in on a no-holds-barred emotional scene.” He rubbed his hands expectantly, yawning through a grin.

“Oh,
Peter
,” she said, glad he, at least, was his usual self. She felt exhausted already; it wasn't even eight o'clock in the morning, and she seemed to have gone through days and days of scenes and tears and sorriness.

And there in the room was Rosie, the woman at the Café, her arm in a sling resting outside the white blanket, her short unbrushed hair in snarls on the white pillow. She looked dead, unless you went close and saw the faint rise and fall of her chest, the blanket over it, the brown hand at the end of the cast draped over it as if for a left-handed pledge of allegiance.

Susannah shrugged and sat down in a chair by the bed. “I guess we can't do anything but wait.” She looked at Rosie. At that instant her eyes opened and she and Susannah stared at each other. Susannah wondered if she should speak, and what. She had forgotten her mother's eyes were so brown, like dark bitter chocolate. Up close, her face free of makeup, she looked strangely young, she looked like Peter. “I'm here,” Susannah said, almost involuntarily, and the heavy lids dropped over Rosie's eyes again, and she lay still.

Susannah glanced at Peter, who gazed back at her expressionless, then at her mother again. Was she still asleep, the brief awakening a false one? Or had she closed her eyes again as a sign—all she could manage in her weakened state—of rejection? Susannah felt a stab of panic just as she had the night she drove to Rosie's in the van. Maybe it wasn't forgiveness Rosie wanted.
I'm always wrong
, Susannah thought. Maybe it was more curses she wanted, more hate. Her right arm wasn't in a sling: maybe she would raise it, and slap her, hard, and disown her again, pour out the venom saved up all these years, Mount St. Helens; it would all come out, and it would kill not Rosie who had tried to die but Susannah who was trying to find a way to live. Good-bye, good-bye, this is the end. If she couldn't kill herself she would kill her daughter.

Peter spoke softly in her ear. “I'm going down to get some more coffee.”

“No!” she burst out, too loud, and looked fearfully at the silent figure on the bed. “Don't you dare leave, Peter. You promised.”

He sat back down, looking unhappy. A fat nurse looked in, brought a tray from a trolley, and left it without a word. Peter lifted the metal cover over a plate, grimaced, and put it back with a small
clank
. “No coffee,” he said. Time passed. After a while, he whispered, “Where's Ivan?”

“Duke brought me,” she whispered back. Later she would tell him.

They were silent again, and then Peter asked, “Where's Duke, then?”

“Parking the car. Then he'll be up.”

Peter rolled his eyes, acknowledging the parking problem, and after a while whispered, “I think they only give out two passes at a time.”

“What do you mean?”

“For visitors. Duke's probably down in the waiting room.”

“Oh
hell.
”

“Shall I go see?”

“No! Peter—” Rosie's eyes were shut, her eyelashes two thick even lines on her cheeks, her mouth slack. She breathed evenly. Susannah didn't trust her. “Please stay here.”

Peter was already up. “I'll be right back.” He spoke with the exaggerated gestures and lip-movements people use when they whisper. “I'll just see if he's there and I'll tell him to get some coffee or something and then later he can use my pass and come up.” He pointed—
down
, then
up
.

“Oh,
hell.
” She thought of Duke forlorn in the waiting room. “All right. But please hurry back.” She put her palms together in a prayer. “Please.”

He nodded and left, then stuck his head in the door. “Did you tell him what happened?” he asked in a stage whisper.

Susannah nodded, Peter disappeared, and immediately Rosie's eyes opened again. “Susannah,” she said in a clear voice; Susannah, startled, said nothing; how strange it sounded, and familiar—her mother saying her name. “You don't need to be afraid of me,” said Rosie. Her eyes filled with tears. “I'm your mother.”

Susannah leaned forward, instinctively, and took Rosie's good hand. The tears spilled over and made a track down her cheeks, one on either side. Susannah thought of Edwin. “Don't cry,” she said, and wiped first one side, then the other, with her finger. “It's all right.”

“I went into the store and bought a gun. He asked me what I wanted it for.” Her voice got weaker. “I said I wanted it to shoot myself with. He laughed.”

“Ssh,” Susannah said, and clasped her mother's hands tight. “It's all over now.”

Rosie closed her eyes; tears seeped neatly out the corners, and her mouth tightened over a sob. Susannah stroked her hand. She could think of nothing to say. If it were Edwin, she could tell him she was pregnant; she didn't think that was what Rosie wanted to hear.

“They keep asking me questions,” Rosie said finally. “They make me so tired. But I wanted to see you.”

“I came right away. But we can talk later. They've given you something to make you sleep.”

Rosie nodded, the tears still running without interruption down their tracks. Susannah took a tissue and wiped them again. Rosie kept her eyes closed, and before long Susannah could see she was sleeping, with a half-smile on her lips. Susannah took away her hand, and Peter returned.

“I was wrong,” he whispered. “You can have as many passes as you want for a private room, but Duke thought he'd better not come up. He said this should be for relatives only. I left him in the cafeteria eating a cheese Danish.” He looked at Rosie. “She moved.”

“She woke up for a minute.” Susannah put Duke out of her mind. She felt sick to her stomach: morning sickness? The medicinal smell didn't help, and the faint smell of egg from the breakfast tray. “She said she was tired.”

“Is that all?”

“She told me not to be afraid of her.”

Peter waggled his head and widened his eyes, an Eddie Cantor face. “Just what I've been telling you all along.”

Chapter Seven

The Door in the Hedge

The first thing Rosie said, when they had parked the car and proceeded up the puddled slope to the house, was, “It's all wrong.”

“What is?” Susannah asked her.

“Everything.” She looked around at a flat plane ringed with hills; behind her were the sparse, wet woods the road had wound through. There were leathery yellow leaves among the green on the trees; they fell to the car and stuck. There was a rank smell of pond, of not enough sun. An unfamiliar bird cried
skreek
and flew up black against the concrete sky. “Everything is,” said Rosie.

What she wanted to do at that moment was get back in the car and drive off, stop at a pub and have an early lunch with a couple of pints of the thick, sweet ale she was getting used to. Forget the whole thing. They could go to Knole, or Penshurst, or to the castle at Goudhurst. It had been a mistake to come to Silvergate.

“It's the rain,” said Susannah. “It's your shoulder hurting.”

“No, it isn't,” Rosie snapped. “It's everything. It looks so bleak and desolate.” She regretted her tone of voice, and she altered it. “There used to be hops growing over there,” she said, taking Susannah's arm. “It was part of the farm, where they grew hops. And then the sheep were—” She paused, confused, and looked around.
Was
that where the farm had been? This part of the grounds, in fact, didn't look familiar at all, at least not in this drizzle. It had been raining since they stepped off the plane at Heathrow. Of course, it must have rained when she was a child, but she couldn't remember it doing so; not, at least, like this—a relentless onslaught of chilly rain and fog. And the damp did make her shoulder throb, though she wouldn't admit it to Susannah. Susannah liked the rain, she said. She had gone out in it their first day, in Guildford, while Rosie collapsed into sleep at the inn. Susannah, armed with guidebooks, wanted to see the famous clock and the ruined castle. Jet lag didn't seem to affect her.
Youth
, Rosie thought, not without resentment, but Susannah attributed it to her pregnancy. “I've never felt better,” she said. “I swear it's given me some kind of extra strength. And then,” she added, teasing, “I did sleep on the plane, while you flirted with your fellow passengers.”