The Sabbathday River (29 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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All of the Worst Things
BY THE TIME SHE DROVE OUT TO HEATHER'S house later that afternoon, Naomi had managed to winnow her memory of the interview to a vague impression of the girl's shorn hair and a detailed list of Polly's necessary things. This, transcribed over a Flourish order form, lay on the passenger seat as she turned onto Sabbath Creek Road, and Naomi drove, leaning forward, eyeing with suspicion the darkening sky.
“Looks a little nasty,” she called to Erroll as she pulled up next to his car. They both got out.
“It's supposed to storm,” he told her. “I can't stay too long.”
“Fine.”
Naomi reached back into the car and retrieved her list.
“You been to see her?” he asked.
Naomi nodded. They were walking around to the front door. “This afternoon. They've cut off all her hair,” she said accusingly, as if Heather had not made the request herself. It occurred to her that she wanted him to feel bad.
“No kidding,” Erroll said. “I hadn't heard that.”
“And they wouldn't let me give her the gifts I brought. A bar of soap, for Christ's sake!”
“There's probably a reason,” he remarked. He looked, she thought, paler than usual, a blue cast to the skin around his blue eyes. “Look, I'm not going to keep saying I'm sorry about this, Naomi. I'm not happy, but there's no question, you know?”
He paused, waiting for her.
“I know you know that, Naomi.”
“Fine, fine.” She nodded impatiently at the door. “Let's just get on with this. I've got a whole list.” She brandished it. He sighed and fished the key from his pocket.
“No one's been here since the night we interviewed her,” he commented. They both stepped in, smelling the sharp air.
“Yuck,” she said involuntarily. “What'd you do, leave a stink bomb?”
Following the smell, she walked directly to the kitchen and flung open the oven door.
“Nelson,” Naomi said. “Jesus Christ.”
He came up beside her and they looked at the two rotting chickens as they breathed through their mouths.
“Where's the garbage?”
“I took what was in the bin back to the station that night. We had to go through it. Then we threw it away.”
“Help me find some garbage bags.”
She rummaged in the drawers until she found a roll, then she threw away the chickens, pans and all. On the top of the stove, a pot of potatoes had fossilized into sculpture. Naomi threw that away, too, and the perishables in the fridge. Then, consulting her list, she started putting Polly's plates and utensils into a shopping bag.
Through the kitchen were signs of disarray: drawers pulled out, cabinets emptied onto countertops. Erroll stood in the center of the room, watching her without comment. By the time they moved into the next room, it was too dark to see without light.
The living room was even more disturbed, with cupboards open and chairs upturned. Playing cards were spread over the living-room couch. Naomi frowned at them, then gathered them up.
“What were you looking for in the cards?” she asked him sourly. “Did you think she killed her baby with a joker?”
“They were there already,” Erroll said. “The little girl was playing with them.”
The playing cards, the chicken in the oven. “You just moved them right out, didn't you?” she said harshly. “Just came on in and moved them out, whatever they were doing.”
“Heather came voluntarily,” he said, sounding tired. “Naomi, I'm not going to discuss this with you.” He glanced at his watch. “Can we keep going, please?”
“Sure.”
She moved past him upstairs, gathering Polly's toys from the steps. In the upstairs bathroom she took shampoo, the pajamas hanging on a peg over the tub, a bath mat, and everything that looked baby-specific from the medicine cabinet.
“You're going to need another bag,” he observed. “I'll bring one up.” He turned and went downstairs.
In Heather's bedroom the bedclothes had been flung back and the denuded mattress actually cut open. She stared at it without even rudimentary understanding. The books had tumbled forward off the bookcase: paperbacks, a thick Norton anthology that looked pristine, a couple of child-care reference books which Naomi gratefully picked up, a small green address book with some kind of gold crest on the cover. Clothes in the closet had been pushed roughly aside on their hangers, and objects on the floor picked up and dispersed. She felt, in this room more than any other, the invasion of Heather's privacy, the exposure of her life. She felt how even the image of such hands in her own things enraged her, and then, eyeing one partially untwisted wire hanger at the foot of the bed, of how suspect any person's belongings could be made to seem. There was nothing in here for Polly, at any rate.
He helped her with the crib, lifting and twisting it down the stairs and out the door, where they placed it in the back of Naomi's wagon. She was glad they hadn't had to break it down, since it looked complexly put together and she wasn't at all sure she could manage it on her own. He brought out the high chair from the kitchen and wedged it into the back seat. There was a separate bag just of Polly's clothes, and Naomi, remembering that the little girl loved applesauce, took the last of the batch from the freezer in the basement. This act in particular gave her a brief jolt of optimism, and she was glad she'd thought of it. Erroll turned the heat back down and walked through one final time on his own—to make sure, she thought bitterly, that nothing deleterious to
Heather had been removed, and nothing beneficial surreptitiously planted—then he got into his car.
“Naomi.”
Erroll had rolled the window down. She was standing a few feet away, digging for her keys.
“What?”
“Has anyone said anything to you? Any calls you want to tell me about?”
“What calls?” Naomi said.
He sighed. “I just want you to know, we're here to make sure people behave themselves. You and that little girl deserve to be left alone, is what I'm saying. I take that seriously.”
She looked dumbly at him. “Has someone made a threat against me, Nelson? Or Polly?”
“Not at all,” he said. “And anyone who does is going to be sorry about it. There's just grumbling about the situation. Well, you knew that.” She waited. He looked regretful. “You know how people feel about all this, Naomi. They're bitter about Heather. And anyone who defends her … well, some people—not most of them, I'm saying
some—
would naturally feel angry at anyone who defended her.”
“How sweet,” she said caustically. “You're worried I'll lose my many dear friends in Goddard.”
“I'm not worried,” Erroll said. “But I want to know right away if anyone does say anything to you.”
“Well, I'm not worried either,” she said. “Christ, what paragons of virtue!” Naomi rolled her eyes. “Listen, anyone who could turn on a little girl like Polly who never hurt anyone, they don't
deserve
to have me for a friend!” She looked back at Erroll.
“You call me any time, Naomi. All right?”
“Sure,” she said. He started his car and drove back down the lane. She stood for what seemed a long time, watching him go, and numbly unbalanced by this confirmation of how completely she was alone. The first drops of rain fell on her, hitting the part in her hair. Naomi looked up into roiling skies. She got into her car.
The engine rumbled to life. She swung the wagon in a backward arc, her arm behind the headrest of the passenger seat, her neck craning to the rear. Through the slats of the crib and the dirt of the rear window and the skein of falling rain, she took in the briefest glimpse of Heather's
back field, its long slope down. And then, with an unwelcome rush, it all came back to her: the jolt of cold metal pressed against her forehead, and Heather's forehead pressed to the same metal, and her whisper. Naomi stopped, her foot on the brake, her hand about to shift. She shook her head. The very idea.
“Oh,
please,”
she said, softly but unquestionably aloud. “Don't even
think
about it.”
Except that now she couldn't
not
think about it. And what was there to think about, in any case? A mad girl's fancy, the crazed, irrational hope of the guilty that some stray thing would show what was unalterably true to be, after all, unalterably false? It didn't bear the smallest effort. And she was late, and now it was raining.
“
Shit
,” Naomi said. This time her voice was not soft. She jerked back the ignition, furious, and got out of the car.
In the three minutes of her indecision, the rain had grown strong and the sky virtually dark. She set off quickly, rounding the back of the house, intent on doing only a quick survey and setting this ridiculous uncertainty to rest. Uncertainty about what? She upbraided herself. That Heather had told the truth about a hill behind her house, and a pond at the foot of the hill? And if she had, so what? Because Naomi, mortal that she was, could not ever hope to make sense of the sad and tangled things in Heather's mind, nor ease those things at all, so this—this crazy search for nothing—must be for something else. Would she feel worse or better if the pond was there? She didn't care. She wanted to go home.
It wasn't there. Naomi stood at the top of the slope and peered into the rain. There was nothing at all, just a a kidney-shaped depression clogged with muddy water. Not a pond, by any means, or no more a pond than, say, the fire escape of her College Town apartment had been “The Riviera,” and yet that was what they had called it, she and Daniel and their housemates, stripping to the waist—herself along with the guys, because feminine modesty was inconsistent with feminism—and oiling themselves to attract the melanoma-rich waves of light. Local parlance, not serious. She squinted at the little place, its surface just discernibly pocking with rain.
The pond.
It's small, she thought. As Heather had said. Naomi, unable not to go closer, went closer. With a curse for each step, she let the slope make it easy, her running shoes squelching the mud. It got bigger as she came near, but not much. Even up close, Naomi thought, it was a stretch to
call this anything but “the puddle” or “the mud hole.” The red herring! She chided herself. Or the clothes on the emperor who happened to be naked. My personal waste of time.
All right, so it was a little pond—big deal. A rectangle of thick water, but tapering at the end nearer her, like a love seat built to stick out of a corner. At its edge were three stones, each the size of a human head, but tipped over, as if the eyes were looking down into the muddy ground. It looked unsavory, a bathtub promising only additional filth, a sorry little landmark. Naomi turned back to the house and was surprised by how far up it seemed, how steep and high above her.
So Heather had told the truth, she mused, and Naomi was glad to know it. This, it seemed to her, was ample payback for having had to come down here: the girl was not so mad her madness was unanchored by truth. And yet, really, Naomi knew that much already. So what was gained by this? And how could she go back now and feel that she had settled anything at all? The pond before her, pebbled by rain, had given up nothing but its existence.
Because—now, honestly—it had to have happened as Heather finally admitted. There weren't other possibilities, and even Nelson had understood that Heather somehow preferred to think of her baby here, in this filthy water, than zipped into a body bag in a Peytonville freezer. How surprising! Naomi thought, staring glumly into the pond.
But, then again, why down there and not some other place? Why not—she looked around—underneath those trees, or farther across the field where the Sabbathday was edged in stones? She pushed back wet hair from her forehead and noted, for the first time, how cold she was and her sweater wet through in the sleeves. She wanted fiercely to leave, but by now it was clear what had to be done before that could happen.

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