The Second Silence (7 page)

Mary stumbled into the bathroom and cranked on the shower. Stepping under the steaming blast, she felt a deep chill that no amount of heat could dispel. Whatever she was walking into, she had a feeling it was going to be a lot more than she’d bargained on.

Mary took the First Avenue bridge to I-87 and drove steadily for two and a half hours until she reached the exit for Route 23. Twenty minutes later she was cutting over onto 145. Four lanes gave way to two, and tollbooths and rest stops to gently sloping hills and sunny pastures where cows and horses grazed. The towns seemed to blend together, each barely distinguishable from the next. Athens. South Cairo. Cairo. Cooksburg. Main streets made up of squat brick buildings interspersed with once-grand Victorians and white steepled churches that might have been built from the same blueprint.

Even the people looked alike from one town to the next: men and women oblivious of current fashion as they strolled to church or to their favourite eatery. Old people sipping coffee out on the porch. Passing through Preston Hollow, she smiled at the sight of a freckle-faced boy fishing from a wooden bridge set smack in the center of town.

At a service station just north of Livingstonville, where she stopped to fill her tank, a paunchy gray-haired man in overalls with a rangy mutt loping at his heels asked if she’d like her oil checked. Taken by surprise, Mary agreed to it, never mind that she’d had the Lexus fully serviced just the week before. Fresh from the city, where such courtesies had died out eons ago, she always needed a day or two to adjust to the fact that in this part of the world, time, though not exactly at a standstill, moved at a different pace.

The knowledge was at once comforting and disquieting. Because the slower pace only seemed to underline how much
she
had changed. Mary felt sure that were she to bump into her teenage self walking down the street, she’d scarcely recognize the girl.
I was so young,
she thought. Playing catchup with a baby on her hip while her friends toted books and backpacks about college campuses. Rising at dawn to a dirty diaper after a night of studying logarithms and Longfellow, molecular formulas and Melville. And always, always, there was her mother.

She’d thought moving back home was the solution, but she only ended up trading one set of problems for another.
You should have listened to Charlie,
a voice whispered, words that over the years had become a chant. He’d believed in them, believed that if they stuck it out, their fledgling family would survive.

Charlie.
Even after all these years the thought of him brought a dull pang of regret. Her memories, rather than becoming faded, seemed to have crystallized in some way. Charlie, on their wedding day in his ill-fitting suit, beaming as if he’d just been handed a prize. Charlie, cradling their minutes-old baby in his arms, tears of joy running down his cheeks.

One particular memory stood out from the rest. She would never know if that had been the night Noelle was conceived, but she chose to believe it anyway. For no other reason than that it made sense for something so wondrous to have resulted in their daughter. Mary let her mind drift back to that warm spring night, easily finding the path that had been worn to a groove from the countless times she’d trodden it. She saw herself racing barefoot down the creek bank in the moonlight to meet Charlie. Her heart in her throat, because she’d known perfectly well what was going to happen. The same thing that had happened twice before, once in her bedroom when her family was at church and once in the backseat of Charlie’s car. Yet this time was different somehow. Maybe it was the moonlight or maybe the look on Charlie’s face: one of love so pure she’d ached to bottle it—like perfume to be savored a dab at a time.
He’d never hurt me,
she’d thought.
No matter what happens, I can always count on that.

Charlie had spread an old blanket from the trunk of his car beneath a weeping willow that shielded them like a tent fashioned of green lace. Pale light spilled between its drooping branches to dapple the sand with silver dollars. When he pulled her into his arms she was shivering, but Charlie’s kisses had been warm and the air filled with the chirping of frogs that seemed to chorus their approval. She couldn’t recall either of them removing their clothes; in memory they were always naked: Adam and Even sprung from the clay. Charlie, a long silver blade in the moonlight, reaching out to smooth the gooseflesh from her bare trembling limbs. She, holding her arms out to let him know that she wasn’t shivering out of fear. Though she hadn’t known it then, the emotion that filled her like the beating of a thousand wings was desire. Not like the flame that had flared only briefly the first two times, but a grown-up urgency she had no name for.

Charlie, seeming to sense it, took his time. Kissing her until her mouth was tender and swollen before reaching down to stroke between her legs. Mary knew about climaxes from books devoured under the covers at night by flashlight—
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
came to mind—and had experienced firsthand what happened with boys. But she herself had never climaxed, unless it had somehow occurred without her knowing it. In the view of the Catholic Church, it was a sin to even touch yourself.

Yet as Charlie continued stroking, the flame leaped higher and higher with each silken brush of his fingers. She found herself greedily arching to meet his hand. Her mouth open and her throat burning from the air sucked in to cool the rising heat. She was scarcely aware of Charlie’s hardness pressed against her leg. For the moment the entire universe was contained in the white-hot point, like a starburst, between her legs. Then she was crying out and Charlie was thrusting into her at the same time, and everything was dissolving into a blur like scenery rushing past the window of a speeding car, and she was
…
she was … oh yes … no question … oh God … she was climaxing.

Afterward, she collapsed on the blanket, as limp as someone drowning who’d been rescued from the creek. ‘How
…
how did you know?’ she managed to stammer.

Charlie held her so tightly she imagined him bearing the faint impression of her naked body, like a ghostly thumbprint on a windowpane. ‘I just did,’ he whispered.

And that was the essence of Charlie. Somehow he’d known. He’d always known what was right for her … though she hadn’t always listened.

The road before her blurred and Mary brushed a tear from her eye. Certainly she didn’t feel that way about Simon. Nor had she been inspired to heights of passion by the men with whom she’d fallen in and out of love over the years. She told herself that one’s first love is always the sweetest—if they’d met at another point in their lives, it wouldn’t have been the same—but she knew better. Charlie was different. He was special. Countless times since then she’d wondered what her life would be like had she made a different choice that long-ago winter day.

Oh, she’d meant to go back, in a day or two or three, but somehow the days had turned into weeks, and the weeks into months. Her mother, though quick to play martyr, had looked after the baby while she earned enough credits to graduate. When Mary took a part-time job at the Hollywood Dress Shop, she told herself it was to set aside a little money so Charlie wouldn’t have to break his back working sixty hours a week. They still saw each other, on weekends mostly, but seldom alone. Doris refused to baby-sit just so they could have a couple of hours together. Didn’t she have enough on her hands the rest of the time, she complained, looking after a baby and sick husband to boot?

Mary hadn’t had the strength to argue. She’d felt too beholden. Also, with her mother there was always a price to pay, and Mary had nothing left to give. So she and Charlie would sit in the living room, playing with the baby, while Doris kept an eye on them by every so often poking her head in as if vaguely searching for something misplaced.

Mostly what they’d talked about was Noelle. How big she was getting, her new trick of pushing herself onto her back, the noises she made that sounded like words. Charlie never spoke about how lonely he was. He didn’t have to. It was written all over his face: pride and hurt and longing all wrapped up in a sharp-cornered package. He wouldn’t beg, she knew. Mary would have to want him enough to come back on her own.

In the end, though, she didn’t have the guts.

Mary remembered vividly the day she learned he was seeing someone else. Six months after she moved back in with her parents, he took up residence in a rambling Victorian shared with two women and three other guys. There had been nothing romantic with Sally, not at first. That was Charlie’s story, anyway, and she believed him. It was the Age of Aquarius after all. People of both sexes roomed together and even slept in the same bed without a thought to where it might lead. But there was Charlie, lonely and at loose ends. Looking back, Mary supposed it was inevitable that he and Sally became lovers, yet the blow nearly crushed her. It was as if a door that had been left open, if only a crack, had been closed forever.

The affair lasted less than a year, but by the time it was over Mary and Charlie were divorced. Then, in the spring of 1973, her father passed away. There was no more talk of her moving out after that; it was just assumed she would stay. In fact, Mary had the uneasy feeling that were she to leave, she’d be robbing her mother in some fundamental way. For though Doris complained about the extra work, bitterly and often, Mary’s fall from grace had given her something nearly as precious as the granddaughter she doted on: a cross to bear.

Mary was so lost in thought she almost missed the turnoff for Burns Lake. With scarcely a glance in her rearview mirror at the empty lane behind her, she made a hard right into the exit. Rounding the bend onto Route 30, she was immediately welcomed by a patchwork of cornfields stitched together by the creek that meandered through them like an uneven seam.

Along the horizon low green hills shouldered a scattering of clouds in a sky so blue you couldn’t look at it without squinting. Minutes later the wheels of her Lexus were bumping over the wooden bridge that spanned the creek into town. Less than half a mile ahead, where the road crooked upward like a beckoning arm, lay the steep hill that climbed up toward Main Street.

Home,
she thought
…
whatever that meant.

She rolled her window down, not so much for the breeze as for the familiar smells and sounds indelibly associated in her mind with Burns Lake. New-mown grass and the dry nose-tickling smell of alfalfa; the whirring of insects and friendly chugging of sprinklers. As she passed the Flower Mill on her left, she caught the perfumed scent of the rosebushes bundled in burlap and lined up alongside the greenhouse like bright rows of birthday candles. A farm truck laden with bales of hay was wheezing up the hill ahead of her, spilling bits of straw like confetti in its wake. As she mounted the crest onto Main Street, a familiar sight greeted her: eighty-year-old Elmer Driscoll, in his World War II uniform, standing watch on the lawn of the Golden Meadow Retirement Home and saluting as she drove past.

The sun had risen over the treetops, and the brass spire atop St Vincent’s, taller than all the rest, glittered as if newly minted. Driving slowly through town, she passed the American Legion Hall, with its jauntily fluttering flag and Civil War cannon that had served as a hobbyhorse for generations of children. On either side, squat brick buildings were lent a fleeting majesty by the lambent morning light, and in the town square, the bronze statue of horticulturist Luther Burbank, father of the Burbank potato, which for decades had been a staple crop of the region, gazed serenely from his perch, his hair and beard stained white by the birds that made their nests in the trees overhead.

In the park the playground stood silent at this hour, and with a quickening of anxiety Mary thought of her granddaughter. On her rare visits to Burns Lake, this was where she brought Emma. Her granddaughter especially loved the wooden fortress with its slides and tire swings. Whenever Mary tried to steer her onto what Emma scornfully called the ‘baby’ slides, she would point to the biggest one, saying firmly, ‘I want to go on
that
one, Grandma.’

Mary’s chest tightened … as if she, too, were poised on the brink of something steep. What should she do about Noelle? Her daughter’s counselor at Hazelden had cautioned against interference, stressing that alcoholics needed to face the consequences of their behavior; it was their only hope of getting sober. But did that mean she was just supposed to stand back while her only child committed slow suicide?

She sighed as she turned onto Bridge Road, plunging into the deep cleft of shade cast by the train trestle. Why did motherhood have to be so bloody complicated? It wasn’t just this predicament. It was their whole long and bumpy history. Maybe it had all started when Noelle was a baby with Doris’s assuming the role of mother. Or the move to Manhattan when Noelle was ten, a move her daughter had bitterly resented. Whatever the reason, they’d never been what you’d call close. On good terms, yes. But close? No, not really.

Mary made the left onto Larkspur Lane, where even this early in July summer had taken firm hold. The trees formed a canopy of green overhead, and sweet william and impatiens spilled onto sidewalks and walkways. Morning glories crept up over the railings of porches onto which sofas and easy chairs had been dragged to catch whatever breeze there was to be had. The air hummed with the wick-wick-wick of sprinklers. And in the Inklepaughs’ garden, it looked as if a good crop of sweet peas and runner beans had established a beachhead. Doris’s next-door neighbor would be busy with her canning come August.

Her mother’s sturdy clapboard house looked exactly as it had the last time she’d visited, only then the trees had been bare, the lawn brown and crusted with snow. Now, with the maples and elms throwing a spangled light over the lush grass below, and the roses bursting with blooms, it was a Norman Rockwell illustration come to life. Mary half expected a white-haired grandma from central casting to step onto the porch bearing a freshly baked pie.