Chapter Twenty-Three
I looked at the blanket, my tears blurring the pink heap on the floor, but I could see clearly enough to know that Esther wasn’t there.
Hadn’t she been?
My mind struggled to ask this question, not wanting to know the answer, not wanting to believe what my eyes saw, what Henry said.
As he ran to make a phone call, I knelt on the floor, my knees creaking with the motion. I hadn’t knelt in years, not since before the polio, when we used to go to the Lutheran church every Sunday morning. The creak of my knees reminded me of the sound of the wooden kneelers groaning and shifting with the weight of the congregants as they got into position to humble themselves before their god.
My baby.
This was the only prayer I could mutter on the bedroom floor.
My baby.
I didn’t speak a request, only a name, because the request was too real to me, so real it didn’t need to be stated, because any god worth worshipping would know what I needed: my little girl in my arms, ready to start her day as I thought she had for weeks now.
Nora wasn’t there to hear my cries like she did the morning I needed a clean sock. Now, with empty arms, I needed so much more. But she wasn’t there when I needed her. No one was.
What did I expect? When had anyone been there when I needed them most? When I fell out of the tree at age five, the tractor was too loud for Daddy to hear me calling for him. When the hornets stung me, Mama was with Georgie and wouldn’t let me get close, in case the polio attached to me, too. And in those late nights when sleep wouldn’t come and I had to decide if I was leaving for college or staying to help Mama keep the farm, Daddy had already passed, having taken his last breath years before.
But this time I wasn’t fully alone.
“Mama?” The little voice came from behind me, full of sleep and confusion.
“Wesley!” I wiped the tears and snot from my face, trying to pull myself together for him.
“Why’re you in here?” he asked. “Taking pictures again?”
The boy was so brilliant. Of course! My camera! It could prove that Esther had been there, that I hadn’t been hallucinating her entire existence.
“Wesley! Run and get Mama’s camera.”
“But I’m not allowed to touch it.”
“You are now! Please, I need the photos that are in it. Run fast!”
I could hear Henry on the phone. I couldn’t make out the words, but I could hear the intonations of his voice. If I could get the film developed, that would prove Esther had been alive.
“I got it!” Wesley’s voice reached me before he came back to the nursery.
“Hurry!”
I knew the sound of Wesley running, even though he wasn’t supposed to do it in the house. But I didn’t hear that familiar, fast padding. Instead, I heard a different, whirring, straining sound.
As Wesley rounded the doorframe and walked into the nursery, he pulled at the film that hung loose from the open camera.
“I don’t see pictures, Mama. Where are they?”
There in his hands was the film that was meant to save me, exposed to light and smudged with fingerprints.
“Wesley, no!” I yelled. He looked at me, frightened. I ran toward him, reaching for the camera, wanting to wind the film back in and hope against all odds that those photos hadn’t been lost forever. But in my hurry, in the rise of my voice, Wesley had startled. The camera fell from his little fingers and bounced onto the floor, the door coming off its hinges and the lens shattering with the fall.
Once again, I melted to the floor and began to sob, but this time I didn’t cry quietly. Wesley walked toward me. I had been a fool to think I was alone.
Of course I had him, but a four-year-old can only offer so much comfort.
Even still, he tried. He tried to be the one to rub away the hurt. He put his arm around my shoulders, leaned his head against mine, and said, “I’m sorry, Mama. What were the pictures?”
I tried to calm my sobs enough to reply. I took a few deep breaths and said, “Of Esther.”
Wesley sat down beside me. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sad she died, too.”
Then, as I knelt on his sister’s floor, he reached for my hand, turned it palm up, and began to recite his own variation: “With a circle and a pat and a heart on top of that, I give all my love to you, yes, I do.”
What had I become? How had this even happened? What did this mean if I had spent weeks living in a delusion that my daughter had lived when even a four-year-old knew better?
With Henry calling for help—quite possibly that Dr. Ruthledge—I did the only thing I knew to do. I kissed Wesley on the top of his head as he sat on the floor, fumbling with the camera.
“I’ll fix it. I promise,” he said.
He meant it, but what I knew was there was no fixing any of this. I kept hold of the empty blanket as I walked to the front door and stepped outside.
Luna met me on the step and meowed a greeting to me. When I began to run, she didn’t hesitate. She trotted alongside me as the blanket waved, a pink flag whipping in the race to escape.
I hurried down the street barefoot, the morning light making my nightgown more sheer than I’d realized. I should’ve grabbed my housecoat. I should’ve planned ahead. I should’ve done so much. Hidden more. Trusted less. Known I’d never really be one of them.
My nightgown clung to my chest as my breasts bounced with each step.
Cars drove by, but I paid them no attention. I didn’t look through the windows to see which neighbors were watching me race down the Twyckenham Court sidewalk in my nightgown. I didn’t wave hello and pretend all was well.
Soon enough, phones would ring throughout Greenwood, housewives starting their day with the latest neighborhood news, the reports of Mrs.
Mayfield in her sheer nightgown, scurrying half-naked down the sidewalk as a cat she had stolen from poor, sweet Bitsy Betser weaved in and out of her feet with every step.
What they wouldn’t know to report was what her husband was about to do to her.
Looking back, I should’ve gone for the car. That would’ve given me a real escape, a real chance to flee, but in my haste, I fled to the place that felt safe.
I could hear Henry calling for me, but I ran on. I crossed into the grass still damp with dew. Luna took off ahead of me as if she knew where to go, as if she agreed that this was the place to hide. Of course, we were both wrong.
As I hid among the tentacle branches, the willow’s roots pushed into my feet, reminding me that parts of it existed in unseen places. I had no plan, only momentum moving me forward, making me believe that if I kept
moving, I could get away. Like Georgie when we were kids and he would close his eyes to block out unwanted things like the monsters under his bed, the call to do chores, the need to take more medicine. I couldn’t squeeze my eyes shut just then. I had to keep my feet moving over all those roots. But if I didn’t look back, if I didn’t notice Henry, if I pretended like he hadn’t just driven his car onto the grass and flung the door open to chase after me, then it wasn’t really happening. This was only a childhood game, and I could get away.
“Lulu!”
He called for me. His voice heavy—not with anger, but with panic. If he was concerned, then why was he doing this to me?
I didn’t answer him. I didn’t respond when Gary began calling for me as well. They were too close behind me, so I ran toward the weeping willow, its tired branches sagging and shadowing the ground beneath so that grass refused to grow. I reached for the trunk, running my fingers across its rough bark, this time not out of curiosity, but out of a need for it to protect me, to show me the way.
I grabbed the lowest limb and tried to pull myself up. My feet scraped across the bark as their voices grew louder.
“Lulu!”
Henry called from behind me. I didn’t want him to say that name anymore.
Who was that person he called for? He called as if I were a child. Why couldn’t he stop and simply let me be?
I tried again to scale the tree, to pull myself upward, to get within the branches and let it hide me from the one trying to capture me. If only I had listened to Wesley all those times he’d asked me to climb with him. Then I would’ve known the hand and foot holds. I would’ve known where to grab, how to pull and shift my weight so that I could escape the ground.
But Henry probably would’ve figured it out as well. After all, he had been
a boy at one point, and climbing seemed to be something they innately knew how to do. I wondered if Henry had ever climbed, if his mother ever let him.
It seemed like something rougher, dirtier, grittier than she would allow her son to do. She had raised him to be proper. Yet how well did that parenting work out? He’d still grown up to make mistakes. He’d married me, after all.
I reached and fumbled, trying to grab on to something as my breathing quickened from the strain. Blood trickled down my arm as the bark scratched my skin with every attempt. My feet were raw, but I wouldn’t feel that until later, as I sat alone on a bed with a sterile white sheet. Tears blurred my vision, but I wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t.
Until I had no choice.
I cried to God to give me grace in that moment, but all I got was an arm around me that pulled me away from the tree.
He was so strong. I admired that back at school, as I’d watch him play basketball or we’d sneak away for a swim or he’d pull me in close and wrap himself around me. I’d admired his strength then. I found comfort in it. I didn’t fear it until that day.
“Lulu.” He spoke directly into my ear, his voice calm, measured, no longer panicked. “Lulu.” He kept saying it again and again with a rhythm the same as my breath.
I pulled away from him. I demanded he let go of me. I called to Luna to claw Henry, but she didn’t help either.
Henry continued to hold me, repeating my name.
I wanted to hear the birds waking up for the day. They should’ve been doing it at that time, but I couldn’t hear them. I couldn’t hear their morning songs while he spoke into my ear.
I closed my eyes, wanting to disappear but knowing that I wouldn’t. By then, I knew grace wasn’t coming for me, so I thought I would ask for something, a little something, to see if he would accommodate me in some
way.
“Shhh.”
“What?” he asked.
“Shut up. For a minute. Just shut up.”
“But—”
I shushed again until he listened. As he quieted down, I heard their songs. I opened my eyes and looked at the tree stretching across the cul-de-sac island.
The sun was beginning to peek through the branches, the orange warming the green leaves and twisted branches. For a minute, he was quiet and I could hear the songs, the calls of the birds, more varieties than I could identify, echoing through the tree as they woke to another day.
I saw a finch flit from one branch to another, calling to his partner. I couldn’t see the other bird, but the one chirping seemed to know where she was. He sang to her, his chest puffed out. I wondered what he was saying. I liked to think he was singing her a song, telling the story of the beauty of another sunrise, another day. Maybe that’s not what he was saying at all.
Maybe he was calling to her. Maybe he was searching for her, saying her name again and again, demanding she listen, demanding she do what he thought was best for her. I would never know what that finch said, and isn’t that really the disappointment of being human? We think we know so much.
We think we are the superior species, and yet there is so much we don’t know. Like the songs of birds. We hear the tune, but we don’t know the words. We only know what we want to hear.
As I listened, Henry spoke again. “Lulu!” He pressed around me like a straitjacket, suppressing any movement of my arms. I flailed my legs, trying to break free, but I kicked the tree. A jolt of pain radiated through my ankle, up my leg, and burst out of me in a scream.
“Stop it!” Henry’s whiskers pressed into me, a million pinpricks pushing into my cheek.
“Don’t touch me!” I tried to break free, but he wouldn’t let go and I began to shudder at his touch, wondering if he had also touched Alice with those hands. “Get off me! I don’t want your hands on me, not after they’ve touched her.”
Henry didn’t let go, but I felt the pressure loosen as he tried to make sense of what I’d said. “Who?” he asked. “Esther?”
“No!” The word escaped from deep inside. “Alice. Don’t pretend. I know you’re having an affair.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” His words hissed in my ear, but he still wouldn’t let go. “Why would you—”
“The way you looked at her, the hours—”
“Lulu,” his voice dropped, too choked by emotion for the syllables to hold together. “Don’t you know?” I could feel his body shaking against mine. “It’s you. It’s only ever been you.” For a moment I could hear the birds chirp again. Then Henry said, “How could you doubt that?”
I stopped pushing against him and let him hold me as the depth of my madness sank in. There was no baby and no affair. What else had I imagined?
“You have to calm down,” he said, measuring his voice. “They are watching.”
As the morning sun rose higher and cast beams through the willow’s reaching branches, I looked around. We weren’t alone anymore. It wasn’t just me, Henry, Gary, Luna, and a few birds. It was the whole street of neighbors, including the ones I called friends. Nora stood and stared, her hand gripped over her mouth. Hatti waddled behind her and cried. Everyone was there, including Bitsy, who walked toward us. She didn’t look at me. She bent down to the ground and picked up Luna as I let Henry hold me.
“Bitsy!” My syllables came out broken, choked with regret. The wind rustled the leaves so their shadows fluttered across our faces. She looked straight at me. Her hazel eyes—a ring of gold glowing from around the pupil
—pierced through me.
As I stood bound by Henry’s hold and Bitsy’s gaze, Gary asked, “Can I help?”
“No!” My shout scared Luna, who scratched Bitsy.
Henry tightened his grip around me again.
“Let’s get her in the car,” Gary said. As he walked toward me, I leaned back into Henry and kicked my legs, warning Gary to stay away.
“Lulu! Please! We’re trying to help,” Henry said.
“How?” I asked as I continued to squirm in his grip, trying to break free.
“Like he helped her?”
“Honestly—” Henry began.
“You know what he did.” My throat burned from the screams and the sobs, but I had to say more. I had to speak up for myself. I had to let all of them know what Gary had done and what he thought Henry should do to me. As I watched Bitsy nurse the scratches that seeped blood on her forearm, Nora began to walk toward us. I thought maybe she was coming to talk to Henry, to convince him to let me go. But instead, she put her arm around Bitsy.
“Don’t you see it?” I shouted. “Don’t you know? He gave her a lobotomy.”
I swear that the birds and the breeze both quieted for a moment. No one spoke. No sound was made except for one. It started low and rose. “Oh, Lulu,” Gary chuckled to himself. “You really are crazy.”
“But—” I tried to say, but both Nora and Henry called my name, begging me to stop. “Come on!” I cried. “Don’t you see it? Nora, the article. You remember. Doesn’t it make sense?”
“Lulu, please,” she pleaded with only those two words, too wrecked to say more.
Gary stepped closer. “Do you think they will believe you?” His auburn hair fluttered in the breeze. “I mean, look at you.” He ran his fingers over Esther’s
blanket.
Henry began to speak. “Now, Gary—”
“No, no, you should also know what she did. She stole my wife’s cat, broke into our house—and then the way she was with Katherine.”
Henry’s grip loosened. “What do you mean?”
“The way she took her without permission, encouraged her to go against her mother’s rules.” He prowled around us and began to speak louder so the audience could hear him. “You certainly have paid special attention to Katherine. I don’t know, maybe you saw her as a replacement for the one you lost.”
“No!” I shouted. “Look at you! You send away your sons. No wonder Bitsy clings to her even though she’s not yours!” I looked around him to see Nora and Hatti trying to make sense of all that was happening. “She’s Ellen’s!” I called. “Her sister’s. The suicide—”
Bitsy held up her hand. The woman looked so small that day, so confused, so alone despite her husband standing beside her. She clung to the cat. Gary put his arm around her, and I saw her flinch. I saw the way her body stiffened in his presence. Then she spoke. “Katherine’s my daughter.”
“Bitsy—” I tried to say something, but the world spun and the haze of my mind began to blur my thoughts. I tripped over words. “Of course she is.” I was so tired. “I didn’t mean—” I couldn’t even string together an entire sentence.
Then the breeze blew again, lifting Bitsy’s bangs from her forehead. That’s when I did something I knew better than to do: I hoped. I believed that Mother Nature had heard my prayers and she was on my side, about to show us all the scars of what he had done to her. Why else did Bitsy plaster those bangs into place, if not to hide the evidence of her procedure?
But as the hair lifted off her forehead, I could see that it was as clear and porcelain as the rest of her face. There were no silvery seams stitched into her
temples, no signs of a lobotomy. Only a sad, frightened, broken woman standing in her nightgown, reflecting myself back to me.
That’s when I stopped fighting and I let Henry carry me to the car. As we drove away, I didn’t look at any of the neighbors. I didn’t even see if Wesley was standing outside our house, waving to his parents as they drove off. I wadded up the blanket and wrapped my empty arms around myself, needing to feel something but no longer trusting that anything was real.
