I didn’t pull into anyone’s driveway to turn around as I needed to. I figured people here were jittery enough without unknown cars trolling around. Instead I turned left at the end of the block and took the long way to my mother’s house. I debated whether to phone her first and decided against it three blocks from home. It was too late to call, too much misguided courtesy. Once you’ve crossed state lines, you don’t phone to ask if you can drop in.
My mother’s massive house is at the southernmost point of Wind Gap, the wealthy section, if you can count approximately three square blocks of town as a section. She lives in—and I once did too—an elaborate Victorian replete with a widow’s walk, a wraparound veranda, a summer porch jutting toward the back, and a cupola arrowing out of the top. It’s full of cubbyholes and nooks, curiously circuitous. The Victorians, especially southern Victorians, needed a lot of room to stray away from each other, to duck tuberculosis and flu, to avoid rapacious lust, to wall themselves away from sticky emotions. Extra space is always good.
The house is at the very top of a very steep hill. In first gear, you can drive up the cracked old driveway to the top, where a carriage porch keeps cars from getting wet. Or you can park at the bottom of the hill and walk the sixty-three stairs to the top, clutching the cigar-thin rail to the left. When I was a child, I always walked the stairs up, ran the driveway down. I assumed the rail was on the left side going up because I’m left-handed, and someone thought I might like that. Odd to think I ever indulged in such presumptions.
I parked at the bottom, so as to seem less intrusive. Wet with sweat by the time I hit the top, I lifted up my hair, waved a hand at the back of my neck, flapped my shirt a few times. Vulgar pit stains on my French blue blouse. I smelled, as my mother would say, ripe.
I rang the doorbell, which had been a cat-calling screech when I was very young, now subdued and truncated, like the bing! you hear on children’s records when it’s time to turn the page. It was 9:15, just late enough that they might have gone to bed.
“Who is it, please?” My mother’s reedy voice behind the door.
“Hi, Momma. It’s Camille.” I tried to keep my voice even.
“Camille.” She opened the door and stood in the doorway, didn’t seem surprised, and didn’t offer a hug at all, not even the limp one I’d expected. “Is something the matter?”
“No, Momma, not at all. I’m in town on business.”
“Business. Business? Well, goodness, I’m sorry, sweetheart, come in, come in. The house is not up to par for a visitor, I’m afraid.”
The house was perfect, down to the dozens of cut tulips in vases at the entry hall. The air was so teasy with pollen, my eyes watered. Of course my mother didn’t ask me what kind of business could possibly land me here. She rarely asked questions of any potency. It was either an exaggerated concern for others’ privacy or she simply didn’t care much about much. I’ll let you guess which option I favored.
“Can I get you something to drink, Camille? Alan and I were just having amaretto sours.” She motioned to the glass in her hand. “I put just a little bit of Sprite in it, sharpens the sweet. But I also have mango juice, wine, and sweet tea, or ice water. Or soda water. Where are you staying?”
“Funny you ask that. I was hoping I could stay here. Just for a few days.”
A quick pause, her long fingernails, a transparent pink, clicked on her glass. “Well, I’m sure that’s fine. I wish you’d phoned. Just so I’d have known. I would have had dinner for you or something. Come say hello to Alan. We’re on the back porch.”
She began walking away from me, down the hallway—luminous white living rooms and sitting rooms and reading rooms blooming out on all sides—and I studied her. It was the first time we’d seen each other in almost a year. My hair was a different color—brown from red—but she didn’t seem to notice. She looked exactly the same, though, not much older than I am now, although she’s in her late forties. Glowing pale skin, with long blonde hair and pale blue eyes. She was like a girl’s very best doll, the kind you don’t play with. She was wearing a long, pink cotton dress with little white slippers. She was twirling her amaretto sour without spilling a drop.
“Alan, Camille’s here.” She disappeared into the back kitchen (the smaller of two) and I heard her crack a metal ice tray.
“Who?”
I peeked around the corner, offered up a smile. “Camille. I’m so sorry to drop in like this.”
You’d think a lovely thing like my mother was born to be with a big ex-football star. She would have looked just right with a burly, mustached giant. Alan was, if anything, thinner than my mother, with cheekbones that jutted out of his face so high and sharp his eyes turned to almond slivers. I wanted to administer an IV when I saw him. He overdressed always, even for an evening of sweet drinks with my mother. Now he sat, needly legs jutting out of white safari shorts, with a baby blue sweater draped over a crisp oxford. He sweated not at all. Alan is the opposite of moist.
“Camille. It’s a pleasure. A real pleasure,” he murmured in his monotone drawl. “All the way down in Wind Gap. Thought you had a moratorium on anything south of Illinois.”
“Just working, actually.”
“Work.” He smiled. It was the closest to a question as I would get. My mother reappeared, her hair now pulled up in a pale blue bow, Wendy Darling all grown up. She pressed a chilled glass of fizzing amaretto into my hand, patted my shoulder twice, and sat away from me, next to Alan.
“Those little girls, Ann Nash and Natalie Keene,” I prompted. “I’m covering it for my paper.”
“Oh, Camille.” My mother hushed me, looking away. When my mother is piqued, she has a peculiar tell: She pulls at her eyelashes. Sometimes they come out. During some particularly difficult years when I was a child, she had no lashes at all, and her eyes were a constant gluey pink, vulnerable as a lab rabbit’s. In winter time, they leaked streaks of tears whenever she went outdoors. Which wasn’t often.
“It’s my assignment.”
“Goodness, what an assignment,” she said, her fingers hovering near her eyes. She scratched the skin just below and put her hand in her lap. “Aren’t those parents having a difficult enough time without you coming here to copy it all down and spread it to the world? ‘Wind Gap Murders Its Children’!—is that what you want people to think?”
“A little girl has been killed, and another is missing. It’s my job to let people know, yes.”
“I knew those children, Camille. I’m having a very hard time, as you can imagine. Dead little girls. Who would do that?”
I took a slug of my drink. Granules of sugar stuck to my tongue. I was not ready to speak with my mother. My skin hummed.
“I won’t stay long. Truly.”
Alan refolded the cuffs of his sweater, smoothed his hand down the crease of his shorts. His contribution to our conversations generally came in the form of adjustments: a collar tucked in, a leg recrossed.
“I just can’t have that kind of talk around me,” my mother said. “About hurt children. Just don’t tell me what you’re doing, don’t talk about anything you know. I’ll pretend you’re here for summer break.” She traced the braided wicker of Alan’s chair with her fingertip.
“How’s Amma?” I asked to change the subject.
“Amma?” My mother looked alarmed, as if she suddenly remembered she’d left her child somewhere. “She’s fine, she’s upstairs asleep. Why do you ask?”
I knew from the footsteps I heard scampering up and down the second floor—from the playroom to the sewing room to the hall window that gave the best spying vantage of the back porch—that Amma was certainly not asleep, but I didn’t begrudge her avoiding me.
“Just being polite, Momma. We do that up north, too.” I smiled to show I was teasing her, but she buried her face into her drink. Came back up pink and resolute.
“Stay as long as you want, Camille, really,” she said. “But you will have to be kind to your sister. Those girls were her schoolmates.”
“I look forward to getting to know her,” I mumbled. “I’m very sorry for her loss.” The last words I couldn’t resist, but my mother didn’t notice their bitter spin.
“I’ll give you the bedroom next to the sitting room. Your old bedroom. It has a tub. I’ll buy fresh fruit and some toothpaste. And steaks. Do you eat steak?”