Edith gasped before she could stop herself, causing both Cecelia and Cal to turn to her. Her daughter-in-law gave a quick shake of her head, and Edith dropped her hand from her own neck and forced a smile.
Reaching for her grandson, she said, “Let’s go bake some cookies so when your mama gets back from having her hair done, we can have a nice snack together.”
“I’ve decided to do my hair for the party myself.”
Cecelia smiled, and Edith caught the scent of alcohol on her breath, as thin and wispy as smoke from a hidden fire. Of course she couldn’t have her hair done. Because then she’d have to remove the sweater.
“Oh, all right. I’ll be happy to watch Cal for you.” She smiled the same smile others had given her all those years of her own marriage, and she was ashamed. Not because she’d raised a son who was as brutal as his father, but because she had learned nothing and was still as ignorant as those well-meaning people who chose to look past the bruises and see only what they wanted to. To think what they wanted to. To believe they understood and placed blame accordingly.
“Thank you, Edith,” Cecelia said as she relinquished her son.
Edith tried to prop the boy on her hip, but he was too big and he slid back to the floor. He looked up at her with his mother’s eyes and Edith felt the oddest urge to cry. He didn’t break eye contact until she’d given him a little nod, knowing he was waiting for her to acknowledge her promise to take him up to the attic.
Cecelia paused in the doorway, her lips parted slightly, as if the words waited on her tongue. Edith stepped forward, wanting to meet her halfway, to prove that she wasn’t the coward she knew herself to be. And suddenly she saw the face of the letter writer, the woman who’d written the word Beloved on a folded letter to her husband and tucked it neatly inside his suitcase. The face of the woman Edith had imagined dozens of times, waiting by a telephone for news. Waiting for the sound of her husband’s footfall outside the door. And the face Edith saw was Cecelia’s.
“Let me help you,” Edith said softly, the words floating between them like petals. They could be caught, or allowed to fall to the ground.
Their eyes met, yet to Edith it seemed they were standing very far apart, their lives connected yet separated by an invisible barrier that neither one of them knew how to break through.
Finally Cecelia’s lips closed and she swallowed. “I don’t need any help. Everything’s fine.”
Relief and shame flooded Edith, making her want to beg Cecilia to let her help at the same time she wanted to pretend that she hadn’t seen the marks on her neck. She felt the absurd need to go talk to the statue of Saint Michael in her garden, to ask him for protection. And forgiveness.
“Grandma, I’m hungry.” Cal pulled on her arm, and Edith looked at him gratefully.
“All right, sweetheart. Let’s get out of your mother’s way so she can get her hair done for the party.”
Cecelia ruffled Cal’s hair as they walked past her. “I love you, baby,” she said.
“I love you, too, Mama,” Cal answered automatically as he followed Edith to the hallway and down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Have a holly jolly Christmas . . . The thin strains of music seeped under the kitchen door. Edith’s purse sat on the counter, and inside it was a copy of the passenger list she’d finally managed to obtain from the police chief—one more piece to a puzzle that seemed to have an infinite number of pieces. She took some consolation in the fact that she’d already figured out so much about the plane and the crash, much more than the police had. They still thought it had been an accident.
She reached into a drawer and pulled out a cigarette and lighter, taking a drag until she could feel the nicotine replacing her doubts. She hoped she could use the passenger list to determine who the letter writer had been, maybe reach out to her in ways Edith hadn’t been able to with her own daughter-in-law. Maybe there was justice in the world, perhaps even a divine reason the suitcase had fallen in her garden.
Edith opened the refrigerator and stared inside. She wondered how Cal’s clear vision of justice would interpret her actions, how judges and lawyers would argue against the biblical “eye for an eye” method of righteousness. It was too early to decide, anyway. She knew little more at this point than that the crash hadn’t been an accident, and that the anonymous letter writer knew it, too.
Edith took another drag on her cigarette and began pulling out the ingredients to make cookies, seeing the bold black letters on the letter each time she opened the refrigerator door. Beloved.
chapter 22
LORALEE