“You know I couldn’t live like that—knowing that somebody got away with killing forty-nine people and that my own grandmother has known all these years. Somebody has to pay.”
“You will, Cal. In the end, you will. You don’t know when to stop.”
He turned away from her and headed toward the stairs.
“Where will you go? Will you try to find her?”
He stopped without turning around. “I don’t know. I just can’t stay here with you. I don’t know what could happen the next time I lose my temper.”
“You need help, Cal.”
His shoulders sagged. “I know. Or maybe just leaving this place will be all the help I need.”
She didn’t call him back, knowing she could never change his mind. As soon as she heard his door shut, she picked up the suitcase and the torn tag and hid them behind the parlor sofa to rebury later, to make sure they would never be found. As she walked from the room she stopped suddenly, almost running into Gibbes.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, touching her chin.
“I know. I bumped into something. How clumsy of me.”
He looked at her with his mother’s eyes, and it was as if Cecelia were looking at Edith with understanding and compassion, and for the first time Edith felt as if her silence had at least given her a moment of triumph, a small restitution paid for Cecelia’s sake. She simply didn’t know whether it had all been worth it.
Gibbes put his arms around her waist, then patted her back as if he were the adult. “It’ll be all right, Grandma. That’s what you told me when Mama died, remember? It’ll be all right. Maybe not tomorrow or even the next day, but one day it won’t hurt so much.”
They listened as drawers were opened and slammed shut upstairs in Cal’s room, and then heard the sound of a suitcase sliding out from under his bed. Edith took Gibbes’s hand, then knelt in front of him. Her heart ached as she brushed her fingers against his soft cheek, and he looked at her with his mother’s eyes. She had failed to save Cecelia, had failed to raise good men. Gibbes was her only hope, her last chance. “I’m going to take you to the Williamses’. Go on upstairs and pack your overnight bag with a couple of changes of clothes. If you need more, I’ll bring them.”
“Why are you sending me away? Did I do something bad?”
She shook her head, then kissed his forehead. “No, sweetheart. You’re the only one who hasn’t.” She touched his face, wishing she were strong enough to start over, to do a better job with Gibbes. But she was tainted with too many ghosts, haunted by the daughter-in-law she couldn’t save and the faceless passengers on the doomed plane. She’d thought she could justify what had happened, telling herself it was an accident, that being physically and mentally abused by someone you loved did awful things to the way you saw the world. But it didn’t matter anymore what she thought; Cal had discovered her secret and would enact his own twisted sense of justice, and she was helpless to stop him.
She looked into Gibbes’s golden brown eyes and saw Cecelia. “I want you to be happy, and I know you can’t find that here, or with me. At least not right now. Promise me that you’ll be happy, that you’ll see the good in people, and seek forgiveness first. Can you promise me that?”
He nodded solemnly as his arms slid from around her before he turned and headed slowly up the stairs. He stopped and faced her again. “Can I come back here? Is this still my home?”
“Yes. Always. But right now the Williamses can give you the family and guidance you need and that I have failed to provide. I hope you will understand it one day. That you will forgive me for all my failures.”
He studied her for a long time before continuing his ascent as Edith stood at the bottom of the steps, listening to the sounds of her two grandsons packing their belongings along with the final pieces of her heart. She’d thought of the useless energies of her life, all wasted, all misunderstood. She would be alone until she died. It was all she had left to do. It would take years, she supposed. Wasn’t it true that only the good died young? It would be a fitting punishment for a woman who’d only ever wanted justice for the silent victims of crimes people never spoke about, and those who were only whispered about in confidence.
She stepped out onto the porch and took a deep breath of the fall air that already carried a hint of cooler temperatures. The afternoon lay still in the curve of the river where her beautiful house perched on the bluff, the low tide exposing stagnant pluff mud and listless grass. She felt like that now, sensed her own outgoing tide with each breath.