“Well, are you coming in? Heat’s not getting any cheaper,” Mrs. Carlton says, interrupting my thoughts. I take one last breath of cool, rain-fresh air and enter the house, Elle right behind me. Bleach fumes set my eyes to watering and sear the lining of my nose. Sauna-level heat intensifies its effects, making a bleach-nebulizer that burns my lungs. Elle sneezes, loudly, and earns a glare from Mrs. Carlton, who produces a tissue from one of her pockets and tucks it into my daughter’s reluctant hand.
“Come and sit a spell.” Mrs. Carlton turns her back and shuffles down the hall.
Elle holds the tissue with the tips of her thumb and forefinger, ewww written all over her face, and I gesture maniacally for her to just put it in her pocket.
Oblivious to Elle’s antics, or at least I hope so anyway, Edna stays on course and doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t seem to lean on the walker, and as we follow her down the spotless hallway, I catch her picking the thing up and carrying it for a step or two before remembering that she’s supposed to lean on it, not use it as a fashion accessory.
The sitting room hasn’t changed at all since my childhood. The blinds are closed tight to keep the sun from fading either the carpet or furniture. Same stiff old couch and chairs, same dull beige lampshades, all still covered in plastic to keep off the dirt.
Elle and I lower ourselves gingerly onto the sofa, planting our feet to keep from sliding forward off the slick surface.
“I used to babysit your mother,” Mrs. Carlton says to Elle. Her voice is grinding and harsh, out of keeping with a tiny frame so aerodynamic that she seems to hover above the armchair, still gripping the walker to keep herself from drifting away. I keep sneaking glimpses to see if her butt is touching the chair.
“I remember.”
Mrs. Carlton wasn’t my mother’s first choice of babysitter, but she couldn’t argue with the convenience of having childcare right next door, or with the price, which was free. There were days, mostly during tax season, when both of my parents stayed late at the office. On those days, when the school bus dropped me off, I would do my homework at Mrs. Carlton’s kitchen table, while her venomous gossip poured over me and gave me insights a kid definitely didn’t need into the behaviors of all the neighbors.
I remember tasteless dinners, and the misery of washing dishes afterward and never getting them clean enough to satisfy.
“It won’t hurt you,” Mom said when I complained. “Life isn’t all fun and games, Maisey.”
“You were just a bitty thing when your folks moved in,” Mrs. Carlton is saying now. “Maybe three and so precocious. Watchful, you were. All big eyes. You had a way of hiding in plain sight. You’d be sitting right there, and all the adults would forget about you. Freakish for a child that age, I always thought.”
My ears perk up. This is exactly the direction I want this conversation to go. If anybody knows the secrets my parents have been keeping, it will be Edna Carlton.
“Life is truly a vale of tears. Your mother was far too young. How old was she, now? She can’t have been more than twenty when she moved in here with your father. When I asked if her mother knew she’d moved in with an older man, she just about tore a strip off my hide. Total spitfire, I tell you. Informed me that she was of an age, thank you very much, and that who she’d married was none of her mother’s business and certainly none of mine. Then she slammed her door in my face, and it was two weeks before she consented to speak with me again, and then only because she was in need of a babysitter.”
“She’d been sick,” I say, as soon as I can squeeze a few words into the torrent. “I don’t suppose they told you.”
“Hmmmph.” Edna actually says this, pronouncing all the phonetics. I’ve always thought when I saw hmmmph in books that it was an exaggeration of a sigh or a hmmm. Nope. There’s actual spittle involved; an errant ray of sunlight sneaking in past the closed blinds highlights the tiny drops and turns them into rainbows.
“What are you looking at, Maisey? You always were the strange child, staring off into nothing like you could see the dead wandering about. Can you?”
Startled out of my musing on rainbows and spittle, I stare at her, blankly looking for the right answer to her question.
“Can I what?”
“See dead people.”
I blink back a vision of my mother’s dead body as I saw it before she was cleaned up and made presentable. If she were to haunt me, she would come to me like that, vengeful and trailing IV tubes and EKG wires. I wish I’d let her go peacefully. I wish I could go back to that instant and make a different decision. Regret sits like a boulder where my stomach used to be.
“She means like ghosts,” Elle says, helpfully, scuffing her feet in the perfect carpet and then catching herself as she starts to slide forward off the slick plastic. “Obviously you can see dead people.”
“Right.” I scrub my sleeve over my eyes and swallow to steady my throat. “No. I don’t see ghosts. I was probably daydreaming. I did that.”
“Looks like you still do.”
My right hand curls into a fist, and I force it flat and slide it under my butt where it will behave itself. I will remain calm. I will remain calm. I will not rise to her bait.
“Did you notice anything different with my parents in the last few months?” I ask, steering the conversation toward what I really want to know.
“Besides the part where he hit her over the head and let her lie there for three days without calling for help? If I hadn’t come over to check on her, the poor dear would have died right there in her bed.”
“She had an aneurism. She fell.”
“Or maybe he pushed her.”
And that’s it. My tolerance is done. I don’t care that she’s an old woman. I don’t care that my father isn’t technically my father. I don’t care that I’d planned to try to weasel information out of her about my childhood and my parents and whether she knows anything about Marley.
I’m on my feet, the air crackling around me like I’m about to burst into flames.
“Give me one reason to believe my father would hurt her. Just one.”
Edna cowers back away from me, both hands raised in front of her face as if she thinks I’ll actually hit her. She’s tiny and ancient and bitter. Shame infiltrates my rage, but I don’t back down. Not yet.
“Well?”
“I was just theorizing,” she quavers. “It’s the way of men.”
“Not all men. Not this one.” Another childhood memory rises from the depths, summoned by her words. Edna had a husband once. He’s long dead, but I remember him as lean, stringy, and oddly yellow. I asked my mother about the color of his skin, the yellowed whites of his eyes.
“Too much beer,” she’d said, and that was all. At that age I’d imagined the beer actually settling into his skin and eyes and wondered why it didn’t turn him brown. Now, seeing her hunched up and trembling in the face of my anger, I wonder if the story she’s manufactured for my parents is born out of one of her own.
I make an effort to soften my voice. “Did you hear anything, see anything? Was he shouting at her?”
“You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you. She shouted at him. I heard yelling a couple of times, so loud it came into my house through closed windows. Not to speak ill of the dead.”
“What was she saying?”
Edna settles her face into calm propriety, folding her hands in her lap. “I am not an eavesdropper.”
Right. And birds don’t fly.
On the rare occasions I heard my parents fight, it was always because Dad refused to follow some directive or other. Despite his quiet nature and his abhorrence of fuss and emotional outbursts, if he didn’t agree on something, he would tell her. He went along with her on most things, but every now and then, she’d run up against a streak of iron in him that would not budge or bend. And then the sparks would fly until she accepted the inevitable and either found a way around him or acknowledged that he was right.
Maybe it’s dementia, but the out-of-character things Dad has been doing—burning papers, not calling an ambulance—could also be the result of my mother’s planning. Dad would have fought her at first and then would have given in because what else are you going to do when the woman you love is about to die? And once Dad makes a promise, he keeps it.