“If I had found our mother like that, I would’ve gone stark raving mad.”
It took me some moments to understand what they were saying—that I had been the one to discover my mother, dead. Leaning against the wall outside the kitchen, I ceased to hear their words, but only the low tones of their voices. When my father found me there, he asked me if anything was wrong, but I told him I wasn’t feeling well and wanted to go to bed. I finally met his eyes, and he looked at me a long time. Perhaps he was hearing more of what my aunts were saying. I could not. Would not. But I could see he knew that I’d found out.
He let me go on to bed.
Despite my aunts’ opinions, I’ve never felt shame over what my mother did. Only sadness that she would leave us so callously. It was, perhaps, some strange kind of blessing that I can’t remember that day, that I had no remembered image of my mother, dead in her yellow robe, her limp body hanging in our garage. My only memory is of her standing outside on that strange, hot, windy day, holding out her hand to me. I never told Rachel or even Press. (Though I’m certain he found out.) Holding the knowledge close to my heart, I hoped it would make me a better mother to my own children.
My mother has never come to me in Bliss House. Until the day of Eva’s funeral, I had never experienced more than the occasional sense of something fluttering at the edge of my field of vision. An unexpected chill in a well-heated room.
Finally almost all the women who had been at the funeral were gathered on the wide terrace running along the front of the house. Someone—probably Terrance, our houseman, or one of the day women acting at Terrance’s instruction—had distributed a number of umbrellas and a few antique parasols that Olivia kept in storage.
One group stood in the thin band of shade at the edge of the forsythia bushes in the center of the circular drive as though they might draw some coolness from its tangle of shaggy branches. I could have told them that the only shade to be had from it was deep in the bowels of the overgrown mess.
Only a few months earlier, Shelley, the orchardkeeper’s shy younger sister who was very fond of the children, had given Eva a real bunny for Easter, and I had to crawl inside the forsythia to find it when it escaped from its hutch near the entrance to the garden maze. The bunny had darted inside to hide, alarmed by his sudden freedom. While the outside of the bushy mass was covered in yellow flowers, there were no leaves or flowers on the gnarled trunks of the bushes, and branches arched and dipped overhead, slapping me gently as I crawled, calling nervously for the bunny. It was a dark cathedral redolent of dirt and rotting leaves, and I was glad Eva hadn’t come with me. It was a place to escape to, a secret, empty place in the vast outdoors. When I finally emerged with the bunny, I was stunned to find that Eva had gone into the house, leaving Michael asleep in the grass, and doubly stunned to see that, by my watch, I’d been inside for nearly twenty minutes.
My heart pounded. What might have happened to him? I told no one what I’d done. Had I simply been . . . entranced? I’m still not sure.
Now I felt the same sense of living out of time, of having missed something. The accident had stolen my attention, pushing my grief away for a little while. I’d met my father on the lane as he hurried back to the overturned carriage: Michael and Nonie were safe in the house. Press was far down the lane, doing his part. If Olivia had been alive, she would’ve already made sure that everyone was inside, calmed and fed and given lemonade or sweet iced tea or sherry.
I quietly cleared my throat.
“Let’s all go inside, shall we? There are cold drinks in the dining room, and we can wait for news.”
The women stopped talking and all turned to stare silently at me. For a moment I worried that I hadn’t actually spoken. Hoping they’d follow, I approached the front door where Terrance waited. I gave him a small smile.
What shall I tell you, now, about Terrance? He was our houseman, tall and gaunt and of indeterminate age, with slight folds in the lids of his dark eyes that made me wonder if someone in his family had come from somewhere in Asia. He no longer had a single hair on his head or face—no brows or lashes, not even a single hair growing from one of the many moles dotting his face and neck. His clothes—including his jacket and, in winter, his pullover V-neck sweater—were always black, except for his white standard-collar shirt. He had worked for the family his entire life, and was as much a part of Bliss House as its cherry moldings and priceless carpets and motes of dust floating in the shafts of sunlight coming from the windows around the dome. Terrance simply was. Yet that day, I had no idea at all how much a part of Bliss House he truly was.
Is?