“What happened with Rory,” I said. “Why did you call off the wedding?”
They’d had an argument and gone their separate ways, Del explained. “He was too controlling,” she said. “Always wanting to have sex in the woods.”
I leaned on the small counter, feeling the smallness of the room with the both of us there.
“Like some sort of pagan ritual?”
I told her the couch pulled out into a bed, and she removed the cushions right then, and marveled at the way the bed unfolded, as if it were something she’d never seen.
“He just likes to do it out in the open,” Del said. “He’s claustrophobic.”
She sat on the mattress, trying it out. Then she spotted the travel alarm clock on the end table. “Oh look!” she cried. “Mother’s little clock. She tried to give this to me in the hospital and I told her to take it back.”
Del arranged the pillows and promptly fell asleep, which put an end to my questions. A feeling of both excitement and dread accompanied anything related to Del. She’d come to visit, which meant that I was still someone important in her life, and that pleased me. But we hadn’t spent time alone together in three years, and I wasn’t sure I knew her anymore. It also occurred to me that Detective Thomson may have paid her a visit, that her flight to Maine with Rory had had another purpose.
Across our years of letters, I had never asked Del why she’d turned me away that day I’d tried to visit, and she had never asked me why I’d kept away since. It was as if we had silently acquiesced to a need to keep our distance from each other. That afternoon in Ithaca I watched her sleep, her hands pressed under her cheek like a child. The little travel clock on the end table wasn’t really a gift intended for me, and I wished I had never accepted it. I felt a rush of animosity toward my mother, toward Del, but I tamped it down. As in childhood when she would propose an enticing plan, I was being lured back under Del’s spell.
In the middle of the night I woke up and she was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark having a conversation with herself.
“You told me that was what it was,” she said, “and then you fell into the gap, and the bees interrupted, and the whole Sunday I couldn’t find the place.”
She cut the air with her hand emphatically, and when I spoke to her she didn’t stop or seem to hear me. “Del,” I said. “Oh, Del?” Clearly, she hadn’t been managing her medication.
I should have expected this. In her letters she’d often talked about despising the medication and wanting to wean herself off of it. Yet it unnerved me. I dug the prescription bottles from her bag and read the instructions for dosage. I filled a glass of water at the sink and I handed the pills to her, one at a time, like a nurse at her bedside.
“You need to get those little plastic cups,” she said, trying to provoke me.
“Your experiment failed,” I said.
“This time,” she said.
Eventually, as days passed, Del’s drama seemed to level off. My mother called, and though it felt like childhood tattling, I told her Del was visiting. She pushed in a chair and crossed the kitchen floor and opened a cabinet. The old regulator schoolhouse clock chimed the hour.
“How is it going?” my mother said, falsely bright.
“We’re having fun,” I said. “I’m showing her the sights.”
One Saturday, I’d taken Del on a tour of the campus. I’d gotten a map from the Campus Information booth, and Del had made fun of me for not knowing my way around. Another time, we’d hiked up wooded, spiraling trails in Buttermilk Falls Park. Yet another day, we’d crouched on flat rocks near falls that wet our faces. I’d even taken her across the suspension bridge over the gorge, clutching her hand, feeling myself drawn to the edge.
“That’s nice,” my mother said. “When is she coming home?”
Home meant Ashley Manor, I assumed, but still her question rankled.
“Soon,” I said. I’d enjoyed having Del around again, and I even felt better with her near. I had willed the dead to keep their distance, and for a while even Mary Rae obliged.
6