Out Of The Deep I Cry (11 page)

Renee Rouse took his hand, squeezed it in hers. She nodded. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. I’m just…”

She nodded again, then stitched a smile on her drawn face. “Why don’t you have some of that hot chocolate, lovey.” She stood. “I’m going to tidy up in the kitchen.”

Dr. Rouse took his mug off the table and sank back in on himself, as if his reserves of indignation had been spent. Did all that relentless consideration for your spouse help or hurt? Clare had really only seen one marriage up close and personal-her parents’-but she couldn’t recall her dad apologizing over a snapped remark like Dr. Rouse’s. Of course, she also couldn’t envision her mother bringing Dad hot cocoa on a tray or working to smooth his ruffled feathers.

Clare took her drink off the coffee table with a murmur of thanks. Mrs. Rouse gave her husband another look-checking his emotional temperature-and whisked out of the room. Mug in hand, Clare read COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS in Gothic gold lettering. “Did you attend Columbia?” she asked, trying for some semblance of conversation.

Dr. Rouse gestured toward Mrs. Marshall with his mug. “Her mother sent me. Paid my way through medical school and my residency. That’s how I wound up at the clinic, you know.” He sat up straighter, speaking directly to Mrs. Marshall. “It’s not as if it was my dream to sink my life into that two-bit practice, you know. I was going to do my time and get the hell out.”

Mrs. Marshall sat stiffly, knees together, and sipped her cocoa. Clare waited for her to respond to Dr. Rouse. When she didn’t, Clare ventured, “Why did you stay on?”

“Mrs. Ketchem died right around the time my obligation was up. I had agreed to head up the clinic for as many years as she supported my medical training, you see. Seven years. But when it was time for me to go, I could see there wasn’t anyone competent willing to take on such a thankless, underpaid job. And by that time, I had become sort of-infected by Mrs. Ketchem’s passion for the clinic.”

“
And
you had a life here,” Mrs. Marshall said, “
and
Renee didn’t want to move away from her family…”

He shot a fierce look at Mrs. Marshall. “That’s true. But mostly, it was the clinic. You have no idea what that place meant to your mother. None at all. If I told you-” He cut himself off.

Clare thought it sounded a bit theatrical. Evidently, Mrs. Marshall did, too. “Allan,” she said, her voice gentle, “I’m sure you have insights into my mother that are different from my own. But I’m the person she left as trustee, and I can only act according to my judgment about her wishes.” She put her mug down on the coffee table. “I think our presence here is just causing you more distress right now. Why don’t we leave and give you a chance to absorb what we’ve talked about. You have my number, and if you want to speak further after you’ve… adjusted to the news, please give me a call.”

She stood, and Clare hastily followed suit. Mrs. Rouse met them at the door as they retrieved their coats from the hall closet. “Leaving so soon?” she asked.

Mrs. Marshall laid her hand on the woman’s arm. “Renee, I’m sorry to have had to bring bad news. Please let me know that he’s doing okay.”

For a moment, Mrs. Rouse’s chirpy facade fell away, and she looked older, tired, scared. “He’s just so unpredictable lately,” she whispered. “Sometimes he’ll sit for hours in that old chair, not reading, not watching television. Just sitting. Then other times he’ll come home ranting and raving and ready to take on the world. I wish I knew how to help him.”

“Have you thought about taking him to a psychiatrist?” Clare said. “Maybe he’s depressed.”

“He can’t be!” Mrs. Rouse’s expression went flat. “He’s the most stable person I know.” She reattached the cheery look on her face. “He probably just needs a break. We’re going away this Friday to a medical conference in Phoenix. We’ve planned to take a few extra days afterward, to lie by the pool and order room service.”

“That sounds wonderful, dear. I’m sure it will cheer him up,” Mrs. Marshall said. “Do keep in touch, won’t you?”

The two women exchanged hugs and Clare shook Mrs. Rouse’s hand.

Outside, on the top of the steps, they paused to pull on gloves. “You ought to encourage her to get him to see a doctor,” Clare said. “Stable people suffer from depression, too. And he was acting very oddly in there, you have to admit. Like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to curl up and die or come out fighting.”

Mrs. Marshall clutched Clare’s arm against icy slips as they descended the steps. “Maybe,” she said.

“You sound doubtful.”

At the walk, Mrs. Marshall let go of Clare and snapped open her clutch to retrieve her keys. “We’re from another generation, dear. We don’t go popping off to get mood-altering pills whenever life hands us a setback.”

Clare rolled her eyes.

“I will check in with Renee when they get back from Phoenix.”

“Thanks.” Clare fished her keys from her parka pocket. “Let’s hope it starts.”

“Oh, I think it’s warmed up.”

“Yeah. It’s twenty degrees instead of fifteen.” Clare walked Mrs. Marshall around the snow piled against the curb to her Lincoln and held the door open as the elderly woman got behind the wheel. “What was that remark about you not knowing your mother?” she asked.

Mrs. Marshall pursed her lips. “My mother, because of several tragic events over which she had no control, was the subject of all sorts of gossip over the years. I’ve already heard every variation of her supposed secrets. I don’t need to sit around and have Allan Rouse repeat old stories.” She started up her car. “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

“I’ll be there.” Clare shut the Lincoln’s door and walked to her Shelby. Thankfully, it started.

On the drive back to St. Alban’s, she passed the clinic. It looked vaguely accusing to her in the hard-edged morning light. For the first time, she noticed the carving in the granite lintel over the door giving its original name: THE JONATHON KETCHEM CLINIC. She wished Mrs. Marshall hadn’t interrupted Allan Rouse. Maybe the older woman had already heard it all, but for her own peace of mind, Clare very much wanted to know what the clinic had meant to Jane Ketchem.

Clare didn’t have cause to drive into Cossayuharie much, so she was worried she’d go right by Debba Clow’s place. Narrow roads ran like cow paths around rolling hills and pastures in Cossayuharie, most of them unmarked and all of them passing clapboarded houses and dairy barns, until all at once the driver ran out of fields and was in the sharp switchbacks of the mountains.

“Don’t worry,” Debba had said over the phone. “It’s impossible to miss our house. We have purple shutters.”

Cresting a large hill, the written directions pinched between her hand and the wheel, Clare saw the Clow residence where Debba had promised it would be, straddling the road at the bottom of a narrow valley. Debba had underreported the impossibility of missing it.

It was shaped like the typical Cossayuharie farmhouse, an overlarge, under-maintained structure that had started life as an 1850s four-up-four-down and had shotgunned backward through an 1870s parlor, an 1890s kitchen, and a 1920s extra bedroom. However, the Clow farmhouse also had the less typical 1960s addition of a rotting psychedelic bus in the side yard, multiple 1970s solar panels, something that looked like a steppe-dweller’s tent, and a paint job that defied categorization. The purple shutters were the least of it. As Clare shifted into neutral and let the Shelby roll downhill-her personal gas-saving technique-she could see yellow-and-black checkerboards over the chimney bricks, door lintels encrusted with D-I-Y mosaics, and painted jungle vines flowering up the front porch posts. The porch stairs were colored like Easter eggs and embellished with stencils of what proved to be, as Clare pulled into the dooryard, farm animals. She could make out pink pigs on the lavender step, brown cows on the yellow.

Clare got out of her car, crunching and slipping in the poorly plowed drive. Across the road from the house, an enormous barn had been partially gutted, its old doors widened into something resembling a municipal garage. There were two purple buses parked inside. She shook her head. She couldn’t wait to see what Karen Burns, whose brick town house was straight out of
Traditional Homes
magazine, would make of the Clow place.

She slipped and slid past Karen’s Saab and climbed the stairs to the front door, which was painted to resemble an underwater scene. She pressed the bell-a turtle-and stared at an octopus waltzing with a mermaid while she waited.

“Hi! You must be Reverend Fergusson.” The door was opened by a woman in her late forties or early fifties, with the lean, weather-beaten face of someone who spends most of her time outdoors and active. “I’m Lilly Clow, Deb’s mother.” She took Clare’s hand and combined shaking it with pulling her inside. “It’s colder than a Norwegian well digger’s you-know-what out there,” Lilly said. Deb’s mother looked vaguely Norwegian herself, dressed in an embroidered sweater with her gray hair hanging in long braids. “Thanks for coming out.”

“Thanks for having me,” Clare said, shucking her coat. “It’s quite some place you have here.”

“Yeah, it’s wild, isn’t it? The kids love it. The paint fumes are probably destroying whatever brain cells I have left, but what the heck. C’mon back to the kitchen, it’s warmer. Deb and the lawyer are meeting there while I ride herd over the kids in the playroom.” Lilly led the way through a room that was either a living room or an artist’s studio, and another that was either a dining room or a craft shop.

“Reverend Fergusson’s here,” Lilly announced as they entered the kitchen. Karen and Debba looked up from their seats at a scrubbed pine table and greeted her distractedly.

“We’ve got some nice herbal tea already made up,” Lilly said. “Or I could offer you some juice, or some bottled water.” The table was set with three mugs and a honey jar that had all the earmarks of someone’s first pottery project. A more professionally made teapot sat on a woven mat in the center of the round table.

“Coffee?” Clare asked.

“Sorry, no coffee. We have some chai tea in the fridge if you want caffeine.”

“Ah. Thanks, I’ll just help myself to what’s here.”

“Okeydokey. Me and Raffi will be entertaining the kids if anyone needs us.” Lilly opened a door in the back of the kitchen. Clare caught a blast of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” before it latched shut.

She pulled out a chair-mercifully unpainted-and sat down. Karen had a yellow legal pad in front of her and had been jotting notes. “Have I missed much?”

Karen shook her head. “No, we were just going over the terms of Debba’s divorce decree.” The lawyer picked up her mug and took a drink. When she put it down, Clare noticed that, despite the mug’s lumpy and uneven edge, Karen’s lipstick was unsmudged. There were women who always looked perfect, Clare reflected, and then there were the rest, who had mystery stains on their blouses and unevenly-bitten-off fingernails. Being in the same room as Karen Burns always reminded Clare that she was one of “the rest.”

“So he’s been paying his support on time, and using his visitation schedule,” Karen was saying.

“Yep,” Debba said. “Although only with Whitley. When we went through mediation, he said he didn’t feel competent to meet Skylar’s special needs.” Her voice made it clear what she thought of this excuse.

Karen pulled a document toward her. “That fits in with the motion his lawyer’s filed. He states”-she riffled through the pages until she reached a spot marked with a sticky-“ ‘The minor Skylar has been diagnosed with autism and requires highly specialized care and teaching which Ms. Clow is unable and unwilling to provide. Petitioner would enroll his minor son in a residential educational facility in order to maximize the child’s emotional, physical, and intellectual development.’ ” She squared the document and placed it next to her legal pad. “He’s obviously going to make an argument that you’re retarding your son’s development by keeping him at home.”

“That’s not true! Mom and I both work with Skylar all the time! Plus, he gets all sorts of services through early-childhood intervention. He has occupational therapy and speech therapy twice weekly. His therapists will say I’ve been providing a rich educational environment for him to develop in.”

“Are they specialists in autism?”

“No, but-”

Karen raised her hands. “I’m not trying to argue with you, Debba, I just have to let you know what we’re facing here. I’ve dealt with some of the people in the early-childhood intervention program, mostly through my volunteer work at our church.” She nodded toward Clare. “We sponsor a mentoring program that hooks up teen mothers with older women. I’m sure everyone who’s a part of your son’s team is caring and competent. But now he’s six, and it’s almost time for him to be enrolled in school.”

“I’m home schooling him.”

“Which is a perfectly valid choice. But look at it from a judge’s perspective. You’re going to provide at-home schooling, which many people still see as inferior to ‘professional’ schooling. You don’t have an educational degree, do you?” Her voice raised hopefully.

“I never went to college.”

“Hmm. Not good. So you’ll have Skylar at home, and he’ll be eligible for special-education services, but you’ll be hauling him back and forth to the school for those. The judge will be comparing that to the glossy, professional gleam of a special school.”

“An institution!”

Karen took another drink. “We can’t afford to put special-ed institutions on trial, Debba.”

“So what should I do?”

“One thing would be to find out what your ex really wants. Lower support payments? Different visitation? Maybe he’s tired of paying his half of Skylar’s non-covered medical expenses.”

“Maybe he’s sincere,” Clare said.

Debba and Karen looked at her.

“Maybe he really believes that Skylar needs something different now that he’s reached school age. Maybe he’s worried about Whitley not having been vaccinated.”