The Sun in Your Eyes (26 page)

Marion waited for her to understand.

“It wasn't suicide?”

“Not the way you might have thought.”

“Who was it, in the road?”

Marion said nothing and Lee's stomach turned. Marion gestured for her to hold on and went to heat more water at the stove. Maybe she was one of those people who found tea to be healing. Lee had tried to be one of those people once. After that god-awful Thanksgiving when Natalie Feld had sat her down, put on a kettle, and it really did have a calming effect. Before she drank it, she'd felt a lot like a wild animal that couldn't help biting the hand that fed her. (Shouldn't the Felds have known to stop extending their hands in her direction already?) But the tea soothed her. As though its heat restored some humanity to her. She'd liked the ritual of it and the idea that she might one day make perfectly steeped tea for someone in need. She went to a lovely little shop where a serene and seemingly wise woman sold her several loose-leaf varieties. The canisters sat untouched in her cupboard until she moved and then they sat in the cupboard of her new place.

Marion stood over Lee, filling up the cup she hadn't realized was empty.

“I never got a good look. I couldn't be sure. But when I was in the hospital, your mother came to see me. They'd moved me to an intensive care unit in Manhattan and she came almost every day and she sat with me and talked. I was unconscious. She thought I couldn't hear. Or maybe she thought I could.”

“What did she talk about?”

“I don't remember much of what she said, mostly the cadence of her voice, and a few stray things. Like you remember parts of a dream. She told me about the Catskills. About riding in the back
of her father's Cadillac when he drove the family up to Hirschman's for the summer. Speeding along at night, with the windows down, in the passenger seat of a car that belonged to a waiter at the resort. Linda said she loved the total darkness of the country because it was nothing like the street-lit night of the suburbs and in that darkness she could pretend the waiter was mysterious. On their last night together—and I recall this vividly—he told her he'd write to her and she said, ‘Can you write like you fuck?' Linda said he looked as if he was trying his best not to appear horrified. She never heard from him again.”

“Well, that certainly sounds like her,” said Lee.

Marion continued. “She hadn't been back there, to the Catskills, since those Hirschman's summers. Not until the day she came to Flintwick's. By then Hirschman's was shuttered. I remember driving by that place and pointing it out to Jesse because I thought it was something he might be into. That he might want to go explore the ruin. It was all boarded up behind a chain-link fence. The roofs of the buildings were falling in, and there was this gigantic empty pool. But Jesse just shrugged when I suggested we take a look. He quoted someone, a writer who said nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool, but I could never remember who it was. He never told me about Linda's association with it.”

“It was Raymond Chandler,” mumbled Viv. “The line about empty pools.”

“Is that right?” asked Marion.

“The
Long Goodbye.
”

“Oh,” said Marion.

So her father and Viv had read the same books. Lee wasn't sure what to make of that. What pushed its way into her consciousness just then was the moment, as she had kissed Jonathan Feld, when
his hand had moved to her breast for a long second. And the look on his face when he finally pulled away. Rueful and confused but with an intensity she'd never seen from him before.

“Okay,” said Lee. “Hirschman's. Where Linda apparently had the time of her life.”

Marion didn't seem to get the reference, though she seemed saddened by Lee's cynicism.

“I'm sorry,” said Marion.

“Don't be.
I'm
sorry. I mean, this is why we came here. Please. Keep going.”

“That's about it, of what I remember Linda telling me. How she knew the area, how she knew those roads.”

“You think it was her in the road,” Lee said.

Marion pulled into herself, closing her left hand around her right wrist and folding her arms to her chest.

“I don't know. I have no proof that it was her. All I know is I woke up with a scrambled mind and a gut feeling. Linda came to see me one more time in the hospital after I regained consciousness. I told her I knew she had come to visit me the weeks before, that I had heard her, and she said, ‘Heard what?' She said they must have had me on some really good shit.” That quiet laugh again. “Maybe they did. Maybe I imagined it all. I asked her what she wanted with me. I was in a lot of pain and I didn't have the strength, the inner resources, to challenge Linda. She was so . . . who she is. And I was so very young. She told me she wanted to give me half. Jesse had a will and he hadn't updated it, so his estate was hers. She was going to keep half of it for you and give the rest to me. I didn't know what she was trying to do. Buy my silence? Assuage her guilt? I told her I didn't want the money and she sighed, as if I was being naïve.” Marion's voice caught. “She was wearing that pendant of her father's.
‘It's done' she said. Just like that. She never came to see me again. She was right, though. About me needing the money, of course. The hospital bills were astronomical. But it was also as if she knew I would need to start again. As if she couldn't, but I could. And she was giving me that chance.”

It seemed Marion had been over and over this in her mind and still hadn't quite figured Linda out. She had turned it into a vexing case study, establishing a professional distance so as not to be personally destroyed.

“I changed my look. I cut my hair, dressed differently. I went to college. Then graduate school. Sometimes my ego would get the better of me and I'd wonder if people recognized me. But people rarely did. I realized Jesse was the context in which people had known me. You couldn't have ‘Jesse Parrish's black girlfriend' if you didn't have Jesse Parrish. In time, I became someone else. I probably would have become someone else regardless. I always knew I would lose him somehow.”

“Maybe. But not like that,” said Lee. There was something lovely about Marion's self-sufficiency and endurance, but also something remarkably sad. Her solitary life in a fairy-tale cottage in the forest. If there wasn't a prince, there ought to have been a woodsman, at least, or some dwarves.

“You never heard from Linda again?”

“No, we don't send each other Christmas cards.” A bitterness crept into Marion's voice. “I went into one of her shops in San Francisco once, out of curiosity. I even tried on a tunic. It had a very nice drape. I have to give that to Linda: a sense of proportion in clothes, if not in life.”

It seemed to Lee that she ought to be shocked by what she'd just heard, by all the implications of it, and maybe that would come
later. Or maybe this is what shock felt like: having the dream where you discover an extra room in your house, only waking up to find that room really is there.

Lee felt herself on the verge of tears, coupled with a stubborn urge to keep it all in. As though she didn't want to give someone the satisfaction. But who? Marion hadn't hidden her feelings. And if Viv wasn't overcome with emotion, she at least looked like someone who was trying to be concerned for the sake of a friend, while also spreading one last schmear of soft cheese on a piece of bread. She moved slowly, as if she knew she shouldn't be thinking about hors d'oeuvres at this moment, but nevertheless going for the hors d'oeuvre. It broke the tension.

“I have more where that came from,” said Marion, noticing the time on her watch and turning on a floor lamp. “We could have dinner if you like. Where are you staying?”

“Nowhere yet,” Lee said. “We'll probably go to Carmel or Monterey, find a hotel for the night.” Linda would stay at a posh inn just down the road from here when she used to come for spa weekends with Roy or Stephen or Monty. A cabin at Deetjen's the couple of times she tried the great outdoors family thing with Lee. She couldn't have known Marion had been so close all this time.

“Why don't you just stay here?”

Lee shook her head. “Oh, no. Thank you, but that's okay.”

“It's no trouble. I would like it. I go into the guestroom and I can practically feel it accusing me of neglect. Please. Stay.”

Lee didn't need a lot of convincing. She had been going, going, going, all to get to this and now that they were here, she let fatigue overtake her. She wanted someone to take care of her, and Marion would do that. She didn't have to think about what came next, only had to go out to the car and bring in her bag for the night. It was a
piece of luggage that Linda swore by for travel. As usual, Linda was right about these things. It held all she had needed this whole time and there had still been room, a deep inner pocket, in which to keep safe the Haseltine photo that Flintwick had given her. She pulled it out of its rigid cardboard case. Days ago (Had it really been just days?) when Flintwick first showed it to her, she had seen a complacent man, one who maybe knew that complacency didn't play well so he should disingenuously try to appear a little more troubled. But now she saw it the other way around—Jesse tightening a valve on his worry after he'd let a little of it leak out. It was of a piece with the entire Haseltine series. It had that quality that captivated Carnahan: involving-but-uninvolved. Like the waves and the rocks and the towering trees around here. You could observe the terrain, you could wander in it, it could move you, it could hurt you, but it had no need for you. No need at all.

Marion's face came alive when Lee showed her the photograph. Bewilderment, scrutiny, avidity. Marion was looking at a code she had once been able to decipher easily by virtue of daily practice. She was rusty now, but give her a minute. She would get it. It would come back to her.

“You know what I haven't thought of in years?” she said. “How Jesse used to call me Maid Marion sometimes, like Robin Hood. I never told Jesse that I'd only ever seen the Mr. Magoo version. I didn't want to spoil the romance.”

“I know it's not so simple, but he must have loved you a lot,” said Lee.

“He did,” said Marion. “In his way.”

“You should have this,” Lee said.

“Oh. No. No, I couldn't. You keep it. It's yours.”

Lee didn't argue when Marion handed it back to her, but she didn't really believe what Marion had said. Yes, she could keep it, but it wasn't hers.

I
N THE DARK
,
in the cool, soft sheets of a queen bed, under the white matelassé cover, neither Lee nor Viv was asleep.

“If it's true, she's a monster,” said Lee.

“Lee, if it's true, she was out of her mind. She didn't know what she was doing. Other than trying to kill herself.”

“By stepping in front of his car? So either they went or she went? So he's either dead or he gets to live with her death on his hands for the rest of his life?”

“But that's what she's had to live with. His death on her hands. If it's true.”

“How do you find her so defensible? You always have. I'm asking for real. I'd love to know how it's possible because just for once I'd like to stop hating her.”

“She's not my mother.”

“No, she's not.”

“We all do things we can't take back.”

“Yeah, we all do things. Believe me, I know that. But not manslaughter. I know you're feeling guilty about sleeping with Rodgers, but it's not the same. It's hardly the same thing. I should never have called him. I should never have started that whole thing.”

“I do feel guilty. I feel terrible. But it's also like I feel guilty that I don't feel guilty enough. Maybe that's what it is, what makes me sympathetic to Linda. I'm not trying to excuse what she did or explain it away. I can just feel for her, that's all.”

“When are you going to tell Andy that you're pregnant?”

“As soon as we get back.”

“You should go home, then.”

“Now?”

“We got what we came here for. I should go see Linda on my own, anyway.”

“And the tapes?” Viv suppressed a yawn.

“Who knows. Maybe Linda has them after all, locked away somewhere.”

“You make them sound like Rochester's wife.”

Linda was never a big reader, not like Jesse, but she liked the Brontë sisters. When Lee was reading
Wuthering Heights
in high school, Linda said she liked their anger, ate a pecan sandy, and then walked out of the kitchen where Lee sat at the table with her book. Lee didn't immediately understand what she felt at that moment in Linda's wake—admiration for her mother. She hadn't registered any anger on the part of the Brontë sisters before Linda mentioned it. But once she did, she began to burn through the book, whose first few chapters she'd found a slog. Then she read
Jane Eyre
when it wasn't even assigned. She'd loved how dark and gusty it was, and she loved Jane with her stormy feelings and her sense of right and wrong. Jane was a bundle of contradictions, but was she ever hypocritical? Lee let the thought drift as she and Viv lay there silently in Marion's guest bed.

A light salty breeze came through an open window. It was different from the beachy, smoggy air of the Southern California coast, of her childhood. It was more rugged and moodier up here. Linda, as best Lee could remember, always took her (and the boyfriends) north. Never south, to La Jolla or to Mexico, never east, to the desert that Jesse had loved, where his ashes had been scattered. So when
Lee went to the desert for the first time, it wasn't with her mother but with Alex Garcia, who had his license a year before she did. Alex with his long skateboarder shorts and his smooth, tan skin. He thought the trip to Joshua Tree was all about his coming out to her, and she pretended it was, for his sake. Alex Garcia was paunchy now but still had the same clear complexion and dark, razor-straight hair. Living in Oakland. Working for a start-up that sold eyeglasses online. He wore a Buddy Holly pair himself. That she gleaned from the social network she had belonged to for about two seconds. He had written in her yearbook that he didn't know what he would do without her. But he'd figured it out pretty quickly.