Any Bitter Thing (19 page)

“It’s not just him.”

“This place is full of awful stories. Get worried when I
stop
crying.” I spun toward the door, feeling suddenly light headed.

“Lizzy,” he said, coming after me. “Listen, wait.” He squared me gently by the shoulders. “I’m starting to think maybe we dropped the ball over the summer, all of us. We should’ve organized a visiting schedule or something, shown our faces a little more than we did, eased you back in.”

“Nobody dropped the ball. I didn’t need easing.”

“We’re glad we didn’t lose you, Lizzy, is what I’m trying to say.”

I nodded. “Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry about the Seaveys.”

He gave my shoulders a squeeze. “A heads-up next time, that’s all.”

His sympathy trailed me back across the hall. I sat at my desk, gazing out the window. All the stragglers—the kids held for detention or tutoring or theater rehearsal or basketball practice—stood in a loosely bound throng, waiting for the late bus. Andrea Harmon, freshly sprung from detention hall, sat on the weathered grass a deliberate distance from the group, her back propped
against the listing chain-link fence that surrounded a practice field, smoking what I hoped was a cigarette. Her hair shone a muddy maroon color in the afternoon light and her eyes from a distance looked like cigarette burns, but there was something beautiful there, too, in her long legs bared to the cold, delicately turned wrists poking out from the cracked cuffs of her jacket. I had looked just the opposite at her age, in my school uniform and tied-back hair, though I’d cultivated a similar solitude, acute and palpable. I was glad to see she’d recovered her jacket; there were so few things she loved.

For all the drama of the day, I felt curiously serene; you could even say I was happy. My recent hours with Harry Griggs reverberated still, an afterglow of reliving my childhood days with such pleasure and relief. Perhaps because he was a stranger, Harry had elicited my most sympathetic readings. My stories unfurled without the stain of loss. My years at Sacred Heart had been marked by bitterness, an ugly, fanged thing that left me friendless and unreachable until I rejoined Mariette at college and started living again. I did not recognize this revival as temporary until the accident shook loose that old bitterness from its hiding place inside my own body. Released, it began once again to dog me, until this—this
telling
—began to dull its bite.
Let him rest
, whispered Mariette’s voice in my head; and it came to me that at long last I was doing just that. What did it matter now that my uncle died accused? He lived innocent in memory,
my
memory, and it struck me now that the words “My child” held no imperative, no veiled directive; they were merely a declaration of presence. I am here. I exist.

Maybe that’s all he was asking, the same thing we all ask: to be remembered.

FOURTEEN

The last time anybody could swear to seeing Mariette’s father, he was headed up Random Road, northward, in the dark middle hours of a night in early September. Chummy Foster saw the truck—its flame-orange running boards left over from the previous owner—hugging the black curve, the tailpipe whacking the roadside weeds as the truck wended ditchside and back, over and again. Drunk, Chummy figured. Ray Blanchard, drunk again.

This information did not turn up until mid-November, more than two months after Mr. Blanchard missed the boarding of Gus Fournier’s boat. By then it appeared that Ray Blanchard had taken off this time for good, and an unaccustomed watchfulness had overtaken Mrs. Blanchard, who exhorted us to play near her, as if afraid to lose us, too. Flattered, we cleaved to her, resorting to board games despite the cold and tempting sunshine outside.

We were playing Sorry at the kitchen table. Mariette chose a yellow marker, not her usual green. “I’m a new girl now,” she explained, meaning a girl with no father. She spoke in a complicated timbre, as if acknowledging that she both missed him and didn’t, or missed the idea of him more than the fact of him.

This is what I say now. At the time she might have been wrecked by grief. I can say only that she did not appear to be, which I suppose people must have said of me when I arrived at Sacred Heart to begin my long sleepwalk through the remains of my childhood.

A knock at the back door. Major drooled across the floor to let in the florid, bald-headed Chummy, no stranger himself to the bottle. “I saw Ray,” he announced to one and all, avoiding Mrs. Blanchard’s gaze, which had fallen upon him with the ferociousness of some animal I had no name for. “I’m sorry to be just getting to it, Vivienne, I’ve been off on the boats myself.” He kept hiking up his green work pants, a nervous gesture of sympathy, I realized even then, but the effect on Mrs. Blanchard was that she kept retreating,
merci
, ok,
merci
, her arms violently folded across her middle, taking little mouse steps, back, back, back, until she’d pasted herself against the stove.

“Ok,
merci,”
she repeated, her lips closing tightly.

“He was headed north, up the Random Road, two-three in the morning,” Chummy said. He made a half-gesture toward the newly fatherless children and said, “This was back in September, but I thought you’d want to know in case you need to track him down. I could stop by the police station for you, tell Ted and them, get them looking around in case he turns up.”

“Ok,
merci,”
said Mrs. Blanchard, who had run out of room, her backside pressed against the knobs of the stove. For a moment I feared she might burst into flames.

Chummy hiked up his pants again. “A family man shouldn’t take off like that.” He gave Mariette’s little brothers a single pat each, on the top of their fusty heads, with one of his big, knobbed hands. They gaped. Mariette and I, sharing a kitchen chair, watched him lumber off in embarrassment at this family’s trouble, nearly steamrolling Pauline on the porch.

Pauline clicked into the kitchen and cast a glance at her
sister. “Mr. Foster saw Papa,” Mariette said. “The police are going to make him come back.”

“The police?” Pauline took off one of her high heels, shook out a pebble onto the linoleum, then picked up the pebble and plinked it into the sink. She turned to her sister. Their heads tended together, and they murmured in that way they had when discussing even the simplest matter.

“You think the police care one little bit where Ray went?” Pauline said.

“They might,” Mrs. Blanchard said. “They think men should always come back.” She went to the sink and scraped out a frying pan. It was almost lunchtime.

Pauline said, “You girls get the boys’ hands washed.
Vite!
”

We each took a boy—I liked Buddy best because at two and a half he was still very small and loved to be carried—but we didn’t leave the kitchen. Why would we? Pauline and Mrs. Blanchard were launching an irresistibly adult conversation, Pauline still holding her pointy red shoe.

“Ray disappears all the time, Vivi.”

“Not this long.”

“Oh, so!” Pauline said, tossing her hair. “Every time he goes he says he won’t come back. He tells everybody he’s leaving this town and never coming back.”

Mrs. Blanchard hung on to the edge of the sink for a moment, then plunged her hands into the dishwater. “This time is different.” She whirled around, soap flicking off the tips of her fingers. She looked frailer than usual, more papery and brittle, the skin beneath her eyes still soft and punched-looking, though she’d had all summer to heal since the night she answered the door with the bag of peas held to her eye.

“Papa’s gone,” Bernard whimpered. “He left us.”

As if summoned by our voices, Father Mike appeared.
Major nudged the door open and in he came. Everything in the room returned to balance, as if a seesaw had just stopped, flattened at midair. Here was Father Mike, trim and well-kept, his fingers smooth as a woman’s, his face scraped clean of stubble, his clothing predictable, pressed, black and white. He seemed, every time he entered this house, to have come a long way, without sweating, for the sole purpose of refining a place unused to finishing touches.

“Mrs. Hanson’s looking for you, Lizzy,” he said. “Lunchtime.”

“Can I stay here?” I said, shifting Buddy to my other hip. He was heavy, but I liked the work of him.

Father Mike looked around. He looked at Pauline’s shoe, at the lacy ribbon of soap dripping down Mrs. Blanchard’s dress. “Did something happen?” he asked.

“Chummy Foster saw Ray’s truck,” Pauline said.

Mrs. Blanchard made a little cry, turning to face away from us.

“Oh, the children,” Pauline said.

Was Mrs. Blanchard crying, I wondered, because the Ray who hollered at night might come back, or because the other Ray—the one who step-danced and told stories and made money—might not?

Father Mike began putting the boys’ coats on. “Tell Mrs. Hanson I said to feed the lot of you,” he said.

“But Father,” I whined, “Father.”

“No buts,” he said. “Now.” Because he never made commands, we obeyed, all of us, glancing over our shoulders as we scampered down the shortcut to the rectory, the crisp November air strafing our faces.

Mrs. Hanson was hardly thrilled to see us—four kids to feed instead of one. “He said what?” she asked, scuffing her hands on her apron lest her consternation be not plain enough.

“He’s helping
Maman,”
Mariette said. “He doesn’t want us to see her cry.” I gawked at Mariette, her weight distributed evenly, defiantly, on both feet.

“Fine, then,” Mrs. Hanson sighed. With each passing year her lips paled another shade, as if keeping pace with the rest of her diminishing reserves. I had never thought her unkind, merely underpowered for the job. “Make yourself useful, Lizzy, and put out some plates.”

We ate tomato soup and buttered bread in relative silence. Father Mike and I had made the bread the night before, way past my bedtime, listening to
The Barber of Seville
on the radio. The boys were miraculously quiet, anesthetized by the unfamiliar table, new food. The bachelors had wisely hidden themselves away.

Mrs. Hanson was glaring at me. “Take that off,” she ordered.

I looked up. The shirt was my best, a hot-pink shell with a wave of sequins glimmering across the front. Crissy Miller had one exactly like it. Father Mike had thought it too loud, had done his best to talk me into something else, but in the end he relented, as he always did. “It’s my favorite,” I protested.

“You look like a tramp,” she said. “It’s beyond me why he puts up with your shenanigans.”

At nine I did not understand innuendo. “Tramp” meant a hobo, a drifter, homeless and unwanted. “Shenanigans” was her word for finding me in Father Mike’s bed back in the spring. The humiliation still burned—in both of us, it seemed, for she had changed utterly toward me since then. Her impatience, which had never struck me as personal, had turned to a pointed disgust. Clearly she was remembering anew, her face resolving into that same expression of shock and insult, her prodigious wrinkles converging into the open O of her mouth. Such a baby, I imagined her thinking. Such a tramp, wandering the house at night. The little princess, running downstairs after a nightmare. What shenanigans.

“I’m not changing unless Father says,” I informed her, emboldened by Mariette’s stolid presence and the audience of little boys.

My defiance stunned us both. Her eyes shuttered open. “You think I’m not on to you?” she said. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to?” She ripped off her apron. “I won’t stay in this place a minute longer. You tell that uncle of yours, that so-called
priest
, that I will no longer abide.” She snatched her coat from the rack in the hall as we gawked at her, goggle-eyed. Her own eyes, amazingly, spilled a thin, tearful trail. “I once had a perfectly satisfactory life,” she said, then turned and left for good.

Just like that, we four found ourselves baffled and abandoned, inexplicably insulted. Mariette cried first, then her little brothers startled into tears, then I did. By the time Father Mike returned, we’d worked ourselves into a state and ran to him in a kinetic, sticky throng, wrapping ourselves around his narrow middle, seeking the comfort of his body and lamenting the sudden caprice of our world.

It was Harry Griggs I told this story to, two months after our first meeting. I’d made a visit per week, sometimes two, during that window of time, in secret. I suppose it could be said that I was “seeing” him, but that admission would point in the wrong direction entirely. Nevertheless, I left school at the earliest possible moment like a woman aflame, scooting past Jane’s desk without a word, my coat halfway on as I fumbled for my car keys.

When he opened the door to me on this particular evening, I discovered a second chair placed near the white one, a
TV
tray between, and two matching coffee cups, with matching saucers, arranged on the tray with a tower of Fig Newtons on a new plate. Each time I returned I found something else placed there just for me.

It was four-thirty and he seemed a little breathless, having rushed home from his shift gutting chickens to make coffee for
two, as he had from the start. I would stay an hour (believing, perhaps, that adhering to the length of an actual therapy session mitigated my lie) and leave rested.

Outside Harry’s windows the vanishing daylight glowed; doomed leaves rattled on their branches. “I love Fig Newtons,” I said, picking one off the plate. “I used to eat them all the time when I was a kid.”

“I know,” he said. “You told me.”

We smiled at each other. During the term of our acquaintance he’d become more and more regretful, his eyes sagging over me. He claimed that if he could do it over he’d remain at my side on the muddy shoulder to listen for signs of life and hold my hand. I didn’t honestly believe him, but so what? The bad Samaritan was making up for his half-good deed by remaining at my side now, listening now, holding my hand—figuratively speaking—now.

“It’s starting to look really nice in here,” I said.

“I got the car fixed. Busted head gasket cost me a shitload, but now that I’ve got wheels I figured I might’s well fix the place up a little. So I drove out to Ames last night to get the chair.” He patted the back of the new chair, a high-backed rocker with tweed upholstery. The
TV
tray was fashioned out of a wood laminate stamped with green acorns.