Arcadia Falls (48 page)

“And where’s that?” she mutters, stepping into the jeans I’ve picked up off the floor. Haruko snores gently in the other bed, oblivious to our talking.

“You’ll see,” I tell her. “A surprise.”

She falls back to sleep as soon as we’re in the car. I put a blanket over her and drive down to Route 28 and turn west. In Pine Hill, I stop at a bakery and buy bear claws, jelly doughnuts, French crullers, and two more cups of hot cocoa. The car fills with the aroma of chocolate and
yeast and sugar—better than incense any day. The road spools out beneath us, like a ribbon extending into our futures. I feel like we could just keep going. What’s to stop us?

The dawn drive reminds me of when we left Great Neck last August, but I felt then as if we were fleeing the wreckage of our old lives and going to the one place that would have us. Now I feel the world is open to us. All we have to do is choose.

But I want Sally to be part of making the choice this time, and in order for her to do that she has to know everything. I feel in my sweatshirt pocket for the folded pieces of paper. They crinkle at my touch, brittle as fall leaves and as crackling with energy, as if they might spontaneously combust in my pocket.

When I pull off Route 28 Sally stirs and stretches. “What smells so good?”

“I told you there would be doughnuts,” I say, wafting the wax-paper bakery bag under her nose and then snatching it away. “But first there’s a hike.”

She groans, but gets out of the car good-naturedly enough. Even when she sees how steep the path is, she doesn’t complain.

What a good kid she’s turning out to be, Jude
, I find myself whispering under my breath as I pant behind her on the steep trail.
You’d be proud of her
.

She gets to the top before me and I can hear her little cry of delight and surprise. At the top of the hill is a small stone chapel standing all by itself.

“It’s like something from a story. How did it get here?”

“It’s the chapel from the convent of St. Lucy’s. It was moved here when the valley was flooded,” I say, waving toward the view, which is just emerging out of the darkness. The sun has crested the ridge to the east, lighting up the high outcropping we stand on, but not the valley below yet. “A group of artists got together and saved it because of the paintings inside.”

Sally swings open the door, ignoring the view of the valley, and begins opening the shutters. I haven’t seen her this excited since Jude bought her
a plastic playhouse on her fifth birthday. The pictures silence her though. She walks from frame to frame, following the story of the fifth-century Irish girl who probably wasn’t any older when she ran away from home than Sally is now. I fill in narrative details when needed, but mostly Lily and Mimi’s paintings tell the story with remarkable clarity.

“So she had to give up her baby and her daughter grew up without her! That’s awful!” Sally cries with the outrage of the young at unfairness and injustice.

“But look, they’re reunited later.” I gloss over the part about mother and daughter getting burned at the stake for preaching Christianity. “Here they are on a cloud ascending to heaven.”

Sally shakes her head, displeased. “You mean they find each other only to die? Ugh, what an awful story! Imagine if I’d grown up with strangers instead of you, Mom.” She leans against me for a moment and I squeeze her shoulder. Then she’s gone, kneeling in the corner, looking at the artist’s signatures. “Lily Eberhardt and Mimi Green,” she reads. “The same Lily who was one of the founders of Arcadia?”

“The same,” I say.

“Who’s Mimi Green?”

“She was one of the first artists who worked at Arcadia. She did the landscapes. They’re pretty, aren’t they?”

Sally takes a step back and stands in the middle of the room to get the full effect of the landscapes. The gently rolling green hills, the verdant valleys, the flashing river, and the thick forests that serve as backdrop harmonize so well with the figures in the foreground that they seem to fall away, like half-forgotten places slipping behind mist and cloud. But looked at closely, little details emerge: yellow jewelweed and blue cornflower growing in the meadows, foxes and rabbits hiding in the woods, red-winged blackbirds and yellow finches in the branches of the trees. It’s a paradise—but it’s also real: the East Branch valley before it was inundated, a little paradise on earth captured on the stone walls rescued from the flood.

“Wow, she was really good,” Sally says. “I’ve never heard of her. Did she go on to paint anything else?”

“She gave up painting,” I say, steering Sally out of the chapel and to the bench. I take out the lukewarm hot cocoas from the bag and hand Sally a cruller. “And she went back to using her real name. Mimi Green was a name she used for working at magazines because her real name was too … well, too ethnic.” I take out the adoption certificate that Callum found in the County Records Office and smooth it out on my lap. I point to the name on the line for adopting mother.

“Miriam Zielinski,” Sally reads. “That sounds familiar—”

“Zielinski means ‘green’ in Polish,” I tell her. “And Mimi’s a nickname for Miriam—”

“Wasn’t Grandma’s mother named Miriam? And wasn’t Zielinski her maiden name?”

“Yes. Her married name was Kay. I always thought that was a funny name for a Polish Jew, but I figured that my grandpa Jack’s father’s name had gotten changed from something long and unpronounceable when he landed at Ellis Island. I asked once, but Grandma Miriam pretended she hadn’t heard me and my mother said she never knew. But now I do.” I point to the name of the adopting father: John McKay. “He was Irish—or at least they gave him an Irish name at the convent when he was left there. He died when I was only five, so I don’t remember him much, but everyone said he adored Miriam, so I figure he didn’t mind blending in with her family in Brooklyn—”

Sally shakes the paper in front of my face, cutting me off. “But this says they adopted a baby girl whose birth mother was Lily Eberhardt!”

“Yes. You see, Miriam—your great-grandmother Miriam—was a friend of Lily’s. She was at St. Lucy’s when Lily had her baby—a baby she couldn’t tell anyone about. Lily left before her baby was adopted, but Mimi—Miriam—stayed. She had let on to Gertrude Sheldon, who was a patron of the convent—that Lily had had a baby and then Gertrude, who I think must have gotten pregnant in Europe only to lose that baby, wanted to adopt the baby.” I take out of my pocket the adoption form that poor Fleur Sheldon had found and then left at Dora and Ada’s house, the one that listed Gertrude Sheldon as the adopting mother of Lily’s baby. “What I think must have happened is that Mimi decided at
the last minute that she couldn’t bear to see Lily’s baby go to Gertrude, who was, by all accounts a pretty awful woman.” I shudder, thinking of poor Fleur spending her holidays alone at Arcadia while her parents skied at Chamonix. Inside my pocket is the letter Callum had found in the St. Lucy’s archives.

I imagine that Gertrude Sheldon wrote the same sort of note when she was forced to return a hat that didn’t “suit.” But I don’t show Sally this egregious example of inhumanity. I continue with Mimi and Jack’s story instead.

“So she convinced the nun to switch the babies and give another girl the name Ivy St. Clare. And she and Jack, who she met and fell in love with while she was working on that mural, took Lily’s child. They named her Margaret, in honor of the nun who ran the convent and helped them take the baby in secret, and that’s how your grandma Margie got her name. And how I got mine, for that matter. I always thought it was an odd name for a Jewish family. They moved back to Brooklyn and Mimi—or Miriam, as she called herself—gave up painting. I guess she thought that’s what she had to do because that’s what women did back then.”

I consider adding something like: Thank goodness women don’t have to make those choices now! But I don’t. Who knows what choices Sally will be faced with in the years to come? I hope she’ll draw and paint and work and fall in love and have children, but whether she’ll do those things all at once, or in some completely new and different order and
combination that I can’t begin to imagine, only she will be able to decide. Right now, I only have one choice I need her to make.

“So Lily Eberhardt is—”

“My grandmother and your great-grandmother. Yes. But that’s not the only reason I brought you here. We’ve got a decision to make.”

I tell her our options. The job in Queens. Max’s offer of an apartment in Great Neck. Our options here. We hash it all out. When we’re done we’re covered in powdered sugar and the mist has cleared from the valley.

“So you’re sure?” I ask, brushing the sugar off my hands.

“Yeah,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

I feel a little light-headed on the drive back, but that’s probably all the sugar I’ve consumed. Or the brightness of the morning sun we’re driving straight into. When we arrive in Arcadia Falls, the town looks fresh-washed, not like the decaying Catskills town I saw it as months ago at all.

“Hey, there’s Haruko and Hannah—they must be going to the used-record store that just opened in town. I told ’em we have a real turntable…. we still have it, don’t we?”

“Yes,” I say without hesitation. It’s another relic of Jude’s I hadn’t been able to give away. “Do you want to get out and catch up with them?”

“Yeah … if you don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” I say. “I have some errands to run in town. I’ll see you back on campus.”

I park and walk toward the Rip van Winkle Diner, my heart thudding in my chest. I try to put that down to the sugar, too, but I know it’s because I’m hoping to find Callum there so that I can tell him we’ve decided to stay. When I open the door to the diner, though, my heart suddenly feels as heavy as the lumps of dough in my stomach. He’s not there. It’s ridiculous, I know, to think he’d be sitting here waiting for me—as ridiculous as it is to think he’s been waiting for me all these months, but still I feel unaccountably let down by his absence. Too discouraged to stay and eat, I start to leave, but Doris Byrnes sees me and waves me in.

“Are you looking for Sheriff Reade?” she asks.

I consider trying to deny it, but she’s looking at me as if she can see right through me. I remember Callum telling me that Dymphna Byrnes was a bit of a witch and I have the feeling that her cousin has just as much uncanny power.

“Yes,” I say. “Do you know where he is?”

“He’ll be working on that house,” she says.

“The blue Queen Anne on Maple Street?” I ask, as if there’s any doubt which house she’s talking about.

She nods, but is distracted by someone calling for a coffee refill. I leave before anyone can notice how flushed I am. The people Callum fixed the house up for must have hired him to do more work on it, I tell myself as I turn onto Maple Street and spot the blue house. Daffodils line the front path and the lilac bush in the front yard is leafing out—there will be lilacs in a few weeks. I walk up onto the porch under the watchful enigmatic gaze of the Greek goddess who has been returned to her carved acanthus bower in the gable. Her face has been completely restored now, but she still looks like she’s keeping a secret. The front door is open. Music comes from a radio playing inside, something mournful and Irish that suddenly erupts into a hard rock beat.

It’s no use knocking with that music blaring—and the owners are probably not here if Callum’s playing the radio so loud—so I go in. The house smells like fresh-sawn wood and lemon furniture oil. The hardwood floors in the foyer and living room gleam in the sunlight pouring through the freshly washed windows. The house looks newly scrubbed, as if waiting for something, but there’s no furniture in the living room and my steps echo in the foyer as if the whole place is empty. Only the statue of the wood nymph stands in the living room. Her face, which has been finished now, looks oddly familiar. I stare at it for a few minutes, trying to decide who she looks like until I realize that she has the same face as the painting over Ivy St. Clare’s desk. It’s Lily’s face, but it’s also mine. Callum had seen the resemblance before I had.

I follow the radio music, recognizing beneath the hard rock beat the familiar strains of “Amazing Grace,” into the kitchen. Callum is standing on a stepladder wiping clean an empty cabinet. He turns when he hears
me come in, but he doesn’t step down. He gazes at me as if there’s a story written on my skin he’s trying to read.

“I thought you were getting this place ready for some couple from the city?” I ask, surprised myself that this is what I choose to ask him first.

He drops the cleaning cloth on the counter and steps down from the ladder. I take a step forward and catch the scent of lemon from the oil on the cloth that’s now on his hands. Cherrywood. Lemon. And something else I can’t name. Him.

“You and your Sally, you’re the couple from the city. I thought this place would be perfect for you. I can give you a pretty good price on it … that is, if you’re staying.”

For answer, I step closer and rest my hand on his chest. I feel his heart beating beneath the thin fabric of his T-shirt and smell the warm musk of his skin beneath the cherry and lemon scents on his clothes. The roughness of his cheek brushes against the top of my head as I lay it on his chest. His arms come up around me. I feel as if I’m fitting myself into a mold I’ve been shaped from. I feel as if I’ve come home.

C
AROL
G
OODMAN
is the author of
The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, The Drowning Tree, The Ghost Orchid, The Sonnet Lover
, and
The Night Villa. The Seduction of Water
won the Hammett Prize, and others of her novels have been nominated for the Dublin/IMPAC Award and the Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her fiction has been translated into eight languages. She lives in New York State with her family.