Billie Standish Was Here (6 page)

A jolt shot through me like a zap of electricity and I
whipped my head around to stare at her. It was her turn to look away. I watched her chin wobble as she stared at the curtained window and forced more words to come out.

“My daddy . . . the one man who was supposed to look after me . . . and he hurt me. Whenever he could get me off somewhere.” Her shoulders started shaking, her head dropped to her chest, and tears started dripping down onto my face.

“Oh, Miss Lydia. Oh.” There didn't seem to be anything else to say.

“Oh, child, I would do anything to take this away from you. Anything,” she said. “I . . . should never have had a child. I never meant to. Because of what he did. What he was. And when I found out I was expecting . . .” She scrunched her eyes tight and spent a minute pulling herself back together. “. . . I prayed to God every night that I was carrying a girl. That there'd be no way to pass it on. And then . . . I had a boy. A boy, a boy, and I felt worse than Typhoid Mary for bringing him into the world.”

I felt so bad. Like it was my fault she'd had to remember all that. Like I should have hidden what happened for her sake, not mine.

But the way her face twisted up told me something different: that this was the kind of thing you never forgot,
reminded or not. That even if I still owned it, all to myself, there could be no pretending it hadn't happened.

I started wishing I could trade places with Miss Lydia and have all those years between my age and hers over and done with.

And then, all at once, I was tired enough to feel like I could sleep for a few of those years. I was way too tired to think any more.

So Miss Lydia started thinking for me. After my clothes were done and we both got dressed, she said we needed a plan. She said I should stay with her until my folks came home and she'd stick up for me if they said anything about losing my key.

“Are you saying I shouldn't tell them?” I hadn't thought that far ahead yet, but something faint started to claw at my stomach.

Miss Lydia shook her head. “I think it'd be best. Won't undo what's done and you got to remember, I've known your folks longer than you have. Known folks in general longer than that.”

I guess she could tell I didn't understand. “My own mama blamed me when she found out . . . well, you know,” she said. “And I got a pretty good idea your mama's no smarter than mine was. Your daddy . . . well, your daddy would feel like he had to do
somethin'
about it. And whatever he did, everybody in the countryside
would know why sooner or later. And that's just more to talk.”

She hung her head and shook it, while tears dripped onto the hands clasped together in her lap. “And . . . honey, the plain, honest truth is that people, most of 'em anyway, are no damned good.” She shuddered like she was trying to shake something off. “And there's
nobody
gonna blame you, child, long as I draw a breath.”

It sounded like nobody was going to blame Curtis either. The twist in my gut started to feel like fear. I didn't know how I could stand living right across the street. I said, “But . . .” and found I couldn't say his name. I shivered and Miss Lydia pulled an afghan off the back of the sofa onto my shoulders. I shook it off. Tried again. “But he . . .”

“—will never hurt you again as long as he lives,” she finished. Then she said, “Trust me.”

Well. My mama had told me never to believe anybody who had to tell you to trust them. But I'd had enough doubt planted about Mama's thinking to confuse that issue.

And anyway, I knew she was right about Daddy. And about other people finding out. I'd be better off dead than living in Cumberland if everybody knew.

But I had to trust somebody. This felt a whole lot bigger than me.

We cooked supper for my folks out of her pantry and she helped me carry it over when we heard them drive in. They tried to yell at me about losing my key, but Miss Lydia interrupted and offered to call Mr. Ripley of “Believe It or Not” on their behalf. She half smiled as she explained that it was the first time she'd met anyone who had never lost anything. The look she leveled at them rendered them both pretty sheepish by the time she was finished. She kissed my cheek before she went home.

I was alone with my parents then, terrified to look them in the eye. Surely they would see I was a completely different person than I had been that morning. They'd want to know why.

But they didn't give me more than the usual glance. Something ominous as a thunderhead was hanging in the air of that little kitchen and they didn't notice.

After my heart slowed down and my hands quit shaking, I asked Mama for permission to take some aspirin. She wanted to know if I had a headache.

I did, from my head hitting the hard wood of the lunchroom floor. But I said, “No, I think I might be coming down with something.”

I sniffled a little for effect and a small shock went through me head to toe as I realized this was it. I had decided not to tell.

I had to run to make it to the bathroom before I
threw up. After that I went straight to bed, but a long time passed before I was able to close my eyes, let alone go to sleep.

The sirens woke us up at 3:30. We all jumped out of bed and tried to run out the door at the same time, but Mama made me stay behind. So I stood at our front window and watched the lights on the police cars go around and around, splashing red across my face and onto the walls around me.

Mama came walking home by herself after a while and acted mad that I wasn't in bed. I asked what had happened and she said, “That old fool woman shot Curtis for a prowler when he came draggin' in, like he hadn't done it a million times before. I guess she's gone senile. Now go back to bed.”

And I did. But I never did get back to sleep.

I
  t turned out the river had crested that day. Two days after Curtis's funeral everybody started moving back to town.

Curtis Jenkins's funeral was the strangest I'd ever seen—and I had been hauled to the funeral home more times in my eleven years than I could remember. Around here when anybody dies, everybody goes. I've never figured out whether it's out of respect for the family or out of fear that otherwise, when their own time comes, theirs will be the only body in the room. Probably a little of both.

But this one was different, all right. How do you write a eulogy for a man nobody liked? What do you say to a woman who killed her own son, even when you think it was an accident? The Lutheran preacher just gave kind of a regular sermon. Maybe a little heavy on the “be prepared” theme. In this case it came out sounding a lot more like condemnation than praise for the departed.

The time before and after the service turned into a reunion for all the Cumberland folks who hadn't seen each other since they'd packed and run for the hills. It didn't seem right, all that laughing.

But I don't think Miss Lydia heard a noise anyone made. She just sat in the front pew in her navy-blue dress and black old lady shoes with her hands twisted around a lace-trimmed linen hanky. And she stared straight ahead at nothing. Or at everything, I don't know.

The only time she moved was when I was within reach. I don't know if she could hear me or smell me or what. Without turning her head or blinking she'd reach out, pull me in close, and squeeze until I could barely breathe. I might have wondered if she really had gone around the bend if I hadn't seen just about every kind of behavior imaginable from folks sitting in the front pew of that room that always smelled like carnations.

I remember after Grandma Wharton's visitation Daddy had little red dashes on his white shirtsleeve from Mama's fingernails digging in and drawing blood. Old Man Sullivan stood in front of his wife's casket like a guard dog at her funeral, fairly snarling at anybody who came close. And you never knew whose relatives would get into a shouting match right there over their dead body.

Grief seems to come down to individual style about as much as dancing does.

As for me that day, I had every emotion going on at once. My brain worked so hard it felt like it might seize up. I was horrified and sad and relieved and guilty and still in shock over everything that had happened in just three days' time. The one thought that I kept coming back to was, “Please don't die, old woman. Please live as long as you can, even if you don't want to right now.”

It had come to me that if I lost Miss Lydia, I'd be the only person in the whole world who knew what had really happened and why Curtis was in that coffin at the front of the room. And I wasn't sure I could hold all that knowledge inside me without breaking into pieces.

When the trucks rolled into Cumberland and everybody started lugging in the same crap they had lugged out less than a month before, Daddy did feel pretty smart. That presented him a problem. He thought pride was just about the biggest sin you could commit, so now he couldn't say “I told you so” to anybody.

But he must have granted himself special dispensation after the door slammed behind him at home. He'd come in about ready to bust and strut around crowing to Mama about who said this and that and what had he tried to tell all of them a month ago?

And Mama, she'd laugh and egg him on, making him repeat a story he'd just told the day before. It was like they had been in a coal mine or something, dragging home
every night dirty and discouraged and too tired to talk. And now they were partners in some kind of secret celebration only the two of them had earned.

It was them and me—a team and a nation of one. I guess it always had been. But now they felt so smart and there was so much they didn't know I couldn't stand to look at them. I could barely be in the same room.

What made the nightmare even worse was that while Daddy came out looking smart, Mama had found a whole new way to be mean. I couldn't believe the things she said about Miss Lydia at our kitchen table and the dirt wasn't even tamped down on Curtis's grave before I heard her make a joke to Missy Hambrick about it being “a heck of a way to cut down on the grocery bill.”

This was the old woman who had lived across the street from Mama her entire married life. Her only child was dead, by her own hand. And Mama found it laughable.

I'd always been afraid of her and tried to please her even when I suspected it was impossible. Every time she flew into one of her fits, it'd make me try even harder the next time.

Now I was beginning to suspect there was less to Mama than meets the eye.

One thing I didn't doubt for a second—Miss Lydia had been right when she said, “I got a pretty good idea
your mama's no smarter than mine was.” Oh, did I thank God every night Miss Lydia had convinced me we were the only ones who needed to know the truth. Then I thanked God she was still alive.

And although I was afraid it was something that would send us both to hell some day, I thanked God that Miss Lydia had made sure there was one thing I'd never have to be afraid of again.

Sure as rain.

I
  f the town had been dead for over a month, it was more alive than ever when folks moved back. There were cars and trucks going all day long. Dogs were yapping and kids were yelling and laughing and snotting all over the place. I realized I'd gotten used to the quiet. And I'd liked it.

It was still too wet to get into the fields, so Mama and Daddy were mostly around home the next week or so after the river crested. Mama kept me too busy to think about much of anything other than trying to do things exactly the way she liked. I pretended I still cared.

There was a trip to Milton to restock the pantry. Catching up with the laundry took two whole days with the wringer machine and backyard clothesline. Then there was the slapdash cleaning I'd been doing that Mama now had time to inspect.

We took our meals at the table together for the first
time in months, but those two spent that time yakking at each other like they were still high on the adrenaline that came with Being Right. Either that or they were discussing the separate sections of paper each had their nose buried in. I might have been watching them on TV for all the interaction offered me. Not that I had anything I wanted to say to them.