Charlotte’s Story (5 page)

My heart pounded. What might have happened to him? I told no one what I’d done. Had I simply been . . . entranced? I’m still not sure.

Now I felt the same sense of living out of time, of having missed something. The accident had stolen my attention, pushing my grief away for a little while. I’d met my father on the lane as he hurried back to the overturned carriage: Michael and Nonie were safe in the house. Press was far down the lane, doing his part. If Olivia had been alive, she would’ve already made sure that everyone was inside, calmed and fed and given lemonade or sweet iced tea or sherry.

I quietly cleared my throat.

“Let’s all go inside, shall we? There are cold drinks in the dining room, and we can wait for news.”

The women stopped talking and all turned to stare silently at me. For a moment I worried that I hadn’t actually spoken. Hoping they’d follow, I approached the front door where Terrance waited. I gave him a small smile.

What shall I tell you, now, about Terrance? He was our houseman, tall and gaunt and of indeterminate age, with slight
folds in the lids of his dark eyes that made me wonder if someone in his family had come from somewhere in Asia. He no longer had a single hair on his head or face—no brows or lashes, not even a single hair growing from one of the many moles dotting his face and neck. His clothes—including his jacket and, in winter, his pullover V-neck sweater—were always black, except for his white standard-collar shirt. He had worked for the family his entire life, and was as much a part of Bliss House as its cherry moldings and priceless carpets and motes of dust floating in the shafts of sunlight coming from the windows around the dome. Terrance simply
was
. Yet that day, I had no idea at all how much a part of Bliss House he truly was.

Is?

Waiting for the women to respond, I caught a movement over near the patio.

Someone stood inside the glass French doors, watching from the dining room. It was a woman, but I couldn’t quite make out her face. Then she moved slightly, and, in a reflected flash of light, I saw the faded blond hair, the thick stroke of silver at the hairline that seemed to exist to highlight the long, pinkish scar just above her eye. Her mouth was wide and thin, firm with intent.

Olivia.

Heedless of both Terrance and the women around me, I hurried into the cool embrace of the front hall. As my eyes adjusted, I found that there were five or six people who hadn’t come back outside on hearing of the accident, standing in the middle of the hall, beneath the dome. I didn’t have the presence of mind to greet them, and if they were offended, I couldn’t help it.

I knew before I went into the dining room that Olivia wouldn’t really be standing by the window, or anywhere else. But perhaps there would be some vestige, something moved or disturbed. If it were possible for anyone to come back from death on the strength of her ties to a particular place, Olivia would be that person. Every
room was stamped with some piece of artwork, some fabric, some piece of furniture that had been hers, or whose history she knew. Her face was on a number of portraits. I hadn’t yet changed anything in either her bedroom or morning room, even though she had left all of her personal belongings to me. Bliss House itself had belonged to her. So why would she leave in death?

The dining room wasn’t empty, but there was no Olivia, and I surprised myself by feeling disappointed rather than relieved.

Marlene, our housekeeper, looked up from the table where she was putting out a stack of linen luncheon napkins from the press in the butler’s pantry. I thought she was around fifty years old at the time, but even at twenty-seven I was a poor judge of the age of anyone who might be over thirty. In truth, Marlene was barely forty then, but she hadn’t bothered to cover the premature gray mixed into her brown hair, and her eyes were dark but not wide or lively. Beneath the short sleeves of her black, summer wool dress, her arms were fleshy and loose. There was a kind reserve in her eyes that I appreciated, even though what she said next brought me up short.

“Mrs. Bliss would have me put out more sherry. Because of the accident.”

How many more times would I have to hear similar suggestions beginning with the words
Mrs. Bliss would have
? Grief and the possible presence of Olivia couldn’t quell my own self-consciousness and irritation.

“Sherry, and Scotch too, I think,” I told her, my voice sounding breathless even to me. “The men may want something strong.”

She went back to arranging the napkins on the Sheraton sideboard, which, like the baronial dining table, was overladen with food—ham biscuits, gelatin molds and tomato aspics, deviled eggs, peach and apple pies and crumbles, fruit salad, fried chicken, and fried chicken livers—that people had been bringing to the house for two days, and with more that Marlene and her helpers had made.
The dining room was Marlene’s purview. Not mine. I didn’t like the room at all, and almost never used the steep, narrow stairs in the minuscule hallway between the dining room and kitchen, even though they were the closest to the second-floor nursery.

The dining-room walls—twelve feet high like those of the rest of the rooms on the first floor—were completely covered with a mural of staring eyes. Not human eyes, but the eyes of peacock feathers that were so precisely drawn that they looked like they’d been painted from the memory of a terrible dream. Press had told me he’d been made to count them once as a punishment for some infraction he couldn’t now recall. How many eyes did he say there were? More than a thousand, I think. What a thing to do to a child!

But it wasn’t just the walls. There, drooping in a grand crystal vase that someone in the family had brought from some long-ago European trip, was a lush armful of peacock feathers that begged to be touched. Stroked. The coronas around their opaque pupils glimmered gold.

All those eyes. Had they witnessed Olivia’s return? My mind was restless, and I was so shaken that I believed I could feel my blood pulsing through my veins.

If Olivia could come back, why not Eva?

Chapter 5

A Sign

For nearly two weeks after the frantic strangeness of the day of Eva’s funeral, I stayed close to my bedroom, tethered by guilt and grief. The day itself lives in my memory in a series of tableaux: the fly on Eva’s flowers, the gray, bloody head against the carriage window, the terrified horse, Olivia’s face in the French doors. But isn’t that what our memories are? We walk down a long hallway, opening doors into rooms whose permanent contents wait to surprise or comfort or horrify us. I lay in my bed, not wanting to breathe, remembering brushing Eva’s teeth before bedtime, checking her for ticks when we returned from walking on the deer trail in the woods, her pleased laughter when, at two years old, she stuck her hand in a bowl of noodles and wiped them in her hair. Strangely, I even lingered over Eva in her bath, singing the Eensy Weensy Spider as she tried to string bubbles along the inner wall of the tub as though they would make a spider’s web.

She’d awoken from her nap that day as I slept downstairs, and tried to draw herself a bath in the bathroom off the nursery. Press
said she had turned off the water and hadn’t yet undressed, but must have tumbled in, hitting her head. By the time he took me up to see her, he had laid her on her bed and taken Michael from the bedroom. Yet sometimes in my dreams I saw her in the water face down, yet somehow alive. I wouldn’t—couldn’t—imagine her otherwise.

Even though my dreams were tortured, I slept. To my shame, I rarely thought of the Heasters, and my dreams were filled with only Eva.

I knew it was only a matter of time before Nonie would force me from my bed. I could only remain there as long as she was willing to chase after Michael, whom I made sure to see at least once a day. Even though I couldn’t trust myself to be left alone with him, I knew better than anyone that he shouldn’t be allowed to think that I had abandoned him completely.

Waking to sunshine, I could hear Press moving around in his bedroom. (Does it surprise you that we had separate bedrooms? That was the family’s tradition, and I quickly got used to having my privacy whenever I wished. I loved my room with its pale green-and-white dogwood-blossom wallpaper, thick wool green-and-tan carpet, and sumptuous white bedding. I realize now how considerate Olivia had been by updating the bathroom and redecorating the bedroom before I moved in.) He was probably getting ready for work, which I should describe as
work, such as it was
. He kept a law office in Old Gate proper, handling the affairs of a few of his mother’s old friends, but he mostly dealt with the details of the Bliss estate.

He’d told me the night before that he was going to work, and that he was visiting Rachel and Jack afterwards, if I didn’t mind. There had been something, too, about a memorial for Helen and
Zion, but I hadn’t really listened. Or cared. I assumed that he just wanted to get away from my sadness.

I wondered, silently, how he could move so quickly and go on with living. Wasn’t it his sadness, too?

“Charlotte?” His voice was muffled by the door connecting our rooms, but I heard both my name and the soft knock.

I didn’t answer. Everything could continue to go on without me, and I had no desire to see him. I couldn’t yet let go of my self-blame. It was mine. My guilt, and my shame. I wasn’t willing to share.

Nonie was with Michael, and Marlene and Terrance would mind the house as they always did. There would be a breakfast tray outside my room, left there at 8:30 by Terrance if I hadn’t appeared in the dining room earlier. Nothing compelled me to move from where I lay. Eva was gone, no matter what I did or didn’t do.

Press came quietly into the room. Standing beside my bed, he was a shadow blocking the sharp light of early fall that filtered through my eyelids. His cologne, the
Floris No. 89
he’d begun wearing after his trip to New York to see plays with Jack and Rachel (I’d had terrible morning sickness with Michael and couldn’t go), was overpowering in the still air. I kept my eyes closed. Finally, he bent to kiss my cheek, brushing my hair lightly with his fingertips.

He walked across my room, not back to the door, but toward my tall dresser.

I opened my eyes just a little to see him raise the bottle of sleeping drops that Jack had brought to me after Eva died up to the light of the window. Jack was a firm believer in the power of pharmaceuticals, and always said that there was no reason anyone should suffer if there was a drug to help. I shut my eyes again quickly.

I knew Jack had meant well, but I hadn’t taken the drops in over a week. I was certain that if Olivia could come back, then Eva could too. I just wanted to see her one more time. It had to be possible. I worried that the drops might make me sleep so deeply that I might miss her in the night.

I didn’t know who to pray to in order to see my child again. Not God. God didn’t govern Bliss House. After years of being immune to whatever link Bliss House had to the dead, Bliss House had shown me Olivia. There had to be more. It
had
to show me more.

Press left the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.

“Michael, go to Mother.” Nonie’s voice.

I opened my eyes to a different light.

My one-year-old son gave a shrill crow of pleasure as he ran across the carpet to my bed.

Had I fallen back asleep? Yes. I’d fallen asleep with a prayer on my lips.

“Eva.”

In a dream, she’d been in the kitchen, standing on a stool beside Olivia, her yellow curls tied back out of her face with a Wedgwood blue velvet ribbon I’d never seen before. Olivia, who had long ago taught Marlene all the recipes she’d learned herself as a girl, seldom went into the kitchen except to give instructions or to catalogue the pantry’s contents. (“Even the best staff makes mistakes,” she’d once confided to me. “They become careless, and get cheated or become too generous with the family’s things. It’s rarely malicious, but they need to remember whose things they are minding.”) This dream-Olivia was stirring something into the kitchen’s enormous crockery mixing bowl, and I could hear her murmur to Eva, who was watching, rapt. I had almost heard what she was saying, but Nonie’s voice had broken the dream. It was gone.