Evenfall (20 page)

august

GERT’S made a lifetime out of walking away, out of keeping herself to herself and avoiding other people’s troubles. Stick your nose out, get involved, and you’ll only get hurt. Yet for the past few days she’s been haunted by the look in Cort’s eyes when Andie’s beau showed up. She’d like to swat her niece’s behind for playing with the boy’s heart when she had no right to it in the first place. She tells herself it’s not her problem, that the boy’s well-being is no concern of hers.

And yet. The memory of that look stays with her throughout the day and into the next. It’s not till she catches sight of her face in the mirror beside the cottage door that she recognizes where she’s seen it before.

When she first returned to Hartman, she’d thought she was over him. It had been years, after all. She’d survived a
war, made a career out of the skills she’d practiced on the dead and dying. She’d had lovers, men who could be—or needed to be—discreet. If they didn’t touch her heart, it was easier that way. When Clara called, she’d just ended her latest liaison, a doctor who’d become too attached.

July in the hospital was a hot, sticky affair. The window in the break room looked out over an air shaft, and a fly was buzzing against the pane, desperate to get out. She threaded the telephone cord through her fingers. In her sister’s voice she heard the rippling waters of the creek, dark shot through with gold, calling her home.

“I’ll come,” she said, staring out the window.

She’d thought she had something to offer. She wasn’t that girl anymore, the daughter with something to prove. She was grown, a woman, and she’d gone farther than any of them ever would. She’d meant to help, of course, but to show them, too, a bit of what they’d missed.

Clothes were something she thought little about, but she’d dressed carefully for this trip. She’d bought a blue silk suit that she knew brightened her eyes and a soft gray cloche that accented the sharp angles of her hair. When she’d boarded the station at New York, the conductor had whistled, long and slow. She’d had his admiring attention throughout the ride, and when she stepped onto the platform she felt only pity for the sister who greeted her. Clara was thinner than she remembered; she’d lost the girlish roundness that had made her so attractive.

“You look like a million dollars,” Clara said, half laughing, half crying. “I’m afraid to touch you, you’re so fine.” But
she did, leaning in for the careful hug Gert permitted. Up close, worry lines cobwebbed out from the corners of her sister’s eyes, and a furrow creased the space between them.

It was over Clara’s shoulder that she caught her first glimpse of him. He stood just off the platform, arms crossed, leaning against the car. When Clara released her, he came forward, and she saw how the same lines that marked Clara spread across his face. She thought, with satisfaction and a bit of regret, that she’d made the right choice. He didn’t offer to hug her, just smiled and said it was good to see her again, then picked up the bags at her feet, turned, and walked away, leaving her with the distinct impression that she’d been judged as well and found somehow wanting.

They didn’t speak again. On the car ride to Richard’s, where Gert insisted she be taken first, Clara filled the silence with talk of the new baby and Richard. Gert remembered her little brother as a scrawny, fearful child, one they’d tried to protect from their father. She’d been fifteen when he was born, her mother’s change of life baby, and she’d pitied him. He’d been barely six when she’d left home for good. She could not reconcile the image of that small boy with the cursing man who met her at the door and barred her way.

She thought Frank would knock him down. There was rage there, but at what she couldn’t yet say. She told Clara to stop wringing her hands, stepped between the men, backed Richard off with the tone of voice she’d used on soldiers twice her size. When Frank brought her bags in, she sent him and Clara home. Despair was her vocation, and she was practiced enough in it not to need help.

She found the infant in the back bedroom of Richard’s house. When she picked it up it mewled. The cloth diaper was overflowing with soft yellow stools, and she had a moment’s regret for the fine blue suit.

She cleaned the child up, stripped the sheets and left them in a corner until she could attend to them. She took the baby with her into the bathroom and laid it on the mat while she scrubbed the tub and ran a bath. She ignored Richard, who stood in the doorway, watching, and studied the child. It was small, and the yellow had spread to its limbs, but it wasn’t the worst case she had seen.

She found a stack of clean diapers on the floor next to the bed, carefully pinned one on the baby, then left it on the bare mattress of the crib while she went to prepare a bottle.

Her brother followed her.

“What’s it’s name?” she asked.

“Andrea,” he muttered. “Will it live?”

“Yes.” She heard his exhale, then the scratch of a match being struck. “Outside,” she told him without looking up, and he didn’t protest.

She spent the next four days there. The living room received the most light, so she cleaned the windows and dragged the crib in. When her brother staggered back in, he saw the infant, still naked except for its diaper, sleeping peacefully in sunlight.

“Catch its death,” he slurred, but she didn’t bother to answer, and he collapsed on his bed, shoes still on. She left him there.

She knew all the hiding places: the tank of the toilet, the
wedge of space behind the furnace, the shoe box at the top of the closet. She’d taken his wallet and secreted it among her sanitary napkins at the top of her suitcase. When he raged through the house, he overturned the box but looked no further. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t unlock the door.

She stayed beside the child the entire time, leaving it only to prepare a bottle or make coffee. When the dry heaves started, she pointed to the bathroom and told him that if he missed, he’d clean it up himself. The coffee cup he threw went wide, smashing at her feet on the wooden floor.

On the third day, when he began to weep and cry for the dead wife, she ceased making coffee and switched to chamomile tea. She laced his cup with a mild narcotic she’d been prescribed after the war to help her sleep, and only when he’d closed his eyes did she lock herself inside the baby’s room and let herself doze. She made herself wake every hour to check on them both.

At midnight, she’d turned over to find the baby staring at her, dark eyes opened wide. She’d reached over, brushed a finger across its brow to check for fever, and it smiled at her. A reflex to gas or air bubbles. Gert withdrew her hand, but it continued to smile.

“Don’t,” she heard herself say. “I’m not your mother, you hear me?” She heard the exhaustion in her own voice. She left the room, checked to make sure her brother was still breathing. When she came back, the child was fussing. She changed it, carried it downstairs with her to the kitchen. She’d scalded the bottles earlier and left them to cool on the counter. Now she opened the icebox, took out the milk she’d had Clara
pick up from McCallister’s farm, and mixed it in a pan with blackstrap molasses. When it was warm enough, she poured it into the bottle—tricky, one-handed—and took the bottle and the child upstairs. She’d had the idea of putting it back in the crib, but each time she tried to put it down it fussed. At last she settled herself on the floor, the babe in her lap, wide dark eyes staring. She plopped the nipple in its mouth and it sucked immediately, tiny starfish fingers splayed against her hand. When the bottle was three-fourths empty, it fell asleep. She tried to rouse it to burp but it wouldn’t wake, a warm limp weight against her shoulder. It smelled of milk, and of the molasses, and beneath that a soft damp scent all its own. She found it hard to put down, even though it was sleeping, and sat for some time, its head tucked beneath her chin.

By the fourth day, Richard’s hands were steady enough to hold the plate of toast she brought him, and when the first bite didn’t send him retching to the toilet she packed him and the babe up in a taxi and brought them to the big house. Richard needed nourishment, and she needed rest.

She’d told Clara to settle the child on a blanket in the late afternoon sunshine and taken her brother up the stairs to one of the spare rooms on the second floor. She’d helped him to bathe and shave, his hands still not steady enough to trust with a razor. She’d put him to bed in a clean pair of pajamas, his hands scuttling like nervous crabs over the top of the quilt.

“Stay a moment,” he’d said, and she’d sat on a chair beside him. She’d heard the same words a thousand times, but she listened anyhow. They liked it when you listened, she’d
found. It made them more pliable later, that they thought you cared. When he reached the part in the words where he thanked her, she stood up.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ve got the babe to live for.”

“Ah, but who do you have, Gertie girl?” he asked, and she turned to the door without answering.

The light was starting to fade when she started down the stairs. The house was redolent with the scent of peaches; she’d forgotten what fresh peaches smelled like. She went to the kitchen, meaning to ask Clara for some clear broth for their brother and perhaps a bite for herself. A peach, maybe. A bit of bread with real butter.

But she heard humming in the front room and followed it, curious. She stopped in the doorway. He was holding the child, its dark head tucked under his chin, and when he looked up the cat-shaped blue eyes met hers, and she was gone, drowning. He reached a hand toward her and said something, but the words vanished as he spoke them. She thought she’d lost the capacity to feel like this, but now she was all feeling, no rational thought at all. If he’d touched her then, she would have walked out the front door with him, taken the child and nothing else. The three of them, the way it had been supposed to be.

There’s a noise behind her, a footstep. Someone is gasping for breath. She raises her eyes, and sees in the mirror above the fireplace mantel her sister, ashen, and her own white face.

SHE turns away from the mirror. “Mind your business,” she says aloud, but there’s nobody but Buddy to hear. He purrs and twines beneath her feet, batting at her ankles with his oversized paws. She picks up the phone book, puts it down again. The cat is driving her to distraction. When she picks up the phone book for the second time, he jumps on the table, swatting the pages as she flips them.

“Enough of you,” she says, and carries him out to the porch. She doesn’t run him off, though, and he stretches out in a patch of sun, boneless and content in its warmth.

She watches him from the window as she dials the number, absently curling the phone cord through fingers thickened by age and arthritis. She’s still thinking of what to say when Catherine McCallister answers the phone. Her voice, amplified by years of scolding schoolchildren back into their bus seats, booms through the receiver into Gert’s ear. They exchange pleasantries about the state of the weather (good) and the size of the collection plate at church last Sunday (poor) before Catherine gets down to business.

“Well, hey, Miss Gert, what can we do for you?” she says. “Tell me my Cortie’s not being too much of a pest. He’s up there so much I’m surprised you haven’t run him off before this.”

“Not at all,” Gert says. “Actually, your son’s been quite helpful.”

Catherine snorts. “I’ll bet. I’ve raised five boys, Miss Gert, and despite what they think, I’m no fool. If one of them is off busting his butt for free, it ain’t you he’s looking to impress. No offense.”

“None taken,” Gert says.

Catherine lowers her voice. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. We’ve hardly seen him all summer, and suddenly he’s moping around the house like a cat with its tail run over. I made my roast beef for dinner last night—the one I bring to the church picnic every year—and he hardly touched it.”

“Really,” Gert says, but Catherine’s not listening.

“Now he’s talking some fool nonsense about goats. I tell you, Jim just about had a heart attack. We had a buck growing up, and the smell alone is enough to put you off them. I’m not saying dairy cows are fresh as a daisy, but goats? No, thank you. Not to mention the trouble they get into.”

Gert looks out the kitchen window. There are gnaw marks on the porch banister and tiny hoofprints all over her lawn.

“I understand perfectly,” she says. The glimmer of an idea has occurred to her, and it takes shape as she listens. When Catherine pauses to draw breath, Gert jumps in before she can change her mind.

“Actually, Catherine, I have a problem,” she says. “And I was hoping Cort could help.”

“Well, of course, Miss Gert. Just say the word—what do you need?”

Gert picks her next words carefully. She knows how Catherine has raised those boys, and while she’s always been in favor of a stern hand and a strict approach, in this case it could work against her. If she reveals too much, Cort might
not make it over to the farm again in her lifetime. Too little, and he might not be motivated enough to return while there’s still time to make a difference.