Keeping Secrets (42 page)

“
We’ve
destroyed
her
life? Do you know what she did right before her suicide routine? She telephoned Lowie’s mother and called Lowie a bitch. So Lowie telephoned Caroline’s mother and returned the compliment.
Then
Caroline calls Lowie’s boss’s wife, some nice fifty-five-year-old woman who’s sitting at home playing bridge with her friends, and tells her her husband is having an affair with Lowie. It’s gone entirely too far. This poor woman I don’t even know has her life in shambles because of us? Because of me and this crazy bitch?
I’d
give her some medication if I could get my hands on her—enough to cool her out forever. I think Dr. Ente was wrong, Maria. I
am
in touch with my feelings and I’m extremely pissed.”

* * *

Jesse had come home for the night.

“I don’t want to hear about how pathetic she is, Jesse. I want you to tell that woman that when she gets out of her phony sickbed she’d better lay off.”

“She’s been through a lot, Emma. You don’t understand how hard this has been for her.”

“Hard for
her
? What the hell are we talking about?”

“She loves me.”

“Jesus H. Christ! I wish you could hear yourself. It’s like you’re reciting the Lord’s Prayer, like there’s something so God Almighty holy about her love. You tell her that if she makes one more nasty phone call, I’m going to go down there and rip her phone out—her tongue too.”

“You leave her out of this!”

“How can I leave her out, Jesse? The woman is smack in the middle of us. She might as well be here, recuperating in our bed.”

“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I think you’ve lost your mind.”

“You’re right, Jesse. I think I’ll get out of here for the weekend and see if I can find it. When I finish up at Tony’s tonight, I’m not coming home. I’m spending the weekend with Maria and Clifton.”

“Tony. Tony Boccia and his goddamned restaurant. That’s all I ever hear.”

“’Bye, Jesse. Go stay with your precious Caroline.”

* * *

At the bottom of the hill, Emma didn’t take the left turn that led down past Los Gatos, through San Jose, up to Berkeley and Maria and Clifton’s. She stopped at the pay phone.

“Can we spend the weekend on the
Grits
?”

After his “yes,” Emma dialed Maria’s number and asked her to cover for her. Maria also said yes, but she couldn’t promise anything for Clifton. After all, he was
Jesse’s
friend.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. I don’t know exactly what I’m doing, not even approximately. But I’m very very close to figuring it out.”

* * *

It was that October weekend that Jesse caught Emma in her lie. When Jesse called, Maria was taking a nap; Clifton answered the phone and hemmed and hawed, but his story didn’t fit. And it was
that
Monday morning, when the first rain of the season came early to the Santa Cruz Mountains,
that
Monday morning when Emma awoke to the rain’s pitter-patter and lay in bed thinking how much she’d loved summer rain back in West Cypress,
that
Monday morning when Jesse awoke with a magnificent erection, lifted her out of a tub of soapy water, and made slow lovely love to her before his rage at the knowledge of her betrayal transformed his passion into rape.

And once that battering was over,
but only with his dick, he never lifted a hand to you, never,
, Emma had heard the click which announced the end of her indecision and knew it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

When she awoke in that motel room in Needles after one day on the road,
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
, rather than Jesse, was lying by her side. Emma slid a look at the book, sat up, stretched and grimaced.

Ouch! There were sore spots where he’d used her body, spots that hadn’t been called into service in a long time if ever.

But there were no such tender places in her psyche. She grinned. She was on the road. She was flying.

Halfway through New Mexico, Patsy Cline came on the radio singing “Your Cheating Heart.” Emma closed her eyes and sang along so long and loud she ran off the road—which was okay. There was nothing much in New Mexico to run into. It was West Cypress,
now why was she going to West Cypress?
, that might prove to be a little bumpy.

Then she had almost conquered Texas, two and a half days of nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles.

Jake and Rosalie didn’t know she was coming. She’d surprise them, as Rosalie always had done when they visited relatives.

“Of course they’ll be home,” Rosalie had once said when Emma asked. “Where else would they be?”

Rosalie would be out in her garden, puttering around with her fall crop—collards, potatoes, turnip greens.

And what was Jake doing? What he’d always done, sitting sipping coffee, slowly turning the pages of the paper. Did he still imagine going to any of the places whose names he read there, she wondered, to Kenya, Katmandu? Or had both the years and the tranquilizers that kept away the boogeyman of hallucination dulled those dreams? She’d have to ask him when she saw him whether he thought about traveling anymore.

She was in East Texas now, rolling faster and farther, drafting in the zone of no resistance behind eighteen-wheelers. The interstate signs flashed by—KILGORE, LONGVIEW, MARSHALL.

This was Texas hill country, then, there, she’d crossed the Louisiana state line. And here was the first exit to Shreveport, thirty miles north of Sweetwell. If she got off the interstate, to whom would she say hello? Only ghosts lived there now, and besides, the hypnotic highway beckoned to her,
Keep going.

I-20 had no patience for turnoffs and side trips. It did not love old cars, small towns and serendipitous detours. That’s what antiquated Highway 80 was for, its meandering two lanes paralleling the straight shot of I-20 in a wavy line.

Emma thought about that. If she got off the interstate now and found that old road, might she meet herself coming the other way, the seventeen-year-old Emma, headed toward Grandma Virgie’s funeral and a date with J.D.?

And if she did meet herself traveling into her future, now her past, if she could step back those fourteen years, would she know that
Emma
Fine? What would she say to that young girl who’d never been away from home, who was at that instant a virgin impatient to give up her prize?

Would she say, Whoa! Stop! Wait! Look before you leap! If she could do it over again, would she travel all the same roads again?

“You do what you want to do,” Minor had said to her that last afternoon floating on the ocean aboard the
Grits
. “If staying with Jesse’s what you want, remember that what he is is what he’s going to be. And so are you.”

“You think so?” She’d run a finger along his face.

He’d kissed her finger. “I’d make it all better for you if I could, baby. But no, I don’t think people change. They don’t change their basic nature.”

Had
she
, she wondered? Was she the same girl who had left West Cypress swearing never to return? If so, why was she now almost there? Just a few minutes more. What solace did she hope to find? Shouldn’t she have just gone ahead and boarded a plane early for her appointment at the restaurant in Rome? Wouldn’t that make more sense than this, whatever this was?

Then she pulled into Rosalie and Jake’s driveway. The carport was empty. Where on earth could they have gone?

18

West Cypress October

1974

She knocked on the side door. It was locked.

“Hello! Is anybody home?”

Nothing. She called again, waited, and had started around the side of the carport to the back when she heard Jake’s voice.

“Who is it?” He sounded frightened. The door stayed closed.

“It’s me, Daddy, Emma.”

“Who?”

“Emma. Emma Rochelle Fine.” She laughed then. “Your long-lost daughter. Remember?”

“Emma?” He fumbled with the lock and then the screen and peered out into the bright sunshine of the October day. “Emma, is that you?”

She hugged him then, long and hard. He was so much smaller than he used to be. But his grin was enormous, a black jack-o’lantern hole. Jake hardly ever wore his dentures anymore.

“What are you doing here? Were you coming?” He looked worried then, as if her unexpected visit were something he had known about, something so very important that he had inexplicably forgotten. Or perhaps she wasn’t really here; perhaps his hallucinatory terrors had returned.

Emma saw all that in his face and reached out for him again. “No, no, Daddy, I didn’t call. I…” and then she stumbled. Across four days and almost two thousand miles, and she still hadn’t figured out exactly how the rest of that sentence ought to go. “I have a couple of weeks before I leave for Europe and,” there it was, “I thought I’d run home and surprise you.”

Jake grinned again. She ought to have remembered that he really didn’t care about the particulars. He never did, which was why it was always so easy to make it up as she went along.

At seventeen: “We were at the drive-in Daddy,” when she and Bernie had spent four hours at the Cypress Holiday Inn.

At eighteen: “We’re going to the Big Game at LSU,” when they’d finally sneaked away for a weekend in New Orleans at Bernie’s fabled Hotel Monteleone.

And after half a fifth of Jack Daniel’s had made her sick: “It must have been that Trenton Inn barbecue.”

“Where’s Rosalie?” she asked.

“She and Janey went out to her old place to dig up some fruit trees—or something.”

“She never sits still, does she?” Emma laughed.

Jake shook his head. “You know Rosalie. Always doing.”

“And yet she’s been dying since she was forty.”

Jake looked puzzled behind his swimming magnifying lenses.

“You know, Daddy, how she’s always talking about how bad she feels, how she’s got the rheumatiz, and the next thing you know she’s digging postholes or tearing down a wall.”

Jake grinned. He stepped backward then. “Come on in the house.”

“I will for just a minute, but I’m hungry. Let’s run over to The Tavern and get some lunch. I could sure go for an oyster po’boy and a beer.”

Jake hesitated. “Rosalie left some chicken.”

“Hell, Daddy. I don’t come home every day. Let’s go celebrate.”

“But the chicken, she’ll—”

“We’ll throw it into the garbage or feed it to the dog.”

Jake laughed, and she could see the mischief rising in him. When she was a little girl they had sneaked off every once in a while, as if Rosalie were the Wicked Witch who’d locked them up and said, “Never, never any soft ice cream.” Because they had ice cream, didn’t they, for sale in their store, though not the creamy kind that came out of a machine in a swirl, then dipped into a vat of melted chocolate. They’d thought those illicit cones from the Tastee Freeze the best stuff in the world.

“Oysters and beer,” Emma insisted. “My treat. Let me run in and pee, and we’ll go.”

Jake was sitting in her car, ready and waiting.

The beer was cold in frosty bottles. The fried-oyster sandwiches on French bread with mayonnaise and hot sauce tasted exactly the same as when she was sixteen and Bernie had first bought her one. Nothing, Emma thought, nothing in West Cypress ever changes, and in this case she was grateful.

“Good?”

Jake nodded with his mouth full.

Indian summer had lingered on this year, and it was still warm enough to eat outside. There hadn’t been much rain here, she thought, watching through the willows the Coupitaw’s sluggish flow. She had once read somewhere with surprise that it was one of the prettiest rivers in the country. They were sitting on top of its levee on the Cypress side.

Emma pointed behind her, across River Road to the row of mansions behind a parade of old magnolias. “When I was a very little girl, I used to wish that when I grew up I’d live in one of those houses.”

Jake smiled. He wished she did. He wished she lived closer to home.

“I’d watch the ladies get out of their big cars. They wore lots of jewelry and pretty clothes and looked like they smelled
pink
.” She laughed. “Maybe that was why I bought Rosalie that pink toilet water. Do you remember?”

Jake nodded. Emma had saved her allowance for weeks to buy Rosalie’s birthday present at the five-and-dime store. She’d picked out the bottle all by herself, brought it home and poured its contents into the toilet, then proudly called Rosalie in to see. Rosalie had laughed and laughed and laughed, and then had told everyone who came into the store how Emma had thought the toilet water was for the toilet.

“God, I cried for days, I was so embarrassed. What a literal-minded child I must have been.”

Jake leaned back against a tree and listened. Ever since she was a little bit of a thing, so bright and sassy, he’d loved hearing Emma talk even though he could never think of much to say back to her. And now her world was so far away from his, so different, sometimes he didn’t even know what she was talking
about
, but that didn’t matter. Just the fact that she was here, her low musical voice trilling upward when she was excited, gesturing with her long slender hands, smiling—that was enough.