Piper (23 page)

The dinner conversation bubbled along pretty much without me, thanks primarily to Willard, who was fearless.

“Are you as rich as everyone says you are?”

“Willard!” Dad said.

“That's all right,” Carlisle said, seeming to enjoy it. “How rich is that?”

Willard looked over at me for guidance, then back at Dad who was busy spreading peanut butter on his Parker House roll. “Do you like dogs, Mr. Carlisle?”

Carlisle laughed. “My sister and I used to have one.”

“So?”

“She died.”

“Your sister?”

“Willard!” Dad said, irritated again.

Carlisle put his napkin to his lips. “I meant our dog.”

“Oh.” For Willard, nothing more needed to be said.

If I had a fraction of Willard's abandon, I would have waded in at that point and pressed Carlisle with my own list of particulars. I didn't care how rich he was. I wanted to ask him how he could come into our house and sit in Mom's chair, how he could set a finger on the forearm of the man he'd cheated. I wanted him to tell me he'd pressured Mom to do the Jacuzzi that day. I wanted an apology for what he'd done to her. I wanted him to break down, fall on his knees, and tell us he was sorry he'd ever cast a covetous glance at her.

The sound of a fork scraping across a plate, which I realized was mine, brought me out of it. I was clenching the handle in my fist like I was going to stab someone. There was a piece of gravy-laden turkey on the tablecloth where I'd bulldozed it off my plate, and everyone was looking at me. Champagne was supposed to make you giddy and amorous, but I was fighting wars inside my head I didn't have to fight.

I cleaned up everything on my plate except for the cranberry salad, which was horrible. Willard, on the other hand, cleaned up all of his, although I'd noticed him mixing it with his other food groups. I was a monogamous eater, one food at a time. I didn't like to cover up the faults of one group with the virtues of another. Carlisle was the last to finish, principally because he cut everything into such tiny bites. I wondered if it was for dietary reasons. Willard had told me about one of his bowling buddies who used to chew up steak meat for his Jack Russell terrier because it wasn't secreting enough saliva.

Dad made a grand entrance with the third bottle of champagne, ricocheting the cork off the ceiling and into the remains of the purplish goulash Willard and I had put together. I was past caring. I imagined putting my hand over the top of my glass when Dad came around, but somehow the bubbly must have poured right through the knuckles because when I looked again my glass was full.

Carlisle excused himself and came back with a gift, nicely wrapped with a gauzy red bow that rose off the top of the package like a poinsettia, and handed it to me.

I looked around. “Nobody else gets one?”

The package was the size of a shoe box and heavy. Lead heavy, not water heavy. I shook it, thinking it might be coins, Carlisle's down payment on my college tuition. There was nothing this man had that I wanted and I couldn't imagine that anything he'd pick out would bear the least resemblance to my own tastes. As a courtesy, I thought he could have given something to Willard, who was reaching over, trying to help me undo the ribbon. I was thinking of a way to refuse his gift, unopened, to make a statement right there in front of Dad, to make it clear there was someone in the family whom Carlisle couldn't buy off. The contents were rolled in flimsy tissue paper that I uncoiled into my lap until there was nothing left but a rough-hewn brass hand. A lady's hand. The fingers were cradling empty space that could have been a plum.

“It's your mother's,” Carlisle said. “Her art and her hand.”

I pulled it against my stomach and gulped. I knew she'd fooled around with clay. Some of her crumbling, mostly unrecognizable, pieces were still in our attic. But I'd never seen anything metal and nothing so personal. I knew this was Mom's hand. I'd watched her paint with it, smooth my eyebrows down with it when she tucked me in at night. It was better than any bag of school money. Yet, rather than just thank him, I couldn't help but smolder. What else did he have of hers that we didn't know about?

“Let me make a toast,” Dad said.

I sat up from my slouch, rested Mom's hand in the trough between my legs, and reached for the stem of my glass. In my mind, I quickly counted out the time that had elapsed since her drowning, something I'd calculated with regularity. Every day since her death I'd engaged in that pitiless game of asking myself what she and I were doing a year ago that same date. Last Christmas Eve, we were eating honey-glazed ham and croissants that had turned out more like scones. Willard was with us, as a guest not a boarder then, as well as Louise Mead from the paper and her daughter, who had Downs Syndrome.

Dad tipped his glass toward Carlisle, with a tear in his eye. “Here's to vindicating John Carlisle.”

“No!” I blurted, without thinking.

Dad glared at me. When he tried to set his glass on the table, it caught on the edge of his plate and spilled onto the tablecloth. “Take that back.”

I looked over at Willard, who was perspiring, to see if he was following this. There was a vacuous look on his face, but I couldn't tell if it was shock or champagne. I shut my eyes. I was mad that Dad had plied us with champagne. What was I supposed to do, say I was hoping Carlisle would skate free of his criminal charges on the back of Mom's good name? It had been two days short of four months since her death.
My God, Dad, where's the poetry in this man? Are you so spooked by life that you have to settle for this
?

“Piper?” Dad said.

I couldn't look at him. It was the darkest evening of the year and the woods were filling up with snow. I gritted my teeth, knowing that if I said anything, it would be pure bile. I set the brass hand on the table, but when I grabbed the arms of my chair to scoot back, I must have caught the edge of the tablecloth because the hand thudded to the floor.

“You can't just walk out! You're being rude …” Dad's voice was fading as I passed the rack with the Collier Encyclopedias and headed up the stairs.

I slammed the door to my room and flopped stomach down on the bed. A tidal wave was washing over me, and I knew I had to take strokes against the current to get back on top. I was losing Dad and I was angry because I'd been so damned inarticulate. I hated it when it took me two days to think of the right thing to say. Then it was too late. Our family dinner had turned out to be a parody. There was no family. This was a house inhabited by transients. Wherever we were heading, it wasn't going to be together.

Then I heard Dad's footsteps coming up the stairs, in that strong-footed, this-is-my-castle way he used when I'd sassed Mom or melted one of his long-play records on the radiator. I thought of hiding in the closet, then I considered facing him down on the threshold of my room, and then I thought of the roof.

It was freezing outside and the shingles were slick from the frost. I closed the window behind me, leaving a crack just wide enough to get my fingers back under, and perched on my haunches like an owl as close to the gable as I could manage. A fog was visible in the flood of the streetlight at the corner. I could see the lights blinking on the Normans' Christmas tree in the house across the street. There were two extra cars parked in front, probably their sons' families home for Christmas. Mrs. Norman still canned fruit in the summer and brought us Mason jars with peaches and pears. It was a little old-fashioned; after all, fresh fruit was available practically year round. But at least their family was still together. Same father, same mother, same old Norman boys.

Then Dad's magnified shadow appeared on the shingles next to me, his elbows up and his hands shading his eyes against the window pane. I scrunched up closer to the wall so he wouldn't see me. What more was there to say? He'd said his piece and I'd said mine. Some things you couldn't legislate. The window scraped in the sash and I tightened myself into a cannonball.

“Piper! I want to talk to you.” I played possum, the same way I used to do in hide-and-seek, thinking if I didn't move they wouldn't be sure it was me and couldn't call off my name. “Let's not leave it like this.”

I mumbled into my knees. “What do you want me to do?”

He was bracing his palms on the weatherboard and leaning out the window. “John feels terrible.”

I didn't know if he meant it as a provocation to make me jump off the roof, but that's how it hit me and I felt the same rage I'd experienced reading Dad's pithy little redemption piece in the computer files. “Fuck John!”

“What did you say?”

“Why are you going around town trying to pick up dirt on Mom? She's dead. Leave her alone.”

“You're acting hysterical.”

“What's wrong with hysterical? Why aren't you a little hysterical?”

“Piper …”

“You've spent so much time stuffing all that journalism in there's nothing left but a pinhole for any feelings. Your greatest organ isn't your free will, it's your sphincter.”

He slammed the window down and I could hear the counterweights bumping around inside the casing. His shadow disappeared from the frame of light on the shingles. The door banged shut. He was cranked. Good, maybe he'd wake up and come to his senses.

My heart was still racing and perspiration had broken out on my face despite the temperature. As usual, I'd exaggerated my case. It wasn't true he had no feelings. He was crushed that Seamus had promised to come out for Christmas and then never showed. He was scavenging on the side for a little intimacy the same as I was. I'd severed something and the thought of drifting in space unattached to my tether frightened me. I wasn't sure how or if I'd ever get back to the comfort of the shuttle that was my ride home. For sure, I was on the wrong side of the moon.

When I looked up into the ether, searching for a single star, there were none. I knew Mom was up there somewhere laughing her head off. She thrived on confusion. “Your Dad has to be shaken up like old paint sometimes,” she'd told me. Well, I'd done that all right. I'd dumped open the whole can.

I stayed outside until it started to snow. As each flake landed on my knee, I just let it rest there. They lit catty-corner and cock-eyed, each one having trouble fitting against the others, leaving space. More space than body. Yet from a distance they formed a monolith. Like the Normans across the street. Like the Scanlons might have if Mom hadn't died.

I sat there motionless, offering no resistance to the elements, warmed by a single thought. I was keeping the promise I'd made to Mom.

15

The ground stayed frozen throughout Christmas vacation. The ridges formed by the tire tracks on the dirt roads were so hard I could walk the tops of them like train rails and, as each ridge petered out, I found another one to jump to. The Parks Department filled the children's wading pool at Kla Hah Ya Park for ice skating, rimming the edges with two-by-fours to act as expansion joints so the force of the ice wouldn't break the concrete. There was always a community bonfire going there at night between the restrooms and the swings. Toddlers with wobbly ankles warmed their backsides, as teenagers lit cigarettes off the ends of smoldering sticks and slunk back into the night to talk. I couldn't have been more than eleven the time Jesse Little tried to feel me up with his mittens on while I was tightening my two-bladed skates next to the cement tortoise where the water comes in. Of course, I didn't realize that's what he was trying to do until several years later when he tried the same thing in the school auditorium during lights out for a film documentary on
The Red Menace
. Like I said, there wasn't that much to feel, but Jesse didn't have a lot of choices.

When I came home from school, I heard the faucet running and looked out back to see Willard watering the garden. The excess water was draining toward the garage and pooling up in the low spots. It couldn't have been more than twenty-five degrees out and the stalks and vines in the garden looked like bent coat hangers, but he was rocking the hose up and down like a fishing rod, letting the water lap at the base of each vine. He didn't seem to notice me when I came out the back door and stood next to him.

“What are you doing, Willard?”

When he turned, the hose turned with him, and I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting soaked. “Carol sent you?”

“No, Carol didn't send me.”

“Gotta' get the root zone, she says. I never get the root zone.” He wore no gloves and his hands were shaking.

He's dying inside, I thought.
Don't do this, Willard
.

I wrapped my hands around his. He was humming and bouncing the hose up and down, but I tightened my grip until he stopped fighting me and the humming stopped.

“I think you've drenched 'em pretty good.” I said. The truth was any water that reached the root balls would just freeze and choke them to death.

I walked him downstairs and helped him change out of his wet clothes and into a pair of moth-bitten suntans I found in his drawer. I slipped a dry pair of socks over his feet. As he warmed up, his sense of place seemed to return.

“Is the boss coming tonight?”

“You mean Carlisle? I don't understand why you treat him like such a VIP after what he did with Mom.”

He stopped lacing his shoes and looked up at me. “Kitty?”

“He's a cheater, Willard. He cheated on Dad.”

“You mean …”

“He … slept with her.” It made me nauseous to say it.

“Kitty and Mr. Carlisle?” His voice was thin, like the idea had never entered his mind, and I was sorry I was the one who'd burst his bubble.

“I'll burn the paper down before I'll let Dad save Carlisle's ass.”

Willard's eyes grew big. “Burn the newspaper?”