The Keeper (7 page)

“Oh, Liz,” she said, “Don’t we have enough problems? I hate to see you do this to yourself. Have you noticed the basement? The basement’s a mess. I really think you need to sweep down there.”

Liz shook her head. “I asked Bobby to take me to her apartment tonight. I haven’t seen her in a year. How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”

Mary leaned in close to Liz. So close that she could smell the Ivory soap on her skin. “Not another word, Elizabeth Rebecca Marley. Not one more word.”

Liz’s frown hardened, and Mary saw that she was angry. Furious, and for a moment, Mary was frightened. There was something inside this girl, something foreign. Something that surfaced when Mary least expected. A formidable thing, and Mary knew that one day, she would be outmatched. “Did you ever call her after Dad died? I’ll bet you didn’t. I’ll bet you never asked her to come home. You let her live in that terrible place, just like you let her live in the basement. You never even tried to help her because you don’t care.”

Mary was tempted to strike her daughter. A quick slap to the cheek to bring her to her senses. To shut her up. “Not another word,” Mary said. “You had a bad dream. It’s over now.”

“It’s like she’s dead to you. Maybe you should take all her stuff to the dump. Just like Dad. You can take my stuff, too.”

Mary grabbed Liz’s shoulder and held it firmly, too firmly. Liz winced. She didn’t know she was lucky; Mary’s first instinct had been to slap her.

Liz’s face turned red. “Look at my neck, Mom!” she shouted. “Who did you think did this?”

Mary sank her fingers in more deeply. She pushed her thumb into the skin beneath her collarbone until Liz yelped. “You were thrashing in your sleep. You’ve always been strange that way.”

“No, Mom.”

“You were, Liz.”

Liz didn’t answer, but Mary knew she almost had her. “You need to be careful with that imagination,” she said. “Crazy runs on your father’s side of the family.”

They locked eyes, and Mary could see Liz’s resolve slip away. First Liz’s shoulders fell. Then her eyes sank toward the floor. Then she sighed deeply, and it was all over. “Fine,” Liz said.

“Fine what?”

“You’re right.”

“About what?”

Liz swallowed. “I had a bad dream. I’m not going to visit her.”

“Did you tell Bobby?”

A silent communication passed between them, and Liz shook her head. “No. I never tell him anything.”

Mary nodded. “Good. Because he seems like a nice boy, but you never know. He hears those kinds of things and maybe he’ll change his mind about you. Maybe he’ll decide he likes blonde better,” she said. Then she sat back down and closed her eyes. She thought about the coming spring, bridge, the rain, new shoes. She thought about jazz musicians, Portland, her swollen knuckles that ached on wet days, the sofa that needed new fabric. She thought about these things until the flush left her cheeks, and the tenseness in her jaw slackened, and she was able to convince herself that she had done nothing wrong.

She smiled at Liz. “Eat something. You’ll feel better,” she said.

Liz blinked, and placed a forkful of rice in her mouth. She chewed mechanically. “You like it?” Mary asked. “I got it from the health food section. It’s not bleached so it’s supposed to have more vitamins.”

Liz nodded and continued eating until her plate was scraped clean. Then she stood.

Mary said, “Why don’t you stay home tonight? I’ll call in sick. We can snuggle. Watch a movie like when you were little.”

“Why?” Liz asked.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to,” Liz answered.

“You don’t want to what?”

“Be here,” Liz said. Again, her look was stony, not like the daughter Mary had raised, and Mary thought about how quickly you can lose your children. You turn your back, and they become monsters who live under your roof. “Then go,” she said.

Liz raced out of the room. A few seconds later, a door slammed.

Mary got up and poured herself another glass of Zinfandel. She knew she shouldn’t. She had to leave for work in another fifteen minutes. She did it anyway. As she sipped from her glass, she thought about Liz. Smart Liz, who had always taken A’s in her science courses. Angry Liz, who would go away to college and never come back. Probably not even for Christmas or her own wedding. In a way, the second daughter would follow the footsteps of the first.

Just then, in her mind’s eye, Mary saw Susan as a little girl. Pigtails tied with yarn. Small, white teeth. A speck of blood rolling down her chin. She took a step toward Mary, and it reminded her of that children’s game:

Mother, may I?

No, you may not.

Mary leaned against the counter. Up the stairs, Liz’s stereo blared. Down below, the boiler kicked. In her mind, Susan Marley approached with an angry smile.

A
t six o’clock that Thursday evening, Georgia O’Brian finished what remained of her coffee and left the Mid-Maine Medical Center. Stuck to the vinyl of the passenger side of her white Honda, she found dried blood. She started to scrape it away with her fingernails, but then stopped, leaned back in her seat, and cried. She did so with her eyes fully open, looking out over a parking lot full of cars and falling rain. When she finished, salty tears dried to her cheeks, she was able to clean away the blood. She was able to start her car. She was able to turn on the radio, and drive along the highway through gales of rain that became thicker with each yard that she approached Bedford. The Moose 105.1 blared classic rock through the speakers of her radio, and though she did not feel ambitious enough to sing along to Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights,” she hummed.

As she neared Bedford, the long pipe of the mill came into view. Until it closed last month, it was run by a corporation that had serviced the office paper industry. Clott’s demise happened slowly, and at first hardly anyone had noticed. In the eighties Clott instituted a hiring freeze. In the mid-nineties the layoffs started in earnest. Each year before bonuses and raises at Christmastime, her father handed out pink slips to another ten percent of his staff. The men who stayed worked two and three jobs at once. They fixed machines, they sorted, and they worked the assembly line. Even her father moved out from his air-conditioned office and started working the floor.

They should have seen it coming. They should have noticed that the population of the town had dwindled from six to four thousand. Fewer people had gossiped over early-bird specials at Olsen’s Diner, eating biscuits, pancakes, eggs, and heavy meat. Fewer people had shopped at the stores on Main Street. But they had expected things to come around. A down cycle, they had thought, which would invariably lead to an up cycle. No one truly became alarmed until Paul Martin wrote an article for the
Corpus Christi Sentinel
pointing out the obvious: Clott was preparing to close its Bedford mill. But by then it was too late.

Last December, Paul had spearheaded a protest rally against the Clott Corporation. In the
Sentinel
article he’d explained that if enough people showed up for his rally, the company might be shamed into keeping the mill open for another year or so. The extra time would allow Bedford to invest in and attract new industries like tourism.

Georgia’s boss was sick on the day of the protest, so she had to work at the shop. But she watched what happened. The protest was to begin at noon along Main Street’s center. From there, people would march the half mile down the road to the paper mill. The local television news had agreed to cover the story, and rumor had it that Paul had gotten the go-ahead from the
Boston Globe
to write a follow-up piece for the cover of its Sunday business section.

At noon, WABI set up their cameras outside the Chop Mop Shop. About three hundred townspeople attended, all dressed in their Sunday best. Most of them had called in sick to their shifts at the mill or the hospital in Corpus Christi. Even Georgia wore pressed slacks and a lace blouse, just in case things ran over, and she had time to close the shop and join the festivities. But Paul never showed up. Two hours later, only a handful of people remained. WABI packed up its van and got back on the highway. She’d been disappointed in Paul, but more than that, she’d been disappointed in Bedford. They should have done it without him. Instead people had tossed their “Save the Mill” signs into the trash cans and spent the afternoon watching TBS reruns like it was just another day off.

That’s when Paul showed up. He pulled into the middle of the street, and stumbled out of his car. Then he started walking toward the mill, a one-man parade. She’d watched from her window as he’d looked from one corner to the next, searching for the people who had left hours before. Maybe he didn’t know he was five hours late. Maybe he’d had a drink or two for courage, and two drinks had turned into a bottle, so even then he wasn’t sure whether he was late, or early.

There was a handful of people sitting on benches or in the park. They watched, but nobody said anything. Then Bernard McMullen, whose family had worked at the mill for three generations, threw a rock. It sailed past the side of Paul’s head. Paul turned slightly, like he thought somebody might have whispered in his ear. Bernard picked up another rock, and Georgia swung open the door to the Chop Mop and shouted: “Get out of here, Paul. Just go home. You missed it.” The expression on his face when he recognized her had been terrible. She’d never seen a man so ashamed. She’d wanted to say something kind, but instead she’d shut the door.

Not long after that, Clott’s management announced its plans to close the mill. Nobody bothered writing articles or staging another protest. They were embarrassed, mostly. They’d trusted Paul, and he’d made fools of them. WABI ran a clip of Bedford’s empty Main Street in a sequence entitled, “What if you threw a rally, and nobody came?” But maybe they also knew, just as Paul must have known, that their protests wouldn’t do any good.

And so, when Clott finally shut its doors last month, it came as no surprise to anyone. Despite this, they were all, somehow, surprised. Georgia’s father and three other foremen had been kept on payroll at Clott for an indefinite amount of time. Two days a week they were supposed to administer severance, hire vendors to clean out the mill and the chemicals stored inside it, and sell off all the old machines to the highest bidders. In the mornings now her father watched game shows in his bathrobe. Though he was almost seventy years old, it was only this last month that he had started to look like an old man.

Georgia kept driving down I–95. She had once heard that when you cut a tree, you can hear it scream if you listen very closely. If you traveled ten miles north of Bedford, you might find strips of land cut away, fallen branches, rotting roots, and stumps of trees. You might imagine the historic echo of buzzsaws, or the groaning of the earth itself. A few years ago when she had been driving, just to drive, to get away from the colicky baby whose fretting never ceased, she had discovered the tree graveyard. She’d pulled over to the side of the road and touched the massive stumps. Her fingers had traced their ridges: countless years recorded by slim bands of wood. She listened for the screaming. She never heard it.

At her exit, Georgia turned off the highway. By the time she traversed the Messalonski River, she had managed to forget the trials of the day. She concentrated on the comfortable way the town made her feel. With the heat blasting through the vents and the rain falling hard outside, she felt like she was wrapped inside a warm cocoon.

At six
P.M.
that Thursday evening she pulled into the driveway of her childhood home, a half mile south of Main Street on a cul-de-sac that led to the parking lot of the Catholic Church of Our Lady of Sorrow.

“You home?” she heard her father call when she got into the house.

“Coming.” She found him playing a hand of solitaire and smoking a cherry cigar behind the desk in his study.

Ed O’Brian was one of the few men she knew who was larger than she. Even now, as his bones shrank with age, when he stood next to her, she never wondered whose shadow was bigger. “Everything hunky-dory?” he asked very slowly and calmly. It was the only way he ever spoke.

Georgia sighed. “Fine. He’s fine. Nine stitches, but he’ll live.”

Ed’s shoulders drooped, and she knew he was relieved. “Good, he needed a whupping.”

“Not funny.”

“Georgie.” He smiled at her. “’Course it’s not funny. You eat dinner?”

“Sort of.”

“I’ve got some leftover garlic steak.”

She pulled up a chair and sat next to him. “Burnt on the outside, bloody on the inside?”

“Yup. The way I like it. You tired?”

“Yeah. But I’m gonna go back and bring him some things.”

“You need a nap,” he said, grinning at her. “You’ve got that funny look in your eyes you get when you’re tired.”

“You think I’m cranky?”

His eyes widened in mock horror and he nodded.

She sighed. “I think I’m cranky, too.”

“You been sleeping okay?”

“No. Nightmares.”

“Marley, right? Me, too. Loony broad. Maybe she’ll go for one of those walks and forget her way home. Corpus Christi can have her.”

Georgia laughed. “You work on that. I don’t know what time I’ll be back so you don’t have to wait up.”

She made a move to stand but he held up his hand and she settled back into her chair. “I got some news,” he said. “You’ll hear about it anyway.”

“What?”

“The conference call today. They said the transition’s over. Two months severance for management, one month for everybody else,” he said without emotion. If she were not his daughter, if she had not lived with him all her life, she would not have known that this information caused him considerable pain to relate.

She sighed heavily. “You’re fired?” she asked.

He didn’t answer, and she realized that she had overstepped the boundary between daughter and father. She had admitted that he was fallible. She was briefly irritated that she had a father like this, so lost in time, so old when she had been born.

He shrugged. “Don’t worry, Georgie, we’ll get by. Just tighten our belts a little. How was the park?” he asked, changing the subject just like that, like their lives would not be different after this. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Georgie. She wanted to remind him she was no longer ten years old. He could tell her that it wasn’t about the mill, a job he didn’t even like. It was about having nothing to fight against, wishing you did. Not even a reason to be angry, just this biting in your stomach that you can never release. No good reason to let it go, nothing to set it loose on.
I get it, Dad. I sympathize, believe me. I cut hair for a living.
But they could discuss this later, after things had time to settle. For now, she could let it go. She could give him that.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” she said.

He shrugged and she knew he was embarrassed. “Yeah.”

She got up and he restacked the cards, shuffled.

“Sure you don’t want to play a little pot poker? I’ll spot you.”

She laughed. “Good night, Dad.”