The Legacy of Eden (34 page)

I looked at my cousin but he leaned back in his chair and snapped his napkin onto his plate.

“Here she goes again.”

“Cal, where the hell are you?” my grandmother shouted, looking at the door. Mom rose up and went to stand next to her.

“God, he’s always with that slut of a daughter of his. I’m so sick of it. If only he knew what a whore she was. Simpering after her like some dumb mule. I wish to God she’d died in that stupid car wreck.”

We sat there for a minute in horrified silence and then suddenly she burst into tears.

“No one ever pays any attention to me. No one!” she screamed. “Lou, are you deaf? I said to clear this mess up.” She swiped a plate with her hand so that it went crashing to the floor. Mom was next to her in an instant, helping and cajoling her from her seat while Ava and I circled her.

“No, no,” Mom said, batting us away. “She’s had too much excitement and you’ll only crowd her. Merey, help me—Ava, you clean up here, okay?”

There was the harsh scrape of the chair. Cal Jr. got up, left the room and slammed the front door as he went out into the night.

“Here, here,” I say, taking out a handful of money and shoving it at the waitress as I hurry out after my sister. She is walking in long purposeful steps, but I catch up.

“I know you hate me, I know I deserve to be hated, but I swear if I could undo it, if I could go back and make it different I would.” She swings around and for a second I think she’ll hit me but then she just carries on walking.

“I would because I didn’t know and ever since I found out, ever since I realized I’ve been—it’s been…listen to me!” I scream suddenly, grabbing her arm which she shrugs off before squaring up to me.

“What? What’s it been doing, Meredith? Hurting, have you been hurting, pining, regretting?” Her voice comes out in a contemptuous parody of a whine. “Does it keep you awake at night? Does it? Are you racked with guilt? Because even if you are, so what? So what? You think this is about that night? It’s not. It’s about after.” I shrink back and she wipes her hand over her mouth before dropping it to her side.

“You want me to take you in my arms and tell you it’s all okay? You want me to sit there and grieve with you about Mom and the farm. Let me tell you something, Meredith. Everything you are going through, you’re supposed to go through because that’s a consequence of what you did.”

“I didn’t know,” I splutter. “How was I supposed to know?”

“Because I told you,” she screams. She takes me by the arm and drags me into a side street and shoves me against the wall. “I told you, I wrote to you and I explained and you never returned my calls. You wouldn’t help when Mom was dying—you left me there and you didn’t give a damn what happened or what would happen. You left me in hell and didn’t give it a second thought!”

“That’s not true, that’s not true.”

She holds my face up by her hand and forces me to meet her eyes.

“You ran as far and as fast as you could and you did not care who or what you left behind. You left me there knowing what he did to me.”

I shake my head, tears of rage coursing down my cheeks.

“No…” I hold on to her wrist. “I’d just heard that kind of story before.”

“From who?”

“From Claudia, and that turned out to be a pack of lies.”

I throw her hand away and release myself, standing up to her.

“You said it to him, you said it.” I am panting now.

She shakes her head in disbelief. “Then you never knew me.”

I’d helped Ava with the cleaning up while Mom dealt with our grandmother upstairs. It was much later when she finally came back down.

“I’m so sorry, Merey,” she said, holding out her arms for me.

“No, Mom, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”

“God, and those things she said in front of Cal, about his mother…” Her eyes skimmed the top of my head. “Is he very upset?” She looked from me to Ava.

“Cal Jr. hasn’t come back,” Ava said.

“Oh, God. Ava, will you go find him? You’ve always been good with him.”

We stand there in silence, staring at anything but each other. I can barely stand so I hunch against the wall.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I hold up my hands and then drop them again. I am exhausted. I grip my knees with my hands. She pauses with me.

“Why did you never come back?” she asks. “Because you were ashamed? Because you were embarrassed by what you’d seen or because coming back would mean that you’d have had to stay at home and face up to the truth? Why choose the hard thing when it’s so much easier to be in New York and pretend that I was the bad guy?”

I am speechless.

“You know, I had to nurse both Grandmother and our mother until they died and I had no one but him. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

I look at her in horror.

“You don’t get to come here and say you’re sorry.” Her eyes are bright as she speaks. “It isn’t good enough. It will never be good enough.”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out, not a sound, and then from somewhere, I begin to howl. I hold my hands up to stifle it but it bleeds through my fingers, a wounded-animal thing that seeps through the cracks and bursts like a flood, sweeping away all dams of control in a torrent of recrimination and despair unleashed.

I was calling for her. It was I who had offered to find her.

They had been gone too long, the two of them, and Mom had started to worry.

Throwing the flashlight among the darkness, it punctured the thick purple haze of the evening with circles of white. I remember how the air was full of the smell of azaleas and the sound of crickets mingled with the brush of the wind through the sycamores.

Swinging my free hand lazily, waving the flashlight around the path I knew so well, I began to think of how much I would miss my home, and for a moment I allowed myself to feel how truly scared I was of leaving the farm—of a life outside of Aurelia—and I was stricken with both the fear of the unknown and my desire for it. Though the summer winds were a welcome respite from the onslaught of heat that had been thrust on us all afternoon, I gave up a shudder.

And then I heard it.

It was the sharp snap of twigs being twisted into the earth. I swung around and moved off the path down to the rose garden. I heard them before I saw them. His voice was low, half in a whisper, but in the stillness of the night, it carried.

“Say it,” he urged and then more forcefully, repeated, “Say it!”

And then another noise. At first I didn’t even know it was her. It was a sound I had never heard from her before.

“Say it, say it, Ava.”

There was no other noise but a slow rhythmic rustle of earth and movement. I crept around slowly and saw their legs lying on the ground, hers spread against his.

I turned off the flashlight.

“Say it!” And then I saw his legs move up and hers stretch out and she stifled a cry.

The bracken snapped further up by their heads. I could hear him grunt in exertion. Her legs were scrambling on the ground as his own grew more energetic. They looked like they were running.

And then I heard her, I heard her say it, half caught in a cry and a sob and when she said it she started to cry, soft but consistent sounds that ran from her mouth as her legs fell down and were still.

I looked through the garden then and saw the angle of her neck turned from him, her whole body utterly still as he started to gain momentum. She looked like she was playing dead, her wrists held down by his, her dress up against her waist. But she wasn’t, because she looked up and saw me.

She opened her mouth to cry out but she didn’t get the chance to.

Because I ran.

We are in her car now. I sit hunched there in my seat, all but screaming for God knows how long, while she sits beside me and waits it out. And then there is silence. The sounds just die away and leave me with nothing. She shifts in the seat and fiddles with the buckle of her seat belt.

“I’m sorry I came here,” I say at last.

She sighs.

“Even now, after all these years, I still can’t get away,” she says more to herself than to me. “When you’d all gone and Mom was sick and we were the only ones left, I saw how much he hated it. He told me how he’d always hated it, loathed every last speck of the place.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

Ava sighs, staring ahead. She looks tired. “She thought he was obsessed with it because he wanted to own it, that’s why she groomed him to take over the place, but that was never his intention. As soon as there was no one left in his way he was always going to rip it apart piece by piece. He blamed it for losing his mother.” She shrugs. “In the end, he always thought it was the preciousness of the family name that made Granddad get rid of her and he never forgave them for it. He never forgave them for taking her. They took her away from him, so he decided to take the one thing away from them that they cared about.”

“But they were dead,” I say, confused.

She gives me a rueful look. “It must be nice, not having to know how his mind worked.”

I look down at my hands.

“When did you decide to believe me?”

There is a pause. “I don’t know,” I say. Lie. I knew. I remember that night, remember when I had dreamt it and the next few nights over and over. Each time I closed my eyes the memory switched onto my mind’s projector until I woke up panting and I realized what I had seen. What I had run away from.

“I went away, I grew up,” I continue. “I started to realize that things like that weren’t just—weren’t always so simple. And slowly I just… I didn’t want to believe it. I wouldn’t for the longest time.”

She breathes deeply. “You know, for a long time I thought maybe you were the right one. That maybe I had brought it on myself, after everything that happened when I was a kid. But then I would remember that I pleaded with him and even though I said what I said, it wasn’t…”

“I didn’t understand what I saw.”

“I know.”

“Not at first.”

“I know—” She stops. “But I did tell you.”

I fall silent again.

“Please forgive me.” It is only a whisper but it resounds in my ears.

She doesn’t speak and then she leans forward and holds onto the steering wheel.

And I stay there beside her and we sit that way in her car, with those words hanging in the air, while the world keeps on running around us.

Epilogue

AURELIA WAS SOLD a month later. It was an anonymous bidder who took it. I received a letter from the solicitors a week afterward informing me of the complete dissolution of the farm and all its assets. I put it back in an envelope and stuffed it in the back of a drawer.

My already messy apartment is now even more so. Boxes from the clear-out with Claudia line the walls of my home in building blocks and towers of brown and beige. I sometimes take down a box and rummage through, lifting out things and holding them in my hand, just staring at them, conjuring up memories that take me through space and time to places of comfort and warmth, before I grow tired and put them back in their box again. I don't know what to do with them all. I can't unpack them. I take them out like exhibits from a museum and peer at them, using them as conduits to the past.

I don't know what Claudia has done with the stuff she took, or the letters. We haven't spoken since we met in Iowa. I sense the slight chink in her armor has been hastily soldered shut. We'll return to our routine of brief and infrequent correspondence over time but in the interim we both need our space. I wonder sometimes how she does it, how she goes about her life of shopping and dinner parties so easily. But I think perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps she, too, opens her boxes and weighs the objects in her lap, thinking of a time that was and one that could have been with the same sharp slice of regret. How would I know even if she was? It's not like she would tell me, even if I did ask.

You know, I once heard that in Greek
nostalgia
literally means the pain from an old wound. I suppose that makes me a masochist, because every night I unpick the scab and open the veins up, letting the memories pour from the scars there, until they trickle down my face in tears.

I can't stop myself.

I wish I could.

I wish I could stop thinking of that night in the rose garden, or that day in Ohio. But I replay that moment over and over again in the restaurant, in the street, in the car. I am alone with nothing but my thoughts now for company. They've stopped coming to me, my family. Ever since I saw Ava, they've gone—descended back into their graves with no warning, as quickly and with as little effort as it took for them to rise out of them.

But that doesn't mean I don't see them.

Because every night I have the dream. In a way it's a comfort. Without it I would miss them.

What do you think that means?

I am walking the road that takes me to Aurelia. It is night and the road is silvered by the moon. I find myself back at the entrance, to the sign in curlicue black lettering that I cannot read but whose ends look like tails swinging in the dark and I make my way up the gravel path, winding my footsteps to a house so white it shines. The lights blaze from the windows, the open air carries voices from inside, voices I recognize and long to hear again. I walk up the porch steps and knock on the door.

He opens it.

Behind him I can see the opening of the hallway leading to the living room and I know they are all in there, all waiting for me to join them. I want to, so much, but I have to get past him first.

“So.” He leans against the door frame, a grin spreading across his lips. I look behind me but the world is black. The moon has gone.

“Can I come in?” I ask, peering over his shoulder. I can hear my father's laughter drift out into the hall.

“Sure,” he says conversationally. “What's the password?”

“Password?”

“Hmm…” He pulls out a cigarette and lights a match.

“Go on,” he says reasonably, “say it.”

I stare at him.

“Say it.”

“Say it.”

“Still playing games?” I ask. “Aren't you too old for that?”

“You're never too old, girl,” he says through a mouthful of smoke rings. They wobble in the air and melt near my face.

“Cal Jr., who is it?” my grandmother asks, but I can't see her because the door is pulled, blocking her from view.

“Well?” he asks.

I pause, but only for a moment.

“I love you,” I whisper.

And just like that, he pulls back the door.

And I go home.

* * * * *