The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (22 page)

All I wanted was to get back to my ironing, but I crunched my bones down into one of the little chairs in front of his desk and folded my hands up on my stuck-together knees the way Miss Sparrow had taught us in deportment lessons, most of which I never thought I’d need, but some of which I could see might come in handy now. Suddenly, Robert Morgan wrenched off his bifocals with a savage yank. This close, it left his face too naked, as if I’d just caught him stepping out of the shower. I looked back down at my callused hands. Ugly as they were, anything was preferable to the doctor’s come-to-Jesus stare.

He cleared his throat. “I have had an unpleasant phone call from the county morgue. I need you to listen well to what I’m about to say, and to prepare yourself.”

My heart did a barrel roll in my chest. I swallowed hard. Of course, I already knew what the doctor was going to tell me. He was going to give me some grievous news about my sister. I’d been hoping for some kind of information about her, and now I realized with a rush that it wasn’t going to be good. Robert Morgan put his glasses back on, as if he not only wanted to deliver the message, but also see its impact.

“A woman fitting your sister’s description has been found floating in a pond outside of Albany. She was naked, so there’s no identifying clothing or jewelry. She’ll require a positive ID from someone who knows her. From two people, in fact, but don’t worry”—he stuck a hand across the desk, as if to steady me—“I’ve asked Amelia to come with me. She knew Serena Jane well enough to recognize her. You can stay here with Bobbie. You shouldn’t have to do this.”

I shifted my hips a little in the uncomfortable chair and didn’t say anything. On the one hand, I was grateful for Robert Morgan’s sudden and uncharacteristic concern about my emotional well being. As sure as there were fleas on dogs, I would have crumpled if I’d had to see my beautiful sister’s hair streaming across the steel table of a morgue. It just irritated me that Robert Morgan knew me well enough to guess it.

There was a light tap on the office door, and Amelia’s head appeared through the crack, her dark eyes calm. She tiptoed over to my chair and squeezed one of my shoulders. It was the first time I’d seen her since the move, and she looked even slimmer to me than usual, her black hair knotted neatly behind her neck. I remembered all the times in childhood she’d called for me to come and kill off a spider in our bedroom, hiding her face behind her long tapered fingers, and it made it hard for me to imagine her at the doctor’s side in a chilly, tiled room, watching as Bernie Briggs, the coroner, unzipped a rubber bag. Before I could change my mind, I sat up and spoke.

“Amelia, this shouldn’t be your business. I’ll go with Robert Morgan. Lord knows I’m big and bad enough.”

Amelia threw a panicked glance at the doctor and squeezed my shoulder again. The doctor nodded, and she reassured me in a wavering falsetto, which was what her voice always did when she was nervous beyond belief. “Let me do this for you, Truly.”

I should have known better. I was heads bigger than Amelia and about three times as wide around. Without exception, I was always the one who lifted the shovel in the garden, manhandled the meanest horse, picked up the sofa so she could sweep under it, and stacked the bales of hay. But weakness has an insidious side no matter how big you are. It will creep and slide, wrapping around your ankle like a snake until it’s up around your throat, squeezing hard, turning you blue in the face. I slumped in my chair, picturing Serena Jane bloated and tinged green, and understood again that if I had to see that image for real, it would undo me.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Go.” I felt an immediate wave of relief and, after it, the sinking feeling that I was letting the snake get too good a choke hold on my bones and that in the end, like all snakes, it would always be there, waiting to bite me in the behind.

“You’re making a wise choice,” the doctor said as I stood up to return to the kitchen. “This is how families operate, Truly. We lift each other up when the road gets rough.”

If that’s true,
I wanted to answer,
I’d be in heaven right now. My road has been that bumpy
. But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything at all. The snake had my tongue.

When Robert Morgan came home that evening, it was with the prowling step of a cat guarding a kill. Amelia crept close on his heels, her lips pinched shut, as if what she’d seen that afternoon had left flecks of something malodorous dusted on her soul. I was sitting in the parlor with Tabitha’s quilt over my knees. The dishes were done. Bobbie was fed and upstairs, and the house had settled into a twilight stupor, dragging me along with it. First I heard the front door open, and then I listened with astonishment to what sounded like Amelia and Robert Morgan whispering angrily.
What could they ever have to discuss?
I wondered. It was out of character for Amelia to speak to anyone but those closest to her.

“If I’d known, I never would have agreed,” Amelia hissed, and the doctor gave it right back to her.

“One person dies, another lives, Amelia. That’s the way of the world.”

“But this—”

The doctor cut her off. “This is what we agreed. Now you keep your end of the bargain.”

“Hey…” I came shuffling into the hall, my heart hammering out its usual crazy rhythm, my joints aching the way they always did whenever I sat still for too long. “Well?”

Robert Morgan shrugged off his coat and slammed his keys down on the little round table, where they splayed like a pile of bones. He didn’t even look at me. “It’s what we expected. Funeral’s tomorrow.”

I expected Amelia to come over to me, but she didn’t. She stayed put in the far corner of the foyer by the front door, gnawing viciously on her thumbnail. I sank down on the stairs, numb to my toes, feeling as if the last living part of me had just been amputated. We’d been separated since childhood, my sister and I, but always, in the back of my mind, I’d told myself that I wasn’t alone. Now it really was just me left to walk the earth. And Amelia. I looked over at her, and her eyes flickered uneasily to the doctor.

“Talk about it later,” Robert Morgan growled. “Right now, go and get Bobbie. We have to tell him.” But I couldn’t move. “Get up,” Robert Morgan said. “You can fall apart later. Right now I need help telling Bobbie.”

I stayed where I was, though, elbows planted on knees. For some reason, all I could think about were the vinyl suitcases Amanda Pickerton had given my sister and me after our father died. Mine had gotten lost in the detritus of the Dyerson farm shortly after I’d moved, but I’d never minded. Serena Jane, however, had always kept hers at the back of her closet, ready for Hollywood. Robert Morgan didn’t know it, but on my first morning in the Morgan house, after I’d fried bacon for Robert Morgan and Bobbie, after I’d dried the pans, and made the beds, and swiped a rag around the toilet seats, I went through my sister’s things. Most of them I didn’t recognize. A pair of midheeled shoes in sensible tan. A silk dressing gown hung over a chair. A string of pearls with a broken gold clasp. In the closet, her clothes were still arranged like soldiers for a battle. She still read movie magazines.

And then I saw her old suitcase sticking out from under the bed, its lid left open like a mouth grappling with an afterthought. Inside, there was a gaudy magazine picture of some Pacific idyll—palm trees, and lots of sand, and, most of all, an ocean as blue as my sister’s eyes. Along the horizon, getting as far away as it possibly could, a tiny ship sailed.

I heard footsteps now and sat up straighter on the stairs, opening my eyes. Robert Morgan was shuffling back into the hall, marching Bobbie in front of him by the shoulders. “Son,” he said, remaining behind him, “your aunt wants to tell you some news.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but nothing came out. Bobbie tipped his elfin face up to me expectantly, all the sadness of missing his mother pinched up around his eyes, which were blue, just like Serena Jane’s.
He knows,
I realized.
He already knows.
Suddenly, I knew what to do. I stood up and stuck out my hand.

“Come with me,” I said. “I’ve got something to show you.” Robert Morgan shot daggers at me, and Amelia was shaking her head, but I didn’t care. I was damned if I was going to let Serena Jane’s memory sink in a swamp of pond water. The world was bigger than that, I decided. It still had me in it, after all. And it had Bobbie, too.

“Follow me,” I ordered, marching back upstairs with Bobbie at my heels. I burst into Robert Morgan’s room and opened the closet. “Your mother is gone from this world,” I said. “I’m so sorry I have to be the one to tell you that. She was my sister, and I loved her, and the Lord knows I will miss her, too. Here”—I swept my arm toward the closet—“take anything you want.”

I watched as he delicately touched the hem of a brown skirt, then the sleeve of a blouse. He ran his fingers across the clothes and back again, then buried his nose in an armful of dresses. “This one,” he finally said, pinching the faded aquamarine fabric of a dress. It was Serena Jane’s wedding dress.

“That one? Oh, honey, are you sure?”

Bobbie nodded fiercely.

“Okay.” I lifted the hanger. “Anything else?”

Bobbie shook his head.

“Okay. We’ll put this in your closet in your room, and any time you miss your mom, you can look at this and remember her, all right?”

Bobbie didn’t say anything, just clutched the dress to his chest and pressed the satin to his nose—the only embrace he had left with his mother. I longed to go to him and put my own arms around him, but this was clearly a private moment, and he was still getting used to me. I was afraid he would just shrug me off, angered by how little I resembled Serena Jane.

I did what I could. I stood in the same room with him, breathing the same stale air in and out, listening to the trees toss their branches like horse heads in the wind.
Shh, shh, shhh,
they whispered, doing all the soothing for me, making promises I wasn’t sure I could keep. That everything would be fine. That I would be able to fill the hollow blue void my sister had left. That in growing up, the gap-toothed, wide-eyed boy I saw standing in front of me wouldn’t choke and fade but, rather, root and spread with the savage, persistent glory of a weed.

Chapter Fourteen

A
t night, its blunt corners dulled by moonlight and shadows, the Morgan house let its ghosts out to roam. In the summer, racked by heat and insects, the interior walls of the house groaned like old dogs left to lie in the sun. And in winter, the radiators howled and clanged with the pent-up fury of banshees. It was during the winter, particularly, that I most felt the presence of the Morgan line. I would draw the curtains of my room tight against the cold and then lie tucked up in bed under the flowery quilt, watching the latest of late night TV and trying to ignore the sensation that the walls were watching me. The door to my room tapped gently against the threshold, pulled to and fro by licks of frigid air racing through the house, making a kind of mournful music.

There was little evidence of me in my room. My toothbrush, hairbrush, and a tube of lip balm sat on top of one bedside table, and a six-month-old
People
magazine was overturned on the other, its pages crinkled and turning to yellow. I took the magazines from Robert Morgan’s waiting room before he threw them out, digesting the outdated love affairs of movie stars and the antics of rock singers with sanguinity. I’d never flown on an airplane, never tasted champagne, and never even bothered to open a bank account. What little money I needed was provided in the household account, leaving me to keep my own savings in the box underneath my bed. Occasionally, I added a twenty-dollar bill here or a ten-dollar bill there, until the wad of cash was as thick as my wrist. If I were to unfurl it, I imagined, it would swell and expand like a sail filling with wind, ready to take me and maybe Bobbie across the sea.

I came to understand that life at Robert Morgan’s had its inside and its outside components. Inside, there was television, food, and the scraping tick of the grandfather clock, and outside, there was the world of other people. Whereas my size had been a useful benefit at the farm (and sometimes even unnoticeable among the horses), it suddenly made me all thumbs in the china doll setting of the Morgan residence. During my first year there, I think I broke half of Maureen’s old dishes, along with two of the spindly parlor chairs, an heirloom teapot, and an entire army’s worth of vacuum cleaner parts. Eventually, I just resorted to doing things the way we’d done them at the farm, by the most elemental means possible. A broom replaced the vacuum, and on sunny days I hung the rugs out to beat. I cooked exclusively with the cast-iron pots. Even so, my body still missed its old regimen of physical labor. Trapped indoors all day, I began to feel pangs and pains that I’d never noticed before. In colder weather, the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet would go stinging numb, as though bees had been feeding on them. Sometimes spots danced in front of my eyes like polka dots on parade, and, of course, there was my stuttering heart. When I bent over and stood up quickly, or when I heaved myself upright in the morning, it contracted and fluttered, sending unfathomable messages down my veins.

And there were other changes, too. My jaw was growing squarer, it seemed, and my brow wider. But the worst was the weight I started to put on. Maybe it was because I wasn’t doing farmwork anymore, or maybe it was the extra bites of food I snuck throughout the day, but as soon as I moved under the doctor’s roof, I started gaining weight and couldn’t stop. In August, I was wearing my usual overalls and rough men’s shirts, but by October, springy new flesh cocooned my belly and thighs, wrapped around my shoulders, and began padding out my thighs. My shirts grew too tight, then my dungarees, until finally I had to haul Serena Jane’s old Singer out of the closet and run up some loose dresses for myself. Amelia brought me the fabric—the plainest, darkest, sturdiest she could find, the kind she would have chosen for herself to make her even more invisible. It didn’t work that well for me, though. The first morning I came down for breakfast in one of my new creations, both Robert Morgan and Bobbie stared at me, slack-jawed.