The Mountain Story (12 page)

“That one is in your regrets pile too, Vonn. You could have gone on that trip. You should have.”

“
You
didn’t pay me back,” Vonn protested.

“But
you
lost out. Mim and Pip were happy to loan you the money. You cut off your nose, Vonn.”

“We would’ve been happy to loan you money,” Nola said. “It’s true. You should have gone.”

“You don’t get off that easy, Bridget! She doesn’t get off that easy!” Vonn shouted.

“But she did,” Nola said.

Vonn trembled, and I could feel she was fighting tears. “So you are really going to sit there and say you have not one regret?” Her doggedness would serve us well.

“None.”

Nola cleared her throat and said, “Well, I have regrets.”

“Mim, please.”

“I do. Lots of them.”

Bridget and Vonn shared a skeptical look. “Perfect wife. Perfect mother. Perfect grandmother. Name one thing that you seriously regret,” Bridget said.

“I dug two graves,” Nola said darkly.

“You dug two graves,” I repeated, confused.

“JFK said those who seek vengeance dig two graves,” Nola said.

“I don’t think JFK said that,” Bridget said.

“You’re obviously not saying you killed anyone,” Vonn said. “Right?”

“I made a very big mistake that changed the lives of a lot of people.”

“What did you do?” I asked, eager for the distraction of Nola’s confession.

“Mim?”

“I hated Laura Dorrie,” Nola said into the darkness. “She was my classmate in senior year, the year we moved from Wisconsin to Toledo.”

“Where you fell in love with Pip.”

“Laura Dorrie thought she had dibs,” Nola said.

“So you hated her?”

“I like to think she hated me first,” she said. “But yes. On the first day of senior year at Harding High I fell head over heels for Patrick Devine. He was a two-sport athlete. We said ‘hunk’ back then. He was a
major hunk
. All the girls had a crush on him. He sang with the band and no one thought that was weird. He was a crooner. Just loved all that Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett stuff.”

Nola was there, walking in slow motion down the halls of high school, starring in her own memory. “He looked just like Warren Beatty in
Splendor in the Grass
. I nearly quit orchestra for Cheer that first week just so I could get closer to him. First time I loved anyone more than my violin.”

“
Violin
? I didn’t know you played violin, Mim,” Bridget said. “I thought you played piano.”

“I was a prodigy,” Nola said matter-of-factly.

“You were a
violin prodigy
? I never once saw you play violin.”

“Did Pip make you stop?” Vonn asked. “Did you give up violin for Pip?”

“Don’t be silly,” Nola said.

“So what about Laura Dorrie?” I asked.

“Laura’s father owned Dorrie’s Steak House downtown, not far from the townhome where we lived. The Dorries were very wealthy.”

“So you killed him?” I asked.

Nola ignored me. “Laura had the nicest clothes. Little sweater sets and silk blouses and gorgeous wool skirts.”

“You were jealous? That’s your regret?”

“Laura played violin, too,” Nola continued. “Before school even started that fall I auditioned for the senior orchestra leader and was told I was going to replace her as first chair. There was a whole to-do about it and her father was supposed to talk with the school principal but he missed the meeting. Everything was made worse by the fact that Laura Dorrie’s father had just hired my father as a line cook at his restaurant.”

“You said your father was a piano teacher.”

“He was also a line cook. His English wasn’t good. He had a thick Hungarian accent.”

“And you were a violin prodigy,” Bridget said. “Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?”

“Why would I want to remember painful things?” Nola said.

“But never to mention that you were a
prodigy
?” Vonn said.

“When I was playing the violin it was the most important thing. When I stopped playing it wasn’t. I had Pip. And Bridget. And then you, Vonn.”

“Laura Dorrie?” I prompted again.

“Right. That first day of school Laura was assigned as my student guide because we both played violin and she introduced me to the whole graduating class as the new girl whose
Hungarian father washed the dishes at her father’s restaurant. When I told Laura that my father was a cook, not a dishwasher, she just said, ‘Tomato tomahto,’ then she said that she’d
kill
me if I didn’t stay away from Patrick Devine.”

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t. And when it got around that Patrick had asked me on a date Laura Dorrie showed up at my locker, grabbed my wrist, breaking the clasp on my bracelet, which had belonged to my grandmother in Europe so it was very special to me, and she told me that I was going to be ‘sorry’ for what I did.”

“She broke your bracelet?” Vonn asked.

“Yes, and she didn’t even apologize. She just said, ‘I don’t like thieves.’ ”

“So?”

“So I fixed the bracelet but I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew something awful was going to happen.”

“Another clairvoyant,” Vonn said.

“Laura didn’t say boo all week long but I could see in her eyes she was planning something. When the final school bell rang I was relieved the week was done.”

“You had a date with Pip that night?”

“He wasn’t Pip then. He was Patrick, and I did have a date with him but my parents didn’t know. They didn’t allow dating.”

“What happened with Laura?” I asked.

“I was walking home and I could hear my mother shouting from half a block away. Then I heard my father’s voice. He was supposed to be at work.” Nola took a deep breath. “They were speaking Hungarian so it took a while for me to piece together that Mr. Dorrie had just fired my father and was going to lay criminal charges against him because two boxes of frozen New
York strip loins belonging to the restaurant had been found hidden under a coat in his bicycle carriage.”

Vonn and Bridget murmured their sympathy.

“My mother didn’t think for one moment that my father was stealing strip loins from the restaurant, because we hadn’t eaten a decent cut of beef in years. It was obvious that my poor gentle father was being framed. He said it was because of his accent. My mother was wailing, ‘Who would do such a thing? Why?’ ”

“Laura Dorrie?” Vonn blurted.

Nola nodded. “Laura Dorrie. My poor father had been wrongly accused and humiliated and fired, all because of me.”

“So what’d you do?”

“The laundry was sitting there in the basket on the table with the bottle of bleach and all I wanted to do was grab the thing and start gulping it down. I was that close to the edge.”

I swallowed hard because I knew the feeling.

“But I couldn’t stand there one more second listening to my father crying in the other room, so I took the bottle of bleach and ran out of the house without my parents ever knowing I’d come home.”

“What were you going to do with the bleach?”

“I didn’t know. I walked around the block a few times. I sat in the park for a bit. I’d lost the nerve to drink it. Then I had an idea and headed for Dorrie’s Steak House.

“The street was more crowded than usual. I went around the back but it was busy behind the restaurant too, people going in and out of the back door. So I hid in the alley beside the restaurant, waiting until some cars drove off, then I stepped out onto the sidewalk. The steak house had this fancy red carpet out front.”

“You poured bleach on the red carpet? That was your revenge?” Vonn asked.

“
That’s
your big confession?” Bridget said. “I knew it.”

“I had the cap off the bleach and I was all set to pour when I heard Laura’s voice coming from the apartment overtop the restaurant. I’d heard the girls at school talking about how the Dorries’ place was like a palace and how Laura had a closet as big as most girls’ bedrooms, so when I saw there was a set of stairs that would take me straight up to the open window where these gorgeous white curtains were blowing, I put the cap back on the bottle of bleach and snuck up to take a peek.

“When I got up there, Laura wasn’t in the room. I just stood there at the open window. She had this huge canopy bed and silk curtains, and I could see that the door to her closet was open.” Nola took a moment to catch her breath. “You would have thought she was a Hollywood starlet—all the clothes in there. Then I remembered the bleach was still in my hands.”

“Ah!” Vonn cried.

Bridget inhaled. “Her
clothes
?”

“I waited a minute then leaned in through the window to make sure she was really gone. She was, but I noticed that there was a package of cigarettes and a lighter on the windowsill and cigarette butts all over the landing. I figured she must smoke quite a lot and I got worried she was gonna need a nicotine fix any minute, then I heard a noise in the hall, then my bracelet snagged on the window ledge and broke again and fell off.”

“Oh no,” Vonn said.

“It was dark by then. I couldn’t see very well so I grabbed the lighter from the windowsill. It took me a hundred tries to light it but finally I did. I held it so that I could see the landing,
but I couldn’t see the bracelet. Then I got thinking maybe the bracelet was caught on the windowsill.” Here Nola stopped for a very long beat. “After that, it all happened so fast.”

“What?” I asked.

“I raised the lighter. The curtains. They went up—just … 
boosh
!” Nola said, gesturing with her good arm.

“I ran down the stairs and grabbed this man walking on the sidewalk and showed him where the fire was shooting out of Laura’s bedroom window and he ran into the restaurant to call the fire department. No one was hurt.” Nola paused. “Well, that’s not exactly true.”

“That’s a terrible story, Mim,” Bridget said.

“That’s why I never told you,” Nola said.

We were quiet for some time. “What about Pip?” Vonn asked.

“When I made it to the playground in the park where we said we’d meet, Patrick was already there, worried because of all the sirens. I can’t say what possessed me but I told him what I’d just done.”

“What did he say? What did you do?”

“He took me to his church. It was quiet and dark and smelled like candles. We just sat there in the front pew for an hour, could have been longer, holding hands. Didn’t say a word. All I knew was that I didn’t want to drink bleach anymore and the warm feeling I got in that place made me feel like I’d come home.”

“Didn’t your family go to church?” I asked.

“My mother’d been married before. She said they weren’t welcome.”

“Pip never talked about God,” Vonn said. “I wouldn’t have believed he ever set foot inside a church.”

“He turned off church at some point after we got married. He wouldn’t tell me why. Close as we were he would never tell me why. He didn’t want to ruin it for me I guess. That community has brought me a lot of comfort.”

“Pip brought you to the church and then stopped going himself. You don’t think that’s weird?”

Nola shook her head. “He used to say, ‘I’m a
glow
-er not a
show
-er.’ ”

“He did,” Bridget remembered.

“He liked to be on the golf course Sunday mornings. Maybe it was that as much as anything.”

“Did you ever confess to anyone else that you started the fire?” Vonn asked.

“After being in the church I decided to go to the police and tell them about the accident with the lighter. Patrick said he would come with me. But when we got to the police station there was
chaos
. The fire had been contained but not before it damaged a big garage out back where Mr. Dorrie was hiding thousands and thousands of dollars in stolen goods. Apparently he was the gate for some operation.”

“Fence?”

“Fence. Yes. Anyway, the police weren’t interested in my confession. They shoved us out of the way.”

“So you never told?”

“I never told.”

“But it was an accident,” Vonn said. “You were a kid. They wouldn’t have prosecuted you. It wouldn’t have turned out differently if you told. It’s terrible that you’ve regretted that your whole life.”

“Regrets serve their purpose,” Nola said. “You’ll see.”

Bridget had fallen asleep and was snoring loudly.

“Deviated septum,” Nola said.

Vonn leaned past me, gently took her mother’s head in her hands and changed the tilt of her jaw. It was the first intimate gesture I’d seen between the two women. The snoring stopped, but the wind roared in again.

“It’s like an animal. Or a demon,” Nola said.

“Her snoring?”

“The wind. The howling,” Nola said.

“How’s your wrist?”

“It’s throbbing more now,” Nola allowed. “It’s Bridge I’m worried about.”

“She’ll be fine, Mim. She’s always fine,” Vonn said.

“You think she’s fine, but she’s not.”

We listened to the wind a little longer.

“Pip used to say, ‘She’s going to surprise all of us one day.’ ”

“She surprises me every day,” Vonn said.

“She’s only human. Just like you. Just like me.”