The Undertaker's Daughter (39 page)

Jemma looked at me, tears streaming down her face. “She left. Didn’t try to help me. She slipped out the door while Evelyn was beating me.”

I didn’t know what to say to her.

“I saw a Coke bottle on the counter. I picked it up and told Evelyn that if she hit me again, then I would hit her back with the Coke bottle. But I changed my mind. I thought that if I did hit her with it, she would kill me. So I put the bottle down and backed away. I grabbed one of the kitchen chairs and held it in front of me. I couldn’t stop crying and I begged her to leave me alone.”

Jemma told me that Evelyn abruptly left and went up the stairs. Before she reached the top, she turned to face Jemma and warned, “I’m not finished with you.” Then she disappeared upstairs.

That was when Jemma called me.

“She did one more thing.” My younger sister shook her head. “You won’t believe this. I went into the bathroom while Evelyn was downstairs with you. The top that Valerie had been wearing, my top . . . it was in the toilet and Evelyn had peed on it.”

Neither of us said anything for a long time.

“What’s that? Is that her? Did you hear a car drive up? Go downstairs and check.”

“I didn’t hear anything, Jemma.”

“Go downstairs and check!” she screamed. “Please. Go see if she’s back!”

No one was there. It was going to be a long night.

“I think you’d better pack some things. You can come back to my apartment and stay with me after we go to Greenville. We’ll have to think of something to tell Mother.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, you can’t stay here. We still have to go to Greenville tomorrow, but then you’ll come back with me.”

“What are we going to tell everybody when they see my face?”

“We’ll tell them you fell down the stairs. It’s the truth.”

“No, it isn’t. I was pushed.”

Later, I thought we should eat something but was surprised to find no food in the house. “Why is the refrigerator so empty? There’s always something in the refrigerator.”

“Mother leaves cash for groceries and emergencies, but Evelyn steals it.”

“Jesus Christ, Jemma, you should have told Mother!”

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to her right now.”

“Well, do you feel like going out? Let’s go get something to eat.” I looked at her face. “You can stay in the car. We’ll just pick something up.”

“Sure we will. You forget you’re in Jubilee. There’s nothing here except the Beacon Dipper.”

“Then we’ll go to the Beacon Dipper and I’ll get out of the car and order and you can keep the doors locked.”

“What if she comes back while we’re gone?”

“Then we’ll just drive to my apartment. We’ve got to eat.”

Suddenly the simple task of eating had become complex. We were held hostage by the thought of Evelyn’s returning. I couldn’t talk Jemma into leaving the house. But that was okay because every time I looked at her bruised face I felt sick and lost my appetite.

That night, for the first time since we were young girls, we slept together in Jemma’s bed. We were both frightened and found something, a bat or a broom, I’m not sure, to put beside the bed, and I placed a knife under the mattress. Just in case.

Evelyn didn’t come home that night. I don’t know where she and her children slept, probably at a friend’s house. Jemma and I left early that morning for Greenville. For sixty miles on a two-lane road, we practiced our story, our lie about Jemma’s face.

“What happened to you?” my mother asked immediately.

“I had a really bad fall down the steps,” Jemma said. “But I’m okay. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

And that was it. No more questions, not even a second glance. Clearly our lie had been accepted. My mother didn’t want to think about us right now. When she was not with my father, she was thinking about him, and we held her attention for only moments before she looked at her watch.

Rex had just delivered a patient to the hospital and stopped by to see us before he drove back to Jubilee. He looked at Jemma and said nothing until our mother left the room. “What happened to your face?”

“I fell,” Jemma said a little too quickly.

“Jesus. You better take care of that.”

“I’m fine.”

I changed the subject.

That night at the hospital Jemma and my mother took a break from my father’s bedside while our friend Billy and I stayed with him. The hospital room blinked and bleeped with lights and sounds from a bank of machines. After all that had happened the day before, I had almost forgotten about my father. I still didn’t know what was wrong with him. I hadn’t seen my mother long enough to question her, and we put on happy faces while in his room. He couldn’t sit up. Even when the nurse came in and removed the oxygen mask, he still didn’t speak. He was restless and his legs wrestled in continuous movement under the blanket.

He lay with his chest bare, that long, pitiless scar on his stomach fully exposed.

Billy read my mind. “Just think, if your daddy hadn’t been guarding that building, he wouldn’t have that scar. And who knows, maybe he wouldn’t be sick today?”

“What building?”

“Well, the building where he was shot. When that soldier came out the door and shot him.”

“But I thought . . . I thought he was in a jeep, transporting a prisoner?”

We stared at each other, not knowing what to say about these conflicting stories.

My father reached for his groin.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Billy.

“He’s trying to remove his catheter. It’s probably uncomfortable.” Billy reached for my father’s hand and gently moved it away from his groin.

I felt terrible. Evelyn had served up twenty-four hours of hell and it wasn’t getting any easier. I held my father’s hand. He stared at me with glassy, wild eyes and slowly guided my hand toward his lips. I thought he was going to kiss my hand. I was so touched that tears streamed down my cheeks. But when my hand reached his mouth, he opened wide, too wide for a kiss, and I saw his teeth. I noticed they had accumulated saliva. Before I knew what was happening, those teeth came down hard upon my hand. The weakness of his illness temporarily disappearing, he held on to my wrist while he savaged my hand, and I was trapped by his unnatural strength.

“He’s biting me!” I turned to Billy, my hand gripped in my father’s mouth. “He’s biting me! Make him stop! Why is he biting me?”

Billy calmly took my hand and gently pried it from my father’s grasp. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Then why is he doing it to me? Why didn’t he bite you?”

“He doesn’t know who we are. It’s the drugs. It’s just the drugs. They’ve pumped him full tonight. He won’t even remember this tomorrow.”

Eventually, I would discover after hours of combing through records that this was not the first time my father had been treated with powerful drugs, but it would be the last. For now, refusing to face the inevitable, I held his hand while he slept.

 CHAPTER 17 

T
he next day I drove Jemma back to college with me, but she couldn’t stay for the rest of the summer without alerting my mother, so we devised a system in which a couple of Jemma’s friends rotated staying with her, so that she need never be alone with Evelyn. Our elder sister kept an erratic schedule after the day of her insanity. We didn’t see her again for a few weeks. My fear of facing her slipped away when a big, walloping dose of anger took its place. I chose to ignore her. It was much easier to pretend that she didn’t exist than to risk another confrontation. Jemma erected an invisible brick wall around herself whenever she was in Evelyn’s presence. We had inadvertently adopted the old Amish habit of shunning and put all of our energy into it. Jemma and I neither knew nor cared about Evelyn’s response to this. She never mentioned what she’d done or approached either of us with anything resembling an apology. She was so absorbed in herself that it took her a while to figure out we weren’t speaking to her. She finally got
the message when I ran into her in front of the drugstore in Jubilee. She was speaking with a friend of our family’s and called out to me, “Hey, Mrs. Dale and I want to ask you something.”

I stopped beside them. People meandered around us in the early evening, socializing while shopkeepers locked their doors for the night. It was still hot, and Mrs. Dale fanned herself furiously with a small paper fan, a tropical scene on one side and a tractor advertisement on the other. I realized for the first time that I had never seen Evelyn sweat, and today was no exception.

“Mrs. Dale wants the phone number at the hospital. I can’t remember it. Do you have it?”

I watched my sister’s brown eyes grow wider as I silently stared her down.

“What?” She looked at Mrs. Dale and back to me. “What?”

I turned around and walked away in silence.

It was a small, but very public, gesture. Mrs. Dale would rush home and tell her best friend that the Mayfield girls weren’t getting along, how terrible, with Frank so sick and Lily Tate running herself ragged. And then Mrs. Dale’s best friend would tell her friends at the beauty parlor. That’s the way it usually went. I might have wanted that result, I’m not sure.

Evelyn rarely visited the hospital, and when she did, she arrived with an entourage of seedy-looking characters, stayed for a few minutes, then left. Jemma and I developed sudden hunger pangs and quit the room, not to return until she was well on her way. Oddly enough, my mother did notice this, even though Jemma and I thought we cleverly disguised it.

“What’s going on with you two and Evelyn?” she asked me.

“Nothing.”

“I wish you’d make more of an effort to get along with her.”

“Oh, well, don’t worry about it.”

“You all need to get along right now. I don’t have time for this.”

“We will.”

But we didn’t.

This proved to me that our mother really did swallow the lie we’d told her about Jemma’s swollen face. Thomas was the only person we told about Evelyn’s day of madness. His and Emily’s first baby, the first granddaughter in the family, was less than a month old. They lived almost a four-hour drive away, which made it difficult for him to visit the hospital, so Jemma and I didn’t expect him to drop everything to caretake us. And I didn’t want him to do anything. Thomas was too much of a diplomat; we weren’t eager for him to referee and try to patch things up. Jemma and I became quite comfortable avoiding Evelyn. Forgiving her was out of the question.

At the end of the summer semester the university’s theater department gave performances of Edgar Lee Masters’s
Spoon River Anthology
. When I auditioned, I thought the production might be a big yawn. But during rehearsals I discovered I felt at home in the play. Postmortem autobiographical epitaphs slid easily off my tongue. Spoon River’s residents were able to tell the truth about their lives in the small town for the first time, with honesty and without fear. The production was dark and somber, and we moved slowly around the cemetery like phantoms compelled to speak. The director added little-known, melancholic folk music, and a few of us sang these old ballads woefully. The thing was, I forgot to tell Jemma that the show wasn’t going to be a barrel of laughs. She’d never heard of Edgar Lee Masters. On the night of the last performance, I invited her and her friend Percy to the cast party afterward. They came backstage, and when I saw their faces, my smile disappeared. Jemma looked as if she’d seen a ghost.

“What’s wrong?” Surely the play wasn’t that depressing.

“We’ve got to go.”

“Yeah, I know, we’re all going to the party, right?”

“No,” Jemma said. “We’ve got to go to Greenville . . . to the hospital.”

“Now? It’s late. Why do we have to go now? We can’t see him tonight, visiting hours are over.”

There were people everywhere, jostling around, looking for their friends and family, speaking to me, pulling on me.

“We have got to go right now! Mother didn’t want me to tell you before the performance. It’s not good there. She wants us to be there tonight,” Jemma insisted.

“Okay, okay. Let me change and we’ll go.”

We left Percy to drive back to Jubilee on his own. By the time we were in my car and on our way, it must have been eleven o’clock. I knew what was going on, but I couldn’t say it or face it. Jemma and I had never said the words:
He’s dying. He’s going to die
.