American War(94)

“You should be in bed,” my father said. “You’ll give your mother trouble tomorrow if you don’t get your sleep.”

But I pleaded, and he was too distracted by the looming car and our new guest to argue. I hid behind his leg and peered out, fascinated by the arrival of this stranger about whom my parents had argued for weeks.

The car pulled up to the house. The asphalt was newly laid and the wheels crunched against it. When my mother came out of the car she looked exhausted.

I’d seen her this way before—the previous winter, when Zenith came through and devastated the greenhouses. The house, made of fine red brick, withstood the storm, but throughout the property there were shards of glass, solar panels twisted and cracked. For five days straight she worked with the laborers to repair the damage. I remember seeing that drained look on her face. It was in those moments when I think she secretly wished my father was well enough to help her, that his mind was healed enough not just to carry on pleasant conversation, but to hold important things in memory, to keep from wandering to his clouded place. Sometimes, when I refused to go to bed or played in the parts of the yard that were off-limits, my mother would yell at me. It felt then like she was yelling twice at the same time, once for whatever I’d done and again because she was mad that it was always her who had to do the yelling.

The passenger door opened and from the car unfurled a huge, hunched body. The enormity of it blocked out the light from the driveway lamp and for a moment all I saw of her was a limbed wall of blackness.

“Welcome home, Sarat,” my mother said.

The stranger moved slowly out of the light. My father descended the porch steps. He looked confused, his eyes squinting as though he were trying to focus on a very faraway thing.

“For God’s sake, Simon,” said my mother. “Don’t you remember your own sister? Come here and give her a hug.”

My father stepped forward and hugged her; she tightened up at the feel of his arms around her, and did not reciprocate. When he pulled away from her my father had tears in his eyes but the stranger looked at him in a way I’d never seen before. There was a kind of vicious longing in her eyes, a recollection of something once tender, now poisoned. She looked at him as though he were a plaster mask of her own face, cast before the onset of some great deformity.

I ran in for a closer look at our visitor. I hid behind my mother’s skirt.

“Benjamin, this is Sarat,” she said, pulling me out from behind her. “This is your aunt.”

I stared at the towering woman, dumbstruck. I had seen a picture of her once. In the picture she must have been a teenager, lean and bald-headed, a menacing smile on her face. But what stood in our driveway bore almost no resemblance to that image. This woman was fat, her gut pressed against her dirty gray shirt. But it was more than that. All of her seemed oversized—her limbs trunklike, her nose flattened and wide.

She looked old; I’d been told she was my father’s younger sister—she was not even thirty years old—but she looked older than him; older than my mother, even. As a child I imagined there were only three ages anyone could be—young like me, old like my parents, or very old like my grandparents in the North or the women in black dresses who came to see my father. But this woman was none of these things.

My mother ushered me toward our guest. I waited for her to lift me—to hug me and pinch my cheeks the way all our visitors did. Rarely did anyone come by the house without a present for me. The very old women in the black dresses—who called me the miracle of the miracle—would often take me aside and give me crisp hundred-dollar bills. But this visitor did nothing. Not knowing how to respond, I hugged her leg.

She stood motionless. I felt my mother lift me up.

“It’s past his bedtime,” she said. “I’m gonna take him upstairs. Come in, Sarat, come in.”

Our guest looked at the house as though it were made of thorns.

“Whose is this?” she asked.

“It’s ours, Sarat,” said my mother. “It’s yours. We tore the old one down a few years ago when things got better, after…” She paused. “Come on in.”

But she was looking elsewhere, to the eastern edge of the property, where the seawall curled south past three greenhouses and the broken old shed.

“Why’s that wall there?” she asked.

“The levee? We put that in around ’91,” my mother said. “Used to be the river would flood and wreck the greenhouses three, four times a year.”

“The river don’t run that way,” our guest said. “That’s land for another ten miles. I used to walk out there.”

“Sarat, the river moves,” said my mother. “It ate all that land a long time ago.”

I thought I caught a twinge flash across her face, but quickly it was gone.

She seemed to dismiss our home entirely. Everyone always said there was no finer piece of property in all of northern Georgia than the Chestnuts’ place. But she barely noticed it at all.

“We got a room for you all ready,” said my father. “It’s a nice room.” He looked to my mother, who nodded.

“That’s right, a nice room,” my mother said. “I think you’ll like it, Sarat. It has a view of the river, just like your old room did.”

Our guest seemed to retract slightly at the mention of the river, as though some primal mechanism of defense deep within her had been triggered. I had no idea then of what water had done to her.