Beautiful Little Fools(50)

Still, I lived for those parties. Dressing up and going into the city on Tom’s arm. Lake Forest was too quiet. We were far enough from the city that I only went in for a specific engagement. At least in Cannes, I had the beach to while away my days. Here it became almost too unbearably cold to spend much time outside, even by the end of September.

Tom played polo most days, and I was left behind at home with only the staff and Pammy. Sometimes I wondered if everything might be better if I took Pammy’s care all onto myself. She would keep me endlessly busy, and being with Pammy always made me feel happy in a way nothing else did. But when I mentioned it to Tom, he said he wouldn’t hear of his wife being a nursemaid.

I desperately missed Jordan, missed having a friend and a companion to brighten up the house and my days. I was hazy on the details, because she didn’t share them with me. But I knew there had been some kind of scandal in the golf tournament a few months back, and that Jordan had left it for a little while, gone to New York City to stay with her aunt. But I also knew she barely knew her aunt and didn’t like her much either. I wrote her letter after letter, imploring her to come to Lake Forest, to stay with us. She wrote back only once and simply said she wasn’t feeling up for parties. No parties, I promised her. We’ll stay in the house and just talk and talk the way we used to back in Louisville. But that letter got me no response.

I got so desperate for companionship that I wrote to Mother in late October, inviting her to come stay with us for a spell. She said she didn’t relish the cold winters in Chicago, and that maybe we could come to Louisville in the spring. What neither one of us wrote, what sat there unwritten between us, was that it was almost December. Almost the four-year anniversary of the train crash that took Daddy and Rose from us. And we Fay women were just superstitious enough that neither one of us was willing to travel that same exact train route at the same exact time of year.

And then maybe it was being in Chicago. Maybe it was the bone-chilling cold that rolled in with November, the thick layer of ice that turned the lake white and inhospitable. Maybe it was that I was lonely and friendless and increasingly uncheered even by the parties I continued to go to with Tom. But I missed Rose more desperately than I had in years, since the months around when the accident first happened.



* * *



ROSE CAME BACK to me again in my sleep.

One night, she appeared in my dream. She was dressed in her white Communion dress, her pretty blond hair tied back with a pink ribbon. She was Rose before the polio had hit, no limp and no trace of illness in her lungs.

She ran fast across our Lake Forest yard, not even out of breath, laughing, imploring me to follow her. She ran and ran and I chased her, and then she ended up at Tom’s stables, and she beckoned me to go inside with her.

She unlatched the door and walked in, and I followed after her, watching her pet the ponies on their heads, cooing to them. I was fully aware that it was my first time entering Tom’s space since we’d moved to Chicago, but that didn’t bother me in my dream. What bothered me was, I couldn’t catch Rose. No matter how fast I walked, she was one step ahead of me. I longed to touch her, to hug her, to hold her, for just one more moment. But she was just out of my reach. Even when I started running, I couldn’t quite catch her.

Rose, I cried out. Wait!

I opened my eyes and she was gone again. My bedroom was dark, empty. A pale blue and orange fire crackled in the fireplace across the room, and I was chilled but also sweating. I rolled over, and Tom was gone, too. His side of the bed was still unslept in. I checked the clock and it was just after midnight. And then I stood and went to the window. I could see his stables from here, and the building glowed a little, in the distance. Rose? I blinked back tears. No, of course it wasn’t Rose at all. It was Tom. That’s where Tom went, in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t sleep? To visit with his goddamned ponies.

Daise, be good, Rose’s voice whispered in my ear.

I walked downstairs and grabbed my coat and a lamp. We’d been in Chicago six months and I’d yet to go out to the stables. But now I was half asleep and I still felt Rose lingering on my skin, making me brave or senseless. She was just here. Just petting the ponies. And I knew she wasn’t in the stables now. Truly, I knew she wasn’t. But Tom was. And maybe if I showed an interest in his ponies, everything would feel better again. I could go to him there and bury my face in his neck and inhale that deep spicy smoke and whiskey scent of him. And I would stop feeling so desperately lonely.

I put on my boots and trudged across the lawn to the stables. The frosted grass crackled as I stepped, the sound so loud it seemed to reverberate against the cool quiet of the December night. But we were so far away from everyone and everything, there was no one else around to hear it but me.

When I reached the stables, I was breathing hard, sweating a little under the heavy wool of my coat. I put my lamp down to fiddle with the latch on the door. And then, once I got it open, I heard a sound. A strange, unexpected sound. It was a feral cry, but not the kind of cry a horse makes. It was a human sound. A woman’s cry. She was in pain. In my head, I knew it couldn’t be Rose, but my dream was still so close, so real, my heart didn’t quite believe it.

I’m coming, Rose.

I picked up my lamp again and ran inside. The stable was dim, with a trail of lamps lining the floor, and it smelled so strongly of horses it turned my stomach. But still, I continued walking, toward the light, the row of lamps. Toward the desperate sound of the girl crying out.