Commonwealth(83)

Holly shook her head. “You couldn’t have left it there. We were all so obsessed with the gun. It was all we ever thought about.”

Franny had untied the bandanna and, carefully, pointing the gun away from herself and away from Cal, unloaded it the way her father taught her. She put the bullets in the front pocket of her shorts, holding the open revolver up to the light, spinning the cylinder and looking down the barrel to the sun to make sure it was empty. She tied it up in the red cloth but there was really no place to put it. She tried to put it in her waistband but of course it showed. Finally she decided to hide it behind a tree nearby. When everyone was gone she would go back and get it and take it to the house. She would get Jeanette to come with her and they would put the gun in Jeanette’s purse. No one would think that was strange because Jeanette always carried her purse. She remembered being glad to have something else to worry about, something other than Cal.

Franny looked over at the barn. “I always thought I did the wrong thing.”

“What would the right thing have been?” Holly put her arm around Franny’s waist. “We had no idea what was going on. We didn’t even know he’d been stung by a bee.”

“We didn’t?”

“Not until later. We did that night when Dad came back from the hospital, but before that we didn’t have a clue.”

“I loved it here,” Franny said, though she had never known it before.

Holly looked surprised. “Did you? I hated this place.”

Franny looked at her. Holly had been such a pretty girl. Why had she never noticed that? She thought of her as a sister now. “Why did you come back then?”

“To make sure you were going to be okay,” Holly said. “We always stuck together. Don’t you remember that? We were such a fierce little tribe.”

“Listen,” Franny said, looking up. “Do you hear the birds?”

Holly shook her head. “It’s your phone. That’s what I came to tell you. You shouldn’t worry.”

“About the birds?” Franny asked, but then Holly was gone and the room was dark again. She could still hear them.

“Answer your phone,” Caroline said from the other bed.

The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. “Hello?” Franny said.

“Mrs. Mehta?” a voice said, a woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“This is Dr. Wilkinson. I’m calling from Torrance Memorial Medical Center. Mrs. Mehta, I’m sorry to tell you that your stepmother has passed away.”

“Marjorie’s dead?” Franny sat straight up, the news pulling her awake. How was that possible? When had she gone to the hospital? Caroline got out of her bed and turned on the light on the table between them. There was only one person who was going to die and that was their father.

“What?” Caroline said.

“Mrs. Cousins,” the doctor said. “Her heart monitor alerted the nurse a little after four o’clock this morning. We attempted resuscitation but it was unsuccessful.”

“Mrs. Cousins?”

“Teresa died?” Caroline said.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said again. “She was very sick.”

“Wait a minute,” Franny said. “I don’t think I’m understanding what you’re saying. Could you say this to my sister?”

Franny gave the phone to Caroline. Caroline would know what questions to ask. The digital clock on the bedside table said it was 4:47 in the morning. She wondered if Albie would be awake by now, if he had set his alarm. He was taking an early flight to Los Angeles to see his mother.





8

Six months in advance of her retirement, Teresa bought herself a ticket to Switzerland to visit Holly at the Zen center. She did it so she’d have something to look forward to. She wasn’t sure about retiring so much as she feared becoming a doddering presence in the job she had loved for so long. Over time she’d seen everyone come and go, rise and fall and pack the contents of his or her desk into a box. Sooner or later she’d have to do the same, and wouldn’t it be better to do it before they started nudging her towards the door? At seventy-two she might well have the time to figure out another life, not that she was sure what that meant exactly. She thought she might take a bridge class or do a better job with her yard. She’d thought that she could go to Switzerland.

Two weeks after her retirement party, a pretty gold watch on her wrist and a ticket in her purse, she called a taxi for the airport.

Holly didn’t come home anymore. When she first went to Switzerland twenty-five years ago, she had planned to be gone for a month. She came back after six months, and then it was only to apply for a permanent visa. She officially quit her job at Sumitomo Bank, which they had held for her. Holly had been an economics major at Berkeley and even though she was young she’d been valued at her job. She gave up the lease on her apartment which had been sitting empty all this time. She sold her furniture.

“Are you in love?” her mother asked. She didn’t actually think that Holly was in love, even though she exhibited all the classic signs: distraction and dewiness, a loss of appetite. Holly had cut her dark hair close to her head. Her face was scrubbed, and for the first time in years Teresa could see that a smattering of freckles still remained. Teresa was afraid her oldest daughter had been kidnapped even though they were sitting together at the kitchen table drinking coffee, that her brain had been taken over by a cult that had allowed her body to come home long enough to sort out her possessions, throwing everyone off the trail. But asking Holly if she’d been taken over by a cult was a harder question.