Whisper Me This(40)
More guilt. Mrs. Carlton is right, of course. I don’t know who to ask. I’m not even sure what a church funeral looks like.
“Well, are you coming in? Heat’s not getting any cheaper,” Mrs. Carlton says, interrupting my thoughts. I take one last breath of cool, rain-fresh air and enter the house, Elle right behind me. Bleach fumes set my eyes to watering and sear the lining of my nose. Sauna-level heat intensifies its effects, making a bleach-nebulizer that burns my lungs. Elle sneezes, loudly, and earns a glare from Mrs. Carlton, who produces a tissue from one of her pockets and tucks it into my daughter’s reluctant hand.
“Come and sit a spell.” Mrs. Carlton turns her back and shuffles down the hall.
Elle holds the tissue with the tips of her thumb and forefinger, ewww written all over her face, and I gesture maniacally for her to just put it in her pocket.
Oblivious to Elle’s antics, or at least I hope so anyway, Edna stays on course and doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t seem to lean on the walker, and as we follow her down the spotless hallway, I catch her picking the thing up and carrying it for a step or two before remembering that she’s supposed to lean on it, not use it as a fashion accessory.
The sitting room hasn’t changed at all since my childhood. The blinds are closed tight to keep the sun from fading either the carpet or furniture. Same stiff old couch and chairs, same dull beige lampshades, all still covered in plastic to keep off the dirt.
Elle and I lower ourselves gingerly onto the sofa, planting our feet to keep from sliding forward off the slick surface.
“I used to babysit your mother,” Mrs. Carlton says to Elle. Her voice is grinding and harsh, out of keeping with a tiny frame so aerodynamic that she seems to hover above the armchair, still gripping the walker to keep herself from drifting away. I keep sneaking glimpses to see if her butt is touching the chair.
“I remember.”
Mrs. Carlton wasn’t my mother’s first choice of babysitter, but she couldn’t argue with the convenience of having childcare right next door, or with the price, which was free. There were days, mostly during tax season, when both of my parents stayed late at the office. On those days, when the school bus dropped me off, I would do my homework at Mrs. Carlton’s kitchen table, while her venomous gossip poured over me and gave me insights a kid definitely didn’t need into the behaviors of all the neighbors.
I remember tasteless dinners, and the misery of washing dishes afterward and never getting them clean enough to satisfy.
“It won’t hurt you,” Mom said when I complained. “Life isn’t all fun and games, Maisey.”
“You were just a bitty thing when your folks moved in,” Mrs. Carlton is saying now. “Maybe three and so precocious. Watchful, you were. All big eyes. You had a way of hiding in plain sight. You’d be sitting right there, and all the adults would forget about you. Freakish for a child that age, I always thought.”
My ears perk up. This is exactly the direction I want this conversation to go. If anybody knows the secrets my parents have been keeping, it will be Edna Carlton.
“Life is truly a vale of tears. Your mother was far too young. How old was she, now? She can’t have been more than twenty when she moved in here with your father. When I asked if her mother knew she’d moved in with an older man, she just about tore a strip off my hide. Total spitfire, I tell you. Informed me that she was of an age, thank you very much, and that who she’d married was none of her mother’s business and certainly none of mine. Then she slammed her door in my face, and it was two weeks before she consented to speak with me again, and then only because she was in need of a babysitter.”
“She’d been sick,” I say, as soon as I can squeeze a few words into the torrent. “I don’t suppose they told you.”
“Hmmmph.” Edna actually says this, pronouncing all the phonetics. I’ve always thought when I saw hmmmph in books that it was an exaggeration of a sigh or a hmmm. Nope. There’s actual spittle involved; an errant ray of sunlight sneaking in past the closed blinds highlights the tiny drops and turns them into rainbows.
“What are you looking at, Maisey? You always were the strange child, staring off into nothing like you could see the dead wandering about. Can you?”
Startled out of my musing on rainbows and spittle, I stare at her, blankly looking for the right answer to her question.
“Can I what?”
“See dead people.”
I blink back a vision of my mother’s dead body as I saw it before she was cleaned up and made presentable. If she were to haunt me, she would come to me like that, vengeful and trailing IV tubes and EKG wires. I wish I’d let her go peacefully. I wish I could go back to that instant and make a different decision. Regret sits like a boulder where my stomach used to be.
“She means like ghosts,” Elle says, helpfully, scuffing her feet in the perfect carpet and then catching herself as she starts to slide forward off the slick plastic. “Obviously you can see dead people.”
“Right.” I scrub my sleeve over my eyes and swallow to steady my throat. “No. I don’t see ghosts. I was probably daydreaming. I did that.”
“Looks like you still do.”
My right hand curls into a fist, and I force it flat and slide it under my butt where it will behave itself. I will remain calm. I will remain calm. I will not rise to her bait.