I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(41)
“Why don’t you sleep on it?” said George.
“I don’t need to,” said Edith. “I’m in.”
Two weeks later, on December 19, 1953, a woman’s voice—neutral, almost machinelike—on the phone told Edith that the first woman, Margaret, would arrive that night, and, just after midnight, she knocked on Edith’s back door. Shockingly young, possibly not yet out of her teens, with a gray wool coat that was much too big for her, clutching a cheap valise that Edith knew was probably full of things she’d only recently been given that did not quite feel like hers (George had said that many of the women left in a hurry, empty-handed), and an old, yellowing bruise on her cheekbone, Margaret stared at Edith with the wide, frightened, bewildered eyes of an injured animal, and on an impulse, even though she was not usually quick to touch people, especially strangers, Edith took the girl’s free hand in both of hers, murmured, “Oh, sweet child,” and pulled her gently into the house.
Edith would learn that some of the women—and, occasionally, heartbreakingly, some of the children—could not bear to be handled, flinching or pulling away at the slightest touch; some recoiled when she offered words of sympathy; some could not, especially upon first arriving, even meet her eyes. She would learn to move slowly around them, to change their bandages without comment, to offer them food with the efficiency of a waitress in a restaurant, and to wait for a sign—a hand reaching out, a cautious smile, the offering up of a small, personal fact (“My mother has a clock like that one;” “I wish I hadn’t left the book I was reading sitting on my nightstand. Can you imagine, fretting about a book at a time like this?”)—that they wanted a more human connection. She would learn to take her cues from them. But that night, almost before she had stepped across the threshold, Margaret fell into Edith’s arms and clung, her thin shoulders quaking with near-silent weeping.
Because there were no other guests at Blue Sky House, Edith walked Margaret into the living room. When Margaret stopped crying and dropped, exhausted, into the chair Edith offered her, she said, staring into the fire, “He didn’t even hit me that often, only when he got really jealous. But it was always in the face. And once you get hit in the face, you’re always waiting for it to happen again. Your body gets so tired from bracing itself for the next blow, and it gets so you can’t sleep and your mind can’t focus on regular things anymore. Even more than the hitting, it was the waiting that got to me.”
For a couple of minutes, the crackle and hiss of the fire was the only sound. Then, Margaret turned to Edith with a wry and weary smile. “Well, I always did want to get out of Roanoke,” she said, “and here I am.”
Over time, Edith would find that, just like Margaret, despite their instructions to hide their history, most of the women would tell her where they’d come from, would let slip a tiny piece of what they’d left behind. She understood this impulse, this laying claim to a past. It was as if they were saying, Despite my vanishing act, I am not a ghost; I am real, a flesh and blood woman, with a story that belongs to me.
After Margaret had gone to bed in the little downstairs bedroom, Edith got out a notebook and performed, for the first time, an act that would become a habit: documenting this woman’s brief stopover in her own life, setting down, for no one’s eyes but her own, a record of this person who would disappear. She knew as she wrote that it wasn’t wise, that George would be angry if he found out, but she couldn’t shake the conviction that everyone whose life brushed against her own should leave a trace, even if it was just a few, scant, cryptic lines on a page.
In careful, precise printing, she wrote the date, followed by this: Margaret. Roan. Cont chk. Auburn hair, pale, skinny inside her big wool coat, freckles like sprinkled nutmeg across her nose.
Chapter Sixteen
Clare
The night I found Edith and Joseph’s marriage certificate, his obituary, and her photographs, Zach called me. Even though it was nearly three in the morning, I was still awake, or partly awake, floating, under the blue sky of Edith’s ceiling, in a hazy state not only between wakefulness and sleep but between my present and Edith’s past. In this dreamy space, it was oddly easy to feel that Edith was close by, not like a ghost or a guardian angel, but physically under the same roof as me, the way, when I was a kid, I would lie in bed and know that my mother was in the house, feel the peace of that knowledge in my bones, even if I couldn’t hear or see her.
Even the buzzing of the phone against the bedside table didn’t yank me out of this calm, Edith-is-near state, which is maybe why, when I saw who was calling, I didn’t ignore it as I usually would have, nor did my heart start galloping like a spooked horse; I just answered.
“Zach, it’s really late,” I said, quietly, firmly, just as Edith would have.
“I know,” he said. His voice was a little high, a little loud and excited, but, happily, he wasn’t crying and didn’t sound drunk. “I’m sorry. I just—today when I was walking through the park on my way home, I saw this girl, maybe eight years old, walking with her dad, and she was in a costume. This straw hat, maybe a boater it’s called? With braids that might have been attached to the hat or maybe she had a wig on or maybe they were real, but anyway, red braids, pretty convincing, and this sort of pinafore dress, and these button boots, and I flashed back to that miniseries you made me watch—I mean, yes, you made me, but then I actually enjoyed it a lot—the one based on those books you loved as a kid, and I walked up to her and said, ‘Excuse me but are you . . . ’”—he paused, waiting.