Never Coming Back(26)

Sing to me, mermaids. Please sing to me.

Panic churned within, skin-prickle-heart-pound panic. I took a long pull on Jack and then another. And then another. Then I called Annabelle Lee, the choir director, my mother’s best and only friend. Don’t call her Annabelle Lee, my mother’s voice sounded in my head. She hates that name.

“Do you even know what that name is from?” I once asked my mother. Seventeen. Know-it-all.

“Some poem,” she said. “Some long poem that her father liked.”

Right back at me. No backing down. She didn’t know the poem and she didn’t care that she didn’t know the poem. Another difference between the two of us.

We were still on the porch, me and Jack in his bottle and the fairy lights twinkling in their almost-unseen way, when I heard the choir director’s car grinding and moaning around the curves of Turnip Hill Road. Once heard, the sound of Annabelle Lee’s car could not be unheard. It was an ancient Impala, kept running by the sheer force of Annabelle’s will, her math-and-music mind, and the parts she scavenged from Ron Hubbard’s car graveyard. She had insisted on driving up from Sterns when I called, said she wanted to see the Tiny, as she’d heard it referenced in town.

“Forsooth,” I said to Jack, “what car through yonder woods approaches?”

The urge to uncap Jack and take another long swig overcame me; I fought it. The urge to leap out of my chair and run inside and turn off the lights and lock the door overcame me; I fought it. The urge to jump into the Subaru—the keys were already in my pocket—overcame me; I would’ve done it had the Impala not already been mumbling its way up the bumps and rocks and exposed roots of the driveway. Annabelle Lee slid across the vast expanse of the front seat to the passenger’s side, because that was the only door that still opened, and emerged. I picked Jack up by the scruff of his neck and dangled him in the air. If battle was upon us, Jack was my ally. It would be the two of us against the one of Annabelle. ’Tis enough, ’twill suffice. A fisher cat screamed from somewhere nearby. It sounded like a girl in peril.

“Are you angry at me?” I said.

That was not what I intended to say. The sound of my voice, the childish tone of it, made me angry, and I was me. Annabelle Lee hauled herself up onto the porch. Hauled. Heaved. Hefted. Hove. H words went scrolling along the bottom of my mind. The porch planks groaned under her weight.

“A little,” she said. “You’ve been here a year and you never returned my calls. A lot of time’s gone by.”

“I’m trying to make up for that. For lost time. I’m trying to fill in the blanks.”

It seemed important to emphasize the word blanks. Hello, my name is Clara Winter and I am powerless over italics. Heads nodded around a table, murmuring, Hi, Clara. Hi, Clara. Hi, Clara. Jack was still in my hand and I swung him back and forth to make the italics stop but they kept coming. Annabelle Lee—it was hard to think of her as anything but that, hard to call her by just her given name—regarded me.

“Maybe I can help fill them in, those blanks. Some of them, anyway.”

“She’s my mother, though.”

“She’s my best friend. And you’re the one who called me, finally, at least tonight.”

Annabelle Lee had seen my italics and raised them with her own. She shifted weight and the porch floor groaned again. Unlike my weightless mother, whose singing voice was bigger than anything else about her, Annabelle Lee’s organlike contralto matched her body.

“Still the distance between you two, Clara?”

“It’s not that far. I go down there every other day.”

“That’s not the kind of distance I’m talking about,” she said, a tinge of scorn in her voice. Impatience. Breathe in, Clara. Breathe out. Regard Annabelle’s scorn and impatience with calm and detachment.

“There was a lot of stuff back then,” I said.

“There’s always a lot of stuff,” Annabelle said. “It’s called being human.”

Calm. Detachment. Fake it till you make it. “I’m trying to figure things out,” I said. “Before it’s too late”—she opened her mouth, about to snap out more scorn, but I held up my hand and she stopped—“and I figured you might be able to shed light.”

To shed light. That sounded good. Annabelle nodded, wary but willing. Okay. Good job, Clara. Begin with small questions, such as why had my mother gone to choir practice every Wednesday for more than thirty years but never sung in church, not once? Why had she always eaten out of cans and jars? Those kinds of questions. Mild questions. Beginner questions.

But that was not what I did.

“For example, do you know what happened between her and Asa that night?” I said. “Why he broke up with me the very next day? Why she literally, physically, ripped up my MVCC application? Why she didn’t tell me that whole fall that the two of you were plotting and scheming to get me out of the state? And what about the house? Why didn’t she tell me she was selling the house?”

My voice was rising. There was nothing calm or detached about it. Annabelle Lee shook her head.

“The house,” I said. “Our house. Who would do that, Annabelle? Tell me, what kind of person does that?”

She was still shaking her head. Then she turned and lowered herself off the porch, one step at a time. Bracelets jangled on her wrists. Rhinestones shone on her loafers, rhinestones she had no doubt glued on herself. There could not be two more different friends than my mother and Annabelle Lee, the choir director.