The Paper Palace(98)

I bristle. “She was my best friend. I feel her absence every single day.”

“Life can be lonely.”

We sit there together silent, each pretending to concentrate on eating.

“This is delicious,” I say after a while.

“The applesauce makes it moist. So, what brings you to Memphis?”

“My husband Peter. He had to come here for work. Mum’s at the pond, taking care of the kids. We have three.”

“And is this the first time you’ve been back?”

I nod. “I should have come sooner. I visited Conrad’s grave yesterday.”

“I’ve never been. Cemeteries depress me. Mother visited him once a week. She never quite recovered from it all. I think she blamed you.”

I feel as if she’s thrown a glass of ice water in my face.

“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling the inadequacy of those words. “I couldn’t save him.”

“Oh, well. If you’d jumped in he probably would have pulled you down with him in his panic. He was that type.” She takes a big bite of cake, chews slowly. “You saw him drown.”

“Yes.”

“That must be a hard thing to get out of your head.”

“I never have.”

Rosemary fingers a small cross that hangs around her neck. She seems to be considering something. “I’ve tried to picture it: Conrad falling off the boat into the cold open ocean. He was a terrible swimmer. What was it like, watching him go under? I wish I’d been there to see it myself.”

It is such a bizarre thing to say. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?” She gives me a long hard look. “You remember that summer he came home to stay with me and Mother?”

I nod, feeling a dull dread.

“Well, that was my idea. I was quite lonely after Con left. Mother was in a mood half the time. I’d sit on the porch swing, try to stay quiet as a mouse. She said noise made her nervy. Anyway, Conrad, Mother, and I made a plan to drive across country to my uncle’s home in Santa Fe. I was so excited. The first night Conrad was home, he came to my room after Mother was asleep. I woke up with him on top of me. I could barely breathe. I tried to call out for help, but he kept his hand over my mouth. I sobbed into his palm.” She pauses, picks a bit of lint off her trousers. “The whole time he was raping me, he kept saying your name.”

The room bleeds into a white blur. I feel as though I am being sucked slow motion through the center of a star. I can vaguely hear the low hum of the air conditioner. Somewhere down the street children are shouting. I imagine them playing with a hose, dousing each other in cool water. A car drives past. Then another.

“He came to my room almost every night that summer. I was thirteen years old.” Her face is impassive, bland. She could be talking about cats. “My brother was a monster. Every night I prayed to God he would die. And finally God answered my prayers.” She pauses. “Part of me has always wondered if it wasn’t God who answered my prayers, but you.”

Rosemary reaches over to the coffeepot and pours herself another inch of decaf, carefully adds two sugar cubes with a little pronged tong. “Edmund wanted children, but I could never see the point. More coffee?”

I am too numb to respond.

The front doorbell rings. “Oh good,” Rosemary says, standing up. “That’ll be the dry cleaning.”



* * *



—

Outside Rosemary’s house, the sun is still shining, the air dripping with heat and the exhaustion of being. A boy bicycles past, ringing his tinny bell. Weeds grow up from a crack in the sidewalk. I come to a crosswalk. The smell of banana peel, a vacant brown lot strewn with plastic bags that float and settle like a broken laundry line of wife-beaters. I need to call Jonas.





31


   Yesterday. July 31, the Back Woods.


“What time are people coming?”

“I said sevenish.” My mother has her head deep in the refrigerator, hunting for a lost tube of tomato paste.

I grab a white linen tablecloth from a drawer and throw it over the porch table. “Are we eight or ten?”

“Nine, including Jonas’s insufferable mother. I don’t know why we had to include her. I hate odd numbers.”

I take a stack of pasta bowls from the shelf, carry them carefully to the table, and set them around. “What about Dixon and Andrea?”

Mum hands me a pile of cloth napkins. “Dixon, yes. Andrea, no. Use these. And the brass candlesticks.”

“Why not?”

“That dreadful son of hers is visiting from Boulder for the weekend. She asked if she could bring him, and I said no.”

“You truly are the absolute worst.”

She hands me a breadboard. “Why on earth would I include him? He didn’t know Anna.”

I bring wineglasses to the table, two by two. Forks and knives. Salt. Pepper. I concentrate on each small task as if it is a lifeline, anchoring me to the present, to my life right now. I cannot get Rosemary’s words out of my head, her mundane, unvarnished voice as she handed me absolution, a pardon for my crime.

“What else needs doing?” I say.

“You can open a few bottles of claret to let them breathe. And grate the cheese. There’s a hunk of Parmesan on the door of the refrigerator.” She places a white ironstone compote filled with limes and bright green pears in the center of the table.