Читать книгу Look Closely - Laura Caldwell, Leslie S. Klinger - Страница 11

After leaving the Marker Mansion, formerly the Sutter home—my home—I drove slowly, not sure where I was going, letting the sights of Woodland Dunes fill my head and refresh my memories of the place. I passed the town’s riding stables, matching white barns with green roofs resting on a large field, a white fence surrounding the property. Patsy and I used to ride there on Saturdays, eating brown-bag lunches in the long grass behind the barns when we were done. The town’s championship golf course with its rolling greens and intermittent circles of sand appeared the same as it did years ago, just like the lighthouse at Murphy’s Point.

I turned left on the outskirts of town, then left again toward the lake. And suddenly, there it was. A square plot of land on a hillside dotted with trees and sprinkled with gray and white headstones. The Woodland Dunes Cemetery. I hadn’t realized I was so close. In fact, I didn’t know if I could have found it if I tried.

I pulled into the lot, the tires of the rental car crunching over the gravel. As I got out, I remembered where to go. My dad had brought me here a few times before we moved. I walked toward the far left corner, the heels of my loafers sinking into the damp, spongy ground. I passed an older man in jogging clothes squatting over a small, simple headstone. He pulled stray weeds with a quick hand as if accustomed to the movement.

I stopped when I came to the tall white column made of stone, an angel on either side looking down, protecting the grave. A grayish-green film had made its home in some of the crevices of my mother’s memorial, around the angel’s wings and in the edges of the lettering that read: Leah Rose Sutter, Beloved Wife and Mother, 1942–1982. The rest of the grave site was remarkably clean. No weeds or sand on it like some of the others nearby.

Then I noticed it. A single yellow tulip lying at the base of the monument. I stood completely still, staring at it, my mind latching onto our old house again, wandering the rooms inside, seeing it the way my mother had always kept it. Flowers below the porch, blooms in the vases in the library, and more flowers in her bedroom. In the spring, when the air was new and clean as it was now, those flowers were usually tulips, mostly yellow.

I wrapped my arms around myself. The fact that my mother loved yellow tulips, and the fact that this one had been placed by her headstone had to be a coincidence. I wasn’t aware of anyone who visited her grave. My mother’s own parents had died a few years after her, and she had no siblings. Once we moved away, my father and I never returned. As far as Dan and Caroline were concerned, I didn’t know where they were. They had both been so much older than me. After my mom died, Caroline had gone off to boarding school and Dan to college. We never really saw them after that. My dad and I moved all over for his work at the firm—San Francisco, London, Paris, Long Island—and when I asked about Caroline and Dan, he said that they had their own lives and families. He gave the impression that they didn’t want to be a part of ours any longer.

Maybe the flower had come loose from a nearby bouquet. I glanced at the other grave sites. Some were untended and nearly overgrown. A few had small flower arrangements but no tulips.

When I looked back at my mother’s grave, I had the odd feeling that someone was watching me. A few more glances around told me that I imagined it. The man in the jogging clothes had turned away, walking back to the parking lot.

I bent down and lifted the bud. It looked fairly new, only two of the petals showing signs of droop, probably no more than a day or two old. I laid it gently on the cool stone again, wondering who could have left it here. No matter. I was grateful to the person for honoring my mother, for remembering her.

This time, there were two cars parked in Della’s driveway. As I pulled in behind them, the front door flew open, and a short woman dressed in gray slacks and a sleeveless white blouse rushed down the sidewalk. I got out of the car and opened my arms to hug Della, the woman who’d helped raise me until we moved away from Woodland Dunes, and someone I recalled well, as if there was nothing to fear from my memories of her.

“Oh, Hailey.” Della held a warm hand to my cheek. “You’re so grown-up. You look so much like your mom.”

“Thank you.” Other than my father, I didn’t come across many people who knew my mom, and I liked hearing about the resemblance.

Della took me by the hand and led me around the back of the house where she had a pitcher of iced tea and a tray of cookies waiting on a metal patio table. The branches from a tall oak tree formed a canopy of shade, the breeze making its leaves ruffle and whisper.

Della fussed over me, telling me to sit in one of the chairs. While she spooned ice into our glasses and placed a few cookies on a paper plate, I noticed how little she had changed. Her olive skin was still smooth, her cheeks still full with a pink glow. Her hair, though obviously dyed to keep its black color, still lay in crinkled waves to her chin. She’d put on a few pounds, but they only made her seem more like the comforting figure of my memories.

“Tell me,” Della said, settling into the chair next to me. “Tell me everything about you.”

I talked about law school, my job, my apartment in Manhattan. When I finally slowed down, I took a bite of an oatmeal-raisin cookie, the soft, sweet taste raising a recollection of Della in our old house, lifting a baking sheet out of the oven, placing a hand on my head, telling me to wait until they were cool.

“And you’re not married?” Della said. She bit into her own cookie, but her eyes watched me, waiting for an answer.

“No. I’m a long way from married.”

“No one special then?”

I shook my head. “A few years ago, I was dating someone seriously.” I thought of Michael, sitting bare-chested in his bed, eyes playful, holding firm to my hand, trying to pull me back under the covers.

“And what happened to that?”

I shrugged. The therapist I’d seen after Michael and I broke up had nodded her head at the end of our first and only session and said in a grave tone, “Abandonment issues,” as if she was making a horrible diagnosis like, “Permanent facial disfigurement.” It was natural, she said, for a child who lost a parent so young to have such feelings, but I couldn’t carry them over into my adult relationships and push people away. I knew she had a point, but I had never learned how to avoid keeping most people at arm’s length. I got busy with the bar exam, and I didn’t keep up with the prescribed weekly appointments. Michael met someone at his firm our first year out of law school, and he slid away from me the way the others had. I didn’t think I was ever really in love with Michael, or with any of them for that matter.

I felt that I’d know true love when a kiss could make everything, the rest of the world, disappear. I kept waiting for that moment with Michael. I didn’t expect it to happen right away, but I hoped each time. I’d close my eyes, feel his lips settle over mine, and while I enjoyed it, I was always still right there. Nothing ever disappeared, not the Miles Davis music Michael always played or his high-rise apartment where we often stayed. I began to wonder if maybe I was incapable of feeling that kind of love, or maybe I was laboring beneath an unattainable fantasy.

Della asked me about college at UCLA, about high school on Long Island, about the tutors in Europe and grade school before that in San Francisco. And then we were back to Woodland Dunes, to the year my father and I left.

“I missed you all so much when you were gone,” Della said. She raised a paper napkin to her eyes, and I wondered for a second if she was going to cry. “It was like a part of my family had left.” Her voice creaked, betraying her age. “Of course, I had my own family to take care of. Max was twelve and Delphine ten. My husband said I had to get over it. I had to get over Leah’s death and get a new job.”

“And did you?”

“Oh, I got other jobs, although never as a housekeeper or a nanny again. I cleaned office buildings for a janitorial service, and I cooked meals for the sick.” Della tsked, as if none of that had mattered much. “I never got over Leah.”

“You two were close,” I said. An image drifted back of my mom and Della in the kitchen, sun slanting through the high window over the sink, the two of them laughing as they washed dishes. It seemed to me now that my mother probably kept Della around as much for her company as her housekeeping skills. I couldn’t remember my mom having any other close friends.

“She was a wonderful woman.” Della’s voice was softer now. “A good friend. And I miss her every day.”

I stayed silent, and tilted my head up for a moment, watching a squirrel above me racing from branch to branch. I had missed my mom every day, too, but not in the same way. I longed for the vague concept of my mother, of a mother in my life. I missed her especially when I was learning about boys, shopping for prom dresses, graduating from college, from law school. I had my dad for all those things, and he tried to be everything—father, mother, friend—but sometimes I craved female guidance and companionship. My friendship with Maddy had filled some of that void, yet no one could totally replace a mother.

“How did she die?” It was the question I came to ask, the one that had been haunting me since I read that letter, but I hadn’t meant to say it so abruptly.

Della sat straighter in her chair, then raised a hand to her lips. She lifted her shoulders, then let them fall again. “It’s hard to say. What do you remember?”

I pushed my mind back to that time when I was seven years old. I remember not needing to ask the question of how she had died, as if I had known the answer and didn’t want to be reminded. But somewhere along the way, I lost the knowledge.

“I don’t really remember anything specific,” I said. “That’s the problem. And I need to know.”

Della pushed her plate away and leaned on the table. “Do you remember talking to the police?”

I felt a strange pulse beating in my neck. “The police? I talked to the police?”

“We all did.”

I tried to conjure up some sense of my seven-year-old self, in a police station, sitting across from a detective, swinging my legs underneath the table. “I don’t remember.”

“Well, they never made any decisions. They never drew any conclusions. Just looked into her death and closed the file. It got people to talking, though.”

“I remember the whispering and the looks,” I said, slightly agitated now that I was getting close to the topic, yet not learning anything. “But why did the police look into it?”

A gust of wind blew through the backyard, pushing Della’s hair into her face. She brushed it away; she sighed loud enough that I heard it over the breeze. “Oh, sweetie, your mother died from a blow to the head. They wanted to find out if someone had done that to her on purpose.”