Club Storyville (7 page)

In those months, so much had happened. I had changed so much. When he left, I thought it was Scott who would be different when he came back, but I was the one who wasn’t the same person.

“Three too many,” I mumbled into his Army shirt, knowing I’d given myself away when Scott pushed me back.

“You okay, Lizzie?” he questioned, his concerned eyes scanning mine, and I knew if there was any person I could trust not to let them send me to the asylum, anyone who would understand what it was I felt for Ariel, it was Scott, who had his own crush on her, but the shutting of the driver’s door reminded me we weren’t alone.

Glancing up as the sandy-haired man a few years older, and few inches taller, than Scott came around the front of the car, I tried to find my composure, to be a proper lady in the stranger’s presence.

“Lizzie, this is my friend Jackson,” Scott introduced us.

“Hello there,” Jackson held his hand out to me.

“Hello.” I quickly shook it, and slipped my hand free again.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Jackson smiled broadly, and I suspected I was supposed to feel something, that normal girls would, that Jackson’s piercing blue eyes and straight white teeth should be as beautiful to me as Ariel was standing in the rays of light streaming through Nan’s window. “Sorry about your dog,” he added, distracting me from everything I didn’t feel.

“What did you tell him?” I turned threatening eyes on Scott.

“Only the truth,” Scott grinned. “How you cried for a week and a half when Max died.”

“Don’t tell people that!” I slapped him on the arm, and, even after weeks of training at being tough, Scott flinched and raised his hand to the spot.

“You’re the reason we could never have another pet!” he came back at me, and, though I would have liked to have said something in my defense, there was nothing I could say. Not only was it true, it was proof I had always been the weak one, the one who never had been able to endure life with all its loss and disappointment and fear. I was the last person who needed to be different in any way, to feel things that were abnormal, to have thoughts beyond my control.

“I’m sorry.” I was utterly grateful when Jackson started talking again and stopped the torrent of painful realizations. “It’s my fault. Scott told me about you, and I just wanted to know more and more. He forgot to tell me how pretty you were, though.”

Surprised by the compliment, I accepted it with a blushing smile, as a lady should, neither arguing against his opinion, nor surrendering modesty to vanity.

“Eww,” Scott was happy to throw in his disagreement on my behalf. “Why would I tell you that?”

“Anyway,” Jackson went on with a small laugh. “Now you can tell me about yourself, and protect all your secrets.”

The statement a reminder of just how perilous my secrets had become, I was glad Scott was reaching into the car as my smile wavered, because he had a way of noticing those things.

“Where’s Mom?” he asked, slinging his pack onto his shoulder, and I forced the smile back onto my face.

“Kitchen,” I replied weakly. “There’s only a few minutes left on the chicken, so she couldn’t come out.”

“Well, don’t want that to burn,” Scott gave a brilliant grin at the mention of Mama’s cooking. “Let’s go see her.”

“You should see Nan first,” I said, and, pausing in his happy homecoming, Scott appeared to realize in a single frozen step that the days he had with us, before he shipped off, were the last days he would ever spend with Nan.

“It’s bad?” he asked, and, not quite able to relay the information I’d collected from all my different sources, I could only nod in response.

When he appeared suddenly younger, like a little boy playing dress up in a soldier’s uniform, I wanted to be Scott’s big sister, to hug him because he needed hugged, instead of because I did, but, with Jackson standing right there beside him, I knew Scott would hate it.

“Well then,” Scott blew out a breath. “Let’s go see Nan.”

Turning to lead the way, because it was the only thing I could do, accept things with grace and try to be a good hostess, I was surprised again when Jackson caught up to me, offering his arm, and, with no real excuse not to, I took it.

Chapter Six

Though it was held in our own dining room, with it being Scott’s first time home in months, dinner was a special occasion. Putting on a dress midway between my daily wear and the dresses I kept in pristine condition for public events, I thought I knew what it meant to dress for dinner. Until I walked into the dining room and saw Ariel, and she looked like so much more of a lady than me, so elegant and so perfect, different somehow than normal, but exactly like herself.

The flowing burgundy dress she wore sweeping the floor, I envied its fabric, wondering what it felt like to the touch, what it felt like for her, where it lay against her body.

At the table, I sat between Mama and Jackson, with Nan and Ariel across the way, and Daddy and Scott at the table’s ends. Nan’s wheelchair taking up so much space, Ariel wasn’t quite across from me, but, facing my way as she was, I thought she would be forced to see me. Amazingly, though, every time they glanced her way, Ariel managed to avoid my eyes as if they weren’t in front of her.

After the night of the meteor shower, before our fateful day in the garden, I would often turn to find her watching me, a soft smile coming to her lips when I caught her, as if she knew it was okay to look. I should have known then what the feeling I got in the pit of my stomach meant, but, not wanting to know, I chose to pretend it simply didn’t exist.

Sitting there at the dinner table, all I wanted was for Ariel to look at me that way again, as if she liked finding me close by, but, like Adam and Eve, our sins from the garden would forever follow us it seemed. Any chance we had at paradise was gone.

Ariel was uncomfortable even being in the room, I could tell. She had come at Nan’s command, and would have liked to have been just about anyplace else. If spoken to, she responded, at appropriate places in everyone’s stories, she smiled, but she never told her own - feeling, perhaps, she had none safe to tell - and those fleeting smiles that came to her lips were fake.

With such focus on Scott and Jackson, no one else noticed Ariel’s silence, or perhaps they just thought it appropriate in the context of a family dinner where she wasn’t an immediate member.

That didn’t stop Jackson from going on, though. As Daddy asked questions about the Army’s accelerated training and where they would go when they shipped out, Jackson was as quick to respond as Scott, and the rest of us left them to their discussion, even Nan keeping her thoughts largely to herself.

It wasn’t until Mama went to collect dessert, and Daddy volunteered to help in my place, that Jackson turned his attention fully on me. Throughout the evening, he’d kept me in the circle of his responses, looking to me for reaction when he shared a story he thought would get a laugh, but left with only Scott, Ariel and Nan, Jackson turned in his chair, his hand reaching out to rest on the back of mine, and it was reflex to pull away as his knee touched my thigh.

“You haven’t said much,” he said, and I realized he had registered my silence as I had registered Ariel’s.

“I’m just listening,” I responded as his leg bumped mine again in the limited space beneath the table. Noting with some dread the accidental touch didn’t feel like a tenth that of Ariel’s, I wished it would feel like more, that I could make it feel like more.

“Scott read me some of the letters you sent him at Basic,” Jackson smiled. “You always make him laugh.”

“I’m glad,” I glanced beyond Jackson to Scott’s humored gaze. “I mean to make him laugh.”

“I don’t have any brothers and sisters,” Jackson went on, and his gaze felt overly intent upon me. “Just my parents. Their letters are always about how worried they are about me, but how proud they are, about how they hope the war will end before we have to go.”

“Will the war ever end?” Nan could hold her tongue no longer, and I wondered if she could tell I was uneasy or if she had just kept her opinion to herself too long.

“It will when we get our hands on Hitler,” Jackson responded with utmost confidence.

“Don’t count on it, Son,” Nan said, coughing as she lifted her snifter from the table, and I realized the small brandy she had requested had loosened her tongue along with the phlegm in her chest. “There will always be someone to fight.”

“Maybe there won’t.” Scott’s hopeful response didn’t change Nan’s opinion, and, with a disbelieving shake of her head, she threw back the rest of the brandy like a thirty-year-old shipman.

“I was thinking...” Jackson turned his attention back to me when it was clear Nan would say no more. “Maybe I could write to you. There are so many things I can’t tell them, and their letters always make me feel kind of sad. It would be nice to have someone else to write to, someone who is funny and clever. Like you. Would that be too much bother?”

It was a rather ridiculous question, if it was too much bother for me to pick up a pen when he was going off to a war. It was what lay beneath the simple request that made things more complex, my own feelings that made it feel like a betrayal.

Glancing to Ariel, though, I found her eyes locked on her glass where it sat on the table, wanting nothing to do with me. So, why I felt like I had to consider her, I wasn’t entirely sure.

“Of course, it’s not a bother,” I responded to Jackson, watching his lips curve upward. “You can write to me if you want.”

“And when I write,” he returned, “you’ll write back?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, and, those white teeth on brilliant display, Jackson reached for my hand and pulled it to his lips.

Smiling with discomfort as his lips pressed to my skin, soft and gentle, they were neither as soft nor as gentle as Ariel’s lips had been when I kissed her, or as stimulating as they had been when Ariel kissed me back. Not just unable to imagine Jackson kissing me that way, not wanting to imagine it, my eyes skittered over the table again as Ariel’s eyes rose from my hand at Jackson’s mouth to finally meet mine.

Though her gaze was right on me, Ariel still didn’t seem to see me, but to look through me, as if my presence, my existence, mattered little to her. Her gaze falling away as my hand fell to my lap, there was a grunt of surprise from Jackson when Ariel pushed back suddenly from the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said when Jackson reached for his shin, and I could tell it was an honest accident when Ariel looked truly embarrassed.

“It’s all right,” Jackson assured her with a pained laugh. “I’d better be able to handle more than one kick from a lady.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Ariel declared. “I’m going to go to my room.”

“Are you all right?” Nan asked her, and I didn’t know what I wanted her answer to be. If Ariel was all right, it meant she wasn’t hurting, and that was good, but if she wasn’t, it meant she was hurting, and that was good too.

“Yes,” Ariel returned, looking more composed as she laid a consoling hand on Nan’s shoulder. “I’m just a little tired, and I certainly don’t need any dessert. Please, make my apologies, and call me if you need something. Scott,” she finally looked up from Nan, “welcome home. And Jackson,” her eyes were different, like they were lying. Or maybe it was my imagination. “It was nice meeting you.”

“You too,” he stood up next to Scott as Ariel made her departure, and I wanted to get up too, to follow her, to ask Ariel if it bothered her, seeing Jackson’s lips on me, as I knew it would bother me if I had to see anyone else’s lips on her.

I wanted to kiss her again, to do more than kiss her, to make it up to her, to make her remember how it felt when we touched that way. I wanted to tell her I loved her, that I needed her, that I was hers and could be nobody else’s, but I knew those were only symptoms, and, if I waited long enough and fought hard enough, they would pass.

Chapter Seven

J
ackson was in Richmond only three days before he drove on to his parents’ house in West Virginia. It was so hard having him there, though, it felt like much longer.

Each smile, each compliment, each passing touch reminded me I was wired wrong. I was like a radio that didn’t come on when the knob was turned, but started to play when someone touched the speaker by accident. Of course, if a radio behaved that way, people would think it an interesting quirk. When a person did, they were scarcely thought a person.

It would be easier, I thought, once Jackson was gone, more like things used to be. No longer would I have to keep my laughter at his jokes at just the right level, so Jackson would think I thought he was funny, but Ariel wouldn’t hear me thinking Jackson was funny.

I knew I shouldn’t worry about her, about what she thought, that I should let Ariel hear me laughing at Jackson, let her believe I wanted be laughing with him, but Jackson wasn’t the person I wanted to be giving so much of my time, and I did worry.

Even when he left, though, Jackson wasn’t gone completely. He didn’t wait to start sending letters. When he called Scott to let him know he made it safely to Charleston, he wanted to talk to me. For half an hour I listened to him go on about spring flowers on the side of the roads and the trees of West Virginia.

He asked if I’d ever been there.

“Once,” I told him. “When I was a little girl.”

“You should see it here, Lizzie,” he said, and I wondered when he’d decided he had the right to adopt my brothers’ nickname for me. “It’s a lot like Richmond, but it does have its differences.”

“Maybe I will,” I said, and when the conversation went on, not really saying anything of importance, and saying far more than was being said, I told him it would cost him a fortune, but Jackson said, although he gave most of his money to his folks, he had a little to use as he wanted and he wanted to talk to me.

A few days later, Jackson called again, and again a few days after that. Scott kept teasing, saying Jackson had taken a shine to me. Each time, I would smile and say, ‘No, he hasn’t,’ and my heart would break a little more, because the fact that things felt different with Ariel made things feel different between Scott and I. I didn’t know if I was lying to him by not telling him, or if he was failing to see me. Either way, though, we didn’t know each other through and through anymore. Scott thought his teasing about Jackson would make me blush and be happy. It made me feel pale and empty.