Evenfall (30 page)

Just to be sure, she crosses the room and opens the desk against the far wall. Two months ago the top compartment was filled with a host of treasures she’d placed there for safekeeping: An ivory letter opener. A crystal inkwell. A moth-eaten velvet bag filled with the cool weight of marbles. They’re all gone.

If she walked through the house, if she looked in every room, she’d never remember all that she’s lost, all that she’s carelessly given away. The water has stopped upstairs, and
she can no longer hear the dog’s footsteps padding through the rooms.

“I think you need to go now,” she says to Cort, ready at last. “I have something I need to do.”

“So do I,” he says, and when he pulls her to him, it’s enough, almost, to make up for what she’s been missing.

GERT doesn’t make it to Evenfall until it’s almost dark. After she leaves town hall, she has to talk herself out of heading directly to the big house’s cemetery and stretching out across its graves. It’s what she deserves, after all, for being a foolish old woman who has outlived her usefulness. This way, she’d at least save Andie the cost of a burial.

Instead she drives to the cottage, makes a cup of tea, and stretches out across the bed, not bothering to remove her shoes or even pull down the coverlet. She stays there for at least an hour, motionless, until the cat begins to claw at the screen door. Gert ignores the sound of nails on metal as long as she can. The cat hooks a paw inside the screen, pulls it open, and pads across the floor to the bed. It jumps up and lands on Gert’s chest, staring into her face and mewing.
When she still doesn’t move, it bats her on the nose with its paw.

“You are a nuisance and an irritant,” Gert says. She stands up and lets the cat fall to the floor. “What I was thinking when I fished you out of the creek, I’ll never know.”

But of course she does. She remembers exactly what she was thinking the day she walked by and saw a small, helpless form scrabbling along the sides of the creek bank. She pours the cat a saucer of milk. She takes a few deep breaths, letting the smell of the lavender from the open window revive her. And then she picks up the phone.

Her first call is to Fritz Kneeland. Until he retired from the position last April, Fritz served as the town’s counsel, handling the rare legal issues that cropped up, as well as his own busy law practice. He’s a handsome man, with a full glossy head of white hair. Gert suspects he has a soft spot for her. Just a few weeks ago during Sunday service she caught him casting a sidelong glance at her legs as he slid into the pew next to her. And while Gert’s made it a point in life not to rely on her feminine assets, this is no time to be sanctimonious.

She explains the situation to him as best she can.

“Hmmm,” he says. “I believe I might have caught a whiff of that down at town hall.” They discuss options for a bit. Gert would like murder to be among them, but Kneeland talks her out of it. For now.

“What you want is to put the fear of God into your brother,” he says. “I believe I have just the thing.”

Kneeland’s grandson, it turns out, is a professor at Yale
and something of a celebrity. In his spare time he consults for CNN on family law, and he’s written several bestsellers on the subject.

“Here’s his number,” Kneeland tells her. “Tell him you’re a friend of his granddad’s, and he’ll get right back to you.”

To Kneeland’s credit, he does. Gert’s no sooner hung up the phone after leaving a message than the grandson’s calling her back. He introduces himself, listens carefully as Gert talks, and doesn’t interrupt once.

“Well,” Leroy Kneeland says as she finishes. “That does sound like a problem. But the only way I can see it really working is if they declare you incompetent. Now, have you given them any reason to…errr…doubt your mental capabilities?”

There’s a long pause as Gert reviews the events of the last few months, lingering longest on the goats inhabiting her back pasture.

“Possibly,” she concedes. “But nothing I can’t explain.”

“And do you have other relatives or friends who might be willing to vouch for your mental acuity? Aside, of course, from my grandfather?”

Gert certainly hopes so, but today she’s not sure of anything. They talk for a bit more, discussing strategy and plans, finally deciding on what Leroy terms “strategic escalation.” She gives him her brother’s phone number and thanks him. When she asks after his fee, he waves her off. “If this doesn’t work and we have to go to the next level, then we’ll talk. Right now though, it’s a pleasure to help someone my grandfather thinks so highly of. The old guy has had a rough time
of it since my grandma died,” he says. As they hang up Gert makes a mental note to wear her blue dress, the one that best shows off her legs, and to sit beside Kneeland next Sunday.

Leroy promised to call her brother immediately, but Gert still waits a half an hour. She finds a Brillo Pad and gives the sink a good scrubbing, using a cotton swab and bleach to get into the cracks around the counter. When she puts so much pressure on the swab it bends into a vee, she realizes how furious she’s become. She puts her cleaning tools away, turns on the faucet, and runs cool water over her wrists.

When enough time has passed, she dials her brother’s number. The phone rings and rings, and finally Richard’s voice comes on. It’s a recording, asking her to leave a message. Gert does, the one she and Leroy had agreed upon, that essentially suggests Richard stop his infernal meddling or face his sister in a court of law.

But she’s not satisfied. She paces the small living room, back and forth, like she’s seen the cat do when she’s confined it inside on cold winter nights. It strikes her that somewhere in the house she has Richard’s cell phone number. He’d given it to her in case of emergency, sometime last year when Frank was dying, although it was clear he’d be of no use when the actual emergency came. She tears the house apart, looking for the scrap of paper he’d scribbled it on, and finally finds it pressed neatly inside her address book. She dials, gets a recording, hangs up, waits fifteen minutes, then dials again and gets the same message. She does this twice more before she remembers that on the newer phones you can see the number of the caller without answering. She calls
Richard’s cell again and this time leaves a not-so-carefully-worded message suggesting her little brother check his voice mail at home and then call her. She hangs up emphatically.

It doesn’t take long. Within twenty minutes her phone is ringing. She picks it up and waits.

“Gertie?” a voice says. “Are you there?”

“Don’t you Gertie me,” she snaps, and once she’s started it’s difficult to stop. Ever since this morning, when Walter called her into his office, she’s been plagued with a self-doubt that’s foreign to her. She wonders if this is how her niece lives, if the uncertainty she’d felt when she’d glimpsed her own face in the mirror is something Andie encounters every day. She lays into her brother with a fury.

“But you’re forgetting, Gertie,” he says, when she stops to draw breath. His voice is cool. “You’ve always forgotten, the lot of you. Andie’s my daughter. By selling Evenfall, I’m doing what’s best for her. What Frank would have wanted.”

Spoken by her brother, the words are as much an untruth as anything else he’s said, but still they give Gert pause. She stands by the kitchen door, twining the phone cord through her fingers, and wonders just exactly what it is that Frank wanted.

She knows about loss. She knows what it’s like to stand close enough to touch your heart’s desire, to stand there day after day, and not be able to reach it, to take what’s yours. To search, every day, for the place you belong. Richard had that place, but he walked away. She can see clearly the part she played in making that happen, but the final decision was his.

For all those years she and Frank performed a careful
dance, with Andie at their center. To raise the dust on their past, to cross the line, could have cost everything. She’d not been willing to take that chance, and she’d assumed he hadn’t either. Now she wonders if she’s been wrong. Perhaps Frank hadn’t seen Evenfall as a burden from which to shield Andie, but as a gift. A gift he’d left to her.

The cat rubs against her legs and she scoops it up, burying her nose in its fur. It smells of lavender. It occurs to her that she’d turned down Evenfall once before. To do so twice would be ungracious.

“Gert?” Richard says. “Are you still there?”

“Yes,” she says. She takes a breath. “I am. I intend to be for quite some time.” And then she tells her little brother what she should have said years ago, the one phrase she knows for certain of which Frank would approve. She tells him to go to hell.

A storm’s coming, but still she chooses to walk the path through the woods instead of driving. The leaves rustle, showing their silvery undersides in the wind. When she reaches the big house the sun is setting, and the clouds rushing in are as black as the coming night. It’s amazing, really, how seeing the house as a gift changes its appearance. The lights are on in the living room, and the house glows like a sentinel against the darkening sky. Still, walking up the front path, she shivers, though whether from the cooling air or what’s to come, she can’t tell.

The front door is ajar, and Gert knocks before pushing it
all the way open. “Hello?” she calls, but no one answers. She pauses, listening. Voices are coming from the living room, so she sets off down the hall.

When she looks in she sees Cort and Andie standing in front of the fireplace. If Gert had to guess, she’d say that until a few minutes ago they’d been doing more than talking. Andie’s lips are swollen and her hair is half out of its ponytail, curling loose around her face. Cort’s shirt is wrinkled and he’s got a look in his eye Gert’s never seen there before. Well, she thinks, it’s about time.

Neal’s standing in front of them, his back to Gert, and it’s his voice that’s the loudest. The dog twines between the three of them, whining, brown eyes glancing at Gert as if to ask for help. Aside from Nina, none of them have noticed her yet, so she stands in the doorway, waiting and listening.

“Look, I fucked up,” Neal’s saying. He paces in front of the two of them. “I made a mistake in Italy, I told you that. But this is how you try to get back at me?”

Andie raises her hand. “Stop it,” she says. “This isn’t about us. Just answer the question. Is it true?”

Neal stops his pacing and turns to face them. “You’re going to believe your teenaged farm boy over me?”

“Just answer me, Neal.”

“Fine. Yes, your father asked me to give him a hand, and I put him in touch with a couple of developers I know. That’s one of the reasons I came down here, okay?” Neal pats his breast pocket, pulls out his cigarette case, and takes out a cigarette. The wind is picking up outside. Gert can feel the breeze through the open window. It lifts the hair on her
neck, tickling like a caress. It takes Neal three tries to light his cigarette. He snaps the lighter shut, and Gert sees his hand is shaking.

“And yes, I took a couple of things to the antiques dealer, just to get some prices. Like you told me I could. And yes, I may have sold a few of them while I was there. So sue me. I’ve been doing it all for you. For us.”

In a strange way, Gert can follow his logic, twisted as it. You cannot steal what you already own. As far as Neal seems to be concerned, Andie is his, as is all that comes with her.

He takes another pull on the cigarette. “You don’t belong here. It’s the ends of the earth. You’ve told me so yourself.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Andie says, just as Gert clears her throat. The three see her for the first time. She steps into the room. There’s an awkward silence, broken only by the roll of thunder. The storm is here.

“Perhaps I can help answer. I’ve spoken to my brother,” Gert says, looking directly at Neal. “He admits he was a bit…misguided in his pursuit of Evenfall. My lawyer has convinced him to drop his efforts, and I strongly suggest you do the same.”

Rain pounds against the house, hitting the windows like bullets. The house creaks like a ship, the wind swelling and breaking against it. The lights blink off for a second, then come back on with a buzz.

“Look,” Neal says, turning to Andie. “Maybe I misspoke a little. I didn’t mean to offend anyone. The house isn’t the point, after all. The point is you and me.”

The dog is growling, low, deep growls that Gert feels in
the pit of her stomach. Lightning hits somewhere outside and the whole house shakes.

“There is no you and me. Not anymore,” Andie says.

“C’mon, babe,” he says. He sounds incredulous. “You’re going to throw away three years together for a one-night stand? For this?” He points to Cort, who looks to Gert as if he’s more than willing to break the offending finger.

“You heard her,” Cort says, but Andie speaks over him.

“No,” she says, and a small sigh of relief escapes from Neal. Gert finds she can’t bear to look at Cort. She watches his feet, instead. He’s wearing yellow work boots. One lace is partially untied, but it doesn’t matter. He’s standing absolutely still.

“No,” her niece says again. Neal crosses the room to her, but before he can reach her, Andie takes a step back. She gestures to the room and all that’s in it, and Gert sees that the gesture includes herself and the boy. Possibly the dog as well. “For this. For all of it.”

“What do you mean? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Neal says. “C’mon, Andie. Don’t do this.”

“You don’t have to know,” Andie says. “It’s enough that I do. But I want you to pack up. I’ll spend tonight at the cottage, and I want you gone in the morning.”

“Well, what if I’m not?” he asks. “What if I need more time?” A spoiled child, Gert thinks. Someone had a hard time saying no to this one, early, when it counted.

The dog cocks its head, as if listening, and then bares its teeth at Neal, backing him toward the door.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “Call it off.”

Cort’s making no move to restrain the beast, so Gert gives
him a look. The last thing they need is a lawsuit by this fool. Cort catches the look, gives her a can’t-blame-me-for-trying shrug back and reaches for the dog.