Fall from Grace (8 page)

Annabelle went over to the window wall, where she cupped her hands around her eyes and leaned close, to squint through the grimy glass.

“What do you think, Ma?” said Rose-Iris tentatively. She'd come up next to Annabelle and was trying to see inside.

Annabelle smelled the thick, rich smell of weeds triumphant, and saw in her imagination the weeds ripped out and replaced with exotic flowering plants, in pots.

“There's surely a job to be done in there, all right,” she'd muttered crossly to Rose-Iris, but excitement stirred in her chest. Then she'd turned and said loudly to Herman, who was leaning against the truck, watching her, “There's a job to be done in there, I can tell you.”

“You can handle it,” Herman had said.

Annabelle, looking around now at her indoor garden, thought that he'd been right. She went back to bed. She climbed in beside Herman and turned so that her back was to his back, and she shut her eyes and prepared to go to sleep.

Vancouver came into her mind. She imagined herself walking along a street there, downtown it would be, maybe she'd be on Hastings Street, in front of Woodward's, near the restaurant where she used to work. There she is, walking along, thinking about her shopping list; she's taking her time, looking around her, enjoying herself, minding her own business…and all of a sudden there's a touch on her arm. She turns and sees that it's Bobby. “Why Bobby,” she says, cool as a cucumber, “what on earth are you doing here?” (She tried to imagine what he'd be wearing, strolling along the street in Vancouver, but she couldn't. So she went on.) He tells her why he's come to town, and then he looks at his watch and says, “Why it's almost lunchtime. Would you care to join me?” And Annabelle frowns a little and then says, “Well I guess that would be all right, as long as I don't miss my—my dental appointment,” she tells him, “which is at one o'clock.” (No, thought Annabelle, in bed with her eyes closed. She did a revision.) “As long as I don't miss my dental appointment,” she says to Bobby. “And what time is your dental appointment?” Bobby asks. “It's at two o'clock,” says Annabelle. He takes her by the arm. “I'll make sure you don't miss it,” he says in her ear, and propels her down the street.

Annabelle turned onto her back. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been to Vancouver on her own. Not since she lived there, before she got married to her first husband, could she remember walking down a street in Vancouver on her own.

“Hey,” said Herman the next morning, and Annabelle turned from the stove to see him holding up her wedding ring. “What's this doing here?”

“My finger started to itch,” said Annabelle smoothly. “I think I'm allergic.”

“Y
EAH,” SAID BOBBY into the phone. It was a week later.

“It's me again.”

“Jesus Christ. I don't believe this.”

“All I want is to talk, I just want to talk to you,” said Steven. “Listen—don't hang up—you don't understand. Please. Don't hang up.”

They could hear each other breathing.

“I—you see,” said Steven, “I've been working on this for a long time. It's been on my mind for a long time. I've got something for you.”

“Like hell you have.”

“Yeah, I have, really.”

“You got nothin' I want, Grayson.”

“No, but listen—”

“Lay off. Stay away from me. Or I'll have your ass.”

H
ETTY WILLIS WOKE at six o'clock the next morning, as usual, when her clock radio came on. She lay in bed for fifteen minutes, getting caught up on the news. There was certainly a great deal of friction in the world. Things could—and did—so quickly, so easily, get out of hand.

She got up, and did some slow, cautious stretching exercises before getting dressed and opening the curtains and making her bed.

It was almost seven when Hetty went out into the hall, where several cats awaited her; her bedroom was one of the few rooms in the house in which cats were not allowed. They roamed freely through most of the house, and in and out of it freely, too, through the pet door in the kitchen.

Hetty made her way downstairs and into the cats' room. Here she refilled the fifteen food and water dishes, which in another life had served as containers for yogurt, cottage cheese, or margarine. Then she went into the kitchen and had breakfast, watched by several cats arranged on the tops of cupboards, on the seats of chairs, on windowsills. After she had washed the dishes, she set about doing the cat chores.

She took a plastic bag into the cats' room and scooped into it the droppings from all fifteen litter boxes. Then she selected three of them for a thorough cleaning, dumping the litter into a plastic garbage bag, scouring the boxes, sprinkling them with baking soda, and adding clean litter. Each day she did three boxes in this way.

She took a wicker basket from the cat cupboard and checked its contents: brush, flea comb, a dozen new white flea collars, felt pen, ointment. Then she climbed the stairs and proceeded to search the house, room by room. Each cat she came across along the way got checked for fleas, and for scratches or other minor injuries. When she found a cat whose flea collar was dated more than three months earlier, she replaced it. Every day she flea-combed all the cats of the same or similar coloring; today it was the black ones. She didn't bother to try to keep track of the cats as she inspected the house, looking for them; she had decided long ago that the odds were she'd encounter all of them frequently enough to keep everything under control—health, cleanliness, fleas. But she had to look for them diligently—under furniture, on top of bookcases, behind curtains—because cats liked to hide, and they especially liked to hide if they weren't feeling well. Today Hetty found nobody injured, nobody sick, and the flea situation wasn't bad, either: it must be the heat, she thought.

She made preparations for lunch, and then sat down on the couch in the cats' room with a cat on her lap—a Siamese—and four more arranged around her. She stroked the Siamese and did a bit of planning for the end of her life, which she judged to be about eighteen months in the future. In twelve months she would be seventy-five and it was at seventy-five that each of her parents had died; and her sister, Lucy, too, in Barbados just last year. Hetty spent a small portion of each day considering this matter. Careful planning was essential to the success of any endeavor, including death.

These preparations had become more urgent, lately, with her nephew's reappearance in her life. It's an ill wind, she thought… It was his stepfather's recent heart attack that had brought Bobby out of exile and although God knew she meant the man no harm, she was happy that Bobby had come home.

Oh what a bad time he'd had, she thought. He deserved to have some happiness come dancing into his life.

Hetty took the cat's face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She often did this; searching for cat-souls, she called it. But she never found any, had never spotted a cat-soul: they kept them well hidden.

First, he'd gotten married. Right out of high school. To a girl so young she was practically still a child. Hetty had suspected that the girl was pregnant, and that had turned out to be true. Bobby's mother, Rachel, had been furious.

And then his father, Wallace, dying like that. Hetty's brother. Hetty had tried to blame everything that happened next on Wallace dying, on the pain and confusion his death created, but she couldn't. People had to be held accountable for their actions no matter how much pain they were in, or else there would be chaos.

The Siamese sat up and rubbed the top of his head against Hetty's chin, and the sound of his purring comforted her.

She got up from the couch and went into the kitchen, where she brushed her skirt almost clean of cat hair and washed her hands. Then she prepared lunch and put the coffee on to perk.

A few minutes later Bobby arrived. He gave her a big hug and lifted her into the air, laughing.

She hustled him into the sitting room and poured coffee into two mugs. She sat on the edge of her straight-backed chair nodding, smiling, pleased by the sight of him. He was a strong, healthy-looking man with wide shoulders, slim hips and clear skin. There was a scar, a little one, on his forehead that hadn't been there before he went away.

He didn't have much to say, but that was all right.

“Howlong?” she said, after a while.

“Dunno. Depends,” he said. “I'm going away for a couple of days,” he told her, scooping more sugar into his coffee. “But I'll be back. At least for a while.”

He stirred his coffee absently. Then he stood up, and walked over to the window. He stood staring out at her side garden, his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Hetty watched him for a few minutes. He didn't move, just stood there, staring outside. He looked different, of course. Ten years was a long time.

She had written to him while he was in jail. Sometimes he wrote back, and she taped his letters carefully into the scrapbook. He had phoned her when he got out, from Vancouver, to tell her that he wasn't coming home right away. She hadn't heard from him again until three weeks ago, when she'd opened her front door to see him standing on the porch, smiling down at her.

She got up and went to him, and lifted her hand and put it on his shoulder. She didn't know what exact thoughts were in his mind, but she knew that they were sad ones, maybe angry ones. She knew he was in turmoil. She wanted him to start his life all over again, and she thought he wanted that, too. But it's not possible, thought Hetty, her hand on his shoulder, gazing outside at the small patch of brown grass between her house and the neighbor's rickety fence. You can't start your life again. You can only resume it. Continue. Proceed.

“This guy wants to see me,” he said absently. “I dunno why.” He gave her a grin meant to be reassuring. “You got anything to eat around here?”

She had made ham sandwiches, and bought some cinnamon buns.

She would have liked to be closer to him than she was. But she thought she was probably as close to him as anybody would ever get. A couple of outcasts, Hetty thought. That's what we are.

He seemed to shake off his sadness, if that's what it was, while they ate, and drank their coffee. He talked, and even made some jokes, and when he stood up to leave, he seemed almost lighthearted.

“Wait,” she said, a bony finger tapping at his chest. Then she pointed to herself. “Speak.”

Bobby folded his arms. “Shoot.”

Hetty was excited about what she had to tell him—too excited for her crippled speech. Frustrated, she hurried to her desk and scrawled a message on a piece of her stationery.

She thrust it at him and waited, impatient.

“ ‘You're in my will,' ” he read. He glanced at her, and she nodded vigorously. “ ‘The house,' ” he read. “ ‘And money.' ”

Bobby folded the paper, slowly, in half, then folded it again. He held it loosely in his right hand, head down. Hetty patted his arm, making soothing sounds. He put both arms around her and held her for a while.

Hetty walked with him to the door and watched through the window as he made his way down the long, crumbling flight of steps that led to the highway. So many wasted years, she thought.

And he'd deserved that, too; she admitted it.

Bobby had done wrong.

“I
'M GOING INTO town, Ma,” said Rose-Iris the following day. “To the library.”

“Okay,” said Annabelle, stirring a pot of homemade chicken noodle soup.

“Can I come? Can I?” said Camellia.

“No,” said Rose-Iris, hurrying out the door.

Camellia pelted after her, and Annabelle went to the door to watch, through the screen, as Camellia danced around Rose-Iris and then ran, backward, in front of her, pleading and pleading, until finally, as Annabelle had known she would, Rose-Iris, with a furious, jerky motion of her arm, granted Camellia permission to accompany her.

Annabelle went back to the stove.

Pretty soon Herman and Arnold came home, and Annabelle dished up the chicken noodle soup, along with some cheese sandwiches and bowls of raspberries for dessert.

After lunch Arnold was allowed to go and play with his friend who lived down the highway; work was over for the day, because the paper was finally sending a reporter over to interview Herman about the mini-zoo.

“I'm at loose ends,” said Herman, watching Annabelle do up the dishes. He was straddling his chair, and his chin was resting on his arms, which were folded along the back of the chair.

“I can think of a few things for you to do,” said Annabelle.

“Like what?” said Herman, dismayed.

But Annabelle knew he wasn't dismayed at the prospect of being asked to do a chore or two; it was the idea that there were any left that he hadn't already taken care of that bothered him.

She laughed. “Nothing. I'm teasing you. Why don't you relax? Watch some TV, or something.”

She let the water out of the sink, wiped the countertops, and wrung out the dishcloth.

“Annabelle,” said Herman.

His voice was so quiet that Annabelle turned around swiftly, thinking something was wrong. She could tell from the look on his face that nothing was wrong—but she didn't know what it did mean, either, that look.

“What?” she said.

He shook his head. “Nothing. I just felt like saying your name.”

She felt a great tenderness for him, sometimes. And always, always, there was the gratitude. She went to him and kissed him on the forehead. “I'm going to work in my garden,” she said.

Annabelle set to work weeding the perennial bed; the dirt felt silky under her bare feet. She looked into the thick breathing forest as she worked, smelling the greenness of it. The dirt of her flower bed, the forest, the heat—it brought to her mind a book she'd read as a child, called
Girl of the Limberlost
. She remembered it as being about summer, and the healing power of the sea, and sun-hot tomatoes eaten right off the vine.