Necessary Lies (18 page)

Nobody ever asked me that question. I asked Nonnie about him sometimes, but she’d just say he’s gone, no point in talking about it, and her eyes would get watery. I had to remind myself he was my daddy but he was also her son and the hurt of talking about him was too much for her, so I kept my questions to myself. Mary Ella said she saw the accident and she saw his spirit fly into the sky like an angel and that’s all she’d say, which was like saying nothing at all.

I was quiet so long, Mrs. Forrester leaned toward me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is it too hard to talk about?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just that I ain’t never talked about it. Hard to know what to say.”

“Do you have any memories of him?”

I remembered Henry Allen talking about Daddy not so long ago. “He’d take us out in the pasture and play ball with us,” I said.

“Really? You and Mary Ella?”

“Everybody,” I said. “Me, Mary Ella, Henry Allen—that’s Mr. Gardiner’s son—and Eli, Devil, Avery, Sheena. Some other kids from … just around. I don’t remember who. But lots of them. I think they all liked him because he liked to play as much as we did.” I felt proud of my father, describing him like this. I could picture him. Throwing the ball. Swinging us around by our arms till we was dizzy, every kid begging for the next ride. I remembered him whupping Mary Ella once for breaking one of our windows, but I didn’t remember him ever hitting me. “When it rained, he played cards with us in the house, or once on the porch under the roof.” I’d forgotten that, sitting on the porch floor with him, dry and happy, listening to the rain that couldn’t touch us. My throat started to close up. I didn’t think I could talk. I looked down at the ground, hoping she couldn’t tell.

“It hurts to think about losing someone you love very much,” she said, “and it sounds like you really loved him.”

I wiped the back of my hand across my eyes. “Don’t do no good to remember things like this,” I said. “That’s what Nonnie says and maybe she’s right.” I looked at her. “What good’s it do?” I asked.

“Well, I think when we lose somebody, maybe we owe it to that person to remember them. To hold on to the good memories.”

I thought about that for a minute and liked what she said. Nobody wanted to be forgotten.

“My mama … it was like she wasn’t there, really. She was always sickly. And then she did such a shameful thing and they took her away for good. Do you know about that? What our mama did?”

“Tell me,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I could. “You said hold on to the good memories about a person, but what if there ain’t … aren’t any?”

She looked away from me like she wasn’t sure of the answer herself. “You don’t have any good memories of your mother?” she asked.

I thought and thought. “I can’t remember a single one,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and that made me want to cry again.

“I’ll tell you the thing she did, though,” I said. “The shameful thing. Mrs. Gardiner? Mr. Gardiner’s wife? She works in the store. And my mama went in there with a knife out of our kitchen and walked right up to Mrs. Gardiner and cut her cheek. Cut it bad. That’s why they took her away. I guess she was a terrible shameful person.”

“Do you know what ‘mental illness’ means, Ivy?”

“Crazy?”

“Crazy is kind of a … mean word for it. A word like that blames a person for being mentally ill. But your mother was mentally ill. That was something she couldn’t help, any more than you can help having blue eyes. Her mental illness made her dangerous, though, so they had to take her away to be sure she couldn’t hurt anyone else, but also to put her someplace where she could be taken care of.”

“We’re not allowed to see her.”

“Is that something you wish you could do?”

I shook my head. I was afraid of my mama. Afraid of how I’d feel around her. “I don’t know her,” I said. “Is that terrible, that I don’t want to see my own mama?”

She looked out over the field of tobacco in front of us, the green barn in the distance. “Feelings are never right or wrong,” she said after a moment. “They just are.”

I thought of how much I loved Henry Allen. It wasn’t wrong, no matter what Mr. Gardiner might think about it.

“I know what happened with William,” she said. “With Mary Ella putting the wrong lotion on him.”

“She almost kilt him.”

“I doubt that would have happened, though I guess it was really painful for him.”

“He’s still hurting from it. She feels right bad, but that don’t change what happened. Nurse Ann needs to come out a lot more to check on Baby William. Nonnie, too, because she don’t check her sugar right.”

“So you’d like Nurse Ann to check on Nonnie and William more often.”

“Yes. But not me,” I added quickly. The last thing I needed was to have Nurse Ann badgering me more about doing it.

“Why not you?”

I couldn’t look right at her, talking about this. I looked toward the green barn, but could only see the back of it. I couldn’t see none of the workers. “She brung me some things to use when you’re … you know, doing it with a boy.” I made little circles in the dirt on the ground with my fingertip, looking at them instead of her. “Mary Ella’s the one that needs them things. She stole some of what Nurse Ann brung me, so it’s her she should be talking to. I don’t know why she’s worried about me and not Mary Ella.”

“Who is Mary Ella’s boyfriend?” she asked.

“Who
isn’t
?” I said. “You seen her. They’re all after her. All the boys for miles and miles around. She’s like a barn cat in heat and they all know it.”

“Do you and Mary Ella get along?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am. She’s my sister,” I said, like that explained everything. “I used to wish I looked like her. Awful pretty. But if that prettiness comes with being stupid, I don’t want it.” I looked up at her. “I worry about her,” I said. “She can’t take care of herself good. You going to have this talk with her, too?”

“I may.”

“She won’t answer nothing. She’s like one of them books with a lock and key.”

“Like a diary, huh?”

“Yes, ma’am. I never actually seen one of those.”

“Ivy…” She licked her lips. “You’re very pretty, too.”

“I am not.” I smiled and knew I was turning red like a fool.

“Yes you are. Not the way Mary Ella is. Very few girls are that beautiful. But you have a prettiness that’s all your own and that I’m sure boys are attracted to. Do you have a boyfriend?”

Did Mr. Gardiner tell her? Here I’d let her talk to me about all these other things and forgot I was supposed to be worried about him. “No,” I said.

She knotted her hands together and was rubbing them. “I want to be sure you’re able to finish school,” she said. “Not have to quit because of having a baby, like Mary Ella.”

“I ain’t gonna have no baby,” I said. “You don’t got to worry about that.”

She nodded. “That’s good. I was concerned because one of your neighbors said she’s seen you out very late at night and she’s worried—”

“Who?” I asked. Was she talking about Mrs. Gardiner and the fire or somebody else?

“It doesn’t matter. The important thing to me is that you’re safe and not … getting in trouble.”

“I’m all right, ma’am,” I said. “You need to spend your worries on my sister, like I said. And you can tell that to Nurse Ann, too.”

“Okay,” she said. She changed her legs under her from one side to the other. “What concrete things do you need now? Your family?”

“Concrete?” What was she talking about? I thought of the cement stoop on our house.

“Things,”
she said. “More clothing? Any furniture?”

“A window fan!” I said. I’d been asking for one of them two summers in a row now.

Mrs. Forrester smiled. “I don’t know if that’s possible,” she said. “Charlotte—Mrs. Werkman—didn’t seem to think so, but I promise I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you have any concerns about me taking over from Mrs. Werkman?” she asked.

Yes,
I thought, I had plenty. “She was sort of like a magician,” I said. “We’d tell her the things we needed and she’d get them for us, like magic … except the window fan.” I made dots around the circle I drew in the dirt. “She knew Nonnie had sugar problems before anybody else knew it,” I said. “She even knew Mary Ella had a bad appendix before she felt sick. You can die if you got a busted appendix, so maybe Mrs. Werkman saved her life.”

“You’ll miss her,” she said.

I nodded, but I was thinking how, in all the time I knew Mrs. Werkman, she never sat with me alone in the shade and asked me all these questions like I was a grown-up. Like what I thought mattered.

She never asked me one single question about my daddy.

17

Jane

I hadn’t paid much attention when Charlotte was driving us around Grace County, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I faced an unfamiliar fork in the road after leaving the Gardiner farm and had no idea which way to go. Fifty-fifty chance it would be the right way, I thought, and I turned left. Ivy was on my mind as I drove. I felt a little shaky about my conversation with her. I’d rushed into asking her about her father way too quickly. Such a sensitive topic and I just dove in. I’d made her sad and hadn’t meant to do that. Still, I could tell the moment she’d decided to trust me and I’d felt that trust deep in my bones. She was brighter than I’d expected. An IQ of eighty? That test had to be wrong. I wished she didn’t have epilepsy. Was it so awful, having a baby if you were epileptic? Some women did it, didn’t they? Plus, it seemed like she’d stopped having seizures. Yes, her children would probably end up on welfare, just like her, but I hated being the person who prevented her from ever having a family if that’s what she wanted.

I came to another fork, this one even less familiar than the first. I made a right, and before I knew it, I was utterly lost, surrounded by woods so dense I could barely see the sky. I remembered the one and only time my family went camping. I’d been twelve, which would have made Teresa ten. She and I became separated from my parents in the woods. Within seconds, we were completely disoriented. I remembered holding her hand, trying to be the brave, reassuring older sister to keep her calm even though I felt panicky myself. With every step we took, I didn’t know if we were moving toward my parents or away from them. Finally, we stopped walking and shouted for my parents, and after what seemed like a lifetime, they found us.

I had some of that same panic now, realizing I hadn’t seen another car for at least twenty minutes. I drove another mile or two along a narrow road before deciding I’d better try retracing my steps. I turned around, but the road suddenly seemed full of forks and turns, and with each one I guessed, realizing after a half mile or so that I’d most likely guessed wrong. I finally pulled over and checked my map, only to discover that the little road I was on was nowhere to be found on that creased sheet of paper. I was supposed to meet Robert at his office for a dinner date at six and I wondered if I would make it—or if I’d ever get out of the woods at all.

Far ahead of me, I saw a man and dog walk out of the trees, the man’s green jacket nearly blending into the undergrowth. I pressed on the gas and drove forward until I was close enough for him to become aware of me. He turned and looked at me over his shoulder. His face was weathered, and he carried a shotgun at his side.

I pulled up next to him and leaned over to roll down the passenger-side window. “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m trying to find my way to Ridley Road.”

“You’re a long way from Ridley Road.”

“Can you point me in the right direction?”

He told me several turns I’d need to make, and I thanked him and began driving again, determined this time to pay attention. I looked at him in my rearview mirror as I pulled away. He was shaking his head slowly, and I imagined he thought a girl like me had no business driving around the back roads of Grace County.

*   *   *

By some miracle, I arrived at Robert’s office a few minutes before six o’clock. I parked at the curb in front, admiring the white shingle that stood outside the small brick building.
ROBERT FORRESTER, M.D., PEDIATRICS.
I’d hoped to have time to run home and change my clothes, but that wasn’t to be. I took off my saddle shoes and put on the black pumps I kept in the car, but I was still wearing the casual skirt and blouse I’d had on all day. I knew I was a dusty mess, especially after sitting on the dirt by that barn with Ivy.

Robert’s receptionist, Sandra, greeted me when I walked into the waiting room.

“He’s just wrapping up,” she said. “You want to have a seat?”

The waiting room was filled with color: sky-blue walls, Kelly-green carpet, and chairs that looked like they came out of a crayon box. I sat down in an orange chair. I had the feeling Sandra was watching me out of the corner of her eye, most likely appalled that I was going out to dinner looking as though I’d been doing farmwork all day.

The door leading to the examining room opened, and I watched Robert walk into the hall with a little girl and a woman. The girl’s cheeks were red as though she’d been crying, and Robert squatted down in front of her, saying something to her that made her nod and then laugh. He gave her shoulder a squeeze and I felt so much love for him. He was wonderful with his patients. Someday, he would be wonderful with our own children. He got to his feet and spotted me, acknowledging me with a nod and a smile, then he disappeared into his office. I waited until the little girl and her mother had left before walking into his office and shutting the door behind me.

He was writing notes at his desk, and he nodded toward one of the chairs.

“I love seeing you with your patients,” I said as I sat down. “You’re so kind with them. So good with children.”

He smiled. “That little girl you saw might not agree,” he said, still writing his notes. “Had to give her a booster shot today and she wasn’t very happy with me.” He closed the folder on his desk and sat back, a frown replacing his smile. “You’re not dressed for dinner,” he said.

“I didn’t have time to go home and change,” I said. “Sorry.”

“I thought you were going to be done early today. You said you’d have time to go home and freshen up.”