Orchids and Stone (26 page)

Vic stood in the bathroom waiting to brush his teeth. “I don’t know what we’re fighting about, Daph.”

“We aren’t fighting,” she said.

“I know this weekend has difficult and painful anniversaries for you but—”

“She didn’t accidentally leave the milk out. Jed put it away. Then I had to put it away because she got it out and left it out just to annoy me.”

“Seems to have worked.”

“Jesus, Vic.” Daphne smacked her hands on the bathroom counter. A container of bath crystals he’d bought for her several years ago—she’d never used them—fell over.

Vic swept the little flood of pink crystals into his palm, then let the dust settle into the garbage can. “Daph, I think you ask the wrong question sometimes.”

“What?”

“What? Just think about it, will you? Wondering whether a child will sometimes try to annoy you, get under your skin—”

“Oh, I’m not wondering. I’m announcing it as a fact and getting no support from you.”

He raised a palm. “I support you. I do. I get that she’s getting under your skin. But she’s eleven.”

“Eleven is old enough to put the milk away, isn’t it?”

“You ask the wrong question. Isn’t eleven young enough to get a little bit of a break from you?”

“You know what? You’re in a bad mood because you’re tired because your sleep schedule’s screwed up because you went to day-shift hours yesterday. Well, I didn’t screw up your work schedule. That was you. And wasn’t your shift-change-training thing optional? You said that, last month when we talked about getting a long weekend off together.”

“How often do I change my schedule and go to training? Once a year?”

“Yeah? Well, my union has a meeting every first Wednesday of the month. But how often do I go? Never.”

He snorted. “It’s a roofers’ union. They just go to drink.”

“We’re roofers and waterproofers and allied workers.”

Vic raised his hands. “Excuse me, madam.”

Daphne left him in the bathroom, swinging the door shut between them. On the far side of the bed, she knelt and raised the dust ruffle. Their luggage was there but no box nestled next to it. Panic rose, then she remembered moving Suzanne’s papers to the closet shelf. There, she caressed the box with a fingertip. Back at the bedside, she pulled out her suitcase.

Grazie scrambled and stood quivering, panting. Suitcases meant travel and her natural want was to go along, to be included. But now she panted, hind legs propped wide, and collapsed. The bathroom door opened as Daphne winced at Grazie’s pain.

Vic said, “I have to put her down.”

“You give up on her, you give up on me.” Daphne’s shoulders rose in defense.

“What?”

She sneered and made a mocking echo. “What?”

He stepped around the bed, drawing closer to her and stopped dead when he saw the suitcase.

“You’re . . . leaving,” Vic said, his voice full of air and defeat and wonder.

“I’m just . . .” Her voice trailed. What would she put in the suitcase? What did she need? Nothing. “I’m going to go crash at my mom’s. Just go think. Or not think.” Should she put the suitcase back and take Suzanne’s box?
Don’t cry
.

She couldn’t speak, but there was nothing else to say. He followed her down the stairs, dumbly carrying her empty suitcase.

Josie stood in the kitchen doorway. Her eyes widened. “Daddy?”

Vic set the suitcase down. With a fixed gaze, Daphne walked past the girl, opened the door, and took a breath on the front porch. When she tried to shut the door, someone grabbed it from the inside. Daphne let go without looking back and moved down the brick steps.

“Daphne, don’t leave,” Josie called. “I . . . I’ll be . . .”

Vic’s voice was soft. “Jose, come inside.”

Starting her truck, Daphne saw Vic, his face dim in the dark, a mask. He held his daughter and kissed her hair.

CHAPTER 25

A shin-high gray shadow boiled out of the house on Mapleview Drive. Daphne gasped but, hampered by an armload of tools, her reflexes amounted to flinching.

“Cinderfella, you scared me,” she told the rumbling cat. “Inside, now. I’ve come to keep you company.”

Stepping across the threshold at home pelted Daphne with memories. Here was the tile floor where her mother dropped her father’s coffee mug the day police came to tell them about his suicide. Straight across was the living room with the same furniture she’d grown up with, the carpet where Suzanne had taught her to play checkers. This home had seen Suzanne fight with their mother about what Suzanne wore, about whether she could extend her curfew, go to a party, see that boy. Daphne closed her eyes.

If she turned to the right, there would be the kitchen and the dining area toward the back of that long room, also full of memories. To her left were two sets of stairs, one down to the basement—where her father had paced and ranted when Suzanne went missing—the other up to the two bedrooms.

Daphne pinched tears from the inner corners of her eyes thinking about those two bedrooms, the one she had shared with her sister, the one her mother had shared with her father.

Last month, when her mother started talking about this weekend, Daphne had snapped. Snapped at her mother and hung up. She’d scheduled time off from work for these last two days.

But she hadn’t followed through, hadn’t acted on the impulse to break away from her family’s old patterns. No matter how fleeting thoughts of escape might tantalize her, she couldn’t finish the deed. She’d known it the second she heard the hurt in her mother’s response. They couldn’t change.

Daphne dumped her loaded tool belt and coil nailer by the kitchen doorway. With the neighborhood not as good as it used to be, she didn’t want to leave her tools in the truck overnight.

In her mother’s living room, Daphne flopped on the couch. The heavy cat jumped on her stomach, making her grunt, then hopped onto the couch arm, his tail rattling pictures on the end table. Suzanne’s high school graduation graced one frame, Daphne’s the other. The sight of the telephone behind the framed photos made her think of calling Vic. She wanted to. She didn’t want the night to end this way.

She didn’t want them to end at all. She didn’t. But sometimes, it was just too hard. If it hadn’t been for this weekend with the anniversaries of her father’s death and her dead sister’s birthday, she could have kept herself together.

Or if it hadn’t been for Minnie Watts.

Minnie, are you safe?

No. Daphne shook her head. Minnie is not safe. She looked at the phone again, wondering if she should give her mother’s phone number to Officer Taminsky in case he had an update.

No. No need. Vic would call her if he received news. Vic was like that. He’d never let a spat stand in the way of doing the decent thing.

She pulled Cinderfella to her chest, pressing her face to warm fur as she rose. From the living room, she could see a great deal of clutter in the dining area and she half-wondered what unnecessary cleaning her mother had been up to. The cat nuzzled her as she carried him up the stairs.

When she’d moved out of this house and in with Thea, Daphne had once referred to the cat her mother adopted as her replacement. Her mother had snapped that no one could replace a daughter, and Daphne didn’t try to get lighthearted with her again.

Cinderfella loved to be carried. Her mom said he was too heavy to carry and he had to walk himself around. His rumbling purr filled Daphne’s body as she held him. Loose hair tickled her nose as they rubbed faces.

The pleasure of petting a friendly animal brought to mind first meeting Vic, with Grazie making introductions. Before he’d gotten to the point of buying them ice cream, he’d been trying hard with chitchat.

“I’m a meteorologist,” he’d said.

“Are those necessary anymore? I mean, isn’t the weather monitored with computers? Or can’t we look out the window or stand on a rooftop?”

“Well, there’s even more to me, you see. I’m dual-educated. An oceanographer and a meteorologist.”

“Oh.” Daphne had no snappy comeback material for oceanography majors.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a roofer.” Having loaded drywall that day didn’t change her love of being on building summits.

He’d gaped, stunned as people always were when faced with a young woman who chose her trade. “Don’t buildings pretty much already have roofs on them?”

They’d both laughed at his weak effort, and she rewarded him by indicating the empty spot on the bench. After a great chat, he’d bought three vanilla cones while she held Grazie’s leash. Daphne wanted to feed Grazie the extra cone, so Vic held two cones while she and the dog made a great mess. After, they’d walked and talked and turned the encounter into lunch. They chose a place with sidewalk seating, so they could keep the snuffling, chuffing mass of yellow fur at their feet. Daphne could not stop petting the dog, telling her what a fine girl she was. Something clicked, felt comfortable, in whatever she or Vic said right from the beginning. They talked about everything. The city, themselves. The present, the past, people and work and coffee and how good those sandwiches were.

When he asked about her family, she told him. She told him the whole deal about her sister and her father, stopping just shy of Suzanne’s contingency notes and the guilty question blanketing Daphne ever since. Before, she’d always gotten the signal from men that they couldn’t take it all in, but Vic was different. He didn’t get distant or bored with her, didn’t become standoffish or fidgety at her family’s tragedies. He listened, his face contorted in beautiful sympathy. It was a first, all of this great kindness in a new man.

Just into couplehood, he told her his great secret—that Jed was not his child. That when Cassandra admitted this, he’d wondered whether Josie was his and then he’d put the thought away, but not because he necessarily thought Cassandra hadn’t let another man father their daughter, too. He’d thought instead of changing the kids’ diapers, of holding them when they were sick, of reading to them and playing with them, of taking them places. He took them to school, extracurricular activities, and their friends’ houses. And he knew in his bones that he did what a father does, so he was their father.

He was a good father.

When he’d told Daphne about managing to reconcile the truth about his son’s paternity, and how he chose to be Jed’s father forever because he’d served as Jed’s father, and because he loved Jed and wanted the best for the boy, Daphne had been impressed by Vic’s handling of his great secret and cowed by her own—
what if my sister left me a note that last night and I never found it, never told a soul?
She didn’t reveal her secret, her secret fear.

But as the anniversary of her father’s death and her sister’s birthday approached on her and Vic’s first year together, Daphne succumbed to circling the drain. The doubly hideous anniversary always brought her down. While Vic stroked her shoulders and nuzzled her hair and told her how sorry he was for her pain, she told him about the note she never found, about how she wondered so many things, like why her father quit life, and why Suzanne was killed and by whom, and whether a final note existed at all.

He’d wrinkled his brow and asked a lot more questions about Suzanne, general things that brought Daphne to gush about an adventurous, beautiful, young iconoclast who’d awed her kid sister. Then she told him more about the sneaking out and the notes.

Vic had talked about the unlikelihood of there having been a final note. He’d told Daphne she’d done enough, done all she could. She could safely step aside. There probably wasn’t another note, not that final night, since she never found it.

But, Vic, I can’t ever know for sure.
As soon as the words were out, her mouth hung open; then she’d snapped it shut it, closed her eyes. Leaning against his chest, she told herself to stop it, just stop it. She wouldn’t say that again—complain about not knowing—not to a man living as a father of a boy who was not his child. Not to a man who held himself as the father of a girl whose paternity he doubted.

Instead she told Vic she agreed that all the worry and wonder in the world wouldn’t bring back her sister or her father and this was the way it was.

But sometimes, especially this one weekend every year, it was a hard reality to live.

“So, I, uh, ran away, Cinder-kitty,” she told the kneading, purring cat.

Suzanne ran away, and was gone for a weekend the first time. She’d told Daphne when she came back that it had just been a lark, and Daphne, then seven, had pictured songbirds in trees, morning larks.

“Where did you go?”

“Lopez.”

“What’s that? Is that a man you went to see?”

“It’s one of the San Juans, Daffy. Don’t you ever look at a map?” Suzanne had braided Daphne’s hair as she talked.

When she and Vic were a firm couple, several months after meeting, he’d asked if she’d like to get away for a weekend.

“Maybe to Lopez?” Daphne had said, heeding the ancient, lurking call of the island. She longed for the possibility of understanding her sister and the places on the planet that spoke to a wild child.

He’d nodded and checked the ferry schedule, booking them for a night at a bed and breakfast on a rocky beach. They’d left his car in Anacortes and walked onto the ferry. She’d been disappointed that it was just an hour’s ride on the water.

She didn’t find answers to her sister there, but Vic was beside her and attentive. He was a man in his own rut who made room for her because he wanted her in his life. And she wanted him right back.

Upstairs, Daphne released Cinderfella when he asked to go into her mother’s bedroom. It had been years after her father’s death, Daphne recalled, before she stopped thinking of the last room on the right as her
parents’
bedroom.

And she still thought of her old room as the one she shared with Suzanne.

“Hang on, Cinder-cat,” she said, and turned the knob to her old bedroom. The dent in her old bed—from the last time she’d sat there to talk to Suzanne’s ghost—was gone. Her mother had straightened out the girls’ old room. Daphne smiled, thinking of her mother, the perpetual housewife, tidying and minding her household, even though the deep cleaning—releasing the hoarded past—was more than Frances Mayfield had ever done.

Suzanne’s bed had a new dent, a full-length imprint.

Daphne’s fond feelings turned wistful as she pictured her mother there, aching again over her murdered child.

She should leave her mother a note, she decided. She could put it in her mom’s bedroom.

Something concrete, a bit of learning about the past, occurred to her. She could leave a note of real substance.
Remember Lindsay? I found her, Mom, and . . .

Opening her old closet to find a bit of surplus notebook paper and a pencil, Daphne was stunned. Bags and boxes of clothes and kids’ things were compiled in the previously untouched girls’ closet.

Some of the bags were labeled
girls clothes
and another pile was marked
garbage
. A box of old novels and textbooks had a big black question mark on the side. School supplies were gathered in a carton marked
Boys and Girls Club
and another box was labeled
Salvation Army
.

I have a surprise
. A little sound of understanding, of sorrow, escaped Daphne as she looked at her mother’s hard work, recalled her mother’s promise.

“Good for you, Mom.” She swallowed down a cry. “Good for me. For us. Thanks.”

Taking a piece of paper and a pen from the box of school supplies, Daphne began her note:
Mom, remember—

The cat yowled from her bed.

Daphne nodded. “Come on, Cinderfella.”

Crumpling the note paper, just as her face crumpled, Daphne tried with moderate success to resist a good bawl. Of course her mother remembered Lindsay Wallach. Why wouldn’t she? Her mother needed no help in recalling misery and pain and unanswered questions.

Swallowing, Daphne decided that she would never mention seeing Lindsay.