Acts of God (30 page)

At seven I went down to the coffee shop for a breakfast of cereal and decaf, which I carried back to my room because I didn't want to miss his call, but Nick didn't phone. Lying down on the bed, I waited until ten o'clock, afraid to leave my room, thinking I would hear from him. But I didn't.

By eleven I needed to get out. I couldn't stand sitting in the room, waiting. I got in the car and drove. Once again I thought of heading back to Chicago, which I knew I should do, but instead, I drove into Winonah. I drove through the downtown and cruised past Prairie Vista Automotive. I wanted to see if Nick was in his office. I drove around the block once or twice, thinking about stopping in, but thought the better of it.

Instead I decided to drive the old route I used to take to get to school. First I cut over to Mulberry and down past my house. From my house, I headed over to Laurel. Though I wanted to go straight toward the school, instead I went in the direction of the lake. I drove all the way until I pulled up slowly in front of Nick's house.

There were no cars in the driveway. The house looked empty, as if it were on the market. I pulled over, parking on the street across from the house. Walking up the gravel path, I stood for a moment at the front door. I knocked, but there was no answer. I knocked again. Then I smelled the smoke. I had no idea where it was coming from, but the air around the house had taken on a slightly acrid, smoky smell. Something was burning.

I tried the door but it was locked. Then I went around to the side of the house where the smell was stronger and my eyes began to water. In the kitchen I could see gray smoke billowing from a pot. There was a side door and when I pushed it, it opened. I ran into the kitchen, covering my face against the thick, noxious air, grabbed a dishrag, and pulled the pot off the fire. The bottom of the pot was charred with burned milk that I assumed Margaret had forgotten on the stove.

I took the pot, carried it to the sink, let the cold water pour inside. The pot sizzled and steamed. When it quieted down I found myself standing there in Margaret and Nick's kitchen, unsure of what to do. I opened windows to let the smoke seep out and clear the air. I wondered if I should leave a note to explain the burned pot and what I was doing inside their house. But what if someone was home? What if Margaret was asleep or passed out, drunk?

Walking down the corridor, I stood alone in their vast living room. The smell of smoke still hung heavily in the air. I called out several times, “Hello, is anyone home?” I knew I should go. I had put out that small flame and now I had no business being here, but for some reason I couldn't bring myself to leave. My heart pounded in my chest as I stood still. I was going to turn around and walk out, but I decided to make certain everything was all right.

I headed down a corridor to the wing where the bedrooms were. Peering into each bedroom and bathroom, I made certain that no one was home, no one was hurt. I had wandered through people's houses like this dozens of times on the job, examining closet space, testing for the comfort of beds. I opened a closet in the hallway. The smell of cedar and mothballs wafted my way. Winter clothes hung in there—heavy woolens, parkas, lambskin coats. I closed it and continued down the corridor, pausing at Danielle's room.

I saw that the room was oddly devoid of a child's things, as Danielle seemed devoid of a child's spirit. The room even smelled old, as if someone no longer young lived here. The bed was a spartan cot with a gray comforter. A neat row of books, mainly mysteries—Nancy Drew, Boxcar Children—lined the bookshelf, but looked as if their spines had never been cracked. Two porcelain dolls and a stuffed horse stood like sentinels on a shelf. The only sign of childhood was a unicorn poster on her wall. If I could mother her, I thought, I'd buy Danielle silly things—a Slinky, bandannas, pop-bead necklaces. But of course she was their child, not mine, and I had managed my own mistakes with the two I had, though they were basically good kids. That much I knew.

I needed to get away from this room, feeling as if I could stifle here, as if someone had sucked the air out. I tiptoed down the hall, heading farther into the west wing. The door was open; I wandered in. I felt that pleasure Shana said she experienced having the keys to other people's houses, thinking about what might be revealed there.

In the room Nick and Margaret still shared, I opened drawers, rummaged through. I was looking for something, though I couldn't say what. Opening Nick's first, I found boxer shorts, neatly pressed and folded, T-shirts laundered a spotless white. The drawer smelled faintly of Nick's sweat and his Paco Rabanne cologne.

In the dresser on the opposite side of the room, I found her things. The top drawer contained blue silk underwear, a red teddy. The silk lingerie slipped through my fingers. I fondled black panties with a red trim. What could she possibly do in these? Nick had never mentioned this side of their life together. Had they played games behind these closed doors I didn't want to imagine? Was this the way she had enticed and held him all these years? I did not want to contemplate it.

I moved swiftly through T-shirts, athletic clothes, cotton pajamas. Then I came to a bottom drawer, different from the others in its disarray. It was filled with odds and ends—old receipts, a school ring, miniature soap and shampoo bottles taken from hotel rooms, sewing kits, odd buttons, a box of old letters. But I did not reach for any of these. Instead my hand reached around, looking for something but I didn't know what. I dug in the back and something soft brushed against my hand.

Reaching for it, I pulled out what looked like a small animal, soft and furry. I turned it, staring, because it was something I had seen before but couldn't quite remember when. I stood in their bedroom holding a scarlet rabbit's foot on a key chain in my fist.

On the plush carpet I didn't hear the footsteps. I missed the slamming of the car door, the walk across the entranceway. Now Margaret stood glaring at me in her stiletto heels and toreador pants, her black hair wild with thick curls, where I expected to see twigs and leaves as if she had just barreled through the woods to get here. Her eyes were red with rage. “What are you doing here?” she shouted at me. “What are you doing in my house?”

“There was smoke,” I told her. Margaret sniffed the air. “I wanted to be sure everyone was all right.”

“But what are you doing here?” If she'd had a gun, I believe she would have shot me. Instead she just stood there, hands on her hips. Defiantly I stood before her and now I opened my palm slowly, letting the rabbit's foot roll onto my fingertips. “I came back for this.”

She stared at it, then back at me. Perhaps from her look she had forgotten it was there. Or when I'd given it to her. Or that she'd claimed to have lost it so many years ago.

Then she said, “If it's yours, take it. Take it and get out of here.”

38

Two days later Margaret left
a message with my mother, saying that she wanted to see me. I phoned Nick to ask him what he thought I should do. “Call her,” he said, his voice sounding relieved. “Maybe she wants to make peace.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm moving out next week. She seems ready to accept it.”

“All right, I'll see her.”

We met at the coffee shop in the newly refurbished mall off Main Street. It was a trendy little place with lots of espresso machines and steamed milk and housewives in workout suits with strollers. Margaret came in, wearing a jacket with padded shoulders, tight black jeans, and boots. She looked ready for Los Angeles, not Winonah, and it seemed to me that she was a woman whose experiences had never quite lived up to her expectations, though she'd come close.

We ordered our coffee, then sat down at a table by the window. “This is a little awkward, I know,” Margaret said.

“Yes, I guess it is.”

“Well, all's fair in love and war, isn't it? Anyway, Nick and I were probably not going to make it. I want you to know this, Tess. I don't blame you. I want you to remember that.”

“You don't blame me,” I said. “Well, I blame you.”

She looked at me oddly. “Because I went with Patrick to the prom?”

“You must be kidding. No. Because my father had an affair with your mother; because you knew about it for years and you never told me.”

“I was supposed to tell you?” Margaret looked at me, stunned. “Your parents never broke up; they stayed together. You had your family intact.”

“Everything was ruined.”

“Not like it was for me,” she said cryptically.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, it doesn't matter what I mean. It's the truth, that's all.”

I took a sip of my coffee, but it was too hot and I burned my tongue. In the background a child cried as its mother spoke in harsh tones. “I'm sorry I went into your house the other day. I'm sorry I went through your things.”

“It doesn't matter, Tess. I don't blame you for seeing Nick. For wanting to get back at me.”

“I don't think that's what I've been trying to do.”

“Oh, who knows what we've been trying to do.… Anyway, none of it matters now.” She got an odd, distant look in her eyes, as if she saw someone she knew crossing the street. I looked behind me, but no one was there. Then she laughed that high-pitched laugh, but I just shook my head. I didn't know what the real joke was.

“Anyway, I was going to give it back to you. Here. I was going to give everything back to you. I brought you a few things I wanted you to have.”

She handed me a thick brown envelope and nodded for me to open it. Inside was my old dog tag with my name on it that I'd been missing for years. The cardinal and bluejay feathers that had once been in my room were wrapped in a piece of yellowed newspaper. The Chicago Cubs T-shirt I'd lent her that night when we spun around in the rain was folded neatly and pressed.

“I was planning on giving you back the rabbit's foot anyway,” she said. “You didn't need to take it.”

“You kept all these things?” I asked, stunned.

She nodded slowly. Some were stolen from me. Some I'd lent her. What surprised me most was how much at that moment Margaret seemed to resemble me. How she saved things just like I did.

“I know you never liked me that much,” Margaret said. “I know you hold things that happened in your life against me. But remember, Tessie, no matter what, we're blood sisters. We're bound for life.”

39

The day it happened was
an October afternoon when the sugar maples turn a blazing gold, like treasure from a pirate's chest. It was the kind of Indian summer day we'd once walked home from school in, dragging our heels, leaves crunching beneath them, the smell of burning in the air. We'd stop in the Episcopal churchyard and scoop up horse chestnuts in their thorny shells, stuffing them into our pockets until the light began to fade. Then we'd race home before our mothers came looking for us.

I had always loved those days of Indian summer. I'd dallied in them, been late, faced my mother's reprimands, all for the crunch of leaves and a pocket of thorny pods and that smell of burning. But that has all changed. Now, something in that time of year has been irrevocably taken from me.

In the brilliance of that afternoon an ordinary blue car pulled over to the side of the railroad crossing. No one really noticed the car or that Margaret was waiting inside. Later the neighbors said that they hadn't paid attention to how long she waited at the intersection not far from the Potomie River. It is just a small commuter stop where you can't even buy a ticket and there's hardly ever a stationmaster there.

It's a convenience stop, really, just a few blocks from the site of the Havenhill Summer Festival, that music event that draws conductors and orchestras from all over the world, that for two months a year puts Winonah on the map. In the summer you can see people from Chicago and as far north as Madison walking with their picnic baskets and blankets from the station along Dearborn Road to the old Potomie park.

As a girl, I'd lain in the grass at Havenhill for a Joan Baez concert or Crosby, Stills and Nash. Or listened to the Chicago Symphony with Ozawa conducting Beethoven's Ninth on the Fourth of July. I'd eat fried chicken and potato salad and make out under a blanket with some boy I hardly knew, whose name I cannot recall, let alone his face. Once I came home with mosquito bites all up and down my arm.

But the music season was long over and it wasn't the busiest intersection anyway so no one noticed the blue car. Nor did anyone notice the woman inside or what she was doing. Many women in Winonah pull over by the side of the railroad tracks to wait for their husbands to get off the commuter trains that take them into the city. No one paid any attention that it was too early for husbands to be coming back or that the woman in the blue car was waiting on the Milwaukee side of the tracks.

But the people who lived nearby would always remember the sound of metal, the shatter of breaking glass. Some rushed out, thinking the train had derailed. Others would report hearing screams, but hardly anyone on the train was hurt, though a few were tossed about by the sudden stop.

I wasn't there. I only know what I read in the newspapers and what people told me, the people I have known all my life. I only know what happened because I read about it and I can imagine it. But I do know what kind of day it was. It was one of those brilliant, golden days—the kind of day when Margaret Blair came to live in Winonah in the first place.

*   *   *

It was in October that Nick phoned and told me he'd moved out. “Tessie, would you come and help me get settled?” Though I had only been back a few weeks, I didn't hesitate. I flew back as soon as I could. Nick was moving into an apartment in a building he owned—the same building where Margaret and her mother had first lived.