Arrowood (17 page)

Mrs. Ferris brought Grammy's things over the next evening, harboring no ill will after our confrontation, or so she claimed.

“Here are the photo albums,” she said, stacking them on top of Grammy's step stool. She clicked her nails over the spines and slid a marbled blue album out of the pile, handing it to me. Its cheap cardboard cover was peeling apart. “This one's your mother's. I can't believe she didn't even want her own pictures.”

I flipped through the pages. High school pictures. Mom and her friends in their cheerleading uniforms, their feathered hair stiff with hairspray; her senior portrait, wearing a boatneck sweater and pearls, her fist tucked demurely under her chin. I stopped at a prom photo, where she stood beneath cardboard palm trees in a poufy taffeta dress, a huge cluster of pink carnations and baby's breath strapped to her wrist. A boy in a white tux held her by the waist. He had coppery hair and an athletic build, and he was smiling so hard his lips had lost their color. He looked familiar, though his hairline was lower, his face more balanced without so much of his skull exposed. Heaney had been telling the truth after all.

Mrs. Ferris peered over my shoulder. “So lucky. Natural blonde. Lots of girls would have killed to have her hair.”

Mom's hair was white as an albino rabbit in the picture, as always, but her normally pale skin was a bronzy orange, like she had smeared on self-tanner for the occasion. The photographer had caught her midlaugh, her mouth open, teeth showing, eyes half closed. I didn't know what she had seen in Heaney, before my dad came along and blinded her to other men, but she looked happy. Maybe she had liked his overattentiveness, the way he always wanted to take care of things. Maybe he had big plans back then. Or maybe he didn't, and that became a problem.

“How long did my mom date Dick Heaney?”

“Hmm.” She folded her skeletal arms across her chest and leaned down to get a closer look at the picture. “I'm not sure. I didn't really know her before she met Eddie. I do remember her saying Heaney had a hard time moving on when it was over, though. And your dad didn't care much for him, I know that, but I've never had any problems with him all the years he's been working here.”

“Why didn't my dad like him?”

“It was a bit ridiculous, actually. He was jealous, I think. Your grandparents were charitable people. Your grandfather did a lot of mentoring through the Rotary Club, and he helped Heaney out quite a bit. Felt sorry for him, with no mother, and his dad on disability. He wanted to give him opportunities he wouldn't have had otherwise. Eddie felt like Heaney was trying to worm his way into the family. He came home from college on summer break to find Heaney was practically living with them, and Eddie didn't want him there.”

I turned a page in the photo album, the image of my mother's orange skin and white hair from the prom picture still flashing behind my eyelids when I blinked. There were more shots of Mom with Heaney. Mrs. Ferris looked them over, tapping a fingernail on my mother's face.

“You know,” she said, “I wonder if she was the reason all the cleaning ladies he hired for Arrowood were always pale, with that same platinum hair as hers. Well, not quite the same. Most of them were bleached, and not professionally. I could tell that from across the yard.”

That seemed a bit creepy, that he hired women who resembled my mother, though I knew some men were attracted only to a certain type of woman. Maybe he simply liked blondes.

“I've been meaning to ask,” Mrs. Ferris said with forced brightness, “how's the profile coming along? It's all right if you're not able to get a full page of text. We can always pad it with pictures.”

“I'm getting close.” That was an exaggeration. Mrs. Ferris needed one page, and so far I had written over a hundred, covering everything from timber baron William Sr.'s arrival in Keokuk in the 1800s to my father's death on a blackjack table at the Mark Twain Casino. I was nowhere near close to condensing it down to one perfect page, though not for lack of trying. The more I wrote, the more deeply mired I became. My ancestors seemed noble and purposeful, building fortunes and working for the abolitionist movement and volunteering to fight in wars, while I spent my days rattling around in the empty rooms they'd left behind, eating Pop-Tarts and wiping dust from the molding. The Arrowood family as it had been in its heyday—when it was large enough to fill the entire house—felt like a party I was a hundred years late for. I was one of them, stuck in the wrong time, looking back at what I had missed. It was something I had always loved about history, an advantage it held over the present. My family was there, everyone I had lost: my sisters and uncles and grandparents, my distant cousins, the three other Ardens. If you went back far enough in time, everyone was still alive.

“The sooner the better,” Mrs. Ferris said. “I'll be waiting for it.”

I had dialed my mother before Mrs. Ferris made her way down the porch steps.

“Hello?” she said. I recognized the voice of Lisa Robertson on TV, my mother's favorite QVC host for the past sixteen years. She was extolling the virtues of Diamonique rings.

“It's me.”

“What is it? My show's on right now.” Her voice was sludgy, as though she'd been drinking. Gary must have gone to a conference or a men's fellowship retreat. She never got full-on drunk when he was around.

“Why did you act like you didn't know Dick Heaney?”

“What are you talking about?” I heard a clink and imagined her tipping a wine bottle into her coffee mug.

“I saw a picture of the two of you at prom.”

There was a muffled crash, like she had knocked something over. Maybe the wine bottle going into the trash. I knew she would pile newspapers on top so Gary wouldn't see it.

“So what?” she slurred.

“You didn't find it worth mentioning that you dated the caretaker?”

“Why would it matter? Was I supposed to tell you about every man I ever dated?”

“It's just a little awkward. He looked really disappointed when I told him you were married. He thought you might move back here.”

She snorted. “I'd sooner chew off my own arm.”

“How long did you date him?”

“Do we really need to have this conversation?” she snapped. “You want to know the intimate details of a relationship I had before you were even born? Fine, I liked him because he was old enough to buy beer for me and my friends. He'd do just about anything I asked him to. He beat up a guy who was rude to me at the bowling alley and nearly sent him to the hospital.” She sounded a bit too pleased about that. “It was fun for a while, but he got too clingy. He was always talking about getting married. And no way in hell was that gonna happen.”

She had to be blind drunk to stay on the phone with me for so long, to tell me those things. I wondered what had her drinking so heavily. I hadn't heard her this bad since she'd married Gary.

“Was that enough?” she asked. “Do I need to get more explicit?”
Explicit
lisped out with too many syllables. Her shrill laughter cut into my ear, and when it finally trailed off, she said she had to get back to her show, because Lisa Robertson had finished selling all the Diamonique and was moving on to fine jewelry. I tried to imagine Heaney, with his thick forearms and stretched-out smile, beating up a man for insulting Mom. It was disturbing, though I almost felt sorry for him, that he had been so taken with my mother. He hadn't stood a chance.

I turned on my laptop and peeked at my credit card statement online. I had been using my Discover card for expenses so that I could conserve my cash, and the balance was creeping steadily higher. I had applied for the jobs at the Super 8, the gas station, and the phone-answering service, and hadn't heard back from any of them. I knew that if I wanted to find a job teaching history, which was what I'd been working toward for so long, I would have to complete my thesis and get my degree. That should have been my top priority, right after dashing off the one-page Arrowood profile, which shouldn't have taken more than an hour. Avoidance, however, was one of my greatest strengths (my superpower, Ben used to say), so instead of getting started on either of those things, I decided to do some laundry. I'd noticed specks of mildew on the towels.

Around nine o'clock, I changed into my nightgown and went to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer. I stepped in something cold and wet, and jumped back. Water was spreading out from the washing machine and across the floor. I tried to ignore the leaden weight in my stomach, telling myself that the washer had overflowed because I'd overfilled it, cramming all my towels in on top of my clothes, not because of some disastrous issue with the plumbing. If there was a bigger problem, I could worry about it later. I needed to sop up the water from the painted floor before it could do any damage.

I grabbed a mop and bucket out of the storage closet, but the mop was old and stiff and didn't seem to do more than spread the water around. I glanced over at the pile of sheets mounded in the corner, the ones that had been covering the furniture, and I couldn't think of a better idea. I spread them out on the floor and swished them around with my feet.

I worked from the outer edges of the room, pushing the water toward the center and then wringing out the sodden sheets in the laundry sink. I thought I was making progress until I noticed a still-growing puddle surrounding the washer. I pinched my eyes shut, trying to think. There had to be a shutoff valve somewhere, probably in the basement.

I kicked the wet sheets aside and unlatched the basement door. The basement showed Arrowood's age more than any other part of the house. The walls were stone and mortar, the floor hard-packed dirt. My mother had always hated it, and she refused to go down there for any reason, even on the few occasions tornado sirens had blared outside and the TV weatherman advised us to seek shelter. She had wanted a clean, finished basement with carpeting, like the one she had now, where she hosted a monthly Bible study with Gary. I hadn't minded it so much. I had liked to explore down there as a kid, turning on all the lights, digging through musty steamer trunks, dragging out the antique croquet set that no one but me had used in years, filching bottles of Coke that Granddad kept stacked in cases under the stairs.

I could feel the temperature drop as I descended below the house, goosebumps ridging my bare arms. The basement smelled a bit like the river, dampness and rotting wood and silt left behind by a flood. I held my breath for the three quick strides from the bottom step to the dangling chain that turned on the light. A wide pool of standing water spread off into the darkness, reminding me of a cave my dad had taken me to when we lived briefly in the Ozarks. We entered by canoe, the dark passageway narrowing and the ceiling dropping while the guide told a story about a group of tourists who had drowned. I didn't want to call Heaney, but I didn't want the house to flood, either.

Heaney came over right away, brushing off my apologies and calmly assessing the situation. I tried not to think of him in a white tuxedo with his arms around my mother. “It wasn't your fault,” he said. “Drainpipe's clogged, and the hose is about rotted out. I'll have to get a replacement hose tomorrow, and finish clearing out that drain, so no using the washer in the meantime. You're welcome to do laundry at my place if you need to.”

“Thanks. I think I can wait.”

“How about you come on down with me and I'll show you where the main shutoff is. Good to know in case something like this happens again.”

I followed him down the stairs. The sump pump was making gurgling sounds somewhere in the shadows, like someone struggling to breathe. Heaney showed me where he'd turned off the water supply, and pointed out the labels on the fuse box, in case I ever needed to shut off the electricity.

“You must know everything about this house after working here for so long,” I said.

“I know it as well as any of the Arrowoods.”

“Maybe you could help me with something. My grandmother wrote about a hidden room down here that was used as part of the Underground Railroad. Do you know anything about that?”

He looked surprised by the question and cocked his head to the side, thinking it over. “Well, there is one thing. Back here.”

He stepped out of the pool of light cast by the bare bulb and disappeared into the furnace room. I followed him, my bare feet inching along the wet dirt floor, my stomach twisting uneasily as I crossed into the darkness. I knew there was another pull chain hanging somewhere nearby, another bulb waiting to fill the room with light, but I couldn't remember exactly where it was. I tried to recall the layout of the maze of rooms that burrowed under the house, windowless nooks with low ceilings dripping wires and pipes and clusters of gauzy spider eggs.

There was a metallic scraping sound, and I flinched as the light flicked on. Heaney stood next to the furnace, an ancient behemoth with pipes coming off it like the arms of an octopus.

“I had to repair the boiler a while back,” he said. “I accidentally tore up part of this wall taking out a pipe. There's storage space on the other side, and it seems like it goes the whole way back, but when I was measuring things to get it fixed up, I realized it doesn't. There's dead space in there. It's not big enough that you could call it a room, really.”

“Did you go inside it?” I asked.

“Nah. Chipped out a little hole in the mortar and shined a light in. Couldn't find any sort of door, or any way to access it.”

“And? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” he said, chuckling. “Empty. It could've been used for cold storage at one time, or maybe there used to be an old pipe or chimney there, and it got sealed up, who knows?”

I wrapped my arms around myself to stave off the chill. “Maybe there used to be a way in.” I was thinking of the house plans I'd found. I could check and see what lay above this section of the basement.