The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 25

  “Don’t say hell, Gideon,” Jesse said, imitating their mother. “Say heck.” They laughed, and for a shimmering moment before it closed again Gid thought he felt a hairline crack in his heart, a fleeting beam of light.

  * * *

  The lanterns were lit and the fireflies were out. It was time for the cake. Doro was sitting in a lawn chair, chatting with a cousin, when ClairBell found her and asked her to cut and serve. “I thought you’d want to have a part in things,” ClairBell said. “Not that you haven’t already,” she was quick to add, “but I mean it might be nice for us sisters to do the honors. Daddy’s little girls. Besides, you’ll just love the cake’s theme. It’s right up your alley. Bookish, what I mean is.”

  Doro got up. She winced inwardly at the “Daddy’s little girls” bit, but when her sister was feeling expansive you had to go along. She wondered if ClairBell had taken something and then she laughed at herself. Of course she had. Trying to puzzle out the reasons for her family’s addictions and thinking she’d found the answer, Doro had once asked if ClairBell believed that people smoked or drank or took pills to blunt their feelings of loss. ClairBell had given her a look, and then snapped. “You still think it’s some kind of moral horse race, don’t you?”

  Doro went with her sister to the center table and stood by while ClairBell removed the foil sheets that had covered the cake box. With a pair of kitchen shears she cut the tape that sealed the box. “Where did you order this?” Doro asked, more to make conversation than for any other reason.

  “Lady works out of her basement,” her sister answered, busy lifting the lid to reveal the sheet cake. “I told her what we wanted and … oh, wow, it’s just beautiful!”

  It was all Doro could do not to gasp. The cake was a glossy, garish, gel-covered horror. In frosting, amid a border of muddy-looking sunflowers was the design of an open book, also in frosting, with the words “Book of Life” in bright green cursive. The book’s pages were studded with plastic toys, a galloping horse, a motorcycle, a tractor, a shotgun, a tiny scale of justice, a green army man with rifle raised, a telescope, a radio, a miniature Easter Island head that looked uncannily like Ebenezer. Above the book, which looked more like a tombstone or the tablets of the Ten Commandments than it did a book, an inky blue night sky held unidentifiable heavenly bodies made of silver dragees and the words “Happy Birthday Daddy” in orange. The name only ClairBell called him. No comma to offset the proper noun.

  “Pretty, huh?” ClairBell said, admiring the cake. Everything had gone as she had hoped. She had mended her torn family. She decided to share some of the credit with her sister. Doro was a stuck-up piece of work, with snooty notions, and she’d always left ClairBell out of things. Wouldn’t share a bed with her, claiming ClairBell kicked. Paid less than no attention to ClairBell’s overtures of friendship. Still, they were sisters. She put a hand on Doro’s arm. “Let me get the candles. You round everybody up and tell them it’s time to sing.”

  Doro felt her heart constrict, but she did as she was bidden. The less she had to do with the awful cake, the less it would seem that she’d had a hand in it. With every announcement she made, she resisted her impulse to disown the monstrosity and said simply, “Time for the cake,” or “Birthday cake time.”

  When everyone was gathered, ClairBell led the group in the birthday song. Everyone applauded. Uncle Big Bill stepped forward. “To ClairBell, our hostess!”

  A cheer went up. ClairBell had hoped for this and so she’d prepared a few words to say about her father and how much she loved him, but when the time came to speak the words she couldn’t get her throat to work right. Instead, she made a deep curtsey and blew a kiss before turning away from the crowd to hide the sweetest tears she’d ever cried.

  Doro had thought that maybe when it was cut into pieces the cake would look less awful, but when she scored it the creation looked worse than it had before. The way the colored gel bled at every knife cut made her think of the tacky paint-swirl pictures kids made for five dollars at the state fair. As people came through the line she tried to make her expression bland and smiling, and that kept her going until one of the more waggish cousins came through the line and, teasing, said, “That’s some cake you got there, Dorito. You bake it yourself?”

  Suddenly she could take no more. She plopped the piece of cake she had just cut onto a paper plate and opened her mouth to disown everything that had to do with the tasteless mess, but just then ClairBell appeared with a stack of paper plates and Doro couldn’t bad-mouth the confection in front of her.

  ClairBell saw what was going on and she determined to ride to her sister’s rescue. It was clear that Doro wanted to take credit for the cake. Probably would have, if ClairBell hadn’t shown up to witness the moment. On any other day ClairBell would have called her out and set everybody straight. No uncertain terms. She wouldn’t have shared the credit, but today she had credit, in abundance. To the cousin she smiled, and making her voice louder so it would carry and everyone around could hear, she said, “She didn’t bake it, but she did design it!”

  Doro smiled stiffly, smiled miserably, and lowered her gaze.

  * * *

  It was a clear evening. Abel wished he’d brought his telescope, but he’d left it at home because the last few times he’d tried to set it up he couldn’t get it to work. Something seemed to be wrong with it. On the southern horizon Sagittarius was rising, the familiar teapot shape that was the first constellation other than the Big Dipper that he’d learned as a boy. He’d once known the names of the stars that formed it, known the secret language of the heavens, but now he’d forgotten. Beyond the teapot’s spout he knew lay, but he could not see, the numberless stars of the galaxy and the path to its very center.

  The day had been good and he was touched by it. His daughter had done this to show him how much he was loved. Truth be told, he had needed it. His ouster as the family’s head had hurt. As if he needed them to tell him what he already knew. That he was an old spent star. One foot on the ground beneath him and the other in the great beyond. He saw the way they looked at him when the wrong words came out of his mouth, and in their looks he saw pity. There was a time when he would have disdained the pity and tried to overmaster it. Not now. Now he understood that its wellspring was love. Love notwithstanding, he was tired. He had lived a long time.

  Hattie, who was rounding the corner of the house to toss table scraps into the dog pen, saw him silhouetted against the sky, his wide, big-eared head, his bowed legs, the third leg that was his cane. She picked her way across the uneven ground. She thought that maybe this would be a good time to broach the subject of bringing Billy home. The night before, she’d had a premonition that Billy wouldn’t last much longer. She’d missed him all day. It wasn’t right that he wasn’t here. She wasn’t superstitious about omens and such, but the feeling was so strong that she thought it might be God, preparing her.

  “My bride,” Abel said, raising his free arm so she could slide in next to him. When they were courting he’d tried to teach her the constellations, but she couldn’t hold the names in her head and finally he’d given up. And now, he reflected, he couldn’t remember them. They were gone from his mind. Somewhere he’d read that the Osage or the Kiowa or maybe the Kaw—he couldn’t remember which tribe, either—made a distinction between the Near Sky in which birds flew and trees rustled and from which snow fell, and the Far Sky, the home of the old ones, invisible from earth. But he couldn’t recall if the moon and the sun and stars and planets were part of the Near Sky or the Far Sky. It didn’t matter, he supposed. All he had tried to know and to understand, all of it gone, his mind whitening, losing its salt. He thought of the Hubble photos, world upon nameless world billowing up like great glistering clouds. He was glad he’d lived long enough to see them and he was sad that he’d never know more than he knew at this minute and would, as time went on, know less and less.

  Hattie felt good standing beside her husband. Beneath the pabulum and soybean sm
ell of the Boost he’d just injected she caught a whiff of his smell of old—his soap, bay rum, his scalp, his breath—and it struck at her heart. She wanted to say something about it, but she couldn’t, for this wasn’t the kind of thing she said. She slid her arm around his middle, careful not to disturb the peg tube, and leaned her head on his shoulder. A line of Wordsworth’s came to her and so she recited that instead. “‘The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting…’”

  He was silent for a long time and so she asked, “What are you doing out here?”

  Without thinking he answered, “Having a look at my new home.”

  She looked at him to see if he was trying to start an argument about the afterlife. But he appeared to be serious.

  “Do you mean heaven?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Call it that if you like.” He pulled her closer. “It’s where we’re all headed.” He kissed her hair. “And you’re in for a surprise, Hat. You don’t have to be good to get in the door.”

  “Well,” she said, but nothing else would come. She wasn’t sure what he meant—probably his old theory that everything was made of stardust. She’d lived with him long enough to know that his contrarian impulse was most easily triggered by a direct question, and so she didn’t ask him if he believed in a heaven after all. She wasn’t sure, in a sudden heave and shift of belief, that she did. And she wasn’t sure it mattered, what she believed. Heaven either was or it wasn’t, and no amount of wishing or will on her part would change things. What a time, she mused, for the bottom to fall out of a lifetime of certainty. In the space of a moment she felt oddly light, oddly young, oddly free, but then suddenly old and alone and bereft. She would not let this happen. She collected herself. “Well,” she finally said, “think whatever you want, but I know what I know.” And just like that she was back in the fold.

  A great warm memory came to Abel then, and he considered telling her about his visit from Jeff, but then he thought better of it. She was a literalist, might take his vision as apostasy, you couldn’t know. And the old vision was tangled anyway. Jeff, Jesus, Allah, God, Jehovah, Yahweh—what did the name matter? He lifted his cane and pointed it toward the teapot’s spout, directing Hattie’s gaze toward the thickest part of the Milky Way. “I’ll meet you right there. I’ll have a carnation in my lapel.” He gave her hip a pat. “And a reaction.”

  She made a pfft noise, turning away so he wouldn’t see the rise of pleasure and then—inexplicably—a sudden ache. She walked back down the rise.

  * * *

  Around two in the morning when the phone rang the only one still awake in the Amicus house was Doro. Hattie and Abel had gone to bed long before. Doro hadn’t been able to sleep for thinking over the day’s events, not so much the party itself, which now seemed a blur, but the upsetting confession that came as she and ClairBell stood in the yard saying their good-byes. ClairBell had taken her hands in hers and looked at her so directly that her blue gaze made Doro uncomfortable. “Now, we’re sisters and I don’t want any hard feelings between us,” ClairBell had said, “and I just hope and pray you understand.”

  Suspiciously, but like the gaping fish she was, Doro bit. “Understand what?”

  “Oh,” ClairBell said, affecting surprise. “I thought you already knew.”

  Doro waited, heart racing. The exchange had the marks of a ClairBell coup and she suspected it had to do with the Eliot chair. She was supposed to ask “knew what?” but she wasn’t going to give her sister the opening. She waited.

  “That Daddy told me I could have the chair,” ClairBell finally said.

  Later Doro would think of stinging things she should have said, but at the time all she could come up with was silence.

  ClairBell wouldn’t be denied her moment. “So no hard feelings?” She made her sweetest, most fetching face and held her arms wide. “Sister, I need a hug.”

  Doro stepped back, unable to speak. She got into her rental car and shut the door and locked it. She started the engine and backed down the long driveway, waiting until she turned out onto the road before she punched the gas pedal to the floor and let out a throat-scouring yell. For miles she yelled that ClairBell Campbell Moody Green Billups should fucking fuck her fucking self, until her neck glands hurt and she thought she might give herself a stroke, and then the rest of the way home she cried like a child.

  Now, prowling through the quiet house, she turned up nary a stray cigarette but in the kitchen she discovered, wrapped in a foil tent, a few pieces of the terrible birthday cake that Hattie had saved in case Billy showed up. The cake was still awful, but she was ravenous, gritting her teeth, in need of something to fill the gnawing in her belly. In the kitchen, by the light of the fridge, standing over the counter, she wolfed it, shoving cake and clots of frosting into her mouth with her hands, washing down mouthfuls of Crisco and corn syrup and red dye #40 with gulps of milk from the carton until the roof of her mouth was slick. She ate her fill and still there was some left, liquefying brown gel drooling down the side. She dug her fingers into the cake, drew a glop of it toward her mouth thinking to finish it off so it would be gone, but then, seized by anger that wouldn’t die, she flung the mess hard at the refrigerator door.

  When the phone rang she was on her knees, wiping the floor tiles with wet paper towels. Her mouth and throat went dry when she heard a woman who identified herself as a unit clerk at Saint Francis asking if she was related to William Campbell.

  Her knees weakened. “I’m his sister,” she answered.

  The unit clerk said, “Your brother has been hit by a car. A hit and run. I can’t tell you any more than that. The police will have to. I’m just supposed to let you know that he’s here in the trauma unit.”

  Doro found her voice. “When was he brought in? Can you tell me that?”

  “Early yesterday morning. I can check on the exact time for you.”

  Anger rose. “You’re just now calling?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. He didn’t have a driver’s license or any ID and he wasn’t conscious when they found him.”

  Her wits returned. “So he’s conscious now? He’s awake?”

  In the background phones rang. The clerk said, “He’s conscious but he’s sleeping. He’s stable.”

  Doro hung up and called Jesse, who drove over. They decided to let their parents sleep. “He’s safe,” Jesse said. “There’s nothing anybody can do. Especially not Mom and Dad.”

  Doro said, as though struck for the first time by the idea. “They’re old, aren’t they? Really old.”

  Jesse nodded. “Let’s tell them first thing and then we can drive them up there. They won’t be able to manage.”

  Quietly, they made a pot of coffee and sat in the living room. “This makes me think of when Nick…” Doro said. “When we were waiting for word. I was sitting on the sofa, the one that used to be here, that old plaid one with the fringe. Grandma was in the rocking chair and her face looked broken. It was the first time it hit me that she was really old. Funny to think we’re almost the age she was then.”

  They were quiet until Jesse said, “I was in the kitchen, at the counter with Billy. He was about twelve, I guess. He didn’t really know what was going on, I don’t think. He was drawing mansion floor plans on graph paper the way he did and he wanted to show them to me. He was proud of himself. Talking fast—that birdie-chirping Boysie-talk of his. He’d designed this castle with twenty rooms and ballrooms and libraries and conservatories. But he hadn’t put in any doors between the rooms. There were just boxes of rooms with no doors. And he didn’t put in any bathrooms. I joked with him about it. Where was His Highness supposed to take a crap, you know? Drop the royal load in the banquet hall behind a potted plant? A litter box? I ragged him pretty hard. It made him mad and he started waling on me with these little Richie Rich slaps and that’s when the phone rang and we heard—” Jesse broke off. He bent over and looked at the floor between his knees.

  Doro said, “I shouldn�
�t have said anything.”

  Jesse looked up. “No, it’s not that. It’s something else.” He thought of telling his sister about his trials with Patsy, how he didn’t know what to do. In the time between the birthday party’s ending and Doro’s call, Gid had brought Patsy home from the Pay Dirt, the two of them staggering into the farmhouse kitchen like cartoon drunks, slaphappy and foolish. Jesse had been asleep but he’d heard them banging around, trying to make a midnight breakfast, falling over each other. He’d not been able to go back to sleep, and he’d resolved to tell her she had to leave, that he couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It’s just … damn Boysie,” he said after a time. “Why couldn’t he be a jerk?”

  Doro shook her head.

  Jesse collected himself. “Do you remember what Dad did? After Nick.”

  Doro repeated the legend. “He called up his buddy and they got on the private plane to Missouri.”

  “No, before that.”

  She didn’t.

  “After Mom called and told him and he told us and all of us were crying and screaming, Dad came to our rooms with that bottle of pills he had for his back injury. Darvon, I think. Whatever they had back then. And he gave a pill to everybody, even Billy. He told us it would take the edge off. It would help us calm down.”

  Doro said, “I don’t remember that.”

  “Maybe you were outside.” Jesse closed his eyes and rested his head on the back of the sofa. “I’d had two beers already. Stole ’em from Dad’s barn. I wasn’t tanked but I had on a pretty good buzz. When that pill hit, I thought I’d hit nirvana. I always kind of wondered if that was when it got into me.”

  They talked through the night, dozing off and on. They agreed that their sister was a grade-A horse’s ass.

  “I’m not going to speak to her again,” Doro said. “I quit. Trying to be nice and tiptoeing around her.”

  Jesse nodded, waiting for his big sister to sort herself out. She was like him—hot talk when angered but nothing much behind it. He wouldn’t be surprised if by morning when ClairBell joined them at the hospital the hot talker and the grade-A horse’s ass would be locked in a big fleshy white-haired sisterly embrace and boo-hooing to beat the band. He wouldn’t be surprised if when he got back to the farm there’d be Patsy, standing at the stove, frying him a ham steak, a bruised, sweet look on her face, a table set for two, and his heart would be wrecked all over again.