Dark Water - Laura McNeal [79]
“So, Pearl?” various friends and not-friends asked. “Who were you with at the river?”
“I can’t really talk,” I said, whispering as though my own voice were too damaged to explain the many things that would, if told, exonerate me.
Greenie never asked about that or anything personal again, and though I saw her in the halls and at all the places you’d normally see someone who lived in your town, we either pretended not to notice one another or smiled fake smiles and waved as if we’d once shared nothing more than a few homeroom classes a long time ago when we were other people.
On the horrible sunny day of the funeral, my mother and I didn’t sit by Robby or my aunt, who were naturally near the front. I continued to feign muteness, and my mother, though she knew better, didn’t wise anybody up. She sat beside me at the back even though she was the barefoot girl in the biggest picture that was displayed at the front of the funeral chapel, the one photograph of Hoyt with my mother that hadn’t burned, saved among various other family things by a cousin in Idaho. It showed a fifteen-year-old Hoyt and a five-year-old Sharon Wallace on Hoyt’s first motorcycle. He’s smiling and she’s smiling, and they look like they’re about to go off on a helmetless ride.
My father sent flowers, but he didn’t come.
Robby played something by Mozart on the clarinet, and my aunt, who sat next to several unfamiliar French relatives, nodded when a slim bearded man said he was going to read a stanza from a poem by Agnès’s favorite author, Victor Hugo.
“When the living leave us, moved, I gaze,” he began, and though I kept my eyes focused on my fingers in my lap, I saw the mountain lion turn toward me in the smoke.
The breeze that takes you lifts me up alive,
And I’ll follow those I loved.
The casket was closed. It lay huge and shiny on a bier at the front of the chapel. I watched for Mary Beth, who I thought would surely come to offer her respects to Robby if not to mourn, secretly, for Hoyt. I thought that Agnès was lucky in one thing: Hoyt hadn’t left her for his lover as my father had left us. That was better, wasn’t it? I knew what he’d done, and Robby knew, but Agnès didn’t, and I added this to all the other qualities that made my uncle a good man.
Mitchell the marine was waiting respectfully outside for my mother. He was wearing camouflage, which he apologized for, and he’d come there on, of all things, a motorcycle. “So you’re Pearl,” he said, and I didn’t hear any particular judgment in his voice, no more than I heard in other voices.
I could feel Robby and Agnès and the French contingent watching us and wondering about the soldier. I could do nothing but nod my frozen nod.
“Would you like me to go to the cemetery with you?” he asked my mother.
She was not only red-eyed and trembling but unable to speak. I think what she would really have liked was to ride on the back of his motorcycle to a place far away, as she had once done when she was five and Hoyt was fifteen, but she didn’t do that. She led Mitchell to the Oyster car, and she handed him the keys, and understanding everything perfectly, he drove.
Fifty-seven
On Saturday, Mitchell came to the RV on his motorcycle. This time, he wasn’t wearing his uniform. This time, my mother climbed on the back, locked her arms around his waist, and left me, against her better judgment, alone.
Thirty minutes and nine days after the fire started, I stood on the bank that once led to Amiel. It wasn’t quiet. A cracking, pounding sound came from the grotto, and when I waded across, I found two men and a woman whacking the shell of Amiel’s hut with sledgehammers.
They stopped and stared suspiciously at me.
“What are you doing?” I asked. I surprised even myself with my loud, undamaged voice.
“Removing a fire hazard,” they said.
I didn’t go past them to the roofless homesteader’s house for fear I’d lead them to something they hadn’t yet discovered. I’d have to find another way. I walked downstream, then worked my way around, got lost, and finally recognized