Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [75]
The sound of giggling bubbled up from the bottom of the hill, where the three girls lay on their backs, breathless and laughing, their hair and clothes covered with grass and bits of twigs. The lazy August sun fell on the girls’ hair—blond, black, and red—and Lee was reminded of seeing a herd of horses in a field when he was a child, and how pleasing he found the different-colored manes.
Looking at them, it was hard once again to imagine anything was wrong in the world, or ever would be.
He heard the familiar sound of the front screen door slamming and turned his head toward the house. For one painful instant, he expected his sister to be coming out onto the stone porch to wave at him. He had to blink to clear his eyes when he realized that it was, of course, his mother.
“Hi,” she called, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Where’s the birthday girl?”
Lee pointed to the bottom of the hill, where the girls had gotten up and were brushing the grass from their clothes, still laughing. He didn’t want to disturb the sweetness of the moment, so he turned and joined his mother on the front porch.
Fiona Campbell greeted her only son with a quick, firm kiss on the cheek, then held him at arm’s length, grasping his shoulders with her long, strong hands.
“So glad you could make it,” she said. “It means a lot to Kylie.” She would never say it meant something to her, too—that was not her style. “What on earth did you do to your arm?” she said, frowning.
“I ran into a door.”
She raised a single eyebrow, but didn’t say anything more about it. That was typical of her—the less said about unpleasantries, the better.
His mother was tall and straight, as lean as the day she was married to Lee’s father. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a businesslike sweep of bangs, short in the back, just reaching the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes a clear, piercing blue, and she walked with the unyielding step of a woman who has never known a moment’s self-doubt.
Loss was the touchstone of his family’s life, and his mother was both ridiculous and rather heroic in her refusal to bow down to it—indeed, to recognize its existence. The straightness of her spine, the clearness of her gaze in the face of disaster were both vexing and full of an odd grandeur, like a Greek tragic heroine.
Lee turned to see George Callahan emerge from the house. He was Kylie’s father, and Lee believed that a kinder, more patient man had never walked the earth.
“Hi, George,” he said, extending his left hand.
“Hey there, fella,” George replied, grasping Lee’s hand in his enormous paw, holding a beer in the other. George was big and blond and bluff, with a touching awkwardness around other people. When there was work to be done, he was your man—hardworking, honest, reliable—but in social situations he always seemed to be struggling to overcome his natural shyness. Big and broad-shouldered, he never really looked at home at the kind of cocktail parties Lee’s parents had favored. He was much more comfortable in front of a grill, flipping steaks, spatula in one hand and beer in the other. He was wearing blue jeans and a freshly ironed white shirt on his generous frame, and wore his straight sandy hair slicked back. His square face was shiny and pink, as though he had spent the day in the sun.
“What’d chya do, get in a fight?” George asked, indicating Lee’s injured arm.
“Yeah—but you should see the other guy.”
George laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet!” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “Can I get you a beer?”
“Sure.”
“Comin’ right up,” George said happily, lumbering back into the house. He loved waiting on people—it was talking to them that presented problems.
“So it’ll just be the three of us and the three girls,” Lee’s mother said, sitting in one of the chaise longues on the porch. “Kylie will have another birthday party at school