CHAPTER 22 #3
Annabelle said this could take some time and to try and keep myself occupied. I’m writing now but I can see that as the pains grow stronger and more frequent I will no longer be able.
I spent time reading over this scrapbook, and I’m glad that Annabelle has made us do this.
It will be something we’ll cherish when we’re old.
I read over my last entry, how I wrote about our friendship helping us weather any storm.
How appropriate! Just as my pains started, the sky brought in thick gray clouds.
A storm is coming, the thunder already on the horizon, the approaching sound sending waves of panic through me.
I close my eyes, and lie back, and pray for the storm to be over soon.
Slowly, Piper lowered the page. “That’s the last page. But that’s not the end of the story, is it?”
The murmur of voices began again, the river of words that seemed to travel around Lillian and through her, too fast for her to understand them. But she thought she could hear Annabelle, telling her to breathe, that it would help take the pain away, and that one day the pain might be useful to her.
Lillian turned her head, the fine linen scratching her cheek, the bed now seeming to be a small, iron single bed instead of the mahogany rice poster. “No, it’s not,” she said, closing her eyes so she couldn’t see the ghosts anymore.
Helen’s voice came close to her ear. “What happened to the baby, Malily? Was it stillborn?”
“You need to leave,” Lillian whispered, hoping Helen would understand it was for her own good.
“Was he?” she repeated.
Lillian’s eyes fluttered open and rested on her granddaughter. “If I tell you, will you promise to leave?”
There was a brief pause while Helen considered this. She nodded. “And Piper?”
“She wouldn’t leave, even if I asked her.”
Helen nodded. “Tell us, then. Was the baby stillborn?”
She closed her eyes again, remembering. “No. He was born healthy and strong, with all ten fingers and toes. He was perfect.”
“Then tell us what happened, Malily. How did Samuel die?”
Lillian heard Josie’s voice now, from behind her, mixing with Annabelle’s like a chant. Tell her. She shook her head, trying to erase the voices. “Somebody turn on the radio. Please.”
Piper stood and moved to the nightstand and flipped on the radio, the volume loud and pulsing.
Josie’s voice came through the radio, clear and sweet and full of all the hours lost between truth and regret.
Time is a river, and it ain’t got no banks; I can’t go nowhere but down, down to the place the heart breaks.
Lillian jerked her arm from the blanket and slammed her hand down on the radio, shutting it off, the silence a solid presence in the room. “I need you to leave, Helen.”
Piper and Lillian watched as Helen made her way to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. “Did you ever love Grandpa Charlie?”
“I did. He was good to me, and I grew to love him.”
“But Freddie was your true love. The one you really never got over.”
She didn’t want to answer, but she had no more time for secrets and lies. “Yes, he was.”
Helen nodded. “I love you, Malily. Nothing I’ve heard so far and nothing you can say will change that.” She rested her forehead against the door. “And I’m going to find out anyway. You were the one who used to tell me never to hesitate when it comes to what I want, remember?”
Lillian closed her eyes again. “You don’t want this.”
Helen opened the door and Lillian briefly glimpsed Odella standing and taking Helen’s arm before the door closed.
Piper stood at the window, peering out at the alley of oaks, her body rigid with tension.
“You’ll want to sit down.”
Piper shook her head. “No, I want to stand.”
The corner of Lillian’s mouth turned up. “Annabelle didn’t like being told what to do, either. Her only weakness was when she thought those she loved needed her. Always to her detriment, I’m afraid.”
Piper returned her gaze to the window. “So what happened? After Samuel was born.”
Lillian stared at the radio, still hearing Josie singing. Time is a river. . . . She didn’t turn away this time, knowing there was no escape from the voices anymore.
“I need a drink.”
Without pausing, Piper moved to the armoire and poured Lillian a sherry and brought it to her before returning to her position by the window. “Tell me.”
Lillian drank the sherry in one gulp, and she felt the heat seeping into her veins, calming her. But the numbness evaded her, as if she were intended to feel every last word. She placed the empty glass on the nightstand and it fell over, but neither of them moved to right it.
“Samuel was born healthy. I’d known it was a boy.
And not just because Josie told me she could tell because of the way I carried him in my belly.
I felt him in my bones, the way a mother does.
” She smiled at the memory of her roundness, the swell of her belly and tenderness in her breasts.
She’d been proud of the changes to her body.
They’d made her feel older, more like a woman. Beloved.
“It was his body they found in the river, wasn’t it?”
The warmth of the sherry made her limbs feel weightless, like she was floating in water, carried downstream.
Her eyelids drifted closed and she was once again in the attic room in the house on Monterey Square, the window closed, locked in the stale, sweltering heat of the Savannah night.
Her sweat had drenched the clean sheets Annabelle had put on the bed, the warmth of the baby tucked up next to her burning her skin.
She spoke as if in the middle of a dream, feeling the heat and the damp sheets, the terror that gripped them when they’d heard the footsteps on the stairs.
“The baby was fussy. My milk hadn’t come in yet, and I couldn’t feed him. He kept crying because he was hungry, but he wouldn’t suckle. Annabelle thought to let him suck water from a soaked rag, and that worked for a spell, but he’d get tired of that and start crying again.”
“Did Freddie make it back that night?”
Her voice seemed to come from far away. “No. And not the next night, either. Things were bad right then. Two of Freddie’s friends and a white man had been found shot to death in a car in a field over in Summerville.
They’d been called agitators, going around to small towns and speaking out about their liberal views on the voting system and segregation.
Views that back then could get a man killed. ”
The late-afternoon sun had begun to drift down the horizon, its orange light peering through the blinds that Piper had opened. It outlined her profile against the window, making her appear as if she’d been etched in glass, so fragile to look at, but how deceiving.
“Annabelle was beautiful, too. But her beauty was different than yours. She seemed so strong on the outside, that people never guessed how vulnerable she really was. How easily broken.” She watched the younger woman for a moment, the delicate nose and cheekbones, the stubborn jut of her chin and the fisted hands that hid fingers permanently callused by holding a horse’s reins.
“They never said that about you, did they? I’m sure it was a surprise to everyone that you stopped competing. ”
Piper’s eyes were cold and unyielding. “Please don’t change the subject. When did Freddie finally arrive?”
Lillian threw the blankets off of her, the heat overwhelming.
“Why do you need to know this now? Can’t you just leave it alone?
Your grandmother is dead, and knowing the rest of her story isn’t going to change that.
” Her words were slurred, her body trying to give up a fight her mind wasn’t yet ready to.
“When did Freddie finally arrive?”
So persistent. Annabelle had been that way, too. Up until the very last letter Lillian had returned. Lillian lay back on the pillow, and went back to the small attic room, remembering the first flash of lightning that permeated the room with light before dipping them all into darkness again.
“I stayed in the attic room for two days, while Josie and Annabelle took turns watching over me, and making sure I ate. Sometimes they’d take the baby to stop his crying or to give him fresh water in a rag.
Dr. O’Hare came up once to let us know that someone had come to the house looking for Freddie or for me, and he told them he hadn’t seen either one of us for over a month.
But it scared him enough to come up to the attic to tell us none of us should come out.
That we should close the window because of the baby’s cries.
We’d already heard about the church fire, and the marriage records that were taken, so we figured if they were looking for me in Savannah, they’d probably already been to my daddy’s and told him what they knew.
It was only a matter of time, and we knew we had to get word out to Freddie not to come, that they’d be waiting for him. ”
“And then what?” Piper didn’t turn around.
Lillian tried to keep her eyes open, so she wouldn’t have to see it all again, but her lids fluttered closed, obliterating her comfortable bedroom at Asphodel and revealing the nightmare of a storm-ravaged night seventy years before.
“He came. We didn’t know it was him at first. Dr. O’Hare had gone to the store to get food.
He somehow managed to put the armoire in front of the door in the attic just in case.
We sat in the dark taking turns holding Samuel and trying to quiet him, daring to open the blinds only a little.
A black shelf cloud lay over the city, and Josie said it was a bad omen, that we needed to prepare for the worst.”
“And did you?”
“What could we do? We had nowhere to go. We had to sit there and wait, and pray that Dr. O’Hare came back soon, and that Freddie knew not to come near.” She waved her hand over the upended sherry glass. “I need another drink.”