A Rose by the Door Read online

  Nathan

  April 26, 1996

  Dear Jacob,

  Im not going to prom anymore. Susan’s dad found out about me getting suspended and he talked to Dr. Mabry and they both decided since I am suspended it isn’t right to let me go to prom. Thats best for Susan W. I think because by the time that dance rolls around I don’t think I’m going to be here anyway. I’ve had enough looking at Mom and knowing what she did. Told her last night that she had to get you back or else I was leaving, too. She said, “Oh Nathan, you wouldn’t do that, would you? Make me choose like that?” I said I would make her choose.

  From

  Nathan

  April 29, 1996

  Dear Jacob,

  Ive made a decision and I hope you wont get mad at me for being so hard about this but its how I know to fight everything. Mom either keeps both of us or she doesn’t get either one, but no matter what she does, the damage is done and I cant go back to seeing things the same way again. It doesn’t make any difference whether I stick around here or not. I got suspended so I cant go to school and I cant play ball or run track or go to prom. I know this will hurt her but its just the same as she’s hurt you and me so that’s fair. Wanted you to know I haven’t seen Dad at all since you left. He hasn’t come to see us.

  Nathan

  May 1, 1996

  Dear Jacob,

  This may be the last postcard you dont get from me because Im true to my promise and if she wont come through, then I wont be living here long. Might as well be graduated and gone already. There isnt anything good around here for me any more. I told Mom what I was thinking and she said I couldn’t do it and she wouldn’t back down. If you ever read these I want you to know I fought for you and I love you and I think what she did was wrong Jacob, thanks for being my brother

  Nathan

  As Gemma read each postcard, she moved slower and slower. When at last she’d completed them, she stared at the last one.

  Disbelieving.

  Gemma had the awful feeling that all she had known was left behind, that she had fallen over the edge of the world. For surely the world had an edge to it, and she was toppling off, with nothing to hang on to, nothing to understand. She did not know, at this awful moment, where she was headed. Something larger than life, larger than herself, larger than anything, had goaded her on.

  How could Nathan have a brother, and never say anything about it?

  Gemma had felt, since the day she’d found out Nathan died, that he might still be with her, watching her from someplace not so distant—that he still called for her from somewhere along the sandstone creek bed where they’d often walked or from the shores of Lake Mac where he’d loved to go. But at this discovery she felt as if she’d left even Nathan’s spirit behind her. Nothing she knew was as it seemed. She felt a vague sense of deprivation, as if she was homesick, only she didn’t know what she ought to be homesick for. Gemma felt erased, empty, blotted out.

  With quavering hands, she gathered the postcards and tamped them together on the night table. She laid them exactly where she’d found them, in a neat stack hidden beneath the fish stringer. Her chin dropped to her chest and she didn’t move.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mama? Mama? Where are you?” Goodness, Gemma had forgotten about Paisley. Here she came, waking up. Frantically, she latched the tackle box shut.

  “Just a minute, Paisley Rose,” she called in her best singsong voice, trying to make it sound as if nothing important was going on. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Just a second. I’ll be there in a second.”

  Gemma pulled the chair closer to the closet. It scraped across the floor with a complaint that made Gemma wince. She climbed up, replaced the fishing box on its shelf.

  She had carried the chair halfway back to the desk before she remembered the track trophy she had moved out of the way and set on the shelf.

  Gemma sighed and carried the chair back. She retrieved the trophy and climbed up again, reaching to put it back where it belonged.

  “Mama?” The door swung open and in walked Paisley. “Mama?”

  The trophy wobbled. For the second time, Gemma caught it. “Whew.” She breathed a huge sigh of relief. When she did, she grazed another trophy with her knuckle. It teetered, and another did the same beside it, as if they’d been connected, as if they’d been set up to fall like bowling pins.

  Desperately, she tried to catch them. She grabbed and caught only air.

  Gemma could do nothing but stand on the chair and watch them go.

  In slow motion they tumbled end over end, spinning, the shining gold runners on top, golden legs straining toward a goal, arms lifted high over their head with a wreath of victory. Both gold statuettes identical. Both of them hitting the ground. Both smashing to pieces on the floor.

  “Look what you’ve gone and done, Mama.” Paisley backed her way out the door, her eyes wide with terror. “Oh, look what you’ve gone and done.”

  Although Bea had left her house in a grim mood this morning, it had been, for all the major purposes in her book, a relatively good day.

  She had organized her desk and answered what seemed like a hundred phone calls, helping customers with new hookups and electricity questions and bills. She’d even handled one irate lady with great aplomb, explaining in detail why the conversion to natural gas did not make the woman’s charges decline.

  To celebrate, she and Geneva and several others had walked across the street to the Cramalot for drippy ham burgers and thick chocolate shakes to celebrate her return. The conversation had not hinged upon Nathan at all, but instead upon Geneva’s cataract surgery last month, which she claimed made her see so much better that she now realized she had wrinkles. “And you know what?” she’d grinned as she sucked chocolate milkshake into her straw. “I never knew it before, but you all have wrinkles, too.”

  Only two times had anyone mentioned Nathan all day and those had only been to find out how much money had been donated in his honor to the Antelope Valley Sunday school fund and if anyone had discussed putting up a memorial plaque in honor of the 440 Relay record beside the high school track.

  Perhaps the most fulfilling part of the day, Bea decided, was the surprising anticipation of returning home.

  During the past long five years, she had left for work early every morning and returned home each evening to find her house dark and silent and empty. Tonight, she’d return to cartoons on the television and the music of birdsong wafting through open windows, and Paisley might even greet her with one of those hugs.

  All those long hours at her desk Bea kept thinking, I wonder what those two are up to. I wonder if they’ve gotten outside to enjoy the sun. I wonder if they’ll leave the puzzle out so I can see what the picture looks like put together.

  Bea stared into her desk drawer as a dozen No. 2 pencils rolled.

  She knows I’ll never answer those questions. She knows I haven’t been talking since all those things she asked me at Nathan’s grave.

  Bea picked up a tiny bottle of correction fluid and twisted the lid open, used the brush to dab a white gob on a receipt.

  I wonder if I shouldn’t stop by the Superette to buy more cereal because I’ll bet they ate the whole box. I wonder if I should talk to Geneva about her grandson Cory baby-sitting Paisley because I’ve heard he does that sort of thing.

  In the end Bea stopped by the store not only to buy more Cap’n Crunch, but also to pick up tea bags and lemons so she could make iced tea. She pictured them sitting on the brick stoop out front, sharing details of their day, smelling the roses. And she picked up something for supper, too—chicken to roast for a salad, crisp Romaine lettuce and ginger dressing, with carrots she would teach Paisley to peel.

  “I’m home,” she sang out the moment she pushed open the screen, juggling the handle of her pocketbook with one arm and the heavy sack of groceries with the other. “What’s going on around this place?”

/>   She had expected them to come running to greet her. That didn’t happen. The Flintstones weren’t blaring on television. The windows weren’t open. The whole place felt as stifling and empty as if there wasn’t anyone there at all.

  Nobody had even turned on any lights.

  “Paisley?” she called out. “Gemma?”

  “Paisley is outside,” Gemma said from the kitchen chair in the corner, the corner so dark in the afternoon light that Bea hadn’t even noticed her sitting there. “She’s playing with Addy Carpenter down the street.”

  “That’s nice. I’m so glad she’s made friends with Addy.”

  “Are you?”

  “Why, of course.”

  There was something in the girl’s voice that Bea didn’t understand. She stepped into the kitchen and turned on a light so Gemma wouldn’t be in shadow. There she sat with the knobs of her knees aligned side by side, her chin propped in the cup of her hand, with an expression Bea couldn’t decipher. She sat with Bea’s huge Sneed family Bible open and spread wide in her lap, the thick set of pages balanced across her legs.

  “You got some reason to be reading the Bible?”

  “No.” Gemma responded softly, so softly it was like she didn’t want to hear her own words. “No. Not the Bible.”

  “What then?”

  Gemma leafed backwards through an entire section of Old Testament Books before her hand came to rest possessively on the frontispiece where Bea could see names, dates, lives, written in her grandmother’s hand. In her mother’s hand. And in her own. Gemma raised her eyes to meet Bea’s. “This is what I wanted to see. The names you’ve written yourself in the family tree.”

  Bea set the grocery sack on the counter and began to empty it. She set the lemons in a sunny pile on the windowsill beside Paisley’s one-stalked bean. She tore open the box of tea bags and began to align them inside the canister where she kept them. She did all these things because she was afraid to look up, afraid to interpret the inexplicable, afraid to understand the outrage on Gemma’s face.

  “What are you looking for?” Bea asked across the room.

  “I was looking for somebody’s name here, and I couldn’t find it.”

  “Somebody’s name?”

  “Yes.”

  Without thinking, Bea touched her throat. “Whose name?”

  “I was wondering how you could have a son and not write his name in the family Bible.”

  “Oh, his name’s there. Nathan. Don’t you see it?”

  “I see Nathan’s name all right. That wasn’t the name I was looking for.”

  Bea’s blood ran cold. This was it, then. Her lungs constricted. She knew, in one loathsome turning point, the name Gemma searched for and would not find.

  No.

  In that moment, in her sudden helplessness, all of Bea’s resolve was forgotten. She cried out in desperation to the very one she had accused of betraying her, to the very one she had charged with not hearing her, of not answering her, of not being trustworthy.

  No. No. Not this, Lord. Please. After everything else you’ve done, don’t do this, too.

  She answered Gemma, feigning innocence for a moment, buying herself time. “It wasn’t?”

  “No.” Gemma shut the Sneed family Bible with a loud snap. She held the holy book clutched between two hands, a wall between them.

  “What name, then?”

  A moment passed. Another. “You know which one I mean, don’t you? I see it in your face.”

  “I don’t,” Bea lied.

  “There was a boy here named Jacob. Two years younger than Nathan. What happened to him? Why isn’t his name written here with the others?”

  Oh, Lord. Please. Not this. Not now.

  Even as Bea spoke the words in her heart to God, she said the same words out loud to Gemma. Hair prickled at the base of her skull. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I beg you, Gemma. Not now. Leave this alone.”

  “This is it, isn’t it? This is why Nathan left home.”

  Bea put the groceries away. She threw the lettuce into the hydrator with a loud thud. She slid the chicken breasts across the top tray in the refrigerator and slammed the door. She scooted the grapefruit juice across the metal rungs, making the same sound as an Autoharp.

  Gone was the moment she’d imagined, when she would have set Paisley on a stool beside the kitchen sink, tied on the ancient black-checkered apron that had belonged to Bea’s mother, and taught her how to use the peeler to skin the carrots in brilliant orange curls. She dumped the plastic bag of carrots on the counter, dug the peeler out of the utensil drawer, and began going after them herself, holding onto a vegetable with one stiff fist while she skinned it with short, vicious strokes. Carrot peel flew against the side of the sink and stuck there.

  “Why are you asking about Jacob? I thought you said Nathan didn’t tell you.”

  “He didn’t.”

  Bea left the carrots. She dug a bag of birdseed from the bottom of the pantry and started to bang out through the door. Only then did Gemma lay the Bible aside on the kitchen table to reveal the awful thing hidden in her lap. Glancing there, Bea came to a standstill. Nathan’s trophies laid in heaped parts between Gemma’s knees.

  “No!” Bea let out a shattered cry. She released the bag of birdseed, dropped to the floor beside Gemma’s knees. “No. Oh, no.”

  “I broke them,” Gemma announced without emotion. “I went into Nathan’s room and I broke them.”

  Bea turned her tear-stained face up to Gemma’s. “Did you mean to?”

  “Of course I did. I’m not good enough to be a part of your family and you never wanted us here. Better to prove it now than later, don’t you think?”

  Bea grabbed for the pieces and swept them into the hem of her blouse. She rocked back on her heels, weeping, staring at the jumble.

  “All this time, we’ve been trying to prove we’re good enough for you. All this time, and I’ve learned there isn’t anybody good enough. You aren’t the kind of person who anybody can prove that to.”

  “You touched his things.”

  “Yes.”

  “You destroyed these.”

  “Yes.”

  “The 440 Relay Trophies. District and State. He was so proud of these. More proud than anything else he owned.”

  Gemma’s question might as well have been a rusty knife-blade in Bea’s heart. “If he was so proud, you tell me, why did he leave them behind?”

  Bea spoke the words from the deep, wounded place in her spirit. “Nathan wasn’t kind to you. He wasn’t. You know that, don’t you? He wasn’t.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “So much like his father. If he had been kind, he would have made sure you had a pretty wedding. He would have brought you home.”

  Bea lifted herself from the floor and gathered up what was left of Nathan’s treasures. The pain inside her grew so vast, Nathan might have just died again. Bea laid the fragments on the counter and began to piece them together, the same way Paisley and Gemma had pieced together the jigsaw puzzle earlier in the day.

  Her shoulders rose and fell with every word. “Maybe . . . I can . . . glue them . . . together.”

  “Leave them alone. Let Nathan be gone.”

  Unable to face Gemma, Bea retrieved the bag of bird seed and started for the door a second time. “Don’t follow me any more. I don’t want you anywhere around.”

  The bird feeder she went to fill had been empty for weeks; the squirrels in Bea’s trees always devoured the grain and corn before the jays and the kinglets ever got a chance. Bea removed the roof from the glass-sided feeder and began to pour in the blend of nuts and seed and thistle. She heard the door open and shut behind her. Gemma had followed her.

  Bea fitted the roof to the feeder back over the gambrel of the little hut. With her fingers, she spread a thin layer of seed in the little trays. The feeder swayed from a low branch in the box elder tree. Back and forth. Back and forth. “Gemma, I think it would be best if you
and Paisley left me alone.”

  “It’s very easy for you, isn’t it, Mrs. Bartling, to ask people to leave your life?”

  “You read those cards in Nathan’s room, didn’t you?”

  Gemma clutched her elbows with opposite hands. “What does it matter how I found out? What matters is that I know.” Bea started toward the house. Gemma trailed right behind her. “Why isn’t Jacob’s name written with the rest of the family, Bea? Why did you send him away?”

  As Bea slammed back into the house, as she returned the wadded bag of seed to its place and started digging for the small globe bulbs to replace the ones that had burned out in the light fixture over the table, the voice came from some place within herself, from somewhere tarnished and wounded and embattled, the place she had quietly sealed off from herself like a tainted cavern.

  So maybe you’re there, God. So maybe you’re listening. Well, if you are, I have to tell you that I am angry. Angry. Every time I try to help somebody in your name, it causes more pain instead.

  Bea climbed on a chair and began to unscrew the lightbulbs, one by one.

  I gave you a chance once, didn’t I? I gave you chances a hundred times. Why should I ever trust you?

  “There are things in my life, Gemma, that I will regret until the day I die. I don’t need the two of you around to remind me of them.”

  The lightbulbs in her hand were hot. Unexpectedly so. Crazy. She’d been crazy. Why set out to change bulbs when the light had been turned on? Hot glass seared her palm. She juggled the hot bulbs and tried to get them to the table below her, but she missed. Glass shattered on the floor.

  Gemma stood before her with a sprinkling of glass across her feet. “Look at us, Mrs. Bartling. All we ever wanted was to know you. Me and Paisley, two broken things, when all you think about is broken trophies and dusty things that nobody but you even cares about any more.” Gemma reached up a hand for her.

  “I don’t want you to touch me.”

  “You’ve burned your hands. Let me help you down.”