Although Ethan didn’t say it, I think it may have put into perspective the trouble he was in with regard to the pocket watch.
“It’s okay,” I said to Mom. “I’ve explained things to Ethan.”
Mom took a breath and said, “Marla’s in the hospital.”
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“She... Agnes and Gill had taken her back to their house. Marla couldn’t go home. She was left alone in the kitchen for a second and...”
“No,” I said.
Mom nodded.
“What?” Ethan said. “What happened?”
I looked at him. “Marla tried to kill herself. Is that right, Mom? Is that what happened?”
She nodded again. “I have to get off my feet.” I shot up out of my chair and pulled hers out for her. Once she was settled in, I sat back down.
“How?” Ethan asked. “Like, with a knife? Did she stab herself? Did she turn on the oven and put her head into it? I saw that on TV once.” He might as well have been asking how birds fly. Pure, simple curiosity.
“Jesus, Ethan,” Dad said. “What a thing to ask.” He looked at Mom and asked, “How did she do it?”
“Her wrist,” Mom said wearily. “She cut her wrist.”
“That’s where all the blood comes out,” Ethan said, in case we didn’t know.
“You know what?” I said to him. “Why don’t you go do something?”
Ethan wiped his mouth with a napkin and dropped it on the table. “Okay.” He knew this wasn’t the time to push it.
Once he’d left the room, Mom asked, and not for the first time today, “What are we going to do?”
Dad said, “There’s not really anything we can do. Makes you wonder, though, if she really did do it. I mean, why the hell else would she try to kill herself?”
“You,” Mom said, looking at me. “You need to help her.”
“What would you have me do, Mom?”
“Really? You have to ask that? What have you spent your career doing? Asking questions, finding things out. You can’t do that for your cousin if you’re not getting paid for it?”
“That’s low,” I said.
“I don’t care! Marla’s family.”
“You want me to go around asking questions? What if I find out something that proves she really did this? What then?”
Mom pondered that for a second. “Then you’d find proof that she had a good reason.”
“Excuse me? For stabbing some woman to death?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean that she wasn’t in her right head. That she wasn’t responsible for what she did. If she did it, which I don’t think she did. Marla’s always been a good girl. Not quite like the rest of us, I know, but she’s not a mean girl. She’d never do anything like that. Not unless something had gone very wrong in her head.”
“Mom, honestly—”
“And besides, if it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t be sitting there right now.”
I went silent.
Dad said, “She’s got you there.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m not the only one with a bad memory,” Mom said. “You’ve forgotten what happened that summer at Agnes’s cabin?”
Marla had alluded to something when we were in the car.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “The raft. This is about the raft.” Back then, the Pickenses had built a wooden platform, about six by six, floated it on sealed oil drums, and anchored it a hundred feet from the shoreline. We’d go out there and dive off it.
“We’d told you not to go out there alone,” Mom said. “And especially we told you not to do flips off it. We kept telling you one day you’d hit your head on the edge.”
“Which, one day, I did,” I said, the incident now starting to come back to me.
“You knocked yourself out,” Dad said. “You did a flip, whacked your noggin on the edge of the raft, and went into the water unconscious.”
“Marla saw me,” I said.
“She was sitting on the dock, dangling her feet in the water, mooning after you — she had such a crush on you,” Mom said. “She saw you hit your head and go into the water facedown, and you didn’t move a muscle. She went running up to the cabin, screaming at the top of her lungs that something had happened. Agnes and I were sitting at the kitchen table playing cards. Agnes ran out of that cabin like she’d been shot out of a cannon. Jumped in the boat and went out there and got you.”
“I don’t really remember it,” I said. “I only remember being told about it, after.”
“You lost about a day,” Dad said. “Of memory. Agnes saved your life, but she’d never have had a chance if it wasn’t for Marla.”
“Think about that,” Mom said. “And you’ve got nothing else to do. You might as well be doing something useful.” She put her hand to her mouth, then reached out and touched my cheek. “I’m sorry. That was an awful thing to say.”
“And it’s not exactly true, anyway,” Dad said. “The boy got a job offer today.”
Forty years old, and still “the boy.” Still that boy who fell off that raft and nearly died.
“You did?” Mom said. “What is it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I have to think—”
“Randall Finley offered him a job as his right-hand man,” Dad said. “How about that?”
Mom looked nearly as horrified as when she’d taken the call from Marla’s father. “Finley? That horse’s ass? He’s offered David a job?”
“What’s wrong with Finley?” Dad shot back. “He’s a good man.”
“What’s he want David for?” she asked him.
“I’m right here,” I said.
“Gonna help him take another run at the mayor’s seat,” Dad said. “I bet, with David’s help, he could do it, too.”
Now she looked at me. “I forbid it.”
I sighed. “I haven’t given him an answer yet.”
“It pays a thousand dollars a week,” Dad said.
“I wouldn’t care if it paid a hundred thousand dollars a week,” she said. I had to admit, for that kind of money, right now I’d have done PR for the Taliban.
There was a knock at the door. Mom started to push herself away from the table, but Dad was already on the move. Once he was out of the kitchen, Mom said, “You can’t be serious.”
“It’d help until something better comes along,” I said. “I’m not a fan of the guy, but it’s a paycheck.”
She put her hand on mine a second time and closed her eyes. “Do what you have to do. I haven’t got the energy for this, not with everything else that’s going on. But I want you to help Marla. Will you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know how. But... okay. I’ll... I don’t know... I’ll ask around. Maybe find something that helps.” I smiled sheepishly. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten about the raft.”
“We nearly lost you,” Mom said, and sniffed. “I can still see little Marla, busting into the cabin, looking like she was almost in shock, saying, ‘David! David! David’s gone!’ I’ll never forget it.” She caught a tear with her finger before it had a chance to run down her cheek.
“Someone for you,” Dad said, standing in the doorway, looking at me.
“Who?” I said.
“She didn’t say. Just asked for you. I invited her in, but she said she’d wait outside.” His eyebrows went up half an inch. “Nice looker.”
Mom brightened. “Who is she, David?”
“I have no idea,” I said, “but I’m not going to find out sitting here.”
There was no one on the porch when I went out the front door. She was standing at the foot of the steps. I couldn’t tell who it was right away, given the dim porch light, and the fact that she was looking out toward the street, arms crossed over her chest.