“Well, thank you,” he said, looking pleased. “For everything.”
He gave Deborah one of his wry smiles and winked at her. “But I’ll bet that’s the last time she answers her own phone.”
Copyright © 2006 Nancy Pickard
Cry Before Midnight
by Donald Olson
That a caterpillar could turn into a butterfly seemed a less remarkable feat of nature than the transformation of the girlhood friend Anna so fondly remembered into this willow-thin, middle-aged woman, brown as a gypsy, with a mane of strawlike hair which looked as if it had been trimmed in a windstorm with a pair of pruning shears.
“My dear, I swear to goodness I wouldn’t have known you,” declared Anna as they drove toward the lake under a brooding late-autumn sky.
She had prepared herself for a certain shock of unrecognition when she picked Maureen up at the airport. Although Maureen had dutifully kept up her end of the correspondence, unlike Anna she had never sent so much as a single snapshot to record the inevitable change in appearance over the twenty-five years since they’d last seen each other. Consequently, Anna still carried in her mind the image of a seventeen-year-old girl inclined to plumpness, with excitable brown eyes and feather-cut raisin-colored hair.
It was of their childhood days that Anna chattered all the way to the house, as if wanting to forestall the questions Maureen must have been dying to ask ever since receiving Anna’s urgently worded telegram.
“I’m impressed, girl,” said Maureen as they climbed out of the car. “You did yourself proud.”
Anna pursed her babyish lips. “A prison, that’s what it’s been.” Though undeniably an imposing one: a tree-girdled red-brick colonial, all massive chimneys, creeping ivy, and black shutters, with a sweeping stone-balustraded terrace overlooking the lake, slate-colored now under a dull metallic sky.
Anna helped Maureen with her bags. “A hatbox? Don’t tell me women wear hats in the wilds of New Mexico.”
Maureen smiled. “I don’t use it for hats.” In the foyer she unstrapped the lid and carefully lifted out a heavy receptacle. “One of my replicas of a Cochiti polychrome storage jar.” Globe-shaped, with a short tapering neck about as wide as a fist, it was decorated with a bird motif between bands of brilliant black and red. “The perforated stopper’s my own concession to modernity, so it can be used for a variety of purposes.”
Anna gushed over the workmanship but when she would have examined it more closely Maureen stopped her with a laugh. “No, no, mustn’t touch. It’s a gift for Carter.”
“For Carter?”
“Oh, I have something for you, too, but I thought Carter might be less antagonistic — if I brought him something special. You wrote about his passion for rock candy. Well, the jar’s full of rock candy.”
Anna bit her lips and looked worried. “How sweet of you, but I’m afraid Carter’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“Come into the living room. I’ll fix us drinks before you unpack. I’m dying to tell you everything.”
“Things can’t possibly be as desperate as your telegram implied.” In the other room Maureen fished the telegram from her snakeskin bag and read it aloud: “Something terrible has happened. Need you desperately. Don’t fail me. Come at once.”
An endless flow of long, intimate letters had kept the friendship alive, Anna’s far more emotionally extravagant than Maureen’s, but it was probably that difference in temperament that helped account for the youthful bond between them. After high school Anna had married well, moved to Porthaven, lost a baby in childbirth. Neurotic complications had ensued, contributing to the gradual erosion of the marriage while Anna poured out her misery and self-pity in effusively indiscreet letters to her friend across the continent.
Maureen, the loner, the artist and dreamer, had eventually settled down near one of those historic Pueblo ruins in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains south of Taos, New Mexico. There she had established her own pottery, eking out a modest legacy from a deceased aunt by selling her works in shops around Santa Fe and Albuquerque. Her descriptions of the solitary life had filled Anna with horror; she could not conceive of such an existence, without even a phone or running water, but she’d had the good taste not to express her distaste, for that flow of letters had become as essential a lifeline to her as blood transfusions to a hemophiliac. Without you I would go insane became a recurring theme in her letters to Maureen. Anna’s husband Carter, as much a victim of the doomed marriage as Anna, regarded the correspondence with sardonic disapproval, using words like “unhealthy” and “pathological.”
Now Maureen regarded the other woman with a faintly sceptical look, as if the telegram couldn’t have been dispatched by the same person who sat facing her with no sign of mental distress in her heavy-lidded, protuberant blue eyes. “You always did have a talent for hyperbole.”
“I meant every word! It was the last straw. The final crisis.”
“You’re talking about Carter.”
“Who else?” Over the years Anna’s voice had acquired an habitually carping tone.
“So why didn’t you leave him? You never did give me a straight answer in your letters. And all that rubbish about planning to kill yourself. Really, girl.”
“I meant that, too. I even changed my will, just as I told you. Everything I have goes to you.”
Maureen lifted her hand and with the fingernail of her pinky scratched delicately at the corner of her eyebrow. “There are less drastic ways of ending a marriage.”
“How could I leave Carter? At my age? What would I do? Where would I go? We had a frightful row the other night, the very worst.”
“That’s when he left?”
“Yes.” Anna’s lips quivered, her gaze falling away from Maureen’s intense scrutiny.
“So I should think your problem is solved. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? To be rid of Carter?”
“If it were only that simple.”
“You mean he’s not gone for good?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Girl, what is it you’re not telling me?”
Anna flung her hands apart. “Oh, so much. I could tell you anything in a letter, but now... I thought it would be so easy.” Indeed, pouring out her soul to the visionary Maureen, the distant mother confessor, was quite different from exposing herself to this flesh-and-blood Maureen with her piercing, cynical way of cutting through Anna’s flabby defenses. “Give me a little time,” she pleaded. “Let’s get you settled first. You must be exhausted. I’ll show you your room and you can have a rest from me while I prepare dinner.”
Back in the foyer, Maureen said: “So much for my gift for dear Carter.”
Anna looked wistfully at the painted jar. “I’m afraid candy is strictly forbidden in my case. I’ve been diabetic for years.”
“I know.”
Anna looked a bit shamefaced. “I wonder if there’s anything about me you don’t know.”
“Thanks to your letters, I could probably write the definitive biography of Anna Lyman, complete with footnotes.”
“Carter always said I didn’t know the meaning of the word restraint.”
“And such a memory. I’d all but forgotten many of the little escapades and secrets we shared.”
Anna sighed. “Such happy times. At least I had a carefree childhood. Anyway, the jar is lovely. I’ll put it in Carter’s study for now.”
“Better let me, it’s quite heavy. Just show me where.”
Over dinner, Anna continued to evade Maureen’s questions, prompting her friend to talk instead about her own experiences “in the Wild West,” and then trying to disguise her boredom as Maureen rattled on about the Pueblos and their customs, on one of which she appeared to have become an authority. Lecturing Anna on everything from the symbolic importance of the eagle and antelope in Pueblo culture to the grisly aspects of religious dances she’d witnessed in the kivas, where whipsnakes and diamondback rattlers are smothered in cornmeal by the Pueblo women and then fearlessly snatched up by feather-bedecked male dancers.