Pulling onto the shoulder, she stared at the peaked roofs among the silver birch and red maple trees. People down here longed to live in one of those mansions, like Brenda Sampson did. Although Constance lived in another mansion on the west coast, these mountainside ones, with their steep pitched roofs like steeples jutting up to God, remained the prize, even for her, after so many years. No amount of time away had changed that and her weakness sickened her.
She felt a stabbing pain in her chest as, closing her eyes, the humiliations and cruelties her mother and she endured came back, with nauseating clarity.
Although her mother trained as a teacher before coming here, the only school in Amelia was run by small-minded people who saw John Hunter’s drunkenness as a mark against his wife. They couldn’t entrust their children to such a woman, although they did entrust them to women like Miss Pennington, Constance’s fourth-grade teacher, who went out of her way to humiliate her students, especially Constance. Once she refused to allow Constance to go to the washroom and when it was evident Constance had had an accident, Miss Pennington alerted the other students by holding her nose and pointing at the girl.
The others turned, following the wooden stick and staring as Constance’s face became redder. They waited for her to cry and when she did, turned back to their teacher’s nodding head.
Only Brenda Connors had a pitying look and, after school, she kept the bullies away by screaming she would have her father tell Roger Sampson’s what they’d done.
“Mr. Sampson will fire your fathers,” she said.
It was a bluff the bullies couldn’t afford to call, because people had been fired from the factory for less.
Constance’s mother refused to work there, although she was offered an easy, well-paying job in the office, instead cobbling together work in coffee shops and restaurants, and at the Majestic Hotel, where she was forced to serve Roger Sr. and his wife. Some nights, Ruth would come home from the hotel raging, her hands tight, hard fists that found a target on Constance’s arms.
“If it wasn’t for you, I would have gotten away from here,” Ruth said during the worst of her rages, and although she always apologized, insisting she didn’t mean it, the words lingered, souring things between them.
When Constance was back in Amelia, everything played, over and over, like a reel that wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t gird herself with her successes since leaving. It was as if all of that evaporated once she was here, and Constance became the same frightened girl, hunching her shoulders and waiting for the next blow.
She knew she should leave — should never have come back again — but couldn’t turn away from the promise she made her mother.
The Sampsons would pay.
Twilight had set in when Constance got back to the hotel. In her suite, she pulled off the short red wig and shook out her own tarnished silver hair. Scrolling through the movie channel, she settled on Rear Window. Meeting James Stewart at a party was one of her best memories of Hollywood, the man gracious and kind.
The Hollywood of the 1970s was a different place from when he was one of the town’s biggest stars. When Constance became the next “big thing,” it was only because she had a face and body the industry wanted at the moment. For a while, she was more than willing to use both to distract people from her lack of talent and, for someone who always had to scrape to get by, the money she was paid was irresistible.
Still, like most young women in Hollywood with few skills to make their careers last, she went from being the next “big thing” to “Who is that?” with alarming speed. Roles dried up the closer she got to thirty and men were happy to save her further tragedies in love by turning their eyes elsewhere.
None of this bothered her much, since she had never been comfortable in Hollywood and hated feeling like a commodity. She was happy enough to take her money and run.
When Rear Window finished, she turned out the lights and sat by another rear window, looking at the manicured lawns that sloped down to tennis courts and an outdoor pool. Being a guest here was more than she could have imagined growing up, but even now, she felt out of place.
All the money in the world couldn’t make you comfortable in a world of people who didn’t want you.
Pouring another glass of wine, she felt the familiar catch in her chest and chased her evening pill with the smooth burgundy.
Sleeping fitfully, she awoke early, panicked and unable to get her bearings. The heavy brocade draperies were shut tight against the moon and the room was so black that, for a moment, she couldn’t see her hand when she wiped perspiration from her forehead.
After breakfast, she drove back to town for a bottle of good wine for dinner, although she and Brenda had happily shared the yeasty homemade wine Constance snuck out of the house. They were fifteen then and still fooling themselves that they could stay best friends, together forever, despite the money and privilege separating them.
Constance watched the merchants open their stores for the day. Some of the buildings had been boarded up since she was last here and the bright trim on others looked desperate, like a too-wide smile masking fear, just like her own. The street was anchored by grey-stone buildings, the church to the left and the library to the right.
St. Thomas, with its red doors and bell imported from England, beckoned the faithful inside, although there were few faithful in Amelia when Constance was growing up and, she imagined, even fewer now. Still, they trickled through those doors, taking their place behind the Sampsons, who filled the front pews.
Sampson money built the church just as it built the library, which also had few faithful, but both endured as evidence of the family’s devotion to God and culture.
Constance hadn’t been in the church since her mother’s funeral. A few others had been scattered through the church that morning, but more for the reception afterwards than in sympathy for her loss. Roger Sampson, Sr., slipped into a back pew, leaving before the final benediction, and her own Roger had shown up too, with Brenda and their son, but when Constance followed the coffin outside, they too were gone. It was just as well, as she couldn’t imagine, in her grief, what she would say to them.
Brenda had given her directions to the house, but both knew there was no need. Constance had snuck into it with Roger many times that last summer.
She chose a royal-blue dress for dinner, the color he said he loved her wearing. Then, the blue complemented her strawberry-blond hair. Now, after a rinse thrown into her hair this morning to mask the yellowness, the blue would complement silver. The dress was form-fitting, the expensive wool expertly tailored. Pearl earrings and an accompanying string around her neck completed the look she wanted Roger to see: elegant, in control, and worthy of walking through that front door, her face gleaming in the polished wood as she passed, instead of sneaking through the dimly lit pantry.
Still, for all her outward confidence, Constance parked by the lake, trying to steel her courage. As she sat there, lines from a favorite poem came to her, with its images of dark woods and promises to keep, and like the passerby in that verse, she had much more to do before she could shake this place from her shoulders and sleep.
Sighing deeply, she pulled back onto the road and started her climb up the mountain. Beside her was the wine she brought for herself and Brenda, as well as a bottle of single-malt scotch, the favorite brand of the Sampson men. She’d tucked the pills into a pocket of her dress, hidden behind folds at the waist, a lethal combination for people, like her, with heart conditions. It was frightening how easily people’s health records could be obtained, for the right amount of money.