“Lord deliver me,” said Mona, imitating Celia perfectly. “What does Aunt Celia know about raw eggs?”
She was so sick of the family discussing Rowan’s tiny likes and dislikes, and Rowan’s blood count, and Rowan’s color, that if she found herself in one more pointless, ineffectual, and tiresome discussion, she would start screaming to be let out.
Maybe she had just had too much of it all, from the day they’d told her she was the heiress-too many people giving her advice, or asking after her as though she were the invalid. She’d written mock headlines on her computer:
GIRL KNOCKED ON HEAD BY WHOLE LOAD OF MONEY. Or, WAIF CHILD INHERITS BILLIONS AS LAWYERS FRET.
Naaah, you wouldn’t “fret” in a headline today. But she liked the word.
She felt so terrible suddenly as she stood here in the kitchen that the tears spilled out of her eyes like they would from a baby, and her shoulders began to shake.
“Look, honey, she stopped the day before, I told you,” he said. “I can tell you the last thing she said. We were sitting right there at the table. She’d been drinking coffee. She’d said she was dying for a cup of New Orleans coffee. And I’d made her a whole pot. It was about twenty-two hours from the time she woke up; and she hadn’t slept at all. Maybe that was the problem. We kept talking. She needed her rest. She said, ‘Michael, I want to go outside. No, stay, Michael. I want to be alone for a while.’ ”
“You’re sure that was the last thing she said?”
“Absolutely. I wanted to call everyone, tell them she was all right. Maybe I scared her! I’m the one, making that suggestion. And after that, I was leading her around, and she wasn’t saying anything, and that’s the way it’s been since then.”
He picked up what appeared to be a raw egg. He cracked it suddenly on the edge of the plastic blender and then pulled open the two halves of shell to let loose the icky white and yolk.
“I don’t think you hurt her at all, Mona. I really, really doubt you did. I wish you hadn’t told her. If you must know, I could have done without your telling her that I committed statutory rape on the living room couch with her cousin.” He shrugged. “Women do that, you know. They tell afterwards.” He gave her a bright reproving look, the sunlight glinting in his eyes. “We can’t tell, but they can tell. But the point is, I doubt she even heard you. I don’t think … she gives a damn.” His voice trailed off.
The glass was foamy and faintly disgusting-looking.
“I’m sorry, Michael.”
“Honey, don’t-”
“No, I mean I’m okay. She’s not okay. But I’m okay. You want me to take that stuff to her? It’s gross, Michael, I mean gross. Like it is absolutely disgusting!”
Mona looked at the froth, the unearthly color.
“Gotta blend it,” he said. He put the square rubber cap on the container, and pressed the button. Then came the ghastly sound of the blades turning as the liquid jumped inside.
Maybe it was better if you didn’t know about the egg.
“Well, I put lots of broccoli juice in it this time,” he said.
“Oh God, no wonder she won’t drink it. Broccoli juice! Are you trying to kill her?”
“Oh, she’ll drink it. She always drinks it. She drinks anything I put before her. I’m just thinking about what’s in it. Now listen to me. If she wasn’t listening when you made your confession, I’m not sure it came as a surprise. All that time she was in the coma, she heard things. She told me. She heard things people said when I was nowhere about. Of course, nobody knew about you and me and our little, you know, criminal activity.”
“Michael, for chrissakes, if there is a crime of statutory rape in this state, you’d have to get a lawyer to look it up to be sure. The age of consent between cousins is probably ten, and there may even be a special law on the books lowering the age to eight for Mayfairs.”
“Don’t kid yourself, sweetheart,” he said, shaking his head in obvious disapproval. “But what I was saying is, she heard the things you and I said to each other when we sat by the bed. We’re talking about witches, Mona.” He fell into his thoughts, staring off, brooding almost, looking intensely handsome, beefcake and sensitive.
“You know, Mona, it’s nothing anybody said.” He looked up at her. He was sad now, and it was very real, the way it is when a man of his age gets sad, and she found herself just a little frightened. “Mona, it was everything that happened to her. It was … perhaps the last thing that happened….”
Mona nodded. She tried to picture it again, the way he’d so briefly described it. The gun, the shot, the body falling. The terrible secret of the milk.
“You haven’t told anyone, have you?” he said in a serious whisper. God help her if she had, she thought, she would have died at this moment, the way he was looking at her.
“No, and I never will,” she said. “I know when to tell and when not to tell, but …”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t let me touch the body. She insisted on carrying it down herself, and she could hardly walk. Long as I live, I’m not going to get that sight out of my mind, ever. All the rest of it-I don’t know. I can take it in stride, but something about the mother dragging the body of the daughter …”
“Did you think of it that way, like it was her daughter?”
He didn’t answer. He just continued to look off, and gradually the hurt and trouble slipped away from his face, and he chewed his lip for a second, and then almost smiled.
“Never tell anyone that part,” he whispered. “Never, never, never. No one needs to know. But someday, perhaps, she’ll want to talk about it. Perhaps it’s that, more than anything else, that’s made her silent.”
“Don’t ever worry that I’ll tell,” she said. “I’m not a child, Michael.”
“I know, honey, believe me, I know,” he said with just the warmest little spark of good humor.
Then he was really gone again, forgetting her, forgetting them, and the huge glass of gunk, as he stared off. And for one second he looked as if he was giving up all hope, as if he was in a total despair beyond the reach of anyone, even maybe Rowan.
“Michael, for the love of God, she will be all right. If that’s what it is, she’ll get better.”
He didn’t answer right away, then he sort of murmured the words:
“She sits in that very place, not over the grave, but right beside it,” he said. His voice had gotten thick.
He was going to cry, and Mona wouldn’t be able to stand it. She wanted with all her heart to go to him and put her arms around him. But this would have been for her, not him.
She realized suddenly that he was smiling-for her sake, of course-and now he gave her a little philosophical shrug. “Your life will be filled with good things, for the demons are slain,” he said, “and you will inherit Eden.” His smile grew broader and so genuinely kind. “And she and I, we will take that guilt to our graves of whatever we did and didn’t do, or had to do, or failed to do for each other.”
He sighed, and he leaned on his folded arms over the counter. He looked out into the sunshine, into the gently moving yard, full of rattling green leaves and spring.
It seemed he had come to a natural finish.
And he was his old self again, philosophical but undefeated.
Finally he stood upright and picked up the glass and wiped it with an old white napkin.
“Ah, that’s one thing,” he said, “that is really nice about being rich.”
“What?”
“Having a linen napkin,” he said, “anytime you want it. And having linen handkerchiefs. Celia and Bea always have their linen handkerchiefs. My dad would never use a paper handkerchief. Hmmm. I haven’t thought about that in a long time.”
He winked at her. She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. What a dope. But who the hell else could play off a wink like that with her? Nobody.