her office, then checked the bathrooms, the locker rooms, the basement. They turned off lights as they went.
'Oh, I meant to ask you. I was hoping you could come with me to the cardiologist. Talk through the procedure with my doctor and me, the recovery and so on. Help me get the medications straight – you know how I am, I – '
'I'll go with you if you want me to. But I can't make promises about the cardiologist. Even if he is good- looking.'
Janet smiled as they came back into the gym, dazzlingly bright after the back hall. 'Damn Dee anyway.'
'You want to go out for something to eat? Or we could go to your house and I'll fix that salmon – '
'You know I just want you to…' Janet petered out. At a loss, she gestured at the big bright space, the purity and simplicity of it, all the good ghosts. Embrace life, she probably wanted to say. Find something like this. But she just came up with, '… be happy.'
'I know.'
They got to the front hall. Janet unlocked the switch cover and cut the gym lights and then the hall lights. The building was dark now and somehow much bigger. They went out onto the front steps, where Janet shoved the doors shut and checked them with a hard yank.
The sky was deep purple velvet, the street a harder dark pierced with blue streetlights and the metallic reflections of parked cars. Halfway down the block an SUV with a dead black windshield crouched, motor idling, just its parking lights on. The city made an encompassing whisper, a vast vacuum of white noise.
'Mom,' Cree began.
'Mm-hm?'
'I love it in the gym. With all the people there. All the noise and distraction.'
'It's not 'distraction,' Cree – '
'But let me ask you something. Can I?'
'Cree, it's not 'distraction.' It's called 'life'. If I push at you sometimes, it's because I want you to enjoy it. I'm sorry i f – '
'Mom, how do you feel right now? With the lights off, the gym all dark. If I wasn't here right now, and you were going to go out into the dark and go home alone as you usually do. As strong?'
'Well, this is not the safest neighborhood in Seattle… an older woman, alone, naturally I – '
'Not that part.'
They were still standing in the pool of light at the top of the stairs. Janet looked up at Cree. 'You mean, am I like the older waiter in that Hemingway story? 'Nada y nada y pues nadd? A little, probably. Sure. So what? 'It is only insomnia, many must have it.' Or however it goes.' She snorted.
'I'mjust saying, see, this is what /need to look at, this side. This set of feelings, you know? That's what I need to figure out. I don't want to fear it. I don't want to ignore it, or pretend it's less important than… back in there. That's all.' Hearing herself, Cree realized she was too serious, too urgent. She'd turned this visit into one of those cloaked good-byes.
Janet didn't answer for a moment, just stood looking up at her, concerned. After a while, she grinned a tight, small grin, to show she accepted the point, she got it. Mom always got it. She sighed. 'What I don't understand is why you come to me as some kind of… oracle if you're not going to listen to what I tell you. And I'm no good at being a damned oracle anyway.'
'I don't come to you as my oracle, Mom.'
'What then?'
'Hmm. More of a good luck charm. My lucky talisman. Gotta rub up against you once in a while.' Cree took her arm and hugged it against her side.
That seemed to please her. She shook her head, confounded. 'What is it with mothers and daughters?'
Cree shrugged. 'Beats me.'
Janet tugged her toward the steps. 'Okay. So I'm full of shit for the cardiologist caper. So take me home and let's eat something. If you promise to be a good girl, I'll tell you some other scandalous tales about your father. Deal?'
Cree wondered what it cost her to treat of him so easily, so cheerfully. Maybe not much – everyone was constituted differently in those matters. She promised to be good.
5
Lila Warren's eyes widened. 'Oh, I don't think so. I can't go back. No, I really don't think I can go into that house again.'
'Even in the middle of the day? Even if I'm with you?'
'You have to understand, I'm… i t has upset me badly. Very badly. It's been over three months now, I thought maybe I'd be getting over it, but I'm not. It's only getting… worse.' Lila's speech carried only a moderate accent of the Deep South, the stretched and rounded vowels.
They were talking across a low table and a pot of tea in the second-floor sitting room of Lila Beauforte Warren's house, on the northern end of New Orleans. From the windows, Cree could see over the grassy slope of the levee to the scattered trees of a shoreline park, and then to the vast flat blue of Lake Ponchartrain. The border between water and sky was straight as a ruled line and completely empty.
Lila's house was not one of the lavishly ostentatious piles Cree had passed as she drove here in her rental car, but rather a contemporary, somewhat smaller copy of a Greek-revival plantation house. And that described Lila herself, Cree thought: a contemporary, miniaturized version of a Southern businessman's wife. The sense was reinforced by the minute watercolors hung here and there, neatly framed, that Lila admitted were her own. The hand-sized floral still lifes were tiny and unobtrusive, yet their rich hues and slightly ominous darker tints suggested that a great deal of feeling had been compressed to fit within those little frames.
Perhaps Lila's diminution came from her current uneasiness. She was clearly struggling to cope with some recent, troubling experience. But there was also something habitual there, more deeply rooted. She had obviously lived with some kind of uncertainty and diminished sense of herself for a long time. Cree could see it in the rounded hunch of her plump shoulders, her small, uncertain hands, the tentative way she set the tray on the table and then rearranged the teapot and cups as if unsure she had put them in just the right places. Her eyebrows were uneven: One of them tilted up slightly at the center, enough to suggest a hint of alarm or doubtfulness.
And yet she was still rather pretty, Cree thought. She had shoulder-length, graying-blond hair that seemed to rebel against the controlled hairdo she'd chosen, a face with full lips and a generous but nicely upturned nose. Her knee-length blue knit dress, her makeup, the simple pearl necklace and earrings – all were good matches for her natural coloring. From the photos on the mantel, Cree could see that though she'd always tended toward the plump, she was one of those women who carry their weight mainly in bust and hips, retaining an enviably narrow waist.
The tea had had time to steep, and now Lila Warren poured a wavering stream into two fine china cups.
'Mrs. Warren – '
'Please call me Lila. I hate formalities. If we're going to get to know each other as well as you say we'll have to, we might as well start with that. Lemon? Sugar? I can get some milk if you'd prefer – how thoughtless of me not to have – '
'Lemon is fine, thank you. Lila, this is a lovely house. If your experience has been so upsetting, why do you still want to move back into Beauforte House?'
Lila sat with her cup hovering, saucer held beneath it. 'That's a very good question. And it's one my brother has asked. He would be quite happy to sell the house. Before this all happened, I just thought it would be good to keep it as the family center, our historic home. My children all have the Beauforte middle name, there's a lot of family pride there.
My youngest son just went off to college last fall, my last baby out of the nest, and I began to think, you know? About what a family is. About what it means to have a place where you all know it's home? Where everyone comes back to? I would very much like to provide my children and grandchildren with… that. It's not easy to explain if you don't share the sentiment.'
