Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, page 28
“Oh, I don’t know,” Catherine said, wincing as her entire back spasmed and she leaned over to stretch the muscles. Then, “You see what you have to look forward to when you’re my age?”
“Just stop it. You aren’t old,” Antonia said. “I used to get backaches all the time until I met—” She paused. “I’ve been told that lower backaches are a sign of financial stress. Is it your lower back?” Catherine said that it was and went to sit on the sofa, unable to bear standing, unable also, she conceded, to bear Antonia’s presence. She wondered then if the backache was a manifestation of the betrayal she was feeling. Please get out of here and never come back, she thought. “Look, you should let me help you out, Catherine. I have so much money now, and I’m your friend, and that’s what friends do.”
“In exchange for what?” she asked sharply, too sharply, she thought, and regretted it instantly.
“I’m sorry?” Antonia said. “What do you mean by that?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.” She sensed, though, that the current in the room had shifted, the air around them seeming to darken.
“Yes, you did,” Antonia said. “I’ve gotten to know you, and I know that you don’t say anything you don’t mean. So I’m going to ask you again: what did you mean by that?”
“We really should be getting to the store,” Catherine said and tried to rise, but couldn’t. “I’m going to need your—”
“We’ll go, but not until you tell me what you meant,” Antonia said firmly. She took a step forward, and paused. “I’m doing you a favor by giving this reading, remember, so the least you could do is be honest with me.”
Catherine stared at her, and it was as if the girl she had known—had imagined, she thought with displeasure—was fading to become the girl she had always been. In the last of the light, she could just make out Antonia’s face, the severity in it, and noticed again just how unattractive she was. “Henry told me everything,” she said at last. “He told me what you’ve been doing in that house. He told me all about your second novel.”
Antonia took another step forward, then paused again. “You’d really believe anything that came out of that man’s mouth?” she asked. “I’m surprised at you, Catherine. I didn’t take you for an idiot.”
I am an idiot, she thought sadly. She had just wanted a friend, a new friend, and here is what she had gotten instead. “Has it all been one big lie, or just most of it?” she asked.
“Oh, you people,” Antonia said, stomping her feet in frustration. “Where is it written that certain stories are forbidden to tell? Look at the world we live in, Catherine. I am a part of the world we live in, whereas you’ve always just been a visitor in it. I ask too many questions and I’m way too nosy and sometimes I hate myself for it, but it’s always with one purpose in mind—to get to the truth, because the truth is what I do.”
“The truth is what you do,” Catherine said, trying to rise again. “You’re twenty-three years old. I’m not sure you’d recognize the truth even if it bit you on the leg. There is a vast difference between what we know and what we think we know, and some stories, I’m sorry to say, just aren’t meant to be told, no matter how badly we’d like to tell them.” Henry was right about her, she thought. She does think she’s above it all.
“Do you know why I write fiction?” she asked. “Because I get to write about what I know, and learn about what I don’t. I get to discover the story as I go along. It’s never static, it’s always in flux, but you have to have the facts before you can begin to alter them. That’s why you’re going to let me see Wyatt’s manuscript.” And she turned her eyes from Catherine to the room, searchingly. “I didn’t come all this way for nothing, and you can’t honestly believe I’d let this story go because it’s going to hurt your feelings. No one cares where the story came from, only that it was told. I’ll tell it well, Catherine. Why can’t anyone ever see that I love my characters as much as I love the people they’re based on? Why isn’t that ever mentioned? I’m not just some selfish girl sitting at a desk. I’m a selfless writer trying to understand why we do the things we do and why we hurt the people we most love. What else is there, Catherine?”
Catherine didn’t know. She didn’t have an answer, and she didn’t want to think about the question. She didn’t know why anyone wrote. It seemed to her suddenly like the most ignoble profession anyone could have. Ignoble, ugly, self-indulgent, irrelevant—and just plain mean. She struggled off the sofa at last and moved painfully, slowly, past Antonia to the door. “There is propriety. There is privacy. Certain stories remain hidden because certain stories cause too much pain. I didn’t see it until this very moment, but you feed off the pain and suffering of others,” she said, opening the door, knowing that the moment Antonia left, the night and her job would be lost for good. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to leave.” Yet even as she held the door open and Antonia gazed through it, she understood that she would have to go on with her life as she had had to go on after Wyatt’s death. Antonia had been right about one thing at least—for the last year and a half, perhaps even farther back than this, Catherine had been a visitor in the world. She had clung fiercely to what little remained in the hopes of spinning the flimsy gray threads of her days into something more durable, something with value and weight. Tonight she finally saw that she had only managed to fray the threads until they had fallen apart in her fingers, as thin and as light as cobwebs.
When Antonia took a step toward her, Catherine braced herself by shutting her eyes. She felt the whoosh of air as Antonia hurried past her and onto the porch, where she stopped and said, “Like certain people, we stumble upon a story by accident and only when we’re ready, Catherine. You might not be ready to let the story go, but I’m certainly ready to take it from you.”
Catherine opened her eyes, angry now, and slammed the door. Then she hobbled over to the counter and grabbed her purse, because she had to face Harold; she owed him this much, she thought. Though she’d hoped and expected to have seen the last of Antonia, the girl still had not left the property. Now she was banging on the cottage door, shouting Henry’s name. When she heard Catherine approach, she spun around and asked, “He’s in there, isn’t he?” Yet Catherine simply shrugged. As Antonia returned to her assault on the door, Catherine turned to see a figure standing across the street. In the dark, she had a hard time making him out. It can’t be, she told herself, as she felt a flash of fear, and her back spasmed again. She had no idea what Royal Lively was doing across the street, when she’d been told that he had been arrested. He was not wearing his suit or his hat, like he had the last time she’d seen him, though she would have recognized his imposing posture anywhere.
Catherine was just about to warn Antonia about him when she lifted up her foot to take a step, and her back gave out. As she stumbled, she lost her grip on the purse, which tumbled out of her hands, the compact, lipstick, and manuscript spilling out. The girl looked down and without a moment’s hesitation reached for the manuscript. Then she sat down in one of the chairs, Henry forgotten for now. Catherine watched her unroll the rubber band and flip through the pages with an avidity she had never seen before. As she massaged the small of her back, the pain radiating up and down her spine, she wished she could do something to stop her. All the while, she kept wondering about Royal, and turning her head, she glanced at the spot where he had been standing; he was no longer there. His presence continued to baffle and appall her, just as Antonia’s behavior continued to distress her. When I get hold of the manuscript again, I’m burning it to ashes, she thought, trying to rise but falling back, again.
Then, suddenly, Catherine heard him behind her, a mere rustle coming from the lilac bush, nothing more, and she called out to Antonia. Later, after it was all over and they were rolling Catherine away on a stretcher, she could recall only the merest of fragments—Royal rushing out of the bush and Antonia dropping the manuscript, the pages being scattered by the wind, the horror on her face as Antonia watched them go, then turning her eyes on Royal, even as she went rummaging through her purse and rising from the chair and closing her eyes and Catherine saw the shiny flash of the gun in her fingers, which she was pointing directly above Catherine’s head. The air sounded with an enormous, explosive echo, as Royal Lively crumpled to the ground. When Catherine opened her eyes again and picked herself up from the ground where she, too, had fallen, she looked at the man sprawled behind her. She let out a cry, because it was not Royal Lively lying there but his brother, Linwood, Antonia’s father, who lay bleeding from a wound in his throat. She would recall how Antonia was again in the dirt gathering up the loose pages and how Catherine made her way over to her, wanting to comfort her, which shocked her, as it had been the last thing on her mind—to comfort this child who had just murdered her father.
“Antonia,” she said, but the girl was frantic now, grasping for this page and that page, seemingly unaffected by what she’d just done, by any of it, the gun now lying discarded in the earth. Unable to bend, Catherine had no way of getting the gun, no way of getting the pages, though she tried her best anyway, even as the girl ferociously swatted her away. “Antonia,” Catherine repeated, and pointed to the man lying in the dark behind her. The girl, though, didn’t seem to hear her, focused as she was on the pages, which the wind kept blowing away. Antonia was about to go after them but then stopped abruptly and stood up, as if what had happened had just registered. She gazed past Catherine, then took a step toward her father. When at last she realized what she’d done, every part of the girl drooped, her bones seeming to liquefy, and before Catherine could stop her, she had picked up the gun, and had brought it to her mouth. At least this was what Catherine thought she’d seen her do, but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t be sure of anything. She was only certain that she’d found the strength to rush at Antonia, knocking the gun out of the girl’s hand, though not before she’d already pulled the trigger and the pages went flying from her hand, the wind scattering them once more, all the pages of that godawful book, and the breath was leaving Catherine’s body, the ground rising up to her as her legs gave out again. The last thing she remembered before she collapsed was the blackness of the night rushing over her, and the earth under her, dampening from the blood that escaped from the hole in her chest.
Buzzards above the Bed
_____
After that, the night seemed to Catherine to be a constant surge of police officers and doctors and nurses, who came and went from her hospital room. To the police officers, she tried her best to explain what had happened, and to the doctors and nurses, she tried her best to convince them that she was fine to go home. She wasn’t fine, they told her. You’ve been shot, they told her. Rest now. They gave her morphine for the pain, and she sank into happy oblivion for a while. When she woke, the room was empty, though not entirely, because Wyatt was sitting in the chair beside the bed. “Oh, Wyatt, you’re here,” she said. “I just had the craziest dream . . . We’d rented the cottage to Henry. Why would we do that?”
“Henry’s gone. Hush now,” he said, and she did.
When she woke for the second time, Linwood Lively was sitting in the chair where Wyatt had been. “Oh, Linwood, you came back for her. She thought you were her uncle . . .”
“You have to tell her now,” he said.
“Tell her what?” she asked.
“The novel,” he said, and that was all.
When she woke up for the third time, it was morning, and no one was sitting in the chair.
They kept her for two days, then released her. The bullet had entered and exited without consequence, passing through her and leaving a deep flesh wound that would heal in time. She wore a bandage. “
You’re lucky,” the doctor told her.
She didn’t feel lucky.
JANE HAD SENT her jonquils, her favorite, but she did not take them home with her. She dropped the card in the trash, the card on which she’d written I’m still your friend. Love, Jane. She had not visited. No one had.
WHEN THE TAXI approached the house, Catherine shuddered, gazing out the dusty window at her quiet, tree-lined block, at the familiar sights, the familiar cars in the familiar driveways. Everything looked exactly as it always had, except that nothing was exactly as it had been. The painkillers worked marvelously, giving her a buffer against the chilling reality. She paid the driver, then she was standing at the edge of her yard. It was a hot, stuffy day, no wind, no sound, not even birds singing in the trees, which she found odd. It was as if someone had come along and vacuumed up every sound, she thought, remembering that she’d had the same thought on the afternoon she’d gone to see Henry. She moved slowly toward the cottage, knowing that he wasn’t inside it anymore, wishing suddenly that he was. Wishing that she’d never written that letter to her dean, wishing that he’d never been ousted from NYU, wishing that she’d chosen a different course of study than comparative literature.
In the house, Catherine disrobed, then took a shower, careful to keep the bandage dry. The muscles of her shoulder and chest were stiff, but that was about the extent of it. There were other pains, hidden and deep, that surfaced and sank again, as she moved about the rooms. She thought about Antonia and the gun, and about her father. The police had taken Catherine’s statement, then asked her if she wanted to press charges, but she told them she wanted to forget it, so no charges were drawn up.
We’re looking into the other matter, they told her, and asked her to explain again how Antonia had gotten hold of the gun.
“I lent it to her,” Catherine said, surprised at herself. “For protection.”
“The gun is registered to a Harold Brody,” they said. “He reported it stolen.”
“Not stolen,” she said. “I borrowed it. I told him that. He just didn’t remember. Antonia was unsafe,” she went on. “Her uncle . . .”
“The one we apprehended,” they said.
“Yes, him,” she said. “It was dark. Neither one of us knew. We thought it was him.”
“Then you thought you were both in imminent danger,” they said.
“Yes,” she said. “Imminent and horrible danger.”
“So it really was self-defense and an accident. Is that what you’re telling us?” they asked.
“Yes,” she said. “What else could it have been but an accident?”
Catherine dressed, then pulled the small suitcase down from the attic, and filled it up with clothes. She grabbed her purse and her keys and headed out to her car. She needed to be somewhere, anywhere that was away from here, and she was about to get into her car when she looked down to see a book—a battered copy of Antonia’s novel—sticking out from under her car. She picked it up and tossed it in the passenger’s seat, then threw the suitcase in back. She was leaving. As she reversed out of the drive, she gazed at the cottage, at the spot where she’d fallen in the dirt, still stained with her blood. She looked also at the spot where Linwood Lively had died. She sighed. Nothing was right or would ever be right again, she knew, and Catherine felt the summer expand and contract around her. She thought about the day Antonia had shown up at her door, called out her name, and stepped into the house, drawing Catherine away from the chaos of grieving. Moments like these came out of nowhere, the announcement of a stranger. But who had been the real stranger, Antonia or her?
Life sends us people all the time, she thought, and we either invite them in or send them on their way. On that afternoon in June, she had invited Antonia into her house and felt the passing of something between them.
Catherine took the road that led over the Kissing Swans Bridge and crossed the sparkling water, thinking about Wyatt. She hadn’t been back to the bridge in ages. In a few hours, the bats would awaken and take flight, filling the night. The further she drove, the more her thoughts returned to Henry, but she was going, heading into the mountains and beyond them to the interstate. The Corolla shuddered the higher she climbed, and she wondered if she’d make it. The engine groaned, the gears cranked, and the radio came in and out, broken lyrics and sharp crackles of static. She gazed down at Antonia’s novel, at the girl’s face staring up at her. In it she saw her own face, or at least a resemblance. In the photo, Antonia was smiling, looking out from clear blue eyes that hadn’t yet seen the sights of this summer.
Finally the car stalled. It was an old, unreliable car, but she loved it and talked to it now, saying, “You can do it,” saying, “Don’t let me down.” When it started again, she turned it around and headed back into Winslow, to the garage, where she dropped the car off, knowing that she had no money to pay for whatever the mechanics would find wrong with it. Then, reluctantly, she called Jane, who was there in fifteen minutes, happy to see her, overjoyed that she’d called. Jane, her friend, and when Catherine saw her she began to cry, and began to tell her the story about Antonia Lively, and about all that was, and all that was not, and about all that would never be.
The House at the End of the Block
_____
Catherine spent a week with Jane, who nursed her and changed her bandages. She got her tea and scones from Maddox Cafe and brought home a different movie for them to watch every night. To Catherine, it was almost like being back at college, with only the best parts of it. They were girls again, and they went swimming in Jane’s tidy, well-kept pool and had dinner on the sunporch, under swirling ceiling fans. Catherine was pleased that Jane did not mention what had happened, or encourage her again to bring up Antonia or Henry.
One afternoon, Catherine was headed out for a walk, when she saw Jane pull up in the Corolla. It was dusk and the distant mountains were gilded under the last of the sun. “No more stalling,” Jane said, handing Catherine the car key. “It should run for another hundred years, or so they tell me.”
