The Myth of Perpetual Summer Page 2

  “You could easily get someone with more experience. This is a high-profile case with national attention. Lawyers will come after this case like a shark after blood in the water,” Ross says. “But Amelia is really good. And she cares about the outcome, not the media exposure she’ll get. She can devote the time. And she’s not asking for a huge retainer. She’s already contacted the Orleans Parish jail to get in to see him.”

  I don’t admit it, but that retainer would be a problem. I have a little savings, but I’d have to borrow the rest. And going through that kind of credit scrutiny will be blood for the sharks in my own particular waters—Keith and Stan are already circling at the foundation.

  “Have you called your grandmother?” he asks, his voice more neutral than his eyes.

  “No.” I almost can’t ask the question, but the wrongness of my assumption about Mrs. Saenger blindsided me. “Do you know if she’s still at Hawthorn House?”

  “As of last Christmas she was. She sent Griff birthday and Christmas cards here, even after I wrote to tell her he was gone.”

  The relief that rushes through my veins tells me I love her far more than I resent her. Still, just the thought of that emotional conversation makes me sway.

  “But when I called yesterday,” he says, “there was no answer. Do you want to try now?”

  I should say yes, of course. But I don’t have the strength.

  “You don’t want to talk to her.” Ross has not lost his ability to see inside me. He’d been that way since the moment he saved my life.

  “I’d rather not. Not right now.”

  The look that crosses his face makes me feel like a wayward child—and I suppose in a way I am. But at the moment, I can barely form thoughts into words.

  Ross nods. “I’ll try again. You look ready to drop. Have you eaten or slept?”

  “I can’t eat. The mere thought of food . . .” I shudder.

  “Let’s get you upstairs. You can take a hot bath and get a nap.”

  “I’ll call a cab, get a hotel. Then I should go see Walden. He needs to know he’s not alone.”

  But he is alone, because you left him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll stay here. And there’s no way you’ll get in to see him today. Amelia hasn’t even gotten in yet.” He’s already in the front hall, picking up my suitcase.

  The thought of going back out into that sweltering heat makes me dizzy. I’m not sure I can even drag myself up the long, curved mahogany staircase.

  I follow him to a bedroom with ice-blue draperies, bedspread, and filigree on the wallpaper. Just looking at it makes me feel cool and calm.

  “There’s a private bath through that door. Get some rest, you’re going to need it.”

  As he’s backing out of the room, I say, “Don’t let me sleep long. I want to go see him as soon as—as—” I put my hand over my eyes. The first tears I’ve allowed since this all began start to fall. I turn away and wave Ross from the room.

  I hope he doesn’t try to comfort me. I’m too worn to ward it off and too weak to not crumble.

  After a couple of seconds, his soft footsteps move away and I hear the door quietly close.

  I reach into my purse and pull Griff’s lucky arrowhead out of the zipper pocket. Then I curl on my side on the cool bed, clutching it to my chest, and allow myself a regret-filled cry.

  * * *

  I dream of a storm-filled sky, lightning bolts and tree-stripping winds. A dark swirling twister barrels down on me as I chase Walden, his blond hair bobbing ahead of me, a bright spot in the dimness. We’re surrounded by endless acres with no shelter. The roar is right at my back, the wind ripping at my clothes, snapping my hair in my face. Then the noise rises over my head, the funnel skipping over me. Then descending, plucking Walden from the earth, his small feet still running as he hangs in the debris-filled air.

  I wake yelling his name.

  Feet thud up the stairs and down the hallway, stopping abruptly at the bedroom door. I hear Ross’s hand on the knob before he pauses, then knocks. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” A drop of red falls onto the wide bell of my pants, standing out against the argyle design. I open my hand to see I’ve squeezed the arrowhead so hard I’m bleeding. “Oh shit!”

  The door bursts open, and Ross is by the bed before I can blink. “What happened?” He heads into the bathroom, returning with a thick blue towel. When he tries to wrap my hand, I pull it toward my chest, careful so the blood doesn’t drip onto the bedspread. “It’ll ruin it.”

  Confidently, yet gently, he takes my hand and flips the towel around it. “It’s a towel, for God’s sake, not an heirloom.” Then he looks in my eyes. “Lulie, did you . . . ?”

  The sound of the nickname I haven’t heard in years sends a clammy shiver across my skin. “Did I what?”

  “Try to hurt yourself.”

  “Of course not!” The idea of him trying to dig around inside my head irritates me. “If I was going to kill myself, I’d have done it in San Francisco where nobody would find me until I was good and dead.”

  He surprises me by laughing. “Only you, Lulie.” After a pause, he says, “At least you answered one of my many questions.”

  “And that is?” I pull my hand and the towel from his grasp.

  “Where you’re living.” He raises a brow. “Alone?”

  “Very. By choice, if that’s your next question. And I’m not isolated in a filthy apartment filled with a hundred cats. I’m quite normal.”

  There’s something in the way he looks at me that makes me uncomfortable. I shift and get off the far side of the bed.

  “Normal is what I always wanted for you. Of course, normal is a relative term. And quite separate from happy or content.”

  I head to the bathroom to run some cold water over my hand and rinse off the arrowhead. “Quite content,” I say over the sound of the running water. I adore my job, my apartment. I have acquaintances, not the emotional entanglements of deep friendships.

  I look in the mirror and see him leaning against the doorjamb to the bathroom. “So how did you cut your hand?”

  I finish rinsing the arrowhead and hold it up for him to see, but I keep my eyes on his reflection, not the real man.

  “Unusual good luck charm,” he says.

  “Talisman,” I correct. “I don’t believe in luck.”

  He steps closer behind me. “Do you still have a place to cast your anger and your fears?”

  I am so startled that I turn to face him.

  “You’re not the only one who remembers.” His gaze holds mine for a second, then he turns. “I’ll get some bandages for your hand.”

  As I listen to Ross walk down the stairs, I wonder—if I’d continued to toss my fears into a river, would things have turned out differently for all of us?

  * * *

  I’ve changed to the coolest clothing I brought, a flowered halter dress that felt totally acceptable in California but seems overexposed as I walk into the kitchen of this old Southern mansion. If Ross is shocked, he hides it well. He sets a grilled pimento cheese sandwich on the kitchen table and nods for me to sit.

  Funny, I’d forgotten all about pimento cheese. Just like I’d forgotten about the weight of the air.

  “It’s too hot for this,” he says. “But Mom always made it when things got rough.”

  “Thanks.” I know if I take a bite, it will grow in my mouth until I choke on it. I pick up half and try to at least look like I’m going to eat it. As Ross is getting glasses of sweet tea, I wonder which of the four chairs around the table was Griff’s when he lived here.

  Has he seen the news? Is he on his way back home?

  Even if he has, Walden is mine. Mine to protect. Mine to save. He and Dharma were always mine to care for.

  I pick a few pinches off the sandwich and drop them on the plate in an effort to make it look like some of it is disappearing. “Did you know my uncle sent Walden back to Lamoyne?”

  I relay yest
erday’s conversation with Uncle Roger.

  “Walden was unhappy.” Uncle Roger sounded every bit as distant and snobbish as my mother always described—before she amended her assessment when she needed to dump her kids on him, a man none of us had ever met. “We sent him back to his grandmother after two weeks.”

  “You separated the twins?”

  “It was for the best. We adopted Dharma—she’s made our lives a delight. She’s in New York, on Broadway.” His voice lifted with pride.

  “And her twin is headed to prison because you gave up on him after two weeks! He was a traumatized nine-year-old! How could you be so heartless? You need to get him a lawyer—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa there, little lady. First of all, you do not tell me what to do. Second, Walden is not my concern.”

  “Do it for Dharma,” I say. Your delight. “This will break her heart.”

  “I doubt that. She hasn’t seen him for nine years.”

  My hand tightens around the receiver. “Can I have her number? I need to call her.”

  “No, you cannot. Dharma needed a clean break from all that madness down there. That’s why I’ve thrown away every card and letter you’ve sent.”

  “You did what?” I wrote those letters so they would know I still loved them. I never expected a response, because I never included a return address.

  “Her time before she came to us is irrelevant. Do not, I repeat, do not drag her into this in any way. Her life has nothing to do with her brother’s, or yours—or my feckless sister’s for that matter.”

  “No. I didn’t know that,” Ross says. “Griff never wanted to go back to Lamoyne. He couldn’t stand you not being there.”

  “This all could have been avoided if Gran had let me stay.” The bitterness of her betrayal is just as choking as it was then.

  “Listen, Lulie, there was no good solution back in ’63. Not for any of you.” By the way he pauses, I know I’m not going to like what is coming. “As soon as you’re done picking at that sandwich, we need to leave for Lamoyne. I finally tracked down your grandmother. She’s in the hospital.”

  * * *

  Despite Ross’s assurances that Gran’s situation is not life-threatening, my pulse pounds in my temples and my hands fidget as I ride in the passenger seat of his Mercedes toward Lamoyne. I try to calm myself as I listen to Don McLean sing “American Pie,” glad for the noise of the radio.

  “I’m not sure I would have thought to call Mr. Stokes.” The admission is slow in coming, mostly because calling him is the most obvious thing to do and it didn’t cross my mind.

  “When I didn’t get her at home after several tries, I decided I’d better do something. I mean, a lot could have happened since Christmas. And this business with Walden—”

  “Are you sure it’s just high blood pressure?”

  “That’s what Mr. Stokes said. When I spoke to her on the phone, she called it ‘a little episode.’ We’ll know for certain soon.”

  My stomach drops to my ankles. After all this time, I’m going to face her—and all my assumptions are likely to be blown out of the water.

  “I hope her blood pressure doesn’t skyrocket at the sight of me.”

  “She loves you, Tallulah.”

  A long time ago, I believed that without question.

  At the sign announcing seven miles to go, my mouth goes dry. I realize I’m as nervous about seeing my hometown again as I am about seeing Gran.

  And I don’t relish doing either under Ross’s observant eye.

  We’ve made the turn off before I realize he’s taking us past Pearl River Plantation, a route he could have easily avoided by staying on the highway.

  Long strands of Spanish moss reach low over our heads, a veil shrouding the secrets I left behind. Foliage crowds the narrow road, its density so pressing I feel as if we’re going to be crushed. Living in the city, I’d forgotten how closed in a person can feel while still being outdoors. I open the window, only to be met with air so thick it feels solid and the sour smell of vegetation rotting in the humidity. Dark brown water fills the narrow drainage ditch running parallel to us. I see something slither into it.

  I thought I’d faced returning to the South when I arrived on Ross’s front steps. But the shock of seeing this place robs my body of breath and chills my skin. Before we left New Orleans, I put on the matching short, puffed-sleeved jacket so I won’t give Gran a coronary with my halter dress. I pull it closed over my chest. This is my homecoming, here in this quiet isolation, amid the leafy green vines that shape trees into monsters, on this dusty road I walked for over half my life.

  My time in California ceases to exist. My professional success evaporates. I am a powerless child.

  As we near the lane to my old home, I swear Ross is purposefully slowing down. At least he doesn’t point it out like a tour guide of my past.

  I can’t help but look. The painted sign is warped and peeling, the lettering no more than a washed-out memory of the vibrant green it used to be: PEARL RIVER PLANTATION—PECANS AND BLACKBERRIES—OWNERS: DRAYTON AND MARGO JAMES. I close my eyes and I see ten-year-old Griff standing in the heat with his ruler, swatting mosquitoes until he had the lettering perfect.

  The mailbox is missing, the graying post leaning away from the road. The lane is so overgrown I can barely see where it used to be.

  All these years, I assumed Gran was still running the orchard, even if the house was vacant and overtaken by mice. But the farm is a ruin. By now the blackberry canes are impenetrable and wild, and foraging animals are well-fed on the pecans. Our generation killed the James family legacy once and for all.

  It seems I created fanciful lives for all those I left behind, lives that had no basis in reality.

  Myths.

  2

  January 1958

  Lamoyne, Mississippi

  The Mississippi sky is angry; all swirling gray and spitting. Tiny white ice balls hiss against the stage set up in front of LaFollet Hall at Wickham College—well, in just a few minutes it won’t be LaFollet Hall anymore. It will be James Hall, a lasting tribute to our family. And the James family, at least our little branch of it, can use all the respectability it can get its hands on. This has only recently come to my attention—last spring, after my tenth birthday, to be exact. Daddy demands specifics when presenting oral arguments. I never used to notice the sideways looks and the whispers around town, or how people abruptly stop talking when they think I’m in earshot. But lately things have changed. Or I’ve changed. I’m not sure which.

  Daddy is a history professor here, just like Granddad James and Great-Granddad James before him. Anybody can donate money, Daddy says, but the James family has committed their lives to this “bastion of higher education.” Which, when I really think about it, makes me wonder why there hasn’t been a James Hall before now.

  Griff (who’s just a year older than me, but a whole lot more cynical, according to Daddy) was the first to point out that a lot of things about this honor don’t add up. First, he said, Christmas break is a mighty strange time for a building dedication, when everything is deserted and dark. Dedications come in the spring, when nature decorates the campus with giant ivory magnolia blooms and bright azaleas. And then there’s the reason for the name change; something mysterious dressed in whispers and snippy answers. For this being such an honor, it sure has a big cloud of stink around it.

  I asked roundabout questions, but all I got was a whole lot of cold shoulder. Two days ago, Granny James took me by the arm and leaned in close, the way she does when she’s either dead serious or sharing a secret. My hope for a secret was squashed when she used all three of my names. “Tallulah Mae James, it is unbecoming to question one’s good fortune. We’ll hear no more about it.”

  Well, I knew sooner or later adults always blab about what Gran calls things that must never be mentioned. You’d think they’d be better at keeping things to themselves, with their rules and maturity and all. Sure enough, last night I overheard D
addy talking on the phone. Turns out Jacob LaFollet was a Communist, so the name had to change “posthaste” (which is the same as PDQ, but Dad likes old-fashioned words).

  I reckon the posthastedness is why I’m out here in a sleet storm, shivering in anklets and black patent leather shoes.

  As I watch from the stage, the Spanish moss is getting stiff, frozen drips from the twisted arms of the old trees. My hands inside my white rabbit muff are the only warm things on me.

  This muff is the best thing I got for Christmas. Naturally, it was from Granny. When I opened it, Margo—she hasn’t let us call her Momma since the twins were born—had a hissy fit, saying nobody needed to wear a poor rabbit’s fur and that both Granny and I should be ashamed. Granny told her to get down off her high horse before she got a nosebleed. In a polite voice, of course. Granny is always polite, even if the meaning of her words cuts deep. Margo gave Granny the stink-eye and lit a cigarette, which Granny hates because proper Southern ladies do not smoke. That’s the way it is between them.

  I keep the muff hidden in the way back of my closet, just in case Margo gets it in her head to get rid of it. She’s like that. Daddy says she’s a woman of conviction and principles. Maybe so, but I think sometimes she just wants her own way.

  I peek at the newspaper photographer in the first row. He’s not looking at Daddy, the star of the show. He’s looking at Margo. Everybody always looks at Margo. Instead of wearing a nice dress, coat, gloves, and a church hat like the other ladies, she has on tight, tight black pants and a fluffy mohair “ski sweater.” (I guess it’s okay to steal the hair off a goat but not a rabbit.) Why does she always have to stick out like a kangaroo at a tea party?

  She’s from up north, although I’ve overheard some people say they think she came from another planet. She is special. Extraordinary. Daddy reminds us all the time. Lately, though, I’ve been wishing raising blackberries and pecans at Pearl River Plantation—or even the fact that Dharma and Walden are twins—was enough special for her.

  Even this morning, on the James family’s special day, she had Daddy stop the car when we got to campus. “Let me off at the curb. I need to see someone about the rally for Africa before this absurd waste of money.”