The Little Giant Of Aberdeen County Part 25

"I think he's going to be okay," I continued. "Why, I bet Marcus puts on five pounds having Bobbie live with him." At Marcus's name, I frowned and shut up, and Amelia, sensing my ire, closed the door to the pantry and resumed her dusting.

We spent the rest of the afternoon more or less in silence, nursing lemonade on the front porch. I was tempted that afternoon to confront her, to lay the whole puzzling mess of Serena Jane in her lap and see what she had to say for herself, but I wasn't done punis.h.i.+ng her yet. The longer I stayed sul en and sulky, the more uncomfortable she grew, and it pleasured me to watch her nervous fingers tug on her braid. I relished the times she knocked and knocked at the front door, then final y slunk away like a banished dog when I refused to answer, or the awkward silences between us whenever she brought up Marcus. And that's another thing, I thought, the unfamiliar sensation of rage swil ing through me, making me feel al -powerful. Marcus belongs with me. That garden should have been mine. Even if I'm dead and gone, they shouldn't be together.

No matter how I imagined it, it peeved me to picture Marcus kneeling in the dirt in back of Amelia's house, just as it gal ed me to think that somewhere out there, my sister might be trailing her bare feet through the sand and rough water of a California beach, wondering about the cracked sidewalks and crooked fences that she'd left behind in Aberdeen and wondering about Bobbie, too.

What if she hears about the doctor's death? I wondered. What if she comes strolling back into town?

The days of summer continued to heat up, and the sc.r.a.p of envelope in my drawer curled and dried until I thought it might float away, but it didn't. Instead, the notion of it bil owed and swel ed like a thunderhead until I final y couldn't take it anymore. If I kept al the questions I had inside of me, I knew, they would multiply and multiply, until I real y did come apart at the seams. And I didn't want that.

Quite the opposite. No, I decided, the time had come. I needed to let the clouds inside me burst.

At the end of August, on the last real dog day of the year, Amelia came knocking as sure as the sun, two paper sacks ful of vegetables clutched in her skinny arms. She had her on usual black-and-white attire, and there were little stray hairs curling at her temples. But whenever I picture Amelia, it is her mouth I always think of-lips as crooked and thin as her father's, but at the same time as resolute and hard as her mother's, for they gave nothing away very easily, especial y a confession.

"What's in the sacks?" I asked, unlatching the kitchen screen door for her.

Today, Amelia was effusive. Her words tripped out of her mouth lightly. "Beets. Lettuce. Baby carrots and greens." She put the bags on the counter. The heady smel of fresh dirt swam through the air.

I kicked a chair out from the table, I kicked a chair out from the table, refusing to look at her. "Have some coffee. I'l put a pot on."

Amelia blew a wisp of hair off her s.h.i.+ny forehead. "Too hot. Got any iced tea?"

I opened the icebox. "Orange juice or lemonade."

"Lemonade." Amelia sank into the chair.

She squinted at me. "You look different. And what are you doing at the back of the house? Looks like a war zone." Now that my hand was better, I'd resumed my burning of decades of the house's trash, in spite of the heat. Watching the flames dance and spit somehow dampened my sense of rage and made me feel calmer.

I sloshed lemonade into a pair of gla.s.ses. "Spring cleaning."

"It's almost autumn."

I shrugged. We sat in silence for a moment, watching our gla.s.ses sweat. Final y, I took a deep breath. "You know, there's stil a whole heap of stuff out there in the doctor's office."

Amanda stared down at her lemonade.

"Autumn's around the corner. I could get to it then."

I took a sip from my gla.s.s and set it down, back in the precise spot it had been. It seemed important in that moment not to alter anything more in the world than I had to. "I've been out there already, you know. When I burned my hand." I held up my palm, healed now but for a faint half-moon.

"Oh?" Amelia's eyes were definitely her father's, I decided-heavy-lidded, thick-lashed, built for gambling.

"Seems the doctor tidied most things up himself."

"I'l scrub the room for you, then."

I continued on as if I hadn't heard her. I felt terrible toying with Amelia this way, but at the same time, I couldn't contain my fury. "I mean, not everything is gone, of course," I said. "His books are stil there. And there was this." I reached into my pocket and pul ed out the sc.r.a.p of envelope with 11 Palm and California written on it. "Along with this." I pul ed out the copy of the deed to the farm.

It's an interesting sensation when intense anger is final y realized. It's as if after watching a top spin for hours, it suddenly stops and fal s over. Your eyes keep darting and twitching, not wanting to believe what they see. I waited. There was an uncomfortable wal of silence between us, and then Amelia stretched out a hand and touched the sc.r.a.p of envelope with the tip of one finger. "Where was it?" she breathed.

"Inside a book. Is this what I think it is?"

Amelia nodded, her eyes stil downcast. I leaned back hard against my chair, and it crackled and groaned. "I don't understand. I thought she committed suicide."

"It was someone else." Amelia's voice was a whisper-a mayfly skimming the surface of a pond. "Not Serena Jane."

"But how did Robert Morgan get the body?"

"He said it was her. He made me say it, too. He said if I didn't, he'd take the farm." Amelia cupped her head in her hands, and that action told me enough. It was Robert Morgan, after al . How had anything in this town ever happened but through his lies, intimidation, and tal tales?

I pictured my sister's square, blunt headstone. "So that's not Serena Jane buried in the cemetery." Amelia shook her head again, and her pa.s.sivity infuriated me.

Amelia sniffed. "He-he said that if you ever knew, he would know. He said he'd cal in every last creditor in three states. I tried to get him to give the letters to you, or at least to Bobbie, but he said what was done was done, and that should be the end of it."

I sat back again. Her pragmatic answer shocked me. Al this time I had a.s.sumed she'd kept the location of my sister a secret out of a kind of jealousy, but I had only been flattering myself, I realized. When it came down to it, Amelia was a Dyerson through and through, wheeling and dealing, always dodging the bul et of debt. She did it to save her own skin, I thought, not mine. I remembered Robert Morgan leveraging the same threat to get me to move in with him and wondered what Amelia would have done in my place. Would she have made the same sacrifice? I suddenly hated the Dyersons and their long-faced hard luck. No wonder they were such sad cases, I thought. They al but opened their arms to the world's abuse. They never even tried to change a thing. I smacked the table. I would never be change a thing. I smacked the table. I would never be like that, I knew. I couldn't in the body I'd been given, and this, more than anything, made me realize that whatever Amelia had been to me, it was never a sister. I laid my head down on the table. So much for trying to keep the universe in place, I thought.

Of course, what was done was done.

Wasn't that what I had been tel ing myself ? Had I been wise to bow to the greater pul of the past, I wondered, letting it suck me into the mystery of the quilt and now of my sister? I didn't have an answer at that moment, but the time had come, I thought, to address the question and begin living in the present.

I couldn't stay angry forever, or I'd burn myself up. I knew that. I needed to try to forgive Amelia.

I unfolded my fingers and took a breath.

"I'm angry, Amelia. So angry I can almost not see, but too many years have gone by. What I figure we need now is a fresh start. No Robert Morgan. No creditors. Tel me where the letters are, and we'l go from there."

Amelia's mouth froze into the shape of a zero, and I remembered how much trouble she'd had reciting her elocution lessons for Miss Sparrow, how no matter what she did, she could never get any part of the story straight. "Sorry, Truly," she babbled. "So, so sorry." She covered her face with her hands.

My stomach churned with a bad premonition. "Amelia, what have you done?" The past was so tantalizingly close, it seemed, al I wanted to do was reach out and bite it. "Tel me, where are the letters?"

Amelia heaved a huge sigh. "Burned."

"Burned." Neither a question nor a declaration, but an echo, hol ow and loose.

Amelia elaborated. "The doctor burned them. I watched. We built a little fire in the parlor, and he threw the envelopes in."

Inside my chest, my heart flapped ragged and sere. "Why would you help him? How could you? And where was I?"

"You came into the parlor, remember, to tel us there was pie? You didn't know what we were doing. Robert Morgan shouted at you, and then you went back to the kitchen." I thought briefly back to that afternoon, when Amelia had been crouched in the corner, ash dusting her hair, and the doctor had snapped at me so suddenly. Amelia took a deep breath and continued her explanation with difficulty. "I was trying to get him to give me back the farm. Al I've ever wanted is for you to come back there and live with me like it used to be... . Truly, please say something."

I stared at the scar on my hand. Al this time I'd been trying to cinder the remnants of the past when the item I most wanted was already up in smoke. I closed my eyes and pictured waves was.h.i.+ng sand off a beach. "I wil never forgive you for this, Amelia," I final y said, my voice as low and rough as it's ever been.

I heard a sob catch in Amelia's throat.

She stretched a thin arm across the table toward me, but I jerked my hands away. "Get out." I turned my head and closed my eyes, wanting her to go more than anything, wis.h.i.+ng she would disappear and leave my beautiful blond sister in her place.

When I opened my eyes, however, Amelia surprised me. She was standing in front of me with the jar of Tabby's herbs, a calculating glint in her eye. She shook the jar, loosening sediment and smal particles, sending them swirling.

"Give me that." I lunged for it.

Amelia widened her eyes. She mimed drinking the concoction, then pointed toward the doctor's office, a question hanging on her lips.

I gasped. "How do you know about that?"

Her voice croaked out rougher than I'd ever known it. "I heard you and Marcus talking about it on the day of the doctor's funeral. You thought I'd gone, but I hadn't. You just didn't see me."

"The doctor asked me to do it," I said coldly. "It was his idea."

Amelia worked her mouth. She was thinking.

"He was sick, and confused," I said. "He was going to die anyway."

Amelia jutted out her chin, defying me to contradict her. She pushed out her words with difficulty. "So tel me, Truly, was it mercy or murder?"

I rounded on Amelia and s.n.a.t.c.hed the jar out of her hands. "Does it matter? He never had a chance anyway. I just hurried nature along. And if it evened up some old scores, so what?"

It was stil better than what she had done, I reasoned. I had merely taken life, but she had gone beyond death and erased my sister's existence. Her beyond death and erased my sister's existence. Her accusations niggled at me, however, reminding me of the price Marcus predicted I would have to pay for fol owing the doctor's wishes. Mercy, I was discovering, was a heavy blade that could cut both ways. It wasn't always kind. I set the jar on the kitchen table and folded my arms. "We're done. Get out."

Amelia knew al about mercy, though.

She'd spent a lifetime courting it. I watched her sink to her knees. When she looked up at me, her eyes were as s.h.i.+ny and black as the graveyard crows.

"Please," she whispered, "forgive me. You're al my family. I don't know what I'l do if you don't forgive me."

On a different day, perhaps, when the air wasn't hot as a crucible, when there was a little lick of breeze, I might have relented, but the kitchen was close, and al I could feel was my own sweat, wel ing up so fast, it threatened to choke me. I was sick of life, sick of the cicadas shril ing al through the night, sick of the twists of vines crawling over al the fences when they would only drop their leaves in a few weeks and die. I closed my eyes. "Go," I seethed, and waited til I heard the back door close as softly as a sigh.

I went through the house, pul ing the shades down in al the windows and turning off the lights, so mired in sorrow that I didn't even notice that Amelia had taken the jar of Tabby's herbs with her. It wasn't until the next morning that I learned of their absence, and remembered her anguish, and, with my heart in my mouth, asked myself if I would have gone after her if I'd known, dragging the heavy, burdensome sword of mercy in the dirt behind me.

Chapter Thirty.

I wish I could say I was the one who found Amelia, but it was Marcus who discovered her curled like a snail in her vegetable beds when he showed up to weed. Already, the bugs were feasting on her. A conga line of ants was parading in and out of her left ear, and a spider was tentatively exploring the cavities of her nostrils. A trail of green liquid ran down one side of her mouth into the vegetation.

Marcus reached down and brushed the insects away from her cheek, then straightened up, parked his hands on his hips, and limped over to his truck.

The sound of frantic knocking woke me, then I heard Marcus's voice cal ing me, and I rushed downstairs. "What is it?" I asked, my dressing gown half-open over my pajamas. "Has something happened to Bobbie?"

Under the last fingers of dawn, the shadows under Marcus's eyes were deeper and his irises were the color of a pond right before it freezes.

He put a fist to his mouth and coughed. "It's Amelia.

You need to come with me. Oh, Truly, what have you You need to come with me. Oh, Truly, what have you done?"

We didn't say a word to each other the whole bone-rattling ride out to the farm, but when we arrived, I was surprised that Marcus drove past the house and straight out to the barn. "What are we out here for?" I asked, slamming the truck door, but Marcus stil didn't say anything, and when I entered the barn, I saw why.

He had laid out Amelia the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, on a board between two trestles. In spite of the plentiful holes in the roof, the light was stil dank and dim, but Marcus lit a kerosene lantern that smoked and sputtered, then set it up high to spread the light.

At Amelia's feet, I saw the empty jar.

"Oh, my G.o.d." I turned away, but Marcus was behind me, and he forced me to face Amelia.

"I moved her in here. I found this lying next to her." He indicated the empty jar. "How could you do it again, Truly? I thought you were sorry! Why did you give her that stuff?"

A fly buzzed near my ears. The sun was coming up, and the heat would soon begin to bring pests, I knew, as wel as a stench. We had to cal someone. "I-I didn't give it to her," I whispered. "I swear. She took it."

"Why?" Marcus's voice was a hammer driving a nail.

I bowed my head. "We had words. Wel , I did. I didn't give her the chance to have them back."

Marcus walked closer to Amelia. A ray of light was beginning to stroke her hair. "Over what?

What could she have possibly done?"

I wrapped my arms around myself.

Where did I start? I wondered. With the fact that my sister was real y alive? Or that Robert Morgan had buried someone in her name? Or maybe with the welt on my hand and the day I'd found the sc.r.a.p of a letter? When it came down to it, maybe words were what had fueled this mess. After al , my life under Robert Morgan's roof had started with a note from Serena Jane, just as Amelia's life had ended because of one.

"I guess you could say that our words undid us," I final y muttered.

Marcus c.o.c.ked his head. "I don't understand."

And so I told him then in the close air of the barn about Robert Morgan whispering, "California," and Amelia helping the doctor burn the letters and how one smal fragment had slipped out of the past like an ember shooting up a chimney.

And I didn't stop there, either. I told him al about the doctor's diagnosis of me, and how I'd let that secret isolate me from the very ones I loved the most- Amelia and Marcus, but especial y Marcus-and how Robert Morgan had been wrong in the end. I explained about the quilt being used for better and for worse, and how, even though I wanted to, I knew I'd never be able to untangle myself from its mess of threads and roots. I told him about how the angel wings that Tabitha had sewn had seemed to become embedded in my own flesh.

When I was finished, tears the size of raindrops were sliding down my cheeks, and my breath was coming in such jerky gasps that I almost didn't even notice Marcus taking me into his arms.

"Hush," he whispered. "It's al right. I'm here." And for the first time since that afternoon in the cemetery, he put his lips to mine.

There are some confessions you must make face-to-face, some truths so painful that you must utter them not eye-to-eye, but directly into the other person's soul. "You were right," I said, my mouth pressed against Marcus's. "I should never have made the drink. This is al on my hands."

Marcus squeezed me. "No. You couldn't have known this would be. You aren't responsible."

He backed away from me but kept my hands gripped in his. "Listen, Truly," he began, "about what you did for the doctor and Priscil a Sparrow-"

"I should have listened," I interrupted. "I shouldn't have ever done it."

He stopped me with another kiss. "No.

You did right. I know it better than anyone. I did the same thing, remember?"

I nodded and was silent, remembering his letter and what he did for his wounded friend. "Is it murder or a mercy when one of the needs in life turns out to be death?" I whispered, remembering Amelia's final question, but Marcus didn't have an answer. We just stood together, heads bowed, hands clenched, our hearts pus.h.i.+ng blood through our bodies-mine large, his smal -in the same languid cadence.