Page 1 of The Night the Lights Went Out
One
MERILEE
Sweet Apple, Georgia
2016
If there was one thing that Merilee Talbot Dunlap had learned in eleven years of marriage, it was the simple fact that you could live with a person for a long time and never really know him. That it was easy to accept the mask he wore as the real thing, happy in your oblivion, until one day the mask slipped. Or, as in Merilee’s case, when it fell off completely and you were forced to face your own complicity in the masquerade.
No, she knew she hadn’t made Michael have an affair with their daughter’s third-grade math teacher. But she had allowed herself never to question any discrepancies in her marriage, content in her role as suburban wife and mother, until the props and scenery were pulled away and she was asked to exit stage right.
“Mommy?”
Merilee turned toward her ten-year-old daughter, Lily, blond and fine boned like her father but with a perpetually worried expression that was all her mother’s. It seemed Lily already had a permanent furrow between her brows from the worry she’d been born with. The last months since the divorce and the stress from the upcoming move hadn’t helped.
“Yes?”
“What if I don’t meet any friends in my new school? And what if I don’t have anybody to sit with at lunchtime? And I’m thinking I shouldn’t be in the accelerated English class, because what if I’m not smart enough?”
Merilee carefully snapped down the lid of the plastic container she’d been filling with her collection of old maps. She’d been collecting them since she was a little girl, when she’d been in an antiquarian bookstore with her grandfather and he’d shown her an ink-drawn map. It had sketches of horses and cows and fences, and a cozy log cabin with smoke curling from its lone chimney.
“That’s where you live,” he’d said, pointing to the cabin.
It looked nothing like the white-columned brick house in Sandersville, Georgia, she’d lived in all her life and she had told him so, only to be made to understand that the cabin and everything around it had been plowed under to make room for her house and their neighbors’ houses in the twenties, when he and Grandma weren’t even born yet.
For a long time it had given her nightmares, thinking she could hear the cries of the people from the cabin, not completely sure they’d been removed before the demolition. It scared her to think of how temporary things could be, how your life, your house, your family, could be erased like a sand castle at the beach. And when her little brother had died, she’d known for sure.
Her grandfather had bought her the map, unaware he was fostering what would become a lifelong obsession. Merilee wasn’t sure whether her love for old maps was because they reminded her of the grandfather she’d loved more than her own parents or because she’d needed proof that things changed. That no matter how good or bad things were, they were never permanent.
Merilee knelt down in front of Lily, silently cursing her ex-husband one more time. As if making her feel extraneous and unwanted weren’t bad enough, his inability to keep his pants zipped and his eyes from wandering had added an extra layer of vulnerability to their daughter.
Gently holding her bony shoulders, she looked into Lily’s pale blue eyes. “You’ve never had problems making friends. You’re a nice person, Lily, and that’s why other girls like to include you. Remember that, okay? It’s who you are, and if you stick with that, you’ll be fine. And Windwood Academy is much smaller than your old school, which is a nice thing when you’re the new kid. You’ll know everybody in all of your classes pretty quickly.”
“And if they don’t like me?”
A little bit of the old spark lit her eyes, making Merilee inwardly sigh with relief. “I’m going to make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Lily laughed her sweet laugh, a sound that evoked champagne bubbles popping, almost eradicating the guilt Merilee felt over having leftThe Godfatherin the DVD player one night. It had been right after she’d learned of Michael’s affair, when she’d felt the need to watch violent movies with lots of blood and bad language after the kids had been tucked into bed. Lily had flipped it on the next day thinking it wasThe Princess Bride, and in the five minutes it had taken for Merilee to realize what was happening, Lily had been exposed to more violence than she had seen in her entire ten years. After much apologizing and lectures about the difference between movies and real life, it had become a secret joke between them. For weeks Merilee had watched her daughter for any signs that she might need counseling, glad for once that her daughter had always had the maturity of a forty-year-old rather than that of the young girl she was.
Merilee stood, her right knee popping, yet another reminder of why her husband had wanted to trade her in for a younger model. “As for the accelerated English class, they put you in there for a reason. You’ll do great. And if you find you don’t like it, we’ll move you—just give it a try. That’s all I ask, all right?”
Lily’s small chest rose and fell with an exaggerated sigh. “All right. Should I tell Colin to finish packing his suitcase?”
“I asked him to do that three hours ago. Where is he?”
Lily twisted her mouth, unsure of her role. She wasn’t a tattletale, but she also liked to keep to a schedule. “He found a hole in the backyard and has been sitting in front of it waiting to see what might crawl out.”
Merilee swallowed a groan of frustration. Her eight-year-old son had always moved to his own clock, content to study his world at its own pace. Merilee found it endearing and frustrating at the same time, especially on school mornings when Colin wanted to study how long it took for toothpaste to fall from the tube without his having to squeeze it.
“Would you please run out and remind him that I told Mrs. Prescott we’d meet her at three o’clock and it’s almost two thirty? She’s ninety-three and I really don’t want to keep her waiting in this heat.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Lily ran from the room, blond hair flying, calling her brother’s name with the harsh, authoritative tone Merilee recognized as her own. She bit her lip to prevent herself from calling out to remind Lily that Colin already had a mother.
She picked up the stack of plastic containers and moved to the garage, empty now except for the used Honda Odyssey minivan she’d bought with her own money. She’d let Michael keep the Mercedes SUV and his Audi, wanting the excision of him from her life to be a clean cut, even if it meant not having heated seats or a state-of-the-art stereo system. It was the principle of the matter. And at the moment, the only thing she had in abundance were principles.
Through the open rear door, Merilee spotted the jewelry roll she’d tucked into a back corner of the minivan. It was her brother’s Lego figures. She’d taken them from his room without asking, knowing her mother would never have let her have anything that had belonged to David. Deanne had wanted to claim the grief as her own, dismissing anyone else’s as not big enough to count. So Merilee had taken them and wrapped them in her Barbie jewelry roll and kept them hidden, taking them out only on the anniversary of David’s death, as if somehow that might bring a part of him back. It had been a while since she’d done that, but still she kept them, hidden in her sock drawer as if afraid her mother might find them and ask for them back. As if David were still the precocious boy of seven instead of the twenty-nine-year-old young man he should be.
After tucking the last of the smaller boxes and their suitcases into the back of the Odyssey, Merilee made one final pass through the rooms of the now-empty home she’d lived in for less than two years. The rental house was already furnished, so it had almost been a relief to let Michael have all the furniture they’d accumulated over the past eleven years, and she’d felt a pang of regret only when their four-poster bed had been hauled into the moving van. It had been the bed where both of their children had been conceived. She imagined that if she ever had to see Tammy Garvey again, after the woman had been sleeping on that bed with Merilee’s husband for a while, she’d mention that to her.
