Page 76 of Dreams of Falling
“I asked Mack to bring down my old photo album and pictures to show Larkin,” Ceecee’s saying. She puts the watering can on the floor by the window and comes to sit in the chair by my bed. “I always promised you that we’d look at them together, so I’ll leave them downstairs so we can when you wake up.”
I wonder if she believes what she’s telling herself, or if she’s just saying it to make me feel better. She clasps her hands between her knees like a schoolgirl, and I wish I could laugh, because it’s funny to see her like that. Ceecee has always been so serious, the job of motherhood too important for her to act like she was anything but. Of course, it all makes sense now. Maybe if I’d known earlier, I could have made it easier for both of us.
“Larkin saw the records from the fire. The fire chief marked your mother’s death as ‘suspicious.’” She waits a moment as if expecting me to answer. “I’m thinking you must have known that, but I can’t figure out how. You were just a baby at the time.”
Ceecee looks out the window, although there’s nothing to see except the side of another building. “‘I know about Margaret.’ When you wrote that on the ribbon, that’s what you were talking about, wasn’t it? About what happened during the fire.”
Again she pauses, and I strain and push and tug against the weight that’s pressing me into this world. I want to tell her what I know. And how I found out. Not from the official reports at all. But a place she’d never think to look. A place hidden in plain sight.
“I remember being interviewed by the police, and by the fire chief,” she says. “I told them that I was there looking for you and Margaret, and that’s true. But there was something I didn’t tell them. I thought it would look bad. That they wouldn’t let me have you if they knew. Nothing else mattered, you see. Because you should have always been mine to begin with.”
The ceiling light shifts and twinkles as if it’s made of water, and my bonds feel looser somehow. I’m listening carefully to Ceecee, knowing that whatever she needs to tell me is part of why I’m still here.
“I was so exhausted that night. Worried about you and your mother. We thought you were both wandering somewhere outside, and wewere all so scared. For both of you, but especially you. You were an innocent baby—just two years old. Margaret was the one who’d put you in danger. She was supposed to have evacuated to Augusta.
“I remember being so angry. I didn’t know where you were, if you were in trouble, even. Bitty and I went out in the storm, searching for you and your mother. Of course, the first place I thought of was Carrowmore. I remember driving my car through the rain, my nerves making my hands slip off the steering wheel. I thought for sure I’d drive off a bridge. I honestly have no idea how I made it, but I did.”
She swallows, her eyes distant, as if seeing something beyond the four walls of the hospital room.
“I didn’t see your mama’s car when I got to Carrowmore,” she continues, “so I thought you weren’t there. I figured out later that Margaret must have parked at the back of the house, but the storm was so bad, it never occurred to me to look there.”
She reaches over to the bedside table and picks up the bottle of hand lotion she brought me when I first got here. She’d been upset at the condition of my hands and nails, as if it were the hospital’s fault. I wanted to remind her that I’d been refinishing furniture.
She picks up my hand and begins massaging lotion into the dried skin and cracked cuticles. I can barely feel it, like when your arm falls asleep and you pinch it. I’m like a cicada, fooling everyone into believing that I’m in the bed, even though my spirit has flown away and is trapped against the ceiling.
But I want to feel Ceecee’s touch, to know that I am loved and to recall just how much. And I want her to remember the reason why my hands and nails are in such bad shape.
She stops, lifts her elbow to wipe her eyes on her sleeve. “I thought you were lost out there in the storm. If something had happened to you, it would have been Margaret’s fault, and I would never have been able to forgive her. Or myself.”
Ceecee is quiet, but I hear her sniffing and see a tear drop onto my hand. “I found you, though. You and Margaret, safe and sound. At first, anyway.
“I told the police and the fire chief that I must have been sleepingwhen the fire started. And that’s true. They asked me why I was upstairs in one of the bedrooms instead of in the wine cellar or someplace safe from the storm, and I told them I didn’t know. That’s the only lie I told that night. Because I do remember, and the truth was too shameful.”
She moves with the lotion to the other side of the bed and picks up my right hand. She moves slowly, like an old woman, and it saddens me. I’ve done this to her. I know that. I want to tell her that I love her. And I want to tell her good-bye. But I can’t seem to figure out how.
“I need you to tell me what you know about Margaret. I’m so afraid that I did something when I was asleep, or thought I was asleep. I need to know the truth of what happened.”
She stops rubbing lotion into my hand and looks down at the shell of my body, as if I’m still there. “When I was being interviewed, the police and fire chief asked if maybe I’d dropped a candle, or left one lit too near a curtain. Or if I was smoking cigarettes. Which was nonsense.
“I’ve never smoked a day in my life.” She bristles. “They said they found cigarette butts in a charred ashtray that managed to survive the fire. But of course they did. Bitty smoked, and she and I were at Carrowmore almost every day.”
There is something in her voice that makes the cracking sound in the ceiling stop, magnifying the sound of the lotion and the pump on the bottle. It’s like Ceecee’s just been forced to take a bitter medicine, and she can’t quite get the taste off her tongue.
“Almost every day,” she says again, and I can tell she’s crying, using the sleeve of her shirt to wipe her eyes. “And each time I went, it was like walking on broken glass. But I did it gladly, because it meant I could spend time with you.”
The nurse appears in the doorway to say it’s time for my bath, and Ceecee stands and smiles. She puts the lotion away and kisses me on the forehead. “Good-bye, sweet Ivy. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She walks to the doorway, but turns back, her eyes troubled. “Please wake up, darling. Please.”
I hear her footsteps in the hallway, and I smell the lotion she’s put on my hands. I say a prayer that she smells it, too, and that it makes herwonder why my nails and the skin on my hands are as frail as the filament that seems to be keeping me from pressing through the ceiling.
I’m in a thin place, I think, where this world is so close to the next. I just wish I knew what I’m supposed to do about it.
•••
Larkin
2010
I sat down at the dining room table where Ceecee had left a thick photo album and a shoebox stuffed with photographs. She’d apologized for their being so disorganized, but it had been too painful for her to sort through them, which was why they’d ended up in the attic. I thought I’d go through them, and if it looked like I’d be here for another week, put them in some kind of order. Maybe place them in new albums, those archival ones. Although if they’d survived this long in a South Carolina attic, perhaps they didn’t need anything so technically advanced.
