Page 28 of All These Beautiful Strangers
The shriek came again, and this time I recognized it. It was the metal chain tied to the old elm, and the mysterious object I was so carefully tracking was the tire swing, blowing in the wind. I laughed at myself. There was nothing dark and ominous waiting for me out there. It was just my mind and my nerves playing tricks. There was nothing to be afraid of.
I looked up at the night sky. The rain was coming down harder now; the storm was picking up. I had better head in. I took a deep steadying breath and plunged once again into the water, back toward the house.
Nine
Charlie Calloway
2017
The next morning I woke up in my mother’s old bedroom. It was in the attic of my grandparents’ house, with walls that sloped in the middle to the ceiling. Next to the bed was a small circular window that looked out over the driveway and a basketball hoop. I imagined my mother being woken up on Saturday mornings by my uncle Will and uncle Hank playing a game of H-O-R-S-E.
My mother’s bedspread was a patchwork quilt that my grandma had made. Next to it was a rocking chair, and a white dresser with a mirror overlooking it, and dozens of pictures stuck into the edges of the mirror. The snapshots were faded now: school pictures of my mother’s friends and classmates, a picture of my mother and Claire as teenagers at the boardwalk in Jersey, my mother sitting next to a dark-haired boy on the front porch steps, laughing. There were shelves in the far corner of the room that held rows of trophies and ribbons from my mother’s time on the swim team in high school, and an easel and an old smock next to them.
It struck me then that I hadn’t known her at all, really. For a long time I had tried to forget her, or to hate her. And before that, she wasn’t a person but my mother. She was the woman who braided my wet hair into plaits after my baths. The woman who sat up with me all night when I was sick, feeding me push-up ice pops to ease my sore throat and watching Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken again and again and again until the DVD was scratched and would no longer play. But my mother had been a person before she had been my mother. A person with her own friends, her own likes and dislikes, her own memories and adventures and heartaches. She had lived a whole life before I came along. Maybe if I tried to understand a little bit of that, I could understand why she left.
I figured the best place to start was where Uncle Hank had left off: at the house on Langely Lake. He had found the pictures there, which surely were some kind of clue. I hadn’t been to the lake house in years, but maybe if I went back now, saw the place with fresh eyes, I would find something, or maybe I would at least remember something that could be useful.
When I came down to the kitchen, Grandma was at the stove cooking pancakes. There was bacon frying in a skillet. Her smile fell a little when she saw that I was fully dressed and had my overnight bag slung over my shoulder.
“Leaving already?” she asked.
“I thought I’d get an early start,” I lied. “I have this big trig exam tomorrow that I still need to study for. But I can stay for breakfast.”
“Wonderful,” she said. “Pull up a chair and I’ll get you a plate.”
I sat at the kitchen table as she made up a plate of bacon and eggs and pancakes and sat down next to me with a cup of coffee to watch me eat.
“Your grandpa is having a bit of a lie-in,” she said with an exasperated smile. “The man’s seventy-five and doesn’t know his own limits.”
“Is that bacon I smell?”
I looked up to see Uncle Hank wandering in from the den, in the same jeans and rumpled plaid button-up he’d been wearing the night before. He was suffering from a serious case of bedhead.
“Speaking of children who don’t know how to grow up,” Grandma Fairchild said.
I didn’t really want to be around my uncle Hank, and I was a little afraid of what might happen if my grandma left the room for any reason and Uncle Hank got me alone. Would he start in again with the questions and his theories? So I ate my pancakes quickly, before he had the chance.
When I went to stack my plate in the sink, I noticed piles of washed Tupperware containers on the counter. Each pile had a little sticky note with a name on it, and I saw one with Claire’s name. I hadn’t had a chance to really talk to Claire last night at the party, but if I could get her alone, probe her a little, maybe she could give me some insight into the photos that Uncle Hank had found, among other things.
“Hey, Grandma,” I said. “Do you want me to drop these by Claire’s? It’s on my way.”
“Are you sure you remember where it is?” she asked. “I’ll jot down the address for you, just in case.”
She wrote the address down on another sticky note and hugged me a little longer than was comfortable in the doorway.
“Don’t let it be another year before you come by again,” she said. “It was good—so good—to have you here.”
When she pulled away, I could see there were tears in her eyes. She turned her head to try to hide them.
The Rhodeses lived in a blue two-story house on Maple Street. There was a green hatchback in the driveway when I pulled up. I stood on the front porch and rang the doorbell with the Tupperware containers stacked in my arms.
Greyson answered the door. He was wearing jeans and a light V-neck T-shirt. His hair was still wet from the shower. He smelled like citrus and nutmeg.
“Martha Stewart, nice to see you again,” he said.
“Is Claire here?” I asked. “My grandma just wanted me to drop these off on my way out of town.”
But Greyson didn’t reach for them. Instead he held the screen door open for me and motioned for me to come inside.
