An Act of Love Page 19

  “I want you to get control of yourself and deal with this, Emily,” Linda said firmly. “We have to talk about this. Hysterics are of no help.”

  Emily swallowed. She looked at Dr. Travis. “I’m supposed to sit here and take this shit?”

  “Your mother’s right, Emily. We have to deal with this.”

  Emily crossed her arms over her chest and glared hatefully at Owen and Linda. “Fine. Fine. Do it.”

  Owen began again. “There are some entries in your diary in which you seem, well, infatuated with Bruce.”

  “Well, I was! But that’s back when I was a freshman. I’m certainly not infatuated with him now!”

  “The point is, several of your paragraphs describe romantic encounters between you and Bruce …”

  “Oh, God,” Emily moaned, “I was such a dork. Don’t you understand? They were just daydreams. Didn’t you ever daydream? I know it’s pathetic. I was just a retard. But I got over it. I got over it a long time ago.” She was clutching her arms, digging her fingers into the soft fat flesh.

  Dr. Travis leaned forward. “If I could interrupt here for a moment, I’d like to point out that sexual and romantic feelings between stepsiblings are not all that unusual. There is nothing inherently wrong with feeling romantic or sexual love for a stepsibling. Some people manage to hide it, some talk to counselors about it. The important thing is to accept it as something normal, not harmful, as long as it is not acted upon.” She looked at Emily. “Emily, you’ve done nothing wrong by feeling in love with Bruce.”

  “Perhaps not.” Owen cleared his throat. “Still, it seems to me to be some kind of proof that Emily wanted to have sex with Bruce, that she led him on, or, on the other hand, that she only daydreamed this business of the rape.”

  Emily nearly rose from her chair. “I didn’t daydream the rape! And I didn’t want to have sex with Bruce!”

  “Your diary—” Owen began.

  “Take a deep breath, Emily,” Dr. Travis said.

  Emily took a deep breath. Her skin was mottled red. But finally, in a reasonable voice, she said, “All right, maybe I did want to ‘have sex’ when I was a freshman, but it wasn’t sex, really. I just wanted, oh, something dreamy, like music, kissing, and gooey stuff. Not what Bruce did to me. Bruce held me down. He hurt me.”

  “Perhaps your actions—”

  Emily interrupted her stepfather. Now her face was scarlet. “I know what you’re going to say. That I tempted Bruce. Gave him signs that I wanted him to rape me. Right? Right?” Her glance flew to her mother. “Mom, how can you let him talk this way to me?”

  “Emily,” Linda entreated, “honey, we’re trying so hard to sort through this.”

  Emily looked at her mother. “I screamed, Mommy! I fought! Bruce just laughed! He knocked me in the chest. He hit me. He choked me with his arm. It was nothing like love! Nothing tender! Nothing romantic. He was mean. He was hideous.” Spittle was forming in the corners of her mouth as she turned back to Owen. “I just wish someone would rape you.”

  For a moment there was silence, and then Emily cried, “I knew Owen would do this. I knew he’d take Bruce’s side. Bruce has always told me that nothing is mine, not the farm, not anything. I don’t even have a home! I can’t go back to the farm, not when Bruce’s there, not with Owen hating me!”

  “I don’t hate you,” Owen protested.

  “Bruce told me!” Emily shot back. “He told me if I told he’d make my life hell. And he was right!” Sobbing overtook her.

  “Emily, please, darling,” Linda began, but Emily interrupted her.

  “Don’t call me ‘darling.’ Don’t call me fucking anything! Not as long as you’re married to this—this shit.”

  “Emily—”

  “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I never want to talk to you again in my life! Not while you’re on Owen’s side.”

  “There are no sides—”

  “Oh, give me a fucking break! I don’t care anymore, I don’t care what you do, search my room, read my private diaries, take everything from me! I’ll make my own life, and the hell with you all!”

  “Emily.” Rising, Linda moved to embrace her daughter, but Emily shrank back as if repulsed.

  “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me ever again while you’re married to him.”

  Linda entreated, “Emily, please don’t be this way. I love you, darling. I—”

  Emily stuck her fingers in her ears and shut her eyes tight and began to sing nonsense syllables, just as she had when she was a little child and wanted to ignore her mother’s words. Now it made her look truly maniacal. It chilled Linda’s blood. Helplessly she looked at Dr. Travis.

  “I think we should probably end this discussion,” Dr. Travis said.

  “But I can’t,” Linda protested. “I can’t leave her with things like this!”

  “Emily needs time,” Dr. Travis said. “Give her some time.”

  “But Emily—” Linda felt torn in half. “Emily, I’ll call you tonight.”

  Emily kept her eyes shut, her fingers in her ears. She continued to babble.

  “I wouldn’t call her tonight, Mrs. McFarland. She probably won’t be ready to talk to you. I’d wait a few days.”

  “But this is intolerable.”

  “Not intolerable. Just very hard.” Dr. Travis rose and opened the door to the corridor, then stood back to let them pass through.

  Owen took Linda’s arm and together they left the room.

  In the car on the way back to Ebradour, Linda and Owen did not speak. Did not dare to speak. Their thoughts rode with them, a bomb, a Pandora’s box between them. At the farm they hurried off their separate ways.

  At the end of the day they sat down in the kitchen to eat the vegetable-filled omelets Linda threw together.

  “Wine?” Linda asked.

  “Please.”

  They ate in silence. For dessert Linda brought out a loaf of bread she’d made the day before and her homemade wild grape jelly. They ate steadily, impassively, hungrily; they’d both forgotten to eat lunch.

  “We have to talk,” Linda said finally.

  “All right,” Owen agreed.

  Then they sat in silence until suddenly Linda burst into a kind of gentle hysteria that made her cry and laugh all at once. “What can I say? I’m overwhelmed! I don’t know what to do! It’s too much!”

  “I know, kid,” Owen said, reaching over to rub her shoulders.

  “God, that feels good.” Linda shoved her plate aside and lay her head on her arms on the table.

  “Remember when we decided to get married?” Owen asked, musing aloud. “How we promised ourselves that our lives were not about our children? That we’d fight, work hard, to keep the business of parenting and stepparenting from eating up our relationship?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “I thought we did a good job.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “It was tough at first. When we were first married.”

  “You thought I was too lenient on the kids and I thought you were too tough.”

  “You used to let Emily get in bed with us.”

  “She had nightmares. She was eight years old, in a strange house.” Linda was beginning to tense up again, and then Owen said, “You made us into a real family. Made us all sit at the table every night, eating and pretending to talk.”

  Linda smiled into her arms. “And pretty soon we were actually talking.”

  “Remember the rule we made, that they’d have to settle their arguments by themselves by the end of the day, or no TV for either one.”

  “That was clever of us,” Linda said, adding sadly, “I don’t think that’s going to work this time.”

  “I know.” After a moment’s silence, Owen continued: “You taught us how to celebrate. We never had good birthday parties before you came. Or Halloween parties. Or Fourth of July. I was always obsessed with my work.”

  “And you helped me make Emily more independent. I used to g
et so anxious when she went off to the pond with Bruce. Afraid she’d drown. Or up into the woods. Afraid she’d get eaten by a bear. Or fall out of a tree and break an arm.”

  Owen stroked her arm, her back, then ran his hands up her neck and caressed her head. It was wonderful to be comforted.

  “We’ll work this out.”

  “I have to tell you I’m pretty discouraged.”

  In reply, he pushed back his chair. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Good idea.” Rising, she grabbed her jacket from its hook and followed her husband outside.

  Linda had always loved the vast mysterious silence of the night air, broken only by a limb cracking, a bird singing out, the wind feathering the leaves of the ivy that twisted and fluttered along one side of the house. The porch lights illuminated the pumpkins she had put on the steps of the front porch. They were beginning to cave in on themselves. It was time to add them to the compost heap. She pulled her coat closed at the neck against the brisk wind. In any other year she would be thinking about decorating the house, inside and out, for Christmas.

  The night air was cold, fresh, and full of the scents of crushed leaves, clawed loam, pine, and the sweet rot of apples hidden in the high grass of the old orchard, waiting in winy knots for the animals. The sky was overcast, the stars hidden. But they knew their way.

  Over the years the children and Owen and she had worn a trail through the meadow to the pond. Now they followed its sinuous channel past the fenced pasture, the occasional boulder protruding from the ground, and the various sudden hollows and dips, which in wet weather became mushy or slick. On either side of them the hills rose up, dark with forest.

  By the pond a boulder protruded, making a perfect bench. Linda and Owen eased onto it and sat staring at the gray water, which looked in the dim light like a soft shadow spreading across the land. Something rustled on the other side, a fox or skunk. Deer came to drink from the pond; she’d seen them often, and tracks of other creatures, too, raccoon, possum, rabbits. It was possible they were accustomed to her after all these years. She’d like to think so. She’d like to believe that in some deep beast way they had come to accept her, to consider her one of them, an occasional night creature. Certainly she had come to feel at home here. She’d learned to let go of the world here, and to listen to whatever lessons the wind and water and earth and air brought. Patience. Acceptance. Gratitude. An appreciation of the variety of acts and accidents that befell even an isolated pond on a cold, cloudy night.

  For a long time they stared out at the water. Gradually the black of night shaped itself into different streaks and stripes of gray as Linda’s eyes became accustomed to the lack of light, and she thought that perhaps this was how she should see her daughter, not as a golden child, a sunshine, but as a person suffused, like everyone, with a spectrum of radiance and blackness and shadow, and only deepened, not diminished, by her darkness. She should see her stepson that way, too. And Owen, what was Owen thinking?

  “Nice,” he murmured.

  “Mmm,” she agreed.

  He took her hand in his. “You’re cold. Ready to go back?”

  She nodded.

  They held hands as they walked through the dark back to their house. As they entered, Maud, rumpled and grumbly, staggered out to meet them.

  “I’ll let her sleep with me tonight,” Linda said, lifting the old dog in her arms.

  Together they put out the lights and made their way through the house to the second floor and their separate bedrooms.

  Linda pulled on her flannel nightgown. She was just sliding into bed, taking care not to knock Maud, when Owen came into the room and climbed into bed next to her, as he had thousands of nights before. He smelled clean and fresh, and his body was like a warming fire. He yanked the covers up and socked the pillow as he got comfortable. He rolled toward her. He reached out his arms.

  She moved into his embrace, welcoming his warmth, but when she felt his heavy leg on hers and his erection pressing like a club against her belly, she was startled.

  Usually after an argument both she and Owen needed to make love, to share the wordless affirmation of their unity before surrendering to the separation of sleep.

  But tonight her body recoiled. She could not do it. She could not even pretend.

  “Owen.” She pushed him away. “Not tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t … Owen, I can’t make love now. Not now.”

  “Because of Emily?” Owen asked. “You mean you can’t make love because of Emily?”

  “Because of Emily and Bruce.”

  “Great.”

  “I’m sorry, Owen. I don’t know why … I just don’t feel right. It just doesn’t seem right.”

  “How long is this going to last?” He was very angry and punched his pillow hard as he sat up again.

  “I don’t know.” She sat up, too. “Owen, what if we never know? What if we live until the ends of our lives with Emily insisting that Bruce raped her, and Bruce insisting that he didn’t?”

  “Then we’ll have to live to the ends of our lives standing by our children.”

  She felt her breath stop for a long moment. Then with a kind of hopeless sorrow she said, “I love you for saying that. Without hesitation.”

  “Great,” Owen said again. “Ironic, isn’t it.” Throwing the covers back, Owen rose and strode from the room.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The next morning they had just finished breakfast when the phone rang.

  “Now what,” Owen growled.

  Linda waited tensely, unable to move, until Owen mouthed at her, “Celeste.” He listened a few moments, then said, “I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

  “What’s up?” Linda asked.

  Owen went out to the porch and returned with his work boots. “Black bears. Celeste was riding in her back pasture and found lots of fence down. Black hair caught in the barbs.”

  “That must be by her forested land.”

  “Right. She doesn’t feel brave enough to try to mend it herself, even if she takes her gun with her.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Linda said.

  “It’ll probably take most of the morning and some of the afternoon, too. She’s always helped us out when we needed it, and besides, I didn’t think I was going to get much writing done today anyway.”

  “Would you like me to make you a thermos of coffee or a sandwich to take along?” Linda asked.

  “No, thanks. She’ll have stuff there.”

  He kissed Linda’s forehead, then grabbed his old farm jacket and leather gloves and jumped into his trunk and drove down the road toward Celeste’s farm.

  Celeste was out by the barn, hitching the wagon to the tractor. “Hey, buddy,” she called. “This is great of you.”

  “No problem. I need the exercise.”

  The day was windy and cold and vivid. Overhead waves of clouds rushed past the sun, smudging the ground with flickering bands of shadows. Owen turned up his collar and jumped on the wagon while Celeste settled herself on the tractor, started the engine, then steered away from the buildings and toward the hill. The land spread out around them, rolling toward the horizon in the dulled golds and browns of late autumn. He knew this land almost as well as his own. The rocks and hollows held memories of childish games, pleasure, secrets. But he hadn’t been out here for a while, for years, he now realized, not since he’d married Linda, really, partly because with his enlarged family he had more responsibilities and less time, partly because Linda didn’t understand his relationship with Celeste. He was glad to be back here now. The land was pleasantly familiar, yet made no emotional demands on him, and today he was glad to be free of that. It was good, hard labor. After a while Owen took off his jacket and still, in spite of the cold air, he was sweating. They worked steadily, not talking.

  By one the sky was completely overcast.

  “Want to stop for lunch?” Celeste called.

  “No. Let’s get this
all done before the rain hits.”

  As they headed back to the buildings, the wind picked up, and they found the horses tossing their heads and bucking. Thunder rumbled overhead. Celeste and Owen shut the horses in their stalls, then kicked off their boots at her back door and entered her house.

  Owen loved Celeste’s kitchen. Large, with two rump-sprung armchairs in front of a fireplace, it was the heart of her house, and always completely cluttered. The stove was blotched with spilled sauce and spattered oil. Cobwebs laced around the plates on the shelf near the ceiling. The slate floor was gritty beneath his feet. The long table where Celeste cooked and ate and polished her boots and did her necessary correspondence was covered with catalogues and mail, unpacked bags of groceries, dog medicine, a bowl of apples, stacks of books, a box of envelopes, dog leashes, dirty plates and mugs, and now, as she entered, she tossed her work gloves onto the pile.

  “Start the fire,” she suggested. “I’ll make lunch.”

  Soon they were settled with sandwiches and coffee. The fire threw off golden light and welcome heat, and to make it all perfect, the rain started, lashing at the windows, making the room cozy, safe.

  “You’re a pal,” Celeste told him, sighing and stretching her long legs toward the fire. “I owe you a big one.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I was glad to do it. Needed a diversion today.”

  She looked at him. “Oh, yeah?”

  He stared at the fire. The coffee and sandwich sent a satisfying heat through his belly. If he’d had to bet his life on it, he would have bet that Linda had told Janet about Emily and her accusation that Bruce had raped her. He knew Linda told Janet just about everything. He knew she’d told her what kind of lover he was and even the size of his penis.

  So he told Celeste about Emily. “Look,” he concluded. “Don’t let Linda know I’ve told you. She’d be furious. We want to keep this quiet.”

  “ ’Course you do,” Celeste murmured.

  “I shouldn’t have told you, except, well, I sometimes think I’m going to lose my mind. I just can’t see Bruce—”

  “Bruce didn’t rape Emily.” Celeste’s voice was rough with indignation. “How can you even doubt your son for one single second, Owen? Jesus Christ.” She slammed her plate down on the slate floor so hard it cracked. Rising, she paced around the kitchen. “This sucks. Jesus Christ. Poor Bruce. Poor you. Owen, listen to me.” She knelt by Owen’s chair and stared up at him. “Listen to me good. I’ve known Bruce since he was a baby. I’ve watched him grow up. I’ve seen him and Emily play games over here; he’s told me secret stuff he hasn’t told you, I mean really dumb dirty jokes and stuff. There is just no way that boy is a rapist. He is a good boy, Owen. He is a wonderful boy. Don’t you even think for one second about not standing by him. He needs your support now. You give it to him. You give it to him all the way.”