“Call me Immi.”
“All right.” Holly smiles. She’s got a good one. Jerome tells her she doesn’t use it enough.
“I’m gonna take you at your word, Holly. Because I cared for that girl. Certainly felt sorry for her troubles. I just want you to know that I’m no tattletale and no backfence gossip.”
“Noted,” Holly says. “May I turn on my phone and record this?”
“No you may not.” Click-click go the needles. “I don’t think I’d tell you at all if you were a man. I’ve never told Yard. But women, we know more than they do. Don’t we?”
“Yes. Yes we do.”
“All right, then. Ellen—she was always an Ellen, never an Ellie—she was in her family’s bad books ever since twelve or thirteen, when she gave up eating meat, or any meat products. Total vegetarian. No, that’s not right. Total vegan. Her family was part of one of those hardshell bunches, the First Unreformed Church of I Know Better, and when she quit eating flesh they quoted the Bible at her left and right. The pastor counseled her.”
Imani puts a satiric emphasis on counseled.
“I’m a fallen-away hardshell myself, and I know you can always find scripture to support what you believe, and they found plenty. In Romans it says the weak person eats only vegetables. Deuteronomy, the Lord has promised you shall eat meat. Corinthians, eat whatever is sold in the meat market. Huh! They must have loved that one in Wuhan, where this damn plague came from. Then when she was fourteen, they caught her with another girl.”
“Oh-oh,” Holly says.
“Oh-oh is right. She tried to run away, but they brought her back. Her family. Don’t suppose you know why?”
“Because she was their cross to bear,” Holly says, thinking of times when her own mother said something similar, always prefacing it with a sigh and an Oh, Holly.
“So. You know.”
“Yes I do,” Holly says, and something in her voice opens the door to the rest of the story, which Imani might not have told her otherwise.
“When she was eighteen, she got raped. They wore masks, those stocking things people wear when they go skiing, but she recognized one of them by his stutter. He was from her church. Sang in the choir. Ellen said he had a good voice, and didn’t stutter when he sang. Excuse me.”
She raises the back of one hand and wipes at her left eye. Then the needles resume their synchronized flight. Watching the sun flash on them is hypnotic.
“You know what they kept talking about? Meat! How they were giving her the meat, and didn’t she like it, wasn’t it good? Wasn’t it something she couldn’t get from some girl? She said one of them tried to put his doodad in her mouth, told her to go on and eat the meat, and she told him he’d lose it if he did. So that boy fetched her a wallop upside her head and for the rest of the business she was only about a quarter conscious. And guess what came of that?”
Holly knows this, too. “She got pregnant.”
“Indeed she did. Went on down to Planned Parenthood and got it taken care of. When her folks found out—I don’t know how, she didn’t tell them—they told her she wasn’t part of the family anymore. She was ex-com-mu-nicated. Her daddy said she was a murderer no different from Cain in Genesis, and told her to go where Cain went, to the east of Eden. But Traverse, Georgia, was no Eden to Ellen, furthest thing from it, and she didn’t go east. She went north. Worked ten years’ worth of blue-collar jobs and wound up here, up to the college.”
Holly sits silent, looking at the needles. It occurs to her that next to Ellen Craslow, she hasn’t had it so bad. Mike Sturdevant hung Jibba-Jibba on her but he never raped her.
“She didn’t tell me that all at once. It came out in pieces. Except the last part, about the rape and the abortion. That came out all at once. She was looking down at the floor the whole time. Her voice cracked once or twice, but she never cried. We were in that laundry room by the office, all by ourselves. When she was done I put two fingers under her chin and said, ‘Look at me, girl,’ and she did. I said, ‘God sometimes asks us to pay up front in this life, and you paid a high cost. From now on you are going to have a good life. A blessed life.’ That was when she cried. Here, have a Kleenex.”
Until she takes it and wipes her eyes, Holly hasn’t realized she’s crying herself.
“I hope I was right about that,” Imani says. “I hope that wherever she is, she’s fine. But I don’t know. For her to leave so sudden like she did…” She shakes her head. “I just don’t know. The woman who came for her things—clothes, her laptop computer, her little TV, her knickknack ceramic birds and suchlike—she said Ellen was going back to Georgia, and that didn’t sound right to me. Not that going back south means going back home, there’s a lot more Georgia than one little shit-splat of a town, pardon my French. That woman might have said something about Atlanta.”
“What woman?” Holly asks. All of her interior lights have flashed on.
“I can’t remember her name—Dickens, Dixon, something like that—but she seemed all right.” Something in Holly’s expression troubles her. “Why wouldn’t she be? I walked across to check up on her when I saw her going in and out, and she was friendly enough. Said she knew Ellen from the college, and she had her keys. I recognized the lucky rabbit’s foot Ellen kept on her keyring.”
“Was this woman driving a van? One with a blue stripe down low on the side?”
Holly is sure the answer will be yes, but she’s disappointed. “No, a little station wagon. I don’t know what kind, but Yard would, working in the impound and all. And he was here. He stood on the stoop when I went over, just to make sure everything was all right. Did I do wrong?”
“No,” Holly says, and means it. There was no way Imani could have known. Especially when Holly herself isn’t entirely sure that something unlucky happened to the already unlucky Ellen Craslow. “When did this woman come?”
“Well, gee. It’s been awhile, but I think it was after Thanksgiving but before Christmas. We’d just had the first real snowfall, I know that, but that probably isn’t any help to you.”
“What did she look like?”
“Old,” Imani says. “Older than me by maybe ten years, and I just passed seventy. And white.”
“Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
“I might,” Imani says. She sounds dubious.
Holly gives her one of her Finders Keepers cards and asks her to have her husband call if he can remember what kind of car it was.
“I actually helped her carry out the laptop computer and some of the clothes,” Imani says. “Poor old lady looked like she was in pain. She said she wasn’t, but I know sciatica when I see it.”
March 27, 2021
When Barbara arrives at the old poet’s Victorian home on Ridge Road, red-cheeked and glowing from her two-mile bike ride, Marie Duchamp is sitting on the couch with Olivia. Marie looks worried. Olivia looks distressed. Barbara probably looks mystified because that’s how she feels. She can’t imagine what Olivia feels she needs to apologize for.
Marie is first to speak. “I encouraged her, and I took the envelope to Federal Express. So if you want to blame someone, blame me.”
“That’s nonsense,” Olivia says. “What I did was wrong. I just had no idea… and for all I know you will be pleased… but either way I had no right to do what I did without your permission. It was unconscionable.”
“I don’t get it,” Barbara says, unbuttoning her coat. “What did you do?”