Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“You should stop me,” said Marion, “if you don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but I’d like to give you the full story.”

“No, please. Go on.”

“Why don’t we make ourselves more at home then.” Marion settled into a corner of the saddle-brown leather sofa, taking her feet up and placing a throw pillow in her lap. Lee took the other corner and let Viv have the recliner.

“Sorry for the interruption,” said Viv.

“Not at all. So where were we? I wanted to go out. To get out of that house. So we went into town for dinner. Only one place was open at that hour, a bar where they had tables and served some food. I had a chicken sandwich and French fries and I’m sure it was mediocre, but I couldn’t eat it fast enough. Jesse was looking at me, like, Who are you? I guess he’d never seen me eat like that. He was drinking. More than he was eating. I should have taken the keys. I should have driven us home but he was so possessive when it came to his car. He’d let me drive it before but I could tell he didn’t like it so I had it in my head that he was the driver. I remember walking to the car and he had his arm around me and I had my hand in the back pocket of his jeans and he walked me to the passenger side door, a gentleman, and we were leaning against the window, kissing. I loved the way he felt up against me. It was my weakness. I don’t know if he ever knew that. But that was my weakness.”

Marion was both there and not there. When she shifted her gaze from an empty space on the wall, she looked almost surprised to find that Lee and Viv were listening to her.

“So we got in the car and Jesse was driving. He liked to drive fast, of course. It didn’t matter that the roads were dark and slick and there was a fog. We were the only ones out there on the mountain road that led back to Flintwick’s place. Then there was a turn and out of nowhere there were headlights up ahead, off to the side, and someone was just standing there in the middle of the road. Standing there and not moving. Jesse swerved and we went over.”

Marion waited for her to understand.

“It wasn’t suicide?”

“Not the way you might have thought.”

“Who was it, in the road?”

Marion said nothing and Lee’s stomach turned. Marion gestured for her to hold on and went to heat more water at the stove. Maybe she was one of those people who found tea to be healing. Lee had tried to be one of those people once. After that god-awful Thanksgiving when Natalie Feld had sat her down, put on a kettle, and it really did have a calming effect. Before she drank it, she’d felt a lot like a wild animal that couldn’t help biting the hand that fed her. (Shouldn’t the Felds have known to stop extending their hands in her direction already?) But the tea soothed her. As though its heat restored some humanity to her. She’d liked the ritual of it and the idea that she might one day make perfectly steeped tea for someone in need. She went to a lovely little shop where a serene and seemingly wise woman sold her several loose-leaf varieties. The canisters sat untouched in her cupboard until she moved and then they sat in the cupboard of her new place.

Marion stood over Lee, filling up the cup she hadn’t realized was empty.

“I never got a good look. I couldn’t be sure. But when I was in the hospital, your mother came to see me. They’d moved me to an intensive care unit in Manhattan and she came almost every day and she sat with me and talked. I was unconscious. She thought I couldn’t hear. Or maybe she thought I could.”

“What did she talk about?”

“I don’t remember much of what she said, mostly the cadence of her voice, and a few stray things. Like you remember parts of a dream. She told me about the Catskills. About riding in the back of her father’s Cadillac when he drove the family up to Hirschman’s for the summer. Speeding along at night, with the windows down, in the passenger seat of a car that belonged to a waiter at the resort. Linda said she loved the total darkness of the country because it was nothing like the street-lit night of the suburbs and in that darkness she could pretend the waiter was mysterious. On their last night together — and I recall this vividly — he told her he’d write to her and she said, ‘Can you write like you fuck?’ Linda said he looked as if he was trying his best not to appear horrified. She never heard from him again.”

“Well, that certainly sounds like her,” said Lee.

Marion continued. “She hadn’t been back there, to the Catskills, since those Hirschman’s summers. Not until the day she came to Flintwick’s. By then Hirschman’s was shuttered. I remember driving by that place and pointing it out to Jesse because I thought it was something he might be into. That he might want to go explore the ruin. It was all boarded up behind a chain-link fence. The roofs of the buildings were falling in, and there was this gigantic empty pool. But Jesse just shrugged when I suggested we take a look. He quoted someone, a writer who said nothing ever looks emptier than an empty swimming pool, but I could never remember who it was. He never told me about Linda’s association with it.”

“It was Raymond Chandler,” mumbled Viv. “The line about empty pools.”

“Is that right?” asked Marion.

“The Long Goodbye. ”

“Oh,” said Marion.

So her father and Viv had read the same books. Lee wasn’t sure what to make of that. What pushed its way into her consciousness just then was the moment, as she had kissed Jonathan Feld, when his hand had moved to her breast for a long second. And the look on his face when he finally pulled away. Rueful and confused but with an intensity she’d never seen from him before.

“Okay,” said Lee. “Hirschman’s. Where Linda apparently had the time of her life.”

Marion didn’t seem to get the reference, though she seemed saddened by Lee’s cynicism.

“I’m sorry,” said Marion.

“Don’t be. I’m sorry. I mean, this is why we came here. Please. Keep going.”

“That’s about it, of what I remember Linda telling me. How she knew the area, how she knew those roads.”

“You think it was her in the road,” Lee said.

Marion pulled into herself, closing her left hand around her right wrist and folding her arms to her chest.

“I don’t know. I have no proof that it was her. All I know is I woke up with a scrambled mind and a gut feeling. Linda came to see me one more time in the hospital after I regained consciousness. I told her I knew she had come to visit me the weeks before, that I had heard her, and she said, ‘Heard what?’ She said they must have had me on some really good shit.” That quiet laugh again. “Maybe they did. Maybe I imagined it all. I asked her what she wanted with me. I was in a lot of pain and I didn’t have the strength, the inner resources, to challenge Linda. She was so. . who she is. And I was so very young. She told me she wanted to give me half. Jesse had a will and he hadn’t updated it, so his estate was hers. She was going to keep half of it for you and give the rest to me. I didn’t know what she was trying to do. Buy my silence? Assuage her guilt? I told her I didn’t want the money and she sighed, as if I was being naïve.” Marion’s voice caught. “She was wearing that pendant of her father’s. ‘It’s done’ she said. Just like that. She never came to see me again. She was right, though. About me needing the money, of course. The hospital bills were astronomical. But it was also as if she knew I would need to start again. As if she couldn’t, but I could. And she was giving me that chance.”

It seemed Marion had been over and over this in her mind and still hadn’t quite figured Linda out. She had turned it into a vexing case study, establishing a professional distance so as not to be personally destroyed.