Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

spectacles that seem at odds with lavish vestments. From the Book of Common Prayer, he reads the Burial of the Dead to those lately assembled on the shore of the black pond, under the cypress, and to those already here, beneath the mossy stones, who’ve heard the words before.

“‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts. Shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer….’”

As he reads, Addie’s gaze drifts over the small crowd to Paloma, and to Jarry at her side. Clarisse is absent, and Addie wonders at this briefly, but it’s Jarry’s face that occupies her thoughts. His head is bowed, and he looks fretful and intense. His collar and clothes are disarranged, as if he’s slept in them, if he has slept at all. His eyes are red, and he looks drunk or slightly mad.

“‘Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and most merciful Savior, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.’”

Moving in a kind of dream, she watches Harlan throw his clod of earth and throws her own. In a kind of dream, she takes the white musk rose he breaks from Jarry’s climber, holds the stem as Harlan kisses her, and mounts his horse.

“I’m sorry, Addie, at how poorly this began.”

The sun is behind him; looking up, she has to shade her eyes. “Godspeed, my dear.”

“I wish I could stay,” he says, but even with the sun behind him, Addie sees his eyes stray to the tree line and the road. In them is a sheen she’s seen in dogs before the hunt, and she can tell that, even as he speaks the words he thinks he means, he’s eager to be gone.

“Go,” she tells him. “And know that I’ll pray always for your swift and safe return.”

He leans down and kisses her, and then, at a soft canter, he rides away down the white road, toward the vanishing point where the lines of trees converge in the allée.

Watching, Addie feels a subtle sense of letdown, and the clear thought comes to her, That wasn’t it…. Marriage hasn’t proved to be the plausible beginning of the beginning she had hoped. But under disappointment looms the sudden sense of possibility, the same she felt three days ago, standing in the Nina’s bows, as though perhaps now it, true life, can start.

Harlan is gone now, and when she turns, the park opens like the green world of a fairy tale, and coming toward her through it, also moving in a kind of dream, is Jarry. As she waits, Addie’s heart is beating out a heavy klaxon in her chest, and she does not know why, or ask, or what will happen when he comes.

When he arrives, she smiles, but he does not.

“Yesterday, when we came back from the swamp,” he says, direct, without preliminaries, “you were about to tell me something….”

Addie blinks. She holds her smile, but it grows fixed and out of touch with the false incomprehension in her eyes. “Was I? I was so confused then, Jarry, I hardly remember where I was. I’m afraid it’s slipped my mind.”

He studies her doubtfully.

“I’m sorry how it’s turned out,” she says. “I know it must be a disappointment to you.”

He continues to regard her searchingly. “It’s not your fault,” he says, and as he walks away, she waits for the voice to speak, to thunder from the depths and tell her what this means. It doesn’t, though, and it occurs to Addie now it won’t. The voice, silent for so many years, has gone to ground again. And, after all, isn’t it a great relief? Why, then, does Addie feel bereft? The cup has passed, as Addie wished and prayed it would—why, then, the sudden, violent need to drink?

THIRTY

I’m thirsty, Daddy!” Hope whined from the backseat.

“Me, too, Doddy—I firsty, too!”

“We’ll get some water in a minute.”

“I want juice!”

“Quiet!” As the yellow light turned red on Meeting Street, Ran gunned it through the intersection. The driver of an eastbound car leaned on his horn, Dopplering angrily away down Broad, and Ransom, rattled by the Charleston traffic, watched him in the rearview and had to swerve to miss a tourist carriage. Jamming on the brake, he felt the ABS engage, stuttering underfoot. The passenger-side wheel scraped the curb and the Odyssey lurched forward, then rocked stiffly back to rest.

“Are you all right?”

From the back, the children regarded him in shocked and sober silence.

As the hansom pulled around, the driver raised an open hand and stood up in the seat to glare. Ransom, feeling like a criminal, sat there with a pounding heart and told himself to breathe.

“Who you trying to kill—yourself or someone else?” An elderly basket lady, who’d spread her wares on quilts before the courthouse, posed this question. It had, for Ransom, an ominously prophetic ring he knew well from prior episodes and well knew to distrust.

Despite the dose of lithium he’d downed at Claire’s OB, he was deep in the dark tunnel now and days away from any hope of light. The profound unwisdom of his course struck home, as usual, in retrospect. Last night with Claire, he got his wish; today, he got the price. And here he was—and here they were. Again.

“Let me get back to you on that,” he told the basket lady now. “We’re having a minor family meltdown here.”

She shook her head and tsked, returning to the weaving in her lap.

“I want ice keem, Doddy!” Charlie cried, demanding compensatory damages as he emerged from trance.

“Well, you aren’t getting any,” Ransom said, “and that’s the end of that. It’s almost suppertime. I got you ice cream yesterday, and look where we are now.”

That’s right, said the voice. It’s all the children’s fault for wanting ice cream yesterday, isn’t it? If not for that, you’d be sipping hurricanes on Easy Street and there’d be naked women fanning you with ostrich