I dropped the magazine. “They won’t let me in yet,” I said, standing up.
“What happened?”
“She fell.”
“Where?”
“At my house.” I flinched slightly at her incredulity. “Well, actually, behind the house, in the field.”
“In the field?”
“Yes, Elaine.” I looked at Larry. “Hi.”
“H’lo, Cassandra.” His face was expressionless.
Without makeup, Elaine looked surprisingly old. She was wearing a floral scarf around her hair and a faded pink sweatsuit. There was a greasy spot of cold cream on her neck.
“In the field?” she repeated impatiently.
“Yes. In the field.”
“Well. Are you going to tell me what she was doing there, or am I going to have to guess?”
“I think Clyde might want to tell you herself.”
“But Clyde’s not here now, is she?” she said, with exaggerated politeness. “And I need to find out what happened. So why don’t you fill me in.”
As we were talking, Horace and Kathy arrived with Chester in tow, his hair sticking up unevenly and his shirt on inside out.
“Cassie!” Kathy squealed. “You poor thing!” She hugged me and then pulled back, pinning my arms to my sides. “We came as fast as humanly possible. I am so relieved to see you’re not here all alone.”
“Hello, Kathy,” Elaine said curtly. She acknowledged Horace and Chester with a nod. “Cassandra was just about to do us the favor of explaining what happened tonight.”
“Hey, y’all,” Alice said, coming in with Eric on her hip. “Is Clyde okay?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Alice Marie.” Elaine rolled her eyes. “I cannot believe you brought that child to the hospital.”
Alice frowned. “What’d you expect me to do, Mother, leave him by himself?”
“Well, I thought perhaps your banker friend—”
“My banker friend is no longer in the picture.” Her face colored, and she cleared her throat. “You might as well all know, since I’m sure good old Bernadette will soon be spreading the joyous news far and wide. My banker friend is married.” She shifted Eric to the other hip. “Are you satisfied now, Mother?”
“Oh, Alice Marie, what a thing to say.”
Horace, who had left the group and gone to the front desk, came back and said,” We’ll be allowed to see her in a minute. A doctor’s coming out to tell us what’s going on.”
Elaine looked out me expectantly. I looked at the floor.
“I do not want to get into what we discussed this afternoon. This is not the time or the place. But I expect that when I ask you a simple question you will treat me with respect enough to answer it.” She stared at the top of my head until I looked up again. “Now, what happened to my mother?”
“She fell,” I said evenly. “It was dark outside, and she didn’t see the hole. I came home from work a little early, and I guess I startled her.”
“What hole? What was she doing out there at night in the first place?” Horace asked.
I looked at him, at his anxious, wrinkled brow; I looked into Kathy’s kind, sympathetic eyes and Larry’s unreadable ones. Elaine’s arms were crossed, and her lips were a thin waxen line. Alice raised her eyebrows at me and smiled. “She was looking for a … keepsake.”
Elaine leaned closer. “What do you mean?”
“Something she lost a long time ago,” I said. “She thought it might be in the house. I guess when she heard me coming she panicked and—”
“Was it there?” Elaine interrupted. “In the house?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Well, what the hell was it?” Horace said.
“I don’t—”
“What was it?” said Elaine.
I hesitated. “It was a box. Full of letters. We … I … found it in the basement. I think Clyde knew it was in the house and she just wanted to get it back.”
“Do you know what the letters were about?” Kathy asked.
“They were … personal.”
Elaine squinted at me. “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “Something just doesn’t seem right about this, Cassandra. Something doesn’t add up. This kind of thing didn’t happen before you came down here.”
“Now, Elaine—,” Larry said.
“No, let me finish. Mother is not the type to go running around in the dark looking for old letters. She just isn’t. I think there must be something you’re not telling us.”
“Come on, Elaine,” Horace said. He smiled at me apologetically. “It’s been a little bit of a shock. We’re all kind of worked up.”
“No!” Elaine said fiercely. A rash was spreading across her neck. “What kind of game are you playing, Cassandra?”
Everyone stepped back.
“I think you know,” I said.
She looked shocked. “What—”
“You’ve been living with that secret all these years too. And so have you,” I said, turning to Horace. “The problem is, it’s not really a secret. And it’s probably not even true.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” Elaine said.
“Clyde has lived half her life in the past. And you—you act like you’re helping her, protecting her, when all you’re doing is keeping her from dealing with it.” I turned to the rest of them. “When is it going to end? When it’s too late? When she’s dead? Everybody goes around whispering behind each other’s backs—”
“You’re a fine one to talk about going behind people’s backs!” Elaine broke in bitterly. “Slutting around town with my son—your own cousin.” She spit the word out. “The very thought makes me ill.”
“What’s all this about?” Larry said, looking back and forth between us, his eyes narrowing to flinty chips.
“I didn’t think it was my place to tell you,” I said quietly to Elaine. “It was his. Why he didn’t tell you, I don’t know. But I think it’s got something to do with all of this, everybody keeping secrets from everybody else, afraid of—I don’t know what. And the secrets just get worse the longer they’re kept.”
Elaine was fuming. “You may find this difficult to believe, Cassandra, but things were just fine before you got here. Just fine.”
“Not for Clyde they weren’t.”
“Don’t you say another word about her! You don’t know anything about what she’s been through!”
“I know that she’s been in a lot of pain for more than twenty years about what happened to my mother—and that you haven’t been much help.”
“Cassandra, I think that’s enough.” Horace cleared his throat and signaled to the white-coated man coming toward us with a clipboard under one arm. “Doctor,” he said, “I’m Horace Clyde. I believe you’ve got my mother in there.”
The doctor transferred his clipboard to the other side and shook Horace’s hand. He nodded at the group. “Mrs. Clyde is doing just fine,” he told Horace with a hearty smile. “You all can come on into her room, if you like. She should be waking up shortly.”
Horace headed down the corridor with the doctor, bombarding him with questions.
“I don’t think this is between you and me, Elaine,” I said as we followed along.
She stared straight ahead.
I watched her profile. “I don’t want to be your enemy.”
She stiffened but kept walking. “You’re just exactly like Ellen,” she said. “You think you have the God-given right to pass judgment on anything and anybody you choose, no matter who you hurt.”
I felt my face flush. “What did my mother ever do to you?”
“She hurt Clyde. She hurt her a lot.”
“But what did she do to you?”
For a moment she was silent. Then she said, “That’s all in the past.”
“I don’t think it is. I don’t think you can let go of it.”
She stopped abruptly and turned to face me. “Aren’t you a piece of work,” she whispered. “You’re the one l
iving in the past.”
“At least I’m facing it.”
“Maybe it isn’t yours to face.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “You never really liked my mother, did you, Elaine?”
“No,” she said. “No, Cassandra, I never did.”
Wh en I woke up, everybody was standing around my bed. Horace and Kathy were white-faced and solemn. Chester looked half awake, his hair sticking up in clumps where he’d slept on it. Alice was bouncing Eric on her hip. He was wearing pajamas and sucking his thumb.
“All this fussing over me,” I said.
Elaine had a sorrowful expression on her face, like she thought I was already dead.
“Don’t furrow your brow, Elaine. Fastest way to wrinkles.”
“Oh, Mother,” she said, trying to smile. “I’m the one who told you that.”
“How are you feeling, dear?” said Chester, coming over and tugging on my hands. “You look as perky as ever.”
“Pshaw,” I said. “Just a wrinkled old woman.”
“You’re a liar, is what you are,” he said, but there was no force in it.
“Don’t cry, Chester,” I said. “I might not believe you.”
He touched me on the shoulder and turned away.
Over to the right I saw Cassandra, leaning against the wall, watching. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she said.
I kept looking at her. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Elaine looking from her to me. “Cassandra,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about what I did.”
She came to the bed. “I know.”
“There’s so much I want to tell you—”
“There’s so much I want to hear.”
“I broke all the pieces, didn’t I?”
“Not all,” she said. “I think there was one you missed completely. And the rest of them were mainly just practice. Now I can start on the real ones. “She smiled, but I could tell she was sick about it.
“That’s right,” said Elaine. “Clay pots can be mended. Who’s the one with the broken hip?”
“Leave her alone, Elaine,” I said. I beckoned Cassie closer and whispered, “Troy’s my favorite too.” I reached for her hand and squeezed it.
“Mother, you rest now,” Elaine said, fussing with my blankets.
“I’m all right, Elaine. You look like you could use some rest yourself.”
“Shush now. Close your eyes and sleep.” I felt her long, moisturized fingers on my face. Her voice was strict. I closed my eyes.
At five o’clock in the morning, the trees by the roadside were gray-green, the ones behind them black silhouettes against a grainy sky. The few cars I passed had their lights on. I wondered about them: where they’d come from, whether they had been driving all night. I passed fields of sleeping cattle, the black and white of them distinct in the cool gray air. Small, warm, yellow buds, millworkers’ windows, shone like fireflies down in the valley.
My eyes were tired, so tired that they stung and the sockets felt raw. When I left the hospital Clyde was under sedation, breathing loudly, tubes coming out of her arms. A broken hip, painful but mendable. The doctor looked at his clipboard, read the vital signs to the relatives, and explained about old women and childbirth and calcium deficiency. Hip fractures in women are common, he said, the baby in the womb needing so much calcium to grow that it robs from its cradle to get it. Most women never fully make up the loss. But her break wasn’t bad, as breaks went. She’d be up and about in no time.
I didn’t say it, but it looked to me like Clyde was going to die.
Staring at the road, I thought of her, quiet in the bed, surrounded by family. When I had held her, waiting for the ambulance, she was as soft and solid as a sack of flour in my arms. I was calm as the attendants questioned me, calm as I called Horace, waited at the hospital, dealt with Elaine. But now, by myself, I thought of the cold yellow tint of her skin, her blue lips and red-rimmed eyes, the raised bones of her chest, visible through the flimsy hospital gown. I thought of her frail hands covered with age spots. I thought of my mother, in her lime-green dress, and I started to weep. My voice rose out of me like an animal sound, and I didn’t even try to contain it.
When I got home I would strip out of my clothes and take a long bath. I would lie back, staring at nothing, considering only the strange paths by the cracks in the wall. And when I was ready I would call Troy and tell him that maybe I’d had all the time I needed to figure things out on my own. There were no more secrets here; the house had given me everything I’d asked of it. In that last long space of lightening darkness I had come to the conclusion that maybe I did know how I felt about him. Maybe I’d known all along.
For all those years the thought of that box festered in my mind like an open wound. I was certain that when I found it the wound would heal and I could finally forget. What I couldn’t see is that sometimes the healing is not in the forgetting but in the letting go. Sometimes the answer you need is to a question you don’t know how to ask.
There are so many ways to tell this story.
She climbed up that boulder and stood on top with her hands on her hips, staring out across the water.
“Sure is beautiful, Connie,” she said.
“Sure is,” I agreed.
From the flat rock where I was sitting she looked like a beauty contestant in that blue-black swimsuit, her hair as dark and shining as it had been when we first met.
She walked to the edge and leaned over, looking down into the water. “I don’t believe what they say about that whirlpool. It looks perfectly normal to me.” She stood up. “I think it’s a lie to keep us from having fun. Like Amory not letting you drive.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’d think there’d be a reason for them to say it.”
She peered over the edge again and shook her head. “Old wives’ tales. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop doing what I want because of some old wife.” She laughed, and her laugh was deep and scornful. I felt like she had spit in my face. I turned away from her and started cleaning up the picnic.
“Come here, Connie,” she said suddenly. “Let’s jump off together.”
“No, thank you.”
“Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Don’t be such a spoilsport,” she teased.
“Bryce, I’m not even wearing a suit.”
“What do you need a suit for? It’s only you and me out here.”
I looked up at her standing there. She was looking down at me. I have never hated anyone more than I hated her right then.
“I’ll watch,” I said.
I saw something flash across her face—doubt, maybe, or fear. Whenever I think of that day I think of how she looked for that one moment: eyes cloudy, shoulders uncertain, slightly quivering lips. It lasted less than a second. Then she seemed to brace herself. She stood very straight and gazed over the water again, then crossed two fingers at me and smiled. I smiled back at her.
“Wish me luck,” she said.
“Good luck,” I said.
I watched her, poised on the rock, her knees bending slightly as she gathered her strength, the tips of her fingers rising, rising, over her head. As she arched her body forward I felt a lift in my own shoulders, something like the pull a bird must feel in its wings just before it takes flight.
About the Author
CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE was born in England and grew up there, in Tennessee, and in Maine: A graduate of Yale and Cambridge, she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in writing at the University of Virginia, where she received her M.F.A. Her fiction has appeared in the Yale Review. She lives in New York City and teaches creative writing at New York University and Yale.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Liiterary Guild Alternate Selection
Barnes and Noble Discover Award nominee
Named one of the most promising new novelists of 1993 by Library Journal
“Sweet Water is one of those books
that is a discovery.”
—Knoxville News Sentinel
“A poised first novel of a young woman’s self-discovery through her searching exploration of family history—history that is both damaging and redeeming.”
—Maureen Howard
“Kline reveals the overlapping stories of Cassie and her grandmother Clyde with grace and intuition, articulating an entire spectrum of passions from lust, jealousy and hate to love and forgiveness.”
—Booklist
“A powerful, enthralling novel that packs a wallop to the last page…. Kline combines the elements of a thriller with a probing look at family relationships. Near the novel’s end a dramatic confrontation between Cassie and her grandmother tautly combines rage, disbelief, revelation, and, ultimately, love in a few heart-rending pages.”
—Chattanooga Times
“A compelling psychological study of bitterness, guilt and fear.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Characters well worth knowing, as is the tale…. Sweet Water reveals the desperate measures that the human heart is capable of… and the redemptive power of memory and forgiveness.”
—New York Daily News
“Kline blends satisfying storytelling with psychological chills…. This book is filled with secrets—as well as love, hate, revenge, and guilt. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
“Exceptionally fine … a gripping story, a mesmerizing plot and pages filled with memorable characters…. It is a difficult balancing act, and the author pulls it off with the grace of an Olympic gymnast…. Kline is adept at getting the reader to suspend disbelief, get on Cassie and Clyde’s emotional roller coaster, and be glad for the ride.”
—Yale Alumni Magazine
“Sweet Water has the energy and power that spring from the deepest narrative source, the family.”
—Kelly Cherry
“Enjoyable and impressive…. The North/South influences, the contrasts and conflicts, come through strongly … imaginatively and effectively presents opposing backgrounds, values and points of view.”