Chapter 8 - THE CONFRONTATION BY THE RIVER
The storm came from the south on a Tuesday in late September.
It was not a hurricane—only a tropical depression that had stalled over the St. Helena Sound, turning the sky into the color of a bruised oyster and bringing three days of steady, torrential rain that drowned the marsh until the river looked like an inland sea.
The water had risen to within eighteen inches of the lower veranda at Oak Bluff.
Margaret was in Savannah at a meeting of the colonial dames, and Julian had been called to the trauma center at noon for a four-car pileup on the Highway 17 bridge. I was alone in the house with Hattie.
At four in the afternoon, through the drumming roar of the rain on the tin roof, I heard the sound of an engine that was not Julian’s wagon.
It was a small, high-pitched whine—a sports coupe struggling through the six inches of standing water that had covered the shell road near the gate. I rolled to the library window and pulled back the heavy linen drape.
A white Mercedes convertible, its soft top gray with water, had stopped beside the lower steps. The front bumper was hanging loose on the left side, clogged with marsh grass and mud.
The driver’s door opened.
Emily stepped out into the pouring rain.
She wore no veil today. She had on an expensive cream-colored trench coat that was already soaked through at the shoulders, clinging to her like skin. Her hair was pulled back into a wet, ragged tail, and she wasn't wearing shoes; she was barefoot, her small, white feet sinking into the shell gravel as she staggered toward the steps.
She didn't use the knocker. She hit the front door with both fists—a flat, wet *thud* that echoed through the empty hall.
Hattie came out of the kitchen, her apron flying, a heavy iron skillet in her hand. “Miss Clara, don't you touch that latch,” she warned. “That girl looks like she’s got the devil in her pocket.”
“Go back to the kitchen, Hattie,” I said.
My voice had no tremor today. It was steady, low, and cold.
“Miss Clara—”
“Go, Hattie.”
I rolled into the entrance hall. The floorboards were cool beneath my wheels. I unlocked the heavy brass deadbolt and pulled the cypress door inward.
The wind took the screen door out of Emily’s hand, slamming it against the exterior wall with a crack like a split rail.
She stood on the threshold.
The rain was running down her face, washing away her mascara in black, crooked tracks that looked like the scars on my neck. Her teeth were chattering, her small, perfect chin trembling with a combination of cold and hysterical fury.
“Where is he?” she screamed over the sound of the rain.
“Julian is at the hospital,” I said.
“Not Julian!” she shrieked, stepping into the hall. She brought the smell of wet wool, stale gin, and expensive floral perfume into the dry, cedar-scented air. “Daniel! Where is Daniel?”
“Daniel isn't here, Emily.”
“He is!” She lunged forward, her wet hands clawing at the air. “He hasn't answered his phone in four days! His apartment on Tradd Street is empty! His mother’s house in town is locked! You’ve got him out here! You and that miserable, dried-up old woman have hidden him out here so he won't sign the reconciliation papers!”
I looked at her.
The little girl from the four-poster bed. The girl who had held the gray rabbit while the house fell down.
“Daniel is in Virginia, Emily,” I said quietly. “He took a job with his uncle’s firm in Richmond three weeks ago. He sold the Tradd Street lease to a doctor from Charlotte.”
Emily stopped. Her hands dropped to her sides.
“Richmond?” she whispered. The word sounded small, hollow, like a dry seed rattling in an empty gourd.
“He isn't coming back,” I said. “He’s filed for an annulment in the ecclesiastical court on the grounds of fraud. His mother didn't have to convince him. He read the audit.”
“The audit,” she repeated. A terrible, wild laugh broke out of her chest—a sound that had nothing to do with the sweet girl from Saint Michael’s. “The audit! That old woman has spent forty years counting other people’s silver! What does she know about what it cost to raise us?”
She took three steps toward me. Her wet trench coat dripped onto the yellow pine floor, making small, dark pools between my wheels.
“Do you know what Father’s office looks like right now?” she hissed, leaning down until her face was six inches from mine. “There are four men from the bank in the library! They’re putting yellow tags on the mahogany! They’re taking the portrait of Great-Grandfather Whitmore down from the dining room! Mother hasn't left her bed in ten days—she’s taking three Valium every four hours just to stop screaming!”
“You still have the horses, Emily,” I said.
The silence that followed was broken only by the rain hitting the high windows above the fanlight.
Emily’s eyes narrowed until they looked like the eyes of an animal caught in a headlight.
“You did this,” she whispered. “You sat there in that chair, looking like a martyr, looking like a saint, and you let them take everything from me. You were always jealous. Even when we were children, you’d sit in the corner with your stupid charcoal and look at me like I had stolen something from you.”
“You didn't steal it, Emily,” I said. My voice was very quiet now, but it had the weight of the pluff mud behind it. “They gave it to you. And you ate it. You ate my legs. You ate my face. You ate seven years of my work, and then you wiped your mouth with your veil and asked me to go sit with the coats so the pictures wouldn't look ugly.”
“I didn't ask you to go back into that room!” she screamed, her face turning purple with rage. Her fingers curled into claws; for a second, I thought she was going to strike the left side of my face—the side that didn't feel. “I was ten years old! I didn't tell you to jump into the fire! You wanted to be the hero! You wanted everyone to look at you and say, *‘Look at Clara, look how noble she is, look how much she loves her little sister!’* Well, they looked, Clara! They looked for six months, and then they got tired of looking at a monster!”
The word hung between us in the cold, wet air of the hall.
*Monster.*
It was the word that had lived behind my mother’s eyes every time she smoothed my collar. It was the word my father had swallowed every time he looked at his shoes. It was the truth of 44 Legare Street, finally spoken aloud in the Callahan house.
I looked at her.
And for the first time in twelve years, the strange, cold weight inside my ribs—the stone of shame that I had carried since the night the balcony collapsed—cracked open.
There was nothing inside it.
There was only a small, vain, terrified girl who was twenty-two years old and had never learned how to exist without four hundred people telling her she was pretty.
I reached up with my right hand—the hand that had survived the fire, the hand that had survived Vance’s dull knives, the hand that had drawn fifty plates of Carolina briars with Sarah Middleton’s shake.
I took Emily by the wrist.
My grip was not soft. The tenolysis had worked; the tendons in my forearm fired like steel cables. I pulled her down three inches, until her eyes were level with mine.
“I didn't go back for the hero, Emily,” I told her. The smoke in my voice was clear now, as hard and sharp as broken slate. “I went back because you were my sister. And I would have stayed in that pantry until the beams turned to ash if it meant you didn't burn.”
I squeezed her wrist until her fingers opened and her wet leather bag dropped to the floor.
“But that girl died in the church, Emily,” I said. “The girl who would have burned for you is gone. And what’s left doesn't give a damn about your wedding pictures, your father’s desk, or your mother’s Valium.”
I let go of her.
Her arm fell back against her coat as if it had been broken. She took two steps backward, her bare feet slipping in the puddles she had brought into the house.
She looked at me—really looked at me—for the first time since November 2012.
She didn't see a monster. She didn't see an invalid.
She saw an iron wall that she could not climb, could not charm, and could not break.
May you like
She turned without a word. She ran out through the screen door into the gray, blinding sheets of rain, her white trench coat flapping behind her like the wings of a broken gull.
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