“I want to see it,” Eric said.
The rain had started in again, falling in black sheets against Morgan’s bedroom window. He’d waited until she fell back asleep, watching from the doorway as Caren held her hand in the dark, as their daughter’s breath deepened and she curled herself into a tight, soft ball. Caren kissed her on the forehead and then started out of the room. When she stepped into the hallway, Eric grabbed her by the wrist. “Caren,” he said. His tone was soft and forceful and quietly intimate, so that she wasn’t clear if the touch was meant to signal aggression or affection. His eyes were sunken and blood red.
“Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“Morgan’s shirt,” he said. “What did you do with it?”
She stared at him for a moment.
“I got rid of it,” she said, meaning the bloodstain. The light from her bedroom across the hall outlined the hard angles of his face, the tense, squared shoulders, but she could not, in shadow, read his expression with any precision. She heard the rain pattering on the roof and the bullish sound of his breathing. “I washed it,” she said.
“I want to see it.”
“I washed it, Eric.”
“I want to see it!”
She sighed, glancing over her shoulder. The door to Morgan’s room was still open. Eric made a move in that direction, but she stopped him. She knew where the shirt was, knew every detail of her daughter’s room, even in the dark. He waited for her in the hallway, watching through the door as she went straight to the top drawer of the bureau beside Morgan’s bed. The shirt was folded neatly. She walked it to Eric in the hallway. He unfurled it right away, snapping the fabric, holding it in front of his eyes. Dissatisfied with the light, he walked into Caren’s bedroom. There, turning the cotton over in his hands, he asked her, “Where is it?”
“It was on the sleeve, on the left side.”
Eric inspected the white sleeve, his eyes finally coming to rest on the grayish half-moon shape where the stain used to be. He studied it for a long time, and then looked up at her. This time, by lamplight, she could see his face clearly. He let out a long sigh. “You know what Morgan told me, when we were in the car today, when it was just the two of us? She told me she never saw any blood.”
“What?”
“She didn’t see any blood, Caren.”
“I showed it to her, Eric,” she said. “It was on her shirt.”
“Are you sure it was blood?”
His tone was gentle, an exaggerated show of patience for a woman whose motives it was clear he no longer trusted.
“You don’t believe me.”
“I don’t know what to think, Caren.”
“I know what I saw, Eric.”
“But, Christ, if it really was blood on her shirt, why the hell did you wash it?”
“I just panicked,” she said, which was a lie. But it was the only sentiment she thought he would understand. She knew exactly what she’d done, had handled the task with care and relative calm. There wasn’t much in her life she could completely control, but her daughter’s laundry was under her jurisdiction, she’d decided. Eric sighed again, sinking onto the side of the bed, Morgan’s shirt still balled in his hands.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here.”
“I didn’t ask you to come.”
“Yes, you did. You knew if you called me with this, if Morgan was in any kind of trouble, that I would come down here. You knew I would drop everything.”
“You think I made all this up just so I could see you again?”
Eric looked up, his eyes meeting hers, but he didn’t say anything, and his silence revealed his suspicions.
“A woman was murdered, Eric!”
“I know that.”
“There were police here, and they were talking to our daughter. I was scared, Eric, and, yes, if I’m being honest, I’m glad you’re here,” she said, which, on its own, was hard enough to admit. “Why in the hell should I have to go through all this alone?”
“I have never asked you to raise Morgan alone. Let’s be clear about that.”
He stared at the shirt in his hands. “That was your choice, Caren.”
Outside her bedroom window, the light was moving toward dawn. The sky was slate gray, and there were droplets of rain dotting the glass. Eric clasped his hands around Morgan’s shirt. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. He was momentarily lost in his thoughts.
Finally, he set the laundered shirt gingerly atop her quilt.
“This is weird for me,” he said.
“What is?”
“Being here with you,” he said. “I mean, I’m getting married in three weeks.”
He glanced down at his hands, resting them as a set in the space between his bare knees. “You’ve been dragging your feet about getting Morgan’s plane ticket for the wedding. You haven’t made any plans to get her there. And I don’t know what to think, what you must be feeling.” He looked up, waiting for her to tell him what she was feeling. She didn’t, however, and in the end Eric seemed to have expected this. He rose from the bed, leaving the shirt behind. “I just want to move on, Caren.” Fine, she thought.
“I’ll buy her plane ticket tomorrow.”
“Okay, then,” he said, heading for the door. She could sense his dissatisfaction. But it was only long after he was gone that it occurred to her that maybe Eric had wanted something more from her, needed it even, especially now, on the eve of his marriage to another woman. Maybe, she thought, he had his own reason for coming all the way down to Louisiana, blood or no blood.
He had always said he didn’t blame her for what happened.
And she supposed she was meant to feel grateful for that.
But, truth be told, she had always very quietly considered his lack of rage over her behavior, what she’d done, his own act of betrayal. He had not taken the news like a man so much as he had taken it like a lawyer, with a level head and a clear tone of voice. He asked for few details but seemed comforted to know that it had happened only once, with a man she hardly knew, a guest passing through her hotel. Inside of fifteen minutes, he was holding her hand, owning up to his own bad behavior—the way he often used work as a shield, holing up in their extra bedroom with stacks of files most nights, just so he could have an hour or two to himself, something that, on the other side of becoming a father, he’d come to cherish more than sleep. Parenthood had turned out to be a costly miracle. It gave them a beautiful girl, yes, and a vaulted perch upon which to see the world, to sit and reflect on the nature of pure grace, the surprises life can bring. But it took from them, too. Eric was a new lawyer at a prestigious firm, working eighty-hour weeks; and Caren was by then managing most of the hotel’s day-to-day operations, the dream of someday returning to law school having been laid aside by motherhood. Whatever of them was left at the end of the day went to Morgan first. She and Eric spent more and more time in their separate corners, their separate roles as her parents. Mothering, she learned the hard way, was about loss as well as love.
Those were rough years for Caren, right after Morgan’s birth.
She had taken Helen’s death particularly hard, and having a child so soon after losing her mother had felt almost like a base form of punishment, pointed and cruel.
Eric repeatedly brought up Chicago as an option, a solution to their overworked lives and a place where they might settle down. His mother could watch Morgan some days. She might offer both of them, but Caren in particular, a guiding hand in parenthood. But the mention of his mother in place of her own only made Caren’s grief thicker, hardening in places to an impenetrable crust. Eric told her almost daily that he hadn’t meant it that way, but by then she wasn’t listening. Any mention of Chicago and she would change the subject, sometimes walking out of the room. Eric grew irritated, then angry, repeatedly accusing her of making things deliberately harder on them, of having no real concept of family—which was as close as he would ever come to commenting on her background.
This from a man who had yet to propose marriage, she thought.
She didn’t think it was fair, Eric asking her to move across the country without some kind of commitment, or at least a spoken promise to stay by her side. It was a kernel of resentment that grew into an irrational panic: he was going to eventually leave her, just like her father had left her mother behind. She and Eric were two people who had started out about as far apart in life as a man and a woman could have, and she started to wonder if Eric sensed it, too. The marriage talk had ended almost as soon as Morgan was born. She was starting to worry that her background mattered more than he let on.
She didn’t even realize how angry she was.
Only how easy it was to act out.
Men came through the doors of her hotel every day, dozens by the hour, in fact. She found one from some far corner of the country, Seattle, or maybe it was Boston or Newport. She didn’t remember. Nor did it matter, anyway. There was no way to soften it, to get around what she’d done. It was a stupid and impulsive act, a test with unseen consequences. And she, of all people, should have known better. One of the first things they teach you in law school, in the first week of any decent trial prep course: don’t ever ask a question if you can’t live with the answer.
The night she told him about the affair, they actually went to bed together, falling asleep in tandem for the first time in months. And then just before dawn the next morning, Morgan starting to stir in the next room, Eric whispered in her ear that he was sorry. It was obvious to him now, and he could finally admit to himself that there was a reason he had never proposed to her after all these years, why he’d never made it official. Lying half-awake in their bed, she listened as he told her that, deep down, if he was being honest with himself, he could admit that he’d always had doubts about whether she was the one. “I don’t blame you, Caren,” he said. “I really don’t.”
She was lying on her side, facing the wall.
She remembered feeling numb from the waist down.
“So that’s it?” she said. “You’re done?”
“I’m tired, Caren.”
Morgan called out from her bedroom. She was still sleeping in Pull-Ups, even at five, and needed to be changed first thing. The morning duty was always Caren’s, since Morgan was born, and so she alone walked down the hall to her daughter’s room, helping her pick clothes for school and then starting breakfast. By the time she returned to their bedroom, Eric was already dressed for work. He kissed her, quite tenderly, his breath warm and sweet. It was the look in his eyes that finally broke her, when she finally started to cry. What she saw was relief. In the end, her transgression had cost him nothing. She had given him his way out.
That was August, 2005.
Within weeks, Eric, without telling her, went to Chicago for a second interview in the Economic Development Department of then-senator Barack Obama’s hometown office. Eric had grown up in Chicago and had ties to the newly elected freshman senator.
He blew his cover that weekend, though, calling home to tell Caren he was not meeting a client in Tulsa, as he’d said, but was actually in Chicago. He’d been watching news reports about the hurricane, and he wanted her and Morgan to get out of the city while they still could. Caren, who had grown up near the Gulf (and slept through Category 3 hurricanes), would have stayed in the city, at the Grand Luxe Hotel, where some of her coworkers were bringing their families . . . if Eric hadn’t insisted they leave.
Two last-minute plane tickets to join him in Chicago seemed extravagant and unnecessary, and things between them were still quite raw. She thought it was best if she stayed down south. She had wrongly assumed that getting a hotel room would be easy. But everything was booked, from the capital to Alexandria, even as far north as Monroe. In the end, they headed west. Caren pulled Morgan out of school and loaded up the Volvo with a single suitcase for both of them, plus a plastic bag with crayons and coloring paper . . . grabbing at the last minute the paisley-covered box of her mother’s things that Lorraine had sent her, setting it on the front seat beside her for the five-hour drive across the state line. They rode out the tail end of Katrina in a motel room outside of Beaumont, Texas, on and off the phone with Eric, neither one of them with any idea that the last evidence of their life together was being washed away as they spoke, Morgan reaching for the phone every few minutes to say hi.
Eric took that job in Chicago.
He wanted Morgan with him, but made no specific mention of Caren.
She asked for time to think about it.
They stayed in that motel room for days, she and Morgan, with its sage-colored curtains and thick, dusty carpet. Caren made the beds every day and cooked their meals on a small range stove in a corner of the room. A trucker’s special, they called it, a place for people with no real home. They ate grits and butter, fried apples when she could find the right kind, and thick slices of ham on toasted bread—the sort of food her mother used to set aside just for Caren, nights she worked in the kitchen, nights Caren waited up for her. She felt a strange peace there, the whole of her life contained within the four walls of that motel room, her daughter napping on her lap some afternoons.
“I’m your mother,” she said to her one day, a whisper in her ear as she slept.
I’m your family, she said.
They stayed a few more nights, just the two of them, until Caren was finally ready to go home, to the only one she had left. What they had, they packed into the car, heading out early, early in the morning, Caren with that box of her mother’s things riding shotgun beside her. Interstate 10 will take you all the way into New Orleans if you let it, but instead they cut south from Baton Rouge, heading for Ascension and Belle Vie. She had steeled herself for the reunion. She’d prepared herself to hate the place on sight, pointedly refusing to be courted by a pretty picture, or its pretense of antebellum grace. And she made herself a single promise: she would not forget her family’s generations of sweat here, and how trapped she’d felt by that very legacy, growing up in the shade of these trees. Her original contract was for one year. The job paid well and provided a roof over their heads. The plantation was furnished and populated, and she thought it might soften the losses they’d endured, for a while at least. The plan was to sit out for a few months, to stow away in a familiar place, until she could figure what she wanted to do next, what she wanted for her life and for her daughter. It was only supposed to be for one year. But the place got a hold of her, from that first day, the first hour even. And it surprised as much as it confused her to discover that she did not, after all these years, hate the plantation at all, that she could not hate what was now, and maybe always had been, her real home, the way she came into this world.