Cavedweller (22 page)

When people asked her why she had run, why she had left Clint and the girls behind like that, Delia was never able to explain. She would think about that gun, the cool chestnut table under her cheek. She would remember the despair that flooded her when little Amanda began to sob and Delia couldn’t pull herself up to go to her. She had left her children long before her body left. She had been gone long before she climbed on Randall’s bus.

Clint swayed forward in the shower and groaned. His flanks shook like a horse’s after a long run. Delia wiped her face with the back of her hand, reached for the soap bottle, and squeezed the gel over his shoulders and down his back. She used a sponge to scrub him, brusquely, her breath hissing as she breathed through her mouth. Her eyes were unfocused, her motions automatic. I didn’t kill him then, she was thinking. I don’t have to kill him now. I just have to get through this little bit here. Next few days, a couple of weeks, maybe a few months. With all I’ve done, I can do that.

When Clint groaned again, Delia turned him impatiently and swiped the sponge down his front. Soap foamed and bubbled on his flabby thighs and shrunken cock. The sparse blond hair on his chest stood up in wet spikes. He put his head back and let the water run down his chin. He was concentrating so hard on not falling that he did not see how Delia looked at him. When she shut off the tap and wrapped him in a towel, he collapsed into her arms like an exhausted child. She staggered but held him until he could manage to struggle with her back down the hall.

That’s the last time I can do that, she thought when Clint finally dropped back on the bed. She wiped sweat out of her eyes and saw Amanda watching them from the hall, the look on her face grimmer than the shame on Clint’s. Lord, they were always watching, one or the other of the girls, always looking at her with faces she could not read.

Clint lifted his shaking hands and pushed damp hair back off his emaciated features. “Thank you,” he panted. “I could barely stand myself.”

Delia nodded and held the towel to her chest. Maybe she could get a wheelchair, ask about a county nurse. At the door she heard a half sob behind her. Stubbornly she did not look back. Let him pull the sheet up on himself, she thought. Let him die wet in that bed.

It was after midnight when Delia finally lay down on the couch again. Come morning she would have to be at the Bonnet early. She had left everything a mess when she hurried away that afternoon. M.T. and Steph were always picking up after her, but day by day she was falling further and further behind. If she could put Clint in the hospital, she would take two days and sleep straight through. She would have time to talk to the girls, to rake up some of the trash that had blown all over the backyard, go through the bills, and maybe even write Rosemary. She covered her face with her hands. But if she put Clint in the hospital, Grandma Windsor would be there in the hour. She would have a lawyer with her, and Reverend Hillman while she was at it. The old woman had not been to see the girls once since they moved, but Delia could feel her eye on them. And Reverend Hillman was probably upset that Amanda had shifted over to Tabernacle Baptist. No doubt he was watching them too. She could feel them all watching and waiting, eyes on her at the supermarket, oily tongues speaking her name when she passed, teenage boys grinning at each other when they walked by the Bonnet every afternoon. If Delia put Clint in the hospital, she would never get those papers from the bank.

“It’s a bargain,” he had said to her, and she had thought she could do anything she had to do, carry him bodily to the graveyard, bury him with her hands and a teaspoon. But to care for him for week on week, to watch the girls standing outside the door of his bedroom, to see Cissy in there with her face fixed on that man’s eyes. Delia could smell rubbing alcohol on her fingers, the sweet, musty stink of Clint’s skin under it. Her whole body shook with exhaustion.

A dog barked out in the dark, a hound-dog howl as protracted and melancholy as any song Delia had ever sung. In California it would be three in the morning. Rosemary might be up. She was a night person, she had always said so. She might be out on her deck watching the moonlight on that stand of cactus she loved so.

“I’m a cactus rose myself,” Rosemary told Delia once. “I’m prickly and sweet-scented and dangerous to the unwary.” Delia could hear her chuckle, a deep growl of satisfaction. “And I’m like you,” Rosemary said. “I can survive on just about nothing. And nothing’s enough when you know who you are.”

“I need help,” Delia whispered to the night.

She wiped her face with her palms. There was the sound of a door closing, one of the girls going to the bathroom, Delia thought. She pushed herself up. She would fill the kettle before she went to bed, save herself a little time in the morning. In the hall she saw a shadowy figure outside Clint’s open door. It looked like Dede, but the hall was so dark that it was impossible to be sure who was standing there, hunch-shouldered, staring in at the dying man.

“Dede?” Delia whispered. The figure did not turn but walked the three steps to the other bedroom door and went inside. Amanda.

Why was she standing in the hall like that, watching her father in his restless sleep? Delia stood motionless for a moment, listening to the ragged breathing from the sickroom, the silence from the girls. What was this doing to them? What must it be like, watching this happen, unable to get away or change a thing? She had not expected Dede and Amanda to be so angry at Clint, so much banked resentment on their faces every time they passed his room. Some days it seemed they hated him more than she did. Some days it seemed only Cissy felt any pity for the man who lay and watched them all with his burning, desperate eyes.

Oh, Clint was suffering, she knew. He was paying for his sins. Purgatory, M.T. had called it, purgatory in life. But there was no purgatory hot enough for Delia’s rage at Clint. She knew that Cissy thought her cruel. Cissy looked at her now like it was Delia who had sinned against Clint. Some days she wanted to shake the child, to make her see what she really could not be expected to see—that when a woman learns to hate a man the way Delia had learned to hate Clint, she cannot look at him like a human being again in this life. She cannot just forgive him and make peace without some miracle of the soul. What Clint had done to them all, that was the one sin she could not forgive him. Maybe God could forgive, but not Delia.

She walked through the house to the girls’ room and listened to their breathing, steady and strong. Then she looked over to Clint’s room. His door was always partially open, but she could hear nothing.

She went to the door and pushed it gently. It swung soundlessly wide, spilling light from the little lamp on the floor by the bed. The radio was playing so softly she could only make out the murmur of voices from some far-off station. She leaned in and looked at Clint. His head was thrown back and his mouth was open. She could see the stubble on his chin like a scattering of big black grains of pepper. He looked like a corpse. Delia gritted her teeth when she saw his chest rise slightly and sink again. No, he was just asleep, deeply asleep, and that was rare enough to be frightening. Maybe the cancer cells in his bones had undergone one of those miraculous changes, curled up like hibernating frogs and fallen asleep to drift back and forth in his bloodstream. Maybe the cancer was receding like the tide receded, shrinking and dwindling away. Miracles happened—even to evil sons of bitches who deserved to rot in hell.

“No,” Delia whispered. No, not to him. Clint’s mouth worked, gasping for air. His body shifted, and the racked breathing began again, the slow cadence of pain to which Delia counted off the weeks. For a moment guilt sang in her brain. Had there been a miracle starting and had she stopped it?

Delia hugged herself. She had joked one time that she felt as if she had been raised by bears. There was no way for her to know how real people raised their young, how they loved and guided and pushed the child into a civilized state. But if Delia had come from bears, Clint had grown up among wolves. Not even his mother had shown him a gentle hand. When she first met him, it was that need that had charmed her, that boyish hunger for a gentle hand. She had misread it. She had thought they could heal each other. Now she looked at him dying and felt nothing at all.

God will judge me, Delia thought, but she could not change what she felt. She rubbed the knots in her left shoulder. He had twisted her arms up behind her and beaten her head on the floor. She could remember it as clearly as the smell of her babies’ newborn bodies. He had left her helpless on that floor, walked out, and left her with Amanda screaming terrified from the next room. She had to crawl across the floor to get to her girl. She had to swallow her own cries to comfort her daughter.

Delia’s teeth ached. She had been grinding down so hard that her jaw was trembling. She opened her mouth and tried to relax her neck. That was where the tension always got her, in her jaw and neck and the torn muscles of her shoulder. God, she wanted a drink. She wanted to drink whiskey and listen to the old records. She wanted to lie in Randall’s arms and not care when they might die. Delia shook her head and looked again at Clint. She was taking good care of him as she had promised, keeping her side of the bargain. Dr. Campbell told her he was surprised at how well Clint was lasting.

She looked around Clint’s room. The walls were patchy and spotted from all her scrubbing. There was a sour smell of sweat and sickness in the floor itself. The whole room would have to be cleaned and painted. Maybe the floor would have to be sanded. She ran her toe along one of the boards at the doorjamb. She would get a carpet, something with a nice bright pattern. When he is gone, I’ll polish this room until no one will know what it looked like when he was here, Delia thought. When it is good enough, I’ll move Amanda in here. Amanda needs a room of her own. She looked across the hall. What had Amanda been thinking, standing here looking at Clint?

Clint moaned and stirred in his sleep. Bad dream, Delia thought, and watched him rock his head. He pulled his legs up just a little. He was losing the ability to move them much anymore. He wouldn’t get out of that bed again.

“God,” Delia whispered. Maybe she could find someone to help. Not M.T., who gagged every time she came in the house, and not Steph, who made endless terrible jokes about rotting bodies and the fate of men who drank. Maybe Delia could find the money to hire someone.

There had been something frightening in the way Amanda had stood at Clint’s door, something terrible in the set of those shoulders. Delia moved down the hall and gently put her palm on the door behind which lay her girls. Her mouth tasted sour, her eyes felt full of sand and heat. Her whole body wanted a taste of liquor, tequila like a jolt to the nerves, bourbon like a balm for the soul, ice against her teeth and the glass thick and reassuring in her hand. Delia put a knuckle to her lips and bit a fold of her own skin, tasting blood and bitter while her pulse pounded in her ears.

“You can’t do everything on your own,” M.T. had told her. “Let your friends help you. Let me do for you what you would do for me.”

Rosemary had said the same thing. The last time they spoke on the phone, her friend got angry. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Delia. You tell me what is going on now. Tell me what I can do. I could be there in five days. Three, if you gave me reason.” And she laughed full-out into the phone.

That was what Delia needed. Not a drink of whiskey but the sound of Rosemary’s laughter. She went to the living room and dialed the number she knew by heart.

 

 

T
he first few moments Amanda and Dede spent with Rosemary Depau were blurred with embarrassment. Delia had told the girls that her friend from Los Angeles would be staying with them for a while, to help out when Clint was doing so badly and things at the shop so busy. She had not mentioned that Rosemary was the most beautiful black woman they would ever meet.

The day Rosemary arrived, she was wearing a pink crepe de chine blouse and a wide gold necklace that covered a scar on her throat, a fine blue-black line along the side of her neck from an inch or so under her chin to a point just below her left ear. Except for that scar, she was flawless, her face clear and glowing. She had dark mahogany skin that gleamed with reddish highlights, and a gorgeously shaped mouth, dark red and pursed like a rosebud. Her short brown hair glistened with sweet oil and showed the delicate shape of her skull. When she climbed out of the rented car, Amanda was startled and intimidated. Dede was simply enthralled.

Rosemary’s eyes were huge and black and glittered like her earrings, small gold scallop shells perfectly positioned on her lobes. Gold jewelry, generous proportions, full hips and breasts set off by that slender waist, makeup that made those eyes seem larger still and the lips dewy even with a cigarette dangling from them—if it were not for the fine crevices at the corners of her eyes and a sadness in the eyes themselves, Rosemary would have looked like a model in one of those glossy ads in Jet magazine. A fantasy creature, that was Rosemary, a chimera from a noir classic—Dorothy Dandridge in blue jeans and a pink crepe blouse.

“You were friends in California?” Dede demanded of Delia while Rosemary settled her luggage in Delia’s room. “Real friends, like you and M.T.?”

“Like M.T. Like family.” Delia nodded. “Rosemary kept me alive out in L.A. Every time I thought I would die, she was there for me. If you’re very lucky, someday you will have a friend like that, a woman you can trust with your life. I’ve been lucky past that. I have two. No woman is safe who doesn’t have one. Any woman who does, well, she an’t never on her lonesome.”

“What we need is God,” Amanda said sourly.

“Well, God is good.” Delia’s expression was solemn. “But Rosemary and M.T. never seemed so far away as God.”

Rosemary was perpetually wreathed in cigarette smoke, though in deference to the sick man in the back bedroom, she smoked out in the backyard. Cissy was surprised that she bothered. The first day, when Delia led Rosemary back to introduce her to Clint, Rosemary only nodded briefly in the direction of his strained features. She did not say anything, and neither did he. Delia did all the talking, nervously babbling her appreciation for Rosemary’s coming to help while her friend’s long, elegant fingers rubbed together like insect legs.