Later that night, as he waited in bed while she finished up in their bathroom, Lou thought back to the church fair. He thought of the cake and the delicate rosebuds, of the look on his wife’s face as she had stared at the minister who, blissfully ignorant, had greedily relished the slice she had cut him with only the barest of acknowledgment. She had lost herself for the rest of the afternoon, until finally she had slipped an arm around his waist just as he was thinking he would like to leave. They had passed the table with the cake as they walked to their car and he had noted that it was still as she had left it with only one slice taken away.
He wanted to tell her his thoughts: to say them and wait for her response so that maybe then he would fully understand the meaning behind what he had seen, but as ever when she stepped into the room, her body pale beneath the white cotton nightdress and her hair crowding her shoulders in waves tinged with red, he opened his mouth and the words seemed to fail him. Instead of voicing all these thoughts he said, “You know there’s talk that Cal Hathaway may be coming home.”
“Who?” his wife asked.
“Walter’s boy.”
“Oh. Why does that matter?”
He turned to face the ceiling. “No reason, I guess.” He shifted so that his back faced her when she slipped in beside him. “Just nice for Walter to have his family back.”
“What did you say his name was?” she asked.
“Abraham technically, ‘cept almost everyone calls him Cal.”
“Why’s that?”
“It’s his middle name.”
“Like me,” she said quietly.
“I like Anne-Marie,” her husband said, an unexpected tenderness suddenly tugging at him. He waited for her to say something else, but she didn’t and so he untensed himself and settled down to sleep.
Outside, crickets chirped before the milk of a half moon and Anne-Marie Parks heard them well until the early hours of the morning when she finally fell asleep. She did not think about what her husband had told her; there was no immediate reason why it should be relevant to her. She did not know that she would later marry the man whose name she had so casually forgotten as she lay hugging her pillow, waiting for sleep to come. Nor everything else that would come to her: things she stayed awake aching for, night after night, until she woke beside her husband, hating the rise and fall of his back because that, and not what she had dreamt of, was her reality. She was so unaware of what lay in store, of what she was capable, or who she really was.
This was all when she was still just Anne-Marie Parks, the local doctor’s wife; seven months, four days and ten hours away from becoming Lavinia Hathaway.
When Abraham Caledon Hathaway finally returned home, it was to find his father dying. The man who had once wrestled him down and cast his belt on his back at sixteen after he had stolen the family truck and gone drinking, had withered to a husk and now lay in blue-striped pajamas on white linen sheets.
Cal had stood in the doorway of his childhood home contemplating how close his father looked to death. He was not horrified by this. He had met death already over a year ago. His wife had been decapitated in a car accident while he was out at work as a salesman. A truck with a load of metal ladders had slammed on its brakes at a red light, but the ladders had not been properly tethered to the back. At the force of the stop, one of them had dislodged and shot straight through the windshield of his wife’s car and smashed into the base of her head at the neck. Their three-year-old daughter, Julia, had been in the passenger seat next to her at the time, although miraculously she was unhurt. Cal had picked her up at the hospital after he had identified his wife. Her skin and cherry-patterned dress were still covered in her mother’s blood. He stared into the calm brown eyes of his child and had known then and there what death really was, and also, that at the tender age of three, she now knew it, too.
That was why he let her come upstairs with him to see his father when they first arrived at the house, even though his sister, Piper, had protested.
“It ain’t right,” she had called after them both from the bottom of the stairway.
“What isn’t?” their brother Leo had asked, coming in to take the lunch she had laid out for him on the kitchen table.
Piper turned. “He’s taking Julia up to see Pa.”
Her brother had humphed as he tore into a cold beef sandwich with mustard. “So they’ve arrived, have they? Anyway what do you care? It’s his kid.”
“Would you let yours come up?”
“I don’t have none so I wouldn’t know. Anyway, I’m thinking that’d be more along the lines of their mother’s call. She don’t have no mother.”
Piper jutted out her chin in irritation. “Still ain’t right.”
“He say how long he staying for?”
Piper watched her brother as he stared at her over his plate.
“I didn’t have time to ask. He just dropped his bags and went straight up.”
“No sense beating ‘round the bush, I guess. He’s only here for one reason and we all know it.”
When Cal came back downstairs, he paused at the bottom step at the sight of his younger brother. Piper ignored them both and, bending down low, she faced the silent unflinching gaze of her niece.
“Do you want some lunch Ju-bug?”
Julia looked up at her father, who stared at her in silent agreement.
“She’ll ask for it when she’s hungry,” he said.
He looked at his sister. She was still as she ever was: thin, wiry, her hard jaw and her overly inquisitive eyes searing everything with their gaze. He looked at his brother sitting at the table, staring at him thoughtfully as he ate. Already he could feel the enmity wash over him. Suddenly he was incredibly tired, and he longed for the silent confines of his small apartment back in Oregon.
He nodded in greeting.
“Long time,” he said. Leo raised his eyebrows; Piper looked at the floor.
“Could say that,” Leo replied.
“I heard you got married,” Cal said.
“Yeah. Just before the war.”
“You fight?” Cal asked, suddenly curious.
Leo used the last of his sandwich to mop up the mustard sauce on the plate.
“Yeah.” He looked up and stared at his brother. “I did my time.”
Cal looked away, as if lost in thought, before he cleared his throat.
“Did you see any action, Cal?” his brother asked softly.
Cal met his brother’s unflinching gaze.
“I saw plenty.”
“Pa’s glad to have you back,” offered Piper, the light notes of her voice grating against the air in the kitchen.
“Pa barely knows his own name,” Cal snapped. Piper looked away out onto the porch and sniffed.
Julia frowned and began to swing against the grip of her father. Cal looked down at his daughter as if he had forgotten she was there.
“Julia, this is your uncle Leo,” he said, raising a finger. “Remember the pictures I showed you?”
Julia looked at her uncle and then shook her head.
“Well, it don’t matter,” said Cal. “He was much younger in them than he is now.”
“Hi there, girl,” said Leo and gave her a halfhearted wave. He turned back to his plate. “You both gonna be here long?” he asked sharply, without looking up.
Cal