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Still Life
By Christa Parrish Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2015 Christa Parrish
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4016-8904-9
CHAPTER 1
She believes tragedy comes only in the night. It's her mama's two stillbirths and a toddler brother lost to a fever her father said would take him; Ada had kissed the listless boy good-bye with all the others in the room, gathered there to pray him home to Jesus, and bit her cheek against the rebellious words—aspirin, alcohol bath, doctor—pooling on her tongue. It's the Langley family cattle, bloated with a strange plague and struck down dead, nearly forty in all gathered from the muddy pasture the next morning and burned so whatever afflicted them wouldn't spread like fleas on toast. No one honestly believed the burning was necessary. Surely one of the Langley kin had somehow secretly sinned against God or man. Probably both. Not long after that the eldest daughter confessed these sins to the elders and was deemed restored to the fellowship after twelve strikes with the paddle and three days of solitary fasting in the woods. We are all desperately wicked, her father said over supper, though he would not tell them what Rebekah Langley had done. It can be any one of us at any time, if we don't take captive our thoughts at the first hint of wandering.
Ada hoped he couldn't discern her thoughts, even if he was a prophet of the Lord.
It's the shadows in her bedroom at night, the ones she'd been taught were demons and still may believe it, despite Julian's skin and scent and laughter beside her—all things to drive her past away. Garlic to vampires. Human hair to garden vermin.
The switch to a disobedient backside.
It's not dark now, though, and the knock comes on the door. She finds strangers in dark suits, perspiration on their brows, neckties askew. Two men, one young and one old. White men. The young one speaks while plucking the skin beneath his thumbnail, asks if she's the wife of Julian Goetz, flying from Cleveland to Albany on Union North Flight 207. She tells them she doesn't know the flight number, didn't pay attention to it since he plans to drive himself home from the airport, but yes, she is his wife and is there a problem? They want to know if she's turned on the television today, or the computer.
Now she's nervous. "Who are you? What do you want?"
"There's been an accident. A plane crash. Julian was on the flight."
"Don't say his name like that," Ada says. They're not allowed to be so familiar with him, these men of polyester and sweat. "You don't know him."
The old one apologizes, his voice streaked with too many of these visits, and asks to come inside.
She moves, allowing them to pass.
* * *
She hadn't been concerned he wasn't home yet, or that she hadn't heard from him. People are waylaid all the time, flights delayed in the gate, traffic on the highway. Cell phone batteries dead. She didn't bother to contact him.
She breathes easier when he's gone.
She loves him, she's fairly certain. There are moments she catches sight of him in the corner of her vision and is stunned by his bone-aching beauty. Something rushes around her, warmth at once, soft and sharp. Her father would call it lust, but she knows better, can almost put a name to it, the proper name; the word is there just outside her understanding. If she can feel this feeling a little longer, she'll be able to decipher it. But it's gone too soon and she's left with nothing, a sensation she's but a table leg, all one substance straight through, all one temperature, unable to be filled or emptied out.
He called her from the airport a bit before ten this morning. "My flight's overbooked. Why in the world airlines do that, I don't know."
"What does that mean?" she asked, phone beeping several times in her ear, not used to the sleek screen and how her cheek pushes against the buttonless images, turning the speaker on and off, dialing random numbers, muting her voice.
"I've been bumped to the nine-fifteen flight."
"Oh."
They have reservations tonight for her birthday. Julian's idea. He wants the day to be special. She's twenty-six and has never had any sort of celebration. The day came and went with unspoken recognition in her previous life; her mother allowing her an extra biscuit with butter and honey at breakfast, or perhaps adding peaches to her pancakes. Her father nodding as she ticked another line on the doorframe, documenting not her height but her years since she'd stopped growing. They might all forget how old they were if not for the Sharpie marks in the pantry.
She doesn't want the attention anyway. "It's alright."
"No, it's not." He sighed. She could practically hear him mashing his fingers against the soft tissue behind his eyelids. "Look, just let me—I'll call you back."
He didn't call, but texted twenty minutes later: I'll be home in time. Be ready to party.
* * *
The men speak at first in hushed tones to each other. The ditty of a text message, the electronic tap-tap-tap of a reply. The old one puts the telephone to his ear when it rings, nods over and over again, responds with a single, convictionless, "Okay."
She knows, now, she won't see Julian again this side of heaven.
What she doesn't know is if she should offer them a seat or a glass of water, if hospitality is in order, or efficiency. So she waits, fingers interlaced and against her navel, body curved into the banister at the bottom of the stairs. The men's eyes flicker to the sofa and chair in the living room, to the photographs on the wall beside her. The young one steps forward to look at the first framed image. A protest in some country she'd never heard of when Julian told her of it—world geography wasn't important in her community—where the off-center face of a young boy, maybe nine years old, shouted his angry words against the crowd. Above him, a man's arm, in flames. The boy's hair is beginning to singe, to smoke, about to be set afire in the next moments, the ones not captured on paper. Ada remembers being horrified when she first saw it. Angry. "You stood there and took a picture, and did nothing to help him?"
Julian had turned his body slightly away from her. "He was fine. Someone in the crowd threw a blanket over him. And the guy's arm."
"But not you."
"It was taken care of, Ada."
"Two strong arms are better than a quick wit. Or a quick lens, in this case."
He turned away completely. "I've helped before."
She'd wanted to believe him.
The young one isn't repulsed, though. The photo pulls him closer until his nose is almost to the glass, and he reaches to touch the boy's twisted face.
"Mike," the old one says.
His hand dives into the pocket of his pants.
The old one introduces himself as Wright and the young one as Bowen. Airline liaisons. "May we sit?"
"Oh, yes, of course. I'm sorry." She fumbles with the words as Wright holds his arm out toward the leather living room set, as if it's his own home and she's the visitor. She turns sideways to squeeze between them, sits on the chair. They both take a place on the sofa, each on the end cushions, the middle one empty.
"You haven't seen the TV today, then," Wright says.
"We don't have a television."
"News websites?"
Ada shakes her head. "I'm not good with ... those kind of things."
"Me either. Old dog and all that nonsense." Wright clears his throat. "As we mentioned, there was an accident. A crash. We don't believe any of the passengers survived."
She closes her eyes, nestling between his sentences. Her nostrils flare on their own volition. She hears Bowen's phone jingle again, Wright say, "Take it outside." Thumping of feet on the dark, shiny floor. Too dark and too shiny for her taste. Masculine wood.
"Mrs. Goetz?"
"Where?"
"On the border of New York and Pennsylvania, in the Susquehanna."
"I can smell it," she mumbles.
"No, not from here," Wright says, and his eyes glaze with piteous familiarity; he's seen others go half-insane in their own living rooms before. Ada wonders about his everyday job. Plane crashes are few and far between. What does he do in that in-between?
He waits seconds for a response, and getting none, says, "Is there someone you can call? You shouldn't be alone. Any family close by? Friends?"
"No."
"No one?"
"Julian's sister." That imaginary jet fuel smell thickens to a haze, filling her skull, dulling the speed of her synapses. "She doesn't live far. Two hours, I think?"
"Is there someone not so close. To Julian, I mean. Someone who—"
"I know what you mean."
She finds her phone on the dining table, where she dropped it earlier, and scrolls through the contact list Julian programmed there. All people he knows, people she's met once or a handful of times. Names he parades through conversations, expecting her to remember.
She chooses one.
Hortense.
"Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Ada, happy birthday to you," Hortense sings. "That man of yours has taste, taking you to The Waterfront. You think mine would? Nope. Not in fourteen years."
There's murmuring in the background, and Hortense says, "I don't care that it's only been open for three. You've never taken me anywhere remotely like it. Denny's is a fancy date to you."
Ada probes around her mouth with her tongue, feeling for something to say, finding only sticky, dehydrated spit. Her hearing tunnels, Hortense at the end of a long, thin tube saying, "Ada? Ada, hey, are you still there?" But her vision grows sharp and she sees Wright, in glowing pixels, moving from the couch to her elbow, prying the telephone from her hand. His voice runs from the other end of the tube, to Hortense, as he explains what has happened to Julian.
"She's coming," he says.
In the twenty minutes between hanging up with Hortense and her arrival, Wright covers Ada in a gray chenille throw he gathered from somewhere in the house, brings ice water and microwaved tea to her—both set on the end table, untouched and without a coaster. She watches beads of condensation crawl down the side of the glass, puddling on the wood, and Wright with Bowen at the front door. Suddenly Hortense is above her, around her, and Ada thinks, She will grieve harder than me, she's known him twenty times longer than I have. But Hortense is iron, and she emerges from the hug with a tearless face and firm jaw. She knows pain. This is nothing. A blip. A nuisance.
Life.
Before Ada met her, Julian had said Hortense was the most beautiful woman most people would ever see. And she is. Even Ada knows it, despite growing up sheltered from the world of celebrities and Cosmopolitan and glossy lipstick. Some beauty is purely objective. No one needed to tell her Rachael was the prettiest of her sisters, prettiest in the community, really. No one needed to point out Ada's own eyes were too wide set, her nose too blunt, her lips too colorless and pillowy.
And then Julian told her, "She doesn't have hands," preparing her, and since it was summer Hortense came wearing a billowy but sleeveless blouse, arms ending at the wrists, three fleshy, bulbous nubs of never-to-be fingers stuck to the end of one of them. The right one.
Hortense speaks with the men from the airline. She nods and responds and gestures. Ada can't make out anything they say. Bowen takes an envelope from the inside pocket of his blazer, hesitates. Hortense holds out her arms and clamps the rectangle between her wrist bones. She sets it on the side table and leads the men to the door, locking up behind them. Retrieving the envelope, she sits on the sofa across from Ada's chair, maneuvering a folded sheet of paper from inside. Opens it.
"They're setting up some sort of meeting place for the families, at the Hilton Garden in Albany," Hortense says. "They give phone numbers. One for information. One ... if you need to talk to someone. A counselor. Do you?"
Ada shakes her head.
"Mark's on his way. Bringing food. You need to eat."
"Okay," Ada says. She does well with orders; they comfort her since it's what she's known most of her life. Julian never told her to do anything. He asked. He offered. And she'd sit there with the choice between going to a movie or strolling the downtown, anxiety crashing over her, because she could not pick and wanted Julian to make the decision for her, and he refused.
She thinks for a second time, I won't see him again this side of heaven.
Hortense reads the thought from her face and for a moment her perfect mouth trembles. Ada wants to cry but needs permission to do so; if Hortense begins, so will she. The doorbell rings, then, and Hortense sniffles, stands. "That's Mark," she says, voice cracking. She coughs, straightening her shoulders, adjusting her armor. "We'll eat and then call Sophie."
CHAPTER 2
Her heart hears the hotel telephone ringing before her ears do, so when she wakes completely, her chest is constricted, and Katherine thinks, He's found me. Next to her, Thomas stirs but doesn't open his eyes, and she knows from these past five months that he sleeps as soundly as if in a coffin. She exhales until she can no longer force breath from her lungs, which only deepens the pounding behind her rib cage.
The phone rings again.
She turns her head toward it, red light flashing with each wail, and notices her cell phone blinking as well. She turns it over. Unplugs the cord from the landline.
It's dusk; they'd left the blinds open. She hates this time of day, all the contrast draining from her surroundings, making it difficult for her to see much more than shapes, outlines. No details, and that's where the devil is, for sure. She lays in the semidark, semisilent room, listening to Thomas snuffle, hearing footsteps in the hallway, stopping at their room. A polite knock on their door. And relief comes. If it had been Will, he'd be pounding and shouting.
Soft rustling, the sound of paper, something she recognizes, dealing with forms and contracts and sign on the dotted line, please in her day job. She slips from bed and sees the folded page beneath the door, sees her naked body in the full-length mirror on the wall, years of gravity and mothering and ice cream tugging down her parts. She wraps a white towel around her middle and snatches the paper from the floor, opening it to read the handwritten words. Please call your sister Jennifer as soon as possible. Important. Katherine knows it must be. Jennifer wouldn't bother her otherwise.
Katherine dials her sister's cell phone, ignoring all the other notifications.
"Seriously, Kate. I've been trying to reach you all afternoon."
"I had the volume down on my phone," Katherine says. "What's going on? Is it one of the boys?"
"No, they're fine, but turn on the television."
"Why?"
"Just do it. The news."
"What channel?"
"Try fifty-two."
"I don't think the hotel numbers are the same." Katherine clicks through the stations until she finds CNN, bold yellow lettering scrolling across the bottom of the screen declaring BREAKING NEWS and NO SURVIVORS. On the screen, she watches footage of a flaming airplane wreckage submerged in a river. Rescue vehicles buzz around the scene, dozens of angry wasps vainly searching for purpose. "The plane crash?"
"Yes," Jennifer says. "Kate, that's your flight from this morning, out of Cleveland."
"Oh, God." Nausea pounces, and Katherine folds in half, one arm sandwiched against her belly, the other still pressing the phone to her ear. "I could have ..."
"Will's going crazy. He's called here a dozen times. I told him you were shopping. You need to get in touch with him."
"Okay, okay."
"He's driving out here."
"Now? From New York?"
"He doesn't want you to step foot on a plane after all this."
Katherine's eyes find the clock. "When did he leave?"
"Don't worry. He won't be here for another five hours or so. After midnight, at least."
She swears softly, her queasiness pushed out by rising annoyance. "I'll be to your place by eight."
She hangs up, checks her other messages. From Will, mostly. A few from the boys and Jennifer. Shaking off the towel, she fumbles into the clothes she tossed onto the chair earlier, knocking Thomas's to the floor and leaving them there. She flops onto the corner of the bed, on his legs, and he finally wakes as she rolls on her socks.
"What are you doing?" he asks her, looking surprisingly boyish with his tousled hair and sleep-puffed eyelids.
"Going back to Jennifer's house."
"What? Why?"
"Will is coming."
Thomas struggles out of the blankets, sits upright now. "Does he—"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Still Life by Christa Parrish. Copyright © 2015 Christa Parrish. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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