“Let’s take your bag upstairs and go say hello to your grandmother. Maybe meeting you for the first time will cheer her up.”
The stairs loomed ahead, dark and steep, evoking in Molly memories of being banished to her tiny room when she was even younger than Ariel. The house had seemed full of threatening shadows then; of hidden monsters waiting to leap out and punish her for sins she never fully understood. Now, perhaps for the first time, she saw the place for what it really was: a desperately stark box as severe and confining as the man who’d once ruled it with an iron fist.
The door to her parents’ room door stood ajar. Pushing it wider, Molly peered inside and was immediately swallowed in another blast from the past. The same plain brown linoleum covered the floor. The thin beige curtains at the window were as familiar as the black iron bedstead hulking in the corner with a plain wooden cross hanging above it, on the wall.
Never had her father carried her from her own bed and snuggled her between him and her mother to chase away a bad dream. Not once had she been invited to climb in beside them for a morning cuddle or a nighttime story. In her child’s mind, that room had been as spartan as a prison cell, and looking at it now through an adult’s eyes, she saw nothing to change that perspective.
Aware that she was no longer alone, the woman half-reclining against the pillow shifted, raised one flannel-clad arm weakly, then let it flop down again. “Cadie, is that you?”
Shocked by the feeble voice, Molly stepped closer and saw that Dan had not exaggerated. Hilda Paget had never been a big woman but injury, illness, and a lifetime of hardship had reduced her to little more than a bag of fragile bones held together by loose skin.
Blinded by a wash of grief and guilt beside which the years of resentment and anger seemed suddenly pointless, she said, “No, Mom, it’s me.”
“Molly?” Again, the woman moved, this time trying to lean forward, but the effort cost her dearly and she sank back with a grunt of pain. But her eyes burned holes in her sunken face. “Child, you shouldn’t have come! People will start talking all over again.”
Swallowing the sudden lump in her throat, Molly bent to press a kiss on her mother’s cheek and stroked the limp hair away from her brow. “Let them. I’m here to take care of you, and that’s the only thing that matters.”
“But I already have someone. The nurse comes by twice a day, and Cadie from next door stops in every morning and again at night, and does a bit of shopping when I need it. And Alice Livingston brings me soup at noon.” But despite her protests, she clutched at Molly’s hands as if she never wanted to let go. “How did you know I was in trouble, Moll? Who told you?”
“The hospital social worker, abetted by your new doctor. Why weren’t you the one to call me, Momma? Did you think I wouldn’t care that you’ve been hurt or that I’d turn my back on you when you needed help?”
“I knew how much you hated it here, and what it would cost you to come back again.”
“I still hate it here. I probably always will.”
“Then why put yourself out for a woman who never looked out for you the way a mother should?”
“Because you are still my mother, and now that my father’s gone…”
She didn’t finish the sentence; didn’t add, “there’s nothing to keep me away,” because there was no need to hammer the point home. John Paget had chased her from the house so often, wielding whatever came to hand and cursing her at the top of his lungs the entire time, that there wasn’t a soul in that dismal neighborhood who didn’t know how deep and abiding the antagonism between father and daughter had been.
Many was the hour she’d shivered in the bitter winter cold, with nothing but hand-knit slippers on her feet and a thin sweater to protect her from the wind and the snow; many the summer night that she’d hidden in the wood shed behind the house until she’d deemed it safe to venture to her room again.
Yet for all that people had seen and heard, they’d shown her not a shred of pity. Instead they’d stood in their doorways and shaken their sanctimonious heads as yet another family fight erupted into the street. Poor John Paget, plagued with such a hussy, and him with only one leg, poor soul! Wild, that’s what she is. Born that way and she’ll die that way. Tsk!
No doubt when they heard she was back, they’d lurk around the cemetery, waiting to catch her dancing on his grave. As if she’d expend the energy! She was glad he was dead, and if anyone asked, she wouldn’t compromise her integrity by denying it. He’d been a monster and the world was well rid of him.
“Don’t think I haven’t paid for what I let happen when you were little,” Hilda Paget said, the suffering in her eyes provoked by hurts which went deeper than those afflicting her broken body. “It’s haunted me that I turned a blind eye to the way your father treated you. It would serve me right if you left me now to rot in this bed.”
“What, and live down to everyone’s worst expectations of me? Give them the chance to nod their heads and say, I told you so? Not likely!” Molly laughed, doing her best to make light of a past she couldn’t change. “Sorry, Momma, but I’m here to stay for as long as you need me, and I haven’t come alone.”
Her mother’s glance flickered to Ariel hovering near the door. Her voice broke. “You brought your little girl to visit me? Oh, Moll, I never thought to see the day!”
The yearning in her mother’s eyes, the pathetic gratitude in her voice, ripped holes in Molly’s heart. Steeling herself against the onslaught of emotion, because she knew Ariel would dissolve into tears if she saw her mother was upset, she beckoned to the child. “Come and be introduced, sweetheart.”
With more composure than any ten-year-old had a right to possess, Ariel came to lean lightly against the side of the bed. “Hello, Grandma. I’m sorry you got hurt when your car was hit by a train.”
Tears pooled in Hilda’s eyes. “Dear Lord!” she quavered, wrapping her bony fingers around Ariel’s small hand. “Dear Lord, you take me back near eighteen years! You’re the image of your momma when she was your age, child, the living image. So pretty, so fine. Look at those big brown eyes and that lovely hair, Moll! She’s all of you, and nothing of me, thank God!”
What she didn’t come right out and say was that Ariel had inherited John Paget’s looks. Not wishing to draw attention to such an unwelcome fact, Molly squeezed Ariel’s shoulder and said, “Go unpack your bag and leave your grandma to rest while I see what I can put together for dinner, honey, then we’ll have a picnic up here. That okay with you, Mom?”
“Can’t think of anything I’d like better.” Hilda was tired, no question about it, and her breathing labored, but her smile shone out like a beacon in the fog. “Don’t think I ever had a picnic in bed before. Don’t think it was ever allowed when your father was alive. Guess maybe I’ve got more to look forward to than I thought, yesterday at this time.”
How she made it out of the room and downstairs before she fell apart, Molly didn’t know. Choking on emotion, she took refuge behind the antlered coatrack while she groped in her pocket for a tissue. But mopping her eyes did nothing to silence the accusations ringing in her head.
It’s a bit late to shed tears now, Molly Paget. You were the only thing to stand between that poor woman in the bed upstairs and her bully of a husband, yet you walked out and left her to fend for herself when you knew she didn’t have it in her to stand up to him. You’re a pitiful excuse for a daughter and deserve every word of criticism and disapproval ever cast at you. How would you feel if Ariel grew up to abandon you the way you abandoned your mother?
Destroyed, that’s how! Because Ariel was the most important person in the world to Molly.
But Hilda had had a husband, and what he thought and wanted and decreed had always carried the day, no matter how harsh or unreasonable his demands. If living with him had become too burdensome, all she’d had to do was pick up the phone. It wasn’t as if Molly had disappeared without