The Legacy of Eden. Nelle Davy

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СКАЧАТЬ have tried to push back, now rushes forward to escape.

      Once while on the way to the bathroom, I passed my cousin Jude, who I have not seen since I was ten. He cracked a hand on the back of my legs. “Toothpicks,” he chortled; I gave him the finger.

      Part of me is terrified. I wonder if I am losing my mind. But I find their intrusions oddly comforting. It is like turning up at a reunion I have been dreading only to remember all the things we had in common, all the memories that made us laugh, and I am reminded of a time when it was easy to be yourself.

      At one point when I was flicking through the channels and stumbled on a soap opera my grandmother used to love, I hesitated. Even though I knew it was crap, and I have never watched it, I left it on for her, imagining she was behind me, waiting to hear her slip past and the soft creak of the wicker chair as she settled down to watch it. Just before it broke for commercial I said aloud, “This is madness.”

      Swift in reply, she answered, “Only if you expected a different outcome.”

      It was at this point that I decided to call the lawyers.

      “Good afternoon, Dermott and Harrison, how may I help you?”

      “Yes, this is Meredith …” I hesitate. What name do I use? And then with a sense of weariness I think, what’s the point in trying to pretend. “… Hathaway. May I speak with Roger Whitaker, please?”

      “Will he know what it’s regarding?” the receptionist asked.

      For a second I was struck dumb. “Yes.”

      I was sitting down this time. I took a deep breath and leaned back into the headrest as I was put on hold. After a few seconds the line was picked up and a male voice answered the phone.

      “Miss Hathaway, so good to hear from you.”

      “Is it?” I asked.

      “Of course. I assume you’ve had time to think over what we detailed in the letter?”

      “What part? The part where you told me my cousin was dead or the other bit where the farm’s going to be sold off and auctioned to the highest bidder to settle against his debts?”

      “I know this is difficult to take in—” no, I’ve been waiting for this for seventeen years “—but we think perhaps it would be best if we spoke face-to-face about this. One of our senior partners was a friend of your grandfather’s. He knows how important the farm was to your family.”

      “Was it?”

      “Excuse me?”

      “Was it important to us—I mean how many of us had you tried to contact before you found me? How many times did you get hung up on or ignored? Probably got cursed out a few times, too, huh?”

      The voice was deliberately gentle at this point. “We were aware that there had been a significant rift between several family members. We know this is a delicate situation and for the sake of your family’s past connection with this firm we wanted to make the process as smooth as possible ….”

      I saw that I was in for the lengthy legal homily.

      “You can’t.”

      “I don’t think that—”

      “You can’t ever make it better. You can’t make it nice and easy or simple, so do yourself a favor and don’t try.”

      There was a pause. “There was talk here that perhaps it might be more effective if you or a family member could sign over the responsibility of handling the dissolution of the farm and its assets to us. Of course this could prove to be difficult, considering that there is no direct claimant to the farm and others could contest the process if they should hear and—”

      “No one will.”

      “Well, uh, even so there is the matter of personal items, artifacts. We weren’t sure if someone would want to come down and sort these out from what should be sold with the farm and what would be kept.”

      I saw my childhood home, the one a mile down from the main house with its yellow brick. Suddenly I was in our blue living room with the window seat behind the white curtains I used to hide under while I perched there waiting for Dad to come home.

      “Of course.”

      “When can you come down then?”

      “What?”

      “When would you like to come to the farm and do this? The sooner the better, to be frank. I don’t know if you are working, or if it would be a problem for you to take time off—”

      “I work for myself. I’m an artist—a sculptor actually.”

      “Excellent, then when shall we set up an appointment?”

      I opened my mouth, suddenly utterly bereft. I raised my eyes from the floor and shuddered. They had lined themselves up all around me in a crescent of solemn, knowing faces.

      “I don’t know.”

      Our farm was on the outskirts of a town surrounded by the farms of our neighbors: people whose children we played with, whose families we married into, whose tables we ate at. Together our farms formed a circle of produce and plenty that enveloped our small town, a hundred and seventy years old with its red-and-white-brick buildings and thin gray roads. Simple people, simple goals, old-fashioned values: this is where our farm is still to be found. I had not seen it in nearly two decades, but as I looked at the crowd of faces glaring at me from the other side of the room, I realized with a thin sliver of horror I had no choice, I would be going back. And I shuddered so violently, I had to clamp a hand over my mouth to stop myself from crying out.

      “We’ll leave you to think about it. But please—” his voice retracted back into smooth professionalism “—don’t take too long.”

      It took me three hours to find it. There was a lot of swearing, I tore a button off of my shirt and scratched my arm, but eventually I sat cross-legged on the carpet and smoothed the crackled plastic of the front before I opened the album.

      Ava had packed it in my suitcase the night before I left for college, the night I found her in the rose garden. I had opened my trunk in my new dorm to find it slotted between my jeans and cut-off shorts. I couldn’t bear to look at it for a long time. I had left it in the bottom of the trunk and when I had to repack for Mom’s funeral, I had tipped it out on the floor, daring only to look at it from the corner of my eye. I am a firm believer in what the eye doesn’t see, can’t be real. That was why, much to my mother’s deep disappointment, I became a lapsed Catholic.

      But this time I flipped back the covers and stared. I drank it in. The photos had grown dull with age. The colors, which were once vibrant blues and reds, were now tinged with brown and mustard tones. I slipped my fingers across the pages, watching the people in them age, cut their hair and grow it out again. From over my shoulder, my father leaned down and stared at himself as a young man on his wedding day. The light behind my parents was a gray halo surrounding the cream steps of the New York City courthouse. They had married in November, just before Thanksgiving, and you could see behind the tight smiles, as they stood outside in their flimsy suits and shirts, how cold they were.

      “Phew, СКАЧАТЬ