Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

that the fingers were blunt, spatulate, and the nails were bitten to the quick. I did not speak.
    “You’re right,” Charlotte said in a voice like iced steel. “We haven’t.”
    She walked unhurriedly around Sheri Scroggins, then paused and looked down at her son. He sat with his mouth open, simply looking at us. We might have been apparitions.
    “I never thought I raised a fool, Theron,” she said to Tee, and walked off the terrace and was swallowed by the huge old rose bushes, drooping with their fragrant cargo, that shielded the entrance. I could not move.
    “Molly…” Sheri Scroggins said.
    I looked at her, straight into her eyes.
    “Mrs. Redwine,” I said, and walked away after Charlotte.
    Behind me I heard Tee call, “Molly. Mom…”
    I shook my head without looking back. The myriad eyes seemed to leave smoking pits in the flesh of 88 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    my back. I could still feel them when the attendant brought our cars around to where we waited, silent now, under the stone porte cochere.
    “This will never happen to either one of us again,” Charlotte said grimly as she got into her big blue Mercedes. The Redwines had a driver, but she hardly ever used him.
    I smiled at her, surprised that I could make my mouth move, and got into my little Toyota wagon and drove home through the silent, snaking streets of Ansley Park, grateful for once that we lived there instead of Brookwood Hills or Buckhead. This trip took only minutes. I don’t remember thinking anything at all during it.
    Teddy was out when I got home, but Lazarus was there, thumping his tail from under the wrought-iron table on the patio, where he retreated in hot weather.
    “Have you been out? Want to go for a walk?” I said to him, but he only thumped his tail harder and grinned at me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth and dripping. Lazarus was a sensible dog. He could not be lured out in midafternoon during a heat wave.
    “Later,” I said, and went up the stairs to the bedroom. My bedroom now. I closed the shutters against the hot, gray whiteness outside, took off my dress and shoes, and lay down on the bed.
    I had thought perhaps that I might need to cry, or at least wrestle with feelings too powerful to permit yet. I waited.
    But I did not cry and I did not feel anything except the familiar sleepiness. Sleep tugged at me like an undertow, and finally I turned on my side and let myself slide down into it.
    It was thick and black and deep, and I don’t know how long it would have held me under if the telephone had not waked me two hours

    UP ISLAND / 89
    later. By then the white heat was seeping out of the afternoon behind the shutters, and the idiot throbbing of the television from the downstairs library said that Teddy was home.
    I fumbled with the receiver, dropped it, retrieved it, and finally put it to my ear.
    “Hello,” I said thickly. I sounded to my own ears as if I were drunk.
    It was my mother’s voice, round and full and carrying, trained. For some reason the sheer perfection of it irritated me almost beyond reason.
    “Oh, I woke you, didn’t I?” she said, and I thought I could hear the creamy smugness of one who never, under any circumstances, slept in the daytime.
    “That’s okay. What’s up?” I sought to exorcize the treacly stupidity with briskness.
    “I have a lovely plan,” she caroled. It was the voice she had used when I was small and she wanted to motivate me to make some change in my imperfect self, to amend somehow the sheer unsuitableness that this large, square child was for a dancer, a feather, a curl of flame. The irritation mounted.
    “And that is?” I said.
    “That is a day of pampering just for us. Like I told you the other night at dinner. I have us an appointment at Noelle in the morning—hair, makeup, massage, nails, a salt scrub, whirlpool—and then you can take me to the club for lunch and we’ll show off our fabulous new selves. And then I’m taking you shopping. To Neiman