“Because I didn’t know that she had left behind anyone except her first husband,” I said.
“Well, I know that now. But I didn’t know it then. And do you know what? It’s silly, but it hurt my feelings. It made me mad at Catherine all over again—and mad at you—because I wasn’t mentioned in that book.”
“Oh Lois.” I felt a strange sense of unreality, and I thought my head was not quite working right, as though I needed food. Only more than that.
“Well.” She laughed a small laugh. “If you write a book about this, I’d like to be in it.”
“Oh my God of course,” I said.
And she said, again with a little laugh, “As long as you make me look good.”
As I looked back at her, the way the light fell against her face, I saw then a fatigue on her face, and I understood that our talk had not been easy for her; it had taken a lot out of her, and I felt sorry.
* * *
I was almost not able to walk straight as I hurried down the street. And there was William sitting in the car. His head was thrown back on the top of the car seat and at first I thought he was sleeping; the window was all the way down. But he sat up the moment I stood near him. “Does she want to see me?” he said.
And I walked to my side of the car and got in and said “Let’s go,” and William started the car and we drove. The only thing I left out was that I had told Lois about his other wife leaving him, and her reaction to that.
Otherwise I splashed the whole story out to him.
* * *
William listened, interrupting several times, asking for clarification or for me to repeat something, and I did. Over and over we went like this as we drove, and William chewed on his mustache and squinted through the windshield, he no longer had his sunglasses on, and he seemed very intent as he listened. At one point he said, “I’m not sure Lois Bubar is telling the truth.” And I said, “About what?” And he said, “About my mother coming up here. Why would my mother come up here at that point in her life?”
I started to say that I recognized the dress that Lois said Catherine had been wearing, but I didn’t say anything, and William continued: “And Catherine’s brother never died in prison. I have the death certificate for him online, and it does not say he was in prison.”
I said, looking around, “Where are we going?”
“I don’t know,” William said. “Let’s go find the Trask farm, and Catherine’s house. You said you had the address.”
“I have the address for Catherine’s childhood home,” I said. “The Trask farm is on Drews Lake Road in Linneus. No street number. But right over the line from New Limerick.”
William pulled the car over and said, “Let’s figure this out,” and as he brought out his iPad I checked my phone and found two texts from Becka. The first said: Are you and Dad getting back together? The second one said: MOM, tell me what’s happening up there??? I answered the first: No angel, we’re not but we are doing very well together. And then I answered the second and said: So much to tell! I was surprised that she had asked that about her father and me getting back together. I put the phone back in my bag.
“Okay,” William said. He had found Linneus, Maine, on his iPad and he found Drews Lake Road, and then he started the car again and we drove, and after a while there it was: the house that his mother had lived in with Clyde Trask and where she had met William’s father. It was a house. That’s the first thing I can say. But I understood that in this area—in many areas—it was almost a stunning house. There was a long porch along the side of it, and it stood three stories high, with black shutters against the bright white paint of it, and there was a barn nearby that was stuck into a hill as these barns often were, and we pulled over and looked at it.
William said, “It’s not doing anything for me, Lucy.” He glanced at me. “I don’t care, is what I’m saying.” And I told him I understood that.
But we continued to look and we found the windows of what we thought was the room where the piano must have been where Catherine heard Wilhelm play, but we both of us, I think, felt a slight—revulsion would be too harsh a word—but we both of us, I think, did not somehow care for it.
And then we drove down the road, it was a road where nothing was on it, just a few trees being sprayed with sunlight right now, and then we saw a small post office; it looked very old. “Oh Lucy, look,” William said, and I understood why this moved him. It was obviously the same post office his mother had come to check every day for letters from Wilhelm.