Centerville

Chapter 6

48 Chapter 6 Elizabeth Greenly glanced up at the clock on the mantle above the fireplace in the Edwards’s living room. It had just turned six o’clock. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting on their couch, and she couldn’t remember all the steps that had led to her being there. Reverend Edwards had come up to her, seemingly out of nowhere, when she was standing with Izzy on the sidewalk downtown. They had spoken and maybe he had gone away and come back again, or maybe he had stayed with her, but at some point he had picked up Izzy and carried her to Elizabeth’s car and persuaded Elizabeth to follow him over to his house. She remembered walking around the edge of the area that had been sectioned off from the fire and asking questions. She had talked with a police officer who had tried to get information about Carlton for her, but had been unable to learn anything. At some point Louise Bradley, who had come downtown concerned about her own husband who owned the bakery, had spotted her and tried to help her get information. Thomas Masey, who managed the hardware store, had told them the story that was circulating, that a bomb had exploded in the back of the drugstore. 49 “Do we know this for a fact?” she’d asked, the words like a tight cage around something fragile that was opening inside her. Thomas had shaken his head, taken aback by the brittleness of her question. “We don’t know anything for a fact,” he’d said. She had been hopeful, the way a mind can latch onto something until it grows bigger and bigger. This was something she still remembered , sitting in the Edwards’s living room. For the first few hours, she had been sure that Carlton was safe and would end up being rescued. “I’d know if he was dead,” she’d told Louise Bradley and Janet Darcy who stood waiting with her. “We have a strong connection. I would sense it if he wasn’t alive.” She had been so convinced, that watching the fire, she hadn’t felt afraid. Instead she had felt larger than herself. She had known other things in her life also, for example, that Carlton and she would end up getting married, something she had felt with certainty several weeks after they started dating when she was in college. She’d known also that they would have three children, and that no matter what happened, the children would grow up to be all right. Standing in front of the fire, she was filled with that same clarity—everything will work out—so that when Janet Darcy asked if she was all right, she had answered that she was fine. Now, sitting in Reverend Edwards and Nancy’s living room, listening to the radio reports, she didn’t know anymore what would happen or if anything would ever be all right again. She felt as if the ground underneath her had dropped away. “I have a long way to fall,” she told herself. She wasn’t sure where that thought had come from. Nancy Edwards sat down next to her on the couch and laid a hand on her knee. Nancy was always neatly dressed, and Elizabeth 50 felt large and messy next to her. While Nancy kept busy cooking and doing volunteer work for the church, Elizabeth preferred to sit reading or drawing. She loved to go for long car drives. Now Nancy said, “Would you like a sandwich or something to eat? I have a plate I could bring you of crackers and cheese, a little fruit.” She shook her head. “No. No, thank you,” she said, thinking that eating was the furthest thing from what she could imagine doing. “Have some more iced tea.” Nancy handed her the glass, and she noticed that the ice in it had melted while sitting on the coffee table, the cold condensing in beads of sweat that ran down the outside of the glass and made a ring on the polished wood of the table. She held it to her mouth and began to drink, and once she started she couldn’t stop. She heard herself swallow again and again, turning the glass up as she kept drinking until she’d emptied it. When she set...