Blue Sky Hill [01] A Month of Summer Page 6
I didn’t want to die in a place like this, and I didn’t want to live in a place like this. I didn’t want to be alone.
Evening light crept in around the edges of the window blind. I focused on that, listened as ambulatory patients moved down the hall for game night, and thought of an old poem:
Oh far away, do smile at me, at me,
In swells of rose and deepest blue,
Await my sleep to carry me,
Away to the shores of a moonbright sea …
I wanted to let sleep carry me away, back to the days when we children from the houses off the hill rode our bicycles to the park in Blue Sky—back to the days when I stood by the old iron fence and watched a tall, broad boy with striking hazel eyes and thick, dark hair. He smiled at me, and I fell in love, but I was just a girl, and he a teenager, practically a young man. My father worked with his father. I made it a point to see him again… .
A phantom pain in my legs pulled me from the memory. The sensation was akin to a charley horse, but throughout my legs, dozens of charley horses, a thundering herd, running at top speed.
My teeth chattered and my breath came short with the pain. It means something, I thought. It means I’m getting better. One wish in a long line of wishes that began when I fell to the laundry room floor and lay crumpled there with something dripping into my mouth. I didn’t know where I was, or what was happening. The liquid tasted salty and thick. I thought it might be blood.
I prayed as I was fading away. God, please, don’t let Teddy or Edward find me here dead. Not now. We’re not ready.
When I finally came to in the hospital, I gathered that days had passed, and the doctors had been waiting for me to regain awareness. After that, it was anybody’s guess. I heard words like “coma,” “brain stem,” “subarachnoid bleed,” “impaired function,” “aphasia,” but in my mind I was back in the little hospital in College Station, forty-eight years ago, when, after fainting behind the wheel of my car on my way to freshman classes, I hit a telephone pole and was taken to the hospital, where my parents were informed of two things: I’d lost a great deal of blood, and I was pregnant. The doctor discussed the pregnancy with my family, and the fact that, if the fetus did survive, there was no way to predict what effect the trauma, blood loss, and medications would have. There was also no way to know how the pregnancy might hamper my recovery. There were treatments and medications they couldn’t use because of the fetus. He intimated that a loss of the pregnancy might be for the best. I was young, unmarried. Children should be years in the future for me.
As the doctor left the room, my mother stood in the corner, weeping. My sister, Ann, agreed with the doctor. My father was silent. He only looked at me in a scornful, disappointed way that hurt more than anything he could have said. Eventually, he would want to know, of course, who the father was—how, when my parents had worked so hard to provide a college education for me, I could have done such a thing, why I hadn’t told them.
My mind was a fog that had nothing to do with the accident. I pretended that, with all the stresses of spring semester, I hadn’t known I was pregnant. But the truth was that I had. The truth was that I’d been stalling for time since just after winter break. I’d been hoping, praying, waiting for an answer that had finally come just before the accident. The letter had been brief, to the point, communicated through his family lawyer, and unmistakably clear. He denied responsibility for this pregnancy, and I should not attempt to contact him again. If I had a baby, I would be having it on my own. If I chose to raise it, I would be raising it on my own. That idea would trouble my stern, old-fashioned Catholic parents as much as anything. Errant Catholic girls were occasionally known to quietly go off to special places, disappear for six, seven, eight months, then return as if nothing had happened, rejoin normal life with little more than an occasional backhanded whisper to mark the passing of those months, the creation of a life.
As I lay in the hospital, the options, the repercussions, went through my mind in a flash. I’d caused all of this. It was my fault.
I wondered if losing the baby would be my punishment.
Years later, when I realized Teddy wasn’t like other children, when he missed the developmental milestones, failed to attain normal speech, and fine motor control, I wondered if my sins had been visited upon him. When he grew up unable to do the things other boys did, I felt cheated, cursed. When I sat by his hospital bed on his fifteenth birthday, after a group of neighborhood boys pushed him off the little bridge by the park, I felt blessed beyond measure. As big and strong as he was, Teddy hadn’t fought back. He thought the boys were his friends. He didn’t want them to be in trouble. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. There was nothing in Teddy but goodness. Evil and the reasons for its presence in the world were beyond the realm of his heart’s comprehension.
I wondered where he was now—if Rebecca would go to the house and find him there, if she would be kind to him. More than anything, I wanted to be there, to protect him, if need be, from her.
CHAPTER 5
Rebecca Macklin
A series of dead bolts, security chains, and locks clicked this way and that as Teddy attempted repeatedly, unsuccessfully, to disengage all of them at once. The locks were an odd conglomeration of antique hardware and new brass units, which appeared to have been freshly installed. Sawdust had coated the door and collected in the corners of the threshold. I touched a finger to it as Teddy tried to solve the puzzle again, then pulled on the door, meeting the resistance of at least one dead bolt.
With each failure, his movements grew more frantic, and he muttered instructions to himself, occasionally calling out, “Jut a minute, A-becca. Jut a minute, okay? Don’t go way, A-becca. Don’t go way. Okay, A-becca? I gone open the door. I gone open the door. A-becca?”
“I’m still here.” I laid a hand on the glass as the muscles in my neck stiffened with frustration, and a vague tightening sensation pinched at the base of my skull. The beginnings of a migraine wouldn’t be far behind. I needed to get to the hotel room I’d reserved, dig out the bottle of the medication the doctor had prescribed last month, and lie down where it was dark and quiet.
I will not have a migraine, I told myself, even though, after a year of suffering, I should have known that refusing to be afflicted with something as ridiculously inconvenient as migraine headaches didn’t make them go away. Sometimes the body takes on a life of its own.
Was that how Hanna Beth felt, lying in her bed at the nursing center? Did it seem as if her own body had betrayed her? Was that how my father felt as his memories began to fade? News of his decline came in a letter disguised in a Christmas card—a package bomb, of sorts. A stealth attack that went undetected until Macey, gleefully opening a stack of Christmas mail as we drove to gymnastics, held up a card with a painting of a cardinal in the snow, and asked, “Who’s Hanna Beth?”
“Never mind,” I said, then snatched the card away and tucked it between the seat and the console. “That’s someone you don’t know.”
Macey shrugged and returned to the stack of mail.
I drove on, wishing Macey hadn’t torn the envelope. I wanted to send it back unopened, as usual—to prove I had no interest in making contact.
But the card, now freed of its innocuous wrapping, tugged at the fringes of my vision, until finally in the parking lot outside Macey’s gym, I slipped a hand between the seat and the console and pulled it out. I read Hanna Beth’s letter, her warning—almost two years ago now—that time may soon run out.
I threw away the card, unburdened myself of it as I walked into the gymnastics studio. The words lay on my mind, conjured a vision of my father coming in from work with his briefcase, stopping to pluck a daisy from the pot by the door, hand it to me, and pat my hair. “How’s my girl?” he said. The memory wound through my senses, a muscle tightened in the back of my neck, and my head began to compress with the new and blinding sort of headache I’d experienced intermittently since reaching my mid-forties.
As Teddy tried the locks again, I thought of tall, suntanned Susan Sewell, sitting at the sidewalk café with Kyle. I didn’t want to own that reality, either. I’d forced it from my thoughts most of the day, made it misty and unreal, like a scene from a movie you fall into so deeply that you mentally insert yourself for a moment before realizing it’s just a story. Those are only actors. This is not your life.
This could never happen to you.
My mother said that to a girlfriend on the phone as we sat in a Dallas hotel room making plans to move the rest of our things out of my father’s house the week after all the paperwork became final. Well, you know, Carla, I never thought this would happen to me, but you can’t be too sure. Watch yourself—that’s all I can say. You think you know somebody. You think you’re a good wife, and you’re doing all the things a good wife should, and then boom, you’re on your way to California to live in your parents’ guesthouse until you can figure out what comes next. It can happen faster than you think. A woman can’t afford to be pie-in-the-sky these days. A woman has to be practical, watchful… .
My mother went on, warning our younger ex-neighbor, whose daughter I’d babysat while she and her husband went with my parents on dinner dates, never, ever to be too trusting of her husband, to be gullible. Was that what I’d done? Had I been gullible, believing Kyle was spending so much time at work because my absence, while seeing to my mother’s affairs, had increased the workload around the office? Was I naive to believe that planning a surprise anniversary trip to San Diego could bridge the distance? When we were together in San Diego, the distance became concrete, developed sharp edges that sliced through our conversations, brought up difficult subjects … why was Kyle spending more time than ever at the office, why was I still hanging on to the boutique?
“It’s been a year,” Kyle pointed out. “It’s time, Rebecca.”
“It’s not that simple, Kyle. There’s a lot to deal with.” How could I explain what I couldn’t understand myself? Letting go of the shop was like letting go of my mother. I knew Kyle wouldn’t understand that line of reasoning—in fact, he would resent it. My mother had always been a barrier between us. In his view, she was overly dependent, a purposeful interloper in our relationship. In her view, he was too demanding, too slow to understand that, as a divorced woman with no other children, she would naturally rely on me for advice in business contracts and financial dealings, for help and care and comfort when her lupus flared up and periodically caused debilitating symptoms.
Kyle did his best, but the truth was that my mother was hard to deal with. Now that she was gone, it was tough for Kyle to accept that so much of my time was still consumed with her affairs. Part of me wanted to keep the boutique, as my mother had desired, so that the thriving shop she had built from nothing could one day be passed on to Macey.
Part of me was afraid to even mention that possibility to Kyle. Both of us knew I couldn’t keep spreading myself so thin.
On the anniversary trip, we made love to keep from talking. The big things remained unsettled, but by the time we came home, we were laughing about little things, joking, flirting, enjoying each other. It felt good. It felt like we were finally moving into a cycle of recovery.
You think you’re doing all the things a good wife should, and then boom… . It can happen faster than you think… .
Maybe those words had been in the back of my mind all along. Perhaps that was why I’d always been in such a hurry to cram everything—a career, a child, a house, vacations, lessons and activities for Macey—into what felt like a limited amount of time. Perhaps that was why I could never relax and just … be. Even during our vacations, I felt the need to keep busy with tours and activities, to do everything before time ran out.
What if Kyle was tired of it? What if he was tired of the boutique, the lingering guilt and grief that made me hold on, my driving need to be good enough—a good enough daughter, wife, lawyer, mother? What if Kyle was tired of it? What if he was tired of me?
Behind the door, Teddy was getting emotional, muttering and sobbing about the locks, occasionally hollering for my father, “Daddy Ed.” Wherever my father was, he wasn’t answering. I had the fleeting thought that something might have happened to him. What if he’d wandered off, and Teddy was alone in the house? What if my father had suffered a heart attack, a fall, an accident of some kind? Would Teddy know what to do?
I felt a surprising stab of panic, like nothing I’d expected to feel. For years I’d been prepared for a letter, a note, a communiqué from an estate lawyer, telling me my father was dead.
I grabbed the lower doorknob, tried to twist it, to push open the door. On the other side, Teddy turned the locks frantically, sobbing, “A-becca? Don’ go way, A-becca. Don’ go way. A-becca?”
“Teddy!” I snapped, trying to calm the torrent of words, to stop the frenzied click of dead bolts locking and unlocking, and Teddy yanking the door, pulling and rattling it until it seemed the frame would give way. “Teddy, listen! Is there another door? Is there another way you can let me in? Is there another door, Teddy?” The racket stopped, the shadow receded from the window, and everything went silent. “Teddy?” I called. “Teddy, are you there?”
No answer came from the house. I leaned close to the frosted glass, tried to see through to the other side. Nothing but misty white shapes.
At the end of the wraparound porch, where an attached garage with an overhead apartment had been added in the fifties, one of the doors creaked, then started upward, the motorized opener squealing and grinding as the heavy wooden door bounced along, the panels bowed and off-kilter, in need of repair. I left the porch, skirting the overgrown bushes.
Teddy emerged from the garage. “A-becca! A-becca! Hi-eee!” Beneath an uncombed mop of salt-and-pepper hair, he smiled broadly, giving a buoyant, joyful grin that was nothing if not genuine.
All I could think of was moving day, thirty-three years ago, when he ran across the lawn waving and calling my name. I wanted to retreat to the car again and close the door.
I backed up a step in the driveway, threw out my hands without thinking. When Teddy reached me, he grabbed my fingers and held them in his, oblivious to the barricade. “Hi-eee, A-becca,” he said, shaking my arms up and down so hard that I stumbled sideways and a twinge pinched in the back of my head. “The policeman say to Daddy Ed, A-becca gone come.” He squinted hard, thinking back, apparently. A network of wrinkles formed around his eyes, and it seemed strange for them to be there. I took him in fully for the first time, a man in his forties, a big, broad-shouldered boy with a two-hundred -pound body and the cautionless way of a child. “That wud yed-terday, I think. Yed-terday. The police give me ride in po-lice car.” His eyebrows shot upward with surprising enthusiasm. “Policeman say, ‘We gotta call somebody, Teddy. Who we gone call?’ And I say, call A-becca. She my sit-ter. My sit-ter in Cal-forna. Tha’s a long, long way.” Pursing his lips, he shook his head and frowned, suddenly somber. “A long, long way, and she can’t come see Daddy Ed. If the police say it, you gotta come, though.” Loosening his hands from mine, he raised a finger into the air. His eyes met mine, just for a moment. “You all-way gotta do what a policeman say.”
I slipped my hands behind my back, afraid he would grab me again. She my sit-ter. For thirty-three years now, they’d been telling him he had a sister, and I didn’t come to visit because I lived too far away? Why would they do that? Why would they foster in him the expectation that I would one day arrive here, and we would somehow share a normal family relationship? “Teddy, where is Daddy Ed?”
Teddy glanced toward the garage door, now hanging crooked with a colony of mud wasps nested in the corner. “Oh, he sleepin’.”
Disquiet tickled the corner of my mind. How could any
one sleep through the yelling and the racket of Teddy trying to open the door? “Teddy, how long has Daddy Ed been asleep?” He seemed confused by the question at first. “Teddy, how long?”
Teddy backed away, intertwining his fingers against his chest, worrying the front of his soiled Ford Trucks T-shirt. His smile went slack, and he blinked rapidly. “I don’ know.” He ducked his head almost imperceptibly, waited for me to say something.
“Did he get up this morning?” I stepped around Teddy and started toward the house. “Did he have lunch with you?” I had a vision of Teddy alone in the house with my father’s body, like something in a horror novel or a sad news report.
“We got pea-nit butter jelly—me ’n Daddy Ed got pea-nit butter jelly for lunch—I know how to do it.” Teddy mumbled the words in a string without punctuation. He followed me across the threshold into the cloakroom, where coats hung neatly on hooks, and shoes were lined up underneath the long wooden bench I remembered from my childhood. A mountain of dirty clothes lay piled in front of the dryer and scattered on one end of the floor, as if someone had started to do the laundry, but then forgotten. Something had mildewed in the washer. I could smell it from across the room.
“Where’s Daddy Ed, Teddy?” I moved through the open area, pushing away the assault of memories. I used to hang my coat on the ornate metal hook by the English oak umbrella stand. The coat was red wool, my favorite. My father’s golf cap hung directly across from it. I liked his hat being there. The hooks were empty now, except for a mangled umbrella covered with the dust of disuse and ready for the trash.