by Ethan Joella
She tries to catch her breath. Is it her ribs?
Later, she will think about him saving her, about the way his eyes looked so far away, and how good his cold hand felt on her ripped skin. She knows she will think about him and just shake her head because life is like this. “It was my fault,” she says. “I always think I can save everyone.”
“Me, too,” he says, and he helps her along.
19. The Time Machine
Darcy was never the type of widow who would set a place for her late husband at the table, or bake him a small cake on his birthday. She didn’t keep his clothes hanging in the closet or his toothbrush in the holder. But the one thing she finds herself doing every year without fail at the end of summer, the time of year when he first got sick, is getting angry.
As each year went by, she thought the anger would soften a bit the way she had softened in so many ways with age (not complaining to the newspaper office every time the boy missed the porch and made her hunt in the pachysandra; not shooing the stray cat that would sleep under her porch swing; not chiding Tabby, who worked the register at the dry cleaning business, for failing to put the dollar bills in the same direction), but the general anger this time of year didn’t stop. And she welcomed it.
She would feel the end of summer approaching, and maybe it was the intolerable heat, maybe it was the insects everywhere (she couldn’t even sit with her tea on the back deck because the mosquitos would swarm around her), but she found herself in a rage every August. And this year she is worse than ever.
“If you would be so kind as to not insult me, dear, we can continue this conversation later,” she says to her daughter, Mary Jane, on the telephone before hanging up and wringing her hands. It is a Wednesday morning, and she has told Tabby she won’t be in until later this afternoon. She shakes her head, and fills a glass of water from the tap and sips it slowly. She thinks for a minute and can’t remember what annoyed her so much about Mary Jane. Something about her saying, “Mother, just relax,” or, “You know you can hire someone to do that, right?” Darcy shakes her head. Whatever Mary Jane said doesn’t seem that bad now, seconds later. She will have to call her back and apologize.
Darcy rinses her glass and sets it in the drainer. She examines the peel on a banana that she’ll eat later. She checks her small stack of bills and places them in her mailbox with a clothespin so the mailwoman will take them. She comes back into the kitchen, sees Ginger’s letter on the kitchen table, and attempts to read it once more. Her heart races as she does. She becomes so annoyed. Some phrases stand out: I think of you often; I sometimes think I see Luke in a crowd; I wanted you to know… Darcy holds the note on its thick stationery and crumbles it slightly—not enough to rip it. “That’s enough of that,” she says, and sighs.
She walks down the basement steps, tearing her stocking on a loose nail that’s been bothering her for months now, only to find that the washing machine has stopped midcycle because her small bathroom rugs were unevenly balanced, and she is so irritated that she kicks the appliance.
“Darn you, you piece of junk.”
The basement has a pleasant coolness to it, and she takes a deep breath to calm herself. She thinks of Ginger’s note again, about Mary Jane telling her to relax, and her head hurts. She gets flashes of thoughts about Luke—they come to her this way (sharp, quick, vivid) almost every day: Luke gone eight months. Wrecking beautiful Betsy. His sweet, tired face that day in December, just a few days before he died. It’s good to have you back here, she said. Did she hug him when he came into the house, his last time home? Did she?
They found all sorts of things in his system—alcohol, painkillers, you name it. She refused to look at the autopsy report. She still sees Luke on the stepladder with the Christmas star. Does this look right, Mom? he said. Yes, dear, fine. Fine.
She rubs her temples.
These old cars weren’t made for that kind of impact. Somewhere in the paperwork it said Betsy couldn’t even be towed. She wonders if he ever wore Von’s sunglasses when he drove. He would have looked so handsome.
I’m trying to wake up. I’m trying, Mom.
She busies herself, reaching inside the washer to align the rugs a bit better and pushing the button again, hearing the machine kick back on and make its satisfying whirring noise. She likes when things are happening, when something is being worked on. She hugs her arms by her waist and doesn’t want to leave this basement.
When the children were still young, she and Von had toyed with the idea of making it more of a finished room. They had moved the old living room furniture they were replacing down here—the brown sofa with its floral print and the two blue La-Z-Boy recliners she and Von would sit in after dinner, along with the low wooden coffee table with the claw feet and the television built into the cabinet that Von said still worked “perfectly good.” When they had new carpeting put in, she asked the installers if they could bind a section of the old carpet when they were hauling it out, which she placed in the center of the basement.
It was never a musty, typical basement because their house was built into a hill, so it had a wall of windows and a nice door that led right out into the backyard. Against the back of the house sat the wrought-iron bench that Von used to rest on after he mowed the lawn. He would take out a pack of cigarettes and look at the enormous view of the green lawns of Wharton, shake his head, and say, “I tell you what. If this don’t beat all.”
For a while after Von died, she kept the lawnmower in the corner of the basement where the furnace and water heater sit in their closet, pestering Luke to help her out and cut the grass, but he wasn’t reliable, and sometimes he cut the grass too close so he wouldn’t have to cut it so often. It was around this time of year, her angry time, that she dragged the lawnmower out to the yard, parked it by the curb, and put a sign on it that said FREE and hired a lawn service. “You’re no muss, no fuss,” Von would have said. Luke was still living at home then. She felt glad that the worry was gone about the grass getting cut, but also felt as though she was taking something from both Von and Luke.
She walks over to the television now and presses the power button to see what happens, and lo and behold, one of the morning talk shows comes on. This delights her for a second because something has survived from the cable line Von split himself and ran down the wall in the groove of the wood paneling. “We can sit down here and neck all night,” he said, laughing.
“You are a silly man,” she said.
She lets the television play, even though she notices the dust on the screen, and is distressed by Luke’s drum set and two guitars over in the corner. She glares at them. She asked him time and again to get rid of them. He hadn’t touched them in so long (thankfully, because the noise would vibrate the whole house, and the cymbals that he clanged every so often would jar her teeth). But how many times did she ask, “Can we relocate these things?” and he’d just laugh her off and say, “Mom, one day I’m going to surprise you, and I’ll have a whole band down here singing your name.”
“I would throttle you,” she said. “Now take out a classified ad. I will be glad to foot the bill, dear.”
The drum set with its big bass drum and its extending appendages of other drums looks like some kind of sea monster. She is disgusted that it’s here, still alive, and Luke is not.
Why did Luke leave it behind when he moved out? She should have hired Wally, the big guy Von used to have blacktop the driveway and haul cement bags, to load up the drum set years ago. She should have had him bring it right over to Luke’s apartment and leave it in the hallway. Now she’s stuck with it. Did he know that seeing it would torture her later? Did he care? Did Luke ever care what he did and what effect it had?
If Von had lived longer, if she had told him to cut it out with the smoking years and years ago, she thinks he could have helped Luke. Wouldn’t he have said, No more, kid. You gotta straighten this monkey business out? Wouldn’t he have given him the toughness he needed, grabbing his arm, telling h
im, if it had gotten that bad, that he was taking him to rehab? Or maybe Von would have said, Rehab? I’ll show you rehab, and would have dealt with Luke by taking away his keys and making him move home. You want to act like a baby, well then babies live with Mom and Pop.
Von was the strongest person she’d ever met. So unafraid of any circumstance. He never seemed nervous. He could laugh while being shot at if he were ever shot at; once, he said during the Cold War, “If any Russians come here, they better be ready to get kicked back a few continents.” She loved that toughness, she misses that toughness. She stares at the drum set and wants to break it into pieces.
A commercial for Drano is murmuring on the television now, and she stops for a minute to watch the cartoon dramatization of the liquid dissolving a clog in the drain. Then she walks over to the drum set and sees the drumsticks where Luke last left them. The sun comes through the high windows over in the corner, and it makes the cymbal disk glimmer. There is a music stand, and two guitars propped next to a speaker with a frayed cord. She wants to drag it all away but is surprised how connected the drum set is.
In a second, without really thinking, she picks up one of his drumsticks and hits the cymbal quickly, a noise like someone just told a joke on Johnny Carson. She puts the drumstick back with the other one and stares out the window.
The washing machine is droning, making that nice wet swishing sound, and she looks back at the long basement. What did they envision for finishing it? Maybe sectioning off the washer and dryer. Maybe adding some cabinets, a stove, and a fridge. She remembers thinking they could put a large table in front of the fireplace for holidays. No mess upstairs. And then Mary Jane could have that group of girls sleep down here during her slumber parties, and Luke and those Meddleson brothers he liked to skateboard with could watch their movies and play their video games, dropping popcorn and slurping that Kool-Aid she hated. She imagined opening the door and standing on the top step, listening to the pleasant noise of the young, the girls recounting who said and did what, and the boys giggling and telling each other to shut up.
She wonders now why they let the basement idea vanish.
It seems to her that Mary Jane and Luke were fourteen and ten at one point, and then in seconds, Mary Jane was graduating college. Luke was dating Ginger, and doing his concerts, but still living at home. Sometimes Ginger would come over for dinner, always helping Darcy clear the table, always telling her a good story about her college classes or something her parents had said. Luke had so much respect for Ginger, and Darcy hoped in a way that made her stomach knot that Luke could stay with her forever. Whatever his faults, Ginger softened them. And he made Ginger laugh, and oh, did she look at him like he was a prince. Almost as if Ginger saw something in Luke that Darcy forgot about.
Sometimes Darcy would look out the back window and see them walking around the yard, arm in arm, Luke a half foot taller, Ginger’s hair longer then, the weeping cherry tree and white azaleas behind them. Sometimes they’d bring Ginger’s dog over and they’d throw the ball to it again and again. Darcy wasn’t a dog person, and they never asked to bring it inside. Sometimes, after Ginger had left, Darcy and Von would wake to the sound of the drums or the nasally electric guitar beating through the floorboards. Von would grumble and put his slippers on and march down to the basement, and the noise would stop in seconds. He’d come back to bed and smile. “Noodle head,” he’d say. “He didn’t think it would wake us.” And then Von got sick, and Luke broke up with Ginger, and then Mary Jane was married and pregnant and then and then and then.
She wants this drum set out of here. She can’t look at it another day. Maybe she will call Wally. He could bring it to the thrift store. Two or three armfuls and it would be gone. She hears the washing machine draining now, and another talk show comes on with a host she remembers was an actress once, and Darcy perches tentatively on the sofa. Maybe she can just wait until the rugs are clean. She sits back, and her body remembers this sofa, remembers the way the cushions felt against her shoulders, its velvety texture. How many years since she has sat on it? It must be twenty. But she has vacuumed it every so often. She has folded laundry on it.
She sinks back into the couch and watches the woman on the talk show move through the audience surveying them about their end-of-summer bucket lists, sticking her small microphone in an eager participant’s face. Darcy hates that phrase, bucket list. She hates the thought of doing things only because you’ll die. Most of the time, you don’t know when you’ll die. And items on a list won’t save you either way. Why bother? she thinks. Why discuss it with strangers on a talk show? Darcy puts her feet up on the coffee table.
She looks around when she wakes up an hour later.
Upstairs is Ginger’s letter on the kitchen table. God, that letter makes her angry. She can’t say why. She doesn’t feel differently about Ginger. She is a dear, dear girl. One of the best people she knows. But she wants to burn the letter. She wants to knock on the door of Ginger’s new place and throw it at her, watching the pages scatter on the floor. She stretches and walks over to the built-in phone nook where the black rotary phone sits. “It’s like going downstairs to a time machine,” Luke used to say, pointing to their old furniture, the type of phone the world barely even used in his time. She picks up the phone. His time. Her son has lived and died already. How can that be? His time. How can she still be going through the everyday, looking at the lawn, washing her rugs, rinsing her dishes, when he has already lived and died?
She thinks of Ginger’s letter again, and her stomach flips: I don’t use words like “love of my life,” but Luke was something like that to me. Sure, Ginger, she thinks. Sure, sure. Go on and be free, she thinks. And then to invite her and Mary Jane to the wedding! The absolute, absolute nerve.
She feels the sweat bead on her forehead as she dials. Wally, good old Wally, answers on the third ring. She has called him many times over the years: to prune the maple tree at the edge of her yard, to take down the children’s old swing set, to lug the ancient cash register away from the dry cleaning store before the new one was delivered. He is always pleasant, always polite. Never charges her much. “I have a job for you,” she says.
* * *
A few days later, she stands on her front porch as Wally loads the last of the drum set into the back of his truck. She nods at him and hands him a check for his time, along with a twenty-dollar bill (“You don’t tip ’em, they’ll think twice about coming again,” Von always said). Wally nods and thanks her. She listens to his loud engine start up and regards the two guitars, the drums, and music stand on its side, its many legs up in the air, the speaker pushed against the tailgate.
She holds Luke’s drumsticks and almost tosses them into the back of the truck with everything else, but then she remembers these were on a Christmas list when he was a teenager, when he still made lists for her.
She remembers going to the small music shop in Middletown, and the man guiding her to a wall of mallets and drumsticks and all types of cleaners for saxophones and flutes. She liked this set of sticks because they were red.
She holds them in her hand and feels a blast of pain like an ocean wave that nearly knocks her down. She tries to be tough every single day, since Von, since Luke, but these blasts catch her unaware, always hit her so hard. She holds the drumsticks. She watches Wally’s truck take her son’s stuff, and it rattles in the pickup bed, the cord from the speaker dangling out the back, flapping as the car takes off.
She looks at the lawn and sees dead, dry spots from the heat. She notices a few loose leaves meandering as they fall. She is so sad and empty and disgusted—yes, disgusted, perfectly disgusted. At Luke, at Ginger. When Von died, all she felt was afraid. Afraid and heartbroken. As though someone had stolen everything from her. But this loss is different. She is angry, and Ginger’s letter that she moved to the drawer where she keeps the birthday candles and garbage bag twist ties just makes her angrier.
She needs to get to the cleaners. She
has payroll to write out, the utility bills to handle. That’s what her Saturdays are reserved for. She promised Kay Lionel she’d have that set of linen napkins and tablecloths pressed for a dinner party. She needs to put an ad in the paper to replace her seamstress, Freddie Tyler. She needs to call the company to have them wax and polish the floor.
The air is so warm that she can see squiggly heat waves above the road. She hears the buzz of insects. A car she doesn’t recognize pulls into her driveway, and a woman waves shyly at her. She wears sunglasses, but Darcy sees a familiar flick of her hair and recognizes the dimples and cheekbones right away. She is filled with dread.
“I thought I would stop by,” Ginger says as she steps out of the car. She is still as beautiful as ever, her hair in a bob above her shoulders.
“Hello, dear.” Darcy looks down at Luke’s drumsticks. She feels her mouth form a frown. “I would invite you inside, but I’m late for work.” She hates being cold to Ginger. She has never spoken one mean word to her in the fifteen years that she’s known her.
“Oh.” Ginger takes her glasses off. “Okay, well maybe another time.” She stands by the car door.
“Okay then.” Darcy feels her knees wobble. She feels her heart flutter. She is better than this. Talk to the poor girl, Von would say. What would Luke say? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
“I’m sorry,” Ginger says. She holds the car door, and Darcy sees the ring on Ginger’s finger. A square diamond. Platinum band. Something that looks like an heirloom, something someone would have given back in her day.
Darcy shakes her head. She knows how ridiculous her anger would sound. She knows how illogical it is, doesn’t she? Poor girl. “You shouldn’t be sorry. My goodness, why should you be?” But she still feels the anger inside her, the bitter resentment. She imagines scanning that letter one last time, and that’s exactly what she thinks: that Ginger betrayed her. Ginger. Luke. She’s mad at both of them. Go to your room, she feels like saying. I don’t want to look at you. She imagines Luke’s sullen way he would hang his head and slog down the hall. He never slammed his door like some kids might. He would just mope inside and she’d hear him throw himself on the bed.