I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  “But there was a blizzard, and the telephone wouldn’t work, so I couldn’t call for help. So I had to leave you here, bleeding profusely from the hemorrhaging of your womb, while I ran through the blizzard, across the street to the hospital, to get help.”

  I felt her pull at my panties.

  “But they didn’t get here in time, and you died.”

  Inside my head my mother’s voice screamed: No!

  I rose up from the floor—desperately fighting the effects of the drugs with which she had doctored my coffee, and I hurled myself against her, knocking her against the examining table. I hit her, once, twice, again and again, causing her head to bounce against the hard tile floor. It all felt like slow motion to me, like an underwater battle fought by a furious, clumsy, lumbering creature. Finally, she sprawled, bleeding from her nose and mouth, unconscious.

  I dragged myself to her desk, pulled the telephone down onto the floor, dialed 911, cried help, and then fell asleep on the floor with the phone off the hook.

  Epilogue

  Memorial Day

  I WAS NEVER ONE TO VISIT CEMETERIES ON MEMORIAL DAY, and neither was Geof, but this time we both went to the Harbor Lights Memorial Park.

  We ignored the rules against fresh flowers. Removing the plastic tulips from my mother’s grave (installed “compliments” of the management), we replaced them with our vase of Shasta daisies. The vase, which was clear, heavy glass, tilted when Geof set it on the ground. He straightened it, and then we stood back, admiring the effect of the big pink daisies against the green, green grass. Geof put his arm around my waist, and I leaned into him.

  “I’m going to go sit on a bench,” he said. “Don’t hurry, Jenny, I’ll wait as long as you want.” He kissed my hair. I turned my face up to his and caught him full on the lips. He squeezed my waist, and then I watched him stroll away to a cement bench about a hundred yards from my mother’s grave.

  I climbed from there up a little incline past the graves of assorted relatives and friends. A few steps beyond was a flat marker which, on the day of my mother’s funeral, had been concealed by the green mat that had covered the gravesite. On that day, an edge of the mat had rolled up, revealing to me only a small corner of this little brass marker. My mother’s friend, Francie Daniel, had prevented me from seeing it that day, but it was also she who had finally told me of its existence.

  Now it lay openly revealed to this sunny Memorial Day.

  There was no name on it, only an engraving of a child’s hands clasped in prayer. This was where my mother had buried an empty coffin. I had a feeling it was here that my mother had symbolically buried her heart.

  I felt no grief, no sentimental tug toward this grave. The embryo that was killed was only a potential person, not a real one. But there had been a real person who had lived in my mother’s full grown, vital, beautiful body. Somebody I loved. Somebody I needed then and now. I turned away from the empty symbol, and returned to my mother’s grave and sank to the ground beside it.

  Finally, I could fill in the blanks.

  Because… and so.

  Because my father was a fool—something he couldn’t help, it seemed to me—and because the businessmen of Port Frederick stuck together in a collusion of old-boy power, I was pretty sure that Cecil Greenstreet had been able to conspire with Pete Falwell to bankrupt Cain Clams. And so they got away with it. Whether or not my family cared to spend the money it would take to fully investigate and maybe even to file lawsuits, none of us knew yet. Given my father’s unwillingness to face the truth, and the lateness of the date, I rather doubted we would, or could.

  Because I had been ignorant of all of that, I came back to my hometown after college loaded with guilt for the damage I thought my family had wreaked on the people who worked for us. Because the old men felt a bit of communal guilt, they hired me to run the foundation. And so I had devoted the last decade of my life trying to compensate for sins I had not committed and that, in fact, my father hadn’t committed, either. And so, I discovered that even the sins that parents don’t commit, but are only perceived to have committed, are visited upon their children.

  Because an old-boy network of another sort ruled my mother’s life, she died. And so, she turned to the only person who offered to help, a woman, but one who was warped by the sacrifice of her own ambitions and desires. And so they were both, my mother and Marjorie Earnshaw, female strangers in a strange male land.

  The only question remaining about Marjorie Earnshaw had been why she removed the PFF annual report from my lap as I sat sleeping in my car. And that, it turned out, was simply explained: because it was sliding off my lap, she picked it up and then didn’t know what else to do with it but to take it with her. And so Marj inadvertently caused us to follow false trails that led away from her, although they helped to uncover the sabotage of our business.

  I touched Mom’s gravestone.

  Good-bye, womanly Margaret.

  Good-bye, lovely, female, blessed, cursed Margaret. You had no place to turn but inward, and so there you retreated, cocooned within yourself, for yourself, by yourself, defeated but victorious. Having found all of the other doors closed against you, you opened the one remaining door to the only home where you felt entirely welcome, the home of yourself

  With my hand on her headstone, I made a vow to her.

  “If I ever have a child, Margaret, I’ll have it for you, too. If it’s a girl, I’ll name her after you, but I won’t raise her to be you. If it’s a boy, I’ll teach him to love the kind of woman you wanted to be, but never could be.”

  And then I realized: I was that woman.

  All of my debts were paid.

  I looked over toward Geof, wanting to wave at him or to shout out the news of this marvelous epiphany. I was free. And so, in a way, was he. We were free to return to our jobs or to leave them for good. I was free to start a foundation of my own, if I wanted to put my newly formed philosophies into action, or free to sail my life into other directions entirely. We were free to remain in Port Frederick, or to leave it.

  I picked a daisy from the vase and started plucking petals to predict my future.