“You did it all the time.”
“But I was used to living here.”
“And what about just last week?”
“That was different. I was in the midst of an unexpected storm.”
“And now Nora is.” Gran sighed. “Amazing. It’s about time someone did something about that situation.”
“I think Alden is trying. And there’s nothing we can do.”
“Perhaps. I’m tired now. I think I’ll go to bed.”
Meri immediately stopped thinking about their neighbors. “Do you feel all right?”
“Stop fussing,” Gran said and kissed her good night. “I have every hope that things will work themselves out.”
Meri stayed up after Gran went to bed. But she felt lonely after all the excitement of the last couple of weeks. And she would miss Nora. She was as far from a sullen teenager as you could get. Of course, that might be because she was being entertained to the max.
Still, Meri felt sorry for her. She didn’t envy Nora having to face her mother the next morning. She wondered why they were coming back early? Just because Alden had asked that Nora be allowed to stay longer? Could anyone be that vindictive?
She knew the answer. She went to bed.
Meri awoke with a start. Glanced at the clock; it was a little after midnight. Then she heard what had awakened her. Something from outside her window. A scraping noise.
Not an animal in the compost pile. It was a repeated action, rhythmic, like a branch might sound brushing against the house. Or someone digging.
She climbed out of bed and looked out her window. There was no wind. The clouds that had earlier hugged the sky had blown away. The moon was full, and it washed the landscape in an eerie light.
And then she saw the source of the noise. It was only the silhouette of a man, but she recognized it, so familiar to her she didn’t need to see the details. Alden.
Alden was digging the garden, in the middle of the night in his shirtsleeves. Had he totally lost his mind? And where was Nora?
Meri grabbed her jeans off the bed and struggled to get them on, finally pulling off her hand splint and yanking them up with both hands. She shoved her bare feet into sneakers. Pulled a hooded sweatshirt over her sleep shirt and went quietly downstairs and out the door.
Alden was so intent on what he was doing, he didn’t notice her. He must have been at it for a while. He’d finished almost half of the plot. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. The jacket and the shirt he’d been wearing earlier were tossed onto the wooden stump that served as a table and sometimes a chair.
Meri just stood, watching him. She wondered why having known him so long, and having come to expect and demand so much of him, that she had never really noticed how physically strong he was.
He was churning up great clumps of sod. The muscles in his back and arms were like whipcords. Not bulky, yet powerful. He stopped to wipe his forearm across his eyes.
Meri shivered in the cool night air. She walked straight over to the garden, opened the chicken wire gate, and walked in.
He looked up momentarily but kept hoeing. She knew he saw her. But he wouldn’t stop. She could feel his intensity, raw, uncontrolled, from where she stood.
It frightened her. And she’d never in all their dealings been frightened. Tonight she wasn’t frightened of him, but for him. Something had been unleashed for whatever reason and he was taking it out on the garden. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Tilling Gran’s garden.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“It’s as good a time as any.” The hoe cut the soil with a hiss.
“Alden, stop and talk to me.”
He barely glanced at her but kept bringing the hoe up and attacking the earth like he wanted to kill it.
“You shouldn’t start a garden in anger.”
“Who says?”
“I don’t know; the Buddhists, I think.”
“Good for them.” The hoe came down with unwarranted force.
“Stop for a minute and talk to me.”
He leaned over, lifted a rock out of the soil, and hurled it over the fence.
“Alden.”
“Lower your voice. Do you want to wake Gran up?”
“I will, if it will make you stop. You’re scaring me.”
It was like a magic word. He stopped. “Sorry. Everything’s fine. Go to bed.”
“Obviously not everything is fine. If it were, you wouldn’t be digging a garden in the dark.”
“It’s nothing. I can deal with it.”
“You know, you’ve looked after me my whole life. I only just fully realized it since reading Mom’s diary.”
“I wish you never had.”
“And I appreciate it, but I’m an adult now. I can take care of myself.”
“I’m well aware of that.” He started up again.
“And so can Gran.”
He stabbed the hoe into the soil and stopped.
“So let me and Gran help with whatever’s going on.”
“Thanks. But I don’t need—”
“Bullshit. You’re angry and you’re hurting and you’re trying to handle it all yourself.”
“I’m fine.”
“Dammit, if you were fine, you’d be at home asleep, not digging in your undershirt in the middle of an April night. Enough already. If you don’t want to confide in me, fine. But don’t make yourself sick. Then Gran will feel like she has to take care of you, and she needs to take care of herself.”
“You’re right. I’ll finish tomorrow.” He pulled the hoe out of the soil and snatched his shirt and jacket off the stump. “Good night, Meri.”
He returned the tools to the shed and struck off across the meadow without another word.
If she hadn’t been afraid of waking Gran up, she might have yelled after him that he was being stubborn, ungrateful, and a hundred other things she’d regret in the light of day. But Gran needed her sleep, so Meri just watched his back until he disappeared into the darkness—and she didn’t like that image at all.
Therese rested her forehead on the windowsill and watched Alden stride away. Would that dam ever break? Would she live to see it? She stood by the window until she heard Meri come back inside. Then she climbed back in bed, and sending off a selfish prayer to the Almighty, she drifted into sleep.
Chapter 22
Nora showed up at the door while Meri was still making coffee the next morning. The girl looked like she’d cried herself to sleep and she probably had.
“Where’s Gran?” she asked as soon as Meri opened the door.
“Still sleeping; what are you doing up so early?”
“Couldn’t sleep, and anyway, I wanted to spend as much time with everybody as I could before they get here.”
“Where’s your dad?”
“At home; he said I should come say good-bye myself.” She shrugged. “We kind of had a fight last night.”
“Oh no, is he sulking?”
Nora shook her head; the tears were ready to flow again, Meri could tell. “Worse.”
“Oh dear. What?” Meri willed the coffeemaker to hurry. She needed some caffeine to face this morning; she hadn’t slept that well herself.
“When I got home last night, he was outside just kind of looking down at the beach, like he does sometimes. So I was going out to talk to him, but he walked down the path and when I went to follow him, I found this.”
She looked around then pulled a folded sheet of paper from inside her windbreaker. She unfolded it and smoothed it out, at least as much as it could be smoothed. Someone had crumpled it into a ball. Meri recognized Alden’s handiwork; it’s what he did when his work wasn’t going the way he wanted.
“Look.”
Meri pushed her hair back and leaned over the drawing, pressed her hands across the page to flatten it better. It was a line drawing of Gran sitting in her recliner, Meri sitting on the sofa beside her, and Nora in her little print dress twirling for th
em to see. They were happy and the illustrations caught the warmth and love perfectly.
And it caught something else, too.
On the edge of the paper, he’d started to draw another figure, dark, isolated. Then he’d slashed a line through it. Meri could see him tearing it from his drafting table and crumpling it in those long fingers; the throw toward the wastepaper basket, which he invariably missed.
She looked up to see Nora watching her, her eyes dark and forlorn.
“We made him feel left out. I shouldn’t have gone to Newport; I should have stayed here, but I didn’t know I’d have to leave early. I was selfish. I should have stayed.”
“Nora, it’s fine. He’d already asked if he could take you into town before you even came. He wanted you to have fun.”
“He didn’t think I could have fun with him? What’s wrong with me?”
What’s wrong with me? Not what’s wrong with him. But with me. Meri thought it had much more to do with Alden than with Nora. She just wasn’t sure why.
“I think he just felt the, uh, proportions of the figure were off. Look.” She pointed to the man’s shoulder. It was a total lie, the proportions were fine. The three of them looked as happy as a Norman Rockwell painting. Except for the tall dark figure, standing back of the archway, in the shadows.
Damn the man. What was wrong with him? They all loved him. Meri had motioned for him to come in and he’d refused. Why?
“I bet he’ll sit down this afternoon and redo it, and get the proportions right.”
“Really?”
“Really. He goes through lots of versions before he settles on the one he likes.” Though he usually didn’t wad them up and throw them away, unless he was frustrated or hated them. “Did you ask him about it?”
“No. When he came in, he looked so . . . I don’t know . . . I’d never seen him like that. I asked him why he came home without me?”
“He said I was a big girl now and I could take care of myself.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“What?”
The coffeemaker beeped. Meri practically lunged for it. “Want some?”
Nora shook her head.
Meri poured herself a cup and turned to face Nora. “I pretty much told him the same thing last night. Basically, that I was a big girl and didn’t need him anymore.”
Nora pulled the drawing around to look at it. “Is that what this means? That he doesn’t think we need him anymore?”
Meri pushed the picture away. “I think you’re taking too many psychology classes. We all need him—you, me, Gran, Lucas. And we all love him. He’ll be fine.” Meri would make sure of it. She just had to figure out how. But Nora didn’t need to be worried with the details.
“If you have to go home, try not to make it worse for him.”
Nora’s face twisted.
“I know.” Meri couldn’t help it; she enfolded Nora in a Gran hug. It felt weird, and yet right somehow. If she couldn’t offer solace to a teenager, what good was she. God knew, Alden had done the same for her more times than she could count.
It was about time she started returning the favor.
“Don’t worry. Gran and I will take good care of him until you get back. It’s only six weeks. Look, here’s Gran.”
Nora sniffed but straightened up. “Hi. I came to say good-bye.”
Gran opened her arms and Nora walked right into them. Gran rubbed her back. “You’d better get going. I saw a car from my window. Meri will walk you part of the way.”
Nora clung to her for a minute longer then turned toward the door, her head bowed.
“And, Nora dear, try to remember this too shall pass.”
Meri left her much needed caffeine behind and followed Nora out the door. She crooked her arm in Nora’s and the two of them walked across the meadow matching steps, sometimes bumping hips over the uneven ground. Any other time this would have made them laugh and set off a spontaneous doo-wop.
But not today. When they got in sight of the car, Nora stopped. “I think I’d better go on from here alone.”
Meri nodded. “I was never a favorite with your mother. I never understood why.”
“She hates your guts.”
“Why on earth? I hardly know her. I babysat you guys, then I went off to college. Then she left.”
“She was, still is, jealous.”
“Of me?”
“I heard her tell Dad once when they were fighting. She said that you had all of him and she never could. I didn’t know exactly what she meant, but I can kind of see it now. You let him be himself. Or something. I’d better go.”
She gave Meri a quick hug and walked resolutely away.
Alden heard the car drive up and looked at his watch. It wasn’t even nine o’clock. What was the goddamn rush?
He downed another gulp of coffee and went outside.
Mark got out of the car. They shook hands like civilized men. And Mark said, “Sorry. Hope this schedule change didn’t screw up your plans for the day.”
Alden didn’t bother to answer; they both knew the reason for this early visit.
Jennifer got out of the car. She looked more pregnant than she had a few days before. He considered for a second that maybe she wasn’t feeling well and really wanted to get home. That ended before he could even finish the thought.
“So where is she?”
“Saying good-bye to Therese. She’ll be back in a minute.”
“Couldn’t she have done that yesterday?”
Alden ignored her, looking into the tinted windows for his son. Wasn’t he going to say hello? Finally the back door opened and Lucas got reluctantly out. Sauntered over.
“Hey, how was the computer museum?” Alden asked, sounding overly bright and not being able to tone it down.
“We didn’t go,” Lucas said quietly.
“Why?”
“Because we had to come pick up your delinquent daughter,” Jennifer said.
“Don’t fight,” Lucas said. “It doesn’t matter.”
The hell it didn’t. Now the bitch was punishing Lucas for her anger at Nora and him.
But the pleading look from Lucas stopped any invectives that roiled along his tongue, begging to be set free.
“Well, we can drive up and see it when you visit this summer.”
Lucas gave a quick shrug, shoved his hands in his pockets, looked at the ground.
Alden felt like he was standing in quicksand eating at his ankles, sucking him down. Sinking. Sinking. Don’t fight it. Just let it take you.
“Here she comes,” Mark said so loudly that he could have been announcing a damn parade.
When Nora saw them all look her way, her step faltered but she kept coming. Determined. And Alden felt a swell of pride and love for his daughter. And also for the woman who had turned away and was returning home. She knew Nora was strong enough to handle what would come next.
And as much as Alden wanted to protect Nora from the hell she would face once she got in that car, he knew he couldn’t.
He couldn’t help her through her coming ordeal; he couldn’t help Meri with hers. And Lucas would hardly speak to him; his son didn’t want Alden’s help even if he could give it.
Maybe being torn between two warring parents was too much for him. And for Nora, too. She just put up a better front.
“Get in the car,” Jennifer snapped as soon as Nora reached them.
“I have to get my bags.” Without stopping, Nora went into the house and came back with suitcase and backpack.
Alden started to reach for them, but Mark beat him to it.
“You’re an ace,” Alden said to Nora. “I didn’t think you’d be able to get all those new clothes in one suitcase.”
“I didn’t have that much.” She gave him a hug, clinging like there was no tomorrow. He kissed her forehead. “Go on. I’ll see you in a few weeks.”
“Nora, you’re keeping us all waiting.”
Nora’s face twisted, but she breathed it away. She li
fted her chin and, not looking at her mother, walked around the car to the backseat. Lucas slumped after her, not even mumbling a good-bye.
“Don’t expect them any time soon.” Jennifer stalked away.
Alden was too shocked to counter. But before he went after her to ask what the hell she meant, Mark stopped him. “Don’t pay attention to her; she’s just hormonal.”
“Mark, I was there before you. I know hormonal. That was just plain vindictive.”
“Well, thanks for having her.” Mark nodded and returned to the car.
Thanks for having her? She’s my daughter, you fucking twit. He watched them drive away. He wasn’t surprised to see Nora looking out the back window. But he hadn’t expected to see Lucas, one palm to the glass. Trapped like Hansel and Gretel. An image he would not forget, and he’d be damned if that witch would do any more harm.
He stood in the yard irresolute. He wanted company and yet he didn’t. He had to do something, he just didn’t know what. He was losing his children and he couldn’t let that happen.
He finally turned and went back into the house. It was cold and uninviting. While Nora had been here, they’d opened the windows and she’d made him move upstairs, not to the master bedroom—he’d never sleep there again—but to one of the many guest rooms, none of which had seen a guest in decades.
Alden climbed the stairs; they creaked beneath his feet, or maybe it was him creaking. Down the hall to Nora’s room. She’d even made the bed after a fashion. They’d found an old comforter in one of the closets, Peter Rabbit à la Beatrix Potter. He smoothed it out, fluffed the pillow, and put it back on the bed.
The dresser had been cleared. No signs of his sixteen-year-old dervish. Except for the wrinkled bed, the room might have been unoccupied for ages.
He turned to go. The closet door was ajar, and he saw a swatch of color inside. Had she forgotten something? He opened the door.
They were hung up neatly in a row. Every one of the new things she’d bought in town with Meri.
Everything he’d bought her, she’d left behind. He reeled back. She thought he’d betrayed her by not making Jennifer let her stay, as if that were in his power. Now she was rejecting him.
He wanted to take them from the hangers and rip them to shreds, but he didn’t. That would be admitting his failure. So he gently closed the door and went to move his own things back downstairs where they belonged.
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