Things Worth Remembering

by Jackina Stark

  He studied as much as he could about depression. He decided I was having a major depressive episode, combined with postpartum depression (wouldn’t that be magnified if a mother didn’t bring her baby home?), and when winter set in, seasonal affective disorder. He sensed the effect gloomy weather might have on me even before he read about it. By the end of September he opened the blinds before he left for work, knowing how much I love the sunshine, and turned on the lamp by my chaise longue, hoping, I’m sure, that the light would beckon me that far from my bed. He continued to do these things long after he realized I shut the blinds and turned off the light as soon as he left.

  He was also tenacious about asking me to let Paula visit. She had stopped by many times, bringing me flowers, books, notes from my former students. For weeks I was asleep when she came, or pretended to be. When Luke begged me to see her, I finally relented. Like Luke, she came in and lay beside me. “I’m sorry, Kendy,” she’d say. Eventually she began to say more than that on her weekly visits, and eventually I half listened as long as she talked about nothing that mattered.

  By sometime in October, I put on one of my two sweat suits after my shower and gathered my hair into a wild ponytail. I’d pull the bedspread up and lie on top of it, covering myself with a throw. I hoped Luke would call this progress. I still wished to sleep constantly; that’s all I had energy for.

  “I feel like a balloon that’s losing its air,” I said once, trying to explain to Luke how very weary I felt. It was a rather bad simile, but it was the best I could do. When I did wake up, I wanted to sleep again and found myself taking a sleeping pill even though I had already slept for hours.

  When Luke complained of how many bottles of sleeping pills I was consuming, I told him they were over the counter and much milder than prescription sleeping pills. “Still,” he said.

  So I began alternating sleeping pills with allergy pills, which contained the same ingredients but in smaller doses. Sleep served as Novocain to deaden the pain of guilt and regret and sadness, and it allowed me to spend my days wandering in the darkness, far away from home.

  I tried to go to Miller and Anne’s for Thanksgiving, I really did, but as I told Luke and Maisey after I had dressed for the occasion and actually put on makeup, I just couldn’t do it, not yet. I had managed to go to church once before Thanksgiving, but the mere act of greeting people and trying to assure them I was better overwhelmed me. I told Luke I was sorry but to please tell anyone who asked that I’d be back as soon as I was comfortable in public again. “I’m just indisposed,” I said. “Tell them I’m indisposed.” Somehow he covered for me.

  When December arrived, Luke broached the subject of decorating the tree. The task seemed insurmountable, and just thinking of it made me laugh. So the following week, having graduated to holding a book in my lap as I lay on the bedspread with a throw over me, I heard Luke and Maisey putting up the tree, the requisite Christmas carols playing on the stereo. Tears spilled down my face when I heard through my closed door the strains of “O Holy Night” and remembered what life had been like when I had loved living.

  Maisey spent New Year’s Eve at church again and went to Jackie’s when the party was over. I heard her telling Luke rather tentatively to have a happy new year, and I got out of bed and came into the living room as she was collecting her things to leave.

  “Maisey,” I said.

  “Jackie’s mom is waiting, Mother.”

  “I just want you to know I love you.”

  “Okay,” she said, heading for the door.

  “And, honey,” I said, exhausted by the effort of speaking to my darling child, “I hope you have a good new year.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and she was gone.

  Luke lay beside me that night. “We conceived our son a year ago tonight,” I whispered.

  “I know,” he said.

  I rolled over and soaked my pillow with tears. Luke curled up behind me, holding me, until I finally felt myself slipping into sleep, relieved that the worst year of my life was coming to an end.

  “Better?” Luke asked the next morning.

  “I hope,” I said.

  I showered and stayed up much of the day. I even ate at the table with Luke and Maisey that night, listening to Maisey’s reports about the party the night before and about Jackie’s bursting into her parents’ room when they got home from it, clanging two pans together and shouting, “Happy New Year!” Luke said it was no wonder they agreed to let Jackie stay with us so often.

  But it was February before I dressed every morning, tried to do a small load of wash every afternoon, and even fixed something for dinner several nights a week, if you call grilled cheese sandwiches dinner. Spring came early, and I put on a jacket and began to sit on the deck, soaking up the sun. I realized sometime in March that I wasn’t taking sleeping pills anymore, and when Paula stopped by, I joined in the conversation, at least asking questions and smiling when smiling was called for.

  One day during Paula’s spring break, she asked if I was going to try to teach the following year.

  “I deserved to lose the baby, Paula.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “I deserved to lose the baby.”

  “What do you mean, honey?”

  “Nothing.”

  Before too many more weeks passed, swearing her to secrecy, I gave her a summary of my time with Clay. “I thought I loved him,” I said, a summary of my summary.

  “I don’t think losing your baby and crossing the line with Clay are related, Kendy. Could you give yourself that much of a break?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I’ve started back to church. I’ve been listening to my worship music. I don’t think I’m well, but I’m better. In the last few weeks, a vivid image has comforted me from the time I wake up in the morning until I fall asleep at the end of the day: Ragged and weary, I’m caught up in the embrace of a tender Father who’s been watching for me, longing for me to come home.”

  Paula’s eyes filled with tears. She got up from her chair to sit beside me on the glider, holding my hand until Luke came home and asked what we were up to.

  “Girl stuff,” Paula said.

  I smiled, but how I dreaded the day I would have much the same conversation with him.

  Maisey

  I hold my breath when we walk into a house that is eerily quiet. I hold it again when we enter the kitchen. I see a note on the kitchen table, my name scrawled on the envelope in Dad’s handwriting. Tearing it open, I read that Mom is running an errand and won’t be back for quite a while. Dad is at a meeting and should be back by five.

  So the house is empty. What a relief.

  I pour a soda and walk out on the patio, sit in the sun, and pray that everything can go on as usual, at least until the wedding is over. Marcus is returning phone calls and grabbing a book from his room before he comes out to chill awhile with me. These may be the last hours we’ll have to ourselves before we rush to my car and leave for our first night as husband and wife.

  I wonder where Mother is. Maybe she’s avoiding me as I have been avoiding her.

  That is very unlikely. She’s always been one to confront— me or anyone else in her “sphere of influence.” That would be one of her favorite phrases. Maybe it’s the teacher in her. When we were still in elementary school, maybe fifth grade, Heidi, Caitlin, Jackie, and I were out here dancing on the patio with Mother. She was trying to show Jackie another move besides the sprinkler.

  “Girls,” she said, stopping her demonstration and walking over to our CD player. “Come here!” The four of us gathered around quickly; Mother seldom gave commands. She pushed Repeat and listened to a few lines, stopped the CD, skipped back again, and listened one more time. “Do you hear that?” We looked at each other and then at her. “Do you really think we need to be listening to these lyrics? This is trash. Really. And you’re not going to fill your minds with it on my watch.”

  Jackie ran to her purse and pulled out another CD. “How about th
is one?”

  We put it on and were relieved that one of our favorites received unqualified approval from the most important censor in our lives.

  Of course the worst confrontation took place the night she came to my room after Dad tucked me in, wanting to discuss the “distance” that had come between us during the months she went on sabbatical in her room.

  By the time Mother had returned to the land of the living, I was able to look at her without throwing up, but everything had changed, and by that summer I think she began to realize it. That fall she was teaching in another district and got home later than she had before, and I had started high school and was involved in so many activities I usually got home even later than she did. That seemed a good enough explanation for the “distance,” but when she sat on my bed that night in November and brushed the hair out of my eyes, I realized it wasn’t completely adequate.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  Not to worry, I thought, you have stupid Clay. Of course I never saw them alone together after that day in the kitchen, but that didn’t mean anything; I hadn’t seen them alone together before that day either.

  I didn’t say any of that, of course. Mother’s the confronter, not me.

  “I’m right here,” I said.

  She looked at me. Or maybe she was looking for me. “I know you are,” she said, trying to smile. “But it seems like I woke up and my little girl was gone.”

  “She is, Mother. I’m a big girl now, practically an adult.”

  She smiled again, but tears brimmed in her eyes.

  For a moment I felt bad. But she had brought this on herself. As far as I was concerned, she was lucky to have Dad and me at all.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  My heart stopped.

  “For what?”

  “Well, honey, I’ve told you this before, but I’m sorry I disappeared on you last year. It was an important year for you—so much was going on in your life. And while your father and I lost a son, you lost your little brother, and I wasn’t there to help you through it.”

  Now, that was an understatement.

  “Dad was here,” I said.

  “I know. And I’ve been so grateful for that.”

  Please.

  “He’s good at tucking me in too,” I said. “He said he didn’t know what he’d been missing.”

  “Well, that’s the upside, isn’t it?”

  “I’m tired, Mother,” I said.

  “I love you, Maisey, more than anything in this world.”

  “Thanks,” I said, which was more of an insult than it sounds.

  I knew she wanted to hear something else, something I had said thousands of times before the catastrophic event that changed our world forever: I love you too. That I could not say, but when I heard the door click and her footsteps on the stairs, I cried myself to sleep, completely forgetting I was a big girl now, practically an adult.

  I’ve been tempted, especially at first, to tell my friends about what I saw—their adoration can be sickening—but something’s kept me from it. I do sometimes wonder what they would have said. All these years, and I told no one until yesterday. I almost told Marcus after our engagement became official, but by then I knew him well, and I could just hear him saying, Don’t you think you’ve made her pay for her sins?

  If so, I’d say I’ve paid for them too.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Kendy

  Ah, the Mississippi River. I am close. This trip, one I’ve made hundreds of times, has seemed much longer than five hours. I wish I could have been here earlier, and I wish I could be home the minute I leave Mother’s room. But, what is it Luke says? If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride?

  Well, as a matter of fact, I wish beggars could ride. And I might as well go whole hog and wish there were no beggars. Too much sadness in this world. Some of it I have caused.

  With the distance that years bring, I have wondered what kind of deficiency accounts for what I allowed to happen. Surely there must be one. Possibly more than one. Isn’t there someone or something I can blame besides myself? Or along with myself? It wouldn’t make it better, but it would make it at least comprehensible.

  I’d like to blame my birth father, a deficiency if there ever was one. If I had told Mother of my incredible indiscretion (such an innocuous term for falling in love with my husband’s uncle), she might have been generous enough to let me place some of the blame on my father’s neglect, though strangely, she herself blamed him for nothing. She did say once, however, that he was useless.

  I of course didn’t quite believe that. How could I believe that of a man whose name I did not know, but who must have wanted so much to know me, despite his indifference in his youth? That was one thing I did pursue: I nagged and nagged Mother to tell me who he was, and finally she said she’d tell me the name of the “sperm donor” when I turned eighteen. “Mother!” I had said. Not a nice thing for a child to hear, but I’m sure frustration had gotten the best of her.

  “Okay,” I said when she gave me my present the evening of my eighteenth birthday. We had just come home that Friday evening from the dinner Margaret had prepared in my honor.

  “Okay?” she had asked.

  I felt bad. She thought that was my response to the gift I hadn’t even opened yet.

  I laughed and told her I was thinking about something else, and then I opened my present and saw, resting on plush black velvet, a stunning pair of diamond stud earrings. I rushed to the mirror and put them in. She stood behind me and said they looked perfect. “They are,” I said. And I didn’t have the heart, when she had bought me such a thoughtful and expensive keepsake for this special birthday, to broach the subject of my father that night.

  “I’m being lazy today,” she said when I came to the breakfast table the next day, “taking the morning off.”

  She smiled when I acted like I was about to faint.

  She looked across the table as I sat down with my bowl of cornflakes and said, “Okay.”

  I held on to my spoon for support.

  She said she had been in bed for quite a while last night before she finally understood what I had meant by “Okay.”

  I put down my spoon and told her I was sorry my dad’s name had dominated my thoughts even while I held her unopened birthday present in my hand. “Such a wonderful present,” I said, touching an earlobe, still trying to fathom my mother’s unprecedented attention to this particular passage, especially nice since we had had several unpleasant discussions about my choice of universities during that year. No, I hadn’t expected such a generous and special gift.

  She told me there was no need to apologize, that I had been waiting a long time to know my father’s identity.

  She got up, retied her robe, and walked to the refrigerator to get both of us some orange juice. I sensed how badly she did not want to say his name inside the walls we inhabited. I know now he had nothing whatsoever to do with us, but that was something I would have to find out for myself. I know now how much Mother dreaded that for me.

  “Your father’s name,” she said, putting the pitcher and two juice glasses on the table and sitting across from me again, “is Craig Tanner.”

  I repeated it, amazed I finally knew his name. I don’t know how many times I repeated it in my mind after that moment at the breakfast table, and I puzzled even myself when I waited more than a year to contact him. I didn’t ask my mother to help me locate him, but at some point during my freshman year of college, Margaret tracked him down for me in Denver, Colorado.

  I picked up the phone to call him several times until finally stress alone caused me to stay on the line to hear his voice and to say, “Hello?”

  “My name is Kennedy,” I added seconds later. He didn’t reply but seemed to be waiting for something else. I realized I needed to add one detail. “Kennedy Belk.” Still nothing. “Your daughter.”

  He of course was very surprised to hear from me, or perhaps horrified is a better word. Fo
r some reason in those first minutes, he told me, among other things, that he had been married a couple of times but had no children.

  “No other children,” I replied, surprising myself. I thought he might be glad he had an offspring in the world, but if tone and words are any indication, he was far from elated. I said I’d like to see him, and he took my phone number and said he’d get back to me.

  “I can come to Denver when school’s out,” I said before he hung up.

  He didn’t call for weeks, but finally the phone rang, and instead of Paula saying she’d be late or some guy asking for a date or my history notes, it was my father on the end of the line. He didn’t want me to come to Denver, but he said if I wanted to meet him, he’d fly to St. Louis the next time I was there. I did not intend to let this opportunity get away from me. I told him I’d be home the next Friday.

  “That’ll work,” he said.

  He didn’t even get a hotel to spend the night the Saturday

  I met him. He fit me in for a long lunch between his flights in and out of St. Louis. We met at a restaurant near the airport. I told the hostess I was meeting Craig Tanner, and she led me to a luxuriously padded booth where a handsome man with my sky-blue eyes sat drinking a glass of wine and perusing a menu. He stood up and put his hands on my shoulders, as close to intimate as we would ever be. “Well,” he said, looking into my face, “there you are.”

  We ordered (I have no recollection of eating whatever was put before me), and he looked at me across the linen tablecloth. “I do believe you favor my mother,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Do you have any pictures of her or my grandfather? Do I have aunts and uncles? Do I have cousins?” Seeing him had been my focus all these years, the family that came with him not even in my peripheral imaginings. Suddenly I longed to know them.

  “Not with me,” he said. “Maybe I can send you some.”

  He had no trouble chatting. I learned his family knew nothing about me. I think I might have winced when he said that, though he didn’t notice. It made me terribly sad, because I knew I wasn’t the one to tell them such a thing and doubted very much that he ever would. I was glad my grandparents had other grandchildren from an aunt and uncle I’d never know either. My father repeated what he had said on the phone: that he had been divorced twice (“Not a bit good at the marriage thing”) and that he had no other children (his voice implying “Thank God”). He added that he was dating a woman a mere five years older than his recently discovered daughter. How about that?