by Bill Clegg
* * *
She is underwater, the place where the land goes and the compass breaks and everything before ceases to be; there is only a weightless, somersaulting now. She reaches for sand but there is nothing but the water and the white. She tries to lengthen her body, find the angle that will involve it again with gravity, but the undertow and the opposing hurl of collapsing waves yank and bend her until she eventually goes limp. She is drowning. In time, the sea calms, slackens its grip and allows her to surface for air, re-orient with the elements and locate where she is within them. Her eyes scan frantically to find the horizon, to locate anything familiar. Above her a lace sky, and on the ocean floor below, a dragon glares from a wrecked carcass. Across the room, Lupita sees a familiar figure in the doorway. Abuelita, she whispers with desperate wonder, tú has venido. Ita, ayúdame. She’d prayed to her and she is here. She will be safe now, healed in her grandmother’s embrace. She blinks to see more clearly and sees her grandmother’s hair is dark and fastened in a tidy bun, not the long, silver strands she remembers spilling down around her shoulders, the hair she remembers pulling on as a child, that spilled through her small hands. And her arms are smooth and thin, not plump and wrinkled and draping with soft folds. These are not the arms that once held her. They are, she recognizes now, her sister’s. The woman in a yellow church dress, with a small white handbag clutched against her chest, is Ada. She’s so close. Lupita calls to her, but in her throat there is no voice, no sound; her eyes meet her sister’s and in them she screams for help. Ada does not move from where she stands, but she holds her gaze. Her eyes, so much like their father’s, are a rope to grasp, a new hope that this can be stopped, survived, will not change her, will ruin nothing, and when it ends she will still be the same girl who minutes ago reveled in warm, calm water that smelled like lavender and roses. But the eyes that hold hers let go, they look away in a head that shakes from side to side with judgment and disgust; the rope goes slack in her hands, her sister turns away. She goes under.
* * *
Later, after Mr. Goss abruptly and without words leaves the room, Lupita surfaces. She is frantic to cover herself, but as she does feels like it is someone else, not her, hurrying on the pajamas, bathrobe and boots she shucked so carelessly only an hour before. That girl is someone she does not yet know. A girl who is stunned and alone, who has been made new but feels ancient. A girl who runs.
Dana
Time had taken plenty—energy, beauty, sex, family, certainty, friends, the future—but until she saw Jackie step under the portico light and knock on Edgeweather’s old oak door, it hadn’t occurred to Dana that something might be returned.
When Jackie fled from the third floor, Dana didn’t follow or call after her. The reunion, all that it brought back, and its swift end, were more than she could process into actions. She was disoriented, confused, and so she stayed still until she wasn’t and then made her way down to the foyer and out into the driveway. At first, since there was no car parked in front of the house, Dana had assumed Jackie had already driven home. But she hadn’t heard a car door slam or an engine rev. She scanned the dark lawn toward the river and then back across the driveway until a glimmer of pink caught her eye. When she looked closer she could see the fabric of Jackie’s nightgown dangling below her dark coat as she moved along the road toward the stables.
Dana crossed the lawn to the stone wall, where she could see Jackie unlatch the gate and start down the short dirt drive. She knew what her old friend was remembering and wondered what exactly had stayed with her after all these years. The fidgety horses? The hovering adults? The light rain that morning? The trick she’d tried to play on her, calling the stallion a mare? They were little girls then, with big feelings and small, uncomplicated lives. Now they were two women in their late sixties, one shivering in nightclothes next to an unlit, empty stable, and the other, stooped along a stone wall, in borrowed sweatpants, spying on her. It was so grim and ridiculous Dana nearly laughed out loud as she moved to a place between the trees where she could see more clearly. Still and pale in the dimly lit night, Jackie appeared like a scarcely remembered figment from an unsettling dream.
Dana wondered what would happen next. Would she go to the river? Walk back down the road to the house she grew up in? It occurred to her that Jackie did not have the keys anymore and she wondered where Kenny kept them. Her body tensed in anticipation, as if bird watching or spotting wildlife on safari in Africa. She crouched behind the wall when Jackie stepped away from the stable, and then rose slowly to watch her approach the gate again. Where will you go now, she muttered to herself. As Jackie retraced her path along the road and stepped back into the driveway, Dana didn’t expect her to return to the house. Jackie had never been one to change her mind. As a kid, she didn’t waver from vanilla ice cream; in high school she stayed loyal to the Beach Boys, tolerated the Beatles and refused to listen to Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones; and the only boy she ever wanted was Floyd. Standing in the shadows along the house, Dana could not remember an instance when Jackie had revisited a decision or judgment she’d made. She didn’t ascribe her intractability to strong character or good judgment so much as titanium stubbornness and deep-rooted pride, which made her pounding on the door she’d just stormed out of so unlikely. But here she was.
Dana made her way to the side of the house, careful to stay in shadow. She edged along the brick wall outside the study where, long ago, her father had made his phone calls, read and signed the stacks of papers he’d carried in his briefcase from the city. She was never allowed in that room. Even in college and in the few years after, before they’d all stopped visiting, it was the one place at Edgeweather, besides her parents’ bathroom, that remained off-limits. Not just to her, but to everyone. A man needs a sanctuary, is what he’d say. Her grandmother told her that when he was young her son always made forts and secret hideaways in the woods. Drove his sister crazy, poor Lee was always searching for him He liked to disappear, that one.
Dana remembers her father occasionally leaving the city on business without warning. He’d vanish from the apartment for a few days and when she asked her mother where he was she’d only receive silence in response. As she got older, it stopped occurring to her to ask. But when she was young, she followed her father’s movements closely and when he was in his study at Edgeweather, she’d stand with her ear pressed to the closed pocket doors and listen when he was on the phone. She could never quite make out what he said, his words warped into sounds that made no sense, a low-toned foreign language. He only caught her once. She hadn’t heard the approach of his footsteps before the doors suddenly slid back and he was there. Tonight, as she crept around the corner to the front of the house and saw Jackie at the door, Dana felt the urge to rush the portico and holler WHAT ON EARTH, the same words her father spat in disgusted surprise before he pulled the study doors shut and returned to whatever he’d been doing. But she resisted the impulse to ambush and settled against the house, careful not to cross into the light beaming from the windows.
Jackie has been at the door for more than a few minutes, knocking—three times, fast, a pause, then twice, harder, and on and on. Dana watches and once again has no idea where she is or what she is seeing. She panics and begins to tell herself what she knows: she is outside, in the dark, a woman is knocking. She recognizes the entrance to the house, Jackie, old and in bed clothes. She remembers that Philip drove her from the city today. The rest follows but the reason she is here stays murky. She knows she’d hoped to accomplish something by turning up at Jackie’s house with the briefcase filled with copies of adoption papers and, for no reason she was aware of, a history of the Moravians of eastern Pennsylvania. Had her aunt put the book in there? Her lawyers? The man she met at the diner yesterday? And then she remembers: Hap, Lupita, Floyd, and all the rest of it, straight back to her dialing the number at Edgeweather from her father’s bank the day before the Fourth of July, a lifetime ago.
As if it had just happene
d, Dana now remembers every word she and Lupita said to each other on that phone call, how the vague idea to complicate Jackie’s perfect picnic inked to life before she’d thought it through. She hadn’t considered what actually might happen. She’d had no plan, only a reactive instinct set in motion before reason or conscience could divert her: to go where she was not welcome, with Lupita.
And then she waved. She can feel how her arm rose when she saw Floyd standing by the station wagon; how her hand jumped to life in a phony greeting, her fingers falling quickly in line and fluttering forward and back as she called him over. If only she’d left it by her side, turned her back on Jackie’s husband and left him alone. What would everyone’s life look like now? She can’t help but wonder how much differently her own would have turned out. Would she and Jackie be close? Would they even be in each other’s lives? There was no knowing, but she remembers the night she lost what remaining hope she still had for reconciliation. It was after that dreadful summer had ended, after she’d returned to Bryn Mawr for her sophomore year. She’d just come back to her dorm after dinner when she saw a note taped to her door.
The words were written in light blue pencil on a folded piece of white paper. URGENT—call Lupita 203-364-1679. Dana ripped the taped paper from her door. It had been almost two months since she’d seen Lupita and she’d tried not to think about her, or anything else that reminded her of the Fourth of July. It jolted her to see her name here, at school, where Wells and everyone in it seemed like they didn’t exist.
Dana crumpled and unfolded the phone message while she waited in line behind two girls to use the hall phone. It was the first Sunday night after the summer holiday and most of the girls were already calling their boyfriends or parents. Dana kept wondering why Lupita had called her, what on earth could be so urgent. Not only did she resent her for the intrusion, but for stirring up memories of the summer, which became more vivid with each passing second. When at last it was her turn to use the phone, she dialed the number she recognized as the one for the telephone in the apartment above the garage where Lupita still lived with her father. Her mother Maria would be in the city with her parents until they left for the winter in Palm Beach where, since July, Lupita’s sister Ada now worked. According to Dana’s mother, who’d reported the news as if she’d arranged it herself, Ada was already dating the caretaker’s son, Mateo.
The phone rang once before Lupita picked up.
Dana, is that you?
Dana grimaced in silence before she agreed to be identified. Ok, so it’s me. What do you want.
I’m in trouble, she said in a voice Dana did not recognize as Lupita’s. Since they were children, Lupita had always seemed gloomy and serious, a bit of a pain occasionally when she silently hovered at the edge of and spied on whatever she and Jackie were doing. Later, in the few times she’d been in her company after high school, Lupita remained aloof and silent, proud. Not least when she caught her stealing her car to meet Floyd two years ago. But she was not aloof or proud now. I didn’t know who to call.
The telephone connection was not clear and what Lupita said sounded to Dana like, I don’t know why you call.
Why am I calling you? You left a message asking me to! The question is why on earth are you calling me, Lupita? How could I possibly help you? I’m at school. How did you even find my number here anyway?
Lupita spoke calmly now, her old steel returning. She told Dana she was pregnant with Floyd’s child, that they’d been together on the Fourth. She let Dana register the news before adding: In the woods behind the cabin, exactly where you told him I would be.
* * *
Jackie stops knocking and comes down the portico steps to the side of the house, less than two car lengths away from where Dana is standing. She approaches the window nearest the front door and begins to bang against the glass. Closer now, and more harshly lit, her hair appears thinner than before, a dull silver pulled behind her head in a black plastic clip like the one Dana has seen Marcella wear to keep the strands out of her eyes when she vacuums. She notices a slightly exaggerated curve in Jackie’s upper spine, how it pushes her neck and head forward just enough to remind her of the osteoporosis chart in her doctor’s office in the city.
Jackie looks weathered, but hearty, her arm seems inexhaustible banging against the glass. Dana pictures her when she was young. Trim, by country standards, and plain. Her style was simple, neat, and in her looks and physicality she’d always reminded Dana of Judy Garland. Appealing, healthy, in the realm of pretty. In manner she was earthy, unfussy and blunt, the qualities that first seemed so attractive; the same ones that Dana would later register as insensitive and curt. She remembers Jackie’s cool dismissal when she’d asked what her plans were for the Fourth of July. The quick, clear line she’d drawn between Dana and her family, how she discarded her, after years of friendship, for a farm boy. When she considers Floyd now, she sees a dumb country lug easily manipulated by women. In this way, he was no worse than many men she’d known. Still, when they were teenagers, he seemed the poorest choice. A two-timing sneak who did not care for, let alone love, Jackie. After Dana saw Lupita and Floyd sneak behind the shed at Hatch Pond and bullied a confession from her the next day, she hesitated before telling her friend. By their last years in high school, there was a felt but unnamed distance widening between them—Dana’s planning for college and Jackie’s tunnel vision on Floyd made their usual midweek calls less frequent—and when they did speak or see each other on the weekends, neither wanted to hear about what mattered most to the other. Spilling dreadful news about Floyd would only make things worse between them, and Dana understood Jackie well enough to know that she’d treat the information—and very likely its messenger—as an unwanted obstacle in the clear path she’d set to gaining her heart’s desire. So Dana said nothing and Jackie got what she wanted.
Long before July Fourth, there were times when Dana was tempted to puncture Jackie’s illusions about Floyd, usually after listening to her brag about how well-liked he was, or something having to do with the farm he hoped to run someday; but as high school ended and Jackie got pregnant and married and settled into the little house in town, what she knew about Floyd and Lupita felt less and less important and more like gossip. For all Dana knew, what was between them had ended the morning behind the barn. It wasn’t until she’d unexpectedly heard Lupita’s voice answer the phone at Edgeweather that she felt the need to find out. A day later, she waved, called out to Floyd, and he followed her up the hill.
It never occurred to Dana that Jackie might think that she was the one Floyd betrayed her with. But according to Floyd, who’d called Dana the next day to say that Jackie had thrown him out, this is exactly what she thought. She thinks I took off with you, that you and I… he’d sputtered before Dana slammed the phone down and ran to her car. She drove to Jackie’s as fast as she could, knocked on the door, circled the house, called for her. Jackie’s refusal to engage felt like her dismissal days before. As mortified as Dana was by the fallout of her mischief, Jackie’s clear message—that Dana was disposable—cut deeper. The longer she remained outside Jackie’s house, the angrier and more resentful she became, and eventually she left.
Almost forty-nine years would pass before she showed up again at Jackie’s door to tell her what she’d failed to the first time. Had she been protecting or punishing? For years, she almost believed the story she told herself: that she’d tried to save her friend from a philandering husband and paid a high price for it. But time and the occasional therapist chipped away at that tale and eventually she accepted the uglier truth of what drove her.
The consequences were more difficult to make peace with. She’d kept track of Jackie and Lupita, and even Hap, through the photographs the private detectives sent, but she was never exactly sure what she’d hoped to find in those images. Evidence that what she’d done had disrupted the dreary fates of those involved and re-routed them to better lives? This never arrived. What she saw, year after year, w
ere glimpses of the people she’d nearly destroyed, piecing their lives back together in time to get old.
After she left Hap in the diner, she was sure she needed to tell Jackie everything, as soon as possible, before he bee-lined to Wells and appeared at her door with bits and pieces of the story, but not the truth. When Dana came home she told Marcella to have a car ready by seven the next morning. This was yesterday, but it felt like years had passed.
And here was Jackie, only a few yards away, and Dana still did not know what to say. Another impulsive plan to protect her friend falling apart just as she recognized she was only seeking something for herself. Beating Hap to Jackie’s door gave Dana a second chance at what she’d missed the first time. To be understood, if not forgiven. Why else would she have taken her up to the third floor of Edgeweather tonight? She’d kept so many secrets from Jackie for so long, beginning with the night of the prom. Not just what happened after, but what she’d felt before. Feelings too frightening to express shoved into elaborate fantasies she’d willed to life—a beautiful shared bedroom in the attic of her house, insisting on being Jackie’s prom date, even buying her dress. There was too much to say. And to try would upend too much. If Jackie hadn’t forgiven Floyd, she had at least made peace with what she believed he’d done. Given the damage she’d already caused, Dana knew she didn’t deserve to be absolved, or understood. The best she could hope for now was to spare Jackie another loss.