A Long Time Gone

by Karen White

  Her hands had dropped into her lap, and she was staring at them. Very quietly she said, “If I’m all those things, why doesn’t my dad call me?”

  I wanted to shout and scream and hurl all the abuse I could think of at my ex-husband. Mostly I wanted to cry over all the times I’d sat in my drug-induced fog and never said anything at all.

  I moved to her chair and crouched next to her, being careful not to touch her. “I want you to listen very hard, and remember this: Your dad’s issues have nothing whatsoever to do with you. If he can’t see what’s wonderful in you, then it’s his problem, not yours. You can’t live your life through his eyes or anybody else’s. You need to make sure that who you see in your mirror is somebody you like.”

  I sat back on my heels, breathless at the memory of hearing those words. I’d been about seven or eight, and Carol Lynne had her suitcases by the door again. I was hysterical, trying to say anything that would make her stay. Tommy had disappeared into his room, and Mathilda and Bootsie had already given up.

  Carol Lynne had knelt in front of me and told me about living my life through my own eyes, and liking who I saw each morning in my reflection. At the time, I thought she was only talking about herself.

  I stood, my voice shaky. “Come on—help me clean this up so we can get back to sleep.” As if.

  Without argument, she slid from her chair and began stacking containers. I picked out two pieces of corn bread and stuck them in the microwave, then helped stack the rest of the containers before returning them to the refrigerator.

  The microwave binged and I took out the corn bread, placing each piece on a napkin before handing one to Chloe. She looked at me suspiciously.

  “You said you were hungry. I am, too.”

  She took it reluctantly but didn’t move to eat it. I took a bite of my own, as if to show her how it was done. After swallowing, I said, “Have you heard the cypress trees at night? They make music.”

  “Right.” Despite her belligerent tone, I heard a note of curiosity, too.

  “Well, I’m going outside to listen. You can come if you want.” I didn’t look behind me as I moved toward the kitchen door, deliberately walking slowly but not holding the door open behind me. At the last moment, I felt the tension of the closing door stop and heard Chloe stepping down onto the back porch before pausing.

  “Are there any wild boars out there?”

  I stopped and faced her. “No—my garden doesn’t have anything in it for them to eat. Besides, despite what Tripp led you to think, they’re not all that common.” I began walking toward the mound, satisfied to hear Chloe following behind me.

  We walked past the silent garden and the old cypress tree toward the Indian mound. A half-moon smiled beneath the freckles of stars in the clear sky as the outside lights from the house lit our way toward the outline of the mound. We climbed the small hill without speaking, the chorus of night insects ringing in our ears.

  I finished my last bite of corn bread, and when I looked at Chloe I saw her crumpling her napkin in her hand. I sat down on the grass, feeling the cool dampness of it beneath my baby-doll pajamas. At least Chloe in her own ill-fitting sleepwear had no room to comment. Holding my breath, I lay all the way down, the cold prickles of grass tickling my skin as I looked up at the stars. Without a word, Chloe did the same, the white of her nightgown glowing like a neon sign atop the ancient mound.

  “Close your eyes,” I said. “You can hear the trees better that way.”

  I didn’t check to see if she’d closed her eyes or not. It was always easier to let her decide on her own what she wanted to do. I’d learned that, at least, trying to be her mother.

  As if on cue and I the conductor, the strings of a quartet began to play, the low notes of a bass the perfect foil for the melodic duet of cellos and violins. I closed my eyes, the music overtaking all of my senses, and I felt myself beginning to drift asleep as if the symphony of the trees had the power to banish my nightmares.

  “That’s pretty cool,” Chloe said.

  My eyes popped open, and I tried not to show my surprise. Any admission above “It doesn’t suck” was a big compliment coming from Chloe.

  “Yeah. I think so, too.” I turned to her, the grass brushing my cheek. “Is there anything else about the boondocks you find cool?”

  She was silent for a moment, and I was worried that she couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally she said, “The house. It’s like a house you’d find in a Dr. Seuss book.”

  I grinned, admiring her imagination. “Mr. Montgomery has always said the same thing.”

  Chloe made a gagging noise. “Please don’t say that we think alike. I might have to go rinse my mouth out with bleach or something.”

  I laughed softly, hearing the wave of sound begin on one side of the swamp and move toward the other like a giant hand brushing the tips of the trees. “Oh, it wouldn’t be such a terrible thing to think like Mr. Montgomery. Don’t tell him I said so, but he’s a pretty neat guy once you get to know him.”

  “So you think he’s hot?”

  I stammered. “I, uh, um, I’ve never really thought of him that way.”

  “Right. Well, he’s pretty old and all, but he looks a lot like Ryan Reynolds, and all my friends think he’s pretty hot.”

  Considering “all her friends” meant Hailey and maybe one or two other girls, it wouldn’t have counted as an official survey, but she wasn’t that far off the mark. “I’m not looking for a relationship, Chloe. I’m just trying to figure out some things.”

  She was silent for a moment, staring up at the stars. “Why did we never do this in LA?”

  “Because the lights of the city make the sky too bright. It’s one of the advantages to living out in Pork Butt, Mississippi.”

  She snorted out a laugh. “It’s still the most boring place on earth.”

  I neglected to mention that she’d chosen to be here. “You’ve only been here for a few weeks, Chloe. Tommy said you could spend a day with him next week in the fields, depending on if the weather holds, and there’s fishing, and swimming, walking the levees. We’ve got museums and old plantations and the blues, and some of the best soul food in the world. As a kid growing up here, I never thought I had nothing to do.”

  “But you still left.”

  And here I am. I didn’t say anything, hoping she’d be distracted by the night music.

  “So why did you leave?” Chloe asked, her voice holding none of the weight of her question.

  Because it was something I’d been born with, a poison in the blood I’d inherited from my mother and she from hers and way on back before anybody alive could still remember. Because I’d grown up to believe that my mother’s constant departures meant that anywhere else was better than here. But every time I started to tell her, I stopped, the words suddenly as foreign to me as another language. After a few false starts, I said, “Because my mother came back here to live and I’d grown too used to living here without her. And I wanted to see the world outside of the Mississippi Delta. I figured California was a good place to start.”

  I felt her look at me. “That’s lame.”

  I turned my face to her but she was back to staring at the sky. “Yeah. I wish you’d been here nine years ago to tell me that. You would have saved me a lot of trouble.”

  She was silent for a long moment. “In California we don’t have trees that sing. Maybe if we did, I might miss being home.”

  “But you have the sound of the ocean.” I watched a plane on its lonely trek across the sky, remembering Bootsie and me doing the same thing when I was little, making up stories about the people aboard, wondering if they were leaving or coming home.

  I lifted my hands in the air, my index fingers and thumbs forming a triangle to put the plane in perspective, the metal-and-bead ring that Chloe had made for me reflecting the light of the stars. “Home m
eans so many different things. It’s more than the sounds and the smells, even though they’re important, because it’s what we remember most from when we’re children.” I thought hard for a moment, still unused to the clarity of my thoughts. “It’s where your people are.”

  Her voice sounded very small. “But what if you don’t have any people?”

  I thought of her mother in Australia and her father on his honeymoon with his third wife, and how he hadn’t bothered to call his only child. “Then you find your own.”

  She sat up and I could feel her agitation, something the pills had always made sure I was immune to. “Yeah, well, the only ‘people’ I found was somebody who could only stand to be with me if she was popping pills.”

  I sat up, too, so badly wanting to tell her that I’d stopped, that I was here with her watching the stars because I wanted to. That some deranged part of my brain thought that I might be able to make a difference in her life. But I couldn’t. Because then I’d have to tell her that I’d stopped the pills only because her father told me I couldn’t.

  Chloe pulled herself up. “Life sucks and then you die.” She stomped down the hill of the mound, her moods and hormones as winding as the path of the river.

  I didn’t go after her. Instead I wrapped my hands around my drawn-up legs and pressed my forehead into my knees for a moment, wondering if shame could be fatal.

  I lifted my head, watching her white nightgown make its way toward the house like a stealthy ghost. I knew there was nothing I could say to her that would make her think differently; she’d have to figure that out on her own. But mostly I didn’t run after her because I wasn’t sure that I’d convinced myself that she was wrong.

  Chapter 26

  Vivien Walker Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  MAY 2013

  My mother sat at the kitchen table with Cora, dressed like Jackie Kennedy and sipping coffee with white-gloved hands. I sighed inwardly. She was coming with Chloe and me to start organizing and sorting the historical archives from where they’d been stored in the basement of City Hall in preparation for the move to the new library building. I paused on the threshold a moment before anybody noticed me, watching my mother behave as if she were a regular person having her morning coffee—a regular person who remembered that her favorite color was red, and that her daughter wasn’t in high school anymore, and that she’d spent most of her motherhood with a suitcase in her hand and an old yellow house and two children at her back.

  I’d borrowed Tommy’s computer to look up ways to help people with dementia and Alzheimer’s, and had read in one study that looking at old photographs was good therapy, if not a cure. When Carrie told me that there were boxes full of old photographs in the archives inherited from the newspaper when it had downsized to smaller offices, I took it as a sign.

  “Good morning,” I said, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl and heading for the coffeemaker. I was about to ask where Chloe was when she burst into the room. She’d reverted to the hair hanging in front of her face and her black T-shirt and jeans.

  She flopped herself in a chair across from my mother and next to Cora, then glowered up at me through her heavy fringe of hair. “I’m ready.”

  Cora put on what I could only describe as a “teacher face” and turned toward the adolescent. “You know, Chloe, I’d be happy to stay here with you and go through the history textbook section on manifest destiny and the acquisition of Texas. Or you can go help Vivien with the archives today. It’s completely up to you.”

  Chloe rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Yes, ma’am.” She didn’t mumble it, but looked up at the ceiling.

  I pulled another banana from the bunch and placed it in front of Chloe. “Have some breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  She sighed heavily, as if I’d just asked her to dig a well, but took the fruit and began to peel it with surgical precision. I wondered if she got that from her father.

  “How’s Mathilda?” I asked Cora.

  “She’s fine, thank you. Fit as a fiddle. I can only hope that I’ve inherited those good longevity genes.”

  “Good to hear it. Please tell her hello from me. I’m going to try to stop by again soon. We didn’t get to finish our conversation, and the last couple of times I dropped by I was told she was too tired or feeling poorly.”

  Cora looked at me oddly. “Are you sure you were all talking about the same Mathilda? Because my grandmother hasn’t felt poorly a day in her life.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. No matter. Just please tell her that I’ll try again soon.”

  “I certainly will.”

  I turned to Carol Lynne. “You ready?”

  “Sure. Where are we going?”

  “To town.”

  She looked over at Chloe. “Good. Because I think JoEllen needs to go shopping.”

  Chloe glared at me as if I had control over what my mother said.

  “Come on, then. I’ll drive.”

  “Is Bootsie coming?” Carol Lynne asked, repeating the same question she’d asked each time we were about to get in a car and go somewhere.

  “Not today,” I said. “We’ll catch up with her later.”

  We drove for a while without talking, listening to the sixties station while my mother sang along. Chloe glowered from the backseat, making me wish for the sweet girl in the billowing white nightgown who’d listened with me to the music of the cypress trees.

  “Where are we going?” Carol Lynne asked again.

  Chloe interrupted her glowering. “To shop.”

  I was grateful for not having to answer the same question again, but it also brought into focus that my mother needed to see a doctor whether she wanted to or not. Tommy said he’d tried, but I knew he wasn’t one to push against a brick wall, especially when that brick wall was the mother he’d always worked so hard to please.

  I wasn’t one to push either, but I also wasn’t one to give up too quickly. Whether it was persistence or sheer stupidity, I always seemed to be the person hanging on to the reins long after I’d been thrown by the horse. The pills had made me forget about that part of me, and for the first time since I’d stopped taking them, I was glad my mind was clear enough to remember something worth remembering.

  “Carol Lynne, when was the last time you saw a doctor?”

  She stopped singing, then looked at me as if surprised to find me sitting next to her. “Not too long ago, I think.”

  I nodded. “I haven’t had a checkup in a while, so I was thinking if you needed one we could go together.”

  She frowned. “I’m not sick. I don’t need to see a doctor.”

  My attempted smile wobbled, then fell. “That’s why it’s good to go now, before you need one. Then if there’s a problem, it gets spotted early, when there’s still time to fix it.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest just like Chloe did when she was getting ready to argue. “I don’t want to go.”

  I understood why Tommy would have dropped the subject at this point. We’d inherited more than just our red hair from her, after all.

  “I know. I don’t like to, either. It’s just that, you know, as they grow older people start having different health concerns. Like cardiovascular issues, or changes in bone density. Or memory problems.”

  Her voice turned almost venomous. “I do not have memory problems. I remember everything perfectly. Just ask Bootsie. She’s always saying how I never forget a thing.” She shook her head as if she were trying to convince more than just me.

  She knows, I thought. In the far reaches of her mind that still worked, she knew something wasn’t right. She knew enough to pretend that everything was fine, and to react defensively if somebody tried to tell her otherwise. There was hope, then. Hope that there was memory there to
remember what I needed her to.

  “But there are medications. . . .”

  “No!” She screamed the word at me, the sound reverberating in the small confines of the car.

  Chloe reached up from the backseat and put her hand on my mother’s shoulder, and if my mother’s screaming at me hadn’t already made me want to cry, Chloe’s action would have. I flicked on the signal and began to turn, but my hands shook, causing me to run onto the shoulder before jerking the car back to the road.

  After a few deep breaths, I faced her again. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”

  She wore a wide smile when she turned back to me. “For what?”

  Warring emotions bombarded me—relief, anger, confusion—all aimed at something I didn’t understand and the woman I understood even less.

  “Never mind,” I said softly, driving around the main square one more time, looking for a place to park.

  Carrie met us in the marbled lobby of City Hall. Bo was in school, but Cordelia sat in a baby carrier on her mother’s back. At least until she spotted me and held out her arms, shouting out, “Hold me, hold me.”

  “Do you mind?” Carrie asked, shrugging off the shoulder straps. “If you’ll just hold her for a few minutes she’ll stop.”

  “Sure,” I said, wishing I hadn’t as soon as the little girl’s arms were around my neck and her sweet smell wrapped around the rest of me.

  “I’ve got to get back to the theater, but Carol Shipley—that’s one of our most enthusiastic volunteers—is waiting for you in the basement to show you the ropes.”

  “Mrs. Shipley? As in the high school librarian who had her index finger practically glued to her lips? And who hated anybody touching any of the books and messing them up?”