Agnes

by Jaime Maddox

  In less than a week, the swollen Susquehanna would rise from its own bed, and the bed in which Sandy and Jeannie were daydreaming would be washed away, along with half the town and all their dreams.

  Chapter Three

  The Funeral, May 25, 2011

  West Nanticoke, Pennsylvania

  The cemetery was much as Sandy remembered it. A formidable stone wall lined the approach to a majestic stone archway. A wrought-iron gate (which had never been closed during all her trips here) guarded the entrance. Stone walkways allowed access between rows and rows of ancient grave markers. The trees were in full, vibrant bloom, surrounding three corners of the graveyard. On the bottom perimeter, beyond the road, was a cliff that fell hundreds of feet to the Susquehanna below.

  Sitting on the freshly mowed lawn, with the sounds and smells of spring overwhelming her senses, Sandy wished she could feel the joy this season was meant to bring. As she stared into the distance, eyes unfocused, she couldn’t help feeling just a little sad. Nellie had been a special woman. She had been graceful and elegant, tough and decisive, loving and compassionate. She had loved Sandy unconditionally, taught her values like honesty and integrity, showed her how to laugh at herself and the world. Her grandmother had really been more like a mother to her, and even though Sandy had known this day would come, she wasn’t quite prepared for it. She had suffered loss before—her parents, her grandfather, the two great loves of her life—but this one somehow felt different. Nellie represented the past, and with her death, the final link to Sandy’s history was broken.

  Nellie had been the epitome of strength, up until her final days. She ruled three brothers during her formative years. She stole the heart of Sandy’s grandfather, a man from one of the wealthiest families in Northeastern Pennsylvania, one who broke ranks and followed his dream of practicing medicine instead of working in his family’s businesses. This man of steel was putty in his wife’s hands. And though Sandy never knew her father, she had come to learn that he was equally enamored of his mother.

  As a child growing up in her grandparents’ house, Sandy witnessed epic battles of will played out at the dinner table on a nightly basis. There was no topic David and Nellie Parker didn’t discuss, often heatedly. As much as her grandparents adored each other, they didn’t necessarily share the same views on the Vietnam War and politics, religion, and money. Sandy knew these were the same conversations all couples inevitably had and had chuckled when she found herself debating with Diane for the first time over dinner so long ago.

  When she lived in Nellie’s house, Sandy often sat and watched the drama unfold before her, a witness to the events rather than an active participant. And just that had been exciting. There were always sick patients, always business activities, always repairs and issues with their rental properties. Sandy’s role in her relationship with her first lover had been similar—the quiet sounding board for Jeannie’s myriad ideas and opinions.

  After Nellie lost her husband and Sandy lost Jeannie, both women evolved in their relationship into a compromise that suited both of them. Realizing that Sandy wasn’t the debater her husband had been, Nellie learned to coax opinions and conversations from her. And Sandy learned to open up and share more, growing more comfortable expressing her ideas and opinions. The growth period was one of discovery about themselves and each other and brought them even closer. As a result, when Sandy left for New York—and she had needed to go—her relationship with Nellie didn’t suffer. Through the years she had visited often, eventually building a home in the Poconos, and often included Nellie in her travels.

  This woman had been so vital in her life! While Sandy had so much to celebrate about her grandmother’s long and fruitful life, she couldn’t shake the sadness. She would miss her grandmother terribly. She would miss Nellie’s wisdom and love, her laughter, and, most especially, their debates.

  “It’s beautiful here, Mom.”

  Startled from her reverie, Sandy nearly jumped. She looked up from her seat on the grass and smiled at her daughter, who took a seat beside her and grabbed her hand, squeezing it lovingly. Petite and with coloring that suggested an African ancestry, her daughter couldn’t have looked more dissimilar to her. Yet their manners were so similar that they did in fact seem much the same. They sat silently, erect, with laced fingers pulling on bent knees, enjoying the vista before them as well as the calming reassurance of each other’s company.

  Sandy marveled that four decades had passed since her last visit here. She had lived an entire life in the interim between visits. Passing by so quickly, the days and months and years vanished as she attended college classes and played basketball games, dated women and fell in love again, worked on Wall Street and managed her own firm, traveled the world.

  Adopting Angela had been the greatest decision she’d ever made, for her daughter had kept her busy and kept her young, filling Sandy’s life with love and joy. Now Angie had given her a most precious gift—a grandson.

  Life had come full circle for her as she found herself back in the place she’d spent her life avoiding. In all those years, Sandy had been here only once, but not to this place she’d so often visited as a child. Traveling abroad, studying art and antiquities in museums and exploring glacier bays and river canyons, she’d never felt whole. She now understood she’d been avoiding the very balm for her angst. She’d run from here and bandaged her wounds, but she’d never really tended to them and allowed them to heal.

  It was time to do just that. She took in the view of the mountains, breathed in the fragrant air, and felt a tiny bit of peace. It was hard to not feel peaceful here, and even with the sadness the cemetery could invoke, the memories it could stir, it was still a comforting place for her.

  Miles upstream, the foothills of the Pocono Mountains faded into the Wyoming Valley and into the depths of the Susquehanna River. On the west side of the river the Endless Mountains of the Appalachian chain formed the valley wall. Between those two ridges lay acres of fertile farmland and towns with businesses and homes and parks, but here just the mountains faced off, the river standing between them as if protecting them from each other. On the east bank, just south of Nanticoke, there was enough clearance to build a railroad bed, but not much else. On this side, the mountain dove so sharply into the river it had to be blasted with dynamite to create enough space to accommodate Route 11. Indeed, at certain points of the journey, if you looked up from the road you would see the mountain looming overhead rather than the sky above.

  Why had she and Jeannie spent so much time up here at Riverview, among the dead? Her young mind had never analyzed the reasons, and even as an adult she would have argued it was a desire to be close to her father, whom she’d never met. He was buried on the hillside here, resting beneath the shade of a splendid maple that seemed as old as the mountain itself. She’d come back on this beautiful, sunny day to lay his mother to rest beside him.

  Sharing the beauty of this place with her daughter, Sandy now realized she might have had no other motive for her childhood trips here than the simple desire for peace. The cemetery, set so high on the mountainside, was still and quiet. No random cars passed. No ambient noise filtered from nearby homes or schools. As a child who was always under the watchful eye and tutelage of her grandparents, visiting the cemetery let her escape from that adult universe.

  She had never ventured here alone, and never with her grandparents, whose only child perpetually slept beneath the trees here. When her father, David Parker, Jr., died in a car accident, his parents were in such a state of shock they didn’t consider planting him in the Poconos, where his maternal ancestors were buried, or in Wilkes-Barre, where the Parkers had been laid to rest. Riverview was close to their home, so into the ground of Riverview he went.

  Her father had been in his third year of study at the University of Scranton when his car hit an icy patch of road as he was driving back to school one early morning. He was killed instantly. His parents never knew for sure why he’d made the thir
ty-mile trip home the night before he was killed, but after his college sweetheart informed the Parkers that she was carrying David’s child, they suspected he’d planned to tell them the news. Why he didn’t, they never knew. They didn’t ask questions that no longer mattered; they simply buried their son and tried to vent their grief.

  David might as well have been at the South Pole. His parents never visited their son’s grave. The Parkers were spiritual people, and they believed their son hadn’t died but was granted eternal life in Heaven with God. Bringing flowers to the cemetery, crying over an “empty” grave were just not on their agenda. Her grandparents insisted that the greatest respect they could pay their son’s memory was to love and cherish his daughter. That they did.

  Even still, the spiritual peace they felt was something that eluded their small granddaughter, who didn’t have memories of a father or a child of his to cherish. All curiosity and unanswered questions (Why didn’t her parents marry? Where did her mother go? Why did her dad come home that night?), Sandy found she could create answers that were to her liking very easily, explanations that eased the concerns of a child’s conscience. Those answers didn’t really satisfy her heart’s longings. To her small mind, her father existed only in pictures and in his grave. So she went to the cemetery and spent time with him.

  Her family plot was small, with just the three graves and two headstones, one that already bore her grandmother’s name. She would have to make arrangements to have the date after the dash engraved. Unlike so many families here, including the Bennetts, who had large family markers, it would be easy to miss the three simple graves where her family was buried. Sandy knew where they were, though—she’d been to her dad’s grave a million times.

  She and Jeanie had hiked and explored the woods, picnicked, biked the roads, and pilfered flowers from fresh graves to adorn her father’s site. Riverview was a busy place and never wanted for a fresh grave to target.

  Sandy studied the grave markers of the people who were her only family for the first thirty years of her life. Her father had been dead for nearly sixty years, her pop for more than forty. Her grandmother had finally given up the fight and passed peacefully in her sleep, ninety-eight years after taking her first breath. As Sandy looked at the dates, it occurred to her that her grandmother had gone to the ground loving a man who had been dead longer than they’d been married. In all those years after his death, Nellie had never stopped loving her husband and never would have even considered keeping company with another man.

  Sandy could understand her grandmother’s feelings for her grandfather. God knew, she herself had lived a lifetime in love with the ghost of Jeannie Bennett. Even though she’d found love again after Jeannie’s death, no one had ever owned her heart except the beautiful girl she’d first loved. Their love affair was sacred, a secret she’d carried her entire life.

  Her partner, Diane, who’d shared Sandy’s life for twenty years, had never known. Breast cancer had stolen Diane at the age of fifty-two, and since then Sandy had dated again, many women, in fact, but she knew she’d never love again. She’d been blessed, not once but twice, so how could she possibly hope for lightning to strike a third time? A more-than-adequate supply of single women had been happy to share Sandy’s company for the past few years. During the last few months, she’d found herself spending more and more time in the company of one woman in particular. A passion for golf and trips to the theater were two strong ties; they shared fun days and were quite compatible at night as well. But as far as her heart went, the storms of life had washed out that access road.

  As much as she enjoyed her time with this new lover, Pat, Sandy would never consider the relationship anything more than casual. And that was okay, because she had everything she needed.

  With the sun shining on the beautiful face of her daughter, Sandy thought of those two other women she loved. Jeannie and Diane had been the same in so many ways, yet so different in others. Jeannie was quite feminine, always dressed in the latest fashion and never a hair out of place. Diane was somewhat frumpy but would have been adorable wearing a grocery bag. Jeannie was stubborn, Diane compliant and the peacekeeper. Jeannie could and would play with anything that could be ridden, bounced, or thrown. Diane, a professor of mathematics at Columbia, was interested in how far balls flew in relationship to their weight and volume, but didn’t know the difference between a golf ball and a football. Yet they both loved music and food and travel, hiking and camping. They were two very different women, but they had both loved her passionately, and she had loved them both right back.

  The time was long overdue to pay that first woman a visit. After the flood, after learning that Jeannie had been killed, Sandy had never returned here. The need to believe in God, to believe that Jeannie was not really dead but given to a higher power, had compelled Sandy to adopt her grandparents’ stance on cemeteries. She had never visited, even for Jeannie’s funeral. She had never said a proper good-bye. After a lifetime of holding Jeannie in her heart, the time was right to let her go.

  During the past few weeks as she had anticipated her grandmother’s interment, Sandy had thought of little else but those two women—Nellie and Jeannie. She knew she would have to come to Riverview and see Jeannie’s grave. It had taken forty years and many tears, but now she finally felt ready to say that good-bye.

  While the cemetery hadn’t changed much, Sandy had. Those nimble knees were gone, the victims of too many rebounds and jump shots. “Give me a lift, would you?” she asked Angela, and when they were both standing, Sandy nodded her head uphill. It was time to tell the secret. “Come with me. There’s someone I’d like you to meet.

  “Jeannie Bennett was the first girl I ever loved,” she explained to her daughter. “She was killed in an accident when her family was evacuating during Agnes.”

  If Angela was shocked to hear her mother’s words, she didn’t show it. Instead, eyes filled with love met Sandy’s, and a sentimental frown turned down the corners of her mouth. “Oh, Mama! How awful! What happened?”

  Holding hands, Sandy led her daughter toward the Bennett family plot, not far from her own family site, and told Angie the story of her life in West Nanticoke. She had never spoken much about her early years. In the beginning it was too painful for her, and later it would have been difficult for Diane to hear. Yet Sandy knew her daughter had always been curious, in the same way she was curious about her own mysterious beginnings. Sandy knew this was a story her daughter would like to hear, and she was pleased for them both that she was finally able to tell it.

  Sandy carried a single flower with her, taken from her grandmother’s spray. As she thought of Jeannie the smile that formed on her face was automatic, as reflexive as her rising pulse when Jeannie had kissed her. She could almost hear her laughter as they walked among the gravestones, among their ancestors and their neighbors’ and friends’ ancestors, studying a piece of history. On Memorial Day, flags honored those who had died in service of our country. Cherubs on children’s stones noted their tragic deaths. Large family stones in the center of their plots commemorated the wealthiest of their neighbors. Those were perfect for climbing on, and one stone was large enough to host a picnic. Jeannie and Sandy had often dined there, eating peanut butter and grapes, then lying on their backs searched for shapes in the clouds, pondering the mysteries of life and death and the unknown beyond.

  The Bennetts had been fruitful and multiplied, and locating their plot even after all these years was not a difficult task. Finding the marker for Jeanne Marie Bennett proved to be more challenging. Sandy noted Jeannie’s parents’ stone and read with sadness the date her on her father’s. Paul Bennett had died the night they had evacuated Canal Street—June 22, 1972. The accident had happened just a few minutes after the Bennetts left their house for what would be the last time.

  Sandy had stood on her porch watching them go, thinking all the while they’d be back in a few days, hauling mud and muck from their cellars and scrubbing walls with blea
ch to kill the river germs. She would work with Jeannie, side by side, helping their families through another flood, and when their task was completed they’d steal a beer and share it along the riverbank.

  How wrong she’d been!

  She brought herself back to the present, not wanting to think too much about the flood. She could tell herself she was ready and mentally steel herself, but traveling back in time was still not a pleasant journey. She shook the sadness threatening to overcome her and resumed her search.

  Helen Bennett, Jeannie’s mother, had died almost a decade earlier, in 2003. Even though Mrs. Bennett had always been kind to her, in all these forty years Sandy could never bring herself to reach out to the woman. To do so would have been to out Jeannie, for Sandy couldn’t have spoken of Jeannie without acknowledging their love. And while she was sure Jeannie would eventually have declared her love for Sandy and told her parents they were lovers, she hadn’t yet done it. Sandy thought it best to leave the secret of their love buried with Jeannie, and so she’d never contacted her family. Besides, what would have been the point? The girl she knew and loved was a very different one than her mother knew. Better to talk to old friends, like Linda Grabowski—but Sandy hadn’t done that either. She’d simply run away. Away from the pain and the people who would remind her of what she’d lost during Hurricane Agnes.

  Jeannie had died from injuries she suffered in the same car crash that killed her father. Always a fighter, she’d hung on for days before her body finally gave out. It had all been such a mess with the flood that Sandy had never even gotten to see her. Flooding forced the closure of the Wilkes-Barre hospitals, causing them to transfer Jeannie out of town. Sandy had never even heard all the details about the accident. It had never mattered to her, though, and it still didn’t. Jeannie was dead. No matter how it had happened, dead was still dead. That Jeannie had been unconscious for a week and hadn’t suffered gave Sandy one small measure of comfort.