Chasing Windmills

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Well, that's close to what the other doctor said. And look how much healthier I got after I started running.”

  He made a sound like a snort. “Seems no matter what I allow it's not enough.”

  “So, are you going to do it?” No reply. I waited. Still nothing. “Father. I said, are you going to do it?”

  “Sebastian. Please be quiet and let me think.”

  All the way home, no more word from my father. We ate dinner, he went to bed. Not a word. But he looked intimidated to me. And I took that to be a good sign.

  I SAT ON THE SUBWAY SEAT with Maria beside me. Holding her hand.

  “I've been thinking how it's going to be,” I said.

  “Oh. You mean if we go away together?”

  My stomach turned to ice. Heavy, tingling ice. “If?”

  “When. When, I mean.”

  “You didn't change your mind, did you?”

  “No. It's just scary to think about it.”

  “But you still want to do it.”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  By now I was full-on scared. And I couldn't think what to do to fix it. I had to get us back to that place where we definitely knew what we would definitely do.

  I reached deeper into myself than I ever have before. And this is what I found.

  I said, “When I was little, I spent some time in the desert. The Mojave Desert, in California. Have you ever been to the desert?” She shook her head no, and I went on. “It's hot. But then, so is the city. But it's a different kind of hot. I guess it's hotter, but it's dry. A baking kind of heat. It doesn't make you feel like you're going to faint. And at night, the stars are so clear. There are hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe more. Maybe millions. And they're so bright. It's like every little square inch of sky has a thousand bright stars. And it's not flat, either. There are mountains. A whole range of mountains on the horizon. And on the mountains are windmills.”

  “Windmills?” she asked. I felt as though she had clicked out of her worry and into my story for the first time.

  “Windmills. Thousands of identical windmills. They sit up there on Tehachapi Pass and turn the wind into power. And there are layers after layers of them. So you could just watch them spin forever. It's like watching water flow. I don't really know how to describe it.”

  “I'd like to go somewhere where there are windmills,” she said. “Is that why you told me that story?”

  “Yes. It is. I wanted you to know there's a place for us.”

  Her eyes lit up and she squeezed my hand tighter. “Oh, Tony! You do know that movie! I thought you didn't, when I first brought it up. I know it's old. But I love that movie.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Except it didn't have a happy ending. But we will. Right?”

  “I wish I could picture those windmills,” she said. “But I can't see them in my head.”

  “I'll bring you a picture of them.” I figured I could print one off the Web.

  “Will you, Tony? I'd love to see.”

  She put her head on my shoulder all the way back to Union Square. It seemed like, if that really had been a rough spot, it was smoothed over now.

  When the doors opened, she kissed me, short and fast on the mouth. “Windmills? Really?”

  “Really.”

  “I can't wait to see that,” she said. “Day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes. Day after tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  Then she was gone.

  On my way up the stairs that night, I had a Knowing Moment.

  I guess in some ways I'm like my sister, Stella. She just pays more attention to stuff like that than I do. I can do a lot of the same things as Stella can, but most of the time I just ignore it.

  Stella says that the past and the future aren't really so different, like we think they are. I mean, in metaphysical terms. I don't quite get this part, but I think it has something to do with quantum mechanics, which I guess nobody exactly gets anyway. Stella says there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to remember the future exactly the way we remember the past. Well, I guess remember is the wrong word, but there isn't exactly a right one. Because we don't do it, so we never made up a name for it. But Stella says we only use some really small percent of what our brains can do, and maybe that's one of the unused parts.

  I'm taking a very long way around to say this. On the way up the stairs, I knew something. Very plainly. I still had not gotten Tony's address. Or phone number. Or last name. And as I was walking up the stairs, I knew it was too late.

  If I had really thought about it, I could have gone a little further in my head and put together that lots of big trouble was waiting for me upstairs. But all I thought about was Tony. Losing Tony.

  It was almost like my life flashed before my eyes and all I saw was Tony.

  When I opened the door, I didn't even see Carl. I swear. I felt his fist hit my cheekbone, slamming me back against the door, slamming it closed as I hit it. I hadn't even seen him coming. I think I saw a flash of the fist, but it seemed unreal. Like something you would dream.

  I felt the wood floorboards under my knees.

  “I went by your work today,” he said.

  And part of me thought, Good. Good. It's over. It was ridiculous, it needed to be over. Now it is. My whole head was throbbing. I could feel a trickle of blood run down my cheek where Carl had caught me with his class ring.

  He said, “I was going to stand right with you and be some support for you while you asked Danny about your paycheck.”

  I thought, You liar. You are such a liar. You didn't go there to support me. But it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

  I pulled up to my feet and walked into the kitchen. A little dizzy, but I was going. I was going to get some ice to put on my face.

  “Don't you walk away from me!” he screamed. Loud enough for the neighbors on both sides to hear. But I didn't care about the neighbors. I only cared about my kids. I knew they could hear, but there was nothing I could do about that. I just hoped they stayed in their rooms. I was pretty sure they would. They always did before.

  “Don't you dare walk away from me! I want to know where you've been.”

  “Nowhere,” I said. And I opened the freezer door to get the ice. “I just rode around on the subway.”

  “Bullshit!” he screamed. “You look me in the eye and tell me there isn't somebody else.”

  I looked down at the kitchen linoleum. I had to. There was nothing else I could do.

  Stella says when we were kids and things got bad she would go outside herself. She said she would be in a spot near the ceiling in the corner of the room. Watching. Like everything was happening to somebody else. Like you watch a movie on a screen.

  Not me. I tuck in. I go into an even deeper place in myself. And I pull the covers in over me. And then I dare you to find me. You have to find me to touch me or hurt me. At least, the part of me that really counts. I go inside and just hold very still. And part of me feels dead. Like it doesn't matter. Whatever it is. It just doesn't matter.

  I think I had my eyes closed when I got hit with Carl's flying tackle. I just remember falling with him on top of me. And, of course, hitting the kitchen table is one of those things you don't ever forget. We have a big glass kitchen table with a border of metal all around it. Like a frame. I hit it with the side of my body, and then we hit the ground, and I just lay there on the floor feeling like someone had stuck burning hot knives into my side.

  I'm not sure where Carl went, but he wasn't on top of me. And I didn't really care. I kept trying to take a breath. But I couldn't get any air in. I was used to getting the wind knocked out of me, so I guess I was just waiting. It would hurt too bad to breathe anyway, so I wasn't going to try too hard.

  The door to the freezer was still standing open. I could see steam pouring out of it, the way fog pours over the top of a mountain. Or, at least, the way it poured in a photo my mother used to have over her bed.

  My breath wasn't coming back. You'
d think I'd be all panicky around that. But not so much. It was strange.

  That thought came into my head one more time. You didn't get his address, and now it's too late.

  I don't remember anything else after that.

  I can only describe my father's mood the following morning as sullen.

  He looked almost like a little boy to me. An old child with gray hair. Sulking.

  I got it in my head that I was just going to open my mouth and ask a brave question. But I froze. I opened my mouth and nothing happened. After that it just got harder.

  It's like if someone had a loaded gun in your face. I don't know how else to describe how it felt to try to talk to my father. Even on a good day. If someone always has a loaded gun in your face, you weigh every word before you say it. You only dare say it if it might save you. But you're never sure, so there's this tendency to freeze. Say nothing at all.

  This went on for nearly a whole bowl of granola.

  Then I decided to say “Father.” Put it out there really fast. Then I'd have no choice but to finish the thought.

  “Father.”

  He looked up. Suddenly he looked more angry than sullen. It was something like looking right down the barrel and seeing a live round. I couldn't go on.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  “What is it, Sebastian? Spit it out.”

  “I just wondered … if you'd thought any more about what the doctor said.”

  The minute it came out of my mouth, I knew it was a stupid question. He'd thought about nothing else since. I had interrupted his thinking about it to ask if he was thinking about it.

  “We're getting a second opinion,” he said. I dropped my spoon. On purpose. The clanking sound startled him, set him off as if I'd yelled at him or challenged him. “Not even an opinion,” he said. “I don't pay a doctor for his opinion. I wanted him to prescribe sleeping pills for you and instead he tells me I'm raising my son wrong. Where he gets off, I don't know. He barely knows you. He hasn't sacrificed his life for you, like I have.”

  Now, mind you, my father said this a lot. That he sacrificed his own life to raise me right. He quit his job as a college professor when his mother died, and has managed to live on the money she left him. And, yes, it's been all about me. Even I have to admit that. And I'd heard that same song about sacrifice a hundred times. And this was the first time I didn't believe it. And I can't even explain what changed.

  All of a sudden it was just written all over his face. He didn't sacrifice anything for me. He didn't want his life anymore, so I was a convenient excuse not to have it. Letting me have friends, that would have been a sacrifice. Keeping me all to himself was purely selfish.

  “I'm going running,” I said, and stood up rather abruptly. My legs hit the underneath of the table so hard that I knocked over his glass of orange juice. He scrambled for a dishcloth to clean it up. I didn't. I headed for the door.

  “What about the rest of your cereal?” I heard him ask.

  I didn't answer.

  I think I finally got it. It doesn't pay to try to communicate with my father.

  • • •

  I DIDN'T GO STRAIGHT TO DELILAH'S. I was going to run first. I wanted to run some of the bad thoughts and bad energy out of my system. I wanted to outrun my bad morning.

  But as I passed by under her window, I heard a big voice yell, “Hey!” But I didn't catch that it was her voice. That one little word wasn't enough for me to recognize it. A second later I heard, “Hey! Tony!”

  Amazingly, I looked around. Isn't that amazing, that I would answer to Tony? I thought that was amazing.

  “Up here.” That was when I recognized that it was Delilah.

  I looked up. She was waving her arms frantically. Yet somehow happily, too.

  Of course, I went back upstairs. She was waiting for me in her open doorway.

  “Isn't that amazing, that I answer to the name Tony?” I asked her that from halfway down the hall.

  “I didn't want to get you in trouble with your father. You know, if he heard.”

  It struck me that this was the second time in a couple of days that just yelling someone's name on the street could have spelled disaster. Then it struck me how wrong that was. To have to keep your life sectioned off like that. A signal that you'd fallen into a bad way to live.

  “Hurry up,” she said. “Hurry up. Get your skinny little butt in here.” Her face seemed happy, lighted up—but scared, too. And I got a little scared myself. Started thinking Maria was standing in her apartment or something. Not that she ever would be. I just couldn't think what else would be so exciting and scary. “I got something for you.”

  As I walked through the door, she set it in my hands. A big nine-by-twelve cardboard Express Mail envelope. I looked at it for a minute without comprehension. I really didn't know, at first, what it was.

  Even when I looked at the name on the return address. Anne Vicente. I knew I knew that name. It was so familiar. It's not that I couldn't place the name, exactly. It just all happened so fast. Or maybe in a weird way it almost happened in slow motion. So I could almost feel the bits of information drop into my brain and find a spot. Before I could even process the name, click with why I knew the name, my eyes fell on the last line of the return address. Mojave, California. My stomach went cold, my knees almost buckled, and I got so dizzy that Delilah had to step in and lead me over to the couch to sit down.

  “It just came in the morning mail,” she said. Like the words had been ready to explode from her mouth for a long time. “Just about an hour ago. I didn't know how to let you know. I was going nuts.”

  The words sounded hollow coming into my brain. Like I was half asleep, and someone was talking to me. Dull and far away. The envelope was sitting on my lap. I just kept looking at it. I looked up at Delilah. I expected her to tell me to just open it. But I underestimated Delilah. She was smarter than that. She knew it wasn't all so easy. My answer might be in this envelope. My whole life might be about to change. Retroactively. That was the weird part. I might be about to have to go back and rewrite—or at least reframe—the last decade of my own history. Or maybe I'd read this letter and still wouldn't know what to believe. Suddenly that seemed a thousand times worse.

  I picked up the envelope. Held it in both hands. “I didn't think this could possibly get here so fast,” I said. It sounded like somebody else. In a way. “Three days?”

  “Might have been four,” she said. “Pretty sure it was four.”

  The envelope had one of those tear strips on the back. Lift the little tab and pull off a whole long strip of the cardboard and then you're in.

  I held it out to Delilah. Closed my eyes. “Pull that, okay?” Might've sounded stupid. But I needed help. I felt the tug of it, and heard the quiet rip of the cardboard letting go.

  I looked inside. There was an envelope, but something more, too. What looked like separate small papers or pictures.

  I turned it upside down and spilled the whole thing out onto my lap. The envelope said, “To our darling Sebastian.” It caught in my chest like something solid I'd breathed into my lungs, something I'd meant to swallow. I picked up one of the pictures. They were pictures. I could see that now. They were lying facedown on my lap. I picked one up and turned it over.

  It was a picture of my mother.

  I want to put something to how I was feeling just here, but there's nothing to say. Part of me knew it. Part of me was expecting it. That part had already given up and stepped out of the way. It just fell into this perfect blankness, like a fresh fall of untouched snow. Nothing moved, and it never made a sound. For that moment, I mean.

  It was a moment when something became so inevitable that I just surrendered to it.

  She was standing in front of a big jeep sort of vehicle. Very new. The car couldn't have been more than a couple of years old. Her hair was partly the honey brown I remembered and partly gray. She looked about the same age as my father. Which she was
, almost exactly. But, I mean, my father now. I mean, she wasn't the age I remember her. But it was her, and I knew it.

  I picked up another photo. I'm not sure how much later, though. It was my Grandma Annie, sitting on the porch swing of her little house in Mojave. It was the same house. I recognized it immediately. And, ten years aside, the same Grandma Annie. The same tanned, leathery skin and cheery gray eyes.

  I turned over the third picture, and it made my stomach buzz and tingle. She had sent me a picture of the windmills the way they look from her backyard.

  I looked up at Delilah. It's hard to describe what I saw in her face.

  I handed her the picture of my mother.

  “Is this your Grandma Annie?”

  I shook my head. I couldn't talk.

  “Didn't think so. She looks too young. This is your mother.”

  I nodded.

  Then I started to cry. And you know what? I wasn't even humiliated to cry in front of Delilah. You tell me, do you know anyone who wouldn't at a time like that? Because, well, if you do, I don't want to know them. You'd have to be made of stone. You'd have to be dead.

  I wasn't dead. Not anymore.

  Delilah brought me about three big handfuls of tissues and piled them in my lap. She even hobbled over and got me a little wastebasket. I was going though them pretty fast. I needed a system. I never bothered to take out my handkerchief. Wouldn't have been enough.

  I'm not sure how long that went on before she said, “Don't forget you got a letter under there. Not to rush you now, child. Take your time.”

  But I could tell she was curious. And truthfully, I'd more or less forgotten. I was so busy processing the information that I had a mother. The letter from my grandmother, who I'd always known was out there somewhere, had fallen to the back of my mind. Besides, it was obliterated by a sea of tissues.

  I plowed through and found it. And opened it up. I read it once through quietly to myself. Then I read it out loud to Delilah. Because I knew she wanted to know. Not out of nosiness. Just caring. She wanted to be part of this. And she was. How could she not be? She'd started it. This whole moment was courtesy of Delilah. I owed her.