Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  Anyone coming along will see an older woman talking to the trees. But no one comes along, and she has the trail to herself for an hour. Then she makes her way back to the car, and not sure how it had happens, knows what turn she will take next.

  So, my lovely friend, where will the next road take you?

  Bon Voyage!

  M

  * * *

  Joan closes her eyes. Madge had guessed at the mode of the runaway, and she knew, long before Joan herself understood, that once she’d tossed a dream or two by the roadside, a new destination would appear. For the first time in months, hope fills her chest, makes her lick her lips, get ready for what is coming up around the next curve.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sunday Afternoon: Uprush

  Joan

  Joan finds the numbers she needs in the cell phone. Madge might have made it a little more complicated if she had gotten rid of the phone, but the woman couldn’t think of everything, she supposes. The slow, intricate risotto was the very best thought, worthy of a novelist, as was the recipe for mussel stew that lay on top of the refrigerator. She dials the number on the land phone. A female voice answers. It is evening on the east coast and she hears the clink of dishes in the background. “Slocum’s. Hello?”

  Joan asks to talk with Jim, and he is silent as she tells him that his mother has been missing over twenty-four hours. “How was she when you last saw her?”

  “She seemed good, happy to see us. Excited maybe, but we all were. She made dinner, sat and with us. Afterwards, she asked if we wanted to go for a long walk on the beach in the morning, but by the time we got up, she was gone. We thought we could catch up with her, but we went for a couple of miles without seeing her.”

  “You know about it, that she was sick?”

  “She mentioned a little doctoring, not to worry. She seemed okay, in fact, very okay.”

  “God. She has her good days and her really bad ones. Roger has been walking her through the bad ones. Is he there?”

  “Madge said he flew back to Nebraska to see his mother since she’d be with us at the beach. We had a great day together. She even showed us the unfinished first chapters of her next novel. About the four of us. She asked us how we wanted our stories to end.” Joan feels her throat tighten. This part is the truth. Why does it strike like a dagger through her throat to say it? Maybe because in the past telling the truth has usually proved painful. Moreover, she needs to lie a lot for another day or so. Like now. She swallows, goes on. “We are worried, Jim. We wondered if a sneaker wave might have gotten her. We have no other explanation.”

  “Sneaker wave? How many of those occur? Like once a decade? You’ve got to be kidding. Unless I hear from you tonight, I’ll be there tomorrow afternoon. Let me call my brother. He’s not good with news like this. He’ll go crazy if a stranger calls…”

  “We’re not strangers. We’re your mother’s friends and we’re going a bit crazy ourselves. We’re glad you’re coming, both of you, we hope.” Joan wonders if that last sounded as if she already knew what tomorrow would bring. But Madge told her, that last night, whispering last thoughts, that she wanted her boys to be near.

  Children need to say goodbye, she had whispered. Everyone does, the leaver and the left behind, no matter what the situation.

  Joan did not say goodbye to her mother. She had used her sons as an excuse not to go back to San Mateo when the tests came out bad. She couldn’t face revisiting her mother’s life-long bittersweet yearning for a better life. She understood now that the seeds of her own irrepressible need for more, always more, had been planted before she could talk, as she watched a young woman read a Sunday newspaper and weep over impossible desires. A last goodbye between an unfulfilled mother and her dream-stalked daughter might have absolved each of them of the curse of dissatisfaction. Such a conversation might have allowed the daughter to say another goodbye years later to a damaged man who entered her life carrying a bouquet of lilies and snapdragons and a dream. That goodbye is still possible. Joan moistens her lips, thinks about another man, clad in yellow and blue golf clothes, who has given her the courage to think on these things, just as the sisters used to murmur without a clue about what that really means. Whatsoever things are true… And she will visit her sons, hold her grandchildren. Soon.

  The ringing of the phone disrupts her thoughts, brings her mind to the task at hand. The sheriff is on the line.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said, and we’ll be out knocking on doors along the beach, all night if we have to. If she is with someone, we’ll find her, and we’ll be pissed.”

  “You won’t be the only one, Lucius. We’re worried sick and now her sons are, too. I’m still trying to find Roger, her partner. But I think I’d rather be pissed than the alternative, so please do the door-to-door thing. We’ll be up waiting your call.”

  “You’re great at this,” Lou calls from the kitchen where she’s shelling the lobster for the risotto. “You should be a politician or something.”

  Joan decides to take that comment as a compliment. Lou may be quiet, but she’s got her back in all this, just like in the cop movies. And right now, she’ll get Lou’s back by taking over some of the forty-five minutes of stirring required by that risotto. That’s what friends do.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Sunday Afternoon: Headland

  Lucius

  Lucius hikes toward the houses above the road that poke widows-walks and third-story look-outs into the fog above rooflines. Liz goes to the houses lined up against the dunes at the oceanfront. He hadn’t planned on using the girl as a deputy, but he senses that people answering seldom-knocked doors, those of the few year-rounders, will not shut them in her eager face, as they are likely to do in his.

  Most of the houses in the village belong to city folks and are used only on weekends, if that. Their windows are dark, driveways swathed periodically in the glow of the motion detector lights the owners have added to the eaves of their getaways. Raccoons, usually.

  Lucius is not optimistic about finding Madge Slocum in the arms of a lover. He’d paged through a couple of her books in the library that morning. They weren’t about sex. Well, they were sort of, he corrects himself, but they were more about…damn. Relationships.

  The R word, as his second wife called it. Important for women to have them, she yelled as she walked out the door. Flipping through patches of Madge’s words, he had become aware, in a painful way, of his several failures in that line. Someday he’d maybe have another chance to find out what she meant. But not right then. He closed the book with a snap and placed it back on the shelf. “We’re looking for a missing woman here,” he said aloud, “not True Romance,” causing a woman bending into the bottom row in the S section to rise up and say, “I know what you mean.”

  For a moment he thought he should respond, but she seemed to be close to tears, the flicking eye-brows-turned-up-above-the-bridge of the nose look, the look he’d been defeated by so many times. He nodded, avoiding her wet glare, slipping by her bent body like a culprit.

  Now, focusing on the wooden steps of the house in front of him, thinking of books, he considers the open tide table. One day’s tides had been highlighted, the way a person might mark something he didn’t want to miss in the weekend TV schedule.

  Living six miles away from the ocean, he doesn’t pay much attention to the tides except when his grandson comes to visit on his pre-arranged twice-a-year schedule. If it is the January weekend, they rent a boat and go crabbing in the bay, not that Lucius knows much about crabbing, having grown up east of the mountains where crab means white plastic stuff from Japan, but the boat guy is helpful, tells them how to bait the traps, where not to go so as to not float away forever.

  Michael likes crabbing, crabmeat and butter, and laughing at his grandfather who isn’t good at telling female crabs from male crabs and who drips butter down his shirt and says, “Fuck, excuse the language,” as he wipes at his chest. And Lucius l
ikes Michael, and if he is sorry about anything in life, it is not his own divorces, but the one that sent this grandson to live with the boy’s mother in California and only two trips a year to check in with Gramps.

  He should take a look at that tide table. Liz would know where to find one. He signals to her to go back to the car. They’ll knock on doors of empty houses later.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Sunday Afternoon: Storm Warning

  Joan

  Joan finds the Nebraska phone number on Madge’s cell phone. After ten or so rings, an aged voice answers. “Hello?”

  Must be Roger’s mother, Joan guesses, and she asks for Roger.

  “He’s not here,” the woman answers. “He just came for a day or so and said he had to get home. We hardly had time to talk.” Roger’s mother is either sad or angry. Maybe it was the same thing when one is ninety.

  “He’s left? Already?” She shouldn’t have said it that way. The slip seems to have pushed the mother’s outrage to an even more intense whine.

  “Yes, he has. I told him he might as well not come if he couldn’t stay around a while and trim the bushes and clean the gutters. He doesn’t realize I need him sometimes.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be back soon, Mrs.…” Joan glances at the cell phone directory, “Hickman. He speaks of you often.”

  Sounding mollified, Mrs. Hickman says she supposes so; he was a good son usually. Joan hangs up and turns to Lou and Jackie who are listening. “We may have an unexpected visitor soon. Roger seems to have figured things out.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Early Sunday Evening: Turning Tide

  Lou

  “You already know about my son-in-law divorcing me.” Jackie is hunkered into the sofa, half of her lit by wavering strokes of candle flame, the other half in shadow. Lou is relieved when her long-legged friend shifts, brings her strong face into view. “Madge guessed right. My attorney is working out a settlement, despite a few last minute hitches, my fault. In a few months, I’ll be free of that marriage, of that stepson, of the past miserable months. I’ll only miss a sweet man who thinks I am his mother.”

  * * *

  After they had skimmed each other’s stories over an early risotto supper, Joan told them to get ready for a slumber party, and they have settled in front of the fire, wrapped in wool and chenille against the evening’s chill. Lou lit the candles and set out the wine. Since she was in charge of the ceremony, she decided they would begin by reciting the Bible passage, Whatsoever, but only she could remember it all. Jackie mumbled like always and ended with a quiet “Shit.” Then Lou told them to draw dune grass straws to see who will go first, and Jackie got the long one.

  Joan is the only one wearing a nightgown, peach satin. Lou and Jackie’s pajamas hold either gardens of flowers or cats. The glow from Jackie’s candles, the soft robes swathing bodies, the wall of dark rubbing at the windows create a mythic scene. Lou smiles. They really are old crones whispering tales at midnight.

  “No solrisinal, rising sun women in this room tonight,” Lou hears Joan whisper as she resettles herself on the floor cushion, her back against the sofa. “Can I do this?” But it’s Jackie’s turn to talk.

  Jackie speaks carefully, enunciating as if she’s parting brambles with her words. “Madge knew that I was going on a retreat with Xavier, and she imagined that he would come to my cabin during the night. So did I.” She glances up, and Lou encourages her with a nod. “And he did.”

  Lou can imagine it. The answer to Jackie’s dreams, the priest at her feet, confessing his love in passion-ridden terms. Then, if Jackie stayed true to form, she would have had a moment of free-floating joy, followed by the bursting of the ecstasy balloon. Jackie loved the chase, not the capture. Except for the old man. Lou wonders if Jackie’s recent show of courage is because of the balloon or the empty string.

  Jackie puts down her glass. “And, you probably won’t believe this, but I ran out of lust for my priest that very week. Really, I did, just like Madge said.” She’s through the thicket, has found the path, thank God, Lou thinks, sees Joan’s tongue wiping her upper lip in agreement.

  “I had been writing down my thoughts, in a journal, and making a list of things, like Madge said, only my list was about all the things I didn’t like about Xavier, such as his smartass smirk when I tried to talk about god or goddesses, the way he lectured whether I was listening or not, even his eyebrows. I thought how I would tell him he was being unfair to me, this twisting and dangling when nothing could come from it, I didn’t need it any more, I was growing up, all that shit. So when he came in that night, I was ready.”

  Jackie looks at her friends, raises her chin a little. “He started crying. At first I thought it was about us, and I felt sorry for him, he looked so miserable. I opened my mouth to say something, maybe different than I had planned, who knows? He looked so pathetic. Then he wiped his eyes and confessed he had just had sex with someone, a priest friend, and he felt bad about it. Like he wanted me to forgive him.

  “‘Goodbye, Xavier,’ I said. ‘Go pray or sublimate or something.’” Then Jackie grins, rolls her eyes, pulls a hand through her wild hair. “Actually, I also told him to fuck off, which he had kind of already done, of course, and it felt good. I wanted to go home. And I did. To a mess, but to two people who love me. I’m getting good at Nintendo.”

  Joan laughs out loud.

  “Madge will like that ending,” Lou says, as she reaches to pat Jackie’s black mass of curls. “So do I.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Early Sunday Evening: Green Flash

  Joan

  Madge does like it, Joan is sure. She can feel Madge’s quiet applause at Jackie’s discovery of the two people who love her and whom she loves without expectations or conditions. She and Madge had talked about Jackie sometimes, wondering what would bring her to this next place. Fred, of course, began the process, adoring her, calling her Mother, awakening Jackie’s sleeping capacity for caring which had gone unexamined in a haze of libido and alcohol. Xavier, this last week with him, offered the opportunity for Jackie to walk away from what was and move on to what will be. And Madge caught it all in her story.

  Lou points an open palm toward her. Her turn.

  Joan leans back, feels Lou’s boney legs at her back. “Not yet. I’m going to take a moment here,” she says, “to think about a story Madge didn’t write. About Madge herself. Fill up your glasses while I do some quiet remembering.”

  * * *

  “I always wanted to be perfect,” Madge confessed that day years ago. “I cooked with Joy of Cooking, raised my sons on Brazelton and Spock, kept the Kama Sutra under the bed, and went through five copies of Strunk and White, writing my first two novels. I was an almost-perfect woman. Then Jerry killed himself, and I realized I had skipped the most important book of all, the one that would have taught me to listen, to be compassionate. I hadn’t really heard anything he was trying to tell me.”

  A year after Jerry’s death, Joan and Madge sat drinking coffee on a sunny restaurant patio in Palo Alto. Joan had driven from Clarkston to the Peninsula to settle her mother’s small estate and, more important, to escape her fracturing family. Madge had just come from meeting her agent, a new book in the works. “I don’t know if I’ll ever finish it—it or any other book. My hands refuse to touch the keys of my word processor.” She wasn’t weeping. Just the opposite, really, her face white, eyes dry and cold in their stillness, her lips barely moving behind the whispered words. “Whenever I look at its blank screen, a vision of Jerry, his face still and reddened with fumes, gone, floats across it.” She glanced away, touched her mouth with her napkin. A fragment of a smile collapsed into a moan. “I feel so guilty.”

  Joan did not speak. Madge’s shoulders heaved, her hands brought the napkin to closed eyes, pale crumpled cheeks. This moment was a precious gift. Joan waited in silent gratitude.

  Madge straightened her shoulders, lay the napkin aside, and said, her voice shaky bu
t determined, “I guess I need to talk. Okay?” and Joan touched Madge’s hand. They sat for an hour, Madge remembering, working to forgive herself, closing her eyes when the words were too painful. Finally, she lowered her shoulders, sat back, her eyes alive again, almost smiling, and said, “Thank you.” She signaled the waiter for coffee refills. “Now, friend, it’s your turn.”

  Joan wasn’t sure what Madge meant.

  “This can’t be one-way, you know, this sharing. You have to give me something too. Otherwise it would just be me kvetching and both of us walking away empty.” Madge moved her cup towards the server. “What’s going on? Where’s Tim?”

  Joan looked at Madge and wondered if she had ever understood what friendship was. She felt for the Kleenex in her purse. And then she confessed her Clarkston life, Madge sad for her, each of them dabbing at eyes, not embarrassed at the scene they must be making, two middle-aged women holding each other in a long goodbye, whispering soft words, beginning a connection that lasted until this moment and beyond.

  * * *

  The tape recorder on the trunk whirls, unnoticed white noise under the surf outside, the crackling fire in front of them. Joan shifts, glances at Lou, adjusts a pillow against the shinbones of her friend, begins, ready to give as well as receive, as Madge taught her at that afternoon and again this weekend.