My mistake was stopping at a convenience store near the city limits of Santa Fe moments before an armed robbery was to begin.
When I made it back to this room tonight, I collapsed on the bed. I had no energy for removing my makeup or my clothes. I did pull back the covers so I could hide beneath them.
Before I fell into a merciful, restorative sleep, my promise came to comfort me: “I am with you always.”
“I know,” I whispered, “but I wish you could hold me.”
The truth is, though, as sleep came like a gift, I did not feel alone.
September 1
Well, I’ve lived to see the first day of September. After yesterday, that suddenly seems quite remarkable.
I awoke this morning to sun peeking through a slit between the curtains. I had closed them last night after I woke up wondering why I had gone to bed with my clothes on. I got up, put on a gown, took off what was left of my makeup, and wrote the second half of yesterday’s entry. I was back in bed pretty quickly, counting my sheep: “I will fear no evil, for you are with me”; “It is I; don’t be afraid”; “I am with you always”; “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
I managed to fall asleep again, but dreaming made it fitful. Surprisingly, I didn’t dream about crazed killers wearing colorful ski masks. Instead I dreamed of Tom. In fact, he made an appearance in two of the dreams. Tom used to say he never dreamed, or if he did, he never remembered a dream when he awoke. I can’t imagine such a thing.
In the first dream I was stuck up to my armpits in something like quicksand. I saw Tom standing nearby on solid ground and called out to him.
“Tom, help me!”
“Hurry up,” he said. “The kids are waiting for you in the Alamo.”
“But, Tom, I can’t move! Get me out of here!”
“You can get out of there, Audrey.”
He had some nerve. I couldn’t even lift my arms out of the muck.
“Thomas Hanes Eaton,” I commanded, “get something and get me out of here!”
“The kids are waiting,” he said.
I looked down, surprised to see that the mire I was caught in was now only up to my waist. I woke up, wondering if I ever managed to get out.
The other dream about Tom was equally as frustrating in a different way. He was sitting by the river where I ate lunch yesterday. When I walked up and saw him there, I was elated.
“Tom,” I said, sitting beside him, smoothing my jean skirt underneath me, “where have you been?”
“At the waterfall,” he said.
“I was just there!” I said. “Isn’t it pretty?”
“Very pretty.” Then he stood up and stretched. “Well, I’d better get going.”
“What do you mean? I just got here.”
“I have to go mow the yard.”
“No, no,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Stay awhile.”
“I have to get it done, honey.”
“Okay,” I said, starting to get up, “I’ll go with you.”
“No,” he said, “stay here and swim.”
I looked down and saw I had on my bathing suit instead of a jean skirt and white T-shirt. And I noticed Helen, poppy red hair blazing in the sun, sitting beside me, throwing rocks into the river.
“Helen,” I said, “what are you doing here?”
She smiled as if I had asked an amusing question.
When I turned back around, Tom was hardly discernible in a distant field, mowing on a John Deere tractor, much too far away for him to hear me calling, “Wait! Wait!”
I heard giggles then and turned to see Helen playing in a waterfall with Kelsie and Jada. They called to me, and I was thinking of joining them when I awoke.
Each time I dream of Tom, I recall Milton’s sonnet about his late wife: “But O, as to embrace me she inclined, / I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
I finally left the haven of my room and spent the entire afternoon strolling down Canyon Road, where there were lots of people. Today daylight and people were priorities. Galleries and restaurants housed in adobes lined the streets, one after another, so many of them. Some of the galleries looked quite modern, with whitewashed walls and sparse displays. Art was displayed outdoors as well, and flower and sculpture gardens delighted me when I happened onto them. I enjoyed the paintings, sculptures, pottery, and other types of arts, but everything was pricey, and it’s a good thing my cottage-style home isn’t right for most of it.
But I did enter one shop that displayed paintings I could imagine in my home. As I entered, I stood aside for a couple hauling a large wrapped painting to their SUV; when they left, I practically had the place to myself, for a while anyway.
“If I can help you with anything, let me know,” a woman said from behind an easel as I ambled through a spacious room where she was working in a corner, natural light pouring through a bank of windows beside her.
“I love the paintings,” I said. “They’re different from most of the things I’ve seen today.”
“I’m glad you like them,” she said. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon, and her long, full dress mimicked the muted colors of the paintings, a beautiful palette I’ve seen on the facades of old buildings in Rome and Venice.
She wiped her hands on a rag and put down her brush, and I realized I was talking with the artist.
She had captured scenes of New Mexico magnificently— the deserts, the river, the pueblos, the old churches, Canyon Road, the flower and sculpture gardens.
“Have you always lived here?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, I haven’t,” she said. “Five years ago, my husband and I moved here from Chicago.”
“You pulled a Georgia O’Keeffe?”
“I doubt either of us will live to be ninety-eight,” she said, “but we did visit here and fall in love with it.”
We talked for a while longer and walked together through two more rooms. She seemed to enjoy looking at her paintings as much as I did; I sensed they were old friends. We were standing before a large picture dominated by an iron railing with flowers spilling over it when I glanced over at a table where a small picture sat on an easel.
“Oh my,” I said, walking over to stand before it. “That’s lovely.”
“It’s one of my favorites,” she said.
It had no price tag. I hoped the cost wasn’t astronomical. That it was only an eight-by-ten made me think purchasing it might be a possibility.
I nodded to the painting. “I was there yesterday,” I said.
“Believe me, it was the nicest part of my day.”
She smiled and I decided not to elaborate on my day except for the exceptional scenery.
“Nambe Falls is beautiful,” I continued. “I wished as I stood looking at it—the water tumbling, the double drop, the landscape around it—that I could remember it forever, and here it is.”
“I wanted to capture it,” she said. “That’s hardly possible, but I was satisfied.”
We walked on through the rooms, talking about several more of her paintings, and I was honored that an artist whose work I admired was available to chat about her pieces on this first Friday afternoon in September. I left her shop with the picture wrapped and bagged, as excited as I’ve ever been about any purchase.
I saw the artist, Mona is her name, and her husband that evening at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and spoke to them as music played in the courtyard. I told her I hadn’t seen a painting in the museum that I loved any more than the one I purchased from her that afternoon.
She laughed as though the idea were absurd, but she seemed pleased nonetheless. She gave me her card and said I should e-mail her sometime and stop in when I’m in the area again.
When I got back to the hotel, I unwrapped my waterfall and thought of the words in John 7 that I had read before I left this morning: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”
I feel like I’m standing in that waterfall, arms extended, palms up, like my Indian brave.
thirteen
September 2
The drive to Albuquerque didn’t take long. This is Labor Day weekend, so I actually called ahead and booked a room. Tom and I never made it to Santa Fe, but we spent the night here on several trips we made to California, and for that reason alone I’m glad to be here. I had to smile as I pulled up to a gas pump and remembered the time we stopped here only to fill up and trade drivers on our marathon trip from California to Springfield.
On one trip west with the kids, we arrived in Albuquerque early enough to give in to the kids’ pleas and take them to the water park. It is quite a nice one, with enough slides to have amused the kids and their dad.
They had rushed back and forth between the slides and the wave pool, stopping by to see me floating on the lazy river in my yellow inner tube. I like lazy rivers, the gentle rocking as close to the comfort of being in the womb as I can imagine. I might have set a record for laps that day, coming out only for a drink and a forced trip to the slide area to watch my family zip down all seven slides. Actually, I enjoyed watching them; it was their nagging that bugged me.
“Come on, Mom, try it!”
Even Tom urged me to do what I had no intention of doing. I didn’t parasail in Florida either, but sat on the beach, watching them soar through the air, later listening to them exclaim about the thrill of it.
“You really should try parasailing, Audrey,” Tom said over a pile of French fries the evening they survived it.
“Why do you think a woman who won’t go down a water park slide would jump up and parasail, Tom? Here’s an idea:
You should spend time lolling on a lazy river.”
So I have no idea what got into me today when I put my things away, pulled on my bathing suit, tied a long sarong around my waist, and drove to that water park. I walked right past the lazy river and put my things in a locker and headed for the slides, planning to go down every one of them before I left, including the enclosed one, ominously called Lightning.
Despite the fact that I had recently survived a wild man wielding a gun, fear filled me as I looked up at the first slide. Just climbing the stairs higher and higher, children rushing past me for another go at it, raised my heart rate substantially. Standing at the top and looking down the three miles to the pool below, I might have walked back down the stairs if I hadn’t turned and looked down at a skinny little boy behind me, hair sticking out all over his head, skin the color of tea steeped in the summer sun.
“Go, lady,” he said, “you can do it!”
I looked into his confident blue eyes and then at the petite girl in charge. She smiled and told me to sit down, lie back, cross my ankles, and fold my hands over my heart.
Is that a comforting image?
But before I could answer my own question, I flew down the thing (I know for a fact that I was riding the air at one point), submerging into the waiting water fewer than thirty seconds after I had been hurled from the top. Having watched the kids and Tom through the years, I knew to yank on my bathing suit underwater until I was decent, and then I popped to the surface to find steps and the next slide. Before I got up the stairs though, the boy from the top of the slide torpedoed into the pool and, without bothering to adjust his swim trunks, splashed through the water to give me a high five.
“Are you going again?” he asked.
“Not on this one,” I said.
Next thing I knew, he was padding along beside me, telling me the slide I was walking toward wasn’t as fast as the one we had just gone down.
“It’s fun, though,” he said.
I could see I had a slide enthusiast on my hands. The boy, ten-year-old Jared, lives in Albuquerque and uses his season ticket to come to the water park several times a week. I think he was in a panic that the park would be closed after Labor Day. His mom and sisters were somewhere in the park suntanning, he said with some disdain as he escorted me to the next slide. He was to meet them later at locker 152.
After the fourth or fifth slide, I thought I should say something. “Jared, surely someone is waiting somewhere to play with you!”
Someone a tad closer to your age, I thought.
“My buddy had to leave,” he said.
“What about your sisters?”
“Nah, you’re a lot more fun.”
Hearing that sad news, I didn’t feel the need to meet his sisters.
Jared and I went down all seven slides, saving Lightning for last—his favorite, and as it turned out, mine as well. When we finished the marathon, I decided a few laps around the lazy river might revive me enough to make it back to the hotel unassisted.
“So,” I said, “what time are you supposed to meet your mother and sisters?”
“Five thirty,” he said.
I looked at the waterproof watch I had worn, surprised it still worked. “It’s quarter to six, buddy.”
“Whoa!” he exclaimed and zoomed off, a horizontal bottle rocket aimed for a bank of lockers.
I was wrestling my inner tube into the lazy river when he walked by with a woman and two teenage girls. He hollered something at me and waved, all he could manage as they yanked him by his Superman T-shirt and herded him toward the exit.
The first thing I did when I got back to the hotel was e-mail the kids and tell them about my adventure. “I wish I could tell your dad,” I wrote. “He’d say, ‘Good going, Audrey!’ ”
“Stay here and swim,” Tom had said in that awful dream, and it seems I took him up on it.
September 3
Before church this morning, I turned to John 8, where Tom had marked verses that record Jesus saving the adulterous woman from her accusers and then saying to her, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” Such passages were among Tom’s favorites. He used to say Jesus is in the forgiving business. There was no theme he loved to teach more than God’s forgiveness. Because of that, my husband was a peacemaker in our church and in the school he oversaw. “Seventy times seven” wasn’t an incredulous number to him; it was love’s concession.
I’ve always thought I was quite good at forgiving, that in any lesson Tom taught on forgiveness, I was not student but merely moral support, if not prime example.
So I was as surprised as I was irritated when I got Andrew’s latest message this evening.
“Are you ever going to forgive me?”
Several one-line replies came to me:
Who did you say you are?
What a stupid question!
Choices have consequences.
Get a life, Andrew.
On the twelfth of Never.
I have no desire to answer him. If I did, however, and if I let the Holy Spirit work in my heart first, I would likely say: Don’t be silly, Andrew, I forgave you long ago.
And I did forgive him long ago. That I can’t pinpoint when doesn’t mean I didn’t.
I once heard a speaker say that cutting someone out of your life is the same as killing the person. While I thought that a gross overstatement, Tom seemed to understand the premise. I wonder what he would say about my refusal to acknowledge Andrew’s e-mails. I wouldn’t know. We didn’t discuss Andrew. Tom knew he broke up with me and that I left Oklahoma because of it. But only a year before we met, Tom himself had broken up with a girl he had dated almost two years.
So it goes.
But that was different, slightly more mutual, and she had some inkling it was coming. That would have to help. The summer after our freshman year at OSU, Andrew laid out our future: become engaged the summer after our sophomore year, get married the next summer, complete our last year of undergraduate work as man and wife in a cute little apartment. Then I’d teach and put him through law school, which would be followed by his brief but illustrious career as a lawyer before his inauguration as the youngest governor of the state of Oklahoma.
So I could not have been less prepared for what he did two months short
of putting an engagement ring on my finger. If there were any signs, I didn’t detect them, even in retrospect.
The night he ruined everything, my three roommates had made plans for the evening so Andrew and I could have an intimate dinner for two in the apartment. I had never cooked for him before, had never cooked a dinner by myself, period. I spent part of my spring break in Mom’s kitchen learning the art of making her memorable meatballs, and back at the apartment, I made no fewer than three separate batches of spaghetti to make sure I didn’t put a sticky mess on the table. The afternoon of the momentous dinner, I made a salad and stirred up the special Austin dressing passed down from my great-grandmother, and I made a from-scratch carrot cake, promising the girls I’d save them most of it. When preparations for dinner were under control, I put flowers in the middle of the yellow Formica table and went to my bedroom to prepare myself. I wanted to look as perfect as possible.
After a lengthy shower and a ridiculous amount of time working with my long, straight hair, I could have auditioned for and won a spot in a shampoo commercial. I slipped on a new sleeveless minidress with an empire waist and put on a pair of platform shoes, somehow fashionable at the time. I lightly sprayed my whole body with Andrew’s favorite perfume and stood before my mirror for an assessment. Observing myself from as many angles as possible, I had to admit I had met my goal.
Then I went to my top dresser drawer and pulled out the package I’d wrapped with such care the night before; Mother had taught me how to tie an impressive bow during my last trip home. Shopping with Willa at an antique mall during spring break week, I had found a pewter circle with filigree edging and the letter A in the center and snatched it up, planning to have it made into a keychain for Andrew. The jeweler had called me last week to say it was ready, and when he opened the box for my inspection, I told him it was perfect. I couldn’t wait to give it to Andrew. A gift for no reason, extravagant according to Willa, seemed the greatest pleasure to me, a woman filled to the brim with love for Andrew Ackerman.
Tender Grace Page 9