At Last

by Aliyat Lecky

  David had asked where she wanted him to place the box when he was there. She had to consider where she wanted to store the belongings inside. The large box was full of items she couldn’t bear to leave behind. Photographs of her family, Sydney and David, their many vacations and shared events she didn’t care to frame and hang, gifts that had been given to her over the years by her children, cards they created for her, keepsakes she had collected over her lifetime—one being an intricately designed silver brush her parents had given her many years ago during her early adolescence—and other items that might have been lost long ago had she not thought to save them for herself. It contained objects that denoted significant moments in her life, such as the tiny silver wedding bell she received in the mail two months after Maggie’s wedding—the only proof she had that Maggie had ever existed—her college diplomas, a faded high school tassel she used to keep swaying from the rearview mirror of her first car, and other items of great to little significance.

  Helen pulled the box close to her as she collapsed on the couch. She didn’t open the box. She merely thought about its contents one reminiscence at a time. Tonight would be her test. If she made it through the night without any regrets, she would be ready to wake to face the new dawn. As she sorted through her memories, a deluge of realizations washed over her. The comprehension of how she had become the person she was clicked in place like puzzle pieces dating back to when she was just a little girl. Still, the picture of her life was incomplete, and she was inundated with questions about the dark spaces where bits of memories were distorted or absent.

  Helen lay on the sofa, wondering how her life might have been different if her childhood had been different. It was time. She had explored and evaluated so much of her past in the last year. She needed to make the ultimate confrontation. She must confront her parents, and have them to fill in the fragments of her life story in the places she didn’t have access.

  ***

  “SO, YOU’VE SETTLED into your new place? I guess the number on the caller ID is your new number?”

  “Yes. My cell is the same. That hasn’t changed. Mom, is Dad home?”

  “He’s here. He just walked up a moment ago. You sound great, Helen. How are you?”

  “Fine.” Helen was unnerved by her mother’s nonchalant small talk. “Mom, I called because I need to talk to you and Dad. To ask you both a few questions.” Helen scratched clarity into her brow. “Can you ask him to pick up a line?”

  “Hey, sweetie, how are you? Did I hear correctly? Have you gone and moved out of your house?” He paused. “We’ve been worried. I’ve call your numbers. You don’t answer. Richard tells us you don’t want to talk. Well, he never told us you didn’t want to talk—”

  “We figured that out ourselves.” Her mother finished his sentence. Helena must have detected the same minute crack in his voice that Helen had. Helena had always been the emotional rock of the family. Almost dispassionate at times when others were emotional wrecks.

  “I’m okay, and yes I have a new home, Dad.” Helen was not feeling okay at the moment. How could they be so blasé about their past phone call to the point of not mentioning their conversation? Her chest was tightly stretched, and butterflies pressed dangerously on her lungs. “I called because I needed to talk. Is it too late?”

  “No.” Both parents answered.

  “Richard’s been keeping us in the loop. He told us last week you were moving out, but he didn’t tell us you were moving so soon.”

  “He couldn’t have.” Helen’s guilt warmed across her face and neck. She didn’t want to experience another one of his tirades, so she hadn’t been open with him about the date of her final departure. He knew she was moving out, but she elected not to tell him exactly when until the day of her move, and when David was present. “I only gave him a small window. I wanted to avoid any…” She searched for an innocuous phrase. “…emotional incidents.”

  “Yes, he was quite upset when he told me you decided to move.” Her father’s voice was soothing. He was stating a fact, not making indictments.

  “Yes, I know. This is difficult for us all.” Helen pulled the hair at the back of her neck. “Dad?”

  “Yes, dear?” To Helen, he sounded as though he was bracing himself.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Helen imagined that in their silence, her parents were trying to figure out how to answer her question. “For most of my childhood, the other children teased me about you. They made gay jokes, and I didn’t see it. Why?”

  “I suppose you saw want you wanted to see,” her mother said.

  “Fine, I can accept that at some point I was too young to understand, but once I was old enough to figure it out, you hid the fact that my father is gay from me when half the world knew. I have been old enough to handle it for decades now.”

  “We weren’t forthright with you, Helen, because we didn’t want you to be ashamed of us. Honey, times were different. It was not as easy as it is these days. Your father would have been humiliated by the very people who worshiped his work. He would have lost any hope of being taken seriously.”

  “He was an artist. People accept homosexuality in artists,” Helen said.

  “No. Don’t be fooled by hypocrites. They only pretend to be tolerant of le artiste,” Helena said.

  “That’s no excuse. Do you understand what your lie cost me growing up? I was ashamed, not that my father was gay, but of the perception of his being gay. I equated homosexuality with queerness, don’t you understand? Had you been honest, I might have been able to come to terms with…with what’s taken me more than half my life to accept.”

  “I don’t know what to say, except I’m sorry. We are.”

  “I might have thought differently about what I needed from life to make me happy…to feel fulfilled.” Helen’s goal was not to react to the diffidence in her parents’ voices. Her aim was not to make them apologetic about their relationship with her. Nor did she need them repentant. She only required honesty. “And you told Richard you knew about me. You warned him?”

  “Helen, your father felt he had a right to know,” her mother said.

  “Well, did you know? Did Dad tell you he was gay before you married him?”

  “Yes. I knew. It was one of the things I loved about him, Helen. That’s all you need to know. The rest is between us.”

  “Mom, are you a lesbian?” Helen was confused by her mother’s remark. She didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Helen, there are people put on this earth who live for the pursuit of beauty. That is my fulfillment. I won’t say more than that. Just understand that your father has always been the perfect match for me. He is my soul mate.”

  “And she is mine,” Jack added.

  “How can you say that when you and Bennie have been together for so long? Mom, how can you live like that?”

  “Helen, you ask me how I can live like I have. I am happy. Your father makes me happy. I love him. I have always loved him. You, you have to understand some of what I feel. Haven’t you loved Richard?”

  Helen considered her mother’s words carefully. She did love Richard. She recalled the conversation she had with Mom at Sappho’s Repose. The discussion had been very enlightening. Mom had told her that she shouldn’t allow herself to be so defined by society’s standards or constructions of truth.

  “But why didn’t you tell me about Dad?” She redirect the dialogue to the subject she wanted to discuss. “And why didn’t you tell me what I was facing?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jack said.

  Helen took a deep breath. “You must have recognized what was going on between Maggie and me. Why didn’t you advise me, or assure me that what was going on between us was real?” Helen fought back tears. So many years of regret fell upon her with immense force. So many prodigious incidents crashing about her. She felt as though she might empty her cracked soul upon her parents that night. There was so much she might have avoided.

  “Honey…” He
r mother’s voice was clear. She sounded as though she were sitting next to Helen. “We guessed what might be going on, but we had no way of knowing for sure.”

  “You didn’t bother to ask, Mother.”

  “And if we had, would you have told us? Besides, ask yourself why it has taken you over half a century of living to recognize your father for who he is, and then ask the same question about yourself. Helen, why has it taken you so long to comprehend that what you experienced when you were a young woman was real?”

  Helen considered the question carefully. “Perhaps if I had known that what I was doing was unobjectionable, that what I was experiencing was authentic, three-dimensional emotions, not some sort of college girl’s experimentation…” Helen paused again, the receiver held against her lips, sealing in her lamentation. “All this time. You don’t understand.” She shook her head slowly. Helen understood that she could not assign her regrets to her parents’ handling of their relationship. “All my life.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t. Don’t regret what you have left behind you. If you want more, live for it. Seize it. Life is there before you.” Her father was reading her mind. “Otherwise, you’ll have too much to grieve over. Celebrate what you have. Our beautiful grandchildren, your wonderful work, your new love.” He sneaked the last one in smoothly.

  “What?” Helen was stunned by his remark.

  “We know about Noami, Helen. We’ve known about her for a while. Of course, we didn’t know her name at first. Richard had only mentioned that you were involved. He never told us her name.”

  “Then how?” Helen was flabbergasted.

  “Our grandson. You raised them to call us regularly. At least he still does,” Helena said proudly. “David told us.”

  “Oh.” Helen smiled. David was so wonderful.

  “That’s about all he would tell. He felt like you should be the one to tell us more.” Jack added the air of a question in his tone.

  Helen considered her next question carefully. Her parents had not given her the answers she wanted. She hadn’t completely absolved them of their part in some of the mistakes she herself had made, but they were her parents. They had made decisions based on what they thought was best. “Dad, one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “All those years ago when Richard and I announced our engagement?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Helen could tell by the way he answered that he already knew what she was going to ask. “You told Richard? I mean, what did you tell Richard?” Helen waited for his answer, but it didn’t come. Instead of an answer, she heard her father’s anguish from the other end, and Bennie comforting him with indistinguishable words of love and support. Of course, Bennie was there, standing wordlessly, providing her father support, throughout their entire conversation, standing near her father.

  “Your father told him about our conjecture concerning your affair with Maggie. Whether it might be the manifestation of a young woman’s sexual curiosity or a tragic love affair, we could not say. We didn’t try to speculate its significance or triviality. But we felt he had the right to know.”

  “He’s been afraid all these years that I would disappoint him, and now I have.” Helen spoke to herself, but her mother responded.

  “Helen, he had the right to make an informed decision, just as I was given the chance before your father and I were married.”

  “Mom, how’s Dad?” Helen knew intuitively that her father was no longer on the line.

  “He’s distressed. But he’ll be fine. Bennie is taking care of him.”

  “Mom, who takes care of you?”

  “You see, that’s the benefit of being someone like me. I don’t need to be taken care of, but when I do, I have your father. And, Helen, I have Bennie as well. We are a family, you see.”

  “No, I don’t.” Helen couldn’t fathom what her mother meant.

  “Richard told your father he was willing to let you keep your lover if you stayed with him, is that true?”

  “Yes. That’s what he said.”

  “Was that an attractive proposition?” Helena asked.

  “Yes, for about five seconds.” Helen answered truthfully.

  “Ask yourself what that would entail. How would your triad define itself if you were allowed to live and love in that way, each of you getting what she or he wanted or required without guilt attached? Can you imagine that? Go back to that five seconds of perfection when you considered his proposal attractive. There’s your answer. The details, my sweet, are not your concern. Now if you’ll excuse me, your father is quite beside himself, and Bennie is a wreck as well. I shall be up all night pulling them together. We love you. Your father is waving he loves you, as is Bennie. Goodnight. Call if you need us.”

  “Goodnight, Mother.” Helen ended the call from her end. Her parents were not as forthcoming as she would have liked, but she did feel better. She stood at the foot of her bed, wondering if she would be able to get any sleep, and wishing Noami was there to share her bed. They were not officially a couple, yet over the last few weeks, it felt as though they were. She had even spent a few nights at Noami’s since the New Year.

  Helen undressed slowly. She hadn’t slept nude in years. At least not when she was alone. That practice she had only resumed with Noami, who preferred sleeping without the benefit of pajamas. Helen lay prone, spread-eagle, stretching across as much of the bed as she could. The sheets were cool, yet inviting, and her pillows smelled of her favorite scent of lavender. Helen buried her nose under her warm covers. She stared out her bedroom window into the starry night, thinking that what she wanted most of all was a new haircut.

  ***

  HELEN WAS AWOKEN the next morning by the brilliant sunlight streaming brightly through her bedroom window. She stretched in her bed, aware that she would have to pull the drapes at night if she didn’t want to wake so early. The sun had begun to raise earlier in a sign that winter was slowly winding down, and making preparations for its routine, protracted departure. Helen gazed out the window, squinting into the glare of the sun in an attempt to gauge the day. Cold. She knew that for sure, but how cold was her question. Her plan was to spend most of the day working quietly in her in her office. For the first time in her career, she was working on two novels at once in an approach that Angie practiced quite adeptly. Previously, the idea of composing two works at the same time seemed overwhelming, yet Helen felt compelled to begin the second before she completed the first. The first was a novel idea she developed a few years prior, even before the last novel she completed—the story of a family of sisters, named after flowers, who shared a common secret. The second, a love story unlike any she had ever read, loosely inspired by hers and Noami’s. She hoped their real-life narrative would end as well as the one she was presently penning.

  ***

  WARM, BROWN LIQUID splattered across the hard, cold floor. Helen rushed to clean up the coffee, which spilled from the shattered mug she knocked from the table when the sound of the doorbell startled her. She wasn’t expecting anyone so early in the morning to be ringing her bell—particularly since she hadn’t given anyone entry to the elevator.

  “Richard, how did you get up here?” Helen didn’t meant to be rude, but was quite dumbfounded as to how he managed to be standing at her front door, having navigated a doorman, a private lobby, and secure elevator.

  “Your door man let me in on the elevator. I told him I was your husband, and that I’d lost my key. I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t think you’d let me up if I’d called from the lobby.”

  “You are correct.” Helen pulled her robe tightly about her, a little disturbed by his effort. She would have to have a talk with that doorman. “Richard, what can I do for you?”

  “I needed to talk to you. Can I come in, Helen?”

  “Just for a moment. I was working,” she lied. She was feeling slightly nervous with him being there. She wasn’t sure what his reaction would be. “I’m working on a deadline.” She stepped aside to all
ow his entry.

  Richard stepped in to the room, taking in his new surroundings. “David said it was nice.” He whistled for emphasis. “He wasn’t lying. This is nice.” He walked around, getting a look at the place. “What’s back that way?” He asked casually.

  “The sleeping quarters.” Helen answered offhandedly. She headed back toward the kitchen, hoping he would follow. “Richard, I was just having coffee. Would you like a cup?”

  “Yes.” He paused, looked back toward the rear of the condo where the bedrooms were, before following into the kitchen. “You have a very nice place here,” he repeated. “How are you getting along?”

  Helen poured two fresh cups. She passed the Splenda and cream. “Richard, what can I do for you?” She asked patiently. She had no idea why he was there, and wanted to know so that she could end the visit before it turned ugly. Helen knew Richard better than he knew himself, and recognized the internal struggle smoldering before her. She was staring into the eyes of a quiet storm.

  He didn’t answer at first. He simply looked intently at her, engaged in silent supplication. They stood in that way, sharing an awkward silence for countless seconds before he spoke again. “I needed to talk with you this morning. I didn’t sleep much last night. I kept wondering what I could have done differently…if I could have said something that might have kept you from leaving.”

  “Richard, don’t. We’ve already been over this ground several times.” Helen guided him toward a seat.

  “No, Helen, I need you to hear me out. I promise. I only came to talk.” He placed both his hand over hers. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about this all night, and I have come to a conclusion.” He scooted his chair closer to hers without removing his hands from hers.