Shenandoah Summer

by John Muncie

  Alyssa rolled her head slowly back and forth, her hands cradling her face. “Oh no,” she kept saying.

  “Damn, I should never have given those drawings to Abbi. But she said you could use the cheering up.” It seemed to Tug that everything he’d done in the hospital had been wrong.

  Alyssa let her hands fall to the bed. “Ha, that’s a good one. Darryl went ballistic when he saw them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tug said again. “I’m sorry about what happened to you and I’m sorry how we left things. I was a jerk.”

  She ignored his apology. It didn’t matter now. It seemed like another lifetime ago when Tug had peeled out of her driveway and her biggest worry was what he was doing in New York with the gorgeous woman she’d seen on a Web site.

  “Tug, what did Darryl say to you?”

  “He accused me of—well, you can imagine what. I told him I was just an artist looking for things to draw, and that was all there was to it. At first he wasn’t buying any of it. He just kept getting madder and madder. I really thought he was going to punch me. Then he said something strange. He told me you’d never leave him or the farm because of Julie. Alyssa, who’s Julie?”

  Alyssa didn’t respond.

  Tug took her hand again and held it tightly when she tried to pull away. “Alyssa, who’s Julie?”

  She yanked against his grip. “I thought I asked you not to do that here.”

  “Alyssa, I asked you who Julie is.”

  “And I asked you not to hold my hand,” Alyssa snapped back. “Just leave me alone. I’m tired.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who Julie is.”

  Alyssa closed her eyes. Tug was horrified to see tears falling down her cheeks. He let go of her, realizing how bullying he’d been. This was not at all how he’d imagined their reunion.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, for the third time that night. “You don’t need this from me. Go to sleep. Just rest, okay?”

  He pulled the blanket up around her and took the pile of drawings from under her hand. “Go to sleep,” he said. He kissed her salty cheek and slumped back in the chair.

  Once again, the only sounds were of Alyssa’s shallow breaths and the vigilant beeping of the monitor. He thought she’d fallen back to sleep.

  “Julie is my other daughter.” Alyssa’s eyes were still closed when she said it, and her voice was so quiet that at first Tug wasn’t sure if she’d spoken or he’d imagined it.

  “Juliette Mercer Brown. She died eleven years ago.”

  CHAPTER 60

  Alyssa felt a profound sense of relief, and release, when she spoke Julie’s name out loud. It had been a long time since she’d said it to anyone but herself. She’d stopped going to grief support meetings a couple of years after her death. Friends, acquaintances, and co-workers who knew about it carefully avoided the subject. Darryl had told her early on that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore; that was his way of dealing with the grief. “She’s gone,” he’d said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. It just makes us feel worse when we talk about her.” And at Limespring, no one even knew Alyssa Brown once had two children.

  “She was five when she died,” Alyssa said. “A car accident. She’d gone to the movies with her best friend, Megan.” Her breath began coming in short bursts; her cheeks were wet again with tears.

  Tug went to the bed and put his arms around her. He could feel her chest heaving against his.

  “Beauty and the Beast,” she said between sobs.

  It was difficult to understand everything, but Tug got the gist of it. Icy roads; Megan’s mother was driving; a truck lost control and crossed lanes; Megan was in the hospital for two weeks; her mother was burned by the air bag; Julie died at the scene.

  “And I wasn’t even there,” Alyssa cried.

  Tug held her as tightly as he could without dislodging the tubes in her arm. Her skin felt hot to his touch. They sat there, rocking slightly, with Tug whispering, “I’m so sorry; so, so sorry.” After a while her chest stopped heaving; her breathing became more regular. Tug drew back a little and wiped her face with his fingers.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She stiffened and abruptly pulled away after glancing at the door. “Tug, if someone comes in and finds us. I . . . I can’t deal with anything more today, just please sit over there, okay?”

  Tug shrugged and moved to the chair.

  Alyssa saw the hurt on his face and she felt a catch in her chest. He’d just said he loved her. A week ago, she’d been telling him the same thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she started. “I didn’t tell you about Julie because . . .”

  She stopped and looked over at the window. She could see the other wing, the lights in the other rooms. “Because . . . I don’t know, because we stopped talking about her. Darryl wouldn’t and after a while I couldn’t. It just hurt too much. I almost told you that day you saw me on top of the hill. I said I was looking for a place to set off fireworks. I lied.”

  “I know,” Tug said.

  “I knew you knew,” she said, her eyes still turned to the window. “But I couldn’t make the words come out. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

  They sat there silently for a few moments. Then Alyssa turned back to Tug. “I named the two hills at the farm the first day I saw the place. Mount Roz and Mount Julie. I was on Mount Julie when you saw me.”

  “Is that where she’s buried?”

  Alyssa nodded. She was crying again. It was difficult for her to get the words out. “Her ashes,” was all she could say.

  She wiped her fingers across her cheeks. Tug started to get up, to be next to her, but she held up her hand to stop him.

  “Please,” she said and shook her head. Then she took a few deep breaths and started talking again. “I couldn’t do it. Darryl had to. I had the cardboard box in my hand and it was so small. Half the size of a shoebox. And so light. It didn’t seem fair. I wanted her to have more weight. I wanted the box to be so heavy I could barely pick it up. But I could hardly feel it. I couldn’t let her go. Darryl took the box from me. He took off the lid.”

  Tug was silent for a while. Any response seemed inconsequential after what he’d just heard. Finally, he said, “I wish you’d told me sooner.”

  “It wouldn’t have changed anything,” she said flatly. “Darryl’s right, I’ll never leave the farm. It’s the only place I’m still Julie’s mother.”

  So it had come down to the farm again. And Tug finally knew the reason why.

  “Alyssa,” he said, “you can’t change what happened. I wish to hell you could. I wish to hell I could. I know what it’s like to lose someone. But Julie’s not on top of that hill, any more than my father’s in his grave. He’s here.” He took her hand and put it on his chest. “He’s inside me.”

  “Stop it!” she said, her voice rising, raspy and strained. “I don’t want to hear it. It’s different. You can’t understand. You could never understand. You’ve never had a child.”

  The words hit Tug hard, and before he could stop himself, he struck back. “I understand plenty. I understand that you’ve turned that farm into some kind of ghoulish shrine to your dead daughter. Well let me tell you something, it’s not going to keep Julie alive or bring her back. That farm is your prison, Alyssa, and you’ve got to let it go. Otherwise you’re going to wake up one day, alone with your memories, trapped in a house that leaks every time it rains. You’re not afraid of losing Julie, you’re just afraid of moving on.”

  He put his hands up to his face. “Jesus Christ, Alyssa, I shouldn’t have said that. I just don’t want to lose you. I love you.”

  “Well, I don’t love you.” She turned away and knocked the call button from the arm of the bed. Tug started to pick it up, but she stopped him.

  “Just get out,” she said. “I can manage on my own. I always have.”

  CHAPTER 61

  A storm front was expected to blow in later, but it was mostly sunny when Alyssa drove down
Limespring Hollow Road. The air was lighter and crisper than the last time she’d been in Markham.

  So much had changed in six weeks, including the landscape. As much as she loved the early fall colors—the slight blush on the dogwoods, the reddening edges of the maples, and the deep gold of the autumn wildflowers—they always made her sad. It meant winter was coming.

  She drove straight to the barn. Though Betsy had assured her that Roy and Theo were fine, she wanted to see for herself. Besides, she missed them. Missed their smell, missed the way Theo nudged her pockets looking for carrots, missed Roy’s kind eye. Tug once told her that Roy would have been a priest—“the good kind”—had he been human, while Theo would have been a cad. “I know these things,” he’d said.

  She walked through the pasture toward the distant red and brown dots by the fence. Roy and Theo were as far away as they could get and still be on her property. She put her fingers in her mouth and whistled. Theo lifted his head. She whistled again. They came cantering to her and she pulled some carrots out of a coat pocket. Betsy was right, they were fine. No cuts or scrapes, just pig fat from all that grass and standing idle.

  She stood there for a long time, running her hands down their necks and rubbing their faces, breathing in their horsy smell. She forced herself not to think about the summer. Instead she thought about Roz.

  She pictured her in her dorm room, meeting her roommate for the first time. Prentice Walters was a Valkyrie from a prep school in Baltimore. It wasn’t a match she would have made for her daughter, but sometimes opposites attract. When she first met Darryl twenty years ago, their differences had drawn them to each other and, for a while, kept them together. Roz didn’t need a long-term relationship with Prentice, just a year.

  She and Darryl were getting counseling. She’d agreed to it the day after he stormed out of her hospital room. Neither had said the name “Tug” again, but he was always there, always the subtext of Darryl’s discontent. Even in the sessions, they skirted the issue of what had happened that summer.

  “What’s past is past,” Judith, the counselor, would say. She was a gray-haired woman who wore hand-painted glasses. “Let’s figure out a way to move forward.”

  They’d tried, but their differences were no longer attractive. Darryl complained that Alyssa was overly dramatic; twenty years ago he’d called it “delightful exuberance.” Alyssa accused Darryl of being emotionless and judgmental; twenty years ago she’d found his steadiness and discerning eye reassuring.

  Judith said they needed to drop the labels. Each had to relearn to appreciate the other. She’d even given them exercises to do at home: Write ten things you like about your mate. Both she and Darryl made excuses the next week that they’d been too busy to complete the assignment. So Judith gave them in-session exercises. “Sometimes it helps to just sit and look at the other person, the way you did when you were first in love.”

  They sat and looked at each other, Alyssa trying not to think about Tug. She had no idea what was on Darryl’s mind, but she was fairly certain it wasn’t her.

  Still Judith was hopeful. “It took a long time for things to unravel, it’ll take some time to reweave it back together.”

  Darryl hadn’t wanted her to go to the farm. He said she wasn’t ready for the drive. “Liss,” he’d said that morning, “you can barely walk around the block without getting tired.”

  “I have to go. The blacksmith’s coming and I can’t find anyone to hold the horses.” Then she added, halfheartedly, “Come with me. The leaves are starting to turn. It’ll be a beautiful drive.”

  Darryl shook his head and said something about a tennis lesson. “Just call as soon as you get in, okay?”

  She started back to the barn, holding carrots to Roy and Theo so they’d follow her. She wanted them in stalls when the blacksmith came at three. Darryl had been right about her stamina. Walking through the pasture, she had to stop three times to catch her breath.

  On the last stop, she stood and surveyed the farm. Odie Watkins’s cows had kept the grass down in the front pasture and his son had just mowed the lawn; the centaur whirligig kicked out in the light breeze and a tangle of hoses still lay by the back door waiting to be straightened out.

  The familiarity was disconcerting. It seemed odd that the farm appeared just as it had the morning she’d ridden up Mount Buck with Abbi, Marius, and Nattie. She wanted there to be a difference, something to mark the change in her life.

  She led the horses to their stalls. Roy and Theo were the only ones left. Betsy had picked up the rest of the herd after the accident and taken them to their adoptive families.

  Alyssa gave each horse some hay and filled their water buckets. The mundane regularity of this chore tricked her—for a split second it was summer and she expected to see Tug’s folding chair in the aisle.

  Of course it wasn’t there, but his presence was palpable. When she closed the door to the tack room, she saw the photo, the faded ribbon, and the hanging bridles that he’d drawn his first week at the farm. When she walked under the loft, she was up there again, wedged between hay bales, spying on him. When she walked past the tractor, the manure spreader, the piles of sawdust, she saw him sitting there, drawing.

  But she’d made her decision and sealed it with: “Well, I don’t love you. Just get out.” During the next few days in the hospital she wondered if he’d come back. When he didn’t, she told herself she was grateful.

  Alyssa left the horses to their eating and walked down to the house, deliberately avoiding the herb garden. She wasn’t ready for memories of basil and tomatoes. Inside, she phoned Darryl and left a message. “It’s me, I’m here. Everything’s fine. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon in time for the barbecue with the Fullers.”

  The doctors had told her it would take months to fully recover. They urged her not to push herself and to nap when she got tired. She was beat from the walk in the pasture, so she lay down on the red sofa and quickly fell asleep.

  A knock at the door woke her up. It was Reedy Collins, the blacksmith. She walked him to the barn and held Roy, then Theo, as he trimmed their feet, hammered on new shoes, and filled her in on Fauquier County gossip. The tango teacher who’d worn the red, white, and blue bikini to Alyssa’s July Fourth party was sleeping with the house painter; the dressage lady in Hume liked girls; the gazillionaire banker who’d been building the mansion across Route 688 was leaving his wife and selling the property. Some things never changed.

  The storm front rolled in just as Reedy drove off. By five, there were rumblings and lightning flashes on the horizon. Alyssa was cleaning out the refrigerator when the rain came. She got out the usual array of pots and placed them under the known leaks, hoping there wouldn’t be any surprises.

  She was tired again. So she walked upstairs to the bedroom, opened the French doors, and lay down. The comforting sound of rain drummed on the tin roof. She began to drift off.

  Zygomaticus.

  She and Tug were in bed together. Her arms were flung back on the pillow. He was giving her an anatomy lesson, telling her about Mr. Reifman. The rain drummed harder; they made love.

  She slept fitfully for a couple of hours; she’d wake, feeling woozy, fall back asleep, then wake again. She wished the rain would stop. It was impossible to escape her memories with the soundtrack of summer playing overhead and the thick summer smell of fresh-cut grass riding in with the storm. She got up, closed the doors to the balcony, and lay back down. The rain pounded harder against the roof. She covered her head with a pillow to block out the sound.

  In the breezeless cell of her room, in the muffled darkness under the pillow, she thought about what Tug had said to her in the hospital. He’d called the farm her prison. “You’re going to wake up one day, alone with your memories, trapped in a house that leaks every time it rains.” She could picture the anger in his face when he’d said it. She remembered the anger in her when she’d heard it.

  He could never understand.

  She threw th
e pillow off her head and walked over to the balcony. The hard rain had become a drizzle. She opened the doors. Off in the darkness were the faint outlines of the two hills she’d named twelve years ago. Tug was wrong. The farm was not her prison, it was the place that still connected her to Julie.

  She went downstairs, put on a raincoat, and went outside. The storm was moving on. Through breaks in the clouds, Alyssa could see pieces of the sharp night sky. She walked through the pasture by the side of the house, past the little pond, and up Julie’s hill. She had to stop several times to catch her breath. By the time she got to the top, she was so lightheaded she had to sit on the wet ground.

  Next to her, half buried, was a small green-glazed flower vase. Julie’s kindergarten class had made it in her memory. Alyssa kept it filled in the summer, usually with black-eyed Susans. The day Tug had seen her up there, she’d been telling Julie about the Limespring artist who was spending every day drawing the farm.

  She often talked to Julie up there. Mostly about family news: how Roz was doing in school or a trip Darryl had made. She wanted to talk to her now, but what was her news? That she was miserable? That she couldn’t stop thinking about that artist?

  “I miss you, sweetheart,” she said out loud to the darkness.

  There was no reply. There never had been. But for the first time, she felt no closer to her daughter on the top of that hill than if she were in the supermarket picking apples.

  She stood up and steadied herself.

  “I’m Julie’s mother!” she yelled.

  Who was she trying to convince? She was the one who had relegated Julie’s memory to the farm. She looked down at the little vase at her feet. The words echoed inside her: “I’m Julie’s mother.”

  Alyssa said it again, this time quietly. She was Julie’s mother and always would be, regardless of where she stood. She’d gotten lost in the dream of Finally Farm and of being near Julie. But that wasn’t the only tether holding her. She knew she’d stayed married to Darryl because it was safe, not just because he held title to the farm.