by John Muncie
It scared her to love Roz and Julie as much as she did. That exquisite vulnerability was the double-edged sword of love. She’d barely made it through Julie’s death. If something happened to Roz, she knew that would be the end of her. She wouldn’t allow herself to be any more vulnerable than she already was. But then Tug had come along.
She looked over to the farm. The windows made a bright pattern of squares in the night. Tug had been right. It was her prison.
She pressed a button on her watch. The dial glowed for a few seconds. It was 8:30. It was time to leave.
It was time to leave.
CHAPTER 62
Alyssa walked in just before ten that evening and dropped her umbrella into the ceramic stand by the front door. The stand was shaped like an elephant’s foot. It was one of the few touches of whimsy in the Browns’ small brick colonial. “Home simple, farm extravagant,” had been Darryl’s motto, and Alyssa had agreed.
“Hey, is that you?” Darryl’s voice and TV sounds bounced out from the den.
“Yes,” she answered back.
She found him lying on the couch watching a rerun of Law and Order. He hit the remote’s mute button when she entered the room.
“I thought you were staying at the farm. What happened? You okay?”
“No.”
He sat up with a grimace. “Oh, man, I knew you were going to overdo it. You always do. Should I call the doctor?”
“No, it’s not that. I feel fine, just tired.”
“So what’s wrong?”
She had no idea how to answer. On the drive back from Markham, her mind had spun crazily. How were they going to tell Roz? How were they going to tell their friends? Where was she going to live? How would she move? How would they divide up twenty years of life? A hundred scenarios and questions. But she had never thought about how she was going to tell Darryl.
She looked at her husband, wondering how to begin. Already he seemed different, older, as if her decision had somehow aged him.
“Did something happen at the farm?” he asked.
“Yes.” She said it hesitantly, but it was the right question. All she needed was to answer it honestly and twenty years were done.
“What?”
“It’s over, Darryl. I’m sorry.” And she was. Sorry for not trying harder, for not being more honest, for not honoring Julie’s death with a better life. And, most of all, sorry for not having had the courage to leave sooner.
“What’s over?” he said, but he looked away when he said it. And she knew that he knew.
“Us. We’re over. The marriage counseling is a joke. You know it, I know it. There’s nothing left between us, except your hold on the farm. And that’s just not enough anymore. I got Julie’s death and the farm all tangled up. I should have cut free a long time ago. She’s dead. There’s nothing I can do to change that. You can have the farm. I don’t care anymore. It’s over. It’s just over.”
Darryl stood up from the couch. “You’re leaving me?” It was more an accusation than a question.
“We don’t even like each other anymore, Darryl.”
“Oh, I get it. Your boyfriend called you at the farm, didn’t he?”
Alyssa shook her head. “It’s never been about Tug, it’s always been about us. Don’t you see? Even before Julie died, there wasn’t enough. And then when she died . . . Yeah, I fell apart. I wanted to die and all you could do was tell me my big emotions scared you. Well, they scared me, too. Darryl, there’s no us anymore. There hasn’t been for years.”
He walked toward her. The color had drained from his face, his muscles were coiled. Alyssa thought he might strike her. But he stopped a few feet away and she saw the fight leave his body. His shoulders slumped, his hands unfurled. He stood that way for a while.
“I know,” he finally said.
“I’m so, so sorry,” said Alyssa, fighting back tears.
Darryl reached out to hug her, twenty years of habit, but Alyssa pulled back slightly, and instead he caught one of her hands and held it as she cried.
CHAPTER 63
There are four things Alyssa Brown knows for sure:
She’d kill to protect her daughter, Roz. On the eighth day God created Shakespeare. No matter how little she ate, she’d never get below 137 pounds. And she could love something but let it go.
She didn’t really know the last one until an October morning when she stood at the top of the gravel driveway that led to the little yellow farmhouse in the distance. It was the first time she’d been back to Finally Farm since the rainy night she’d stuffed a pillow over her head. It would be the last time.
B.J. Goode, the same tweeded real estate agent who’d shown them the property twelve years before, would be putting up a for sale sign in a few hours. Alyssa had driven out not just to make her farewells but to comply with B.J.’s request to “thin the place out.”
“It’ll show better if it’s just a little less cluttered,” she’d told Alyssa on the phone. Darryl hadn’t had the guts to ask her to clear out her stuff, so he’d asked B.J. to do it.
“You know, just tidy it up a little. I’d start with that large gorilla thing in the living room and then the hanging swords. I also think the lines of the house would show better if you took out the . . .”
The list went on. After a while, Alyssa stopped listening. She knew what to take. Anything that made the house hers. If she could have, she’d have piled the mosaic floors in the back of her truck next to Mr. Monkeysocks. She’d store the costumes and set leftovers at Emerson. The rest she’d put in her new apartment.
She stood for a while, remembering. One evening, during their second summer at the farm, she, Darryl, Roz, and Julie had invented a game that was half baseball, half dress-up. If you hit the ball you had to put on a mask or a funny hat before you ran to first base. The masks and hats were too big for the girls, flopping over their faces. They ran around trying to keep them on, shrieking with laughter. The four of them played until it was so dark nobody could see the bases anymore.
Costume-ball. Alyssa hadn’t thought about it in years.
She blew out a deep breath and climbed into her truck. She’d been dreading this day since she’d told Darryl she was leaving and he could have the farm. But she knew she could get through this; she’d been through worse.
As she approached the farmhouse she saw a car parked in the drive. She banged her hand against the steering wheel. “God damn it,” she said. She’d argued with B.J. about their timing. B.J. had wanted to get there early to prepare for the next day’s open house. Alyssa wanted to spend her last hours there alone. B.J. had reluctantly agreed—at least that’s what Alyssa had thought.
“God damn it,” she said again. She slowed down and stopped by a gate in the fence. Later there would be time for a confrontation; first, she had to say good-bye to someone.
She got out and began walking up the slope of Mount Julie. It was clear and mild, an Indian summer morning. The autumn reds and golds brightly confettied the surrounding landscape.
At the summit, she knelt down by the little vase half buried there. She jostled it back and forth until it broke free. She filled it with a handful of soil and put it in her jacket pocket. Then she laid a small bouquet of black-eyed Susans over the tiny hole that remained.
The day they’d scattered her ashes had been clear, too, but bitterly cold. The three of them had bundled up and walked to the top of Julie’s hill for the little ceremony. They took turns telling Julie stories. Alyssa told about the time Julie had said, “Hi, clown!” to the bank teller who was wearing too much makeup; Roz told one about Julie thinking she’d seen Tinkerbell; Darryl talked about watching her be born.
Alyssa knelt on Mount Julie for a long time, looking out over the countryside, letting wave after wave of memory and emotion wash over her. Then she stood. “It’s time for me to leave this place, my sweet, sweet baby,” she said aloud, and, without looking back, walked down to the car.
In a minute, she was ro
aring up to the house in a cloud of dust and gravel, ready for a fight. But the car wasn’t B.J.’s black Hummer. It was a black Chrysler station wagon.
Tug’s station wagon.
How had he known she’d be there that day? She hadn’t talked to him since that evening at the hospital. She purposefully didn’t tell Abbi about her breakup with Darryl, because she knew Abbi would tell Tug instantly.
She hadn’t been lying when she told her husband that their problems had nothing to do with the artist at Limespring. What happened between her and Tug this summer was like a window in an advent calendar—one perfect, contained moment.
But that was it. There were too many differences between them. It was fantasy to think they could live happily ever after. Living in a dream world had already cost her too many years of her life.
But now he was here.
“Tug?” she called out. No answer. She said it louder: “Tuuug!” Nothing but the usual farm sounds answered back.
As she approached the front door, she saw a piece of paper taped to the porch. Drawn in charcoal pencil, in Tug’s unmistakable hand, was the message: “Hi, Cowgirl. Go upstairs. There’s something for you in the bedroom.” It was signed, “Sultan of Sketches.”
The door was open, which wasn’t surprising. She always kept an extra house key under the metal pig sculpture on the front porch.
“Tug,” she called out again as she walked up the stairs. Still no answer.
The bedroom was nearly stripped. The bedstand was gone, the walls were bare, the old shoe-drying rack where she used to store her clothes was already in her apartment. The bed was covered by a white sheet. In the middle of it was a drawing and a big book with a blue cover.
She picked up the book. Gray’s Anatomy. The word “clavicles” came to mind and the image of Tug running his fingers down her torso. At first she didn’t understand what the drawing was about. She tilted it up, down, and sideways before she realized it was a piece of a larger picture.
She turned it over. On the back was a yellow sticky with a note that read: “To see the next part, go to the garden.” It was signed, “S of S.”
The garden was a jungle of weeds, desiccated tomato vines, and basil plants with long, frizzy shoots covered in tiny blue flowers. On one of the raised beds sat a ripening pumpkin the size of a soccer ball. On top of it was one seed packet for Genoa basil and another for Brandywine tomatoes, the heirloom variety they’d eaten at the Rail Stop restaurant. There was also a second drawing. It was another part of the picture, and when she put the two pieces side by side, it looked like a country scene. There was a field and part of a barn.
On the back of it was another message: “Go to the barn.”
Outside the tack room, now empty of horse gear and ribbons, stood a folding chair with a toy red barn sitting on its seat. Underneath the plastic barn was a third piece of the drawing; on the back, another yellow sticky.
“Belushi bees and raspberries. Meet me there.”
Alyssa left the barn and started to climb the back pasture. A couple of hundred yards ahead, next to the iron gate, stood Tug.
Still weak from the accident, Alyssa was breathing hard as she approached the fenceline.
“How’d you know I was going to be here today?” she called out.
“Abbi heard all about the sale from Jackie. I think Jackie knows your real estate agent. And Abbi called me.”
“No one at Limespring can keep their mouths shut,” Alyssa said.
“Aren’t you glad they can’t?”
Alyssa thought of a couple of snappy answers. But the truth was in a single word. “Yes.”
“Here, this is for you.” Tug held out a jar. “I couldn’t find golden raspberry jam, only regular raspberry. You’ll have to use your imagination.”
She took the little dimpled jar.
“I wanted you to have parts of the farm you could take with you,” Tug said. “I knew this would be a hard day for you and I didn’t want you to have to go through it alone.”
They looked out over the fields Alyssa had first fallen in love with twelve years before.
“It sure is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.
“That it is.” He paused. “Do you want to see the last part of the drawing?”
She nodded.
“Put the other pieces on the grass,” he said.
She knelt down and laid out the three quarters. There were fields, three-board fencing, and the back half of a barn bleeding off the left side of the page. He placed the final piece of the puzzle in the empty space on the upper right and completed the drawing. On it was a small house that she didn’t recognize. It had a wraparound porch with a swing hanging from the rafters. She leaned over and examined it.
“That’s Mr. Monkeysocks in the swing.”
“It is,” Tug said. He knelt down next to her and pointed. “Look at the front door.”
Alyssa did. “It’s Roz’s hammer knocker.”
There were other pieces of Finally Farm in the drawing. Inside the front window, Alyssa could see the tips of hanging swords. Next to the front door was the centaur whirligig. At a corner of the final piece was Marius’s installation, the one that looked like a cement mixer.
“As much as I like Marius, I can’t stand his art,” Tug said. “That’s why I put it way up there.”
A breeze began to rustle the drawings; Tug anchored each piece with a rock. “We could have a place like this if we tried. Or something close to it.”
Alyssa looked down the slope at the lost Finally Farm.
“I love you, Alyssa. I want us to be together. I want all your crazy things mingling with all my crazy things. I know it won’t be easy. You’ve got your life, I’ve got mine. But nothing’s insurmountable. I’ve already called a few galleries in Washington and they’re interested. I’m not sure what I’ll be showing them, but it’s a start, isn’t it?”
Alyssa turned back. “I guess this is where the music swells, I run into your arms, and we get a standing ovation?”
“Hopefully.”
She knelt down and traced her fingers along the lines of the drawing. “Tug, I don’t know if that’s our ending. Everything’s changed. I’m leaving Emerson at the end of this year, Roz’s in college, I’m about to be divorced, you love the city, I love the country—”
“Alyssa, shut up,” Tug said, cutting her off. “I don’t care about any of that. All I want to know is this: Do you love me?”
She didn’t answer directly. Instead, she moved her fingers to the two small figures near a fence in the corner of the drawing. “What are these?”
“Horses. Roy and Theo.”
Alyssa looked at the drawing. She touched the images of Roy and Theo again then turned to him.
“You’re going to need more horse lessons.” She was smiling. “They still look like dogs.”