Such Good People

by Martha Whitmore Hickman

  “No. Five minutes, maybe. Did you bring your drawing stuff?” He eyed the huge purse she carried. “Or you might want to take a nap—we started out so early.”

  “I brought a small pad and some pastels, and a book. But I may just sit on the porch and absorb atmosphere while you’re gone.” She glanced out the window—the sun still bright on the water.

  He smiled, “That’s fine, too. I spend a lot of time doing just that. One of the joys—and hazards—of the place.”

  “Hazards?” she said.

  He had been pouring wine and he turned the bottle to stop the drip and looked up. “It gets lonely,” he said, the vulnerability in his eyes again. “C’mon—you ready?”

  They ate lunch from paper plates and assorted bowls for salad and soup, drank wine from goblets and coffee from heavy crockery mugs. “Not exactly the Four Seasons,” Fred said, lifting another crusty, fragrant clam from the cardboard box.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said, licking her fingers, then wiping them on her napkin before picking up the wineglass again.

  He found an unopened bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies in the cupboard. “Dessert.” He broke it open and offered it to her, then sat down, his look thoughtful. “Your husband,” he said. “You said he’s very busy. Is he a nice guy? You love him? You have”—he hesitated—“other children?”

  “We have two sons—wonderful young men. And my husband—” The image of Trace sustained her, quelled the uneasiness she had felt. There was a shadow, too. She would speak of it. Fred was obviously no stranger to domestic tension. “But we’ve had some hard times. Our daughter’s death has meant different things to us. Sometimes we’re not much help to each other.”

  “Couples split up over things like that, you know.”

  A surge of anxiety rose in her chest. “I know.”

  He looked at his watch, pushed back his chair. “You want to have a walk on the beach before I go?”

  *

  They walked down the slope of sand toward where the ground leveled out and then walked along, following the shoreline. The incoming tide had left a chain of small shells and beach detritus. Below that lay the ribbons of silvery threads, like lines on a musical staff, deposited as the tide went out. The air was cool. A breeze whipped in off the water, capping the waves with spume and white froth. Farther up the beach, the blackened hull of a boat tipped on its side into a low dune. Gulls swirled overhead, landed, took off again. A few sandpipers jigged along on their short legs. High on the shore, a row of houses paced along, their open porches for the most part empty of the chairs and chaises that would occupy them when summer came.

  “Wait.” Laura ran to the water’s edge, close enough to the incoming tide to reach down and put the palm of her hand on the water. She backed off quickly as the wave advanced.

  “I just like to touch the water,” she said, returning to him. He laughed, and reached for the wet hand she offered him. “We’d better turn back. I’ll have to be leaving soon.”

  They turned, began to walk hand in hand along the beach.

  Again she took a deep breath of the salt air. “Do you know,” she said, “that a few months ago I wouldn’t have believed in this moment—not ever in my life again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought I would always be sad. There might be exceptional moments I’d be happy. Now it seems possible it could be the other way around.”

  “It will be,” he said, “if you let it.”

  Something about the tone of his voice made her wonder. “Oh?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve been through some things in my life, too, Laura. Said some good-byes.”

  She thought of the divorce, of his daughter, of Ginny saying, “It was awful for him.”

  “Yes?” she said. He didn’t answer her, but the tenderness of the moment made her want to bring him some word, some gift of disclosure shared, and she said, “It’s part of the problem, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “Letting go. Being willing to let go.”

  Again he didn’t respond, and this time she was relieved, because maybe she’d been pressing him, and she was glad he felt free not to go on. It was probably her way—to want to tell all, but not his. And she didn’t want to frighten him—out of her own need to make of him something he was not, some perfect father figure to whom she would bring all things and lay them at his feet and he would bless them. Only the blessing wouldn’t last. She would have to find more gifts to bring him, a constant stream, so he would pay attention to her and not to anyone else at all.

  She was left with her own prescription and it reverberated in her head: “Letting go. Being willing to let go.” She was learning that, wasn’t she, to let go of her sadness, her preoccupying grief for Annie? Doing much better than she’d have thought possible? But as they approached his house, she felt a mounting sadness, as if some huge cloud were trying to push its way into the center of her consciousness. It was as though time pulled apart and collapsed back on itself—like an accordion bellows—except the moves were distorted and without frame.

  “I can’t get it straight in my mind,” she said.

  “Can’t get what straight?”

  “My daughter’s accident. When it happened—the time all runs together for me. The fact that it happened to her first and then I learned about it.”

  They had reached the house. She turned to him, her head a buzz of confusion.

  “Laura?” he said, a puzzled expression on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, agitated, feeling the cloud coming closer, about to envelop her. “I know I’m not making sense. You go on to your meeting. I’ll be fine.”

  “You sure?” His eyes searched her face.

  “Yes. Yes. I may go inside and take a nap. Or I might do some sketching.” With a wave of her hand, she took in the bright afternoon, the porch with its two rockers still in place.

  “Good. I won’t be long. A couple of hours, maybe.” He hurried down the porch steps and out to the car, and she went inside and closed the door.

  Inside the house, Laura walked through the living room, pushed open the bedroom door, and, taking a blanket from the top of a blanket chest, she unfolded it and lay down on the double bed and spread the blanket over herself and closed her eyes. But after a few moments, she remembered with almost a kinetic memory having performed these same gestures on the day of Annie’s accident, and in a turmoil of anxiety she sat up in bed, slid her feet back into her boots, wrapped her heavy sweater around her shoulders, and went out onto the porch—where she could get some air—and sat down in one of the rocking chairs and buried her face in her hands.

  In her mind, she hovered again at the day of the accident. Why did those midafternoon hours run together? She remembered going up to the cabin to take a nap and looking out from the porch to see if she could spot the riders. They had already gone. She remembered Trace rushing in and the drive to Estes Park, then to Boulder, and the long wait while Annie lay in some secret room.

  But the time between, the hour or two when she was resting, lying on the bed reading—she could not find that anywhere in her memory. When she thought of the accident, it was always happening while they were racing into Estes Park. That was where her mind kept putting Annie’s fall—while they were riding in their anguish to meet her.

  That was wrong. Annie was already mortally hurt. Strangers had called an ambulance. The ambulance had already taken Annie and Bart on ahead. Why did she keep getting it in the wrong order, keep having to take the event and put it back in place, like a child who keeps cutting ahead in line?

  She drew her knees up against her chest, dug her heels against the edge of the chair, and rocked back and forth. Tears sprang to her eyes. Words began to form out of the swirling images in her mind.

  It was hers. It wasn’t yours. It was her body, not your body. You are two people, not two parts of one. Her life was hers. Her death was hers. You cannot have it, not even as a way of keeping her can y
ou have it. So let her go.

  Tears streamed down her cheeks. Why this confusion? Why had she fought that so hard, so fused herself in her own mind with her daughter that she could not even allow her to die away from her own hovering emotional presence? That a blow to Annie’s body must be perceived as a blow to her own—some doomed attempt to preserve the illusion that they were one? Because if they were two, Annie might leave her and she would be abandoned? The irony of it was clear. Annie had left. Still she had persisted in thinking of them as one. What was the terror so great that she would try, against the facts, against her own knowledge, again and again to rearrange the truth, to preserve some myth of her own making, so that she experienced Annie’s death as a tearing away at her own being?

  She heard a sound of low wailing, hiccuping sobs, helpless, like a child abandoned. It was her own voice.

  In a bright hospital room, lights shine from the ceiling. A doctor stands in a white coat; a white hat covers the top of his head. He wears a mask over his mouth.

  Why is she here on this table? What is he going to do? Her neck is sore. Why did they bring her here, and let strangers wheel her away to this room?

  They are putting green cloths on her body. They are bringing bottles and tubes. The light is bright and coming closer. There is a long needle in the doctor’s hand.

  She opens her mouth and screams.

  *

  Rock. The chair creaked on its hinges, back and forth, on the wooden floor of the porch. She clutched her knees more tightly against her chest. A gull flew across her line of vision, cawing at the air.

  So had she learned in that operating room, the months of recovery from her illness, a lifetime uneasiness, a fear of being separated from those she loved? And not only separated but also violated in some way? That needle, the image of knives. “The doctor said it was the only hope—putting in a tube to drain pus from the lung.” No wonder she had repressed the memory of it—a legacy of terror.

  But there were rewards from that time.

  Her mother is coming toward her down the hall; her maroon flannel robe sweeps behind her. She sits down on the edge of the bed, strokes Laura’s cheek. Outside, Lillian calls, “Mother?”

  “Not now,” Rachel says. Lillian goes away. Her mother’s hand soothes her burning forehead, reassuring her, promising her that she will not die. As long as Rachel is there, she will not die.

  Rock. Rock. Had she made some Faustian bargain with her mother—that they would always be special to each other because Rachel’s love, her care, her will, her very presence had made the critical difference and a child who, according to the doctors, had “no right to be alive” lived? It was never to be forgotten, either—this debt—and at any time, it might be called in. It had worked fine for most of her life. Her job in another city, her marriage to Trace—they had put enough distance between Rachel and herself that the delicate balance of closeness and independence could be maintained. But when Will died and it came to Rachel’s moving in with her, some unconscious wisdom—her own desperate need for survival—had raised a barrier as impenetrable as lead, and she had said no. It had taken her forty years.

  It was no wonder Rachel was upset. To her infinite credit, she had adjusted and gone on, the river of her love diverting around the rock of Laura’s defection and coming right back—“I don’t mind anything you do, dear. Don’t you know that?” Rachel, who had translated her fear that her invalided mother might die into adulation—“my angel mother”—with whom she had never exchanged a cross word.

  Had this struggle for independence—always present from parent to child, but compounded in her case and Rachel’s by the special circumstances of their life together—had it swung down like an acrobat monkey swinging down from the rungs of a ladder to imbue Annie, too, with this burden of a mother’s love almost too demanding, too enriching, to bear? Because it was enriching—a gift for intimacy that, with all its dangers, bestowed some luminous aura, like the legendary jewel in fairy tales that contained such extraordinary power for evil and for good that people risked killing and being killed to keep it in their possession.

  If she had unwittingly handed this legacy to her daughter—the cloud that had driven her inside and then out onto the porch, darkened now, hovering close—was that part of the reason—as well as Trace’s distance, his abstractedness—that Annie had been so adventurous, so determined to forge her own ground? Had it even—rock, rock—in a moment of panic Laura considered it—driven Annie to ride away to her death in order to escape, win a freedom she could find in no other way?

  Rock, rock.

  She held the thought, like a tissue pattern piece against a piece of cloth, against her knowledge of Annie’s life. Then, with relief, she put it aside. It did not fit. Annie had left—there was no denying that—but not out of pique, or some desperate search for freedom—any more than the trauma of her childhood illness was Rachel’s will for her. She remembered Ginny’s words—held like a banner against the irrational fear that her relief at being spared some of the tensions of life with Annie had caused Annie’s death. “You’ve got it in the wrong order,” Ginny had said. “That’s a side effect. It’s after the fact. It doesn’t make you an accomplice.” Or the creak of the rocking chair—it didn’t rock because it creaked. It creaked because it rocked.

  And another thing. Perhaps Annie’s lunges into independence had been a sign of health, of a transmitted strength that also passed from mothers to daughters, from women to women. After all, Annie had had no invalid mother, no long childhood illness to bond her to some script of undue accommodation to a mother’s wishes.

  The strength passed from daughters to mothers, too, she acknowledged, eyes stinging again, remembering Annie’s courage on Ferris wheels, the bittersweet memory of Annie’s words when she told her, finally, that she and Gordon were making love: “I feel very good about myself as a woman.”

  The patterns of mothers and daughters—her grandmother Laura, her mother, herself, her daughter. Stories of infinite complexity, but the outlines constant, like those transparent pages in the World Book Encyclopedia they’d bought for the children—in which the muscle system overlaid the page for the nervous system, which overlaid the page for the bone structure, which overlaid the page for the circulation of the blood. Somehow a congruence achieved. Distinctive, the outline always the same.

  Yet they were all symbols to explain the unexplainable—like the bread and chalice that Matt offered at the memorial service—a cup of wine, a piece of bread to share. Like Rachel’s hand on her back, soothing away the fear. The sound of Rachel’s voice in the night as she sat by the bed, singing, “Through the darkness be “Thou near me/Keep me safe till morning light.” The sight of Rachel walking through the pine trees to visit while she lay in her hospital bed, eyes turned to the window.

  She stopped rocking, wiped her face with her hand. The massive threatening cloud that had pursued her had broken up, become patches of light and dark. She looked at her watch. It was past four. She had been sitting here for more than an hour. Fred should be coming back.

  She sat quietly, trying to see it all, let it find its place. The feeling startled her at first—the low contractions deep in the womb—and then she remembered this same sensation in the waiting room in Boulder, and she wondered, What is being born this time? Something began to come clear. The clouds were moving again, driven by the wind. There was a hill, some figures on a hill. In a rush of recognition and returning panic, she stood up. There was another journey she had to make and she did not want to make it alone. Just then, she heard his car pulling in beside the house and she ran to the end of the porch. “Fred!”

  He bounded up onto the porch, his face distorted with consternation. “Laura, whatever—” He took her hands in his. “You’re freezing. Why aren’t you inside?” He put his arm around her shoulder and led her into the house, over to the sofa, where light from the skylight brightened the blue twill cover, and they sat down.

  “I’m really all r
ight, Fred,” she said, steadying her hand on the knees of her wool pants. “But I need you to be with me. I’m awfully glad you came just now.”

  “I’m right here,” he said. “What is it, Laura? Are you sick? Do you need a doctor?”

  She shook her head. “I just need you to be with me,” and she took his two hands in hers and sat forward on the sofa so her knees pressed against Fred’s, and closing her eyes tightly against tears, she saw the slope of a hill like the hills in the woods behind Hadley where she used to walk with her family on Sunday afternoons. On the hill were two figures. At the bottom of the hill ran a clear stream, rocks breaking the surface and watercress growing in the lee of the rocks. The figures were herself and Annie and the narrow stream at their feet was like the River Styx, the stream between the living and the dead. Though there was no sound, the words played in her head:

  You have been here long enough. You must leave her now.

  Are you sure it’s time?

  It will never be easy, but you’re ready.

  Can I look back?

  Yes.

  I will still be her mother?

  Always.

  And the sadness will stay with me?

  Yes.

  Can I go back if 1 want to?

  For a while, yes. You’ll be with her one day, you know.

  And I am not abandoning her?

  Look at her. Does she look frightened or troubled?

  *

  She looked. There was no fear on her daughter’s face, only a tender smile. Gripping Fred’s hand even more tightly, she watched as the older woman let go of the young woman’s hand, walked down the last stretch of shallow slope, and stepped over the brook to stand on the other side.

  “Oh, it’s so sad,” she said. She was crying softly. Her grip on Fred’s hands relaxed, and she pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her shirt and wiped her face. “Well!” she said, and sighed. But there was a lightness in her voice, for the relief of it. Then she began to tell him….