by Barbara Hall
Later he gathered the family together and announced, in front of her, that Catherine had had a nervous breakdown. The doctor had concluded that she had had a temporary but profound break with reality. If her stress levels were kept to a minimum and her social engagements were limited, she should soon return to normal. In the meantime, everyone should consider her fragile mental state before investing in anything she had to say.
The whole family was there, Mom told him. Her brother Gregory, Suzanne, her sister Sandra, her own mother who, she said, listened to the whole thing with a low level of interest, as if her ability to get all worked up about her children had been used up, like energy leaking out of a battery. By then she was crazy in denial. She smoked and drank iced tea and stared out the window.
Her siblings looked at her with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion. She knew it was all over. There was no one to turn to. She only had to endure her time at home.
It was devastating, she told him, being called the crazy one when you know you’re the only one with a direct link to anything resembling reality.
“How did she survive it?” I asked.
“I can only tell you what she told me. That it had to do with me. The fact that I believed her. And she knew I believed her. That helped her stay sane.”
“But you didn’t talk to her again?”
“She wouldn’t let me.”
“Why?”
“She wanted to keep me out of it. She didn’t want to drag me into it.”
“But you should have insisted.”
He nodded as if he had turned that very thing over in his brain for most of his life. And I felt bad because I knew I had hit a nerve and I knew it was easy for me to say.
“I was sixteen, Lynnie. That’s all I have to say in my defense.”
That summer she had taken her life savings and her father’s silver coin collection and she had bought a bus ticket to the West Coast. She felt guilty about the coin collection, Dad told me. She actually wanted to pay her father back for it. Dad, the lawyer, gently explained that stealing silver from a murderer wasn’t going to be her undoing. It was a matter of survival.
She made it to California on the bus and she found work and Dad didn’t ask what kind. I knew she had cleaned houses because she told me once when I was little. I was watching her move like a lightning bolt with a sponge through the bathroom and I asked her how she knew how to do that so well and she told me.
But this was how she said it: “Oh, I did it to make a little extra money when I was in college.”
Was she ever in college? I asked my dad.
Later, he said. After they got married. She studied philosophy and literature. She wanted to be a writer.
Did she ever write anything?
He looked off when I asked. It made him smile.
“She wrote poems. I read them. Then she burned them. I wish she hadn’t.”
“Why’d she burn them?”
“She was afraid they weren’t good.”
“Were they?”
He nodded.
He waited a minute and said, “She wanted to burn the letter, too. She was surprised to find I’d kept it all that time.”
“But you didn’t let her.”
“I thought it was important. It was history.”
Finally he looked at me and smiled.
He said, “She was happy, you know. She made it.”
“Did he look for her?” I asked. “Her father. When she left.”
Dad shook his head. “He didn’t want to find her. He wanted her to disappear.”
“And he never got caught.”
“No. He died.”
“And the rest of the family?”
“Her mom died, too, we heard. Everyone else is somewhere in the South. There were camps. Everyone was against her. She didn’t feel she needed to look back.”
“So that’s the story. Bad guy gets away with it. Good girl run out of town. Fairy-tale marriage. Dead in a car wreck. Father and daughter left behind to misunderstand each other. I’m looking for the justice.”
“Don’t get obsessed with that.”
“Then I’m looking for the point.”
“They lived out their stories. All of them. It’s what we’re here to do. How do you want your story to go? That’s the point I was trying to make. It’s not about what happens when we die. It’s about what happens when we live. It’s about creating character because that’s what we take with us and it’s what we leave behind.”
“She had character.”
He nodded.
“I want to have character, too,” I told him.
“You’re well on your way.”
“Because of her.”
He shook his head. “Because of you. The choices you have made.”
“To surf in a big swell.”
He smiled. “It was the wrong thing to do. But it was for an admirable reason.”
“Yeah, I get that now.”
“Character comes from doing the right thing. You listen to yourself. You have an instinct and you don’t ignore it. As much as possible, you send fear packing.”
I nodded. “From the guy who won’t go on a date or let me drive a car.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Or ask out the doctor.”
He stared at me for what seemed like a long time. “I thought I was imagining that.”
“Please. Do something before I get embarrassed.”
“What if she says no?”
“Character’s a bitch, isn’t it?”
He smiled. “You’re babbling again.”
“I’m on drugs,” I said, and closed my eyes.
• 3 •
December 22
Dear Mick,
Thank you for your letter, which I got right before I left town. I was out of it for a while. They wouldn’t let me take calls at the hospital and my father carried that tradition over when I finally got home. I’ve told you how overprotective he is. He claims he’s getting better. But you might as well know, he blamed you for the whole surfing incident, which is just ridiculous.
Well, that’s not entirely true. He blamed you for half of it and me for the other half. He wasn’t happy. To be fair, I nearly died and all. That didn’t sit well with him. And I was being an idiot. I apologize for the whole ordeal. I was showing off for you. I wanted you to think I was superfabulous, an international woman of mystery. But now that I’m coming clean about everything, I’ll admit that was my second time surfing in the whole history of being me.
It won’t be the last, though. I figure once you nearly die doing something, you’re protected under the lightning-doesn’t-strike-twice law. Maybe I can get you to try it. Presuming you’re remotely interested and want to go anywhere near a large body of water with me.
I would love to take you up on your suggestion that we should move on to a food date, but that won’t happen until after New Year’s. I’m out of town. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to call and tell you that. But the fact is, the reason I’m out of town over the Christmas holiday is a complicated one and I want to share it with you in person. As it is, I can give you a few details.
I’m in a place called Union Grade. My mother and father grew up here. They met in high school and again after college. While they lived here, they both knew about a terrible crime that was committed and they tried to tell the police but no one believed them.
The crime happened to a girl my age named Jackie. In fact, I was named after her. She was my father’s cousin. My mother saw it happen.
It was her father who killed the girl.
Oh, look, apparently I’m telling you the whole story now.
I was afraid to tell you. I was afraid of how it would sound. But now that I’m writing it, it doesn’t have such a terrible feel to it. It just feels like the truth, and as someone once told me, the truth just is. There’s no other quality to it, like good or bad or right or wrong.
My mother tried to teach me the difference between
secret and private. This is not a secret anymore. It’s been told. When it was a secret, it enslaved a lot of people. Once it was told, it set a lot of people free, even though it caused pain. And I guess that’s how it works.
So I’m not telling you a secret. But I am telling you something private. I hope you understand what that means. I trust you. And after trust, who knows? Maybe fun, maybe frolic, maybe scandal.
I make jokes to cover up my insecurity. I didn’t invent that process. Bear with me.
I like you and I have since I first saw you and I hope you feel the same way.
But back to Union Grade, Virginia. My dad and I flew to Washington, did the whole twelve-monuments-in-a-day routine, then drove four hours down to this town, which is far from anything you’d ever want to know about, practically in North Carolina, which is a state the guidance counselors in L.A. don’t even mention when going over colleges.
I was all prepared to be a snob and hate it, but the truth is, it’s beautiful. I’m not really a writer, not like my mother was, so I won’t do a great job of describing it. It’s the mountains, really, and the trees. Everywhere you turn, some green hillside or blue mountain peak or a vast network of evergreens. There are all kinds of trees—right now a lot of them are naked but still beautiful, with their branches reaching out like arteries, bending in the wind and just waiting for the leaves to return to them.
Dad says that in the fall, it’s magical, when all the foliage turns to red and orange. He’s talking to me a lot more than he used to. He’s all excited to be here and when he remembers things his eyes get a glow and it’s like I can see the guy who was once happy, before he got his heart broken, before he decided that his role in life was to be a bereft widower.
That’s changing, I think. He’s walked away from me a couple of times to indulge in a private cell phone call to one Dr. Penny Torgensen. She took care of me in the hospital and did everything but a belly dance to impress him. He finally noticed.
Anyway, there’s something about this place. The quality of the light. The clouds. The ground, which is red in a lot of places instead of brown. Red clay, they call it, and in the summer, my father says, it’s red dust. But it’s a valuable commodity because it’s what they use to make brick. He finds it amusing that everyone spends a fortune to import brick in Los Angeles. Back East, it’s considered the cheapest building material. None of the rich people have redbrick houses. They prefer wood or quarry stone. Dad says it’s the same way people in L.A. don’t appreciate the ocean. Anything that’s right up under you
doesn’t seem special.
I’ve never identified with any place except California, but I can imagine myself belonging to this part of the earth. I can imagine that the trees or the red clay would speak to me. I can imagine growing up here and making friends and dreaming about the world as my mother did. I can imagine longing to get out, too. Part of why I like being here is that I know we can leave.
He showed me the house he grew up in. It wasn’t as horrible as he remembered. I thought it was kind of nice, even. It looked like pictures you’ve seen of early American houses in New England or Williamsburg, but it wasn’t old and it was kind of pretentious. Someone had cut down a large oak tree he remembered being right outside his bedroom window, and that made him angry. He has this thing about not destroying nature. I suggested that lightning might have struck it and he didn’t dismiss the idea. He allowed it to cheer him up. He said, “That happens here, you know. We had real honest-to-God thunderstorms. Not what passes for weather in Los Angeles.”
Then he showed me my mother’s house. It was an actual Victorian house, built right after the Civil War, but someone had put ugly yellow siding on it and painted the windowsills forest green. It had a wraparound porch with rockers and a swing and an antique milk can by the door. It had columns (Doric—those are the plain ones, right?) and someone had stuck an American flag on one of them, and Dad found that amusing and distasteful—from an aesthetic rather than a political point of view.
He showed me the high school, which was your basic ugly 1970s L-shaped architecture (that’s how he described it), which could have
doubled as a detention center. We stood and looked at the track field where he used to run and then we stood and looked at the tennis courts where my mother played, and finally at the parking lot where he used to meet her after school. He didn’t get as weepy as I’d imagined. He even smiled.
When we were standing in the parking lot, his cell phone went off and it was Dr. Penny again, and he took the call and chatted with her. I thought that was a good sign. He didn’t consider it hallowed ground anymore. It was just a place from his past.
Finally he took me to the spot. The place where it all really happened.
I was nervous to go there and I was sure he was, too. We drove to the end of this long row of houses that were surrounded by woods. At the beginning of the road, the houses were new and expensive-looking with nicely kept yards, all full of flowers and hedges and fancy lawn furniture. But as it got closer to the end, toward the woods, the houses got smaller and the lawns were full of toys and cheap plastic chairs and tacky gnomes.
I said to my father, “Wouldn’t the rich people want to live near the woods?”
He said, “They’re afraid.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s always been the poor part of town out here. And they don’t know how to change that. Plus, it’s like the ocean in L.A. They’re afraid of what might be in the woods.”
“What might be in there? You mean animals?”
“Animals,” he said. “Monsters. Fairies. Dragons.”
“Seriously, Dad.”
“I’m speaking symbolically. Anyway, they aren’t entirely wrong, are they?”
“I guess not.”
“The woods are unsupervised. Unmonitored. They don’t account to anyone. Even now. That was the problem with the whole place when we were growing up. The town was too remote. It wasn’t accountable to anyone. It’s better to be accountable. That’s the whole plan behind society. We answer to each other. Coexistence. Consideration.”
He stopped talking as we actually stepped into the woods. It was quiet in there. Nothing moved because it was winter and there were no animals around. A few birds darted about, just as my mother described in her letter. But other than that, nothing but the sound of the wind moving across the carpet of dried leaves. And then the smell of the evergreens. The cedars, mostly, and pines. There were so many of them, nothing like the landscape in California. It smelled like a huge Christmas tree lot, only stronger, and I saw the branches and the needles swaying in the wind, and I thought of my mother wandering through the woods and calling for her father.
My own father was holding my hand very tight. Every snap of a twig made him hold it tighter. I thought he might cry but he didn’t. He just kept walking and I kept letting him lead me.
Once I looked behind me to picture her running away, back to the truck. I couldn’t see our car anymore. I wondered what it would feel like to be chased and I couldn’t imagine it. Didn’t want to imagine it.
Finally my father stopped and stood very still and looked at the sky. I did the same. There was nothing in it but a few cirrus clouds. It was a bright winter blue. And it was pleasant to stare at it. It looked like a way out. It looked like a painting that everyone had the privilege to see. And when I looked up, I knew it was possible you were staring up, too, somewhere three thousand miles away, and that even though the sky might look different to you, it was the same sky, the same sun, and we were connected under all this.
That was how she must have felt, staring up. Connected to someone she hadn’t even met, and to a world of people she longed to join, and maybe every time she looked up, she found the courage to believe in that.
My father put his arm around my shoulders. He said, “I’m glad we came back. It was so much darker in my mind.”
“Yeah, it’s really just woods.”
He nodded. “I don’t k
now why I thought it would be more.”
But I know why.
It’s all about perspective, Jen explained. When you’re lying on your stomach paddling into a wave, it looks enormous because you’re at eye level. But when you jump off your board and stand up, you can see how small it is and it brushes right by you.
My father and I have both been paddling into the past at eye level.
We just had to stand up to it.
Yours,
Lynne
SEVENTEEN
Mick closed the book and looked at me.
We were standing in the parking lot at Santa Monica beach, near the location where I had once almost died. It was night and the light from the bonfire on the beach was spilling across the sand and landing on us. It made him look tanned and exotic. His hair was still long and he still pushed it away from his face when he was nervous. The book made him a little nervous but it also made him smile.
There was music coming from the bonfire, too. Old stuff. Classic rock. People were getting sentimental. Bonfires weren’t usually allowed on the beaches of Santa Monica, but this was the one night of the year when the cops made exceptions.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He said, “I think it was a lot of work.”
“Not that much. Typing, cutting, pasting.”
“A lot of typing, though.”
I shrugged. “Good practice for a future reporter.”
“That’s not what you said in the journal. You claim you’re not a good writer.”
“Not poetic. Not good at making things up. Somewhat better at telling the truth.”
He smiled. “I think you’ll be great at it.”
“And you’ll be a famous artist. And we’ll meet in New York and go to galas.”
“I don’t see how that’s going to happen. I’ll be stuck in Rhode Island without a car.”
“Take the train. When you get to New York, you won’t need a car.”