I spoke to my mother regularly. She filled me in on all the details of Benno’s life. He had a friend named Sal who was somewhat of a tomboy. He’d tried out for the basketball team but didn’t make it, so my father installed a hoop over the garage so he could practice. It had snowed ten inches, school was canceled, and my mother took Benno and Billy sledding at Fort Adams State Park and afterwards out for hot chocolate and glazed doughnuts. I was happy to hear he was thriving, but heartbroken he was thriving without me.
In February, instead of a valentine, I sent him a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A week later he called.
“I got the book.”
I’d spoken to him only a few times since last summer. He was eleven now and his voice was deeper.
“Oh, good,” I said, acting as if we’d just talked yesterday.
“Why did you send it?”
“Because it’s one of my favorite books.” I was going to tell Benno about Greengage, but I had to do it in precisely the right way. Ease him in gently. Otherwise he’d freak out.
“So what did you think?”
“I liked it okay, but Edmund was totally annoying. And who would want to eat Turkish Delight? I mean, it sounds delicious but it’s actually disgusting. Squares of pink jelly.”
“Tell me some of your favorite parts,” I prompted him.
He paused, thinking. “When it was snowing in the wardrobe. And Lucy saw the light in the middle of the forest and she followed it.”
If he gave me the chance, I would show him the light that pierced through the fog and we would follow it together.
“I thought it was cool how they spent years in Narnia, but when they went home only minutes had passed.”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it, if it worked that way?” In my case it had been just the opposite. I took a deep breath. “It’s good to hear your voice. I’m happy you called and I’m happy you liked the book. Will you call again?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
—
I missed Greengage so much. I thought of it every day, just as I thought of Benno every day, thus I tried to keep both my lives alive. Every night before I went to bed, I recited a litany of their names. Joseph, Fancy, Magnusson, Friar, Elisabetta, and on and on. I begged for their forgiveness, too. Nine full moons now that I hadn’t shown up. The fog could have been there every month, or for two of those months, or three. Or perhaps it hadn’t even been there at all. That was the best-case scenario. I couldn’t bear them thinking I’d abandoned them, too.
—
“They can’t just do that. They can’t just take the money out of my paycheck without my permission!”
Mr. Templeton stood in front of me, struggling to remain composed. A lineman at Bay Tel, he’d been working for the company for nearly twenty years. He’d taken out a loan to pay for his eldest son’s college tuition, and he’d been late on his last two loan payments.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Templeton,” I whispered, “but they can.”
Mr. Pease, the collector, had begun garnishing his wages. I’d known this was coming. I’d gone to Mr. Pease and begged him to give Mr. Templeton another few months, but Mr. Pease refused. He was a smarmy man who delighted in others’ misfortune. Sometimes I thought he approved loans for sport, when he knew the applicant would default.
“Perhaps if you went and spoke to Mr. Pease,” I said. “He might be willing to work out a new payment plan.”
Mr. Pease would likely do nothing of the sort, but I couldn’t bear to leave Mr. Templeton with no hope. I slipped him an extra ten when I counted out his cash. I wouldn’t tell Ludwig I was short—I’d simply add a ten of my own to the drawer at lunch.
The time I’d been at Baytelco had done me a lot of good. On Friday nights my colleagues and I had a standing date at Dino’s for fried cod and half-price beers. Despite the limitations of my job, and my obsession to get Benno home, I got up in the mornings feeling like I had a purpose. I was part of the working world.
—
A week later Ludwig called me into his office.
“Shut the door, please.”
Oh shit.
“Sit down.”
I remained standing. “Please—”
“Sit down, Lux. I have something to discuss with you.”
I sat and bowed my head, waiting for the blow.
“Clearly you’re not all that happy in your current job.”
I’d gotten a Meets Expectations on my six-month performance review along with a list of things to improve.
“That’s not true, Mr. Ludwig. There are things I love about it.”
“Like what?”
“The people.”
“I’m sorry but that’s not going to cut it. We have to face facts. You’re not a good teller. It just doesn’t come naturally to you.”
“But I’ll make it a good fit. I’ll do anything. I’ll try harder, I swear.”
“There’s no need to try harder.” His mouth was set in a hard line.
He’d already made up his mind and there was nothing I could do to change it.
I nodded. “How long do I have? Can I stay until the end of the week?”
Would he give me a reference? How would I explain another gap on my résumé to a future employer?
He gave me a confused look. “I’m not letting you go, Lux. You’re one of the most hardworking employees I have. I’m promoting you to loan officer. Your customer service numbers are through the roof: members love you. There’s a fifty-dollar-per-week salary hike, and the downside, obviously, is that you’ll have to work with Pease—”
“Tell me you’re not fucking with me, Ludwig.” I couldn’t believe he’d just put me through this.
His cheeks turned red. “I am not fucking with you.”
“Oh my God!” I leapt up from the desk and threw my arms around him.
—
Being a loan officer was a natural fit for me. I loved hearing people’s stories. When applying for a loan, they were always vulnerable, so I made sure to put them at ease. I had a photo of Benno on my desk, a great conversation starter. Oh, you have children, too! Tell me about them. How old? What are their names? Where do they go to school? Yes, the cost of clothes has skyrocketed. Forget Macy’s, Penney’s has the best sales.
Once we’d made a connection, then they’d tell me why they needed the loan. College tuition. A new car. A vacation. To pay for their kid’s braces. Their mother’s nursing home. A leaky roof. I easily spent an hour with each potential customer, something Mr. Pease was constantly giving me crap about. “Half an hour tops is all it should take,” he said. Sometimes I’d see him timing me with a stopwatch. He could tell whether an applicant was a good risk as soon as they approached his desk.
“Just look at their shoes,” he told me. “Are they scuffed? Do they need a shine? Do they need resoling? Are they out of fashion? Have they been purchased at Goodwill? The shoes will tell you everything you need to know.”
I’d looked at plenty of shoes in my lifetime, and I agreed with Mr. Pease: they revealed quite a bit. What they revealed was highly subjective, however. Scuffed to him meant desperate. Scuffed to me meant hard worker. Out of fashion to him meant given up, doesn’t care about how they look. Out of fashion to me meant frugal, knows where they spend every cent.
When I had to reject somebody for a loan, I made sure I did it in a way that preserved their dignity. I never sent them away without hope. I gave them a list of things they’d have to do in order to get that loan, and many of them reapplied successfully in the future.
Even though we butted heads quite a bit and I’m sure Mr. Pease would have liked to fire me, he couldn’t. My customers adored me and made sure to trumpet their satisfaction to the credit union staff. Aluminum-foil-wrapped paper plates covered my desk. Homemade baklava, cookies, biscotti. Frequently I received flowers—not from the florist, but hand-picked bouquets from backyard gardens, the stems wrapped in damp paper towels. I secured my customers’ loans. T
heir kids graduated high school, and gave their valedictorian speeches while flashing perfectly straight teeth.
I was the patron saint of the out-of-date, the invisible, and the left behind.
—
Benno began calling every Sunday at four. All week long I looked forward to our phone date. I kept a notebook of things I wanted to share with him. Penny’s latest escapades. The new bodega that had opened on Divisadero. The plate of empanadas a grateful member had given me.
He in turn played me his favorite songs. Confessed how much he hated his Latin teacher. And asked me about his father. Did he have any extended family on Nelson’s side?
I told him that when he was very young I’d hired a private detective and found Nelson’s mother in Wisconsin. A little town called Folsom Lake.
“Just his mother? No father? No brothers or sisters?” he asked. Obviously, he’d been fantasizing about having a big family. Aunts and uncles. Cousins.
“That’s it, as far as I know.”
“Did you call her? Did you tell her about me?”
“Benno, are you sure you want to hear this?”
“Why? Is it bad?”
“I don’t think it’s what you want to hear, which is why I haven’t told you before.”
“Well, now you have to tell me.”
“All right. I wrote to her. I told her about meeting Nelson in San Francisco before he shipped out. I told her what a lovely man he was, how much I enjoyed our time together. I even made copies of the letters he’d sent the first couple of months he was in Vietnam. I wanted to make sure she believed me.”
“You have letters?”
“Yes, and I’d be happy to let you read them if you’d like. You’ll get a real sense of him. He was funny and honest and full of heart, just like you.”
Benno went silent.
“I also told Anna King about you. That was the real point of the letter. I enclosed your picture and offered to come to Wisconsin to visit.”
“Did we go?”
“No, sweetheart.”
“Why?”
“Because she opened the letter, read it, and then taped it back up. Then she wrote Return to Sender on the envelope and mailed it back to me.”
It took a moment for Benno to take that in. “She didn’t want us. She didn’t want me!” he cried.
I heard my mother in the background and Benno telling her to go away. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. A minute later he came back on.
“She didn’t know you, Benno. If she’d gotten to know you, she’d have wanted you. Who knows why she wasn’t capable of responding? Maybe she was scared. Maybe she thought I was lying. Maybe she was in so much pain from Nelson’s death that she couldn’t bear the thought of dredging it all back up. I don’t know.”
He hung up soon after that. What more was there to say? I anguished. Had I done the right thing? Should I have given him a less painful version of the truth? Should I have lied and told him Nelson had no family? But Benno called me the following night, and the night after that, and soon we were speaking daily. Making our way back to one another.
—
On June 28, 1981, Benno came home. I met him at the airport gate, nervously holding a box of See’s chocolate creams. When I saw him coming up the ramp with his shaggy hair and ripped jeans, I threw the box in the trash. This was not a visiting dignitary, this was my son.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
He made no move to hug me and I kept my distance; I’d take my cues from him. We walked through the airport, at least a foot between us.
“The car smells funny,” he said when I opened the trunk.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Rotten apples. Or bananas.”
“Oh—sorry.”
“No prob.” He shook his hair out of his eyes. “Can we stop somewhere and get a milkshake?”
—
He sucked down his black and tan frappe.
“Good?” I asked.
“You don’t know how much I’ve been craving one of those.”
“Awful Awful’s didn’t cut it?”
“I got sick of them after a while. Too thick. You had to eat them with a spoon.”
The adolescent cool dribbled down his face, exposing the boy. “What now?” he asked nervously.
“Home?”
“I guess. Will Anjuli be there?”
“She should be. She’s got a regular babysitting gig with Penny.”
“Rose and Doro?”
“Of course. Everybody is so excited to see you. To welcome you back.”
“You didn’t plan some kind of a surprise party, did you?”
I tried to read his face. Should I have? Did he want one? “I thought you’d want to settle in first. But we could have a party this weekend. That’s a great idea.”
He signaled to the waitress for the check. He looked exactly like my father in that moment; clearly he’d copied the gesture from him.
The waitress put the check face-down on the table, and I went to pick it up. Benno grabbed it first.
“I’ve got it.” He slid his wallet out of his back pocket and extracted a ten-dollar bill.
“Did Grandma give you money?”
“It’s my money. I earned it at McGillicutty’s. I worked there on weekends. Sweeping up. Doing laundry.”
My father made him get a job?
“It was fun. And it was my idea, not Grandpa’s.”
—
When we got back in the car, Benno fiddled with the radio dial. He spun past “While You See a Chance” and “Jessie’s Girl.” He stopped on Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.”
“I love this song.” He turned his face away from me so I couldn’t see him crying.
—
On the next full moon, I took him with me to the Valley of the Moon. We tramped through the forest. Every ten steps or so, he’d stop and look up at the sky. I hadn’t told him anything about Greengage. The only way to explain it was for him to see it. My plan was to bring him here every full moon until we were let in.
We walked up the creek bank. He carried the knapsack and our gear, loping along easily. All I’d told him was that we were going camping overnight. If the fog appeared—well, then I’d tell him everything.
The last couple of weeks had been awkward and sweet as we tried to figure out how to live with each other again. In a way we were strangers. Instead of calling me every night, he called Newport. My parents were a safety net now.
He liked that I had a proper job. Liked that I left the house at eight wearing a dress and heels. He’d become quite independent. In the mornings he’d take off soon after me and make his rounds: to the dog pound to visit the strays, over to Tower Records, skateboarding in Golden Gate Park. In the afternoons he kept Anjuli company while she babysat Penny for Rhonda.
“This way,” I said, directing him to the clearing of redwoods.
He put the knapsack down by the fire pit. “You’ve been here before?”
“A few times.”
We hadn’t talked yet about where I’d gone. He knew what he’d been told by my parents: I’d joined some commune called Greengage, but he hadn’t wanted to know more and so I hadn’t offered. What kind of a place could have exerted such a pull that it kept me away from him for a year? It was clearly easier for him not to ask.
“It’s like Lapis Lake,” he said.
He didn’t have to tell me what he meant. The Valley of the Moon had a timeless feel, just like the lake.
“You came here alone?” he asked.
“Yep.”
“You were never scared?”
“I was scared, sometimes.”
“But you came anyway?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Because sometimes fear is the thing that makes you feel most alive.”
It had taken Benno a long time to learn to hold his breath underwater. He was five, nearly six, when he finally did
it.
“Keep your eyes open,” I’d told him, that long-ago day at the Y.
“Don’t let go of me,” he said.
“I won’t. I promise.”
We slipped under the surface of the pool together, holding hands. His cheeks bulged. His little legs kicked wildly. He gazed at me with a death stare, and I remember I just kept nodding, silently transmitting You’re okay, you’re okay to him.
Now he said softly, “I want to feel alive.”
—
Five hours later, Benno yelled, “Mom, Mom, wake up!”
The tent was unzipped; Benno was outside. I stepped into the fog. It swirled around me.
“I’ve never seen fog like this. It’s so thick, like a blizzard. You could get totally lost,” he said, a look of wonder on his face.
Or found. I took his hand.
It is naïve, I know, but you never think the unspeakable thing will happen to you. That is something that happens to other people. That is the accident you watch from the side of the road, unable to tear your eyes away from the mangled body in the street, a stranger, somebody’s mother, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s wife. Somebody’s beloved, but not yours. Never yours. That experience has always resided outside of you. You are the observer. That is your birthright. You will go home, whole and intact, having come face-to-face with your mortality from a safe distance, and everything will be heightened for a time. You will be grateful. For the full coal bin in the basement. For the sound of your loved ones in the kitchen at dusk, laughing quietly as you sit in the parlor, an unread book on your lap, feeling vibrantly, exquisitely alive, because you were not the one, you are never the one.
Today, I was the one. And for all the rest of my days, I’d be the one, too. The man who’d lost his wife so brutally and so suddenly there was no time to say goodbye. I recognized the stunned look in my friends’ eyes. Astonishment and relief. I didn’t blame them. I’d been standing erect on the side of the road all my life, and now it was my turn to kneel in the street. The question wasn’t why this had happened. The question was why I ever thought I’d be spared.
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