Running from Monday

by Lea Sims

  She took in the full length of his tanned muscular body sprawled out under her crisp white comforter. He was sleeping on his stomach, both arms up under the pillow, and head facing away from her toward the opposite wall. His sandy blonde hair, which last night had hung in a long bang over one eye, was now feathered across the pillow, exposing his strong stubbled jawline.

  His name was Adam, though she couldn’t recall what he had said his last name was. She did remember him saying he was a personal trainer at a midtown fitness club. After sending her challenge back to him via their waiter, she had watched Adam look back at her in surprise and grinned. He pulled out his phone, did the fastest search for Orion’s Belt likely ever performed by anyone, and then strolled over to their table with his whiskey in hand.

  “Do I actually have to pronounce these?” he had asked with a hesitant grin as he approached their table.

  “Can you?” Delaney had replied, squinting up at him with focused consideration, as if she were interviewing a job candidate.

  “Um, okaaay…” He looked back down at his phone and paused, then launched into his best effort at naming Orion’s Three Sisters. “Al-ni-tak, Al-ni-lam and…Min-ta-ka?” He had laboriously pronounced each syllable like a second grader reading See Spot Run.

  In the middle of this adorable recitation, Delaney shot a look at Lexie, who had her elbow on the arm of her chair, chin resting on her hand, and eyebrows raised in delight as she watched the man standing in front of them read from his phone exactly as she had hoped he would. Lexie loved throwing “crazy bait”—that’s what Delaney called it—out to men. The fact that they nearly always bit the line and then flopped around like fish out of water entertained her friend to no end.

  When he was done butchering the sisters, he had looked back at Delaney expectantly. “How did I do?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” Delaney had said deciding to let the poor guy off the hook.

  “Whaaat?” he asked, confused.

  She stuck out her hand to officially introduce herself. “My name is Delaney Anderson,” she had said to him with a dazzling smile. “I have no idea who the Three Sisters of Orion’s belt are, so you could have pronounced them perfectly…I don’t have a clue.” She laughed as he looked back and forth between her and Lexie, eyebrows furrowing then suddenly rising as realization dawned.

  “Your name’s not Andromeda,” he said flatly. It wasn’t a question. One side of his mouth curled up in a self-deprecating smirk, as he realized the joke had been on him. “Nicely played,” he said, as he turned to walk back to the bar.

  At that point, Lexie had jumped to attention to chase him down, “Oh no, honey!” she said, pulling on his arm. “Don’t you run off! We were only having fun with you.” He then turned around slowly with an eyebrow up, looking only at Delaney and asked, “What…no more quizzes? I don’t have to name the first ten elements of the periodic table?”

  Delaney leaned forward intently, mimicking her previous look, and responded, “Well…can you?”

  He saw the twinkle in her eye, burst out laughing and said, “Uh…no. But I think oxygen is on there somewhere, right?” She grinned, nodded and invited him to sit down. He was charming, witty, and had fallen in comfortably with the joking and storytelling that had ensued between her and Lexie. At one point when he was ordering another round of drinks for the table, Lexie had given Delaney the what-are-you-waiting-for look. It hadn’t taken long for the playful banter that flew back and forth between her and Adam to turn into some serious sparks. Aided by a few more drinks and the sultry tones coming from the jazz quartet, that slow burn had culminated in a shared cab back to her apartment and a pretty spectacular romp that started in the kitchen and moved quickly and heatedly into her bedroom.

  A lot of women would wake up on a Saturday morning after a bar scene hook-up feeling any number of things. The belt-notchers, on a mission to keep the relational upper hand and conquer the male world one sexual encounter at a time, would gloat triumphantly. The hopelessly romantic and relationally desperate would wake up wrung out and insecure. The good-girl rebels who were testing the waters of sexual freedom would probably be wracked with post-mortem guilt, trying to gather up the remnants of their dignity and slip out the door with their heads hung low. And other women would lie there in complete security, thrilled to have spent a great night with a hot guy and wonder if they should wake him up for another round or go make coffee.

  Delaney felt none of those things. In fact, she felt nothing at all.

  As she looked down at Adam sleeping soundly next to her, a familiar numbness settled heavily within her. It had been present for so long, she had lost any ability to recognize how deeply abiding it was. She should feel something this morning about the choice she’d made. She’d brought a random stranger home for sex, and it hadn’t been the first time she’d ever done it. She should probably feel some sense of guilt or shame about that, but she didn’t. If anything, she felt guilty for not feeling guilty. Sure, she could rationalize that she was living in a generation of modern women—women who had the freedom to own their choices and make apologies to no one. If she wanted a hook up with a hot guy, there was nothing wrong with doing so in this day and age, she would argue. She lived life on her own terms. Lots of people said they didn’t care what other people thought, but Delaney was one of the rare few who could say it and actually mean it. But somewhere very, very deep down, she knew she should care.

  She had been disconnected from her emotions for most of her adult life, to the point that she would shrug off the jokes and comments people would make about it, saying, “I’m just not an emotional person.” And she had convinced herself it was true. Some women were emotional and some weren’t, she would tell herself. She believed she was just wired differently, though she often watched the interplay of other women and felt like an outsider. Whenever the women in her office would talk about a movie or TV show that had them all reaching for the Kleenex, she could never join in or share their sentiments. She was at the same time both secretly envious and very wary of women who cried easily. She never knew whether it represented something excessive in them or deficient in her.

  She hadn’t always been that way. When she was younger, she lived in “perpetual e-motion,” as her Aunt Beth would say. She had felt everything so deeply as a child that she bordered on the unpredictable and dramatic, especially in middle school, but she had reached a point by high school where untended and untempered emotions had taken their toll on her. She could no longer function in the raw. The brain is a resilient organ, brilliantly capable of anesthetizing itself in ways that are necessary for immediate survival but profoundly damaging in the long-term. When she could manage them no longer, Delaney had let her emotions slip like water through her fingers and disappear into the cracks in the floor, leaving her numb but functional. She got so good at suppressing and ignoring her feelings that one day she just stopped having them.

  It was as though a giant stone had been rolled across her heart, heavy and immoveable, and whatever feelings she may have possessed in her childhood now lay locked up and dormant behind it. There had been people in her life, like her Aunt Beth and even Danny to some degree, who had attempted to lean heavily on that stone, but it never moved. She had shed very few tears in the last ten years and none in the last year. The fact that she had walked through this divorce like a zombie should have been a red flag even for her, but she chalked it up to a dead marriage where all the love had drained out. You don’t cry over spilt milk, she reasoned, especially if it was sour.

  But there were random moments, like last night when Lexie had told her Danny was holding hands with his new girlfriend, that she would experience an intense connection to feelings so raw and unexpected that it was as if she had somehow stumbled into a forgotten room. The light in that room would click on for just a moment and illuminate a space so packed with dusty memories and articles of pain that she would immediately
hit the light and slam the door.

  She could hear her Aunt Beth telling her to value herself—that if she didn’t value herself, no one else would. But then, her Aunt Beth would also tell her that she was running from God.

  God.

  Delaney’s jaw clenched at the intrusion of that name. Images of church pews, stained glass windows, and a hymnal in her hand flitted through her brain along with hazy memories of Sunday school lessons on craft felt boards and summer church picnics chasing fireflies. Unbidden, she experienced a brief flash of her uncle standing in the aisle passing an offering bucket to her row, smiling widely to the families seated around her. Her stomach lurched. She could not abide hypocrisy in any form. And she had no room in her world for fairy tales of giant boats filled with animals, men getting swallowed by whales, or babies being born in mangers and growing up to die on crosses. She definitely had no room for any God who said he loved her but was as invisible and indifferent as any pretend deity could possibly be.

  With that vehement thought, she slipped quietly out of bed, threw on a long T-shirt, and tip-toed out to the kitchen to make coffee.

  A few minutes later, she sat down on the couch with a cup of coffee and a buttered English muffin. Her guest was still sleeping it off in the shuttered darkness of her bedroom. She was about to flip on the TV to watch the news when she heard a vibrating sound coming from her purse on the counter. In the blur of her late-night arrival, she had never taken her phone out of the bag or turned her volume back up. Annoyed at the interruption, she got up to answer it, reaching into her bag and sliding the green bar to accept the call, not taking the time to register the number on the caller ID.

  “Laney?” a soft voice said from the other end. Delaney froze in mid-stride back to the couch, her entire body tensing. No one in a five-state radius called her Laney.

  “Who is this?” she asked, guarded.

  “Is this Laney Anderson?” The woman persisted.

  “This is Delaney,” she confirmed and corrected. “Who is this?”

  “Laney, this is Claire Sheffield. Your Aunt Beth’s friend,” she offered hesitantly. As soon as the woman said her name, Delaney remembered who she was and recognized her voice. Claire had been friends with her aunt for years. They both sang in the choir and served in the ladies’ auxiliary at Shady Oaks Community Church. If memory served, Claire Sheffield had been one of their soloists, and Delaney recalled that the woman had been one of the few people in the choir who could actually carry a tune. She had often wondered how the woman could endure standing in front of her Aunt Beth’s dissonant alto harmonies week after week on the platform. Somehow, despite that, they had been inseparable friends.

  “I remember who you are Ms. Sheffield,” Delaney said, softening her tone but no less guarded. “Can I help you? Has something happened?”

  The woman took a deep breath and paused. When she finally spoke, her voice cracked with emotion, “There is no easy way to say this, Laney, but your Aunt Beth has passed. We believe she had a massive stroke sitting in her car in the driveway late last night. She had just come home from dinner with our small group. A neighbor found her in her car this morning.”

  For a long moment, Delaney said absolutely nothing. Time stood completely still. A reel of images and sound bites began playing in her brain—her Aunt Beth teaching her to make an apple pie, her Aunt Beth scolding her for climbing the magnolia tree in the front yard in her brand-new Easter dress, her Aunt Beth crocheting baby blankets for the church nursery in front of Jeopardy every night. Her Aunt Beth sleeping soundly in the other room.

  “Laney, are you there? Did you hear what I said?” Claire asked anxiously.

  “Oh, I heard you, Ms. Sheffield,” she responded in a thick, strained voice. “Where is she? I mean…what happens now?” She stumbled uncharacteristically over her words, uncertain what to say. The dull headache she had awakened to this morning now kicked into another gear. She closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath.

  “That’s why I’m calling, dear,” Claire said, her voice filled with kindness, “and please call me Claire. Because your aunt was found in her car, law enforcement had her body taken to the county coroner this morning. They believe it was a stroke but they want to be sure. There will be an autopsy, which takes about forty-eight hours. They will release her body to the funeral home Monday morning. But, honey, you were Elizabeth’s only family, which means there aren’t any decisions being made yet without you.”

  Delaney listened in frozen silence. The thought of her Aunt Beth’s “body” lying on some cold metal table in a morgue left her knees weak beneath her, and she dropped heavy again on the sofa. Her mind was a jumble of scattered thoughts and images. “Thank you, Claire,” she finally responded weakly. “I’m not sure what to say. I have no idea what my aunt would have wanted. Do you? I don’t know whether she wants a burial or what kind of service…would she want a viewing? I just don’t know. I can’t wrap my brain around any of that.” She paused, covered her eyes with her free hand, and let out a ragged sigh. “Oh Lord…I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”

  “I know, honey. Believe me, I know.” Claire’s voice trembled with emotion. She didn’t say anything for a moment, and Delaney could tell the woman was trying not to break down. Claire finally cleared her throat and continued. “I do know that Elizabeth had a will. We talked about it a few times. She and Jimmy have a plot at Shady Oaks, where Jimmy is buried, and I know her funeral expenses and casket were prepaid. I also know for sure she’d want a church service. I was thinking we should try to do it Tuesday or Wednesday. Is that too soon for you to get here?”

  Delaney considered the timing. She was used to making quick travel arrangements for work, and she knew this wouldn’t be difficult. “Let me book a flight and make arrangements, and I’ll call you back. Please proceed with whatever preliminary preparations you think need to be made, and I’ll try to get down there as soon as humanly possible.” Claire left her number and Delaney told her she’d touch base later.

  She hung up the phone and set it on the coffee table. She took the blanket draped over the arm of her sofa and wrapped it around her tightly, drawing her knees to her chest. For what seemed like an hour, she did nothing but sip her coffee and stare across the room. What should she do? How should she feel? She had been totally unprepared for this moment. Her aunt was only fifty-six, and Delaney had never thought about her dying, much less at this age. She had not spoken to her Aunt Beth in at least six months and as infrequently as once a year or so prior to that.

  When she left college in Savannah twelve years ago to take a job in New York, it had put more than just physical distance between them. She wanted to leave her childhood—and everything associated with it—behind. It was nearly impossible for Delaney to extricate her aunt from the ghosts of her childhood, and while she had not meant to abandon her, Delaney had put Elizabeth Lowell in a box marked “Georgia” in the warehouse of her mind and pretty much left her there. She had selfishly assumed that her aunt was “just fine” living her life back at home while Delaney lived hers in New York. They had never had an argument or a falling out, nothing that had set them against each other, and she knew her aunt was hurt and bewildered by the distance Delaney had put between them. A gap that could now never be closed.

  But the town Delaney grew up in, the home she spent the better part of her childhood in, and the people who had been present but oblivious to the horrors of that childhood—they represented a black hole of ugly that Delaney had barely climbed out of and never wanted to return to. Even her Aunt Beth, whom she truly loved, was too close to all of that, though she didn’t know it. And for all the world, Delaney would never have shattered her aunt’s heart by exposing it. She had told herself many times in the last twelve years that her aunt was much better off in a bubble of ignorance, and to preserve that bubble for both of them, Delaney had to stay as far away as she could.

>   In the quiet of her living room, Claire Sheffield’s words still ringing in her ears, she now realized that in relegating her aunt to the corner of her mind, Delaney had never paused to consider, or care, how her aunt was living or whether she had health issues or financial concerns or needed help with her house or her bills. She never pictured her sitting at home alone or sleeping alone or living alone. Beth Lowell had come home from a beloved church group to an empty house and an empty driveway, where she had sat alone in her car and died without a friend or family member beside her.

  If it was possible, an even heavier bleakness seeped into Delaney’s soul. She couldn’t process this outcome or even know how to respond. Her mind floated aimlessly like a bird over a stormy sea with nowhere to land. She had no point of reference and no anchor. She felt as she had for quite a while now.

  Adrift.

  Georgia

  [Ten years old]

  A long line of headlights stretched out behind the sleek black Lincoln town car, ready to proceed from the parking lot of Shady Oaks Community Church to the cemetery two miles down the road. It was an utterly gray day marked by low fog and a steady drizzle of cold rain. People were filing out the side door of the church sanctuary, opening umbrellas, and dashing across the parking lot to climb into their cars and join the procession.

  Delaney sat between her aunt and uncle in the backseat of the town car. She stared down at her hands and the balled-up Kleenex in her palm. Rolling the damp tissue between her fingers, she refused to look at the two vehicles parked in front of their car. Two hearses carrying two boxes. Two boxes carrying two people.

  She looked up at her Aunt Beth, whose elbow rested on the door, a handkerchief pressed to her nose. She was staring out the window at the people crossing the pavement. Rain droplets streaked down the window, blurring the image here and there, but her aunt pressed closer to the glass, her blue eyes roaming in painful gratitude across the landscape of friends and family who had come to pay their respects.