by Kris Radish
31. Sign the final house papers.
32. Pick out all the extras for the condo. Stop procrastinating.
1. Stop being afraid. (Here I go again.)
It’s possible. Connie leans her lovely blonde head towards the wall and decides to rest it there. She is thinking that if it happened once it is very possible that it may happen again. Why not? Why the hell not? After this past month, and part of the one before it, is anything not possible?
Her house could speak again. Connie knows that if it happened once, even if the electrical problem was fixed, it is very possible that it may happen again. The trapped whispers and sighs and yearnings of her entire family could leak out into the palm of her hand. They could leak out and filter down her arm and back into her heart where they belong.
“Come out,” she whispers seductively with her lips touching painted plaster. “Speak to me. Please.”
Nurse Nixon has returned to the Franklin Nixon homestead. She has shuttled back to Indiana with her bulging suitcase, her new wardrobe, more than enough Diva supplies to last her the next 20 years, a new face, new hair, choices times one hundred, and a deep and throbbing desire to stand in place for just a few moments, breathe quietly, search for the answers to the unlimited questions she must address, and simply let the past few months settle into some kind of solid and recognizable form.
If such a thing is even possible.
Not to mention there is a stack of mail to choke a well-maintained physical trainer, a yard that looks as if it is eating itself, unpaid bills, a list of people who want to see her house, condo papers to finalize, a new job to consider, phone calls, the last purging of the house. And an uncontested fight to get and keep #1 off of her list of dreams.
And this one looming and terribly immense deadline. She has one week. Seven days to make yet another decision because the Diva Sisters need to know if she wants to manage the Chicago store, if she’s in, if she wants to keep moving in this direction, plunge full-time into the lovely world of Divaness, manage the staff, sit on the executive board, help with the Midwest expansion plans, the ever-increasing demand for sex-toy parties—or lurch back towards whatever is left of her prior life.
How Connie wants the silent walls to speak to her.
How she wants to wake up the band that has gone into hibernation inside of the kitchen walls.
“Frannie, I need a break from my break,” she told O’Brien the morning she decided it was time to get on an airplane and head west. “I need to lie down on my ratty couch for more than an hour, process what has happened, and make some pretty heavy decisions.”
“Get home,” O’Brien ordered. “Don’t do anything rash yet—well, anything more rash than you already have. We’ll make believe we’re back at work together and plotting the takeover of the entire health care industry.”
“I’ve missed you.”
“Ditto, baby,” Frannie shared. “Slink back here and I’ll help you ease into your decisions.”
Ease?
Where’s the ease? Connie wants to know. The love is everywhere and now it is up to her to find the ease or make ease out of what suddenly seems like a pile of chaos. Sex toys, Michael, all these daughters she feels as if she has just gotten to meet for the very first time, the choices she moaned and begged and yearned for not so long ago, and the calm stint she thought she had designed for herself during her three-month retirement.
Where to start?
Connie willed herself into practicality and savaged through the first two days back in Cyprus as if her entire body were on fire. She mowed the lawn and answered calls, checked in at the old hospital and the new medical facility, let Sabrina and Macy know she was back from New York, but nothing more than that, and then she made a list of everything else that she needed to finish.
Another list, but this one was not as dreamy as the totally tattered pages she had attacked during the past couple of months.
By Wednesday morning the house was as good as it was going to get for a real-estate showing, as long as no one looked too closely in the garage where she was careful to tuck Jessica’s box of Diva plans into a well-hidden position, and Connie had assigned herself the task of disappearing for most of the day while a series of eager purchasers pawed their way through the house.
Michael thought a nice solution to her numerous problems would be to move to New Orleans and open a Diva store there that would not only help the faltering economy of Louisiana, which continued to stumble from being washed out to sea, but would also help to keep his personal economy right where it needed to be.
“Like you need any help,” Connie retorted, bragging before he had a chance to do it himself.
“At least think about it,” he told her.
“What? Because I only have to make a thousand decisions by the end of the week?”
“No, because we are so good together.”
“Michael, we just met.”
“Connie, remember when you couldn’t even say the words ‘sex toys’?”
“Barely.”
“You slept with me.”
“I did?”
Michael’s laugh was a wink away from being totally irresistible. It was one of the many, many things she liked about him, but on her list of things to do this week, get tied down in a serious and lasting relationship wasn’t really that close to the top. He knew it too, but Michael also knew about lost chances and being too afraid to try something because of something else that was still lodged in your memory bank. Something that needed to be permanently erased or ignored, like a bad dream.
“Here’s what I do know,” he had explained before he left New York on what turned out to be not just a one-day, but a three-day visit. “I am totally attracted to you. You are fun, and sexy, and sweet, and smart, and I don’t want to let go of that, Connie. Call me a sap but I could fall right in love with you.”
Love.
Connie did not totally freeze because her left eye twitched, but she was as close to freezing as possible. It was a number, two numbers, actually, on her list of dreams that she was not quite ready to shift into her front pocket.
“You just like me because my daughter owns a sex-toy store,” she had finally managed to say.
And they left it there, just like that, blowing in the wind that drifted from Cyprus to the swamps and back again. Just there, with talk of a visit back to New Orleans, and one to Chicago, and another to Cyprus, and long phone calls, and Connie thinking about him when she should be thinking about five thousand other things, and remembering the night, and the two after that, in his suite, and the mornings, and the terrific shower, and the lunch they never ate, and wondering how for the love of God she had lived so long without it.
Without sex and lust and passion.
And that was the question, she knew, the real question she had to answer in the days she had to pick through the sides of her life back in Cyprus, Indiana. And as hard as she knew the excavation process might be, she also knew that it would be a journey that could prove to be fascinating, fun, and not anything like the days she thought she would be having when she pored through her list of dreams.
The list. The leather book was now resting back in the lap of the rocker and she remembered to pick it up and stick it inside of her underwear drawer minutes before the real-estate agent drove up, as she headed back towards the old hospital, the new nursing facility, and out to see the condo that might be hers eventually.
Or not.
O’Brien was waiting for her not so patiently at the hospital where a parade of morning catastrophes had made her want to jump from the same window she constantly kept her patients from imagining as a jumping-off point.
Connie had made the obligatory trudge through her old unit, past the administrator’s office, through the break room and back towards O’Brien’s unit where they sat in O’Brien’s office and looked at each other like two extremely happy but slightly confused women.
Rolling through her visit to the hospital, Connie explained t
hat coming back was like stepping into a time-warp machine. Everything suddenly seemed old and long ago. Connie flashed back with O’Brien to all the moments when someone they were working with departed for a new position, or some portion of a new life, and how that change would throw them and everyone they worked with into some kind of introspective place of wondering.
Wondering if they should be making a change. Wondering why they stayed. Wondering what would happen if they made a change. Wondering what was beyond the large entrance doors to their world.
“I don’t miss this,” Connie admitted. “It’s like suddenly entering a strange land. I had no idea I would feel this way.”
“It’s old stuff, Connie. You were ready to leave this place a long time ago. It’s good to know for sure, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but what if I feel the same way when I get over to the new job? What if I walk in and want to vomit and feel as if that world is just as old?”
Frannie looked at her friend and smiled. She smiled and asked her why she was suddenly so afraid. So weary. So unsure.
Connie didn’t have to hesitate to answer. She had everything planned. She had her list. She knew where she was going. There was a mild plan that could have been altered here and there and, when she looked up, she could see where she was going.
“Jesus, Connie, you need to stop for a second.”
“I know,” Connie said, dropping her head and running her hands through her hair. “I feel like I ran into a wall that wasn’t supposed to be there while I was going as fast as possible.”
Frannie reached across the table and put her hand on Connie’s arm. She said she had an idea. A little idea.
“What?” Connie asked.
“First of all, none of this is bad,” O’Brien offered. “This is all good stuff. Choices, chances, places, new people. I bet it was all on your list but maybe it looked a bit different to you. But it’s also a lot to digest, and there isn’t a lot of time, which really has never mattered in the past.”
“So?”
“What did we always do, what have we done for years when we needed to be, or settle or solve or just act stupid?”
Connie smiled and sat back up.
“The lake and dunes. Can we go?”
“Yes, baby. We have to go. I’m the psych nurse here and it’s part of your rehabilitation plan.”
First, Connie agreed to go visit the medical complex where she was scheduled to start work as a consultant in just a few weeks. Act like you are going to go there all the time, like it’s your job, and see how you feel, O’Brien advised. Then she was to spend part of a day at the new condo. Walk the neighborhood. Think about living there, turn around when she was pulling out of the driveway to go someplace and see the house, the condo, that part of her life. Sit in the yard. Look out the windows. And then back to the old house. The one with the stuff in the garage. The one guarding her list of dreams.
“We’ll go Friday after I’m done with work,” O’Brien told her. “I’ll call and see if we can get a cabin. We’ll do the whole thing. Stop for a fish fry, get our wine, pull in late and sit in the dark while we watch the waves for a while. Then we’ll get to it.”
And you, O’Brien, Connie thought as she got up to start on her assignments with hearty resolve, how could I ever live without you?
They always stop at the Wind Drift Café, a small corner joint blocks from their favorite motel and cabins that they had discovered ten years ago and had claimed as their own oasis, more than a port in the storm, a lively, down-to-earth pub and restaurant that served whitefish so fresh O’Brien swore to God every single time they ate it that her plate was still moving.
Their Northern Indiana Cheers never changed and that, of course, was part of the charm. The Friday night waitress, Mary, would probably die serving french fries; the bartender, Bruce, would do likewise, serving his five millionth old-fashioned to one of the crusty local guys; and the owner, a saucy redhead who was pushing 80 and had been flirting with O’Brien’s husband Daniel since the day she met him, always treated them like empresses.
“I’d sure as hell miss this place,” Connie admitted, diving into her tart cole slaw, a kind of Midwestern must-have salad that is a mandatory part of a traditional Catholic, old-school Friday night fish fry. “Do you know that I’ve driven up here a few times by myself just for this fish, and to gab with all these wonderful people?”
“Me, too,” O’Brien confesses. “I actually drove up the weekend you were in New Orleans because Daniel was wrapped up with work and I needed to breathe some of this lake air.”
“Hey,” Connie says brightly, reaching across the tartar sauce. “If Daniel dies, or runs off with the meter maid, and things don’t work out with the Swamp Man, I’m going to marry you.”
O’Brien doesn’t flinch.
“Another mixed marriage?” she jokes. “If my mother isn’t dead by then she’ll die on the spot. Another white family relative will push her over the edge. And, oh, yeah, we couldn’t hold the reception here by the lake because we’d have to get married in a foreign country, what with the same-sex issue and all, which is a very perfect reason for moving to Canada, if you ask me.”
They joke, but both women know they could live together in a second and that, no matter what Connie decides to do with this lively middle section of her life, they’ll always make time for the Wind Drift, these quick getaways, and each other. Those facts are without question. Everything else is hanging fire or, at the very least, smoldering lightly.
Connie loves the ebb and flow of the conversations at the restaurant where people listen in on each other’s discussions and then add what they think, buy you a drink and ask if they can eat your leftover bread without hesitation, guilt, or a second thought.
“There is some of this in Chicago and New York,” Connie stresses as they force themselves to leave so they can catch the sunset. “It’s easy to get seduced by a city but really, nothing’s like the Midwest, and the open charm that seems to pour from just about every place and every person.”
“Write that down,” O’Brien urges. “We need to keep tabs to help you make your decisions.”
“The decisions,” Connie says, faking self-strangulation with her hands as they get into the car. “The dreaded decisions.”
Frannie has managed to book a room at a small, old-fashioned-looking hotel right on the edge of the Indiana Dunes State Park that is deceiving on its faded exterior because the rooms have been gutted, fitted with new floor-to-ceiling windows, private decks, and new interiors that are small but as charming as anyplace they have ever stayed. Their favorite cabin, a rustic number right in the park, was swallowed up weeks ago during the rush to be near water in the middle of summer.
But first the requisite and very quiet drive down a road they had discovered years ago. It parallels a private patch of land leading out to what they call their ocean but what is actually the south end of Lake Michigan. The road is not on any map, and had probably been designated for abandonment, but has been lost in some kind of unique paper shuffle. And there it is every single time they make their homage—a narrow strip of asphalt that curves around a field, past a very old farmhouse, and ends abruptly behind a stand of sturdy pine trees that holds fast in the rising white sands that stretch for miles in either direction, and shifts just as much as the rest of the world around it.
Glorious solitude.
A lively summer breeze.
The still-warm summer sand.
A sun dropping like a slow rock.
The soft swooshing sound of bird wings.
Not another person in sight.
And wise O’Brien running back to the car for a special bottle of wine, two sturdy plastic glasses and a flashlight, before the sun turns the corner.
“Connie,” O’Brien finally says after she has opened the wine and passes a glass to her friend. “Guess what?”
“What, honey?”
“This is that Australian stuff you were drinking the night you
heard the house talking.”
“Really?”
“I put a whole case in the car.”
“Are we expecting company or is this going to just be a wild, drunken weekend?”
“Just us, just for us and for the hours of talking, and because I couldn’t lift the damn thing out of the trunk by myself.”
Connie laughs and takes a sip and swears to God she immediately hears what sounds like a gaggle of singing sailors. She looks at O’Brien, who hears it too.
“What the hell?”
They turn towards the sound and see a long irrigation pipe sticking up, right into the wind, that Connie guesses immediately is whistling and echoing because their bodies have blocked some portions of the lake breeze.
“Shit,” they both say, laughing at once.
“It was on the list,” Connie says next.
“What?”
“A case of dry red wine. Or buying some really expensive wine. It was on my list of dreams.”
Connie brings the glass to her lips, takes a sip, and holds the wine inside of her mouth for a very long time before she swallows it. When she does, she tastes the rich tannins of a wine that likes to bite and slap taste buds on the way down. She filters a drop of earth, a pinch of the sky, a hint of lemon, and feels the breath of a baby on her neck, the wine floating towards her bloodstream, a warm ache at the very tip of her pubic bone.
“It is on the list.”
“It was pretty expensive, you know. I think you wanted it to be expensive.”
“Anything over ten bucks is expensive.”
“Thank God,” O’Brien says, feigning a fainting spell. “I just made it—this was twelve bucks a bottle and there was no discount for the case. This is a big deal, baby.”
A big deal, Connie repeats, as they launch into a conversation that will take them through another bottle of wine and into the slice of darkness that they can actually see riding across the lake on waves that get longer with each gust of wind. A big deal, as they shift their hips, lean into each other. O’Brien lights up one of her damn cigarettes and Connie grabs one and smokes it too and then puts it out after three puffs because she finds it as disgusting as sucking on a dirty sock. A big deal, as they talk about the list and life.