I'll Stay

by Karen Day

  “Thanks, but it’s late.” I glanced at Ben, who nodded.

  Neither Logan nor Beth tried to talk us into it. We followed them to the door and then waved as they drove away.

  “I can’t believe him,” I groaned as I watched the car’s taillights, sharp and red, slowly fade. “He’s so cynical and condescending.”

  “Let it go,” Ben said. “It’s not worth the energy.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t make it so complicated, Clare, when it doesn’t have to be. He likes to pull your chain. After tomorrow, you won’t see him for what, another year?”

  I sighed and looked through the screen to the sky. The moon, round and silvery, hung low over the trees and cast gray shadows across the yard.

  “Let’s go to bed,” Ben said.

  “I’ll come soon,” I said. “I’m just going to close up.”

  He kissed me on the cheek and started across the living room. I opened the screen door and walked onto the flagstone patio. The lawn furniture had been replaced, too, but in my mind I saw the old picnic table where my mother sat writing. Tap, tap, tap, zing! That sound often woke me.

  Logan tried to get her to use a computer but she refused and continued to write on her typewriter, just as she had every day for as long as I could remember. I thought about the morning I woke and saw Lee standing here on the patio. I had forgotten to tell her that no one, under any circumstances, should interrupt my mother while she was writing. But Lee hadn’t let my mother intimidate her.

  Had Lee been here tonight, we’d have rehashed everything. She’d have noticed how Logan and Beth wouldn’t clean up. How funny Uncle Richard was about riding the ferry. How Oliver had been so quiet. She’d have had something to say about all of it, too. She wouldn’t have minded things being so complicated.

  But I was thinking of the Lee from before Florida, not the Lee from after.

  When Sarah called after my mother died—I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly a year—she asked, again, why Lee and I weren’t speaking. But she was less argumentative than she’d been in the four previous years when she’d tried multiple times to broker a rapprochement between us.

  “I don’t get it.” Her voice was gentle. “You two were best friends and now you don’t even talk. And you’ve basically disappeared. No one sees Lee anymore, either.”

  I remembered gripping the phone so tightly that my hand began to sweat and feeling that familiar, sick sensation in my stomach. Disappointment. Anxiety. And guilt, too. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m not in better touch with everyone.”

  “It’s about that night in Florida, isn’t it?” She didn’t wait for my response. “You know, Ducky and I were there, too. We all feel guilty about this.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  She sighed. “I work with rape victims in my emergency room, and I see the toll it takes on them. We should have insisted that Lee get help that night. It would have helped her to address the physical and psychological trauma. Actually, it would have helped all of us.”

  Maybe. But you can’t undo what’s done. You can’t change what happened just because you want to or because you wish you’d behaved differently. As my mother used to say, you can’t wallow in it. You move forward. You get married, find a career, and eventually have children. You try to do your best. You try to be a good person.

  I didn’t know where Lee was with all of this. Because if she’d learned something about that night that had given her peace, that might give me peace, too, then that meant she’d been thinking and maybe talking about it. Did she tell her husband? Had she been to a therapist? And did she tell both of them what I did?

  Without Lee around, without the job of taking care of her, without that constant reminder of what I’d done, I’d been happier. Ben and I were good now and had had so many great times over the last couple of years. On vacation in the Caribbean. At his Christmas party in the hotel downtown when we drank champagne on the rooftop in the snow. The night we moved into our condo and sat on the living room floor, laughing as we celebrated. Not once during any of those times did I dwell on what had happened.

  But now I had that letter and her request and I didn’t know what to do.

  A cool breeze rushed across the lawn and blew the hair off my face. The air smelled like rotten leaves and decay—fall was approaching—and I shivered although I wasn’t cold. I moved the wrought iron chairs so they were neatly aligned against the side of the house, and then I reached up and put my hand flat against the window. The glass felt cold and smooth beneath my palm. I thought about one of the last lucid conversations I had with my mother, before the pain became unbearable and the morphine was increased and she began hallucinating about naked people in the bushes with guns.

  “What ever happened to Lee?” she asked one Saturday in early August. She was lying in the hospital bed in the dining room, the windows open and a warm breeze blowing through the screens. Her bald head was wrapped in a flowered scarf and her skin had a sallow, almost translucent sheen to it. She was chilled and had blankets piled on her, but she wouldn’t let me close the windows. She hadn’t been able to work for days. I didn’t know it at the time, but she’d never work again.

  “What do you mean?” I’d been reading to her from her heavily marked-up copy of Paradise Lost. My mother thought this poem showed Milton’s supreme command as a writer and it was filled with the contrasts she loved—Satan and Christ, heaven and hell, light and dark, good and evil, love and hate, humility and pride. I’d forgotten how much of this poem was about war.

  “You were such thick friends during college and right afterward, and now you rarely speak of her,” she said. “Do you still see her?”

  Over the years my parents had both said to me, why don’t you have Lee come up to the Vineyard? Why don’t we see her anymore? Where’s Lee? I hadn’t wanted to get into it with them. When I finally said that we’d had a falling-out and that over time I was sure we’d be fine, my mother seemed satisfied and didn’t ask me to elaborate. But that day in the dining room she seemed to want something more.

  “We grew apart,” I said. What I’d done was so un-Phoebe-like. And so unlike anything her war heroes had done, either.

  “So, there was no argument?”

  I shifted in my seat. “Why do you want to know?”

  My mother closed her eyes and I thought that was the end of it. But then they shot open, and she tilted her head toward me and said, “Except for your father, I never had a best friend. I’m afraid I wasn’t very good at all of that. But I was always impressed with you and Lee. You let her in, didn’t you?”

  I was so surprised that I nearly fell off my chair. I’d never heard her admit that she wasn’t good at anything nor had I thought she’d given Lee or our friendship much thought. And it made me angry although I didn’t know why. Soon afterward, she fell into a restless sleep and I left and we never came back to this conversation.

  But I’d thought about it a lot over the last year and knew why I was angry. Why didn’t we have more conversations like it? I thought about the cutting board and how I’d been unable to ask for, and tell her, what I needed and wanted. I’d always been hesitant like this with her. So, was our lack of communication my fault?

  But she hadn’t made it easy. She was unknowable. Protective and secretive. Maybe if she’d been more open, more accessible, more—what was the word? Vulnerable. Maybe then she wouldn’t have been so confusing to me and to Logan although he’d never admit it. How much better would our lives have been if she’d allowed me, or anyone, in?

  Lee once said that I had trouble being open and vulnerable, too.

  But I’d tried. I’d let Lee in. Intimacy hadn’t been easy for her, either. I remembered what her aunt said that day in the bar while Lee was in the bathroom. She protected herself by not having many close friends. I protected myself, too. From people who wanted at my mother through me. And maybe for other reasons, too, although at the moment I wasn’t sure what they were.

/>   I pulled my sweater across my stomach and looked up. Millions of stars dotted the dark, silent sky. I remembered a summer night years ago when Lee and I stretched out on the driveway, still warm from the afternoon sun, and counted shooting stars. Where was she right now? Did she think much about me anymore?

  I shivered again and glanced at the house. Tomorrow morning would come quickly. While Ben was out running, I’d make oatmeal for him. I’d make sure that my dad ate it, too. They’d both be grateful for this.

  I stared at the empty space where the picnic table had been and felt a sudden, familiar twinge of guilt. Why hadn’t I done more to help my mother? Maybe if I’d worked harder, probed more, circled back to the conversation about friends, I could have gotten her to open up. Instead, I’d sat at her bedside, day after day, reading, taking care of her, at times silently seething at something I couldn’t quite identify.

  I glanced back at the house.

  “Lycidas.”

  Of course. It should be acknowledged at tomorrow’s service. I turned and started toward the door, certain that there was a copy on the shelf in the living room. And I felt a little better because this was something I could do for her.

  CHAPTER 25

  Mailer didn’t show up and neither did Louise Glück. But Janice, my mother’s editor, was here and so were a few other writers, such as the poet Melinda Stauder, who read the long passage in Listen, Before You Go when Whit describes the oppressive jungle heat to Phoebe. Margaret Ogilvy, also a poet, talked about my mother’s unofficial role as the Mother of Minimalism. My dad, who loved my idea of reading from “Lycidas,” wanted me to do it although no way would I get up in front of everyone. So, Uncle Richard read it.

  We sat in wood chairs in Margaret’s backyard, flowers bursting in vases on the tables near the house, in the gardens surrounding the shed, at the edge of the yard, and along the walkway. The sun, which should have been forgiving now that it was September, seared into my skin every time it peeked through the tree leaves. Birds perched along the stone wall chirped and sang and the air was fragrant with freshly cut grass. Everything was so alive and vibrant, yet we were here to say goodbye to my mother. The scene felt surreal and I imagined her appearing from around the shed, basking in the attention, deciding that she wasn’t dead, after all.

  As Janice made her way to the podium, I glanced at my dad, dressed in a new blue suit with an extra starched white shirt, and sitting forward in the seat next to me as if wanting to make sure he heard every word. On my other side, Ben kept crossing his legs, shifting in his seat, and taking a napkin across the sweat that dotted his upper lip and ran in a steady stream down the sides of his face. This morning, he’d been on the phone with Patrick and got a late start on his run. He hadn’t completely cooled off before showering and dressing.

  “Take off your blazer,” I whispered.

  “You don’t think that’s disrespectful?” he asked. I shook my head. He sighed, relieved, as he pulled off the blazer and draped it across the back of his seat.

  “It’s lovely to be here today to celebrate a wonderful writer.” Janice placed her palms on the podium and looked over the crowd. I glanced at Logan, across the aisle, as he lowered his eyes and stared at his hands in his lap. Next to him, Beth, dressed in a loud pink and green flowered sundress, white-framed sunglasses as large as dinner plates, stared at Janice with a forced smile that made me wonder if she was even listening.

  “Winning the North American Book Award for Listen, Before You Go not only changed Eleanor’s life but changed mine, as well,” Janice began. “Before this, I was an assistant editor, working on mid-list novels. But I knew Eleanor was something special. She worked harder than any writer I’ve ever known. Writing was in her bones and blood and gut.”

  People in the crowd murmured and nodded. My dad sat so still that he didn’t appear to be breathing.

  “It was a privilege to work on something so meaningful,” she said. “Eleanor was a woman full of intellect and conviction. But writing, I believe, served a deeper purpose. Some people write for the thrill of publishing. Some write because they enjoy putting words together. Some write because they have to; their lives depend on it. A sense of fear or anxiety leaves them no choice. This, I believe, was Eleanor.”

  Logan and I turned our heads at the same moment to look at each other. That writing was something over which she had no control was a thought I was sure neither of us had ever had.

  Then Janice began to talk about the early stages of Listen, but I kept repeating a word that she’d just said. Fear. Fear. When my mother was first diagnosed with stage four colon cancer, Ben and I had been incredulous that she’d never had a colonoscopy and only sporadically been to a doctor. It made no sense. Only later did I realize that she was afraid of doctors and what they might find.

  Were these the same kinds of fears that made my mother write?

  * * *

  “I want to introduce you to someone,” my dad said as he reached for my arm. The service was over and I was making my way through the crowd, trying to say hello to everyone. My dad stood next to an older man and woman, both short, bespectacled, gray-haired, and dressed in clothes that I imagined weren’t even fashionable in the 1960s when they were purchased. I knew immediately that they were academics. “This is Agnes Menendez and her husband, Thomas LaFleur.”

  “Nice to meet you.” I reached out my hand. “Thank you for coming.”

  Agnes, who must have been sweltering in her nubby, yellow wool skirt and matching jacket, had a limp handshake. But Thomas’s hand was strong and firm, despite his slight frame.

  “So, you’re the famous Phoebe,” Agnes said, raising her eyebrows.

  I felt my cheeks warm and glanced at my dad.

  “No, no,” he said. “This is Clare. Phoebe was a novel character.”

  “She knew that.” Thomas laughed, nervous, and when he raised his hand to scratch his nose, I saw a long, brown string hanging from the elbow of his mud-colored blazer. Agnes simply nodded, her way of apologizing, I imagined. How could I get out of this? I looked around and saw Oliver alone by the birch tree.

  “Agnes is a Victorian,” my dad said. “She just published a very well-received book on Tennyson’s poetry.”

  “Oh.” I felt off balance in a way that I didn’t like. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “My book is nothing like what Eleanor published. Of course, they were intended for different audiences. Mine required ten years of research.”

  Agnes turned away when a woman I didn’t know tapped her on the shoulder.

  Thomas leaned toward my dad and me and whispered, “Don’t let her fool you. Eleanor achieved the grand triumvirate. Academia, novel publishing, and having children. And she was a female Miltonist, to boot! Agnes never got over any of it.”

  This was ridiculous. Why were they even here? When a waiter came by with a tray of champagne, I reached for two glasses, excused myself, and walked over to Oliver. It had been awkward at the house last night; we barely knew him, and Logan, having had too much to drink, dominated the conversation through most of dinner. Oliver smiled and thanked me when I handed him a glass.

  “It’s nice of you to come,” I said. “I imagine you don’t know anyone but us?”

  He shrugged. “I’m happy to be here. When I got the invitation from your dad, I thought it’d be a nice way to say goodbye. I was already coming east on business.”

  I nodded and sipped my champagne. A cellist and flutist were playing over near the house. Servers were passing mini crab cakes and smoked salmon. Logan and Beth were talking with Uncle Richard and Aunt Denise near the garden. Ben was with the Donahues. And Dad was still enmeshed with the academics.

  I glanced at Oliver. He wasn’t much taller than I was. He wore a blue suit, a white button-down, and a red bowtie. His hair was thinning across the top and his glasses were too big for his face. He drained his champagne glass in one long drink. I tried to remember the day and circumstances when he ga
ve me Ellie but couldn’t. Why hadn’t we seen more of him over the years?

  “When was the last time you spoke to my mother?” I asked. Although she rarely talked about her family, she’d told me multiple times that Oliver was her favorite cousin. And then I suddenly remembered him at the apartment on Dean Street, long before Listen was published, sitting in the kitchen with us.

  “Ages ago,” he said.

  Last night, he told us that he was a lawyer who worked for several wineries in Oregon. The wine he’d brought was so good that even Logan praised it. He told us that his wife had died several years ago and that his children were scattered all over the west. Other than that, he hadn’t said much. He was one of those people who blended into the group; pleasant but not vocal, friendly but not too friendly, confident but not pompous. He felt trustworthy. I liked him.

  “It’s too bad you two didn’t stay in touch.” I’d only had one glass of champagne but it had gone to my head and made me dizzy. “My mother always said her family was so small.”

  Oliver stared at me, barely seeming to blink. “I called several times, especially after Listen, Before You Go was published, but she never called back.”

  I lowered my glass. He stared at me so intently over the top of his glasses that I felt as if he wanted to tell me something and was waiting for a sign from me to continue. I nodded and asked, “Why wouldn’t she call you back?”

  “It was hard for her, I think, to talk to me.”

  “Why?”

  He took his fingers and thumb over the corners of his mouth. “So little was talked about in those days, when we were kids. I listen to talk shows today and think, my goodness. The things people say. And reveal! But then I read her novel and, well, art imitates life, doesn’t it?”

  I tilted my head as I looked at him. My mother had such little patience for memoirs and autobiographies and was so dismissive of confessional poets. But I also knew that writers wrote about what they knew. “Sure, to a certain degree.”