Jason drove her back to her hotel when the evening was over.
“This is out of your way,” she said, a statement rather than a question. Now that she had seen where he lived, she could see exactly how far out of his way it was.
“I don’t mind,” he said.
“Your daughter is precious.” She said it quietly and used exactly the word she meant.
“I know. I realize it more now that her mother is gone.”
They drove in silence for a few moments until he spoke again. “When Libby died, Delia took it hard. That was a rough patch. I took some time off work.”
“That’s good,” Annie said firmly and quickly. “That’s what you should have done.” Another certainty.
They were at the hotel, and she was sorry.
He parked the car, opened her door, and walked her into the lobby. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you,” he said, and his eyes met hers. “I hope you decide to stay.”
“Thank you.” She darted her eyes away, feeling guilty, as if she had done something wrong.
They exchanged good-byes. She returned to her room and sat for a while just thinking about what she should do. There were steps to be taken, and in specific order, and even though she had decided firmly that she would take them, she felt a churn of unexpected emotions, an unsuspected ambivalence. A still, small voice, her grandmother Mamie would have called it, cautioned her, whispering No. She shook her head. The voice belonged only to herself, no matter what Grandma Mamie would have said.
Four
Annie woke early, packed her things, and checked out of the hotel. She called a cab and gave the driver the directions her sister had given her over the telephone that morning. She had felt a mix of emotions to hear Theresa’s voice. Part disappointment, part pure sweet joy. They arranged a brief visit before Annie had to catch a late evening flight back to Seattle. Her sister and brother-in-law had just been sent to Los Angeles. They’d spent most of the last few years in San Francisco, where the headquarters of Dov’s ministry was based.
She watched the driver weave his way through downtown Los Angeles and realized her relationship with Theresa, like so many other things, had suffered collateral damage from the events that had devastated her life five years before.
She had gone straight to them when she had left Sam. They had lived in New Jersey at the time, and she remembered hearing them arguing, her sister and her sister’s husband, the morning after she had arrived. The walls were thin in their apartment, and Dov’s voice was raised. Theresa was shushing him. It wasn’t doing any good. He was an Israeli and was raised in a loud passionate family.
“She needs to go back,” Annie heard him say. “They need to work this out together.”
More shushing and then Dov’s voice again. “How can they work this out if she is in Newark and he is in North Carolina?”
Theresa said something back, a low murmur. Annie turned her head and closed her eyes tightly, though she knew going back to sleep would bring no escape. Her sorrow watched over her during the long hours of the night. There would be no reprieve. She got up and put on her clothes. The same ones she had worn the day before, when she had tried to go back to work. She could not work. What had she thought? That she could write about school board meetings and park budgets again?
She put on the black pants, the white blouse. She brushed her hair and pulled it back. She made the bed, folded the borrowed nightgown, and set it by the pillow. She put on her shoes and went to the bathroom, making noise so they would know she was up and would stop arguing about her.
They were ready for her when she came into the kitchen. Dov, a huge man, looked silly looming over the tiny dinette table, and Annie might have smiled another day. His name meant bear in Hebrew, and he reminded her of one with his huge bulk, his shaggy hair and beard, his ripe, round voice. It was deep and seemed to reverberate through his chest before it filled the room. “Good morning, Annie,” he said, the words vibrating toward her in musical waves.
“Good morning,” she answered, not meeting his eyes. She didn’t have the energy. Besides, she already knew she would leave today. She had never planned to stay here. Well, maybe she had hoped to stay for a while, but it didn’t really matter, did it? She felt no ill will toward either of them. She could not have any more emotion. No disappointment or pain at their reactions.
Her sister was unnaturally busy at the sink. She flashed Annie a too compassionate smile. “Here,” she said, handing her a cup of coffee doctored with sugar and cream the way she liked it.
“Sit down,” Dov said. “Have some breakfast.”
Annie sat down beside the high chair. Her sister’s baby smeared a banana across the tray. She could hear the sound of cartoons from the living room where her nephew watched television. She took a bite of eggs from the plate Theresa put down in front of her. She felt queasy and took a sip of coffee instead.
It was Sunday morning, and in the life she had left, they would have been going to church. She and Sam would have dressed up and gone there and sat among those good people and put on their church faces and listened intently and sung the praises of Him who does all things well. “Wonderful message,” they would have murmured at the door, pressing hands. And everything would have been a lie. She wondered if Theresa and Dov’s church was like that, too, full of liars in its own Messianic, foreign way. They went to church on Saturday, and Dov began the service by blowing on a ram’s horn. Her brother-in-law, the rabbi.
“Annie,” Dov spoke again. “Would you like to talk?”
Annie looked at him. His eyes were kind and soft, and she knew he meant her only good. In an ordinary situation he would have welcomed her for any length of time into their small apartment and busy lives. But this was no ordinary time.
“What has happened between you and Samuel?” he pressed. He pronounced Sam’s name the Hebrew way, Schmuel, and she almost smiled, thinking how hard it would be for southern ears to make sense of what he’d said, to relate it with the multiple syllables they made of Sam. And how like Dov to launch right in, but she supposed it made sense. He was a missionary with Jews for Jesus, and anyone who routinely broadsided strangers in the airport would have no trouble addressing the domestic troubles of his in-laws. She tried to imagine how it would feel now to walk up to a stranger standing in line to check their bags and ask them if they knew the Messiah. She had done things like that at one time with a wholehearted abandon that she doubted she would ever feel again. For anything. For anyone.
“Nothing happened,” she said, and it was the absolute truth. Nothing had happened. The counselor had said they should go away and “talk about their pain.” So they had dutifully gone, Sam even arranging unprecedented time off work in an effort to show her he was trying. She had rented a room at the Cape Hatteras Inn, and they had spent a grim two days there in silence, Sam staring at the floor and Annie looking at his stoic face, wondering when the volcano would erupt. When they arrived home, he had been paged to the hospital immediately. A child had needed him, and he had been almost giddy with relief. She had watched him drive away, seen the plume of dust remain after his departure and finally settle, and that’s when she had known she could not stay there any longer. She had made the brief foray into work, just to clean up loose ends and clean out her desk, then had come home, waiting to tell Sam. But he hadn’t come home. He had called around ten to say he would sleep at the hospital. There was an early morning surgery scheduled, and he was tired. She had quietly accepted his words and then hung up the telephone.
She had gone to their bed, had lain there for an hour or two staring into the dark of the bedroom, but the house was too noisy with memories to sleep, so after a while she had found her shoes and purse, had written a note saying a simple good-bye, and left.
She had driven Sam’s truck out of the yard, bumped over the rut into the road, and just kept on driving. Down the hard-packed red dirt road to the graveled part, to the two-lane blacktop, to the four-lane, and then onto
the interstate. Through Asheville, then up to Virginia, to Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. She had driven and stopped and slept in the truck cab, then driven again. She hadn’t really drawn a breath until she’d reached Newark, with its crowded puzzle of busy streets and cramped buildings, and in their shadows she’d felt cool, felt some of the searing pain ease, like a burn held under a cold stream of water. Her sister had greeted her with opened arms and no words. Dov, apparently, needed verbiage.
“I’m leaving,” she had said to him in a tone that she hoped conveyed her disinclination to elaborate. “And you don’t have to worry. I appreciate the bed, but I never intended to stay here.” More torment clouded her sister’s face.
“Where will you go?” Theresa asked, near tears.
“I’m not sure. But don’t worry. I have everything I need,” she said, then carried her cup to the sink and gathered her coat and her purse.
Theresa had cried. “Don’t go like this,” she begged.
“You know you’re welcome in our home,” Dov said. “That’s not the issue.”
“I know,” she said simply and kissed his cheek. “It’s better this way.” She gave her sister a kiss and a squeeze, as well. She left, closing the door behind her, and afterward she could hear them begin arguing again. This time Theresa’s voice rose shrill and angry over Dov’s low murmurs and the baby’s cries.
She’d gotten into the truck and sat there for a moment. It had been gray October. The leaves had turned. The air was heavy with unshed rain. She wished she could be somewhere things were growing, where things were green and alive.
Its leaf shall not wither.
She knew she had heard that somewhere before, had probably read it in the Bible. Without analysis, she picked up the map and plotted a route to Seattle, thinking of evergreens, knowing nothing about it other than it was a place where things grew all year long, even in the dead of winter. She had known so very little about anything, she realized now, only that she couldn’t bear a stark winter looking at the skeletons of trees.
The cab exited the freeway into Compton now and turned once. Twice. Again, then pulled to the curb. Annie checked the number on the paper in her hand. There it was. A seedy bungalow in a bad part of town. Dov didn’t believe in insulating himself from the people he ministered to. The yard was littered with tricycles, Big Wheels, bicycles, and basketballs, the detritus of their large and happy family. Annie was not envious of her sister, she told herself again. She had made that decision deliberately, as if putting on a garment as each of Theresa and Dov’s four children had been born. She had attended the first two births with genuine joy, for they had been before her sorrow. She had held the warm fresh bodies of her niece and nephew. The third time she had done the same and had let everyone believe her tears were those of joy. The fourth time she had phoned and sent presents and had shed no tears at all. Now she saw her nieces and nephew rarely but sent them birthday cards and Christmas cards, a bill tucked inside each one, and in turn she received thank-you notes in various states of scrawl, pictures documenting their progress from round-faced babies to gap-toothed children. She didn’t feel she knew them, really, as anything other than a collection of names, ages, and pictures on her refrigerator.
She paid the cabbie and gathered up her things. “Could you come back in two hours?” Annie asked. “Just honk. I’ll be listening.”
****
The visit was awkward, and she was thankful she couldn’t stay for supper. Not the reunion with her sister, which was, as always, heart-tearingly sweet. Although seven years older, Theresa had always been a mentor and a friend. But Annie and Sam’s estrangement and Dov’s strong opinions on the matter had strained their relationship to the breaking point.
Time hadn’t mellowed him. He was there, waiting for her, not at work as she had hoped. He embraced her with a shaggy hug, and they inspected each other.
“You’re skinnier,” he said, frowning.
“You’re not.” She smiled back.
“I wish you could stay for dinner,” Theresa said. “The children will be home from school soon.”
Annie felt a pang of regret and wondered why she hadn’t arranged the trip differently. She had no plans. The week yawned before her. Surely she could have stayed here an extra day. The thought flitted by and was drowned out in the dull drone of conversation. She followed Theresa through the house, anxious to leave Dov in the living room. She praised Theresa’s renovation and decorating attempts. She examined the sewing machine Dov had bought her for Christmas, looked at the quilt Theresa was making, and that was the best part of the visit. That was the time when her sister stopped being someone foreign and strange and was her sister again, and they were back at Grandma Mamie’s, at the old oak table, flinging scraps of cloth from the sacks their grandmother produced from the spare-room closet. There were calicos and ginghams, stripes and polka dots, bits and pieces of every garment her father’s mother had made in the preceding fifty years. Annie grinned now, just thinking of those quilts the two of them had made, odd, ragtag creations, unbalanced in color, the patterns shrieking crazily, the seams crooked.
“You’ve moved on,” she told Theresa with a smile. “This is a far cry from where you started, gal.”
Theresa grinned back, and Annie saw her sister as she had been, long coltish legs, brown hair pulled back in a braid, earnestly pinning and stitching. Their sewing times had been one of her few memories of growing up together because of the gap in their ages. By the time she turned thirteen, Theresa had been gone, making Annie even lonelier. Still, Sam’s mother, Mary, had always been a surrogate mother to her, and Grandma Mamie had been there, as well, for most of her childhood. There had been no need for Papa to solve the problem by getting married.
It occurred to her now that perhaps Papa had married Diane because he wanted to, not because his daughter needed a mother, and she felt a little ashamed as she remembered how she had shunned her stepmother. Not that Diane had seemed to lose much sleep over the situation. Annie could still picture her completely absorbed in her spinning and weaving, and she felt the familiar conflicting emotions when she remembered how Diane had been the one to introduce her to those passions. She had grudgingly allowed Diane to show her, to guide her hand on the fluffy pelt of wool as it stretched out and became workable yarn. She and her stepmother had come to a sort of understanding then.
Theresa had never had the problems with Diane that Annie had. In fact, Diane had been Theresa’s staunchest ally when she’d met Dov and had thrown the entire family into a tailspin by running off and marrying him. Dov hadn’t been Jewish for Jesus at that time, just Jewish, posing quite a trial for the Baptist Dalton clan. Theresa and Dov had both come to faith later. With a vengeance, Annie thought ruefully, and once again she dreaded the confrontation with her brother-in-law that must surely occur before the visit ended. There was one every time she saw him, even if it was only an intense look and an exhortation to put away bitterness and return to her husband. How could he understand that it was not just bitterness but hopelessness that kept her away? The knowledge that the man she’d once loved had retreated far away, had gone somewhere she would never be able to reach.
She looked at her sister, who had just finished telling her how she had chosen the colors for this particular quilted creation, a rendition of Missouri Star in shades of green and red, and Annie thought again how odd marriage was, how strange and downright weird that words murmured at an altar could somehow join in the unseen realm two people as different as her sister and Dov, could hold two together so absolutely when their lives had pulled violently apart. Well, there were remedies for that.
“I’m going to file for divorce when I get back to Seattle,” she said quietly when Theresa finished talking. Her sister didn’t seem surprised at the abrupt shift in conversation. Her eyes filled, the only indication she had heard. There was silence for a minute. Another.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Annie asked.
Theresa shoo
k her head. Annie wondered what she was not saying. “You’ve changed,” she supposed. “Go back. Become the person you used to be.” Vain, cruel things, and she understood why her sister remained silent rather than speak them.
They went back downstairs. They talked. They had tea, and for once Dov did not offer her any exhortation. When she said she must leave, he hugged her gently, looked at her with the sad brown eyes, and said good-bye, and Annie felt desolate as she drove away. Unaccountably and unexpectedly bereft.
Five
Everyone was gone when Annie got back to Seattle. When she woke up Thursday morning, her apartment was eerily quiet. No sound of the Weather Channel, Joyce Meyer, or the Today show blaring from upstairs. Mrs. Larsen had told her last night that her daughter was taking her to Vancouver to see her son. There was no thumping, calling, or loud music from across the hall, either. Adrienne was at school and then would be at her father’s until Monday. She saw no evidence of the birthday party save a few paper plates in her garbage can.
She got out of bed, washed her face, and put on her robe. It was brilliant aqua cotton-polyester, zipped up the front, and she had bought it for $3.99 at the Goodwill store. She liked to imagine that it had belonged to some sweet old lady who had worn it every morning as she drank tea and worked a crossword puzzle. She didn’t like to think about how it had ended up at a thrift store. But it suited her, felt good against the cold winter mornings, and hugged her warm at night when the narrow bed seemed miles across and she couldn’t sleep.
She went to the window and compared her view with the one she had had yesterday from the hotel window in Los Angeles. This one was a little lacking. Instead of skyscrapers and bright lights, she could see the interesting, if not beautiful, landscape of the industrial section of the Ballard district of Seattle, the part tucked around the feet of the bridge. There was the Bardahl Oil sign, the parking garage, the body shop, the doughnut shop. And there was Shirley, down on the postage-stamp lawn doing her Tai Chi in spite of the overcast fog of the morning. Even early June in Seattle sometimes leaned more toward soggy spring than summer. Annie dropped the curtain, then opened the sliding door to her balcony. She stepped out onto the small back porch, a rickety affair constructed of two-by-fours slapped onto the brick façade.
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