The Goodbye Quilt

by Susan Wiggs

  Molly walked slowly with a curious dignity, her full skirt tolling like a bell with each step she took. So tiny, I thought. A porcelain doll, all alone up there. She didn’t look at the audience, didn’t try to find me with her eyes. She stood still, and my heart skipped a beat. But Molly knew what she was doing. She jacked up the stool to its highest level so she could reach the keyboard.

  We had practiced how to smooth the full skirt in order to sit down properly. She remembered every unhurried move. Her patent leather shoes glittered in the stage lights, dangling above the pedals. Mrs. Dashwood said she wouldn’t use the pedals until she was tall enough to reach them.

  She rested her little hands on the keyboard. This was it, I thought. This was her moment. I took in a breath, ready to be dazzled.

  It was a disaster from the first chord. Wrong notes, hesitation, whole measures forgotten. It was the longest ninety seconds of my life.

  When it was over, I had aged a decade. Molly barely made it through the adorable curtsy we’d rehearsed. She fled into the wings and we found her in the stage hallway, a crushed flower surrounded by blue petals.

  “This is the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she sobbed, going limp against Dan when he picked her up. “This is worse than missing larynx in the spelling bee.”

  “I still can’t spell larynx,” I murmured.

  “We should have gone for ice cream,” Dan said.

  In the passenger seat of the Suburban, I dart my needle into the heart of the fabric, quilting it with the words, “Be audacious.” The cornflower-blue fabric is like new. Molly never wore the dress again.

  She didn’t give up piano, though. Following the recital, she walked into the house, went straight to the piano and played the Bach flawlessly, every note ringing sweet and true through the empty rooms. “Just to make sure I could,” she said.

  Glancing over from the driver’s seat now, Molly notices me working the blue piece. “What’s that one?” she asked.

  I angle it toward her. “Your first piano recital.”

  “I don’t remember that dress.”

  “Bach’s ‘Minuet in G Major.’” The name of the piece usually jogged her memory.

  “I’m blanking. Cute fabric, though.”

  Funny how the heart holds its memories, or lets them go. Each detail of that day is etched into me. I can even remember the flavor of ice cream we got afterward—maple walnut with chocolate sprinkles. Yet Molly has cast the nerves and trauma of that day from her mind. They are not important to her.

  “Remember that red silk charmeuse you wore to your senior adjudication last January?” I ask her.

  “Of course. I brought it along to keep you from cutting it up,” she says, her urgency making me smile. “I love that dress.”

  “I know. I figured you’d want to wear it again.” Unlike the flounces and sashes of her childhood, the red dress makes her look truly grown-up, slender and elegant. Maybe even sexy, with its clinging shape and single bare shoulder. In the same auditorium where she’d once stumbled through a minuet, she had performed last on the program. Supple as a ribbon of scarlet silk in a breeze, she had swayed through a grand, emotional rendition of Chopin’s “Nocturne in C Minor,” a piece he composed when he was seventeen, the same age Molly was.

  Mrs. Dashwood, scarcely changed from the no-nonsense teacher we’d known for years, had handed her a tube of Chanel lipstick and declared her one of her most accomplished students ever.

  The adjudicator gave Molly the highest possible marks and pronounced her the winner of the competition. Had she played better than the other students? It was hard to say. The adjudicator was Italian, a retired professor from the state college. All the other competitors were boys. It was hard not to miss the professor’s enthusiasm for a pretty, talented girl in a red dress.

  Still, I believed she had outdone the others in more than just looks. She had a gift. That nocturne sang with feeling. She knew how to take a heartfelt emotion and fling it wide for all to hear.

  I’m kind of glad she doesn’t remember the first disastrous recital. But I’m also glad I pushed her to do it. It occurs to me how much simpler it is to push your child in the right direction rather than yourself.

  Molly flicks on the turn signal and drifts over to the right lane.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Thread, remember? You need thread.”

  The Suburban glides down the exit ramp and she takes a right, following a sign that points to “City Center.”

  Before too long, we find one of those chain craft and fabric stores. “They won’t have the right kind,” I lament.

  “Then get another kind. No biggie.” She catches the look on my face. “You should have brought more of the magical thread, if it’s so important.”

  We step into the bright commercial glare of the craft shop. “You’re right,” I admit, “but Minerva’s ran out and won’t be getting in any more. She’s closing the shop, you know.”

  “Nope, I didn’t know. I thought it was for sale.”

  “It is. She’s retiring and selling the place, but I doubt she’ll find a buyer in this economy. I’ll miss it. All her customers will. The idea of driving all the way to Rock Springs has no appeal to me at all.”

  “Bummer,” Molly says, tucking her thumbs in her back pockets as she regards a display of notions.

  As always, beautiful fabrics draw my eye. A few impossible-to-resist fat quarters make it into my shopping basket. The lure of a new project beckons. This happens a lot; I get close to the end of one thing and another pops into mind, seductive and infinitely more alluring than the project at hand.

  At the end of a multitiered aisle, Molly fingers a green glass suncatcher marked Special of the Week. “Can I get this?”

  My knee-jerk reaction is, You don’t need more junk. But she takes after me, a magpie drawn to every glittering object that catches her eye. She’s always been this way. Besides, it’s in the shape of a music note, and it’s only five bucks.

  “One more pit stop,” Molly says. Instead of going to the car, she heads into the shop across the way, a department store named Bradner’s.

  I happily follow her. It’s fun shopping with someone who has her figure; everything looks good on her. But when I step into the store, I catch a whiff of White Shoulders perfume. This doesn’t seem like Molly’s kind of shop.

  “What do you need, sweetie?”

  “Come on,” she says, her eyes sparkling. “We’re going to pick out some new clothes for you.”

  “But…”

  “But what, Mom?” Her excitement flashes to annoyance.

  The usual litany of excuses piles up: I don’t need new clothes. I don’t have time. I don’t want to spend the money. I want to lose some weight before I buy a bunch of things. I’m not important enough.

  I look at Molly and grin. “Let’s do it.”

  She did not inherit her fashion smarts from me. Must be all those style blogs and glossy magazines she loves to read. When she teams up with a salesgirl named Darcy, there is no stopping the two of them. I surrender to their superior savvy and wait in a big double dressing room in a bra and panties that have seen better days, bare feet in need of a pedicure.

  The glaring fluorescent lights and full-length, three-way mirror have no mercy. I stare at myself in triplicate, the images growing smaller and smaller into infinity. Molly and Darcy bring in tops, slacks and jeans, silky cardigans and jackets nipped in at the waist, belts and low-heeled pumps. They can’t resist accessorizing with statement jewelry, bright scarves, slender hoop earrings. The attention feels good—and the clothes look good on me.

  Molly hands me a cream leather hobo bag. “You are so pretty, Mom. Wait until Dad sees you. Wait until everyone sees you.”

  In the end, I buy about half of what she wants me to get. Even that seems excessive to me, but with all the nice things to choose from, it was hard to narrow them down. We walk out of the store with a parcel as big as the quilt bag. It’s
filled with new jeans and shoes, a top and sweater and skirt, a wrap dress and hoop earrings, and a melon-colored paisley scarf I couldn’t bear to leave behind. Molly and Darcy made me keep the new undergarments on, leaving my elastic-less ones in the trash. “When you start with a good foundation,” Darcy pointed out, “everything looks better.”

  “Well,” I say, setting the shopping bag on the backseat next to the quilt. “That was unexpected.”

  “That was fun,” Molly said. “Way more fun than a fabric shop.”

  “A different kind of fun than the fabric shop.”

  She’s not done, and her enthusiasm is infectious. On Darcy’s recommendation, we go to a nearby salon for a shampoo and style. We have our toenails polished candy pink and emerge from the salon flipping our hair around and giggling.

  “Look at us,” Molly says, primping in the Suburban’s visor mirror. “We’re new women.”

  Chapter Eight

  The next day, the sheen is off our hair. Molly urges me to wear something new but I decline, not wanting to wrinkle the clothes, sitting in the car all day. The bag with the beautiful new things stays on the backseat. The outfits are too nice for a car trip. I want to save them for something special.

  According to the peeling roadside billboards, we have two choices for lunch—a Stuckey’s that has ninety-nine-cent burgers, or Bubba’s Beach Shack, on the scenic shores of Lake Ontario.

  “It’s a lake,” Molly says. “How can it have a beach?”

  “It’s one of the Great Lakes.” I am nearly cross-eyed from sewing. The end of our journey looms closer, an outcome I can see and practically touch. I stayed up late last night, working on the quilt. Working is, of course, an elastic concept. I can be staring out at the night sky and call it “working” if I’m planning the next quilt.

  “I never thought about a lake having a beach. Back home it’s just…a shore, I guess.”

  “We should have taken you to see the Great Lakes when you were little.” And here it is again, that sense of things left undone, unfinished. What else have I forgotten to show her, to teach her?

  She glances over at me. “You took me to Mount Rushmore and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and the Everglades. You can’t show me everything.”

  “I wish I had, though. We always had such fun on those summer driving trips, didn’t we?”

  There is a heartbeat of hesitation. And in that heartbeat, I hear a contradiction. Could be, she has memories of being hot, carsick, bored. Sometimes Dan and I were short-tempered and we were terrible at picking out places to stay. Bad motel karma became a family joke. Remembrances of summers past are marred by nonfunctioning swimming pools, moldy smells, shag carpets.

  “Sure,” Molly says. “We had a blast.”

  “But the Great Lakes—I remember going to Mackinac Island on my high school senior trip. I saved up for months in order to go. It was so beautiful, like stepping back in time. I wish we’d taken you there.”

  “You can’t take me everywhere,” she repeats.

  New adventures lie ahead of her, a vast stretch of unexplored terrain. She’ll be taking trips without me, seeing and experiencing things I’ll never share. Which is as it should be, I remind myself.

  Without further debate, she takes the next exit and wends her way through a threadbare town of redbrick buildings and convenience stores plastered with fading advertising posters. The route to Bubba’s is well-marked, and within a few minutes we enter Tanaka State Park in western New York, a quiet oasis on a weekday afternoon. As we head to ward the water, I notice that the colors of summer are fading here, the greens subtly shifting to yellow, the wildflowers casting their petals to the breeze.

  The beach shack is adorable, and I’m instantly glad we’ve come. It has a huge deck with picnic tables covered in red-and-white checkered oilcloth, and a long dock reaching out to the deep, wind-crested waters of the lake. And it truly is a beach, fringed by sand and weathered by wave action. From this perspective, the lake looks as infinite as the sea itself. There are even herring gulls here, and I wonder if they lost their way and became land-locked, and if that would matter to a bird.

  The waiter is the sort of gorgeous teenage boy who makes me feel like an urban cougar as I check him out. I can check him out as much as I want, because he has not even noticed me. He’s eyeing Molly. Who wouldn’t? Boys have always been drawn in by her pretty eyes, her smile that hints that she knows a secret.

  We order the fish fry lunch, and it arrives in paper-lined baskets with French fries and coleslaw. It’s beautiful here, and graceful boats skim across the water in the distance, the sails puffed out in the breeze.

  “Check that out,” Molly says, indicating a parasail kite flying from the back of a speedboat.

  “Yikes, looks scary.”

  “Looks awesome.” She dips a French fry in her coleslaw, a habit she acquired from Dan ages ago. She gazes dreamily at the sky, studying the little sailing man with stick legs, like a paratrooper GI Joe.

  As we watch, the parasail is reeled into the back of the boat, and they tie up at the dock right below the restaurant.

  “It’s definitely awesome,” the cute waiter says, coming to refill our iced tea glasses. From the pocket of his half apron, he hands her a card. “Here’s a coupon for $5 off a ride.”

  I shake my head. “We won’t be needing—”

  “Thanks.” Molly snatches the card. “Thanks a lot.”

  “We’re not doing it.” I dole out cash to cover our tab, leaving a generous tip even though I wish he hadn’t put ideas in Molly’s head.

  “Come on, Mom. We’ve got time.” Ignoring my protests, she heads down the stairs to the dock, her steps light with excitement. When I get to her side, she’s already talking with the guys in the speedboat.

  “It takes fifteen minutes,” she says, “and we won’t even get wet, except maybe our feet.”

  “We’re not doing it.”

  “Ma’am, it’s very safe. I’ve been doing this for years,” the boat driver assures me.

  I hate looking like a stick-in-the-mud. But I also hate the idea of dangling several hundred feet above the lake, tethered to the world by a rope no bigger than my finger.

  Molly has that expression on her face. I don’t see it often, but when I do, I know she means business. The stubborn jaw, the fire in her eye. A minute later, she’s signing a faded pink form on a clipboard without reading it, and asking if I’ll pay the fee. I haven’t read the disclaimer, either, but I’m sure it absolves the boat guys of any liability if we happen to wind up at the bottom of Lake Ontario.

  Studying the form over her shoulder, I point out one line. “It says here you need to weigh at least a hundred pounds. Last I knew, you were just under that.”

  She shrugs it off. “After this summer, I’m well over a hundred.”

  The boat guys seem to believe her. They put her in a high-tech life vest and helmet and she kicks off her shoes.

  “A helmet?” I ask.

  “Just a safety precaution,” the man says.

  I want to ask how a helmet is going to keep her safe if she plummets into the lake. I want to say that she’s never tipped the scale past a hundred pounds, but I stop myself. It’s my nature to cite the potential disaster in every situation. I recognize that. So, apparently, does Molly, because she learned to dismiss my fears years ago. She has gone mountain biking, horseback riding, scuba diving. A spirit of adventure is good, I remind myself. It’s small and mean of me to dampen it.

  Just the other day, I was thinking about what a pushy mother I’ve been. But the things I pushed her to do didn’t place life and limb at risk. Especially pointless risk.

  She’s grinning ear-to-ear as they harness her to the sail. “’Bye, Mom,” she says. “See you when I come back around.”

  “Be careful,” I can’t help saying, and now there’s a fire in my eye as I send out warning signals to the boat driver and his helper.

  Then there is nothing more to say as they head away fro
m the dock, the big engine cutting a V-shaped wake behind the boat. My heart is in my throat as they reach open water, and the rainbowcolored sail fills with wind. Then, a moment later, Molly is aloft, a tiny doll tethered by a slender cord. She flies like a kite tail, higher and higher until they run out of rope. I shade my eyes and look at her, silhouetted by the sun.

  Then my heart settles and I wave both arms wildly over my head. “Go, Molly!” I shout, jumping up and down on the dock. “Go, Molly!”

  Watching her fly is incredibly gratifying. I fumble with my mobile phone, try to get a picture to send to Dan. She’ll probably look like no more than a speck against the sky, but he’ll get the idea.

  A gust of wind ripples across the water in a discernible path. I can actually see the gust filling the sail and then turning it sideways. Molly’s stick figure legs swing to and fro like a pendulum.

  “Omigod,” I say. “Omigod, she’s going to fall.”

  Apparently the boat driver knows something isn’t right. His partner starts cranking in the cord, his movements fast, maybe frantic. I stand motionless on the dock, my feet riveted to the planks, my stomach a ball of ice. Here is the definition of hell—knowing something terrible is happening to your child and being completely powerless to stop it.

  If she dies, I think with grim clarity, so will I.

  The wind whips her like a rag doll. Her screams sound faint. I wonder if she’s calling my name. I send up a prayer, pushing it out with every cell of my body and soul.

  The screams grow louder, and then I realize she’s not screaming at all. She’s laughing.

  Chapter Nine

  “You should try it,” Molly says, combing back her wind-tossed hair and pulling it into a bun. She is still shivering from the lake, her lips tinged a subtle blue. With her hair pulled back, she looks sophisticated, older. We return to the beach shack to get her something warm to drink. The hunky waiter hovers, bringing her hot tea in a small stainless steel pot.