Rebecca's Road

by Marlene Lee

  “I wish we’d never come to this conference.”

  “Me, too,” agreed Rebecca. “I’m only here because I needed a place to stay. I’ve had more anxiety attacks in North Carolina than in all the rest of my travels put together.”

  “You’re not a writer?”

  “Not at all. I’m on a trip across America.”

  “How far have you traveled?”

  “From California.”

  “Why?”

  Rebecca looked at herself in the mirror. She lowered her head several inches, then quickly straightened because the roots were showing gray again. “I wanted experience,” she said, ashamed of telling the truth. “Until this trip, I’ve never had any.”

  “Everybody has experience,” said Darla. “Just sitting in one place is an experience.”

  But Rebecca wasn’t interested in fine points. “I’ve never had any experience of my own.”

  “Don’t you have friends?”

  “They all moved away after graduation.”

  “Couldn’t you make new ones?”

  Rebecca knelt on the floor to apply the Band-Aid. “It was easier to stay at home with Mother. Anyway, that’s what she wanted me to do, and I always did what Mother wanted.” She looked up into Darla’s face and blushed. “I met a nice man recently. His name is Raymond.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “On a bench in Missoula, Montana.”

  “A bench?”

  “A bench on the university campus. That’s where he likes to sit and grade papers. He’s a teacher.”

  Darla reached down to her heel and idly smoothed the Band-Aid.

  “But Mother told me to forget about him.”

  “How can your mother tell you to forget about him? Your mother’s dead.”

  “Sometimes I still hear her talk.”

  “Mothers never stop talking,” agreed Darla. “And if they’re like my mother, they’re usually right.” Her hands flew to her face and she cried out in a despairing voice, “I shouldn’t have married Timmy!” She looked as if she might faint backwards into the tub.

  Rebecca reached down to smooth Darla’s hair. Her forehead was clammy. “You’ve only been married two weeks,” she reminded the girl.

  “Oh, Timmy! Timmy!”

  Rebecca’s heart began to race, but it wasn’t anxiety about herself. She was afraid for Darla. The child mustn’t return home. She tried to think what Mother would do if she were here.

  “Let’s go shopping,” she said desperately.

  Darla seemed stupefied by the suggestion.

  “Want to go shopping?” Rebecca repeated.

  “Why?”

  “That’s what my mother would do.”

  “Isn’t that avoiding the problem?”

  “Well, yes,” Rebecca admitted. “Mother and I always avoided problems.”

  Darla dried her tears and stood up. “Excuse me for saying so, but your mother doesn’t sound very mature.”

  Rebecca had never thought of Mother as mature or immature. She was simply Mother. “The main thing about my mother was that she knew best what people should do and so everyone did it. Is that immature?”

  “That’s bossy.”

  Rebecca’s heart raced faster. She expected another anxiety attack but felt angry loyalty instead. “My mother was a wonderful woman,” she informed Darla stoutly. “You didn’t know her so you can’t say what kind of woman she was.”

  Darla bent her knee and screwed her head around to look at the bandaged heel. “At least my mother’s mature.”

  “All right, Miss Know-It-All!” Rebecca suddenly shouted. “My mother might have been immature. And she was bossy! But so is yours! I can tell from listening that your mother is immature and bossy!” Rebecca felt her chest fill, not with anxiety, but with a thawing of something old and crusty. She looked into Darla’s startled eyes, looked so deeply that she felt she was looking into herself. “Don’t wait until your mother dies to—live,” she breathed.

  Darla’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t need your advice. You’re not my mother.” And she wheeled out of the room. Upstairs, someone turned on a faucet. The pipes screeched. The lovely flood in Rebecca’s chest dried up. Darla was right. She was the last person on earth to give advice. Hating herself for her fifty years of obedience, she turned and scanned the medicine cabinet for a pill that would make her feel better.

  ***

  Just after midnight Rebecca padded to the bathroom. Half-asleep, she used the toilet, rinsed her hands, and left by—the wrong door. She stopped, frozen in the doorway. Darla and Timmy were so busy making love, the single bulb still on, that they didn’t hear her. They’d forgotten to lock their door from the room side, and so Rebecca saw them face each other, kneel on the bed, kiss and work together until, by some kind of mysterious agreement, they lay back on their pillows, arms around each other, tense and still, until, by more agreement, they began to move once again. They seemed much older than eighteen and nineteen.

  Rebecca was transfixed. She should have immediately closed the door, but didn’t. Their nakedness shocked and aroused her. Moaning, half-singing together, Darla and Timmy were very different at night than they were in the daytime. Mother had been wrong about sex. Some people enjoy it.

  She closed the door carefully and returned to her room. Flushed and overheated, she sat down at the desk and pulled the writing tablet toward her. Through mounting cries in the next room, she wrote a sentence. She stopped and listened, but the sounds trailed off like something moving away from her into the distance. Outside the old stone dormitory, crickets took up the slack and made another kind of sound on their dry, brittle instruments. A languid breeze blew across the window sill. Rebecca applied herself to the writing tablet and produced another sentence. When she finished she carefully removed the sheet from its pink rubber binding and returned to bed.

  ***

  The next day after class she followed the sunlit balcony around to her room, entered, and found the bathroom locked. She stepped out onto the balcony again and knocked on Darla and Timmy’s door. Timmy opened it.

  “Have you seen Darla?” he asked. His left eye had moved off-center again.

  “No, but can you unlock the door?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and stepped into the bathroom. But he stopped abruptly. “What the. . . ?”

  Over his shoulder Rebecca saw the medicine cabinet standing wide open. Every medicine bottle, every jar, every tube was gone. After one stunned moment Timmy turned, ran back into the room, and flung open empty drawers. He leaned on the bureau, arms braced like a man who is going to be sick.

  “She left,” he said.

  Rebecca took a sideways step into the bathroom and examined the shelves, unwilling to believe Darla had stolen from her. In the bedroom Timmy began throwing clothes and books into a pack.

  “Can you give me a lift to the bus station?” he asked.

  Rebecca felt an attack of something coming on, but since her medicines were gone she didn’t have to decide which one to take. By the time she’d finished packing—without her medicines it didn’t take long—she felt better. Timmy was waiting for her in the parking lot. They drove silently to the station. He took his pack out of the back seat and came around to the driver’s side. Through the window he shook Rebecca’s large, spotted hand. Then, impulsively, his sky blue eyes filling with tears, he lowered his head, laid it sideways in the open window, and gave Rebecca a kiss on the cheek.

  “I wish you were my mother-in-law,” he said.

  “Where are you going, Timmy?”

  “To find Darla.” He straightened up and pulled cash out of his pocket. Rebecca waved him away, but he thrust some bills into her hand. “It won’t cover all your medicine.”

  “No, please,” Rebecca said. “Darla’s frightened. She was just trying to fortify herself.”

  Timmy’s left eye wandered out of focus, then centered again. He replaced the money in his pocket and disappeared into the bus station, a muscular ye
t innocent young man. Rebecca sat in the car and cried. She so hoped Darla and Timmy would stay together. Opening her crocheted purse, she re-read the sentences she’d written last night while crickets sang in the darkness and Darla and Timmy made love:

  ‘Dear Raymond, Do you remember me, the woman from California? We met at your bench in Missoula. We ate dinner together and talked. I am coming back to Missoula. Do you want to see me? Sincerely, Rebecca Quint.’

  She replaced the letter in its envelope, sealed it, stamped it, and dropped it in the mailbox on the corner. Then she got back in her car and set off in what she hoped was the road to Montana.

  9

  August Singularity

  From the second-story window Raymond looked down at the bench he considered his own, then turned away. It was empty.

  In the classroom behind him, U.S. Forest Service students scratching away at their final exams represented the end of his satisfying career: forest ranger, administrator, and teacher in the wilderness management program at the University of Montana. Before him lay the oval green campus, quiet at the end of August, the old brick buildings and stately trees imperturbable.

  Raymond had once been imperturbable.

  He glanced at the cumulus clouds overhead, then moved on to his real interest: the horizon. Searching for forest fires was second nature to him. He leaned out of the open window and scanned the sky: its distances were clear and smokeless.

  There were no present emergencies.

  Unless it was the red-headed woman who’d taken his need for conversation as a sign of love.

  He collected the students’ exams while he gave them one last pep talk on the importance of managing our wildernesses, after which he returned to the window and gazed downward again. His eyes widened.

  There she sat, the red-headed woman, looking singular, maladjusted, on his bench. He turned back to the students, shook hands with each, clicked off the lights, and walked slowly down the hall. The test papers were a comfortable weight in his scruffy briefcase.

  As he approached the bench, the woman shaded her eyes with one large hand and squinted up at him. He remembered her green eyes and dry, freckled skin. Her hair roots were growing out gray. He wanted to think she’d been a true red-head before she became a dyed one; he wanted to think she didn’t hear her mother’s voice anymore.

  “I came back,” she said.

  “So I see.”

  She transferred her straw purse from one arm to the other and looked down at her feet.

  “I wrote you a letter,” she murmured.

  He placed his briefcase on the bench. “I was surprised it reached me: ‘Raymond, Teacher, U.S. Forest Service, University of Montana.’”

  “I didn’t know your last name.”

  “Butterick.” The sun was hot on the back of his neck. He took a large white handkerchief out of his pocket. “Where have you been since I saw you last?”

  “Visiting an old school friend in Missouri. Then I drove to North Carolina and stayed at a writers’ conference.”

  “Are you a writer?”

  She folded her arms around her midriff as if she had a stomach ache. “No. It was an accident.”

  “You had an accident?”

  “No, I stayed at the writers’ conference by accident.”

  He wiped the back of his neck with the handkerchief, wondering how you stay at a conference by accident.

  She dipped her head, then lifted it. “I’m sorry I ran away that night when you came to help me.”

  He replaced his handkerchief and sat down. “Don’t mention it.”

  “No one has ever talked to me the way you did.”

  He believed it.

  “You made me face facts.”

  He doubted it. A silence lay between them like debris.

  “It’s the end of Summer Institute,” he finally said. “I have a lot to do.”

  She glanced down at her feet again. A breeze came up, rousing the shrubs and grass. Strands of red hair fluttered across her face. She stood up from the bench, tall, hesitant, ungainly.

  “I’m staying at the same bed-and-breakfast on the river where I stayed before.” She moved her purse from one arm to the other and, discomfited, walked away toward the footbridge that crossed the Clark’s Fork River.

  ***

  The river flowed between brushy banks, past the back wall of a shopping center on one side, a green park on the other. Downstream, Rebecca could see the high, narrow, Victorian bed-and-breakfast where she was staying. She paused to lean on the bridge rail and watch, directly below, two suntanned boys swing from an old tire tied to the bridge supports. They hung over the fast-moving river, shouting in voices that were about to change, pumping rhythmically up and down until the swinging tire reached the height of its arc and shot them through the air and down into the current, two flashing, changing bodies in an afternoon that would soon turn to evening.

  The disturbed water opened to accept them, then closed again.

  During the anxious moments she waited for them to bob to the surface, Rebecca herself was plunged into a river of sorts, an imagined current in which she was swept down the remaining years of her life, faster and faster, with no time to gain a foot- or handhold. Until recently, time had hardly existed. In the fifty years before Mother died, very little had happened. No particular danger or inconvenience to Rebecca. No particular happiness.

  She searched for the two boys. Dear God, had they drowned? She gripped the bridge rail and stared into the river. Needles of perspiration punctured her hairline.

  The boys surfaced. She could hear them laughing. They were swimming against the strong current, back to the tire. They had not drowned. They had popped to the surface, eager to pump and fly and dive again. Eager for the water to close over their heads and eager to bob up through it again and again.

  ***

  The temperature was dropping.

  Raymond stood in the entrance hall of Rebecca’s bed-and-breakfast, listening to the quick rill of the river behind him. When she came downstairs, her head lowered so as not to trip, the only thing new was her hair roots. She still wore the plain skirt and blouse, she still carried the small straw purse, and her feet were as large as he remembered. Where her eccentricity and spotty frankness had been interesting, even bracing, two weeks earlier, she’d lost a lot of credit calling him from Wyoming during an anxiety attack, then running away from him after he’d driven half the night to help her.

  “The weather’s changing,” he said. She smiled at him, taller than he but pleased as a girl that he’d come to call. He softened. “You might want to bring a sweater.”

  When she returned with the sweater he was standing on the porch, looking at the sky.

  “We have something called the August singularity,” he said. “It can snow in August.”

  “I didn’t bring warm clothes.”

  “You probably won’t be staying long.”

  “Without Mother, there’s no reason to go home.”

  “You said your father was alive.”

  Rebecca threaded her long arms into the sweater sleeves.

  “I imagine he misses you.”

  “He doesn’t even miss Mother.” They climbed down the eight porch steps. “He has a fiancée.”

  “Well, God bless,” said Raymond.

  “But he stole the fiancée from my brother.”

  Raymond forgot about the sky and looked directly at Rebecca. “You mean to say his son was engaged to her first?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.” She began buttoning up her sweater with snatching motions of her large-knuckled fingers.

  “Isn’t that—frowned upon?”

  “It’s illegal,” she said. “Incest is illegal.”

  “That’s not incest, is it?” said Raymond. “Incest is when blood relatives . . .”

  “Whatever it is,” Rebecca said, reaching the last button, “it’s not nice. She brightened. “Have you found someone to help you with the ranch?”

 
He didn’t remember telling her he needed help with the ranch.

  “Have you forgotten? You said you’ve lived on the ranch most of your life. You said that your grandparents bought it before the Depression and that it was a good thing since they never could have afforded it after the Depression. That your wife used to help with the work. That your sons helped before they moved to Salt Lake City. You said you’re having a hard time with all the chores since your wife died and you had your heart attack. That’s why I asked you if you’ve found someone to help with the ranch.”

  Good Lord. Had he said all that?

  “My daughter is visiting,” he said, clinging to a vestige of privacy. “She helps.”

  “What about the heavy work?”

  “My daughter can lift anything I can lift.” A moment later he added, “She can lift more than I can lift.”

  “I wanted to work on our orchard but Daddy wouldn’t let me,” said Rebecca. “He believes that women have no business working in the peaches. He always wanted Mother and me out of his way.”

  “And how did you stay out of his way?”

  “We shopped.”

  “I suppose you liked that.”

  “At the time, yes. But now I look back and see how many years I wasted. You’re not learning very much when you’re shopping.”

  Raymond shrugged. He didn’t know about wasted time. He’d never wasted a minute. He’d pushed himself hard all his life, somehow keeping the ranch going at the same time he was employed by the Forest Service. Even now, when the doctor told him to slow down, he took it to mean he should have one job instead of two.

  The air was growing distinctly chilly.

  “August singularity,” Raymond said again, reading the sky.

  “Will we be snowed in?” Rebecca asked cheerfully.

  We won’t be snowed in, Raymond thought to himself. You might.

  “Very doubtful. We’ll get a couple of inches.”

  All this time they’d been walking along the river, watching the water darken. He’d intended to take her farther downstream to the coffee house, but as they approached a large steel-and-concrete building, its stacked terraces recently built out over the water by a development company from Denver, he slowed. The neon sign, ‘Spirits,’ looked inviting. In the glass overhang of the bar a few people sat drinking and watching the light leave the river.