by Marlene Lee
He was very tired. Inside, the double bed took up most of his bedroom. He lay down on it, this bed whose springs would never creak again because his wife was turning toward him. He closed his eyes and listened to the wind pick up strength. It blew across his grave.
When he awoke the weather had changed. Cold rain was sweeping across the mountains. The sill beside him was wet. The smell of rained-on earth rose from the ground and touched him briefly with the sweet, wild scent of boyhood. He got up, closed the windows, and went out to sit on the porch again. Rain water, driven under the eaves, cooled and cleansed him. He drew a long, careful breath. He couldn’t last as long as the mountains or the valley or his house and barn, but he could last as long as a current of wind or a raindrop that returns to the earth for another use. With his foot against the floor of the porch he pushed himself back and forth in the old swing.
Later he put on his rain slicker and boots and let the horses out of the pasture. They whinnied and tried to find his pockets in the yellow slicker. Once inside the barn they stirred up dust with their wet, shapely legs, and snuffled through buckets of oats. Rain drummed on the tin roof. Raymond stood at the open door and watched storm clouds to the north. He felt peaceful and refreshed from his nap and from the cool rain. He’d passed through a difficult two hours with the woman from California. Her absence rested him.
But on his way back to the house to fix an early supper he stepped up onto the porch, slipped on the wet steps, and fell heavily. The world spun while he lay in an undetermined space, struggling to keep Mount Patterson in focus, enduring a flame in his left side that required him to breathe shallowly in order to breathe at all. After a prolonged effort to disentangle himself from the slicker, he reached the floorboards of the porch and stood swaying, stung back into alertness by the rain blowing across his face. Gingerly he pulled open the screen door and walked through. He went to the telephone and dialed standing up. It would hurt too much to sit.
***
Rebecca’s drive down the canyon and into Missoula was fast and wet. She didn’t care if the road was slick. She wanted to put Raymond and his ranch far behind her. The windshield wipers cleared the windshield but not her eyes. This is what comes of trying to be a person in your own right. Of failing to consult Mother for her opinion. Of driving across the country alone. This is what comes of being strong, able to work tirelessly, and wanting to help. This is what comes of talking to strange men.
She was embarrassed. Not just embarrassed. Humiliated. She had thought he didn’t mind her height, skinniness, big feet, and inexperience. She had thought he liked her.
Remembering the night in Wyoming, she moaned with regret. He could have turned around and driven back to Montana. Instead, he cared enough—actually, he was angry enough—to follow her from the motel where she’d called him, to pull in behind her when she tried to hide from him on a country road, to jump out of the car when she started to run, to chase her down the white line of the highway in spite of his heart condition. And then when he caught her, to suggest breakfast at the truck stop. And at the truck stop, to tell her she’d been cowardly and mean to sneak away. That she should have been living her own life all these years instead of living for Mother.
She’d continued eastward on her trip across America, in love for the first time, squinting into the sunrise and mulling over all that he had said.
Now, coming down out of the mountains into Missoula, she pounded the steering wheel and cried loudly. It had been her last chance—first chance, too—to love a man. The man who, a few minutes before, had told her to leave his property, the way Father ordered trespassers off the orchard.
When she reached the bed-and-breakfast on the river, she left her straw hat in the car, hating it and the new work clothes she’d bought, and ran upstairs to throw herself between the carved foot- and headboards of the ornate old bed. Another wave of sobbing struck. Strangely, even while she cried, she was almost grateful to have something to cry about. Unlike her unfocused anxiety attacks, these hot tears knew why they were being shed.
She sat up, untied the heavy boots, removed her work clothes, and crawled between the sheets. This must be what the songs and poems were all about. “I cried over you . . .”
There was nothing more for her to do in the years ahead until she, like Mother, died. There was no reason to live. But if she must live, she would spend her remaining years sleeping. On her death bed, if she was awake, she could say she’d been consistent: she’d slept through her life.
When she awoke, wind was blowing the lace curtains in and out and the sills were wet. She lay in bed waiting for Mother.
Someone knocked on the door. Good heavens. Surely not Mother. Rebecca got out of bed and opened the door a crack.
“Telephone call, Miss Quint.”
“Who is it?”
“A man named Raymond.”
Why was Raymond calling someone he didn’t like? She dressed and walked down to the telephone at the foot of the stairs.
She didn’t bother with hello.
“Why are you calling?”
There was a brand new supply of animosity in her voice. Raymond’s voice was colored, too, in a way she hadn’t heard before. He spoke shallowly and with care.
“Rebecca, can you help me? I fell on the porch step. I need something from town.”
Her mind emptied itself of everything but his voice. She leaned forward, as if he were standing near. “Yes,” she said.
“I need an Ace bandage from the drug store.” She knew exactly what that was. Whenever her brother had an attack of pleurisy, he would wrap his rib cage with the wide cloth tape.
“I don’t have to go to the store,” she said. “I already have one.”
“Be careful driving up the canyon. The road will be slippery.”
She put down the telephone and took the Victorian stairway two steps at a time. If she could have taken the canyon two steps at a time, she would have, but she drove carefully in the stormy, premature darkness and arrived at Raymond’s gate thirty minutes later. She didn’t knock but went right on in to where he sat, pale and exceptionally upright, on the edge of a straight chair in his living room. She knelt in front of him and handed him the bandage. He reached for it and flinched. With his other hand he began to unbutton his shirt.
“Help me off with this.”
Rebecca slipped the shirt off his shoulders and arms, gave it a little shake, and hung it over the back of a second chair. She averted her eyes, but they would not stay averted.
His chest was like a gray fur pelt. She’d seen her father without a shirt. Her brother, of course, many times. While Raymond opened the package, she thought back over girlhood summer swims at the one-mile dam where she’d seen boys from school, their flat chests so different from her own, their swim trunks holding mystery. Mother worried about boys and polio, in that order, and was afraid Rebecca might catch both, swimming in a public place. Rather than argue, Rebecca had stayed home.
Raymond carefully stood and turned to straddle the chair. “You’ll need more room to work,” he said, taking one end of the pink, wide, elasticized tape and holding it under his left arm. “Wrap it around me.”
She did. When she leaned toward him to pass the tape around his back, she knew her breasts were too near him for lady-like behavior, but he didn’t seem embarrassed, and she had the bandage to think about. He rested his arms on the top of the chair back and laid his head on his arms.
“Tighter,” he said. She stretched the tape and continued wrapping. His muscles were loose and his skin rolled a little over the edge of the tape. She liked the soft hair of his chest and the warmth of his back. His shoulders were cool when she brushed against them. The bandage ended behind him, at the waist, and she fastened the folded end to the layer beneath. The clip embedded itself and held. Raymond touched her elbow, cupped it in a way that surprised her, and said, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She picked up her purse and walked toward the door. She d
id not feel anxious. Only sad.
“Have you eaten? I have some left-overs.”
She turned back. He was standing, one hand on his chest, practicing breathing. She watched him take careful steps away from the chair.
“Do you want me to eat with you?”
He took his hand away from his chest and rotated it, palm up, toward her. She laid her purse on the sofa and took it, following him at his slow pace to the kitchen. She’d never warmed up left-overs in her life. Mother and the cook didn’t like her to be underfoot in the kitchen. She spilled things and was clumsy. But today she’d wrapped Raymond’s chest, dead-headed geraniums, shoveled dirt from a ditch. She had found his ranch at the end of a remote canyon, at the end of a road. Surely she could warm left-overs.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marlene Lee has worked as a court reporter, teacher, professor, and writer. A graduate of Kansas Wesleyan University (BA), University of Kansas (MA), and Brooklyn College (MFA), she currently tutors in the Writing Center at the University of Missouri. After graduating from Kansas Wesleyan, she taught English at Salina Senior High School. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous publications. Her debut novel, The Absent Woman, was published by Holland House Books in early 2013.
Of Rebecca’s Road she says:
“I wrote the Rebecca stories one after another, in the order in which they appear, using my own travels as a template. Though less eccentric than Rebecca, though motivated by different circumstances, I share her desire to know more, experience more, and to fill in life’s borders with color.”
http://marlenelee.wordpress.com/