“I thought you’d left me,” he said. “I couldn’t bear that.”
He brought me presents: a kitten from a little girl he’d met in front of the food co-op who had a box of them to give away. A bottle of green drawing ink and a brush made from a lock of his own hair, tied to a piece of bone, a music box, and a pair of very delicate silk slippers that I suspected he may actually have stolen from the house of a rich woman he worked for briefly. He brought me a velvet purse, inside of which were shells he’d gathered on the beach for me, that he laid, one shell at a time, over the naked skin of my belly. One day he came back from town with fresh oysters, also gathered on the beach, with the plan of feeding them to me, but he couldn’t get them open, so finally, after an hour of trying, he drove back to the beach to set them free again.
“They shouldn’t die for nothing,” he said.
He said we should invent our own language that no one else would understand, not that there was anyone around to listen to our conversations anyway.
“The government probably has its eye on me right now,” he said. “On you too, just because you’re with me.”
KNOWING WHAT I KNOW NOW, it is difficult to describe what it was like, loving Ray. Years ago a recovering crystal meth addict spoke at my son’s school. She said that even after ten years clean, she still missed the way it felt to have that deadly substance in her veins. If she’d kept using it, she would have died. Still, life without the drug felt, sometimes, like a lesser thing. A sad though necessary comedown.
Listening to her speak in that auditorium filled with my fellow concerned parents, sitting next to my good husband with whom I’d lived at that point for close to twenty years, the image of Ray’s face was all I could see, and a wave of grief and longing overtook me, so strong I had to cover my eyes. Even after all that time.
Back in our British Columbia days, the way I felt when he was in me was like no sensation I have ever known, and I could have swooned from the rapture of it. After a while of being with him, the simple act of his touching my hand would cause my pulse to change, bring heat to my skin.
He had made a name for all the places on my body he loved to touch, which was all the places on my body. He made me promise I would never speak these names to anyone but him, and in spite of everything else that happened in the end, thirty years later I never have.
Our lovemaking went on for hours, leaving me exhausted. I was too weak afterward to try and make friends, or make art, or even clean the house. All around us things were falling apart, but there never seemed to be any time to put them back together.
He sang to me, songs he made up—every day another different strange lyric and tune. Because he never seemed to rest, and I did, he would sit on the edge of the bed sometimes and play me to sleep with his harmonica—Gypsy-sounding tunes that invaded my dreams.
Many times he told me he wanted to have a child with me.
“Where would the money come from?” I asked. “How would we live?” I might be able to sleep in a frozen bed, with nothing but rice in my stomach, but I knew if we had a baby, I would want more for her. School, friends, a house with running water, cookies in the oven, birthday parties, a Christmas tree.
As we were living now, we hardly ever saw anyone but each other, though increasingly—on those rare occasions we’d drive to town to pick up supplies—I’d find myself looking for opportunities to strike up a conversation with someone. It didn’t matter who, a different voice was all. And then I’d feel guilty, as if I had betrayed Ray, knowing what he had said to me a thousand times: that he would never need any other human being but me. Me and our child. A universe of three.
Sometimes I imagined what my father would think if he could see me in this place. I would picture his gentle, worried face—the expression he had when too many days had passed without rain, or one of the cows had milk fever, or deer had gotten into the corn, and the homesickness would come over me. I wanted to be with Ray, but I was missing parts of the world too. I wanted to believe there was a way to have them both—the things I had loved, and the man I loved more than anything—but I didn’t know how to make this happen.
By the time fall came—close to a year now from when I had arrived on the island—Ray was talking daily about the two of us having a baby. He knew it would be a girl, he told me, and he even had a name for her: Daphne.
I had been using a diaphragm—a purchase I’d made right before flying to Vancouver, on my way to being with Ray. Now every time I took it out of the case, he shook his head. “What about Daphne?” he said. “Don’t you want her to come live with us?” He said it as if there were a real person just outside our door, alone and shivering, in need of nourishment and rest, and I was denying her. Sometimes, when we made love now, it was as if the face of our unborn, unconceived child was pressed against the fogged-up glass, pleading with us to let her come in.
“I want to throw that thing away,” he said. “I want to burn it.” But I put the diaphragm in anyway. I could not see us as parents, responsible for another person besides ourselves.
Then, one November night we were lying in bed together—moonlight streaming in the window, slashing across the naked body of the man I loved—and I found myself talking to Ray about something that hardly ever came up with him, consumed as our life was in the present.
“All my life, I’ve had this feeling that I didn’t really belong in my family,” I said. “I love my father, and maybe I love my mother and my sisters, but they feel like some other species of being from me. I don’t really know them. They don’t know me.”
“I am your family now,” Ray said.
I knew this. But one person didn’t seem like a family. You needed more than that.
“Let’s make our family,” he said. “We’ll be our own tribe. That comes from us and no place else but here.”
That night we made love without the diaphragm. “You are my family now,” he said, his eyes burning into me. “The only one I need. We’ll make our own good family.”
I believe I knew the instant it happened that we’d conceived a child, and by the next morning I could feel it in my body. A few weeks later, I made him take me to the clinic in town to confirm this. From the moment I told him the news, Ray couldn’t stop smiling. For me, there was the oddest mix of feelings: joy mixed with a clutch of panic whose origins I could not fully identify. Partly, I think, I was just so terrified that this might change everything between Ray and me. Nothing, not even a baby, was worth risking that.
But another worry plagued me too. I had loved the way Ray felt things so deeply, and how I could always make things right for him. Now we were introducing a child into our delicate, often precarious balance, and I couldn’t help comparing the probable future to my own past. As lonely and frustrating as it had felt, growing up with my two quietly stoic parents, there had been a sense of comfort in knowing how strong my father was. When our barn burned down, when the crops failed, when my sister and I ran away to Woodstock, my father had remained steady as a heartbeat. An hour had never gone by in which I didn’t know that whatever happened, he would take care of things. I tried to imagine how it would be for our baby, who would look to her father for strength and protection. And find a man less able to offer support than to require it from those he loved.
Thinking about my father as I was now, I registered a surprising impulse.
“I want to call my parents,” I said.
All that year, I had told them almost nothing of what I was doing. The handful of notes and cards I’d mailed home—no return address—had said, simply, that I was living on an island in British Columbia and was happy.
Now I wanted them to hear my news, and the wonderful fact that the father of my baby was a man they’d known most of his life, the older brother of my birthday sister, Dana Dickerson. Our families would be truly linked in the way my mother always seemed to want.
We placed the call from a pay phone outside the clinic. I could hear the ringing, imagined the two of them
in the family room, having washed the dinner dishes and watching television probably. Or my father would be reading, my mother doing a jigsaw puzzle or working on a quilt.
“It’s Ruth, Daddy,” I said, when I heard my father’s voice come on the line. “I’m calling from Canada with news. Can you put Mom on?”
Then I told them. On the other end, after I’d said the words, only silence.
“Are you sure about this, Ruth?” my mother said. Not the excited tone I’d expected from a woman whose whole existence for the last ten years had seemed focused on the arrival of grandchildren.
“We got the test today,” I said. “I’m six weeks along.”
“That’s really something, sweetheart.” This from my father. From my mother, still, nothing.
“And Ray Dickerson. I guess this means you two have gotten reacquainted. You’ve been spending a lot of time together I imagine?”
“We live together, Dad. We’ve been together a year now.”
Suddenly it seemed bizarre I’d let all this time pass without telling them.
“I need to think about this,” my mother said, when she finally spoke. “It’s big news. Complicated news. I need time to think.”
I laughed. How much time did a person need to take in that eight months from now—right around when the corn came in, or started to—a baby would be born? How complicated was that?
We had no phone number to give them, but I told them our address. Next day came the text of a telegram, delivered to our rural delivery mailbox, announcing that my mother would be paying us a visit.
I might have expected this for the birth, but she was coming now. In three days. She had included her flight arrival information in the telegram.
We made the long trip to Vancouver to meet her plane, naturally. No way would I have expected my mother—a woman who had never traveled anywhere before, other than to Wisconsin, on a bus—to make the difficult journey alone to the island where we lived.
It was easy to spot her exiting the jetway—a small, stout figure with a determined look, like a soldier heading off to war. She was wearing her old gray coat, a scarf around her neck, a hat, her sensible shoes, and a pin in the shape of a flower on the collar. She was carrying her purse in one hand and a paper bag in the other that I knew contained a jar of her strawberry jam. Her arms, when she put them around me, had that old familiar stiffness, though after a year of Ray’s touch, it felt even stranger now to be held by a person whose embrace conveyed less love than wariness.
I worried about what she’d think when she saw our home—not so much the woodstove because we’d had one of those on the farm, too, but the outhouse, the bucket sitting by the door that we used to haul water, the tar paper on the roof and plastic on the single-pane windows of the place that, in her eyes at least, would seem like nothing more than a shack. In the few days since receiving the news of her arrival and meeting her plane, I had raced around cleaning up, hanging curtains, taking down the drawings of Ray, naked, that covered our walls, and the poems he’d written for me, tacked in odd places around the house.
My mother barely spoke on the drive home—the two ferries, and the two endless stretches of highway in between, though I pointed out scenery along the way, and she nodded.
“Very nice,” she said, her voice tight. “This is beautiful country. I’ll give you that.”
We had fixed up a bed for her in the corner of our living space I used for my art studio, the only other room in the house besides ours. I had set a bowl of shells I’d collected next to her cot and laid an Indian print spread over the thin mattress, along with as many blankets as we could find.
It was dark by the time we got home. Because the pregnancy made me so tired, I went to bed almost as soon as we reached the house. You never knew how Ray would act around people—sometimes charming, other times silent and morose—so I was relieved and happy to see how friendly he was being to my mother. As I excused myself, I could hear him boiling water for tea over the woodstove.
“This’ll give our baby’s future grandmother and me a chance to get to know each other better,” he said, sounding like a person I barely knew.
From where I lay in our bed, I heard comforting sounds coming from the kitchen—mugs clinking, the honey pot being set on the table, the plate of cookies that I’d baked the day before laid out. I fell asleep feeling happy at the picture of Ray and my mother getting along so well, and dreamed of our baby.
When I woke up the next morning, everything was different. Although it was early, my mother was already dressed, her bag still packed, as if she were about to leave.
“We’re going home,” she said when I stepped out of the bedroom, my stomach still churning with the morning nausea.
“What are you talking about? We are home. My home.”
“I’m taking you back to New Hampshire now,” she said. “There’s been a terrible mistake. Your father and I will take care of you now.”
What she was saying seemed so crazy, I just laughed. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen her in more than a year. Maybe some swift and devastating form of dementia had overtaken her though she was only in her early fifties.
“I live here now, Mom,” I said slowly. “I’m not going anywhere. I live with Ray. We love each other. We’re having a baby.”
“Ray agrees with me, you need to leave this place,” she said. “A car is coming to take us to the airport.”
Through the window, I could see the figure of my lover, but I’d never seen him looking like this. Though it was cold that morning—freezing in fact—he was sitting in the yard. His back was hunched, and he held his head in his hands. He was not weeping, as I had seen him do on numerous occasions. This was worse. He seemed stunned and mute, as someone might look after undergoing electroshock therapy.
“Ray!” I called out the door. “You need to come in here. My mother’s saying crazy things.”
The room was spinning. I had been nauseated before. Now I threw up. My mother went to the sink for a cloth and some water from our pail. Her old standby: cleaning up.
I tried to call out again to Ray. I opened my mouth, but no sound came.
Slowly then, like a man in a horror movie—a zombie, a character in Night of the Living Dead—he made his way into the house. I tried to meet his eyes, finding nothing. On the floor at my feet, my mother was still washing up. His face, as familiar to me as my own hand, had gone flat and blank. But there was something else. His beautiful long hair that used to fall down past his shoulders was gone. Chopped off. What remained stood up in short, uneven patches on his fine-boned skull. I could see a thin blue vein running through his skin, blood pumping.
“What’s going on here?” I screamed. “Nobody’s making sense.”
“This never should have happened,” he said. The voice of a dead man, if dead men could speak. “It’s best for you to go.”
“What’s going on? Why isn’t anyone saying anything?” I realized something now. He had never come to bed that night. Wherever he’d slept it was not with me. Not then, or ever again.
“One day you’ll understand, this was for your own good,” my mother said, gathering a few pieces of my clothing. “For now, you just need to come with me.”
I reached for Ray. I pounded my fists on his chest, scraped his skin. I pulled at what was left of his hair.
“What did she do to you?” I screamed. “You’ve lost your mind.”
No answer. It was as if Ray’s soul had left his body, and all that was left was skin and bones and organs—all but the brain and the heart.
“I can’t talk about it,” he said, his voice flat and low. “You just need to go away now. We can’t have this baby.”
“What are you saying? This was what you wanted. A hundred times you told me so.”
“I made a mistake. I don’t want it anymore. I can’t talk about this. Get out.”
The world went dark.
SOMETIME EARLIER—BEFORE SHE MADE THE trip to Canada, probably—my m
other must have arranged for a taxi to pick us up. Now it was parked in the yard. I could hear my mother’s voice telling the driver, “You’ll have to excuse my daughter. She’s going through a lot at the moment.”
I have the dimmest memory of Ray as my mother was leading me out to the taxi. He was lying on the bed, curled up, with his newly shorn hair sticking up in clumps, his face turned to the wall—but when I called out to him that last time, he had looked up and our eyes met.
“This isn’t real,” I said. “Just say something to me. Come and get me.”
I can still see his ravaged face as he looked at me.
“What are you doing?” I was crying. “What did she say to you?”
He shook his head and turned again to face the wall.
I HAVE NO IDEA HOW my mother got me into that car. I have no memory of the journey back across the Campbell River Narrows, or the drive to Nanaimo, the second ferry, the final stretch of highway. For the first twenty minutes, I screamed and wept. After that, in all the hours of our journey, I doubt any words were spoken.
I know all kinds of things must have happened—checking our bags, presenting our passports—but how she managed to take care of this I have no idea. Somehow, my mother had a ticket ready for me. One-way to Boston.
The Good Daughters Page 14