Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  He shook his head. ‘Sounds to me like something must have happened while you were in that canyon.’

  He pushes some dirty plates out of the way so he can put his elbows on the table and cup his chin in one hand. He smiles suddenly, a lopsided smile that seems to appear right out of his fingers.

  ‘Well, at least we both had a great dad.’

  I look into Ricky’s dark green eyes. They are the same colour as my own.

  ‘Why were you shouting at him? That day I watched you from the deck?’

  He sighs. ‘I’ve regretted it every day since. I wasn’t shouting, but I probably came on too strong. I was telling him it was time to leave that big mean old house up there on the hill and come live with us. He could have had one whole part of the house here to himself and I’d have known he was safe. But no. He was too goddamn stubborn.’

  ‘Safe? Did you think he was in danger?’

  ‘Yeah, from daughters who sneak around his house.’

  I stumble through an unsatisfactory explanation. He listens and then says: ‘That the last time you saw him?’

  I nod sadly.

  ‘I last saw him when they brought back the tow truck real late on Sunday night,’ Ricky tells me. ‘I know you know all about that. They didn’t mean to disturb us but I heard them so I went out to see how they got along. They were all real agitated because they’d nearly been picked up by Highway Patrol.’

  ‘How was Daddy?’

  ‘Oh… very tired. He’d been driving the truck and had his licence checked and stuff. And… he was sort of sad.’

  ‘Sad?’

  Ricky speaks quietly now. ‘Like he knew what might be coming. I mean, when I said good night, he walked up to me and…’

  I stare at him. His voice has stopped as though it just ran right off the road. His face creases. He looks down at Jordan and suddenly sweeps the baby on to his lap, hugging him tightly, placing the baby between himself and his grief. The child curls against his father’s body but he cannot hide his father’s tears. Ricky is stubborn. He doesn’t want to cry, he wants to get those words out. When they emerge, they are almost incomprehensible.

  ‘He hugged me and he said goodbye. Not good night. Goodbye. Like I wouldn’t see him again…’

  Ricky is crying hard now and the baby doesn’t like it. He wriggles to get away. I stand up and, reluctantly, offer my arms to the squirming Jordan. He reaches out for me and I lift him. A baby in my arms, fitting its body to mine, looking up into my eyes, stretching its fingers to my face. I feel an intense pleasure and an intense pain. I kneel down and put my other arm around Ricky. He is, after all, my brother.

  ‘Oh no,’ says a voice. Martha is frozen in the doorway.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, no, this is not allowed to happen.’

  We all look at her and Jordan reaches for her. She walks right over and removes him firmly from my arm. I take a step back from Ricky. His face is dark, his chin is shadowed, his pupils are so dilated that his eyes look black and beneath them are the dark smudges I recognize as grief’s thumbprints.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he tells Martha. ‘She already knew everything.’

  ‘So what? C’mon Ricky, you gave your dad your word. No contact. Looks to me as though there’s a whole lot of contact going on here.’

  ‘Martha, she’s my sister. Dad’s dead now and –’

  ‘You promised,’ she says. ‘He wouldn’t have made you promise if he didn’t have a good reason.’ They stare at each other stormily.

  Martha turns to me.

  ‘Why?’ she demands. ‘Why do you have to keep coming here like this?’

  ‘If you found you had a brother, wouldn’t you want to know him?’

  ‘You didn’t need him before. You don’t need him now.’

  But, despite his hostility, despite everything, it seems to me that I’ve waited for Ricky all my life. The brother whom I loved was taken away from me as a tiny baby and now it feels that he’s come back as this big, dark, angry stranger.

  ‘You’ve made a mistake,’ Martha says, returning to the gallery with Jordan under her arm. ‘Your father didn’t want his two families ever to know each other because he knew something bad would happen.’

  ‘What can happen?’ I ask her but she has swayed through the door and slammed it shut behind her.

  ‘Why didn’t Daddy want us to meet?’ I ask Ricky. ‘Why? Did he ever give you a reason?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Martha will come round, I guess. She can take a while to get used to things.’

  I say: ‘I have to go now. I have to meet Scott and then get to Mother’s clinic. They don’t allow late visitors.’

  When we go outside, the house looks pretty. A house and a barn, Daddy’s other house, his other barn, the warm, bright side of his life.

  Standing by my car, Ricky asks: ‘Well, are we going to meet again?’

  I look at him. ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘Lucy, I’m kind of relieved. I think this may just be one of the good things to come out of Dad’s death.’

  And to my amazement he suddenly puts his long arms around me and hugs me to him, this stranger who is my brother.

  37

  A wind from the ocean is blowing Scott’s hair around and he is looking out from the porch through binoculars.

  ‘It could be a whale-watching boat,’ he reports. ‘The migration might have started.’

  The sea wind feels so cold that Scott has given me an immense sweatshirt. Here on the coast, March is back. The heatwave felt like June but it was just a strange, stifling faux-summer and only the ocean wasn’t fooled, retaining the icy depth of its colour throughout.

  Apart from the funeral I haven’t seen Scott much recently. I suspect that Brigitte must be home from France and I hope she doesn’t arrive while I’m here.

  I place the big folder right in front of him.

  ‘Just look at that through your binoculars,’ I say. He tries, comically, and then puts down the binoculars and picks up the folder.

  ‘Is this executor stuff?’

  ‘It’s everything. Done. Finished. Phone calls made, death certificate duplicated and enclosed where necessary. All you have to do is sign the letters and put them in the envelopes and get them to a mailbox. They even have stamps on.’

  ‘Oh Jeez, Luce…’

  He flicks through the pages of neat figures, letters and envelopes.

  ‘Luce, I don’t know how to thank you…’ He leans across the scaly wooden table and kisses me. Not a long kiss, but long enough to show that, at the very least, he’s grateful.

  ‘When’s your flight?’ he asks.

  ‘Tomorrow, three o’clock.’

  ‘Can I come to the airport?’

  ‘Okay, but you may see me again soon anyway. I’m thinking of moving back to California.’

  For a second, no, a fraction of a second, I detect something like shock on his face. I wonder if things have already progressed too far with Brigitte for Scott to feel the State of California is also big enough for me. Then he recovers and smiles and there is genuine pleasure in his smile. He reaches out for my hand.

  ‘That’s terrific,’ he says. ‘How come?’

  ‘Now Daddy’s dead, maybe Mother needs me,’ I say. ‘And my family’s here. Stevie’s buried here. There are a lot of reasons to come back.’

  ‘Luce…’

  The wind has blown some colour into his cheeks. Or maybe he’s embarrassed. I wait for him to speak then realize he’s waiting for me. He presses my hand tighter. Beyond us the ocean is noisy. The weather has provoked it. No longer a slumbering zoo animal, it is a wild creature again. The waves crash violently against the shore. Neither of us speaks. We watch in silence as a couple of surfers, inexperienced or maybe just intimidated, attempt and fail to ride the sea’s magnificence.

  When I stand up to go the wind almost buffets me back down.

  ‘I have to get to Redbush now so I can say goodbye to Mother.’

  He releases my han
d. We walk to the steps together. He says: ‘Lucy, the police don’t seem to have any answers. I’m not sure we’ll ever know what really happened to Eric. Can you live with that?’

  Not knowing. I remember how, when Sasha and I arrived at Daddy’s house that night, I relished my last few moments of not knowing.

  I say: ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know. And in the last couple of weeks, so many other things have been resolved.’

  He halts suddenly and, holding my shoulders, revolves my body so we’re facing each other. He studies me.

  ‘You look good, Luce. You look terrific. So alive.’

  I smile at him. ‘I’m just beginning to feel good, Scott.’

  I kiss him and turn to go. I clatter down the steps on to the beach. As soon as my feet hit the sand they are silenced.

  I drive up the coast towards Redbush. The first time I visited Mother at the clinic, there was almost no Redbush town. I remember it as a small, rural community but now it has expanded beyond recognition. The houses are large with big front yards and well-watered lawns. Many are no longer new: children who were born here may already be parents themselves and the houses already contain childhoods, histories and memories.

  I know that, before the houses, there were other histories and memories. I try, unsuccessfully, to equate the mature trees with the trees which used to stand next to the small farms here. I trace the lines of asphalted roads, looking for the tracks I remember that led to isolated houses with rusty pick-up trucks parked by rusty tractors in dusty yards. Suddenly, I am overwhelmed by the way the past has been replaced, built over as if it never existed. The houses and people and horses on the hill here have gone but if I remember them (a group of sun-drenched kids drinking pink liquid under a tree watched by a wide, aproned woman. A man kicking, in frustration, a truck with a flat tyre. A low red house with a horse, the same colour red, prancing inside an adjacent corral, sometimes a saddle slung over the wooden fence, sometimes actually a rider, the horse doing some fancy dance beneath him) then how can they be completely gone?

  So long as you remember the past, it must continue to exist somehow, even when it obviously and indisputably is not there any more. I remember the suntanned people and their houses, their orchards. How I always looked out for the red horse when we drove this way and how it nearly always pranced and shone in the sun but sometimes it just stood still and ate hay. My memories of this road have the intensity of the recent past so it’s hard, almost impossible, to reconcile them with the houses and pools and lawns which have stood here for many years creating their own memories.

  When I reach the clinic the guard examines my ID closely and then, still looking hard at me, calls through to the clinic. Finally he nods.

  ‘Uh-huh. Go right over.’

  Mother’s big, smiling nurse is waiting for me in the conservatory. He says: ‘I’m real glad you’re back for another try. I didn’t think you would be after the last time.’

  The hallways are silent until, as we pass one door, I hear people laughing. Perhaps five, six voices, laughing together with spontaneous delight.

  ‘That’s the Alzheimer’s group having big fun,’ says the nurse.

  ‘I didn’t know it’s big fun to have Alzheimer’s.’

  ‘Oh, believe me, it isn’t. But that group has a wonderful facilitator. She says, hey, it’s a second childhood, let’s enjoy it as much as, more than, the first one. Her methods are controversial but people have come from all over the state to watch her at work and they’re generally very impressed.’

  ‘How about the patients?’

  ‘They love her. They just want Alzheimer’s group all day.’

  ‘Would Mother benefit?’

  We’re passing through a door now. He pauses.

  ‘Um… she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, of course. And to be honest, I don’t see her laughing with the rest of them. She gets sort of sad.’

  Mother at the graveside, shedding small tears like jewels. Surrounded by people, but alone now without Daddy.

  The nurse says: ‘I’m sorry you saw her mean side last time. She can be that way with your sister. I couldn’t believe she did it to you when she hadn’t seen you in so long.’

  ‘Jane says Mother mostly doesn’t know her.’

  The nurse throws back his head and laughs. ‘Oh, she knows Jane, that’s for sure.’

  He stops at Mother’s door. My heart begins to clatter. My hands feel clammy. When I walk into the room I search for Mother’s tiny body amid the ornate drapery, the cushions, the plush chairs.

  ‘Wait and I’ll get her. Her class is just over.’

  ‘What class?’

  ‘Ceramics. It finished five minutes ago.’

  There is a blue felt folder lying on the bed, worn at the corners from use. When the nurse leaves I glance out of the window to make sure no one in overalls is watching me. Then I open it. The folder is full of photographs. Baby Nicholas. Me. Daddy. Grandma, the aunts. Me again. Daddy and me. Another baby, probably Nicky again. Me, gazing rapturously at Nicky in his cradle. The house, looking curiously unclothed without foliage, Daddy standing outside it. Along with the photographs are postcards, with my writing on the back. Postcards with abstract blues, a brown dog, felt-booted peasants in old Russia. Every postcard I have ever sent Mother is here, dog-eared with use, but careful use, like the photos.

  I reach the back of the folder and there is just one more picture. A class picture, three rows of smiling kids. Cornington School, Second Grade, says the small blackboard the teacher holds. I remember the picture being taken in the fall, right after we started in second grade when we had barely learned the teacher’s name. First I see Lindy, blonde, pretty, her head a little to one side and, right next to her, me. I am looking at the camera, smiling a little and cradling one arm against my body. It is encased in plaster. I look closer. I was six, almost seven, when I went into second grade. But I know I broke my arm years earlier, in the canyon in Arizona, because we took that trip right after my brother died and I was four then, I’m certain of that. I stare at the plaster arm in the picture, trying to persuade myself it is a white sleeve or white paper, or even a joke. But the way I cradle it, protectively, is unmistakable.

  I hear voices in the hallway. I rapidly replace the picture and close the folder. My mind swoops and wheels like a seagull. My brother died when I was four. I broke my arm in a canyon two years, not two weeks, later. We didn’t go to Arizona right after my baby brother died. It was years afterwards that I walked out of the canyon with my arm throbbing in time with Mother’s yells.

  I recall Ricky’s voice, his lazy drawl: ‘Sounds to me like something must have happened while you were in that canyon.’

  The door opens to reveal Mother, her arm in the nurse’s. Today she wears eyeglasses. Their frames are severe and they make her seem less vacant.

  I walk right over to her. I don’t want to frighten her so I say, very softly: ‘Hi, Mother, it’s Lucy.’

  ‘Lucy.’

  She reaches out and there is a small, warm tug at my hand. Carefully, gently, she embraces me. I submit to her maternal caress and the moment has a strange, isolated sweetness of its own.

  ‘I guess I’ll leave you two,’ says the nurse. ‘I’ll leave you two right now.’

  I hear the door thud shut softly behind him.

  I say: ‘Mother, I’ve remembered a song. A song you used to sing me when I was little…’

  She waits. She looks apprehensive. I hope the song will be there when I need it. I reach inside my memory to that strange evasive place where music is stored. A few broken bars of the nursery song float out. I hum them and Mother’s face breaks into a wide smile and for a moment her eyes shine. Then she picks up the tune from me and gradually, uncertain at first, she begins to sing. I close my eyes while, holding both my hands, she sings gently. When we reach the closing bars, we both make birds with our hands and they fly away. We look at each other smiling, delighted.

  I say: ‘Mother, I want to tal
k to you about my baby. About Stevie and how he died. Just lately I’ve started telling about it a little but I want to talk to you, because you’ll understand better than anyone.’

  We go over to the window and sit in the same chairs we sat in last time. Mother looks at me, waiting for me to speak, and I see her mind is fully engaged. There is clay in her hair, clinging white to some of the strands. There is more clay under her fingernails.

  I tell her how Stevie used to cry and cry. ‘Each yell seemed to eat a little bit of me away. His unhappiness was my unhappiness. The misery he was expressing was the misery inside me. I loved him so much, he’d turned me from a solid state to a liquid one, but his demands, his dissatisfaction, his crying made me some other woman and, God knows, that woman wanted to smother him often enough. I just wanted him to stop. When he died, it felt inevitable. I had silenced him so many times in my head that I knew it must be my fault.’

  I am crying now and Mother reaches out and wraps my fingers in her two small hands. When I look up, I see that she is crying too.

  She says: ‘It was my fault.’

  I stare at her. I assess her eyes for knowledge, for coherence. She looks right back at me, tears falling, no longer silently but accompanied by a high-pitched wail I remember in my dreams. ‘She did it again! It’s my fault she did it again!’

  Her words slip between the crevices. I am alone in a sizzling landscape of towering red rocks and sunbaked earth. I am approaching the mouth of the canyon, my arm throbs in pain and I hear a shrieking which at first I think is some angry desert bird. Then I know it is a woman and I know the woman is my mother. I listen and her words bounce off rocks, reverberate through the canyon, scramble along dry riverbeds. ‘It’s my fault, she did it again! She did it again! Oh God, she did it again!’

  I say: ‘Who did it again? Who?’

  I look at Mother now, her blue eyes, her pale skin, the clay in her hair. Mother holds my hand tightly, staring back at me, waiting for me to know.

  We were in Arizona two years, not two weeks after Nicky died. Jane and I went into the canyon. And Jane came out alone. That’s when Mother started to yell. That’s when her misery took her through the membrane between unhappiness and psychosis. That’s why they all stopped and stared when I appeared, but it was too late for Mother. She believed Jane had done it again.