Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  “Well then,” Jon says. “I guess we’re off.”

  “What are you guys up to tonight?”

  “Open mic at The Night Before. Mia’s reading some new work.” Jon drops Esmé’s gear inside the door. “Hey little girl,” he calls out. Esmé is systematically arranging and rearranging her stuffed animals in a semicircle facing the TV screen. “I’m leaving now. Love you.”

  Esmé races toward her father, colliding into—and then hugging—his legs. “Bye, Daddy! Bye, Jonafun! See ya!” Jon is about to kiss her on the head when she stag-leaps back into the living room.

  “Poor child,” he says, and Larken perceives that his mournful tone is only half put on. “Terrible separation anxiety. Whatever shall we do?”

  “You guys have a fabulous time tonight!” Larken cheers. Yes, she is in love with Jon and Esmé—even with Mia—and for this reason and so many others they must not must not must not break up.

  Hours later—after Esmé has devoured her mac and cheese and carrot-raisin salad, taken a bath, cuddled with Larken on the sofa, and watched Finding Nemo—Larken finally notices the blinking light on her answering machine. There are six messages.

  First message, received four forty-two P.M.: Please call me, honey, Viney says. It’s important.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Esmé yells from the bathroom.

  “What’s that, sweetie?”

  Second message …

  “What will our hearty breakfast be?”

  “How about pumpkin pancakes?”

  “I love pumpking pancakes!”

  It’s me again, honey. Please call as soon as you get this, okay?

  “Finish brushing your teeth now. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Do you remember that part about Nemo’s mom?”

  Third message: Larken …

  “Larkee!”

  … sweetie …

  “Yes!”

  I need to talk to you. It’s about your father. I don’t want to …

  “That part with Nemo’s mommy.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  … just call me as soon as you can. OK?

  “What happened to her?”

  “Well,” Larken says, making an effort to slow her breathing and control her voice. “We don’t know for sure, do we? They didn’t show that part.”

  Fourth message …

  Larken hears Esmé spit into the bathroom sink and then pronounce, “I think she got killed by that fish with the teeth. Not the shark. He was funny. The other one.”

  Larken. Viney is crying. I don’t want to leave this on your machine, but … Honey? There’s been an accident.

  “You remember that other fish?” Esmé prods. “The bearcooduh?”

  “That was scary, wasn’t it? I’m glad you held my hand during that part.”

  Your father, Viney is saying. Your dad …

  “Larkee?” Esmé has finished in the bathroom and is padding across the living room to where Larken stands.

  “Yes, button.” Larken turns down the volume.

  “Do you ever cry?”

  “Sure I do. Everybody cries.” Larken redirects Esmé’s body toward the bedroom. “Get into bed now. I’ll be right there.”

  Esmé takes Larken’s hand, insistently. “But I want you to come, too. Carry me. Piggyback.”

  “Okay,” Larken says, pausing the answering machine. “But then you have to go to sleep.”

  Esmé climbs onto a chair, and from there onto Larken’s back. “I’ve never seen you cry,” she says.

  “That’s because when I’m with you, I’m happy.”

  In the bedroom, Esmé’s sleeping bag has already been laid out, her pillow has been fluffed, her favorite stuffed animal—an orca whale—is standing guard.

  “I cry when I’m with you sometimes,” Esmé observes.

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “You need to go to sleep now, little bug. Close your eyes. I’m just going to clean up and then I’ll be in.” Larken heads back into the living room.

  Fifth message: Lark, Bonnie says, her voice emotionless. Dad’s dead.

  “Larkee?”

  I’m at Viney’s. She’s gone to bed.

  “Don’t forget to brush your teeth!”

  Call us in the morning.

  “Larkee!”

  “I hear you, Esmé. I won’t forget.”

  Sixth message received

  “Are you coming soon?”

  Larken? Gaelan, tearful. You must have heard by now. I’m driving down tonight.

  “LARKEE! I’m waiting and waiting and waiting for you.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Call, okay? Even if it’s late. God, Lark. I can’t believe it.

  End of messages, the voice of the answering machine declares: an ersatz female voice devoid of comfort.

  Larken reaches down to press the Erase button, and then, alarmingly, down and down and down, for the cluttered landscape of her desk falls away, miles away, and she sees typed papers and pictures of Madonnas and angels laid out below her from a great height, overlapping and intersecting rectangles forming a crazy-quilt field of text and color over which she is suspended: sans net, sans parachute, sans wings. She clutches the thick wooden edges of the desktop. Gaelan helped her move this desk into the apartment. It was heavy, even for him.

  “My mom is never going to die,” Esmé concludes. “Never never never never.”

  Hope’s Diary, 1961:

  I could have eaten her, I suppose

  Isn’t it all just so much list-making? Doesn’t it all boil down to this: providing for, fending off, sheltering, feeding, clothing, childbearing: There really isn’t much else other than this: seeing to the base needs that we humans are shackled to. Everything else is frosting, so much fluff, and count yourself lucky if you have it. Wait for the inevitable, hope you arrive at death’s door before your children and if you must bury them know that the rest of your life will be about nothing so much as moving away from them and yet strangely toward them, toward a reunion much-desired and yet what of the living and their need of you?

  I lost the baby.

  There are many lists now to be cast into the trash, things like: Paint the nursery (even though Llewellyn is already trying to reassure me, everyone is trying to reassure me, even women who have been through this and oh how eager they are to come out of the woodwork now when something like this occurs and if I sound angry instead of grateful for their commiserating pity it is because I am, I am because their wounds are remote and not still oozing as is this one, as are my breasts from unexpressed and unsuckled milk. I long to run outside at night and spray the heavens with grief).

  Paint the nursery.

  Buy diapers.

  The clothes—where will I put them?

  I could have eaten her, I suppose. That would have been a better memorial perhaps. Primal, after the fashion of wild creatures, even country cats. Had I ingested her, maybe I wouldn’t be suffering this madness of loss now. She would still be part of me, not separate. I could try to dig her up. Should I?

  L. thinks I’m mad. He’s right. And here’s the most dreadful thing, more dreadful even, possibly (although I don’t think so) than the loss itself: it’s the certain knowledge that a great divide has sprung up between us. The landscape of our marriage is forever changed, there is an unbroachable cliff, a sheer drop-off over which no bridge can ever be built because there is nothing on the other side. And it’s not the pregnancy—we were united then, we were in it together even though it was my body—but it’s the death, the death, the giving birth to death, which would have been the truth in any case, even had the baby come to term, I know this now in a way I might not have if this hadn’t happened: it’s us, always us, the mothers, giving birth and giving death (they give birth astride the grave, which of the Greeks said that?) and now I understand that L. will never never never know this, never feel the way I do. He can never know what this is like the way women do,
perhaps, is it so?

  He does not see my actions in the correct context.

  When I took the strainer from the kitchen into the bathroom and began fishing for her in the toilet—diaphanous, silky she was, and yes I can even call it a she because I know it to be so and require nothing else but that knowledge—he tried to restrain me. As if I were crazy, as if I were endangering myself. But nothing would have stopped me from saving her, nothing could have kept me from giving her a proper burial. The Greeks come again to mind: I could play Antigone now and know her brain-inflamed desperation to bury her beloved brother, her kind, her kin.

  L. kept trying to pull me away from the toilet. I kept getting free. There must have been violence involved—I notice now bruises on my legs, scratches on L.’s face. But he must have let me go because I carried her—sheer, unboundaried, a bit more than a collection of cells but not yet in recognizable human form, more like a sea creature—and placed her between two of the squares

  Work on the baby’s quilt was also on the list

  from her quilt. They will always be her colors, there will never be another quilt like this one, never another pattern for any child henceforth

  (as if I could ever do this again)

  and carried her to a spot deep in the field but easily found, next to a small outcropping of rocks and began to dig.

  L. stayed behind, watching, distant. Why couldn’t he come and mourn with me? What prevented him? What was he so afraid of?

  I could sense him seeing me newly. Horrified? Maybe. Quiet and tolerant in his way, but there it was, another kind of chasm, a deep ravine and what to bridge it?

  I dug as deep as I could with bare hands and anointed the ground with blood and milk—blood was running out of me by then, my clothes were soaked so perhaps L.’s resistance was of the simplest kind: he was revulsed by me, by my leakage. Being a woman is so untidy, and here was me, a mess of leaking fluids. Only my mouth was dry. I wish I could have produced something besides dry sounds, a hollowness of grief. If only Mother’s mouth could have opened in a song, something to send her on her way, a river to the sea for my little sea creature.

  And so I named her: Marina.

  It is not that we have the power to give life, this is not the thing that will make my husband and me strangers for all time; it is the power to give death. It is the knowledge that we—that I—have done this.

  It really is all our fault. It really is the most terrible power on earth, given to us, the mothers.

  I don’t want this.

  I can’t have this.

  And yet and yet and yet

  Chapter 6

  Blind Driveway

  Gaelan is always reminding her that it’s a myth—this idea people have that certain places are protected. But he would also be the first to admit that, in spite of every technological advance—the Doppler towers and the mathematical models and the color imaging and the computer-generated simulations—they still don’t know what the hell causes a tornado or how it will behave once it’s born, and the truth is there never has been one that’s touched down within the city limits of Lincoln, not ever, so when Larken has put off her departure as long as possible and is facing the inevitable drive away from her tree-lined street in her mythically protected city and toward the danger zone, her hometown, she still can’t make herself release the hand brake and step on the gas.

  She’s been sitting in her car—firmly buckled into the driver’s seat, with the engine running and the air conditioner on high—talking to Jonathan. It’s been quite a while: long enough for the sun to creep up to her eye line and start searing her vision, long enough for the gas gauge to slip to below half-empty. Larken flips the sun visor down and swigs the last of the coffee Jon brought out when she was loading up.

  “Thanks again, Jon,” she says, handing over the coffee mug. “I guess I should—”

  “Here, Larkee!” Esmé hollers gaily. She holds out a bouquet of squeezed-to-death, gone-to-seed dandelions that she’s picked while Larken has been trying to say good-bye.

  “Thank you, sweetie! I love these.” Larken resists the urge to lick her thumb and start cleaning Esmé’s face. She thought she got all the syrupy places after they ate pancakes and watched Clifford the Big Red Dog earlier this morning, but dustings of black dirt are stuck to odd, unlikely places: an earlobe, a temple, the inside corner of one eyelid, the spot between Esmé’s brows where a jeweled bindi should be. Gritty and sweet, that’s how she would taste. Poppy seeds encased in carmelized honey.

  “Aren’t you going to put them in water?” Esmé asks. “They’re dying.”

  “Oh! Well, I don’t have anything in the car to—”

  Jon squats next to Esmé and hands her the coffee mug. “Why don’t you ask Mum to rinse this out and fill it with water so you can put Larken’s flowers in here?”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back!” Esmé skips up the porch steps and into the house. Jon’s eyes trace a path that makes Larken think of Super-man and his X-ray vision; it’s as if Jon is actually seeing Esmé trundle up the stairs and through the second-floor rooms to the bedroom he shares with Mia, where the window shade is still down. Larken was awake for most of the night, so she knows that Jon came home alone around one o’clock in the morning. Mia got home at four. They didn’t make love, but they didn’t fight either.

  “How does she manage to get Mrs. Butterworth on her eyelids?” Larken asks. She does not want to go. She is needed here.

  “It’s one of her special skills,” Jonathan answers, still gazing up at his bedroom window, as if he has superhero ears as well as eyes and can hear whatever words are being spoken: “‘Achieves excessive stickiness.’ It’s right up there with ‘Creates nightly havoc with bedclothes’ and ‘Performs sword-fighting bits from The Princess Bride.’ We should all be so gifted.” He turns back to face her. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”

  She has to go. Her father is dead and she has yet to shed a tear.

  “Don’t tell Esmé, okay?”

  “What do you want me to say if she asks? It’s obvious something’s up.”

  Larken nods, considers, and then sighs. “I don’t know. Just play dumb.”

  “Ah! That would be one of my special skills.”

  “Lie, I mean. Tell her you don’t know anything. You can lie to your daughter, can’t you?”

  “Absolutely. It’s a prerequisite of parenthood. They won’t let you take the kid home from the hospital until you can prove conclusively that you’re an expert liar.”

  Esmé is walking toward them, slowly, carefully, holding the coffee cup.

  “Mia was still sleeping,” she whispers, “so I did it myself.” She arrives car side and holds out the drowned dandelions. Jon dips a corner of his shirt into the water and applies it to Esmé’s dirt and syrup spots.

  “Well,” Larken says.

  “We miss you!” Esmé shouts.

  Jon hands over Esmé’s bouquet and then leans through the open window and kisses Larken on the cheek. He hasn’t shaved yet. He smells of coffee grounds and the peculiarly clouded scent that Mia wears.

  “I’m so sorry, Larken,” he says softly. She loves the way he says her name, like no one else, ever: the dropped r, crisp k, the vertical spaciousness of sound—LAH-kun—so that she feels herself to be a different person entirely. “Take care, okay? Safe journey.”

  Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, they call to one another as Larken backs down the driveway and pulls away. She watches their diminishing figures in the rearview mirror until she can see them no more, wondering how many generations it took for the word good-bye to evolve from the phrase God be with you.

  I’ll only be gone a few days, she reminds herself.

  But she has a sudden, terrible presentiment that she will never see Jonathan and Esmé again, and she starts to cry before she has even turned the corner.

  Larken spends a lot of time this way: coming and going.

  She travels to and fro singly, defiantly, American-style,
without feeling guilty about the price of oil or the global insensitivity implicit in one-person occupancy. She rests in the knowledge that, for this at least, the earth forgives her. Just as there are rules that dictate her professorial conduct, Larken maintains another mental guidebook that keeps her eco-karma on an even keel, assuring that her sins against Mother Earth are expunged by compensatory good deeds: For the sin of single occupancy, she dutifully flattens and recycles every box, feeds her kitchen scraps to worms, turns off the tap when she’s brushing her teeth. Atoning for other kinds of sins is more complex, but when it comes to automobile travel, Larken’s conscience is clear. Driving alone—especially on the open road—unlocks a peculiar inner landscape that allows a liquidity of thought, heightened awareness, emotional safety, and access to memory that she finds nowhere else. Thus, she does not carpool.

  As she motors through town toward Highway 77, Larken becomes curious about the fact that she can weep freely over her upstairs neighbors but not for her father.

  Dad is dead, she thinks, waiting at a red light at Ninth and South. She hopes that this unvoiced declaration will alter the torrent of feelings and tears arising from thoughts of Jonathan and Esmé. Dad. Is. Dead. Larken is struck not only by the content of her thoughts, but by the fact that the language is so unequivocal, so unlike the language she has used over the years to describe her mother’s absence: never Mom is dead or When my mother died but Mom went up or When my mother disappeared.

  Dad is dead, she repeats, more insistently. Any moment now her nose and eyes will find new reasons to run, her inner monologue will start to reflect the more obvious and appropriate wellspring: her father. Who is dead. Or so she’s been told.

  The light turns green. Still nothing. She tries an experiment.

  “Daddy is dead,” she says aloud, evoking the potential power of child-speak, but her nasal passages are so clogged with mucus that she can’t manage the plosive d’s with any kind of authority and it comes out sounding like “Addy’s head.”

  She tries again.

  “D-addy,” she emphasizes, “is D-ead.” Maybe the effects of sound waves pinging around the interior of the car will incite emotion, find their way through whatever passageways carry the outer world into the inner one, causing matter to be translated into spirit, utterance to be formed into feeling. “Daddy. Daddy. Daddy. Daddy,” she repeats, still hoping for an answering sadness in her heart. But the d’s evoke comedy, a punch line. Daddy may be the right name for her father, but it’s the wrong vocal prompt for grief.