by Kris Radish
The two women sit while the fireflies start to dance under the streetlights in the alley and begin a slow parade through Emma’s yard until it looks like a minor holiday.
“Thanks for letting me talk, Emma,” Joy says as the gentle swaying of the porch swing helps her slow her aching heart. “You need this like a hole in your head. But there’s no one else to talk to.”
“Not Debra?” Emma asks, surprised. “You have always seemed like identical twins.”
“That’s not much of a compliment for either one of us lately.”
“Don’t tell me someone over at Debra’s is having an affair, too?”
“No, not that I know of, but Debra’s not the happiest woman in the world either.”
“You mean with the drinking and screaming and control issues?”
“Two of those things are kick-started by the drinking.”
“The drinking,” Emma repeats very quietly.
And Joy doesn’t answer but turns away from her.
The weight of what Joy has told her, what Joy thinks she knows, what must possibly lie ahead churns through Emma—anger and sorrow and shock—frightening her.
If she felt as if she didn’t before know Joy or Debra or even the illusive Erika or their mother, she surely does not know them now.
If she felt helpless and on the verge of hysteria about the lack of progress on the reunion planning, now Emma feels totally bewildered. And yet she so wants to be able to laugh now, to clasp Joy’s hands between hers and say, “Thanks for trusting me, thanks for opening up a window to the edge of your heart, thanks for being honest, and for stepping over the fence you have built that I have so rarely dared to touch. Thanks especially for sharing your daughter with me—even if I have no idea what I am doing.”
Emma so desperately wants to be able to obliterate the years of assumptions and silences and wrong connections that have created this huge distance between her and Joy. But all she can do is to whisper silently, “What in the hell is going on around here?”
12
THE TWELFTH QUESTION:
Has your mother run off with my father?
A MOMENT OF PEACE, A BREATH of silence, a few hours alone with lots of coffee, no sisters in sight, her slutty mother still in disappearing mode, and a stack of employee papers to go through is suddenly a far-off dream as Emma’s twenty minutes of blessed quiet at a remote coffee shop is interrupted by a total stranger who walks over to her table, bends low to meet her eyes, and asks if Emma’s mother has by chance run off with her very own and much beloved father.
Emma’s mouthful of delicious, special-of-the-day French roast flies past the face of a woman she does not recognize but who obviously knows exactly who she is.
“Oh my God!” Emma says apologetically as she wipes coffee off her own face and arms and the entire tabletop. “I’m so sorry! But you startled me.”
“No, I’m sorry,” the woman counters. “I’m the one who should apologize. I could have started by saying something like ‘Hi, aren’t our parents dating?’ or ‘Hello, are you Emma Gilford? I’m Susie Dell and you don’t know me so please don’t be startled.’ But no, I had to do what I always do, and that’s just bust right through the door and act like I own the dang place.”
“Sit,” Emma orders after she’s cleaned up her coffee, pushed her stack of envelopes to one side and cleared a spot at the end of the table. “You do know how to make an entrance, Susie Dell.”
Emma wonders, as Susie leaves for a few minutes to get her own cup of coffee, if someone has not been slowly poisoning her. Perhaps evil aliens have been slipping into her house and depositing some kind of rare substance into her food supply that makes people’s lives suddenly fall apart, explode, disintegrate, and spiral uncontrollably into a succession of weird and highly improbable circumstances.
Susie Dell? How in the world did she recognize me? Is this just a coincidence or has she been following me? Her father and my mother? What in the holy handbag hell is happening?
Ms. Dell looks normal. She’s a fairly attractive brunette, about Emma’s age, and smart enough to carry on a conversation after she’s not so quietly introduced herself and she’s already said she’s sorry. Susie is a lanky version of a young Sally Field. She’s got long dark hair that is streaked with red highlights, dark eyes, and a smile backed up by a set of very lovely and very white teeth. Her high cheekbones, long legs, and apparent quick wit and outgoing personality make Emma wonder immediately if her father is equally attractive and charming.
It takes Emma three cups of coffee and a huge caffeine buzz to get the answers to at least a few of the questions that have without warning invaded her life. A few answers and about twice that many questions.
Susie Dell is the lovely thirty-eight-year-old daughter of a retired attorney from Charleston. Robert Dell, widowed himself for the past five years, is apparently not an ax murderer, but a well-heeled Southern gentleman who has been under the guidance of his single daughter and only child as he has been wooing—and falling in love with—Grandma Marty.
“I feel like an ass,” Emma admits, when Susie finishes. “How could I not know about this? How could I not know my mother is obviously one hot tamale?”
“Blame my father.” Susie throws up both hands as if she is going to catch a random ball. “He’s sort of swept your mom off her feet. After my mother died he fell into such a depression I thought he was going to die, too. He met your mom on a field trip with the Higgins senior center and somehow he worked up the courage to ask her to dance.”
Susie explains how she recognized Emma from a family photo that Marty gave to him. Then she announces that both she and her father have been invited to this year’s family reunion.
Just the mention of the words family reunion makes Emma weak in the knees. She wants to confess to Susie Dell. She wants to tell her to take her father and run because the entire Gilford family, present company included, are crazy as loons. There are so many red flags popping up to warn nice people like the Dells that when Emma closes her eyes even she can see a red flag farm.
There are red flags as far as the eye can see. Unhappy-marriage red flags. Excessive-drinking red flags. Too-much-angst red flags. Domineering-and-often-overly-demanding-female red flags. Four-sisters-who-know-everything red flags. Waving red flags of anger and repressed emotions. Uncertain, embarrassed, and often regretful red flags fluttering as if they are on fire. Months-of-reunion-planning red flags that are too damn tired to wave. Red flags of jealousy and longing and rows and rows of red flags of grievances flapping in the breeze that definitely need to be aired out.
Who in their right mind would want to dive in and join that parade?
But Susie Dell, bless her heart, is apparently dauntless. She says her father is suddenly one happy man and that is all she cares about.
Emma cannot help but laugh out loud and like this woman. She’s honest, she’s brash, and she has the ability to make Emma feel instantly at ease, as if they have just restarted a conversation they ended a week ago. Or maybe like sisters who have known and accepted each other for a very long time.
And as they share life stories Emma bravely reveals that she’s on emotional overload. She tells Susie that her shoulders ache for a variety of reasons, least of all the fact that she has three exceptionally difficult sisters, one wild niece, a reunion the size of the state fair to help plan … and other things that she almost—just almost—decides to share.
Susie Dell, an only child, says she would sell her favorite shoes for a sister and wants to know what is so wrong with all of that. Just what?
Nothing and everything.
Nothing because that’s what happens when you are born into a family, planted inside of a humming nest where everyone shares the same last name, blue eyes, blonde hair and a propensity for overbearing attitudes that can overwhelm even the strongest outsider.
Everything because balancing a personal life, if you are lucky enough to have one, and living past the borders of your n
uclear family lines is not as easy as it might seem on the surface.
Especially if you have a soft spot the size of a pond of water lilies inside your heart and are starting to think it may be time to drain the pool and fill it with fresh water. Or better yet fill in the whole damn thing with fabulous soil and plant yet another garden.
Especially when you close your eyes and imagine your mother dancing naked with the retired attorney from Charleston.
Especially during a combination of family crises that seem to be popping up like weeds after a hard rain.
Especially because suddenly the word predictable seems to have vanished from the vocabulary of life.
“Well, Emma darling” is what Susie offers next. “When my mother died I finally cried for a month when I realized what I was going to miss. And when I stopped crying, I realized the only thing that mattered was knowing that I had been loved. That’s it. None of that other life shit mattered.”
And it seems, to Susie Dell anyway, that even though Emma has not told her everything that Emma has a lot of shit in her life at this particular moment.
If you only knew the rest of it, Susie Dell.
The two women exchange phone numbers and plan a dinner and a garden tour and Emma cannot help but wonder if her mother felt the same, instant, open connection with Robert Dell as she does with his daughter.
Later, when the coffee has finally evaporated from her bloodstream, and Susie has called to let her know her father left her a message to say that he was having the most wonderful time on an island with Marty, Emma cannot stand it anymore. She goes to lie in her garden.
It is past the heart of spring. Lying in the small slice of grass that runs between the rows of her newest plantings, Emma can feel that the heat trapped inside of the earth has changed. It’s warmer and stronger. It’s pulsing in a way that makes her realize she has to crank up the watering and switch the organic fertilizer.
Then Emma forces herself to do something the rest of the world knows as the word relax. She pushes first one foot and then the other against the now strong stems of her plants and she forgets about her gardens, her slutty mother, her job, her sassy niece, the broken heart of her sister, the broken spirit of her other sister, the sister who rarely comes home, and the looming family reunion that will start crashing around her the second Marty returns … if she ever returns.
Emma Gilford tries to move her mind past her life, past the succession of problems and immediate life crises that have seemed to pop up like the gophers she cannot keep from her gardens no matter what she does.
But all she can think about is the conversation with Susie and what it might be like if Marty never came back, if the matriarch was swept away and left the entire mess—including the responsibility for the huge reunion event—to cure itself.
And that is all Emma can think about—Marty not returning.
What would it be like if Emma and Susie had to switch places? If Emma was the one dealing with the pain of loss because her mother was no longer there for her?
Emma imagines it and feels her stomach roll as if she is standing on the deck of a ship being tossed through the eye of a hurricane. Even as she pushes her hands deeper into the grass to stay connected, to keep from falling overboard, she cannot stop the swell of immediate sorrow that pulses through her body.
“Everything really would change,” Emma whispers. “Everything.”
By the time Susie Dell does come to visit Emma three days later and enters even deeper into the Gilford jungle, Emma has already tried repeatedly to call her older sister Erika, who seems to have vanished.
My family is beyond odd has become Emma’s new mantra.
But Susie Dell is fun and lively, and is not afraid to just say it like it is, and sees absolutely nothing strange, awry, ridiculous or bizarre about Emma’s life.
“We all have family shit,” she said nonchalantly. “Half the country is riddled with angst and anger over this boomer-caught-with-parents-and-siblings-and-kids-and-grandkids stuff. I say just get over it. It’s life, Emma, for God’s sake. Suck it up.”
Suck it up.
Great advice, if only it was that easy, Emma ponders before she pauses long enough to think about the three unanswered phone calls she has received from Samuel, messages she cannot bring herself to erase.
The three phone calls that now seem like a treat compared to Joy’s revelations, Debra’s disheveled life, her mother’s retired attorney and Stephie’s college secret—oh, yeah, and that other event thing that is coming up fast.
The phone calls after all these years when Emma worked so hard to forget him; years comparing the way her heart moved or didn’t move when she dated someone else; years sometimes hating herself for what she did, what she didn’t do, what might have been; years eventually surrendering to the notion that it would never have worked, that it was wrong and just a physical attraction; years lost, absolutely lost, to the drowning sensation that she could only describe as yearning.
But for what? Can a heart, a soul, a body yearn for something that really does not exist? And if it does exist and there really is still a chance, what about all the time that has been squandered?
Emma leans in towards the gardens that Susie Dell is surveying and so wants to say, “Just shit,” through her teeth, thinking at the same moment that she has sworn more in the past few weeks than she has during the past ten years. “Why can I not erase the phone messages and why do I hate everyone I am related to?”
And when she turns after dinner to see Susie Dell, sitting right where a real sister should sit, Emma is suddenly struck by a dizzying feeling of lightness that makes her see this woman as a sister. She sees her as a forgiving, open, real woman who looks at Emma’s life and yearns for what she has even as Emma looks at her and yearns for her simple, uncomplicated palette of life that does not include sisters.
And her feeling of safeness with Susie Dell grabs her right by the throat and seems to shake the long-held Samuel story out of her. It’s as if she cannot stop herself, as if she has been dying to tell someone and Susie Dell is the first person who happened to stop by.
But even Emma knows better than that. Even Emma knows that the universe and Marty had something to do with the synergy that is being created as Emma claims Susie Dell as her fourth sister and tells her the story of Samuel.
Even as Emma admits without hesitation that Samuel had been her sister Debra’s boyfriend before he and Emma came to be lovers but when they met he was free and she was free and they were adults and it was something—perhaps the only thing—that she could own and one of her sisters could not claim.
And Susie Dell does what a sister should do: She does not judge. She simply listens. And that kind act helps Emma get up and walk towards her room, pull open the middle drawer of her dresser and fish around for an old cedar box where she has kept her most private treasures since she was a little girl.
Emma fishes past a copper bracelet, letters wrapped in pieces of thin silk, rocks she collected during high school from places she can no long remember but back then were special to her, until she reaches what she is trying to find.
On the very bottom of the box there is a small leather bag that has not moved in a very long time. Emma picks it up gingerly as if the photograph inside it is a precious antique document and carries it back to the porch and Susie Dell.
Emma is shocked that the photo of her and Samuel does not pain her as much as she thought it would. She presses her hand to her heart and feels the gentle surge of blood, a light thumping, but not the turbocharged bolt of power she used to feel each time she looked at this photograph. There is not an avalanche of tears and the pull that used to start behind her eyes and roll through her body until she was a total physical wreck.
Samuel, as Debra’s ex-boyfriend, was more than a familiar face to Emma. She had always adored him, loved talking to him, was distressed when he broke up with her sister after so many years, five years seemingly filled with tumultuous dating and arguing
and breaking up and getting back together. She could see after it happened for the last time how they were not a mix that would keep. Samuel was soft and loved to get lost in his botany PhD research; Debra loved to fill her life with anything but quiet and the stillness that plants demanded.
Emma had looked up one morning during a particularly grueling semester of graduate school and there he was crawling through the grass outside her lab building. She’d seen him and his long legs, nearly shaved hair, trademark bright white T-shirt, and she’d started to laugh and he heard her and looked up. It was as if something magnetic passed between them. Emma actually jumped and he started to laugh too, and that was the beginning of something.
Something wonderful that changed her heart and life, she now tells Susie Dell. Something wonderful, until he was sent to the jungle to do research and then to another jungle and one after that, all the while pleading with her to wait for him because he would come back to her. Someday. He swore he would.
And finally Emma could wait no longer. She went back home to Higgins and she left Samuel and everything but one photograph behind.
Emma thought of him now as someone she barely knew even as she remembered the curve of his shoulders that descended like pillars into his back, the way his hands seemed to know exactly where she needed them to go, the lovely brown mole just below his clavicle. And try as she did she could not now think of their encounter, what she knew as love, to be wrong. She could not and would not, which is why she could not bring herself to erase his messages.
It was the pained look in Debra’s eyes, the sweet taste of wine cascading down her face the night Debra threw wine at her, the look of betrayal for not knowing what had happened even though Debra had moved on and was already planning a wedding to a different man when it happened. Then the silence these past few days when Emma had not called and Debra had not called and Marty was not there to serve as a buffer between them.