Heart and Home

by Jennifer Melzer

  Dad walked back toward where I stood still beside Lottie Kepner, and the first thing I noticed was the dirt on his shoes, dirt that had been dug up so they could put my mother into the ground. The notion pressed on my already frazzled nerves, sending me into the next phase of realization. My stomach trembled within, and for a moment I was sure I was going to be sick, but then something completely unexpected happened. A cold numbness in my face crept upward into my cheeks, along the top of my skull before it circled around the back of my neck. The scene before me seemed to waver like asphalt in the hot sun.

  “Janice,” the slow echo of my name bounced upon the drumming canopy flaps. I saw hands reaching for me, but my vision began to blacken around the edges. I was falling backwards, the way I sometimes fell in dreams: endless, drifting while the world swarmed in around me. The slapping of those flaps dulled to a faint whisper, and for a moment I could hear nothing else but the dry rustle of leaves above me.

  Dark emptiness curled around me like a blanket, while that hush of leaves carried me far away.

  “…looks like she’s coming around.”

  The first thing I felt when I came back into myself was the frigid wind as it crawled up the folds of my skirt. One by one a collection of voices came at me from every direction. One panicked woman’s worrisome cry was followed by the slow, mellow depth of a man in control.

  “Oh, thank heavens,” the panic receded from the woman’s voice. “She’s opening her eyes.”

  “Janice, can you hear me?”

  My eyelids fluttered against the numb pressure throbbing inside my head, and as I searched almost frantically for something to focus on it was a pair of denim blue eyes that caught my attention. Upside down, the face looked strange and alien, but warm, steady hands under my back and neck kept me calm. They were his hands, old blue eyes, and then Dad was there drawing my attention to him in desperation.

  I felt my numb fingers being tugged as he called, “Jan? Jannie, can you hear me?”

  I swallowed and nodded slowly, trying to sit upright before I even questioned why I was flat on my back. The earth should have been cold underneath me, but it was warm and soft. I tingled inside, the sensation making me feel cold and unstable. I tried to focus, tried to look away from those compelling eyes, but I couldn’t.

  “Try to relax until the spinning stops,” Troy said. He had a deep, rich voice that immediately calmed me, and though I generally lacked trust, every muscle sunk into his command.

  “It’s all pins and needles.” My own voice sounded like I drew it down from the clouds. “Like my whole body just fell asleep.”

  “It’s the rush from the oxygen level in your blood escalating,” he said. “It’ll pass in a few minutes. Just keep calm.”

  They were all standing around me, I realized. Everyone in town crowded in to stare down at me, and some of their faces were long with concern while others seemed round with shock and curiosity. I thought I heard someone whisper, “People just don’t faint,” while another replied, “Give her a break, she’s probably devastated.”

  Dad still held my hand in his, and Lottie parked her wheelchair on my other side, her grey eyes filled with concern. “Troy, why don’t you go and fetch that bottle of water from the truck?”

  “I’ll be right back,” he told me. He lowered my head slowly to the ground, which he’d covered with his bundled suit jacket. “Just keep still. Don’t try to move.”

  I nodded and was grateful as the crowd gathered around me began to recede into curious groups. Some of them started to leave, while others called out to let Dad know they would catch up with him at the fire hall. Those that lingered stared on, and as their eyes bored into me, I felt a strange rage burning in my belly.

  God. How humiliating. How many people fainted at funerals? Did people really even faint at all anymore? It was like some old fashioned attention grabber I remembered from black and white movies, or the Victorian Era, when women were fragile and breathless from tightly tied corsets.

  Dad was in constant conversation with Lottie Kepner. Mrs. Williams stood nearby with Amber, who sent her children off with a thin man I didn’t recognize. The once willowy, dark-haired beauty was still beautiful, but she now possessed a hometown, mother of three look that I’d never imagined on her. Miss Rogers was there too, fussing at my side, but whatever it was she said to me seemed to go in one ear and out the other.

  “Here, drink this.” Troy hunkered down beside me again, sinking a knee into the earth as he leaned around to look at me. “It’s still cold.”

  “What if I catch cooties?” Had I hit my head?

  There was a twitch at the corner of Troy’s mouth, but no one else in the ring around me seemed even the least bit amused. “You might want to spray it down.” He tilted his head and the flicker of a grin spread a little deeper against his features. “I had a few sips on the way over so it’s probably infested.”

  “I hear they aren’t so bad after you hit twenty,” I reasoned.

  “Here,” a soft chuckle followed, “let me help you sit up.” Before I could protest he slipped his hand between my back and the ground, and with a gentle motion swept me forward. For a moment my spinning head protested with hints of black just around the edges of my blurred vision. “How’s your head now?”

  “Mm,” I could barely even shake it without feeling dizzy. “I feel really strange. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” He still had one knee in the mud as he leaned in toward me. “It might be a while before you get your bearings back. Just relax, and try to focus on your breathing, get the blood flow regulated.”

  My father moved away from the scene to say goodbye to someone, and Troy’s mother was caught up in friendly conversation with Miss Rogers behind us.

  “So are you the town doctor now,” I questioned.

  “Doctor?” he guffawed. “No ma’am.”

  “Oh.” Each new thing that came out of my mouth made me feel stupider than the last. “How do you know so much about fainting?”

  “My cousin Ernie’s a diabetic.”

  I searched my memory for any cousins of his I might remember, but then Dad returned and leaned in over me.

  “You feeling all right now, Jannie?”

  “Much better, Dad.”

  “Thanks for looking after her, Troy.”

  “No trouble at all, Mr. McCarty,” he nodded respectfully toward my father. “If you think you’ll be all right, I should help Mom into the truck.”

  “I’ll be fine, really.”

  “Sure?” His soft eyes shone with worry.

  I nodded, “I’m sure. Thanks for the cooties.”

  His grin was incredible, stretching the muscles in his jaw in a way that you rarely saw in smiles. “I hear they’re not so bad after you turn twenty,” and then he winked.

  He started to stand up, but for a moment we held one another’s gaze. Part of me wondered how I could have forgotten about him, or even worse, never really noticed him. I should have at least remembered how blue his eyes were.

  “Take care, now.”

  He gripped the handles and turned his mother’s wheelchair toward the truck, leaning down to whisper something in her ear as he maneuvered through the hilly grass. She reached up and patted his hand, and I watched from my cold seat on the ground as he loaded her into the passenger’s seat and helped her with her seatbelt. As he stepped up into the driver’s seat, his gaze crawled across the grass to where I still sat, and I thought he smiled at me one last time.

  Miss Rogers leaned in to offer me her hand, “I’ll help you up, dear.”

  “Oh, no, Miss Rogers,” I patted her hand. “I’ll manage.”

  It took everything in me to steady my legs and stand. I smoothed the wrinkles from my skirt and brushed away the clinging dried grass and leaves. I looked up just in time to watch Troy’s white Ford disappear along the winding hill of the cemetery drive.

  Chapter Four

  I felt like a ghost walking through the buffet lin
e at the fire hall, or maybe ghost isn’t quite right because it wasn’t like they couldn’t see me. It was like one of those dreams where you show up to take your SATs naked, or like I plunked a vulture hat down on top of my head and was making a huge spectacle of myself. When anyone actually dared to make eye contact they offered twitchy, insincere smiles, but the minute I looked away I caught them from the corner of my eye putting their heads together to whisper.

  It must have been the fainting. I knew fainting was outrageous, and I hated myself for having actually done it. A huge part of me wished I could go back in time and find some way to not faint, but then I thought about his hands on the back of my neck, his curious smile and those stunning eyes.

  Had he always been so attractive? I mean, I’d never really paid attention to him beyond the whole “Sonesville Hero” thing, and even that never interested me. He was just another dumb jock, one of the holier than thou with no eye or mind for the rest of us, or at least that was how my small circle of friends had seen his kind.

  I thought about my circle of friends for a moment and wondered why Megan Ward and Karen Pryer hadn’t contacted me since I’d been back in town. They both got angry with my best friend Erika Lewis and me for forsaking the town. Best friends forever meant we had to come back, and when we both refused to attend the five year reunion the lines of communication closed. Erika and I still kept in touch, when our careers allowed it. In fact, she sent condolence flowers and a card from South Africa, where she was currently on one of the most significant archeological digs of her career. Maybe the whole thing would have been easier with Erika, I thought. The two of us lived in our own world through most of high school, our big plans to escape the very glue that bonded us together.

  “Janice?”

  I turned from the tin-foil platter of baked beans and into the curious, but hopeful stare of a forgettable face. I vaguely remembered seeing her at the cemetery; she’d been the one who’d stopped to talk to my father, her gentle hand reaching out in a sincere act of comfort.

  “Hi.” I scratched through the faded memories of my youth to place that face. Scrawny, blond stringy hair, but the worst crime she’d made against herself was the large, bright red glasses frames straight out of the 1990s. Unfortunately, none of it helped me identify her, and I felt a surge of guilt clench tight in my stomach.

  “Hi.” Everything about her was nerves and insecurity. “I just wanted to say how sorry I am about your mom. Chandra was such a wonderful person. She brightened up our scrapbook circle every first and third Wednesday of the month.”

  “Thank you.”

  Scrapbooking, quilting, canning, prize watermelons at the county fair, volunteer work. My mother was clearly a superhero.

  “She always talked about you and your work. She was so proud. In fact, she was working on a whole scrapbook of your career. She started it with the school paper and the articles you wrote for the Shopper and the Sonesville Standard, and of course she had a ton of articles from the Tribune-Review.”

  “She did?”

  Maybe if I’d come home she might have shared them with me. I didn’t even know she’d liked to scrapbook, but the last thing I wanted was for any of these people to know how little I really knew about my own mother.

  “She did, yes, she did. Scrapbooking… it was just one of her things. She had a lot of uh things.”

  “Yeah,” the woman nodded. “I have some of the projects she was working on at my house. Maybe while you’re home you’d like to come over and pick them up.”

  Home. There was a conflicting ache in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t really been planning on staying long enough to call it home, now that she mentioned it. “I—yeah, I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I have work and…”

  “Oh, no, no. Of course you do.” At some point she’d reached out and laid her hands on my arm. I hadn’t even noticed. “I’m sure you’ll be heading straight back now that all of this is over, but you know, in case you don’t or something, I really think she’d like you to have them.”

  “Yeah, okay,” if only I could actually remember her name.

  “You’re not over here bothering poor Janice with minutes from the quilting bee, are you Becky?” The shadow that moved over us was Amber Williams, complete with a plastic fork stabbed into a piece of lemon cake.

  Becky Raynard. I should have recognized her, but the believer in me wanted to have faith that the underdog could rise up against the challenges after high school. I felt ashamed now that I hadn’t recognized Becky, but then having been tormented most of her life by the Amber Williamses of the world, she learned the effective art of making herself invisible when necessary. I watched Becky, her demeanor shrinking impossibly inward, and realized if she suppressed herself any more than she already had she’d wind up imploding, or something equally messy.

  “Amber,” I turned a plastic smile on her. “Becky and I were just talking about scrapbooking and what a fantastic way it is to bring friends together. In fact, I am seriously considering extending my stay just so I catch up with Becky and her friends at the next meeting.”

  There was a new glow in Becky’s face, as though that simple statement really turned her whole day around. Why I said it I really had no idea because the truth was I wanted to get as far away from Sonesville and the small town pettiness of people like Amber Williams as possible. In the city pettiness was an anonymous crime, the type of thing you could completely overlook and ignore. In Sonesville, it was in your face everywhere you turned.

  “Right.” Amber’s stiff nod looked like it made her neck hurt. “Well, I just wanted to stop over and make sure you were all right. Everyone was a little worried after you fainted.”

  It took everything in me not to say, “I’ll just bet they were.” I could feel my lips pinching in on each other in a scowl, and was thankful I’d caught it before it could satisfy any twisted plans she had. Same old Amber always seemed to know how to stir up trouble by digging down around the roots.

  “I’m feeling much better now, thanks.”

  “Well, you know, my mom is a nurse.” And what that had to do with the price of tea in China was anybody’s guess.

  “I’ll be sure to call her if I need anything.”

  Becky was like a hinge between us, the only thing keeping us civil in the ultimate stare-down. Had we been alone, Amber might say whatever was on her mind without refrain, but Becky’s presence seemed to stifle her a little. Even as she had just gone out of her way to make Becky uncomfortable, I highly doubted there had been chance for much rivalry between them without the backdrop of high school.

  “Well, you take care.” Amber’s smile was more erasable than an etch-a-sketch. One shake and it was gone as she turned away from us. She did pause to call over her shoulder, “Call me while you’re in town. I’d love to play catch up.”

  “I bet you would,” I muttered to myself, sparking a light of admiration in Becky’s green eyes. “So, Becky, I don’t know how long I’ll be in town, but call me with the date for your next meeting and I’ll definitely do my best to make it if I’m still here.”

  “Really, Janice, you don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to.” Inside a voice noted that my mother would have wanted me to.

  “Okay,” she nodded. “I’ll call you.”

  Becky fluttered away with far more life than she’d approached me with, and I scanned the fire hall for my father. My distracted gaze settled on Troy Kepner, but then it was impossible not to notice him since he stood at least six inches taller than everyone else in the fire hall. He was beside his mother’s wheelchair, one foot up on the folding metal chair in front of him as he partially leaned inward to participate in the conversation. He nodded at whatever was being said, and for a moment paused to smile. I noticed a dirt smudge on the knee of his pants, obviously the result of him leaning down beside me, and a momentary surge of guilt nagged at me.

  As if he felt my stare, he lifted his gaze to mine and I looked away too quickly.
I hustled over to the table where my father sat with Miss Rogers and a few other familiar faces that offered me their heartfelt condolences during the funeral.

  I didn’t really feel much like eating, but went through motions while I listened to so many of her friends share their favorite memories of my mother. Did I remember that time she took over the carnival committee and brought the whole affair back to life? And the Girl Scout troop fundraisers were never the same after I finished school and mom wasn’t a leader anymore. She still held the record for most blue ribbons won in a single year at the county fair, and there wasn’t a soul in all of Sonesville who could top her apple coffee crumb cake.

  “She kept this town’s heart beating,” Bonnie James shook her head.

  “She sure did,” Dad reached over and patted the top of Bonnie’s hand. “She sure did.”

  It was like she couldn’t help herself; my mother had to have her hands in everything, and her vibrant spirit lit up every function she attended. She didn’t just keep the town’s heart beating, she was that heartbeat. I started to push my chair away from the table and muttered something meant to sound like excuse me before darting through the crowds of people gathered around my mother’s memory.

  Her name was everywhere, voices singing her praises, lamenting her loss, and it was too much to hear. She was the only real connection I felt to that place, the only string tying me to its memory, and that string was cut away making me feel like there was nothing I could do to stop the spinning feeling inside me.

  I pushed through the double red doors and welcomed the rush of cool air against my face. Raindrops dappled my cheeks as I stalked toward the parking lot, but I wasn’t even sure where I wanted to go. I couldn’t remember where Dad parked the car, not that I could leave without him. I just needed to get away from the clawing hands that sunk into my conscience in an attempt to draw me back into the familiar comfort of that place.