A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

  Apparently, it did include Jennifer’s return address; if anyone wanted to write back, they could. It may have been Jennifer’s way of testing the water, but it was not what Rose was waiting for. Yes, things had happened in that car that night, and Rose had blamed herself for three long years; still she believed with all her heart that if she found her daughter, they would hug and cry and forgive each other. But this letter, to her son, made her furious. What had she done, really, to deserve this? Nightmares every night, two thousand dollars paid to a detective who turned up squat, that look of pity from people she knew—three years putting her life on hold in hell, and then a letter, to Peter? No, she was not going to write back.

  Jennifer had punished Rose with her absence, now Rose would do the same. It had been a game with no winners. She was smart enough to know exactly what she was doing.

  And now Peter has dragged her down here to the hospital because the baby has been born. A girl. Here Rose is, riding in the elevator to the eighth floor while Peter waits downstairs in the lobby because he says she has to do this on her own. Why the hell does she have to do anything? Jennifer comes for Christmas bearing gifts, and now it’s Rose’s move? Well, damned if she’s going to be carrying anything. Still, she does—she carries hope so deep inside that she hardly knows it’s there. She can remember loving Jennifer. She is sure she does. Maybe she can, again.

  A nurse tells her which room Jennifer is in, and Rose runs her hands through her hair. Smooths her skirt. Would kill for a cigarette. She steps around the corner and into the room.

  Jennifer lies on the hospital bed, the baby in her arms, unaware Rose is standing in the doorway. But this cannot be her daughter. This is a woman holding a baby. A woman who gave her a wind chime for Christmas.

  Maybe that would be the best way to go about this. This is just a woman she’s met recently, who is not the same person who hurt her so badly. If she thinks this way, maybe she can trick her heart.

  She clears her throat.

  Jennifer turns and sees Rose, her look changing to surprise and shock. Good, Rose thinks. Good. Then the baby mews, little soft wet cries. Without a word Jennifer lifts up her loose nightshirt and exposes her breast, holding it from underneath, adjusting it so her nipple is closer to the baby’s mouth. She shifts the baby now, and the two meet. There is a moment when both the baby and Jennifer close their eyes, and Rose is no longer here, could be dead, but then Jennifer opens her eyes. “Hello, Mother,” she says.

  It’s not enough. Nothing would be. Even this child, her granddaughter. Rose is suddenly furious with herself, because she doesn’t want to hold this baby, and that will make her look bad.

  “What’s her name?” she says, still standing only a foot inside the door.

  “Jasmine,” Jennifer says. “But I’m going to call her Jazz.”

  Her daughter has said this just to be ornery. Certainly no one is going to call their daughter Jazz. Rose rolls her eyes, then unable to pull back a gesture, she becomes ashamed at herself and gets angry at Jennifer for making her feel ashamed. “And does the baby have a father? A last name?”

  “Mine,” Jennifer says.

  “My God, Jennifer. How are you going to raise a child without a father? Seriously, what is the man’s last name, if I may ask?”

  “You may not,” Jennifer says.

  They stare at each other for a minute as the baby nurses. Rose swears she’s not going to talk first, but she does. She just can’t hold it in anymore. “If you can’t answer a simple question with a little kindness, I’ll have nothing to do with either of you. You shouldn’t have had a child, if she can’t have a father you can name.”

  Before Jennifer can say anything, Rose turns and leaves the room. Her hands are shaking again, quite badly. She can hardly catch her breath. She is alone in the elevator going down.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Nana? Are you okay?”

  Rose lifts her head. She must have fallen asleep. On a step? Her bottom aches from the hard concrete. A girl who looks familiar sits next to her. Rose pats the girl’s thigh, comfortable with this child, whoever she is. On the ground is a feather, black and glossy like a wet night. “Starling,” she says, and bends down slowly to pick it up. Holding the feather to her chest, she grins. She loves birds, and cats. A funny combination. Like me and this young girl here, both in god ugly shoes. She laughs and pats the girl’s leg again. “Let’s get going,” she says, the words slipping from her so easily. And why shouldn’t they?

  I pick up the phone, call my sister, Betsy. Her husband, Jasper, answers. I hear alarm in his voice. He must think I’m calling with bad news. Why else would I call? It’s not that I never talk to Betsy, but the times I do are always the times I must.

  “Mother’s okay,” I say. “I’m just calling to talk to Betsy. Is she there?” Holding the black portable phone in one hand, I close the door. I’ve never been in Jazz’s room alone with the door shut. It feels strange, like I’m doing something wrong.

  “I’ll get her.” Jasper doesn’t bother with the how are you’s, or the how’s the weather stuff. We have never been a how’s-the-weather kind of family. When we want to avoid something, we avoid each other.

  “Hello?” Betsy says.

  “Hi,” I say. “Mother’s okay. She’s out on a walk with Jazz. I think she’s doing better, like a remission. We had a long talk today.”

  “That’s nice,” Betsy says. She’s not dumb. She’s very, very smart, it turns out; has a master’s from Case Western, a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. She knows I didn’t call her to say I had a nice talk with Mother.

  “That nursing home called. I left you that message. Did you get it?”

  “Yes. I called you back, remember?”

  Yeah, she did. We played phone tag. Now I’m It. “I think I’d like to keep her here for another month or so, but I keep going back and forth. What do you think, should I keep her here?”

  There’s a pause. “I can’t tell you what to do. You’ll have to figure that one out on your own.”

  “God, I wish I could. Actually, I wish I took her in a year ago, so sending her to a nursing home now would be okay. Two months isn’t that long.”

  Another pause. I haven’t asked a question. She might just wait till I do. I skip over all the worries I have about keeping Mother, and cut through whatever Betsy’s thinking in silence. “I know you’re mad at me. I know you don’t like me much. I know I never gave you any reason to.” Which is probably exactly what she is thinking. I stumble on. “Look, I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching. I missed so much. I left you and Peter, and I’m really sorry. I know I never said that to you, except in a perfunctory way, but you always look at me like you hate me, which you might, I don’t blame you. I’m really sorry I left you behind. You don’t have to forgive me, but I’ve got to say it, okay?”

  “Is this some kind of AA thing?” she asks. “For some addiction you have? Because I don’t want any part of that.”

  “No. No, it’s not. I don’t do drugs anymore.” I sit on the edge of Jazz’s bed, try to relax. She has stuffed animals on her bed, even at the age of sixteen. I missed knowing Betsy at this age. She went from fourteen to twenty-four in a leap I took.

  “I just want to say I’m sorry because I want to. It’s all my own idea. Really. I know I can’t make up for everything. I just want to talk to you. I want to know about you, and Mother, while I was gone.”

  “Oh, I’m supposed to give you a synopsis? You want footnotes?”

  Shit. I stand up, pace. This is not going to be easy. “No. Jesus, Betsy. Just talk to me. Okay?”

  There’s a pause. “All right. What do you want to know?”

  The first thing I think of is, “How long did it take Daddy to die?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “From the time he got sick, till he died. Wasn’t it a few years?”

  “No, six months. Why?”

  I swallow. “It seemed longer. Did she tell you why I left?�
�

  “No. Why did you leave?”

  “Can I tell you that later?”

  “Whatever.”

  I smile. The professor saying whatever. “Did she try to find me?”

  “Yeah. Of course she did. She called the police a hundred times, your friends, she went and hung out by the school. Do you know how embarrassing that was for me? She talked to everyone until she got the name of some guy you hung out with. She confronted him in the parking lot, screaming at him. That was my school, too, Jenny. Not that you cared. He said you were gone. He didn’t know where. I don’t know what else she did, except she always asked if you called. You didn’t.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “Tell her,” she says.

  I’m walking in circles like a dog trying to figure out where to lie down. I sit on the floor. “Did she drink more because I left?”

  “What do you think, Jenny? The shock of your leaving drove her to sobriety? Yeah, she got worse. Peter joined the football team, the track team, the baseball team. I stayed home. She lost her job, but they took her back. She filed a claim for disability. She thought of that all by herself, when no one did stuff like that yet. She was smart, smart enough to write you off. But, hell, she didn’t. She just pretended to. She cried a whole lot. Is that what you want to know? Does that make you feel better?”

  “It’s not about feeling better,” I say, knowing it is. This won’t do it, that’s for sure. “So how did she stop drinking? Peter says it was because of you.”

  A pause again. I wait, slipping off my shoes and socks. I rub my feet.

  “I came home for Thanksgiving, from college, and she was a mess, just lost her job. I transferred back to Cleveland, dragged her to AA. She hated it, but she went, because she knew if she went to AA she could prove she had a disability. But she faked half the steps. She’s cagey. She knew how to pretend she wasn’t drinking. She cut back. She didn’t stop. She never did.”

  “Jesus, Betsy. I’m so sorry.”

  “You said that already.”

  I hear the downstairs door open and close. Jazz and my mother are back from their walk. I’m sitting on the floor, my upper body moving back and forth, like those Jewish men saying their prayers. If Jazz walks in here, she’s going to think I’m having a seizure or something. I want to hang up the phone so bad my hand sweats trying to loosen my grip on it.

  “But Peter says she stopped drinking. I didn’t see her drink after I got back.”

  “Yeah, well, Peter was in college, playing football, riding his bike across America,” Betsy says. “And exactly how often did you see her after you got back? She drank when she was alone, and with people she felt might understand. Like me. She was a functioning alcoholic. I got that term from my trips with her to AA. I learned a lot while you were out in San Francisco, wearing flowers in your hair.”

  “Mom! I’m back!” Jazz yells. I hear footsteps on the stairs.

  “But she’s forgotten about alcohol now,” I say.

  “You want to bet?” Betsy says.

  “Mom? Where are you?”

  Betsy must hear Jazz shouting. “You probably have to go,” she says. “That’s okay, because I’m done with this now. Nice talking to you.”

  “Betsy, I just want to be friends. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  “Next time you call, try asking how my kids are.” She hangs up.

  “Mom! Where are you?”

  “What are you doing in my room?” Jazz says, looking at me sitting on her floor like it’s some crime.

  “Talking to my sister.” I shrug. “Well, I was. I’m not anymore. How was the walk?”

  “Okay.” But her face doesn’t say okay.

  “What? Did something happen?”

  “Well, I didn’t get to ask her anything about World War Two, that’s for sure. She kind of got into this feather I found. She kept saying starling. We had to sit down on the Shermans’ steps. She was twitching. I guess she was a little weirder than usual, but that doesn’t mean I’m telling you she should go to a home.”

  “I understand. Thank you for taking her. Where is she?”

  “In her room.”

  “Okay.” Then, “Jazz?”

  “What?”

  “Do you still like stuffed animals?”

  She squints at me, like I’m asking a trick question. “Sometimes,” she says. “Why?”

  “Nothing.” But I smile, a big smile.

  “Jesus,” Jazz says. “You’re just as nuts as Nana.” She doesn’t say this meanly, she’s just trying to make a joke.

  I check on my mother. She’s watching TV with the sound off. I ask if she wants to be left alone and she nods. Sometimes I do ask the right questions. I turn the sound up, close her door. Jazz is in her room, with her door closed. All the doors are closed. It’s time to talk to Todd.

  He turns and looks at me as I enter the computer room, his hands poised above the keyboard. He types with just two fingers, so now it looks like he’s waiting to direct a little orchestra. “Ready to talk?” I ask. He shakes his head no, then yes. He types a few words, signs off.

  There are clothes all over the place, heaped on the high-backed chair, the guest bed, the ironing board, spilling out of the plastic laundry basket. The basement is locked to keep my mother away from Todd’s tools. It also makes doing the laundry more of a pain in the ass than it already is. I take the stuff off the chair, throw it on top of the basket. Todd swivels his chair toward me. We are a good distance apart.

  “I’m sorry about dinner,” he says. He always apologizes first, and suddenly I see it not as a kindness but as a manipulation. If he’s apologized, what’s there to talk about?

  “I’m sorry, too,” I say, automatically, although all I did was make a nice dinner and say my mother was doing better. “Who were you talking to?”

  He looks at his hands. There are dark stains under his broken fingernails, and his knuckles are large—a workingman’s hands, the kind I like. He’s wearing his wedding ring; the double rings were his idea. The whole marriage thing was his idea, but I took it seriously. Take it seriously.

  “Friends,” he says.

  “What friends?”

  “Why is this important?”

  “You know it is.”

  He nods. We’re speaking slowly, carefully. My stomach’s churning.

  “So?”

  Todd cocks his head to the side, thinking, his eyes looking up and right. I read once that your eyes look up and right when you’re remembering something or imagining things, and you look left when you’re lying, or doing math in your head. I wonder who he’s remembering, or imagining. I’m comforted only by the idea that he’s not about to lie.

  “There’s a Web site for my high school, an alumni chat room. I found some old friends there. We talk sometimes.” He shrugs, as if it’s really nothing at all.

  “Any women?”

  “Two.”

  “Two? Have you seen them? Did you meet up?”

  “Not yet,” he says. How can the right answer sound so wrong?

  “You want to?”

  “Jen, there’s men in this group, too. Old friends I haven’t talked to for years. Most of them live out-of-state. We’re thinking about a reunion. There’s an old friend, Lue Levin, lives in Montana, he carves trees stumps into art. We used to hang out, drink. We’ve had some good talks, on-line. It’s good to have someone to talk to, sometime.”

  “And the women?”

  “One’s in town, the other’s in Columbus. One was a girlfriend, the other just a friend.”

  “The ex-girlfriend lives . . .”

  “In Columbus. I’m just talking to them, Jen. I’m not having an affair.”

  At least he doesn’t say yet this time.

  “Because I don’t talk to you enough?”

  He nods.

  The both of us sitting in chairs, facing each other, makes me feel as if we’re having an interview. I get up, start folding clothes. “I’m sorry. It’s temporary. I’m
a bit overwhelmed with my mother—”

  “Jen, it’s like you have this little goddamn club going. First it was the Jen and Jazz Club, and now it’s the Jen and Rose Club, and I’m not supposed to understand the secret hand signs. Well, I’m making my own.” He shoves the sliding shelf with the keyboard so hard it bangs closed under the desk with a thunk. “Look what I’m fucking doing, Jen. I’m using a goddamn computer to talk to people. That’s not how it’s supposed to be. I thought we had something special. I’m living in this house full of women, and I’m completely left out. Don’t tell me I’m imagining it.”

  “Okay. I won’t.” We stare at each other. “I know I’ve been distant recently—”

  He laughs, a harsh laugh. “Babe, you can be the queen of distant, it’s not something recent. But I accept that, sometimes. Hey, it intrigued me when we met. You were like this mystery. When you’d tell me stuff, when you said you’d marry me, I felt special, like I had done something no one else could—”

  “You did.” I sit on the corner of the bed. I’m within touching distance of him now, but we don’t touch.

  “Let me ask you something,” he says.

  “What?” There’s a bit of nastiness in his voice. He’s not going to ask me to sit in his lap, give him a kiss.

  “Why did you marry me?”

  I hold perfectly still. I know where he’s going with this. “Because I love you.”

  “Not in love, though, right? You never say it that way.”

  He’s right. I married him because I was afraid of being alone. For a long time Jazz was all the love I could stand. She was always with me, like my arm, or my heart, even when she was at school. And then she turned thirteen just as I started dating Todd. Casually dating; I didn’t need a man. I could take care of myself. But my daughter’s hips grew wider, her breasts swelled like rising bread, and I knew she would leave me soon. But I did feel more for Todd than other men. I loved him in moments. We were good together.