“I’ve got the suitcase.” With solemn fortitude, Nathan’s mother set the emergency brake, opened the driver door, and extended stiff legs to the pavement. Leading with both feet, it took another moment for her to work her way out from behind the steering wheel. She opened the rear door and gripped the handle of the dilapidated pink suitcase. “Happiness Is A Visit To Grandma’s.”
“Don’t you have any other skirts besides that one?”
Mrs. Bartling pulled out the little bag and set it hard on the pavement. “That one looks to be about three sizes too small.”
“Sure, I do,” Gemma lied. She doesn’t like the way I look. She doesn’t like the clothes I wear. Even though she’s letting us stay, she doesn’t think somebody like me is good enough for her son. “I just didn’t bring any more with me, that’s all. At home I’ve got plenty of them.”
But there was no home. There were no other skirts. Only a small assortment of necessities in the suitcase and a hope that had begun dying its slow death.
“Well, no sense standing out here where all the neighbors can see you. Let’s get you inside. Let’s get the two of you settled.”
“Thank you.”
It had been a long time since anyone had invited Gemma to get settled. She climbed out of the Monte Carlo and stretched, her wrists jutted high and her fingers folded, breathing in the pungent, sweet incense of fresh-mown lawns and water sprinklers, of car wax and roses, of someone grilling on a back porch. From down the street came the steady singsong of a swing set, chains creaking in distant cadence to the rhythm of some child’s swinging.
Here they were.
Nathan’s home.
Gemma stood beside the grass, eyes closed, arms up-stretched as if she were reaching for him, expecting to find traces of her dead husband here. She had thought she would feel closer to Nathan the minute she climbed out of the car. But she didn’t. If anything, she felt vague disappointment. This place should have brought her closer to him and, instead, he felt further, further away.
Forget about it, Gemma. He’s gone. There isn’t anyplaceyou can go, anybody you can see, who’s going to bring Nathan back again.
She dropped her arms, opened her eyes. Paisley tumbled out of the car behind her, toting a plastic grocery sack looped around one arm. In it she carried three pictures she’d drawn with crayons on construction paper in vacation Bible school, two packs of Juicy Fruit chewing gum that George Sissel had given her, a yo-yo, a bouncy ball, and a painted flowerpot that read “Jesus Christ, The Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever” in which Gemma knew her daughter anxiously awaited the sprouting of some sort of bean.
“Watch out. Don’t drop your pot,” Gemma warned Paisley. “It’ll break. I don’t want you getting dirt all over Mrs. Bartling’s floor.”
“I won’t.” Paisley skipped toward the house, confident, innocent. “I’ll becareful.”
In the driveway next door a man tinkered with his truck, encircled by Kendall motor-oil cans and funnels and wrenches. He slid beneath the pickup with a rumbling scrape of his creeper, emitted a few grunts, then slapped his hands together in satisfaction as the ping of oil hit the aluminum pan.
A woman came trekking up the street, round as an airship and wholesomely happy. “Oh, Bea,” she shouted and waved broadly at all three of them where they stood together at the front fender of the car. “I’ve been worrying about you. How are you doing, anyway?”
“I’m okay, Lucinda. Fair to middling.” Mrs. Bartling handed Gemma the suitcase. “Got out and went to church Sunday.”
“Good to see you getting company.” Lucinda inclined her head pointedly at Gemma. “Company always helps.”
The oil-changing neighbor propelled the creeper out from under his truck. “When are you going to start showing folks those roses of yours again, Bea?” He polished his crescent wrench on the sleeve of his greasy coveralls. Then he, too, gave a keen nod toward Paisley and Gemma. “Sure don’t seem right without you puttering and pruning,” as he slid back under, the exhaust pipe and the transmission muffling his words, “in the dirt next door.”
Mrs. Bartling shook her finger at him. “That’s my business, Corwin Kepler, not yours.” But, as if the neighbor’s comments had made Mrs. Bartling suddenly self-conscious about her flowers, her steps broke their cadence. She stared disconsolately at the jumble of leaves and browning blossoms. Just as quickly, the woman raised her chin and marched with great purpose up the front brick steps. “Oh, never mind those roses.” She held open the screen and shooed Gemma and Paisley through like a brood of chicks. “Come on in. Come on in. No sense standing out here all day and letting everybody ogle you.”
Mrs. Bartling led the way up the hall again, past the row of familiar photographs, past the bathroom, past the child’s room with its two single oak beds, rock collection, and baseball pennant. Paisley stopped short, making Gemma pull up behind her. “Don’t we get to stay in Nathan’s room?”
Mrs. Bartling seemed not to hear Paisley’s question. She opened the door to a different bedroom and turned on a bedside lamp. Even though their hostess must have aired this room out for them, the room still smelled faintly of mildew and sachet. “You’ll both stay in here.”
A formidable wooden headboard stood against the far wall. In the window Gemma saw the grill and knobs of an ancient air conditioner. An assortment of perfume atomizers stood in a row on the pink linen-covered dressing table and an array of clean, fresh towels sat folded and stacked on the bed. Gemma set the suitcase on the white luggage rack with linen ribbons that stood open and waiting in one corner.
Paisley stood in the center of the room and asked the same question Mrs. Bartling had pretended not to hear the first time.
“Why don’t we get to stay in Nathan’s old room? Nathan said if we ever came to visit, I could stay there. He said I could play with his Tonka trucks.”
Even though Mrs. Bartling’s answer was quiet and calm, her face had blanched to the color of parchment. “But now Nathan is gone. That makes everything very different,” she said. “You mustn’t touch anything. No one is allowed to sleep in his room. No one has slept in his bed since he last slept there himself.”
Mrs. Bartling left them alone to unpack. One by one, Gemma opened each drawer on the dresser and found it empty except for the fragrant, floral papers lining the bottom. She placed Paisley’s few pair of underwear and shorts in one drawer and situated her meager supply of T-shirts, panties, and socks in another.
“Where do you want to put your crafts from vacation Bible school?” she asked her daughter. “There are six more empty drawers here.”
Paisley hugged the bag and the little flowerpot against her chest. “I don’t want to put them anywhere,” she said. “I want to keep them with me.”
“Are you sure? I’m worried about you spilling dirt. You need to find a window for that plant.”
Paisley shook her head.
Gemma gave up and moved to other things. On the counter in the bathroom she positioned their two toothbrushes and their small, wrinkled tube of Crest beside the sink. She aligned a pot of lip gloss, a hairbrush, and a stick of Mennen Teen-Spirit deodorant on one side of the tile counter.
It had taken precious little time for them to move in.
Gemma took Paisley’s hand and led her to the family room. “Sit down,” Mrs. Bartling said as she bustled around the house. “Make yourself comfortable. Do whatever you’d like.”
They sat down together, side by side, in the plump, old, tweedy recliner, two girls—a big one and a little one clutching a paper bag and a flowerpot—staring at the taupe wallpaper with little sprigs of green. Over the years, the paper must have faded. Two diamond shapes stood out in relief where, long ago, something must have hung.
Gemma’s breath caught. Two mahogany wooden carvings had hung in that spot once, two silhouettes of gazelles leaping a fence. Nathan’s father had yanked them off their hooks and taken them with him when he left.
Nathan had told her about that.
Gemma stared at her feet.
Beside her on the floor sat a wooden sewing box and in the box, beside the miscellany of threads and scissors and the pincushion shaped like a tomato and filled with sawdust, sat a tiny bird’s nest with one glimmering Christmas icicle woven in among the twigs and hair.
Nathan had told her about that.
Gemma drew one pained, shallow breath and gaped at the nest. “He found this in a tree outside. He told me about it.”
Mrs. Bartling grabbed the sewing box, cradled it against her chest as if to protect it. “This nest is no business of yours.”
But Gemma couldn’t stop. “Nathan found it in July,” she said. “He left it alone in the hackberry bush for three months after that, wanting to make sure no bird was going to lay a clutch or return to it before he took it away. Even after he brought it inside, he worried.”
“Don’t pretend you belong here,” Mrs. Bartling said, “just by knowing about a nest.”
“Nathan was always tenderhearted about things like that. Worrying about a bird.”
The question stood instark silence between Gemma and Mrs. Bartling: Why would a boy who could be tenderhearted toward a sparrow runaway from his mother?
Suddenly, everywhere Gemma looked, she saw things that seemed familiar to her. The hole in the linoleum by the door. The simple chandelier that hung from a chain over the table. The tapestry on the wall of The Last Supper.
Nathan had told her about all of these things.
“The day he died,” Gemma said, “we had hamburgers for lunch. He built one so thick with tomato and lettuce and pickles that he couldn’t get his mouth around the bun. Then he told me he wanted to take Paisley fishing just the way his dad had always taken him. And he kissed me good-bye—”
Mrs. Bartling set the sewing box down with a thump and a rainbow of thread spools rolled out across the floor. “Stop it. Oh, please, stop it. I want to hear these things. I really do. That’s why I invited you here.” She buried her face in her bony fingers. “But it’s too soon. It hurts too much today to hear what Nathan did, or said, or how he acted.”
Gemma stood abruptly from the chair, making it rock to and fro with Paisley still in it, realizing she’d crossed some forbidden, invisible boundary. When she spoke now she went cautiously, the way a dog would go, nosing her way into unsafe territory. “I feel as if—” Gemma scanned the room, the hole in the linoleum, the tapestry, the faded diamonds on the wallpaper. “—as if I already know this place.”
“Don’t try to make me accept you,” Mrs. Bartling told her. “Don’t think you can be family because you were married to my son.”
Gemma stood in the room like an animal, caught in truth, trapped.
“I wasn’t trying,” she lied. “I wasn’t pretending.” Then, much softer. “I wasn’t pretending I belonged here. I really wasn’t.”
Mrs. Bartling turned away toward the kitchen and stared at the floor beyond her left foot, as if she couldn’t bear meeting their faces while she answered the question that hung unspoken between them. “I’m the reason, you know. I’m the reason he left and never came home.”
Outside the window, evening was beginning to fall. A single car drove along Pattison, sending up a muted hiss of tires along the pavement. In the meadow behind the house, Gemma could make out the round shapes of cows as they grazed a close-cropped summer pasture.
She could think of nothing to reply.
Paisley was the one to break the oppressive quiet between them. “Can you put this in your window?” She rose from the recliner and with one little hand held up her flowerpot to Mrs. Bartling. “It has to be in the sun so it can grow.”
“No, honey bananas.” Gemma tried to stop her. “This isn’t the time—”
Mrs. Bartling took the flowerpot from the little girl with some relief, as if she was thankful for the diversion it gave. “It’s all right,” she said to Gemma. She went and set the pot on the windowsill beside the sink. “We’ll keep it here. That way, one of us will remember to water it. Outdoor plants get plenty of attention around here, but sometimes the indoor ones get slighted.”
But Paisley wasn’t finished. She began rummaging in her sack. She pulled out one of her construction-paper drawings and held it high so Mrs. Bartling could see.
“Can you hang this on the refrigerator?”
“Oh, my,” Mrs. Bartling gushed. “What a nice picture! Who is this?”
“I drew a picture of us. See?” The little girl pointed to each face as she named them off. “Here’s Mama and me and Nathan.”
“No, Paisley Rose.” Again, Gemma tried to stop her daughter. “No pictures right now. Because seeing those makes us so sad.”
As most four-and-a-half-year-olds are prone to do, Paisley didn’t listen. She kept right on talking, holding the drawing high and letting it dangle in midair. “I made Nathan’s hair sticking up all over his head like it did when he let me brush it.”
From where she stood across the room, Gemma could make out the drawing, a child’s rendering of the happy family they’d once been—three wobbly stick figures standing side by side with massive heads and grinning, plain faces, their arms outflung toward one another, their clothes outlined around straddled, spindly legs.
Paisley said, “Nathan said we should be in some sort of contest because we looked like we belonged together.”
Gemma flinched at her daughter’s words, a direct contradiction to the censure Mrs. Bartling had already issued.
Don’t tell me what he did, what he said, how he acted . . .
But to Gemma’s surprise, what Mrs. Bartling would not accept from her, she accepted from Paisley instead.
The woman smiled with great sadness and tousled the little girl’s hair. “From looking at your picture, I can see how he’d say something like that.”
Paisley smiled, satisfied.
Mrs. Bartling reached for the proffered drawing. She turned the picture right side up and peered down at it, her eyes gone soft and grave. “Is this what Nathan looked like when he was with you? He looks very happy.”
Only Gemma noticed the careful, bitter edge to her voice. Only Gemma knew what else Mrs. Bartling must have been thinking.
If he hadn’t been this happy with you, maybe he would have come home to me.
Mrs. Bartling opened a cabinet, pulled out a wheel of Scotch tape, and tore off little pieces. “Here. Stick these on each corner of your picture. I’ll let you put it up, okay?”
“Okay.”
With pride, Paisley hung her drawing, smoothing it out across the width of the refrigerator door with two slender little hands. For the rest of the day, every time Gemma happened to glance at Mrs. Bartling, she noticed how the woman’s eyes paused often on the child’s drawing, on the big smiles, the outstretched arms.
Chapter Twelve
Bea had a certain unsettled feeling about going to bed with guests in her home. Like a faultless hostess, she had fed them supper, folded back their mint-green sheets and blankets, plumped their lopsided pillows, even offered them a snack of Geneva’s homemade banana bread and glasses of milk before bed.
She had turned off the window air conditioner in the family room, opened all the windows, and started the attic fan, drawing the balmy, fresh night air into the house like tendrils of warm breath. She made certain her two guests had everything they needed before she yawned purposefully and excused herself to don her nightgown, robe, and slippers. She pulled her squiggly gray hair back with a stretchy headband, splashed water on her skin, brushed her teeth and smeared Pond’s Cold Cream all over her face. Then she climbed into bed, leaned her head against her own plumped pillows, pulled her own covers up to her ribs, and listened for them.
Even though the lamp had been turned out downstairs, she could still hear sounds she wasn’t accustomed to—whispers and mouselike movements and the rustling of bed linen. She couldn’t hear their words from this far away, but she could certainly guess at what they might be saying.
; “Scoot over a little, would you?”
“Can I have that other pillow?”
“This is a comfortable bed.”
“And a comfortable house.”
“What do you suppose she did that made Nathan leave and never want to come back?”
Bea stared at the ceiling, her chest hollow, her temples aching, as tears squeezed out of the sides of her eyes and dripped down the sides of her face.
It’s my fault.
Nathan had told them about the bird’s nest. Nathan had been happy with them. Nathan had talked about visiting and staying in his old room.
There’s a child’s drawing of my son hanging downstairs on my icebox, a picture of grasping hands and smiles in a row.
All the things a mother should have rejoiced in, only she hadn’t been allowed to rejoice, because she had never known.
“Lord,” Bea whispered into the darkness. The simple name, the plaintive cry, came almost unintentionally. “Lord.”
No answer came.
Only silence. Breathtaking silence.
As long as Bea had been sequestered here in this house, alone and hurting since Nathan’s death, she had been able to close out the presence of her heavenly Father in her own heart. The dry, dusty distance had claimed her, had whispered its awful lie to her and made her believe it—a song sung, a story ended, a dark dirge of separation that repeated itself in broken litany over and over again.
Didn’t you pray and ask God to bring your son home safely?
God forsook me when He let Nathan die.
Doesn’t George Sissel say God loves you no matter what is happening around you? That you shouldn’t doubt He is there?
If He cared about me, He would have listened to my prayer.
You’re the one that pulled away. You’re the one who is shutting God out of your life.
A Rose by the Door Page 11