by T. Greenwood
I thought about taking my own life. I recalled that urge I’d felt at the Charles after Eva had first sent me away. I dreamed myself walking into the lake and never coming out again. I dreamed of swimming, of sinking, of allowing the water to fill my eyes, my nose, my lungs.
It was Gussy who finally pulled me out of the murky depths of despair. For three days during which I could not even get out of bed, she took care of me. She fed me as though I were an invalid, pressing the cold, metal spoon against my lips. She held a cool, wet cloth to my fevered forehead. She slept next to me, her arms keeping me afloat. But on the fourth day, she came into the room with freshly pressed clothes in her arms and said sternly, “It’s time to get up. Your children need you.”
She drove me all the way back down to Hollyville. I think I knew then that I would never go back to the lake. I whispered quietly, “Good-bye, tree house, good-bye, lilacs and bees, good-bye, lake.”
In Hollyville, she stayed for another two days to help me get settled back into my old life. The girls went back to school. Frankie never stopped working. Everyone else went on, business as usual. It was as though only my world had gone on without me, running its parallel life, and was waiting for me to simply step back into it.
Frankie was surprisingly forgiving. He didn’t even drink for the first week I was back. Despite everything, he understood the power of this grief. And above all, he seemed relieved to have me home, though I wasn’t myself anymore.
“Did you go to the funeral?” I asked him one night as we lay in our old bed.
He shook his head. “Of course not.”
The idea that Eva and her girls had been laid to rest without me there had nearly killed me. But I knew that as much as I wanted to be there, needed to be there, it would only be inviting catastrophe. I could only imagine what the accident had done to Ted, how his rage might manifest now. I worried that he would come to Hollyville to punish me. To make me pay for first stealing his wife and then stealing her life. But I also half welcomed the idea. Let him come, I thought.
“Have you spoken to Ted?” I asked.
Frankie clearly did not want to talk about it anymore. His eyes burned red, and his hands shook. “I sent a card.”
I felt my insides churning, burning. I tried to picture Frankie at Woolworth’s picking out a sympathy card to send to Ted: some pastel disaster with meaningless passages of calligraphic scripture that was supposed to somehow express his regret that his wife had single-handedly brought about the death of his wife, three daughters, and their unborn child.
“What did you say?” I asked. “In the card?” My whole body was quaking, and he could feel the seismic repercussions of my grief in the mattress beneath us.
“What was I supposed to say, Billie?” he said angrily. “Sorry my wife tried to steal your wife? Sorry she killed her and your children?”
A blow to my jaw, a bone-crushing fist to my chest, would have hurt less.
He got out of bed then, and like a boxer who had just thrown the knockout punch, he looked somehow both triumphant and stunned.
Downstairs, I could hear him pulling the jug of wine from the cupboard. I could hear him drinking, the radio blaring a baseball game. I could feel the whole house trembling with his anger. Here was my old Frankie: the angry, frustrated man I remembered. And I welcomed him back, this monster. I needed him here to remind me what it was about him that disgusted me, that filled me with anger and self-loathing. But even as all the familiar feelings, of being trapped, of fear and rage and disappointment, mounted, I realized that it didn’t matter anymore. I had nowhere to run. There was nothing for me to run to. No one. Eva was dead. And he was right, I had killed her.
“Do you have Johnny’s cell phone number?” I ask Gussy.
She nods and reaches into her purse, pulling out her address book. She undoes the various rubber bands she has wound around the book to keep it together and flips to the W section. She reads the numbers to me, and I punch them into my cell phone. I hesitate for only a moment, my finger hovering over the Call button.
He answers on the first ring.
“Johnny,” I say. “It’s Billie Valentine. I’m here. In the parking garage.”
Gussy and I make our way through the cavernous garage to the elevators. I think stupidly that we should have brought something: flowers, a coffee cake. But we don’t know why we are here, and so our arms are empty as we ride the elevator to the third-floor breezeway and then make our way into the hospital.
I have always hated hospitals, always loathed the minty green walls and antiseptic scent, the cheerful faces of nurses and all the closed doors behind which people were sick and dying. Lou died in a hospital, attached to a thousand machines pumping life into her. It nearly killed me to see her there. When I finally go, my one wish is that I die in my sleep. That my heart stops suddenly and irrevocably while I am lying in my own bed. Or maybe during my morning swim; let the water take me. The sharks and fishes.
“Down this way, I think,” Gussy says, pointing to a brass sign on the wall that says 301–313.
We turn the corner and head down the long hallway, our shoes squeaking on the linoleum. There is a waiting area next to the nurses’ station. A man stands up from one of the chairs there and faces us, lifting his arm as if to wave.
“Is that Johnny? He doesn’t look sick to me,” I say.
As we get closer, the man looks so much like Ted it nearly takes my breath away. My mind spins wildly, out of control. I have one foot in the present and one in the past. And for a moment, I am consumed by fear. He has finally come for me, I think. Ted has finally come to punish me for everything that happened with Eva. And I think as my heart accelerates, the engine of my body burning hot and fast, that my wish might not come true. My heart might just stop here in this awful hospital. But when we get closer, and he holds out his hand, I can see it isn’t Ted (of course it isn’t Ted). It is Johnny. Johnny, Eva’s Johnny.
He is in his fifties now, but his face remains the same as that child I knew so long ago. The freckled face, the dark hair and wide eyes. His forearms are covered with tattoos, the inky pictures blurred in blue rivers underneath a mess of black hair. He is large, muscular. His jaw set firmly, his eyes sad and tired.
“Billie,” he says, and he holds my hand, studies me as if looking for the woman he knew in my wrinkled face, in my wild silver hair. “Thank you so much for coming.”
“Why are we here?” I say. I feel tricked. Cheated. We have just driven three and a half hours through the night, and Johnny is not on his deathbed. As far as I can tell he’s as healthy as can be. “I thought you were dying.”
Johnny shakes his head and smiles sadly, motioning for us to sit in a couple of chairs in the waiting area. Gussy sits down and immediately pulls her knitting from her purse. This is what she does when she doesn’t know what to do with her hands. I envy her this mindless task, this busyness.
I sit down, readying myself for whatever it is that Johnny plans to say, and he sits across from me. He takes both of my hands, and looks at me intently. He smiles.
“I remember your face,” he says. “It’s the same. Your eyes.”
I nod. I don’t want to interrupt him, but I’m also hoping he’ll tell me what’s going on.
“Can I get you some coffee?” he asks. “Tea?”
I shake my head. “Why did you ask me here?” I ask.
“Gussy might have told you about my troubles,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “She said you’ve had some problems with drinking.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” he says, laughing a little. “I spent a lot of years trying to erase what happened that day with booze and pills and other shit. Excuse my language.” He blushes.
My eyes sting. But really, what did I expect? I brace myself for his accusations.
“Losing them felt like the end of the world.”
I nod, trying hard not to let those pictures in, the ones of water. The ones of them trapped. My heart is r
acing.
“But it wasn’t the end of the world. I grew up. I became a man anyway. I got married anyway. I had children, houses, jobs.”
I know he intends for this to make me feel better, but there is little consolation here, because I suspect he may have lost all those things as well. I can read it in his weathered face, his rheumy eyes.
“I’m not sure how you think I can help,” I say.
“I didn’t see you afterward. I had no way of talking to you . . .”
“I couldn’t go to the funeral, you know that, right? Your father would have murdered me with his own hands. I had no choice. . . .” I feel myself coming undone again. I was reassembled that night, as Gussy held the pieces of me in her hands. But these fissures have made me weak, fragile. I worry that I am about to shatter again. I look at him, and know that he probably wants to hear my apologies, to hear that I am sorry for what I did. That little boy needs me. He needs me, and finally, here I am.
“I am sorry,” I say, feeling all that sadness and remorse rising to the surface. I feel like I am swallowing sorrow, gallons and gallons of sadness filling my throat and chest. My voice breaks around the deluge. “God, Johnny, I am so sorry.”
“Billie,” he says, squeezing my hands and willing me to look into his eyes. “You don’t understand. That’s not why I asked you to come. That’s not what this is about.”
I look at him, peer into his face, seeing nothing but his heartache, the anguish I caused.
“You didn’t say anything?” he says suddenly to Gussy, who doesn’t look at us, only shakes her head.
“Gus?” I say.
Johnny clears his throat. “I need to tell you something, and I’m not sure how to say it. I’ve practiced this a half a million times,” he says. “But there’s no good way. No way to make it okay. No way to undo it. To change things.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. I am aware suddenly of how bright the hospital is. Outside the sun is only now beginning its watercolor undoing of the night, the light bleeding through darkness.
Johnny’s hands are trembling. “It’s about my mother,” he says.
I nod. Of course it is about Eva. Eva is why I am here.
“Donna and Sally and Rose all died in the accident. They were trapped in the car when it went into the river.” His voice is cracking.
“I know,” I say, shaking my head. This feels cruel already. “I know that.”
“But my mother . . . Billie, oh, Jesus . . .” Johnny is starting to cry now, and my first impulse is to hold him, to comfort him. He could be an eight-year-old child again. But he isn’t; he is a grown man. He takes a deep breath and squeezes my hand again.
“Billie, my mother and I were both thrown from the car before it went into the water.”
The fluorescent hospital lights are blinding. My head pounds, and my heart pounds, and I squeeze my eyes shut. On the back of my eyes is the image of the river, the car, the children and Eva stuck inside.
“No,” I say. “She and the girls were all in the car. They drowned.” The air seems suddenly thinner. “Frankie told me. Your aunt explained everything that happened. Frankie talked to your father.” I feel vertiginous. All of the blood is rushing from my face to my hands. Everything is numb and tingly.
“Billie, listen to me,” Johnny says, willing me back. Pulling my hands to him as if he can save me now. “Mary had to tell you that. She had to tell you my mother was gone. My father made her. Don’t you understand? It was the only way for him to finally put an end to it.”
I hold on to the edge of the plastic seat, and Gussy’s arm finds me, ready to catch me.
“It was a lie, Billie,” he says, his eyes filling with tears.
“Gus?” I say, waiting for an answer.
Gussy reaches for me, her eyes wet. “Billie, I didn’t know. When Johnny told me, I couldn’t believe it,” she says. She squeezes my hand. She looks frail now; her hands are trembling and her voice is shivery. Like a child. I feel lost in time. I feel lost. “You have to know I had no idea. Frankie either. If we’d had any idea, we would have told you. I would have taken you to her myself.”
“Why am I here?” I ask them both, feeling as though I am drowning. My head held under the cold, cold water.
“She’s sick,” Johnny says. “She’s dying. And she’s been asking for you.”
I am a swimmer. My whole life I have relied on the properties of water. I have trusted it to tell the truth. But water is no different than memory; I know this now.
In my memory that accident is as vivid and real as though I were standing there myself, watching as the car tumbled with Eva and the girls bouncing inside like popcorn in a pan. I can recall the smell of spring mud, frozen under new snow. The sound of the river rushing in its icy current. The taste of snow on my tongue as I opened my mouth to scream. I watched them drown.
But water, like memory, is more devious than it appears, becoming exactly what you need for it to be: liquid or solid. Yielding or firm. It capitulates, or resists. And sometimes, it just evaporates. It simply disappears into thin air, steam rising to the heavens and only a screaming teapot left behind.
I struggle for the memories of the conversations with Frankie, with those days after we returned home. But I can’t trust any of them now; they bob and dip and then disappear. The truths are submerged.
“But I would have known,” I say, shaking my head, still denying this new truth, this violent rip in the seamless expanse of my recollection. “If she were alive.”
Johnny shakes his head. “She almost died. She was in the hospital for nearly a month after the accident. She broke both of her legs. Her wrists. One of her lungs was collapsed. And then, when she finally came home, it was like she wasn’t really home at all. She blamed herself for the accident. She . . .”
“What about the baby?” I ask.
Johnny shakes his head.
“But why didn’t she find me? Why didn’t she call? She would have called me.” I realize then that I am being selfish, a child. She must have blamed me too. If I hadn’t asked her to leave Ted, she wouldn’t have been out driving in the storm; her children would not have died. “Did she know what Ted told us?”
Johnny shook his head.“I don’t know. She was only home for about a month when she took the pills. They were the painkillers the doctors had given her. My father had her sent to Danvers, you know Danvers?”
God, I thought. The mental hospital. The one that looked like a castle, a castle in nightmares.
“How long was she there?” I ask.
“Three years,” he says, and I feel like I can’t breathe. All those years, she was locked away only fifteen miles away from me, and I had no idea.
It is as though I am listening to a story about someone else, a made-up story. This, the supposed truth, is so far from my own. So far from what I have lived with for the last forty-eight years. I cannot reconcile any of this with what my heart knows, what my body knows.
“No,” I say, wishing it away, willing it away. I can’t decide which truth suits me. If it is what I knew to be true, that she died in the river that day, then it explains away the last forty-eight desperate years. It justifies the grief that has settled in my marrow, that pumps through my heart with every beat, that lives in my lungs. But this other story, this strange upended version of events, negates it all. If Eva survived, she would have found me. But she was alive, and she did not reach out to me, did not try to find me. I am not sure I can take this.
“She was destroyed, Billie,” he says as if I have spoken out loud, by way of explanation. “She was trapped. By her guilt. By my father. There was nothing she could do. She just gave up, Billie. She had no choice.”
I am crying now, tears that have lived inside my eyes for decades. They feel ancient and primitive as they emerge, as they stain my cheeks. I have stored this salty water, this ocean of sorrow inside of me for nearly fifty years. I have spent nearly half a century, half of my life, wishing I could unwind the years,
unravel the knots, backtrack and undo. Knowing that it all began with me. That I was the one who pushed her to leave Ted. Who left Frankie too soon. That I was the one who asked her to drive through the storm to me that night. That my anger, my impatience, my foolish and selfish desire for something I could never ever have, that maybe I didn’t even deserve, were what drove her and the girls into the river. Sorrow swells in my throat. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”
“It was an accident,” Gussy says, reaching for my hand. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Billie,” Johnny says, making me look at him. Making me look into his little boy’s eyes. See the little boy’s pain in that ravaged face. “For a long time, I blamed you. I did. But she didn’t. My mother never blamed you.”
I look at him, at his eyes that are also filling with tears. And I ask the one question only he can answer. “Then why didn’t she find me?”
“Don’t you understand?” Johnny says. “That is why I asked you to come here. That’s why you’re sitting here right now. She asked me to look for you. She has found you.”
Eva is in this building. Eva is on the other side of the door we have been looking at across the hall. I can barely make sense of this. I am gripping Gussy’s arm, to stay tethered to the earth. What is waiting for me on the other side of that door? Who is she now?
I try to imagine her inside Danvers. Ted had threatened her before; women could be sent there for nearly any reason back then. Defiance, depression. And Eva was guilty of both. Imprisoned for simply wanting independence. Detained for her despair. Treated like an animal instead of a woman, like a lunatic. Danvers was the stuff of childhood nightmares, a place most people went to and never came back.