Even Now

by Susan S. Kelly

  Then she turned and left me. And though I stood still, I left her, too. We let each other go again, and for the final time.

  From Hannah’s quote book:

  . . . for as the self bends over the past it identifies what it responds to, vibrates with—what it recognizes; the rest is worth little. That is what memory teaches us—the discovery of the essential.

  —Catharine Savage Brosman

  Chapter 15

  In the plots of movies or books or hammock-hatched fantasies, the characters you’re meant to hate get their just fate. It’s traditional. The beauty queen or the bully or the cheerleader or the football star become alcoholic, addicted, get pregnant. They grow fat, ugly, are divorced, beaten, left in the dust. Havoc is wreaked, revenge is sweet. You know the drill: comeuppance all around.

  But of course those are only useful and retaliatory fictions. In real life it’s never that simple. My slutty college friend is now an investment banker. In real life the movie or the book or the fantasy ends and people move on to the next book or movie, the next house or job. As I am moving on, packing for a new beginning again. People begin again every day. Daintry and I will not.

  Hal has bought a cardboard box manufacturing operation in Hickory. Not so far from the mountains. Already he spends several days each week working there. I commute, too, but at night, taking classes toward a degree in horticulture and design from the community college. My ability has surprised me. Some holdover from Daintry’s hold over me? Doesn’t matter. On those evenings Ellen prepares her own kid-friendly suppers, and I’m glad. If my absences do nothing but give her self-sufficiency, they’ll be worth it.

  I went a final time to the columbarium, at sunrise. Rose quietly in the half-dark, predawn chill. Hal stirred under the covers, propped up on an elbow. “Would you like company?” he said. “Would you mind? I’ve never seen it. You’ve never invited me.”

  “Come. Please.”

  I’d driven and he’d sat beside me, eating toast wrapped in notebook paper because there weren’t any paper towels. I’d forgotten to buy them. “I’m sorry,” I said. And again, “I’m sorry.”

  “No big deal,” he said. “I’ll live.”

  “He’s not exactly an unstable isotope, is he?” Ceel had once laughed of Hal. What do you love? What attracts you in a man? Stable isotopes. Adaptability. Two qualities that a year ago were negatives, not positives. Timing is everything.

  Watching the sun creep across the mountains was like watching roof frost melt from white to gray to black slate. Iris-colored clouds cloaked the Blue Ridge, and behind them the sun bloomed slowly from rose to peach to yellow to white. The clouds broke away into high wisps, leaving the backlit mountains bare and whole. “They look like women’s breasts, don’t they?” I said. “Some conical, some rounded, some perfectly triangular?”

  Hal draped his arm over my shoulder as we descended the hill. “I wouldn’t know,” he said. His fingers played about my braless bosom. “Yours are the only breasts I know.” I smiled and threaded his wandering fingers into mine.

  The bulbs had come and gone. Shrubs wore their new ruffled growth like furry animal ears, pale against the darker green of older foliage. Hosta scrolls were unfurling their broad, variegated leaves. Elbow-high perennials were still slender and pliable with newness, but on their own, established and secure. I wouldn’t see their maturity, the splendor of summer fullness. It’s occurred to me that I never really had a summer in Rural Ridge. But among other things, I came for the snow.

  Two tongue depressors poked from the dirt. “What are those?” Hal said.

  “Reservations.”

  “As in ‘Build it and they will die’?”

  I laughed and stooped to lift crinkled foliage of astilbe sheltering the original four marble markers. There, beneath a bleeding heart’s dangling row of ruby teardrops, a plaque was embedded in the ground, centered between the simple markers. Its background was grained and deep brown, the plain lettering raised in burnished brass. It wasn’t a grave marker, or reservation, but a prayer, and though I knew it already by heart, I read the words through twice.

  O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.

  “Hal, look. From the old prayer book. Wonder where this came from. It’s so beautiful. Who. . . ”

  “It came from me.”

  I stood and looked at him, suddenly remembered the anonymous gift. Hal had been the giver. In secret, and for me.

  “I didn’t want you to know,” he said. “So you’d be surprised. Haven’t even seen it myself. But it looks good, doesn’t it? You like it? You approve? It doesn’t. . . ruin anything, does it, because it doesn’t have to stay.”

  “Hal.” My throat stung with not crying.

  “I thought it would fit in a columbarium. Might, well, encompass a lot of things. Your father’s death, anyone’s death. Forgiveness. What you said about tallying up, how worthless it is. Looking around at the end of the day or the end of your life, and realizing contentment is enough, and love, or grace, and hell, I’m no preacher. I just know.” He was embarrassed, his hands huge and empty and gesturing.

  “How did you know it was my favorite prayer?”

  “Oh, Hannah, give me credit or don’t ask me. I’ve lived with you eighteen years. I just know that, too.”

  Of course he did. “I’m sorry. But it’s absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. I love it. And you.”

  “Come here,” he said. “I need a you fix.”

  I went to his lean height, pressed my forehead against his open collar where tendrils curled, blond that wouldn’t so much go gray with age as bleach silver like the undersides of aspen leaves before a storm.

  “You already have me,” I said, and his arms went round me tight.

  I felt a trowel in his jacket pocket. “I thought you’d packed all the tools. What’s this?”

  “For the arum. To transplant it to Hickory. Where is it?”

  With the change of seasons the arum would soon die again. Not die, though, no; it would merely become invisible to anyone but me. I thought of Hal’s rock retaining wall, where white candytuft was spilling over prettily. “You’re leaving your wall. I’m leaving the arum.”

  “But you brought it all the way from Cullen. All these years.”

  I shook my head. “I’m leaving Cullen here, too.”

  “Yoo-hoo.”

  Without looking I know who it is. “In the kitchen, Doesy.”

  “Already echoes in here,” she says, and I smile, remembering the day I’d searched every corner of the house for a hair scrunchie Wendy believed she’d left. “It must not be here,” I’d told Doesy, “I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “I know,” she’d said. “Your house is so small there’s just no place for anything to get lost, is there?”

  “Everything packed?” she asks.

  “Almost.” I ball another pair of socks. “Laundry goes on, though. One of the eternal mysteries of life is how a family of four manages to wear thirty-two pair of socks in a single week.”

  She giggles and displays a flowered gift bag with the Picky-Picky logo of Frances Mason’s sucker store. “I brought a going-away present. Open it.”

  Beneath the ribbons and tissue lies a frame made of twined kudzu vines. Doesy had already put a picture behind the glass, of Mark in the driver’s seat of Wendy’s car with Wendy beside him. Both were grinning.

  “It’s really more for Mark than you,” Doesy admits. “I thought he might like to have this for his desk next year. They do have desks, don’t they?” Mark is going to boarding school in the fall, in New England. It was his decision.

  “Yes,” I say, suppressing a smile, “they have desks.” But no hair dryers.

  “Wendy’s going to miss him so.” Doesy never knew how Wendy treated Mark that bleak nigh
t. She leans toward me, asking in a confidential tone, “Tell me the truth, Hannah. What did he do?”

  “’Do’?”

  “That you’re sending him away.”

  I fish through a carton marked KITCHEN STUFF and find the little tin box containing ink and stamper. I’m familiar with that old stigma of boarding school as a punitive measure. “He didn’t do anything, Doesy. He wants to leave.”

  Her eyes widen. “But how can you let him go?”

  I ink the pad, considering how to answer this question carrying both stun and accusation. Life is that, letting go. People wrestle themselves insistently away like Ceel, or they drift, or they’re severed like a tree limb. Mother couldn’t let me go. Her pact with Daintry was part of that tenacious clinging. Daintry and I did them all. We wrenched and wrestled and severed and inched. We let each other go.

  “For the whole experience,” I finally answer. “Having to be on your own and responsible to yourself. It. . . ,” I grope, “it cuts the cord.”

  Doesy straightens with offense. “I don’t want my cord to Wendy cut.”

  “I know. I understand.”

  “Come back and see us, now,” she says on her way out.

  “Yes,” I say. No.

  I stamp Mark’s name on a boxer waistband. And on another and another. Indelible now, this imprint, this evidence of departure. It begins again.

  Mark ambles into the kitchen and reflexively opens the refrigerator. “There’s nothing to eat.”

  I wave my hand, asking for the positive.

  “But”—he looks at the table—“but you’re stamping, so I don’t have to do it.”

  My stomach flips at the new deepness in his voice. “Who’s going to wave their hand at you far away from me in the frozen North?”

  “Nobody, I hope.” He looks forward to this freedom. And though school is three months away, I ache for him already, the pain that awaits him. Leaving friends, defining yourself for new ones, the discomfort of returning home to find life has gone on without you, happy to be there yet ready to leave again when the two weeks or month or weekend is over. “Back to the womb,” my father used to say as I packed the last day of every vacation.

  Mark has a job in Hickory, too, for the summer, working at a local nursery. “I’m heading for management,” he’d told me, and I’d laughed, delighted he’d be toiling among dirt and growing things. “Saving to buy a laptop for school.”

  “Listen,” I say now, and lean toward him. “Next fall don’t let anybody give you any shit about your accent.”

  “Mom!”

  “Yes”—I sigh—“now you know. I learned how to cuss at boarding school.”

  “Not until then?” He laughs.

  I take his hand, rub the knuckles where dark man-hair sprouts. Even the sight of them fills my eyes, and Mark does something he hasn’t done since I can remember: he kisses me, just at my ear.

  Like the day I’d first visited the columbarium with Peter, the St. Martin’s sidewalk was empty as Hal and I walked back to the car that sunrise morning. Suddenly I’d wanted to test the theory I’d wondered about aloud to Peter.

  The door was unlocked, confirming it. The rubber barrel for powdered milk still sat in the entrance; there were still wicker baskets instead of brass collection plates. Peter’s changes survived. Hal picked up a copy of the previous Sunday’s sermon by the Asheville Academy chaplain who’s filling in. The text was titled “A Call to Forgiveness,” and I thought of Mother and our post-Christmas conversation.

  “Oh, Mother,” I’d said. “You’d forgive a murderer if he was a good Episcopalian.”

  “Murderers can be forgiven,” she’d maintained, a good Episcopalian herself. In that hurtful New Year’s Eve revelation, she was asking, in her way and in her confession, to be forgiven. And as Peter forgave his mother, I’ve done the same. Mothers all, we are doing the best we can.

  A small article clipped from the diocesan newspaper was tacked to the bulletin board just inside the vestibule. He was reassigned to a village parish in Mount Pleasant, twenty minutes south of Charleston. Daintry, no doubt, commutes to the city proper. I keep this, too, not the clipping, but the knowledge of what I am capable of doing, nearly did.

  I looked around the lovely chapel a final time. “I know you say a prayer every morning,” I said to Hal. “I feel like an idiot, but will you tell me what you say?”

  He didn’t laugh. “I just pray, ‘Come into my heart today.‘” He smiled mischievously at me. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” But this was never about religion. It wasn’t about Ellen, or Hal, or mothers and daughters. Nor was it about Peter Whicker. It was about Daintry and me.

  Standing there, I hadn’t prayed. Phrases and fragments from the Bible ran through my mind instead, the brief bits even children know: Jesus wept. In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus. In the beginning. And this: When I was a child, I spoke as a child. But when I became grown, I put away childish things.

  “You always were a saver,” Daintry had said to me that Easter Sunday. I leave the desk, my childish things, for last. My savings nearly obliterate the surface of the desk, items I’ve extracted this morning like archaeological artifacts from the seven drawers, three on each side and one slender, shallow middle drawer. A piece of petrified wood glossily striated with blues and browns that my father brought back from a sales trip to California. Plaster molds of my bucktoothed preorthodontia teeth. The homemade blueprint smudged with erasures and translucent with grease spots from lunches those fall afternoons. Stationery engraved with my newly married initials on which I penned thank-yous and sympathy notes, replies to wedding invitations. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Cheshire Carlson accept your kind invitation for Saturday the seventeenth. . . A creamy sheet held to the light bears faint impressions of my scribbles, replicas of my refusals. Even Letters to Karen, still unread, the stiff spine intact.

  The smallest items are scraps of paper: lists. A list of funeral hymns. Ellen’s Birthday List, the uppercase title precisely centered with requests prioritized by number.

  1. Hang-head doll

  2. A journal with lines

  3. A bible

  4. A silver bracelet with a heart-half charm that says Best Friend

  5. Other surprises

  The collection is so touching, so telling. A baby doll, a charm bracelet. She’s still straddling that delicate balance between childhood and adolescence. There’s time yet. I haven’t missed her silent leap.

  And this, the list of reasons justifying our moving to Rural Ridge and defending our staying in Durham.

  FOR

  small town

  good time to move: Mark starting high school

  temporary job

  no social requirements

  gardening

  Ceel and Ben

  AGAINST

  small town

  not a good time to move: Mark starting high school

  temporary job

  no social requirements

  Well. Anyone can see the pros are longer than the cons.

  I test the deep bottom desk drawer, and it sticks stubbornly, a result of the wood’s expansion one humid summer. One night, frantic to reach something stashed in the immovable drawer, Daintry and I had taken a hammer and dementedly pounded on it until it opened. The wood is still marred with gouged dents, crescents of desperation. I’ve no idea what we wanted so badly, remember only the fierceness of our wanting. I touch the permanent imperfections, fit my fingertips in each small curve.

  Thirty feet of a gum wrapper chain is coiled clumsily in the back. The delicate paper rope slips through my fingers as fluidly and limply as the overwashed gros-grain Daintry had envied. The zigzagged links are still colorful, still scented with the sugary aromas of Juicy Fruit and Teaberry and Spearmint. The chain was a collective gift, when Daintry marshaled the entire sixth grade into chewing, collecting, folding, and connecting hundreds of gum wrappers after I broke three ribs in a horseback-riding accident. Daintry wasn’t taking
riding lessons with me; the O’Connors couldn’t afford them.

  All here but for that seventh-grade timeline. I had a chance to be the best on the assignment, unlike the booklet on China, when Daintry got top honors. She was allowed to cut pictures from National Geographic, while the yellow-bordered magazines collecting at my house had to remain whole and unscavenged for some later need that never arose.

  For two decades I kept the timeline stashed behind books on my shelves. Kept it until our yard sale the summer after my father died. Strangers hovered and browsed among the remnants of a life. There were thirty-four Barbie dolls. No one bought the National Geographic issues.

  Along with an unsold manual typewriter and a fondue set complete with eight diminutive spears, I threw the timeline away. But I can still envision its unwavering progress, straight and true with bold slashes at predictable intervals: birth, childhood, high school, college, marriage, children born, father dead. Friendship isn’t so easily and tidily charted. It curves and meanders and deviates.

  In this story there’s no cataclysmic accident, no gory or revelatory epiphany. In the grand scheme, this isn’t a tragic tale. No one dies or divorces, loses a child or a husband. Yet it’s a story of unrequited love, betrayal, accidents in which people were wounded. And it’s about loss. Loss on a smaller scale is no less painful for the person who is losing something. And like any tragedy, there are lingering questions. Might it have been avoided? Swerved or dodged like highway debris? Were we destined to divide?

  “Did you ever think,” I’d asked Mother after the sale was over and we folded card tables in the dusk, “that everyone’s life is like a timeline?” My father’s abbreviated life was still so recent. “That events are already laid out and just waiting for you to walk into them, for the moment to arrive that they happen?”

  “Certainly not,” Mother had replied, visibly aghast and swift with assurance. “That’s nothing but predestination. Episcopalians don’t believe in predestination. Fate ordained. Certainly not.”