Baggage Check

by M. J. Pullen

  “Oh, no,” she said, pulling away from him and nearly falling over her chair. “No, Alex, we can’t—”

  “What?” he said. The bright smile was still on his lips but fading from his eyes. “We can’t … what?”

  “It’s me,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Can’t do what? Fishing? Or kissing me?”

  “Any of it. This … us. This relationship, or friendship or whatever it is … I can’t do it.”

  His smile was feigned now, but he kept it. He raised his palms to her. “Was it something I said? Do I need a breath mint? I might have some gum in the car.”

  “No.”

  “What, then? I thought that kiss was kind of nice.”

  “It was, but … look, Alex. It’s obvious that you think of this as more than friendship, and I know you had a crush on me in school. But it’s not that simple. That was almost twenty years ago. I’m not that little girl in the bleachers anymore.”

  “I know who you are, Rebecca.”

  “I don’t think you do, questions or no questions. You don’t want me—I’m a mess. I’m going to end up completely crazy just like my mom, and I am hopeless with relationships. You’ve been great, and I like you—”

  “You like me.”

  “Yes, I do. But I can’t stay here much longer. My life is in Atlanta. My job. My friends. I can’t live in Oreville.”

  “What about Birmingham? It’s basically West Atlanta.” His tone was playful, but it was clear he’d been thinking about it.

  “That’s not the point.” She was getting frustrated.

  “What is the point?”

  “It’s that I just don’t…” The next part came out in a rush. “Alex, I just don’t return your feelings. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, come on, you’re just saying that because—”

  “I am not just saying it,” she said. “I know it sounds like a bad line, but I don’t think I’m good for anyone right now. My life is a disaster, my family has fallen apart, and what I feel most of the time is numb. Just numb. I have nothing to give you. I’m not what you need.”

  He looked at her for a moment, his face unreadable, ashen. He went to the bucket and began to work at unhooking her fish. When he spoke, his voice was neutral, steady. “Yours is probably two and a half pounds. You can keep it if you want. Cook it.”

  “Alex,” she said gently.

  He did not look up from his work, but released the fish in the bucket and began winding up the line. “I’m going to throw mine back. They’re a little iffy, and to be honest I just don’t feel like cleaning them today.”

  “Alex.”

  No answer. He quietly packed up the tackle and folded his camp chair, watching intently what he was doing as he wrestled it into the sling that fit around it. She sighed and did the same with the other one and handed it to him. He shouldered them both and bent down to get the tackle box. “Please talk to me,” she said.

  “It sounds like there’s nothing much else to say, Rebecca,” he said, looking at her briefly, finally, and then turning toward the car. “Listen, I have to go. Do what you want with the fish.”

  “Alex, I—”

  “I need to go,” he said. “Thank you for being honest with me.”

  Rebecca had never seen him angry. She did not want it to end this way. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that the way I did. We can still be friends—”

  “I have friends.”

  The words landed like a slap across her face. The implication was clear. Unlike me …

  Rebecca sensed that trying to repair the damage with Alex would only make things worse. Her eyes were stinging and her hands fell to her sides as he walked away, her only friend in Alabama, hating her.

  When the taillights of his car disappeared onto the road, she walked in a daze back to the bucket of fish. The three Alex had caught were mostly still, except for the slow, regular movements of their gills flexing in and out. They seemed resigned to their fate. Her fish, however, still thrashed about absurdly with delusions of escape. He threw himself against the walls of the bucket and his companions, splashing water out onto the dirt where the camping chairs had been just minutes before.

  “Give it up,” she said to the fish. She had a brief, morbid fantasy of what it would be like to pour out the bucket on the ground and watch the fish flounder around. How long would they struggle and flop around before realizing there was no hope, that they could not survive outside their environment? Instead, she grabbed the handle, straining a little at the awkward, watery weight of the bucket, and staggered to the edge of the lake. “At least you have a place to go,” she told the fish as she returned them to the water. “At least there’s somewhere you can breathe.”

  27

  When Rebecca arrived at Mountainside the next morning, the charge nurse led her to an office where her mother sat with her legs crossed beneath her, facing Dawn, the social worker. She heard their laughter before she could see either of them, and her mother’s laugh sounded both familiar and foreign—like a song she had loved and long ago forgotten. They seemed to be talking about art.

  “I always wanted to paint, you know,” Lorena was saying. “I was pretty good when I was younger, before I married Richard. We had the kids right away, and then, you know, who has the time?”

  Mom painted. Did I know this?

  “I know, right? I’m lucky if I can get my pajamas on and fall into bed at the end of the day,” Dawn said, and then acknowledged Rebecca with a broad smile. “Hello, Rebecca, glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us.”

  “Hi, Becky,” Lorena said amiably.

  “Hi, Mama.”

  Her mother’s expression was clearer again today, she noticed. The smile was new, too. Not the perfunctory response to social expectations that sometimes crossed Lorena’s gray face when she knew it was called for, but a real smile. Rebecca tried to remember the last time she had seen it, but nothing would materialize.

  “So,” Dawn said. “We’re here to talk about your mom’s recovery. To start with, I’d like to say that we think things are going well.” She patted Lorena’s hand. “What do you think?”

  Her mother’s mouth flexed downward in an involuntary grimace before she brought back the smile. “Yes, I think it is. Becky, I’m so sorry about all this. I never meant … I never wanted you to have to go through this.”

  Rebecca’s throat was tight. She should say something, she knew, but the feeble “It’s okay” that wanted to roll automatically off her tongue felt inadequate to her mother’s emotions.

  And was it okay? Rebecca didn’t know. She managed a smile and put her own hand on Lorena’s knee.

  “Well,” Dawn began again. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told—”

  “Nothing,” Rebecca said. “I’ve been told almost nothing.”

  “Essentially, there are two issues your mom is dealing with. Well, that you are dealing with, too. One is the dissociative episode she seems to have had a few weeks ago, probably from the trauma and fear of being evicted from her home. That seems to be largely improving now, which is our main concern here. On the one hand, the best place for her to get better is the real world, her home environment. On the other, we don’t want to discharge her until we know she’s grounded in reality and safe.”

  “I’m doing much better,” Lorena said. “Better than even before all this.”

  Dawn nodded. “The other issue is the hoarding, which is a longer-term issue and what you’ve been seeing firsthand.”

  “I am so sorry, Becky. I knew it was getting bad, but…” Lorena choked on the words. The social worker waited patiently. She made no move to comfort Lorena or to continue on with her speech. It was as though she were creating a space for something to happen and was in no particular hurry. Rebecca twisted her ring, wondering if she was supposed to say or do something to fill the silence. Her mother struggled for words and Dawn just looked down at the folder on her lap, her face neutral.
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br />   Rebecca was on the verge of asking what she should do when Lorena swallowed hard and went on. “I knew it was getting bad.” She put a fist over her heart. “I knew, somewhere in here, that I was being selfish, driving you and your father away. But I couldn’t stop. It’s hard to explain.”

  “You don’t have to explain,” Rebecca said, though she realized as she said it that she really did want to understand. It was unfathomable. All that trash.

  “Well, I’m learning, here, that what I was doing—hoarding—was because I was worried about not having enough. We always worried about that growing up. You may not remember your grandparents very well, but they were farmers who lived through the Depression and they knew what it was like to not have enough. We were pretty poor when I was growing up, too, and they were always very careful with everything.

  “I always said I would never be like that, but I guess I was like that, more than I realized, and then when your brother—”

  “You don’t have to do this,” Rebecca said. She wanted to be anywhere else right now.

  Dawn intervened. “She doesn’t need to be rescued, Rebecca. I know that’s tempting when you care about someone, but it’s not helping her.”

  “Dawn’s right. I need to say it. When Cory died, I lost a part of myself. A mother loves all her children, Rebecca, and I love you more than I can say, but Cory was … he was my little star. You and your dad were always extraclose; you had a special relationship. Even when he was little, Cory always—well, it might sound silly, me being a grown woman and him just a child, but he looked out for me somehow.” She put her face in her hands. “I know it sounds ridiculous.”

  “No, Mama,” Rebecca said, standing to put a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “It doesn’t.”

  Rebecca should be angry, she knew. She’d been cleaning out that goddamn house for weeks, including the stupid shrine to the star of her mother’s heart, the boy she could never have been. She’d been living in his shadow for her whole life, and the shadow had only gotten bigger when he died. In death, everyone is perfect, and Cory was the most perfect of all. And now her mother was saying it, the truth she’d had written on her heart for decades. She should be angry; she should walk out of that room, get in her car, and drive back to Atlanta.

  But what she felt was pity. Rebecca had run away from all this long ago, and while her attempts to build her own life might have been shallow or desperate at first, she’d built it anyway. She had a college degree. She had an apartment and a job she loved. She had friends, imperfect though she and they might be. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t the star of anyone’s heart. She was the star of her own life.

  “It’s okay, Mama. Everything is going to be okay. We’ll get through it. You’re going to be okay.”

  Lorena was sobbing now. She reached for Rebecca’s hand and turned awkwardly in her seat to embrace her daughter, clutching her around the waist and crying into the T-shirt Rebecca was wearing. Unsure what to do—she had never seen her like this—Rebecca put her hands tentatively on Lorena’s head. They stayed like that for a long time, mother and daughter, comforter and comforted.

  When she left Mountainside an hour later, she was surprised to find that she felt lighter. She drove back to her mother’s house with the windows down, letting the wind whip her hair and looking up at the bright-blue Alabama sky.

  * * *

  BY MARCI THOMPSON STILLWELL

  * * *

  BLOG: THE CARE AND FEEDING OF A SUBURBAN HUSBAND

  { Entry #185: (Untitled) }

  Tuesday, August 2, 2016

  Sometimes love is not at all what it seems. Sometimes things happen that lead you to question not only your own judgment, but the people and relationships that have been central to your life for what feels like forever. I’ve come to believe that part of our natural state of being in relationships is to take other people for granted. Most of the time, we don’t even know we’re doing it. We meet someone, and we begin to love them. Sometimes it’s a powerful attraction at first meeting that is simply undeniable. Other times, it’s more like a slow boil: a thousand little things that add up, day by day, to someone being absolutely indispensable to our lives.

  That’s weird, isn’t it? Indispensable. You were alive and breathing before you met this person, weren’t you? But then something happens and you become so dependent on them that you are not sure you can live without them. Unfortunately, many of us realize someone’s importance in our lives only after they are gone. A part of ourselves that we didn’t even notice had taken root until something—circumstance, betrayal, death, loss of feeling—takes it away again.

  At what point do we begin taking someone for granted? Is it the same moment that we realize we love them? Or is it later, when they have become a fixture in our lives, like a favorite rug or lamp, and after a while we don’t even see them in the room? People talk a lot about how to keep things fresh in a marriage, to keep it stable, but sometimes I think fresh happens most naturally when things are fragile. When we’re just getting to know someone or trying to win them over, we keep it fresh so we don’t lose it. But once we think we are secure, we stop worrying about “fresh” because we’re too busy worrying about everything else.

  In some cases, maybe we take people for granted because we give ourselves too much credit, and them, not enough. We think that we’re the ones creating the light in our own lives without noticing the everyday luminaries around us. We assume that we are deserving of love and happiness without giving a thought to how much love and happiness we create for others.

  And then … the consequences. More about this later, maybe, but when someone in our lives—whether it’s a coworker, family member, friend, or spouse—feels unappreciated or unloved, do we deserve what happens next? How do we respond to their anger, indifference, or lashing out in retribution?

  I’m aware there are no clear answers here. First of all, you don’t know the details of this particular case. And every relationship is different. But even if you knew all there is to know, I’m not sure the answers would be clear then, either. Every relationship is made up of thousands of compromises and betrayals, millions of affectionate gestures and moments of implicit trust, and countless mundane moments.… When things go wrong, who can say which moment is the tipping point? How can we possibly assign blame?

  * * *

  28

  When the doorbell rang a couple days later, Rebecca was still in bed. Go away, she told the helpful neighbor or newspaper salesman or lawn mower man at the door. I’m asleep. She had already hit the snooze button a couple of times, but her body was refusing to obey the commands of her brain.

  Maybe I can skip one day of everything, she thought. Sleep til noon. Drive to Birmingham, go to a museum, eat a real breakfast for once instead of prepackaged doughnuts and the bad coffee at Mountainside.…

  The bell rang again. Damn.

  Rebecca pushed herself out of bed, every muscle screaming resistance. She had worked harder the past few days than ever before. How did people do this for a living? She made a mental note to tip all future moving men very, very well. She went to the door in the oversized T-shirt she’d slept in, without stopping to tame her pillow-dried rat’s nest of hair, thinking that maybe it would increase the guilt for waking her of whoever was on the other side. Only after she turned the knob did it occur to her that it might be Alex.

  When she saw Jake standing there, she shrieked and slammed the door.

  “Oh my gosh!” she yelled through the door. “Jake, I’m sorry, I had no idea. I’m not dressed.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t see much.”

  Even with two inches of solid wood separating them, she could see him smiling. “I’ll be out in two seconds,” she said. “Let me just put on some clothes.”

  “Okay, but hurry,” he said. “I’ve had to pee since I crossed the state line.”

  She ran a brush through her hair and gargled mouthwash, slipped on jeans and shimmied a bra under the T-shir
t before letting him in. Jake kissed her on the cheek, and said, “Bathroom?” as he brushed past her. She pointed to the short hallway that led to the bedroom and bathroom. The smell of his deodorant—so simple, so familiar—sent her head spinning. Even at nine in the morning.

  While he was in the bathroom, she paced around the tiny living room, frantically moving the few things that had gathered here and there during her stay. Her curiosity was so powerful it was almost a physical feeling, like an itch. She flitted to the kitchen to stash away some Lean Cuisine trays she had rinsed for recycling.

  “Bet you’re wondering why I’m here,” he said when he returned.

  “Well,” she said, trying to think of something witty. Nothing came. “Yes, to be honest. Not that I’m not thrilled to see you.”

  “Marci sent me,” he said. “I’m sort of in the doghouse.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said reflexively. Then what he said registered. “Wait a minute, she sent you to me? I’m the doghouse?”

  He smiled. “Well, I guess technically, your house is the doghouse.”

  Rebecca searched for the words. “I guess I have to say I’m surprised that Marci trusts me, I mean, that she would want—”

  “You’re surprised she would send me to someone who has acknowledged romantic feelings for me,” he said gently. His clear blue eyes were looking at her, unflinching.

  Rebecca felt herself turning crimson and looked down at the dishes in the sink. “Well, yeah.”

  “That’s actually part of why I’m here,” he said. “I think we need to talk about a few things. And also, I would like to offer you my services as manual labor for the next several days. My wife and some of our other friends will be along on the weekend to help, too.”

  She was in shock. “Marci sent you to help me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is this your punishment?”

  He laughed. “Not exactly. Mostly it’s that we all realized you were out here on your own and none of us had done a damn thing to help you. We’ve been assholes, Rebecca, especially me. I’ve been a terrible husband to Marci and a terrible friend to you and it’s time I start making it up to both of you.”