I telephoned Diane and told her I was leaving. I apologized for bad behavior. “Things aren’t going so well with me and Charlie,” she said, a confidence from nowhere.
I started missing Diane as soon as I hung up the phone.
I left Newburg early in the morning. I said goodby to Walker before I left. “This is her home,” he said.
“Yes.”
Newburg seemed anonymous in the morning light, a town that looked like any other town, nailed to the earth with fast food restaurants, gas stations, churches, shopping malls. Then, just as I pulled onto the highway, a great mass of black birds shot out of the trees, wheeling in a windy, rain-grey sky, and I wanted a drink for the first time in five years, and I leaned over the steering wheel and stepped on the gas. The sky seemed heavy, ready to collapse. The first large drops slapped against the windows just after I crossed the Virginia state line. I began to feel better. I stopped wanting a drink.
Epilogue
July 1986
Jennifer kissed me goodby and I waved to her. “See you on Sunday,” she said, waving from her car.
The letter had been waiting for me when we got back from the beach, and I hadn’t opened it in front of Jennifer. I didn’t open it now, either. Instead, I went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee.
That gave me time to think.
“I’m doing all right,” I told the new, gleaming kitchen. New house, new love—amazing, elegant and undemanding Jennifer—and a new book completed, ready to go. I was proud of the book. It was another children’s book, a flashlight shining on the underside of childhood, the monster-closet realm of fledgling nightmare, titled The Curious Thunder. Danny Brock, the hero of the book, is a kid afraid of thunderstorms who, it turns out, is right to be frightened. I didn’t know what my editor was going to think of the book. It wasn’t my usual airbrushed, bright-edged glory. But I was confident it would get published. I was proud of it.
Life was good. There wasn’t any melodrama in it and that was fine. Jennifer had strong opinions about the eternal adolescent male’s penchant for self-dramatization. I was glad I hadn’t encountered her in my arm-waving, soul-rending youth. Those days were an embarrassment now.
I recognized the writing on the envelope, that distinctive, concentrated scrawl. I poured myself a cup of coffee and opened the letter while sitting at the kitchen table. Light poured down from a skylight. It was a house of skylights, filled with light’s benediction, tolerating no brooding corners. Some mornings I hated it, hated its hearty morning smile.
The letter began, “Dear David—We miss you. It’s been a good summer, and—before I forget—Richard is standing here and he says to tell you that he thinks your books are nifty. He is a great fan of yours, really.”
It was like Anna to break silence as though only a day had elapsed. I hadn’t heard from her in years.
I stopped reading the letter to pick up the photograph that had fallen out. Anna, in a man’s shirt with the sleeves rolled up, held her wide-eyed son up to the camera, the both of them smiling. They were on the porch, in golden, morning light, and the little boy seemed pleased with the enterprise, his silky hair fluttering in a breeze, his round belly showing beneath a blue t-shirt. Anna looked, of course, angelic, full of unabashed mother-pride. There was a confidence I had never seen before, an authority in her crooked smile, the cant of her hips.
My hands were shaking as I put the photo down on the table. I felt a strange emotion, sitting there in my expensive, sunny home. I felt as light as a soap bubble. I felt weird and fraudulent.
I picked up the letter and continued reading. It was a chatty, easy letter, not an epistle to evoke strong emotion. She sounded happy and sweetly fixated on young Richard. She enclosed, in a postscript, Walker’s telephone number in case I wanted to call.
I spent the rest of the day on the edge of calling.
I’ve never had any luck with phones, though. I feel like I’m talking to someone at the bottom of a well or a ghost on the moon and the end of a phone call always leaves me with a sense of loss and foreboding.
I don’t love her anymore, at least not in the old, needy way. The desperation has been replaced by a deep affection and a realization that the bond between us is the immutable past. Memories are made of steel.
So I should leave the past alone. Still, I know that I can’t let this letter go unanswered. It means more than its smooth surface would suggest.
And I don’t know just what to say.
There’s another alternative, of course. I’m done with another book. I was going to take a vacation anyway. I could just pop down there and surprise her. I know she’d be glad to see me.
I can almost see myself driving up that rutted, weedy road, wildflowers blooming in the dust, the mountains looming like the massive knees of god. She might be down by the lake, her child chasing a dragonfly along the reedy bank, laughing.
I could go there. The thought is attractive, a little unsettling.
No harm in it, though.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by William Browning Spencer
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2846-2
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Maybe I'll Call Anna Page 24