Ashes To Ashes

by Gwen Hunter

  JoEllen and Tricia stepped away, joining Wallace in the break room. I could hear him making coffee, and Wallace always made it too strong. Their departure gave us a semblance of privacy, though I’m sure they could hear every word.

  Alan’s eyes never left mine. I had never seen eyes like his. They were hypnotic, compelling. As if he was searching for some hidden truth deep inside of me. And they were strangely ambivalent eyes, as if he didn’t want to be here with me. As if seeing me made something in his life more difficult than it already was. Or perhaps more real.

  "I don’t remember much about that night," he said finally. "I don’t remember much about the next few days as a matter of fact. But I remember Ashlee Davenport, who climbed into the car with me and who tried to keep Margie—" The words stopped abruptly and he cleared his throat, looking away. His eyes reddened, though they stayed dry. An awkward silence settled between us. After a moment Alan said. "I know you did all you could for her." I nodded. "And Jim, my assistant. Was he. . . ?"

  Jim. The body hanging on a branch over Magnet Hole Creek. The stench of feces, and the slick red glint of blood in the glare of my flash. "He was gone when I arrived." Only a little white lie. Did Alan notice? Emergency workers save the savable before we work on the bodies with little or no chance of survival. Jim, even if still alive when I arrived, was not among the lucky ones. It wasn’t the kind of thing I could say to a patient.

  "At any rate," Alan said with a wobbly smile, "I wanted you to have a small token of my appreciation." He had a refined smile, chiseled lips. Aristocratic. Mama would have approved.

  I looked at the roses and lifted a hand to touch a bloom. It was feathery soft, like velvet brought to life. I didn’t know what to say. I had never been sent flowers by a patient before, although it wasn’t uncommon for the entire emergency department to receive a bouquet in appreciation for some heroic effort.

  And Jack had never been the cut flowers type. He said he hated seeing them turn brown and die. On special occasions, he sent perfume or jewelry or gift certificates to Macy’s in Charlotte. Never cut flowers.

  Awkwardly, I lowered my hand and nodded. Realizing that was a far from adequate response, I said, "Thank you. They’re beautiful. I’ve never seen so many roses in one place before." Suddenly my eyes filled with tears I couldn’t control. I had seen dozens of roses at Jack’s funeral. White roses for death. And as if proving Jack’s complaint, I had watched them crinkle, turn brown and die in the days following his funeral. Angrily, I caught a tear on the back of my hand. I didn’t want to mourn Jack. Not now. "I’m sorry, I don’t know what came over me," I said, laughing shakily. I could hear the falsehood in my tone, and the anger, smothered beneath. The lies were catching up with me, building one atop the other in a rickety pyramid.

  Alan glanced away again, that ambivalent look back in his eyes. I knew I had made him uncomfortable, and I was ashamed. He had offered a lovely gift and I had been less than enthusiastic in accepting it. I didn’t know how to remedy the situation. "Well," he said. "I’d better get back to bed. The surgeon said I could go home tomorrow if I still looked good. I don’t want him to change his mind." His smile faltered with exhaustion, and I offered him a wheelchair, which he refused, shaking his head. "Exercise. Doctor’s orders. I’m just glad I didn’t live fifty years ago before a break like mine could be pinned and braced instead of put in plaster," he said, gesturing to his leg. "Look Ma. No cast."

  I smiled at the weak joke. "Don’t overdo. It was a nasty break."

  He tucked the padded crutch supports beneath his arms and headed up the hall, his gait the unsteady amble of someone new to crutches and pain. "Alan," I called. He stopped and glanced back. "Thank you for the roses. They really are beautiful."

  "Thank you for saving my life. I understand I would have bled to death if you hadn’t been there. Doctor Hoffman said I have about six pints of other people’s blood floating inside me as it is." His smile faded. "Hope they were all healthy."

  "Me too." It was a common worry among blood recipients; even with science’s most advanced testing procedures, hepatitis and AIDS were still the rare deadly results of transfusions. I was reminded of the carnival barker’s chant at the county fair over in Ford County when I was a child, "Ya’ pays ya’ money and ya’ takes ya’ chances." But then, all life was like that. One big gamble. Alan disappeared around the corner, passing X-ray on the way back to his room.

  "He wasn’t well enough to make his wife’s funeral," JoEllen said beside me. "I heard that her parents flew into Charlotte, made the arrangements, cleaned out her trust fund and bank accounts, buried her, and flew home." She shook her head slowly. "They didn’t even bother to call Alan while they were in Charlotte. Bad blood between her parents and her husband.

  "I heard they decided Margie married beneath her when she married him. Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags never did accept him."

  JoEllen knew all of the hospital gossip. She was a regular receiving station, and the phrase "I heard" was her most overused favorite. I didn’t know how JoEllen had garnered her information, but I had little doubt of its accuracy. JoEllen had impeccable sources.

  "Did they charge him for the accident?" I asked.

  "Police came down to question him several times, but I haven’t heard about formal charges. Nothing in the paper about it though, so I guess not. Maybe the other guy was driving."

  I nodded. Even though Alan’s foot had been forced beneath the dash near the steering wheel, that didn’t mean he had been driving. The occupants of the car had been thrown around violently; they might have been sitting anywhere. The night I hit the twelve point buck I ended up under the dash on the passenger side of the car. I’d worn seat belts religiously ever since.

  The scent of coffee mingled with the scent of expensive roses. I looked up at the bouquet. It was huge, and I had no idea how I would get the thing home.

  "Pull up the Jeep and I’ll help you put them in," Wallace said from behind me, making me jump. "We can drain out most of the water and wedge them in place."

  Wallace was always sneaking up behind me. He always pleaded innocence, but I knew he enjoyed scaring me out of my skin. Retaliation, perhaps, for the years of practical jokes I had pulled on him every summer for most of my life. He had never forgiven me for the time I stole his clothes and made him walk bare-bottomed back from the pond to the house. His revenge had been swift and complete. He had taped a conversation between a boyfriend and me and given it to Monica Schoenfuss . . . who had played it all over school for days. I had been mortified. According to Nana, Wallace had been justified. He never let me forget it.

  The roses were easier to transport than I expected, arriving home with only a rare bruised petal. However, the ribbing I received from Topaz and Jas made me wish I had tossed them on Trash Pile Curve on the way home. It would have been a suitable memorial to Margie.

  "Mamash got a boyfriend," Topaz sang as I struggled to get the flowers out of the jeep. I was working in the glare of the security spotlight out back, hunched over in the harsh shadows.

  "Oh Mama, shame on you," Jas said laughing. But it was a strange laugh, a strained tone, and I paused in my efforts with the roses, identifying the sound in my daughter’s voice. It was the uncertain sound of a child who isn’t really sure she gets the joke, and who hopes it isn’t on her. Grunting, I lifted the flowers, keeping my back to them, trying to decide how I would respond to the words and the tone. I kicked the door shut with the rubber sole of my nurse’s shoe.

  "Umhum. Mamash be a fine lookin’ woman, Jasmine Davenport," Topaz said in her best street talk. "You bes’ be prepared to fend off all the available men in Dawkins County, ’cause they be knockin’ at yo’ door sooner than you think. In fact, we bes’ be thinkin’ a plan to keep her virtue safe, like actin’ as chaperones." Topaz was the only teenage rapper I knew who would use the words virtue and chaperone in the same sentence and still make it sound like street talk. The girl was talented. I grunted again, not bothering to respond. My
virtue was safer than a nun’s.

  "All the broke, available men, you mean," Jas said, her tone still odd. And then she added, trying to sound offhand, "Would you believe, Jasper Jenkins asked me if I thought he should wait another month before he called my mother for a date."

  I stopped and turned, standing in the shadows, the roses heavy in my arms, impeding my view of the two girls. It was clear that Jas had spoken to Topaz, not to me, yet it was also clear that I was supposed to respond to the statement, not my daughter’s friend. Jasper Jenkins? Jasper was a plumbing contractor with legal problems. He did some work for DorCity back in ’92 and a year later a cement truck fell through the street, breaking open a water main and depriving the city of water for two days. He declared bankruptcy to handle the legal repercussions, but the judge ruling on his case lived in the city and had done without a bath for the two days the city had no water. He had tied up the case for some time just to spite Jasper. "He didn’t," I said.

  Jas’ eyes, always so much sharper than mine, settled on me in the darkness, picking out my face between the bobbing blooms, her features troubled. "Yes, ma’am. He did." The sound I had been trying to identify beneath Jasmine’s light tone was suppressed misery, resting beneath her words. And I understood. Jasmine was afraid. She had suffered a catastrophic loss not fair in the life of one so young. And she wanted assurance that her mother wasn’t going to make matters worse. She reached around me in the ensuing silence and opened the back door. Dull light washed the ground at our feet and brightened Jas’ face. She didn’t meet my eyes.

  "Well. I hope you informed him that I have no intention of dating anyone, now or in the future. One husband in a lifetime is a gracious plenty," I said.

  Jas raised her eyes from the roses pulling on my arms and met mine, covering the distance of our disparate heights, covering the distance in our perceptions of the future and our fears of the present. She sucked in her breath. Her eyes widened, and she put out her hand, touching mine. It was one of those mystical, almost religious moments of mother-daughter intimacy, where information and understanding are passed back and forth, seemingly at a glance. But just in case I was misreading the moment, I repeated myself. "I will not be dating, Jas. Feel free to quote me." Jas nodded, her face both relieved and surprisingly guilty. I went on inside the house, feeling the tension in my arms and in the air outside.

  As the door swung to behind me, I heard Topaz snort. It wasn’t a ladylike snort but a full blown, two nostril snort of disgust. "That was a low blow, girl. I mean it, that was a major league cheap shot. You can’t make your mama promise to stay single for the rest of her life. She a young woman—" The door closed on the rest of her tirade. From the kitchen I could hear angry tones as the girls’ disagreement degenerated into heated dispute.

  Silently I placed the crystal vase in the sink and added water. The vase wasn’t one of the cheap pressed glass vases used by florists to hold bouquets. It was real crystal, the Waterford sticker discernible on the bottom. I placed it on the breakfast table in the bright, overhead light. The scent of roses had already filled the room. By morning it would have spilled out into the rest of the house, filling the air. The smell would be the first thing I noticed when I woke.

  My hands trembled, the reaction as startling as the quarrel outside. Paz and Jas never argued. They were like bookends, a balanced pair, uniformly harmonious in all things. The best of best friends. But then, nothing in life was the same anymore. The girls voices rang out in final insult, accusation and retaliation shouted at the same instant. A car door slammed, tires crunched on the drive. Topaz’s little Mazda roared off. Moments later, the lights in the barn came on as Jas turned to her horses for comfort. As usual. When she got over the spat, she would come to me, I hoped. But what would I say to her?

  My uncertainty surprised me almost as much as the argument had. How would I respond when my daughter came inside? Lie? Claim that I liked being alone? That I enjoyed the heartache, the silent house, the empty bed? I had no desire for another man. Not on any level. Yet, it was also true that I had never been alone. I had moved from my mother’s house straight into Jack’s. I had never been a solitary being, detached from a family group, independent, isolated, or lonely. I hated being a widow.

  A radio came on in the barn, the distant strains of Elvis singing about blue suede shoes. Once again, my daughter had gone to her horses and the solitude of the barn, leaving me when grief, anger, and guilt overwhelmed her. Instead of crying on my shoulder as she did in the early days after Jack died, Jas went to Mabel, burrowing up under the old mare’s mane, crying on the muscular shoulder of the barn’s oldest, and only pregnant, occupant.

  Not knowing what else to do in the aftermath of Jack’s funeral, I had followed Jas the first few times she disappeared into the barn. Moving stealthily in the darkness, I had watched to be certain that my daughter would be safe with her sorrow. Tonight, again. I let her go. Wasn’t that what the pop psychologists said? To let a child have privacy, her own space, to grow through pain in her own way? I could only hope that should she need me, she would come to me. And she knew I was here for her—didn’t she?—ready and waiting whenever she needed to talk.

  I showered and climbed into bed. It was after two A.M. when I heard Jas open the back door and tiptoe up the back stairs to her rooms. Guilty but not sure why, I turned into my pillow and waited for sleep, eyes gritty and burning in the night.

  I woke from an uneasy sleep at six A.M., the sound of the phone in Jack’s office jangling me from unclear dreams. Bleary-eyed, I reached over to nudge Jack awake. The mattress was cold, the sheets taut, as if never slept upon. I jerked fully awake, stifling a cry.

  Jack was dead.

  Fists clenched, I bolted from the bed and stopped, my motion arrested like a stop-action sequence in a motion picture. Slowly I turned back, curled my toes into the carpet, and stared at the barren place where Jack used to lie. The phone rang again, the tinny sound of a distant demand. Barefoot, an old tee shirt scanty coverage, I whirled for the office. The answering machine picked up on the fourth ring. I stood in the darkened doorway and listened.

  "You’ve reached Davenport Developments. At the sound of the tone, please leave your name and number, and someone will get right back to you." Jack’s voice, steady and sure and in control. And dead. So very dead.

  A small sound escaped my lips. I stumbled and stopped, my palms against the door jamb separating Jack’s office from the rest of the house.

  The tone sounded, an A flat note. Plaintive.

  "Jack, you pick up this damn phone. You can’t hide behind a machine forever." Bill paused, as if waiting for Jack to answer. He had called on the office phone. As if what he had to say wasn’t for every ear. "Jack, if you want to face this in front of a jury down in Columbia you go ahead and keep ignoring me." Another pause. "Jack, you pick up this phone!" he shouted. "Jack!" His words changed with his anger, a frustrated, out of control fury that escalated as he swore. "My family is suffering, you S.O.B. And nobody hurts my family. An eye for an eye, Jack. You hurt what’s mine and I’ll hurt what’s yours—" The phone beeped in the middle of the threat, cutting off the words of a madman.

  I pressed my face against my left fist, bruising the tender flesh of my lips and cheek. "I’ll hurt what’s yours." Had Bill just threatened me? Threatened Jasmine? I took a deep breath. What had Jack been involved in?

  Macon. The name whispered at the edges of my mind, the syllables a balm and deliverance to my shattered emotions. Macon would be here today at eight A.M. to take over all my burdens. To provide me with answers and solutions and explanations. Macon Chadwick, attorney at law, would handle this for me. But did attorney-client privilege extend to the dead?

  Moving slowly, as if I were in deep water, I pushed myself away from Jack’s office and half turned. Jas stood behind me, the heat of her body like a furnace. So close I wavered to keep from falling into her. We seized each other’s arms to keep from colliding and did a clumsy little dance to
regain balance. She smelled of horses, as if she had been to the barn before dawn. Or had never changed from the night before. I knew instantly that she had heard.

  My eyes traveled up and met hers, tousled hair above, dark rings a mask below, the crusty residue of tears and sleep in the faint lines. Lines my daughter was far too young to have, pressed into her skin by grief. Her lips parted. "Mama?" The word vibrated with confusion, her voice clotted with sleep. She blinked and opened her eyes wide, cracking the salty silt. "He said—"

  "It’s okay, Jasmine." I pushed her from the office opening. "You know how people are when they lose money. He’s all bluster and sweat. And besides, I’ve hired a Chadwick to handle things from now on. You remember Macon? Wallace’s little brother? He’ll be here at eight."

  I maneuvered her toward the kitchen, intending to distract her with food as I had for many years. "And part of his job is to find out what those phone calls are about." As soon as the words left my mouth I knew I had blundered.

  "Phone calls? There’ve been more of them?" With her greater strength and height, Jasmine brought our kitchenward momentum to a halt. "Mama, are you hiding something from me? Are we in some kind of trouble?"

  We. With that single word my heart clenched and opened, like a fist grasping at nothing. A strange heat filled me and was gone. We. Lifting a hand, I brushed her hair away from her face. We. The word of inclusion. Of family. Jack and I had been a "we", however false. Then Jack and Jas and I. Now, after so many years as a threesome, my family had changed back to a twosome. And soon Jas would reduce the numbers again, going to Clemson where she would begin the years of study that would take her toward her goal of being a large animal veterinarian. At some point, Jas would meet a boy and start a family of her own. A new "we" that wouldn’t include me.

  I smiled up at my daughter—so much taller and more beautiful than I had ever been—and moistened a fingertip to rub at the salt on her cheek. She had likely cried herself to sleep. Her skin was the skin of a young woman, not a child, an adult expression regarded me out of her dark eyes. Child-woman. Woman-child. How should I relate to this near adult? I decided to tell my baby the truth. Or at least a version of the truth. "Sit down, Jas."