“What is she doing?” Tuck asked, the gravity of the situation shading his face.
“She’s comforting a stranger, it seems,” Maddy said softly.
The ambulance and firetruck arrived ten minutes later, and the team went to work prying open the car. Doro tried to coax Grace back from the car, but she flinched away. The radio station had played all the way through one song.
“Please, let me talk to him,” she said to the crew manning the jaws of life.
A firefighter standing nearby put safety goggles on Grace and led her to a safe spot. “Keep talking. Keep him awake.”
“Bohemian Rhapsody” droned on.
“Hey, the music stopped. Please keep changing the stations. Let us know you’re okay.” Grace’s voice was loud and steady, even though her whole body trembled. “They’re going to get you out, but please stay awake. Can you change the station?”
All we could hear was the whir of the tools trying to rescue the boy; the radio remained fixed.
“Please! Let me know you hear me!” Panic rose in Grace’s voice, but she continued to talk, shouting above the machinery attempting to pry open the door.
And then Grace turned and faced us, a broad smile on her face: the radio stations were changing again.
It took ten more minutes before the crew was able to extract the stranger, his face bloody and swollen and his legs curled unnaturally away from his body. He had on a Doors sweatshirt and was about our age. As the medics gingerly placed him on the stretcher, he reached out a hand. We all knew he was reaching for Grace.
“Can I ride with him to the hospital?” she asked. “I don’t want him to be alone.”
The medics exchanged glances, then helped Grace into the back of the ambulance. We all piled into Doro’s car and followed the ambulance the thirty minute drive to the hospital. Maddy kept pace with the ambulance driver.
“Way cool. I’ve never gotten to go this fast and miss lights,” said Tuck’s friend Joey.
“Epic,” Tuck agreed.
Scrunched between the boys in the backseat, I thought of my parents, of the moments after the collision: Were they alive? Did they hear anyone’s voice? I thought of my own paralysis that night and how Grace moved forward, doing what needed to be done. None of us were surprised by that. By Grace.
The stranger survived the accident but needed extensive rehab for his legs. He was moved to a hospital in Atlanta. Grace and I went to the hospital to tell him goodbye, but I hung back, sending Grace in by herself. To me, he was a stranger, but to Grace he was Sam Snelling.
My eyes misted at the memory of that night—the evening we all realized what Grace was capable of: her capacity to console.
“How is Sam?”
“He’s living in Atlanta and has triplets,” said Nanette, his sister. “He still walks with a limp and still talks about his angel—your Grace.”
“Will you give him my regards?”
“Of course, honey, and again I’m sorry for your loss. For your losses.”
I smiled and turned to go when Nanette called me back to the counter.
“Sorry, I just checked the record; there’s still one book missing, if you could find that.
“It’s The Optimist’s Daughter.”
28
WELTY’S WAKE
THE WALK BACK TO THE INN was more exhausting than I expected, so I was happy to see Maddy’s truck pull up alongside me.
“Pretty girl needing a ride today?” Maddy asked out the open window.
“You read my mind, Maddy.”
“I need to stop at the hardware store to get a flapper. The downstairs commode is running.”
After parking, he asked if I wanted to come in.
“I’m kinda tired, Maddy. I’ll just wait here.”
The minute in the store stretched to ten, undoubtedly due to Maddy’s running into people he knew. It happened everywhere we went. I smiled at the thought of Maddy and Doro, of how loved they were, of the integral roles they played in the town. I watched as a crew took down the summer banners and raised the fall ones. The petunias in the hanging pots on the street lanterns looked old and tired. Signs in storefronts advertised back to school supplies, and a school bus rounded the corner. Mothers pushed babies in strollers, and squirrels raced across the telephone lines.
I felt suspended in time, not a part of Mt. Moriah, not a part of Chicago. Belonging only to myself. When Maddy returned to the truck, I told him of my resignation.
“Why, little thing, I have to say I’m surprised. I thought you loved that job.”
“I love writing, but I wasn’t doing writing.” When I saw the concern on his face, I added, “I can find another job.”
“And what did Tom say about your quitting?”
When I was quiet, he knew.
“Ah, my lord, Doro would have something wise to tell you, but I just don’t know what to say.” He removed his cap and scratched his head. “This business of you and Tom worries me.”
“I can afford to take some time and think of what I want to do—”
Maddy cut me off. “What you want to do. You mean what you and your husband want to do. You’re in a marriage, little thing.”
“I think Tom’s left me, Maddy,” I said quietly, shocked to hear how the words sounded out loud.
“Now why do you think that?”
“I haven’t talked to him in weeks, and he went to San Antonio on a business trip and didn’t tell me.” My voice quivered. “I think it’s over, Maddy. I think I’m alone.”
“Now listen here. I don’t know Tom all that well, but I know enough to know he’s not a man who walks out on his wife and baby.” He paused before adding, “What did you say to him?”
Clearly Maddy sensed Tom’s feelings toward me had changed because of something I had done. And that was true, wasn’t it? I had shut him out. I had toyed with the idea of not keeping the baby. I had come to Mt. Moriah, and I had fallen for Tuck. I had myself to blame.
I sighed. “I need to talk to Tuck. He’s only been away a day, but I miss him. He’s been so great.”
We were in front of the Inn, and, turning off the ignition, Maddy turned to face me. His look registered the same disappointment and anger as when I struck down his elephant ears.
“Now listen to me, Jo. You are a married woman, and Tuck is a married man. That’s all I’m going to say about that, but I hope you are hearing me.” His eyes sharpened. “Grow up. You are not a girl anymore, Jo.”
And with that he slammed the door and left me in the truck, feeling like I had disappointed one of my last friends in the world.
He was right. I was not a girl, not a child, not carefree. My youth was over, had been since Grace was murdered, since I had moved to Chicago. Mt. Moriah was a lovely respite from my life, but I needed to move on. With or without Tom. I could support myself. And my baby.
I settled in Doro’s recliner with my laptop. Maddy moved through the house, slamming doors, something very unlike him.
“Do you need help, Maddy?”
“No,” was his brusque response.
I wanted a drink. I wanted to drink myself into a wine coma—to fall asleep pretending my life as a writer was not out of reach. “Grow up,” I muttered to myself. I pulled up the Chicago Tribune online and scanned the jobs page. Restless, I turned to the want ads and looked for apartments. The writer in me imagined a world in which the baby and I rented an upstairs studio apartment in a brownstone near Logan Park. There would be built-in shelves and walnut plank floors, and the widow downstairs would care for the baby while I worked two jobs. I would come home exhausted at night, but together the baby and I would read books until bedtime. On the weekends we would stroll to Lake Michigan.
I would put the baby to bed in a bassinet set up beside my bed, and when she was asleep, I would write—pacing myself, forcing myself to take the Jillsandra saga just two pages further each night. In a year, I would have over 700 pages. I would find a good editor—perhaps I could become an ed
itor: I should look for jobs in publishing.
Such were the ramblings of my mind as I whiled away the afternoon in an internet fog. The truth was I couldn’t see beyond tomorrow and didn’t know who I was. How could someone drifting through her life mother someone else?
When the panic turned my palms clammy, I got up and paced. I saw the end table stacked with Doro’s papers and decided to look for the missing library book. I smiled at the thought of Doro reading the book I had recommended, probably thinking until the day she died that the author’s name was Endora.
The Optimist’s Daughter was nowhere in the den or the parlor. It soon became a quest, and I moved like a madwoman through the house. Maddy finished the toilet repair and, washing his hands, took eggs out of the refrigerator. The clock said six o’clock, and the sight of food made me realize how hungry I was.
“Want me to cook dinner, Maddy?”
“No. Thank you.” Maddy pulled out a pound of bacon and soon the breakfast for dinner was ready. We sat at opposite ends of the dinette set in the breakfast room, the clinking of forks the only break in the silence. I knew Maddy was disappointed in me, knew it by the way he held the paper in front of his plate. Perhaps inane conversation would bring him back to me.
“Maddy, there’s a missing library book of Doro’s I can’t find. Have you seen it?”
Shaking his head, he put the paper down. “But it might be in that lap desk she kept by her bed.” A pause. “By our bed.” The paper went up again.
I removed the plates and cleaned the kitchen. Maddy remained, nodding over his plate. Eventually I heard the shower start. Five minutes later, he was in pajamas, hair damp, ready for bed.
“Goodnight, Maddy,” I said from the doorway.
“Night,” he said, turning on his side.
I started to close the door when I saw the teal paisley lap desk on the floor beside Doro’s side of the bed. Curling myself in a ball in Doro’s recliner, I lifted the lid and found the missing library book. I smiled at the Post-it Notes peeking from the page edges.
In a Southern literature course in college, I got hooked on Eudora Welty. For high school graduation Grace had given me One Writer’s Beginnings, the story of how Welty started writing. I was young and sure of my abilities, then, and the world seemed possible.
Over the course of the next two hours, as the light faded outside, I reread The Optimist’s Daughter all the way through, one Post-it at a time.
I laughed out loud at Doro’s notes about the McKelveys: “How crass!” and her Post-it about a loose bird in the house: “I don’t blame Laurel for locking herself in the bathroom!”
In English class I wrote about a passage in which the protagonist, Laurel, “cages” herself in the bathroom while a bird flies loose in the house. I described the cages in which humans find themselves—in Laurel’s case a cage constructed not of steel but of anger and resentment. While the paper garnered an A, it was a collection of naive words written by an ingenuous girl who at that point saw nothing but open doors: a girl who hadn’t lost her best friend, or her aunt, who hadn’t tied herself to a dead-end job or fallen in love with a man who walked out on her. A girl whose heart didn’t lurch at footsteps and darkness.
A girl not yet caged by fear.
My eyes clouded, and I turned pages. Pulling off each Post-it, I set them on the arm of the recliner. They were Doro’s last words to me.
On a note mid-way through the book, Doro wrote, “That’s love.” It was a passage I cherished, describing the life-changing love Laurel had shared with her deceased husband:
“And they themselves were a part of the confluence. Their own joint act of faith had brought them here at the very moment and matched its occurrence, and proceeded as it proceeded. Direction itself was made beautiful, momentous … It’s our turn! she’d thought exultantly. And we’re going to live forever.”
I had experienced that kind of love, lived it—the feeling that tomorrow would beget a new tomorrow and that we’d live forever. Such was my friendship with Grace. Such was the way I felt standing on the Loyola courtyard, my hand in Tom’s. But wasn’t that what I also felt as my head rested against Tuck’s on the chaise lounge? The magnetic draw of two men, each so distinctive. Was there a forever love for me? A forever?
Feeling a sting behind my eyes, I knew tears were taunting me. One Post-it remained, next to one of the book’s most poignant sections:
“… the guilt of outliving those you love is justly to be borne, she thought. Outliving is something we do to them. The fantasies of dying could be no stranger than the fantasies of living. Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.”
On the note, I could hear Doro speaking to me. “Is this how Jo feels? Why she won’t come home? Does she know how much I love her?”
Surviving is perhaps the strangest fantasy of them all.
Suddenly, my body was wracked with tears—millions and thousands and hundreds of them. Tears I had fought back in the last church pew at Grace’s funeral, that threatened me in the night as I huddled in my bed in the corporate hotel. Sobs that teased at the edge of my mind as strangers danced too closely at Tony’s. Sorrow eclipsed by anger when Tom walked out. Weeping that had barely come even as I listened to Maddy’s broken voice and saw the shovels of dirt sprinkle atop Doro’s casket. Tears spawned from a grief so deep inside me that they took my breath away. Clutching the Post-its to my chest, I sobbed the names on my heart. “Gracie. Doro.” As if I cried hard enough, uttered their names with enough ache in my voice, they would return to me.
And then, “Tom. Tuck. Maddy.” For they felt lost to me too.
Yet, at that moment, through the haze of my tears I could see clearly: I understood. I knew why Doro had left me the Inn. She wanted me to return—to face the good and the bad that was Mt. Moriah. Doro had sent me away not out of avoidance, but out of love. And she wanted me back, because this place of our yesterdays was the last and greatest gift she could bestow on me. This Inn was her life; it was our life together.
“Doro,” I whispered. “Doro, I loved you too.” For hours my sobs bounced against the ticking clock and around the room full of the life that Doro had built. For us. Until finally, shirt wet and chest sore from the weeping, silence absorbed my grief and I slept.
In my dream I was twelve years old, but Doro and I lived in her studio apartment, not the Inn. I was playing with Barbies on her Murphy bed, which didn’t make sense given my age, but then nothing ever makes sense in dreams.
I started singing softly, and suddenly Doro came over and looked at me strangely.
“Stop singing that. Stop it.”
“Why?”
“That was Grace’s song, not yours. We can’t sing that now.” She looked down at my pants, covered in cat hair. “You know I don’t like cats.”
“Doro, what’s wrong? Did I do something?”
“You know what you did.” Her voice shook, heavy with disappointment.
“I don’t know,” I pleaded. I was suddenly eighteen years old and the Barbies were shards of glass. I was making a mosaic, aquamarines and violets and tiger eyes. I ran my hand across the pieces of glass—to cover them? To sweep them off the bed? My hand began to bleed.
“Now look what you did.” Doro came over to the bed and shook me by the shoulders. “Careless. Why are you careless?”
“I don’t know, Doro, I don’t know.” Then I was twenty-five, but Doro was the younger Doro who picked me up from the hospital waiting room in 1983. Her eyes were wild, darting back and forth, and I thought she might strike me. Suddenly afraid, I started running down a long hallway that grew longer the faster I ran. Without looking back, I sensed that Doro was following me. At the end the hallway turned sharply and I was at a dead end. With a door.
I opened the door and ran into Doro. In her hand was a jagged piece of glass.
“What have you done?” she asked. Stepping aside, she revealed a large mirror, shattered into a million pieces.
I awoke with
a start. It wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.
29
SHARDS OF GLASS
I SAT UP WITH A CLEAR SENSE of where I needed to go, what I needed to face: the attic, my old bedroom.
Slowly, deliberately, I climbed the steps to the top floor. In my head it was June 1, 1997 again, and darkness was creeping over the house. I hesitated at the top of the attic stairs. Opening the door, I felt stifling heat waft across my cheeks.
I crossed over to the window and turned the air conditioning unit on. It rattled and spit dust out at me, then settled into a loud hum. Outside the window, the crepe myrtle was a brilliant fuschia. When I was eight, that tree was so young that, peering down, I could view only its top. Now I had reached the top. Or it had reached me.
Nested on either side of the east window were the twin beds where Grace and I had spent so many nights. Sinking onto my bed, I ran my hand across the fabric. I knew exactly where to look for the quarter-sized ink dot—the casualty of a late night writing session. As surely as if it were a day ago, I could feel the pen sliding out of my hand as I settled into a delicious teenaged coma.
Doro purchased the twin quilts when I turned thirteen. She thought it was time to renovate my room as I transitioned into a teenager. One weekend we went to a crafts fair in Nashville—Doro, Grace, and me. Bored with the amount of time Doro spent looking at pottery, Grace and I wandered off on our own.
It was Grace who saw the quilts.
“Look, Jo Jo, these would be pretty.” Grace and I had been poring over magazines; she was my chief consultant when it came to decorating.
“You think?” I wasn’t sold on quilts. “Would I get two the same?”
“No, silly, we’ll find one that’s your personality and one that’s mine. Ooh, I like this one.” Grace held up a quilt with deep hues of green and blue.
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