When Time Is a River

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  At the breakfast bar, Christine, still in her nightgown, slumped over a cup of coffee. The kitchen smelled like burnt toast. Emily sat in her highchair smashing Cheerios into sliced bananas with her sticky fingers.

  Brandy pulled out another stool and sat between her stepmother and Emily. “Another fight with Mr. Wonderful?”

  Christine shook her head. “Tanya just called. She can’t babysit for me today. Her sister’s water broke. Tanya is her labor coach.” Christine and Tanya had been best friends since high school. Tanya lost a baby to SIDS last summer. The only time she smiled now was when she babysat Emily.

  Oh brother. Christine was about to ask her to babysit again. Let her stepmother beg as much as she wanted—no way Brandy would change her plans with Stone.

  “My mother will never forgive me if I don’t show up for her fiftieth birthday luncheon. I’ve got to find a sitter for Emily and fast.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “He’s proctoring SAT exams all day. He left an hour ago.”

  “Dress Emily up and take her with you. Your mom would probably love to show her off.”

  Christine sighed. “Emily wasn’t invited. They don’t call them the terrible twos for nothing. My mother wouldn’t want to be embarrassed in front of her country club friends."

  Brandy crossed her arms in front of her waist. “I’d like to help, but I have something important to do.” When Stone called last night, Brandy had squeezed the telephone receiver hard, unable to say a word for fear she’d say something stupid. Unlike the other boys, Stone, who’d entered Ashland High School as a junior, didn’t seem to notice her scars—saw beyond her face to the inside. She told her stepmother about their plans.

  “Stone,” Christine said. “Very cool name.”

  “It’s short for Stonewall. His father is one of those Civil War nuts who goes to reenactments and stuff.”

  “Way to go, girl,” Christine said, as if trying to morph from a mother back into a teenager. “But, please, can you think of anyone I can call?”

  Slapping the highchair’s tray with her open hands, Emily said, “More Cheerios, pease.”

  Brandy picked up the box and poured a small mound onto the tray. “Nice manners.”

  Emily grinned.

  “Who loves you?” Brandy tweaked Emily’s nose between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Band-Aid,” she shouted.

  Brandy wiped some banana from Emily’s chin with a napkin and then turned back to Christine. “Did you try Carla or Margaret?”

  “I tried everyone.” Christine shook her head. “I don’t even know why I care so much.”

  “I do,” Brandy whispered. “She’s your mother.”

  “I’d like to help you with that role in your play if I can,” Christine said.

  Sure. Her stepmother probably had some parenting book she’d never gotten around to reading. Brandy gathered up her defenses. What Christine really wanted was for Brandy to give in and offer to babysit Emily. “I take care of Emily so much that people in the park think she’s my kid. Like I’d be stupid enough to—” She stopped.

  Christine’s smile faded. “Emily is crazy about you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “How about I pay you like fifty dollars?”

  Fifty dollars would be enough to buy the giant Pooh bear in the toy store window for Emily’s third birthday. “It’s embarrassing,” Brandy said. “I try to tell them she’s my sister. They don’t believe me. One woman shook her finger and told me never to deny my own kid—that it’s not the fifties, and there’s no shame in being a teenage mother.”

  Christine swallowed and looked away. “I don’t know what to do. I’m desperate.”

  She’d gotten her hair cut yesterday and bought a white linen suit that wasn’t really her style because she wanted her mother’s approval. If Brandy had a mother and it was her fiftieth birthday, she’d do anything to be there. She felt herself weaken. “I wish I didn’t have plans, but—”

  “I don’t expect you to change your plans with Stone,” Christine said. “I remember what it’s like to be young.” She looked at the floor where Emily had dropped two banana slices and at least a dozen Cheerios.

  Brandy stood. “Don’t slash your wrists yet. Give me a minute.” She’d call Stone and see if it would be okay if they met later in the afternoon. She headed into her bedroom for a more private phone.

  When she returned a few moments later, Christine had her head in her hands. “Stone and I are meeting at 3:30. Will that give you enough time?”

  Christine leaped up, her whole face beaming. She threw her arms around Brandy. “I’ll make a dinner picnic for the two of you. I can pick up some cheese and French bread in Jacksonville.”

  Brandy pulled out a barstool and sat. “Now; how can you help me better understand my character?”

  “I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” Christine said, sitting on the stool across from Brandy. “And I’ve come up with two things. The first is for me to fill you in on everything your father has told me.”

  Brandy froze. “You mean he tells you things about my mother that he won’t tell me?”

  “It’s only natural. I’m his wife.”

  “Yeah, right. It’s perfectly natural for a man to marry a girl young enough to be his kid and then make her his frickin’ confidant.”

  “I know it hasn’t been easy. And I also know how much you wanted him to marry Kathleen.”

  Once again surprised by her stepmother’s insight, Brandy remained silent.

  “It’s okay,” Christine said. “It’s not like I don’t understand. Kathleen could have been a real mother to you.” She paused. “Look, I know I’m young, but I’m on your side about this.”

  “Did he ever tell you about the night of my accident?”

  Emily pounded on the tray of her highchair. “Want down, now,” she said. “Pease.”

  Christine wiped Emily’s hands and face with a washcloth and released her from the highchair. “Go play in your bedroom for a little while, okay?”

  When Emily took off running, Christine returned her attention to Brandy. “Your father took you to the mall in Palo Alto and didn’t strap you into the stroller. Your shoe was untied when you climbed out—”

  “Does that story make sense to you?” Brandy asked. “You know how he hates to shop and he’s far too compulsive to ever leave a kid unattended.”

  “Ordinarily I’d agree, but he had a huge fight with your mother and was pretty distraught.”

  “Fight about what?”

  Christine shook her head. “Just getting him to admit the perfect couple had argued was like pulling his molars out with a pair of needle-nosed tweezers.”

  “So where was my mother?”

  Christine hesitated. “I’m not sure I should tell you this.”

  “It’s not like I’m going to rat you out to my father.”

  “Your mother was passed out on the sofa. She had developed a…well…a drinking problem.”

  Brandy’s throat tightened and she couldn’t speak. She wondered why her dad hadn’t told her the same, ridiculous story. “Is that what he says?”

  “Your father wouldn’t lie.”

  “If she stayed home, clueless, and in some kind of drunken stupor, how did she get to the hospital?”

  “She wasn’t there.”

  “I saw her.”

  Christine fixed her gaze on a point above the kitchen stove. “You were three years old. I wouldn’t be surprised if you—”

  “I didn’t make it up.” Brandy remembered her mother’s face as shock twisted into grief, the piercing scream when she saw her daughter’s face.

  “It must have been awful for her,” Christine said, her voice low and sympathetic. “I’ve tried to imagine how I’d feel if I—”

  “If you what?”

  Christine didn’t respond.

  “My mother didn’t do anything to me,” Brandy said, with a patience she didn’t feel. “How could she when everyon
e claims she wasn’t even there?”

  Christine straightened herself on the stool. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”

  The accusation, like a sudden slap, heated Brandy’s cheeks. “If she felt awful, it was probably because he made her feel guilty. Made her think it wouldn’t have happened if she’d been the one watching me.” Brandy shook her head. “You know how lame he can be.”

  “No,” Christine said. “That’s not what I meant. You were with your father that night because he was afraid to leave you alone with your mother. He was doing something she should have done. But she couldn’t take care of you. Or wouldn’t.”

  Brandy stared at Christine as the full impact of her stepmother’s words settled. Had her dad been telling the truth about her mother not wanting her? She touched the scar on her cheek. “Looks like my father didn’t do such a great job either.”

  “That’s not fair,” Christine said.

  “Yeah, well how fair is it that you’re passing judgment on a woman you never even met?”

  “Sometimes I wish I had. Maybe it would help me understand things about Daniel.”

  Join the club. Her father wasn’t an easy person to understand. “You said there were two things. What’s the other one?”

  Christine’s face brightened. “Your parents’ wedding album has photos in the back of you and your mother horsing around together before your accident. You’re about Emily’s age.”

  “No way,” Brandy said. “Dad has their wedding album? And actual pictures of me with my mom?”

  Christine nodded.

  “He’ll frickin’ kill you if he finds out you showed me.”

  “I don’t intend to tell him. And you have to promise to look at it and then give it right back to me so I can return it before he finds out.”

  “Doesn’t that feel like a betrayal of Mr. Wonderful? I thought you guys talked about everything.”

  Christine shrugged.

  “Wait a minute,” Brandy said, starting to laugh at the absurdity of what her dad had done. “What kind of a geek shows his girlfriend pictures of his wedding?”

  Christine laughed, too. “We weren’t even dating yet.” Her stepmother’s blue eyes sparkled as if the moment rekindled itself in front of them. “I felt privileged. Like I got to see inside him. It was like a fairytale—Daniel so young and handsome. They were obviously in love. I saw something special in the two of them. Something I…”

  This might be exactly what Brandy needed to better understand her character. “So, where is it?”

  “Locked in the bottom file drawer in his office at the university, but I know where he hides the key. I’ll pick it up after the birthday party and be home by 3:30 at the latest.”

  “All right,” Brandy said, trying to contain her excitement and not jump up and down like a little kid.

  Christine stared at Brandy’s hands, then picked them up, held them inside her own. “You should put some cream on those.” She smiled, leapt up and grabbed the bottle of lotion she kept by the sink. “You never know, Stone may want to hold them.” She squirted some lotion onto Brandy’s palm and massaged it into her skin.

  Touched by her stepmother’s concern, Brandy looked down at her long fingers full of calluses. In her excitement over the photos, she’d nearly forgotten her plans. “He plays the guitar, too.”

  The phone rang. Christine let go of Brandy and hurried into the hallway to pick it up. “That must be your father now,” she said, her voice a silver thread still connected to the young man in the wedding album.

  Chapter Four

  While Emily napped, Brandy paced the family room, determined to finish writing her song. Coach Pritchard counted on her to incorporate it into her character’s farewell scene with her baby. For as long as she could remember, Brandy had dreamed about songs. When she got a title, she scribbled it down on whatever was handy—the margin of a novel, the journal she kept on her nightstand, a paper towel or lunch bag. Later, with guitar in hand, she’d start singing that title over and over until the song began to form.

  Singing from deep within wasn’t so much about the range of notes she could hit or how long she could sustain them. It was more about honesty—about sharing the truth of the music and words, whether a song she wrote or one that touched her so deeply that she could sing it as if it were her own.

  But it wasn’t happening this time. Over and over, she sang the play’s title, A Slender Slice of Time. When she finally felt the new line starting to resonate inside her head, she took her guitar out of its case, sat on the edge of the coffee table and swung it over her knees. She hummed the melody that had haunted her, and then sang the three lines she felt good about.

  A child is born and she learns to sing,

  She sets her heart on elusive things,

  But fate steps in and dreams come crashing down.

  Brandy skimmed her hair back from her face and thought about time. About the way everything changes. She hummed again. Two more lines came.

  Her illusions gone, a truth reclaimed,

  Nothing ever stays the same.

  Emily cried out.

  Brandy set her guitar on the sofa and hurried into her sister’s room, hoping to get her back to sleep while still inspired to write.

  Early afternoon sunlight streamed through the pink gingham curtains and it took Brandy’s eyes a moment to adjust to the brightness. Her dad had recently taken one of the spindled sides away from Emily’s white, Jenny Lind crib, turning it into a youth bed. The room smelled like urine.

  Emily stood, wobbling in the middle of her mattress, holding Pooh bear by his arm. Her hair was damp and matted against her cheeks and forehead. She wore a white T-shirt and a pair of wet cotton training pants that drooped to her knees. “You yook pretty,” Emily said.

  “And you woke up way too early. It’s not even two o’clock.”

  “I wetted.”

  “I can see that. Don’t worry. It happens to me sometimes, too.”

  Emily cocked her head, then reached out and touched one of the pearl buttons on Brandy’s shirt. “No it doesn’t. You a big girl.”

  “We’ll change your pants and then you can finish your nap.”

  “No more nap. Feed duckies now.”

  Brandy didn’t want to get all sweaty from chasing Emily. “Not today. I don’t feel so good,” she said, realizing it was true. She had stomach cramps.

  Her period was as regular as a metronome, and not due for two more days. She was probably nervous at the prospect of being with Stone.

  Kathleen had obligations in the afternoon and had been unable to reschedule their acting session. But when Brandy told Stone he’d said, “You’re the one I wanted to see.” She’d been afraid to breathe for fear she’d imagined his words, the sweet tentative sound of his voice.

  Now, Emily jumped up and down, doing her bouncing Tigger impersonation. “Pease. Pease. Pease.”

  “Not today, Em. The park will be crowded with lots of kids on the playground and feeding the ducks. You can sleep with Pooh bear and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood.”

  Emily put her hands on her hips. “I wake now, Band-Aid. Where my necklace?”

  “You lost it. We already looked everywhere.”

  Emily’s eyes welled. “Tigger find my necklace.” She was alluding to her favorite Winnie the Pooh bedtime story, Tigger, Finder of Lost Things.

  “He tried yesterday, remember? You lost it so good that even Tigger can’t find it.”

  A big tear rolled down Emily’s cheek.

  “Don’t cry. Your birthday will be here pretty soon,” Brandy said. “Maybe you’ll get a new necklace. Or something really special.” Again, Brandy thought about the giant Pooh bear in the toy store window.

  Brandy slipped off Emily’s wet training pants, tossed them on the floor, then snatched a pair of dry pants from the drawer and put them on her sister. She grabbed a beach towel from the linen closet and spread it over the wet sheet. “Now go back to sleep.” She gathered the stuff
ed animals and placed them on the bed.

  “No,” Emily said. “Want park now.”

  “I don’t care what you want. This is what I frickin’ want. Go back to sleep. Now.”

  Brandy walked out of the room, slamming the door harder than she’d intended. What a brat Emily could be. None of Brandy’s friends had toddlers for siblings. None of them understood.

  Emily appeared in the hallway. “Band-Aid, no mad at me. I wake up now. Pease go park.”

  Brandy knew her sister wouldn’t go back to sleep, nor would she play quietly in her room. She’d keep pestering about the park. The time would pass faster there. Maybe she’d take Emily around to some of the health fair booths, let her listen to her heartbeat with a stethoscope.

  She grabbed a pair of jeans and a T-shirt from Emily’s dresser. “Okay. You win. But I’m not getting all dusty pushing you on the merry-go-round.” She left a note on the kitchen counter for Christine asking her to pick up Emily at the park.

  After changing Emily’s bed, Brandy packed the diaper bag with snacks, a change of clothes for Emily and a wet, soapy washcloth she’d tucked into a Ziploc bag so it wouldn’t dry out. On her way through the kitchen she grabbed the bag of stale bread and crusts. Not feeling up to a piggyback ride, she slipped Emily into her jacket and loaded her into the stroller, tucked the diaper bag into the mesh basket behind the seat and started toward the park. When they reached Granite Street, she heard the amplified sound of singers performing The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. It was a song she’d sung many times to baby Emily.

  Now, Brandy sang along. After a minute, she stopped singing, thought about the words and wondered for the first time if that song had ever frightened Emily.

  * * *

  On a warm day like this one, the air around the Plaza smelled of cinnamon and fresh baked bread. Brandy’s steps had a bounce in them as she pushed the stroller along the banks of Ashland Creek where shops and restaurants in a variety of architectural styles nestled with their brick, stucco and clapboard sides touching, as if in tribute to the spirit of diversity for which the residents were well known. It was always fascinating to Brandy the way Ashland Creek flowed into the larger Bear Creek, then joined the Rogue River in its timeless journey to the sea