An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  Which didn’t necessarily mean anything, she knew.

  Resolutely, she returned to Tom’s study, picked up the phone and called Diane.

  “My God! Nora! I’ve been trying to get you for an hour!” Diane said, when she answered. “Did you get my message? Didn’t Mo tell you when she got to the clinic?” Then rushed on, before Nora could answer. “He’s here! The baby! Carah went into the hospital around midnight last night and he was born at six this morning. Henry Wade, don’t you love that? Oh, my God. You won’t believe how beautiful he is!

  “Nora?” she said, after a few moments had passed. “Are you there?”

  “I am,” Nora said. “But not . . . I mean – Diane, I’m at Tom’s house, in Bloomington.”

  “What?” Diane said, after a long, stunned silence.

  “I didn’t plan to come. I’d made up my mind not even to e-mail Tom anymore because – well, I don’t need to explain that. But Charlie’s been horrible since Claire left. He won’t help me with Claire, he won’t even talk to me, and I got so, I don’t know, distraught that I e-mailed him. Tom. He came. It was his idea for me to go back with him and see if I could get Claire to talk to me.

  “I’m not staying with him,” Nora added. “I mean, in his house. He’s got an attic apartment. I’m staying there. Anyway. I should have called when I got here last night. But – Charlie didn’t tell Mo?”

  “If he did, he swore her to secrecy because she didn’t tell me. And she seemed okay when I talked to her last night, not like – but Nora, why didn’t you tell me how bad things were with Charlie before now?”

  “I don’t know, I couldn’t. And you’ve been so excited about the baby,” Nora said. “I didn’t want to spoil that with the stupid mess I’ve gotten myself into. And now I’ve –”

  “Don’t even go there,” Diane said. “Believe me, nothing could spoil how I feel about this baby. Or Carah. Nothing! I’m just – sorry. I mean, that all this is so hard. Have you called her yet? Claire?”

  “No. I don’t even know if she’ll talk to me. What if she –”

  “One thing at a time, Nora. Call her, then –”

  “You don’t think she’ll talk to me, do you? Which, okay, didn’t even occur to me till right now. God. I should have called you before I left.”

  “Because you think I’d have talked you out of going?” Diane asked. “I’m not sure I would have tried –”

  “Because you don’t think Charlie will ever forgive me, no matter what I do from here on in? That he even can forgive me?”

  “I don’t know what I think,” Diane said. “Except that you’ve got to find a way to talk to Claire and at least you’re doing something – and whatever happens because of it will . . . happen. Then you’ll know.

  “Meanwhile, you need to stay in touch with me. I mean it. And don’t think there’s any chance of ditching me if things don’t work out so well. There’s no fucking way under the sun I’m letting you do that. Call Claire. Now. Give me Tom’s number,” she added.

  Nora gave it to her.

  “Okay, then. Call me tonight and tell me what happened.”

  When they’d hung up, Nora sat, the phone in her hand, until the dial tone reverted to loud beeping. Then she set it in the cradle and sat, trying to work up the nerve to call Claire. It was still early, which meant she might still be in her room. Or she could have spent the night with Dylan, in his apartment. For all Nora knew, she might spend every night there. Maybe they’d gotten up early this morning to drive back from Cincinnati and were still on the road.

  She’d call Charlie first, she decided. She knew he wouldn’t answer, but it hadn’t occurred to her that it would be her own voice she would hear on the answering machine, speaking to her from her own kitchen.

  You’ve reached the Quillens . . .

  She opened her mouth to leave a message, but her voice wouldn’t work and she pressed the “off” button on the phone, paced a while, then took a deep breath and called Claire’s cell phone number.

  “Hey!” Claire’s voice said. “Leave a message. I’ll call you back.”

  “Honey, I’m in Bloomington,” she managed to say. “Please. Can we talk?”

  She left Tom’s number, realizing too late that if Claire called and she wasn’t there, she’d hear his voice on the answering machine.

  “It’s not me,” he said, when she told him this at lunch. “It’s one of those robot voices. So you don’t have to worry about that. But, you know, you could also just go over to the dorm. See if she’ll come down and talk to you. Or leave a note.”

  “A note,” she said.

  “Yeah. Remember? That thing people did before e-mail. Something simple: ‘I love you. I’m here. Can we talk?’

  “I realize I don’t know jack shit about dealing with kids,” he added.

  “Right. I’m the expert,” she said.

  He grinned. “A joke. Promising.”

  Surprising herself, she grinned back at him.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll show you my office. You can write a note there.”

  It was spacious, with a window overlooking the square, which was still busy with workers going to and from lunch, the occasional shopper, lawyers shivering across to the courthouse in their suit jackets. There was a wall of oak file cabinets, another of floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with law books. His diplomas, framed in black, were hung above his desk.

  He handed her a legal pad and pen and gestured toward one of the client chairs. “Simple,” he said. “Remember?”

  He’d always been good at that, she thought: simple – and wrote more or less what he had suggested in the restaurant. Claire. I’ve come to Bloomington hoping that we can talk. Would you please call me at this number? I love you. XOXO Mom

  “Okay,” she said. “Do you have any plain envelopes? Without your return address?”

  “Oh,” Tom said – and came up with one.

  Nora made her way back toward campus and through the university gates, threading her way toward Claire’s dorm among throngs of students bundled up in bright parkas, on their way to class. She kept an eye out: any one of them might be her daughter. But she reached the dorm without seeing Claire, left the envelope with the desk attendant, and walked back to Tom’s house to wait for her call. But no call came.

  In the next days, she walked Maxine for hours at a time, hoping for a glimpse of Claire, a chance to catch her off-guard and see something revealing in Claire’s first sight of her. And Claire loved dogs. Surely, she wouldn’t be able to resist bending to pet Maxine and ruffle her ears. One vulnerable moment, Nora thought. Just that.

  She stopped sometimes and stood in the trees near Ballantine Hall, where virtually everyone had at least one class each semester. Sometimes she sat on a bench near the music building, listening for the sound of cellos, or hovered near the Union. She felt as invisible among the students as she had felt on that summer day in People’s Park, before her life had begun to unravel.

  27

  “High out of Time”

  Tom had bought his house because of the three-and-a-half-car garage, he said – so big it took up most of the backyard. Inside, there was a stereo, cable TV, a little refrigerator full of beer and soda. A workbench, shelves of automotive products. Mechanics toolboxes with the tools fanned out neatly in the drawers. The Corvette, the GTO, the truck, the Harley, each one gleaming. Pete had lived in the apartment above it for a long time, until his inheritance allowed him to buy a small house of his own, and Tom had rented it until he decided he didn’t like people living so close to him. It had remained empty until he offered it to Kate.

  She was waiting tables at The Regulator when Tom met her. Cody’s father had disappeared with another woman, one without a child, and she was living with another single mother with whom she traded childcare, taking a class a semester, barely making ends meet. More than once, she’d come home after a late shift to find Cody and her housemate Rosemary’s daughter asleep in front of the television and Rosem
ary drunk, in bed with a man she’d been seeing whom Kate did not like or trust. Her parents who had plenty of money refused to give her any help at all.

  “She’d sinned, having Cody ‘out of wedlock,’ ” Tom told Nora. “If she can’t make it through school, if she can’t get decent childcare for Cody and the two of them are driving around on icy roads in a crap car with bald tires, hey, it’s not their problem.” So he’d given Kate the use of the apartment, bought her a decent used car, and found her a day job flexible enough to allow her to take several classes each semester, for which he paid the tuition.

  “And just in case you think anything between us but that . . .” he added, “there’s not. Never has been. I made up my mind a long time ago to never date a woman too young to remember Che Guevara. I’m serious,” he said, when Nora laughed. “She’s old enough to be my daughter.”

  As for what Kate knew about Nora, Tom said he had told her that they’d been close in college and had rediscovered one another when Nora’s daughter started her freshman year at IU this fall. Said daughter was having some difficulties. That’s why Nora was here.

  All this had been to prepare Nora for dinner at Kate’s house that night.

  When they arrived, Cody barreled into Tom for a hug, then turned to look at Nora and said, “My mom told me you knew Tom since before I was born!”

  “Cody!” Kate said, casting an apologetic look toward Nora.

  “It’s true,” he said. “You –”

  “It is, indeed, true.” Tom grinned. “And no secret. My friend Nora is as old as I am.”

  “Wait a minute.” Nora grinned back at him. “I’m one whole year younger than Tom – and he’d better not forget it.”

  “How old –”

  “Stop!” Kate said, but she was laughing. “Sorry. He’s just a little obsessed with age right now. Cody, show Tom and Nora your new Rescue Hero while I get dinner on the table. I know they’re just dying to see it.”

  He took each of them by the hand and led them to the bedroom he and Kate shared – everything in it a little boy’s bedroom, from the shelves of toys and books to the twin beds covered with Star Wars bedspreads.

  “What are Rescue Heroes?” Nora asked.

  “Like 9/11,” Cody said. “The guys who save everybody. Tom got me this.” He took a truck from one of the shelves. “It’s the URV.”

  “Ultimate Robot Vehicle,” Tom explained.

  “Robots,” Nora said. “Cool!”

  Cody beamed. “Yeah. Here’s my new guy.” He held up an action figure dressed like a fireman, put him in the cockpit of the vehicle, and picked up a remote control device. “See. This URV goes anywhere. Even in very dangerous territory.” He pressed a button to make the vehicle move across the floor and narrated a series of imaginary events voice that made Nora remember Claire playing with her My Little Pony figures at the same age.

  “You guys want to play?” Cody asked.

  “Another time, buddy,” Tom said. “Right now I’m headed for your mom’s pot roast. I’m starving.”

  Kate gathered them at a prettily set table, and served up the meal.

  She smiled when Nora said she thought the apartment was charming.

  “Garage sales,” she said.

  She had a knack for putting things together. Except for the single bedroom and a bathroom, the apartment was one big room, with lemon-yellow walls hung with art posters and a cozy chintz sofa that Kate told Nora she’d slipcovered herself. She was studying textile design, something she’d been fascinated with since she was a child, watching her grandmother embroider and needlepoint. Her study corner in the apartment was cluttered with brightly colored yarns and bits of beautiful fabric. A basket of knitting sat on the floor, next to a cranberry easy chair, an estate sale find. She made extra money making sweaters and IU afghans that she sold on consignment in a knitting shop.

  “She likes you,” Tom said later, walking her to the steps of her apartment.

  “You thought she wouldn’t?”

  “No. It’s just, Kate –”

  “Adores you,” Nora finished for him. “She’s worried I’m going to hurt you somehow.”

  “She’s attached to me.” He smiled. “It’s nice, kind of like having my own daughter. And, yeah, she’s probably worried about me getting hurt. But I figure you can’t really get into something like we’ve gotten into without somebody getting hurt, can you? I’m not hurt, so far. And you’re okay – well, as okay as you can be under the circumstances. Right?”

  “I am. I think. So far.”

  “Well, then,” he said.

  Nora hugged herself against the chill, watched the frosty clouds of her own breath mingle with Tom’s in the darkness. He was hatless, his bare hands shoved into his jacket pockets. But they stood there until Tom finally bent, kissed her lightly on the cheek, then took her shoulders and turned them toward the stairs. “You’re freezing,” he said. “Go in. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Alone in the attic apartment, Nora couldn’t shake the image of the four of them at the dinner table; anyone looking in would have assumed they were a family, she thought – a happy family enjoying each other at the end of the day. She and Kate talking about domestic things; Cody bending Tom’s ear about Rescue Heroes and basketball. She looked across the yard to Kate’s lit windows and imagined her putting Cody to bed, then settling into her studies.

  She was old enough to be his daughter, Tom had said. She was old enough to be their daughter. If they’d stayed together there might be a girl like Kate, made of the two of them – loved by them as deeply and fiercely as she and Charlie loved Claire. It took her breath away to think of it. The image of such a girl was so strong it seemed like a memory from a parallel life, one that had been playing out all these years while she lived her life in Michigan.

  How would she be different if she had come back? And Tom? He seemed, essentially, unchanged to her. His silver hair, his aged face still caught her by surprise sometimes. The hint of sadness that surfaced now and then, his resigned acceptance of the world as it was pained her, though she told herself such feelings were inevitable to growing older. All those years she had not known him pained her, too. Who he had been in his thirties and forties? What had he thought and dreamed? How and when had he remembered her? She’d filled up those years in her own life loving Charlie and Claire, yet the time seemed somehow insubstantial to her now, a future in which the three of them would be a happy family again as lost as the life she might have had with Tom.

  She had called Charlie several times, but he hadn’t answered the phone, hadn’t responded to the messages she’d left – or to the letter she’d sent that first week. As for Claire, she’d finally sent an e-mail that said, “Mom. Please stop calling me. I can’t talk to you now. I really can’t. I have no idea what to say.”

  “Now,” Diane said, when Nora called to report this, in tears. “She’s saying can’t talk to you now, she’s not saying she can’t ever talk to you. I know it’s hard, but, trust me, you just need to leave her be.”

  She continued to take Maxine for long walks every morning, but she avoided campus, where she might run into Claire, exploring the neighborhoods that fanned out in every direction. Blocks of student housing, giving way to blocks of neatly kept bungalows, enclaves of stately homes where professors and town professionals lived their lives. Walking back down Kirkwood Street, toward Tom’s, she often stopped to talk to Pete, who sat in his usual place strumming his guitar, pretty much regardless of the weather.

  “Jane,” he’d say – and she allowed it.

  She’d sit down beside him and they’d talk awhile, Maxine leaning her head into Pete’s leg, looking up at him, until he set his guitar down to scratch her ears. He was the one she could talk to about Bridget, maybe because it was the two of them who’d loved her best, who’d feel in some way responsible for what had happened to her for the rest of their lives.

  He had loved Bridget, he assured Nora again and again. He regretted how things had
turned out between them, she was just so – he didn’t know how to explain how it got to be that when he was with her he felt like he was drowning.

  “You guys were better,” he said. “You and Tom.”

  “Because I wanted to drown, I wanted to lose myself in someone else,” Nora said. “Which wasn’t good, in the end.”

  “Yeah, well, it was still better. You guys were friends, you know? Easy together. You’re easy together now.”

  They were – and in the continuing silence from Charlie and Claire, Nora was left to live in the present moment with him, to be drawn into his life. Most days she met him for lunch someplace near the square; they went to movies together; hung out with his friends on pool night at The Regulator. They went to movies, watched IU basketball on TV. They talked. Tom was affectionate toward her, linking arms with her as they walked, sometimes kissing her lightly on her cheek or forehead, pulling her into a quick embrace when it was time for her to go back to her apartment each evening.

  There, Bridget returned to her, in dreams. The dream of Bridget falling backward into the flames; the dream of following her that Christmas Eve, beneath the black bowl of sky. But happy dreams, too, bits and pieces of their lives all jumbled up so that time and place made their own history. Bridget’s grin, her laugh, her voice.

  Alone in the attic apartment, Nora had conversations with Bridget in her head.

  You shouldn’t have followed me that night. It was stupid. I didn’t want to be saved, so how could you have saved me?

  I couldn’t just let you go when I knew –

  You should have. Look what a fucking mess you made of things.

  Not a total mess. Bridget, you don’t know Claire.

  You wouldn’t either if –

  Don’t say that. I can’t think about that.

  Of course you can’t. You never could let yourself think about anything that might get in the way of who you thought you wanted to be. To be honest, Jane, it used to drive me crazy the way you always tried to hide where you came from. Did you think Tom and Pete and I didn’t figure it out? Did you think we’d care?