by Deborah Reed
“I’ve had her birthday marked on the calendar every year for the past six years,” she said. “This is the first one that I’ll actually get to talk to her.”
On their backs, they stared at the ceiling.
“Seven years old,” Vivvie said. “Don’t seem possible.”
“Don’t seem possible I’ve nearly lived as long as the average American male,” Wink said. “Nearly reached my expiration date, and I don’t feel a day over thirty, least not in my head. Maybe closer to fifty in the lower back.”
Vivvie studied the thin lines around his mouth and eyes, decades of frowns and sorrows, of laughter and too much sunshine—his whole life story written on his face. “I know what you mean,” Vivvie said. “I feel younger than I did twenty years ago.”
Wink smiled, lingering on her longer than usual.
“Thank you,” she said.
He lifted her hand and kissed the top of it. “You ought to try and see her on her birthday.”
“You mean fly out there?”
“Why not?”
“You want to go?”
“Why not?”
“We’ve never been on a plane together,” she said, and pictured them on a flight, eating peanuts, watching a movie, nothing remarkable, feeling extraordinary.
“I need to ask you something,” Wink said. “I’ve got something I need to ask. I was going to wait a bit, but now, I don’t know, your mention of flying off together. I think it’s important to be spontaneous in this life. To act when the moment calls for it, and so, well…”
He kneeled on the floor, winced, and lifted his knees back up, one by one, squatting now, only his head and shoulders visible above the edge of the bed. Then he held up a small box and sat next to Vivvie. He was still in his underwear, taking her hand in his. He cleared the way in his throat for a string of seriousness. She could see what was coming. Clear as a train about to run her down in the dark, she could see it, and wondered if she forgot how to talk, how to breathe.
The following week she stopped by the College Park strip mall to look at the ready-mades in the Mr. Right Bridal Gowns and More store. The sweet, early morning scent of honeysuckle floated above the cool, nighttime asphalt as she studied the shapely mannequins in the window display; their big blond wigs, black eyeliner, and peach colored lips reminded her of the brides of yesteryear. They reminded her of the first time she married.
“Mrs. Fenton? Is that you?”
Vivvie tightened the purse strap across her shoulder and turned. A man dressed in a white IZOD shirt and khaki Dockers approached her in the parking lot.
“It’s Officer Moore. I was on duty when you came to pick up your granddaughters that night.”
Vivvie took a step back, made a visor with her hand, and stiffened with fear unfolding. Was this it? Had they turned her in after all? Made it seem as if she were free and clear while they gathered their case against her? Happy for the first time in decades. That’s what she thought, happy for the first time in decades, again and again the same thought. She nearly spoke the words out loud.
“Yes,” Vivvie said. “I know who you are.”
Visions of Wink and Elin conspiring during late night phone calls came to her now, arrived like a note on a platter, filled with a detailed explanation of their masterful trick, the real reasons behind the “kindness” they had shown her this past year.
“How’s those granddaughters of yours?”
“Well. They’re all right. They’ll be all right, under the circumstances.” Vivvie glanced at the mannequins. At least her granddaughters were so far away. They’d never even know what had happened to her. This was a blessing, she guessed. Something to be grateful for. “I guess you know my daughter is no longer with us. First my husband, and then my child.”
“I’m sure sorry to hear that,” Moore said.
She gazed back and forth between Moore and the brides. “I appreciate it.” She shifted her weight, the delicate and poised young brides mocking her from behind the air-conditioned glass.
She braced for the words she’d been bracing against for more than thirty years: Vivien Fenton, you are under arrest for the murder of your husband, Jackson Fenton.
“Well?” Vivvie said. “What’s it going to be?”
“Oh, you know. I just thought I’d say hello. People down at the station still talk about those granddaughters of yours. They just struck everybody. Something really special about them. Broke everybody’s heart.”
Vivvie nodded slowly. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you for telling me that.”
She glanced again at the mannequins, but the thought of a wedding, the thought of marriage, caused her mouth to go dry and her feet to thicken against the insides of her open-toed shoes.
“Good luck, then,” Moore said, and Vivvie said the same, considering the daily calamities that made up the hours of this man’s life. It occurred to her that for some, trouble was fundamental, a way of life, essential, even, for them to be the person they aimed to be.
She drew in the smell of honeysuckle, and then the sound of fast traffic at the corner.
“Take care,” Moore said.
“You, too,” Vivvie said, raising her hand as they parted, feeling the brides of yesteryear at her back. She had been wrong about so many things. There wasn’t enough time left in this world for making more mistakes. Wink had loved her for so long, yet never spoke a word of it, just sat with the feeling, and how strange to think that the love they had existed before she was even in it, while she was still wandering around blindly unaware.
She loved him. Loved him in her bed, in his bed, in both their kitchens and bathrooms. She loved their two lives overlapping, the way they met in the middle, sometimes literally for a picnic in the yard. She loved how she made breakfast at her place and he grilled dinner at his as if they lived on a campground, a couple of travelers having an adventure. Would it be the same if they confined themselves to one home or the other the way marriage would certainly call for?
They’d already gotten it right. The same way Kate had in her final years, knowing exactly what to do with the time that was left. Knowing how to make a life mean something, to wring out its worth when it was right there in one’s hands instead of just wishing about it afterward, or imagining how it could have been, or should have been, different. There wouldn’t be a wedding, Vivvie thought. This is how we do it right.
FORTY-FIVE
AVERLEE COULD HAVE SWORN SHE felt herself growing overnight, growing into “a leggy, galloping girl,” her dad said, “a Great Dane tripping over her own paws,” which made her laugh. He measured her and Quincy in pencil marks on the kitchen wall and she’d shot up an inch in the last month alone. “All that running around outdoors,” her dad said. “Fresh air and dry heat. You’re a eucalyptus, Ave, standing tall in the sunshine, right where it loves to be.”
Averlee would live outside if she could, collecting rocks and naming fish in the creek where she waded barefoot. The creek turned out rocks like jewels, a magical stream with amethyst, azurite, and malachite, broken loose from the mines upstream. For weeks there’d be nothing and then there’d be a chip of turquoise trimmed in copper. Once she found what looked like a yellow diamond, and her dad said it was a rare piece of peridot. He bought her a book of gems so she could match them to the pictures on the page. At night the hallway light shined onto the shelf above Quincy’s bed where Averlee kept her treasures, and the last things she saw before heading into her dreams were blues and greens and a shimmer of coppery gold.
But perhaps what she loved most about living there, besides having her dad, was the pair of cactus wrens in the saguaro out back. Averlee owned a set of binoculars and wore them around her neck all day the way other girls wore a necklace, and every morning began on the back patio with her spyglasses, as Quincy called them, pinned to her eyes as the wrens popped free their heads from their burrow. She knew their catalogue of calls by heart, the tek, tek, tek that reminded her of automatic sprinklers in F
lorida, and the croaky, scratchy song they made when the squirrels came too close. Her dad showed her how curious the birds were, that if she placed anything they hadn’t seen before on the patio table, the wrens would come out to investigate. A pink Barbie shoe from Quincy’s collection might be found next to a white plastic spoon and a stick of orange glue. Today, when they rolled Quincy’s birthday bike into the garage, the wrens followed it through the back door and out the other side.
Now she watched as her dad taught her sister to ride her new birthday bike. It had taken more than half a year of her dad telling Averlee that she didn’t have to do everything for Quincy, that all the worrying and cleaning up and keeping her sister on track was in fact his job. Her job was to be a kid. To find gems in the creek and look at birds and go to school and do her homework. That was it. She didn’t know how it was possible to feel heavier and lighter at the same time but that was how she felt with her dad, with her mom gone, with the wrens poking their heads out of the cactus.
He gripped the back of Quincy’s bike seat, and ran alongside her with promises that he would never in million years let her fall, and yet Quincy still shrieked that he better not let go. Quincy preferred the indoors, a corner by herself to read a book. “She was the still point from which Averlee spun around,” whatever that meant, her dad had written in an email to Aunt Elin. When his work called he often took the phone into another room, accidentally forgetting what he’d left on the computer screen.
“Sometimes I catch Quincy looking up from the pages of her book, eyes fixed somewhere across the room, and I believe she’s in heavy thought about her mother,” her dad wrote. Her aunt Elin wrote back, “It must be hard having to walk a constant tightrope of understanding, trying to keep her from falling too far into herself, while keeping the memory of Kate alive.”
After that it hurt too much and Averlee stopped peeking.
Her grandmother and Wink were flying in today by dinnertime. “You can show off to Grandma!” Averlee yelled down the street. She was losing patience with her sister, and maybe it came out in her voice, or maybe the thought of her grandmother seeing what Quincy could do was where Quincy found the courage, but whatever the reason the mystery of balance was suddenly hers.
Half an hour later Quincy still streamed up and down the street on her white bike in her white tennis shoes and white shorts like a ghost girl discovering new powers.
Averlee and her dad waited at the end of the driveway for Quincy to loop back around and they would clap every time, and after Quincy figured out how to wave with one hand on the handlebar, the other in the air, they clapped even harder, and around and around her sister went, and it never seemed to get old.
FORTY-SIX
LATE NOVEMBER. ELIN HAD SOLD the house she owned with Rudi last year. Her new house sat in a clearing on a small red cliff facing the Pacific Ocean. At the edge of her property an eastern wall of rocky earth dropped a hundred feet onto the shore. Modest cedar shingles and bright white trim made up her carriage house, surrounded by purple hydrangeas, yellow irises, domes of intensely sweet daphne near the doors. A chalky white lighthouse with a cardinal-red roof loomed to the north, the view from Elin’s kitchen sink where she liked to wash dishes by hand. Beyond the long living room windows wind-swept Madronas stacked to the west, their orange-red bark curling in thin sheets, exposing the satiny green sheen underneath. At night the crash of the ocean, the rumble of its storms became the lullabies that eased Elin into sleep.
Her mother told her about the fire, and how that singular photograph had somehow survived, whether misplaced inside the house or carried back into the house inside a pocket or the folds of a chair. She didn’t know. But she felt compelled to hold onto it, to save it like “a dog cheating euthanasia,” she’d said, and then fell silent at the bad taste of her joke, but Elin had laughed anyway, which seemed a good sign, considering.
Elin had the original restored and sealed away, but an enlarged copy hung in a frame above her fireplace in the living room. Every morning she woke to her father swinging her sister through the air. It was as much a memorial to them both as it was a reminder that loving someone, loving anyone, even those long gone, was of consequence, and not loving them was of consequence, too.
“Let’s go, boy.” Elin stepped from the house, holding tight to the urn with Kate’s ashes, Fluke running circles around her feet. He dashed ahead as she closed the front door, and the air smelled of cherry firewood, pine, and sea salt. She followed him down the steep path through the sharp beach grass and onto the shore. She liked seeing it all change with fall, the juniper at her back already gone a burnt, reddish brown.
The black, canoe-sized logs scattered on the beach had changed their shape again, some by force of tides, others by young people dragging them into bonfires. During the summer months yellow blazes lit up the beach, and the ocean wind carried campfire songs all the way to Elin’s front porch. The ballads of drunken teenagers, families lost in hopeless, scattered choirs, couples harmonizing love songs on guitar.
Ropey brown piles of tubular sea kelp were strewn everywhere today, the sky unusually cloudless. Elin plopped down near the dunes, gently screwed the pearl-white urn into the sand, and tossed a stick for Fluke. They were alone save the man on a paddleboard in the distance. It used to be only surfers but now paddleboarding was the thing of the day. The man appeared to know what he was doing. Not everyone did. His strokes were long and steady and he didn’t fall off, not while she was watching. His body was framed in the baby-blue sky; the long white stripes on his wet suit reflected the sun. She’d seen him before. She thought she had. Always in the water.
He paddled away from her, and Elin thought of “sneaker waves,” the way they appeared without warning, a tow with Mack-truck strength heaving bodies and boats out to sea. They were impossible to predict, like an earthquake—no warning, just coming when it came. But today the sun shined, and the air let go a weak, pleasant breeze, and Elin felt an opening in her chest. It wasn’t happiness so much as being on the verge of happiness, perched up there, readying to flee. She did not know why the beast that had come for her sister and father had not come for her. It may yet, of course. There was a blood test she could take, but what was the point? It was either coming for her or it wasn’t. No prevention. No cure. Her only concern was for her nieces. She wasn’t one for praying but if there was any justice in the world, even the smallest bit of rhyme or reason, she implored it to wrap them up inside, to follow wherever they might be.
She’d read Neal’s letters to them before her mother returned the stack. This was a man who deserved a greater love than Elin could have offered. That was the simple truth, and she was right to get out of the way. It was also true that she loved him more than she thought she did after reading what he wrote to his children. But not every kind of love called for action. Some demanded one stay put, allowing for nothing more than it to be exactly as it was.
He was happy. “Most days parenting feels a lot like running stop signs on desert back roads,” he wrote in a recent email. “A no-hands hurtle through the great wide open, a thrill never without risk. You tried to teach me this years ago, how getting to the good stuff required a free fall into the unknown, that that was where the real joy would always be waiting. The prize was at the bottom, gambles and perils and hazards be damned.”
Kate had understood this better than anyone, bravely walking away from the world she’d been given to enter one of her own creation. Elin read Kate’s notebooks, and then stored them in a box in her basement. She had no intention of showing them to anyone, nor of mentioning what was written there, not even to Neal. She often thought of making a bonfire, and believed that one day soon she would set fire to her sister’s words, let their smoke gust sideways out to sea where Kate was about to churn for all of eternity. Kate had asked for the quiet ritual of today, but she would appreciate the fiery spectacle of flaming notebooks, too. For now, Elin needed to have something of her sister’s in the house, her words like a
presence on days when Elin felt a little too mournful, a little too separated from all the people who had truly known her.
A bald eagle glided overhead toward the clump of pines on the hill. They were common out this way. All one had to do was look up. Hadn’t her mother tried to take her and Kate to see one once? She didn’t remember much about that, but the idea of it struck her with a vague appreciation.
It was all laid out before her now, the whole messy past, and she’d done everything in her power to put things right. No doubt she’d come up short, and that, she believed, was what it meant to be alive. The absence of answers and perfection allowed for the wonder, mistakes for tripping trap doors to the glimmering unforeseen. But she had come so far, too, gazing at the ocean and recalling her sister with fondness, with ease. Saving Kate from drowning meant Averlee and Quincy could one day exist, and Elin had given those same children to Neal by walking out on him, by cutting the tie so severely. That was one way to look at it.
But she felt great. That was the truth. No headaches in six months. She’d read that this could happen with age. People outgrew migraines. But she couldn’t help thinking it had more to do with being at the ocean, this cape, the cool blue colors of her days mixed with charcoal and silvery driftwood, winter skies a white-ash swath as far as the eye could see.
Did humans have habitats? It was a question she’d asked Neal the other day in an email. “I feel so alive in my own skin out here,” she wrote. He’d sent back a picture of Averlee with a huge grin while panning for gems in a creek, another of Quincy, her face a study in serenity as she read beneath a lamp. “Yes,” he wrote. “I believe they do.”
The paddleboarder waved in her direction. Elin checked behind her. There was no one she could see. The man shook his wet hair from his face and neck and waved again. She waved back, fanning her arm above her head, not minding if he’d mistaken her for someone else. She stood, brushed the sand from her clothes, cradled the urn in her arm, and headed toward the levee of boulders, an earthly path jutting out into the riptide.
