After the Fire

by J. A. Jance

  MISSING CONDOLENCE

  Pretty cards and thoughtful letters come

  Bringing sympathy and comfort from our friends,

  Both his and mine.

  One is missing.

  Daily I scan the envelopes for some sign

  That his best friend forgives me,

  That he accepts my present grief as real.

  It does not come—no sign, no call, no word.

  The loss of friendship pains me still,

  An ache persisting in an amputated limb.

  Mother’s Day, 1983

  I loved my mother-in-law. The only thing Mary Grandma and I had in common was her son, but even after the divorce we stayed in touch. I made sure she saw the children and talked to them on the telephone. After her son’s death, that relationship continued. The following spring she came to Seattle to visit. The children and I took her to Butchart Gardens in Vancouver, British Columbia, but the light had gone out of her life, and she never regained the joy of living.

  On June 12, 2000, my mother’s middle son, my younger brother Jim, suffered a massive heart attack and died while swimming off Hermosa Beach in California. As I worked on these notes first in 2003, I realized that the words I wrote for Mary Grandma in 1983 now applied to my own mother as well. Evelyn Busk raised seven children. There are six of us left, but like that single envelope in “Missing Condolence,” with first her beloved son and later her husband gone, much of the light went out of my mother’s last years as well.

  MOTHER’S DAY, 1983

  To be mother when a child is gone

  Beyond reach of touch or drop of tear,

  Is grief that only a mother can know

  And pain that only a mother can bear.

  You gave him life and watched him play.

  You brought him up as best you knew.

  Yet, headstrong, he would choose his way,

  And there was nothing you could do,

  But love him, and we know you did—

  Loved him with love unstinting, free.

  You loved him enough to let him go.

  You loved him enough to let him be.

  And though this special day, I know,

  Will not pass by without a tear,

  We wanted to tell you we love you so,

  And through that love, he can still be here.

  Building a Legend

  I remember my husband telling me that it didn’t matter if he drank; he was only hurting himself. That’s nonsense, of course. He was killing himself, but he was also hurting all the rest of us—the people who loved him, his children and his wife. He moved out of the house in 1980, we were divorced in 1981, and he died in December 1982. Time has passed, but much of what I wrote in “Building a Legend” in 1983 still holds true today. One of my children has moved beyond what happened back then. One is still trapped by his unwavering belief in the legend. My son harbors a legacy of blame that holds me responsible for everything that happened and for everything that went wrong. I believe both his parents were at fault.

  I like to think that someday we’ll be over this hurt, but at this point, I don’t hold out much hope.

  BUILDING A LEGEND

  It’s easy now for him to be a hero.

  He’s moved beyond the reach of new mistakes.

  In legend he is twice as big as life-size,

  And the things he did were honorable and great.

  It’s easy too to make him out a villain,

  There’s no one here to speak in his defense.

  If I give each act a black and hidden motive,

  Who would care or know the difference?

  Then let me find the middle ground between them,

  These two opposing views of one who’s gone.

  And when I tell the children of their father,

  Let me lighten truth with just a hint of sun.

  Kindred Spirit

  If you’re married when a spouse dies, there are certain rules that govern your behavior. The grieving widow or widower knows generally what is expected, and other people have some idea of what they should say or do and how they, too, should behave. If you’re divorced and a former spouse dies, all those rules go out the window.

  Months after my husband’s death, I was on the opposite side of this thorny issue when a good friend of mine died. She had been an invalid for years. She and her husband had long been estranged, but due to health insurance and financial considerations, divorce simply wasn’t possible for either of them.

  I had listened sympathetically to my friend’s side of the story as her marriage disintegrated. At the time of her death, I was still angry with her husband and ready to blame him for abandoning her emotionally if not financially. Still, when she died, I couldn’t help remembering how I had felt the previous year, when I was the one looking for that missing sympathy card—the one that never came. Bearing that in mind, I straightened up and sent my friend’s estranged husband a card. Then I sat down and wrote “Kindred Spirit”—for me.

  KINDRED SPIRIT

  I leaped to name another’s grief as false,

  To claim his tears as crocodile or worse.

  I laid my friend’s flown spirit at his door

  And called for him to know his just deserts.

  Yet as the words of judgment crossed my mind,

  I recalled when that same charge was hurled at me,

  When after years of pain and separation,

  Death came home, with love, to set us free.

  So instead of blame, I offer consolation.

  Instead of hurt, I give him hope and love.

  The giver with the gift is overtaken

  While blessings flow to me as from above.

  Fog

  By September 1983, I was beginning to feel better. I was living in Seattle and still selling life insurance but also starting to write mysteries. The first novel I wrote, in 1982, never sold to anyone. The second one was accepted by the first agent and sold to the second editor who saw it. I wrote every morning from four to seven, at which time I would awaken the children and send them off to school. Then I would get myself ready to go to work. I was involved in several civic organizations in Seattle, including the Denny Regrade Business Association, where I served on the committee that planted street trees in the Regrade area in the early 1980s.

  One of those civic organizations met in the early morning for breakfast. Going to a meeting one fall day, I walked downhill in fog so thick that I could barely see half a block in front of me. Being from the Arizona desert, I was totally unfamiliar with this phenomenon. Somehow I had always imagined that fog and rain went together. That particular morning, however, I came out of the meeting less than an hour later and was astonished to discover that the fog had burned away, leaving a clear blue sky overhead.

  FOG

  I walk in fog.

  Its velvet touch caresses me

  And hides the hurt.

  Beyond the fog, the sun

  Shines clear and bright.

  I must keep moving,

  I have earned the light.

  Walking Wounded

  In early 1985 an old friend came to Seattle to visit. His marriage had recently dissolved. We had coffee and talked. There was never any hint of romance between us—it was more a matter of talking together and comparing notes. Somehow, though, by the end of that conversation, I knew I was moving in the right direction—knew I was getting better.

  WALKING WOUNDED

  He is a long-lost friend who comes to town.

  We meet to talk about old times.

  The years between this meeting and the last

  Have cost us both the people that we loved.

  It takes a while to melt the ice, to take away

  The distance passing years can interpose.

  Once the ice floe breaks, we find that we are

  Veterans of the same far-reaching war.

  Our scars aren’t visible to naked eyes,

  But underneath a bland façade
/>   We both are hiding wounds that won’t be healed

  By anything but time’s slow steps.

  When our talk is over, we take in hand

  Our bandaged hearts and hopes and go

  Our separate ways. Maybe when we meet again

  The present tense will offer more allure,

  And we will leave the past where it belongs.

  He goes, but subtle changes have occurred within,

  A hint that springtime’s thaw is under way

  And flowers are pushing through the glacier’s edge.

  Maiden Names

  Growing up in Bisbee, Arizona, I had three special childhood friends. Donna Angeleri was the first. She lived at the top of Yuma Trail, and we spent summer afternoons clambering barefoot through the desert that lined the far side of our street. We coasted down the hilly roadway with a maximum load of four kids packed into our Radio Flyer wagon. When I was in the third grade the Angeleris moved to California, and I never heard from Donna again.

  In fourth grade I met Pat McAdams. We were pals all through school and coeditors of our high school newspaper, The Copper Chronicle. School, marriage, kids, and divorce took their toll on our friendship over the years, but now, through the magic of the Internet, Pat and I are back in communication almost every day.

  Diana Conway arrived in Bisbee the summer I entered sixth grade. Her family moved into the newly remodeled house that had once belonged to the Angeleris. They lived there for a grand total of three months. The Conways were sophisticated oddballs in small-town Arizona. The kids called their parents Joe and Sally. They all rode bikes at a time when no other grown-ups in Bisbee would have been caught dead riding a bicycle. They all loved books, and Diana played the piano wonderfully. Without any noticeable nagging from her parents, she practiced at least four hours every day.

  At the end of that summer the Conways, too, moved to California. I visited them once, the summer after eighth grade, catching a train from Tucson and traveling out to see them. Diana and I corresponded for years after that, but shortly after we graduated from college, we lost track of each other. When my first hardback, Hour of the Hunter, was published, in 1991, I dedicated it to “Diana Conway, wherever she is,” in hopes of finding my long-lost friend. For years nothing happened. Then in 2001, a fan of mine asked about the dedication. It turned out that one of her good friends in Alaska was my missing friend. Since then, Diana and I have picked up the threads of our childhood friendship. And it turns out, my poem was right; our paths have been in parallel. Diana, too, is a writer.

  MAIDEN NAMES

  To Diana Conway from Judy Busk

  We were young girls together,

  Eleven or twelve at most,

  Yet our conversations soared to galaxies afar.

  We carried books by wagonload,

  Dug for fossils, climbed a rock or two

  And swore that they were mountains.

  We lost each other later in a maze

  Of married names that easily removed all trace

  Of those two friends together.

  I think of you, Diana, and I know

  Our paths must be in parallel.

  I only hope someday they’ll cross again.

  Changing Times

  My youngest brother, Gary, was an impressionable high school student when I was at my fiercest, most fire-breathing feminist stage. He made a key ring for me in welding shop and gave it to me forty years ago, when I was teaching on the reservation. I still have it. I am working on my laptop in the living room. The key ring is in the kitchen, resting in the top drawer with my other keys and a haphazard collection of coupons and Ziploc bags.

  I still treasure the key ring, but when I look at it now, I no longer see what is missing.

  CHANGING TIMES

  My brother made the key ring years ago,

  The female symbol with a welded fist

  Clenched in the defiant gesture of that time.

  The fist broke later, I don’t know when,

  And for years it stayed that way,

  Half broken like some long-forgotten grudge.

  Eventually it disappeared—not the ring, the fist,

  And when I noticed it was gone,

  I laughed, because I, too, had changed.

  Interim

  I wrote this poem in June 1984, not knowing that in June 1985 my life would take a sudden turn for the better when I would meet the man who would become my second husband six months to the day from the day we met. I think the long period of quiet, not only after my divorce but also after my former husband’s death, put me in better emotional shape for what was to come.

  For those who are unfamiliar with the Arizona desert, it is helpful to know that the heat of summer usually comes in early June. By July the desert is parched and the trees and plants seem dead or dying. Then the rains come, and life returns. Perhaps people back east or in the Midwest—people who live with snow and real winter weather—have the same kind of reaction to spring, but for desert rats, life begins anew when thunderclouds come racing up from the south, bringing with them life-sustaining rain.

  INTERIM

  The part of me that’s woman has removed

  To some far distant place

  And there awaits a time when I can once more

  Dare the risk and hurt of love.

  It’s quiet here and calm, the stillness of a stagnant pond

  Before the summer rains bring surging life.

  It’s June. The storms will come in mid-July.

  By then I will have waited long enough.

  Daybreak

  I have little patience with people who consider themselves experts in how long the grief process should last. People who haven’t lived through that soul-numbing pain, and even some who have, often act as though there is a certain time by which a grief-stricken person should simply shape up and quit “wallowing” in it. They don’t have the time or patience to listen when someone needs to talk and ruminate about what happened. Interestingly enough, these are often the very same people who feel free to wag fingers and point out that someone certainly “got over it in a hurry.” They have no concept that many survivors, having battled some slow killer like cancer or Alzheimer’s, have done their grieving well in advance—long before death finally made its final curtain-lowering entrance.

  However long it takes, or however short, there comes a day when the survivor opens his or her eyes and realizes that it is morning at last. The sun has come up, and life really does go on. When that happens—when the gray gloom finally brightens a little and one catches that first hint of blue sky—it seems like an incredible miracle, and it is—the same kind of miracle that makes spring follow winter and sunrise follow night.

  DAYBREAK

  Love has come full circle, and I know

  That I am free to live again at last,

  Without my every waking breath and moment

  Haunted by some image from the past.

  With my heart closed and clutching our transgressions,

  Old hates and hurts could never fall away.

  But now the door is slowly creaking open.

  At peace, in joy, I rise to greet the day.

  Benediction

  This final poem is actually out of sequence, but benedictions are traditionally last, and this one is last for that reason. It was written in the early 1980s, when the promise it expresses seemed an impossible dream. Considering what was going on in my life at that time, it’s not surprising that I drew on my past to write it.

  The year I was a sophomore at the University of Arizona, I came down with a urinary tract infection that was severe enough to send me to the infirmary. Early the next morning, shortly after I awakened, my then boyfriend appeared, carrying in his hand a single rose that he had purloined from someone’s garden on his way to see me. It was a dusty pink color with a few sparkling dewdrops still lingering on the petals. That rose is something I’ve never forgotten. In fact if I close my eyes right now I can see the
tender petals and the dewdrops still gleaming like diamonds in the early morning sunlight.

  BENEDICTION

  I gave the Lord my greatest grief,

  My burden, and my care.

  He turned it over like a leaf,

  And soon there blossomed there,

  A flower of faith, a bloom of grace,

  With petals soft and fair.

  The dewdrop sparkling in the sun

  Was once, I’m sure, a tear.

  My life was storm-tossed and confused,

  I couldn’t find my way.

  I asked the Lord to see me through

  And guide me day by day.

  He took my hand and calmed the sea,

  Waves died at His command.

  Then o’er the calm He carried me

  Until we reached dry land.

  And as the storm clouds rolled away,

  Their edges silver lined,

  I watched a rainbow bridge the sky

  And knew God’s grand design.

  He changes weakness into strength,

  Makes courage from despair.

  Our stumbling feet turn into wings,

  When we come to Him in prayer.

  Postscript

  The life I live now often seems like a miracle. More than three decades after starting my long-delayed writing career, I still love writing. Almost twenty-eight years after marrying for the second time, my husband and I both cannot believe our good fortune in falling in love and marrying without wasting any precious time in the process. We have lived every day to the fullest, probably due in large measure to our mutual history. We came into this relationship with our hearts broken and with our dreams shattered. We both knew that life is not forever and that we have to make the most of whatever time we have.