Waking Savannah

by Terri-Lynne Defino

  “There is only one way to be free.”

  Savannah spun at the words. The wheels of her chair squealed. She squinted into the afternoon’s fallen shadows. No one. But the voice—had it been in her head?—wasn’t hers.

  Slumping back in her chair, she blew out a deep breath. Drew in another. Let it go. If Benny and Johanna and half the town knew her story, she had been oblivious to it. No one brought it up, not even after her alter ego, Dr. Callowell, became common knowledge. Conversation didn’t hush the moment she walked into a gathering. The pity she worked so hard to avoid never came.

  Tap-tap-tapping the mouse, she clicked through a few of the articles now almost a dozen years old. She spotted the one she kept in the Box. She read none. But the pictures. Savannah lingered over those.

  Doc in his uniform, smiling the smile he took with him to the desert, but didn’t bring home.

  Sally, two front teeth missing and her hair in the same spikey fashion Savannah had worn for years after.

  Ginger, her freckled nose crinkled and her shoulders scrunched, caught in the moment the photographer called out, “Say cheeseburger.”

  Savannah didn’t weep, even if her belly tumbled over and over itself. Her babies. Her girls. Doc. Oh, Doc. She breathed deeply, eyes closed and conjuring the wings dear, deluded Carmen assured her sprouted like shadow and cloud from her shoulder blades, until the pounding in her head eased. Taking comfort from the notion, letting it go as the fantasy it was, Savannah clicked out of the search engine.

  Her desktop background, a screen shot of Savvy Gardening, appeared. Savannah looked at the image of herself. Really looked at it. The woman on the screen smiled, her dimples as deep as Sally’s had been. She remembered the day Benny took it with her cell phone, an unchoreographed moment while they broke up soil two springs ago. The young people who worked for her had been tossing little dirt bombs at each other. One of them had just hit Savannah’s white shirt.

  She laughed softly. A white shirt? While breaking up dirt on a farm? Savannah couldn’t remember if had been a choice or happenstance, but she did remember the happiness of working her own land with people she cared about. She remembered anticipating the planting, the sprouting, the weeding and feeding and watering. She remembered Edgardo and Raul, watching the kids’ antics and shaking their heads like indulgent uncles.

  The curser arrow hovered over the Google icon. She clicked. Up popped the search screen. Savannah bit her lip, her fingers poised on the keyboard.

  Dr. Adelmo Gallegos. She hit enter.

  Up popped at least as many hits as her own name had garnered. University staff pages. Links to dozens of lecture series. Several scientific articles complete with images. Ade in a white coat, hands in a bin of black earth. Looking into a microscope. Standing before a rapt class, tie undone and arms in the air. Savannah’s heart pattered. She clicked on the image option. The page loaded.

  Ade dressed in a tuxedo, a curvy brunette on his arm.

  Ade with a statuesque redhead, not just in one image, but several.

  Apparently, he liked blondes. Short, tall, lean and athletic, curvy and soft, long hair, short hair, curly or straight, they dominated the images a dozen to one. Image after image going back to the late nineties. Woman after woman. Ade, always dressed impeccably and sporting that expensive smile. The pattering of Savannah’s heart became a thud. Leaning forward, she typed into the search engine: Dr. Adelmo Gallegos and Anita Durst.

  It came up before she even clicked the enter key. Dr. Anita Durst of the Boston Dursts. If Savannah had an opposite in the world, it was she. Tall and leggy, fair as a princess in a German fairytale, svelte as an athlete. Electric-blue eyes. And blonde. Gorgeously, ethereally blonde.

  Savannah clicked on the image. It led to a society page, newspaper article covering a university winter gala of the year prior. Anita, dressed all in baby blue, and white fur—politically correct faux, of course—her arm tucked regally into Ade’s. That she was several inches taller didn’t matter. Ade was larger than life, radiating all the charm and sex and charisma Savannah recognized, yet without any of the tenderness she had come to know. The eyes in the image were cool, the eyes of a man aware everyone was watching him.

  She read the society page about the number one couple in the city of Boston, the couple on everyone’s who’s who list. Speculation about a summer elopement appeared in not just that article, but several others Savannah found. Aside from that, nothing. No scandal. No big break-up newsflash that might have sent Ade into hiding. After a small mention in the commencement program the May just past, new information about Adelmo Gallegos stopped.

  Savannah folded her arms on the edge of her desk and rested her head upon them. She knew nothing about Anita Durst, and yet she knew everything she needed to know. The woman, her family, had kept it all out of the society pages for one reason, so Ade could come back.

  Three days, and no word. Not a call. Not a text. Savannah refused to ask Edgardo or Raul.

  She lifted her head, stared at the screen. She clicked through the images and finally found one of Ade by himself. Kneeling on some bank, along some waterway, sleeves rolled up, elbow-deep in muck, he was looking over his shoulder at a young man. Spontaneous. Smiling. Handsome despite the dirt and disheveled clothes, the hair sticking up in all directions. This was the Ade she knew. This was the Ade she loved. She had no idea who the other man was, the cool one, the man with all those women on his arm.

  She checked the date on the picture. Almost a dozen years ago. When the picture was taken, Ade had still been a man of ideals, a man who got dirty out in the field with his students. She scrolled back and back in time, even found a picture of him as a twenty-two-year-old college graduate.

  Savannah grabbed the pic. And another. And another. She put them all in a file that started with the college graduate and ended with Anita Durst on his arm. Click. Click. Click. The slideshow showed her the gradual changes from student to teacher, and the more abrupt ones moving on from there. She saw the hardness grow, and his light go out. Had he known it was happening?

  Pausing on the crossroads’ picture, Savannah gasped. While he slopped in the mud that day, she had been in ineffectual hiding. Soon after, she would be fighting for her life. Their lives, hers and Ade’s, had shifted at the same time, in such different ways.

  “I came out of the darkness and into the light,” she told the computer screen. “You left the light for darkness.”

  Tears stung. She let them roll without brushing them away. Her tragedy had been sudden and horrific. She had risen from it a stronger woman. A smarter one. For the first time since leaving Georgia, Savannah understood she had stalled shortly thereafter. The determination to honor her daughters in a life fully lived became mired in hiding who she had been, what she had endured. Hiding it from no one, as it turned out. Only obsessively trying to.

  And yet, she and Ade were again at a similar crossroads. If all he said was true, he had been forced out of his false-Eden, but willingly and eagerly followed the path leading out of it. Savannah had only to step back onto the path as he whizzed by, let herself get caught up in his momentum until they were in stride.

  Please, Savannah. I love you.

  His words trembled through her, tingling every inch of skin. Right clicking on the pic of muddy Ade, Savannah saved it as her desktop background. She clicked out of the search engine, closed all the windows, but left the computer on. She still needed to record ledger entries. Later. Right now, she wanted to find Edgardo and Raul. She had a few questions, and until Ade came back to the farm, they were the only ones with answers.

  * * * *

  Did you see that? Did you see? He backed down, and Ricky Ricardo isn’t even around. She did it. Savvy did. Wow.

  Maybe that’s how I get out of here. I have to stand up to what happened to me. But, how? Savvy’s got her ghoul right there to stand against, but I haven’t seen mine in…well, ever. Not since, you know. Then again, Savvy doesn
’t know he’s there. We do, but she doesn’t. Hmmm, maybe my ghoul is around here someplace. Maybe I have to figure out where.

  And maybe I’m just too scared to even try.

  * * * *

  The city’s twisting, illogical layout confounded Ade when he had first arrived in the Athens of America. He fell in love with the place despite this. It wasn’t long before he mastered the T, Boston Commons and the surrounding landmarks. It took longer to become familiar with all the beautiful intricacies and nuances hidden within the touristy haunts. The pubs and restaurants that didn’t appear in guides. The world of art and music outside of famed halls and museums. The intellect never bound by ivy walls. Of science beyond institutions. New York’s grandeur and energy wowed, and it overwhelmed. Ade had spent two full semesters in Manhattan and never fell as hard for it as he did for Boston.

  After nearly a week searching for Anita in all the places they’d once frequented, Ade had to accept that it wasn’t home anymore. It wasn’t that place he loved more than anywhere else in the world. What had been the goal of his life became the scene of its destruction. But it was more than that. Beantown still glowed in all those ways the academic in him loved. What it suddenly and so surprisingly lacked had nothing to do with the city itself.

  Anita had given up the apartment, supposedly because he and she were moving to the grand Durst estate in Cambridge the moment he returned from visiting his sick mother in Ecuador. The doorman’s sputtering reaction to seeing him walk into the lobby had gotten that much information, at least. Anita’s success in keeping their split out of the society pages seemed tight enough. Not so within that society itself.

  Former students he ran across in his search for Anita were as surprised to see him as the doorman had been. Colleagues, however, only pretended. Ade was too good at the game to be fooled by it. He could not suppress the mean-spirited chuckle, inward as it was. People were talking, they simply were doing so quietly. A different Ade would manipulate this to his advantage. Curry favors. Spin gossip. The new and, in his opinion, improved version of himself had no patience for it.

  “She’s playing with you, man,” Carl said, when at last Ade had no choice but to go to the one person he could, if not trust, at least guilt into giving up Anita’s whereabouts. “After months of refusing her calls, she’s refusing yours. Go back to wherever you were. She’ll find you when she’s ready.”

  “I don’t want her there. I don’t want her infecting my life there. I have left this world behind, Carl. I found happiness. I found who I was, who I forgot how to be. Please. I need to see her, to end this.”

  “Look,” Carl finally said, “I feel for you, Ade. I do. I don’t like all the shenanigans that go on around here. I don’t like the power her family has over this whole institution, but I told you before. I’m just an old history prof who doesn’t have it in him to start again. I’ll pass on your message, because she’s going to know you were here, and she’s going to come after me for information. Other than that”—he held up a finger, crossed to the open door and closed it—“all I can say is, she hasn’t missed a board meeting since she took her father’s position on the board. Next one is this afternoon. Four o’clock. And I’m going to be perfectly honest with you. If she gets to me before then, I’m going to tell her I told you.”

  “Will you at least tell me if she gets to you?”

  “How?” Carl asked. “After all I just said, you’re not giving me your new cell number. You’ll know. She won’t show up. Or she will. Sorry, Ade. It’s the best I can do.”

  Parked in the staff lot where Anita Durst, thirty-eight and a perpetual student, had her own parking space, Ade kept watch for her customized, baby blue Porsche. Even if Carl did inform her he’d be waiting for her, Anita wouldn’t even see the ancient rust-bucket that had taken the place of the Audi he’d given back to her. The Dursts did not see poverty, they threw money at it.

  A quarter to four and still no sign of her. Ade groaned, reached for the key. She was giving him no choice. He would have to go out to Cambridge and…

  The passenger door flew open. Ade nearly banged his head on the roof.

  “This is a new look for you, guapo. I like it. Muy macho.”

  Anita climbed nimbly into the cab beside him. Ade did a quick scan of the lot. No baby-blue Porsche. She’d gotten to Carl, but there she was anyway. The roundness of her middle detracted nothing from her grace, or her beauty. If anything, she was even more exquisite than before becoming pregnant. Straightening, he gathered his old self around the new one, and faced her. “Carl told you I’d be here.”

  “He’s been reluctantly helpful,” she answered. “Don’t be angry with him. He did try to resist me. As you can attest, that’s fairly impossible to do.”

  His jaw clenched. “You are looking well.”

  “I am, aren’t I? Who’d have thought it?”

  “And you are feeling well?”

  “Never better. Why? Do you care?”

  “I am making small talk, Anita. Now I am not. Leave me alone. Leave my father and uncle and most especially, Savannah alone. She has endured—”

  “Oh, spare me your lover’s sob story.” Anita waved her hand in the air. “I didn’t do anything to her but leave a message on her answering machine.”

  He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing exactly what she had done. “She is not my lover. She is my employer.”

  “You live in her house.”

  “Until my father and uncle return to Ecuador and I move into the trailer.”

  Anita tsked. “A room in an old farmhouse, a trailer, this…vehicle. My goodness. Dr. Adelmo Gallegos, King of Academia. How far you’ve fallen.”

  “Your opinion means nothing to me,” Ade said. “Neither does any of this. I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t care if you ever do. I am here for one reason only.”

  “Your baby.”

  “That”—he gestured to her belly—“is not mine. If it were, I would not have left.”

  She flashed those perfectly capped teeth her daddy bought her when she debuted, batted her eyes. “You’d have done the chivalrous thing, and married me?”

  “The child is not mine, Anita. You and I both know that.”

  “Because there were others?” Anita laughed. “Darling, you know how birth control works. I used it with them. I didn’t with you. We have been over this before.”

  “And I have told you before, I don’t believe you. Your baby cannot be mine. I am—” Give her his ultimate sorrow to use at will? Share with her what he had shared with no one but Savannah. The wound pricked open when Anita claimed he’d fathered her child seeped through the ineffectual bandage of Ade’s imagining. Sterile. One hundred percent conclusive. He’d had every test. Twenty long years ago. But what if? “I want a paternity test.”

  “Is that so?” Her bought smile never reached her eyes. Ever. She caressed her belly. “I’m sure you know by now that those toys I had scattered about the city have already been paid off and cut loose. I’m also sure you’ve heard that you are in Ecuador with your sick mother, and I am patiently awaiting your return. I am one hundred percent certain this baby is yours, but if a paternity test will end this nonsense and bring you home, Ade, you got it.”

  “Good. I am sure the Durst influence is such that you can get us an appointment first thing in the morning.”

  “Tomorrow?” Anita chuckled low in her throat. “I could get a doctor to do it now if I wanted. You should know by now there is nothing a Durst wants that a Durst does not receive. But no, I’m not going tomorrow or any time before this baby is born. I’m not having a needle stuck in me. Not even for you. We have our whole lives ahead of us. I can wait a little while longer for your mother to recover from her terrible illness. And you can wait until he’s born.” She reached for the door handle. “This truck really is disgusting, Ade. If you expect me to—”

  “He?”

  Her lips curled, more sneer than
smile. “It’s a boy. Didn’t you know?”

  Ade shook his head.

  “Did you listen to any of my messages?”

  “They’re all the same.”

  “Not all of them. Yes, Ade. A son. You are having a son. Does that make a difference?”

  It just makes it more real.

  “You really are old world, aren’t you?” She climbed down from the truck. “Poor Ade. Things are just not going your way. I’m having a C-section on September 19th. Mark your calendar. If you want a paternity test, show up and get it. Until then, enjoy your time with your tragic not-lover in Bitterly. My gift to you, to make up for all the lovers, sorry, not-lovers I had. Even though you had plenty too. Once this baby is born, we are a family. I know you, Ade. You might not like it, but I know you. You’ll be back.”

  Anita blew him a kiss, and slammed the door. He watched her walk away, blonde hair snapping behind her like whips. She was so certain. A boy. A son.

  His son.

  He turned the ignition, revved the engine. Slamming the truck into gear, he jammed on the gas and tore out of the parking lot. Ade wouldn’t slash wide that scarred-over wound and feed it the smallest bit of hope that, by some miracle, he had fathered a child. Anita’s certainty would soon be dashed and she’d be left trying to figure out which of her exiled lovers had done the deed. It was only a month. One month in the grand scheme of things wasn’t so bad. He’d go back to the farm, apologize to Savannah for what Anita had done, for not telling her sooner that he knew of her past, and hope, despite karma, everything turned out okay.

  Chapter 15

  o'er the cloven Gulf of time

  Life on Savvy’s continued on its normal track. High schoolers tended the fields under her foremen’s watchful eyes. Benny worked the farm stand, Irene occasionally strapped to her chest. Vegetables grew, livestock thrived, and both locals and out-of-towners, always beautifying their country gardens, searched her rows for exotic new plantings. Savannah worked alongside them all. And though the headache always ready to break over her like an egg didn’t do so, the dread of it skulked.