Libby studies Sam, decides to continue.“How long have you known Jay, anyway? Three months?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? If I remember, you didn’t know Richard very long before you two got married.”
“That was di ferent.”
“What made it so all-fired different, Lib? That it was you, not me?”
“That’s not what I’m saying, honey. I just think you should wait, get to know each other better, be sure this is what you want to do.”
“What, are you in some way smarter than me when it comes to picking a husband? Do you have some special gene?” Libby puts her arm over her shoulder, but Sam shrugs it off. “I mean it, Lib. Back o f.”
“Sam, baby. I don’t want to fight. I love you.”
Sam swallows her tears.
“I am just asking what you know about Jay. I mean, it seems like he blew into your life from nowhere and swept you up.”
“I know I love him and he loves me. That’s enough.”
“I only want what’s best for you.”
“Well, this is best.”
“And you’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, you don’t have to—” Libby stops and looks at Sam. “Oh, God. You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“Christ, Libby.”
“Well, are you?”
“No. I’m not. If it’s any of your business.”
“Well, it’s not a completely ridiculous question, Sam. I mean, girls do get pregnant, you know.”
“Jesus, Lib. You think I’m a complete fuckup, don’t you?”
“No, Sam. I know you are not a complete fuckup.”
“What then? A partial one?”
“I just want you to be sure.” Libby pauses, catches her bottom lip between her teeth, a dead giveaway that she’s worried.
“I’m sure. So let’s just drop it, okay?”
Libby nods. “Okay,” she says after a minute. “Let’s see about finding you a wedding dress.”
Wedding dress. For the first time, it hits Sam that she is really getting married.
Libby flicks through the hangers, rejecting one outfit after another. “You know Mother’s going to be hurt,” she says. “And disappointed.”
“Who are you kidding?” Sam says. “The only thing she’ll feel is relieved.”
“Don’t fool yourself. She’s been planning your wedding since you turned twenty.”
“Oh, right. The Wedding. And then I get to spend the next six months listening to her complain about how much it cost.”
“She wouldn’t complain.” Libby pulls out a pastel linen dress. The color is the watery blue of a sky before rain. She holds it up to Sam. “What about this? It will be the ‘something borrowed and something blue’ all in one.”
Sam shrugs. The dress won’t fit right. Libby is thinner and taller then she is.
“At least try it on,” Libby says.
Sam pulls off her jeans, slips on the dress, waits while Libby zips the back. She studies her reflection in the mirror and sees in her face the disappointment of someone who was hoping for a transformation.
“The color’s great,” Libby says.
“You think?” Sam tugs at the material stretched over her hips.
“It’s perfect.” Libby disappears into the closet, searching for shoes. She decides on sandals, straps crossed at the ankle and drop-dead heels. “Now, what about jewelry?”
“Something simple,” Sam says.
Libby selects a thin silver necklace and Sam holds still while she catches the clasp at her neck.
Downstairs a door slams, a television is turned on.
“You know Mother’s going to blame me for this,” Libby says.
“That’s silly. You have nothing to do with it.”
“Right. Like she doesn’t always blame me for whatever goes wrong. Besides, you’re her favorite.”
“No, I’m not.” Whatever goes wrong? Is Libby going to start up again about Sam waiting?
Libby lifts an eyebrow. “You know it’s true.”
Sam doesn’t want to be the favorite. It fills her with a responsibility she does not want. “Well, you’re Dad’s.”
Libby ignores this. She stands back to survey the work.
“Do you think this is okay?” Sam asks.
“Better than okay. You look beautiful.”
“Honest?” Sam’s cheeks warm. “Thanks.”
“Okay. Now the hair.” Libby scoops Sam’s hair up off her neck.“How are you thinking about wearing it?”
“I don’t know. What do you think? French braid?”
“Down, I think,” Libby says. She reaches for a brush and strokes Sam’s hair. “Guaranteed, Mother’s going to blame me for letting you go off this way.”
“Just tell her you had nothing to do with it.”
“She’ll still find some way to blame me.”
Here they are, twenty-eight and thirty, and they still bear the weight of their parents’ expectations.
Anyway, at twenty-eight, is Sam really eloping or just performing a legal technicality, like getting a driver’s license? Eloping. It has an adventuresome, middle-of-the-night sound to it but it turns out to be a lot less romantic than Sam had imagined.
Sam and Jay. Sam and Jay. She runs their names through her mind as the two of them drive into Cape May, following the directions the wife of the justice of the peace has given them over the phone. Their linked names sound ridiculous to her ears, like a cheap chain store. Or a songbird found only in the South. Samandjay. Jay’s car—a gold Plymouth Duster—lost its tailpipe somewhere back in Connecticut and now people turn to look as they roar through the resort town. The day is cool, even for Cape May in September. Sam’s feet hurt from the sandals. The blue dress, still holding the scent of Libby’s perfume, is already wrinkled. Jay wears pleated-front chinos and a faded chambray shirt. The color matches the borrowed dress.
The broken tailpipe. The shoes that pinch, Libby’s perfume. The ludicrous sound of their linked names. Later Sam will see these as signs she was not smart enough to read.
Now Sam understood that she had married Jay simply because he asked her, and at the time saying yes had seemed somehow a lot easier than saying no. Not a good reason by anyone’s reckoning. Well, you couldn’t expect to behave stupidly at no cost to yourself.
She replayed Lee’s message, overtaken by the need to talk with him. Maybe Alice would know how to reach him. Sam started to punch the number in, then realized it was after eleven, too late to be waking Alice. If she hadn’t been a little drunk, she would have replaced the receiver. Instead, before she could stop herself, she punched in another number, one she knew by heart.
She got cold feet and hung up on the second ring. Before her sister could answer.
Libby
Earlier, when Libby arrived at the center, Eleanor Brooks had handed her a pink-edged card that said: “Each day comes bearing its gift. Untie the ribbons.” What this day was handing her certainly wasn’t coming gift-wrapped. Coolly, she’d tried to refuse the card, but Eleanor wouldn’t take the hint and so it sat on the tray table at Libby’s station. Just the sight of it irritated Libby. Untie the ribbons indeed. The gift she’d settle for right now was for someone to come in and turn down the damn TV, which the one-legged man had tuned to one decibel below shatter-your-eardrums. His name was Harold Lenehy and he had diabetes, according to Eleanor, who apparently knew everything about the other patients. Names, diseases, history. Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the old woman who always came dressed in a pink nylon sweatsuit, was on her second round of dialysis. Earlier she’d had a transplant but she had rejected it last summer. Jesse, the black woman who praised Jesus, had diabetes. Hannah Rose, whom Libby always thought of as Joan, as in Joan of Arc, had cancer of the kidneys.
“You’ll get to know everyone,” Eleanor had told Libby. “We’re all family here.”
Not me, Libby had thought. She struggled to feel empathy toward the others, something other than irr
itation. She knew she should, but her heart felt closed to them. She had considered switching her schedule to other days, but then she supposed there would just be another set of people who would annoy her as badly as the one-legged man, and Eleanor with her positive affirmations, and Jesse with her faith in Jesus.
Today Jesse again occupied the station to Libby’s immediate left. She was busy playing a variation of gin rummy with her daughter, Lorraine, a seriously overweight woman Libby guessed could be anywhere from twenty-nine to forty-five. It was so hard to tell with fat people. As Jesse dealt, Libby noticed that the woman’s faith in Jesus didn’t appear to hold her back from playing fast and loose with the rules, though the daughter didn’t seem to mind her cheating. They’d been playing steadily for half an hour, but for the past fifteen minutes Lorraine had been fidgeting. All the nerves in that massive body seemed to have settled in her right foot, which tapped and twitched, jiggled and swung. Finally she shifted her weight and, bracing her hands against the chair seat, lurched upright. “Be right back,” she announced. “Gonna get a Pepsi.”
Jesse nodded and continued to shuffle the cards, then laid out a hand of solitaire. “She’s going out for a cigarette,” she said to Libby. Disapproval radiated off her like heat. “She thinks I don’t know. You wait and see, she’ll come back here sucking on a mint and reeking of that stuff. What’s its name? You know what I mean. The stuff you spray on rugs to hide the smell of dogs.”
Libby gave an I-haven’t-a-clue shrug. She had never had to resort to covering up odors in her home.
“Febreze.” Jesse seized on the name. “That’s it. Lorraine’s always got a spray bottle in her purse to cover the stink of tobacco smoke. Thinks she’s got everyone fooled.”
Libby nodded noncommittally, watched her shift a card. The woman cheated even when she was playing solitaire.
“Though she’ll deny it right to your face, that girl’s been smoking since she was fourteen,” Jesse said. “And drinking since she was sixteen. Me, I’ve never touched a cigarette in my life. Or a drop of liquor. And yet here I am lying here and she’s out front having a smoke. It don’t make sense.”
Nothing made sense to Libby. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep coming here. She looked over at Eleanor. How long had she said she’d been coming? Three years. Libby knew she couldn’t do that. She honestly thought she’d rather die.
“You got children?” Jesse said as she put the ace of diamonds at the head of a column.
Libby nodded.
“How many?”
What was it with the people in this place? Hadn’t they grasped the concept of privacy? “Two.”
“Girls or boys?”
“One of each. Twins.”
“Twins.” Eleanor joined the conversation. “How sweet.”
What exactly did she think was so sweet about it, Libby would have liked to know.
“What’re their names?”
“Matthew and Mercedes.”
“Mercedes,” Jesse said. “After the car?”
Good Lord. “No, after her grandmother.”
“Well, I hope she don’t smoke.”
Did Libby know any more about what Mercy did than her mother had known about what she used to do? In spite of her spying and prying through Libby’s things, her mother hadn’t known the half of what she’d done. All through high school, Libby had barely escaped serious trouble, mostly getting grounded for sneaking out at night. Her mother knew nothing about the pot she smoked or the times she pocketed lipstick from the drugstore. One night Libby had cut through a porch screen at Russ Fuller’s house, climbed right through the window, and gone up to his room and super-glued the zipper on every single pair of pants the cheating son of a bitch owned. Remembering, she nearly laughed out loud.
She couldn’t picture Mercy doing a thing like that. But what did she know? She had strived for a connection with her daughter, for communication, but in the end she couldn’t really know what Mercy did.
Over the weekend, at Richard’s insistence—“You can’t hide it from them forever. It’s not fair to them”—they had phoned the twins to tell them about the dialysis. Mercy had been angry that they hadn’t been told earlier. There was something else in her daughter’s voice, too, a note of distraction that normally Libby would have picked right up on had she not been so concerned with reassuring Mercy that everything would be fine. Matt was another story. Ever the scientist, he’d wanted details, had asked if there was talk of a kidney transplant. If so, he wanted to be tested. He had wanted to come straight home, as if Libby would even consider such a thing. Eventually Libby had calmed him down, reassured him, told him she was really doing fine and was looking forward to seeing him over Thanksgiving. To both of them, she made dialysis sound no more difficult that donating a pint of blood. Well, wasn’t that what she herself had once believed?
Jesse tapped a card on the tray table, trying to get Libby’s attention.
Libby looked over.
Jesse leaned toward her, lowered her voice. “My church group is working on my healing,” she said. Jesse’s eyes took on a hot intensity that Libby associated with door-to-door proselytizers.
Libby gritted her teeth.
“Do you believe in the power of prayer?”
“I . . .” Of course she didn’t. If she believed in anything she believed in . . . what? She searched her mind for a word. “Mystery” came to mind. Okay, she’d agree to that. There was a mystery beyond explanation. Yes, she believed in that. Mystery. Why couldn’t people leave it at that? Wasn’t that enough? She looked across at Hannah Rose sitting in the station opposite, her body as translucent as skin. The circles beneath her eyes were so dark that Libby could see the shadows from where she lay. As far as Libby had noticed, the girl seldom talked to anyone. She never had company during the treatments. Yet she radiated peace. Libby thought Hannah would understand the concept of Mystery, that it would be enough for her without attaching titles or dogma to it.
“If you want,” Jesse was saying, “I can ask them to include you.”
“What?” Libby pulled her attention away from the girl.
“In their prayers. They have a list. If you want, I can put you on it.”
Libby didn’t want. What she wanted was to be left alone. She turned pointedly away, as if she was going to try to get some sleep.
Jesse was not about to give up. “It’s a fact, you know. They’ve proven it. People who are prayed for heal quicker. Why, they are even proving the power of prayer can cure cancer. Cancer!”
Fascinating, Libby thought. I’ll be sure to tell my doctor. She looked over at Hannah Rose and thought maybe she would like to know about Jesse’s belief in the power of prayer to cure cancer.
Kelly came over and checked Libby’s monitor. “Your blood pressure is holding fine,” she said.
Too bad they couldn’t measure irritation, Libby thought. Her levels would shoot right off the charts, set off alarms.
She had tried to talk to Richard about how irritating she found the people here, but he had told her she should work at trying to develop a better outlook. “Attitude is important,” he told her, “it creates positive energy.” Like he was suddenly Mr. New Age Guru. Maybe he should have married Eleanor of the Positive Affirmations.
She pulled her blanket up over her chest and considered the futility of asking if the TV could be turned down. Katie Couric was interviewing an actress whose smile was the too-wide, false kind, someone Libby had never heard of, someone who probably knew all about the power of positive energy. She sighed and reached for her tote bag. On an impulse, she’d brought The Will to Change, the volume of poetry by Adrienne Rich that she’d found in the guest room dresser. Jesse had Jesus. Richard had the prairie. And Libby had poetry. In truth, it always had been her connection to something larger than herself.
Shielding the cover from Eleanor, who would no doubt think it was some kind of self-help book, she flipped it open. An envelope was glued inside the back cover. “Proper
ty of Northampton Public Library,” she read. She slipped the card out, read the last Due Dates: APR 10, 1977; DEC 18, 1977; NOV 19, 1978. She pictured the librarian stamping the card, using the date stamp affixed to the end of her pencil. When Libby was a child she had coveted one of those pencils. If she could have figured out a way, she would have swiped one from the librarian’s desk. She turned the card over. The final date stamped was FEB 5, 1979. The year she turned sixteen.
Why hadn’t she returned the book to the library? Had she thought she’d lost it? Had she had to pay for the book? She couldn’t remember. She thought she would remember if she had stolen it, but it was possible. In those days she shoplifted regularly. She opened to the contents page, scanned the titles: “Planetarium,” “The Blue Ghazals,” “Our Whole Life.” Once she had known many of these poems by heart but now she couldn’t remember them. “The Stelae,” “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”
Well, that one she did recall. Words of the opening line floated up out of deep memory. “My swirling wants,” it began. How she had loved that line. My swirling wants. It had spoken directly to her, captured precisely the longings that eddied deep inside her at sixteen. She checked the page number for the poem. When she turned to the page, a slip of paper fell out of the book onto her lap. It was the thin kind used for airmail. Onionskin. The handwriting was hers. Two lines.
Birds are language
words written on the sky.
She read it again, held the syllables in her mouth.
Birds are language
words written on the sky.
She remembered then, could see the birds overhead, could recall the thrill of transforming feelings into language.
She is walking home from school, book bag slung over her shoulder. It is winter, cold, and then, unexpectedly, overhead, a pair of larks. They circle in flight, their white underparts brilliant against the blue sky, and sing out their bell-like pit-wit call. She stops right there—right in the middle of the sidewalk—plops her book bag down in the middle of the sidewalk, mindless of the slush from a snow the night before. She pulls off her mittens, flings them down on top of the bag, and tears a piece of paper from a pad of airmail stationery she’d bought that morning at the drugstore on her way to school so she could write to her Swedish pen pal. A car drives by, a horn beeps, but she does not look over. Nothing else exists. Birds are language... She knows from experience that if she waits until she gets home, this fragment of a poem will vanish, go as swiftly as it had come. She scribbles down the words.
The Law of Bound Hearts Page 11
