For one moment, one still moment, she understood the miracle of it all. The buck and his doe, the prairie and sky and the gathering clouds. The grasses, and the snakes and voles that hid in their depths. She felt the magnificence of wind and fire, of love and beauty. Of connection. Even—in that one flash of understanding—of pain and grief and loss. Of bonesetters and those who were broken. In the time it took to draw a single breath, she grasped it all. She felt it in her heart and in her diseased body. For that one moment, she felt it, and she knew absolutely that she had a place in it, was part of it all, the mystery and miracle of life.
Sam
Forever and ever. Me for you and you for me.
Forever and ever. Her and Libby.
Why was it so easy to make a promise, swear an oath? And, why did anyone, having made a pledge, think it possible to keep it for a lifetime? Intentions weren’t enough, Sam thought. What else did it take? Was it even realistic? Did it all come down to luck?
“Here you go.” The waitress placed a glass of wine in front of her. A red. Merlot or a cab, probably. Sam couldn’t even remember ordering it. She could barely recall phoning Lee or walking to the Moonfish. She stared out through the front window of the café, lost for a moment in her imaginings of Libby hitched up to a dialysis machine. She tried to picture how her sister, always the healthiest in the family, would react to serious illness. Would she be afraid? Stoic? Resigned? Philosophical?
People liked to believe they knew absolutely how they would respond in a particular situation, but they didn’t. Their father had been a pacifist who marched against war and racism, but he’d once struck a man he’d seen beating a dog. Later, he had nearly wept at how, when tested, and in spite of his firmest, deepest beliefs, he had met violence with violence. And Josh? Her brother had always thought of himself as strong, heroic in the John Wayne, do-the-right-thing sense, but now, when Libby needed him, he wouldn’t even agree to be tested to see if he was a match.
Sam knew she was no different. Once, she believed that at news of Libby’s illness she would have flown to her sister’s side, done anything for her. But her immediate reaction when Cynthia phoned— one she could confess to no one, could barely admit to herself—had been a grim flash of satisfaction. She got what she deserved. The thought had lasted just a moment, but she could not deny it. She got what she deserved. Sam was shamed to find herself capable of such vindictiveness.
“Sam?” Lee stood by the table.
“Hi,” she said. When she phoned him earlier he had agreed to meet, but some part of her had been afraid that, still upset, he would not show.
He hadn’t changed after work. There were spatters of white paint on his shirt and a smudge of grease on his forearm. She reached over and traced a finger over the dirt. He bent and kissed her cheek.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“No prob.” He slid into the chair opposite her. He looked exhausted. He seemed reserved.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“A little tired,” he said. “It’s been a pretty full day.”
She wanted to believe that this was all that was wrong, but their last argument echoed. “Lee,” she began, “about the other night . . .” She wished it were possible to take back words, to erase them from a person’s memory bank. Why did she find it hard to apologize? “I’m sorry,” she finally managed.
He nodded. “I’m sorry, too, Sam.” He did not smile or take her hand.
Pain overtook her. She didn’t think she could bear it if he stayed angry. Not on top of hearing about Libby.
“What’s going on?” he asked. “You sounded upset when you called.”
“It’s Libby. She’s sick.” She toyed with the place setting. “She has some kind of kidney disease and is on dialysis.”
Lee absorbed the news. “How did you find out?” he asked. “Did you phone her?”
She shook her head, told him about Cynthia’s call.
He reached for her hand. “How bad is she?”
She shrugged. “Cynthia didn’t have a whole lot of information. All she said was that she was on dialysis and she is on a list for—” The reality of it hit her, robbed her of breath.
“Sam?”
She shook her head, swallowed, blinked back tears. The words would not come.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here.” He threw a bill on the table to cover the wine, still untouched.
Outside, the air was sultry, so thick moisture practically hung from it, the kind of heaviness that left a person praying for a storm to roll through and clear things up. He led her to his pickup and headed toward Sprague Cove, driving with one hand, the other curved over the seat back. His fingers brushed her shoulder. At the Silvershell Beach parking lot, he cut the engine and opened the truck door.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s take a walk.”
They went to the water’s edge, where the sand was firm underfoot. Overhead a gull screamed. There was a beer can on the shore. Lee stooped and picked it up. Sam waited while he carried it to the trash barrel. Lee had told her that it took two months for an apple core to disintegrate in the sea. A tin can took fifty years, a disposable diaper four hundred and fifty. He’d railed against the disposable culture and the men who came to his yard with more money than they had love for boats. “These people think you buy a boat, hop in, and go,” he’d said. “They think there’s no payback, they just go on to the next. But to sustain a boat you have to put in time, energy, thought. You need commitment. It’s true of life, too.”
They walked along the shore toward the far jetty. Lee stopped to pick up a stone. Gray granite and worn smooth by water, the stone was bisected with a narrow band of white. He slipped it in his pocket. For Alice, Sam thought. Alice had a wooden bowl on her coffee table filled with stones, each bearing a perfect line through it. Alice believed they were good luck and collected them the way another person might pick four-leaf clovers and press them between the pages of a book.
“It feels so funny,” Sam said.
“What’s that?”
“That Libby has been seriously ill and I didn’t know.”
“Did your sister-in-law tell you how long she’s been sick?”
“No. She didn’t say much except that Libby wanted Josh to get tested to see if he was a match. She said Libby has been put on a list.” She thought of the message her sister had left on her machine. “I guess that was why Libby was calling me.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Call her, I guess.” She could not think beyond that.
“Any thoughts of going out to see her?”
“Out to Illinois?”
Lee nodded.
“I can’t. I mean, there’s no way I can leave now.”
He looked at her carefully. “Why not?”
“For one thing, I’ve got two weddings coming up.”
“Can’t Stacy do those?”
“I don’t think so.”
He put his arm around her. “How are you doing with this?”
“All right, I guess. I don’t know. It’s so mixed up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m still so angry with her, Lee.” She looked up at him. “Maybe I shouldn’t be now, but I’m still so mad.”
“What are you afraid of, Sam?” he asked.
“I didn’t say I’m afraid. I said I’m angry.”
He studied her.
“What?” she said. “You think I’m afraid?”
He picked up another stone, juggled it a moment and then skipped it out over the water. They watched it hit, once, twice, three times, before it sank below the surface.
“You think I’m afraid,” she said again.
“Anger is just another face of fear,” he said.
“That’s ridiculous.”
The rain began then, sharp drops that pitted the sand, and they headed back.
“What you said back there,” she said when they were in the pick
up. “That’s completely ridiculous. Anger and fear are two separate things. Totally unrelated.”
He shrugged.
“I’m sorry Libby’s sick and of course I’m worried about her. And I’m still angry at her for how she betrayed me,” Sam said. “But I’m not afraid. What would I be afraid of?”
“I don’t know, Sam.” Lee’s voice was even, calm. “You tell me.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Okay,” he said. “You say you’re not afraid, you’re not afraid.” He shifted into reverse, backed out of the lot.
Her hands lay clenched in her lap. Her stomach ached. Anger is another face of fear.
Admit it, she thought. There’s a lot you are afraid of. Losing Lee, for one thing. Being hurt.
Being betrayed.
There it was. As irrational as it was, she was afraid that somehow, given another chance, Libby would once again betray her.
Libby
When Libby got home, there were three hang-ups on the answering machine and a message from Richard, calling to say he’d slated a private session with one of the students and reminding her, too, that he had the full rehearsal for the Music Department’s fall concert. He told her not to hold dinner. It was the first time in months that he’d stayed at school late, a sign that he was returning to his normal schedule. She supposed she should be glad, but she wasn’t. It was perverse of her, she knew. Hadn’t she been urging him for months not to worry about her, not to alter his schedule to tend to her, not to pass off all his duties to his teaching associate? But his message left her off balance, as if he had, in some way, gone on with life without her.
In the kitchen, the dishes were still in the sink from breakfast and she filled a pan full with soapy water. She could have put them in the dishwasher, but the ritual of doing them by hand calmed her. There was something almost meditative about immersing her hands in the warm water, wiping each dish with the sponge, and then rinsing the piece free of suds.
When she finished, it was a little after three o’clock, with the remainder of the afternoon to get through. There was always television, but she hadn’t the least interest in watching talk shows or soap operas or, God help her, reruns of situation comedies.
The wide gray stillness of the house encased her. She missed Richard. She missed the twins. She thought about how Hannah Rose could no longer have children, and she tried to imagine how bereft her own life would be without them. All her memories were wrapped up in them. Big moments, of course, the ones every mother keeps in her memory bank (all the firsts: tooth, step, school), but small, cherished ones, too, individual to her children. The time at the aquarium when Matt stroked the silken back of a moray and said, “I wish I had a pillow just like this.” The day she’d looked out the window to see him sitting on the porch, eyes determined, chin slick, as he tried to learn how to spit. Or Matt at seven, when his hamster died and he refused to allow anyone else to bury it and she had watched from afar as he laid the stiff little body in the ground. She remembered the glee on Mercedes’ face the day she mastered layups in basketball, and her Christmas list the year she turned twelve: a soccer ball and pink lipstick. And her rage when she learned about the cruelty that turned calves into veal, and her subsequent, stubborn refusal to eat meat.
Motherhood, she realized, was a series of memories and a gradual progression of loss. Each day, with each new step of independence, children grew farther away until they left, claimed by their own life.
Mercedes was better than Matt about keeping in touch. She e-mailed regularly, giving Libby news of campus life, her take on her professors, and, after she learned about the dialysis, cheery “be well” messages. But the last three times Libby had called Mercy’s dorm, her daughter hadn’t been there. Nor had she returned the calls.
She knew it was trite—that all mothers said this—but it did seem like only yesterday that her life had revolved around the twins’ activities. This time of day, they would both be home: Mercy studying at the kitchen table, or in the den curled up in the leather chair that had once belonged to Libby’s father, engaged in one of her endless girlfriend conversations; Matt planted in front of the refrigerator, disarming her with his grin, or zigzagging across the backyard, weaving a soccer ball between his feet with an agility that astonished her. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but she missed the detritus of their daily lives strewn about her home. Gym bags and backpacks, discarded jackets and ball caps, empty Diet Coke cans, pizza boxes and orange peels on the den coffee table, grimy sweat socks on the bathroom floor.
She and Sally Cummings were the only two in their group of friends who hadn’t filled the postchildren years with employment or volunteer activities. Richard used to encourage her to get a job, even part-time. But what could she do? Work sales at Williams-Sonoma or B. Dalton? She couldn’t imagine. Before her illness, she and Sally used to meet for lunch and trade news of their children, and she missed that, too, even if it had only been surface chat, for the most part, not touching on the secret longings and linkages of motherhood: how one could be torn almost in half by fear or brought to one’s knees with love.
Libby was overcome suddenly by a simplicity of sorrow, by all the losses of her life—her parents’ deaths, her health gone, her children out in the world, Richard lost in his work, Sam estranged from her— all one great symphony of sadness. She felt weighted with forty years of accumulated disappointments and grief and loss. But she also knew that if someone walked into her home at that minute and asked her if the worst had already happened to her, she could not have said yes. Somehow she knew the worst was yet to come.
She thought back to the moment on the prairie earlier that afternoon when she and Gabe had seen the deer. She closed her eyes and tried to call up the momentary hushed certainty when she had felt on the verge of some tremendous understanding, the sense that all was well and that she was connected to everything. Now that moment of pure peace seemed elusive, imagined.
A memory, triggered perhaps by her prairie reflections, arose in her mind. She suddenly thought of her poetry professor at Oberlin. Libby could picture her clearly, even after twenty years. Anna Rauh was a strikingly dramatic woman, nearly six foot four, with silver-streaked auburn hair and hazel-green eyes. She dressed in long skirts with vibrantly colored overblouses, turquoise and purple and deep blues, and, around her neck, ropes and ropes of beads. Her voice, Libby recalled, was so low it could have been mistaken for a man’s.
Funny to think of her now. Libby remembered how Anna would stand in front of the class and make pronouncements that carried the weight of truth and that Libby would dutifully copy down in her notebook as gospel. Even now, she could recall these declarations. “Some things are unfixable,” Anna Rauh had said, urging them to have the courage to toss poems that were not working. “Notice all things,” she had told them. And this: “When the heart opens, everything matters. Everything.”
Libby thought again of the prairie. Was that what had happened to her in that moment when she saw the buck and his doe? Had her heart opened? Well, it was dangerous to unseal your heart. If Libby knew anything it was that. It opened one to loss and disappointment. It was better not to chance it.
There was something else that Anna Rauh used to tell them: “Follow love whatever the consequences.” She had made it sound easy, but another thing Libby knew was that love was never easy and consequences were often more than a person could endure.
The phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. Richard calling to check in, to find out how the morning’s treatment had gone, she assumed, and she reached eagerly for the receiver. In the past days, she had softened toward him. She had come to appreciate the depth of his concern, had allowed it to heal the rift that lay between them, unspoken, but not forgotten. Nor forgiven, if Libby was honest about it.
“Elizabeth?”
“Yes?” Not Richard. Foolish to feel this disappointment, she told herself.
“I’m so glad I got hold of you.”
“Yes?�
� She tried to place the voice. It was vaguely familiar.
“It’s Eleanor.”
“Eleanor?”
“Eleanor Brooks. From dialysis.”
“Oh, yes. Hello.” Libby’s tone was polite. It had been a mistake to give out her number.
“I’m so glad I got you. I called earlier but there was no answer and I didn’t want to leave a message.”
“I just got home.” She envisioned daily phone calls, attempts at friendship.
“Well, I’m glad I reached you. I only now heard and I thought you’d want to know about Hannah.”
“What about her?” Libby exhaled, more sigh than breath, already dreading what was to come. Every piece of bad news that she’d ever received had come in a phone call.
“Her husband told me. I called Hannah’s house to see if she wanted to contribute to the flowers we’re sending to Harold, and her husband answered.”
“What about Hannah?” Libby said again.
“Well, that’s what her husband told me. He was on his way back to the hospital when I called. Hannah’s in a coma.”
She says every day must be one of the good ones. “Is she all right?” Stupid question. Of course she couldn’t be all right.
Eleanor said. “I don’t think it’s good. Her husband asked me to pray for her.”
The line fell silent. Libby thought of Gabe, the fierceness of his love for Hannah. I swear I’d give her the other one if they’d let me.
“Some of us are getting together on flowers,” Eleanor said.
For the second time that day, Libby railed at the unfairness of life. Her body felt pocked with pain, her head ached with the intensity of tears held in. After a while it became impossible to stay in the claustrophobic solitude of the house. The need for escape, for consolation, drove her to Richard. She needed him as she hadn’t in a long, long time, needed the comfort of his arms.
She parked in the visitors’ lot by North Hall—Richard had never gotten around to picking up a faculty sticker for her car—and crossed to Reid. Classes were over for the day and the building was deserted. Richard’s office was locked, but an adjacent office was open and Libby knocked on the door. A woman sat at the desk, a professor Libby had been introduced to at a faculty party but whose name she couldn’t now recall.
The Law of Bound Hearts Page 16
