Chasing Windmills

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Yeah. I think it would do Natalie good, too.”

  “Okay.”

  I was wondering where Natalie was going to sleep. Not for a nap that day, but in general. Always. But it didn't seem like the time to bring it up.

  “You should go talk to your grandmother,” she said. I could hear the note of tension in her voice. Fear. Or was fear too big a word? No, I don't think so. Fear. “See what's wrong.”

  “She was acting a little funny,” I said, picking up the fear like something contagious.

  “It's the three of us. It's too many. She's going to ask us to leave.”

  “No. I don't think so. It was something that happened on the drive. She was fine at the bus station. Something happened later on, but I don't know what it was.”

  “Maybe you better go talk to her,” she said.

  “Okay.” I said it calmly. At least I hope I did. But I didn't feel calm.

  On the way out I stopped and looked at the banner close up. The people who had fixed up this house for us had all signed it. It said things like, “Welcome back to Mojave! Jerry Argenaut.” “Your grandmother loves you and so do we. Minnie Binch.” “Enjoy the new place. We're glad you're here!!! Todd and Dora Martin.” I just read a few. Then it all got to be too much for me.

  A couple of months ago, I would've told you there wasn't more than one person in the world who really loved me. Maybe not even that. Then I met Delilah, and I knew she did. I knew it nearly from the start. Now here was this declaration—no, more than a declaration, concrete proof—of love from dozens of people, and I didn't even know them.

  I looked back at Maria. She was lying on the bed beside Natalie. Faced away. I wondered if Maria loved me. She'd never exactly said so. But she was here. And maybe that's concrete proof. But as I walked out into the baking heat of the Mojave day, I couldn't help feeling that—as with my father—we were still on the fence about that.

  THE BOARDS ON THE STAIRS up to Grandma Annie's back porch creaked under my weight. They announced me before I was ready to be announced. I could see into the kitchen, and she was working in there. Puttering between the fridge and the counter. I saw her look up at the sound, then look away again.

  I raised my right hand to knock but she spared me the trouble.

  “Come on in, hon.”

  I stepped into her kitchen. The linoleum was so faded it looked as if the design had been walked right off. But it was clean, and had a nice fresh coat of wax on it. Maybe good wax jobs run in the family. I could tell the house had only a swamp cooler, too. It was about twenty degrees cooler inside, but not the icy shock of air-conditioning. And I could hear it blowing.

  “I was making some lemonade for later,” she said. “For when you kids woke up. But you can have some now if you want.”

  I looked at the little hand juicer on the counter in front of her. It had a red plastic top. Delilah's was all glass. But it was still the familiar sight of cut lemons and a hand juicer.

  She was working with her back to me.

  “Delilah used to make me lemonade from scratch,” I said.

  “Well, I'm glad you like it, hon.”

  Another long silence.

  I sat down on a kitchen chair and looked at the refrigerator, with its four or five dozen magnets. Some were shaped like fruit, some like hot-air balloons, some like seashells or fish. Some were from places like the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns. Most held some small scrap of paper underneath. A newspaper clipping or snapshot or recipe. Her counters were lined two deep with glass canisters of peas and beans and pasta.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I just said it out of nowhere. Without even really wasting any time gearing up to speak. No answer. “Because everything seemed fine at first, and then it wasn't anymore, and I don't know what happened or how to fix it.”

  Suddenly Grandma Annie's face was right in mine, filling my whole field of vision. I tried to push back but the chair legs stuck on the linoleum under my weight.

  “You want to fix it? I'll tell you how to fix it. You look me right straight in the eye and tell me you didn't break that girl's ribs.”

  At first I was too stunned to speak. But I think my face might have spoken for me. Because her face softened when she saw my reaction.

  After a horrible moment's pause I said, “I would never do that.”

  And I think she believed me. I think I could see that she did.

  “Well, then why did you look away like that? When I asked if it was an accident?”

  “Like what?” But I had a bad feeling I knew.

  “Like you were ashamed of something.”

  “Oh,” I said. And felt ashamed all over again. “It was nothing that bad.”

  Her face retreated, and she sat down on one of the other kitchen chairs. They had hard, straight wood backs, and I could feel the wood digging into my shoulder blades. I tried to relax a little. Grandma Annie looked guilty and sad, like she wished she had never said it out loud.

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “It's just, you looked like you had something to hide around that.”

  I took a deep breath. It struck me suddenly that this is what it meant to be out in the world. You had to make your way with people. You had to hit big bumps in the road. “I was ashamed for you to know that a few days before we got on that bus together she was living with some other guy. This guy named Carl who had a bad temper.”

  “Why, honey? Why would you be ashamed of that?”

  I was surprised. To say the least. I thought it went without saying. “I guess it just seemed kind of pathetic. Here I am asking you if I can bring my girlfriend, and she really isn't even my girlfriend, I just want her to be. You know?”

  “Oh, honey, I don't care about stuff like that. Just so long as your heart's in a good place. Just so long as I can trust you.”

  I wanted to say something. I wanted to know how she could have thought something so awful about me. But I couldn't say that. Could I? Then I had another thought: If she can say what she's really thinking, so can I. And if she's going to, then I almost have to.

  “How could you think I would do a thing like that?”

  That hurt, guilty look again. “Well, honey, I don't really know you.”

  “Oh. That's true.”

  We sat at the table in silence for a while. A beam of light from the window fell across the table, and I watched little particles of dust float around in it. They looked so bright and so detailed. Like some kind of kinetic art. Beyond that I saw the lemon halves still lying on the counter. Not yet squeezed.

  When she spoke again, it made me jump.

  “It's just that, the one fear your mother and I've had all this time …” Enough time went by that I thought I might never know what it was. “All these years … was that … you might grow up to be …” The longest pause of all. The longest pause in the history of pauses. “… like your father.”

  “I'm nothing like my father.” I spit it out like something poisonous had just landed in my mouth. I was surprised at my own voice. A vehemence almost bordering on hatred. “I will never be like him. Never.”

  “Good,” she said. “Then can we just let that whole thing go by?”

  “Yes.” I said it with some firmness. And I meant it. It was gone, left behind. I was letting it go by.

  “I'll just finish up this lemonade. And then we can go sit on the

  porch with it. Unless it's too hot out there for you. Oh. It's probably

  too hot out there.”

  “I like the heat. I've been looking forward to the heat.”

  It was a true thing, but a hard thing to explain. I guess I was

  trusting the heat to make me feel alive, and to remind me that I

  was really here. At last.

  “I FEEL LIKE I'VE DREAMED OF THIS PLACE my whole life,” I said. We were sitting on her front-porch swing. I could feel sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades. The big round thermometer on the front of her house said it was 105 degrees. And it was in the sh
ade. “It's weird to think that it was only a few weeks ago that I even remembered I'd ever been here. Because it doesn't feel like a place I've been dreaming of for a few weeks. It feels like a place I've been dreaming of all my life.” I stared at the windmills for a while in silence. Watched them spin, whole sections out of rhythm with whole other sections, through the shimmery distortion of the rising bands of heat. “Do you think you can miss a place even if you don't consciously remember it?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “But I would allow for the possibility.”

  I took another sip of the lemonade. It was not as sweet as Delilah's. But it was refreshing.

  Then she said, “He called here.”

  My stomach turned to ice. It flowed in my blood. Made my brain tingle. “My father?” But there was no other “he” she could have meant.

  She nodded. “Said he just wanted to know you're okay.”

  “So he knows I'm here?”

  “I doubt it. I think he figures you went to Celia's. But he would never call there. Never. I just said you weren't here. And you weren't yet. So that was true. But I said I'd spoken to you and I knew for a fact you were all right. And he swore that was all he wanted to know.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I never know what to believe from that man. But he sounded relieved to hear you were okay.”

  Then we didn't talk for a long time. Some kind of little insect was circling my head, and I swatted at it, but it never seemed to do much good. I could feel the sweat on my face. The spinning windmills were beginning to hypnotize me in some subtle way.

  “Do you think he loves me?” I asked after a while.

  “To the degree he's even able to love, yeah. I figure he does.” She swatted her own little insect. “Sometimes people can give you the very best they got and it's still no damn good.”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.” I thought about Delilah, telling me that two or more things can be true at the same time. I missed Delilah. “Do you think he loved my mother?”

  “Oh yeah, he did. I can say for a fact he did. Tell you how I know. Because only love can turn into that kind of hate.”

  More silence. But it didn't feel awkward. The windmills seemed to fill up the space. As if I were experiencing them with all five of my senses. Not just my eyes.

  “I feel like I've been dreaming about this place all my life,” I said. I knew I'd said it before, but it didn't matter. I needed to say it again.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, until a new-looking SUV pulled into Grandma Annie's dirt driveway. I watched a plume of dust follow it, and slowly digested what I was waiting to know, and what I knew already.

  It wasn't close enough that I could see the driver. Not yet. But I had a feeling I knew what I would see.

  “Is that my mother?”

  “You don't say that like it's a good thing.”

  “You said she was coming on Friday.”

  “I said she'd be coming every Friday. In general. But of course she wanted to see you first thing. She even got a couple days off work for you.”

  I could hear the strain in her voice. In the thick of all my other thoughts and feelings, I remember being vaguely sorry that she had to get stuck in the middle of this.

  Meanwhile the driver had come into plain view. I was looking right at her. And she was looking right at me.

  “I'm not ready for this,” I heard myself say out loud. I think I had only meant to say it in my head. “You should have warned me.”

  If she answered, I didn't hear, or don't remember.

  My mother was getting out of the car.

  She was so beautiful. Even though she looked older. But she still had that beauty that comes from the inside of a person and shines out through their eyes. It made me angry. Because of how much of it I had missed.

  We were still holding each other's eyes.

  I felt myself stand. “I'm not ready. You should have told me. It wasn't fair to spring this on me.” The words came out louder than I had intended. Plenty loud enough for my mother, who was still standing beside her car, to hear.

  Then I walked away. Off the porch and back down the path to the guesthouse.

  I faintly heard Grandma Annie say, “No, Celia. Don't. Give him time.”

  I let myself into the little guesthouse, and Maria looked up at me. I could see the shock on her face. It was almost like looking in a mirror. I didn't realize how upset I was until I saw it reflected in her.

  “Tony. What's wrong?”

  “My mother is here.”

  “Oh. Aren't you going to go talk to her?”

  “No.”

  She seemed a little surprised that I would say that. But she didn't ask any questions. And she didn't bring it up again.

  GRANDMA ANNIE CALLED UP SOME NEIGHBORS, and by the end of the day she'd managed to find us a crib. Not that Natalie was young enough to really need a crib, but the size was okay, and the bars on the sides came down, anyway. Grandma Annie loaned us a Japanese folding screen from her bedroom, and we used it to turn one corner of the guesthouse into a tiny makeshift bedroom for the kid.

  I thought it would take Maria forever to get Natalie to sleep, but I guess she was worn out from all the newness and the travel. She fussed for a few minutes as though she'd never stop, and then suddenly all went silent.

  I was lying on the folded-out bed, waiting. I'd made it up with a blanket and pillows. I was just lying on it, fully dressed. Because I had no idea what to do. I'd feel stupid getting into pajamas. Like we were just going to go to sleep together, like some old married couple. But I didn't want to just take off my clothes. I didn't want to assume much of anything. There was still the matter of her broken ribs.

  When the fussing stopped, my stomach got scared. Well, all of me got scared, I guess. But I felt it in my stomach. I lay very quiet and still and waited. The icy feeling in my stomach was spreading into my arms and legs. I was out in the world, having a life, and I had no experience and no instructions. I had never felt so completely lost.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and kept them shut for a long time.

  Then I felt the bed move as she lay down beside me. I felt her move up against me and put her head down on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, but I still didn't open my eyes.

  I heard her say, “Alone at last, huh?”

  I opened my eyes. She propped up on one elbow and we looked at each other. It was a way nobody had ever looked at me before, not even Maria. My muscles got so melty that I said a silent thank you for the fact that I was lying down on the bed. Otherwise I think I might have crumpled and landed on the floor. I doubt I had one limb capable of holding me up.

  “What about your ribs?”

  “We can be careful. I mean … we can be gentle, right?”

  “I'm not sure I know …” The rest of that sentence never really happened. I think the correct word would have been “anything.” I didn't know anything. I didn't know what I was supposed to do even in a normal situation. And now with her ribs adding another challenge …

  But we had never broached the subject of my inexperience. We had left it as kind of a “don't ask, don't tell” proposition. I didn't know if she'd guessed, and I had no idea how or if I should talk about it. Finally I just said, “I don't know how to do this without hurting you.”

  “I'll show you,” she said. Her voice was low. Warm.

  That's when it hit me that I had received a strange example of a blessing. No matter how awkward or tentative I seemed, she would assume it was because I didn't want to hurt her. I could stand back and wait for directions. She would interpret whatever I did—or didn't do—as the newness of this unique intimate situation, not the newness of any intimacy at all. What Delilah would have labeled “Life or whatever-you-want-to-call-it” had cut me a break. I was grateful beyond words.

  I can't say any more about that night. I'm sorry. But a gentleman wouldn't say more.

  I never made love with anybody before.

  An
d yes, in a minute I'll go on to say exactly what I mean by that, but first I want to set the record straight on one thing. Before this, the only guy in my life, ever, was Carl. There's this big misconception that if you have a kid when you're very young then you must be some kind of whore and you probably slept with every guy on the planet. Me, I just fell in love with Carl when I was barely fifteen, and then I got pregnant. I'm not saying that wasn't a mistake, but at least it was only one.

  This was different.

  This was like something that two people do together. Not like something one person does to somebody else.

  I really only offered to do this tonight for Tony. Because, poor Tony. He waited so long. And I'm pretty sure he was a virgin. So, when you're a virgin, it feels like the most important thing in the world, I think. Especially if you're a guy.

  But it was for me, too, the way it turned out. And it was nice.

  It was also a little scary, though. Because it felt sort of like being naked on the inside, too. Like you're really there and there's no place to hide.

  Maybe I'll get used to that in time.

  And he was so careful not to hurt me. Even a little bit.

  Speaking of things I need to get used to.

  I guess I shouldn't say too much more about that night. After all, it's a personal thing. So I think that's all I'm willing to say. I think the rest is between Tony and me.

  I think it was around two or three in the morning. We were lying outside looking at the stars. On a lounge chair. I had one of my legs on either side of her, and she was lying on me with her back against my chest. I had my arms around her, but way up by her collarbone so I wouldn't hurt her.

  It was surprisingly cool. I had forgotten about that part of desert weather. No matter how hot it gets during the day, it cools down nicely at night.

  I was feeling my lack of sleep, feeling exhausted, yet so wide awake that it seemed like I might never sleep again.

  “I see what you mean about the stars,” she said.

  I said nothing. Because nothing felt like it needed saying. For the first time in my life, everything felt complete. I felt complete. I felt like I'd found something I'd always wanted, but in some strange way I'd never even known what it was. I guess I'm not saying it right. It's like all my life I'd been missing something, but not knowing what I was missing. And now it seemed amazing that I had found it. Having had so little to go on.