Wildwood

by Drusilla Campbell

  “The coach cut him. Told him to come back next year when he’s stronger.”

  “The boy lives and breathes football. He must be devastated.”

  “Not quite.” Liz tilted the frying pan, letting the egg mixture spread out to the hot perimeter.

  Hannah looked up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Liz stared at the eggs solidifying in the pan and felt sick to her stomach. In a psychology book Gerard had given her to read she had come across a term for what they were doing now: triangulating. Eddie and Hannah needed to work out their troubles together; they would not benefit from her interference. But she was already so deep in the triangle, two triangles: one with Eddie, one with Dan. She could not extricate herself.

  “What he loves is football cards. And fantasy football—whatever that is. He says he doesn’t want to play the actual live game at all.”

  Hannah’s eyes rounded indignantly. “That’s not true.”

  “He said he’s tried to tell you but you won’t listen to him.”

  “I don’t need someone to explain my son to me.”

  “I’m not explaining him. You wanted to know . . .” She slid the omelet onto a plate and hoped it smelled and looked good enough to distract Hannah who was obviously geared up to be really pissed at her.

  Hannah folded the newspaper, pressing hard on the creases with the side of her hand. “There’s not one used high chair in the classified. Can you believe that? Not one. This is such a throwaway society. Maybe I should go out to the landfill. There’s probably a whole mountain of high chairs out there.” Hannah giggled and her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment. “Do you remember the time we had to walk through the dump to get to—”

  “That wasn’t me, Hannah.”

  “Sure it was. I remember—”

  “I don’t know who you walked through the dump with, but it wasn’t me.” Liz ground pepper over the omelet. “We were talking about Eddie.”

  Hannah blinked. “Don’t you think I know what we’re talking about? I’m not crazy, you know. You were telling me how much better you know my son than I do. That being the case, why don’t you give him a message for me? Tell him he ought to be damn glad to have me for a mother. Tell him he might not always be so lucky.”

  “Hannah!”

  She strode across the kitchen and shoved the newspaper into a bin marked for recycling. “He and Ingrid both think I’m totally obsolete. Like some rusted out high chair . . .”

  “They don’t. Where does that idea come from?” Liz looked at the omelet on her plate, groaned and dropped her fork.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “We’ve got to talk about what’s really going on here.”

  “We have talked. And talked and talked and talked. I’m fucking sick of talking.” Hannah stared at her hands smudged by newsprint. She rubbed them on her Levi’s and looked at them again. Her eyes brimmed. “I’ve tried to convince you. And Dan too. It isn’t like I haven’t tried, really tried hard. But neither of you understand.” Tears spilled onto her cheeks. “You just don’t see things like I do. You and your abortion and him and his . . . whatever. Neither of you realize what’s important.”

  “Oh, God, Hannah, it’s not just the baby. It’s not just Eddie or Bluegang.”

  It’s you, my dearest sweetest friend, little girl grown up and old. There’s something happening in your head and you have to stop and take care of it. You have to let us love you and help you.

  “Remember Mrs. Vogler?” Liz asked. “How she went on a retreat and didn’t come back for four months?”

  “What about her?”

  “When she went my mother said, ‘If a woman’s going to lose it, she’ll do it during menopause.’ ”

  Laugh. I’m joking with you. Please laugh.

  “You’ve been talking to Dan.”

  “We love you.”

  “What a load! If you really loved me you’d stop nagging about Bluegang and you’d let me have your baby.” Tears again. “There is nothing peculiar about wanting to help a baby!”

  “This isn’t about helping anyone.”

  “Of course it is. That’s what a mother does. She helps. And there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be a mother either.”

  “You’re not making sense, Hannah. You already are a mother.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “But it is.”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “No one thinks you are.”

  “Yes, you do. You and Dan.”

  “Hannah, Ingrid and Eddie need you—”

  “Oh, for godsake.” Hannah kicked the base of the cupboard viciously. Liz stepped back. “Ever since you got here, you’ve been stirring things up. First it was the business about Bluegang and then the baby. And now you’re meddling with my son. We were all just fine before you came, Liz. Just peachy.” Hannah struggled to close the flaps of the cardboard box. “Why don’t you go back to Belize and leave us alone?”

  Liz had not expected this and at first she couldn’t think what to say. She could not believe that Hannah meant what she said. She was angry, emotionally caught up in something that had nothing to do with Liz. So don’t bite, Liz thought. Don’t let her goad you into saying or doing something we’ll both regret. But she was sick of tiptoeing around whatever was eating Hannah, weary of trying and failing to force a dialog that Hannah was determined not to have. The effort suddenly felt like so much bullshit, and Liz could not make herself be either patient or tolerant. “I’ll pack my things.” She was human, after all.

  “Don’t be so melodramatic.” Hannah blew back a strand of hair fallen across her face. “No one’s asking you to leave. It’ll all be over after tomorrow.”

  “The operation’s not ’til Friday.”

  Hannah looked confused.

  “The abortion. Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?”

  “Oh, that!” Hannah tossed back her long braid and began to wipe out the cooler with a sponge. “You’ll do what you have to do. I can’t stop you.”

  Hannah made sure the animals had plenty of food. She turned out Glory, gave him a chance to stretch out the kinks. He walked stiff-legged for a few moments then broke into a trot and then an easy lope. The dogs ran after him barking. On the far side of the ring he stopped to smell the ground, bent his knees and dropped into a roll.

  Hannah looked up at the house, graceful and country-elegant even from the rear. Who would expect that people living in a house with such wide windows could hide so much? On the second floor, one down from the guest room, was Eddie’s window. If she were a mockingbird in the citradora looking in, would she know her boy better than she did as his mother? Fantasy football. Fantasy. Who was Eddie? Apart from the fantasy boy in her head?

  Abruptly, she turned her back on the house and walked across the paddock to the far fence where the day before she had glimpsed a figure hiding. If she believed in ghosts she might say it had been Billy Phillips risen up from Bluegang and through the wildwood, come to haunt her. Still begging the help she had refused him. But she didn’t believe in ghosts and she barely believed in Billy anymore. If Liz hadn’t come back she would have managed not to think of him more than once or twice a year for the rest of her life.

  Hannah opened the gate. A few steps and she was on the edge of the canyon looking down through the wildwood to the creek. Gail had said it was mostly dry but she thought she saw a glimmer of light on the water fifty feet below. And there was the path, overgrown but still visible. If she walked down it she would find the great oak at its base. The same saddle of roots. The rocks would not have moved.

  If Hannah had walked up to Mrs. Phillips in the cemetery yesterday and said, “I pushed your son, I caused his death and when he asked for help I turned my back,” would the words have penetrated the fog she lived in, would they have given the old woman a life?

  Of course not, what was over was over and so what was the use of thinking about it anymore? Hannah was sick of thi
nking and talking, of mincing the past into smaller and smaller pieces. Pureed past, she thought and laughed. She knew what she wanted now. She wasn’t a frightened little girl anymore and the mistake she made once, she wouldn’t make again.

  In the early afternoon, Liz knocked on Hannah’s bedroom door. “I won’t disturb you,” she said, looking in. “I just want to know if there’s a rental car place in Rinconada or do I have to call San Jose.”

  Since that morning, they had kept their distance from each other. It was a big house and easy enough to do. But the tension was an atmosphere, present as static before an electrical storm.

  Hannah stood with her hands on her hips gnawing on her lower lip as she considered the clothes piled on her bed. She still wore her Levi’s and sweatshirt, and she hadn’t changed out of her work boots when she came up from the barn. Dirty footprints marked a trail across the pale rose carpet.

  “You’re wearing your boots.”

  Hannah looked down. “So I am.” She laughed as if she hadn’t tracked mud all over a carpet she would have to vacuum, as if she didn’t loathe vacuuming above all household labor. “Why do you need a car?”

  “I have to see the doctor on Thursday. He inserts a dilator to relax the cervix.”

  “I can’t drive you.”

  “I don’t expect you to.”

  Hannah picked up a skirt, examined it and tossed it onto a discard pile at her feet. “I would if I could but I can’t.” She dug in a dresser drawer and pulled out a gray hooded sweatshirt. She looked at it critically. To Liz she appeared to be debating with herself. In the end, she tossed it on the bed.

  “That’s why I want to rent a car.”

  “Look in my address book by the kitchen phone.” Hannah waved her away. “Under C, I think. Maybe R. Or A.”

  In the kitchen Liz found the number of the rental agency under A and called. There was no one in the office. The message machine told her to leave her name and number and she did.

  Returning to her own room she propped the door open on the chance that Hannah might come down the hall and see it as an invitation to talk. She wondered if these really were the final days of their friendship. In the future would she write to Jeanne, meet Jeanne for occasional holidays, call Jeanne for hour-long phone talks and wait for her to reveal some bit of news about their mutual friend, Hannah Tarwater? Would Ingrid move into Liz’s life, a substitute for her mother?

  She lay down, her body suffused with a dull ache like a total body migraine. The breeze through the window was cool. She drew up the comforter and slept a while.

  Ingrid woke her. “A guy called from Drive-Right,” she said from the doorway.

  Liz yawned and stretched.

  “Are you okay, Aunt Liz?”

  “I’ve had better days.”

  “You want me to get you something? Coffee?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Ingrid slouched against the doorjamb, waiting to be invited in.

  “How come you need a car?”

  “I have some errands on Thursday.”

  “That’s half day. Paco and me’ll drive you wherever you want to go. He really wants to meet you.”

  Liz could pat the bed beside her and Ingrid would be there in a flash but the thought of a conversation with this girl who seemed to hold in potential so much of what Liz had lost—well, she could barely face the day let alone that.

  “I need the car on Friday too.”

  “What about Mom?”

  “It’s more convenient if I drive myself.”

  “But Thursday Paco’ll take you around, okay?”

  “Ingrid—”

  She took a few steps into the room. “You’ll love him, Auntie Liz.”

  If Liz asked her to go Ingrid would do it, but she would be hurt and confused; she would think the rejection of her company was about her. That’s the way it was at seventeen. Everything was about you. Liz stared down at her hands, at her fingers laced across her stomach the way the shell of an oyster protects the pearl. Maybe that never changed. She did not want to speak to Ingrid because it would be hard on her, on Liz. She sighed and patted the bed beside her. “Sit down, honey, I’ve got to tell you something.”

  Ingrid perched on the edge of the bed.

  “I need the car to go to the doctor . . .”

  “You have cancer.” Ingrid’s body wilted into itself. “That’s why you came back here.”

  “No.” Liz waited for the moment to pass, for another world to come into being so she could avoid telling Ingrid what she must. “I’m pregnant.”

  The information took a second to register. “Omigod, that’s fabulous.” Ingrid began to talk, sounding like her mother off on a tangent of plans.

  Liz put her hand on Ingrid’s forearm. “No, it’s not great. I came here, to Rinconada . . . I wanted to see you all, but I also . . .” She closed her eyes a second. “On Friday I’m scheduled for an abortion.” Ingrid didn’t seem to hear her. The pronouncement flew over the girl like sheep galloping across the sky.

  “Did you hear what I said? I’m not going to have this baby. I’m going to have an abortion.” Liz waited a moment for the truth to register and when it still didn’t seem to make it into Ingrid’s head, she added, “I don’t want to be a mother.”

  That got Ingrid’s attention. “Why not? You’d be amazing.”

  Liz shook her head, tired of having to convince people of what she knew in the heart of her being.

  “What about your boyfriend? Gerard?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “You didn’t use birth control?”

  “I didn’t think I could conceive. I thought I’d started menopause.”

  “It’s like a miracle.”

  “No, Ingrid. It’s like an accident.”

  Ingrid stared at her. Liz thought, yes, look, see me as I am. Know me. If we come through this . . .

  “How can you love a guy who wants you to murder his baby?”

  She was stunned for a second and couldn’t think what to say. “Ingrid, an abortion isn’t murder. It’s many things but it is not murder.”

  “You don’t know. Not for sure.”

  “It’s my body and I know what’s inside it.”

  “My friend says babies have souls. Even in the womb.”

  “And she’s free to believe that. But I don’t. This . . . thing inside me . . .”

  “It’s not a thing,” Ingrid cried, “It’s a baby. A real live baby.”

  Liz raised her voice. “It is nothing like a baby. Not yet. It’s barely anything at all.” Liz reached for Ingrid’s hands but she pulled away. “Listen to me. In your life you’re going to hear a lot of stuff about abortion, about how it’s wrong or it’s right and maybe you’ll end up being one of those women who thinks it’s wrong. And that’s fine. If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one. But before you make up your mind, I want you to use your intelligence. Don’t get seduced by answers that make everything seem easy, black and white, yes or no.”

  Ingrid twisted a lock of hair around her finger and stared at it.

  “Honey, none of the big questions have simple answers. And the older the world gets, the more that’s true. We all just have to learn to live with shades of gray. No matter how much we long for black and white.”

  Ingrid stared. “How can you live like that?”

  “Just the way you do—or will, the way your mom and dad do. I weigh the good and the bad, the consequences of my actions. I use my brain to look ahead, to think about those consequences. I decide.” She heard her words and thought that it was never that easy. She took Ingrid’s hand and wouldn’t let her pull away. She placed it flat on her stomach. “This is an embryo, not a baby. It doesn’t exist apart from me. If I died tomorrow, it would die too. Right now, it’s a mass of cells growing in my uterus. Against my will.”

  “You make it sound like cancer.”

  Liz opened her mouth and shut it.

  “If Gerard loved you, he’d want you to have y
our baby. I mean, it’s his too, isn’t it?”

  Liz wanted to explain that she and Gerard were happy as they were: a pair. But of course Ingrid would think that selfish because she was more like her mother than she could yet understand. Love and family and children were all of a part to her.

  “And if you loved him you’d think his baby was the most wonderful, miraculous, fabulous thing in the world. You’d be excited.”

  “Is that the way you feel about Paco?”

  “Well, I would if... you know.”

  “What if you had sex and you got pregnant?”

  “I wouldn’t. We’d use protection.”

  “Just suppose.”

  “I can’t suppose. It would never happen, we’d be careful. We aren’t stupid.”

  “But just suppose it did happen to you. Would you want to get married and have the baby, raise it?” Ingrid started to answer. Liz shook her head. “I don’t want you to answer me. I want you to think really hard about what it means to bring a child into the world. All the levels of responsibility, all the possible consequences.”

  In the moment that followed Liz was conscious of Ingrid and the bedroom in which they talked but her senses reached beyond and engaged the house and the yard and the garden. The tang of the wildwood filled her nostrils and the back of her mouth; down in the paddock Glory whinnied, the dogs barked and somewhere in the house a radio played. The narrow, silver-green leaves of the citradora shivered in the wind and a mockingbird sang on a swaying branch. The fullness of the world, its richness and variety tightened her throat and she felt such love for Ingrid as she would not have believed was in her.

  “The point is, you have to do what you believe is right. If you don’t, if you go along with the crowd or follow someone else’s sense of right or wrong, you’re betraying yourself.” Liz folded Ingrid into her arms. “That’s the worst thing you can do, honey. Betray yourself. It can take a lifetime to get over that.”

  “You were such a good boy,” Jeanne said and tucked the infirmary blanket tighter around Adam Weed’s small body, the palms of her hands warm with the pleasure of the simple task. “Nurse Judy says you’re very brave.”