“I’m glad for that,” she said, her voice rough and uneven. “It’s still awful.” Her glance darted around the room, almost frantic. “Do you have a picture of her?”
He did have a picture of the children, and one of Laura, somewhere, but they had gotten shoved out of sight. He stood, reaching behind books to see if he could find them. Finally, his hand struck a hard plastic frame and he pulled out the children’s picture from behind a stack of American Philosophical Reviews. He handed it to her—it showed Annie and Bart and Philip standing together on a mountaintop, the open sky behind them.
“Here she is, with her brothers. On Mount Mitchell. We were on our way south and stopped off to hike. It was a very hot day,” he continued, hardly thinking, the words rolling out. “There were other hikers behind us, and when we got close to the top, this cool wind began to blow and one of the kids overheard somebody say, ‘It’s just like air conditioning.’ It was quite funny.” He stopped, uncertain, gave a faint chuckle.
Kate’s head was bent, her eyes intent on the photo. “She’s beautiful.” She sighed and handed it back to him, and he put the picture on the shelf and sat down.
He saw her watching him and then she said, her brow furrowed, “Do you want to okay these courses now, or shall I come back another time?”
“I’ll do it now.” He took the pages from her, glanced at the list—they’d talked about it last spring—Jim Bloskins’s seminar in Contemporary Philosophy, an advanced course on Aristotle, a seminar on Moral Philosophy, and, of course, her thesis tutorial with him. Quickly, he signed his name on the line for adviser, noting that his hand shook.
She took the papers and seemed to hesitate, as though she would say more. But he stood and moved toward the door. “We’ll talk soon, Kate, and meanwhile, I hope your term gets off to a great start.”
“Thank you, Dr. Randall.” Again, her eyes searched his face. She turned and left.
He closed the door behind her.
Then he sat down at his desk and put his head in his hands, his shoulders in the brown tweed jacket shaken with sobs.
Rachel lifted the window shade to look out at the night sky. Not that she could see, from this window, any of the constellations she used to know. Without her glasses, she couldn’t see the stars very well at all. Or was it the time of year? Not full dark, though it was almost eight o’clock. She’d gone to bed early to get away from Carlena’s chatter. But she wasn’t sleepy yet.
She’d stayed on at Lillian’s longer than any of them had planned—almost a month. She’d been home now for more than a week. Her own bed. Her own things. Her friends to talk to on the telephone. But it was all wrong, all over again. Tears filled her eyes. Annie—that lovely spirited child—not safely home in Woodbridge with her family. She couldn’t get used to it at all.
Carlena kept trying to cheer her. “There, there, dearie. You mustn’t upset yourself. Want me to get something on TV? Want me to make you a cup of tea? Why don’t I get a good mystery book for you to read?” Treating her like a child, as though Rachel couldn’t see Carlena was trying to change the subject, bring up cheery talk.
She reached over and found the right bottle and took another pill. She might be groggy in the morning. She had nothing to be alert for anyway. Except more of Carlena’s talk. Carlena was a good woman. But she had her limitations. Furthermore, she didn’t upset herself. It was life that upset her. She’d lost too many people not to be allowed a little sadness. “Old age must have its liberties,” she often said. And the children so far away. She longed to see Laura. Since she’d been home from Lillian’s, the need to see her younger daughter was almost a bodily hunger. If she could hold her, comfort her, maybe some of her own heartache would ease. They should have let her go to the memorial service. They could have managed somehow, couldn’t they? She shifted her position, trying to get comfortable, pulled the electric blanket loose from where it had gotten caught under her shoulder. There. She would call Laura in the morning.
*
Laura and Trace were in the kitchen when the phone rang. Laura answered. “It’s my mother,” she whispered, her hand covering the mouthpiece.
“When are you coming home?” Rachel asked.
“Philip’s college hasn’t started yet. He’s leaving in two weeks. I don’t want to go while he’s here. Why don’t you come for a visit?”
“I offered to before. You didn’t want me.”
“Mother!” Laura protested. “It was too frantic then. Things are quieter now. You could see Philip before he goes, and Trace and Bart. You and I’d have some time together.”
“Bart’s girlfriend—Paula? Is she still there?”
She paused, not wanting to get into, now, what might be the delicate issue of Bart and Paula. “Yes. She’s staying with us before they—before she moves out.” She grimaced at her own duplicity.
“Well, would I be too much? Could you take care of me? Would I need to bring Carlena?”
“I’m sure I could, for a couple of weeks.”
“Only for a couple of weeks?”
There was silence on the other end. “Laura?”
“This time, yes.”
“Well, I’ll think about it. Good-bye.”
Laura turned to Trace, who was standing by the refrigerator, drinking a glass of milk. “I can’t do it.”
“Can’t do what?”
“Have Mother for an indefinite period. Not now.”
“You don’t have to,” he said.
*
In the past, Rachel had usually set her own schedule. A letter would come—“I’d like to visit you. I’ll stay two or three weeks. Is that all right?” Laura would answer yes, they’d like to have her, that it would be fine.
She would come. They’d have the house shined and ready for her.
With her grandchildren, Rachel was an endless source of delight. On her visits, she read to them, sang songs to them. She folded the corners of a handkerchief into the center, then, with a flip and a turn, rocked it back and forth in a “babies in a cradle.” She taught them to knit yarn rope on a spool. She showed Annie how to cross-stitch, holding the loose end of the thread against the back of the cloth with her finger.
“Like this, Grandma?”
“Yes, that’s just right.”
Ten years ago, Rachel had spent three months with them, convalescing from a fractured foot. She’d fallen when they were on vacation together. “It’s a bad break,” the doctor said. “You’ll be on crutches for two or three months.”
Laura and Trace conferred with the children. “Come stay with us,” Laura said. “You can have Bart’s room on the first floor. He’ll move upstairs with Philip.”
They went home, and when Rachel was able to leave the hospital, Will drove her the hundred miles to their house. They hurried out to greet her. She was in the backseat, her heavy cast propped on pillows. They’d rented a wheelchair and they stood by as, with Laura’s help, she negotiated the move from car to chair.
In the house, Trace and Will lifted her onto the twin bed by the window. She was tired from the trip, relieved to be with them at last. Her eyes filled with tears. “It’s good to be here.”
Will left to go home.
In the mornings, Rachel and Laura lingered over coffee. In the afternoons, Rachel rested and read. They drank tea out of the best rosebud cups as Rachel recalled old stories, old times. She told of summers in the mountains with her mother, of an ocean crossing when she was seven, of visits with cousins and aunts.
She retold stories of Laura’s childhood illness—of fevers, of late-night visits from the doctors, of their all-but-abandoned hope for her, then the emergency surgery, the daily visits to the hospital. “We felt you were saved for a reason,” she said.
Laura took her mother to the doctor, to the hospital for X rays. Will made frequent phone calls. “Stay as long as you want,” he assured Rachel. “I miss you, but I’m managing fine.” The neighbors came to visit. Laura began to long for time alone with Tra
ce and the children. “Is it getting too much for you?” Trace asked.
“It’s partly that she’s my mother. Nothing is casual between us.
One day, Rachel said, “You’re awfully good to me. I know I’m keeping you from other things.”
“I wanted you to come. I can do other things later.”
But now, with Annie dead, Laura could not reenter that world of old securities, old stories told again and again, old adaptations.
Rachel called again. “I think of you all the time. If I come for a visit, how long should I stay?”
Laura hesitated. Surely her mother remembered. “Two weeks,” she said. “I’d love to have you stay two weeks.”
Her mother’s tone turned querulous. “I don’t like to think of having such a definite time. What if I don’t feel like coming back then?”
“You can stay an extra day or two. We won’t put you out.”
Rachel was not amused. “I took care of my mother a lot when she was old and sick.”
“I know. That was very good of you.” But your daughter hadn’t just died, she thought. “This is a hard time for us.”
“I should think you’d want to see me.”
“I do. I’d like very much to have you come, for two weeks. It’s just that”—she hesitated—“I need to take care of myself right now.” There, she had said it. She leaned against the wall, her hand clutching the phone. The blue stripes of the wallpaper seemed to slip and then straighten. I need to take care of myself. If I don’t, now, 1 will be paralyzed in my grief forever. Please understand.
“If you came here, how long would you stay?”
“Probably about a week.”
“You stayed longer than that when Father was dying.”
“Mother! You’re not dying. Trace needs me. We need each other.”
“Well, I’ll think about it.”
On Friday, Rachel called again. “It’s too much for me, making the trip there. If you want to see me, you can come here.”
“I will. After Philip goes.”
In the weeks before Philip left, Trace plunged into his work, Bart and Paula looked for jobs and an apartment, and Philip prepared to return to college. Laura attended to family and household, any vocational efforts of her own far from her mind.
One late afternoon, Laura and Philip were in the kitchen. She was working on the seafood gumbo she had learned to cook since coming south, and he stood by the sink, in jeans and a green T-shirt, fixing his special salad—a variety of greens, mushrooms, nuts, tiny orange sections.
“In a way, I hate to leave you guys,” he said.
Her heart dropped—she dreaded his leaving, diminishing the family again. She looked toward him—tall under the sink canopy, his head inclined, brown hair curling at the back of his neck. “Any special reason?” she said.
He was lifting greens out of the salad spinner. “I worry whether you’re going to be okay—you and Dad.”
It was dear of him, and like him. Since he’d been a small baby, he’d been attuned to other people’s moods. “With each other—or just with life?”
“Both. You have such different ways of reacting to stuff.”
“I know.” She gave the gumbo an extra stir. “Sometimes his matter-of-factness drives me crazy—the way he talks about Annie’s accident.” She felt a surge of regret to be talking to Philip in this way. “I know society makes it harder for men.”
Philip was tearing romaine into the large wooden salad bowl. “I have the feeling sometimes that’s the only way he can keep himself from coming unglued—keep a tight lid on stuff, put the feelings in a barrel and then just keep talking so you won’t notice they’re pounding away, trying to get out.”
“Oh dear.” She felt tears coming on—moved as she was by Philip’s understanding and realizing again how much she was going to miss him. “I, on the other hand”—she attempted a laugh—“am a wet sponge of feeling. Touch me, and get out of the way.” She reached for a tissue in the pocket of her apron—one Annie had given her, the words Laura’s Lunchroom in red block letters over some disreputable-looking characters lined up at a bar. “Oh dear,” she said again.
Philip wiped his hands on his pants, went over, and put his arms around her. “Mom,” he said. “It’s okay.”
For a minute, she clung to him, letting the tears come. Then she stepped back. “What about you? Going back there. Everything different, with her gone. Everything having to be learned all over again, in new terms, almost a different language.”
Tears fell unabashedly from his cheeks. “I don’t know what it will be like. I have good friends there, close friends. I need to move on, and I love college.” He stopped and a long shudder went through him. “But there won’t be a day that I won’t miss her.”
“Oh, Philip,” she said, and they hugged each other again, then returned to their tasks.
*
The days went by. Laura saw her husband’s sadness and did not know how to help him. She loved him. But she was angry, too. Since Annie was not here, she would assume Annie’s anger and her own, as well. Had she not told him long ago, “You’re too caught up in your work. They’ll be grown and you’ll have missed it”? Had she, too, not found his preoccupation with his work infuriating? His bereavement now was for a child he had never troubled himself to know until it was too late.
She and Trace needed each other—she knew that. If they were to find any life in the future, they must find it with each other. Anything else would only compound the grief of Annie’s death, and they had as much grief as they could bear already. Yet nothing fit together as it should, as it used to. Sometimes their efforts seemed only to widen the distance between them—like parabolas that swing close, travel a distance together, then veer off in opposite directions.
One evening at home—Bart and Paula and Philip had gone to a movie—she went by the bathroom and saw Trace struggling to replace a lightbulb over the mirror. The light shield was held in place by small fasteners, hard to handle. He was stretching—one arm in a green shirtsleeve a taut extension from his shoulder. He couldn’t quite reach the fixture.
“Wait,” she offered. “I’ll get the stool.” She brought it from the kitchen. “You want me to do it?”
He stepped away, grateful. “If you would—you know how I am with this kind of thing.”
She climbed up. She undid the delicate fasteners and passed them to him. When she handed him the light shield, it slipped.
“Watch out!” he yelled. He caught it. “You let go too soon.” His voice was harsh.
She hurled the lightbulb into the sink. It rolled around, unbroken. “Do it yourself! I was trying to help you with your job.”
“It’s not mine any more than it’s yours.”
“Damn! You were doing it and I came by. I wanted to be with you. Now look!” She stalked from the room, crying angry tears. From the living room, she heard him climb the stool, heard the grind of glass as he screwed the globe in place, and wished it would drop in the sink and crash. She stood up, paced into the next room. Would they never get through this—this murk of anger and mixed connections?
When the children returned from the movie, she listened to their recounting, jealous of their laughter.
They had a call from Annie’s school. Her class was planning next year’s annual. Was there a picture, maybe, and one of Annie’s poems that they might use for a memorial page?
“That’s very nice. Yes, we’d like that,” Laura said. She searched through Annie’s work, conferred with Trace and the boys about the choice of a poem. She took last year’s school picture from its frame and drove to Annie’s old school.
In the office, she said, “I’m Mrs. Randall. I brought this poem and picture of my daughter.”
The clerk looked at her quickly. Her glance slipped from Laura’s face. “I’ll copy these right away.”
“Thank you.” Other clerks were busy in the office. The silence hung heavy. They don’t know what to say to me, Laura thought. The
ir silence angered and puzzled her. They could at least try—not act as though I weren’t here.
Back home, putting the picture back in the frame, she noticed a smudge on the forehead. From the school’s handling? From hers? It was the only copy, their most recent picture! Frantic, she searched the house for her old set of pastel chalks, tried to match the colors, restore it. The spot still showed. She had only made it worse.
At dinner—she and Trace were alone—she told him what had happened. Her voice shook, telling him. He continued eating, lifting food to his face like an automaton. She reached for the photo she’d left on the buffet. “Look. Can you tell? Can you see the place?”
“No.” But his eyes were veiled, remote.
“You’re angry,” she said.
“No.”
“But you look so…far away. I said I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve…killed her again. This was our best picture of her.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You haven’t.” But the expression on his face didn’t change.
After dinner, she saw him holding the picture, tilting it against the light. “It hardly shows,” he said. He hung it back on the wall and walked away.
*
On Sunday, they went to church. As Laura went by Matt at the end of the service, he put an arm around her shoulder. “Hard times?” he said.
Tears welled in her eyes. “Yes.”
“Something new come up?”
“No. Just being here. And school starting. And it’s fall. I always loved fall.” She looked at him, helpless. “I don’t mind crying. I just wish I could choose when, choose the places.”
“I hope you would choose this place.”
The next day, she called him. “I’m going to see my mother soon. I’d like to talk with you again before I go.”
She went to his office. He took a sweater and some papers off the easy chair so she could sit down. He sat in the chair opposite, tipped back against the wall of books. “How are things?” he said. “You’re going to see your mother? How does that seem?”
“I’ve wanted to go. But I’m scared, too. Wondering how she’ll be—she’s not strong at all. How she’ll be with me. The first time after Annie’s death.”
Such Good People Page 15
