Coming Home

by David Lewis

  She was still waiting for him to answer when he decided to fib anyway and let the chips fall where they may. He would say what seemed right—the proper thing, as his mother had always taught him. Just when he was about to open his mouth, it occurred to him that he did believe her. He didn’t have to lie after all.

  “You do?” she asked, her eyes searching his. He nodded with full confidence into the look of marvel in her eyes, and he’d never felt prouder to be her friend. At that moment, they were just two kids believing God for a miracle, both of them utterly convinced it would happen….

  Thinking on it now, twelve years later, he was still struck by the feeling of transparency that had always been a part of their every discussion.

  Had he really believed? Wasn’t it simply the aura of Jessie’s relentless faith that had momentarily gripped him? Considering the ultimate result, it didn’t matter anymore. No wonder she’d ditched her faith.

  In recent years he’d heard his share of testimonies in church regarding answered prayer, and they’d always seemed a little forced, circumstantial, or too simplistic: “God helped me find my keys” and that kind of thing. Even people who didn’t espouse a particular religious persuasion would speak of miraculously answered prayer, not to mention the New Agers, who had virtually coined the term creating your own reality.

  He recalled a certain seminary student who had given a testimony about God’s answer for financial assistance, only as the story went, God apparently missed the deadline. The young man was forced to quit school because “God didn’t come through.” He returned home, abandoning his training to become a minister, terribly embittered. One day, about six months later, he discovered some insurance documents in his possessions. They turned out to be more than just routine papers, indicating a cash value policy that could easily be withdrawn to the tune of several thousand dollars—more than enough to cover his expenses. The punch line to his story was he’d received the mysterious documents a few weeks before he needed the tuition money, proving God had answered after all but had kept the answer hidden in order to test his faith or perhaps redirect his course of life. Needless to say, his broken faith was restored.

  Thinking now of Jessie’s fondness for country music, he wondered what she thought of Garth Brooks’s song about unanswered prayer. The song told of a chance meeting between a man and the woman he’d once begged God to allow him to marry, only to realize that if his prayer had been answered, he would have missed out on his present wife, who was the true answer to his petition.

  Tonight he’d seen the same glint in Jessie’s eyes, the old determination, the old faith—at least some form of it—and it had broken his heart. In spite of what she might say, she was still thinking, still believing on some level, that her mother wouldn’t—or didn’t—die. He wondered, in fact, if she might never believe it.

  But none of that really mattered now. In fact, their discussion regarding the details of her mother’s death would soon be insignificant. In spite of everything that had transpired today, in spite of everything they had discussed, he was haunted most by the look in Jessie’s eyes when she’d encountered the woman at the fair.

  He sighed, wondering how he could possibly tell her the truth. He’d almost told her tonight, but she’d seemed too vulnerable, and besides, he hadn’t been completely sure yet.

  His cell phone rang. It was already in the cradle, ready for hands-free operation.

  It was his dad. “Are you alone now?”

  “I’m five miles away from home.”

  “Oh … are you …”

  “I mean Castle Rock,” Andy finished, realizing his father’s confusion. As far as his father was concerned, and as long as his son remained unmarried, home would always be his parents’ house.

  “Did you tell her?”

  “How could I?”

  “Well … do you think she knows already?”

  “I don’t know.” Andy sighed. “I don’t think so.” But it seemed like the kind of thing she would know. He wondered if Jessie had simply refused to acknowledge it. Could he blame her?

  “Maybe she does,” Andy continued, wishing the whole thing would just go away.

  Jessie had obviously lived a sheltered life for many years. And she’d been estranged from her grandmother, the only other person who would have had access to the truth. Considering everything that had happened between them, it was unlikely her grandmother would have told her, but maybe her grandmother still intended to tell her.

  “Explain it again,” Andy asked, and his father complied, starting from the very beginning.

  Eleven-thirty. The lights in the magnificent house were off when Jessie got back. She’d spent the last couple hours in a restaurant drinking coffee, working through the crazy idea that was formulating in her mind.

  She let herself in with the key Bill had given her earlier. She couldn’t find the entry light, so she relied on the moonlit shadows to make her way across the entryway to the stairs. Padding up the steps, she heard a squeak and stopped. You missed one, Bill.

  Another squeak. The sound was coming from below her, from her grandmother’s room downstairs, or maybe from the study next to her room, which had been her grandfather’s office. She had very few memories of the man who’d died and left her grandmother set for life. She’d once asked her mom how he died, and she replied, “A stroke, honey.” “What’s a stroke?” she asked, and her mother carefully explained it. Just thinking about it hurt Jessie’s head.

  According to her mother, her grandfather was only fifty when he passed, becoming yet another part of her grandmother’s life that she never talked about. It seemed as if Grandmother had forced the entirety of her existence into conformity with her all-important “appearance.”

  When Jessie reached the end of the hall, she paused before her mother’s former room. Impulsively, she tried the door again. Locked.

  Once in her own room, Jessie tossed her purse on the bed. After a moment’s reflection, she slipped back downstairs again, only this time taking the back way, the set of stairs that led directly to the kitchen. As she went, she formulated an excuse in case her grandmother happened to wander in. Couldn’t sleep, needed milk, wanted to see the place in the moonlight …

  She found the kitchen empty and opened the key cabinet. There were five good candidates. She slipped them into her pocket and climbed the back stairs. Glancing back down the hallway toward Bill’s room, she pulled out the keys and tried them, one by one, her heart in her throat.

  No good.

  Disappointed, she returned to her room. Opening her purse, she retrieved a credit card. She went back to the door, intending to slide the card into the wood, but a strip of misplaced wood prevented insertion. Jessie wiggled the doorknob, then cringed at the noise she’d made.

  Back downstairs, she replaced the keys. Her nerves calm again, she paused in the alcove looking out the windows to the gazebo—magical in the moonlight. The sight reminded her of the gazebo in the park … times she’d slipped outdoors after Mom was asleep and Dad hadn’t come home yet. Back when the impossibilities seemed possible.

  She hurried upstairs again and to bed with a renewed sense of purpose. She set her alarm for seven o’clock but awakened at three. She stewed in bed for two hours, watching the shadows dance across the wall.

  I’m going to finish the story once and for all, she thought.

  It was time to explore the depths of what she didn’t remember, to look under the bed and face the monsters. It was time to move on with her life, in every aspect. Time to face the truth of her mother’s passing.

  While so many things had been repressed, she knew somehow she could remember them again. She thought of last night’s dream and the utter joy she’d felt, and then the corresponding despair upon awakening. Again and again throughout her life, she’d ridden the roller coaster, up … down … up … down. But no more.

  I’ll convince myself, she thought, thinking of her father’s coffin. Maybe I can’t look into my mother’
s coffin, but I can do the next best thing… .

  Soon she would leave this hope-forsaken place and never return. Her newfound determination reignited the old anger. No wonder she had stayed away for so many years. Nothing would ever change the fact that her mother had died in the company of mentally ill strangers. Why? Because of her grandmother’s wicked meddling. Nothing would change the fact that her father had killed himself over grief—amplified by her grandmother’s actions. The state would never have stepped in if Grandmother hadn’t initiated a lawsuit to gain control. Not only had she bought the old house, but now she locked her daughter’s room in her own house as if even the memories belonged to her alone.

  Andy had volunteered what to do. Jessie couldn’t wait to get started. Go to the library and pull up the death records. After that she planned to visit the cemetery. Somewhere along the line, she intended to get into her mother’s room, even if she had to kick the door down. Hopefully things wouldn’t come to that.

  If all else failed, she would go to the institution itself. But thinking about the place of her mother’s death caused flickers of memories to dance at the edge of her mind. Andy had asked her, “Do you remember visiting your mother?” And she hadn’t. Yet there was something … bits and pieces. It was like pulling up a rope attached to a three-hundred-pound anchor, inch by painful inch.

  I was there, wasn’t I? She closed her eyes, focusing on the little that she did remember of the place. Fragmented recollections. She remembered meeting her grandmother and Mrs. Robinette in a room. There were male nurses in a hallway… . And then the images faded again, like a wisp of smoke.

  Eventually, she slept fitfully and awakened at six-thirty. She showered and dressed, but her eyes were still sunken from lack of sleep. Her arms tingled, and her legs felt weak. She wasn’t sure if she had dreamed last night or not.

  When she met Bill in the kitchen, her good-morning smile felt pasty on her face. “I’ll just have some fruit,” she told him. “Maybe some toast, too.”

  “Should I take it personally?” He chuckled.

  They sat in silence a few moments until Grandmother joined them. Bill made several comments about the local news while Grandmother busied herself. The sunshine was muted by miniblinds.

  “Still tired, kiddo?” Bill asked.

  Jessie shrugged, forcing another smile. Mentally, she was tracing her route to the library in downtown Colorado Springs, only a few miles away … Nevada to I-25 to Bijou and she’d be there.

  “Do you have a copy of my mother’s death certificate?” she asked suddenly. Grandmother’s hand quivered and she set her coffee cup down. “Well, now … I’m sure …”

  Bill smiled curiously. “Now there’s a question you don’t hear every day.”

  “I’d have to … hunt around …” Doris replied faintly, without indicating she was interested in doing so.

  Bill stood at the counter pouring another cup of coffee, and her grandmother turned her attention again to the paper, suddenly preoccupied.

  That was only my first question, Jessie thought.

  Her grandmother cleared her throat. “Would you like to attend our luncheon?”

  Not in a year of Sundays, Jessie thought. But she said she would and took a sip of orange juice. She caught Bill’s eye, and his expression struck her as strangely empathetic.

  “We’ll leave at eleven-forty,” her grandmother instructed as she slipped out of the room.

  Bill was silent as he cleaned up. He didn’t whistle and he didn’t turn on the radio.

  Jessie excused herself, and instead of wandering upstairs, she went through the alcove door and crossed the lawn to the gazebo. She sat in the swing, mulling over her conversation with Andy and the strange way he’d looked at her after the cell phone call at the ice-cream shop.

  Bill dropped Jessie and her grandmother off at the Broadmoor Hotel promptly at 11:45. They walked beneath the royal red awning, and a doorman opened the door to the hotel. He nodded his red hat and said, “Have a delightful visit.” Jessie answered, “Thank you, we will,” but the doorman was already greeting another older couple.

  They walked across the elegant tiled floor to the escalator. At the top was a large hall with decorative furnishings, modern paintings, more marble floors, and elaborate wood molding.

  “I wanted you to see Broadmoor East first, before we have lunch,” her grandmother explained in her matter-of-fact tone. “They’ve redecorated the whole place.”

  Jessie’s previous request seemed to have been forgotten. Or perhaps Grandmother had forgiven her indiscretion. They explored the lovely room, then headed out another set of double glass doors, to a small courtyard with a sidewalk circling the lake. Crossing a bridge, they wandered to the opposite side, to Broadmoor West, then entered in through another set of glass doors, following yet another hallway to the left until they reached the restaurant.

  There were seven of them for lunch, gathered around a large round table. Each lady was impeccably dressed, leaving Jessie feeling out of place in her mother’s navy blue skirt and cream blouse. She was introduced by her grandmother as each lady nodded and smiled, studying her.

  After a few minutes of conversation, it became obvious to Jessie the women all had similar backgrounds—degrees in piano performance as well as prestigious husbands. And her grandmother was the ringleader, which wasn’t a surprise anymore. They each kowtowed to Doris Crenshaw, hung on every word, and never disagreed with a single opinion she expressed.

  They discussed the piano teachers’ association, and while only a few of them were still on the board, they still considered themselves the true leadership. They talked about the other members as if stricter membership requirements were desperately needed to filter out the riffraff. They talked about their students as if they were helpless geniuses in need of their enlightenment. And they talked about the symphony as if it were a disgrace to the community.

  Jessie drank her lemon-flavored water and watched the clock.

  “I was simply appalled,” commented one woman, who had said her husband basically ran NORAD, “when she told the entire group that scales aren’t for everyone.” She was referring to a representative from the Music Teachers National Association, MTNA, who had given a pedagogic seminar to their teachers’ group.

  “I think she was referring to the less-talented students,” one teacher interjected, which was apparently the wrong thing to say. The entire group shook their heads in displeasure, and the poor woman took her censure with courageous humility.

  “And to think she is from the MTNA,” put in another woman.

  “We’re witnessing a national devaluation on the importance of pianistic technique.”

  “It’s the computer age we live in,” Jessie’s grandmother added, and the entire bunch leaned forward, as if unwilling to miss a single word. “There’s no patience anymore and no discipline. We are depending upon our keyboards, our synthesizers, and our computer programs to fill in the gaps of our undertrained musicality.”

  “I sold my electronic keyboard,” another lady admitted, aligning herself with Grandmother. “From now on it’s acoustic piano alone, and if that costs me students, so be it.”

  One woman with two or three chins leaned over as if revealing a dark secret. “And not to mention this class piano thing … it’s simply ridiculous.”

  They nodded in unison. They were private teachers, after all. If you were willing to sink to that level, you could make more money by teaching class piano, but you were committing a sin of biblical proportions. All manner of shoddy technique could slip in when you weren’t looking.

  At one point, Jessie had had enough. After her lunch of salad greens, Jessie placed her white cloth napkin on the matching tablecloth and excused herself. The moment she entered the exquisite hall, which led back to the glass doors, she felt a load lift from her shoulders. For a brief moment, she even contemplated just walking out of the hotel and hailing a cab.

  Wouldn’t that embarrass Grandmother? Jessie
thought bitterly, but she felt empty in her soul, and she couldn’t imagine that her mother would have ever done such a thing, much less thought it. A few minutes later she headed back in and settled down at the table. No one seemed to notice she’d returned. They were discussing a particular teacher’s penchant for stealing other teachers’ students.

  By the end of the meal, the group had reached a consensus that it was up to teachers like them—the enlightened ones—to save America. Otherwise, the Russian pianists would conquer the world.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  BILL WAS WAITING for them on the curb. Jessie slipped into the backseat while Bill held the door for her grandmother.

  “So. Did you all get your consorting, plotting, and devious undertaking out of the way for another week?” Bill asked.

  “Oh, Bill,” Doris replied with mild disgust.

  When he’d settled into the driver’s seat, he twinkled back at Jessie. “Was it as unbearable as I think it had to be?”

  Her grandmother let a small sigh escape her lips.

  “It was bearable,” Jessie said, smiling. Bill chuckled and pulled away from the curb. The three of them traveled silently all the way home.

  “Do you need to lie down a bit?” Bill asked Jessie after they’d entered the house. Her grandmother was already heading down the hallway.

  “Why, does it show?”

  “Look a little peaked, that’s all.”

  Jessie headed upstairs, and the sudden fatigue hit her so hard she had to nearly pull herself up by the railing.

  “Can I get you anything?” Bill called up from the bottom of the stairwell.

  “Nothing. Thanks anyway,” she said. Bill nodded and headed back to the kitchen.

  From the moment her back hit the mattress, she began to drift away. Normally unable to sleep in what Darlene had always called “the coffin position,” Jessie was aware of sinking backward … down … down … and her last thought before falling asleep was to wonder if the only incomplete story was the short story she’d begun the moment she’d taken a wrong turn.