“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to college. I’m not. You’re going to be in a whole new world. I’ll be here.”
“I’ll come home on the weekends. It’s only a two hour drive.”
“That doesn’t seem fair to you.”
He touched her cheek with the back of his hand. “How about letting me decide what’s fair to me?”
She was quiet for a moment. “I just don’t want you to miss out on all the college stuff.”
“I may not be too experienced in the ways of the world, but I do know that it isn’t possible to have everything. And I want you. I want you, Becca.”
Part of her felt as if she should argue further. To not do so seemed selfish. But the truth was that she wanted him, too. Already, she couldn’t imagine life without him. Couldn’t imagine going back to the days before he had come to work on the farm. That life now seemed impossibly bland. And if she were to admit it, lonely.
“You have to promise me something,” she said.
“Okay. What?”
“That if you get there and change your mind—”
“Becca,” he interrupted.
“No,” she said, holding up a hand. “Please. Let me finish. If you start to feel that this isn’t what you want, that you just want to go to college and not have a girlfriend back home, you’ll tell me. And I’ll understand.”
He looked at her for a few moments, then leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. When he pulled back, he kept his eyes on hers. “I think you’re underestimating one thing.”
“What’s that?” she said, her voice soft.
“The fact that I’m crazy about you. That I can’t go to sleep at night because I can’t quit thinking about you. That you’re the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. And that I have no idea how I’m going to get through the days between when we see each other.”
Becca looked down at her lap, swallowing hard. “Matt.”
He ducked in then and kissed her again. She slid her arms around his neck and sought to get as close to him as she could.
They kissed until they were both breathing hard and impatient with the console separating their seats. The radio played a slow song, and the light from the star made stripes across them through the windshield.
A vehicle pulled into the lot, turning into a space twenty or thirty yards away. Becca pulled back and smoothed her hands over her hair. “There’s something I need to say, Matt. So, please, let me say it.”
He looked at her for a moment, his voice soft when he said, “Go ahead.”
“I don’t want to be the wedge between you and everything else in your life. You have a lot ahead of you. And already, so many things have changed. Your friendship with Wilks—”
“Hey,” he said, interrupting her there. “That’s not your deal, okay? Neither one of us is going to make him a different person. He’s the only one who can do that.”
“But the two of you were friends for so long.”
“Yeah, maybe I didn’t really know what a friend was.” He leaned against his door, his eyes on her. “Will you promise me something?”
“What?” she said.
“That you’ll consider going to college.”
She shook her head. “Matt, I didn’t finish high school.”
“But you could if you wanted to.”
She started to say how crazy that sounded, but stopped herself, recognizing the little leap in her pulse as excitement for the possibility. “I don’t see how I could—”
“I see how you could. I’ve heard you were an excellent student.”
“I liked school.”
“Why did you quit?”
She hesitated, trying to find words that would make him understand how different their lives had been to this point. “It was what my family expected of me.”
“Did you agree?”
She turned her head and looked out the window into the dark night. “Not completely,” she said.
“Then just think about it. That’s all I ask.”
“It sounds impossible.”
“I think we both know that we have some roadblocks in our path. It seems to me that the key is making sure we figure out how to go around them and not let them trip us up for good.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“If we do what’s right for us, I think it is.”
She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. 11:30 p.m. “I need to get home,” she said.
“You’ll think about it?”
She smiled. Nodded once. “I’ll think about it.”
“Excellent,” he said, grinning. He started the car and pulled out of the lot, passing the truck that had joined them at the overlook a few minutes ago. The shape of a boy and girl shone through the back window, the girl’s head resting on the boy’s shoulder. Becca reached for Matt’s hand, entwining her fingers with his. They didn’t let go of one another until they were back in Ballard County, and he dropped her at the front door of her house.
42
Questions
Life is simple, it’s just not easy. – Author Unknown
Now
Matt didn’t feel like running this morning, but he made himself anyway. He needed to clear his head, and short of a stiff bourbon at eight a.m., it was the only way he knew to do so.
He left the house at a pace faster than he normally started out, finishing the first mile of his loop through town in just over six minutes. He slowed down for the second mile, the end of which he ran past Ballard Family Medicine, a practice now housed in what had once been the home of one of the town’s early founders.
He topped the knoll, winded and sweating, spotting Becca’s white truck just as she pulled up in front of the doctor’s office. He slowed and then stopped short of the driver’s side door.
Becca glanced up and saw him, surprise widening her eyes, and then something else he couldn’t readily identify. She rolled down the window with obvious reluctance.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
He ducked his head to speak to her passenger, recognizing her then as Becca’s sister, Emmy. She did not respond to his greeting or glance his way at all. He looked at Becca again. “Are you okay?” he asked, feeling that something wasn’t right.
She glanced down at her lap and then back at him with a forced smile. “Yes. Fine.”
“Do you need some help?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Thank you.”
He stared at her for a moment, not sure what to say, but certain that she wanted him to go. “Okay,” he said, backing up a step. And then, against his better judgment, “Becca. Will you call me?”
“It’s better if I don’t,” she said.
Emmy still had not looked at him. “Becca-” he said.
“Matt. Go, please. Just go.”
With reluctance, he turned then and ran on, glancing back once to see that she hadn’t yet gotten out of the truck. There was something undeniably odd in what had just happened. As if she were hiding something, although what he couldn’t imagine.
Half-way down the next hill, he stopped, pulled back to the top by his own curiosity. He watched as Becca crossed the street with her arm around Emmy’s waist, all but carrying her.
She glanced his way then and stumbled a step, righting herself with a look of pain.
“Becca, let me help,” he called out.
“No.” She raised one hand to stop him, anger in her voice now. “I don’t need your help, Matt. We’re fine. Really. We’re fine.”
She didn’t look his way again, but crossed the street to the sidewalk and then helped Emmy through the front door of the clinic. Matt stood, transfixed. We’re fine. Why then was he left with the sense that they were anything but?
BECCA’S WORDS ECHOED in Matt’s head the remainder of the morning, a thicket of questions forming in their wake. What had happened to Emmy? And why was Becca so protective of her?
He hung out in the house until noon an
d then got in the Land Rover, needing a change of scenery. He drove through town, deciding to stop at the cafe on North Main for lunch. The place was a landmark in the county and had been around for as long as Matt could remember. He went inside and took a booth out front, lifting a hand to a few familiar faces. He gave his order for the daily special of grilled chicken and mashed potatoes to a friendly waitress who took it back to the kitchen and then returned with his iced tea.
“You’re Matt Griffith, aren’t you?”
He found nothing familiar in her face, but wondered if he should know her. “Yeah, I am.”
She smiled, white teeth flashing against caramel-colored skin. “You used to date Becca Brubaker, didn’t you?”
“You know her?”
“Sort of. Her brother married my cousin. Linda.”
“He did?” Matt said.
“He did.”
“Good for him.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the kitchen, then said, “It’s kind of disgusting how in love those two are.”
“Still?” he said.
“Still.”
“They’re lucky.”
“Either that, or they knew a good thing when they saw it.”
“Jacob never struck me as a dumb guy.”
“No,” she said. “Well, I better get back to the kitchen and check on your order.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“You bet.”
She’d turned to go when he stopped her with, “Excuse me.”
“Something else you need?”
He hesitated, and then, “Do you know their sister? Emmy?”
“I knew her in school. We were the same age. Shame what happened to her. They said she was never the same after John died.”
“John?”
“Rutrough. The boy she dated. They were supposed to get married, apparently.”
“When did he die?”
She thought for a moment. “It was the same year Jacob and Linda got married in September. It happened right before that. Must have been August, I guess.”
August. The same month he’d left for college. The same month Becca had cut him out of her life.
43
Understanding
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
- Henry David Thoreau
Now
Throughout the morning Martha tried to stay busy, cleaning rooms that didn’t need cleaning, baking two pies when she’d just made two others the afternoon before. She tried to tell herself she hadn’t been too harsh with Becca earlier. And yet she knew she had. Knew, too, that Becca was doing what she thought best for Emmy.
It was almost noon when Martha walked outside and stood staring at the crest of Tinker’s Knob, one hand to the small of her lower back where a permanent ache seemed to have lodged.
She glanced at the fence that ran alongside the left edge of the yard and the line of marigolds she and Becca had planted earlier in the spring. Their bold yellow beckoned her forward, and she crossed the grass, bending to pick a dozen or so.
With the bouquet in one hand she let herself through a metal pasture gate and walked through the field where in between tugs of green grass, black and white cows grazed, each noting her progress with big, curious eyes.
The walk from the house to the family cemetery took her a good fifteen minutes. On a younger person’s legs, it could be accomplished in five at the most. At the far end of the pasture, Martha let herself through another gate and climbed the short hill where a single enormous pine tree lent shade to the fenced graveyard.
She stood for a moment, staring at the rows of tombstones, many of the oldest ones a single rock that marked the burial spot. Generations of her own family had been laid to rest in this place, and although she had attended the burials of many of her relatives here, she had always found it to be a spot of great peacefulness.
She opened the single latch gate and walked through, closing it behind her. A worn path encompassed the perimeter of the cemetery. Martha followed it to the right hand corner where a single large headstone and a smaller one sat side by side. She dropped to her knees in between the two, a hand resting on each. The larger one was Daniel’s, the chiseled text across the top reading, GONE TO BE WITH THE LORD, DANIEL MILLER. The smaller one read WILLIAM MILLER, PRECIOUS INFANT, RESTING IN GOD’S ARMS.
William had been born to Martha and Daniel in between Becca and Emmy. He’d arrived two months early and lived only a few hours after his birth, his lungs not strong enough to sustain him. He’d been born in their home, and when his last breath left his little body, Martha sat for hours just holding him, unable to let him go, rocking him in the chair she had rocked both Jacob and Becca in. Daniel had finally taken him from her, wrapping him in a soft blue blanket, pulling one corner over the baby’s sweet face.
Even now, so many decades later, she could still feel the pain of that moment, a pain that never again left her but stayed dormant in one of her heart’s chambers, able to flare to life with a single memory, a single reminder.
She ran her fingers over the words on the tombstone and imagined Lydia Rutrough sitting in front of her nearly grown son’s tombstone, ragged pain consuming her fresh with each visit. Empathy flooded through Martha, and she didn’t know which would be worse, having a child for so short a time, or having him for sixteen years and then to lose him.
But if there was anything Martha had come to understand about life, it was that people didn’t get to choose their tragedy. Tragedy chose its people.
Martha divided the marigolds she’d brought with her, placing half on William’s grave and half on Daniel’s. She pulled stray weeds from the sides of the headstones until they were neat again.
When she was done, she knelt in front of Daniel’s and tried to bring to memory his face as it had been when they’d first met, young and handsome, his eyes full with love for her.
Now, when she looked in the mirror each morning and saw the lines so clearly etched in her face, it was hard to believe anyone could have loved her as both Mitch and Daniel had loved her. But the certainty of this had never left her, and for this, she was grateful. Especially when she thought of herself as Becca must surely see her. A bitter old woman who had forgotten how to smile or laugh.
She was worried about Becca and Emmy. She’d considered, even, driving into town and waiting for them outside the doctor’s office. She couldn’t say for sure what had prevented her, respect for Becca’s decision-making ability or worry for what news the doctor might have given her about Emmy.
She wasn’t naïve. She could see Emmy’s downward progression. She knew, too, that Becca was right to be concerned. How did she explain then her own behavior this morning? Her reluctance to admit that Becca was right?
She stared at her husband’s tombstone and wondered if she had come here today thinking she would somehow find answers. Looking to Daniel for guidance when he was no longer here to guide her.
A breeze lifted the boughs of the pine standing guard over the small cemetery. For Martha, the sound of the wind sifting through the pine needles was a lonely sound. It echoed inside her, and brought with it the resounding realization that she was alone in this. She could no longer rely on Daniel to steer her in the direction of right. Since his death, she had limped along on the assumption that everything they had done was for the best. And now, she no longer knew.
Sitting here in this place where she had lain both husband and son to rest, it was suddenly, painfully clear to her that from this point on, she would have to choose her direction for herself. Choose it and then live with it.
44
There Comes a Day
Are we not like two volumes of one book?
- Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Now
The appointment with Dr. Hayes did not go as Becca had expected. There was a concern in his expression today that she had not seen before, or perhaps had not let herself see. This morning, she felt the weight of it like a leaden bla
nket across her shoulders.
Once he’d finished examining Emmy, Dr. Hayes asked his nurse to wait with her while he spoke privately with Becca.
They walked down a short hall to his office. “Have a seat, Becca,” he said, closing the door behind him and walking around the desk to sit across from her. She had known Dr. Hayes for twenty-five years or more. He had been involved in Emmy’s treatment from the beginning, recommending early on the hospital in North Carolina where she had stayed for a few months with little to no change in her condition.
“Becca,” he said, sitting back in his chair and giving her a long look. “I’m not happy with the changes in Emmy. I think you should consider hospitalizing her.”
Becca leaned back, caught off guard by the abrupt admission. “Based on what?”
“Her weight is down significantly. Clearly, the medication isn’t controlling her depression.”
“Can’t we try something else?”
“We would be switching back to something she’s already taken. I don’t have to tell you that she’s eventually declined on every medication we’ve tried.”
“Why are they not working?” Becca asked, hearing the note of helplessness in her own question.
“There is no magic button, Becca,” he said, not unkindly. “As I’ve explained before, Emmy’s depression isn’t like a broken arm where we can locate the exact spot of the fracture and reset it. Recovery depends on finding the most effective treatment. And to be honest, on the patient’s willingness to want to be helped. I’m getting off the medical facts track here, but I hope we know each other well enough for me to speak from the gut. I think it might just be easier for Emmy to stay in retreat mode than to come out and face the things she’s not able to face.”
In eighteen years, Dr. Hayes had never been this blunt with her. And it scared her. “We can’t know what she’s thinking,” Becca said. “What she feels.”
“No. Not for sure. But we do know that Emmy’s trauma was severe, and that she has never been the same since. More and more is being learned about the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. I know I’ve said most of this to you before, but scientists believe a traumatic event can actually change the biology of the brain. No one knows for sure if it’s reversible. Emmy’s depression has obviously complicated all of this.”
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