by Lynne Hugo
Now, though, with Claire asleep on Jennifer’s bed, and the first three swallows gone from Madalaine’s beer, it’s not so simple. All this should be beneath her, she knows, but a thornbush grows now in the space in her chest left empty when her heart was ripped out. Madalaine is still sitting at the kitchen table, statue-like except for the small movement of her fingers on the Coors can, when she hears and ignores a knock on the door. She whites out a second episode of knocking by allowing the roar in her ears to approximate the ocean, but then Ellie appears in the doorway, anyway.
“Where’s Claire?” Ellie demands, glancing at the beer, then up at Madalaine’s face. “Madalaine, do you really think—”
“Don’t Madalaine me, Eleanor. Yes I really think, and Claire’s asleep. What do you want?”
Ellie flounces her hair, in a blue-and-white polka-dot bow that would have matched the blue of her Wal-Mart smock if she had ever put it on today. She waves a sheaf of white papers at Madalaine. “I went to Lydia’s but there’s no one there, so I went to the hospital, and Joann, she’s the head of the dialysis training team, went over it again with me, and I’ve got the papers. See, it’s peritoneal dialysis. You can learn it in about four hours.”
Ellie says Joann in a important tone, lording it over Madalaine, as if Joann were the president of the damn country, or the nurse’s first name were a state secret, and Madalaine is monumentally irritated. At the same time, she’s impressed against her will; this is not vintage Ellie, this business of doing something on her own.
Ellie goes on. “We need to go ahead and get this done, while I remember.”
“Claire says it’s no big deal, she can be late. She wanted to rest and she was going to ask Wayne to get the review diagrams and stuff from Lydia’s.”
“Well it is a big deal, Joann told me the schedule is important. It’s four times a day and at night. Did she do it last night? Will you please tell me what’s going on? Why isn’t Claire home with Lydia? Lydia memorized every word Joann said while we were with her. Lydia could write the damn manual. I never heard anyone think of so many questions.” Ellie pulls out a chair facing Madalaine across the kitchen table and sits. For once in her life, Ellie just sits and waits for someone else to speak. Madalaine wonders if she’s on something.
“Well, as far as I know, Lydia doesn’t know Claire’s here, or I’m sure she’d ride right in here and let her horse shit all over my floor while she took care of her precious Claire. Just because Brian’s dead and Claire helped him get that way, well, we certainly wouldn’t want anything to happen to Claire.”
Ellie’s mouth literally falls open. She blinks, then again. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Everything seems utterly and forever lost to Madalaine. There’s no hope because there is no hope. Even hurting doesn’t raise a spark in her flinty soul. “Listen, ask Lydia or Claire or Wayne. Don’t ask me. And tell Claire not to ask me any more if she can stay here. Wayne can stay, I don’t care about that.”
Ellie’s jaw may never close again. She’s shocked, genuinely so, and trying to fit the jigsaw together but coming up with a picture of a three-headed woman with an eye in the middle of her forehead. She trashes the pieces and tries again.
“Wayne’s been staying here?”
“You hear good, El.”
“He’s not with Lydia?”
“Both ears work, I see. I’m too tired, I’m going in to sleep now. Do what you want, the dialysis thing, whatever, but get her out of here.” And with that, Madalaine stands, picks up the beer and walks—steadily enough it seems—toward the hallway that leads past Brian’s bedroom to the one she and Bill used to share.
A half hour later, when Claire makes her slow way out of Jennifer’s bedroom and down the hall to the kitchen, she finds Ellie sitting at the table staring at four sheets of paper spread in order on the kitchen table. Her aunt is crying, her face bleary and red-splotched, like a mirror of Claire’s own.
Claire walks to Ellie and puts her arms around her, lets Ellie’s face rest against her chest while she stands there. Her own tears start, and run down her face as if to mix with Ellie’s tears until aunt and niece are borne along together in a great, unstoppable river. “Shh, shh,” she says. “It’ll be all right.”
“Will you please just tell me what’s going on?” Ellie pleads, not really expecting an answer. “Maddie won’t, Lydia’s disappeared somewhere, not at home… It’s the same old thing, no one has the least consideration. What am I supposed to do?”
Claire smoothes Ellie’s hair. She’s hesitant, knowing Ellie, how everyone always goes around her. “I’ll tell you, if you’re sure you want to know. Sometimes it’s better not to. I found that myself.”
Ellie blows her nose into a crumpled tissue she’s fished out of her skirt pocket. “Tell me,” she says, and almost imperceptibly, the river begins a bend.
CHAPTER 26
I can barely come up for air, sobbing in his car while the river runs alongside John and me, behind and ahead of us and through me. My eyes and nose are running, I am drowning in this river of grief, while the bones of hope, washed ashore, bleach and grow brittle. He has put his arms around me and I have let him, though I imagine it is like pressing a wet, dead fish to your chest.
I have never hated John as much as I do now.
What time is it? I straighten up, I check my watch and see that it is past time for still another dialysis. I bargain for her safety: she can never have anything to do with me again, I tell God, if only You will keep her safe. Suddenly, I am desperate to get home. What if she’s come back, wanting help? Suppose she’s forgotten something and wants me to explain it to her? The two times we did it at home she was tired and I did most of the steps of the exchange.
“Take me back,” I tell John. “I need to get back.”
“I don’t think you should be alone,” he says, and doesn’t budge.
I reach over and turn the keys in the ignition. Even though his foot isn’t on the gas, the car answers right away as expensive cars do. “I need to get back. You don’t understand. She’s not done it alone before, I don’t know what she did last night and this morning. Maybe she’s called me for help.”
John shifts the car into gear. “Okay,” he says.
We’re in downtown Maysfield before he says anything else. He clears his throat and I look at him. The wet spots on his white shirt are fading but still visible and I see a little of my makeup has come off on him, too. “Lydie,” he tries. “Lydie, I’m so sorry. I want you to know I would have done it.”
I only half believe him. What has he got to lose telling me that?
“Thanks,” I say, the bitterness crimping the edge of the word.
“You probably don’t believe me, I understand that. I know I’ve never acted like it, but she’s my daughter, too, and I do love her.”
He is turning into the parking lot at Dr. Douglas’s where I left my car after we got the test results. “Save it,” I say, and get out, closing the door harder than is necessary.
By the time I reach home, I have at least collected myself into a coherent bundle. My heart leaps when I notice a yellow stick-up note perched like a bird on my front door, but it’s from Ellie, saying to call her. I crush it and drop it in the kitchen trash once I am inside. Ellie is the last person I can talk to.
I should go on in to work. I only said I needed the morning off, and now it’s well into my lunch hour. Pacing doesn’t help, wringing my hands doesn’t help. Wouldn’t Claire think to call the office if she wanted me?
I walk through the house; there’s no sign Wayne has been here either, though I don’t think I really expected one. In the bathroom, I wash my face, rinse it in cold water. My eyes stare back at me, red-rimmed and empty-looking. I comb my hair, apply eye shadow, liner, mascara, blush, pink-lilies lipstick. What have I done? The enormity of the pain I, Lydia, have caused… What have I done? I try to argue with myself a little. If I hadn’t had an affair, Claire wouldn’t exist. Ho
w can I say that whatever brought Claire into this world isn’t a good thing? But now I stumble on this: maybe Wayne was right after all, and I should never have contacted John, never have told Claire the truth. Hindsight, all hindsight. And what if John had been a match?
I put a note on the door reminding anyone who might care that I’m at work and he or she can call me there. At the office, I feel like a leper who’s the object of conscious kindness, everyone careful not to ask me to do anything, careful of each word that I hear or might overhear. They are relentlessly cheerful, especially Donna, who gives me sympathetic looks periodically but doesn’t ask any questions. And they don’t even know what’s really happening; all they know is that Wayne and I aren’t a match, and, of course, that my nephew is dead. I guess that’s enough.
I leave work fifteen minutes early. Not a call on our answering machine. Not so much as a hang-up. And I begin to feel angry. Surely Claire knows I’m frantic by now. Surely Wayne knows the same. How can they do this to me? After all I’ve… After all, I’m her mother.
I pace, flip through magazines, fold a load of laundry that’s been in the dryer for days. At seven-thirty, I can’t stand it. My nail beds are white, bloodless from the pressure with which I push the telephone’s buttons when I call John. My intention is only to distract myself, tell someone—anyone, I think—that I can’t bear this any longer. I would call Maddie, except that it seems so unfair to ask anything of her, now of all times.
On the phone, at least I do not cry. I just tell him that I’ve still heard nothing from Claire or Wayne. The strange thing is that I want to be mad and stay mad at him for leaving me in this mess eighteen years ago, but when I hear his warm baritone say, “Lydie, Lydie, are you all right?” the anger shrinks down to the size of something that can be set toward the back of a deep shelf.
“I…I’m… No, I’m not all right, I’m a wreck. I don’t have anybody else to call. Maddie, well, I can’t, not with what she’s going through with losing Brian, and Bill’s gone, of course, and Ellie doesn’t seem…”
“I remember about Ellie. Does she still have to get her passport stamped every morning to leave Elvisville for Wal-Mart?”
I laugh. And then I remember how John used to make me laugh. He hears me laugh, and he starts laughing, and I keep laughing, as if I were sighting an island from the splintered rafters of a wrecked ship, it’s that welcome.
“She still works at Wal-Mart, but it’s turned out pretty well, because now they carry a lovely new line of dresses with extra-extra-long sleeves that can be tied in a real pretty bow. In back.”
A beat passes while he digests that. When he gets the picture, he chuckles. “Well, then, I guess that employee discount comes in right handy,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Do you maybe want to come over?” Not a well-thought-out plan, I suddenly realize.
But John is on top of that. “Have you eaten?” he asks. “I bet not. Let me take you out and get a decent meal in you.”
“I’d like that. Yes. That’d be nice. Thank you,” I say, meaning it.
“I’ll pick you up within a half hour.” He lives in a fancy apartment, way the opposite side of town. “If I’m late, it just means traffic,” he says. “Hang on, sweetie.”
Sweetie. When has someone called me sweetie, or any other endearment? I have no idea, but what balm it is. What a sucker I am for balm like that.
CHAPTER 27
“I don’t think we did so bad,” Ellie says to Claire, though she’s been shaky for hours, quelling nausea and light-headedness. The thought of that stuff draining out of Claire and then a whole bag of new stuff going in gives her the willies. Now that it’s over, the tubing put away, and the bag of used stuff set up behind the closed bathroom door to drain into the toilet, Ellie’s feeling pretty good. She didn’t faint and she read a paragraph out loud to Claire when Claire couldn’t remember a sequence of connections.
“Aunt Eleanor, you were superb.”
Ellie can tell Claire means it, because she gives her the respect of her real name. If there’s anyone in the family who ever remembers Ellie’s wishes, it’s Claire. Ellie’s always asked people not to call her that—Ellie. She’d really rather the full Eleanor Ann, which she’s sure Elvis would like, especially since he named his daughter Lisa Marie, and married a woman people called Priscilla, not Prissy. She absolutely surprises herself when she says to Claire, “Oh, honey, that’s okay, you can call me Ellie. Everyone else does….”
“Well, whatever you want to be called, I’ll call you that, and I mean it, I can’t thank you enough.”
“You’re welcome. Really, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. I can probably handle it again…if your Mom has to be away or something.”
Claire puts her hand on her forehead as if she has a headache. She’s wearing cutoff denim shorts and a T-shirt, and looks like very breakable porcelain, but her voice is resolute and adult. “I meant it, I’m not going home. I can’t forgive what she did to Dad, and I can’t believe she’s lied to me all these years. She brought me up with standards, and to believe in certain things, and just because she broke every one of them doesn’t mean that they’re not still what I believe. Or does that make any sense? I may not be saying it right because I’m tired, but I don’t want to even see her. And don’t worry. I can do the exchanges by myself. Dr. Douglas said. It’s just a safety thing to have someone else trained, in case I have a problem. I’ll get real efficient with it. I think I was just still upset this morning.”
Ellie leans forward from one of the upholstered chairs in Madalaine’s family room toward the other, where Claire sits. She opens her mouth and then, realizing that she has no idea what to say, shuts it and leans back against the cushion. “Claire…”
“My mind is made up. I’m staying here.” Claire’s tone is like a red warning.
“Maddie says you can’t stay here.” Ellie’s capacity for tact has been stretched to the limit recently. She makes the statement flatly, without any softening.
“But Dad’s been…”
“I know.” Ellie could happily shoot Madalaine right between the eyes this minute for leaving the house and not coming back all afternoon, sticking her with telling this to Claire.
“Oh…she doesn’t want me here…” Claire trails off and covers her face with her hands. She is rocked, Ellie can tell.
“I think she just can’t…” Ellie tries, but can’t come up with anything to explain her sister. “See why you have to go home? You’ve got to have a place to be, you know, for your treatments and all those boxes of stuff in your dad’s truck. What if it rains? Besides, you still have the operation and all when they find a donor.”
But Claire isn’t listening. She’s uncovered her face and is looking around the room, not seeing the wood stove, the tweedy neutral family room carpeting, the console television, the sliding glass doors out to the patio, even the half-mature trees that Bill planted ten years ago. What she sees are the number of framed pictures of Brian and Jennifer on the paneled walls, in the bookcases, on the end tables. She doesn’t say anything when she’s finished looking, only buries her head back into her hands. Her shoulders begin to shake and she lowers her head almost to her lap, but there is no sound in the room.
Ellie hesitates a moment, then gets up and takes the three steps to Claire’s chair. Awkwardly, she balances herself on the arm and just as awkwardly lays an arm on Claire’s back. It lies there useless as an untied rope. She looks at it a moment as if it doesn’t belong to her. Claire’s back is still shaking, which makes Ellie’s arm shake, and as much to stop that as anything else, Ellie applies a little pressure and curves her wrist and hand down around Claire’s upper arm. When the shaking still doesn’t stop, she pulls Claire toward herself and cradles Claire’s head with her other hand.
Ellie strokes Claire’s hair, lifting and twisting the ponytail and smoothing it down. Claire does not pull away. They stay together that way for what seems a long time, and the shaking subsides.
When Wayne shows up, Claire and Ellie are rooting in Madalaine’s refrigerator and wondering if Madalaine picked Jennifer up from school to keep from having to be at the house. “Maddie said Bill was taking Jennifer tonight, I think,” Ellie is saying, “but who knows what’s going on?”
“Hey,” Wayne says, appearing in the kitchen doorway in his ghostlike way.
Ellie claps a hand to her chest. “My Lord, you scared a year off my life. Don’t ever do that again.”
Claire laughs. “He does that all the time. He doesn’t even do it on purpose, do you Dad?”
“Nope.” Wayne just looks at them and stands there, as though he could last all night in that one spot, and he’s standing right on Ellie’s last nerve.
“Will you sit down or something? You all have some decisions to make. Claire, how about I leave you two alone?”
“No, that’s okay. Stay.” Claire’s found two containers of strawberry yogurt and hands one to Ellie. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got to eat something.” She peels off the foil top and stirs up the fruit from the bottom. Everything’s being stirred up off the bottom it seems.
“You eat, honey.” Ellie tries the endearment and seems to get away with it. “Wayne,” she goes on, swiveling her neck and letting her shoulders follow, to face him instead of Claire. “Maddie’s said that Claire can’t stay here.”
“What?” he says, like he hadn’t heard her perfectly well.
“I said, Maddie’s said that Claire can’t stay here.” She places a heavy emphasis on the names as if trying to penetrate an invisible barrier.
Wayne’s expression doesn’t change perceptibly.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” Ellie demands. She’d never realized how irritating Wayne can be.
“Not really.”
“Dad, what are your plans?” Claire’s looking concerned, Ellie sees.
“Don’t really have any.” Wayne looks down. “I can take you back to your mother’s.”
