Around the Bend

by Shirley Jump

  If the great Rosemary Delaney had missed all the billboards and road signs, what made me think I’d be any better of a navigator in my marriage?

  The magazines beside me no longer seemed cheery and happy. I set their too-bright, too-fake headlines on the floor and slid them beneath the heater with my toe. “He left us both in the dark, didn’t he?”

  She nodded without looking up.

  I had to ask the question neither of us had ever voiced, never had the strength to ask the other. We’d simply gone on after he’d died, one day at a time, each of us in our own rooms, cocooned away, ignoring what had happened. Afraid to speak of it, as if giving what had happened voice would somehow make us responsible.

  “Why didn’t he say anything? Why did he…” My voice trailed off, then caught on itself, and I redoubled my effort to get the words out, because I knew that if I didn’t do it now, we might never have this conversation and this thread would forever remain undone. Maybe, I thought, if I picked it up and dealt with it, I could move on with my life. With Nick. “Why did he kill himself, Ma?”

  The room’s quiet wrapped around us, heavy and thick, a blanket filled with questions. My gaze met hers, both of our blue eyes swimming with tears. “He wasn’t happy, Hilary. That’s all I know.”

  “He was always happy, though. That was how anyone would describe Dad. The joke teller, the comedian. He could have made a statue laugh.”

  “He couldn’t make himself laugh.” She hung her head and I realized that my mother, the woman who I thought had been cold and unfeeling, had drawn into herself all those years ago not because she didn’t care, but because she felt guilty.

  Because she, too, had missed the changes in my father’s personality. She hadn’t seen him slip away, hadn’t noticed him dropping into a deep well, losing his grip on the rope that would pull him out.

  “I married him,” she said, “because he made me laugh, because he brought out the fun side of me. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m not exactly a joke a minute.”

  Each of us smiled, weak smiles, but the moment of levity eased some of the pain.

  “I agree, Ma. You’re not exactly stand-up material.”

  “And he married me because he needed someone to keep him on track, to give him ‘an even keel,’ as he described it. But then we had you, and we got busy and we forgot about having fun. We were tied up with being married, running a house. And then we lost the baby.” She drew in a long, sharp breath, and I could see her reaching for a memory she would have rather kept wrapped up, but like me, she knew she had to open that wound if she was ever going to heal the past. “It was an accident. But your father always blamed himself.”

  “Why would he blame himself?”

  “I was five months pregnant and we had gone on our first vacation alone since we’d gotten married. His parents watched you for the weekend while we went down to Cape Cod. We had no money. I think your dad was working for the paper factory in those days, making something like four dollars an hour. I wasn’t working at all because the pregnancy had been difficult from day one. Anyway, we rented a sailboat, and your father decided I should learn how to sail.”

  “You? Learn how to sail? But you don’t even know how to drive.”

  “I know. Your dad thought he’d start with a boat and work me up to a car.” She shook her head. “But I didn’t want to do it. I was afraid of the damned thing. I’m no good at mechanical stuff. Give me a book to read, a legal brief to analyze, an argument to make and I’m fine, but put me behind the wheel of a two-ton car or a fifteen-foot sailboat…and I panic.” Ma threw up her hands. “Your father was determined, though. He told me what to do, then stepped away and left me at the wheel. He thought it was funny, I thought it was terrifying. We had an argument, I let go of the wheel, the boat hit a buoy, and I lost my footing—”

  “Oh, Ma,” I said, knowing what was coming next, not wanting to hear it, all of my mother’s fears falling into place, suddenly making a horrible sense.

  “—I fell into the water, hitting against the side of the boat when I did. I lost the baby, and even though the doctor said it might have happened anyway, your father took it hard, took the whole thing on his own shoulders. Back then, there wasn’t anything like counseling and Dr. Phil and self-help books. You just kept on making dinner and making the best of things. We didn’t know how to talk to each other, or even what to say. So we let being busy take the place of saying the words we should have. We drifted apart and he and I…we stopped laughing. I threw myself into school; he threw himself into avoiding reality by putting on a show every day.”

  The puzzle began to come together, the father I’d known who’d been so much fun, the one I’d held up as the example of the perfect parent. How many times had I tossed that back in my mother’s face when I was younger? Telling her what a better job he did, parenting me? How much more fun he was? How much nicer he was?

  “He became a big kid,” I said. “He’d hold down a job for a few months, then quit and hang out at home, make popcorn, watch movies with me and my friends. He’d set up impromptu circuses in the backyard for me and the neighborhood kids—”

  “And never cleaned up any of the messes.”

  I understood my mother’s stress then, saw why she’d gone around with that perpetual tight look on her face as if she was an elastic stretched too far. He’d been the fun one—and he’d never had to deal with the consequences. “Why didn’t you ever yell at him? Make him run the vacuum? Do the dishes?”

  She sighed. “I spent my whole day in court, confronting people. The last thing I wanted to do was come home and have another battle. And…to be honest, I didn’t want to lose him. I felt as guilty as he did about what happened. I was afraid, Hilary. Afraid I’d lose him, too.” Her voice cracked and so too did her hard shell.

  I understood her then, so well.

  Because she was me.

  “I know, Ma. I do the same thing, with Nick. I keep trying to keep everything exactly the same as it was the day before because if anything changes I’m afraid it will upset the equation and suddenly two and two won’t be four anymore—and he’ll be gone.”

  Surprise arched her brows. “Nick would never leave you on a permanent basis. I mean, I know he went back home, but break up?”

  “He already did. Back in Indiana. Either I marry him or it’s over. Move forward…or don’t move at all.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  My gaze strayed to the window, as if the view would provide some answer I hadn’t found in the thousands of miles we’d already traversed. “I don’t know. I don’t want to lose him.”

  I’d echoed my mother’s words. Was that what she had done? Maintained a static relationship all those years…only to see it slip through her fingers anyway?

  “Don’t make my mistakes,” my mother said, reading my mind. “Take a chance, Hilary.”

  “Ma, you didn’t make that many mistakes.”

  She snorted. “I made plenty. That what-if tape plays in my head every day. What if I hadn’t fought with him that day? What if I’d just gone along with his plan and had fun? I mean, that was why I’d married him, so he could help me step out of that comfort zone.”

  How true that was. I’d stayed in that comfort zone, motoring along, because it was easier. I hadn’t even explored those what-ifs because they opened too many doors.

  My mother’s gaze strayed to the window, then returned to me. “It’s always easier to retreat to a rut than to climb out of one. After a while, you and your father became a team of your own, and I always felt like I was on the outside, looking in. You two would play Frisbee, and I’d do the dishes and watch.” She paused. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  I saw the look in her face and read it instantly, because I’d seen it on my own, more than once.

  She hadn’t wanted to be rejected. To come outside, and have us turn her away. I could read the vulnerability in the way she picked at the blanket, even now, even after all the m
iles, all the coffees, all the words.

  I slid my hand across the knit fibers and grasped hers, wishing I could go back in time and invite her in to our games. “You wouldn’t have been interrupting, Ma.”

  “Thank you, Hilary,” she said, so softly I almost couldn’t hear the words. “I wouldn’t have been much of an asset to your Frisbee game either, though.” She gave me a smile, another attempt at humor, then raised her gaze to meet mine, sobering. “Do you think we could have stopped him, if we knew?”

  The sixty-four-thousand dollar question. The one neither of us had dared to voice, though I’d be willing to bet millions we each had thought it a hundred times in the years since my father had taken the forty-five his father had brought home as a souvenir from World War II and put it to his temple.

  “I don’t know, Ma.” I drew in a breath. “I was there…that day, but not there early enough.”

  The heater blew its too-hot air with a soft high-pitched whine. Ma’s roommate continued to sleep, quiet snores providing a persistent rhythmic undertow. Outside, the hospital played its busy life in a music of beeps and shouts, footfalls and conversations. But inside room 305-A, it was nearly silent. “I know, baby. The police, they—”

  “They probably didn’t tell you everything.” I swallowed and knew I had to tell her. What good had keeping secrets done either of us? All these years, she’d been so lonely, on the outside, looking in, when all it would have taken was a word, a conversation, for her to be included. Might that have turned the tide? And if I had talked more, opened up earlier, could I have changed this course?

  Maybe. Maybe not. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to go down the same road any longer. And there wasn’t going to be any more closed doors between me and my mother. Not if I could help it.

  “I stopped by the house to see him. I hadn’t been by in weeks. Months, I think. You know how it is, you get busy with work. With friends. Everything else seems so much more important.” My voice became this raw, painful thing that scraped by my throat. “Dad had called me on my cell a few days before, wanting to talk, but I brushed him off. I was at work and had some crisis that seemed more important. If I had taken that call, talked to him, maybe—”

  I closed my eyes, bit my lip hard, wishing I could rocket back and undo everything, retrace steps that I had taken in the wrong direction.

  My mother’s hand clutched mine. “You couldn’t have known, Hilary. Neither of us did. I kept thinking if I hadn’t gone to work, if I’d skipped that court case, but how was I supposed to know? Everything seemed so normal that day.”

  But that didn’t make me feel better, didn’t diffuse the feeling that I too should have had some hint, some inkling to what had been going on behind his blue-green eyes, behind his smile. “He called me that morning, left a message on my cell. Just a regular old, ‘Hi, Hilary, how you doing, this is Dad,’ kind of thing. Even told me a joke at the end.” After he was gone, I’d listened to that voice mail over and over again, until the phone finally died, taking my father’s voice with it. “I went over to the house, but he didn’t answer the door. So I went inside, calling for him. I knew he was home, his car was in the driveway. And then I saw the door.”

  The door to his study. Always open, like he welcomed one and all to come on inside, put your feet up, have a chat. A perpetual mess, filled with toys and newspapers and whatever took his fancy that day.

  “The door was shut,” I said, the words coming now in a steady stream, as if I’d started something I had to finish, a Band-Aid I had to rip off, even though I knew it was going to hurt like hell. “I could hear him inside, muttering to himself. I called to him, but he didn’t answer. I tried the door, but it was locked. He never locked that door.” My mother nodded, listening, her eyes welling. I knew she had, as she said, heard the story from the police after I’d called 9–1–1, but had they told her everything? Told her how I’d felt, how I’d tried? Had they told her how the guilt had crushed me and become these bricks between my mother and me? “Even when I was little and I used to color on the walls, he never locked the door to his study. But this time…This time, he wouldn’t let me in and I just knew, I knew, something was wrong. I felt it. I could hear him, talking to himself, and I called to him, over and over, and I banged on the door, so hard, my hand was bruised for days afterwards. Then…then I heard the click.”

  I paused for a breath, raising my gaze to my mother’s, clouded now by tears, by the images of that day. “You’d think with all my yelling and my banging, that I’d miss that sound, but it came in between, as if he wanted me to hear it. And I remember screaming, because something in my mind figured all that out, put it together that whatever he was doing was terrible and I had to stop him. But he wouldn’t let me in and the damned door was too hard and too strong and that stupid lock held against my fists and my shoulder and my body and everything I tried to do and then, oh, God—” The sound exploded in my head, as clear as it had five years ago and I took in a sharp, hard breath. “And then he did it. And I screamed and I screamed, and somehow, finally, I burst through that door. But it didn’t matter anymore. I was too late, and he was gone, and he didn’t stop, not for me. And I wasn’t there in time. Ma, I couldn’t stop him. I tried so hard. I’m so sorry. You have to believe me. I tried so hard.”

  And then I was sobbing, just as I had that day, sobbing in my mother’s arms, and she sobbing in mine, each of us having blamed ourselves for half a decade. We held on tight, pouring our grief back and forth like two pitchers.

  She pulled back and tipped my chin until I was looking at her, facing red-rimmed eyes, tear-stained cheeks. “I know you did, Hilary. I know you did.”

  “I tried,” I said, over and over, the words coming softer and softer until finally my tears ebbed and her comfort, her absolution, sank in.

  “I don’t blame you, sweetheart. I never, ever blamed you.” She cupped my jaw with both her hands, swiping away the last of my tears with her thumbs. “You can’t stop someone who won’t let you in,” she said. “Not into the room, Hilary. Into his mind.”

  “He never let us in there, did he?”

  “No.” She sighed, a heavy sound filled with years of what-ifs. “I think all those jokes were his way of coping, and I never really understood that, not until it was too late. He had an awful childhood. He used humor to get through it, then later, to keep himself from having to deal with the heavy things in life.”

  “Like the baby.”

  She nodded, and in her face, I read the moments she wished she could undo, the moments she knew were lost forever. “Instead of talking, he put on a smile, kept on laughing, and inside it ate him up. But he wouldn’t talk about it. Lord knows I tried to get that man to talk. Maybe I should have tried harder.” She glanced out the window, at the busy city that surrounded the hospital, watching the helicopter approach for a rooftop landing. “No, I definitely should have tried harder. He missed out on so much. With me, with you. And that’s part of why I brought him along with us. So he could be there, to serve as a reminder to me.”

  “Not to miss out on the good things in life.”

  “No, not to miss out on you.” She took my hand, her grip tight and firm, her eyes locked on mine. “I don’t care if I have one day or a million days left. I don’t want to miss out on a single moment with the people I love. That’s what this trip was really about, Hilary. You.”

  “Me?”

  She smiled. “Yeah.”

  My heart was so full, it seemed to take up my entire chest. For a second I couldn’t even speak. My mother loved me, had always loved me, not just in those late-night kisses, but in the moments when I hadn’t been looking.

  I may have been thirty-six, but I still needed her. I always had, whether I’d wanted to admit it to her or myself. “That’s why I’m here, too, Ma. Because I need to spend time with you. To get to know you.”

  The smile that curved across her face would stay with me forever, clutched in my memories like a butterfly. “I love you
, Hilary.”

  “And I love you.” I hugged her, without tears this time, and knew we had just covered more ground in this hospital room than we’d ever done in the minivan. When the moment of emotion had passed, I drew in a breath and gave her a grin. “How about some advice then, Ma?”

  “Advice?” My mother couldn’t have looked more surprised if I’d stood on her bed and did the hokey pokey. “You want me to give you advice?” She put a hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

  Talk about doing a one-eighty. Maybe I was growing up, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. I might even be okay with it. “Yeah. And there’s no one I’d rather talk to right now than you.” I gave her a grin. “So, if it’s not too late to get your input on my love life—”

  “No, Hilary,” she said, and a tear slipped down her cheek, “it’s never too late.”

  “Good.” I curled up on her bed, and started to talk. Probably for the first time in my life I got honest. With myself and my mother.

  Ma leaned back against her pillows and heard me, then did what any good mother would do—she gave me her two cents.

  I left her room at the end of the day, feeling lighter and better than I ever had in my entire life. When I got back to the hotel room, I made a phone call and maxed out my Visa, taking the biggest risk of my entire life.

  twenty

  “Don’t hang up and don’t say no.”

  “Okay.” The one word came out of Nick’s mouth easily, without suspicion or malice. If he’d been surprised to hear from me, he didn’t say anything. He’d simply shut off the sander in his workshop, then gone inside his office to take the call.

  All I knew was that I was damned grateful he’d finally been on the other end when I’d called.

  “I FedExed a plane ticket to you,” I went on. “Round trip, to San Francisco, with an open-ended return date. My mother and I should be there in two days and I’m hoping you will be there, too.”