The Sunflower Forest

by Torey Hayden

  The worst part for me was discovering the casket was open. Dad hadn’t told me it would be, and I was repulsed by the sight of it. Why would people want to look at Mama when she was dead? Besides, it didn’t even look like Mama. It looked like one of those figures in a wax museum, exceptionally lifelike, but sterile and inanimate, nonetheless. Megan kissed her on the lips and placed a branch of lilac beside her. I didn’t touch her.

  When we returned home, I got out of the car, went into the house, straight through it and out the back door into the yard. I walked to the other end of the backyard, to the fence beside the lilac bushes that marked the end of our property. I had no reason in mind for going there other than to escape Megan and my father’s inane conversation. I wanted to be alone. There weren’t many places around our house for doing that.

  I was still dressed up, teetering uncertainly in a pair of Auntie Caroline’s high heels because I didn’t own a pair myself. Over my dress I had the turquoise shawl Mama had given me, the only time I had ever worn it. It’d been the single bright colour amid blacks and browns and greys. But I reckoned Mama would have wanted me to wear it, so I didn’t care what Auntie Caroline said to Dad about it.

  There wasn’t much to look at from where I was standing. Just the chain-link fence, the alley and the back of the Nelsons’ house on the other side. Distantly, between farther houses I could see the plains encroaching, their emptiness never quite arrested, even in the town.

  Easing out of the heels, I stood in my stockings and felt the damp coolness of grass on the soles of my feet. The air was heady with the smell of lilac. It made me think of Mama’s stories of Lébény, about her sister, Johanna, who had died of scarlet fever while my mother waited downstairs in the great hall, surrounded by the scent of lilac. I wondered if Mama ever stopped to think that she too might die when the lilac was in bloom. Sad, I thought, that she should have died in springtime when all the flowers she had missed so much in winter were finally alive. But in the end I suppose it was best that way, to die in spring and never know another winter.

  Time passed and I remained, fingering the chain-link fence.

  ‘Lesley, why don’t you come into the house?’ It was Auntie Caroline.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I’d rather be alone.’

  ‘No, come on, honey,’ she replied and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘I know how hard it must be for you.’

  ‘Please, just leave me alone. I want to stay here.’

  ‘I’ve made sandwiches,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  I could hear her standing there, although she was doing no more than standing. I didn’t turn to look at her.

  ‘It’s no one’s fault, what happened.’

  I did not answer.

  ‘It’s easy to want to blame someone or something or yourself when a truly terrible thing happens. That’s natural. But you mustn’t do it. Don’t do it, Lesley. Don’t be angry now. This is devastating your father. Please don’t make it worse for him.’

  Absently, I ran my hand back and forth along the cool metal in the fence.

  ‘Your mother was a very hard person to live with, Lesley. I know you loved her dearly. I know you all did. Cowan most of all. But she was a difficult person.’

  ‘Leave me alone, all right?’ I still had my back to her.

  ‘Maybe she was a difficult person all her life. Maybe even in Hungary when she was a girl. Who knows? But she certainly was after the war. A brilliant, gifted, sensitive woman, yes, but so difficult.’

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me about my mother, Auntie Caroline. I know all about my mother. I don’t need you to tell me.’

  ‘Someone needs to, Lesley. You’re no longer a child.’

  ‘I know all I need to know, thank you.’

  ‘But this isn’t your father’s fault. I don’t want to see you blame him for it, because he wasn’t responsible. If he’s to blame for anything, it’s simply for having loved someone a little more imperfect than the rest of us.’

  I shut myself in my room. After changing my clothes, I took out the book I had been reading, curled up on my bed and opened it. It was a good book. It must have been, because I found it so engrossing.

  Megan came to my door to say that supper was on. I told her I didn’t want any, that I wasn’t coming down. When she tried to open my door, I leaped up and slammed it shut on her, hitting her soundly in the head with it. I could hear her in the hallway, gasping from the pain but determined not to give me the satisfaction of hearing her cry. Finally, she went back downstairs to the kitchen.

  Sometime mid-evening my father came up. He didn’t bother to knock; he simply let himself in and closed the door firmly behind him. Crossing the room, he grabbed the chair from my desk, put it alongside the bed and sat down.

  ‘Somehow,’ he said, ‘I get the feeling you’re awfully upset with me.’

  ‘Not especially.’

  I continued to read.

  ‘This is a difficult time for us, Lessie.’

  Not only was I able to continue reading but I was also able to continue concentrating on the gist of the story.

  ‘This has been nearly unbearable.’

  It was as if he were not there.

  ‘And I must confess, this just isn’t the time I need you to do this to me, Lesley.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything,’ I said and kept reading.

  For several seconds my father watched me. I could feel him watching me. Then he leaned over and put his hand across the page of the book. I looked up. He was only inches from my face.

  ‘If you really must know,’ I said, ‘I do think if you’d wanted to, you could have saved her.’

  He flinched. Not in his body, but in his eyes. His pupils contracted and then dilated again. He shook his head.

  ‘You could have,’ I said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes sir. Yes, you could have. If you’d really wanted to. If you’d ever really tried.’

  Again he shook his head.

  ‘You could have moved us, Dad. Like we were thinking about in the winter anyhow. We could have gone to New Mexico or Florida or somewhere and gotten away from the Watermans.’

  He was still shaking his head. ‘No. She wouldn’t have gone.’

  ‘You could have made her. Or you could have gotten her to go to a psychiatrist earlier. Why didn’t you do that? Remember, back in March I was saying maybe she ought to see a doctor. Remember? You could have made her go.’

  He looked down.

  ‘Geez, Dad, it would have been better if she’d been put in a hospital or something. I know she was scared. But she could have gone in the hospital for a little while and gotten over this, and we could have had her back. If you love somebody, sometimes you got to do things they don’t want you to. Anything would have been better than what happened. You should have done something.’

  ‘Lesley, I couldn’t ever have made your mother do what she didn’t want to do. Never. No one could.’

  ‘You could have tried! You could have stood up to her. Just for once. You could have made her see the truth about things. She would have believed you. Not me or Megan or some doctor, but she would have believed you. Of course she was scared of psychiatrists and policemen and being locked up. I know she was. And I know perfectly well how come. But someone needed to force her to understand that you can’t do what she was doing, that even in America they’d come and get you, if you acted like that. You never explained things clearly enough to her. And she would have listened to you.’

  ‘And you think I didn’t try? You really believe that?’

  Silence fell between us. I’d made him angry. His anger flared up and then died down all within the space of that silence. At last he lowered his head, put the end of one fist to his mouth and blew out a long breath. Wearily, he shook his head.

  ‘Lesley, you’ve got to understand how much I loved your mother. She was all the world to me. From the moment I met her. I loved her more than I ever thought
it was possible to love another person. She was such an incredible individual. So unusual. So vibrant. Lesley, I’m not like that. I’m very ordinary. Loving her was the only exceptional thing I’ve ever accomplished with my life.’

  A moment’s stillness followed.

  ‘But, honey, your mama was very much her own person. She controlled her own life. She always did. I never possessed her and I don’t think anyone could.’

  He raised his eyes to me. ‘I took her away from all those things that happened. That was all I could do for her. I took her away and I tried to keep her as safe as I could. I’ve spent all my life keeping her safe. I don’t regret it, but it has been my whole adult life.’ There was another small pause. ‘So, do you think I haven’t asked myself all those questions already? Do you think I don’t feel bad enough about what happened without your help?’

  I picked up a bit of lint off the bedspread.

  Finally, I shrugged. ‘I’m just saying that I think you should have done more then you did, that’s all. You didn’t face up to things, and they were obvious. I kept saying we needed to do something. I kept trying to make you see that we couldn’t just let her go on doing whatever she wanted.’

  ‘Hindsight’s 20/20, Les. But what’s in front of us at the time we don’t have a script for. I was doing the best I could.’

  ‘You were doing nothing.’

  He sighed very deeply and turned his head away toward the window. I could tell he was being consumed by the same sort of taut, desperate anger as I was. I wished suddenly that he would shout at me, that he would scream at me and I could scream back. But he didn’t and the anger stayed cold and restless between us.

  ‘You have to understand that your mother did have some serious problems.’

  ‘I don’t need to hear about Mama’s problems. Auntie Caroline’s already told me all I want to know about Mama’s problems today.’

  ‘What I’m trying to say, Lesley, is that I’ve lived with your mother for over thirty years, and that’s a long, long time to get to know someone in. And in those years I saw her in so many ups and downs, in so many good moods and bad, in what I thought was every conceivable situation – including all the other traumas over Klaus that we had. But Les, I still was not her. I still was not inside her head, thinking her thoughts, feeling her emotions. She did have some real problems; you cannot deny that. And she had some difficulties that you just couldn’t work your way around. But she was a good woman. For all her troubles, she was a good person. And there was never one thing in her character that had ever made me believe she’d go out and do what she did. Holy God, Lesley, of course I would have done more, if I had thought that, if I’d even had the slightest inkling of it. Of course, I would have. But the thing is, I never even dreamed of it.’

  I sighed and looked down at my book.

  ‘She was a very complex woman. I did my best by her. I probably made plenty of mistakes along the way. And no doubt through the years there were a lot of things I could have done better. But, Les, I always did the best I could.’

  With one fingernail I riffled along the edges of the pages in the book. Weary depression was superceding the anger in me. I felt tired. Too tired to keep on with the conversation. Too tired to cry. Too tired to even care.

  My father remained sitting on the chair next to my bed, his hands in his lap.

  ‘Why did it happen, Dad?’

  He looked over.

  ‘She was a good person. Why did she have to suffer through all those atrocious things? They ruined her life. They’ve nearly ruined ours. Why did this happen to us?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I keep wondering what the point of it is. I keep trying to figure out why we deserved this.’

  He shrugged. It was a slight movement, just a twitch of his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think it just happened.’

  ‘There’ve got to be reasons,’ I said.

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘There’ve got to be answers.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure there do. Or at least I’m not sure we ever necessarily know them.’

  I lowered my head. ‘I can accept this happening. If I know why, I think I can accept it, but I do need to know the answers.’

  And all my father did was sigh.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Outwardly, a semblance of normalcy returned. On Wednesday of the following week, Auntie Caroline went back to Winnetka, leaving Dad, Megs and me to try life without Mama on our own. On Thursday Dad decided that it was time for Megan and me to go back to school. It had to be faced sooner or later, he said, and the sooner the better, especially in my sister’s case, because her work had suffered disastrously during the weeks leading up to the murders. My father took Megan back the following morning, so that he could have a word with her teacher and the principal. I returned to the high school by myself.

  Inwardly, however, for me at least, not even a semblance of normalcy showed itself. The thing I had not counted on was the almost palpable way I missed Mama. It was the sense of absence that destroyed me. I woke with it, a curiously flat emotion, and lay in bed, listening for my father to get up first. I couldn’t bear going by his bedroom, seeing him curled up alone in the big bed, still scrupulously keeping to his side, leaving the other half undisturbed. So I would wait. Even on the weekends when I generally got up first, I would wake and wait. The worst time of day, however, was late afternoon. I would always arrive home from school, expecting Mama to be there. Long after I had consciously given up expecting it, some small part of me would tense with anticipation when I opened the door. Then I would see only Megan, sitting alone at the kitchen table, and the flatness would return. The house was soaked in incompleteness. My days were all stained grey.

  I felt weighted down. The weeks were warm and scented with lilac and hawthorn, and each day that passed seemed to add another weight. Day by day, the burden grew heavier, and my shoulders ached with a physical pain and my back hurt so much that standing became an agony. I told Dad about it, and he made me hot compresses and rubbed my shoulders. When that didn’t help, he made an appointment with the doctor for me. But it was the passing days that were so heavy. I said this to the doctor, and he nodded and gave me a prescription for Valium.

  The only way to make my back and shoulders stop hurting was to lie flat on my bed. That helped. More and more of my free time was spent in my room on the bed. If I lay perfectly still and did not move, I felt OK. But I had to keep the door shut to prevent Megan from bothering me, because I discovered talking to Megan made me move too much. And after a while I found talking to Paul or Brianna or Dad hurt too much too. So I locked the door.

  Most of the time in the bedroom I did nothing. I just lay there, stared at the crack in the ceiling over my bed and didn’t dare to move for the pain. And I thought. At first it was just about Mama. My ability to create images of things in my head had always been good, and I could visualize her with intense clarity: the tilt of her head, the hang of her clothes, the spirited quickness of her movements. I could hear her too. She’d had a very distinctive laugh. When she was really pleased, her laugh would go way up the scale to a high note and burst into cackles. Her heavy accent had always dominated her speaking voice and made it very easy to recollect. Her r’s especially had sounded foreign, pronounced in a rolled, throaty way that made them nearly lisped. And she had been capable of absolutely fracturing English on occasion, either by using German sentence structure that kept us all waiting breathlessly for the verb, or by committing hilarious malapropisms, like the time she told Megan’s second-grade teacher that Megs was suffering from conjugal bliss when she meant conjunctivitis. Mama had never been wholly at home in English. It had always been a troublesome language for her that she littered with not-quite words, like ‘quietful’ and ‘longly’, and retreated from whenever it became too inconvenient. As a child I had been annoyed by her accent, her unwillingness to accept English, her persistent foreign
ness. Now these things drenched my memories with tender affection.

  I wondered about Mama as a little girl. I tried to create a picture of her with pigtails and knock-knees, full of childhood’s eager clumsiness and innocence. The sweeping panoramas of Lébény and of Dresden with Tante Elfie unfolded themselves with willing familiarity, but I realized abruptly that I had never been quite able to formulate an ordinary girl to go with them. All I could ever conjure up was a survivor, someone who lived only in extremes, where everything had always been loyalty or betrayal, trust or treachery, life or death. Childish concerns were impossible to measure on such an heroic scale. What did girlish rivalries with schoolfriends, fights at home for the biggest piece of cake or desperation at being left out of a list of invitations to a party weigh in comparison? Thus the only girl I had ever brought to mind had bold Aryan features and the veiled, uneasy acumen so common to the very bright. But she never had innocence.

  I wondered, when I couldn’t re-create the girl from before the war, what she must have been like right afterward. I couldn’t picture Mama then either, with less than a hundred pounds on her tall, rangy frame. I couldn’t imagine her with short hair. Dad, during that era, came to me more clearly. I saw him the way he looked in the photograph we had of Uncle Kip’s wedding. Dad had been best man. Slight and slim in his dress uniform, he’d stood beside Kip on the steps outside the church. His cheeks had been round and red as autumn apples, his eyes completely obscured by the shadow of the visor on his hat. But how had he looked to Mama in that hospital in Germany? She, with her love of classical music and ballet, with her sophisticated knowledge of upper-class European life, with her restless, undisciplined intelligence. How had he beguiled her to want a pimply-faced farm boy from Illinois? What kind of magic did he use to make her choose a life of wearing secondhand denim and scrubbing her own floors and wandering from one backwater community to another with a man whose only accomplishment was loving her? I could create images but I could never give life to the young man and woman they must have been.