by Kris Radish
But those hundreds of miles did not make a difference and he called her and sent her photographs of his friends, and on long holiday weekends when their brother Grant was racing through town with his girlfriends, she and Michael would go to the movies and talk, just like this, about everything, or so Meggie thought.
“I'm in trouble, baby sister,” he says, dipping his head and slouching his long body into a tiny ball. He rises just a bit and adds, “But it's not totally bad trouble.”
Over the years they have talked about everything and when Meggie's girlfriends had crushes on handsome Michael, he was always gracious, and when Meggie talked about her dreams and about how she wanted so many things that her parents did not want, Michael would hold her against his chest while she cried and tried to figure out who she was and what she wanted to be when she grew up. “Oh, my Michael,” she would say over and over again, “Oh, my Michael.”
Meggie cannot imagine steady, wise, gentle Michael even knowing what trouble might feel or look or smell like. When she closes her eyes, she sees him with a long sword in one hand, his arm around her terribly slender waist and an olive branch tied up in his brown curly hair. He is her friend, her guardian, the one she has always gone to.
They are getting just a little tipsy and Michael says he has things he needs to tell her so he can practice telling their parents in the morning before he leaves.
“You're leaving?”
“Oh, yes, my Meggie, I am going far away.”
There is a hot knife burning a hole in the pit of Meggie's stomach, and she can barely speak. “What are you talking about?”
“Oh, Meggie,” he says gently. “Don't cry, baby. Please don't cry.”
“Tell me, Michael, just tell me. Get it over with. Just tell me.”
Michael wraps his arms around his little sister, holding her while he wipes her face with the edge of the blanket, and then he begins his story. Meggie cannot move. She is horrified and at the same time terribly happy. Michael's story is as old as he is and Meggie understands some of the pieces of his tale, because it is her story too.
Michael did not want to go to engineering school. He did not want to go to school at all. He did not want to spend four years studying something he never intended to practice. Michael wanted to travel and paint and lie on his back near the ocean so he could see what happens to the clouds when they pass across the sea and then bump up against a mass of solid earth. He wanted to have his own life and his own friends and he wanted to love who he wanted to love.
“I was in love with this woman,” Michael tells his sister, beginning to cry himself. “Oh, Meggie, I loved her so much. I will always love her.”
Meggie can't move. She is astounded, because she has never heard this story and she never knew. She never knew. Michael cries in her arms now as huge waves of tears, like the clouds he has never seen, roll through him.
“Tell me,” Meggie whispers gently into his ear, wiping his tears the way he has always wiped hers.
“She lived in my dorm and she was an artist and I loved her the first time I saw her. I love her now. I do.”
“What happened, Michael? Where is she?”
“She is black, Meggie, and when I told Mom, when I wanted to bring her home, when I said that I was in love with her, she told me I had to choose.”
“Mom said that?”
“Yes. She said I could have the woman I loved or the family I have known and loved forever, but I could never bring her home, and if I did they would never speak to me again.”
Meggie has to focus so she will not throw up. The beer and the whiskey have her head spinning and she is imagining what the conversation must have been like as Michael sat with his head in his hands and their mother broke his heart.
“Oh, Michael, I am so sorry.”
“It was my choice. It was the biggest mistake of my life and a mistake I will never make again.”
“Where is she, Michael? What happened?”
Michael's girlfriend, wise and beautiful, was used to the searing eyes of discrimination. She was used to the mothers and fathers of the world looking at her, seeing only one thing and dismissing her as other mothers and fathers and sons and daughters had done for more than a hundred years.
“She left me. When I got back from Thanksgiving break she knew what had happened without me ever saying a word. Oh, Meggie, don't ever let this happen to you.”
Michael cries then like Meggie imagines he has never cried before and she holds his head against her heart and runs her fingers through his beautiful hair and lets him cry out his anguish and his anger and his regret—his burning, horrid regret.
“Where is she, Michael? Why can't you get her back?”
“I don't deserve to have her back, baby. She is who I want to be. Strong and true and living a life that is honest. She finished school and moved to New York.”
“You could find her again, Michael. Go find her.”
Michael cries harder, imagining what his life could have been like with a beautiful and brilliant woman who wore her passion every moment of her life. He is ashamed, he tells his sister, so damned ashamed.
“Go to her,” young Meggie says.
“I have to find my passion first. I have to become a man, Meggie. I need to find my own life before I can dare to assume someone like that will even want to be in the same room with me.”
It is almost too much for Meggie. Meggie, who at seventeen dreams of love and romance as if it is all pouring out of a novel. She does not know the complicated entanglements of life. It will be a very long while before she understands the importance of passion as a grounding stone, a way of life, a place that you can never back away from.
“Someday, then, you can find her again,” Meggie tells him.
Michael desperately wants his sister to know that women and men with passion in their lives must not wait. He wants to grab Meggie by the shoulders and tell her to run from these last few years of her life in this town and with this family. He wants his sister to love and live wildly and to know that she can design every moment of her life and then live it exactly like that design she created. He wants to put her on a cloud and have her see what he has already seen.
But he can't. He knows that Meggie must find her own passion in her own time and in her own style, and his wish that night—the night before his leaving—is that he has planted a seed, a thought, a place for her to begin.
“There's more,” he says, sitting up and turning to face her. The quilt falls away from their shoulders and for a few seconds there is a silence that goes from warm to cold.
“Meggie, I joined the Peace Corps. I leave in the morning. Mom and Dad don't know, and I don't know when or if I will ever come back.”
Meggie cannot breathe. Something has clamped its hands around her throat, and she wants to scream and lie down and never get up. Michael. Her Michael. The rock in her life. The one she calls at midnight.
“Listen,” he tells her, knowing that she now thinks she cannot go on, that without him she cannot make it through the week.
“Where?” she manages to say.
“Tonga.”
Meggie can barely imagine it. Tonga. Tonga. Tonga. She can't even remember where it is.
“It's a place for me to start,” Michael explains. “I'll be doing engineering work, which I hate, but this is my choice and the place I want to be. And where it will take me is beyond anything I need to know tonight or tomorrow or the next day.”
Meggie wants to be glad for him. She wants to understand this huge change in his life.
“Michael, I know this is good. Will it make you happy?”
“It's already made me happy.”
“How will you tell them?”
Michael smiles. “I'm leaving them a note on the table and I'm running away.”
Meggie cannot believe it. “Really?”
“Yes, my bags are at my friend Mark's house. He's taking me to the airport in three hours, and I'm out of here.”
; Meggie thinks for a second. “Isn't that kind of like being a coward?”
“I don't care. It's how I want to do it and it's what I need to do. By the time they get up, I'll be boarding the next airplane in Los Angeles.”
“Wow.”
Michael has other things to tell her. How to reach him, what she should do her senior year of high school, how she should act in the morning when all hell breaks loose, but Meggie has already slipped away. She cannot focus on anything but on the fact that something delicious and solid is leaving her life.
Meggie does not know that Michael has settled so deep inside of her heart that he could never, ever leave her. She did not know that long night that her brother would find his passion, not in Tonga, but in being true to the callings of his own beautiful heart. One day, years later, she will learn that his first great love was miles ahead of him and that when Michael finally caught up to her, she had passed her heart on to another man. Michael tried desperately to tell Meggie that every moment counts and that she should not waste even one of those moments. He sent her letters from Tonga, messages that he thought would help her glide to her own passion. When he moved to Seattle and began to paint and went back to school to become a grade school art teacher, she understood what was happening but she did not realize it also had something to do with her.
That night, with Michael holding her hand and pouring out his longings and realizations, there was the soft beating of a Tongan drum in his head. But Meggie heard nothing. There was an ocean right outside her window and there were strange but beautiful birds calling her name and the whispers of ancient souls pointing her in the proper direction, but she was not ready, would not be ready for a very long time.
Margaret Joan Callie dreamed, but she did not know how to dream. Margaret Joan Callie loved, but she did not know how to love.
When Michael left, she was brave enough to stand in the yard and hold him one last time before he slipped into Mark's car and disappeared down Washington Avenue and toward the swaying palms of the South Pacific. She thought she heard someone whisper her name before she snuck in the back door and quietly slipped into bed, wrapping the quilt around her shoulders to savor the final scents of Michael's aftershave and the beer and maybe the lingering echo of one more laugh.
She thought it was the beer when she heard the whisper again, or maybe the whiskey, and so she did not listen. She did not listen to the whispers of her life, and while Michael winged his way west she embraced her old dreams, the ones with ponies and bright morning light and girls dancing in tights. She did not hear the whispers that spoke to her of mountain passes where the birds' wings touched the tips of the trees and all the good men in places with names she could not pronounce who would hold her hand but never hold her down and the way everything that touched her lips never tasted bitter, but sweet and fine.
She did not hear the whispers.
There is a golden unwritten rule in Mexico. It is the rule called “Never hurry up when you could go slower.” This rule has me totally messed up. I do not like to wait; I do not know how to wait. But in the morning when everyone in this part of the universe is still asleep, I want them all to be awake. We should be driving and galloping and running at full throttle toward this momentous life occasion that will show me whatever in the hell it is I missed and should have come searching for years and years ago.
Elizabeth is asleep.
Linda is asleep.
Jane is asleep.
No one in the very dark and quiet home of our lovely hosts is moving, and here I am all dressed up in my purple skirt, with nowhere to go.
“Damn it,” I say to myself as I kick sand all the way to the beach. “Damn it.”
I decide to walk the beach and air out the purple skirt. It could be hours before anyone wakes up, and I am far too restless to sleep. The sun is not close to blinking awake yet either, and I have no idea what time it might be, so I walk into the beginning of the beautiful Mexican day alone and waiting—two items that seem to be appearing at the top of my list quite a lot lately.
The light here is exotic to me, dancing colors that seem more vivid than the colors of the world I am used to. The sky this early in the morning is just now beginning to turn into a flame of orange. The ocean is not just aqua, it is a shimmering wedge of turquoise that slaps my eyes in a way that feels addictive. I cannot stop looking at the water. Even the air has the scent and feel of something earthy, foreign, new. When my feet kick up the sand, I cannot help but think of the mix of men, women and children who have walked in this very same direction. There is a feeling of foreign grace in every movement. With each step, I wonder whose footfall I have replaced, what great woman has walked this same path, what ancient ship passed on the horizon a hundred years ago right in front of where I am standing. The past, I think with a laugh, is not so far behind me.
Direction has not been my strong suit for quite some time now, but I head—what, east?—along the water's edge and past low bushes, where the scent of something sweet—an unknown flower—drifts across the surface of my skin and makes me smile. I think in that moment that this is the first time in weeks and weeks that I have felt great, just simply great. The confusion of my direction does not matter right now; I know my daughter is all right, I am with three of the most wonderful women I have ever known and I am wearing a purple skirt. There is something in the air, in the simple joy of movement, that delights me, and I consciously choose to be happy, and hope to God I can make this happiness last for a very long time.
It is fifteen minutes before I see a building or any signs of life, and then another forty-five minutes before a group of old, battered tables appear on a small hill just at the edge of the water. A café? Maybe some kind of gathering spot. I cannot see over the top of the hill, but I decide to stop and sit in one of the chairs. It looks as if this was at one time a popular place to stop, and when I close my eyes, for just a few seconds, I imagine it is 1959 and that people from all over the peninsula have come to spend a day or two here and that the beach is littered with wealthy Americans and everyone is happy and having a great time. There is no way I could not stop and rest in this terribly important place.
I suppose I should not be startled when a man comes over the rise with a cup of what I presume is coffee, but I am. “Café solo, señorita,” he says, startling the living bejesus out of me and causing me to rise right up out of my chair as he passes me the small cup, tilts his head and smiles. He has beautiful teeth, white and straight, and I stammer, “I'm so sorry, I just stopped for a moment to rest, and I have no money.”
I should have kept up on my Spanish. “Damn it,” I think to myself, as I stand there desperately wanting the coffee and totally penniless and unable to say anything that I think will make sense to this man with the fine set of teeth, but he startles me again by answering in perfect English.
“Someone has already taken care of this, señorita,” he says. “A gentleman who said to watch for the woman in the purple skirt who might pass this way early this morning. I have been looking for you. We open very early, but business is slow in this sleepy Mexican village in the mornings.”
My heart begins to race as if it has been suddenly shoved off a cliff. A man? My aunt's friend? I turn quickly, to see a tall man with a short-brimmed hat move to the edge of the hill. He tips his hat and walks away just as a large bird, the size of a small dresser, takes flight from a far side of the tables. I lose my balance in the cosmic moment and the waiter reaches out to take my arm, and the simple touch of his hand there, just above my elbow, unsettles me even more. It is so warm where he touches me, and when I turn to look at him and his beautiful smile and then back up the hill, the man with the hat has disappeared.
“Wait!” I yell, still unsettled.
“It is okay,” the waiter says. “He cannot stay. He said to tell you he will see you very soon.”
“Who is he?”
“He will tell you that.”
My hands are shaking. I want the beautiful
man with the even teeth to stay with me. I suddenly become bold. This is definitely something unusual.
“Will you please sit with me and drink coffee?”
The waiter nods, still holding on to my arm, and then lets go so he can move up the hill to get more coffee. Before he leaves, he gently places me in the chair and tells me not to go. He is back in moments with more coffee and a plate of rolls.
“You are too kind,” I say.
“It is nothing. Your friend on the hill left this note for you.”
The waiter sits while I fold back the single white sheet and read what the mystery man has written.
A beautiful morning.
The beach is also what she loved, and often, so often, she came to sit in the very chair where you are now drinking coffee with my son, Tomas. Tomas has a heart lined with simple kindness. Let him take your hand. He will bring you to me, and many other places, if you let him.
I am stunned and thinking that I may be in a movie. I look around, turning my head to make certain that everything is real, to make certain that I am real.
“Are you okay?” Tomas asks me, concerned.
“Yes. I'm a bit scared. Was this all planned?”
“Yes. And no.”
“Please tell me where you learned to speak such perfect English, Tomas.”
“I attended a boarding school in Boulder, Colorado, for my high school years and then graduated from the University of Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“Yes,” he answers, and then I get it.
“Aunt Marcia!”
“Yes,” he says, smiling as he sips his coffee.
“Me this morning and the coffee and you coming to meet me. How did you know?”
“My father knew that you would be like your aunt because she loved you so much. He said that your aunt gave you part of her spirit when you were not working and that she worried you would never realize it, because you, well . . .”
