by Lisa Wingate
Fortunately, Macey was looking out the other window, her head jiving to whatever downloaded song was playing on her iPod.
The light turned green, and I drove away, my hands shaking on the steering wheel, the café scene playing over and over in my mind until it seemed like a bad movie rather than reality. One of the hazards of living within proximity of the movie capital of the world. Everything seems like fiction. Even your own life.
Macey reached for the door handle as I pulled to the curb to let her out. I tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned back to me, tugging out her ear buds. “Bye, Mom.” She leaned across the car and hugged me, her long, honey-brown hair, her father’s hair, tickling my shoulder. “Have a good trip.”
“I will.” Closing my eyes, I held on to her until finally she wiggled away. “Be a good girl, Mace. You’ve got your routine down, right? Isha’s going to pick you up from school every day except Wednesday, because that’s her day off.” Thank God for the new au pair. “Dad’s supposed to come get you on Wednesday.” What if he’s sleeping with the au pair, too? “Kendalyn’s mom will give you a ride to school in the mornings, and to gymnastics Tuesday and Thursday, and—”
“And on Friday—if you’re not back by then—Grandma and Grandpa Macklin pick me up, so I can stay with them at the beach for the weekend, and on Monday afternoon—if you’re still not back— I’m riding to dance class with Pesha, but Pesha doesn’t do dance on Wednesday, and Wednesday’s Isha’s day off, so this Wednesday, Brooke Strayhorn’s mom is gonna stop by for me—Brooke’s annoying, you know. All she talks about is video games—but anyway, after Dad drops me at home, if he has to go back to work, I’m supposed to lock up and stay in the house until they come to get me for dance class. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t answer the door. Stay inside.” She swiveled her head, blinked at me over her slim shoulder, then smiled. “I’ve got it, Mom. Don’t worry about me, okay? I’m not a baby.”
I touched the side of her face, smoothed a hand over her sun-lightened hair. “I know, sweetheart. You’re amazing.”
“Moh-om,” she sighed, rolling her gaze toward the window to make sure no one was watching. When the coast was clear, she leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. She hauled her backpack off the floorboard, then stepped onto the curb, turned around, and hip-butted the door shut in one efficient movement. I sat a moment longer, watching her disappear, thinking how wonderful she was, how confidently she moved, her body tightly muscled from gymnastics and dance, preteen gangly and still filled with girlish confidence. Why isn’t she enough? I wondered. Why aren’t she and I, a beautiful home, a thriving law practice, enough for Kyle? How could he put everything at risk? How could he risk destroying her? If he leaves, she’ll blame herself. No matter what we tell her, no matter how many of her friends’ parents she’s seen get divorced, she’ll think he left because she wasn’t good enough.
That reality sank over me like the salty mists of a cold winter day, ached with the dull familiarity of an old injury newly awakened. A part of me knew how it felt to see your father walk out the door and never look back.
Watching Macey bound up the marble stairs, her steps buoyant and light, I had a dawning awareness that, somewhere in the hidden recesses of my consciousness, I’d been waiting for this to happen. I’d been waiting for the day Kyle would leave, and the world would come crashing down around us, and Macey would walk up the courthouse steps one at a time, suddenly a tiny adult. . . .
The plane bounced against the runway again, and across the aisle a little Hispanic girl screamed, then tried to unbuckle her seat belt and crawl into her mother’s lap. Macey wouldn’t do that, I thought. Macey would have more sense. She’d handle this like a pro.
Hugging my knees, I hung on as the plane careered down the runway as if in slow motion, the moments stretching and twisting as the mother pulled the screaming girl back into her seat, pinned her daughter’s flailing hands, curled her body protectively over the little girl’s.
Outside, the engines roared and the brakes squealed, the plane fishtailing back and forth. Over the noise, the mother sang close to her daughter’s ear—a lullaby in Spanish.
I would do that for Macey, I thought. I’d fold myself over her and sing to keep her calm. She would probably think I’d lost my mind.
“Mom,” she’d say. “Chill out. It’s gonna be all right. I saw this on an episode of CSI, and they got the plane stopped right before it fell off the runway. It was so cool. . . .”
For a perverse instant, I wished Macey were with me, sitting in the middle seat, where the bald man in the rumpled suit was bent over his knees.
If it weren’t for Macey, I wouldn’t care whether we made the landing or not. . . .
It was a startling thought, and as soon as it came, I pushed it away, stomped it down and buried it under piles of more practical mental dialogue. Of course I’d care. Of course I care about my life. It’s just been a strange week. Too many plates spinning off-kilter at once. Even as I thought it, I wanted to close my eyes and never come in for a landing—just glide, and glide.
That’s crazy. If a client said that to you at the office, you’d tell her she needed to go see somebody, maybe consider taking a mild antidepressant. It isn’t normal to want to check out of your own life.
Is it?
Combing back a curtain of tangled hair, I pressed my palms over my ears. Seconds stretched out endlessly, until finally I felt the motion around me slow, the plane lurch up, then down, then turn to the left in what was obviously a controlled maneuver.
I took a deep breath and crawled back into my own skin. A glance out the window told me we were veering toward a taxiway, passing fire trucks and airport emergency vehicles deployed for our landing. The crews waved as we went by. Overhead, the speaker crackled and the pilot came on, his voice calm and self-assured.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our apologies for the bumpy landing. We’ll be taxiing to the gateway, expecting arrival at the gate in about . . . uhhh . . . six minutes. Sorry for the slight delay, but we welcome you to Dallas-Forth Worth.”
A flight attendant began reading off connecting flight numbers and gates, and passengers glanced at each other with bemused expressions, thinking, no doubt, as I was, Were we huddled, only moments ago, in crash position, or did I dream that? The frantic thoughts of the past half hour seemed ridiculous now. Beside me, the bald businessman cleared his throat and straightened his suit. He glanced at his watch, as if to say, What—you thought this was a real emergency?
Gathering my belongings, I prepared to bolt as soon as we came to a stop at the gate. As the plane shuddered into place, I popped out of my seat and hurried past six rows of seats before the aisle became crowded with passengers taking luggage from the overhead bins and waiting for the door to open. In first class, a male flight attendant was mopping his forehead and assisting an elderly woman who’d boarded with the handicapped passengers during the stopover in Houston. Hands shaking, the woman clung to his arm as he helped her gather her purse and move down the aisle.
I steeled myself for a slow exit. What I wanted to do was run past them, push my way through to someplace that wasn’t vibrating under my feet. Logic whispered that getting off the airplane wouldn’t solve the problem. The whole world was shifting, everything folding and faulting, threatening to crack.
I should call home, I thought, then realized there wasn’t any point. Nobody would be there, except possibly Isha. Macey would be gone to gymnastics, and there wasn’t much chance that Kyle would be home at four fifteen. He probably wouldn’t answer his cell phone, either. This evening, he would stay at work late, checking and double-checking lucrative corporate real estate contracts and preparing for pending mediations—burning the midnight oil. Isha would put Macey to bed, and Kyle would wander in whenever he finished up at the office.
What if all those nights he said he was busy at the office, all those times I surrendered to exhaustion and went to bed alone, Kyle was really burning the midnight oil somewhere e
lse? What if his tendency to let the cell phone roll to voice mail after hours wasn’t because he didn’t want to be interrupted in his work, but because he wasn’t alone? There was a time when I would have been in the office enough to know what Kyle was working on, but the past year of seeing to the Santa Monica boutique left to me in my mother’s will had caused me to do much of my work via dial-up. In some vague way, I knew that the office wasn’t the only place where distance had seeped in, but I’d convinced myself it was part of the cycle all marriages went through. Things got busy, life got in the way, you drifted for a while, then reassessed, decided to work harder, refocus, and come back together. . . .
What if Kyle had decided to move on, instead?
The exit line started progressing toward the front of the plane, and I watched passengers ahead of me sag with relief as they stepped onto the jetway. Behind a young mother, the elderly woman traded the attendant’s helping hand for a small three-wheeled walker, then politely shooed the attendant away, insisting she didn’t need a wheelchair. A frustrated businessman squeezed past me, hemming me in beside the woman.
“Well, that’s it. I shoulda taken the bus up from Houston,” she said, gazing toward me as we started up the jetway. “If God meant human beings to fly, he’d of given them wings.”
“I’ll second that,” I replied, and we smiled at each other, briefly linked in the kinship of survivors. I fell into step beside her, the need to hurry seeping out of me as I considered baggage claim, car rental, and what lay beyond—just across town now, rather than safely across the country. Only a short drive away, in the once trendy, then down-and -out, and now rapidly revitalizing area just east of downtown Dallas, was my father’s house. Our house, once upon a time, before everything changed.
For the past thirty-three years, it had been her house, their house. A place where I was supposed to spend a month of my summer vacation each year, according to the custody agreements. The plan met its end before lawyers and judges could ever rehash the wisdom of sending a twelve-year-old girl for summer visits in a house with the other woman and her mentally off son, as my mother put it. I didn’t put words to it at all. I just sat down in the entryway of my mother’s boutique and refused to go. My mother was pleased that I was firmly on her side. My father didn’t fight it. I knew he wouldn’t.
Victory is sometimes painful. In a hidden corner of my heart, I needed him to fight harder, to care more, to prove he loved me more than he loved them. That vague disappointment grew into a bitterness that made it easy to write “Return to Sender” on birthday cards and Christmas gifts I knew the other woman had picked out. It prevented my showing interest in my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis at seventy-three. When she wrote to me, I wrote back and told her to do whatever she thought was best. Hanna Beth was his wife, after all. Making appropriate arrangements was her concern. She’d asked me to come several times as the last two years slowly peeled layers from his memory. I declined, not always politely. She urged me to make peace with him while I could. I responded that I felt no animosity about the situation—it simply was what it was. She asked if there was anything she could do to convince me to come before it was too late. I admitted, quite frankly, that I didn’t think so.
I was wrong. When you’re notified by the police that your incapacitated father and your adult, but mentally challenged, stepbrother have been alone in a house for three weeks, and Social Services is one complaint away from taking over, you have no choice but to get involved. Hanna Beth Parker had suffered a stroke and landed herself in a nursing home at the worst imaginable time.
“That’s the baggage claim there,” the woman with the walker said, pulling me back to the present. I realized I’d been strolling down the corridor with her—not interacting or offering my name, just matching her slow pace, as if we were together. She must have thought that was strange.
“Oh, yes, I guess it is,” I agreed, angling with her toward the exit to the baggage area. “Sorry. I was a million miles away.”
Craning sideways, she studied me as I held open the door. “I could see that.” She concentrated on moving her walker across the threshold, then added, “But don’t worry. I was watching out for you, just in case one of them international criminal types might come along, or such.”
“Good thing,” I said, hiding a smile, not sure whether she was kidding. My mother had always been on guard in busy public places like airports. She’d watched too many TV crime shows and read the plethora of Internet forwards about potential schemes used by muggers, kidnappers, and human predators of all types. She’d always complained that work often took me to downtown LA, where no place was safe. Even in Santa Monica, the homeless problem made her uncomfortable, because you could never tell about those people.
“Thank ya, sweetie.” The woman with the walker paused to turn her wheels toward the luggage carousel, then shifted directions with her body.
“My pleasure,” I said. The twang in her voice dredged up some old memory I couldn’t quite put a finger on. There was an unhurried cadence to the words, as if she tasted each one carefully before letting it out. My mother would have called it gum chewing. She said people in Texas talked like they had wads of gum in their mouths. After years of living all around the world, following my father’s job in the petroleum industry, she’d been less than thrilled when, the year I turned twelve, we ended up in Dallas, my father’s hometown. As always, my father was a man ahead of his time. He foresaw trouble ahead for oil families living in the Middle East, so he took a position in the corporate office. He was nothing if not a good businessman. Even Mother could never deny that fact.
“The pilot did a darn good job,” the woman with the walker said, pausing to grab her dangling purse handle and attempt, with shaking hands, to hook it over the arm of her walker. Her wallet, brimming with credit cards and a thick checkbook, was about to fall out. My mother would have had a heart attack.
“I’m just glad to be off the plane.” I hovered for a moment, watching her futilely reach for the purse handle. Would my retrieving it embarrass her? “I guess the emergency landing wasn’t such a big deal after all.”
Using an umbrella from the front basket of her walker, she deftly hooked the purse strap and hung it back in place. “It’s a bigger deal than people probably think. My brothers flew supply planes back in World War Two, so I know a little bit about such things. ’Course, with short runways overseas, you either got the plane stopped or you went in the drink. With these long runways, you got more space, but you got bigger planes, too. Lots heavier. Our pilot today was a crackerjack.”
“That’s good to know.” But it really wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe that we’d come close to potential disaster.
Luggage was starting to pop onto the carousel, and my companion gave it a concerned frown.
“Is someone meeting you here?” I asked. No matter how good she was with her umbrella handle, she couldn’t lift bags off the conveyor.
She checked her watch. “My grandson, but I guess he’s got held up in traffic. He’s a doctor. Busy man. My husband and I raised him after my son died. I come up from Houston to visit him every few months, get my medical tests done, hang around the facility and read to the patients. This time I’m gonna have a little of that orthascotic surgery—that’s why I had to fly in, instead of drive. Got to have a ligament repaired in my knee before I can drive again.” She looked around the room a second time. I tried to imagine what kind of a grandson would leave his elderly grandmother, in need of arthroscopic knee surgery, at the mercy of strangers and unable to get her luggage off the carousel.
But then, the anonymous concerned citizen who had contacted the city police on my father’s behalf was probably thinking the same thing about me. “Can I help you get your luggage? I have a cell phone. We could try to call—”
She cut me off with a quick hand chop. “No. No, now I’m fine. I’ll just go over there and get me one of them good-lookin’ skycaps to grab off my bags, and I’ll wait for my
grandson. He’ll come. You don’t worry yourself over me, all right?”
“All right,” I said. “You’re sure?” I found myself wanting her to say no, wishing she would provide a distraction from my impending trip across town to the nursing home to see Hanna Beth.
“I’m fine, sweetie, just fine.” The woman started toward the waiting skycaps. “I’m not as helpless as I look. I know judo. Anybody gives me any trouble, I’ll smack ’em in the kazongas with my umbrella.” I blinked in surprise, and she glanced back over her shoulder, giving a saucy one-sided smile. “Soon as I get this darned leg in better shape, it’ll be, Look out, world, here comes Ouita Mae Barnhill.”
I stood for a minute watching Ouita Mae Barnhill disappear into the crowd and wishing I had her certainty about the outcome of the next few days. Finally, I stepped up to the baggage claim, grabbed my suitcases, and faced the fact that, willingly or not, I had arrived in Dallas.
As March went like a lamb into April, I was returning thirty days early, thirty-three years late, for my month of summer.
CHAPTER 2
Hanna Beth Parker
Every day at noon, Claude passes by my door, his slippered feet shuffling across the linoleum as he pulls his wheelchair along. He stops and tells me about the food in the dining room, as if that might entice me to get out of bed and walk down the hall. On rainy days, when the world outside the window is melancholy and dim, he talks about trains.
Claude drove lumber trains down in the Piney Woods of East Texas. He has the cloudy eyes of a poet when he describes the scent of steam rising off the engine, casting a gossamer mist over everything for just a moment until the train reaches speed. He tells me this story over and over because he can’t remember that he recounted it yesterday, the day before, the day before that. Life, he says, if he stays long enough to become philosophical, is a journey by train. Outside the window, the scenery is rushing by. If you look away for even an instant, something passes uncaptured. Far in the future, when you leaf through the photo album of memory, your finger, aged and crooked, will rub lightly over that empty space, and you’ll wonder, What might have been there?
