After the Leaves Fall

by Nicole Baart

  I had half expected the lights to flicker or for Grandma to gasp in shock and anguish. Neither happened. In fact, the room was so still and motionless that I felt I could hear the pulse of electricity in all the glowing bulbs. Grandma’s hands were still flat on the table in front of me, and I studied the crescent curve of white on each neat nail, wondering if those fingers itched to slap me just a little. I wouldn’t have blamed her one bit. A part of me wanted it. I looked up, ready to show her that I would accept the discipline, that I needed it and deserved it.

  Instead, when my eyes met hers, the compassion on her face dealt me a blow I wasn’t expecting. Anger, frustration, disappointment, bitterness, revulsion, dismay … I could have accepted any of those. I wasn’t ready for sympathy.

  “Oh, sweet girl,” Grandma breathed, and I could almost hear her heart break with the words.

  Sweet girl? My throat was tightening—it wasn’t right for her call me that. And it only became harder to breathe when she lifted herself out of the chair and came to stand beside me, pulling my head against her chest and stroking my hair as if I deserved comfort instead of condemnation.

  I wanted to push her away, to say it again so that she grasped what I had done and how I had wrecked my own life and hers. Maybe she hadn’t heard me properly. But she was warm and soft and smelled of lemon dish soap and cinnamon—clean yet mild and earthy. I couldn’t push her away if I wanted to. I let her hold on to me.

  Grandma’s heartbeat drummed a steady, soothing rhythm against my cheekbone, and I could feel words echoing in her chest though I could not make them out. She wasn’t talking to me; she was probably praying to God. I was actually reassured by the thought—maybe He could clear a path for me. Though the house was bright, I couldn’t see a single step past the very next one I had to take, and even that was uncertain. Anything beyond sleeping in my own bed tonight was lost in complete darkness, and I couldn’t begin to imagine where I was supposed to go from here. I would have felt isolated but for the wrinkled arms around me and the words that I knew were for me. I put my arms around her.

  “This is not the end,” Grandma said, repeating herself as if cooing to a howling newborn even though I wasn’t crying. “This is not the end. This is not the end.”

  It seemed like a strange thing to say, but with every repetition she drove a tiny seed of hope farther into my heart. I almost didn’t want it there—hope is not a promise, merely a wish, a yearning for something that may never materialize—but it sank down deep where I could not extract it and began, even in that moment, to put down fragile roots.

  It was the hope that scared me most of all, and only when I had felt it tremble inside me did I begin to cry.

  Nativity

  GRANDMA AND I WERE TRAPPED inside the house for two and a half days. The snow fell inch by inch and hour by hour, and from the windows we watched it pile up on frozen fence posts as if it were a complicated dance performed just for us. It didn’t bother us that we were more or less prisoners in our own home; we actually appreciated the time alone as we tried to sort things out according to our own best intentions. Strangely, we didn’t really even talk that much about it. We simply spent time with each other, feeling our way around the room again now that we were no longer two but three. Now that everything was different.

  Occasionally Grandma would offer me a bit of advice on how to care for the baby growing daily inside me. Her suggestions were never backhanded, never intended to harm or ridicule, and I gathered each fragment of wisdom as if it were of incalculable worth and followed it to the letter. I began to sleep on my side, avoided crossing my legs, renounced my coffee addiction entirely, and obediently chewed the vitamin C tablets that Grandma set beside my milk glass at every meal. If she would have advised me to say a hundred Hail Marys or do some long-since-banned penance, I would have submitted myself on bended knees. I almost wished to be Catholic just so I would have something tangible to do.

  But the fact that she didn’t kick me out of the house because of my heinous and soon-to-be-visible sin didn’t necessarily make me feel at peace about anything. There was a lapsed churchgoer in me that knew I deserved hellfire and brimstone, a sobbing confession and the righteous judgment of God and my community. It was like waiting for the ax to fall. I wanted to tell someone else, to get it out in the open so somebody would respond the way they were supposed to. If a public renunciation of self would restore some sort of calm to the restlessness that made my fingertips itch and my pulse race just a beat or two too high, I ached to get it over with.

  However, on Monday morning when Mr. Walker finally made it over to our yard with the plow secured to the front of this John Deere tractor, I smiled at him and waved from the front porch. I struggled tenaciously to act as if everything in the world were as right and pure as the snow that had made the view from our window a wonderland. The truth was, the very thought of telling him made me want to crawl into a hole and die. I held my breath and tried to be normal when Grandma and I invited him in for a cup of coffee and a slice of the apple cake we had made on Sunday when it became clear that church was less than a shadow of an option.

  “Did you two fare okay in the storm?” Mr. Walker asked, licking caramel sauce that had dripped off the cake from his spoon.

  We nodded optimistically, and if we looked weary at all, it was easily ascribed to being cooped up for so long.

  “It was kind of fun,” Grandma commented. “I haven’t seen a storm like that for years.”

  “Well, the snow isn’t going anywhere until January at the earliest. Have you seen the forecast? We’re going to have one crazy-white Christmas!” Mr. Walker sounded thrilled at the prospect.

  I mimicked the smile I saw on my grandmother’s face.

  Christmas was a week away and—not for the first time in my life—I wasn’t looking forward to it. Holidays with Dad had always been off-the-wall affairs replete with birthday cakes for Jesus at Christmas and the ubiquitous white bunny in a basket overflowing with green paper grass at Easter. I got one four years in a row until the rabbit hutch beside the garden shed was filled to overflowing, and we had to put ads in the paper to rid ourselves of the many offspring. There had been an extravagance to everything when Dad was around, and though in retrospect I could recognize that he felt trapped into somehow trying to make up for the many failures that he thought had forever wounded our family, there was a certain charm in our lavish celebrations.

  The year after Dad died had been a very quiet Christmas. He had been gone for only slightly over two months, and Grandma and I simply didn’t have the heart to commemorate him the way we should have. He would have wanted us to put on Grandma’s old gospel records or A Country Music Christmas and drink far too much eggnog and be a little decadent in spite of ourselves. We couldn’t do it.

  That somber first holiday alone set a pattern for us, two lonely ladies that we were, and try as we might, we could not rid ourselves of the solemnity of an occasion that reminded us of the meagerness of our family. I was the only daughter of an only son, and there was a sort of palpable regret in Grandma sometimes, almost as if everything inside her lamented the fact that she had never had more children—that I didn’t have aunts and uncles and cousins to bear some of the desolate burden.

  For my part, I had never longed for an arching family tree. But I did begin to dread certain holidays with a quiet dismay that made me wish we could simply gloss over that particular date on the calendar and get on with life as normal. The more minor days were fine—Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day—because we were always invited somewhere for those celebrations. But people drew lines around their families for the important holidays, tenderly pulling each other in and politely closing doors around themselves to protect the sanctity of those moments alone. I didn’t blame them one bit. Dad and Grandma and I had done the same.

  This year, with the world tilted off its axis and my own body as unfamiliar to me as an unexplored wilderness, Christmas simply seemed irrel
evant. When Mr. Walker reminded me of it, I checked out of the conversation around the table and tried to make myself focus on the details: a present for Grandma, cards for a few people whom I always sent cards to, a tree. … A tree? I glanced over my shoulder into the living room and realized that there was no Christmas tree in front of the bay window. I had no deep love for the holiday, but it seemed wrong to go through Christmas without a tree.

  “Got a little cabin fever?” Mr. Walker asked, startling me out of my reverie. He put his hand on my forearm and smiled warmly at me. “You should get out of the house.”

  “I’m sending her out this afternoon,” Grandma conceded. “We need some groceries.”

  Mr. Walker gave my arm a squeeze and pushed back his chair. “Well, if you get bored, Francesca is spending Christmas with us and seems a little desperate for female companionship.”

  I waited for a shiver to accompany his words, but they evoked no such emotion in me. I had known Thomas and Francesca would get back together, and now I just didn’t care. It was as insignificant to me as if they were virtual strangers. Which I decided they were.

  “Thanks for the invite,” I said courteously, but I didn’t offer a word more. He could interpret my intentions however he chose.

  Mr. Walker settled a suede cap on his head and pulled down the fur-lined earflaps. He tapped his fingers to the edge of the hat and gave us a little nod. “As always, ladies, thank you for the hospitality.” Grandma gave him a warm smile and came around the table to dissolve some of his phony obsequiousness with a hug. “Have a very merry Christmas, Jonathan.”

  “You too, Nellie. Julia.”

  After he was gone, Grandma and I donned our winter gear and headed outside to dig out the car. Turned out, Mr. Walker had already done the job for us. We stood on the driveway for a moment, looking at the swells of white and the steely clouds that threatened even more snow and feeling a little useless and lost.

  Finally Grandma said, “I made a grocery list. Do you want me to come or would you like some time alone?”

  “Well, do you want to get out of the house for a while?” I asked, not daring to say that I really wanted to be by myself.

  “I’ve got lots to do here,” Grandma assured me. “You just go.”

  I was undeserving of such understanding, but I nodded gratefully and accepted the piece of paper and small envelope of cash that she gave me. “I’ll be back soon,” I promised.

  Value Foods was so packed with people stocking up on necessities that I got the second-to-last shopping cart in the whole store. The aisles were traffic jams of mothers chasing energetic toddlers who were reveling in the freedom of being somewhere other than the stifling four walls of all-too-familiar homes. There were at least a dozen people waiting at the meat counter, and the dairy case had already been emptied of the pound blocks of butter Grandma liked to use for baking.

  I tried not to get annoyed and made substitutions whenever I came across an item on my list that had sold out. It actually seemed appropriate somehow to have such a hodgepodge holiday. I had to settle for chicken instead of the traditional Cornish game hens that Grandma prepared for our Christmas feast. Low-fat eggnog because the regular cartons were already gone. Margarine substituted for butter.

  At the checkout, I counted the cash that Grandma had given me and waited for the final amount. When $36.57 flashed on the till, I realized I had enough and asked the girl behind the counter to add a Christmas tree to my bill.

  “They’re pretty picked over,” she warned me. “But they’re cheap— $19.95,” she said as if it were the steal of the century. Without waiting for me to change my mind, she typed in a lengthy code from a laminated piece of paper that hung on corkboard beside her. “Do you need help getting it strapped to your car?”

  “No,” I said, handing her exact change. “I’ll manage.”

  “Hey, it’s up to you. Have a merry Christmas!” she called after me as I slid the handles of four plastic bags on my arms and grabbed a gallon of milk and juice in each hand. I was about to wish her the same, but she was already helping the next customer.

  I wrangled the groceries into the passenger seat of my car and drove it over to the side of the grocery store where there was a makeshift lattice fence around a handful of snow-laden Christmas trees. The boughs of each tree were wrapped in twine so they looked skinny and imprisoned—wrestled into a straitjacket in some satirical comment about the absurdity of such a commercialized holiday—and I studied them for a moment before walking up to the smallest one and grasping it by the trunk. It only came up to my nose, and the top branch was spindly and crooked. I knocked the bottom against the pavement a few times, and snow fell in a shimmer of frosty silver around me. The tree still looked pathetic. I wanted to grab my car keys and cut through the twine so I could see what it looked like without the ropy shackles, but I knew I would never be able to get it home unfettered. It would have to do. I didn’t really have a choice.

  I crammed the tree in the backseat of my car with the short stump on the floor and the last few inches of evergreen sticking out the open window behind my head. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked, and as I navigated the parking lot more than a few people smiled at me and waved as if my little tree and I were part of some sort of quirky Christmas miracle.

  It had been my intention to go straight home, but when I drove past the used-books store on the corner of Main and Hedgerow, I found myself stopping almost against my will. My mind flickered to all the money that I had left in the snow at Brighton, and a drop of regret poisoned the well of my soul when I imagined what I could have done for Grandma with that kind of money. I had always tried to get her meaningful Christmas presents, something that would please her the way that my dad’s perfect gifts had always delighted and amazed. But I hadn’t been given his innate ability for gift giving, and my well-intentioned but usually off-the-mark presents were unimpressive and predictable. A glass pitcher, a new set of baking pans, fancy rose-scented soap and lotion. I hadn’t given a single thought to what I wanted to get her this year, but I had to assume that this might be my last chance to pick something—anything—up.

  The store was stuffy and smelled of dust and mothballs and old books. It was a sweet, familiar smell. I had been a patron of the narrow rows for as long as I could remember, always looking for something popular or interesting—a jewel that someone had overlooked and left as a modest treasure for me to find. I had never found anything even remotely precious. Apparently people held on to their treasures.

  Mr. Fletcher, the owner, was sitting behind a low desk against the wall nearly obscured from view behind stacks of books that he was evaluating and pricing. He was the only person in the store, and he barely looked up when the bells above the door chimed. His watery eyes took quick note of me as he said, “If you need help, you know where to find it.”

  I had heard him say the same thing more times than I could count. I had never asked for his help.

  I went straight to the religion section and thumbed through books on the only faith that Mason acknowledged: Christianity. Once, I had unearthed a translation of the Bhagavad Gita and had made it to the second chapter (“When the mind constantly runs after wandering senses, it drives away wisdom, like the wind blowing a ship off course. … ”) before Mr. Fletcher wondered at my silence between the aisles of books and found me reading the “beautiful, haunting, and poignant” core text of the Hindu tradition.

  He had whipped it out of my hands before I could finish a particularly arcane passage about “vanishing into God’s bliss” and censured me for not telling him that I had found it among the sanctified texts he fastidiously arranged and rearranged. Someone had obviously slipped it into his store as a joke, though he took it very seriously and seemed to question with grave, milky eyes behind bottle-glass spectacles how much damage such a book had done to me. I was twelve, maybe thirteen. I had found it incomprehensible and lovely. Nothing more.

  No such volume existed there now, and all I could find
were tired copies of Janette Oke books nestled between the odd commentary and various parenting tomes. I touched the spine of one and wondered if someday soon I would reach for parenting wisdom from a complete stranger. From someone so utterly and impossibly removed from me and my situation that I would have to weigh each suggestion against my life and decide whether or not it held value for me. I hoped I would not have to depend on such abstractions.

  There was nothing for Grandma in the religious section.

  I wandered through cookbooks, fiction, and even children’s literature before I crossed through poetry on my way to the door. I hardly even slowed down to skim the titles, but a thick book with tattered binding that had begun to roll away from the spine caught my eye. It was a muted gray-green with gold filigree that had faded to a dull glow. There were flowers with red petals climbing the sides and wrapping around the cover in a repeated pattern of cultivated lushness. Had the book said anything other than The Complete Works of John Donne, I would have walked away. Instead, I carefully opened the cover to read the price Mr. Fletcher had penciled in. Twelve dollars. I would have paid much more.

  My father had actually been the John Donne devotee in our home, quoting the occasional line from a sermon or a poem though he was no literary mind or even very well read. But something about Donne had grabbed Dad in his high school days, and he had often proclaimed his undying loyalty to a man as godly and yet as allusive and honest about his own doubts and shortcomings as the seventeenth-century Anglican priest. Dad called him an Elizabethan David—a wicked, fallen, broken, but seeking man after God’s own heart.