A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  Many friends and church members had heard Braden’s speech. They were quick to offer Abby a hug whenever they saw her. “This must be hard,” they’d say. “But seeing Samantha and Braden the way they are, it’s got to be worth it. And you and David still together.”

  “I just want to be real,” Abby repeated every time. “I just want to stop pretending.”

  On Tuesday morning, Abby’s mother phoned. “You need to know that Frank has heart arrhythmia,” she said. “They did tests at the hospital and they’re giving him medicine. He’s going to be fine, but it really shook him up.”

  “Mom, I’m sorry.”

  “When you get the chance, would you send him a card or something? You know how he likes to get mail. He’s blue. And he’s always seen you as a daughter.”

  “I know that, Mom. I’ll do something.”

  On Tuesday night, Samantha put ice cubes in Braden’s baseball cleats, and Braden put ice cubes in Samantha’s sleeping bag.

  On Wednesday morning, they packed Braden up for the team trip to Newcastle and the Little League Wyoming Shoot-Out Baseball Tournament. Samantha stood with them in the Kmart parking lot at six a.m., teary-eyed because she didn’t know when she’d next see her brother again, waving off the caravans of SUVs and cars, shoe polish words emblazoned across rear windows:

  “Go Jackson All-Stars!”

  “Baseball Rocks!”

  “Win the Shoot-Out!”

  Braden peered through the back window, through all those white words written on the Hubner’s Landcruiser, waving, too.

  On Wednesday night, two nights before Samantha and Susan would leave, Abby dreamed of Sophie. “What would you take if you had to leave your house and didn’t have any time to plan?” Sophie kept asking over and over again until Abby wanted to shove her away. What would you take? What would you take? What would you take?

  In the dream, Abby searched from room to room. She gathered her most precious possessions, piling one thing on top of another, until everything toppled out of her arms. Everything was too heavy, too large, too cumbersome to carry. Everyplace she tried to go, a dangerous presence preceded her.

  She couldn’t open the front door. Her feet wouldn’t budge. Not until the door flung wide of its own accord and she stepped out into the moonlight did she realize what it was she’d managed to save.

  The two most precious things in her possession.

  Braden’s Little League baseball trophy. And the comforter from their king-sized bed.

  Abby’s eyes popped open, her heart pounding, her pajamas rumpled high around her, wet with sweat. She lay flat, wide-eyed, clutching the comforter to her neck. Night, as black as velvet, draped around her, in a room that felt vacant and strange. The only thing she could see, three tiny pools of light—the same phosphorescent green as a firefly—from the digital clock. Three-forty a.m.

  The first thing she thought to reach for was David. But his side of the bed was empty, the way it had been empty for so many nights before. The pillow lay cold and unspoiled, the sheets unsullied, as creased and flawless as they’d been when she’d climbed in alone hours ago.

  Unable to fall back asleep, she turned back the covers and padded to the window.

  Out in the driveway, moonlight fell like finely powdered dust over the Suburban and the roof planes of the garage. A glitter-streak of pale white spilled through the tree limbs and lay like lace doilies on the grass. At the edge of the yard, the buck-railing and the little wooden sign that read: “The Treasures, 3475 Peaks View Drive,” bulged with the shape of the logs, catching the illumination, a pencil drawing of shadow and light along the fence.

  Abby squinted her eyes shut, then opened them again. She saw what she thought she’d seen in the shadows, a gentle, sad discovery. Two people stood together in the darkness of their driveway. Her husband, David. And Susan Roche.

  Susan’s jacket was draped over a lower rung of the fence. Abby could see the zipper, its ties and snaps etched in the meager starlight. She could just make out Susan’s blonde hair, light enough to show blue in the midnight radiance.

  The view of them together in the dark, as they must have stood so many years before, two figures tempting fate. Abby put her fingers to the bridge of her nose and pinched out the sight of them. When she pulled her hand away, they were still in the driveway, Susan’s face upturned.

  Abby watched as Susan reached toward him in the darkness and gripped his forearm.

  Abby felt as empty as the mountains. This was her house, her territory, her child, her husband. Of course, there would be some explanation. Probably just papers to be signed or plans to be made, something a mother and father needed to do together for their child.

  Probably just…

  Probably just…

  With all the uncertainty Abby might have felt at that moment, all the broken questions she might have asked, all the accusations she might have flung—What more do I have to do? Why do we keep returning to this? If you wanted to talk to her before she left, why couldn’t you do it in the house?—were not what sat foremost in her mind.

  Foremost in her mind, a memory. Two figures standing in a driveway in the dark, at a different house, thirty-five years ago.

  “Mom? Why were you and Dad in the driveway in the middle of the night?”

  “What?”

  “You were doing something out there. I saw you.”

  “The question is, why were you looking out the window at four in the morning, Abigail? You should have been asleep.”

  “I couldn’t. I had a dream.”

  “What were you dreaming, sweet? Was it something that scared you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I heard you and Dad yelling at each other again. I didn’t like it. It scared me.”

  “Maybe you weren’t dreaming, Abigail. Maybe that yelling really did happen.”

  Now, Abby dressed soundlessly, tugging on a pair of jeans and a turtleneck, closing the bedroom door with two hands against the jamb so it wouldn’t click and awaken Sam. She carried her shoes to the front door.

  “He wouldn’t leave us, would he, Mom? Yesterday I saw him packing his socks.”

  “Yesterday? You saw him packing things yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “He must have planned this all week long.”

  “Planned what?”

  A thin, pursed line on her mother’s lips. “Leaving. Yes, he’s gone. Now you know. He doesn’t want to live with us anymore.”

  “Why?”

  The dishrag, going round and round in circles on the counter. “Who’s to say?”

  Abby opened the front door with a squeak of hinges.

  David saw her first, and turned. He gripped Susan’s shoulder as if he wanted to protect her from this. “Abby—”

  “What are you doing out here, David? What are you doing with her?”

  Susan’s forehead shone full and sallow in the unearthly light. She stepped away from David, even though he tried to hold her there. “We were talking—”

  “Don’t explain,” David said to Susan. “We don’t have anything to hide from Abby.”

  “We were talking about Sam’s birth certificate,” Susan said in their defense anyway. “I never put his name there. I wanted to find out if he wanted me to change that.”

  Abby said, her voice uncommonly steady, “She was touching you. What am I supposed to think?”

  “Aren’t we past this?” David asked. “Past the point of what you’re supposed to think?” We are past it. That’s what Nelson’s tried to show me.

  “I should go.” Susan glanced from Abby to David, then back to Abby again. “I’m sorry.”

  “No, we aren’t past this,” Abby said. “That’s something you owe me, David. We’ll never pass the point where I won’t be thinking.”

  Susan retrieved her jacket off the fence. “It’s late. I’ll see you both in the morning.”

  “We’ll never be past the point where we’re both here in
spite of ourselves.”

  Susan’s car had been parked behind the trees in the street. She left them and drove away, not turning the headlights on until she’d driven past the neighbor’s yard. They both watched her go, the low beams two pinpoints in the darkness, sweeping through the bottom limbs of the trees. Then, only starlight again, but David didn’t move toward the house. The heavy stare of his eyes through the darkness showed that he resented her, that he’d hardened himself against her for interrupting them. The moment Abby saw his reaction, she resented him.

  She asked, “You’re out in the middle of the night, in the driveway, with a woman who used to be your mistress. How did you expect me to respond?”

  “I didn’t want her in the house again. You don’t know what it does to me, seeing the two of you together. You should have trusted me, Abby.”

  “I’m trying to trust you. But I can’t just… pull it out of a hat. You have to earn it.”

  “I’ve been trying to earn it for eight years, Abby.”

  “For yourself, maybe. Not for me.”

  “I have an entire lifetime of my little girl to catch up on. I don’t know how else I’m supposed to do this.”

  She didn’t turn to him. She hugged herself instead, tears coursing down her cheeks, while she saw a ghostly moonlight reflection of his face from behind her in the Suburban window.

  “Ab.” He reached for her, but she drew back. “You’re a lot better than I am, Abby. Do you know that?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “You think I don’t know what I’ve put you through? Or that I don’t care?”

  “David, you broke something between us. I’m just trying to get by.”

  In confusion and sorrow, Abby saw a little girl’s face suddenly peer through the front window, a hand drawing back the curtain, solemnly watching their exchange from behind a sidelong wash of light. Her breath caught. Samantha. A girl’s face in the window that, once-upon-a-time, had been Abby’s face.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. “I just need to get away. So many people depending on you.”

  “Abby.” Just as he took one step toward his wife, Samantha backed away from the window, disappearing into the vast, empty darkness of their house. In the moonlight, Abby watched his face go grim. “What did she see?” he asked. “What did she see? Did she see us fighting?”

  It’s endless, Abby thought. Look what I’ve done.

  “You go in there,” she said to David. “You go in to her and tell her it doesn’t matter what she saw. That it wasn’t what it looked like.”

  With one sad, solemn look, David went into the house, leaving Abby broken, clenching her fists at her sides, unclenching them, the chasm of helpless guilt growing broad inside of her.

  The Treasure’s house had many hiding places large enough to conceal a small girl and her sleeping bag. David checked the kitchen cabinet beside the massive sack of Brewster’s dog food. He checked beneath the dining-room table where the chairs made a forest of wooden legs. In the family room, he checked behind the sofa and beneath the black Mendenhall grand piano where Braden used to play.

  It wasn’t until David heard a choked sob from the rear of the mudroom and followed the sound that he found the humped figure leaning against the wall, hidden behind the wicker basket where Braden kept his staggering collection of baseball mitts.

  “Sam.”

  She sat folded like a fishhook inside the sleeping bag, with her hair hanging in clumps across her face. Beside her, the hot-water heater clicked on and seemed to sob with her. She stared at a baseball in the basket with a timer in it, a radar ball that gave a speed readout to indicate how fast it had been thrown. “She doesn’t want me, does she?”

  “No, Sam,” he said. “It’s me she doesn’t want.”

  Sam’s guileless face shone with her willingness to take the blame. “But, if I hadn’t come…”

  “I’m the one. I’ve made her hurt like this. It’s my fault.” He was being forced to face his own pride like layers of an onion being peeled away. How much of his apologizing had been acting, doing what he’d needed so he could get his own way with Abby?

  At that moment, he heard the Suburban roaring to life.

  “Dad, where’s she going?”

  “I don’t know.” How bittersweet, the first time Sam had actually called him the name he’d longed to hear for a week. Dad. He scooped his daughter, sleeping bag and all, into his arms. “We’ll stop her. She ought not to be driving when she’s this upset.”

  It took David precious seconds to punch the button and open the garage door. More precious seconds to load up, get seatbelts on, and fumble for the keys. He could see Abby’s headlights turning out onto the highway by the time he backed out of the driveway.

  Come on, Abby. Don’t endanger yourself. It doesn’t matter what happens between us.

  By the time he turned onto the highway, she had disappeared around the broad curve, the cutaway bank above the South Park elk feed grounds. He pressed the accelerator to the floor, but by the time he had passed the feed grounds, she had disappeared completely across the Snake River Bridge, behind a stand of cottonwood trees that rose like plumes into the sky.

  David checked the speedometer. Seventy already.

  “How fast is she going?” Sam asked.

  “Too fast.”

  It’s my pride that’s done this. It’s been so easy to take offense at her offense. I’ve even been proud that I haven’t been proud.

  His speedometer had inched up past seventy-five on this winding two-lane highway and still he couldn’t see her. When he crossed the bridge, the road became a straightaway and he caught a glimpse of her a good half mile ahead. Abby, slow down. Slow down. It was the time of night when the animals could be out—elk, deer, moose, even coyotes. In the direction they were headed, an entire herd of big-horned sheep grazed on a hill just above Highway 89. Just as he thought it, he saw her brake lights come on. He saw her swerve. He’d made her promise once that she’d never swerve on that road. And there she was. He’d seen her.

  If he sped up to eighty, he could catch up. Wild-eyed, Samantha clutched the door handle on the passenger side. As David pressed the accelerator to the floor, the panic started somewhere deep inside his own chest, smothering him.

  If she gets away now, I’m never going to see her again.

  The panic edged even higher. Where would she go?

  What would she do, on this road?

  If she gets away now, he thought, panicking, I’ll lose her forever.

  The gentle nudging came inside of him, the quiet, surprising wisdom he had come to rely on during these past weeks.

  Beloved, let her go.

  The thought came with such clarity, David knew God whispered in his heart. But if she gets away now, Father…

  Slow down. Let her get away.

  The hum began in his ears, the pounding in his chest. How could he do this? What would he say to Abby, if she ever asked him why?

  You will never do this again, chasing after her this way.

  But, Father…

  Release her to Me. You are not the one responsible to keep her happy, David. You mustn’t let Abby’s pain control you anymore.

  With sorrowful resignation, he eased his foot off the accelerator, and his breathing slowed. Okay. Okay. So, I let her go.

  David steered the Suburban onto the shoulder and cut the engine.

  The sun was just beginning to come up when Abby turned in off the highway to Horse Creek Station. She hid the car in a parking space behind a row of A-frame rental cabins. With one glance behind her, she scrabbled up the pathway between two rusty barrels where the restaurant burned its trash, through a narrow vee between two boulders, out into a grove of aspen, tree trunks silver-blue in the waxing light.

  A fox crossed the forest floor in front of her, stopped, and peered suspiciously in her direction. Abby leaned her head against a tree trunk, staring at the colors of the sunrise as they began to mount into the sky and sta
in the hilltops. Only then did she sink to the ground, wrap her arms around her middle, and finally let loose.

  Oh, Father. What is this? What is this awful thing in me?

  She held herself so tightly that her ribcage and her shoulder blades ached, and she stared up into the leaf-framed shapes of sky. She had expected David behind her, but he hadn’t come. For some reason, a weight fell off her chest. This moment, this moment, she didn’t have to answer to him. She felt an odd sense of peace with that.

  Why does blame get cast everywhere except where it belongs?

  In this place, where she was separate and alone and alive, the leaves on the trees, the silence of the rocks, seemed to whisper of what she had to do and why she’d come here. Abby stood, brushed off the seat of her pants, took a breath that expanded her stomach like a balloon.

  Yes. Yes.

  Later, she would go back and find Samantha. They would lower the steps to the attic together and climb up. She would go to the unsealed cardboard box containing a papier-mâché piggy bank with rhinestone nostrils, spiral notebooks with pictures doodled in ink, old scribbled notes that had been handed desk-to-desk during school days, and a pink cardboard jewelry box. She’d lift the jewelry box and run her palm over the top of it, brushing off a thick layer of dust. She would wink at Sam, find the little key on the back, and wind it up.

  When she lifted the lid, there would be a dilapidated ballerina there, still leaning sideways from her long incarceration beneath the lid on her rusty spring. Even though her tiny tulle skirt had been eaten away by a moth years ago, the ballerina would begin to spin with one hand held high over her head. Ever so slowly, the old music box would begin to play “The Waltz of the Blue Danube.”

  “You have to understand why this has been so hard for me,” she would say to Samantha. “You have to understand how I want you to have your dad because, after awhile, I didn’t have mine.”

  She would pull the cotton out of the jewelry box and find the rabbit’s foot that she’d hidden there, the black-and-white fur worn off the toes from too much rubbing. “A Souvenir of Yellowstone,” the little tag would read. When Sam asked, “What is that?” Abby would say, “This is the last thing my dad ever gave me before he left my mom. It’s really important that I give it to you. It’s time I started giving things away instead of counting the cost.”