Last Rights

by Lynne Hugo

  “Yes.”

  “Then come.” I surprised myself by saying it, just as I’d surprised myself by holding my own with Evan, who’d always shone so much clearer than I and been so much himself.

  32

  SO TWO WEEKS LATER, Evan was back. I’d begun to acknowledge that there was a decision required of me, though I couldn’t seem to confront it head-on. “Face into the wind;” Mother’s aphorism. It seemed like good advice, though the memory was tainted with the scene that had followed an expression of it, when I’d given the copper-tooled plaque to Roger. I wondered if he still had it. Had any of what had transpired between us all held a kernel of goodness? A vein of guilt as real as flowing blood connected us, that much I knew for sure, and love had proven to be nowhere close to enough to save us from harming and being harmed. I wondered how Evan could miss it; in spite of my best intentions and efforts, already I’d scarred him, strong as he was. Surely it was only time until he would reciprocate, and the circle would reseed itself.

  Yet, the night he returned to Truro, I could feel his need and the need of my own I’d so wanted to refuse. I lit candles in the cottage bedroom and we undressed each other gently, each of us holding back and tentative at first. Unspoken questions were in our fingers, in the air we breathed, their various resolutions elusive as specters in a dance of continuously changing partners above our heads. But then it was as if we were our own beginnings, swimming again in the dark, finding our way flowing over each other like water, loosening secrets, dissolving the hardened places until all that was fearsome dissolved and streamed together, forgiven. I remember thinking that maybe it could be this easy to die, falling like rain into the ocean and lifted as mist in the early haze where there are no edges. But seamlessness never lasts.

  Evan slipped into sleep, still pressing me to him. When I felt him relax, I extricated myself and propped my back upright against the pillow, pulling the sheet and blanket over my nipples, returned to softness now, and over Evan’s bare chest. I tried to read, but kept losing my place, so often did I check on him, just outside the amber circle of my wakefulness. Keeping watch was what I was doing, thinking of how to protect him from what I knew about the course of human ties, wondering if I could protect him from me. The bay had tired into sighs: sorrow and love, sorrow and love, sorrow and love, sounds washing up and back through the open window.

  IN THE MORNING, I FIXED us a brunch of juice, eggs, blueberry muffins from Front Street and coffee; this was still my place, not Evan’s, and I wasn’t willing to relinquish his guest status yet. We’d slept until nearly eleven, and when we sat at the small table by the window, the sun was high, unimpeded by clouds, glaring off the water to redouble its power. Evan’s face was sidelit as he read the newspaper and he did not catch me studying him. When had those tiny lines begun to emanate from the corners of his eyes? He wasn’t thirty yet. The newspaper had smeared ink onto his fingers. Smudged, they looked different than I’d seen them before, vulnerable, capable of frailty. He was going to grow old. I wanted to take his hands in mine and tenderly clean them with a moistened towel, as one might clean a child’s.

  I wondered if Evan had ever studied me in full window light, keeping silence with his observations, as I did then. He looked up, not catching me (I had anticipated the shift of his eyes), only to point out an article about the effort to save the terns. He knew I’d grown to love the little birds that darted after the waves on the beach. I nodded.

  “But I think I’m giving up on the notion that anyone can be saved,” I said, not intending the switch from birds to humans, but hearing it as though someone else were speaking.

  “I think I’m coming to that, too,” he answered. He put the paper on the table and pushed it away from himself in an emphatic motion, making it clear he intended to talk. Leaning in, he said, “But notice, that you really can’t kill anyone, either, unless they let you. Look how you’ve survived your mother. I’m finally getting to the point where I know I can’t save you—that it’s as crazy for me to try, in a way, as what your mother did. Who am I to say what’s best for you, even if I want it to be me?” He gestured toward me, a palm-up, open hand. “Look at you. You’ve made a life here, your own. Obviously you can save yourself. It’s your privilege, not mine, much as I wanted to claim it. And you’ve got to quit thinking you can kill me. I won’t let that happen.” I’d had no idea that Evan knew what I feared.

  Something in me broke open like a bursting pod then, and I had to know if the seeds were poisonous. “Listen to me. I helped my mother kill my grandmother. She opened sleeping pills, they were blue capsules, and dumped them in her own mother’s water. She put a straw in it, and I sat there, I didn’t do anything to stop it, I helped her.” As I got the words out, forced them out, I knew I had to tell him the rest, even though Evan’s face told me he was trying to take in what I’d said about Grandmother.

  “You were a child,” he said. “How can you—”

  I interrupted. Now I used the side of my arm to push my coffee mug back, to use the table for support—or a drawing board, I suppose, if I had to draw pictures for him to get it. “It wasn’t just when I was a child. I…Oh, God, Evan, you don’t know what I’m capable of.”

  “So tell me,” he challenged.

  “I’m trying to. When I was in college—after I knew you, after we were in love, after we were engaged, for God’s sake—when I went home to tell her…Remember?”

  “And my mother had called her and caused…”

  “Right. She was waiting for me, in one of her crazy times. She’d seen us kissing, or she’d been flirting with you, or whatever. She must have gotten aroused. Well, don’t you know, virgins aren’t supposed to get aroused.” Even then I heard the bitter almond between my own teeth. “She wanted me to beat her. I refused and she started beating me, with a belt.”

  His face got angry, the outraged kind of anger. But it was at her.

  “No, listen, you don’t get it. I did beat her. I hated her. Do you hear me? I think I shouted I hated her and that she was going to tell me who my father was and she had no right to keep me from having a life. I don’t even know what I said. She made me do it, Ev, but once I started she had to beg me to stop. Do you see? I beat her, I told her I hated her, and she killed herself? No, Ev—I killed her.”

  “Oh, my God,” he said, his eyes getting glassy with tears.

  I had nothing else to say. When he stood up, I honestly thought he was probably leaving. But he took one step, pulled me up by the arms and drew me against him. “You’ve been carrying this…I do understand. Now I do.”

  We stood like that, I folded in his arms. Both of us cried.

  “Do you still think we can do it?” I asked, knowing the question vague and unspecific. Evan knew what I was getting at.

  “Yes, Ruthie, I think we can be together and not kill ourselves or each other. I want to try, I know that. I really want to try.”

  “I’m afraid of what we’ll do to each other. It seems as though it’s such a dangerous thing, loving and destroying all mixed together.”

  “It does, doesn’t it? I know I haven’t been through what you have, and maybe you’ll think I’m just naive, but I still think that love rises, like cream over milk, you know, that what’s rich and good comes out on top and sometimes you can separate them if you’re careful. But it’s all part of who we are. And that’s okay. I trust the cream in us to rise, Ruthie.”

  “Like cream over milk,” I repeated softly, something in the image familiar, though perhaps it was my imagination. “When I was really little, one place we lived, we had milk delivered. I remember the milkman would leave these glass bottles on the back doorstep in a metal milkbox before we got up, and Mother would shake the bottles really hard before she opened them to mix the milk and cream together. I actually remember that. I’ll have to make you a pitcher for just the cream sometime.”

  “Don’t think I expect we’ll have only cream. But I’d treasure it, Ruthie.”

  We left
it at that, and somehow managed not to discuss it further. Evan went back to New York, the fragile understanding we’d reached stretching between us like a cord of hope that neither of us were willing to strain by pushing to decide a specific course of action. There was too much I still had to do.

  33

  ALMOST ALL THE LEAVES were down thanks to a heavy storm on November first. The dune grass had browned, though in certain casts of sunlight it shone as if gilded. The beach plums were a subdued copper; land blended into the dunes in a limited spectrum of color, more subtle than summer’s, until it reached the sea and exploded into brilliance. Of course, the air was colder almost daily, except for isolated days, one or two at a time, when Indian summer returned to linger. Then I would go to Ben and Marilyn’s to walk the ocean beach after working in the studio all morning. On the colder days, the bay side was the only place I could take my long walks without being buffeted by a wind so intense it stung my eyes and made my ears ache.

  I didn’t make a conscious decision to go through the boxes of our heritage. They were jammed in the trunk of Mother’s car, along with her ashes and, in retrospect, I guess it was fitting that I still carried them all with me everywhere I went. What brought me to take the boxes into the cottage was pragmatic enough: I went out to the car one morning and found it listing heavily onto a flat tire. It didn’t surprise me that Bonnie knew how to change a tire; she did most of the repairs on the rental cottages, and the off-season maintenance.

  “Well, have you got a spare?” she demanded in her brusque way when I went to their house to use the phone. “If you’ve got a spare, I can change it for you.”

  “I guess so,” I answered. Actually, I had no idea.

  “Let me get a jacket,” she said. We went to the car and, of course, to get into the tire well, the boxes all had to be removed. Bonnie and I carted them to my cottage in three trips. I stuck the urn with Mother’s ashes into the backseat. Bonnie didn’t comment.

  “What’s in these, for heaven’s sake?”

  I hesitated for only a minute. Bonnie had been there. She knew how hard it was. “The last of Mother’s things,” I told her. “My brother and I gave everything else away. This is the stuff she had kept for years. I haven’t…well, you know, I just haven’t been able.”

  “It’s probably time,” she said. “Do you want help?”

  “I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “Let me know,” she said.

  Bonnie was right, it was time, but for a couple of days the boxes just sat there, obstacles to nearly every move. I considered moving them back to the trunk of the car, but didn’t. Then, one afternoon, I’d had enough. I made a pot of tea, put on the space heater against the damp chill and opened the first box.

  My mother’s perfume, the one she had worn daily, drifted faintly into the air when I unfolded what was on top: the chocolate-brown dress with the white fur collar. (It had been I who had folded and replaced it after the episode when she’d last put it on. We’d only gotten to the fourth box.) That moment it seemed as if she had appeared at the door, so large a rush of memory and sadness seized me. I had an impulse to apologize yet again for being too late to save her, but it passed even as it occurred. For the first time, I said this to myself and believed it: I did the best I could.

  There was a great silence around and within me. I believe I half expected to hear her condemning voice, but I did not. Nor did I hear anything I could interpret as the voice of God. But in the silence was a release. She had made her decisions, now I would make mine. Like everyone else, in the last analysis I was alone in my own skin.

  I set to work, removing everything from the boxes and examining each article. Most I studied, then folded neatly and replaced. There was one sweater I thought I remembered my Mother wearing when I was quite small, a Norwegian knit cardigan in blue and white, with silver buttons. I had an image of her laughing, the pastel blue almost exactly matching her eyes, when she was the world and the world was—for however long it lasted—good, safe, bearable. I kept that one sweater, and—from another box—a palm-size edition of the New Testament that was tucked in the pocket of a dress. The handwriting of the inscription was unfamiliar, which made me grieve what hadn’t been as much as what had. “For Elizabeth, beloved daughter, with great faith, Mother.” Of the first five boxes of my heritage, that was all I chose to save.

  In the last cardboard box, the smallest, a size to hold a pair of men’s winter boots, were a few articles of baby clothing. Perhaps they’d been mine; certainly the pink smocked, lace-edged dress wouldn’t have been Roger’s, although perhaps it had been one of Mother’s Grandmother had saved. How would I ever know? There was a pair of baby shoes, a report card from my first and third grade years. A brown teddy bear missing eyes, matted and sucked-on. Then this: folded in a tiny white knit suit with a yellowed spit-up stain on the front was a piece of discolored paper. The ink on it had faded, as fountain pen ink does in time.

  Donald Sandburg, 52 West Merritt Street, Seattle, it said. It was paper-clipped to Roger’s hospital record of birth, a scroll-edged document that was a memento, not a legal paper. I knew what it meant, then, that saying about hearing blood in your ears. My heart thudded as if the pounding was from outside rather than in. I began to empty the box faster, still being careful to examine each item as I took it out. A lace-edged bonnet, white. A yellow baby sweater, hand crocheted.

  Yes. It was there, too. A homemade christening dress hemmed in feathery stitches, the lace on it matching the lace on the bonnet, and a black and white picture of a boy…or a man, the picture trying to roll itself up as if to keep the image hidden, its creamy border scalloped. The subject looked young, a hand up to shield his eyes from too much outdoor light. On the back, John Meyer Miller, Oct., 1957. That was all. I studied the picture, though I couldn’t tell what the background was. Did I look like him? Maybe. The features were indistinct and there was no way to tell about freckles or red hair or narrow hips or whether his big toe was longer or shorter than the second. But I thought it: this is my father.

  Then, on the bottom, more pictures, some very old ones, a few with dates and unfamiliar names. Sarah, one said. Some had dates on the back, most didn’t. I had no sense of the passage of time that afternoon. I knelt on the floor by the open box looking at each secret until my legs had cemented themselves in that awkward position and I had to work just to stand.

  I had no idea what I’d do. But, for the first time, there would be a new place from which to start. Whenever, whatever I willed to start. I straightened up and turned on a lamp. One day was gone, but I had reason to believe in another.

  WHEN I WAS FINISHED, I went to the car and got the urn. I believe I held it with a greater compassion and less fear than previously. In the cottage, I removed Mother’s final words to God from where they were still wedged in the base. I did not read the letter again, but removed the top of the urn, laid it on top of the ashes, and there, set it on fire. Not all of it burned, of course, a word here or there escaped, but I crumbled the cooled new ashes and scraps of paper in with Mother’s remains.

  Then, in the dark, I carried the boxes—all except the little one, where I’d replaced the papers and the pictures—and the urn back to the car. During the rest of the evening, the welcome inner silence remained, as though something were at last over. The next morning I didn’t go to the studio, but drove to Hyannis, the closest place where there was a Goodwill collection center according to the phone book. So much of what we’d had had come from them, it seemed right that the last of my Mother’s life should go toward saving women who needed what Mother could give: small protection from the elements until they found their own way in the end.

  I did not return directly to my cottage, but went to Ben and Marilyn’s. They were used to my showing up; sometimes I’d just park and go down to the beach, and other times I would knock at the door and join Marilyn for a cup of tea. This time I parked and carried the urn directly to the beach where I’d seen such joy on Mot
her’s face. On sun-warmed sand below Ben’s house, I removed the top. The afternoon was soft, unseasonably mild, another unexpected gift. When Mother had disposed of Grandmother’s ashes, a gray, substantive cloud had risen from the canyon as though to rebuke and choke us both. I thought of it and almost stopped. I put my hand into the grayish dust and felt the pebbly fragments of remaining bone.

  I tried to think of something to say, but all that came was “Mother…Mother.” In the end, I hummed “Amazing Grace,” in memory of what was not to be saved and what was, as I lifted my mother’s remains by handfuls and released them downwind to the sand, the sea and the air. A quiet breeze carried them away from me. I did not breathe her again.

  THE NEXT DAY, I RESUMED my morning studio work. Lately the pots I’d been throwing were more graceful, narrowing above a wide base then widening out again at the top. “Slow down,” Marcy kept saying. “Just feel it this time. Wait. It’s like your life, you know? Let the clay tell you what it most is, the shape that will be right. It’s a matter of trust.” I tried to listen, but until the day after I’d let Mother go, I couldn’t hear clearly enough. Marcy said, “You can always make something ordinary by imposing on the clay. The extraordinary piece comes, the art comes, when you trust the spirit instead of reciting a creed.” Then she laughed at herself, and said, “Oh, good grief, listen to me. But see, it’s the closest I come to religion.” When she said that, I understood. I had to take a chance. I had to trust what came to me through my own hands and eyes and ears.

  And that day, I finally made a piece to fire and glaze for Evan. It had a handle, sturdy and nearly S shaped for his large hand, the open hand I’d loved from the beginning. I heard the clay saying it wanted to be a pitcher, and I knew Evan and I would set cream out on the table in the home we would make together.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-3409-7

  LAST RIGHTS

  Copyright © 2009 by Harlequin Books S.A.

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