Surviving Valencia

by Holly Tierney-Bedord

  “Are you ready for some more green bean casserole, Mountain Momma?” he asked, giving my knee a squeeze.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you like the kind with crispy onions on top or slivered almonds?”

  “Both are great.”

  “That’s what I think,” he said, nodding and beaming.

  Today marked the twenty-first anniversary of Van and Valencia’s deaths. Twenty-one years. The time it took to go from being born to sitting in Paul’s Club with Dannon and Luna all those years ago, toasting to adulthood. I’d lived two thirds of my life without Van and Valencia. Yet a day had never passed without me thinking of them.

  “Your dress looks nice,” said Adrian.

  “Thanks.” I had sewn it by hand. It was pearl grey with rich gold trim in a four inch band along the bottom. It came just above my knees. I wore deep grey tights and boots with it. The combination of Alexa’s fashion magazines and my addiction to Cut-Throat Couture reruns was turning me into a mad designer. I had cut my hair into a short, swingy bob with choppy layers. Adrian was oblivious to the cliché of a new haircut meaning a woman is starting over.

  “What have Roger and Patricia got to say about becoming grandparents?” asked Adrian.

  “They haven’t said much. Not many things interest them.”

  At Adrian’s aunt and uncle’s house in Cedar Rapids the night before, his family had bombarded us with presents. New clothes, old clothes that had been Adrian’s and Alexa’s, an antique christening gown, passed down over several generations. The backseat was filled with boxes of heirlooms that Adrian was eager to sift through with me. Most women would love to have a man who was so excited to become a father. It was all right here, in front of me, for the taking. I began to suspect that I would never be selling oranges from a trailer.

  “Would you mind if I drove awhile?” I asked. Our policy had always been that the driver chooses the music, and John Denver had to go.

  “That would be good. I could use a little nap. We can switch at the next exit,” said Adrian.

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey, I have always meant to ask you, what’s the story with that treehouse in your parents’ backyard?” Adrian asked.

  “Story? There is no story. What made you think of that?”

  He pointed to a farm up ahead with a big treehouse high in the wide branches of an old oak tree. I looked at it, and craned my neck to continue looking as we went past. The treehouse was old and droopy. Nowadays everyone has sturdy, easy-to-assemble play structures instead.

  “There is a story,” I admitted. “It was for my brother and sister. I wasn’t allowed up there much. Even when they got sick of it, it was still their territory. After they went to college I went up there a little, but I felt like I had to be sneaky. It was the kind of thing that would have made my parents mad. When they died my dad cut down the rope ladder so I couldn’t get in. What an asshole. Now I think it’s starting to rot. There was a hole in the roof where the water was getting in and wrecking it.”

  “Oh,” said Adrian. “What a rotten treehouse.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Rotten in every way.”

  “Rotten as the day is long.”

  “Rotten, rotten, rotten!”

  We both began to laugh. Adrian kept going until he had tears in his eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time we had laughed like that together.

  He reached over and took my hand, and kissed it, then held it to his face. His thumb rubbed my knuckle and the spot where my wedding ring had been for the last many years. He drew in a breath, and I thought for a second that he was going to pass judgment on my naked, non-puffy fingers, but he exhaled and kissed my hand again. I bit my lip and looked away, out to the Midwest cornfields and farms, cold and serious, so different from Savannah.

  “An exit is coming up,” I reminded him.

  He set my hand back in my lap and nodded. “I could use a break,” he said, his eyes weary, his face, a moment earlier laughing, now the face of a tired, middle-aged man.

  Chapter 67

  Welcome to Stewartville. The Future is Bright! promised the sign by the highway. It was a peeling, weathered statement against the bleak, slategray sky.

  Adrian pulled into a gas station and got out to stretch his legs while I went inside to use the restroom. There was a line outside the ladies’ room, so I went over to the magazines, hoping to find something I hadn’t already seen at Alexa’s, something I could take along to my parents’ house. Of course there was nothing but tabloids and the local paper. I glanced over at the line by the restroom door, but it hadn’t budged.

  Something propelled me to I pick up the Stewartville Star and flip through it. I stood there, tired and devoting only a small bit of my attention to the smalltown stories: A local hairdresser was retiring. A new restaurant was opening in town. Two couples, lifelong friends, had taken an Alaskan cruise to celebrate their fiftieth anniversaries. Pages four and five were devoted to school events and sports. 2007 Winter Formal Court Chosen read the headline on page five. December 1 to be One Enchanted Evening the subhead added, an unprofessionally curly typestyle emphasizing the specialness, the youthfulness, of such an evening.

  I examined the students’ faces, momentarily transported back to my own unpopular high school years, that jealous, lonely time. There were ten or twelve couples, some sitting on bleachers, some standing, all with healthy, wholesome smiles. One girl in particular caught my eye, made me catch my breath. She was tall and beautiful with that particular grace I had only ever known one other person to hold: Valencia.

  I squinted at the smeary black and white photo, then looked over at the bathroom line again. Finally no one was waiting. My bladder was ready to burst so I shoved the paper back where it had been and hurried over. The door was locked.

  “Just a minute,” yelled the old woman inside.

  From where I stood I could see the car. Adrian was in the passenger seat, asleep, his head pressed against the steamy window.

  Just use the men’s room, I told myself. I peered inside and saw the seat was covered with urine. So I continued to wait outside the ladies’ room. Minutes ticked by. Finally I couldn’t help myself.

  “Are you okay in there, ma’am?”

  No answer.

  “Ma’am?” I knocked on the door.

  “Just a minute, dammit!” she yelled again.

  I went back to the magazine rack and picked up the paper again. I flipped to page five to reexamine the photo, to decipher that mystique I thought I’d seen. There she was; I hadn’t been imagining it.

  I looked beneath the photo to see her name. What if her name is Valencia? I mused. What if, somehow, I have gone back in time? But it was definitely 2007. The headline said so.

  I skimmed through the names of students on court, keeping one eye on the bathroom door. Then I found her, and I nearly, literally, wet my pants. Elliott Johnson to escort Coral McCray.

  I looked up at the photo of the students, making sure I was matching the correct name to Valencia’s doppelganger. Yes, this name went with this face.

  I closed my eyes, thinking I might be dreaming, but when I reopened them I was still me, still standing in a gas station, the smell of hotdogs all around me. I shoved the paper back in its slot and grabbed the one beneath it, irrationally thinking the photo might be clearer. It was the same. This girl still had Valencia’s face, and more than that, she had Valencia’s presence. I could feel it. And her name was still Coral McCray.

  Coral. McCray. Straight from the pages of one of Valencia’s high school notebooks.

  Chapter 68

  “What took you so long?” asked Adrian, when I got back in the car.

  “Sorry, there was a line. Shh, you just go to sleep while I drive.”

  I put in an old Tori Amos CD to keep him from initiating a conversation and pulled back out onto the highway. Soon the sound of his quiet snoring drowned out the music and I felt like I could try to think. The newspaper was in my bag. My heart was racing,
my head was spinning. I shook my head, laughing silently, shaking all over. I felt tingly with adrenaline. I was thrilled, giddy even, from the rare, elusive shock of a positive surprise. How often in life are we shocked in a good way? Once a year? Once a decade? At a certain point, maybe age forty or fifty, it may never happen again.

  “What’s the matter with you? Are you alright?” Adrian asked suddenly.

  “What? Sorry, I just…” I looked at him. He was squinting at me, looking a little scared, a little irritated. I wanted to tell him so badly, yet I wanted him to never find out. “I was just remembering something funny,” I said. It was the kind of answer that should have been completely dissatisfying, considering how I was behaving.

  “Oh.” He relaxed and closed his eyes again.

  I was glad he didn’t care. A moment passed and he was snoring again, fogging up his window, leaving me alone.

  I drew in a deep breath.

  Back to the paper. Back to the photo. Back to Coral McCray.

  Proof of life after death.

  Proof of life.

  I should have felt nothing but betrayal and disgust. What kind of person disappears, leaving us all to assume she is dead? Even if she was able to abandon our parents, how could she have abandoned me? I loved her more than anyone in the world. How could she have let me ache for over twenty years? She knew I had nothing. I was just a child when she left me. I was so terribly alone.

  I should have hated her. I should have been sick with anger. Or numb, empty of any emotion for her.

  But I was none of those things. Instead I was elated. Ecstatic. Thrilled.

  The world, flat and barren for so long, filled with color and sprang into the shape of a perfect sphere. Dead ends to questions that had been hanging like webs for my whole life connected to obvious, clear meanings. New questions flooded my brain, but in a pink lemonade rush of excitement. No longer the slow trudge sludge of problems that can never be solved.

  Then I did something completely foreign to me. I didn’t even see it coming.

  “Thank you, God,” I whispered.

  Adrian kept snoring beside me.

  Chapter 69

  “Wake up, Adrian. We’re here,” I said.

  People were standing at my parents’ front window, watching us drive in. The driveway was filled with cars. My long-lost cousin BobbieMae had also just arrived. I hadn’t seen her for years. The man who must be her husband lifted a crying baby from its car seat. They pretended not to notice us parking, getting out, removing bottles of wine from the trunk, walking towards them. They hurried up the front steps and rang the doorbell.

  Some small child I did not recognize answered the door and then dashed away, leaving it wide open. BobbieMae and her family disappeared inside, closing the door behind them, even though we were just a few steps behind. All the reasons I hated being here were quickly coming back to me, not that I had ever forgotten. Adrian’s hands were full since he was carrying the wine, so I reached out to open the door. It was locked.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Adrian.

  I rang the doorbell and waited. Adrian shifted the weight of wine from one hip to the other. No one came.

  “Ring it again,” he said, so I did.

  Finally my mother appeared, looking about a hundred years old, wiping her hands on one of those old house aprons that is so old it’s back in style. They sell them for fifty dollars at places like Anthropologie.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said, stepping forward to give her a hug. She stepped back.

  “I don’t want to get your fancy dress covered in gravy,” she whined. “What are you doing ringing the doorbell? I had my hands full in the kitchen. Nice to see you, Adrian.”

  “Hello Patricia. Nice to see you, too.”

  “The door was locked,” I told her.

  “Why would the door be locked?” She shook her head at the silliness of it.

  “Here,” Adrian said, showing her the crate of wine. “We brought a nice mix of some of our favorites for you.”

  “Well, I don’t know a chardonnay from a cabernet, so it’s all the same to me. You’ll have to teach me what’s good.” Wink, wink. It was nice to see she had not lost her flirty spark.

  I waited for her to make some comment, good or evil, about how pregnant I was. Instead she turned around and bustled back to the kitchen, singing, “I better take a look at how Mr. Turkey is doing!”

  I turned to Adrian. “May I take your coat?”

  “Sure.” He set down the wine and took off his coat and scarf. I went to my old bedroom, now an office, and set our coats on the chair. It was freezing in there. I closed the door and exhaled, surprised I didn’t see my breath. There was new carpet, new beige walls, new drapes. Nothing about it was anything like it used to be. It looked so small and tidy. I opened the closet door and looked inside. It was filled with my parents’ summer clothes.

  Someone was knocking at the door, so I answered it.

  “What are you doing in here?” asked Adrian. “Don’t leave me out there with those people.”

  “Come in and shut the door,” I said.

  “We can’t hide in here the whole time.”

  “I know that. I only want to hide in here for a few minutes. This used to be my room, you know.”

  “Uh-huh. It’s nice. Twenty degrees below zero in here, but really nice.”

  “There is nothing in here to show it used to be mine. It’s like I’ve been completely erased.”

  “Parents do that when their kids grow up.”

  “I know. Well some don’t. Some leave a reminder here or there.”

  “True.” He picked up his scarf and wrapped it around his neck.

  “So what was it like,” I asked him, “the first time you ever came here? The first time you saw pictures of Van and Valencia hanging on our walls, and thought ‘I’m in their house’? How did it feel?”

  He shook his head at my crassness.

  “Remember when I showed you the juice glass that Valencia always used, and I was sad. That had so much more meaning to you than I knew.”

  He removed his scarf and set it back on his coat, making a move for the door.

  “Tell me,” I said. “I want to hear it in your words.”

  The door swung open.

  “Oh, hi,” said BobbieMae. “Farnie is going to play in here.” The little boy I’d seen when we arrived came in and dumped a bucket of Legos on the floor.

  “Come on,” said Adrian, reaching for my hand, always able to snap right back to normalcy. “Let’s get out of here and go mingle.”

  “My room,” said Farnie, slamming the door after us.

  We stood in the kitchen, awkwardly, munching on pickle spears. My mother and grandmother insisted there was nothing we could do to help. I felt big and very much in the way.

  “Whose little boy is that?” I asked.

  “That’s Farnsworth. He’s Beatrice’s grandson,” said my aunt Louise.

  I had no idea who Beatrice was. I nodded my head, desperate for the time when I could get smashingly drunk again. I noticed Adrian pouring himself a Gatorade-sized serving of thirty-dollar merlot and I gave him a dirty look. He ignored me, throwing back his head and downing it as if it were a shot of tequila.

  I took a ginger ale from the cooler on the floor and sat down on one of the old, tippy stools at the breakfast bar.

  “No fancy wine for you?” asked Aunt Louise.

  “She’s drinking for two,” my mother quipped. So she hadn’t forgotten.

  “Oh, that’s what I heard. In my day you could drink wine. I don’t know why they changed that. When are you due?”

  “March,” I said.

  “You’re big already!”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “We want to be surprised,” I said.

  I watched Adrian refill his glass. He was drinking for two as well.

  “Now why would you want to be surprised? How can you buy what you need if you don’t know wh
at you’re going to have?” said BobbieMae. Her baby was decked out in Green Bay Packer gear. I could not have said whether it was a boy or a girl.

  “Sometimes it’s fun to be surprised,” I said. “Oh, look at that,” I added, feigning interest in some squirrels playing in the yard.

  Then Adrian made things much worse. “What we are doing,” he said, “is buying clothes for boys and clothes for girls. So no matter which one we have, we’ve got it covered.” This made sense to him, and it had made sense to his family. But mine would see it as worse than wastefulness. They would see it as rampant indulgence.

  Quickly I added, “And we will save what we don’t use for next time.”

  It was too late.

  “You have gotten very spoiled,” sniffed my mother.

  “I heard you couldn’t even have babies. No offense,” said BobbieMae.

  “I heard that too,” said Aunt Louise. “Did you do in vitro?”

  “What ever happened to that car you had with that pro-choice bumper sticker on the back?” asked my dad. “Little foreign car. Was that a Renault?”

  “In vitro costs a fortune!” said my mother, checking the turkey and letting the oven door slam shut for the hundredth time.

  “Who said we couldn’t have babies?” I asked.

  “You’ve been married for years,” said my mother.

  “What if your next baby is the same sex?” asked my Uncle Dave. We all blushed when he said “sex.” He was an uncle by marriage and had never quite gotten the rules.

  “This really isn’t something for everyone to get all worked up about, please,” I said.

  “Who’s getting worked up?” asked my mother.