Mending the Past

by Avery June Ligon

  “You’re going to work out fine.” Mrs. Mae said, patting Luisa’s shoulder.

  Luisa’s heart beat hard as she steered the car toward Mrs. Mae’s home and her mind away from images of cars hitting her now-grown children. How easily I was persuaded, she thought. What would I have done if she’d asked me to hit the woman? A squirrel ran across the road, and Luisa hit the brakes harder than necessary. Calm down. Just focus on the road.

  The trees around the Mae family home had been planted when the house was built and, now, like the home, they were huge. The hill where the house stood had been wrapped in fog for the last week. Even when it hadn’t been raining on Mrs. Mae’s fifth floor tower room, the trees had collected moisture in their limbs and leaves and sent drops of water raining down on all below.

  Luisa had been living in the unceasing rain for a week now. Her ground floor apartment was one room, and a bathroom. No kitchen. The house had a cook. Luisa liked her room, but found too much resemblance between the Mae home and her preteen imaginings of Castle Dracula to feel comfortable. After having read a translation of Stoker, she’d kept her bedroom window locked at night through an entire hot and wet summer while she dreamt of the unnatural creeping, crawling, clawing, and slithering form of Dracula on the wall outside her bedroom.

  Many years now separated Luisa from those haunted Guadalajaran months. Time, though, couldn’t extract the frightened girl from the grown woman. As she drove Mrs. Mae home she spied the grey stone home perched on its hill in the trees with its two towers disappearing into the fog. The ensconced preteen shivered with fright and Luisa shivered too.

  When they reached the small stone house at the gateway, Luisa slowed and gave a meek wave to KRS. He smiled at Luisa and pushed the button that opened the iron gate. Oh, a smile, a kind smile. That was what she had needed. Luisa held onto the image of KRS’s face as she followed this road past the front entrance to an out-of-sight garage around back. She parked the car, opened Mrs. Mae’s door, and called the elevator.

  On the top level of north tower the stone wall ended low, and six feet of glass reached to the ceiling. On a clear day one could see the ocean to the west or rolling farmland and wilderness to the east, north and south. Today, Luisa could just see the outline of the twin tower through the fog.

  “The south wing,” Mrs. Mae had said, “has been closed twenty five years. Since the death of my husband.”

  Luisa surveyed Mrs. Mae’s room for work. When she found nothing she asked.

  “No. Nothing more today,” Mrs. Mae said.

  Luisa turned to leave.

  “You’re forgetting something.”

  Luisa looked at Mrs. Mae. She was holding a slip of paper. Luisa took it. A check equal to four months of pay. Luisa opened her mouth to object.

  “Tomorrow at six.” Mrs. Mae said.

  Chapter 3 Unlikely Love

  Jet met Ed while living in a room in the back of a Mae Shipping warehouse. The rent was cheap, and it would have been a fine arrangement if the sounds of shipping were a steady hum, but they were erratic and loud, and, Jet thought, intolerable. One night, she left her room to see if there were any windows she could board up to mute the noise. Ed, whose work day had run late, found Jet walking around on two-story-high shelving that he was using a forklift to reach.

  The month before Jet met Ed she’d broken up with a guy who wore black clothing and eyeliner to signal just how wounded his soul was. Their relationship had ended on the drive to introduce him to her parents. She stopped to fill the tank at a gas station designed to attract truckers. It was a sweltering day, and when she got back in the car her boyfriend was alternating between sipping from a cold bottle of sparkling water and holding it against his neck. Jet pictured herself introducing this soggy, moaning man to her father. She turned the car around.

  Ed gave Jet a ride down off the shelves, and since Jet couldn’t sleep and Ed was friendly and enthusiastic they walked to a pub. They sat in a booth near the back, away from the street noise, and away from the bulk of the customers. The table between them was dark with grease, and carved with names and dates. The more recent carvings stood out as they receded down into clean, light wood.

  Jet ran her finger over the names in front of her as the waitress set down Ed’s second beer. “So, you sculpt and climb rocks,” he said.

  “And you used to play water polo, but now you play tennis, and you don’t wear make-up.” She smiled.

  “Um, correct. I wear absolutely no make-up,” Ed said. “And I’d say sports are a hobby. What I do is work, but that isn’t very interesting. What do your parents do?”

  “My parents own a little piece of land a couple hours north. From the roof of the house and bathtub in their room you can see the ocean.”

  “Sounds a little like my parents’ home. Though more north,” Ed said, adjusting his back against the booth’s cushion. Jet could see Ed’s comment had been a joke intended for himself, or maybe for her to understand, though not yet.

  “For the most part, my parents live off that piece of land. My dad sells the firewood and marijuana he grows, and my mother reads palms.”

  “You’re killing me. You are killing me,” Ed said. “This won’t work. Ever.” He smiled at his beer and shook his head.

  Jet wasn’t sure what he meant, but she liked how big his laugh was, how it filled the space between them, so she laughed too and kept talking. “They built a small home and they work on it as a hobby. They’ve done a really nice job, but they never leave Liverbrush and-”

  “Liverbrush?”

  “That’s the town they live in.”

  “Wow, that’s a horrible name. I’m surprised I’ve never heard it. I was born and raised in California too.”

  “I’m not surprised. It’s a little town, and California’s a big place.”

  “I interrupted. Sorry. You were saying, ‘they never leave Liverbrush and...”’

  “Oh, well, there isn’t much there, so they can’t really go shopping. I used to offer to buy them things in the city, but my dad would always refuse with, ‘We don’t need much, and so we don’t need much.’ And, that’s really how they are. My dad’s been wearing the same four pairs of jeans for as long as I can remember.”

  “So, your memory’s terrible. Well, that’s good to know.”

  “No, really.” Jet said. “He works in the garden in them and cuts firewood wearing them. Unless he’s swimming, everything he does for the entire day happens in one of those four pairs of pants. When I was a kid I asked how he never wore holes in his jeans. He’d been complaining about how often they were buying me clothes because I wouldn’t stop growing, and tripping. I was kind of a clumsy kid. Anyway, he told me that before I was born my mom got sick of washing and mending, so she’d become a witch in order to cast a spell of longevity and cleanliness over his clothing. He said she’d never gotten any farther than one batch of jeans because then I was born and casting spells was difficult and time-consuming work. The sort of thing a mother just doesn’t have time for. Anyway, that’s my parents.” Jet took another sip of her beer.

  “Daughter of a witch and a drug dealer.” Ed drew his beer closer.

  “Oh, don’t say that. Maybe the daughter of a mystic and a mountain.”

  “Mountain?”

  “Maybe a foothill. Those are rugged, but a little more round. That’s more like my dad. He also has different seasons, but he never really changes,” Jet said, and without thinking she finished with, “You’ll see.”

  * * * * *

  Jet had moved out of the city and into Ed’s home in the suburbs in less than one week. They’d become inseparable. Since they did everything together, it was becoming difficult for Ed to have a conversation with his mother without mentioning Jet. It was time to introduce the two main women in his life.

  They drove to Ed’s family home, east of town, on a beautiful autumn day. They rolled down all of the windows, and Jet took deep breaths of the air, scented with dry sun-warmed grass. She thought
of all of the hours in her childhood that she had played in the tall, dry grass. It made her happy to think that Ed might have enjoyed the same sort of afternoons. Jet watched the oaks pass for a while, then she closed her eyes to concentrate on the feeling of the breeze against her hands and face. The car stopped.

  “Hi KRS.”

  “Hello, Edward. Good to see you.” Jet watched the man push a button to open the gate.

  “Have a good afternoon,” Ed said, waving goodbye as they drove through.

  “You didn’t tell me you grew up in a gated community,” Jet said. “Here all this time I was imagining you running through tall grass, not on a manicured lawn.”

  Ed looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “It’s not a community. Just my family.” Ed rounded a corner, which brought his family home into view. “I did play on the lawn out front. Actually, that’s where I learned to walk on steps. But if you run down behind the house a way, there’s a meadow. I played there too.”

  “You grew up in that?”

  “Yes.”

  “In that?”

  “Yes.”

  Jet laughed. “Ed, you grew up on a miniature golf course. I mean, except that it’s big. Does it have a moat?”

  “No moat.”

  “Will we need to drive through a windmill?”

  Ed smiled and shook his head. “Jet, first I’d like to clear up the one misconception which I know you have regarding me. I’ve only ridden a horse a few times. Water polo doesn’t involve horses and I’m sorry I let you believe that, but you just seemed so excited.”

  Jet was embarrassed into a rare silence. She looked up again at the Mae family home.

  “One more thing,” Ed said. “I’d like you to be my wife. I mean, Jet, would you marry me?” Ed hadn’t meant to propose so soon, but Jet was sexy, and smart, and she’d fallen for him. Usually, women fell for his family. As Ed drove toward his family home, part of him knew that his mother would never consent to such a match, and that piece of him proposed before his mother could forbid it.

  Jet stared at him.

  “Would you say something? You’re making me nervous.”

  “Shouldn’t we be out to dinner, or something? Maybe have a ring between us? Wait. Shouldn’t you be on your knees?”

  Ed shifted and looked at Jet. He was relieved to see her smiling. “Well?”

  “Yes, you big stupid. Yes.” Jet unbuckled and leaned across to Ed. She kissed his cheek and whispered yes into his ear, and then closed her eyes and nuzzled her face into his neck.

  Ed held Jet’s hand to lead her through the house. “My old room is over there. I’ll show you later,” he said. They walked through a room that extended the length of the main house. Jet looked out the windows, over the tree tops, toward the town below.

  Ed led Jet to a sunny room, where he found his mother, and introduced Jet as his fiancee. Mrs. Mae stiffened, and then ignored Jet through the entire visit, though she did this artfully. It seemed to Ed that, rather than ignoring his future wife, his mother had missed him terribly, and simply couldn’t stop doting on him.

  * * * * *

  In the years Jet and Ed had been married, Jet had never succeeded in befriending her mother-in-law. In fact, Mrs. Mae seemed to dislike her more with each passing month. Maybe it was just her out of control post-partum hormones, but Jet had begun to suspect that her mother-in-law was losing it. That her mother-in-law might stop at nothing to get Jet out of her son’s life. Despite Jet’s concern, she’d never been able to convince Ed that this was even a remote possibility.

  “How could Mother have almost run you over? She never even drives, and, for that matter, I can’t remember her having ever gone to the grocery store.” Ed’s loving eyes were partially closed in a mixture of concern and amusement.

  “Fine, she didn’t almost run us over. The woman driving her did. She scared me half to death.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’re shaken. Sounds like a problem with her help. I’m sure she’ll talk to the driver.”

  “Why are you looking at me like that? She didn’t even stop. Even if she, or the woman driving her, didn’t try to hit me, wouldn’t it have been an appropriate time to stop, and apologize, or say hello?”

  “She was probably too embarrassed. Or, maybe, she didn’t recognize you.”

  “No, Ed. She looked right at me and smiled. She knows who I am.”

  “There Jet, see, she smiled at you.”

  Jet sighed and looked down at their baby. He offered a four toothed grin and Jet dropped the argument.

  She took the baby out of his stroller to sit on the couch with his dad. Ed gave the baby a little pat on his head, and then put his arm around Jet and turned back to the TV. The baby sat propped up between his parents He slapped at his dad’s side and then grabbed a fistful of Ed’s shirt to chew on. He chewed and sucked on the saliva soaked shirt until his mom picked him up. The nice, warm, wet shirt fell from his mouth. He wiggled and blew a protesting raspberry.

  “What are you up to?” Jet asked as she carried the baby to the kitchen. He babbled out an explanation. “Oh?” she said. “Really?” This time the baby answered by gnashing his teeth.

  Jet tried again over dinner to broach a conversation on Ed’s Mother, but he avoided it. With slow, deliberate movements the baby worked his dinner to the edge of his tray, and then onto the floor. With each bit of food he made disappear, he began a series of celebratory kicks. All the while, he carried on a conversation with the bits of food and toys as he manipulated them toward oblivion.

  “I sure wish that mess making wasn’t your favorite hobby.” Jet said, looking at the mess on the floor. The baby smiled at her. “You happy little happy,” she said, taking him out of his chair. Jet lifted up his shirt and kissed his tummy. The baby slapped at her cheeks, and laughed. Jet laughed, too. She took him upstairs. It was time for the baby to sleep, and for Jet to have the night to herself.

  Jet watched the baby’s sleeping face. My god, she loved that little person. She resisted the urge to bury her face in his fat little cheeks to kiss him.

  Jet found Ed back in front of the television. She set the broadcasting end of the baby monitor next to him and kissed him goodbye.

  “Have fun,” Ed said, without letting his eyes leave the screen.

  “There’s a bottle of milk in the fridge, if you need it,” Jet said.

  Ed nodded.

  * * * * *

  It was as cold in the gym as it was outside, but at least it wasn’t raining. The yellow tint of the lights made it seem warmer too. The imitation-rock walls were painted with water streaks and lichen. Jet scanned them for anyone she knew. The orange-brown walls rose from a serene sea of blue carpet that covered thick foam. Ropes hung every five feet from the tops of most of the fifty foot walls. To Jet it looked like the ropes grew from the floor like long strands of seaweed. She imagined the gym as an underwater scene with people swimming to the top and sinking to the bottom again, or falling away from the wall and treading the ebbing water.

  Jet slid her gym card and walked to where an employee sprayed rental shoes with disinfectant. “Hm, Cam, looks like you’re having a great time,” she said.

  “Who wouldn’t look forward to spraying a mountain of warm, fragrant shoes? It would really help if these people would just tie their shoes together. Then I wouldn’t have to dig through them.”

  “Have you asked everyone to do that?”

  “Well there is a sign,” Cam said, pointing over his head.

  “People are oblivious, Cam. Not mean. Just make an announcement.”

  “You’re such an optimist.”

  “Just try it. I’ll check in later to see how many people tied their shoes together.”

  Jet walked into the middle of the room to look again for someone she knew. She didn’t see anyone. She left her harness in her bag, and took her shoes and chalkbag to the bouldering area.

  Cam was on the microphone asking people to tie their shoes together at the end of the nig
ht. “And one more thing, if the morning person doesn’t get here in time, don’t call our boss. Just knock on my van door. It’s the blue one in the parking lot. And, please remember to tie your shoes together when you return them. Thanks.”

  Jet sat down to pull her climbing shoes on and survey the long twelve-foot-high bouldering wall. Each boulder problem was marked by a strip of colored tape that stuck out from under each plastic handhold or footchip like a tail. She decided to warm up by starting at one end of the wall and doing all of the easiest problems.

  She sat herself at the base of the first problem and gripped the cold, rough surface of the starting hold. The hold was half framed in red tape. Jet looked to the top of the wall to find the finish of the problem, where a half box of red tape wrapped the top of the wall a few feet to her left. She found the holds and footchips with red tape tails. Climbing, she thought, is so simple. So rewarding. You see the start. You see the finish. You see every move between. She pushed at the wall, straightening each of her legs in turn to feel her lower back and hips stretch. Jet climbed this first route stretching out her body. When she’d grabbed the top of the wall inside of the red finish she climbed back down again.

  Jet found the next problem, and thought back to the only time Mrs. Mae had invited her and Ed over for dinner. She had spent more than an hour changing and re-changing her clothing until she was wearing an outfit she thought her mother-in-law might approve of. She kept the fingers of her left hand in the plastic starting hold as she moved her right foot higher. When she and Ed had arrived at the Mae family home they had found a small dinner party instead of an intimate family dinner. This had pleased Ed. Jet brought her left foot up to her left hand. Ed was always trying to get his mother to socialize. He was certain that would make his mother happier. Jet looked above her head at the placement of the next holds and then looked down to see what footchips she’d need to use.