by Riley LaShea
“I will deal with your mother,” Daddy responded in clipped syllables. “Scott will need care. No one will question it.” Not wanting to think it myself, I didn’t ask what would happen if Scott didn’t come home. “No one is going anywhere,” Daddy declared again. “That’s final. I’m going to check on your mother.”
Relieved as I was at still having my home, it was diluted with the worry of what it would be like, trying to stay there and keep Ariel happy, how oppressive it could feel if there was no place we could be ourselves, and I worried it might be better for us to go.
“I won’t hide in my own house,” I tested Daddy, making sure he understood what it would mean if we stayed, that I wasn’t going to pretend or be hidden away in the attic.
Getting nothing in response, I was forced to turn around, and, standing in the doorway, Daddy looked at me in a way he had never looked at me.
I always knew he loved me, as much as he loved Edward and Scott, that he thought I was smart and I had talent. That was the first time in my life, though, Daddy ever respected me.
“I would never expect you to,” he said, before he walked out of the room.
Turning to face Ariel, I wasn’t entirely convinced I hadn’t made up the conversation. She looked so dumbstruck, though, I knew I hadn’t imagined it, and it occurred to me I didn’t even know if that was what Ariel wanted, to stay there, if she even loved me enough to make a home with my family.
“Do you really love the South?” It seemed the least frightening question to ask. I had thought it difficult to tell Daddy the things I needed to say, until I stood waiting for Ariel to answer and started to wonder if I had confessed everything only to get the same result, her leaving and me yearning for her for the rest of my life.
“Yes,” she nodded at last, her eyes roaming my face as she tried to make sense of it all, before they settled on mine and I could see the truth in them, that behind all Ariel’s strength and composure lay a heart as desperate as mine for something real and lasting. “But I would stay even if I didn’t.”
A small laugh of relief surging past my lips, it turned to joy as I reached for her, feeling Ariel’s hands on my neck, her lips against mine. I knew she meant it, that she would stay, that I was enough to keep her there. I didn’t think in that moment how hard it might be, or how we would live with Mama and her condemning gaze. Closing my eyes to the world around us, I just rested in Ariel’s embrace and listened to the band play.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The light behind the bed flickers. Three winks, a long spell in which it remains on, then two more, and I am transported back to the days after Scott came home when we didn’t know how things would go.
Though he could breathe on his own, and, when I put my ear to his chest, I could hear Scott’s heart as strong as ever, he hadn’t woken since Daddy went to get him released from the hospital into Ariel’s care.
I started to wonder if he ever would.
The lamp was a hand-me-down Scott inherited from Edward’s and my nursery, the oldest remaining relic of our childhood, aside from the blue and pink blankets our parents used to tell Edward and I apart, which still lay folded at the foot of Ariel’s and my bed.
In adolescence, when the pastel yellows and oranges made Scott self-conscious, he’d painted them grays and beiges so the lamp looked more grown-up. It was only after Scott was in high school that the cord frayed and the lamp developed a short that made it a hazard.
Still, it had made it to Nan’s with us, and when Scott needed something to guide him back, Mama pulled it out of the closet and let it flicker by Scott’s bedside, like the beacon in a lighthouse, until one day, just after I’d stopped expecting him to wake up at any moment, Scott did.
“Hey, Lizzie,” his voice startled me at the window as I was watching Mama approach Ariel in the garden with the same worry I always had about what she might say when they were alone together to send Ariel away. “Would you get me some ice cream?”
Spinning around, I watched Scott yawn as if he had no idea just how long he’d been sleeping, what a miracle he was waking up, and Scott’s tired state made him more patient than normal.
“Yeah,” I breathed. “I’ll get you some ice cream.” Dragging my eyes reluctantly from him, I knocked on the window to get Ariel’s and Mama’s attention before pulling it up. “Scott wants some ice cream,” I called out to them, and, wearing matching shocked expressions, Mama and Ariel scrambled to come inside.
Three times, the light winks above the bed. A long spell when it doesn’t. Then, two more.
I wonder if our need for logical explanations about everything undermines our search for meaning.
It was just after Edward died that Scott’s lamp began to flicker. “It’s old,” Daddy said. “Unplug it before it starts a fire,” Mama said.
The light behind the bed was fine when they first moved her into this room. Now, it flickers, three times, a long spell, and two more.
I wish I could remember the Morse code Edward taught me when we were kids.
I wonder if Ariel is trying to send me a message.
How to read a topographic map and plotting coordinates, those were the lessons Scott brought back from the war.
As soon as he could maneuver from his bed, he wanted to teach me, despite Mama’s protests that he needed his rest, and we would walk Nan’s property and beyond until he got tired of holding himself up on crutches and hobbled back to the house.
Sometimes Ariel would go with us. Sometimes she wouldn’t. Scott never asked any questions as to why Ariel was there, assuming she had stayed for him, and, knowing we would always hear Scott coming with the heavy equipment he required to walk, we just let him think it.
“Tell me,” Scott said one day before I was ready, and I realized, along with his strength, he had regained his sixth sense for the things I tried to keep hidden from him.
“Tell you what?” I hedged, moving away across Nan’s garden, not ready to have the conversation when he wasn’t entirely mended and neither was I.
“I know you told Jackson you didn’t want to be his girl when he came here to see me,” Scott said.
“Couldn’t keep his mouth shut, could he?” I tried to joke, but, despite his dedicated service to his country, I felt Jackson a true traitor. Though, I wasn’t sure what allegiance I thought he owed me when I was the one who had never been loyal to him.
“He was upset, Lizzie,” Scott said, and that was my fault, I knew. If I had just had the courage to tell Jackson the truth from the start, or even a kind lie, he never would have gotten hurt.
“I didn’t mean for things to happen like this,” I declared, studying the southern magnolia Mama planted the week after Nan died, just days before Scott got back to Richmond, amazed at how it was already taking to the land and developing new buds.
When she was planting it, I reminded Mama that Nan said it wouldn’t survive a Richmond winter.
“Let’s just see,” Mama replied, and I knew, if that tree took all Mama’s energy until her dying day, that magnolia was going to thrive in Nan’s garden.
“He thinks there’s someone else,” Scott said to me, and, turning toward him with a sigh, I felt such fear, deeper than the fear I felt talking to Daddy or facing Mama, I could scarcely hold myself upright.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell Scott. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell everyone. I felt like bragging even. Ariel was a catch, and she loved me, and that made me feel special. After hearing so loudly for so long, though, how wrong I was, every person felt like a chance to be reminded, and I didn’t think I could take that from Scott when he might have been the only person who had ever looked up to me.
“There is,” I admitted in a tremulous voice, reaching out to touch a yellow rose in first bloom, its silken petal between my fingers reminding me of Ariel, what beauty she had brought, and would continue to bring, into my life, worth every thorn that came with her.
“So, that’s what happened?” Scott said. �
��You met someone while we were gone?”
Laughing at how easy it was for Scott to imagine me meeting and falling for some other man in such a short time, I wondered how hard it must be for him to imagine the reality.
“There was always someone else,” I told him.
“Who?” he asked, and turning with utter conviction, if not confidence, I set my shoulders and prepared to be hurt.
“Ariel,” I declared, because I had made a promise to myself, and a vow to Ariel she didn’t know about. If I was going to be with her, I was going to own it. I wasn’t going to lie. And I was never going to be ashamed to say her name.
Every bit as shocked as I anticipated, Scott stared at me with a look I suspected was similar to the one he wore as he watched the mortar that took his leg off come in. Remembering every word he and Edward had ever said about poofs and queers outside polite company, I wondered what Scott would choose to call me when the truth sunk in.
Watching him open his mouth, I braced for it, his judgment, to come, wondering if I could endure it when it did. “Is that it?” he asked, sinking back against the bench, a soldier at ease, and, laughing in distress, I was sure he wasn’t comprehending what it was I was telling him.
“I mean, that’s not nothing,” Scott went on to assure me he did. “It’s everything. But is that what you’ve been so afraid to tell me?” he asked, and I knew he didn’t just mean since he’d been home, but since I had cried on his shoulder on the porch swing.
“You’re not… bothered?” I risked asking, though the words I had to discard in my mind to get to the question – disgusted, repulsed, ashamed – gave me little hope I would ever find comfort in my own skin again, and, feeling the tears that ran down my face, they didn’t turn to relief until Scott shook his head.
“No,” he said. “A little jealous maybe.” But I didn’t believe him until he waved me over to the bench, pulling me closer like nothing had changed when I sat down too far away. “You know what, Lizzie?” he said. “I left here thinking I knew everything about everything, and I came home knowing I know nothing about anything. I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong or you’re a bad person, if that’s what you think.”
“Would you have felt that way before?” I questioned him, though I knew I didn’t want to know.
“I don’t know, Lizzie,” Scott admitted. “There are things that change people, that make them a little better. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I uttered. “It’s good.” And it occurred to me it didn’t matter what Scott might have said before he went off to war, because I couldn’t even know what I would have done or thought if I had never gone with Ariel to New Orleans.
“Do Mom and Dad know?” Scott sounded scared for me.
“Yes,” I nodded, looking off toward the house, worried Mama had cornered Ariel somewhere and gotten her fangs in her.
“What did they say?”
“Daddy wanted us to stay,” I told Scott, and, nodding, he didn’t seem half as surprised as I had been. “Mama hasn’t said anything. She’s ashamed.” No other word that fit, I was forced to use it, regardless of how it made me feel.
“She worries what other people think,” Scott summed up Mama’s entire life.
“Of course, she does,” I returned.
True to Daddy’s word, though, Mama also hadn’t said anything when she walked into the living room one night and caught Ariel and I kissing. Blinking, as if she couldn’t quite compute lesbian affection, she simply turned around and walked back out of the room.
“Well, that’s one way to get privacy,” Ariel had uttered in the aftermath, and, laughing, I had kissed her again.
“She’s not wrong to worry,” Scott declared, and I knew that was true too. “People are… they can be cruel, Lizzie. Are you going to be able to handle this? Can you take it?”
“Better than I can take being without her,” I responded, feeling more convinced of Scott’s true opinion when that made him smile.
“Will you let me marry Ariel?” he asked, and the question completely unexpected, it was also surprisingly unwelcome. Anger and envy warring within me, I felt as if Scott was trying to steal Ariel away, though I trusted he would never do such a thing.
“What?” I breathed.
“If I marry her,” Scott returned reasonably, “there will be nothing for anyone to think.”
“What if you meet someone?” It was the first good reason I could find against it.
“Who’s going to want me?” Scott said, looking toward the folded pant cuff where his leg used to be, and it wasn’t like him at all, to imagine the worst possible future.
“Scott, you could still have…” A normal life, that was what I was going to say, but the offer turned bitter on my tongue, because Scott could have that, but I couldn’t. He could even marry Ariel if he wanted, regardless of the fact he didn’t love her, not the way I did.
“Let me protect you,” he said. “Please. I can keep you safe.”
Scott was so dedicated to the idea, though I hated it, I couldn’t just tell him no.
“I’ll ask her,” I said, accepting that it would make things easier on everyone, eliminating so many questions, suspicions and worries, I at least had to let Ariel have a say.
“Absolutely not,” Ariel’s say was loud, and I thought her head would twist clean off her shoulders in response to Scott’s offer.
“He just wants to help,” I said, though with admitted difficulty as Ariel pulled her clothes off in the moonlight that streamed through the window. Watching her skin appear patches at a time, I wondered if I would ever get used to the sight of her undressing.
“I understand that,” Ariel said. “And I understand how it might make things easier.” Pulling her shirt from her wrists, she shook it out in her bra before turning to put it on a hanger. “I don’t want to make this harder on everyone, but I won’t marry someone I do not love.”
Jumping as my fingers touched her skin, Ariel was surprised at how I had been drawn across the room by my need to touch her.
“Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t how I felt. I wasn’t okay with Ariel not wanting to marry Scott. I was elated. Because she was mine, and I had shared a lot with Scott in my life, but I had no desire to share her that way, even if it was only in name and on a piece of paper.
Ariel’s arms sliding over my shoulders, her lips met mine with an urgency that always assured me she truly did want to be there, despite the difficulties we were bound to face, that there was enough wonder between us to counteract all the sacrifice.
Ariel was never going to marry. Neither was I. It was something we would simply both have to give up to be together.
Feeling the metal band turn beneath my fingers, I know I need to take it off of her, before it falls off and gets lost, but Ariel has a sense for that ring. Every time I’ve asked someone to remove it, her hand tightens into a fist like she’s ready to punch out whoever tries.
Nan told me the world changed, but I don’t think even she would have guessed how much. Because Ariel and I did get married after all. Some of our younger friends helped us get back up to New York three days after the law went into effect.
We went by train. It seemed appropriate.
The oldest people at our city hall, we were ushered to the front of the line to applause and a quip we might not make it to married if we had to wait very long.
“That’s all right,” Ariel responded to the jokester officiant. “Why do you think we came up here so fast?”
And sixty-seven years after we said ‘I promise you forever,’ we finally said ‘I do.’
Ariel and I had survived the Cold War and the Lavender Scare of the McCarthy Era. We watched the world change under the Civil Rights movement.
If there was a single moment in history I wished Nan had made it to see, it was when Rosa Parks decided to hold her ground on that bus.
Later, in 1963, when black people marched on Washington, yet another Desmond Caster, Cousin Desmond’s son, st
ayed with us with some of his college friends on their way through Richmond, and, though Mama was still clinging hard to the ways of the past, I knew if Daddy hadn’t died four years earlier, he would have seen the business of the world changing.
That was the same year Scott married Melinda. She had served in the Army Nurse Corps in Korea, and they met at the VA when Scott was getting fitted for a new prosthesis.
“I knew you’d just been looking for your own nurse this whole time,” I teased him when he told me he was going to propose.
“Well, you swear by yours,” Scott returned, watching Ariel and Mama argue about something across the room. “I figured, I should take it as a lesson.”
When he moved out, I really expected Mama to go with him, to seize the chance she at last had to get away from Ariel and I and the curse we’d brought upon her house.
She was settled where she was, though, that was what Mama said.
Men went to the stars, just like Ariel told me they would, there were riots at Stonewall, and the Civil Rights movement closed in around us.
Not long after Scott’s kidneys started to fail, AIDS grew into an epidemic. They were still calling it GRIDS, gay-related immunodeficiency syndrome, as if the being gay was the cause, when Ariel came to me just a year after she retired.
“I want to go to New York,” she said.
“All right,” I responded, because it wasn’t so unusual for us to just go. We had been to New York before, to Chicago to visit Ariel’s mother in her nursing home, to Florida, to California, and back to New Orleans several times. We even took Scott when he wanted to meet Desmond. “When do you want to go?”
“As soon as we can,” Ariel said, hesitating for a moment. “I want to move there.”
“Move?” I remember thinking she was crazy. It wasn’t that I had never thought of moving someplace other than Richmond and Nan’s big house. I had just reached an age when I didn’t think it was going to happen.
I understood why, though, Ariel wanted to go. At the time, the disease posed a terrible risk to anyone who worked around it, and she thought she should be the one to take it, instead of younger nurses who had more life left to live, and, since it was considered a gay disease, she knew no one else would care.
