“What do you mean carried away?”
“I don’t know, I can’t explain it.” I watched the muscles in his jaw tighten and remembered how each time I brought up the whole experience of his going to school, he changed the subject. “It doesn’t matter anyway because I needed to come back, and that’s that.”
“But what if there was a way that you could still finish school without giving up on the farm?” I asked. “I mean, God, Troy. I’ve seen the things you are capable of. You can do amazing things with your hands, I just know if…”
“Janice,” he closed his eyes. “Just let it go,” he warned, and though his voice was soft, there was a threatening edge in his tone that made me realize if I pushed it any further we might very well have our first fight. “Please.”
Wrapped up in the newness of the relationship and the desire for every moment to be tension free since our time together was so limited, I heeded his warning and let it go, but it took him several minutes of playful teasing to shift the mood and distract me from the realization that he was more haunted by the choices he made in his life than I was by my mother’s ghost the entire time I’d been home to visit.
Yes, he had shown me a great deal of himself over the last couple of weeks, but he was holding back what I was sure was the greatest part of who he was.
I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of him mumbling in his sleep. He tossed fitfully, teeth clenched as he continued to mutter unintelligibly. I reached out and touched his arm, but he didn’t seem to notice at first. There was a terrible and frightening power in his movement, the tightened muscles like a wall of anger encasing him.
“Hey,” I whispered, and pressed myself against his back. “Troy, it’s okay.” The sound of his name seemed to relax him, and for the time being he stopped fighting against whatever demons plagued his dreams. “It was just a dream,” I brushed my lips along the warm skin of his shoulder and wrapped my arms around him from behind.
During the rest of his visit, I didn’t bring up the nightmare or try to convince him he needed to do something to outlet his need to create. Since he never really visited the city, only driven by it on the way to somewhere else, we spent Monday afternoon walking around North Side bundled up against the cold wind that swept in carrying small flurries of snow from time to time.
We stopped at the Andy Warhol Museum, but unfortunately the only day they closed up shop was Monday. So, despite the fact that it was colder by the water, we walked along the Allegheny River for a while before I drew him into the early financial district on Fourth Avenue so he could appreciate the architecture of some of the oldest and finest buildings in the city. He didn’t seem to get excited until we came out at the Wood Street Subway Station, which fit like a triangle wedged piece of art under Sixth Avenue and Wood Street.
He walked around the building twice before asking if we could go into the station to see the inside. The gallery above was closed, but Troy was quite content to study the building as it was, mentioning that maybe he could schedule his next visit around an exhibit so we could come back and check out the gallery.
Back at my apartment that night we ordered Thai take-out with the intention of watching a movie we’d rented on the way back from our walk. After watching him stretch his neck and shoulder through the first fifteen minutes of the movie, wincing every time he did, I offered a massage which eventually led to another instance of us getting lost in the moment. By the time we returned to our senses the television was playing the opening menu screen over and again, indicating the movie ended, but neither of us really seemed to care.
Knowing he would be leaving in the morning made it hard for me to sleep. It had only been a few weeks and yet every time I looked into his eyes I felt like I knew exactly where I wanted to spend the rest of my life. His actions and his words seemed to indicate he was feeling the same way, but I didn’t want to trust the mayhem of emotion that seemed to taint the reality of a new relationship.
All thoughts seemed to move along a rollercoaster with drops of doubt and peaks of inexplicable euphoria, and I let them roll at their will. I wondered what might happen if the feelings started to wear off, if we grew tired of each other? What if I was overestimating his emotional range, and only seeing what I wanted in him, instead of what he was really trying to share? What if it became purely sexual? What if we were lying to ourselves?
I lay awake for quite some time watching him sleep, but despite my fretful reservations, mind and heart combined to work double-time against me. I wondered what spending the rest of my life with him would be like. Farming was a big enterprise, and it seemed to take up most of his time. Would he let me help him if I were to marry him, or continue to shoulder the monumental responsibility of his father’s burden alone?
Then I thought about children. We both expressed an interest in having children. If we had babies together would like have eyes like his and those wayward curls? After seeing him with Becky’s kids, I was sure he’d be an attentive and loving father. I imagined his children not only adoring him, but worshipping the very ground he walked on as a man. Had he once felt the same way about his own father? Would they be strong like him, and so stubborn they might sacrifice all of their own dreams just to please him?
Completely aware I was losing my mind and my control over my emotions, I sunk into sleep beside him thinking about little children with smatters of freckles and his mischievous grin.
I found myself walking through the cornfield I’d dreamed of while I’d been home for my mother’s funeral. Only now the stalks were green, and great ears of unharvested corn made walking between the rows near impossible. The rustle of leaves around me was accompanied by children laughing, and whenever I turned in the direction of their voices they moved in the opposite direction. Several times I thought about calling out, but then the thickness of the leaves scraped against my skin, drawing little scratches that immediately itched.
I had no idea where I was going or why I was even there, but I continued to follow the sound of their laughter until, at last, I came out along the edge of a vast crop circle. The flattened stalks lay neatly down in a peculiar pattern, as though some great force stamped them down from the sky.
Standing in the center of the circle was my mother. I started walking toward her, but the flattened stalks felt unstable beneath my feet. When I looked down they were bare, and I became immediately aware of the jagged edges under the tender skin of my feet. On each side of my mother there a child, both of them disturbingly androgynous and faceless, and as I studied them, it seemed from time to time their faces became clear, but as soon as they did, they were blurred over again, making them seem like they were out of tune.
“There she is,” she patted them each on their shoulders, and they rushed out to meet me, throwing their arms around my legs with such force that I nearly toppled backwards. “I always thought about having another one,” my mother said. “Two is a nice number, it provides balance,” she added. “Maybe you wouldn’t have been so serious if you’d had a brother or a sister to set you straight.”
“Mom? Where are we?”
“Don’t think I haven’t heard it all these last couple weeks,” ignoring my question, she started toward me with her hands positioned familiarly on her hips. “All the curses, your little blame games. My fault you quit your job.” Her eyes arced upward while she shook her head. “It was the first bit of sense you’ve made on your own in years. Why give me the credit?”
“I was afraid I was doing things all wrong.”
“There is no right or wrong way of doing things, Janice. I have tried to tell you that your whole life. You can make all the plans you like, but if they don’t fit into God’s plan they fall apart.”
“Well that’s just great, Mom. What else can I look forward to falling apart?”
She shook her head, “I can’t tell you those things, babe. That’s for you to work through in your own time.” She reached out and laid her hand on my shoulder, her eyes, which were so
much like mine it felt like I was staring into a mirror, seemed to smile with reassurance. “I can tell you this. A broken and weary heart has been laid in your hands,” her hand lowered and she took both of my hands into her grasp. “Heal it, Janice.” She squeezed my fingers inside her own. “You’re the only one who can.”
“What do you mean, Mom? A broken and weary heart?”
The wind stirred cold behind me as she dropped my hands. Everything moved in slow motion, even the two children, who were holding onto me reluctantly let go to follow her. All around the stalks were no longer green, but dried out and brittle gold with hints of black mildew growing along the leaves.
“Mom, what does it mean? Please? Just tell me what to do, Mom!”
I was surprised to wake then to the sound of Troy’s voice quieting me in the dark with the reassurance that it was nothing more than a dream. I held tight to him in the dark, burying my face into the curve of his neck while trying to make sense of the dream.
The familiar scene reversed, I realized, and it was his turn to save me from the demons in my dreams. Her words echoed beside his promises of comfort, and I wondered if it was Troy she meant? Was it his broken and weary heart I was meant to heal, and if so, how?
Chapter Twenty-Six
I only traveled back to Sonesville once before the Thanksgiving holiday, which stretched my time without Troy to the limit. By that Wednesday I was up and on the road before six a.m., and after stopping to drop my bags off at Troy’s apartment, I drove to Becky’s to help her prepare for Thanksgiving dinner. She insisted during my last visit Troy and I bring our parents to join the Kaufman family around their table, and being our first holiday without my mother, convincing Dad was easier than I thought.
I sat at the kitchen table weaving a lattice-top pie crust over the blueberry filling she’d canned in the summer while Becky sorted through fresh cranberries, tossing out any with damage.
“I’m surprised you’re here so early,” she admitted.
“I didn’t even eat breakfast before I left this morning,” I noted at the sound of my rumbling stomach alerting me to its emptiness.
“Good thing I made these then,” she reached behind her and brought around a fresh plate of chocolate chip cookies. “Dig in.”
I grabbed a cookie off the top of the pile and savored the first bite. “God, if I keep hanging out with you, I’m going to wind up weighing three hundred pounds.”
“No way,” she bit into her own cookie. “We’ll laugh off the calories, I promise.” A small snort escaped me, and she giggled at the sound. “See, laughing them off already.”
“So are you going to be able to get a babysitter for Friday?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, Marty’s sister is gonna spend the night so she’s here when they wake up in the morning,” she rose and walked across the kitchen, pulling a sauce pot down from the stainless steel rack and setting it over a burner. She dumped the berries in and poured orange juice over top, then added a cup of sugar to let it simmer. “You know, Marty is really excited about hunting with Troy this weekend.”
“Troy likes Marty,” I noted. “I’m glad they get along, it gives you and me a chance to see each other more.”
“How about it?” She grabbed celery and onion and came to chop at the table. “So where is Troy this morning? No offense, but I figured his place would be your first stop after two weeks apart.”
“I dropped my stuff off at his apartment when I got to town, but Lottie had a doctor’s appointment this morning to see if they can’t change one of her meds. She’s been having anxiety lately.”
Becky shook her head. “She is such a sweet woman. It isn’t fair when bad things happen to good people.”
“No, it isn’t.”
I only recently learned that on top of suffering from aggressive Multiple Sclerosis, Lottie had intense anxiety that sometimes made it impossible for her to leave the house. She often experienced good days, during which you could hardly tell she was sick, but Troy mentioned recently she started to show mild signs of memory loss.
“I worry about Troy too,” I admitted. “If he’s not there when something happens he blames himself.”
Saying those words out loud reminded me of the dream I’d had about my mother. I’d thought about it often since that night, but the more I thought about the aspects of Troy’s broken and weary heart, I couldn’t begin to imagine how I might be enough to heal the damage he suffered and continued to inflict on himself. From the outside, it might have seemed like an easy task, but the deeper things got between us, the more I realized his heartache went well beyond giving up on a dream.
“Maybe as things get more serious between you guys you’ll be able to help him out with his mom, let off some of the burden he lets weigh him down.”
I nodded, “I hope so.”
I liked Lottie Kepner, and she seemed to like me too, but would that change if things did get more serious between her son and me?
The next afternoon the eight of us crowded around the Kaufman’s dining room table. The kids filled the room with excited chatter while Lottie boasted Becky’s perfect gravy, and among them all I felt a real sense of home and family that I wished I could have shared with my mother as well. She would have fit easily into the picture, passing her maple-candied yams, which I actually managed to reproduce almost as well as if she’d been there to make them herself.
As Troy leaned to pass Dad the stuffing I was at once more reminded of what Becky said weeks earlier, about fantasizing my future with the man I loved while visiting with friends. I looked to his mother and my own father and realized that if I could stop my life in its tracks right there and only move forward through the rest of my life with Troy, I wouldn’t want anything else. I fantasized what it might be like if Troy and I one day had such a dinner at our home, our children chasing each other while family and friends gathered laughing around a perfect meal. I ached inside just thinking about it.
After dinner the guys crowded around the football game and Lottie entertained the boys with coloring books, while Becky and I passed dishes back and forth in the kitchen, her washing, me drying.
“Today has been perfect,” I sighed and took the platter she just handed me into my waiting towel. “We woke up this morning together and went out to feed the chickens. He showed me how to look for eggs, and then on the way back we watched the sun rise over the field. The sky was the perfect shade of orange just before it burst over the horizon…”
“Feeding chickens, huh?”
“I wanted to.” I admitted. “He tends to sneak out of bed while I’m sleeping and then try to sneak back in all cold from being outside, so I just went with him.”
“Did I say June for that wedding?” She teased. “We might have to bump it back to May. Things are getting serious now that you’re feeding the chickens.”
“Yeah,” another dreamy breath escaped me. “I am so happy.”
“You deserve it,” she said.
And while I never really thought too much about what it meant to deserve happiness, for the first time in my life I wanted nothing more. I still had no direction when it came to my career, but it didn’t feel as pressing as I’d expected it would.
Troy and I were only getting closer every day, and the idea of moving back to Sonesville was growing daily in its appeal.
“Hey, have you had anything weird happen at your parent’s house lately? You haven’t really mentioned anything, and I just wondered.”
“I haven’t really spent much time there,” I admitted sheepishly. “Last time I was here I stayed with Troy the whole weekend and we took Dad and Lottie out to brunch after church on Sunday. I only went into the house for a few minutes to say goodbye.”
“Nothing happened once you went back to your apartment?”
“Not a thing,” I said. For a moment I recalled the phone call I’d discovered after quitting my job, and then there was the dream. “Well, I did have this dream but I’m sure it’s completely unrelated. It felt
surprisingly real though.”
“What kind of dream? About your mom?”
Before I could tell her about my dream, Troy ambled into the kitchen in search of a beer. After grabbing one from the refrigerator, he slid in behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. He started to grow a full beard in honor of hunting season, which he paused to nuzzle gently against my neck knowing it gave me chills.
“Who are we gossiping about?”
“You,” I pressed my cheek into his and winked at Becky. “I’m telling her all your dirty little secrets.”
“Tell her about the one from this morning,” a devilish grin lifted his cheeks. I felt my face grow warm at the mention of that morning. Not only had we gotten up early and done his chores together, but we’d watched the sunrise from the loft in the barn where we’d made love on impulse despite the frigid temperature.
“She doesn’t want to hear about that,” I assured him.
“Actually,” Becky cut in, “we were planning that Black Friday trip to the mall while you Neanderthals are out tomorrow murdering innocent deer.”
“A man’s gotta eat,” he said. “And I sure as hell won’t complain when Marty picks off one of those bastards that’s been feasting on my crops all year. It’s the circle of life.”
“You’re kidding, right? You do know that Martin hasn’t shot a deer since he was fifteen years old. You’ll be lucky if he even gets out of bed.”
“He’ll get one tomorrow,” Troy promised. “I know where there’s a whole herd. I’ll make sure he gets one with a nice rack.”
“A nice rack?” I wrinkled my brow. “How many ways have you guys found to use that term?”
“The only two that count.” He left a sloppy kiss on my cheek before backing out of the room at the sound of raucous cheering from the living room.
“Did I say May?” she started. “April weddings have their appeal.”
Heart and Home Page 24
