A Good Distance

by Sarah Willis

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Acknowledgements

  Titles by Sarah Willis

  A Good Distance

  The Rehearsal

  Some Things That Stay

  A Berkley Book

  Published by The Berkley Publishing Group

  A division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  A portion of A Good Distance previously appeared as a short story titled

  “Plaster and Bones,” in the May/June 2000 issue of BOOK magazine.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are

  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

  resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Sarah Willis.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced

  in any form without permission.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any

  other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by

  law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in

  or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  BERKLEY and the “B” design

  are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67809-7

  1. Mothers and Daughters—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3573.I4565557G66 2004

  813’.54—dc22 2003060881

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my mother

  (who had the smarts to know I write fiction)

  Reality is not so much something against which memories can be checked as something established by those memories themselves.

  —The Remembering Self

  Prologue

  Rose carries Look magazine over to the couch, ready to relax for a few minutes before Michael gets home. The apartment’s clean, boxes unpacked, meat loaf in the oven. But wait a minute. Something’s wrong. This is the gray couch from the last apartment, and what’s that over there? Her father’s rolltop desk? How did it get here? And why is she wearing this yellow dress that she threw out years ago, the one she’d worn in the photograph for her high school yearbook?

  The magazine slips off her lap as she stands up. That chair, over there. She’s never seen it before. Her mouth goes dry and she can feel goose bumps rise on her arms. She goes to the kitchen for some water.

  The kitchen wavers like a mirage and Rose holds on to the counter, trying to catch her breath. When the room forms again, it’s a bright, airy kitchen with all new appliances, like the ads in magazines for Frigidaires. “No,” she says very firmly to the room. No. And then it’s her kitchen again, the one in the apartment they have lived in for three days. Really, she must be more exhausted than she thought.

  Rose opens the freezer door to get ice, but it’s empty except for a carton of strawberry ice cream. She hates strawberry ice cream. Now she’s getting mad. Who the hell put strawberry ice cream in her freezer?

  She blinks, and finds she’s sitting in a lounge chair in the backyard of her home in Cleveland Heights, some ten years later. She must have fallen asleep and just dreamt about that old apartment. That must be it.

  Looking around, she sees that the garden along the back fence is beautiful, but there are iris, black-eyed Susans, and mums, all blooming at the same time as if they have no regard for the seasons. She’ll have to ask Michael what he thinks of all this.

  Michael’s dead, someone says to her. He’s been dead for years. “But he’s not,” she says back. Then she wonders who she’s talking to.

  Someone is talking to her though, as if she’s a small, stupid child, telling her some simple fable in a kind, patronizing voice. The story, what is it—Snow White? Cinderella? No. She shakes her head. It’s her story! It’s hers. She hears the words “spudding a well” and “Roxboro Rocket.” But what’s this baloney about naming ducks? What ducks? Stop this, she tries to say, but her throat is too dry.

  She opens her eyes.

  She’s lying in a bed with rails. A stranger sits in a chair nearby. The person with the smooth, crafty voice. I don’t like this at all, she thinks.

  Rose closes her eyes. She’ll go back to that apartment. That was a nice time. No matter what, she won’t wake up again.

  Chapter One

  When my mother moved in with us two months ago, she pounded on my arms with her fists like a little kid. “Who the hell are you? What are you doing to me?” Alzheimer’s. It played silly games with her memory for a while, then got mean quick, draining her thoughts and personality like a pool unplugged, until she was dry and dangerous.

  Those first weeks she lived with us, I spent hours calming her down, hours calming me down. There was so much to do: meals, medicines, showers, putting on her makeup, combing her hair, the multitude of coercions to take her outside for a walk around the block, the interminable fight to get her to come back inside. “I don’t live there! Where are you taking me?” Now that it’s late October, we hardly go out. I frequently ask her if she wants to take a nap. She knows that it is I who needs a rest. “No! Gin rummy!” She has forgotten me, but remembered how to play gin rummy. I hate gin rummy.

  Before she moved in with us, she lived in her own home with an ever-changing cast of home-care providers until that was no longer possible, and it was suggested by everyone that she be placed in a nursing home. Advice my sister and brother agreed to, advice I couldn’t take. Almost one year ago, while driving my mother back to her house after a doctor’s appointment, she made me promise to never put her into a nursing home. I promised. I work in a hospital. I know what those places can be like. But really I agreed because I was trying hard to be the good daughter after spending most of my life as the black sheep of the family. So when she could no longer live alone, or even with a home-care provider, I said she should come live with us. My sister, Betsy, said, “I think she needs professional care, but do whatever you want. You will anyway.” Betsy has never forgiven me, and she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. Yet. She’s probably secretly thrilled Mother is staying with me, proper payback for all the things I’d done. I’d call it Karma, but Betsy’s not the sort to believe in Karma.

  My mother doesn’t remember the promise I made; she would never know if I broke it. But I have a thing about keeping promises. I’ve been so good at it.

  And I have an ulterior motive.

  I need her to get better so she can forgive me. After all that happened, we never spoke of it. During the years before she got Alzheimer’s there was a delicate balance to our friendship that neither one of us wanted to disrupt by bringing up the past. I believed she would see that I was sorry by my actions, if not my w
ords. I was waiting for the right time to speak, when I felt we could talk openly without hurting each other. The Alzheimer’s came first, along with doctors and medications and visits from my brother and sister. Before I knew it, I had lost my opportunity. She had forgotten what happened to us—she has even forgotten me, although part of me doesn’t believe that. How could she forget me?

  I have to remind her. She still has moments of grace, when she can speak clearly for an hour or so, missing only a few words. Last week she told me a story about her father selling Bibles. It’s a story I can use. But those times are rare and even then she is timeless, living in the present of her past. I wait for those moments of grace to ask her questions, to fill in my picture of who she was, so I can recreate her fairly, then give her life back to her, like a gift in a box.

  If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t be alone now.

  Still, most of the time she is only a great deal of trouble.

  She’s living here, in my house, that is not really mine. It’s my husband’s. I have been married to Todd for only three years.

  He insists this is my home, too, but I know better. Before we even met, he sanded and stained the hardwood floors, installed new plumbing, refurbished the bathrooms. He works at one thing at a time, ignoring the rest, so although the floors are sanded, the ceilings have holes and the walls need to be repaired—but he says he has to rewire the house before he repairs the walls, and he has to repair the walls before he fixes the ceiling. If I offer help, he says he’ll do it, thanks. He wants to do it right. He was just about to start on the rewiring, and moving a few windows, when my mother moved in, but now he can’t because it would be too dangerous for her. My mother living with us has stopped Todd from working on his house, and made it not his house. The doorways and stairways have gates. The bathroom is labeled BATHROOM, with red marker on white poster board. All the colorful braided rugs have been rolled up and stored in the basement since my mother’s shuffling feet snag at their rims. Todd’s collection of exotic cacti have been moved into the basement. My mother grabbed one and had to be taken to the doctor’s, screaming profanities the entire way. The basement has a combination lock on the door because of the tools and the table saw. My porcelain figurines are in the attic, also locked. And in my mother’s room Depends are stacked like soft building blocks. The bed has rails. Childproof pill bottles clutter the bureau like a miniature city.

  Now, instead of measuring for windows, Todd mows the lawn until it looks like a golf course, or goes for long rides on his motorcycle even in the rain. When at home, he walks around with his wonderfully strong shoulders slumped, hands clumped in his pockets, leaving the room quickly if my mother walks in. My daughter, Jazz, is sixteen, and although she’s not Todd’s child, they are very much alike. She, too, stays out of my mother’s way, spending more time at friends’, rolling her eyes, keeping her bedroom door shut. And me, I tiptoe about, trying to say I am sorry to everyone. We are a family speaking in body language. We just don’t always listen to what we see.

  I thought Todd might actually like my mother better after she got Alzheimer’s. When she started swearing, she seemed more human, less well-bred. Throughout all my mother’s years, and all her troubles, she has always appeared so well-bred. It was refreshing to see her let loose. Or so I thought, for a while.

  As my mother sleeps, I sit in the chair that waits by her bed for visitors: me, and everyone she thinks I am. Her hair is curly brown, mine straight. Her lips are thin and her cheeks high, her eyes green, brighter than mine. She has a nasty chuckle, a drinker’s chuckle. My mother doesn’t drink anymore, but I am Pavlov’s dog. She laughs, and I see her drunk. What we see, and what we remember, is as malleable as clay; it carries our fingerprints.

  She has osteoporosis, so I take calcium pills. She has Alzheimer’s, so I remember for us both.

  I use what I can: the stories she has told me, the stories I have inferred, the few photos of her childhood, a few letters she has saved, the things she has let slip out, the things I know without asking.

  My mother would tell me I’m being dramatic, that I exaggerate everything. My brother and sister would agree. So would my husband. These are people whom I have told I love you, and I hate you, at one time or another. They can believe whatever they want. I believe everything I say.

  Rose is born on the second of March, 1927, in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and is christened Mary Margaret O’Neill. She’s the sixth child, the youngest. Brent, the sibling closest in age, is ten years older; Celia, twelve years older; Ben, fourteen years older; and so on. Mary is a mistake, although such a subject is never broached in her parents’ well-kept home. She just appears out of the blue and is quite a shock to all.

  Celia treats her as if she’s a baby doll for about two years, then abandons Mary for less childish games. Mary’s mother, Francine, no longer has the energy to take care of a small child, and a plump, sad woman is hired to look after Mary during the day. They go to a nearby park where there’s a small lake and a few ducks, and Mary’s expected to entertain herself. She names the ducks Lily, Millicent, and Theodore and brings them bread crumbs wrapped in a white handkerchief.

  On her fifth birthday the Lindbergh baby is kidnapped. At the dinner table her parents talk of ransom notes and manhunts. Her brothers and sisters whisper to each other about muddy footprints, homemade ladders, and gruesome tortures until they are told to simmer down and be quiet. Mary blows out the candles on her birthday cake, and it’s decided she shouldn’t go to the park anymore. Her mother keeps an eye on her at all times, even letting Mary roll a pie dough, rewarding her with a pinch of brown sugar on her tongue for a job well done. A few weeks later her parents agree that there is very little risk anyone would kidnap Mary, and she’s led back to the park, free to play. She misses her mother and scrapes her knee when she falls off a swing. Iodine and a Band-Aid are the answer.

  In kindergarten there are three girls named Mary Margaret. One girl agrees to be called Margaret. Mary Margaret O’Neill raises her hand. “I want to be called Rose.”

  Her teacher, a very old nun, claps her hands in glee. “Oh, I like that name. Rose you are!” Her parents and siblings continue to call her Mary, but to her friends, and teachers, she is Rose.

  That winter the nuns take up a collection for the poor. Children bring pennies and worn pencils. A yard or two of cloth and old shoes. Grace Mott, whose father owns the bakery, brings day-old bread. But Rose, whose father owns oil wells, brings a dozen cans of salmon, a blue wool coat, and seventeen brand-new packs of crayons. The giddy nun wears the coat in school all day before giving it up for the poor.

  Everyone is nice to Rose, even the class bully. Next week she brings a huge bag of penny candy.

  By the time Rose is eight, all her siblings have moved out of the house. Rose’s home is large and brick and suddenly drafty; hollows of cold air drift from room to room. She starts wearing two sets of socks and two sweaters. Her father takes to calling her “Orphan Annie.” Rose imagines crawling up into his lap, but doesn’t.

  Her father’s oil wells are not the grand, deep, endless oil wells in Texas, but oil wells all the same, all over Ohio and Pennsylvania. He leases the land and mineral rights from farmers, then hires men and drilling rigs. He’s a wildcatter, his own boss. It’s his money he stands to lose, but his fortune to gain. After a week or two of spudding a well, he decides when they have gone down far enough and lowers the nitroglycerine into the ground. Rose gets to miss school on the days that he tosses the small stick of dynamite down into the hole to ignite the nitro. He says she’s his good-luck charm; she was born the day his best well blew. It flowed for four years before it dried up. She stands where her father tells her to, wearing a heavy hard hat meant for a much larger head, and feels the ground explode. It trembles and growls beneath her feet like thunder underground, and then there’s a boom she can feel in her heart as the well blows in and the black blood erupts from the earth. Sometimes this last part doesn’t happen. Sometimes the
re’s nothing down there but more hard rock, and the men shake their heads and swear in low mumbles. Her father shakes his head, too, but when they drive home, he says, “Next time. Next time we’ll find it.” Rose loves these trips with her father. He’s a different person out in the open with his wells. At home he’s quiet and stern, and she’s sometimes afraid of him, but out here, he’s happy and pats the top of her head.

  When Rose is in fifth grade, her father leases some land that he believes will make them rich. It’s the most expensive land he has ever leased, and there’s hardly enough money left to drill, so he takes out a loan. The first well they dig produces nothing but a whiff of gas, but he’s sure they are on the edge of something big. They move the rig a thousand feet and try again. It’s a cool day in February, but it hasn’t snowed for weeks and the landscape looks bare and dead. “Touch this for me, Mary,” her father says, holding out the red stick of dynamite. “Take off your gloves. Give it some luck.” She does. The dynamite feels dry and smells of chalk.

  As her father goes up to the well, Rose stays back with the men. The ground shakes, the oil shoots up, and the rig bursts into bright and brilliant flame, fire rising in the sky like a red geyser. She is so stunned, so completely unprepared, that she screams and screams, but no one comes to calm her down. From out of the black smoke, her father walks toward them, covered in oil and dark soot. He tells her to get in the car, where she falls asleep crying. As they drive home, he says the gas was ignited by a lantern left too close. “We’ll give it one more shot. There’s more oil there. Trust me. There’s a ton of oil there.” What he doesn’t tell her is that the rig is gone and he has to buy a new one. He puts their house up for collateral.