Seeking Sara Summers

by Susan Gabriel

  Waves of desperation washed over Sara as she stared into the clouds contemplating how to reenter her old life. “In Italy, I found the life I always dreamed of,” she added softly.

  The woman reached over and patted Sara’s arm. Her touch was warm and soft.

  “You’re so kind to listen to me,” Sara said.

  “I wish I had some wisdom for you, dear,” the woman said. “Love is difficult. But at the same time it’s what makes living bearable.”

  Sara looked over. There was compassion in the woman’s eyes. It felt odd confiding in this stranger. But at the same time it felt like an unexpected gift to have the woman there. Was this what it was like to have a mother who was still alive? This thought saddened her more. A part of her wanted to sob in this kind stranger’s arms. But Sara would not allow herself that option. She thanked the woman again for listening and took out her newspaper. She offered the woman part. The woman declined, pointing to her book. Sara pretended to read as the words blurred from the tears she would not allow to fall.

  Later in the flight, as the older woman dozed, Sara reached into her travel bag and pulled out the small package from Julia. Inside was a framed photograph of the two of them together on their last day in Siena. Julia had insisted Max take a photo of them in their courtyard in front of the fountain. Sara was wearing the red scarf now packed away in the deep recesses of her luggage. They stood by the fountain, their arms around each other. Julia was glancing over at Sara with a look of genuine love and affection. Sara could not remember anyone ever looking at her that way. And this had been before they had consummated their relationship. Had Julia known what would happen between them?

  Sara’s demeanor in the photograph radiated happiness. The woman in stone peaked out from behind; her arms outstretched and embracing them. Sara closed her eyes to shut out the memory and put the photograph away. At that moment if she could have turned the plane around she would have.

  Hours later the plane landed at JFK airport. Sara followed the steady stream of passengers from her flight through security and customs. The older woman and Sara embraced before departing.

  “I’m sure you’ll do the right thing,” the woman said.

  “But what is the right thing?” Sara asked.

  “Love,” she said.

  Two women, smiling and happy, about Sara’s age, waved at the older woman when they came up the escalator. “Those are my daughters,” the woman said.

  They parted and Sara thought of the Madonna in the inner recesses of the woman’s purse, the mother to mothers. Sara would miss this woman and she didn’t even know her name.

  Jess was to meet Sara where she had dropped her off. Sara anticipated that Jess would be late. Jess was always late. Afterwards, Sara would go to Jess’ apartment and sleep on the gray, lumpy couch Jess had bought used, that smelled like dogs and stale beer. Sara would feign jet lag and a headache and Jess would undoubtedly leave her alone. Maybe there will even be something in the refrigerator for a change besides frozen dinners, Sara thought. Not that she particularly felt like eating. Then tomorrow she would catch the train the rest of the way home, giving her time to come up with a game plan of how to reenter her life.

  Sara passed through security and followed the signs to luggage claim. A man walked toward her. The familiarity of his gait caused Sara to take a second look. She stopped in the middle of the steady stream of foot traffic.

  “Grady? What are you doing here?”

  “I thought I’d surprise you.” He wrapped his arms around Sara and gave her a quick, hard squeeze. “You definitely look surprised.”

  Sara fought to regain her sense of equilibrium, despite the feeling that she was falling off the edge of the world. Her survival instincts raced forward to head off a sense of intense panic. It was too early to face Grady. She needed time to fortify her defenses.

  “I thought Jess was picking me up,” she said. “At least that was the plan when I left. Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine,” Grady said. “I told her I wanted to do it.” Grady grabbed her travel bag that she had lugged on and off of trains throughout Tuscany and threw it effortlessly over his shoulder. “You look good, Sara. Really good.”

  She forced a smile.

  “So how was your flight?” he asked.

  His cheerfulness, in staggering contrast to Sara’s grief, gave the scene a surreal quality.

  “My flight was very long,” she said. In truth, it felt as though she had kept the plane airborne for hours through her own efforts. “But I sat next to an interesting woman.”

  Sara lengthened her stride to keep up with Grady, willing her body to carry on despite her exhaustion. Why was he always in such a hurry to get places?

  At luggage claim Sara and Grady waited for the first pieces of luggage to emerge from the plane. They waited in silence, allowing Sara more time to gather her thoughts. But her thoughts refused to be gathered. They were everywhere, scattered between Italy and the States like lost luggage in route to wayward destinations.

  “So how was Italy?” Grady asked. His attempt to jumpstart the conversation seemed as odd as the situation.

  “Italy was great,” Sara said. Would he ask her about Julia? A rush of distress registered in her stomach as nausea.

  “I shouldn’t have given you such a hard time about going,” he said. “Whatever the cost, it was obviously a great thing for you to do. You look terrific.” He paused. “So, how’s Julia? As beautiful as ever?”

  “Yes,” Sara said. “She sends you her best.” She lied.

  They retrieved her bag and walked toward the parking garage. Grady added bits and pieces of conversation where Sara would have preferred their usual silence. What had gotten into him? Had wandering around their empty house made him realize how much he counted on another person being there?

  “I have a surprise for you,” Grady announced, when they reached the car.

  Sara tried to hide her lack of enthusiasm. She had had enough surprises in Italy to satiate the need forever.

  “We’ve got reservations at the Roosevelt.”

  Sara smiled to hide her sadness. The Roosevelt Hotel was where they had spent their honeymoon.

  “I thought it would be a nice treat for us, since we haven’t seen each other for a while.”

  It was so unlike Grady to plan a romantic evening. Sorrow burrowed into her until she felt hollow. She forced herself not to think of the last week with Julia. She didn’t know how she was going to get through the rest of the evening, not to mention the rest of her life.

  They went to dinner at a small Italian restaurant near the hotel. The last thing Sara wanted was Americanized Italian food, but she didn’t have the strength to object.

  “Is there something wrong?” Grady asked at dinner. “You’re not yourself.”

  It must be bad if even Grady senses something, she thought.

  “It’s jet lag, I guess.” Sara took a sip of water, offering a faint smile to appease him. Externally, she carried on. Internally, her regrets screamed at her that she was having dinner with the wrong person.

  “How about I rub your shoulders when we get back to the room.” Grady took her hand. Sara pulled it away before she realized what she had done. “What’s with you, babe?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Everything, she thought. “I just don’t know how affectionate I’ll be tonight, Grady. I really am very tired.”

  “Right,” he said curtly, and then self-corrected to a kinder tone. “Let’s just have a quiet evening then, and we’ll head back home in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Sara said. He was making such an effort she felt bad for putting him off. The nausea rose. She felt like she might be sick. “I need to find the restroom. Will you order me something?”

  “Sure,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Anything,” she said before flagging down a waiter who pointed the way to the restrooms. Behind the privacy of the stall door, the emotion that had threatened to overwhelm her s
ince the airport in Milan rushed forward. She muffled a scream. Then the tears began: a sudden, messy flashflood of emotion.

  “Are you all right?” a woman asked from the next stall.

  Sara sniffed back tears, embarrassed that someone had heard her. “Yes, I’m fine,” Sara said.

  “Can I get someone for you?”

  The woman’s kindness made her tear up again. “No, really, I’m fine,” she insisted. She stayed in the stall and held back the emotion until the woman left, then continued crying into a wad of toilet paper to mute her outburst. She had cried more in the last two weeks than she had cried in a lifetime. Some of the tears out of joy. Some out of sadness. She had also attracted the kindness of strangers.

  Sara finished off the roll to blow her nose and then went to the sink to wash her face. The woman in the mirror looked sad, broken. Afraid to be herself.

  She reapplied her makeup, relying heavily on under-eye concealer to mask the puffiness.

  Sara returned to the table. “Sorry I took so long.”

  “No problem,” Grady said, buttering a roll. He didn’t notice the devastated woman sitting across from him. “I ordered you lasagna.”

  “Great,” she said half-heartedly.

  “I haven’t eaten all day,” Grady said. “I just had a pack of peanuts at the airport. I’ve been looking forward to a steak all day.”

  Restaurants brought out the carnivore in Grady. He became like his father, who ate meat and potatoes every night.

  “How was traffic?” Sara asked, as if the question were important.

  “Not bad for a weekend,” he said. “The kids say hello, by the way. They still can’t believe you actually went to Italy. Oh, and John and Ashley want to have us to their new apartment for dinner.”

  John had announced his engagement to Ashley last Christmas. They had met in law school and were waiting until they graduated to get married. Ashley was just the type of woman Sara imagined John would end up with. She came from a wealthy New England family and was both beautiful and brilliant. Money and beauty mattered to John.

  “They’re living together?” Sara asked. “Since when?”

  “Last week,” he said. “John talked to me about it. They’ve got another year before they’re through with law school, and they can save money for a house by sharing expenses.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” she said. Their oldest son had already chosen an expected course, one approved of by his father. “Are her parents okay with it?”

  “They weren’t at first. But they seem to have come around.”

  As Grady and Sara continued to talk, her headache subsided and she began to feel more normal. If all else failed they could always talk about their children. This common interest filled her with unexpected gratitude.

  Back at the hotel Sara purposely took a long bath, giving Grady time to fall asleep before she came to bed. She put on the gown that she had worn very little on the second half of her trip, and slid under the cool sheets beside him.

  Sara glanced at the clock by the bed. It was midnight in New York, six in the morning in Florence. In her imagination she heard the church bells ring in Julia’s neighborhood. Julia would still be sleeping in the bed they had shared. Sara closed her eyes, remembering what it was like to lie beside her. For a moment she could almost feel Roberto nestled between their feet. Empty of tears, memories of Julia tormented her with their comfort until out of sheer exhaustion she fell asleep.

  The next morning her headache had returned. She felt hung-over with emotion and thankful for the fact that she and Grady often traveled in silence. He sat behind the wheel of his SUV with a full tank of gas and maneuvered their way out of the city.

  “So tell me about Julia,” Grady said when they hit the interstate.

  Sara turned to look out the window. “What do you want to know?”

  “Has she changed? What did she look like? What did you guys talk about?”

  Since when did Grady get to be so inquisitive? she wondered. “She was the same, really,” Sara said. Her voice sounded meek, pathetic. “Just a little bit older.”

  Grady nodded and drummed the steering wheel with his thumbs, as if his imagination was filling in the blanks. “So what did you guys do?”

  The nausea from the day before returned to accompany Sara’s headache. The last thing she wanted to do was talk about Julia with Grady. “Honey, can we not talk about this right now. I’m really jet-lagged.”

  “Sure,” he said. Without skipping a beat he set the cruise control and leaned back in his seat.

  Silence settled between them as she watched the scenery out the window. Sara was reminded of the train trip between Milan and Florence. Miles of countryside had flashed by, accented by tiny towns. Scenes of being with Julia played over and over in Sara’s mind creating a morose mixture of pleasure and pain. The vague longing she had had for something more in her life was now clearly defined. She knew exactly what she wanted, yet felt incapable of accepting it.

  By midday, they pulled into their driveway. The house greeted Sara with its sameness. The only difference was that Grady had planted a row of honeysuckle vines along the fence and attached their runners with twine. The front flower beds were in desperate need of weeding; an unending chore. They would need to paint the outside of the house again soon. She couldn’t say she was happy to be home, but there was something comforting about knowing what was expected of her there. Grady unloaded the car while she went inside.

  The house seemed darker than Sara remembered. Grady brought in her luggage. “It’s freezing in here,” she said. “Do you have the air conditioner on?” The iciness of Sara’s old life crept back into her veins.

  “Yeah, it’s been hotter than usual this week,” Grady said. “Will you make lunch?”

  Grady took their luggage to the bedroom while Sara searched the cabinets for a can of tuna. For the first time she realized that she hadn’t brought Grady anything from Italy. It hadn’t occurred to her. Perhaps, unintentionally, her coming back was the only gift she had to give.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  For the next few weeks emails from Julia arrived daily. Newsy emails about Italy and her paintings that revealed very little of her true feelings, as though Grady might be standing over Sara’s shoulder and reading what she had written. In every letter Julia made cryptic references to their time together: I thought of the fountain today. The bells of the cathedral are chiming the hour. Roberto misses you. But nothing related to the intimacy they had shared. Perhaps this was Julia’s way of honoring Sara’s need for more time.

  Sara’s emails in return were dull, lifeless. She hid her feelings from Julia as completely as she hid them from herself. She lived in purgatory, suspended between heaven and hell, between memories of Julia and her everyday reality.

  Weeks passed, then months, while she waited patiently for the old Sara to return. Yet like a stretched rubber band, the old Sara refused to snap back into its original shape. Everything had changed, and nothing at all. She was purposely distant with Grady. She stayed late at school and stayed in her home office until the early hours of the morning.

  Never one to push, Grady allowed the distance without questioning it. Every evening Sara wrote long emails to Julia. She sent a few, but deleted most, destroying all evidence of how she had opened a vein and let her emotions bleed red on the page.

  Sara’s body ached for Julia, as though it was a separate entity and every cell had memory of her. She touched herself in the shower, imagining it was Julia touching her. She listened to her breath and heard Julia’s. Whenever she relived their time together, replaying scenes in her mind, Sara fell into the delicious sensuousness of their power. Instead of dying away, these embers lived on, constantly pumped by the circulation of memory.

  In her imagination Julia sat by the fountain, whose patron saint had given them acceptance. The water’s song remained unchanged. It flowed in eternal ringlets at the woman’s feet. Candles in terracotta holders flickered through t
he twilight garden. Sara longed to be there with Julia as the hillside turned golden, as if illuminated from within.

  Sara touched her fingers to her lips, remembering the first time she and Julia had kissed. In the evenings she went outside and glanced up at the night sky. Star light, star bright, she repeated, missing the partner in her duet. Sara’s wish was as clear and certain as the water in the fountain, five thousand miles away.

  Three months passed. Sara suffered through another round of chemo, lost her hair, vomited with regularity, but nothing felt as torturous as keeping the secret of her love for Julia.

  “Are you ready to go?” Grady asked.

  On Grady’s birthday they always went to his parent’s house to celebrate his early December birthday and since it fell on a Sunday this year his mother was going all out. She had made his favorite meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes, green beans, and an apple pie for dessert. Sara’s role was thankfully small and unimportant.

  Sara collected his wrapped present and joined Grady in the car. “Behave yourself today, okay?” Grady said, as she buckled up.

  “What do you mean? Don’t I always?”

  “You’ve been so sullen lately. Just try to enjoy yourself for a change.”

  Had she been sullen? Was it that obvious? For some reason this made her feel a little better. If she was a martyr for doing the right thing, at least this hinted that some redeeming value might be found in her suffering.

  They arrived at Grady’s parent’s house and Grady walked to the front door ahead of her. Sara mentally prepared herself for the scene to follow: greetings for the adored son, acknowledgment of the much less favored daughter-in-law, followed by pleasantries, a tough roast, banter, and goodbyes.

  “Well you look good, Sara,” his mother said.

  “You look good, too, Stella.” Sara handed her Grady’s present.

  Stella’s hair had looked the same since Sara and Grady were children. Styled with industrial-strength hairspray, Sara doubted a bomb blast could dislodge it from its post.

  Grady’s birthday was Stella’s production. Presents were always opened at the end of the meal. Stella handed them out to Grady as she deemed fit, shaking and making a big deal over each one, as if Grady were still in grade school.