by T. Greenwood
I feel terrible leaving them without a proper good-bye; the girls will be disappointed, I suspect. Gussy promised to make her special pumpkin pancakes. But while I hate sneaking away like bandits in the middle of the night, I feel worse that we are leaving the lake while it is still dark out. Whenever we left camp when the kids were little, they liked to make a big show of saying their farewells to each and every landmark. I can almost hear their voices in the backseat. “Good-bye, lake! Good-bye, big rock! Good-bye, crab apple tree!” Now they would only say, “Good-bye, darkness. Good-bye, stars. Good-bye, moon.” It is so dark, we could be anywhere or nowhere at all.
“What did Johnny say?” Gussy asks, lifting the steaming coffee to her lips.
“Not much. He’s at the hospital.”
“Did he say why?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I think maybe he’s sick. Maybe he’s drinking again?” All of this is completely mystifying.“Maybe he’s been sick all along, and he’s just got something he wants to get off his chest before he goes. I have no idea.” I admit, the idea of being beckoned in the middle of the night so some drunk can make amends, or whatever he needs to do, makes me a little angry. It seems like so many of my years were spent appeasing a drunken fool. But still I felt the urgency in his voice, and he is, after all, Eva’s son. I owe him this.
Gussy nods quietly and drinks her coffee.
I reach for my own cup and take a quick sip before returning it to the cup holder and using both hands to steer, focusing on the dirt road ahead. It is foggy, and the headlights only illuminate a few feet in front of us. I feel my hands involuntarily clenching the wheel. Anxiety bubbles like percolating coffee somewhere in my stomach.
If it were light out, we’d have passed the last place where the lake is visible before becoming hidden by the thick tangle of trees.
“Stop!” Gussy says, startling me, pointing ahead, and I slam on the brakes.
“What?” I say.
“Look!” she says, and in the beam of my headlights is a small black bear, a baby, crossing the road. Close behind it is its mother, rushing it along. She turns to face us, and I feel my throat grow thick. I’ve seen bears at Gormlaith only a few times before, and it has stunned me every time. I’ve never been this close to one. We are only a couple of feet from them. If Gussy hadn’t seen them, I would have hit the baby.
Gussy presses her hand against her chest as if to keep her heart inside. And then as quickly as they appeared, they disappear into the woods again, but my heart is racing too. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! We almost hit them. That could have been a terrible accident.”
The word, accident, feels like a blade. I nod. And she looks at me, her eyes apologizing. She reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Her skin is warm from the coffee. I am grateful for this, but my heart still aches.
I drive slowly, cautiously, until we are finally out of the deep woods, and I am relieved when the dirt turns to asphalt and the fog has lifted. I feel my grip on the wheel loosening, the muscles in my shoulders relaxing. By the time we get on the interstate, I have put the bears out of my mind. Accidents. As Gussy peels an orange and the whole car fills with the wonderful pungent scent of citrus, I try to think only of the traffic around me, the barreling semis and the mile markers ticking off as we head to Boston.
Waiting at camp for Eva and the children was excruciating. It was like the summers she had come to stay, only worse. Every moment seemed swollen, time like a slow-moving, icy river. I cleaned the entire camp. I changed the linens on the beds, I dusted the cobwebs, swept up the dead flies, mopped the wooden floors. I split the wood that Gussy and Frank had had delivered, insisting that I was perfectly capable of splitting it; it would save me money in the long run if I split and stacked it myself. And there was something pacifying, satisfying about this little bit of self-sufficiency. As the girls studied the math sheets I’d made at the kitchen nook, I donned my winter hat and gloves and allowed the early spring air to fill my lungs as I swung the ax over and over. The crunch and crack of the logs made me feel as though I was making some sort of progress: the evidence in the growing woodpile as I stacked the wood in the shed. We had many cold nights ahead of us still, where spring would forget itself and winter would return. There might even be snow before spring finally settled in.
Inside, the bowl of remaining Baldwin apples sat on the counter as a reminder that we still had much to endure. That I needed to be patient, resilient, firm.
I didn’t know how Eva planned to get to me. Ted would have the car; he never left her alone with the car anymore. I assumed she’d take the train to Two Rivers and then would call for a ride. I imagined, hoped, that she would call beforehand and let me know her plans as soon as she had a moment alone; by the time Ted saw the long-distance bill, Eva would be with me. It wouldn’t matter anymore. I had to assume that our thinking was the same.
But Wednesday evening (when the temperature, as expected, plummeted) I sat for hours watching the fire burning in the wood stove and the phone did not ring. I stayed awake the whole night, tending the fire, pacing the clean floors. Outside the moon disappeared behind a heavy blanket of clouds. Snow clouds. And by three a.m., snow was beginning to fall.
The girls slept, but I did not. I tried to read, but every word, every sentence was like an incantation, a prayer: every syllable somehow reminding me of Eva. I made a pot of coffee around four a.m., drinking enough to warm my body and make my hands tremble. The fire crackled, cackled. And the sky softened with light, though it kept snowing.
I’d always joked that Mouse was like a baby bear, hibernating in the winter, nearly impossible to wake on cold mornings. But Chessy was up to greet the sun: more bird than bear. And this morning was no different.
“It’s snowing?” she said, shuffling into the kitchen where I was pouring myself another unnecessary mug of coffee.
I nodded, looking out the little window at the thermometer on the tree. It was twenty degrees out.
“It’s so cold,” Chessy said, sitting down next to me. “Can I have some coffee?”
I raised my eyebrow at her. “Aren’t you a little young for coffee?”
She shrugged, and in that simple gesture, I saw the toll that all of this had taken on her. She was a child, but in the last year she’d aged. That delightful innocence that still clung to Mouse had slipped away from Chessy. For the first time ever I looked at her face and saw the woman she would one day become. Before my eyes in the half light of dawn, the color of her eyes deepened, her face thinned and lengthened, even her hands looked older. My little girl was disappearing, and there was nothing I could ever do to retrieve her. The enormity of this awareness nearly took my breath away. I suddenly wanted to be able to hold her, to cradle her entire body in my arms. I wanted to be able to enclose that hand in my own, have it disappear in my grasp. But those days were gone. Those days belonged to some other time, and her smallness, her reliance on me for even the simplest things, was an artifact in the museum of my recollection.
“Here,” I said, pouring her a hot cup from the percolator. I topped it with a healthy dose of milk and spooned in a full spoonful of sugar. “This will warm you up.”
The snow kept falling as dawn turned into morning. As Mouse finally crawled from her cave of covers, hungry for breakfast. By noon, the entire world was swaddled in a layer of white. The flowers and buds that had dared to blossom were covered in ice now, their optimistic blooms frozen.
Chessy was curled up in a chair by the fire, rereading The Wind in the Willows. The only books at the camp for children were the ones we’d left behind over the years. We’d fled Hollyville in such a hurry that she hadn’t even been able to grab Little Women from her nightstand. I thought I should find a way to get her a copy, perhaps from the Athenaeum in Quimby. Mouse was busy playing a game of jacks on the floor. The rubber ball kept escaping her and rolling under Chessy’s chair. Chessy, deep in her book, ignored Mouse as she wriggled underneath her.
With the girls occupied, I
went to the kitchen and picked up the telephone to call Gussy and check to see if she’d heard anything from Eva, but as I pressed the receiver to my ear, there was nothing. No dial tone. I clicked the switch hook up and down, frantically. But still, nothing but silence, just my pulse throbbing in my temples.
The snow and ice had probably taken down the phone line. Eva wouldn’t be able to get through. I imagined her at the train station in Two Rivers, her entire brood of children waiting for what would come next, her futile attempts to reach me, and I swooned, feeling sick. All of that coffee had put me on edge, my entire body electrified with caffeine and fear.
She knew Gussy’s number. I’d seen her scratch it into her address book last summer. She would call Gussy, and Gussy and Frank would go pick her up from the train station. They would deliver her to me. The children in their hats and mittens would all go outside and make a snowman. I dreamed them rolling balls of snow, the stick arms, the carrot nose. I dreamed the stocking cap on top, the red cheeks and soggy wool socks drying by the fire.
But as the afternoon progressed, the only traffic on the road was the snowplow, its lights bright on the newly fallen snow. We were ten miles from town. I might be able to walk, but the children wouldn’t. The closest neighbor was Mr. Tucker, and he had gone to North Carolina to visit his sister for the week. As the sky darkened and the snow kept falling, I felt my stomach plummeting.
What if she hadn’t made the train at all? What if Ted had not gone into work that morning; if he’d been ill or sensed that she was up to something? What if Johnny had said something to him? What if he had figured it all out and forewarned him? Or worse, what if Eva had changed her mind? What if she decided that it was crazy to take her four children, and the one that was due to be born in less than a month, and leave the only stable home she had? What if she, unlike me, had come to her senses and realized the futility of it all? What if she had, finally, resigned herself to the life that she’d been given instead of the one I’d promised we could make? What if she never came? I was sick with worry and sorrow and fear. I could barely keep myself together enough to heat a can of soup and make grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner. I was rendered mute as I helped the girls wash up and brush their teeth and get ready, again, for bed. I was on the verge of hysteria, though I hid it well, as I sat alone, loading another log onto the fire, waiting for whatever would come next.
All that anxiety must have taken its toll on my body. The need for sleep, for rest, trumping everything, because when the headlights shone through the front windows, I realized I had been asleep.
My eyes flew open at the light, and I listened for the telltale sounds of the snowplow, thinking it strange that they would make two passes through in one day. But it wasn’t the plow. And as it slowed in front of the cabin and pulled into the drive, I felt all the fear and trembling trepidation turn into a warm rush of relief and the quavering thrill of anticipation. They were here. This is where my life begins, I thought. This is it.
I ran to the kitchen to open the back door, not bothering to put on my shoes or my coat as I swung the door open, ready to usher the Wilsons in, ready to see Eva’s face, to embrace her, to touch her, to smell her, to hear her whispers in my ear as she held me. My cheeks ached from my smile, my muscles straining with happiness. I patted down my hair, straightened my skirt, futile gestures, I knew, even as I attempted to make myself presentable.
Gussy got out of the car. My eyes were blinded by the headlights; I blinked but only saw stars. The door slammed, and then there was only the sound of her feet crunching the snow. I waited for the other doors to fly open, for the children’s voices to ring out, like bells, into the night.
“Billie,” Gussy said, as I blinked hard again and leaned forward to peer into the dark windows of her car. I shook my head. Why weren’t they getting out?
And then Gussy’s arm was around me, and she was guiding me toward the door.
“Wait!” I laughed, and brushed her off. But even as the sound of laughter rose from my chest, I felt as though I’d been shot. My chest ached. My whole body went numb. I started toward the car, looking blindly into the dark windows.
“Where are they?” I asked, as her arms found me again, as her hands steered me away from the car, out of the darkness, and into the bright kitchen.
“Oh, Billie,” she said, enclosing me. I felt swallowed. I couldn’t breathe. “Billie, there’s been a terrible accident.”
I remember the apples. The bowl of apples on the kitchen table, too red. Like a painting. Like an assault on my senses. As Gussy uttered the words that would change everything, I was blinded by the red winter apples. As I flung myself away from her, screaming, I knocked the bowl over, and the apples flew to the floor, rolled under the table, and the sound of their falling was like the sound of bodies hitting the ground.
It was Frankie who had called Gussy, Frankie who had received the news first. When Ted discovered Eva was gone, he called our house, not aware that the children and I had already left and that Frankie was there alone. He was looking for Eva. He demanded to know where she was, threatened to kill all of us if Frankie didn’t tell him where she was. And so Frankie told him that I’d left him, that on Easter Sunday I’d taken the girls and gone to my sister’s in Vermont. That I wasn’t coming back. Ted had hung up the phone then, and Frankie worried that he would come after us. He was worried about the children, about the danger I had put them in. That was when he first called Gussy, to warn her that Ted might be coming after us. And then he went outside to start the car so that he could get to us before Ted did.
But when he came back in to get his wallet, the phone was ringing again. And this time, it was Ted’s sister, Mary.
Mary told him that Eva had said that she needed to borrow her car, that she was going to take the children to Plymouth Rock for the day. Their Easter break was a week later than ours, and they were all going crazy cooped up in the apartment. And Mary had said, “Of course. Though you sure you want to be out driving in this weather?”
The late winter nor’easter that had brought all of this snow to Vermont had brought freezing rain and ice to Boston. The roads were treacherous as Eva piled all of the kids in the car and got in herself, her belly so large, she was barely able to fit behind the steering wheel now. She’d packed a picnic basket for the children: ham salad sandwiches from the Easter leftovers. There were a half-dozen colored eggs.
Eva was always a fast driver; she liked the way it felt as though the world were disappearing beneath her when she drove fast. The times we’d driven together, I’d clutched the seat as we flew over the hills, our bottoms leaving the seat, the children squealing with delight as we flew. When I imagine that drive now, the one toward us, I try to think of the glee, the sparkle in her eye as she accelerated through Two Rivers, along the winding road that paralleled the train tracks. I dream over and over again the way she might have looked over her shoulder at Donna and Sally and Johnny and Rose all breathless with anticipation. I imagine her smiling, and saying, “Hold on!” as she rounded the bend by the river.
She was so close. We were so close.
But she was upset. She wasn’t thinking straight; she wasn’t being careful. And she wasn’t joyful but terrified and distressed. And so when she hit a patch of black ice, Mary told Frankie, she lost control of the car. It flew, turning over three times, somersaulting through the air.
I dream this flight. I dream the car, that abstract metal box, just one of her mobiles, spinning and beautiful. But there were no strings to hold her up, nothing to tether her to the sky.
Mary told Frankie that Johnny was thrown from the car, landing like a rag doll at the river’s edge, glass shattered, body broken and battered but alive. But when the car finally landed, it tumbled ten more feet down into the icy river.
“Johnny will be okay. But the girls . . . oh, God,” she cried.
Frankie hung up with Mary and called Ted. He called and called, all afternoon, but it wasn’t until nearly midnight
that Ted finally answered the phone.
“Ted,” Frankie said. “Please don’t hang up. I just want to know if . . . please tell me they’re okay.”
“No,” Ted said. “I’ve lost everything.”
Frankie said he felt his throat closing up. That he couldn’t find a single word to say to him.
“What about Eva?” he finally asked.
There was a long, terrible silence at the end of the line. Finally, Ted spoke, his voice a stone sinking to the bottom of a lake. “My wife is dead.”
At four a.m., the sky is the color of a bruise as we disappear into the nearly empty garage, and I park in the first space I find. It is quiet here, quiet and cold. We sit in the car for several moments before either one of us makes a move to open our doors.
“Am I making a mistake?” I ask Gussy, without looking at her. I fear that if I look at her face, I will cry.
“No,” she says, shaking her head. I can see tears welling up in her eyes. She looks like she might speak, but she just shakes her head again.
“Do you think he’s angry, Gus? With me? Do you think he blames me?”
I remember the night of the accident, the night I’d nearly fallen apart. I remember the way it felt like I was unraveling; every fiber of my body seemed to be coming undone. The term they used back then was nervous breakdown, but it didn’t feel like breaking down. It felt like breaking apart. Somehow, Gussy had gotten the girls to stay upstairs as I came undone. When I think of that night now, as I often do, I remember almost nothing except for Gussy’s arms, holding the fragments of me together. I wonder now what would have happened if she had not been there.
Frankie came to the lake the next day and took the children back home. I stayed with Gussy at the camp until I finally could make a decision about what to do next. I barely remember the days that followed. The recollections of those days feel as though they belong to someone else: as though my life were a play and I were a character moving across the paper cutout landscape of that horrifying scene. Eva was gone. Rose, Sally, Donna, and our baby all gone with her. And without them, without Eva, nothing seemed to matter anymore. I didn’t care where I went. I didn’t care what I did. It was over. Everything in the world that mattered was gone. And it was all my fault.
