by T. Greenwood
“They stayed married?” I ask Johnny. “She and Ted?”
“Yes,” he says. “If you can call what they had a marriage. He never forgave her. And she never forgave herself. After I left home, they stopped bothering to keep up appearances. He had girlfriends. He disappeared for weeks, months at a time.”
“Why didn’t she leave?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Johnny says. “I was so caught up in my own troubles, I barely had room for hers, for theirs.”
There are more people in the waiting room now. It is morning, and the orderlies are pushing carts with silver-lidded breakfast trays down the hallways. The eleven-to-seven shift ends, and the morning nurses come in.
“Can I see her?” I ask, my throat swollen and aching.
“Of course,” Johnny says, almost laughing. “That’s why you’re here.”
It takes every bit of my strength to stand and take Johnny’s arm, which he offers to me. It is as if the past forty-eight years have finally taken their toll. I can feel every joint protest, every bone, every muscle resist. It is as though I am asking my body to make a thousand-mile journey instead of a simple walk down a hospital corridor.
“I’ll stay here,” Gussy says.
Johnny opens the door slowly. “Mama?” he says, leading the way into the dark room with his head first. I wait like a child behind him.
There is no answer, and for one horrifying second I fear the worst. That she has passed while I was sitting on the other side of this door.
“She’s sleeping,” he says, and I stop moving. “It’s okay. Come in, and we’ll wait for her to wake up.”
We walk into the double room, past an empty bed. There is a pale curtain dividing the room in two. The only light is a dim overhead that gives everything an eerie glow.
Johnny gently pulls the curtain back and motions for me to come with him to the other side, where Eva lies sleeping in the hospital bed.
I dreamed her back alive again. For years after her first death, I summoned her every single night. I pulled her from the shallow depths of that dream river. I saved her again and again.
She was with me when I fought with Frankie, touching my tensed shoulders as he and I fought, the same argument repeated: a skipping record, a stutter, a stammer, an endlessly repeating tic. She whispered in my ear as I lay down next to him each night, calming me, soothing me with promises that this would not last forever. And I conjured her. I conjured June, the June that never came. The summer that never was. The summer after she arrived safely at camp with her children. The summer we lived together for the first time, not as a secret, in shame, but as a real family. The nights when Frankie tossed and turned, exorcising demons, exorcising Eva, I invoked her. I invited her into our bed. I let her sleep between us.
She was with me as the girls grew older, as I grew older.
She sat on top of the dryer Frankie salvaged from a Laundromat that closed down, the one he offered to me as though an appliance could provide some recompense for everything I’d lost. Her legs dangled off the edge of the dryer, as she watched me do laundry and iron Frankie’s uniform. She was with me in the kitchen as I baked casseroles and cookies and coffee cakes. She sat on the edge of the bathtub at night, as I tried to soak away the sorrow, imagined it swirling in the soapy water down the drain. She wiped away a million tears with the soft pad of her thumb.
She was there at Chessy’s graduation from high school, with me as I drove home after dropping her off at college. I’m fairly sure she took the wheel that night, because I barely remember driving home.
She was the warmth of the sun, the brightness of the moon, the hopefulness of wishing stars.
She was there when Mouse ran away from home the first time, waiting with me as I paced, a dead phone in my hand after calling everyone who might know where she was. She was with me when Mouse came home with a red hickey on her neck and pine needles in her hair and whiskey on her breath and Frankie got drunk and angry and accused her of being just like her mother. When he smelled her fingers and demanded to know who her girlfriend was. When he called her a dyke, a whore. Together, Eva and I held Mouse in our arms and whispered our apologies into her ears.
She was with me every time I almost left but didn’t.
And she was with me a year later, after Mouse had left for good and Frankie and I were alone: when I woke up one morning and decided I couldn’t live like this for another minute. She was the one who told me that I didn’t have to make his coffee, iron his shirts, endure his hateful glances or his pathetic pleas for another moment. She packed my bags for me, and she was the one who turned the key in the ignition. She rolled down the window, turned up the radio, and I remember (I swear I remember ), she said, “Faster, Billie! Let’s fly!” as her hair blew out the window.
I watch her sleep, just as I have watched her sleep a hundred times before. I have memorized her breaths, the shivers of her shoulders and her sighs. Her hair is spread across the stiff, white pillow. It is silver now, but still as long and thick as it always was. Her face is still that quiet dreamy white of youth, though the years are etched in the lines in her forehead and mouth. Her long neck is exposed, the little hollow at her throat. Something about this makes her seem vulnerable, and I have the sudden urge to protect her.
“Please, sit down,” Johnny says, motioning to a chair next to the bed. It looks as though he has been sleeping here. There is a blanket and a pillow he removes to make room for me. He squeezes my arm. “I’ll be out in the waiting room if you need me. Thank you for coming, Billie.”
I nod, never taking my eyes off of Eva.
I reach for her hand. It rests at her side like a sleeping bird. An IV is taped to the back of it, and veins, like rivers, run across the surface of her skin.
Her eyes open at my touch, and she turns toward me, expecting Johnny, I imagine.
“Eva,” I say. Her name feels like something forbidden in my mouth.
Her eyes are unfocused, but slowly, they widen in disbelief. “Billie?” she says.
“I’m here,” I say. I don’t have any other words. Words are clumsy things, inept things.
“I was driving too fast,” she says.“I was so upset. I just wanted to get to you.”
Tears are coming down her cheeks, fat, slow tears. And I feel something so old, so primitive, it’s as though it were the very first feeling anyone, anywhere, ever had. I reach, instinctively, to stop the tumbling teardrop with my thumb, returning the favor, I suppose.
“Well, you finally made it,” I say, feeling warmth spreading into her cold hand.
“I did,” she says, nodding. “I promised I would.”
Gussy returns to Vermont, but I stay in Cambridge at Chessy’s house. She greets me at her door and lingers when I hug her. When she finally pulls away, her eyes are wet with tears. “Please, come in.”
Her house, like Gussy’s house, is warm and light and filled with books. She and her husband are both biology professors, though her husband, Michael, retired last year. He watches birds now, and he’s in Nova Scotia this week, tracking puffins. I can imagine her in front of a classroom full of students; she was always, always a leader. She is humble about her accomplishments, but Michael has kept me updated over the years on the awards she has won, the articles she has had published. I am swollen with pride for her and all that she has become, despite everything, because of it.
There are photos hung on every wall, snapshots and more artful black-and-white photographs that document and preserve her children’s lives as well as her own. After I left Frankie, she staked claim to all of the photo albums, rescuing those artifacts I left behind. Chessy, like her father, is a historian of sorts, and she salvaged these treasures from the wreckage of our family’s life. Frankie had destroyed all of the photos I had of Eva in a fit of rage, and the others, the ones that remained, were too painful for me to look at. When I left, I took only one photograph. It was one Eva had taken of me and the girls at the camping trip to Rippling River. I look so y
oung in the photo, the girls grubby and smiling.
When I called to tell her about Eva, she had only said, “Oh, my God. Oh, Mom.” Now, over tea and my mother’s coffee cake (which Chessy has perfected), we talk. She holds my hands across the kitchen table and listens intently. One thing I have noticed about Chessy in the last few years is that she has become a good listener. Perhaps it is motherhood that has made her this way. She never interrupts, and she has lost that look in her eye that she used to have as a child, the one that seemed to suggest she was constantly assessing, judging, what was being said and who was saying it.
This is the first time we have talked about Eva in years. About running away from Frankie that Easter Sunday. About what happened to Eva and her girls.
“How is she?” she asks me, and I feel as though someone has uncorked me. My throat opens, and my heart spills.
“She’s very sick. She’s had three bouts with cancer since the mastectomy all those years ago. She stopped treatment last month.”
Chessy squeezes my hands.
The cake is sweet.
“Do you remember,” she says, “the time we went apple picking? With the Scouts?”
I start to laugh, remembering Eva running away from the farmer who had caught us poaching his apples. I remember her looking over her shoulder, her dress hiked up, cradling all those stolen apples as she ran. I remember Mouse jogging happily along beside her, and Chessy standing behind, terrified and clutching my hand.
“I remember thinking that she was magical,” Chessy says, her face breaking into a smile. “I was always such a scaredy-cat. I remember wishing that when I grew up I could be just like her.”
I blink hard to keep my tears from falling.
“Me too,” I say, my words catching in my throat.
“I have something for you,” she says, standing up. “A little surprise.”
“I don’t think I can take any more surprises,” I say, half expecting Frankie to jump out from behind the kitchen counter, though he’s been dead now for a decade. “Please.”
“Stay right here,” she says.
When she comes back, she hands me two packages. Both of them are beautifully, meticulously wrapped. “Just open one. The other one is for Eva.”
I carefully undo the ribbon and slip my finger under the tape to reveal what’s inside. It’s a frame, I can see, and my heart pounds as I turn it over.
The photograph is of Eva and me standing together at the boat access area at Gormlaith. It was taken that first summer, before Eva got sick, and she’s wearing her blue bathing suit. We have our arms around each other and are mugging for the camera. We look so young, so beautiful, so happy. For one brief moment I am transported. I can feel the cold water around my ankles, almost taste the breeze. I can hear the sound of a biplane that has flown overhead. This photo was taken only a moment before it flew across the sky, and we all looked up, shielding our eyes from the bright sun. I can smell her skin, feel her hand on my hip.
“Where did you get this?” I ask, my throat swollen.
“After Daddy burned all the pictures, I found the negatives and hid them. There were only a couple of pictures of Eva. But I like this one. Do you remember the biplane?”
I nod, smiling.
“Eva said someday she’d like to ride in one of those. Feel the clouds in her hair, that’s what she said,” Chessy says, laughing.
“I remember,” I say. “Thank you.”
Every day for a week, I go to the hospital and visit Eva. I bring her little gifts to make her happy: the photograph from Chessy, maple candies, lilac hand lotion, magazines. I sit next to her and hold her hand as I read from the books we used to love. When she sleeps, I spend time with Johnny. He’s a good man, and he’s trying so hard to get better. His father’s suicide has tested him, has pushed him to examine himself. To examine his life.
“How is Mouse?” he asks one afternoon as we eat lunch in the hospital cafeteria. “God, I was such a rotten little shit to her.”
“Mouse is terrific,” I say. “She lives in New Mexico. In a teepee.”
He slaps his knee and laughs so hard. I think of him and Mouse tearing around the neighborhood in the Indian headdresses Eva and I made, their war cries. Their whooping laughter.
“I’m going to stop in New Mexico and see her on my way home,” I say.
“Well, please tell her hello,” he says.
Eva knows I am here, though sometimes she doesn’t know who I am. When this happens, I am rendered speechless and paralyzed until her memory comes back; it’s like the moon, waxing and waning as she grows sicker. Sometimes she confuses the stories we read with real life.
“Tell me that story,” she says softly one morning. It is cold out now; winter is coming.
“What story?” I ask.
“The love story,” she says.
“Ethan Frome?” I ask. We’ve just finished this one; it’s sitting next to her on the nightstand next to a blue plastic pitcher of water.
She shakes her head; her eyes are glistening. “No, the one about the artist. The artist and the swimmer. That swimmer with the beautiful long legs.”
I nod, and I lean over and whisper in her ear. “A long, long time ago, there was a very lonely woman who thought she’d never fall in love . . . until the beautiful artist moved into the empty house across the street.”
Eva closes her eyes, and I think she has fallen asleep. I lean over and kiss the fragile skin at her temple, feel her pulse beating underneath with my lips.
Her voice is just a whisper.
“I want to go to the lake, Billie. Will you please take me to the lake?”
Gussy drives us to the lake, and I sit in the backseat with Eva. We hold hands, sharing a quilt that Chessy sent along with us to keep Eva warm. The air is brittle outside, but the sky is bright. The few remaining leaves cling to their branches, and the road is carpeted with them. When the lake comes into sight, Eva squeezes my hand and I look down at our intertwined fingers. After all this time, I still recognize every bone in her hand. I have traced every tendon and vein with my fingertips as though they were a map leading home.
Effie and the girls are waiting for us outside. Plum is swinging in the swing under the tree house, and Zu-Zu is doing cartwheels on the lawn. Effie waves excitedly, and runs to the car as we pull into the driveway.
“Welcome, welcome!!” she says as we get out of the car. And we both help Eva out of the backseat. Effie takes Eva inside, and Gussy starts unloading the trunk, all of the baskets and bags. On the way up from Boston we drove past a farm stand, and Eva had asked if we could stop. Gussy pulled over, and Eva insisted on getting out of the car. She went straight to the bins that were overflowing with apples.
“Look,” she said, reaching for me. “Winter apples.”
“Devin and I have a surprise for you,” Effie says after we have settled Eva on the daybed on the sleeping porch. She takes my hand and leads me out to the back, where Devin has been working on the guest cottage. It looks like something from a fairy tale: gingerbread trim, a miniature porch, a Dutch doorway.
“It’s almost finished,” she says.
“It’s still a little rustic,” Devin says, opening the top Dutch door. “But there’s a working bathroom. I’ve got it wired now too, and there’s a nice space heater to keep you warm. Come on in.” He opens the bottom half of the door and takes my hand.
I follow him into the little cottage, my heart pounding hard and certain in my chest. Inside, the walls are made of cedar; it smells like the forest. There is a double bed, covered with pillows and quilts, a tiny writing desk, and bookcases filled with library books.
“I asked Gussy what your favorites were. The Athenaeum gave them to me on permanent loan,” Effie says.
I run my fingers across the spines.
“And look!” she says, her eyes bright. “We found these in the old shed before we tore it down. I don’t know why I held on to them, but I did.”
On one of these shelves
there are twenty or thirty record albums. I pick up the first one and smile. Sam Cooke. “This is Eva’s favorite,” I say, my eyes filling with tears.
“There’s a record player here. I bought a brand-new needle.”
“Thank you,” I say. “This is all so thoughtful.”
Later that night, after Gussy has left for home and we have moved our things into the guest cottage, Devin and Effie disappear into the camp, leaving us alone. I can hear the sound of their girls’ laughter, and it makes me smile.
Eva is tired, I know. This has been a long trip, and I can hear her labored breath as she moves to the bookshelves and picks up the record. She slips it from its sleeve and runs her fingers across the label. She bends over to put the record on the record player and then lowers the needle into the groove, and that old crackle and hiss overwhelms me.
“Dance with me, Billie?” she says.
I move to her and she leans her head into my chest. The music fills the cottage, and my feet remember. My hands remember. My whole body recollects.
We slip gently into the past, like two bodies into water, but when we emerge it is not into the past, not into that place where we never belonged. But instead, we surface into a new future, the future we should have had, the one we were denied. The one stolen from us.
“Remember?” I ask as she peers up at me.
And she looks at me with her eyes as bright and wild and beautiful as they ever were and nods.
“I remember, Billie. I remember everything.”
Memory is the same as water. It is a still lake bathed in moonlight, a vast ocean, a violent river ready to carry you away. It can calm you or it can harm you; it is both more powerful and weaker than you’d think. It is a paradox.
