The Lemonade Year

by Amy Willoughby-Burle

  “Are you ok with Cassie staying with Jack for a while?” Lola asks, arranging and rearranging herself to get comfortable as if the braces on her legs have surfaced again.

  “No,” I say, looking at my phone where I’ve positioned it beside me on the bed. “But I’m going to have to be. It’s part of the deal now, I guess.”

  Jack has already called to tell me that they stopped by the condo, got her things, and that if Cassie needs anything he will be sure to let me know.

  I open up my messenger to confirm that Cassie has not replied to my third text about whether or not she needs me to bring her something, or did she want to tell Grandma good night, or did she remember to take her homework because she’ll need to go back to school on Monday and does she think she will be at her dad’s house until then?

  What all of it really means, of course, is Don’t leave me, I’m not ready for this. I’m not ready.

  “Did Chris make it to his plane on time?” I ask, changing the subject. “I’m sorry he had to leave sooner than planned.”

  “I got a message a few hours ago that he was boarding,” Lola says. “He should land soon. They’re doing a new spot. I guess that’s showbiz—even goofy commercials.” She makes the same sighing snort that Ray did. “What exactly did I think caused him to have to go back and forth to LA?” She shakes her head and pulls at a loose thread on the old bedspread.

  “I think this is the first time he’s gone since you started seeing him. He’s been on an extended visit for months now.”

  “I think you’re right,” she says, wrinkling her brow. “Where did I think he lived? Was he staying in a hotel all this time?”

  She wiggles off my bed and scoots over to her own.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “If I was known as the goofy insurance commercial guy and I met a beautiful woman who didn’t recognize me, I wouldn’t spill the beans either.”

  She nods and fiddles with the clock on her bedside table.

  “Did Jack come inside?” she says, changing the subject yet again. “I didn’t see him.”

  “No,” I say. “He just stole Cassie from the front yard and left.”

  I make a face at her so she knows I’m exaggerating, but I’m sure she knows that already. Jack’s not a bad guy. He was just a bad husband. I think. It’s hard to see where you’re going when you’re lost. You feel shook up, and nothing looks like it would if you knew the way to get to where you were meant to be. Streets don’t seem to connect like they should. Tree branches hang too far over the road, and mailboxes seem to leap off their posts and roll underneath your car.

  “Probably for the best,” Lola says. “How did it go? Him showing up?”

  “I threw a coffee mug full of vodka at him,” I say.

  She snickers. “Welcome to your life, post-divorce.”

  “You make it sound like a disease,” I say. A sickness I didn’t see coming and one for which there is no easy remedy.

  “Sorry,” she says, seeing that I’m not playing into the joke. “I know there was a time when you wanted this to work out.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “More like a time when I was naïve enough to think it would.”

  Correction—naïve enough to think that it would be easy.

  “Did you think it would last?” she asks. “Going in.”

  “Of course,” I say. “Everyone thinks that.”

  “Was Jack cheating back then? At the start of it?”

  I don’t mind when she asks me questions like that. Sometimes it’s nice to have an opening to talk about things that most people hope you don’t bring up because it’s awkward for them to listen to.

  “I don’t know,” I say, doubting that he was in the beginning. “He says he wasn’t.”

  “Of course he says that,” Lola says. “But he admits to cheating now, right. Like it was a one-time thing or something. Did he tell you how it didn’t mean anything?” She rolls her eyes and makes a scoffing sound at the back of her throat.

  “He says he never cheated at all,” I say. “I saw him though, talking to that girl who worked in his office—that secretary. Body language says it all.”

  “I thought you said he owned up to it?” Lola said in confusion.

  “He says he was ‘seeing’ someone.” I make sarcastic air quotes. “But that he didn’t sleep with her.”

  “Whatever,” Lola says. “He’s playing semantics.”

  “It might have been just as much my fault.”

  Every month that I didn’t get pregnant, I built the wall between us higher. After a while, sex stopped being fun and became a basic scientific function. A man and a woman have sex for the purpose of reproduction. Male and female sexual organs perform mandated tasks to achieve completion of the sexual act in which the male ejaculates sperm into the female. The sperm then makes its way to the egg and begins the process of new life.

  I can almost hear the monotone voice-over from those science films in high school. Except this voice-over goes on to say, Except in some sad cases in which the poor male toils and labors and sends his fruitless sperm inside the inhospitable female for naught. It will be a useless journey and a battle lost, as the weak sperm peck at the steel egg until their energy is spent and they die.

  Not very sexy.

  Then I did get pregnant and everything was great, I think. Then I lost the baby nineteen weeks in and everything broke apart like a plate dropped to the floor. It shattered into pieces that can never go back together, because shards so fine yet so important are lost—too small to see, yet big enough to make it unfixable.

  “Maybe if I hadn’t taken all the fun out, we’d still be together,” I say.

  “Doesn’t give him the right to go elsewhere,” Lola says, ever on my side.

  “No, but it makes it understandable.”

  “It does?”

  “This has been hard on Jack, too,” I say to Lola. “I wish everyone didn’t hate him. I don’t hate him.”

  I want to, but I don’t.

  “I’m your sister. I can’t help but get my hackles up. It just seemed like it didn’t faze him and you were going through it alone. I don’t understand that.”

  She’s wrong about that, it did faze him, but I don’t want to talk about it.

  “Hackles?” I question, and she laughs.

  “Darn tootin’,” she says and throws her pillow at me.

  I throw it back at her, and she holds up her finger. She reaches under her bed and pulls out the album cover. She puts it over her face like Dad used to do, and I want to burst into tears and laughter at the same time.

  This is Lola’s gift. To take what hurts and make it better.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “I know,” she says and puts the album cover under my pillow.

  Lola goes back to her side of the room and fidgets for a while, looking lost. She gets under her covers and tosses back and forth. I know she’s uncomfortable here without her lists. If a hole opens up in her head, she has nothing to close it with. At home, she has everything mapped out. An amnesiac’s guide to her ever-changing universe.

  I wonder what would happen if her system fell away beneath her. I see her like one of the fireworks from the night everything changed—launched into the sky on its way to nowhere but up. No course of action but to exploded into a million bits of color and fizzle out. I can still hear the boom of those fireworks. When I close my eyes, I see their light etched on the back of my lids. My mouth gets dry from the heat, and my heart races.

  I look over to Lola, all these years later. There is nothing I can do about what has already been done.

  Without Lola, there may very well be nothing. She might be one of a handful of people who holds the world together. She’s one of those people without whom it doesn’t really make any sense for God to have gone to so much trouble.

  I’m g
rateful for Chris and hope that he and my sister will fare better than Jack and I did. I wonder about fate and the way people meet. How God must work it all out, just so. Who else could get past that stupid jingle except for the girl who can’t remember ever having heard it? Who else could put up with Swiss-cheese brain but the guy who wishes everyone would forget who he is?

  Well played, God. Well played.

  But about all this other business, I say to Him, I’m not so sure you’re on the right track.

  “Ray came, you know,” Lola says from under her covers, breaking my thoughts.

  “Yeah,” I say, not really listening as I check Facebook, Twitter, and everything else I can think of, looking for Cassie. “It’s nice that he’s here.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she says and sits up in bed. “He came to the hospital, that first time. When Dad first got sick.”

  “Really?” I say, letting my grip loosen on the phone, my attention turn to the past. “I didn’t see him. Nobody said anything.”

  “Nobody knew,” Lola says. “I saw him in the parking lot. Remember when I went to get some sodas and you complained about how long it took me to get back?”

  “I remember,” I say, my voice giving away the disappointment of being left out.

  “I saw him through the window,” she says. “I ran outside. I was yelling out to him, afraid that he’d get back in his car before I got there.”

  I place the phone down and scoot to the edge of the bed.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “He smiled,” Lola says, and her face lights at the memory of him. “I hadn’t seen him since he left the night of the gallery showing a few weeks after he got out of jail.”

  She’s lost for a second in a secret part of a memory that doesn’t include me. I’m jealous of Ray. He gets a part of Lola that I sometimes think he doesn’t deserve, but that, nonetheless, I know is what keeps him alive.

  “Did he come in?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “He had been in North Dakota. Drove all the way. Did you know that’s where he was?”

  “No.”

  I rarely knew anything about Ray. When Dad died, it took a lot of message passing from one old friend to the next to find Ray. Knowing about Michael now stands out as even more odd.

  “I tried to get him to come see Dad,” Lola says. “But he said he couldn’t go in. He said he’d seen me and that was all he really came for.”

  I’m jealous of Lola, too. She gets a part of Ray that no one else does.

  “I wish he had come in,” I say.

  “Me too,” Lola says. “I think he wishes it now.”

  I’m not ready to try to understand his reasons. “Well, he’ll just have to live with that.”

  “Don’t be mad at Ray,” Lola says. “He came. It’s hard for him.”

  “Poor Ray,” I say. “It’s hard for the rest of us, too.”

  I’m sorry Lola is taking the brunt of my sudden anger. I get up from the bed and wander the room aimlessly. I need to move before I shatter.

  “I’m sorry, Nina. I know what this means for you. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  I know she is. She knows how close Dad and I were.

  “Don’t be sorry,” I say and feel guilty that I’m making her feel responsible for my grief. “It is important that Ray came. I told him as much today. Although not as kindly as I could have.”

  “You spoke to him,” she says, trying to smooth it over. “That means more to him than I’m sure he let on.”

  There she goes again, weaving it together. Her cell phone lights up and plays the insurance jingle. I tilt my head at her in a question.

  “Just to remind me.” She smiles hugely at her own cleverness. “It was on a ringtone app on my phone.”

  While Lola talks to Chris, I pull the album cover out from under my pillow and look longingly at the photo. I pick up my phone, but set it down without checking anything.

  The process of grieving is exhausting. I feel it in my arms like I’ve been carrying around an anvil, looking for somewhere to set it down and not even understanding how it was that I came to be holding it. Besides, if I set it down now, my body would be so light I might float to the ceiling and what would everyone think? I can hear Mom now—For Pete’s sake, Nina, this really isn’t the time to be floating around on the ceiling.

  I should consider myself lucky. I won’t drift away into the gray-blue sky and be a dot in a black dress lifting higher and higher until no one can see me as anything other than a balloon jerked away by the wind. I’m heavy enough with grief to stay firmly on the ground.

  I think about calling Jack, but I need to learn to face this new life. It seems strange that our time together is through. Things were bad for a long time, but the actual end seemed so sudden, like when you’re a teenager in love and don’t know that the other half of your union is already calling Sarah Whitmore asking to meet after school on Wednesday because you’ll be in piano lessons and unaware that while you’re playing your heart out, thinking of him, he’ll kiss her for the first time under the bleachers where he first kissed you. You’ll be thinking that when the lesson is done, you’ll meet him at Dairy Queen like you always do, but he’s not coming and you will sit there long into the afternoon, wondering what happened and why you are sitting at this cement circle with the hole in the middle, all by yourself.

  Losing Dad came on sudden as well. Even after all that time in the nursing home, him drifting farther and farther away, the call that he was gone still came as a shock. Dad breathed out, and just never breathed in again. Like perhaps he just forgot he was breathing and would remember in a bit and we’d all laugh and say he was trying to trump Lola at forgetting the craziest thing and he’d say I win.

  That day the stroke happened, I thought he was kidding. We were at Barley’s Pizza and he was telling a joke and, mid-sentence, he started slurring his words and cutting out every other one and then he just slipped off his chair and was gone. He never got to the punch line. It hangs out there in front of me like a speech bubble in a comic, but I will never be able to turn the page and see what he would have said next.

  Those years in the nursing home were like purgatory, though I don’t know if it was his or mine. All of it is so precise and surreal at the same time. The urine stink and medicine cups, the indignity of hospital gowns when he got too difficult to dress, and Dad’s roommate, God bless him, talking about little men in sombreros sitting on top of the television.

  When I visited, I would manage to smile all the way out of the building, nodding to the head nurse when she waved at me, and thanking the activities coordinator when she told me how much Dad enjoyed the banjo player who’d been there the other day, or the movie in the great room, or the whatever-the-heck-it-was that they rolled him to that he couldn’t have given two licks about. I could even hold it together until I made the turn out of the parking lot. But once I was on the road and headed home, I’d always break down into sobs—those snotty ones that takes several hours to recover from completely.

  Lola says her good-byes to Chris, and I try to snap out of my funk.

  “Is it better that he knows you know?” I ask when she’s off the phone.

  “Yeah,” she says. “He said that at first he thought it was nice that I didn’t seem to care about the commercials. Then he realized that I didn’t know about them. But once he figured out why, he felt terrible for letting it go on like that. He said it was just so nice to have the anonymity.”

  “So are you going to give it go?” I ask. “He seems to really like you.”

  “Yeah,” she says, nodding pointedly. “He’s says they’ll start shooting the new spot next week. Mom will love it. He wants me to come out there and visit.”

  “Do you get to be on set?” I say excitedly, glad for this diversion in the conversation. “Can I come?”

  “Su
re,” she says. “But you can’t laugh when he sings the jingle.”

  “I don’t know if I can agree to that,” I say, unable to keep a smile off my face.

  She throws her pillow at me again and bites her lip—just like Ray, so much like Ray.

  She sighs heavily. “I doubt I’ll go. It’s all the way across the country. I don’t know if I’m up for that. I’m a chicken, huh?”

  “You’re the bravest person I know,” I say and hand her back her pillow. “Good night, little sister.”

  “I love you, too,” she says to me.

  In a short time, Lola is asleep. I see us years ago, before the accident even, before she forgot who she was, before her ankles were bound by metal braces and her life bent beyond recognition. Before we knew there were things we would never understand.

  I lay back and close my eyes, wanting black, dark, nothing. But I see too much. I see Dad’s nurses, my doctor with his solemn face confirming no heartbeat, Mom’s neighbors bringing food, my neighbors asking about Jack’s parking space. I see white tulips in the front yard, and I know that before long, they will open too far, bend back, and do their best to look like some other kind of flower, unrecognizable as what they used to be.

  Once I’m sure that Lola is asleep, I slip my funeral clothes back on—less because they’re the closest and more because they fit my mood—and I sneak out to the car. I never once snuck out of the house when I was younger and doing so now makes me think I can turn back time, get grounded, make us miss the fireworks that fateful night, make it all like it was before.

  I ease out of the house and close the front door quietly behind me. Ray startles me out on the front porch. He’s still wearing his suit. He’s plastered.

  “Dad’s dead,” Ray says. “Did you know that?”

  I sit down beside him on the top step.

  “I waited him out,” Ray says, his words a thick slur. “And what did I prove, except that I am, in fact, the awful son people think I am?”

  Ray is drinking straight from Mom’s vodka bottle.

  “What do you think Nicole has told him?” Ray asks, and I know he means Michael. “That I’m in jail? Or dead. I’m dead, just like Dad,” Ray says with finality.