Home Safe

by Elizabeth Berg

  They move to the restaurant, and are seated by the window. Despite the nature of this meeting, Helen regrets the brightness of the light. She looks old, sitting here, she knows it. Oh, who cares? When will she stop worrying about how she looks? Maybe never. She listened once to an NPR story about a woman who was ninety-three and on a diet. Ninety-three!

  She lays the napkin on her lap, accepts the menu from a bored-looking waiter. It is Helen's habit to try to engage every waiter she meets—something that used to drive Dan crazy, and still aggravates Tessa. “Mom,” she said, last time this happened. “You don't need to make friends of everyone!” When Helen said she wasn't making friends, she was just interested in their lives, in who they were, Tessa said, “You don't have to be interested in everyone, either!” It stung, hearing this, and Helen wondered if she was foolish, if it was annoying to be with someone who liked to engage in conversation with virtually anyone who came along. But then in her mind she defended herself, deciding it was a necessary quality for doing the work that she did. Something interesting was in everyone; her obligation and her delight was to unearth it. Her purpose, even.

  But this waiter does not respond to her usual overtures: a smile, a greeting, a comment on the weather, an inquiry into what he really likes to eat here. “It's all good,” he says, and there is in his statement an air of impatience that draws Helen's eyes from him and onto the menu. “I'll have the Caesar salad,” she says, and snaps the menu closed in a way meant to convey her disappointment at his unwillingness to cooperate, as she sees it.

  “The same,” Tom says, and Helen senses that he's not looked at the menu at all, because he has been studying her.

  “You look a little different from the picture,” he says, and before Helen can ask, adds, “Dan showed me a picture of you that he kept in his wallet.”

  “Oh, God,” Helen says. “The one on the porch? With the dog?” They'd been visiting friends at a cabin in Vermont—this was a good five years ago—and Dan had snapped a photo of Helen on the front porch with her arm around their friends' Great Dane. She had just come out of the shower and her hair was flat and wet, her face lacking any makeup.

  “That's the one.”

  “Yes, and the dog looks infinitely better than I. I don't know why Dan liked that picture so much.”

  “You look … friendly,” Tom says.

  “As opposed to now?” She's a bit insulted.

  “You look scared now.”

  “Well.” She takes a piece of bread that she doesn't want, butters it, cuts it in half. Then she looks over at Tom and shrugs.

  He leans forward, speaks quietly. “Why don't I start by telling you how Dan and I met?”

  She nods.

  “I was here in Chicago, meeting with a guy Dan worked with. We all went out to lunch, and Dan saw pictures of the house I remodeled for his friend in Santa Rosa. He hired me on the spot to do one for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Tom makes a widening gesture with his hands. “He hired me to do a house for you. He wanted it to be a surprise, and he gave me the money and told me never to call him at home.”

  “How much money?” Helen asks quickly.

  “Eight hundred and fifty thousand,” Tom says, and Helen thinks, At least he's honest.

  “I have about twenty-five thousand left over, which I'll give to you.”

  “But how …?”

  “He got a post office box for me to send him photos and progress reports. He said if he ever had any problems with what I was doing, he'd let me know, but otherwise just proceed. I thought it was odd that I never heard from him, but then I decided he was just a very busy man, and that he was happy with everything. He had come out early on and seen the land and the original structure and the blueprints for the renovation. I figured that when we had the walk-through, he'd let me know if anything needed to be done. And so now … it's built. It's finished. Has been for a month. I couldn't reach him, and so I called you—he had given me your cell phone number just in case of emergency. After you hung up on me, I did a little more research, and found out that Dan had died.”

  She can't think of what to say. Inside her, Dan has just died again.

  “He said it was your retirement home. And he had me build it according to very specific directions. The bedroom, for example, is … Well, it's just bed. But there's—”

  “A refrigerator in the wall?” Helen asks. “And a big TV? And a few drawers built into the wall? And a bunch of bookshelves?”

  “Right. So this was your idea, I assume? As well as a bedroom-size closet?”

  She shakes her head. “I can't believe this. I told him once what my fantasy house would be, but it was just … Well, it was a fantasy! I never expected that he'd build it, that we'd live there. I thought, in fact, that we might end up living on a boat. That was his fantasy.”

  “He told me that,” Tom says, smiling, and moves his hands to let the waiter put down the salad. He takes a bite immediately. “Sorry, I'm just starving. I skipped breakfast, and didn't have much of a dinner last night.”

  “That's fine,” Helen says. You can have mine, too, she wants to tell him. What little appetite she had, she has lost.

  She watches Tom take a few more bites, then says, “So this house is in Santa Rosa?”

  “It's in Mill Valley, over the bridge from San Francisco.”

  “I know where Mill Valley is.”

  “It's a great place,” he says. “I have to tell you. The kitchen is a masterpiece.”

  “Six-burner stove?” Helen asks.

  “You've got a six-burner stove with a griddle at the center. Burr elm contrasted with pale elm cabinets. There's—”

  “How much do you think I can get for it? Can I get my money back?”

  Tom sits back in his seat. “You want to sell it? Wow.” He stares at her, says again, “Wow. I didn't expect that. I thought you'd …”

  “What? What did you think?”

  “You want the whole scenario?”

  A couple is seated next to them—a man and a woman, serious-faced, each with an open laptop—and Tom lowers his voice. “You want me to tell you exactly how I imagined it would play out?”

  Helen nods.

  “Okay, I thought you'd start crying. You know, happy tears. And then I thought you'd ask a million questions, which I was going to be reluctant to answer. Because you've got to see this place. You've just got to see it. You might think you know how it looks, because he designed it to your specifications. But the tree house—”

  “What tree house? That wasn't my idea. I never said anything about a tree house.”

  “Well, you got one. With wide-tread stairs for climbing up into it. He said he wanted you to be eighty and still able to get up there. It's quite a tree house, not the kind of thing you usually think of when you hear the word.”

  This is beginning to be unbearable. “You know, I …” She smiles, pushes her plate forward. “I wonder if we … How long are you here for?”

  “Going home tomorrow.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Mill Valley. Not that far from your place. I was looking forward to being neighbors with you.” His voice softens. “I only met with Dan those two times, but I really connected with him. He was a hell of a guy.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Hell of a guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “I'm so sorry. Again.”

  She feels herself beginning to tear up. “I'm going to need some time to think about all this. I wonder if we could talk in a few days.”

  He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a card, and slides it across the table to her. It's a handsome card, simply designed, a sepia print on a cream-colored background. She puts it in her purse. “I'll call you. I think for now, I just need to go.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you want my salad?”

  “That's okay. But there's one more thing I need to tell you.”

  She sits back in her c
hair, stops trying to find the arm of her coat.

  “I'm sorry, but you'll need to start paying the bills for electricity, for—”

  “You have twenty-five thousand dollars, right?”

  “Right. You do.”

  “Can't you use that to pay expenses until I decide what to do?”

  “I guess I could handle that for you for a while.”

  “I could pay you to do it,” Helen says.

  “You don't have to. I'll take care of it for now. But you'll have to decide pretty quickly what—”

  “I know. I will. Right now, I just need a little time.”

  “Of course.”

  She gets up and starts to walk away, then turns back. “Do you have pictures with you? Any pictures of the house?”

  Tom shakes his head. “He was adamant that the first time you saw that house was when you were there. He was actually going to blindfold you a few blocks away and uncover your eyes when you were smack-dab in the middle of the kitchen. I thought it was right. Kind of romantic. You can't capture it in pictures, anyway. You just can't.”

  “What's the address?” she asks.

  “It's a post office box. It's a little road, unpaved, very few houses on it. Very private, and really beautiful.”

  And now she does start to cry. She manages a pinched “Thank you,” and rushes out to get her car and go home, she wants so much right now to be home.

  When she pulls into the driveway, she rests her head against the steering wheel. Then she comes into the house, and, without taking off her coat or her boots, heads upstairs to her bedroom. In the very back of her closet, she moves aside shoe boxes that have been stacked up to hide another box. There it is, the Christmas gift she bought for Dan and received in the mail two days before he died. As part of the gift, she had promised herself not to tell anyone else about it, not Tessa, not even Midge. Dan had a man's typically ambivalent feeling toward the relationship his wife enjoyed with her best friend: glad she had such a treasured confidante, but a bit worried about the content of all they shared. She thought it would please Dan that this gift was something only the two of them knew about. It had pleased her.

  On the day the gift was delivered, she immediately hid it in her closet until she could wrap it—she'd intended to put it in a much bigger box, so that he'd never be able to guess what was in it. She has not seen it since the day she put it here; she had, in fact, forgotten about it.

  She unfolds the paperwork lying on top of the Bubble Wrap: World War II Navy Mark II Sextant, manufactured by David White, 1943, Original GI Issue. Precision ground lenses, brass gears and fittings, stainless steel screws. Very fine and precise navigational instrument.

  She pulls the antique out of the box and holds it in her hands, moves the horizon mirror forward and back, studies the half-moon-shaped graduated arc, the telescopic lens. She imagines how pleased Dan would have been to receive this, how he would have looked at it, then up at her; again at it, then up at her. He would have understood that she had gotten it as a way of telling him to go ahead and buy the boat. Not for nothing had he read aloud to her William Steig's Amos & Boris, the children's book about a mouse who sets off to sea. Dan had brought the book home the day after he and Helen had shared with each other their retirement fantasies, and he had read it to her that night, in bed. Helen had particularly liked the passage about Amos, the mouse sailor, lying on his boat's deck and looking up at a night sky crowded with stars. At that moment, Amos was more aware than ever of his tiny size against the vastness surrounding him, but he also came to understand his essential part in and of it. For Helen, the scene suggested a metaphysical kind of anchoring that one longs for and rarely achieves, a respite from a primary loneliness as common to humans as blood and bones. So although Dan had read the book to her as a last-ditch attempt at persuasion, she took it as a conversion experience.

  ten

  “GOOD EVENING,” TESSA'S DOORMAN SAYS.

  “Hi, Walter. Is Tessa home?”

  “Surprise visit?”

  “Yes.”

  “She just got home. She got a new pair of boots today. That young woman has style. Of course, I'm the one who told her about them. They were in Vogue. Would you like to see?”

  “Maybe later. I need to go and talk to Tessa.”

  Helen rides the elevator up, thinking of how she might tell her daughter what she has learned. All afternoon, she pondered whether or not she should tell her at all. Maybe she should just sell the place without looking at it, why make it more complicated? In the end, she decided to come and talk to Tessa face-to-face.

  When her daughter opens the door, Helen speaks before Tessa can. “I know, I didn't call. But I have to talk to you about something.”

  “What happened? Did something happen?”

  “It's not bad. It's … odd.”

  Tessa steps back from the door so that her mother can come in. “I just got some Chinese,” she says.

  “Enough?” Helen asks, and Tessa says of course.

  While they eat straight from the cartons, Helen tells her daughter about the house. She tells her, too, that she's thinking of selling the place, sight unseen.

  “How can you say that?” Tessa asks.

  “Because we're not going to move there, so why spend the time and money looking at it? I like living here. I don't want to live somewhere else.”

  “I could live somewhere else.”

  “No, you couldn't.” Helen grabs a broccoli spear, puts it in her mouth, and sucks off the sauce.

  Tessa gives her a look.

  “Well, all right, yes, you could; but do you really think it's a good idea?”

  “Of course it's a good idea! What better time? I can work anywhere, why not there? I've always wanted to live there.” Then, before Helen can protest, Tessa adds, “I don't tell you everything, you know.”

  “I know. Of course I know. Some things are private—and should be. But where you'd like to live, that's not private!”

  “In fact, sometimes it is.” Tessa puts down her carton of kung pao chicken and leans back, untucks her shirt from her jeans. She looks over at her mother. “You know?”

  “Okay, Tessa.”

  “Don't get all peeved.”

  “I'm not.”

  Tessa makes a grunting sound, the equivalent of “Right.”

  “I'm not! I'm just surprised, that's all. I mean, when did this California thing start?”

  “February seventeenth, 2004,” Tessa says. “Four-thirty-seven in the afternoon. A gray day, a storm predicted that never materialized.”

  “Okay,” Helen says. “All right.”

  “Mom. Mom. Aren't you even curious to see the house? Aren't you dying to see it? Dad had it built for you! It's your dream house!”

  What Helen wants to say is, “Yes, and that's why it's not appropriate for us to live there together. It wasn't for you and me! It was for me and Dad, and Dad is gone and now there's no reason for that house!” What she does say is, “Fine, we'll go and see it.” Some miniature version of herself that lives at the center of her brain throws up her hands. When Tessa asks when they can go, Helen says after Christmas, after she teaches her first class. They'll go then.

  “Promise?” Tessa says.

  Helen nods.

  They return to eating, listlessly now, and when they've finished, Tessa says she has to go; she's meeting a friend.

  “Who?” Helen asks.

  “A friend.”

  “A date?”

  “No. Not a date.”

  “You know, I wish you'd just consider Internet dating. People are too busy to meet any other way! I read this article about a couple who just got married, and neither of them ever thought they'd use Internet dating services, but—”

  “Mom! Mom! Mom! I said I'm not doing it. What I meant when I said I'm not doing it is that I'm not doing it!”

  Helen bizarrely interprets her daughter's strong refusal as possible interest (she was just scared! And why not! It was scary!) and bl
ithely continues. “Oh, try it just once. What could happen?”

  “What could happen?” Tessa says, her eyes big, round pools of blue. “What could happen? Well, let's see. For one, I could meet a fucking psychopath who ends up murdering me in my bed, and not because I invited him to be in it!”

  “Okay,” Helen says. “That's just—”

  “I will not do it and I don't want you to ask me about it again, ever! Just stop!”

  “Fine. Don't do it. Stay single and end up a bitter old woman whose only love is some matted, ancient cat. Who stinks. And who snakes around your ankles every morning in that creepy way they have, begging for cat food that also stinks. Food covered with used foil that you will wash off and use yet again. And that's all that will be in your fridge except juice that you use to mix with your Metamucil.”

  “Mom. I think you're describing your fears about yourself.”

  Helen considers this. Tessa is possibly right. But she tells her daughter, “No. I wasn't alone. I had a great love. And a great marriage.”

  Tessa puts her carton down on the coffee table, leans back against the cushions. She pulls a handful of hair up close to her eyes, checking for split ends. “How did you and Dad meet, anyway?”

  Helen smiles, remembering. “Didn't we ever tell you? It was at a party. I hadn't wanted to go, I had a big pimple on my chin, but my roommate talked me into it. It was a really crowded party but I saw your dad right away, he was leaning against the refrigerator, talking to someone. He was wearing one of those fisherman knit sweaters, an off-white, and he looked so handsome. I didn't talk to him until I'd been there for almost an hour and went to the refrigerator for a beer. He was still standing there, and I remember thinking it was so odd that he hadn't moved. But anyway, I'd been having a discussion in the living room with a bunch of people who thought the idea of life on other planets was ridiculous. And I thought it was ridiculous to think that we were alone in the universe. I asked your dad if he believed there was life on other planets, and he said of course and then we just started talking and he … he asked me out.” Actually Dan had spent that night with her in her little apartment, but there was no need for Tessa to know that. How to explain the sexual freedom of the sixties to a daughter you want to be fiercely discerning? In the morning, Dan had put on the glasses he had refused to wear at the party (that was why he'd stayed at the refrigerator. Everyone came to the refrigerator eventually and then he could see them close up). But he'd put on his glasses and pointed to her pimple and said, “Ouch!” and Helen had felt so happy because it hadn't offended her but made her laugh; and it had put them on the fast track for being comfortable with each other. As they were, ever after. Always comfortable in a way that Dan described as home safe.