by Sue Miller
I thought of my mother, asking me, “We’re the same, aren’t we?” It hasn’t changed us in your eyes to know this. And the comfort she seemed to take in knowing that it hadn’t. I thought of my blurting out to Daniel what I’d done, my hope that he could somehow love me still.
It seems we need someone to know us as we are—with all we have done—and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet love me. Please.
But it’s so much to ask of other people! Too much. Daniel makes it easier on those around him: God is the one he asks to know him as he is, to see him whole and love him still. But for us others it seems there must be a person to redeem us to ourselves. It isn’t enough, apparently, to know oneself. To forgive oneself, in secret.
I crushed the fire into embers and replaced the screen. And as I mounted the stairs and undressed, as I slid under the cold, heavy covers (“Flat as a pancake till morning!” my mother used to say), I felt, I think for the first time, a kind of pity for Eli Mayhew.
I spent the afternoon before I left pulling the sodden leaf mulch off Mother’s flower beds in the front yard. I worried that it was too early, that there might still be a frost, but she was firm: “Oh, it’s always too early, no matter when you do it, they’re so pale and puny. Too early and too late at the same time. It could get cold again, but on the other hand, it’s not good for them to grow very long in the dark. One of those chores you just hold your nose and do it and hope it comes out all right. Anyway,” she said, “I always do it by tax time, and that’s nearly upon us now.”
It was the first slightly warm day we’d had, and I sat in the pale sunlight on the damp ground. The plants were up—she was right—poking their snub noses out of the wet dirt, often having pierced the leaves, so that I had to pull each one off carefully or risk splitting their fragile tips. They were white and looked oddly naked, their secret growing suddenly exposed like this. They seemed at first to shrink and recoil, to dry up a little in the light and air. But even as I worked, they were greening slightly too.
The sunlight bore down on my back and warmed me, though my legs and bottom were cool and damp. I took off my mother’s gardening gloves after the first few minutes—they made it hard to do the delicate work around the shoots. I shifted from side to side, and then up to my knees, as my hip started to ache. But I loved it also. I felt—for the first time, I think, since I’d heard Eli’s name, since I’d met him again—content to be doing what I was doing. I felt innocently useful.
That night I had a dream. Something in it startled me, and I woke myself, making a small noise, jumping under the heavy layers of blanket. It came to me that it had been about Daniel, though I couldn’t remember what was happening. But I had reached out to touch him just before I woke, and I could still feel it, Daniel’s cool cheek under my fingertips. How real it was! I thought.
And then I recalled the dogs in sleep, the way they suckled and ran and tore at other animals, so real their dream life was to them. Did they know the difference when they woke? I wondered. Or were they like demented people, who count as experience what they’ve merely dreamed?
As I lay there, I realized I was doing just that. Because I was happy, happy with just my dream of Daniel, the vague sleeping memory of him. I’d brought him to life, lying in the dark in my mother’s house. I’d felt him and touched him, he’d come back to me. And for that moment in my half-sleeping, half-waking state, the joy that gave me felt like enough.
Once the plane had landed at Logan and we’d slowly filed off, I headed downstairs along with the rest of our troop, toward the baggage claim area, dragging my rolling bag behind me. Ahead of me on the escalator, a little boy of about four was trying to tell knock-knock jokes to his mother, getting them wrong every time, jumping from “who’s there?” directly to the punch line. She laughed politely at each one, though, which was enough for him. “That was a good one,” he’d say. “Wasn’t it, Mom? That was a good one.”
I crossed the wide stone floor downstairs to the wall of windows and revolving doors. Outside, I could see the cars parked and double-parked, waiting. And then I saw our car. Leaning against it, with his back against the driver’s side—turned away from me—was Daniel. I negotiated my bag into the revolving door and made it through. The noise outside was deafening—a plane starting its takeoff.
The dogs were in the car. I could see them barking and jumping wildly around, perhaps in response to all the noise, perhaps at the people passing by, too close to their territory. Daniel was turned almost in profile to me, watching a group of travelers boarding a bus pulled up to the middle island of the drive-through area. The scream of the plane was so intense now that he didn’t hear me come up next to him, he didn’t sense me standing there.
Without asking myself whether I should, whether I could, I lifted my hand to his face and touched it to the flat of his cheek. He startled and turned to me. After the slightest pause, his arms rose in what seemed a nearly automatic response to embrace me.
We pressed together, hesitantly at first. Then I felt him suddenly grip me hard—Daniel!—and pull me fiercely against him. His hands slid up and down my back, I felt his tensed strength. The moment went on and on for me, dizzying in its timelessness. I was drinking in with my body the feel of his, and I was breathless with relief, with the sweet familiarity of our touch. This, I thought, holding him. This: here. Slowly my breathing evened.
But before we stepped apart again, I made myself register consciously the expression that had passed for a moment over his face as he moved forward to hold me: a sadness, a visible regret.
At what? At this giving over, I suppose. This capitulation. To me. To us.
And I haven’t forgotten. I think of it often, and I find a kind of tender sorrow rising in me for him. For the distance he had to cross, the place he’d had to come from, to yield to me. For his giving up some hardness in himself—maybe a hardness that had surprised him or pleased him in a way—to be what I knew again. To be the one who had to forgive me.
So we resume it, slowly picking up the ongoing conversation that was our life together. We talk. We talk. And the words make our silences easier—they’re the current that runs under them.
We make love, too, a little shyly at first, as though there were something embarrassing or shameful about starting again after not having done it in so long.
And there come more and more those other moments of touching, the ones I have most deeply yearned for, I realize. Daniel’s hand, resting on my shoulder as he looks over it to see what I’m doing, what I’m making for dinner. On my arm: “Here, I’ll carry that.” On my thigh—a claim, an assertion: You’re back. I’m back. We’re home again. I know you.
Summer comes, and we walk again at night, trailing the dogs on the worn paths. In the cottoned dark, the words seem easeful, seem like the spoken version of our bodies’ bumping or touching, all part of the same remaking of what it means to be together, to touch each other, to love.
Still, there are things that startle me. New things. Some small, barely worth noticing, perhaps. I am talking at the dinner table one night, happy to be back in our old pattern, maybe going on too long; and I see that he has gone away, that his face has closed in and clouded, somehow. And because I can’t bear to ask—to be told—what’s wrong, I chatter on, ignoring it, until he comes back, until the moment of darkness passes.
Others more dramatic: Leaving late for work, I’m sliding behind the steering wheel of my car when I notice Daniel. He’s deep in the barn, in shadow, just stepping out of his office to come to the house. He’s seen me in the car, and he’s stopped there, waiting. He doesn’t realize I’ve seen him. He doesn’t want me to see him. Maybe he’s been thinking about all of it again and he doesn’t want to have to talk to me, to have to be loving. Maybe he just wants to hold on to something he’s been thinking about, working on. At any rate, he stands still, barely visible, a pale ghost in the shadows, and he waits for me to be gone.
So I go. Because this is my task, as I see it, and I’m trying to learn it well. I’m trying to accept the changes I made when I didn’t intend to. I’m trying to allow for this ordinary distance between us. To let him not want me sometimes. Sometimes not to need him. So that when it comes, I can love it more: the approach, the turning back to what we do want most in each other, what we do need.
I see Eli around town every now and then. Eli alone, or together with Jean. Once, they were jogging by the side of the road as I was driving by. This was early in the summer, one of those long June evenings when the sun sits forever at earth’s edge and day goes on and on in its warm last light. I didn’t recognize them at first. They were just silhouettes ahead of me, a man and a woman, not young, but strong, fit, in good shape, their stride matched perfectly, the legs lean and muscled. Closer, I saw they were my age, and I envied them their bodies, the nice high kick behind each stroke.
And then, just before I pulled abreast of them, I knew who they were and I turned my face away. In the rearview mirror, the sun was full upon then. They were like costumed twins in their bright running clothes, their skin daubed orange in the light, their matching short hair silvered. I watched them grow smaller and smaller on the roadside. They hadn’t noticed me.
I saw him by himself once at the hardware store. I was bent over a bin counting out galvanized nails, and I looked up and there he was, in shirtsleeves and old khakis, his hair grown out a little, standing at the counter asking about paints—oil versus latex. I turned and went into another aisle until he’d left.
But it reminded me of something. I stopped in at the library on my way home, though Daniel was waiting for those nails. I went to the computer room and called up again the newspaper image of all of us leaving the police station after Dana’s death. There we were, young and grief-stricken and angry.
Eli and I were the only ones not wearing coats.
He walked by our house on the Fourth of July, as did half the town, following the parade. I’d been sitting on the front steps with Shorty, the door open behind me. When I saw Eli, Eli and Jean, I stepped back into the darkness of the front hall to wait until they’d passed, until that part of the parade—the antique cars, the firemen throwing candy to the avid children—had gone by. They were with another couple I’ve seen around town a bit but don’t know. They were talking and laughing, Jean and the woman carrying mugs of coffee as they walked along in the dappled sunlight under the old, wide trees. They’re making friends, then, settling in. My wish that they move away will, apparently, not be granted.
But perhaps this is all to the good. Perhaps it’s best to live with the possibility that around any corner, at any time, may come the person who reminds you of your own capacity to surprise yourself, to put at risk everything that’s dear to you. Who reminds you of the distances we have to bridge to begin to know anything about one another. Who reminds you that what seems to be—even about yourself—may not be. That like him, you need to be forgiven.
I tell myself it’s all to the good, anyway.
Still, when I see him, I always turn away, as if I don’t recognize him. As if I don’t know who he is. And so far, he does too.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Detectives Brian P. Branley and John F. Fulkerson, and to Sergeant Joseph J. McSweeney, all of the Cambridge Police Department, for taking time to imagine my story with me; and to my brother, David Beach Nichols, D.V.M., animal lover extraordinaire, for his resourceful and painstaking help—though I alone am to blame for any inaccuracies or unlikely details.
A Note on the Author
Sue Miller was born in Chicago in 1943. She is the bestselling author of eleven previous books including The Good Mother, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, Lost in the Forest, The Lake Shore Limited, the acclaimed memoir The Story of My Father and the Richard & Judy hit The Senator’s Wife. Her most recent novel is The Arsonist. Sue Miller lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
By the Same Author
The Good Mother
Inventing the Abbotts
Family Pictures
For Love
The Distinguished Guest
The World Below
The Story of My Father
Lost in the Forest
The Senator’s Wife
The Lake Shore Limited
The Arsonist
Also Available by Sue Miller
For Love
Lottie is relieved to have escaped to her mother’s house for the summer because her second marriage, barely begun, is in trouble. Also at home is Cameron, Lottie’s brother, who has been in love with their neighbour Elizabeth since high school. Elizabeth is married with three children but now, finally, Elizabeth and Cameron embark on a passionate affair. But as Lottie, Cameron and Elizabeth are reunited, a senseless tragedy befalls them, and Lottie is forced to examine the consequences of what she has done for love.
‘Absolutely flawless … Extraordinary’
Anne Tyler
‘A tour de force by any standards … One reason for Miller’s popularity is that she earns her fans in a time-honoured way: she writes for readers’
Newsweek
‘For Love may be the most honest twentieth-century love story we’ve had in a while’
New York Times Book Review
The Distinguished Guest
At the age of seventy-two, Lily Roberts became a national celebrity on writing her first book – a spiritual memoir. But her new-found fame was not well received by her son Alan and wayward daughter Clary, both profoundly disturbed by Lily’s intimate revelations about her married life. Ten years on their resentment is still raw, and when Lily, now ill and frail, comes to live with Alan, the bitter legacy of their very different memories threatens to upset the precarious balance of their lives.
‘Miller depicts her characters with grace and elegance, enriching their perceptions with strands of connecting images and intertwined history … A very moving book’
New York Times Book Review
‘Wonderful – rich, intelligent and moving’
Los Angeles Times
‘Miller’s skill at dissecting relationships is as well-honed here as ever’
Newsweek
The World Below
What you see in this picture is a woman whose husband might leave her, who might find herself at midlife casting about in her past for answers to her future…
Catherine Hubbard is at a crossroads in her life. Twice divorced, her children are now grown up and scattered across the country. Then news comes that she has inherited her grandmother Georgia’s home in Vermont. There, Catherine finds not only the ghosts of her own past but those of her grandmother’s too. Georgia’s diaries, discovered in the attic, reveal the true story of her life and marriage, and of the tragic misunderstanding upon which she built a lasting love. The World Below tells the parallel stories of two women separated by generations, but linked by the bitter disappointments and regrets that lurk beneath the surface of their ordinary lives.
‘Miller brings unusual skill in the exploration of women’s hopes and regrets. The careful build-up of detail, and an acute understanding of the facts and feelings which lie behind disguises, make this a sensitive examination of two private lives’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Candid and thoughtful … A voice of unusual truth and perception’
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Miller writes with tremendous subtlety and perception’
Daily Mail
The Story of My Father
In the spring of 1986, Sue Miller found herself more and more deeply involved in caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer’s disease. The Story of My Father is a profound, deeply moving account of her father’s final days and her own response to it. With care, restraint and consummate skill, Miller writes of her struggles to be fully with her father in his illness while confronting her own terror of abandonment, and eventually the long, hard work
of grieving for him. And through this candid, painful record, she offers a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, a powerful meditation on the variable nature of memory and the difficulty of weaving a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life.
‘Beautifully written and moving … Every relative of an Alzheimer's patient feels this guilt, here painfully anatomised … The Story of My Father is the best book of its genre I have ever read’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Much more than a memoir, her book is an exploration of the nature of self and an extraordinary testament to an extraordinary love’
Independent
‘Remarkable for its honesty and courage, and for the muted gallantry with which its subject met the loss of everything that made him human’
Daily Telegraph
Lost in the Forest
One minute John is the cornerstone of Eva’s world, rock to his two teenage stepdaughters and his own son Theo, the next he is tossed through the air in a traffic accident, and snapped like a twig. His sudden death changes everything. Eva struggles with the terror and desolation of loneliness, and finds herself drawn back to her untrustworthy ex-husband; Emily, the eldest daughter, grapples with her new-found independence and responsibility. Little Theo can only begin to fathom the permanence of his father’s death. But for Daisy, John’s absence opens up a whole world of confusion just at the onset of adolescence and blossoming sexuality. And in steps a man only too willing to take advantage.
