I
must have fallen asleep in Effie and Devin’s bed, and when I finally wake up, I am disoriented and slightly queasy. I roll over, expecting (for a fragmented, desperate moment) to see Eva’s pale shoulder. But I am alone, lying in my clothes on top of the bedspread, an afghan laid across me while I slept.
The sun has gone down outside, extinguishing the fire that was blazing in the treetops earlier. It is warm and quiet. I smell the smoke from the chimney, the sweet scent of it. I can hear the sounds of the girls downstairs trying to be quiet, their loud whispers taking tremendous effort, the small reprimands from Effie each time they forget. It is dark in the room, but beams of light appear through the knotholes in the floor as I stand up. Mouse used to call them the stars in the floor.
I am embarrassed coming down the stairs, though my only shame is being an old woman who fell asleep after a long journey. Still, I walk into the living room, where everyone has gathered, and feel like I’ve just come late to a party. Everyone looks up at me expectantly before returning to their various tasks and amusements. Effie and Zu-Zu are playing a game of Scrabble. Gussy is on the couch with her knitting and Plum, who looks a little sleepy herself. She is rubbing her eyes and burrowing into Gussy’s side. I can hear Devin in the kitchen, the music of pots and pans and boiling water. I can smell the potent smell of whatever he is making for dinner.
The sun has almost set, and the sky is an old sky, a familiar sky, freckled with stars.
“Well, good morning,” Gussy says. Our mother’s words for us after a nap.
“Morning,” I say, the answer she expects. “What smells so good?”
Dinner is delicious, but I can barely eat. The smells of lasagna and warm artisan bread with garlic butter mock me. I push the food around my plate like a child, and Gussy shakes her head at me like a mother. But I am too nervous to eat. In the morning, we will leave this safe nest in the woods and drive to Boston to see a man who knows the most intimate secrets of my entire life. I feel sick.
“Time for a bath!” Devin says, scooping up both girls, one under each arm like footballs, and carrying them, giggling and kicking for release, to the bathroom. As he sets about getting the girls bathed and ready for bed, Gussy and I sit in the kitchen nook drinking tea, and Effie finishes up the dishes.
“Would you like to take a walk?” Effie asks sweetly as she puts away the last pot and pan. I have been watching the way she and Devin work together, the harmony of their movements. They are like two moving cogs in this domestic machine. I envy this choreography, this symmetry. There is a balance here that defies everything I have known of marriage, of running a household. Lou and I lived together for many years, but even we seemed to have separate orbits. Perhaps because we each had a lifetime behind us when we met, we were too old to fully merge our lives.
“I’d love that,” I say. I feel wide awake after the long nap, my legs restless.
“I think I’ll stay here with Devin and the girls,” Gussy says. “You two go.”
Effie grabs a large, beige barn coat from the closet, disappearing inside it.
“Was that your Grampa Frank’s?” I ask.
“Ay-uh,” she says, putting the accent on thick, and it is Frank I hear. I also see Frank in her slow smile and nod. Effie and Frank were very close:
two peas,
Gussy called them. My own grandchildren have always been faraway, dreamlike: the only evidence of their growth in the myriad of photographs stuck on my refrigerator door. Because I fled to California, I never really got to know them. I’ve met them, of course, and when they were very small I went and stayed with Francesca to help her out every now and then. But I have never truly been a part of the fabric of their lives. No matter how many cards I’ve sent, no matter how many times I’ve called. The distance I sought when I fled the East Coast was one that did not discriminate. It separated me from Frankie, from that old life, from all those unfulfilled dreams (and all the shattered ones), but it also separated me from my own children. It is the price I had to pay. I know this makes Chessy sad. I know she blames me for a lot of things, a lot of absences and holes in her life. I am almost as nervous to see her as I am to see Johnny.
The dirt road that circles the lake is bumpy with ruts and ridges from the grader that passes through once a week. I worry a little that in the darkness I might stumble on an upturned stone. Take a tumble. But then again, a little injury might be excuse enough to cancel the trip to Boston. And then as if on cue, as if I willed it, my ankle turns. “Oopsy,” I say, my body correcting and compensating, righting itself before I take a nasty spill onto the ground, and Effie reaches for me, quickly righting me. Steadying me.
“Are you okay?” she asks. I’ve scared her. I know she must worry about Gussy, about all of us whose bodies are stubbornly defying us.
I nod. “I’m fine. Just clumsy.”
Effie takes my elbow then and helps me navigate the dark road. I am grateful for the help, even though her gesture makes me feel old.
“Which one is the Masons’?” I ask. I have told her that I know Sam and Mena.
“That one, just up ahead,” she says. It is too dark to see, right now. There are no lights on inside. I’ll need to come back during the day to take a picture for Sam.
“Oh, I remember that place,” I say, nodding.
“What was it like, when you used to come here?” she asks.
I look out at the lake, which is still as stone tonight, just a glass mirror reflecting the moon overhead. “It was the same,” I say. “Places like this don’t really change. Only people do.”
Effie stops and looks at me. Her big doe eyes are asking for something I’m not sure I can give. She pauses before she speaks—thinking before speaking another inheritance from her grandfather.
“Gussy told me you’re here because of your girlfriend,” she says.
The word makes me blush. I know this is how women refer to each other now, even women who are only friends. But when it comes to referring to female lovers, the casual use of the word, the lack of shame, never ceases to shock me. I can’t help it. This word belongs to the present, while everything it refers to is an artifact of the past. A past where that word,
any
words to describe that kind of love, was hissed or spat or not spoken at all. Even Lou and I never settled on a term to define ourselves and what we had. We were just
Billie and Lou
.
We stop to watch a pair of loons glide across the surface of the water, calling out to each other in that mournful, prehistoric language I remember so well. Effie squeezes my elbow. “I hope you don’t mind she said something. It really is one of the most heartbreaking stories I’ve ever heard. Like a novel almost. A true love story.”
I feel my skin growing warm. But it isn’t the fact that Gussy told Effie about Eva, about everything that happened, but rather that someone would see
beauty
in the story. The idea that someone could hear about what happened all those years ago and not be disgusted, horrified, by all the tragedies that followed, that someone could find a sliver of the goodness, the beauty, I cling to is almost more than I can handle.
“We’re going to see her son tomorrow,” I say. “I feel sick over it.”
Effie nods quietly. “Of course you do.”
I am overwhelmed with such gratitude toward this girl right now, this young woman. I know, from Gussy’s stories, that she has had her own share of sorrow. She understands secrets and loss. Her college boyfriend died of a drug overdose, but Gussy says that he was better off dead. A
monster,
she calls him. Abusive. Controlling. Mad.
Like Ted,
she whispered. I think about how happy Devin and she seem. I still have trouble understanding how people survive and move on. How you can ever let the past go. If I were able to do that, I certainly wouldn’t be here. And I wouldn’t be going to Boston tomorrow.
“How do you feel about chocolate macaroons?” she asks.
“I feel very good about chocolate macaroons,” I say.
“Well, that is excellent, because Devin made some yesterday, and the cookie jar is full of them.”
But it isn’t cookies I’m thinking about as we walk back to camp. It isn’t even the treacherous road beneath my feet. It is, instead, how I am going to tell Gussy that I don’t want to see Johnny. That instead, I’d like to spend the rest of my stay right here.
F
rankie was always a sucker for Christmas, a sentimental fool over it. It was his favorite holiday, his favorite time of year. He loved everything about it, and being around him, it was nearly impossible not to catch some of the Christmas spirit. But this year, his nostalgia, his Bing Crosby
ba-ba-ba-boo,
only made me feel sorry for him. I would never fit into this world he’d worked so hard to create. He’d cobbled together this family out of thin air; he thought he could make anything. Fix anything. Even this. He seemed to think that if he could re-create a perfect Christmas, he could rewind the clock, he could bring back the Christmases before the Wilsons. He could erase the damage Eva had done. He could buff her out, put on a fresh coat of paint, and make us new again. I imagine this was his only thought as he assembled the plywood sleigh and reindeer, as he gathered the lights. He was the curator of an imaginary history, our home the museum.
He climbed the ladder despite the ice and my warnings, carrying an armload of Christmas lights he’d carefully laid out across the living room floor that morning and tested, tightening each bulb to make sure none of them shorted out the entire mess. He balanced on the steeply pitched roof, staple gun in one hand and the lights in the other. He’d also brought a Thermos up with him, and I was fairly certain, as I heard his boots pounding the shingles overhead, that it wasn’t only coffee he was drinking, his cheer as contrived as everything else.
I couldn’t bear to watch. And so I stirred cocoa in the kitchen and began to bake my way through the day: chocolate crinkles, oatmeal lace cookies, gingerbread. Perhaps Frankie was right. Perhaps we could lose ourselves in tradition.
He was up there for a long time. I’d hear him stomping around, stapling for awhile, and then there would be silence. I pictured him, back against the tall chimney, sipping at the steaming brew. I tried not to think about how loose his knees got when he was drunk, about how he stumbled even on level ground.
He’d fallen off the roof before; it shouldn’t have surprised me when he fell again, but it did. I even thought at first that the sound was simply the Thermos rolling down the roof instead of Frankie himself. And because of the snow, I didn’t hear him hitting the ground; I only heard his moaning. Both of the girls came running down the stairs, barging out the front door in their bare feet, to find their father splayed across the snow as though he were only making angels.
“Go inside, get some shoes on and get your coats,” I said. And as Frankie sat up, I saw the unfortunate angle of his leg, the wrong way it lay bent at a ninety-degree angle from his knee, a pale white thing poking out through his trousers. In my mind’s effort to bring normalcy to the scene, I imagined it an icicle. But when I realized it was not ice but bone, I felt my stomach turn. I ran to the side of the house and vomited quickly, quietly, kicking the powdery snow over my morning oatmeal.
I don’t know how we got him into the car: I remember Chessy on one side of him and me on the other, all legs and arms and that prevailing moaning. But somehow, the two of us managed to get him into the backseat, and I sent Mouse into the house for the woolen blanket I kept over the back of the couch. Chessy insisted on sitting in the backseat with Frankie, and Mouse sat up front. Despite the circumstances, it was a rare treat for her to be in the passenger’s seat. She fiddled with the glove box and the radio, almost gleeful. I slapped her hand away from the cigarette lighter when Frankie moaned again. “God, does anybody have any booze?”
The drive to the hospital was treacherous. The roads looked clear but were sheathed in a layer of black ice. If the Studebaker hadn’t weighed three thousand pounds we surely would have simply skated into oncoming traffic. It was one reason Frankie had bought this car; he’d wanted to keep us safe. The irony of this struck me like an icy blow. Frankie was sprawled out in the backseat, thankfully drunk enough (numbed by the brandy and the cold) that he didn’t seem to feel much of anything. He went in and out of consciousness all the way to the hospital, though I didn’t know if his sleep came from the liquor or the pain. When the orderlies removed him from the car and wheeled him on a gurney through the hospital doors, I realized I hadn’t been breathing. My lungs sucked in air, and my ears seemed to pop open, as though they’d been filled with water for the last half hour and were now clear. Everything was louder than it should be: the sirens; the sound of Mouse and Francesca crying; even the radio, which I’d failed to turn off, playing Christmas carols at high volume.
For four hours, the girls and I sat in the emergency waiting room, waiting for word on Frankie. Mouse finally curled up and fell asleep on one of the uncomfortable chairs; I envied her ability to nod off just about anywhere. Outside, the sky grew bluish as night fell. The days were so short now, the sun heading off to bed long before I did.
The hospital was decorated for Christmas. Hospitals at Christmas are some of the saddest places in the world. The attempts to bring joy to a place where most people are wounded or ill always ring as foolishly hopeful. The sparkly green garlands strung along the nurses’ station, the artificial tree strung with blinking lights, even the fake snow sprayed in patterns on the windows struck me as stupidly optimistic. And all of it made me think of Frankie, pounding together that plywood sleigh, stringing our dingy little house with colored lights, his insistence that everything would be okay, that we could somehow get past all of this, if we simply stuck to the script.
They wheeled him out just past dusk, a foot-to-thigh cast encasing his leg. He looked defeated, even throwing his arms up over his head in surrender. “Merry Christmas,” he said sadly.
“How long will you have the cast on?” I asked, fearing the answer and then immediately regretting my obvious selfish motives for asking. I should have just asked him how long he would be out of work. How long he would be stuck at home with me. How long he would be there to watch over me, to monitor my every move. How long it would be before I could slip away to Eva. I thought of the postcard I’d carefully hidden in the inside pocket of my winter coat, so that it would be with me, a reminder always close to my chest that she wasn’t really so far away.
“Six weeks,” he said. “At least.”
My gasp must have been audible, because it made Frankie snort. “You’re stuck with me through January. What, you got better things to do?”
Usually I stayed home on Christmas Eve, making the homemade raviolis that Frankie and the girls had grown to expect for Christmas dinner and wrapping gifts. But this year, Frankie had insisted that I come with them to Mass. He used his leg as an excuse, but I knew that it was that he wanted to present a united front: to show our neighbors and friends that the Valentines were just fine, despite any rumors suggesting otherwise. As far as I knew, both Frankie and Ted had kept tight lips around our little secret, but gossip about Ted and Eva’s sudden departure (during Christmastime no less!) from the neighborhood had raised a few eyebrows. Hannah had called twice, leaving messages with the girls when I refused the phone. The arguments that kept us up half the night had likely awakened a few neighbors as well, though I suspect that no one would have dreamed to see either of these two things as related.
Getting to church was no small feat, considering how immobilized he was by the cast. We had rented a wheelchair from the hospital, but it was winter, and navigating the icy sidewalks proved to be quite a challenge, never mind the steps up to the church. Luckily, a couple of friends of Frankie’s from the neighborhood were able to lift him, and the chair, up to the doors. He beamed like some sort of royalty as they lifted him; I think he was enjoying this. We sat in the very last pew. The church was crowded with all the Christmas and Easter Catholics. I suspected that the congregation had ballooned some after Kennedy’s assassination as well, all of those lapsed Catholics making a return to the church in support of their fallen brother.
Though I had my doubts about God, I did always feel at peace inside churches. There is something undeniably calming about all that collective reverence. I could see how faith might entice people, how the promise of something better than this life could provide respite for the weary. And that Christmas Eve I allowed myself for a moment to imagine, to relinquish my stubborn disbelief (as I imagined Chessy would do later that night as she hung her Christmas stocking on the hearth). And as all of us, except for Frankie, lowered ourselves to our knees, I prayed.
I prayed for Eva. I prayed that she would be safe. I prayed that the children would not suffer: not mine and not hers. And I prayed that we would find each other, that one day we would make our way back into each other’s arms. It was blasphemy; I knew this. Inside this church, these feelings were sinful and wicked. But if God was as loving and forgiving as they all said he was, then he might also be the one to recognize that the feelings I had for Eva were not filthy or wrong. The love I felt for her came not from evil but from the best places inside of me.
Christmas had always been a time of peace in our house. For whatever reason, Frankie had a set of arbitrary rules regarding his drinking on this holiday, which he adhered to religiously. On any other night, he was half in the bag before supper ended. But on Christmas Eve he didn’t drink until after the children had gone to bed. He swapped his usual tumbler of wine for extra cigarettes, chain smoking to give his mouth something to do, filling his lungs rather than his gullet. The girls knew this, expected this, and they responded to him with affections they usually withheld when he was drinking. You’d think that this would have shown him that there were rewards for his abstinence, that his sobriety had positive consequences: that we all loved Frankie a little more when he wasn’t soused, that everything good about him was drowned inside that bottle.
Frankie insisted on reading the Christmas story from the Bible to the girls on Christmas Eve. He never so much as read a bedtime story to them the rest of the year, but on Christmas Eve, they curled up in his lap and listened as he painted pictures of wise men, scented the air with incense and myrrh as he spoke. He was actually a pretty animated reader, bringing the words in the fragile pages of his family’s Bible to life. I made cocoa and floated marshmallows on the top and hurried the girls off to bed as soon as their stockings were hung and they had set out their plate of cookies for Santa and a carrot for the reindeer. I think maybe Frankie and I both knew that this was the last year that Mouse would believe, and there was something remarkably melancholy about knowing that this illusion, like so many others, was undeniably fragile.
Like clockwork, Frankie poured his first glass of wine as soon as the sound of the girls’ beds creaked with their weight overhead. And I sighed. At least this year, he wouldn’t expect sex. It was physically impossible for him to make love to me with that cast. Ever since he’d found out about Eva, he’d seemed more determined than ever. Rather than moving downstairs to the couch, he insisted on sleeping next to me. To making love to me. As though he had something to prove. And I had tolerated him, tolerated it, because I did not know what else to do. It was easier to give in. It was easier to close my eyes and dream myself away from my body as he pushed and groped and clung. I’d been doing it for years anyway; I had perfected the art of disappearing. But now, I knew that for six weeks I wouldn’t have to silently suffer his touch, to endure his naked flesh and hot breath. Merry Christmas to me.
I left Frankie and his wine at midnight, after filling the stockings and leaving only crumbs on Santa’s plate, and climbed the stairs, feeling the exhaustion of the holiday season, of everything, traveling through my legs and hips and hands. I climbed the stairs like an old woman, feeling as though I had aged a hundred years since Eva left, as though all of my youth and joy had been packed away in one of her boxes.
And as I closed my eyes, I dreamed not of sugarplums but of Eva. And I wished. I wished and wished and wished, like a child hoping for that special doll or teddy bear, for Eva. I wished for a miracle I knew might never come.