Digging Out (34 page)

Over the last year, so often when I’ve needed Marc I close my eyes, and a quiet, a spaciousness that is so still and full surrounds me, and then the answer is there, his answer. Is it really Marc, or is it what I know about him? How I know he might advise or respond?

Once, months after Hallie had gone, when I was up at the cemetery, I thought I saw her. Just a flash of corn yellow and the blue blaze of her eyes and then her smile. Afterward I felt quiet, satisfied. I hadn’t told anyone, ever, afraid they’d think I was losing my mind, like some said of the mams and das who were losing theirs, having conversations with their little ones and imagining their presence. But for a long time afterward I hadn’t missed Hallie so much, had felt her near me.

Gram believed that God resided in all natural things—even rocks and running water had a soul. She was definitely an animist.

I pick up a handful of small rocks, roll them around in my hand. Looking at them.

A line from one of the many poems due to my editor in a month. Most of them about Marc. Eight about surviving Marc’s death, and the newer ones about going on without him.

I am worried about Hannah, about what it will be like for her to grow up without Marc, about whether she will be able to call him up in her mind’s eye as she grows older.

After Parry died, I went through a period where I couldn’t remember what he looked like, or the way his voice sounded, or his smell. I became desperate. I would open his cupboard and go through his clothes, holding them up to my nose, trying to catch his smell. I slept in his T-shirts.

I miss my garden and the ocean, my morning run along Ocean Avenue and the view of the sea through the palm trees, the homeless shadow man who hits me up for change. But when I think about the house, taking Hannah to school and coming home to do dishes and
write—going back there, to what I have called home—it seems as foreign to me as the possibility of living here. It is obvious, after all these years I still know nothing of life and even less of love.

“Alys …” It is Evan’s shadow in the pale moonlight, although it could easily be Dafydd. “Are you all right?” His voice is deep and always reassuring. It resonates inside of me. It is all of what I remember and filled with some new possibility. He moves toward me, slowly, hesitating. “Do you want to be alone?”

The question seems larger to me than what Evan wants to know. And I wonder if that’s really what I want, to be alone. I’ve been alone for far too long as it is, longer than just the year that Marc has been gone. Perhaps longer even than the years after Hallie and Parry died.

“No.”

He comes toward me and stands next to the table. He touches my hand. “You’re cold,” he says.

We sit together for several moments. And then he says, “This is very hard for me.” His voice is so quiet.

“What?”

“To explain what I’m about to explain.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not just about loving you—which I have felt in some fashion or another forever. I know you and your family filled some urgent need for me after I’d left my parents’ home. And later, after the disaster and Parry, we filled a need for each other. And it was all important. Utterly important, at least to me. But it’s more than that.”

I’m not sure what he is getting at. But I stay quiet.

“A few years ago, when I was involved with Shirley.” (It is the first time I have heard her name.) “Well, actually I guess it was seven or eight years ago now. She pressed me to marry her, which I was prepared to do, mind you. But she started to talk about having a child, about what our child would be like. She wanted to make a family with me. I went cold inside. I had to ask myself how I could possibly marry her and yet not want to have children with her.

“I reminded her how many hours a day I spent with children. Told her I wanted to be able to come home to a quiet, tidy house. That I couldn’t commit to having another child of my own. It seemed overwhelming to me. I couldn’t imagine getting up at all hours of the
night, not being able to sleep in on the weekends or travel during the summer months, make my own way.

“So we ended it. Just like that. Almost immediately she moved out. Several months later she moved away. To Bristol, I think. And there I was, all alone again, and somehow I didn’t mind. I was actually grateful to her.

“After she left, I began to build this new feeling inside which was all about me in the world, alone. I bought the meadow and then the cottage came up for sale. I renovated it and then decorated it. And I must say, I’ve enjoyed the last several years. I’ve found some peace. I’ve actually begun to enjoy my life.

“And then you reappear out of nowhere. Oh, don’t get me wrong. You know I kept up with you through Gram. And perhaps I didn’t truly give up on you until you’d married Marc and I heard you were pregnant again. Probably no coincidence that it was about the time Shirley and I got involved. But your reappearance certainly has turned my world around.

“These last several days with you I’ve had to come face-to-face with so much of my past. It’s an incredible surprise, an unbelievable miracle to be with you again. I love you. It sounds almost ridiculous, since I’ve not anything more than a simple sense of who you are now. But for whatever reason, I can say it without a moment’s thought. It seems rather easy to me, straightforward and true. And that’s all very well.

“But when I met your children, when I walked out into the drive this morning, put my hand in Dafydd’s and looked into Hannah’s eyes, something else came alive in me.

“And”—he pauses, looks up into the sky—“and I want to be able to love you out in the open, in front of the world, and have you love me back.”

A shiver runs up my spine. I would like to look away from his intense stare. But I don’t. I stay with him.

“I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Oh, Lord, I’ve probably said it all wrong, I’m sure.”

I continue to stare at him, unable to say anything. I bite my upper lip. Evan has poured his soul out to me. I have heard him. Part of me has even felt it. But the truth is, the news is so good that I cannot hold it inside all at once, but know I must come to it in pieces.

“Alys ’. have I said too much?” he asks. “You don’t feel pressured, do you?” He laughs.

“No,” I say, meaning yes. I give him a look.

“Hmmm, well, what do you say we forget all this for now and go inside? It’s getting cold out here.”

He takes my hand and leads me down the stone pathway.

“Incidentally, you should figure out a way to quit smoking,” he whispers. “It’s a totally disgusting habit. It makes you look like a scrubber and it smells, not to mention what it does to your lungs. It’s very unattractive.”

This makes me laugh and breaks the tension that presses in on my chest.

We sleep together for the last several hours of darkness. I don’t care if either of my children catches us. In the morning, by the time Hannah and Dafydd get up, Evan and I have both showered, separately. I have decided we will all go to church and hear the choir, watch Evan conduct.

“It is really just another day,” Evan says, smiling.

“Yeah, right. There is no such thing for me as just another day in Aberfan.” And there is no use in pretending that everything is just the same between us.

After breakfast Hannah feeds Evan’s wild cats. I am washing up the dishes when Dafydd comes into the kitchen.

“I keep forgetting to ask you about this woman who called me.” He fumbles in his trouser pocket for a moment and then hands me a slip of folded paper. “She called me last week. She said she was going to be in New York soon and wondered if she might see me. She said she was an old friend of Marc’s.”

I unfold the paper. In Dafydd’s sweet slanted cursive, it reads
Gabriella Purdue.

“Oh, Lord,” I say under my breath.

“Isn’t she the singer who sang ‘And Then Came Love’ from
The Yellow Door
“

“Yes,” I say, casually as I can, trying to recover from my surprise, wondering if she has said anything else to Dafydd, told him anything. “It’s just. ’ that… I haven’t seen or heard from her in a very long time,” I lie.

“What do you think she wants?”

I shrug. “What else did she say?” I ask finally, as innocently as I can.

“Nothing, just that Marco had told her all about me and that she wanted to meet me. How do you think she got my work number, anyway?”

“Is it that hard to get?”

I am furious. She has crossed a line. How dare she call Dafydd. How dare she use Dafydd. It is more than a threat. It is war.

I try to smile at Dafydd as if nothing is going on inside. I hate her. I hate Marc.

“Hannah,” Dafydd calls out as he leaves the room.

I get a cigarette from my purse in the entry and light up, taking a deep puff, wandering into the kitchen, leaning on the windowsill, hunched, my arms crossed over my chest, dragging in hard.

Evan comes in quietly and puts his coffee cup in the sink. Seeing the lighted cigarette in my hand, he turns and says sternly, “Come on, Alys. What are you doing? I told you I don’t like you smoking. And since this happens to be my house, I definitely do not want you smoking in here. Particularly not in my kitchen. Put it out, please.”

I glare at him.

“Come on, put it out.”

This is a facet of Evan I do not always like: the meticulous, fastidious homemaker.

“Oh, fuck you, Evan,” I say quietly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, fuck you.”

“How dare you? What in the world have I done to deserve this? I think you owe me an apology.”

“For what? An apology for what? I’m so sick of all of this. You think you know me. Who do you love, Evan? What do you really know about me other than at one time I turned my back on you and … all of this? See how enormously self-centered I am, Evan. I smoke! How in the world could you ever trust me? How could you trust anything about me?”

Evan is quiet.

I can’t believe I am taking this out on Evan.

I throw the cigarette in the sink, where he runs water over it.

“I’m sorry, Evan.”

“Alys?”

I begin to sob, covering my face. Evan comes around and stands in front of me. I am unable to speak, unable to do anything but cry. If this is some debt, some unpaid bill because of our union, our marriage, that I am now responsible for in Marc’s absence, I will not pay it. I will not bear this brunt, either emotionally or financially, nor will my children. I stagger to the bathroom and vomit into the toilet until there is nothing left but sour bile. And then I am sobbing again, choking, completely out of control, my head in the toilet.

“Alys,” Evan says quietly outside of the door, “can I come in?”

When I don’t answer, he opens the door a crack and closes it behind him.

“Alys, what is it?” He kneels down next to me, touching my head. “What’s happened? Tell me, please.”

“Evan, what’s happened?” Dafydd asks, sticking his head into the bathroom. “Momma, what’s wrong?”

He comes over and kneels next to me.

“Please, Mom, what’s happened?”

Hannah knocks.

“Why’s Mommy crying? Mommy?” When I don’t respond she comes and puts her arms around my shoulders and scoots in behind me, close. “Mommy, what’s wrong?

Now there are four of us in Evan’s small bathroom.

“It’s not about her dad, is it?” Dafydd asks Evan.

“I don’t know.” Evan moves me away from the toilet. He puts down the seat and gathers me up on his lap, holding me in his arms like a child. At first I am stiff and then I release into him.

Dafydd says, “Hannah, why don’t you and I take a little walk around the village? We’ll be back in an hour or so, Momma.” Hannah holds on to my blouse.

“Come on, Hannah,” Dafydd urges. “Evan will help her.”

After they’ve gone, Evan carries me into the living room. He holds me in the rocker in front of the fire, continuing to hum the old Welsh lullaby, the same lullaby Gram sang. I close my eyes and fall into the rocking motion, then a kind of light sleep. When I open my eyes, Evan asks, “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“It’s too awful,” I whisper.

“Too awful to talk about? Or do you mean too awful to talk about with me?”

“Both,” I say.

“Alys,” he says, looking sad.

I touch his face. He hasn’t shaved yet, and the stubble that shows dark like a shadow is rough beneath my fingers.

“I was a terrible wife,” I say so softly. Evan puts his ear right next to my mouth as if he hasn’t heard me. I say it again, this time a bit louder: “I was a terrible wife.”

I close my eyes and tell Evan everything.

“Oh, Alys.”

“I might be able to understand another woman. But another child?”

Evan is quiet, his head down. “I understand how you must feel, Alys. Please don’t take this in the wrong way, but I really do understand how awful you must feel.”

I look at Evan as if I am seeing him, or at least his pain, for the very first time. How can he think that what I did to him is the same? I continue to look at him. And as I reach deep down inside, I see that it is the same.

I bow my head, crying again, this time more quietly. And then, looking up, I say, “I am so sorry, Evan.”

D
afydd and Hannah still aren’t back when I’ve finished with the dishes, so, having recovered some, I start over to see Da and Mam.

I go the back way along the ridge, looking out over the whole valley. Noticing, as always, the hills—how they roll into each other like the smooth curves of a woman’s body, the tantalizing iridescent glow of green against raw, rusted bracken weeds, the touch of a late-morning breeze making waves of the greenery. This is the land I am from, what I grew up looking at and loving before the disaster ruined it all for me.

Up ahead, two people walk toward me. The figures disturb my horizon. I do not want to share it with anyone. I want to hoard this beauty as my own. As they get closer, they become Hannah and Dafydd. Hannah runs toward me, her hair blowing out behind her like a blond veil. Dafydd has his hands tucked deep in his pockets. I will never be able to look at him in the same way because now he will always remind me of Evan.