“She forgives Sarah,” Little said. “She don’t know it, but she does. She got it in her head that she can’t come back. She ran away and left her pain here. She thinks it’s still here waitin’. I’d like to see anybody ‘just get over’ what she went through.”
“Then why should I tell her to come back to that?” I asked, sincerely needing to know.
“Because sometimes you gotta look under the bed to see that there’s no monster.” Little leaned back in her chair and folded her hands over her soft stomach. Every action and word resounded with finality. But even her tough demeanor couldn’t disguise the fact that she lived here alone. No tacky school pictures in handmade frames, no greeting cards displayed on the mantle. Nothing that looked less than a decade old except for some prescription bottles on the side table beside some unopened bills.
I looked at her, tempted for a moment to reach out and touch her hand. Instead, I replaced the thimble on the shelf and asked, “Why did you run away?”
Little’s blue eyes stabbed me before they closed. Her head rocked to one side like she was falling asleep. “Cause I needed to. I fell in love and I had to leave.”
“Why?”
“None of your blasted business,” she yawned.
“Little …”
“I tell you when you tell me. But I’m gonna need a nap soon so why don’t you just call your mama and get it over with. You’re gonna do it ‘ventually.”
I blew out a long breath and waited to see if she would open her eyes again. She didn’t. “I’ll see you later, Little. I’m going out the back.” I stepped through the yellow kitchen – funny how in the storm last night it seemed to glow cheerfully but against the bright noon sun it looked dated and dingy – and into her back yard.
She had even more tree limbs down than Sarah. They littered the ground like wounded bodies, twisted in the wind and left as casualties. I skirted between them, making my way to the beach so I could think alone before facing the phone call to my father. I cannot say that Little’s idea didn’t intrigue me, but it didn’t convince me.
My mother at Shelter Cove. I studied the stand of trees hiding Sarah’s house from my view and imagined my Mother in front of them. I tried to picture her as a young girl, playing in her oceanic backyard and stepping where I now stepped, but I couldn’t make it real. It was a flat picture in my head without movement or life.
When I turned to the beach, instead of my imaginary mother, I saw Hester hunched on the shore, piling sand on top of her feet. If it had been Darcy or Claude I would have shouted a greeting, but I couldn’t raise my voice to shy Hester, even in salutation. I walked slowly, trying to make a sound with my steps to warn her of my approach but the sand muffled my footfalls. When I ambled close enough for her to hear my conversational voice I said, “Hey, Hester. Whatcha doing?” Her head whipped around, pink seeping up her neck and into her cheeks.
“Just sitting,” she stumbled on the words.
“Mind if I join you?” She graced her feet with a pleased smile and shook her head so I took a seat. “I just got back from town. I helped Nathan power-wash. Lots of fun.” Her grin widened. I kept up a light dialogue in an attempt to win her confidence. “And I met Little today. Well, last night actually. In the storm.”
“Nathan told me.” It was hard to hear her words because she barely parted her lips.
“Are you two close, you and Nathan?” She nodded, this time turning her head completely away from me. “He tells me you’re very smart.” A small lie – Sarah was the one who actually told me that, but I wanted her to start talking. She shrugged. “Sarah tells me that you’re even smarter than Nathan.”
A small, short laugh before she answered, “No.”
“Just what I hear,” I said, letting my voice lilt up at the end. She laughed again and managed to look at me so I continued. “In fact, I think I believe her. I have a problem and I think you would know the answer better than Nathan.” Hester blushed, but listened. “Little wants me to make my mother come home to Smithport even though it would really hurt her feelings and make her mad at me. Would you listen to Little?” Then as an aside, I said between clenched teeth, “They do say she’s a little …” I tipped my flat hand back and forth and whistled softly.
Hester’s eyes squinted in thought. “If Little’s right I would,” she said, pianissimo.
“Lovely!” I threw my hands up. “Very helpful. How do I know if she’s right?”
She grinned and looked back at the water. “Do you think she wants to come home - subconsciously?” She asked. Her words wiped the smile from my face and I looked at her darting eyes. Much smarter than I thought, and much older than any eight year old I’d ever known. Even Cleo couldn’t compete with this mind.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like it.” I lifted a handful of sharp sand and let it sift between my fingers, leaving two pebbles in my palm.
“I think I’d tell her to come,” she said.
“Why?”
When Hester turned to me the wind stirred some untidy hair off her shoulders and her upturned nose flared slightly as she took a deep breath. “Because I think people belong at home.” I read pain in the tiny spaces between her words. She wasn’t talking about my mother.
“Where’s your dad, Hester?” I asked in my kindest voice.
She shrugged and looped her arms around her knees. “Connecticut.”
“Do you ever see him?”
“No,” she sighed. Her head fell onto one of her arms and she looked up at me, her eyes blinking slowly.
“Would you do it – give an ultimatum? Make her come back?” My tone changed. When I started the conversation I spoke to her like one of my swimming students, flippant and silly. Now I spoke to her as an adult instead of a child half my age.
Hester pushed her lips to one side, “I think so.”
“So I should?”
“I don’t know. I think so.”
The truth gripped my stomach and gnawed on it like a predator that starts eating its prey while it’s still alive. I flinched with physical pain. “I think you’re probably right,” I admitted. “It just scares me.”
“Yeah,” she nodded in sympathy and we both turned our faces to the rushing water, my thoughts jumping from heartache to heartache – Hester’s, my mother’s, Sarah’s, Little’s. As the cold water draped a foamy lace over the hard sand at my feet I realized that I could not include myself in the ranks of the heartbroken. Life had left my heart solidly intact. It made no sense, not even to me, but I shivered as the loneliness passed over me. I felt inferior. Untested. Ignored by God, himself. I thought Hester sighed, but when she looked up I realized it was me.
Cleo fell in love with Little sight unseen when I told her the old woman’s plan. “I have a new personal hero,” Cleo vowed in awe. “Why didn’t I think of that? No, seriously, Jennifer, why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because she’s had eighty years to hone her evil genius,” I offered. “Because you don’t want to traumatize my mother. Because you don’t want me to be grounded until I’m out of college. Take a pick. I dunno.”
“Jennifer, it won’t traumatize her. It will
un
-traumatize her. She’ll get her family back – what’s left of it.”
“Are you a psychiatrist now?” I asked as I twirled the old globe on the desk. “How could you possibly know what it will do to her? I don’t even know. I think it’s a straight fifty-fifty chance of doing more damage.”
“You know it’s the best thing. Even the eight year old kid you asked knew it, which I think is hilarious. You just don’t want to admit it because then you have to do it.”
I ran my finger down the white bumps that represented the Himalayan mountains and slid over China into the Pacific Ocean. “Probably.” Long pause. “What do I say?”
“Why do you always ask me that?”
“I don’t know. If I have access to your mighty brain I might as well use it. Two heads are better than one, right?”
“Can’t argue with that,” she agreed. “Although it sounds like you have access to quite a few genuine geniuses nowadays. Do you think the seafood diet does anything? Maybe the mercury?”
“What?”
“Nevermind. Just say what Little said. Tell her you will come home as soon as she comes to get you. And say it nice. Serious. But nice.”
My eyes drifted from the aqua, bubbling paint of the globe’s oceans to the sparkling water outside. “I don’t know if I can, but I’ll think about it. I’ll call you later.”
“First. I want to be the first one to know what she says.”
I sighed. Her sport. My life. “I’ll call you first
if
I talk to her. But if I do, you better be nice, because I’ll be a mess.”
“
When
,” she corrected. “Not
if
. When you call me, I’ll be here. And I’ll be nice.”
We said good-bye and I wandered downstairs where Sarah and I tried to pretend the phone call with my father wasn’t a sword hanging from the ceiling. Eventually it would fall and strike us, but in the meantime we went through recipe books looking for ideas for dinner and started one of Little’s movies. We didn’t mention Nebraska or my parents for the rest of the day. My father didn’t call back.
Instead of having lines with Nathan on the porch like usual, we did them in the backyard, hauling the broken branches into a burn pile as the day dimmed around us.
“I’ll start,” I volunteered, surprising both of them. “I don’t need to tell you who wrote it because it’s famous and you’ll think I was just being lazy and picked one I already knew.” I reached down and pulled a pine needle out of my t-shirt and crouched beside the brush pile. “We had to memorize it when we read Julius Caesar.”
“There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
”
“I don’t think you’re lazy. What made you think of it tonight?” Sarah asked as she dropped a handful of twigs in front of me and stopped to meet my eyes.
“Because it made sense today. More sense than ever before. It seems to apply now.”
Nathan’s curious eyes met mine but Sarah continued before he could speak. “There are reasons classics are classics. They resonate. They hit us in the gut. Ode to Joy is my favorite song. Not very original, but it’s great for a reason.” She touched my head and went to retrieve more branches.
Nathan’s stare kept wandering back to my face. I watched him work, trying to imagine what he would say about Little’s advice. Would he even want my mother here? He approached the brush pile and squatted down opposite me as he dropped a large branch, teeming with pinecones. He pulled a lighter out of his pocket and as the flame flicked up his glance met mine again, dancing with intensity as the orange glow reflected in his eyes. He put the fire to a leaf, waiting until it steadied. As it started to spread he said quietly, “‘
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began’
.” He’d never looked at me like that before – like he could transfer his thoughts into my head if he tried hard enough. My lips parted and I froze, not sure if he was speaking or quoting.
“You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations - - -
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.”
The leaf curled as the fire advanced silently over its dry veins and left only crumbling ashes. “Mary Oliver,” He murmured, and poked the sticks, pushing a damp one away from the tiny, fragile flame. “Just do what you have to do,” he said low enough that Sarah couldn’t hear.
“Did Hester tell you?” I mouthed, barely even whispering. He shook his head once and then his face changed, went red, and he stood.
I turned to see Sarah coming back with pieces of driftwood. “Let’s see if we can get some nice colors,” she said and dropped it beside the stack. “Sometimes if the driftwood is old and salty enough it will burn blue,” she told me. Turning back to Nathan she said, “Why that one tonight?”
“Because it said ‘full of fallen branches’,” Nathan lied easily. From his spot ten feet away his shadowed face gave nothing away. A scrawny tree shook as he tugged a loose limb from some of its lower branches.
“Well that fits, I guess,” said Sarah. “And that leaves me. I wrote mine down because my brain is average capacity.”
Nathan snorted. “Hardly.”
“Average enough to require paper,” She said as she dug into her front pocket and produced a folded note. “Unlike you two.” Sarah picked a dead leaf from her hair and paused long enough to read, “
We can burst the bonds which chain us,/ Which cold human hands have wrought,/ And where none shall dare restrain us/ We can meet again, in thought
.” She smiled and said, “It’s from a poem called Parting by Charlotte Bronte.” She didn’t wait for us to ask her why she picked it. She lowered herself to the ground and sat with her legs crossed. “Even if you have to leave soon, it’s just a temporary parting. We can write, talk, visit.” Her voice lowered to a wistful strain. “I think Claire might come around eventually, now that we’ve met. Maybe.”
I closed my eyes and bowed my head, almost like a prayer. “Would you want her to come?” I asked. “Really?”
“Of course I would,” she said, the shock bare on her face.
I sighed out a heavy “okay.”
“What do you mean ‘okay’?” She asked.
“I was just wondering. Since she’s been so stubborn and hurt you so much.”
“I haven’t wanted the chance this badly since the fight. I have so much more to gain. I’m ready to take the blame now.” Sarah said it like Nathan and I weren’t even there.
The fire finally gathered its courage and dove into the pile of branches, spitting and crackling. Sarah tossed the driftwood into the middle and the soft blue flames twisted into the air and disappeared into a thin rope of smoke. My voice broke the spell that momentarily entranced all three of us. “Do you mind if I walk Nathan home so I can talk to Claude really quick?”