Sarah took a hesitant step from her post at the door, eyes glued to my Mother’s face. “Claire, I know. I know. Can I tell you?”
“You’re not even listening to me,” my mother cried. “You just want your turn to talk. You shut up! My turn today!” Nature itself seemed to clap its mouth shut at her command. The slap of the words resounded across Sarah’s face. “I sat by the door and thought you’d be home. I waited all night. By morning I thought you were dead. Just like them. I thought I was cursed, that I did it – killed all of you. I was too scared to call anyone and tell them you were missing because once they found your body that would be it. All over. And I couldn’t bury someone else by myself. Especially not you.” My mother’s fierce voice faltered and the memory broke painfully over her face. Neither Sarah nor I dared moved. I’m not sure we breathed.
My mother inhaled and continued. “When I finally told him, Jed put out an alert for your car. We got in touch with one of your roommates and she said that you left upset and called the next day from Massachusetts. Massachusetts!” My mother threw up her hands and defied the universe to come up for an excuse for Massachusetts. “What in hell were you doing in Massachusetts? Why did you call a
roommate
and not me?”
Sarah opened her trembling lips but my mother plowed over her. “Who cares? I was done. You might as well have died. I didn’t care anymore. I packed my bags. I never wanted to see this place again. I don’t even want to be here now!” The long fettered words careened around the room, the only things that dared to stir.
After a dreadful stillness Sarah finally spoke. “But you are here,” She whispered. “I don’t want my turn for
me
. I want it for
you
. You deserve to know what happened. Can I tell you?”
Mother crossed her arms tight over her chest, but she stayed. Sarah cautiously took it as permission. “I drove to Boston. I thought I could get there and still be back sometime in the middle of the night. That’s what I meant to do. I went to pick up a man named John.”
My mother turned just enough for me to see the perplexed slope of her eyebrows. “What man?”
“My professor. I was in love with him. He didn’t usually teach at UMaine. He was an assistant PhD at Northeastern. He filled in teaching a summer class in Maine and I met him.”
“What in the world does this have to do with our mother?” My mother demanded.
“It has to do with us. Why I was late coming home. Why you thought I didn’t care about you. He’s the one I went to Africa with. Just the two of us. In Africa.” And when she said it like that, pausing between the slow sentences I knew just what she was telling my mother. I imagined the sunsets blazing over the plains, streaming through the wide, green leaves of the twisted trees. I imagined dirt floors and brown faces singing and cooking fires and Sarah. And a man. And I knew what she was saying.
“I couldn’t tell mother. I told both of you it was a research trip, but I never told her that I loved John. I never told her it was just us. I never told her that I thought he felt something for me, too.” Sarah gave me a self-conscious look, but continued.
“We …he … he was the only man I ever,” Again she looked to me, her face a shy apology. “In Africa I found out he cared for me, too,” she finished neatly. “So I was on top of the world. I only had one year of school left and I’d found someone to spend my life with, so I thought, and then I called home. And I, I don’t know how to explain it. I thought I couldn’t face it alone. I thought if I went and told him he would help me. I thought I could just run into his arms and he would fix it. I was a fool.” Sarah’s voice dropped flat.
Curiosity was pushing the pain from my mother’s eyes, and pushing the breath from my lungs.
“I got in the car, thinking of mother the whole way to Boston. It was late, campus was closed. I didn’t know where to find him. I didn’t have an address. We’d only just started … our relationship in Africa. I found him in the phone book and drove out to his house. I can’t tell you how relieved I felt when I pulled up outside that little brick townhouse. I ran up to the door, thinking everything was about to get better.” Sarah pressed her fingers to the side of her head. I wasn’t sure she could continue.
“What happened, Sarah?” I whispered.
She slid her eyes to me and gave me a somber, fleeting smile. “His wife answered the door.” She shrugged like it didn’t crush her to say it. Like it didn’t hit me in the head like an anvil.
“His wife?” My mother broke her silence.
“Yes. He came to the door right behind her and I don’t know which one of us looked more mortified. I must have looked like a person who just took a bullet. I think I said something about having a message for John and garbled something about research notes and said I would tell him later. I have never figured out how I ended up at a hotel, but I did. I stayed that night. I called his office the next day to curse him to oblivion, but when he answered the phone he was so relieved to hear from me. He’d called my roommates. He knew about mother. He asked me where I was and he rushed to the hotel and he sounded like he cared so much and that was maybe worse.”
“Maybe Jennifer should leave,” My mother said, too riveted to stop the story, and too much a mother to let me hear the details.
“Maybe. I never told her any of this. But the worst is over. Nothing happened. He apologized. He told me that he really had fallen in love with me. Too late in his life. I think I believed him. I think he believed himself. But what did it matter? It was too late. The timing … so I left. I just drove. I don’t know how long. I don’t know what roads. I just know that I stayed in a hotel in New Hampshire the next night. Claire, I thought it was one night. I swear I did! I don’t remember calling my roommate. I think I had a nervous breakdown. Time didn’t mean anything. All I knew was mother was gone, John was gone, Dad was gone. I forgot … I forgot about you,” a tear tracked down her ashamed face. “I was in my car one day, going over a bridge and the road was empty and I stopped. I just stopped and got out and looked down at the river below me. I’d broken every rule Mother ever gave us. I’d made a mess of myself. And I was alone. I thought I was going to … I thought about just ending it.”
Sarah looked up to my mother and I didn’t understand how she could smile at a moment like that, but she tenderly raised her lips and stared into her sister’s eyes. “That’s when I remembered you, Claire. I remembered that you were the one who called me. You were at home. I remembered that I had a home and someone was waiting for me there and it didn’t fix anything, but it was enough to start with. I drove home to get you.” Her smile faltered and fell, memories battering her face. “While I was killing you, you were saving me. I’m so sorry.”
I tried to read my mother’s reaction. She sat down heavily on the arm of the chair halfway through the story, her unfocused eyes lingering on the floor. Her subdued face showed little emotion other than a deep weariness.
I was the one who spoke, not wanting to leave Sarah alone with her painful story. “So you got here and then mother left? And then … how did you?” I didn’t even try to fit words around the enormous question. I knew my limitations.
“It’s funny what freedom you gain when you lose everything,” she said wryly. “It’s like David in the Bible when his child got sick. He ripped his clothes and shaved his head and wouldn’t eat and prayed all day and begged and cried and everyone was scared to tell him that the boy was dead. But when he found out he washed his face and ate breakfast. When there’s still a chance to salvage something you torture yourself. When it’s gone, you wash your face. You wake up. You start picking up the pieces, no matter how tiny and scattered they are. And then suddenly, the life that you had that was whole is suddenly a mosaic made of the old pieces. And something entirely new. I don’t know how. I just know it happens.”
She gazed at my mother’s hanging head, a thoughtful frown on her mouth. Her mouth opened. And closed. And finally opened again. “Claire, I deserved everything you did. I think I know why you had to do it. I think you needed to be free of this place, and that meant being free of me. But please, please don’t leave like that again. I want the fight to end now.”
“I don’t think we’d know how … it’s been too long,” my mother argued feebly.
“I know how!” A sharp voice barked from the kitchen. We all jumped and Sarah gasped “Little!” in shock. She hobbled in from the kitchen muttering a short apology for scaring us. “I came in the back when Claire came in. Didn’t want her to go running off before I talked to her,” Little said as she stumped into the room, looking unconcerned at our stunned faces. “I was jus’ sittin’ there for Hazel,” she said, staring down Sarah’s glare.
“For my mother?” Sarah asked.
“She’d a killed me if I let Claire go before you two talked. And I’m not quite ready to die yet, despite what my neighbors think,” Little looked at us narrowly in remembrance of our gaff that morning. “I’ve been sitting at the table, to see if you need me. And you said you don’t know how to stop up a big, twenty year hole and I know. The way you plug up a hole that big is with that one,” She said pointing her brittle finger at me. “You both love her and she’s bigger to both of you than the past.”
My mother's slowly mellowing face hardened again. “I didn’t come here to stay. I hate it here.”
“Since when?” Little bit back.
“Since terrible things started happening. My father, my mother – if I’d stayed I probably would have killed Sarah, too. I’ve been here for one hour and you nearly died and a girl went missing and the boys had a fight and now I’m finding out about affairs and suicide attempts and I’m done. I’m done! This place is cursed,” my mother said loudly.
Like a curse out of Shakespeare.
I felt the doom of it spreading like black, tattooed wings over the entire town.
Her tirade didn’t ruffle Little. “Sit down,” she ordered, though my mother was already sitting. “I’ll tell you the only curse you got – the human one. You’re human and people die. Don’t tell me about people dying. You know and I know. And don’t you tell me about people lovin’ the wrong people,” she said turning from my mother to Sarah. “You know and I know. And don’t you get that girl all full of ideas that it all ends foul. Most of the time it does, but she got a right to figure that out herself,” she jerked her head to me, but her finger flew to my mother. “You came home and found me taking a pleasant nap. I can’t help that you all acted like idiots. And then a boy got hisself the girl he wanted, and a bloody lip ain’t such a bad thing. The girl’s worth it. So stop sobbing about your curses. Ain’t nothing bad happened here today.”
And when she finished I wanted to laugh at myself. Laugh at all of us. Laugh at Nathan for agonizing over the future. Laugh at myself for agonizing over Nathan. I knew it wouldn’t last, that the reality would come snaking back in, but for a moment it made sense, the triviality of it all.
Little caught the strange change in my expression and flashed me a momentary, gruff smile. “When’s your flight?” She asked my mother.
“It’s, it’s tomorrow morning. Early. Eight fifteen. I already bought both tickets.”
I ground my teeth together. The clock was ticking. The sands had nearly finished funneling through the hourglass into a soft, misshapen mound.
“Then you got today, don’t ya?” Little said encouragingly. “You stay. You finish saying what you need to say and you get up early and go.”
“I can’t stay here,” my mother answered reflexively.
“You can do anything. You forget I was here. I helped ya. And I never met a girl so tough.” Little’s eyes roamed to Sarah and rested there. “Except for your sister.” I jerked my eyes back to Sarah who’s eyebrows raised in a question.
“Tough is tough, but gentle is tougher. I lost it when Newell married that woman. I got so tough I didn’t know how to be gentle anymore. Sarah lost everything and she kep’ something soft. She found a way to love and hate at the same time. Now that’s a trick. She didn’t grow a shell like us.” My mother stood rigidly, ignoring the words, but Sarah’s eyes glossed over with a shiny film of water. “I never told ya that, did I?” Little said, nodding her head to Sarah. “But I kep’ meaning to.”
In the awkward quiet that followed Little’s words I found my voice. “Can we please stay this last night?” I asked my mother, the hope in my question beating its wings against my throat. My mother shook her head, refused to look at me.
“If you came all this way you should pay your respects to your mama. You ain’t ever even seen her headstone,” Little swung the tempting words in front of my mother whose head finally rose. The old woman walked up to her and rested her wrinkled hand on her wrist, “Go see her with Sarah. Tell your sister what your mama’s wearing. Put this sad story to bed. It’s time to end it now. For your mama. For your girl. For you.”
The air in the room stilled, the atoms seemed to stop their frenzied spinning, waiting for the future to unfold. “I can’t end it, Little. When I’m here, it just keeps going. Tragedy after tragedy. It will follow me. Something else will happen,” my mother said it like she needed someone to refute her. I opened my mouth to try but Little beat me to it.
“Somethin’ bad’ll happen anywhere. To anyone. To everyone. Don’t think you’re so special. But I think this cup is empty. I think you drank the last bitter dregs, you and your sister. You’ve been running like the devil’s at your tail because you probably figgered he was! But the ole Screw has to move on to other people. I ain’t seen him muckin’ around here much lately.”
And though I found none of it funny, though her gravely words mesmerized me, one brief breath of a laugh escaped when she said
mucking around
. I’d already recomposed myself by the time the three women turned to me. “I’m so sorry. I just, I don’t know why but I just remembered Montague Muck and his dog and the Jacks and I’m sorry.”
“She knows Monty?” My mother asked Sarah, for the first time addressing her like a real person. “And the Jacks?”
“She knows most of the town,” Sarah said.
“It doesn’t take long,” I reminded her.