“She was just angry, Mona,” Francesca said. “She had no cause to be angry with me, and despite what anyone says, that accident was not your father’s fault. The road conditions were awful that day, but by the time it got too bad to drive, they were halfway there.”
“Who said the accident was Daddy’s fault?”
Francesca waved her hand like there were slow flies in front of her. “Some people want to find someone to blame when there’s a tragedy like this. They think a bunch of hippies living on a commune, there must be drugs involved. There was a lot of gossip about town, was he stoned, was he not stoned, you know the sort of chatter that people without a purpose engage in.”
I pushed my foot over a patch of gravel to interrupt the dead silence. Mike stood up, brushed the loose dirt from his jeans, and said he was going to go take a walk. “You two should probably talk without me around,” he told us.
Part of me wanted Mike to stick around to hear Francesca deny the claim that my father may have bore some responsibility for the accident. Another part was relieved that he was taking off because I was terrified that the story got worse. That she would confirm these charges. A small aching part of me feared that Mike was leaving because he didn’t want to know this much about me. The strip class, air hockey, and late-night e-mails were within Mike’s emotional comfort zone, but when faced with my real life—the stuff that no one is supposed to see—he was not up for it. As much as the thought of Mike’s evaporation troubled me, I was more drawn in by what Francesca had revealed, if only partially.
“Was he?” I asked tentatively. “Stoned, I mean?”
“He was fine, Mona.” Francesca moved in closer, and brushed my hair from my eyes with her twiggy fingers. “Are you going to be able to lift me up now that we haven’t got Mr. Muscles to help?”
“I can manage,” I said. “Was he really, Francesca, or are you just telling me what I want to hear?”
“Mona, when have I ever told anyone something because it was what they wanted to hear? We smoked a lot of grass at the house, but we had a couple of ground rules. We never smoked in front of you kids and we didn’t drive or use any of the farm equipment stoned. Most of us thought the rules were pretty silly because we’d all driven a thousand times stoned off our asses and we were fine, and a few of us thought that if we were smoking grass, we shouldn’t hide it from you kids. Your mother felt strongly about it though, so we all went along with it because we respected her and wanted to create a space where everyone’s voice was heard.”
I heard seventeen voices screaming in terror. “Anyway, I was up with everyone at six that morning and no one was lighting up, and I know Andy wasn’t sparking up a joint on the school bus with you kids in it, but that didn’t stop people from speculating. It was maddening. The newspapers were a trip. They immediately came up with some catchy little headline, the Magic Bus, for our school bus. They were real careful to write that the allegations of driving under the influence were still just that—allegations. But they made that story into a national sensation with all their hoopla over our social action, pot smoking, and living on a commune. It was like the death of seventeen human beings wasn’t enough.”
Francesca realized this was the first time I was hearing any of this and stopped. “Your grandmother didn’t tell you any of this?”
I shook my head.
“I can’t say that surprises me much the way she carried on when she was here,” she continued. “I figured everyone reacts to tragedy in different ways, and your grandmother’s was obviously to lash out, but I hoped one day she’d tell you that all those news reports weren’t true.”
“I never even knew about the news stories,” I said.
“I’ll never forget that woman. She came into our home like she owned the place, which, truth be told, wasn’t too far off since she’d lent us a hundred thousand for construction. She was furious at me for simply being alive. She didn’t say much to me, but her rage was definitely there. She was like carbon monoxide. You couldn’t see her, couldn’t hear her, but she was there to kill. She was like this for about forty minutes before she went hysterical. She tore through the house, screaming about how filthy it was and how it was a wonder we all survived as long as we did. Then she picked up a picture of your father and mother and—I’ll never forget this—she spat ‘I told you not to marry this bum!’ then threw the frame across the room and cried, ‘He got what he deserved, but those kids were innocent.’ She fell to the floor crying and I went to put my arms around her, to comfort her, but she started screaming at me, too, telling me I thought I could be a better mother to all of you, but look what I’d let happen.”
“Oh my God,” I interrupted. “How awful of her! I’m so sorry she said that to you. You know she didn’t mean it, right? She was just overcome with grief. Grammy was really the most wonderful person, Francesca. I know if she were alive, she would apologize to you now. Really. I know she would.”
Francesca sighed apologetically, not knowing until then that Grammy died. Softer, she continued, “I called you about a dozen times, Mona. I so wanted for us to keep in touch. The first few times, she just hung up on me as soon as she heard my name. Then I had to start communicating through lawyers about the van and some of the property at the house. After a while, she came around on that. I guess she had no use for this silly old thing.” She motioned to the minibus. “The last time I called was about a year after you left Montana, and she was pretty pleasant. Well, she was cordial, at least. But she explained that you were starting a new life and that my presence in it would be a constant painful reminder of the past.”
This was a lot to take in. Where was I during Grammy’s stormy ravaging of our commune? Why hadn’t I heard a single news report about the so-called Magic Bus? Where was I when Francesca called?
Then I realized that the most important moments of life are just that. Moments. And if you’re at the beach while the phone’s ringing, you’re going to miss the call. But my life, up until the past few months, has been spent waiting by the phone and not at the beach. How had I missed so much while nothing else was going on?
* * *
Before we left Montana, Francesca said she had a few things of mine she’d been waiting to return. “Should I go?” Mike asked.
“Stay,” I said and refrained from elaborating.
If you want,
I didn’t say.
Stay forever,
I’d’ve killed myself if it slipped.
If he stays he loves me, if he goes we’re just friends.
I
plucked imaginary petals.
“Okay,” he shrugged.
Why did he have to shrug?
I wondered but didn’t ask.
Fine, shrug all you want. I don’t even notice because I am not one of your column girls!
“Why’d you shrug?” slipped out.
“Huh?” Mike asked. “Why’d I what?”
“Shrug? You just said ‘okay,’ then shrugged like maybe you weren’t so sure or something, or that—”
Francesca jumped in, undoubtedly pitying what a social dolt I’d become. “Why doesn’t Michael help me bring your box up from storage?”
Twenty minutes later, I heard Francesca and Mike’s voices as they approached the apartment door, and was struck by the next image I saw. Francesca’s arm held the door open for Mike, whose bare arms were strapped around a dusty taped box with my name scribbled on it. My past giving way to my future, which embraced my past.
Mike placed the box on Francesca’s kitchen table and reached into his jeans pocket for a Swiss Army knife to slit the packing tape. As he peeled the cardboard flaps back, I smelled the familiar scent of smoke from our fireplace fighting through fifteen years of dust collecting on the box top.
A yellowed linen tablecloth with red flowers embroidered along the periphery. I remember watching my mother hand stitch the flowers on the white cloth.
A rainbow colored yarn God’s-eye I remember making with Jessica the first week we moved into the house.
My mother’s journal.
My parents’ wedding album, which was so old it actually cracked open to a photo of them, holding hands facing each other against the backdrop of a lake. I realized I never knew where they were married, though I was aware that it was an outdoor ceremony performed by one of their friends who had obtained a ministerial license. It looked like Montana, but I supposed it could have been anywhere. I turned to Francesca in a moment of panic realizing that she was probably the last person on earth that could answer that question readily. “Here in Butte,” she told me when I asked.
The blue sheet with gold embroidered stars and the moon brought tears to my eyes. “Your evening sky,” I said softly, remembering for the first time that this was how my mother presented the sheet to us kids. “Ceilings keep you trapped,” she said. “But you’ll always feel free looking up at your evening sky.” Her billowy ceiling decor never made me feel particularly liberated, but not needing to pretend it did back then, did now. “My mother made this,” I told Mike. “It hung on the kids’ dorm ceiling all puffy, so we’d feel like we were in a cloud or something.” He nodded.
Mike asked to see the whole thing and began to unroll the sheet by lifting the edge and shaking it out. With one firm snap, Mike ended fifteen years of the sheet’s bound inertia. But with that same freeing movement, he also sent flying across the room the ceramic mug I made for Todd our last winter at the house. Francesca had packed the fragile mug in the heart of the tapestry to insulate it from other items in the box. Ironically, this protective measure was the very thing that broke it.
“Holy shit!” Mike gasped as he saw the white glazed mug shoot across the room and hit the floor. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that was in there.” He picked up the five pieces it had broken into and examined them sitting in the palm of his hand. “I can fix this,” he promised. “I’ll take it to one of those pottery places where they can make it like new. You won’t even see the cracks when I patch it up.”
“It’s okay,” I told him, not explaining the significance of the mug. Mike felt bad enough as is. I told him I’d prefer he just glued the pieces back together on his own. I didn’t want it to look new. I wanted to see the cracks where my brushstrokes of bitterroot had been broken by my clumsy, well-meaning dog.
“No, let me fix it right,” he insisted.
“Believe me, if you glue it back together, you’ll fix it right,” I said. “I’m not going to drink from this cup.” What I didn’t tell him—for fear of seeming overly attached—was that I liked that Mike had made his mark on the relics of my past. Sure, the marks were cracks, but these fine fissures would represent the labor of his thick fingers gluing together pieces of my broken mug, and that charmed me to pieces.
“Shit, Mona. I feel terrible. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”
With that, a mischievous old woman chimed in. “There’s something you both can do for me,” Francesca said with a smile.
“Could we get arrested for this?” Mike whispered as we crawled over rocks and began scaling the rough terrain. He held my knapsack steady as the contents clanked around.
“I think it’d be a misdemeanor,” I whispered back through the cold night air. “It’s Missoula. It’s not like we’d get anything more than a slap on the wrists. I think a lot of people would come to our defense, even. Can you imagine, we’d be folk heroes?!”
Mike shook his can of navy blue spray paint and popped the plastic cap off. “My dad was in the Navy, remember? He’d kick my ass for this, Mona Lisa,” Mike whispered. “You know I’m only doing this ‘cause I feel bad about breaking your tea cup. We were right to go to war with Iraq.”
We crouched down to hide ourselves, and searched for a good clean stretch of mountainside that would be seen by the entire town. I whispered, “The war’s over, you idiot. Besides, if you’re so gung ho on America, you should support people expressing a political view.”
“I hate to break this to you, Mona Lisa.” Mike contained a snort of a laugh. “This is vandalism, and it’s not like this kind of shit changes people’s minds anyway.” I turned my kneeling body toward him and placed my hand on my hip, mocking a stature of reprimand. “It doesn’t!” Mike defended. “Maybe some pro-war nut, like your father won’t look at our peace sign painted on the side of the mountain and change his mind, but a lot of people who oppose Bush’s attack on Iraq—or North Korea or Sudan, Pakistan or wherever his crusade leads him next—will see this and know they’re not alone. They’ll see a very public demonstration that there are like-minded people out there and that their own activism is not occurring in a vacuum. That’s how people go on, Mike. That’s what makes for a fulfilling life, knowing that you’re not alone and that you’re actually making a difference in the world.”
He shook the can and sprayed. The cold gray mountain enlivened with its first blue arc that grew into a circle, then was filled by Mike, with peace.
* * *
The next morning, as we drove to the airport, Mike made fun of our creation, but I could tell he took pride in his act of rebellion. He made an exaggerated sigh and wiped an imaginary tear from his eye upon seeing our gift to Francesca. “And once again, there was peace in Missoula.” He turned to me as I sat in the passenger seat. He held out his hand for me to slap, which I did. My hand fell exhausted into his with the clap, and his fingers curled around it.
We arrived back in San Diego a little after noon and Mike insisted on walking me back to my car in the airport parking lot. “I’m totally safe.” I laughed.
“I’ll carry your bag,” he offered.
“It’s on rollers, Mike.” I smirked, hoping he would just admit that he wanted to extend our visit a bit. I wanted him to bring up the whole high-five turned hand-holding incident back in Missoula. I wanted him to say something–anything—about our week together, but instead he just said he had something to give me. “What?” I smiled.
“It’s a surprise,” Mike said. He placed my suitcase in the trunk of my car and asked if he left his jacket in my backseat.
“Mike, you haven’t been in my car in four weeks,” I reminded him.