Read The Summer of No Regrets Online
Authors: Katherine Grace Bond
Webster’s red Porsche was waiting when we puled back onto The Center grounds. “Oh, God,” said Malory. “Not today.”
“What?” said Felicity. “Is that your boyfriend?” Malory composed herself and got out of the car. I stayed where I was. I didn’t need to see Webster. My whole brain was numb. I thought I might curl up and go to sleep right there in the backseat.
Webster walked across the gravel and greeted Malory with a kiss, like they were an old married couple. I saw her introduce him to Felicity. She had that sophisticated Malory mask back on. She swept her hand across the air, as if brushing away a fly.
Webster beamed down at her, as if he’d just sculpted her in his very own studio.
Felicity took a picture of the two of them, arm in arm in front of the Porsche. Then she waved and got into her car.
It was like watching a movie. I couldn’t think what I was supposed to be doing next.
Malory came over and knocked on the window. I roled it down.
“Webster and I are going for a drive,” she said. “It’s a nice day. Mom’s off at her herbalist meeting. Dad must be at the co-op buying supplies. His car’s gone. Do you want to come with us?” She smiled a little too brightly, and I wondered if this was a plea.
Spending the day with Webster was too awful to imagine. “I can’t,” I told her. “I just need to be alone for a while, okay?” For a moment, she was Malory again. “Okay,” she said. “Do you want us to bring you anything?”
I shook my head no.
•••
I wasn’t sure how long. Finaly, I got out and wandered across the footbridge to the tree house. I climbed up and stood at my Onawa shrine, my mind full of nothing. In the photo, the kittens’
mother lay frozen, her wound hidden by fur. I lit the candle. Then I took the clipping down and burned it to ash. I pinched out the I took the clipping down and burned it to ash. I pinched out the candle and tossed it into a drawer. I folded my mother’s scarf.
All that was left was the metal box—Dad’s flute. I lifted it up and took it to a patch of sun in the window seat.
The flute lay snug in the red velvet. It was real silver—an expensive instrument—and I knew he’d had it since high school.
Nonni said he used to play on some kind of church worship team. It was hard to imagine.
The light glinted off the tarnished mouthpiece. Dad had always kept it polished—that is, until he decided to throw it away. I closed the case and climbed down out of the tree house with it, barely knowing what I was doing.
In the kitchen I squirted a tiny bit of organic ketchup onto a rag. Strange, I know, but it realy does remove tarnish—and it isn’t as nasty as silver polish. I took it to the meditation room, where I sat cross-legged on the wide expanse of rug in front of the windows. The mouthpiece warmed in my hands as I turned it, rubbing at each little crevice. Dad and I had played together since I first started violin lessons at seven. He’d helped me through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and made my halting squeaks sound musical with his airy accompaniment. I’d never gone through an “I hate to practice” phase, because practice time was always Dad time. Even when I was up to four hours a day, I could usualy count on him to pick up the flute for fifteen minutes when I hit a hard patch. I was sure hitting a hard patch now.
I put the flute together and roled it across my palms. Dad had been sweet this morning. Comforting. It was the first I’d felt connected with him in a long time.
I got to my feet and raised the flute to my lips. I found the first few notes of the
Pleni
and blew: E-F-G-A-E-A-G. They came out clear. I played them again, louder, lengthening the G and letting it hang as I lowered the instrument.
A sharp voice cut the air. “What are you doing?!” I whirled. Dad stood in the doorway with his drum, his face I whirled. Dad stood in the doorway with his drum, his face the mask of an angry god. The instrument slipped out of my hand and tumbled across the floor.
“Dad, I—”
He blazed into the room and snatched the flute up. “You had no right, Brigitta, no right! You should have left it where it was!” The words slammed against my body. I felt the blood drain from my face. Dad didn’t even notice. He spun around and out, flute and drum clutched in his hands, leaving the front door of The Center hanging open.
I watched the stranger he’d become disappear down the path.
The kittens’ den was a damp refuge. I leaned my head against the soft bark and set my hands flat on the leaf-cushioned floor.
For a while I could hear Dad drumming out by the half-completed hermitage. Then the drumming stopped, and I heard his car rumble out the driveway. I should feel something, shouldn’t I?
Luke’s kitten toy was still nestled against the bark wal, untouched. Had he realy learned to carve at Scout camp? Had he ever done anything that ordinary? I wrapped the beaded leather laces around my hand. Trent Yves had a shirt with beaded leather laces in
Imlandria
. Were these them? Had he been trying to tell me who he was all along?
I traced the bite marks on the wooden handle. Kalimar’s? She loved to chew. I ran my thumb over the indentations. It would probably be good to cry, but it took too much energy. I wanted Luke here holding me. I wanted Nonni. I wanted things that couldn’t be.
Back at Cherrywood I’d had a secret grove—a place in the woods where the ground was curved like a bowl and surrounded by a screen of gum trees, beeches, and sugar maples. “You should go back to Cherrywood,” Devon had said.
It was a sweet thing to say. I imagined myself there now—the smell of warm Indiana earth. I’d caled my grove secret, but many days I’d find things there—a tin of gingersnaps, a jar of iced lemonade. And Nonni would be singing when I came back to the house.
A sharp longing to be there knifed into my numbness.
Cherrywood was my true home, not here. I loved where I lived, but it was not a haven, the way Cherrywood had been. I’d thought Cherrywood would be there always, and now it was gone.
But it wasn’t gone! I sat up. I could go there! I had some money. I could buy a plane ticket and just go, just take off, the way I had with Luke. I’d flown back and forth to Indiana by myself since I was nine. It wouldn’t be any big deal. I could go and sit in my woods and breathe the humid air one more time.
Maybe then I would finaly be real.
I grabbed my laptop out of Malory’s trunk and hauled it to my room. I had $857.02 in my savings account. Most of it was from working for Mom and Dad at The Center. The rest was from a violin competition I had won. I transferred $850 into my checking account.
It took $762 to buy a plane ticket on Travelocity, but I didn’t care. It was worth it.
I printed out bus routes and maps of Indianapolis and Westfield. My heart was pounding. I was realy going to do this.
It was after 2:00. How long had Mom and Dad been gone? I packed quickly: two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts, underwear and packed quickly: two pairs of jeans, two T-shirts, underwear and socks, a toothbrush and flashlight. I dropped a candle stub and matches into the backpack for good measure, and shoved my laptop in as wel.
I scrawled a note: “Went bike riding. Back late. B.” That should buy me some time. I didn’t want to worry Mom and Dad, but I had to, had to do this. They would sit me down and try to make me think logicaly. I couldn’t go to Cherrywood, they’d say; Cherrywood belongs to someone else now.
But this wasn’t logical. It wasn’t something I could explain. I just knew that I had to go there if I was ever going to find the Brigitta I had lost.
•••
When I finaly boarded the plane at 7:30 it seemed a natural thing to do, as if I was a returning salmon. It was strange, though, to be doing this without permission. The tight feeling in my stomach was part dread, part excitement.
I had a window seat, but I barely noticed the view outside. I had always loved the moment of ascent, so full of possibilities.
Tonight it seemed to take too long, as if each leg of the journey was an impediment to the destination. Had Mom begun to wonder about my absence? Had Dad? How late would they expect “home late” to be? I should have told them I was spending the night at Natalie’s. But that would have been even more unbelievable now.
I kept having the nagging feeling that the kittens needed food.
Then I’d remember Felix at the rehab center, his blue, blue eyes pleading with me to save him. Only I hadn’t saved him. Had he been scared when Dr. Jackson came with her needles? Had Kalimar?
I couldn’t eat the airplane snacks.
I couldn’t eat the airplane snacks.
I leaned my forehead against the window and tried to pray.
•••
At 3:30, I got off the bus in Westfield. The streets were empty, and I walked, putting one foot in front of the other, heel-toe, heel-toe. On the left was the Kroger where Nonni always shopped; on the right the ice cream place where Opa let me get a triple scoop cone when I was eight and didn’t know any better. Stores gave way to neighborhood—sturdy sandstone houses with arched entryways—many of them built by Opa.
And then, there it was: the porthole window of Opa’s study, the white-painted bricks, the long curved driveway sweeping around to raspberry bushes. Cherrywood. My heart felt suspended in midair.
Six oaks lined the front yard. The porch light iluminated Opa’s stone frogs.
I walked the driveway quietly to the backyard. I was the only one awake in the world. A soaker hose was running. I skirted the spray, making my way down the grass hill and out to the rail fence that divided the yard from the woods. At the fence I turned back. The house was there, sleeping. The screened-in porch, the attic window—all as it had been. Maybe Nonni and Opa would be inside. Maybe they had left the porch light on for me.
I stopped at the edge of the sweet gum trees and inhaled the green scent of their spiny fruit. Home. I was home.
The curtain of branches parted as I pushed through and walked down, down. My secret grove was so dark it was as if I was hanging in space. I crouched to gather beech leaves in my was hanging in space. I crouched to gather beech leaves in my hands. Gradualy I could make out the shapes of honeysuckle bushes, rocks, and roots. And through the branches I could see the house with the blue Dutch kitchen door Opa had made that opened at the top. Nonni would stand there and cal, “Hoo-hoo!” when she wanted me, and I would climb up out of my secret space and take a little side path to the house so I could pretend she didn’t know where I’d been hiding.
Where had I been hiding? All this past year and a half, where had I been hiding? I remembered Nonni reading to me from Genesis how Adam hid from God in the Garden of Eden.
“Adam,” God caled, “where are you?”
I felt tears rush to my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them this time.
There was something I needed to do here, and I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. In my backpack my fingers found the wooden kitten toy and brought it out. I touched the faces: Felix with one ear bigger than the other, Kalimar with her extra-long whiskers. The beads clicked at the ends of the leather laces, and I saw Luke wearing them in
Imlandria
, climbing a sheer rock wall to save Gwen Melier—his Kalimar. And being too late.
Where was he now? Back in LA—maybe at some party with Gwen. I had this floor-dropping-away feeling when I thought of this. All the times he’d been caling me beautiful, touching my hair, kissing me, he had flown off to LA the very next day to do the same things with Gwen. I wanted to be furious with him.
Instead it just hurt, which was worse.
Without stopping to think about it, I cleared a circle in the leaves and began to move handfuls of earth. When I couldn’t dig down any farther with my hands, I used the toy to dig until I had a hole that went up to my elbow. My eyes were so blurred I could barely see. My throat hurt. I realized that I was clenching my jaw.
I sat back on my heels and let the cougar stick rest on my palms with the laces dangling between my fingers. I imagined Luke sitting by the kittens in the middle of the night and carving it, Kalimar climbing Luke’s shirt, and Felix in my lap with goat milk dribbling down his catly beard. Luke gazing at me with his blue, blue eyes.
I wrapped Luke’s
Imlandria
laces around the wood and laid the toy gently in the hole. My mind could barely form the word
good-bye
.
My hands swept the earth back in until the hole was filed to the top. I pressed it down, leaving my imprints. Only then did I notice that my shoulders were shaking.
A sound came out of my throat that I didn’t recognize. It was wild and fierce like an animal, and it went on and on and on. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I pressed my face to the grave I had made and let the feral yowl rip out of me. And then I was pounding the earth, sobbing, “You left me—you promised
—you said you didn’t want to lose me—you lied. And they died
—and we could have saved them—you could have saved them
—I could have—I could have—I could have saved them. And I didn’t—I didn’t—I let them die!” I scratched at the ground. I had dirt in my mouth and in my eyes. I stayed inside the scream until the last shudder had passed through me.
Once I was still I curled my knees up to my chest and listened, sure someone would come out with a flashlight or yell sleep-disturbed curses from their window, but there was nothing.
A swarm of cicadas began their whirring chorus. I wrapped the patchwork coat around me and puled some sweet gum branches over myself as a blanket.
When I was little and didn’t know what cicadas were, I’d always thought their sound was angel’s wings surrounding the house. “Sleep,” the angels told me now. “Sleep and find your heart.”