The Sunday List of Dreams (14 page)

Instead, they drive south for three more miles and then Michael turns off the road at some invisible marker with such swift movements, never spilling a drop of his Jamaican Red, that Connie thinks the car must know the way or this man has been down this particular gravel road more than a few times.

“There’s bumps and a few potholes for the next ten or so miles,” he warns her, gliding through a dip in the road like a professional dirt bike rider.

“
Ten
or so?” Connie asks. “Won’t we hit the ocean or something before then?”

“God, you are fun, Connie.” Michael beams. “The world from here on in is going to be damp and very lively.”

“How lively?”

“Well, sometimes I have to pull over and let a gator pass or someone trying to get home for dinner barreling through at about 60 on this gravel gut-wrencher, or—”

“Stop!” Connie yells as they take a rough corner and a grove of huge oaks sprouting from swamp water appears inches from the side of the rocky road. “Just let me get out and
smell
. Turn off the car.”

Michael obliges. He moves the car off the edge of the road in case someone really does come roaring up behind them, but the instant they get out of the car they are overwhelmed with silence. In the distance Connie can hear birds speaking to each other in their secret ornithology language and the fast-fading ricochet of a truck speeding miles away on the highway. The sun caresses her arms and face and the perfume of the swamps, an earthy wet soil laced with a multitude of sweet smells—late-blooming spring flowers, she assumes—is utterly intoxicating.

Michael says nothing but he is watching her. He knows where Connie comes from. He knows the flat, wooded forestlands of the Midwest have their own charm and the magnificent sky over Lake Michigan is breathtakingly beautiful, but the commissioner also knows that an introduction into this world, extreme, seemingly dangerous, and so foreign to someone who lives mostly with concrete under her feet, can be a charming or a deafening interlude. Watching Connie’s face as it moves from the sky to trees and back around again makes him smile.

“I love to bring people in here,” he tells her, speaking softly so he doesn’t break the spell.

“Bring a lotta women here, do you?”

“I wish,” he replies, laughing. “I actually cancelled about 45 meetings and postponed two major appointments to bring you down here. You’re good people, Connie Nixon, and the last person I expected to see on a DT in the middle of Louisiana. I also happen to think you are beautiful.”

Nurse Nixon cannot respond. The last time she felt attractive was so long ago she sees a hazy image of a young medium-sized woman in tight shorts with hair down to her shoulders, firm breasts, flesh unrippled by time and turbulence, and a smile as innocent as Christmas on her face.

And then she looks at the man seated beside her and she smiles without speaking because what he has just told her—that she is beautiful—must settle deep and firm inside of her before she truly believes it. It must lodge itself in between her last two dates, a marriage that was beyond bland, and the closely held notion that no one would ever want her, touch her, make her heart beat like this, goddamn it, just like this, ever again for the rest of her life. And also because she might not let him.

And so Connie freezes the moment, the way he looks, the damp, rich smell of the swampy world around her, so that she can digest it in her own time, and then she leans over to touch Michael’s hand in that magic spot where she can control him and just maybe the entire world for one more astonishingly beautiful moment.

Connie stretches out on the car hood beside him and they begin talking about the land, how Michael traveled back and forth to his grandparents’ bayou home on a regular basis from Wisconsin, where his parents lived, and how he always felt lucky to live in this place. Connie will remember these 30 minutes parked on the side of the gravel road as a moment suspended in time.

“My mother was a nice German girl from Milwaukee who met my father just after the Second World War, when he was deployed out of the Great Lakes Naval station in Illinois,” explains Michael. “My dad was a Louisiana boy through and through, raised right down at the end of this gravel road, who knew every inch of this country better than anyone.”

Connie thinks about chance as the commissioner tells her about his grandparents, both now deceased, and about his parents, who shared the rich history of their French Canadian past as their ancestors were forced from their homes in the mid-1700s for practicing their Catholic faith. Many of them settled in the south Louisiana swamps and bayous where they could live as they wanted to live. “And they did it with gusto,” Michael tells her, blending their French dialect with the country and its resources they came to claim as their own.

“Their persecuted past, being forced to leave their homes and wander up and down the East Coast all those years, gave them a reason to celebrate in ways that perhaps others find a bit much, but no one enjoys life like the people in southern Louisiana,” he tells Connie as clouds bump and roll overhead, revealing a sky the color of the ocean Connie swears she can smell from the car. “Cajuns have a rule about working hard and playing hard and we are all very good at it.”

In the moments of silence, when memories of his family stir themselves to the surface of his mind, Connie imagines Michael’s mother brushing her shoulder against his wild and happy father at the bus terminal on his way to Chicago and how one glance changed both of their lives forever.

“I suppose,” she says slowly, “we all need to take more chances. I was a breath away from saying, ‘Hell, no, I’m not going into the swamp with a guy who looks like a movie star and who is king of Louisiana’s dildo production,’ but here I am and look what I might have missed.”

“Just wait,” he tells her, swinging off the car and motioning for her to hurry up and get back inside.

The end of the road is a good ten miles away and when they come to a clearing, pass several wooden houses and edge out along a river that Michael tells her is part of the bayou, they veer off onto yet another dirt road that seems to loop along the very edge of the bayou, which to Connie looks pretty much like a wide river. They stop at the first house, a one-story wooden structure, that appears as if it is tended by someone who cares for it with a toothpick and toothbrush. It is immaculate, with a long garden stretching out to the left side, paths off of either end, and a wide porch the entire length of the house that sits almost directly at the edge of the water.

Connie raises her hand to her heart, just like in the movies, and tells Michael it is beyond charming.

“My father still lives here,” he tells her as they walk around the side of the house, and Connie smells something that makes her mouth water. “I bought the house when my grandparents died. And then when my mother died, my dad moved back out here and I spend as much time with him here as I can,” he confesses as he pushes open the door and they enter the simple cottage.

“In here,” someone bellows from a direction that takes Connie closer to the glorious smell which she is about to discover is the famous Dennis gumbo, bubbling on the stove in a kitchen that looks as if it has come right out of a page in a 1933
Good Housekeeping
magazine. A giant white porcelain wood stove is glowing in the center of the back wall, wooden cabinets painted in bright blues and greens line every wall, and, just like at her grandma’s house, a huge wooden table that appears as if it was once dragged behind a covered wagon is the centerpiece of the room. Nicks and dents and slash marks instantly label it as a survivor of countless fine meals.

“Come here and hug me, young woman,” Michael’s father orders. “I have to keep stirring or these little crayfish buggers will swim right out of here. They call me Baboo. Long story having to do with children not being able to say Robert when I was growing up and now I’m Grandpa Baboo to every alligator this side of the Mississippi. Welcome, Miss Connie. You are definitely keeping bad company today.”

Baboo talks nonstop, and with a hint of the French accent that pervaded his life as a youngster but has been washed away by his years of living and working in the Midwest. He is beyond adorable and he shoos them back out the door and to the dock before Connie can say more than a polite, “Thank you.”

And the bayou is stunning.

Michael sits at the back of the flat-bottom boat, a duck boat she tells him is what they’d call it on the Indiana lakes, and they curve past a cluster of houses with porches that hang over the water. Ramshackle by some standards, Connie can see that they are brimming with the kind of life Michael has described to her. Fishing poles and old grills fill every porch and every cottage comes with what seems to be a requisite junk pile so that anything can be fixed at a moment’s notice. A few men whistle to Michael, who whistles back, and one holds up a catfish longer than Connie’s thigh and says,
“Joie de vivre,”
which Michael quickly translates for her as “joy of life” and Connie totally agrees.

On the way back through the bayou, after showing Connie the backside of elephant ear plants, turtles sunbathing on every log, an owl sleeping behind an enormous oak, numerous jumping fish, three alligators—one that Michael touches affectionately and calls Jessie—and an expanse of trees so thick it looks like midnight, he orders her to simply breathe during the 45-minute ride back to his father’s home. No speaking. No sudden movements. Feel the wind in your hair, he tells her. The rush of warm air against your face. The scent of a peoples’ journey still as vibrant and real as the water you can feel snaking off the sides of the boat. Just
be,
Connie. Whatever it was, whatever it might have been, whatever it is, just shove it away and feel this part of life and the world.

“This is a patient and kind place,” he tells her, skimming the boat across water that is already warmer than any July lake in Indiana. “People think it is wild and rough and frightening down all these passageways, but it is beautiful and rich. Like anything, it is what you make of it.”

Connie tries hard. She thinks about #29 on her list. She shuts her eyes and lets go of Jessica and of the cell phone she’d left at the bottom of her purse in the car. She lets go of her real-estate agent and her fear of strange men who look like movie stars. She lets go of her doubts about what kind of mother she has been, what kind of friend she could be now, what kind of trouble she is already creating for the legions of friends and family members who at this moment think she is on a quiet, motherly New York visit. She tries hard to let go of every dying patient, every asshole doctor, every mean weirdo who has pushed up against her life for years and years. And she feels the ancient hand of a French woman touch her face and when she quickly opens her eyes she sees that Michael has steered the boat under a low tree and a small leaf has brushed against her cheek. Connie Franklin Nixon thinks about letting go of her fear of lost love, missed chances, lust and love. She imagines herself sliding across the top of the water just as the boat is doing, just as Michael is doing, and just as she would really love to do.

But then she can’t help herself.

“Michael, do you ever think of your mistakes?”

“All the time.”

“Does this help?”

“All the time.”

“Are you happy?”

“Right now I am terribly happy.”

“What would you change?”

He hesitates and pulls the boat against the side of the wooden steps leading up to his father’s house. Connie waits for his answer as he turns, ties up the boat, holds out his closed hand, and then, without speaking, opens it as if to ask her to sit on a bench that faces the water.

“Beer?” he asks as he dips his hand under the dock and finds some hidden liquid jackpot there. The family treasure chest.

“Yes,” she says, her heart throbbing from the ride, the air, and the stretch of time while she waits for his reply to her question.
What would you change?

He sits next to her on the bench with both hands clasping the brown bottle as if it is holding him in place.

“I have so much,” he finally says. “I lost a lot, made mistakes, the kids are terrific, but, Connie—the truth is I’m lonely. And lately I wonder if I will ever fall in love again. I’d love a life with someone, but only if it’s full of passion. I love what I do but I miss…well, I miss
passion
.”

“Are you proposing?”

Michael laughs so hard she has to reach over to steady the bottle that nearly falls out of his hands.

“Wouldn’t it be hilarious to just get married and then go back and tell your daughter and my kids what we did?”

“Michael,” Connie responds, laughing, and then imagining it for just a second in her own mind. Jessica flipping out. O’Brien trying to have her committed on the spot. Sabrina and Macy sobbing in their husbands’ arms. Dogs barking wildly across the United States. Spinsters weeping into their napkins. Men standing on porch steps with their shotguns balanced on their hips. “This is the most wonderful and insane few hours I’ve had in a long time. You—Well, I’ve never met a man who is as honest as you are this fast.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, Christ, Michael, most of this stuff is a game. People talk and flirt and move the chess pieces of their life into places where they think they can win and unless I am a total ass you are simply sharing this wonderful day with me, and sharing your heart, too, and you’ve totally taken me by surprise,” Connie admits, fingering her own bottle. “I’m not used to it. I gave up on men quite a while ago.”

“Well, maybe we should date for a while then before we get married.”

Connie slugs him and then, without any warning, Michael leans over, grabs the back of Connie’s very short hair, and he kisses her.

Commissioner Michael Dennis tastes like salt and heat and like a fast wave of life. His Burt Reynolds moustache dances against her lip and Connie instinctively moves her arm around his neck, tilts her head, and moves against him so that her neck slides against his and their hips touch. Then her breath takes a nosedive into the far bank of the bayou and it is as if a soft hand has reached inside of her and pulled out something old and hard, something that has been hidden for a very long time in a place much deeper and darker than any bayou.