Authors: Elyse Douglas
Rita struggled for breath. “Alan…James… you dance like a kangaroo.”
We howled with laughter.
We waited for over a half hour to ride the Ferris wheel. After we drew the steel safety bar across us and began to lift, watching the people and cars grow smaller and the land spread out wide to the horizons, Rita looked at me and smiled. It was her real smile. Her best smile. “Thanks for being with me today, Alan James.”
I didn’t want to shatter the perfect moment with a response, so I just looked at her and nodded. It was a truthful thing to do, uncompromising, assured and courageous. With all my best efforts, I revealed my love in that look. No thing hidden. No fear, no expectation or anticipation. Just the truthful surrender that comes when all the defenses have been startled quiet by something extraordinary: like snow falling in the desert.
She saw it, I think, and she didn’t stir. She looked deeply into me, and we hung at the summit of the sky, rocking a little, when I leaned close.
I drove away from Lipton, sleepy, privileged and working on private thoughts. Rita had closed her eyes but she didn’t seem to be sleeping. She’d already given me directions to our next destination: the cemetery where Darla was buried.
We drifted among old gravestones, broken and leaning, some pocked by cruel winters, broiling heat and driving rains. As we climbed the brief rise of a hill, the late afternoon sun caught Rita’s face and bronzed it. Down the other side, we passed the tall tombstones, the ancient towers and obelisks, holding down the once wealthy and influential. They were thick with weeds, enclosed by sinking wrought-iron gates, the names and dates nearly rubbed flat by erosion.
We took a winding path through a quiet sloping meadow, rich with wildflower color and movement, and approached the recent graves. Darla was buried there. Dusty was not. Darla’s modest white marker lay in soft grass beneath spreading elms, with a good view of the woods and a far pasture, electric green in sunlight.
Rita knelt with the flowers we’d purchased at the roadside stand near the cemetery: a collection of daisies, gladiolas and asters. She placed them carefully, reverently, and hovered a moment before sitting back on her knees, sphinx-like, hands prayerful, the tips of her fingers brushing her whispering lips.
I stood silently, head bowed.
“Your mother is here, baby,” Rita said. “Your mother is here on your birthday.”
A robin swept in, landed and froze, his chest puffed, head pitched in translation. He sprinted stiffly, paused, drilled and swallowed. He caught the next updraft and rose, banking left, released.
We had one more stop to make, according to Rita’s itinerary: a train trestle. When the Palmers moved back to Hartsfield from Oklahoma, Darla had discovered that when standing on the trestle, as the scheduled train thundered underneath, she got a powerful thrill. Rita said that Darla went there at least once a week and, on her last birthday at her request, she and her mother had shared the experience together.
The sun was lowering when we arrived and parked on a little dirt road under a canopy of trees. We got out and walked briskly along a weedy path toward the sooty wooden trestle; it appeared more rickety and suspect the closer we got. I was sure that a good sturdy wind could blow the thing into a worthless pile of sticks.
Rita glanced nervously at her watch. “We’ve got to hurry. It’s scheduled to come through in five minutes.”
“You remember that from last year?” I asked.
“Yes…I wrote it in my diary.”
The trestle arched over a 15 foot plunging rocky ravine down to the railroad tracks, and bridged open pasture land, where a leaning, weathered FOR SALE was clearly visible. The trestle had once provided ready access to an isolated factory that lay still and abandoned now, nearly obscured by trees, looking much like an ancient monastery.
Rita scampered up to the trestle, put hands to hips and appraised the 3-foot walkway. With a nod of her head, she grabbed the wobbly handrail and pulled herself along the wooden planks, stepping gingerly in those clicking heels, until she arrived at the crest, looking triumphant and impressed, like a mountain climber who’d just reached the summit of Everest.
She turned to me, grinning broadly. “Come on, Alan James!”
She gripped the wooden rail, testing its reliability. There was a lot of play in it, but that didn’t seem to bother her. Satisfied, she leaned over, looking straight down.
I studied the trestle warily, shaking my head. “Rita, something tells me this thing has taken a huge beating since you were here a year ago.”
“Still the cautious man, Alan James?”
“Yes, Rita Fitzgerald. Somebody should put up a sign on this thing that says keep off or something, or at the very least, travel at your own risk.”
“There was a sign here last year that said that very thing,” Rita said, amused.
“And you probably took it down and threw it away.”
“No… We just ignored it.”
“Not surprised.”
“Come on, Alan James. You’re going to miss it.”
With some overdramatic emoting, grunting and face twisting, I mounted the walkway and shuffled up the slope to meet Rita.
“See. Nothing to it,” she said.
I glanced about but didn’t look down. A puff of wind mussed my hair and rippled Rita’s yellow blouse. Rita stared intently ahead, checking her watch frequently, as if she were in charge of the whole effect coming off just right and precisely on time.
I held the tenuous railing without putting any weight on it, and gazed out at the straight long stretch of tracks, enclosed on both sides by steep banks and overhanging trees. About a half-mile away, it curved abruptly off to the right and out of our vision. Another mile or two beyond that, the train would have once stopped at the old Hartsfield train station.
“It’s late!” Rita said, contemptuously.
“Maybe it doesn’t even come this way anymore. There are a lot of weeds growing on the tracks, not that I’m looking down or anything.”
“I hope it comes,” Rita said, puckering her mouth in disappointment. “It’s so much fun, Alan James. It gives you such a power rush.”
We waited.
“Alan James…”
“Yes.”
“Do you write anymore?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“No time…nothing to say.”
“I loved reading your stories...talking about them in Jack’s. I always looked forward to that. I really missed seeing you and doing that.”
“Yeah…I did, too.”
“Why did you come back to Hartsfield, Alan James?”
I looked at her. “To sell the house.”
“No, I mean when you were in high school.”
“High school?”
“When you left that private school in Massachusetts. You said once that your mother was sick and your father thought that if you came home it would help her to recover.”
The chilly memory returned; the sinking disappointment of leaving my good friend Chazzy Lynch, the bright kid with a lisp and red mop of unruly hair. “…I didn’t find out the truth about that until my mother told me what happened a month or so before she died.”
“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to. It just popped into my head this morning, out of nowhere.”
I shifted my weight to my right foot and massaged the bridge of my nose. “I thought my mother got sick because my father had a girlfriend or something. Anyway, that always seemed to be what happened in a lot of families. It happened to my best friend’s parents, only it was his mother who had a lover. So Chazzy said, ‘Your old daddy is doin’ it to some young thang’ Alan. No doubt, man.’ Well, that’s not what it was at all. Looking back now, I realize that my father was too conservative and too much in love with my mother to ever do anything like that.
“It was Mom’s sister—twin sister—who had died. She was mentally retarded and physically disabled. Mom kept it a secret from my sister, Judy, and me. I don’t know why. Mom said it was just too painful to talk about. Here she was, living a perfectly normal life—a good life with a man who loved her and two wonderful kids—and her sister, Jeannie, I think that was her name, was all twisted up and pretty much dumb to the world.
“So when Jeannie died, Mom just fell into a deep depression. She couldn’t get out of bed; wouldn’t eat; wouldn’t talk. Mom told me all this on one of her last good days. So anyway, Dad got desperate and he said he’d do anything—take her anywhere, give her anything if she’d just get better. Mom said he was on his knees. So… she said, I want Alan home. I want my child home with us.”
I shrugged. “So that was it. Home I came.”
“Did you like that school?”
“Yeah. I loved it. I wasn’t the smartest kid there—close maybe—but not number one, but I had good friends who were more like me or, at least, I thought so then. I guess I thought I had more in common with them.”
Rita grew a little uneasy. “God, I hated it when you came to meet my parents. That whole night was a nightmare.”
I heaved out a sigh. “We had some fun at the Holiday Inn pool though.”
Rita turned away embarrassed. “I got so drunk.”
“You didn’t seem that drunk.”
“I didn’t show it. Never have, but I was blasted. God I was so horrible to poor Robbie Syles.”
“What ever happened to him?” I asked.
“Mom said he moved to Georgia about 6 or 7 years ago. He’s managing another Holiday Inn down there. He never forgave me for that night, and he shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. It was a bad scene with your parents.”
“A nightmare…”
“I couldn’t even see the damned road when we drove to Jack’s,” I said. “The steering wheel felt like it was wandering all over the front seat.”
Rita squealed out a laugh. “You were all over the place, and your little eyes were so intense and you kept saying, ‘I can see where I’m goin’, Rita! Shut up! I know how to drive!’”
We both chuckled, acted out our parts again, laughed wildly, and then gradually, when the memories drifted to the more unpleasant, we turned quiet again. I stared into the afternoon light at the distant zipper-like tracks. “I don’t think it’s coming, Rita.”
She slumped a little. “Oh well…everything changes. Trains go down different tracks just like people.”
But we waited, watching dragonflies circle the fields.
“Alan James…after my father got out of prison and came home, things got bad. Worse, I guess you could say. Mom never was a very secure person; always felt inferior to everybody—even at the factory. She’s painfully shy. Dad was abusive, even before he left us. He started in again when he got back, after those 10 years, shouting out orders, putting us and everybody else down. I was always so embarrassed when Mom and I visited him in that prison. I hate to say it, but he looked right at home in that damned place.”
I faced her. “But you once talked about him so lovingly. He brought you books, you wrote stories for him. You told me that’s how you started writing and reading.”
“Lies, Alan James. Dad was a bully. He bullied me into reading and writing all the things he liked. He beat me when I didn’t do it. I’m surprised I continued when I didn’t have to. To his credit, I did learn to love books.”
I moved closer. “So you never wrote the stories for him or…”
“Of course not. It sounded pretty and I wanted to impress you. I didn’t want to be the stereotypic poor girl from the other side of the tracks who was dating a rich boy. You were smart, came from a wealthy family and I liked you. I certainly wasn’t going to tell you that my father knocked my mother around, stole money from people and raped me when I was 16.”
Shock froze me rigid.
Rita stared at me deliberately, coolly. “Old stuff, Alan James. I’ve worked through most of that in therapy in the last few months. The second time Daddy tried to take me, I stabbed him in the shoulder.” She gave a firm nod. “He stopped trying.”
We got quiet again.
“Pretty stories, aren’t they?” She narrowed her eyes on me. “Don’t pity me, Alan James. I don’t need pity, and I certainly don’t need to be saved.” She paused a minute. “I always thought you wanted to save me and I hated that. It was one reason I told you to keep a Rita Distance.”
I shook my head. “No…well…I don’t know. Maybe I did.”
“I cared about you, Alan James. I really did.” She turned away. “I loved you.”
I took a shallow breath. My voice became thick with emotion. “Why….? Why did you go to Dusty then? Why?”
“Alan James…come on. You were never going to marry me. I was a low life.”
“You weren’t, Rita! Never! You were smart and classy and beautiful!”
“I was pretty and I used it to try to escape from what I was and where I was from. Oh, hell, it’s such a trite old story. I mean, could you imagine my family and yours at the wedding? No way. And anyway, you were going off to college. I needed—no, not just needed—I had to get out of that house. When Daddy came home in my senior year, from who knows where, I knew I had to get away from there as fast as I could. I saw that so clearly when you came to meet them. I also needed protection from him. He scared the hell out of me. I knew, sooner or later, that he’d come at me again. I saw it in his eyes. He was sick and cunningly smart. Still is. I knew Dusty was big enough to protect me. I knew that as soon as Dusty and I started going together, Daddy would leave me alone. Sure enough, he did.”