From Comfortable Distances (59 page)

The dew was thick and
heavy, the air frosty as Tess made her way from her porch, silently, adjusting
her scarf so that no skin was exposed. She felt moody knowing that for the
months to come, each time she went outside she would need to bundle up, delve into
her shell, isolating herself from all that surrounded her. Cold weather made
other people seem out of reach.

There was solitariness to
Mill Basin in this pre-dawn hour that was both unsettling and appreciated—she
turned in her tracks to make certain no one was behind her and then kept going,
moving with precision and a sense of purpose as she coasted down 66
^th
street, the rhythm of her feet hitting the pavement her metronome. She had
woken up at 3:00 a.m. alert and preoccupied, her mind darting from subject to
subject, like a bird in search of prey. She had stared at her ceiling for some
time, trying to focus on something, anything, until it registered that tomorrow
was Christmas Eve, the day that Neal was set to leave. She wondered if she
would see him before then. She was free to visit him at his home—she couldn’t
imagine what Lyla could object to at this point. He had left her a note in her
mailbox that simply said:
Thank you, Tess Rose.
He was leaving. The
thought flashed in her mind as though it were a neon sign:
Neal is leaving,
Neal is leaving
until the next thought registered: in three days it would
be her 56
^th
birthday. Life was so short; why was she filling it with
so much worry, so much anxiety, when in truth, she only got to live such a
short time? She would die, as her mother had, and then there would be darkness
forever.

She moved past the houses
quickly. Not too much was stirring at this 5 a.m. hour; some of the houses were
still darkened, some adorned with flickering Christmas lights and yards
decorated with lit-up plastic snowmen and sleds pulled by Santa. In some of the
homes she could make out Christmas trees in the windows and a sense of warmth
filled her thinking of families with young children and grandchildren all
gathered around. She wondered if Lyla had put up a tree with Neal, but she
didn’t make a move to turn down Barlow Drive to investigate. There were some
houses with lights on inside and for a moment, she wondered what went on in
other people's homes, behind all of the closed doors.

As the sky transitioned
into its darkest moments before it gave way to dawn, Tess felt a fleeting
desperation mingled with a desire to scream, not to be so invisible, and then
it passed, as quickly as the twilight did and the first rings of daylight grew
visible beyond the houses, where she envisioned Jamaica Bay to be still and
silent. She took in a deep breath, coughing as the rush of hard air hit her
throat, her lungs. It was a few moments before she reconnected with her mind,
her feet moving faster than was her normal pace, and she wasn’t sure if they
were attempting to carry her away from the cold or if they were working to keep
up with her darting mind. In moments she lost the cold, lost the motion of her
feet, and was trying to recall what it was she aspired to. People that were
insistent on following their dreams had surrounded her at different phases in
her life. Her first three ex-husbands had wanted to make enough money so that
they could retire in their fifties, but was that a dream or was it greed? Tess
believed that those type of trade-off dreams—if I have this, then I will do
that—were not dreams at all, but little contracts one made with oneself and
voided once other things came up, replacing those wants and desires. She had
made her share of trade-off dreams: if I can get distance from Woodstock and my
mother, then I will get to figure out who I am.  If I can just not be pregnant,
then I will focus on my career and be a better wife. If I can just get through
this divorce, separate myself from this person, then my life will make more
sense. All of those dreams had seemed tangible to her, something to strive for,
something she had strived for, but each of them had focused on the future,
ignored the present.

Perhaps the real dreams
of her life weren’t to be realized by running off recklessly, but staying put,
facing the day, what was. And perhaps the truth was that there was not any one
dream, but an evolving, all-encompassing dream to live her life as truly as she
could. Perhaps what separated those who lived their dream versus those who
dreamed their dream was that they acted on them, and understood that it was
never any one action that would help them to realize their dreams, but all of
their actions. Because in life, everything did matter—and if there was one
thing that Tess wished she had learned sooner, it was that fact: everything did
matter.

In the bus stop ad for
Best Reality, a perfected Tess Rose smiled back at her. In her image, she was
able to see herself at different stages of her life: as a teenager in
Woodstock, walking to school; and in another glance she saw herself in her
first marriage, sitting across from Marc, listening to him and wondering how
long she would be able to go on listening to him. She imagined that she had
seen people like Marc as puzzles to solve, but now she thought differently: a
person wasn’t something for her to solve. Her job was to learn about herself
and through that learning, try to build a stronger bridge to her core, as well
as a stronger bridge to the core of people she loved. Puzzles suggested that
you could make things fit, that they were solvable, but Tess had been shown
again and again that life was about continually figuring out how to resize
things to fit the moment at hand. She could see herself as a mother, alone and
afraid with her child; and then as a middle-aged woman, grappling with
relationships, trying to pass the time as best she could with dinners and wine,
and now. Externally, she had changed—all those faces of Tess, and yet she was
still Tess—sometimes confident, sometimes afraid, quiet and outspoken, alone. “Hello,
Tess,” she whispered, her breath forming a smoke cloud before her. She smiled
at the picture of herself for a moment longer and felt something peaceful and
soft, like love, like acceptance, for the woman in the picture. “It’s nice to
know you, Tess,” she said.

In moments the sky
lightened, the first true peak of daylight surfacing as the outline of the
clouds became visible. In the distance cars were approaching, the street light
on the corner of 66
^th
street and Avenue U turning from green to
yellow to red in seconds. Stop. Tess thought of what a mess everything had been
at various stages of her life, but that it wouldn’t always be that way.  The
light turned green. “Have a good day, Tess,” she said, and then she was moving
again, making her way up 66
^th
street, back the direction she had
come.

The wooden planks of the
docks across from her home were covered in spots with thin sheets of ice. Tess
treaded carefully, holding firm to the handrails as she made her way across the
dock and down the stairs to the sand. The sky was white and crisp, the sand
moist, packed. Seagulls congregated at the shore’s edge, darting to and fro as
the gentle waves smoothed the shore. She put an ungloved hand into the water
and retreated—it was icy. She quickly put her glove back on. In the distance,
she was able to make out a runner, see the smoke of his breath, and for a
moment, she was sure that it wasn’t Neal, he didn’t move his hands that way, but
as he moved closer, it was Neal—he was waving to her. She didn’t know if he
would stop, or if he would keep going, and then he was beside her, panting,
moving his jaw up and down as if he were trying to loosen it up so that he
could speak. Tess felt awkward, as she had meeting him here after she had read
his confession letter. She kept her eyes on the ground, shifting about in the
sand from one leg to another.

The snow began to fall
all at once, the flakes hurdling themselves to the ground, and Tess took in the
darkening sky, the cold seeping into her face until her nose was numb, her eyes
tearing. Beside her Neal too looked up at the sky and then she felt his eyes on
her. She knew that they couldn’t escape what was coming next in their
lives—Neal’s returning, her moving forward without him. She would go on as she
always had.

Neal took off his clunky
sports gloves and reached for her hand. His beautiful, sturdy hand with his
long, lean fingers and she kissed his knuckles as they faced the water. She
thought back to the first time they had shared a dance on Memorial Day weekend
on the cruise to nowhere. They had gone out to sea and come back—it was the
rhythm of life, the waves coasting away and then returning.

“You are my special
friend, Tess Rose,” Neal said.

Tess nodded; there was a
finality to his words that pacified her. After all they had gone through,
that’s what it came down to: he was her friend.

“You are my special
friend, Neal,” she said.

“Shall we warm up?” she
asked after some time, and Neal nodded.

They walked back towards
her home, hand in hand, silent, their steps slow, measured. There was a
strength in letting go, in opening the door for a person, in being unselfish,
in surrendering that which she wanted to keep. She believed this. A chill
gripped her as they crossed the street, sending a shiver through her. She
couldn’t tell if it was induced from the cold inside or out. Neal squeezed her
hand tighter, and the action reminded her of the cool autumn mornings she had
walked Prakash to school, squeezing his hand when a wind rushed them as if with
that one squeeze of the hand, she could instill in him the confidence that she
was there to take care of him, protect him. At the edge of her driveway, Tess
paused. Responsibility set in—she should check the backyard to make sure that
the outside water was turned off so that the hose didn’t freeze up from the
snow. She would have to make a list of things she had to take care of before
she left for Woodstock. Neal offered to go with her, but she insisted on
letting him into her house, telling him to go inside, warm up, and promised
that she would come inside in a few minutes.

This is the way of the
world, she thought to herself, the snow trickling down on her, as she watched
Neal move inside and made her way past the now barren cherry orchid shadowing
the side of her house and through the backyard gate. People came and went in
life. She was trying to keep her logic about her. To pretend there was a future
past the moment she was living was to be absent from her life. Tess was trying
to grasp this, to buy into it, to be in this moment, but in the almost day-lit
sky, the lingering moon’s impression pushed her forward. In two more days, it
would be full. The end of a phase, the coming of a new phase. She saw herself
alone in the days to come, a woman who had returned a man that never truly
belonged to her, gazing up at the moon, full and complete for that one night.

She moved the water valve
one way and then the other, making sure that it was off. Snow fell across the
wooden deck of her back yard, dusting it in whiteness. She pulled the cushions
off the deck chairs and stacked them in the little shed that stood before the
corner alcove where the stump of the dying Evergreen tree she had removed the
year before stood. She moved into the alcove and there, nestled in the corner,
was a garden. Had her gardener done this? He hadn’t mentioned it. It looked
vulnerable in the cold. She inched closer to it, kneeling down beside it, as if
under her watch it would be sheltered from the impending storm. Each of the
seeds had little plastic name tags describing what they were and when they
would bloom and it hit Tess that Neal had done this—this was his garden for
her. It touched Tess to think of him fiddling with a label maker and then
placing the labels just right in the soil, laminating them to keep them safe
from the elements. How was it that she had never wandered into the alcove to
see this gift? As a child, Prakash had often hidden out in this alcove, and
once she remembered Brad building him a mini club house there, which Prakash
had to abandon when the neighborhood stray cats moved in, deeming it a cathouse
and raising their kittens there, all of which Brad had helped Prakash to find
homes for.

There were delphinium,
coreopsis, purple cone flower, asters, daisies, bachelor’s button, foxgloves.
Aside from daisies, Tess had never heard of any of them. For all of her years
in real estate, she had relied on her gardener to go to a house that she was
selling and spruce it up with colorful flowers and shrubs indicative of the
season. She had also relied on him for her own house and had often felt lighter
hearted at seeing the blooming tulips and colorful flowers in her front garden
as she backed out of her driveway in the mornings. Is this little garden what
her gardener had been referring to when he left her a voicemail asking her
about her science project? She supposed it was.

Neal had labeled many sections
perennials and from her mother, she knew that meant they would bloom in the
very same spot, year after year. In another corner of the mini-garden Neal had
planted yarrows and written in parenthesis “for butterflies,” and virgin’s
bower and in parenthesis “hummingbird plant.” She smiled, imagining butterflies
and hummingbirds congregating in her backyard. How her mother loved
butterflies. And hummingbirds. Her hair was getting wet, falling flat. The snow
was coming down harder now, sticking to the ground, so that accumulation was
likely. Tess stood up. The flowers that he had planted would sprout some time
the following year, when he was no longer around. A twinge of sorrow gripped
her so that her heart felt tight, and yet there was something beautiful in
knowing his garden would bloom in the future, as if in his own way he was
leaving behind bits and pieces of himself.