Heart and Home

HEART

AND

HOME

By

Jennifer Melzer

Heart and Home

Copyright 2013
Jennifer Melzer

Cover Design
by Jennifer Melzer

Formated by
James Melzer

No part of
this book may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written consent
of the author.

All names and
places in this book are drawn solely from the author’s imagination and are not
to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, alive or dead, as
well as to actual places, is purely coincidental.

Chapter One

Home. It’s not a complicated
word or concept. Yet sometimes a part of who we think we are gets tangled with
where we believe we belong. We get lost, our sense of home disappears, and no
matter how we long to settle into a place, comfort and peace eludes us. My
mother once said I was born with itchy feet, but I knew the truth the first
time I set my foot on concrete. My dreams were too big, I was too big for the
small town I grew up in, and the day I left for college I never looked back.

Much to my mother’s chagrin,
I didn’t come home for holidays, and eventually she and my father started to
drive into the city just to see me. After graduation I stopped referring to
Sonesville as back home, and begged my mother to stop updating me on all the
town’s happenings. Important marriages, divorces, gatherings and functions… I
was done with them, even if she had turned the details of my life in the city
into small town tabloid fodder.

I was practically a
celebrity after she began plastering my grades beside copies of Dean’s list
certificates on the bulletin board at the local Super Duper. Eventually the
articles I wrote for the
Tribune-Review
replaced my grades until Bob Randall, who owned the market, gave in and made
the paper available to anyone interested in following the life of that rare
bird who’d managed to fly the coop.

And I was darn proud of that
rarity. I was one of the few who had actually managed to escape Sonesville, not
that many others bothered to try. The majority rarely made it longer than a
year before the call of small-town convenience and familiarity lured them back,
but not me.

Eight years gone and living
the big life.

I was never going back.
Long-forgotten neighborhood faces faded one by one from memory, and the term
scot-free had become synonymous with my very existence.
 

Then the call came.

You know, the one you’re
never expecting despite the fact that an inexplicable sleeplessness has had you
tossing and turning all night long.

“Janice?” The voice itself
was familiar, but lost among the many faceless beings I’d forgotten.

Sleep was a precious
commodity I couldn’t afford to waste. I rolled toward the glaring red numbers
on my alarm clock and swallowed against the throb of uncertain doom. “This is
Janice.”

“I’m so sorry,” the voice
seemed shaken and unsure. “I know it’s been ages, and I do wish it wasn’t under
such dire circumstances that I had to get in touch with you, dear.”

“Who is this?”

“This is Miss Rogers,” she
said slowly, as if offering time for recognition. My mind grasped at the straws
of that name, trying to form them into some kind of meaningful face I might
recognize. Was she someone I’d recently interviewed for a story? “I live across
the street from your parents.”

A long face and gap-toothed
smile accompanied by a sloping nose flashed through my mind as I stifled a
yawn. Chestnut hair streaked with silver. She’d lived alone as long as I could
remember and had about a dozen cats that roamed the neighborhood. Her
eccentricity had contributed to the mass childhood notion that she was a witch,
and we avoided her like the plague—especially at Halloween.

“Your father didn’t have
much time once the ambulance came, so he asked me to call and see if you might
come home.”

“My father. . .”

An ambulance? Home?

“It’s your mother, dear.
They think she may have had a stroke.”

After she spoke those words
I entered into a sort of frenzied non-existence. I couldn’t remember later if I
even hung up the phone. I packed haphazardly, stuffing whatever I could grab
into the suitcase without a clue about what I might need or how long I’d have
to stay. The only certain thought in my mind was that my mother needed me.

For the first time since I’d
left Sonesville I felt an urgent need for home, and though it had been years
since my last visit I navigated my way out of the city without map or
direction.

Bleary eyed, but driven by
the fact that my cell phone hadn’t made a single sound since I’d left my
apartment, not even a call from my father, an overcast dawn and I both arrived
simultaneously in Sonesville. The highway exit took me straight to the
hospital, though the road that crawled toward it was somehow different. I
blinked a couple of times to make sure I hadn’t taken a wrong turn at the
Dunkin Donuts that hadn’t been there when I left, but soon the hospital itself
rose into view. The addition of a new wing made the building seem bigger, but
aside from that it hadn’t really changed. I parked facing the old miniature
golf course and paused for a moment to pull myself together.

It had been so late when I
left I hadn’t called my boss, Cal, to let him know I wouldn’t be at work. I
drew in a breath, my head numb from lack of sleep, but buzzed from coffee and
anxiety. As I released the breath I flipped open my phone and dialed in to my
boss’s answering service to leave a message. Once I finished, it was time to
face what I had driven all that way for. I locked up the car out of habit and
charged through the emergency room entrance without a clue about where I’d find
my family.

The check-in desk was empty,
but I could hear the sound of a television news program blaring in the empty
waiting room area.

I slouched against the
counter, and a long exhale drained the last bit of life from me.
 

My breath signaled a series
of movements in a curtained room just behind the check-in station, and then a
heavy-set woman with large gold curls and round blue eyes appeared in the
doorway. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for my mother,”
I explained. “Chandra McCarty.”

“Chandra McCarty,” she ran
her finger down a chart on her desk, and then tapped mid-page. “They moved her
to ICU about two hours ago.”

ICU was bad, I realized. I
was nodding at the woman behind the desk, and didn’t even realize it until I
started to back away. “Thank you.”

I had no idea which way the
intensive care unit was, but I didn’t look back after I darted quickly down the
hall. Occasionally I glanced up at the various directional signs pointing out
elevators or stairs, X-Ray, the Laboratory, Family Planning, Neonatal. I turned
down this hall and that one, and actually started to feel like I was walking in
circles because the multi-colored brick walls all looked the same. I turned
left and saw a small admissions desk in the distance and rushed forward to ask
for help.

“You look lost,” a stunning,
silver-haired woman behind the desk noted. “Can I help you?”

I lifted a hand to the back
of my neck, “I’m looking for Intensive Care.”

“Well if it isn’t Miss
Janice McCarty.” She tilted her head just a little to the left. “I just knew
I’d recognize you the minute I saw you.”

Her face was only vaguely
familiar, and with my mind numb from travel and too much caffeine I just
nodded, but made no commitment to memory. I glanced down at her name tag. Emma
Williams. Suddenly my mind reeled backward sixteen years and found me sitting
at the Williams’ dinner table beside my basketball teammate, Amber. Much to
Emma’s dismay, Amber’s older brother Stacy spent the entire meal talking about
popping pimples.

“Mrs. Williams,” I nodded.

“As much as I’d like to say
it’s good to see you, I wish the circumstances were better.” She pushed her
chair away from the desk and stood. “I promised Hank I’d bring you to him the
minute you arrived.”

“Good,” I nodded.

She began walking, and
despite the fact that I felt numb and disconnected from my own body, my feet
seemed to follow on instinct. We walked several feet before I realized the
petite woman beside me had been talking the entire time about her daughter and
grandchildren. Her words seemed to run together in a way that I couldn’t pry
them apart, and I was surprised when I actually made sense of the words, “Boy,
I bet Amber would just love to see you again. The two of you used to be such
close friends.”

Amber Williams and I had
never been what I’d consider close friends, not even in grammar school. We’d
played basketball together in sixth grade, but even that was short-lived. The
following summer changed us all, and as we settled into junior high school a
new set of boundaries dictated by household income, bra size and boys separated
us into our neat little cliques. From then on out, those boundaries determined
how Amber and her friends treated the rest of us, and I wondered if they were
still clearly defined, if Amber Williams was still good to talk to Becky
Raynard and Stephanie Haywood.

As if she finally discovered
my distraction, Mrs. Williams cleared her throat and pushed a button that
allowed us entry into an isolated area marked “Intensive Care” on a little
black plaque. Inside the compact hallway, the constant mechanical whir of
machinery assaulted my senses as we passed by bleak room after bleak room. At
the sound of our footsteps approaching, my father looked up and it felt as if
his eyes stared right through me.

“Brought her straight in,
just like I promised, Hank?”

The sound of his name
sparked life behind his lost blue eyes, and then he looked at me. There were no
words, nothing needed to be said. I came too late.

My mother was already gone.

For the first time since
that call came, my heart tightened in my chest. Dad swallowed hard and reached
for my hand, and though the comfort of the strong and familiar was exactly what
I needed, I faltered at first, afraid that taking his hand would bring it all
crashing down around us.

He waited there for me, even
after she was gone. He needed my help filling out the inevitable mounds of
hospital paperwork.
 
By mid-morning
the very taste of coffee was numb to my taste buds, and my head felt both full
and empty all at once. There was so much to do, all things that in the past my
mother would have taken care of in such a way that it seemed easy from the
outside, and yet standing in her shoes was harder than I ever dreamed.

When I finally drove us home
in a fog, I barely noticed the sense of calm that came over me as I stepped
into the once familiar and comfortable sanctuary of my childhood home. I
actually had to fight my exhausted father all the way to bed, but I knew how he
felt. Sleep was a temporary reprieve, and as long as I could avoid closing my
eyes, I skipped out on waking up only to discover it was really happening. My
mom was gone, and I hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye.

“Come on, Dad.” I pleaded,
“Just lay down for a couple of hours.”

“Janice Claire,” he started
to protest.

The desperate tone of his
voice brought tears to my eyes, and the combined wear and anguish were beyond
my level emotional tolerance. I managed to live a rather detached existence for
the last few years, readily disconnected from the world and my family, weighed
down beneath my job so there were no feelings to feel. Work required a certain
level of detachment, the long hours and lack of any real sense of social
fulfillment were a must.

Slowly I could feel that
mock anesthesia wearing off, and the true horror was yet to come.

“Come on, Daddy, I can’t
lose you both at once, please.”

“Now you’re talking crazy,”
he insisted.

The protest stopped there,
however, and he sauntered into the den to curl up on the worn, brown sofa with
the quilted throw that hung over it as long as I could remember. He turned on
the radio, most likely to deaden the emptiness that now filled the house.

Hefting my suitcase all the
way, I climbed the stairs. I paused outside the door of the bedroom I spent the
majority of my life in. I knew when I opened the door everything would be the
same as I left it.

I dropped the suitcase just
inside the door, and then closed it behind me. It was near noon and the sun
spilled in around the blinds, illuminating the room just enough that I could
see it was as I suspected. The familiar abstract art pattern splashed across
the white comforter and sheets on the full-sized bed, and lying in the middle
of the two extra pillows was Mr. Bojangles, the orange orangutan I carried with
me through much of my childhood.

I reached out and lifted the
small thing into my arms without a thought or a care about how it would look.
If anything could understand how I felt in that moment, it was familiar
comfort. Just seeing how well she maintained my room, as if there was some hope
inside her that one day she’d find a way to turn back time and bring me home
again…

I sunk down onto the edge of
the bed, the smell of clean linen wafting up to meet me. I wondered just how
often my mother washed those sheets in hopes that I would come home, even just
for the night. I hugged Mr. Bojangles tight against my chest and tried to
breathe, but my breath quickened and I gulped for air as I broke down.
Eventually it was all I could do to curl into the familiar comfort and smells
of childhood lay down my head.