Hope and Other Luxuries (75 page)

But the second I pulled into a parking place and reached for the ignition key, that whirlwind of pain surrounded me. It was agony. It was flames. It was white-hot needles. I got back onto the freeway.

And I drove.

Late that night, I called up my oldest and dearest friend. “Would it be all right,” I asked, “if I came by for a visit?”

“Sure, Clare. You know I'd love to see you. When were you thinking of coming by?”

“Well, I'm . . . Let's see. I think I'm about ten minutes from your house now.”

I was six hours away from home.

M
y oldest and dearest friend welcomed me that night as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. If her brown eyes looked shocked and her eyebrows once again asked questions, she knew to save them for another day. And as for me, I settled down in her guest bed with a feeling of simple contentment.

I had always run to her when life was caving in.

The next morning, over coffee, she finally asked me, “So, do you want to talk about it?”

I did. I talked. I told her what happened. At least, I think I did. I was hooking together words and arranging sentences, but I didn't seem to be able to listen to myself. I couldn't focus on the conversation at all.

Look at that sunshine!
I thought as my lips moved and my tongue moved and the orderly processions of words moved out of my mouth.
Bright blue sky—it's a nice clear day today
.

And my oldest and dearest friend just looked at me, puzzled and worried. Did I look like that?

No, I felt a smile on my face. What was that smile doing there? It seemed to be in response to something I'd said. Had I made a joke? Had I said something funny?

My imagination reached for the tape of the last few seconds. It had movement, feeling, sight—but no sound.

Hmm
, I thought.
Something seems to be wrong with me
. But I couldn't feel that anything was wrong. If anything, I felt better than I had in weeks.

Joe called and told me that the girls were going out of town for a few days. Valerie was taking Gemma to see her other grandmother, and she was bringing Elena along. I could hear his voice on the phone, repeating, “So you're safe. You can come home now. It's safe.”

But of course I'm safe!
I thought with amusement.
Why wouldn't I be safe?

The pain of the day before wasn't even a memory.

I hugged my oldest and dearest friend good-bye, smiled at the worried look on her face, said something—I didn't know what—the tape was blank again—and got back on the road.

Something's wrong with me
, I thought idly.
Something's different. I'm a little broken right now
. But the thought didn't particularly worry me.

Valerie called from her car to check in and tell me how sorry she was. She sounded stressed and anxious. She passed the phone to Elena, and Elena said she was sorry, too. Elena sounded as if she were reading a script.

And when I answered them, I sounded as if I were reading a script, too.

Joe and I spent a quiet evening. It was very quiet, in fact. He tried to talk to me, but I couldn't seem to think of anything to say.

“Are you all right?” Joe asked after a while.

“I'm fine,” I said. Because I was.

“Then why aren't you talking?” he asked.

“I don't need to talk,” I said. Because I didn't.

“I want you to pack a suitcase and call your mother,” Joe said. “I think you need a break.”

So I drove the seven hours' worth of gray concrete freeway up to north Texas ranch country, where my parents live in a little three-bedroom house on my brother's produce farm.

Joe was right. This was safe territory for me. This was very safe. I knew just what I would find when I arrived. My older brother, whip-thin and weather-beaten, in his daily uniform of white shirt and blue jeans, would be out on one of the tractors he's salvaged from garage sales. Or he might be on the phone discussing course loads because he's also a computer science professor at a California university. The produce farm in Texas is just his hobby—a hobby that comes with backbreaking daily labor. He and my father put up almost every building on the farm, including the two-story air-conditioned workshop and garage.

His wife, my godchild, would be puttering around the kitchen, checking on loaves of bread, or possibly brewing a batch of beer, while her four
children came to her one by one with homeschooling questions. Or she might be stripping down and reprogramming another computer. My sister-in-law went to MIT on full scholarship. She has a PhD in computer science, and before she retired, she was a computer science professor, too.

But regardless of which role they were filling at the moment, dirt-under-the-nails farm couple or sophisticated academics, they would welcome me warmly: that I knew. My sister-in-law, the same one I had turned away from my door, would never turn me away from hers.

I called my mother from the highway to let the family know I was coming. They knew that Elena had been ill. What I said to my mother now, I didn't know. Once again, I couldn't seem to pay attention to the words coming out of my mouth.

It's old news to me
, I thought as I watched the interstate roll by while orderly processions of words marched into the phone.
No wonder I can't focus on it anymore. It's boring to me by this time
.

. . . 
Or maybe I'm just a little broken
.

I got out and unlocked the big cattle gate and drove up to my parents' white house. “Greetings!” called my mother from the door. My parents have gotten a little shorter and a little more stooped over the years, but they still make a handsome couple. My father has a chestnut sweep of hair across his forehead, even though it's heavily frosted with white, and his mischievous gray eyes and pink cheeks would look right at home on Santa Claus. My mother, small and girlishly pretty, still has a dancer's ankles, and her white cotton candy hair sweeps back into an elegant French twist.

The sight of them brought me instant contentment. Joe was right. It was good that I was there.

On this island of peace, this place of windswept meadow grasses and wildflowers I'd known since I was a little girl, I could let the gentle routines of family life pick me up and carry me along. I could sit down to the big meals that my mother and my sister-in-law cooked, and I could kneel down with them at night to say the rosary.

My family almost never argues. I've never heard my parents raise their voices. The most they do—and this my mother does regularly—is crimp their eyebrows together into The Frown.

“Do you want that second slice of cranberry bread?” my mother asked my father as he was stirring sugar into his tea.

“Do I want a well-priced blasphemy for my head?” he echoed in amazement. His hearing is bad, but he doesn't do much about it—largely, I think, because it provides him such amusement.

And my mother gave him The Frown.

“Yes,” she said with dignity. “Yes, that's exactly what I asked.”

For a week, I lay low there and licked my wounds. I sat with my parents at the kitchen table next to the windows with the hummingbird feeders, and I talked about everything and nothing: Japan during World War II, genetically modified food, German house construction— anything but what was going on at home. I walked through my brother's greenhouses, and I listened to his brilliant and creative farming ideas. I followed my busy sister-in-law around her large well-equipped kitchen and listened to her stories about homeschooling. And every couple of minutes, one of their four children appeared at my elbow and said very politely, “You know what, Aunt Clare?”

Guess
what
!
echoed the voice of the young Elena in my mind—the daughter who was surely lost to me forever.

What did I say to my family about Elena? I had no idea. Whenever her name came up, I could feel myself speaking—sometimes vigorously. But I retained nothing of what was said—

With one exception.

I think it was my last night there. My sister-in-law, my mother, and I were sitting at the supper table after the children and the men had left, and our conversation was ranging over topics of education.

I think I was saying that I didn't attempt to regulate my children now that they were grown. Valerie and Elena knew right from wrong, I said, whether or not they chose to pay attention to it. They were women now—grown women—and they and I were separate human beings. I brought things to their attention, but I was no longer interested in being their police.

My mother disagreed with this approach, and so did my sister-in-law. “As long as they're in
my
house,” they said firmly.

I looked at my sister-in-law, her face serene and sure, her arms still accustomed to the feel of hugging small, adorable bodies. And then I thought of Elena, shrunk down to bone and gristle, dying in her bedroom at home.

“You have no idea,” I said.

In an instant, my sister-in-law's beautiful face changed to stricken sorrow. “Oh, Clare!” she gasped. “We made you cry!”

The next instant, she was around the table and was holding me in her arms.

“Oh, Clare, Clare, I'm so sorry! We made you cry.”

Was I crying? I didn't feel it. I felt as dry and dead as dirt. What I'd just seen on my sister-in-law's face—pain, regret, love—should be my feelings, too. But I couldn't feel them. I didn't feel anything.

I was severed from my feelings.

The almost-an-argument was over. My sister-in-law would no more say another word to hurt me than she would think of turning me away from her door. But inside that warm, heartfelt hug, I couldn't shake this strange sense of who I had become.

I had pretended all week to be normal, but I was not like my normal, healthy family. I was like the prophet who has seen things no one should have to see. I had traveled out to some terrible country where my sister-in-law—God forbid!—might one day have to follow. And so, once again, I delivered my message—the truth from that terrible place:

“You have no idea. No idea.”

When I got home, Joe wanted to know if I was feeling better. I thought so. I didn't see why not.

The girls were back home, but they were giving me some room. Valerie watched me carefully. Elena was quiet.

Joe said, “Do you think you'll get some writing done today? We could use the money from that Holt book.”

That sounded like a good idea. Why shouldn't I do some writing? So, after breakfast, I carried my laptop into the bedroom again and piled all the pillows up against the headboard. Then I leaned back against them and opened up my latest Word file.

This file contained Elena's memoir. I read the last few pages I'd written, but they didn't seem to have anything to do with Elena or me.
I stared at them for a while, but I couldn't think of anything to add.

That seemed odd.

I had no memory of how to do this.

The problem is that I'm too close to this story
, I thought—although I felt very far away.
I'll write a new story. I want to write my mermaid story now
. I'd been planning to write it for some time.

So I went looking inside my imagination for the mermaid.

But there was nothing inside my imagination. It was an empty room. Nothing moved there. Nothing lived there. It was just dead white space—white like the blank Word page in front of me.

Once upon a time, a mermaid had lived inside my imagination, and I had daydreamed a story for her. How long it had been since she went missing, I couldn't say.

Tor scratched at my bedroom door and meowed, and I welcomed the interruption. But he jumped onto the bed and curled up and fell asleep, and it was just me and my Word file again.

The problem is that I haven't thought about my mermaid in a few weeks
, I concluded.
I need to bring her back into focus
. So I brainstormed a page of ideas about mermaids, based on the mermaid who used to be inside my head.

But when I read through those ideas, they were as dry as class lecture notes—dry and boring.

The inside of my imagination was boring. Nothing moved there now—not even dust.

During the difficult days of Elena's senior year, six months after the Summer from Hell, Elena had asked me to write her a book about mermaids. Busy with poor Martin, I hadn't done that, but I had written her a page about one. I found that page now and pulled it up on my laptop and read it while Tor twitched slightly in his sleep.

When you ask about the ocean, I do not understand you. I only know that once I could fly. I soared above the reefs and sands of my world, and wonderful creatures soared with me. Like your birds, they were bright and colorful. Like your birds, they gathered in flocks. They sang, and I sang with them. I was never afraid.

When you speak of tails, I grow confused. Tails are for your world, for elephants and monkeys. What I had was a broad sail to tame the wind. With it I could swoop and dip and twirl through my blue sky, and I needed nothing else to make me happy. You know of such sails, but you turn them into brooms and tell yourselves that the women who ride them are hags. You are afraid of those women. You are afraid of me.

When you speak of dark waters, of struggle, of drowning, I begin to understand. Once I was light and could dance like a bubble. Now I am crushed down to the ground. In your world, my body is as clumsy as a crawling sea star, as heavy as a boulder dragged under the mud. I lie immobile, helpless, anchored by chains I cannot see, while you spurn me with the narrow blades of your feet.

You have taken my tail, but you have not given me wings.

I reread the simple paragraphs. I couldn't really remember writing them. I couldn't remember being the kind of person who
could
write them. I absorbed their graceful images and compared those images to the dull, empty room inside my head.