The Best I Could (3 page)

It had become a place of
convalescence, a place where we went—
sent
in my case—to lick our wounds and
heal.

Lockston Orchard was the perfect place for
either falling in love or hunkering down to think about all of the
reasons why you shouldn’t.

“You’re better off, you know that, right?”
Jonathan asked.

I stared at the passing city, the
bumper-to-bumper traffic, and high rise buildings. Sun glinted off
of glass, blinding and brilliant all at once. It reminded me of a
messed up painting or a patched up pair of pants.

“Knitting,” I murmured, laughing. “She likes
knitting.”

Why she came to me now, I had no idea, but
she was suddenly there in my head; the girl on the roof, the
splatter of blood on her toes, and the eyeliner smeared at the
corners of her eyes, making them look bigger than they were. Wider.
Darker. Tragically beautiful.

“What?” Jonathan asked. “Who are you talking
about?”

“Nothing,” I replied.

“It’s not mine,”
she’d said about the blood on her foot.

She’d seemed too young to look so … old. Very
different from my mother, who at thirty-eight, still had the eyes
of a child.

A memory assaulted me, an angry one from the
summer before when I’d moved out of my mother’s house.

“She needs a reality check!” I yelled. “She
never grew up, Pops. She’s too busy seeing how much money she can
spend and how many hearts she can break to give a damn about
anything else.”

“She’s had three children,” Pops argued.

I snorted. “And? Goes to show going through
childbirth doesn’t make you an adult. It just makes you a parent.
In her case, a damned bad one.”

Pops stared, a look I’d never seen before
crossing his face. “There’s more to you than you give yourself
credit for, Eli.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to find it
here.”

Picking up a packed bag, I walked out of the
house, the door slamming behind me.

“Ugh!” Jonathan cried, laying on his horn,
the sound shattering the memory, sending it spiraling into
sun-glinted glass. “This traffic is ridiculous!”

“You in a hurry to get rid of me?”

Jonathan grinned. “I’m not female, and I
don’t need one of your Kleenexes.”

My mouth twitched. “Don’t knock the Kleenex,
buddy. They come in handy.” Outside, the city kept moving. My gaze
slid to the sky. The clouds were bunched up hankies swollen with
water we couldn’t see. “There’s always someone crying
somewhere.”

“Yeah,” Jonathan murmured. “There’s
that.”

Again, my thoughts strayed to the girl on the
roof. Not because I had a sudden insta-obsession, but because
there’d been no real tears. Not the kind I understood. A single
tear and a lost look, but no maelstrom of emotion. Only regret and,
strangely, relief.

What were you thinking, Tansy?

Tansy

We were a few miles away
from the hospital when Deena started crying angry tears, the kind
that said “Fuck off!”
not the kind that
said “Hug me through the hurt”.

“I hate him!” she sobbed. “I hate him so
much!”

“Deena,” my grandmother cautioned from the
driver’s seat, her fingers gripping the steering wheel.

“You don’t know!” Deena continued. “You
weren’t there, Nana! You didn’t watch him kill himself.”

“Deena!” Jet growled from the passenger
seat.

I stared out the window, my gaze on the
passing city. There was no reason to go home. The rented house we’d
lived in was two months behind on payment. After Dad’s admission
into the hospital, our landlord told Hetty it was either pay now or
go elsewhere. She’d gathered our things, packed what she could into
the back of her van, shipped what she couldn’t, and told Mr.
Yarbrough we wouldn’t be back.

It was all so fast. A single blink. Our
house. Dad. All gone. Everything I’d spent the last three years
focusing on. Now, it was like I was floating in the middle of an
ocean with nothing around me.

Boats. Maybe I should have asked the guy on
the roof for a ship. One I could knit a sail for. Away, the pattern
would say.

A knitted sail. The thought made my lips
twitch with the urge to giggle.

“You’re hella blind if you can’t admit Dad
committed suicide!” Deena bellowed.

Jet whirled in his seat, his face red, his
eyes flashing.

I was so tired of the screaming, the
accusations, and the fear. “Stop!” I choked out. “Just stop, okay?”
I glanced at Jet. “She’s right. There’s no use denying it.” My eyes
slid to Deena. “But the anger … is it really helping you any?”

“What is this whole suicide talk?” Hetty
groused. “He died because his organs failed.”

“Because he’d been pumping his body with pain
meds, sleeping pills, alcohol, and anxiety medications, Nana,” I
pointed out. “Anything to keep him sedated and not here. We might
as well get it out in the open. Otherwise, it’s just going to
fester. After Dad lost Mom, he just couldn’t do life.”

“He gave up on
us
,” Deena argued.
Crossing her arms, she fell back into the seat. “This van smells
like dog shit.”

“We’re going to work on that mouth, missy,”
Hetty advised. “Your mama would have had your hide if she heard you
speaking like that.”

“Do you see her here?” Deena asked.

Jet sighed, his gaze meeting mine before he
faced forward, defeated.

Hetty glanced in the rearview mirror. “I miss
her, too, Deena.”

Nana was our maternal grandmother. Mom had
been her only child. When Mom passed away, Hetty, a well-respected
veterinarian in Atlanta, had retreated to the countryside, to a
small animal clinic.

“I should have come back,” Hetty went on. “I
shouldn’t have stayed away all of these years.”

Deena snorted. “It’s a little too late now,
isn’t it?”

Too much blame. Too much time between all of
us. “In all fairness, we didn’t contact you,” I pointed out. “Maybe
we should have said something.”

“It wouldn’t have helped,” Jet muttered. “Dad
was determined to join Mom. We can’t blame ourselves.”

My sister hiccupped. “Then we can blame Mom.
He left us to be with her.”

“Deena!” Jet and I cried.

“Stop it!” she screamed. “I hate them! I can
do that! I can hate them, damn it! I’m not either one of you!”

Hetty hit the brakes on the van, throwing us
forward against our seatbelts. “You’re allowed to be angry, Deena,
but not if it makes you hate the world.”

“Screw all of you!” my sister yelled.

Other than Deena’s tears, there was no desire
to cry. We were beyond that. We just wanted to bury our father, to
let his soul join our mother’s on the other side. We wanted to move
on. Deena’s anger, however, held us back. It kept us stuck in a
place none of us wanted to visit.

My eyes met the road beyond,
my nose wrinkling. Deena was right, the van stank. It smelled like
wet dog, old blood, and piss. Outside the window, you could just
make out the words
Refuge Animal
Hospital
scrawled in green down the side of
the tan exterior.

A Porsche pulled to a stop at a traffic light
next to us, and I found myself staring down at a young, red-haired
driver. He glanced up, caught my gaze, and grinned. In the
passenger seat, a vaguely familiar guy looked up, his gaze
following his friend’s to my face.

I stiffened. Eli, the roof guy.

We stared.
I need a boat,
my eyes
beseeched,
to sail far away from this
place. This mess. My family.

The red-haired boy’s lips moved. Eli
answered, his eyes narrowing on mine.

“Is that the guy from the hospital?” my
brother asked from the front seat. “The one you were talking to on
the roof?”

“Yeah,” I murmured.

“Who?” Deena asked, leaning over me. “The
redhead or the brunette?”

The light changed, and the van lurched
forward, breaking my eye contact with Eli.

No, he’s mine,
I thought. Not in a romantic way, but a frantic,
escape route way. Which was crazy. Completely crazy.

“The brunette,” I said finally. “He was just
some guy on the roof.”

“Oh,” Deena breathed,
disappointed. “And here I was hoping
something
interesting had happened
today.”

My throat worked, misery choking it.

Our dad’s death wasn’t enough for you.

Anger at my sister detonated inside of me,
but I shoved it down. Maybe she was right to be so hateful. Maybe
it was the rest of us who were wrong.

I wanted to hate Dad, but I couldn’t. I
pitied him. In the end, before he’d gone to the hospital, I’d sat
next to him, my fingers entwined with his.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be stronger, Tansy,”
Dad whispered. “I did the best I could. I just don’t know how to be
here without her. You get that, don’t you?”

A tear slipped down his face, the pain of it
slicing an excruciating trail down my heart and soul.

“Yeah, Dad, I get it. It’s got to hurt, huh?
To love someone that much?”

“You have no idea,” he answered.

My feelings were split in half. On one hand,
I envied my dad his love for my mother. What would it be like to
love someone so much?

On the other hand, I felt like he was a
coward. Wouldn’t it be braver to keep their love alive? Wouldn’t it
be braver than letting it die with him?

No resentment. Only pity and
disappointment.

I sighed, words spilling forth with the
exhale, “Say hello to Mom, Dad.”

If anyone in the van heard me, they said
nothing. Even my sister. Love wasn’t tearing Dad into pieces
anymore, and I couldn’t be angry about that. Not that part. That
part relieved me.

Dad had been a car, Mom the tires. When she
left, Dad couldn’t keep driving once the wheels were flat. Instead
of pumping gas into his system, he’d started pumping poison.

Like Romeo and Juliet.

Being the child of a tragic romance was like
standing on top of a spinning globe waiting on it to fall off of
its axis.

“I’ve got to go back to the university after
the funeral,” my brother said suddenly. He paused, waiting, and I
knew he expected me to promise I’d stay with Deena at Hetty’s.
Because that’s what I did, I stayed. First with Dad, and now with
my sister.

“After summer you could go back to school,
Tansy,” Hetty offered.

To what?

“I have my GED,” I muttered, shivering. The
idea of returning now, when I felt worlds away from everyone,
scared the shit out of me.

Deena shimmied forward in her seat, her eyes
bright. “I want to drop out, too.”

“No!” we cried.

“Tansy shouldn’t have had to,” Hetty added,
bitterness eating away at the words.

She blamed our dad for my education. The way
she looked at Jet, she also blamed him for letting me quit school
to nurse dad when he was the oldest. She didn’t get it. Jet was
just like our father. He didn’t know how to make sacrifices. People
made them for him.

To change the subject, I suggested, “Maybe I
can work at the clinic?”

Hetty glanced at me in the rearview mirror.
“That could be good. Do you like animals?”

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I did. “I don’t
know.”

“We’ll find out soon. I’ve got a house
full.”

Deena’s eyes widened in horror. “A house
full?” she shrieked. “I hate them!”

“Of course you do.” Hetty’s fingers tightened
on the steering wheel.

“It’s all going to be fine,” Jet assured.

His promise echoed through the small space,
meaning something different to each of us.

Fine was a four letter word. Like fuck or
love. Fine could go one of two ways: happiness or hell.

Eli

The winding road which led into Lockston
Orchard reminded me of a Thomas Kinkade painting, the oaks lining
the drive sending dappled light across the dirt paths. Breaks in
the trees revealed rolling hills and other winding dirt roads that
led into the orchard itself, the trees full of green, oval-shaped
leaves and small, unripe apples. Red-roofed, white washed buildings
and sheds were nestled among the chaos. Blue skies hung overhead,
fluffy cotton candy clouds rolling over smooth, green lawns.

Jonathan rolled down the driver’s side
window, and sweet, flower-saturated air rushed into the car’s
interior.

He inhaled, the wind spiking his hair. “God,
I love that smell.”

“You’re welcome to take my place here,” I
offered.

Jonathan grinned. “Oh, I’m not leaving. I’m
with Mom this summer, remember?”

Dread climbed up my spine, its cold fingers
gripping my heart. My gaze flew to the drive, to the large house
approaching in the distance.

No!

“Please tell me you’re not serious,” I
whispered, so low I knew Jonathan didn’t hear me over the wind in
the car.

My eyes fell closed, opening only when the
Porsche pulled to a stop. My breath came in angry spurts.

He wouldn’t!

The door on the house’s wraparound porch
opened, my grandfather’s burly figure appearing in the light. A
short-sleeve, navy plaid shirt with pearl buttons was tucked into a
pair of gray slacks, his white-peppered hair slicked back. Pops was
incredibly fit for his age, a former naval officer who’d met my
grandmother while stationed overseas.

It wasn’t my grandfather’s presence that gave
me chills, it was the woman who stepped onto the porch behind
him.

He would! Fuck!

Climbing out of the car, I slammed the door,
ignoring Jonathan’s annoyed, “Hey, now!”

“You can go to hell if you think I’m staying
here!” I called.

Pops walked to the edge of the veranda, his
hands sliding into his pockets, his thumbs hooked over the edge.
His battle stance. “You don’t have much of a choice, son.”