The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (17 page)

Especially when you close your eyes and imagine your mother dancing naked with the retired attorney from Charleston.

Especially during a combination of family crises that seem to be popping up like weeds after a hard rain.

Especially because suddenly the word
predictable
seems to have vanished from the vocabulary of life.

“Well, Emma darling” is what Susie offers next. “When my mother died I finally cried for a month when I realized what I was going to miss. And when I stopped crying, I realized the only thing that mattered was knowing that I had been loved. That’s it. None of that other life shit mattered.”

And it seems, to Susie Dell anyway, that even though Emma has not told her everything that Emma has a lot of shit in her life at this particular moment.

The two women exchange phone numbers and plan a dinner and a garden tour and Emma cannot help but wonder if her mother felt the same, instant, open connection with Robert Dell as she does with his daughter.

Later, when the coffee has finally evaporated from her bloodstream, and Susie has called to let her know her father left her a message to say that he was having the most wonderful time on an
island with Marty, Emma cannot stand it anymore. She goes to lie in her garden.

It is past the heart of spring. Lying in the small slice of grass that runs between the rows of her newest plantings, Emma can feel that the heat trapped inside of the earth has changed. It’s warmer and stronger. It’s pulsing in a way that makes her realize she has to crank up the watering and switch the organic fertilizer.

Then Emma forces herself to do something the rest of the world knows as the word
relax
. She pushes first one foot and then the other against the now strong stems of her plants and she forgets about her gardens, her slutty mother, her job, her sassy niece, the broken heart of her sister, the broken spirit of her other sister, the sister who rarely comes home, and the looming family reunion that will start crashing around her the second Marty returns … if she ever returns.

Emma Gilford tries to move her mind past her life, past the succession of problems and immediate life crises that have seemed to pop up like the gophers she cannot keep from her gardens no matter what she does.

But all she can think about is the conversation with Susie and what it might be like if Marty never came back, if the matriarch was swept away and left the entire mess—including the responsibility for the huge reunion event—to cure itself.

And that is all Emma can think about—Marty not returning.

What would it be like if Emma and Susie had to switch places? If Emma was the one dealing with the pain of loss because her mother was no longer there for her?

Emma imagines it and feels her stomach roll as if she is standing on the deck of a ship being tossed through the eye of a hurricane. Even as she pushes her hands deeper into the grass to stay connected, to keep from falling overboard, she cannot stop the swell of immediate sorrow that pulses through her body.

By the time Susie Dell does come to visit Emma three days later and enters even deeper into the Gilford jungle, Emma has already tried repeatedly to call her older sister Erika, who seems to have vanished.

But Susie Dell is fun and lively, and is not afraid to just say it like it is, and sees absolutely nothing strange, awry, ridiculous or bizarre about Emma’s life.

“We all have family shit,” she said nonchalantly. “Half the country is riddled with angst and anger over this boomer-caught-with-parents-and-siblings-and-kids-and-grandkids stuff. I say just get over it. It’s life, Emma, for God’s sake. Suck it up.”

Great advice, if only it was that easy, Emma ponders before she pauses long enough to think about the three unanswered phone calls she has received from Samuel, messages she cannot bring herself to erase.

The three phone calls that now seem like a treat compared to Joy’s revelations, Debra’s disheveled life, her mother’s retired attorney and Stephie’s college secret—oh, yeah, and that other event thing that is coming up fast.

The phone calls after all these years when Emma worked so hard to forget him; years comparing the way her heart moved or didn’t move when she dated someone else; years sometimes hating herself for what she did, what she didn’t do, what might have been; years eventually surrendering to the notion that it would never have worked, that it was wrong and just a physical attraction; years lost, absolutely lost, to the drowning sensation that she could only describe as yearning.

But for what? Can a heart, a soul, a body yearn for something
that really does not exist? And if it does exist and there really is still a chance, what about all the time that has been squandered?

Emma leans in towards the gardens that Susie Dell is surveying and so wants to say, “Just shit,” through her teeth, thinking at the same moment that she has sworn more in the past few weeks than she has during the past ten years. “Why can I not erase the phone messages and why do I hate everyone I am related to?”

And when she turns after dinner to see Susie Dell, sitting right where a real sister should sit, Emma is suddenly struck by a dizzying feeling of lightness that makes her see this woman as a sister. She sees her as a forgiving, open, real woman who looks at Emma’s life and yearns for what she has even as Emma looks at her and yearns for her simple, uncomplicated palette of life that does not include sisters.

And her feeling of safeness with Susie Dell grabs her right by the throat and seems to shake the long-held Samuel story out of her. It’s as if she cannot stop herself, as if she has been dying to tell someone and Susie Dell is the first person who happened to stop by.

But even Emma knows better than that. Even Emma knows that the universe and Marty had something to do with the synergy that is being created as Emma claims Susie Dell as her fourth sister and tells her the story of Samuel.

Even as Emma admits without hesitation that Samuel had been her sister Debra’s boyfriend before he and Emma came to be lovers but when they met he was free and she was free and they were adults and it was something—perhaps the only thing—that she could own and one of her sisters could not claim.

And Susie Dell does what a sister should do: She does not judge. She simply listens. And that kind act helps Emma get up and walk towards her room, pull open the middle drawer of her
dresser and fish around for an old cedar box where she has kept her most private treasures since she was a little girl.

Emma fishes past a copper bracelet, letters wrapped in pieces of thin silk, rocks she collected during high school from places she can no long remember but back then were special to her, until she reaches what she is trying to find.

On the very bottom of the box there is a small leather bag that has not moved in a very long time. Emma picks it up gingerly as if the photograph inside it is a precious antique document and carries it back to the porch and Susie Dell.

Emma is shocked that the photo of her and Samuel does not pain her as much as she thought it would. She presses her hand to her heart and feels the gentle surge of blood, a light thumping, but not the turbocharged bolt of power she used to feel each time she looked at this photograph. There is not an avalanche of tears and the pull that used to start behind her eyes and roll through her body until she was a total physical wreck.

Samuel, as Debra’s ex-boyfriend, was more than a familiar face to Emma. She had always adored him, loved talking to him, was distressed when he broke up with her sister after so many years, five years seemingly filled with tumultuous dating and arguing and breaking up and getting back together. She could see after it happened for the last time how they were not a mix that would keep. Samuel was soft and loved to get lost in his botany PhD research; Debra loved to fill her life with anything but quiet and the stillness that plants demanded.

Emma had looked up one morning during a particularly grueling semester of graduate school and there he was crawling through the grass outside her lab building. She’d seen him and his long legs, nearly shaved hair, trademark bright white T-shirt, and she’d started to laugh and he heard her and looked up. It was as if something
magnetic passed between them. Emma actually jumped and he started to laugh too, and that was the beginning of something.

Something wonderful that changed her heart and life, she now tells Susie Dell. Something wonderful, until he was sent to the jungle to do research and then to another jungle and one after that, all the while pleading with her to wait for him because he would come back to her. Someday. He swore he would.

And finally Emma could wait no longer. She went back home to Higgins and she left Samuel and everything but one photograph behind.

Emma thought of him now as someone she barely knew even as she remembered the curve of his shoulders that descended like pillars into his back, the way his hands seemed to know exactly where she needed them to go, the lovely brown mole just below his clavicle. And try as she did she could not now think of their encounter, what she knew as love, to be wrong. She could not and would not, which is why she could not bring herself to erase his messages.

It was the pained look in Debra’s eyes, the sweet taste of wine cascading down her face the night Debra threw wine at her, the look of betrayal for not knowing what had happened even though Debra had moved on and was already planning a wedding to a different man when it happened. Then the silence these past few days when Emma had not called and Debra had not called and Marty was not there to serve as a buffer between them.

And this painful wondering about what she owed her sister.

Susie Dell sat as still as a silent psychiatrist as Emma slipped the photograph back into the tissue and then inside of the leather bag and set it beside her on the swing as she finished her wine. It was Debra, Emma convinced herself, who held her back from answering Samuel’s messages, she finally said out loud.

Debra who would yell and slam doors and throw more drinks
no matter what Emma decided to do. What did she owe Debra for this? Did she owe Debra for this? And more importantly, what did Debra owe
her
?

Debra, who always felt to Emma as if she were more privileged, more deserving, more allowed to have a life of her own choosing. Debra, who still assumed so damn much about Emma and her expectations and place in the family line of servitude. Debra, who because she was closest in age should have been her closest sister, the one she could confide in and trust. What happened to that? Was it because of Debra, who now seemed so far away from Emma’s heart it was impossible to see or feel anything about her? Was it because of Emma?

If only Emma knew what to do.

“What does your heart say?” Susie Dell asks her, already knowing the answer by the look on Emma’s tortured face. And knowing too that if the excuse was not Debra it would surely be something or someone else.

“He could still be in the jungle. Or maybe he’s married. And what about Debra?”

“At some point you have to stop making up excuses and asking questions like this,” Susie advises her. “Remember what I said before about love? How it’s all that matters? If Debra loves you she’ll want you to be happy and her happiness is her choice as well.”

“That sounds easy. But it’s not that easy.”

And that is where they leave it as the night rides south and Susie Dell thanks Emma for trusting her, for opening up her heart, and as Emma thanks her new friend for helping her see things in a different way.

What Emma does not see is the lovely, gracious and open Susie Dell slipping the photograph out of the little brown bag and placing it in her purse when Emma gets up to refill their glasses.