The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (2 page)

All those years since the last time she heard his voice.

All those years when the seconds, minutes and hours of her life have surely created new stories and experiences that even Emma would call living without realizing her heart has remained suspended.

All those years when the nieces and nephews have grown higher, their mothers—her sisters—a bit wider and amazingly even louder than when they were growing up, and her mother, as the leader of all things Gilford, has remained as boisterous, often hilarious and always entertaining.

All those years when Emma buried herself so enthusiastically in her own work, the lives of those same three sisters, and all those soccer, football and volleyball games, school plays, junior high arguments, voice changes, and first crushes as if she were the real mother and not just the beloved and always available auntie.

“Damn you, Samuel,” Emma finally manages to say again as she wills the swirl of emotion to stop slicing the bricks off of her sanctuary where even more of Samuel is revealed.

His shoulders.

His arms.

The two absolutely astounding and terribly masculine bones just below his throat where Emma loved to rest her fingers.

The way he would simply take her hand and place it there, right there, when they were sitting, standing, lying, breathing, talking, laughing.

She remembers it now, while she places her hand across her own throat where the laughter seemed to rest back then as if it was waiting for any opportunity to spring loose, as an intoxicating mix
of joy and lightness that astounds her as much now as it did the last time she recalls Samuel’s laughter mingling with hers. It was back when everything seemed possible, when romance was as much a part of her day as brushing her teeth, when Samuel was so much a part of her present, and so, she thought, of her future as well.

Emma was finishing up graduate school and living not unlike a cloistered nun in an efficiency apartment that was the size of a large shoebox. She had not yet moved back to her hometown and had not yet stepped back into the comfortable shoes of sister, daughter, beloved auntie. She was single and free and young
and
she had Samuel.

Emma allows herself one sweet smile as she remembers Samuel shuffling out of her tiny bathroom in her ratty flowered bathrobe, wearing her pink bunny slippers after having sprayed his hair with half a can of her hairspray so that it stuck straight up. He’d looked as if he had just touched an open electrical circuit.

“Oh my God, Samuel, what are you doing?” she’d gasped.

“I’ve decided to be one of your sisters today,” he said as if this was something he did every other Friday.

“What?”

“You are homesick, Em. Yesterday you called all of your sisters in the morning and again at night. Oh yes, and your mother at least twice that I know of. So I thought if I could just be your sister for a day, you might feel better, get some work done, and that would be enough to keep you happy until you get back home for a visit.”

“But you are too tall to be a Gilford.”

“I’m adopted,” he shot back.

“Adopted,” Emma repeated, laughing so hard she rolled off the couch, which was also her bed.

“Yes, your mother wanted five daughters, not just four, because
four girls and their periods and all that fighting and jealousy and giggling and emotions were not enough for her.”

“You know all about sisters and girls?”

Samuel winked and opened up the bathrobe to expose himself and said, “Yes, darling, I know all about girls.”

Even as Emma knew that he knew more about some of her sisters than she wished he did, she could not stop laughing. She laughed as he made her breakfast and he started the lapel of the bathrobe on fire. She laughed when he went into the lobby and picked up the mail and had a long talk with the landlady without once acting as if his feminine costume was anything unusual. She laughed when she realized that she got more work done in that day than she would have if he had not made her laugh, had not helped to make her so happy, had not known without being told that she really was just a bit homesick and missed her sisters and her mother terribly.

Emma now realizes she may have laughed more in that one lovely day than she has laughed in all of the days since.

“Damn you, Samuel,” she says yet again as she pushes herself away from the counter where the answering machine seems to be staring at her. She wonders how in the world he managed to find her even as she realizes it is not as if she has been hiding. It is not as if he cannot use the resources of the university, if he is still researching in some jungle for them, to trace the address and phone number that the alumni association keeps on file. It is not as if he could not have predicted that she would eventually move back to Higgins so she could be close to her three sisters and watch out for her widowed but perfectly capable mother. It is not as if he could not call a sister, maybe even
the
other sister, and just ask for her phone number, marital status, present shoe size or what in the hell she had for breakfast the last six mornings.

As if any part of her life
except
Samuel could ever be a secret.

Not with the unwritten rule in Higgins, South Carolina, that states that if you simply exist then whatever you do is everyone else’s business even if you do not know them.

Emma then spends the next five minutes standing in place, avoiding eye contact with the answering machine that she considers hacking to death with the coffee canister that sits directly behind it. Instead she wills the last sounds of remembered laughter to shatter into a million pieces and disappear—just like Samuel disappeared.

“I need this right now like I need another sister,” she mutters out loud.

More memories of Samuel rise to the surface and flutter close to her heart again and Emma scrambles to pull up the gate that surrounds it. She sees his head bent over one of his beloved books, his jeans lying across the edge of the bathtub, the way his eyes closed when he was trying hard to think before he spoke, his kind gestures towards strangers and the delightfully irritating way he always had of stopping, closing his eyes and then raising his hands before he was about to say something that to him was very important. Emma tries without success to put the gate back where it belongs. She struggles to find a reason, after all these years, for such an immense surge of emotion that her heart starts to pound.

Her heart pounds so loudly that it must be because she is so close emotionally and physically to her older sisters that she is kissing the edges of perimenopause, menopause or one of the other
pushing-fifty-and-beyond kinds of female physical, mental and emotional transitional meanderings that all three of her sisters have been moaning about for so long Emma knows with certainty that she could be a part-time gynecologist and a clinical psychologist.

Hot flashes, night sweats, dry body parts, sexual ambivalence, thinning hair and everything from calcium deficiency to falling breasts: That’s surely what’s causing her to feel as if she is having a heart attack.

Certainly she could not be having a stroke just because of one phone message. It is just a voice. Just an old whisper of the past reminding her of someone she once was for just a short period of time. A person she could no longer see now no matter how long she looked into the bathroom mirror. Someone who went missing years ago somewhere around the last line of laughter she shared with the man whose voice was now on her answering machine.

“Damn you, Samuel,” Emma says again, realizing she has sworn more in the past thirty minutes than in the past thirty days and daring to swat at the machine with her closed fist and actually hitting it.

And actually turning it back on.

And actually hearing his voice again.

And actually for real, surely, and with all certainty feeling that something has physically moved through her body as if its intention was to make her physically ill and emotionally distraught and then pound away with not-so-tender fists at her nerve endings and laugh at her, because after all, it is just a voice.

But this time at the very end of the message she hears the words
“Please call
.” Words that must have been there before but were not heard when she released her emotions from the cage where she locked them away the last time she heard him say the word
please
.

Really.

Emma raises her hands to her face, places the tips of her fingers across the top of her forehead and rests her thumbs at the bottom of her jawline. She clenches her teeth together, squeezes her eyes shut, and thinks about the world as she knows it. It is a world that she surely loves. It is a world that surely cannot pause.

Her job, her sisters, her mother, her gardens, the looming planning sessions for the Gilford Family Reunion, the invitation list, the ordering, the lengthy list of tasks that needs to be checked and crossed off and examined and checked again. There is absolutely nothing that can be put on hold. Not one thing.

Emma thinks about her mother, Marty, and how she promised her she would help her strip the wallpaper out of the half-bathroom sometime before all the relatives started visiting, before, during and after the reunion. There’s also the rows of fast-growing weeds against the side of her mother’s house, the storage shed that holds all of the leftover reunion paraphernalia that she must sort through, and whatever in the world else the Gilford matriarch has for her to do in this spring season of planning, freaking out, worrying and arguing about the reunion, which is the biggest event on the Higgins, South Carolina, calendar.

There are a few nieces who are counting on her for some adventures and a couple of wild sleepovers where they can do whatever they want to do without their overbearing mothers yelling at them to keep the chips off the couch, stop calling boys, wear more clothes, avoid drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll, and to get some sleep—as if teenagers need to sleep at night, for crying out loud.

There is all of that, all the delicious pieces of a life she loves. There is absolutely no need for worrying about a little, insignificant phone message among them. There is certainly no reason to answer it.

There may not be time for crap, but Emma Lauryn Gilford astounds herself by not erasing Samuel’s phone message. Instead, she touches the soft spot just below her collarbone where the invisible Frisbee has come to rest and where she feels it quivering as if it could take off again at any moment.