The Shortest Distance Between Two Women (35 page)

Emma had rarely said no to Stephie before the discovery of her even-more-wretched-than-she-could-have-imagined home life. She would surely not now say no ever again, no matter what was happening in her own life.

Erika did not phone. She simply walked into the backyard and tapped on Emma’s window while she was guzzling a cup of very powerful coffee because she knew it was going to be a long night and she needed all the caffeine she could get. Emma was sitting at her kitchen table frantically going over the notes from the picnic folder.

“Emma,” Erika beckoned.

Emma jumped as if she had unintentionally touched a live electric wire, and let out a little scream.

“Shit,” she cried. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” Erika didn’t sound sorry. “Can you come out for two seconds? I want Jeff and Tyler to see your yard and all the gardens. We’ve been out walking like we used to walk when we were kids, you know, aimlessly going up one block and then down the other.”

The tour did not take just a few minutes because Emma was pleasantly surprised to find out that Erika had a passion for gardening too and had turned their apartment condo into the talk of their Chicago neighborhood.

“It’s a whole different way to garden and it’s been absolutely wonderful to transform the entire back of the condo and a huge porch area,” Erika shared as she crawled around on her hands and knees with Emma while the boys settled in under the gazebo with iced tea.

Without intention Emma and Erika ended up sitting in the middle of the far garden for close to an hour, lost in conversation
about everything from potting to terracing in limited spaces, interspersed with intimate details of Erika’s life that hit Emma in a very soft spot just below her neckline. It was like something or someone invisible was pushing her right there with soft fingers as if to scold,
You thought you knew her
.

Emma realized that her vision, her inner photograph of her sister, had been so limited, so blurry, so underexposed—perhaps like the vision her sisters had of her at the same time.

“Emma,” Erika said, shifting forward a bit and placing her elbows on her knees, “you must come to Chicago. Come visit us. None of the Gilfords ever come to see us and I want to take you all over the place. We have unbelievable gardens and a very excellent downtown walking tour and, well, it would be so much fun.”

Chicago.

Emma paused, closed her eyes while she instinctively ran her hands across the bottom row of a section of daisies that she swore she could hear laugh as her fingers lightly touched their stems, and imagined what that part of the world looked like with the people she knew inside of it all. A condo in the city, gardens on rooftops, her nephew taking a train to school as if he were a hard-core commuter, Erika stalking with her briefcase down a long sidewalk, Jeff throwing down a cup of coffee and then driving off to the swanky suburbs to teach high school psychology with the car windows rolled down so he could smell the mingling scents of city and country.

Emma looked at Erika as if she had never seen her before and was again shocked to realize how little she really knew of her favorite sister.

Erika reached across her own lap, wrapped her hands around Emma’s, and said it was okay because it was easy to get so caught up in your own life that it was hard to see anything else. She told Emma about how sick Jeff’s parents were before they died, about a
long-fought battle against Tyler’s school district to allow some experimental classes, and of course, about the raising of a son while still occasionally battling an ex-wife over a mess of absolutely asinine decisions involving Tyler—such as the purchase of shoes and when he should start to shave.

“Control-freak city.” Erika laughs, waving one hand in the air as if she were trying to swat a fly.

“Your plate is full too, sister.” Emma’s wondering how many times she had bad-mouthed Jeff when Erika came to visit alone.

Emma’s heart lurched as she quickly erased all of her imagined notions about her sister and life in the big city. There were no lavish cocktail parties, just lingering Sunday mornings with coffee while the city birds sang. There never had been a nanny there either and no more babies, not because Erika was a selfish career woman, but because she’d never been able to get pregnant.

“I never knew,” Emma whispered, wondering how something so important could slip past her.

“It was my choice not to talk about it,” Erika shared. “People will think what they want to think anyway. Besides, I have a son and he is
extraordinary
.”

Emma leaned in, took Erika’s hands in hers, and told her that if they had not been born sisters she would still have chosen her as a best friend.

“Me too,” Erika said, raising her hand to brush it against her sister’s cheek.

“Girls,” Jeff had finally said, with a hint of begging in his voice, “come talk to us men for a moment.” And even that twenty-minute talk was riddled with surprises.

When Emma asked Tyler what he thought of the possibility of moving to South Carolina if his mother got a new job, she anticipated a teenage gasp like she’d come to expect from her other nephews. But Tyler answered that he didn’t want to go to high
school in a big city. He loved the history of the South and had always wondered what it might be like to have cousins to hang out with, a real live grandma. And cool aunts, he added, as he winked at her.

When Erika and her men got up to leave for Marty’s, where they were staying while Marty not-so-secretly-anymore had Robert’s thong permanently decorating her bathroom door, Emma felt like running after them to beg them to stay. And that feeling accelerated when she saw Jeff put his arm around Erika’s shoulders as they walked down the sidewalk—it was as if they had been living on her street for years and years.

Emma forced herself to finish her hefty list of tasks after that, and hours and hours later, when Stephie came over, her loneliness eased. After Stephie fell asleep in her bed while they were talking, Emma made herself a promise to forget about Samuel, Marty’s recent revelations, and anything she might have forgotten to tell or ask her sisters. And a promise, too, to simply have fun at the family reunion.

Fun with men in kilts.

Fun with her special guest, her boss, Janet, who looks to be wearing Minnie Mouse ears.

Fun with Joy, who opened the first wine bottle at 10:28 a.m.

Fun with an assortment of cousins—first, second and third—who are a delightful assortment of lovely and mostly wild human beings.

Fun with the remaining aunts and uncles who will sit back in their webbed lawn chairs, drinking, still smoking their horrid and much-loved nonfiltered cigarettes, and reciting stories that are almost as old as the damned Civil War.

Fun with the kissing and hugging and moments of spontaneous affection that she notices from just about everyone as if she is at the reunion for the first time.

Emma is especially glad to see Stephie doing something besides practicing her poetry for Tuesday night’s beauty pageant, which Emma and all of her wild sisters have decided to attend. Erika has even convinced Jeff and Tyler to stay on a few extra days and Rick suddenly had the bright idea to rent a small bus to pick everyone up and postpone Joy’s intervention.

“We’ll make signs and posters and fill up as much of the room as we can,” he had said excitedly.

“You know Joy will be there,” Emma had reminded him.

“She can come on the bus, too. We have to start speaking again sometime,” he had decided.

“Did you just smoke dope, Rick?”

“Nope. I’m just being optimistic.”

“So we all get on a bus, all go to a pageant, and then we have a nice family discussion. And then we try to institutionalize your wife and the mother of a potential Miss Higgins?”

“I think we’ll do the intervention on Wednesday,” Rick had concluded with his hands folded over his lips as if he were praying. “We can wait one more day. Stephie deserves this even if she has been a bad girl. And all I can do is hope Joy behaves.”

Emma had tried to imagine this scenario playing out. She remembered how her mother was tired and didn’t want to be the mother anymore and she almost asked where the bus was parked so she could go get it and leave town immediately.

But she didn’t.

She agreed to everything. She decided to let Fate play its absolutely unpredictable hand and to let Stephie have her day and to go to the damned reunion, which now didn’t seem as important as the people planning it. Emma also prayed to God that Joy, her wild
nieces, her sisters and her own mother for crying out loud did not do a striptease.

Her mother—who has been spending most of the first part of the picnic talking quietly with Robert and some woman that Emma cannot remember ever having seen before. A new relative? Someone Robert brought along? It’s surely unlike Marty to not be the belle of the ball but maybe, Emma tells herself as she wanders over to talk to Janet and Susie Dell who seem to be hinged at the hip, Marty is also retiring from that position as well.

Men, it seems, change everything and Marty’s life has surely changed since Mr. Robert Dell flew into her arms and Emma’s has changed since Samuel’s recent phone messages, which linger like darts that have been strategically placed around the edge of her heart creating a longing for what she once had, for what her mother obviously has now.

Emma watches her mother as she walks around the flaming barbecue and heads first to get her own glass of wine and then towards Erika and Susie Dell who look as lost in an intimate conversation as do Robert and Marty. When Emma sees Robert stop while he is talking and take her mother’s face into his hands as if he were cradling a piece of priceless pottery, she stops halfway to her destination and thinks that is what her father must have done.

He must have taken the soft cheeks of his terribly beautiful wife in his hands and kissed her on the lips as softly and gently as Robert is now kissing her. Marty leans into Robert as the unknown woman they are talking to smiles and puts a hand first on Marty’s shoulder and then on Robert’s, as if she has commanded them to kiss and is now telling them it is time to stop.

But they do not stop, and still Emma cannot move, because she sees this lovely moment as a trip back in time, as a way to
perhaps recapture yet one more precious thing that she did not file away for safekeeping in her slim memory banks from the happy times before her father became so ill. Her father did these same things to her mother. He loved her much the same as Robert loves her. He touched her like this and kissed her and always made certain that his hands and lips and face were right where they needed to be. He took her places and opened her car door and worried about their children and went to events that he probably really did not want to attend to make her mother happy.

Emma watches them and even from the distance can see a fine fire lighting her mother’s eyes and she sees that Robert is absolutely and utterly in love and how this makes her mother very happy and very ready, too, for a new kind of life, a life that might explain “not everything,” a life Marty so richly deserves.

And as Emma watches her mother, she feels a swell of emotion that is nothing short of absolutely astonishing even as she feels an ache that is centered around the darts in her own heart for what she knows she has missed by deliberately standing still so damn long.

When Emma puts her hand to her own lips to stifle a cry, it is not a cry of sadness that she tries to hold back, but a cry of joy for her mother.

“Oh, Mom,” she breathes into her own hand. “Go for it.”

She pauses right there, eyes closed, as a volleyball rolls so close to her left leg that if she actually knew it was there she could kick it right back towards Stephie and her two brothers who have been yelling as if they have just been recruited to play for one of those professional beach teams where blonde hair is a requisite.

Stephie is the one who comes to grab the ball and who pushes her hip into Emma to shake her out of her trance.

And when Stephie looks up she sees that there are tears in her beloved auntie’s eyes. Then without hesitation she turns and throws the ball to her brother Bo, to whom she gives some kind of unseen and unspoken message, so that he shouts, “She’ll be right back” and then throws the ball to the server.

“Auntie Em,” Stephie asks softly, moving closer and putting her arm over her shoulders in the exact same way that Robert Dell is now putting his arm over Marty’s shoulder, “are you okay, is something wrong, what can I do?”

Stephie’s run-on sentence makes Emma smile.

“Oh, Stephie,” she somehow manages to say. “You are such a sweetheart.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m terrific.”

“But you are crying.” There’s more than a hint of confusion in Stephie’s young voice.