Wildwood (38 page)

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Authors: Drusilla Campbell

BOOK: Wildwood
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Liz sighed. “I know, I know.”
“My mother and father were drunks. My brother died in a freak accident. When I was a kid I felt like my life could just spin out of orbit at any given moment and I was hanging on for dear life. Knowing where those panties were made me feel like I had a little power. Over something. Someone.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Hannah said.
“I still take things sometimes.” Jeanne couldn’t help grinning. “When I’m mad at Teddy.”
Liz laughed. “You just redeemed yourself, old girl.”
“I don’t want any more talk about me going to a therapist,” Hannah said. “You’re as sick as I am.”
Liz said, “We’re all sick.”
“Omigod,” Hannah said, “the voice of authority.”
“As it happens, I am. This is all I’ve thought about for the last year.”
“And so you came here to force us to think about it too. I hope you’re satisfied.”
Liz nodded.
Hannah looked at Jeanne. “What about you? Is it all out now?”
Jeanne nodded slowly, asking herself: How do I feel? Not shamed or humiliated as she had always expected. The only word that came to her mind was
empty.
At first this made her unhappy and then she saw that it was good. To be empty was to be ready—for change, a fresh start or a new take on a bad start. She held up her glass in a toast. “To us—”
“Battle, Murder and Sudden Death,” Hannah said.
“—We survived.”
 
 
It was after ten when Jeanne parked the car and walked to the house through the oleander hedge. The rain had stopped and patches of star-studded night sky were visible between the clouds. The cold night smelled sharp and tangy. She opened the patio door and stepped into the kitchen. Teddy surprised her, standing in the dark, wearing his blue satin pajamas.
“I thought you’d be asleep,” she said.
“I wanted some juice.” He opened the refrigerator. “How ’bout you? Orange? Cran-grape?”
She didn’t think juice would mix well with martinis and wine. She’d had too much to drink again. This was something she was going to have to worry about eventually, but not now; she thought she might need liquor for a little while longer.
“A bottle of water.”
“Such restraint. I am impressed.” He handed her a cold plastic bottle. She handed it back to him and he tore off the plastic seal.
Jeanne sat down and gestured to the chair across the old wooden table. “I think we should talk a while.”
She hadn’t planned or practiced a speech. She just knew there was something important that had to be said.
“I know where James lives. I’ve seen him.”
“You’ve talked.”
“No. But I’m going to.” She looked at Teddy and in the unlighted room she could not read the subtleties of expression that would have given her a clue to his thinking. She had to ask him, “Well? What do you think?”
He breathed deeply. “I think you’ll be sorry. I think you can’t go back.”
“This isn’t about going back. It’s about moving forward. In my life.”
“Sounds selfish to me. What about him? I think you’ll be sorry.”
“Why?”
He leaned forward, resting his arms on the scarred tabletop. “You can’t just turn yourself into his mother, just like that, because you’ve got some menopausal last chance panic. He already has a mother. He’s a man now and he’s lived his whole life without you. Why would he want you?” He meant to hurt her and he was on target.
“Aren’t you even a little curious?” she asked when she could speak evenly.
Teddy shrugged.
“I know why.”
“Why what?”
“Why you have a son and you don’t care.”
“And now you’re going to tell me.”
“You’re the only one who interests you, Teddy. No one else really matters.”
“I don’t think that’s fair.”
“But it’s true. And I . . .” She stared out the window at the rushing sky that was almost clear now. “. . . I don’t want to be around a man who isn’t interested in me.” A thought struck her. “Were you ever, Teddy? Interested in me?”
He opened his mouth and closed it. She made out the creases in his forehead, the two indentations between his eyes.
If she waited long enough, he’d say he loved her. Experience had taught him this worked to bring her around when she was out of sorts. And maybe he would mean it. Teddy’s version of love might be one of the more peculiar varieties: Here today, gone yesterday and the year before, but from this day forward constant as seasons and school bells. More likely, if he said he loved her it was because he didn’t want to think about changing his life. She didn’t want to think about it either. Separating, divorcing, selling the school, keeping the school: it flattened her to think of the consequences that might arise from this conversation.
“I think we ought to try again,” he said. “We’ve built something fine here, Jeanne. Hilltop is an excellent school.”
She nodded, vaguely impressed that he had resisted saying what he did not mean.
“But it’s taken both of us to build it. If you tried to run it alone . . .”
“I might sell it. There are those Tibetan monks.”
He snorted. “And what would you do then?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe marry Simon Weed.” Even in the twilight she saw his incredulous expression. It made her laugh. “Don’t worry, Teddy, I haven’t been coming on to him. But astonishing though it may seem, someday, someone might actually want me.”
“Give me a chance. You owe me that.”
She didn’t owe him a damn thing. If she stayed with Teddy it would have to be for herself. She had given him more than twenty years of submission borne of her fear that he would abandon her if she did not please him. So now what? Should she see what would happen if she were no longer cowed and submissive? How would Teddy react to a new Jeanne?
“Will you come with me to meet James?”
He answered quickly. “No. I can’t do that.”
“What about after, when he knows why we gave him up. If he wants to meet you?”
Teddy put his elbows on the table and pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “Maybe. I don’t know, Jeanne. I don’t know.”
She looked at him and all at once she knew, without his ever saying it, that Teddy was ashamed, that like her, he had grieved for the loss of their boy. And like her he was proud and ambitious and determined to make a good life. She felt pity for Teddy because it was dawning on him—slowly, to be sure, but consider the size of ego the light had to penetrate—that he wasn’t going to get through life well groomed and unscathed. Like her, like Hannah and Liz, the mistakes made were not the kind that could be ignored forever. Eventually, truth broke through and when it did it burned. Her instinct—or habit?—was to comfort and assure him that she understood and everything would work out fine. But she made herself stay in the chair.
Things would work out, she was positive about that. But how or in what way particularly, she could not guess.
 
 
Dan put his arms around Hannah and spooned her into him. “How’d it go today?”
Hannah felt like knifing her elbow into his ribs. Reason and love prevailed, however, and she relaxed against him.
“You mean with Tam-a-ra?”
Dan chuckled, puffing his warm breath against the back of her neck.
“She seems okay.”
“I want you to know, Hannah, what goes on in her office, it’s just between the two of you.”
“Got it.”
“But—” he paused dramatically.
“Yes?”
“Did she tell you? Are you crazy?”
This time she did jab him and he rolled away laughing. She pushed him onto his back and lay across him. “I am not only crazy, Dan, I am dangerous. A menace.”
“Well, I knew that already.” He pulled her head down to his and kissed her. His lips and tongue tasted of toothpaste and his skin smelled of the herbal soap he showered with.
How could I have wanted to give this up?
She felt him harden against her and she slid down to take him in her mouth. As she did she heard the sounds of her small world settling in for the night. The drip of water from the gutters, the occasional gust of wind brushing the olive trees against the house. From Ingrid’s room the sound of music, electronic bings and bangs from Eddie’s. At the edge of the wildwood an orphan dog barked and far down Casabella Road the Millers’ beagle bugled back.
She raised her head. “I love you, Dan. I love our life. We’re going to be okay, aren’t we?”
He groaned and knotted his hands in her hair. “Ask me that in fifteen minutes. I’m having trouble concentrating.”
She didn’t have to ask him, she knew the answer for herself. And she knew why.
Thank you, Liz. For being brave. For coming home.
Florida
U
nexpectedly Gerard was waiting for her at the airport in Miami. As Liz came through the door from the transfer vehicle into the chaotic terminal she was thinking of him and there he suddenly was as if she had conjured him. Wearing a blue work shirt and shorts, he leaned against a concrete pillar, his muscled brown legs crossed at the ankle. He was looking down at a book open in his hand and didn’t see her right away. She stopped to admire him—the obvious strength and power in his body, the large head and slightly shaggy salt-and-pepper hair. She stood still and enjoyed the moment of anticipation, irritating the tourists and travelers surging up the ramp behind her.
“What are you doing here?”
“The Aga.” He took her carry-on bag.
His resigned shrug, the pleased expression that tilted his mouth and crinkled his eyes, the kiss aimed for her cheek but jostled to her earlobe by the crowd, blended with the sights and smells and distinctive South Florida sound of the airport, and lifted Liz almost off her feet with happiness and relief. She looked around her like a tourist, saw everything from the signs advertising rum and condominiums and the Dolphins to the bright shirts and dresses of the crowd as if for the first time. The music, the Latin beat that was everywhere in the background in Miami: Liz grabbed Gerard’s hand, spun out a little and twirled. She didn’t like Miami and she particularly didn’t like any airport anywhere, but today it all felt like home.
“What happened?” she asked as they hurried through the crowd.
“Who can say? The thermostat, I think.”
Liz laughed. “Bet Signa was unhappy. What’d you do?”
“Mariscos from Timothy’s. Barbecue.”
“Can it be fixed?”
He shook his head.
“You bought a new stove?”
He nodded, smiling a little. “Red Wolf.”
“Omigod, that’s fabulous.” She stopped in the middle of the crowded terminal. “But how can we afford it? They cost thousands. We’ll have to postpone screening in the porch.”
“Maybe yes. Maybe no.” He put his hand on her elbow and they walked again.
Liz thought how amazing it was. They were walking through the Miami airport talking as if no time had passed, as if her whole take on life had not undergone a profound shift in the last week.
She stopped again, opposite a bathroom. “Be right back.”
It was a long narrow bathroom tiled in aquamarine with black sinks and a large mirror on one side, a dozen stalls opposite and at the end a fold-down table. When Liz came out of the stall a young Hispanic woman, fat but pretty in a bright tight dress, came in carrying an infant against her, pushing a little girl in a stroller and talking in scolding tones to a toddler in a T-shirt, diaper, and miniature Nikes. She laid the smallest on the changing table and while she dug for a diaper in a red-and-white canvas bag the girl in the stroller banged something metallic on the stroller tray and the toddler ran from stall to stall flushing the toilets. His mother snapped at him and he ignored her. The girl in the stroller banged louder and began to cry. The mother yelled at the boy and he ran the length of the bathroom, arms out at his side, banging on the stall doors and making what Liz assumed was an airplane sound.
Liz stood at the sink, washing her hands, watching the scene in the mirror. As she turned to dry her hands, the boy streaked across the narrow room, his mother yelled a stream of Spanish, he spun around and careened into the back of Liz’s legs. She bent like the flap of a cardboard box and dropped to her knees, on the way down hitting her chin on the edge of the sink. She cried out, and the boy leaped back and began to wail and ran to his mother, hiding behind her. A woman towing another toddler walked in, noted the racket, turned around and left. Liz pulled herself to her feet and blinked at her reflection. There was blood on her lips.
The young mother asked in heavily accented English, “You okay, lady?”
Liz looked at her and nodded, smiled, and then, confusing both of them, she began to sob.
The mother’s face reddened and she began to speak Spanish too fast for Liz to understand. She yelled at the little boy and his cries joined the racket.
Liz waved away the distressed mother. For some reason, she couldn’t remember a word of Spanish. “Your children . . . take care of them. I’m fine. Fine.” It occurred to her that she should be embarrassed leaning against an airport bathroom wall, bawling like a toddler. But she wasn’t.
This was what had been put aside, postponed; this was what she had not done and had to do before she could move on.
Eventually the mother and her children left with the boy hanging on to his mother’s hand, sniffling and craning his neck around to stare at Liz until he turned the corner. She wet a paper towel and applied it to her eyes. Blew her nose and smiled at the blurred mess that was her face.
When she left the bathroom Gerard was across the concourse leaning against a window, reading again. He looked up and saw her and his face creased with concern.
“What has happened. Are you ill, my Liz?”
“Can we sit down and talk?” She wanted to tell Gerard everything and then get on with life. “I’m not sick. I just need to talk now. I don’t want to wait.”
“Of course,” he said without much enthusiasm. They walked across the flow of the crowd to a row of plastic seats under a window. Gerard drew her down beside him. “The abortion, Liz, tell me. Was it so difficult?”
Thousands of feet over the Bible Belt she had wondered why it was so often difficult to tell the truth. She was a translator sensitive to the nuances of words; but the language of feelings defied her and if she could avoid using it, she knew she would. So now, while it was in her mind to speak, she must make herself do it before the inclination passed. While the impulse was upon her and before the memory faded, in a crowded airport with a thousand people passing only a few feet from them.
Gerard narrowed his eyes and tilted his head toward her. “You changed your mind?”
“If you mean about the abortion, no. I didn’t. I am no longer pregnant. But in a way the trip did change my mind. When I went up there, I knew I didn’t want to have a baby because I was positive I’d make a mess of it.
Merde.”
Without thinking, she began to speak in French. Her story came more easily in the language that was not fully her own. The inherent formality of French and the reflexive voice put a little distance between her words and their content. In French, the words and the feelings behind them seemed manageable and less confrontational. All this might be a mind game but it didn’t really matter because at least she was talking now, telling all before she began to forget. Her memory of what had happened in Rinconada would sift down into the storehouse that held not only Bluegang but Mario and Gail and Willy, Brittany and Avignon and the apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. It would become part of what made her in the same way sunlight and water and soil mixed and became trees and drew down water and were the lungs, the life and breath of the world.
She rested her cheek against Gerard, smelling Signa’s strong soap on his work shirt. “I found out my parents loved me.” And so did Jeanne and Hannah and Dan and Eddie—even Eddie, who had hugged her hard the last morning and whispered
you’re the best.
Ingrid had hung back until the last moment and then burst into tears and clung to her.
“I thought I didn’t know how to be a mother and I found out I did. I could be a good mother, Gerard.” She saw from his expression that he had known this all along.
“Then why? . . .”
“Babies are for the young,
mon cher.”
He looked sad, maybe a little for himself but mostly for her.
“It’s okay. Honestly it is.” She touched his cheek, loving the faintly bristly feel against her hand. “I think this must be the last stage of growing up, the time when you learn that there’s a price to pay for everything. A consequence.”
She watched the people going by—men, women and children—and thought of their lives like individual solar systems burning with energy and events; and the vitality of life filled her with the sense of limitless possibilities. “Life is generous with second chances, but sometimes . . . we just run out of time. We don’t get to have everything we want. But it’s okay because we get something else. And it means what we have, we have to enjoy all the more.”
A female voice over the loudspeaker announced the last call for a flight to New York. First in English and then in Spanish.
“So, I missed my chance to be a mother. And I have to grieve for that, I guess. I do grieve because I know . . . now, I would have . . .” Liz realized she was repeating herself. “But what I have . . . here and now . . . with you . . . is so precious to me. If I hadn’t gone up there and had the abortion and if there hadn’t been all the trouble there was, I’d never have realized. I might have let you drift away. When I think how lucky we are to have each other and how easily I could have lost you . . . I could take off, I feel like flying.”
“I will catch you by the ankles and never let you go.” Gerard wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close to him. “My Liz, there are children in Belize. If you want to adopt—”
“I don’t. Or maybe I do. I don’t know what I want.” His face, his breath and the scent of his skin were unspeakably dear. “Except you, I want you.”
 
 
That night at bedtime Gerard turned off the air conditioning and opened the balcony door. Far down at the bottom of the hotel canyon someone played the marimba and there were sounds of a party by the pool. The air in the room became heavy and tropical, Liz felt her skin grow buttery and it was as if the humidity penetrated even to her muscles, softening her where she had been taut and resistant only hours before. Perhaps it was just being with Gerard again, back where she felt most easy. They made love to each other with their mouths and hands and there was such tenderness in this mutuality that Liz fell back against the pillows filled with a deep satisfaction.
Change. What has changed in me?
She turned, rested on her elbow and watched Gerard sleep. His forehead was completely relaxed, not a line on it. His mouth was open slightly so she could see the moist pink gloss of his lower lip, succulent as a fruit. His lips moved a little as if he were saying something in his sleep. Perhaps I love you. Because he did love her and she loved him. She didn’t think she would have been able to think this as forthrightly a week ago.
What has changed?
It might only be imagination—with Liz that was always a possibility; but why not believe what her heart told her? Surely after all these years she could trust her heart when it spoke so clearly. She and Gerard had been good together from the day they met, from the night they walked into that smoky stinky bar near Le Mans and simultaneously laughed out loud. Liz had thought it couldn’t get better for them, but with her willingness to trust that what they had would endure, what was a partnership had become something else. A picture mounted and framed. A jewel set in gold. Two parallel lines had joined to make a circle large enough to hold them both. It was a variety of love Liz realized her parents might have had and which they had sought to preserve all their married lives despite her.
Our Precious Liz
had tried to make a triangle of their circle but they had not let her.
Liz fitted her body against Gerard’s, inhaled his sleeping smell, a warm, burrowing, home smell, and closed her eyes, contented. She would never have a mother and father who were not distracted, she would never have a chance to save Billy Phillips, she would never have a child of her own. But Hannah and Jeanne, she would always have them. Their love for each other had passed safely through foul weather into fair. And there was here and now this tender and warm-skinned man. And here and now these were enough.

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