Flying in Place (13 page)

Mom had gotten down on her knees to prune some bushes that didn’t really need it. She looked clumsy, encumbered. Donna moved a short distance away and stood, hands clasped in front of her and head bowed, as if she were praying. My father and I simply stood there, watching them. It was very hot. Bees droned through the heavy, humid air, harmonizing with a distant lawnmower.

Mom fiddled with some more flowers, her head bent. When the two of us were here by ourselves she abandoned the pretense of gardening and sat there for an hour or more, lost in contemplation; but when my father came too she wasn’t comfortable unless she appeared to be doing something, and having Donna along only made it worse. Mom kept rearranging flower pots and pulling off dead leaves long after Donna had raised her head and unclasped her hands.

“It looks great,” my father said after a few more minutes. “Really, Pam. I think you’ve done everything you need to.”

“It’s lovely,” Donna said again. “Thank you for bringing me.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand; rivulets were already trickling down my back, and dark circles were spreading from the armpits of my father’s polo shirt.

“I think she’d have liked it here,” Mom said, clutching her gardening tools. “I think she’d have thought it was pretty.”

“Anyone would think it was pretty,” said Donna. “The flowers are beautiful.

“And from her ashes may be made the violet of her native land,” my mother said softly. She looked up at Donna. “It’s a lot nicer than New York, you know.”

“Yes, it is. There’s no doubt about that.”

Mom lowered her head again. “She never would have been happy somewhere without flowers. She loved flowers.”

Her voice was ragged again, and my father shifted from one foot to the other. “Pamela, the flowers are fine. You’ve done everything you need to do. Donna has to get back to her hotel and the rest of us have to get into some air-conditioning—”

“I would like,” said my mother, “to stay for just a few more minutes. If you don’t mind.”

Her back had gone rigid. Don’t argue with her, I thought, don’t anybody argue with her or we’ll all be in trouble.

“It’s fine with me,” Donna said firmly. “I’m the person who wanted to come here in the first place.”

My father groaned. “Look, dear ladies, we’ll honor Ginny’s memory just as much if we
don’t
give ourselves heatstroke—”

“Ginny’s memory!” my mother said, standing and turning faster than I would have thought possible in the heat, “Ginny’s memory! What in the world do
you
know about Ginny’s memory?”

I stared at her, amazed. I’d never heard her get this angry at my father, not even when he burned the letter. “Good question,” Donna murmured, but my father just shook his head.

“Pamela—”

“All of you!” she said. “You’re all trying to take her away from me! Stewart doesn’t want to talk about her and Emma doesn’t want to hear about her and you, Donna, you have the gall to insist on coming here when you couldn’t even respect her memory the night before the funeral—”

“That’s enough,” my father said sharply. “Pamela, just calm down—”

“I won’t calm down! And you can’t take her away from me!”

My fingertips had gone numb, despite the heat.
All you
want to hear is the pretty stuff
. What had happened the night before the funeral?

“Pam,” Donna said softly, “She’s already been taken away. She’s gone.”

“Not to me, she isn’t! She’ll never be gone!” She started pacing back and forth in front of the grave, twisting her wedding ring. “Dear heavenly child that cannot die—mine, mine, for ever, ever mine!”

She was dying. She had to be. She’d never been this bad. Donna put her hand on my shoulder, and my father shifted into his most soothing doctor voice. “Pamela, come on now. I hope she’s in heaven as much as you do, but wherever she is, she isn’t your personal property. Everyone else loved her too—”

“None of you love her as much as I do! How could you, when you can’t even feel sympathy for my pain? If you loved her you’d talk about her, Stewart. If Donna loved her she wouldn’t have tried to—”

“
That
,” he said, all comfort gone, the word as sharp as a scalpel blade, “is long over and best forgotten, and you won’t do anyone any good by mentioning it again.”

But Mom, for once, was in no mood to be shut up. “She thought you were God, Stewart. She thought you were going to save her. Remember that passage from the Bible she showed me the night before she went into the hospital? ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.’ One of those psalms about the wisdom of the Lord, and she told me it was about you. Have you forgotten that?”

“Pamela—”

“That’s how much that child looked up to you, and ever since she died you won’t even mention her name unless you’re forced to!”

“Pamela, what do you want me to say? Yes, I’m a doctor. Doctors’ children die too. I couldn’t cure her when she was sick and I can’t bring her back now. I wish I could! If talking about her could bring her back, I’d talk until I was blue in the face. What do you want from me?”

“Tell me you remember her,” Mom said. “Show me we share a common grief. Tell me something you cherish about her, something that reminds you of her, something you miss—”

“Come here,” he said, and held out his arras. “Come here. I’ll tell you what I remember about Ginny, but I’m not going to have you yelling at me this way.”

Mom went to him, stiffly, and he started rocking her. I couldn’t watch it; he was making calm
shsssh
ing noises, probably the same ones he used on bewildered patients coming out of anesthesia—or frightened ones going under—but from where I stood I could see that his eyes were looking over Mom’s shoulder at something else, something past me and Donna.

“We’d better leave them alone,” Donna said quietly. “Let’s take a walk, Emma, shall we?”

“Sure thing,” I said, and turned to follow her. Perhaps twenty-five feet away from us, a family stood clustered around another grave. The daughter, fifteen or sixteen maybe, wore cut-offs and a white sleeveless top. She had long legs and big breasts; you could see the lines of her bra through her shirt. She stared at the tombstone while her mother and brother patted her shoulder, and I wondered if any of them realized that my father had been staring at her.

“Poor Ginny,” Donna said softly, and I thought she was going to launch into some story of her own, but instead she said, “Emma, it must be horrible for you, having to listen to all that. Is it always that bad?”

No wonder Mom and Donna didn’t get along. “Sometimes,” I said, my mouth dry. “Sometimes better, sometimes worse. You know. It’s just there.” Like women not wearing enough clothing, I thought. Everywhere you look. We could all wear fourteenth-century suits of armor and it wouldn’t do any good.

“Do you hate her?”

“Who?” Mom? Ginny? The girl in the shorts? I didn’t much like anybody right now, including Donna or myself.

Donna smiled at me. “Your irreproachable older sister, of course.
I’d
hate her, if I were in your position.”

“No,” I said. “I used to. I don’t now. I’m sorry she died.” Trying to sound casual, I added, “Did you know her pretty well?”

“Well, pretty well…or I thought so at the time. Now I wonder. But we spent a fair amount of time together, yes. Your mother and I were friends before Ginny died.”

Had they been? But Mom had talked about runaways in the car, and when she’d seen me with Donna on the porch she’d said, “I should have known you’d be with her.”

I bent my head. “Did she ever visit you in New York?”

Donna frowned at me. “Why—yes. She and your parents used to visit once a year or so.”

My mother hated New York.
Aunt Donna and I have the same pajamas. We bought them at Macy’s
.

“Yeah? So what happened? Why wouldn’t they let you go to her funeral?”

Donna sighed and wiped her forehead. “That’s ancient history, Emma, and I’m sure your parents wouldn’t want me talking about it. I don’t think there’s any point in going into it.”

My mother hated little girls in pajamas as much as she hated New York, and she’d just had hysterics about people trying to take Ginny away from her. And Ginny had loved maps because they reminded her of different places.
There were a lot of things I wanted to see
.

“She ran away,” I said. “She ran away to New York, didn’t she? She ran away to your house. That’s why Mom hates you.”

“Oh, Jesus,”’ Donna said, her voice breaking. She wiped fiercely at her face and said, “It didn’t take much for you to figure that out, did it?”

I know lots you don’t know. “Why’d she run away?”

“She wanted to join the circus,” Donna said.

“The
cir
cus? In New
York?
”

“The circus. At Madison Square Garden.”

I stared at her in disbelief. “Oh, come on. Nobody runs away to join the circus.”
You think it’s my fault, because I encouraged her when we went to the circus
.

“Ginny did. We’d gone to see Ringling Brothers the year before, and she’d fallen in love with the acrobats. All the gymnastics, and the lights…she wanted to be a star.”

“She was a star here,” I said. “Why’d she run away?”

“I already told you,” Donna said wearily.

I don’t believe you. “Tell me more.”

Donna sighed. “Your parents called me one Thursday night in October, hysterical, because Ginny was missing. We were all terrified she’d been kidnapped or something; it was a horrible couple of days. I jumped whenever the phone rang, because I was so afraid it was going to be your parents saying that someone had killed her…but my phone rang on Saturday afternoon and it was Ginny, waiting to be picked up at Penn Station. She’d taken all the money she’d saved from babysitting and bought a train ticket to New York, so she could come and live with me. When I picked her up she was starving, poor thing—she hadn’t had any money for food that whole trip, and later we found out she’d been saving her school lunch money, too. It hurt me to look at her. She was so skinny, and she was covered with bruises from bouncing off the parallel bars during practice. She told me she’d been practicing extra hard so the circus would take her. She was afraid she wouldn’t be good enough.”

Ginny was light as a bird
. I swallowed, and my own bruises began throbbing. Someone had killed her. She’d wanted to see the Thanksgiving parade; she’d wanted to stay in New York. And instead Donna had bought her pajamas at Macy’s.
I think that’s why I’m here
. “You sent her back home, didn’t you?”

“Yes, of course I did. She belonged with her parents. But she got sick right after that, got the flu and got pneumonia, and—well, you know the rest. And your mother blames me, because she needs somebody to blame, I guess.”

So do I
, I thought, “Didn’t you wonder why she ran away? Why she really ran away?”

“No. I didn’t wonder about that. I thought I knew the answer. I knew Ginny, remember?” Donna was angry at me, but I didn’t care. I was angry at her too. Let her take it. If she died at least everybody would blame cancer, instead of me. “Maybe I was wrong. If you were going to run away, Emma, why would you do it?”

Still angry, I opened my mouth; I might even have told her the truth, if I’d been able to, but I couldn’t tell her anything. My father’s threats throttled me as surely as if he’d been standing there with his hands around my neck.

“Emma!” my mother said sharply. “There you are. What are you two talking about?”

I turned around. My parents were standing behind us, my father’s arm around my mother, both of them backlit by the sun. I squinted at them, my eyes watering, and said, “Nothing I hadn’t figured out already. Did he tell you what he cherished about Ginny?”

Mom looked at the ground. “Yes, he did. I’m sorry I made such a scene. I do her wrong to talk so wildly…let’s go. It’s been a bad day for all of us.”

No kidding. I hated it here, hated it, hated it, and I didn’t want to be in my body but I couldn’t bear the thought of facing Ginny again, gaunt, skeletal Ginny who had died.
Ginny was light as a bird
.

“Yes, it has,” my father said. “We’ll drop Donna at her hotel and have a quiet dinner at home.”

“No,” Mom said, “Wait—” She stopped, drew a breath, and said, “Doanna, do you want to have dinner with us?”

“What?” said my father. He and Donna were both looking at Mom like she was crazy.

“She’s sick,” Mom said to my father, and to Donna, “you’re sick. You came all this way. I—”

“I’d love to, Pam.” Donna’s voice was gentler than it had been all day. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Wonderful,” said my father. “Just wonderful. We can talk about the weather, Emma can tell us about mixed variables. I don’t know how you two think you can keep from screaming at each other—”

“We’ll manage somehow,” Donna said, and took Mom’s arm. “Come on, Pam. The car’s this way, isn’t it?”

“I’ve got the keys!” my father called after them, and snorted when they kept walking. “Christ. This is going to be fun. Emma, don’t pay too much attention to your aunt. She doesn’t have the firmest grip on reality.”

“She has cancer,” I said.

“Yes, she does. Crazy people get cancer too. I think your mother’s being entirely too generous to someone who hurt her very badly.”

“She has cancer,” I said. “She could be dying, and she looks like Ginny. She’s Mom’s sister,” Spending time with a dying sister suddenly seemed like the most important thing in the world to me. “Give Mom a break, why don’t you?”

“Emma,” he said, in a voice like frozen nitrogen, “don’t tell me how to treat your mother. Do you understand?”

“Yes. What did you do with Aunt Donna’s letter?”

“What letter?”

“The letter about her being sick. Did you burn that one too?”

He whirled to face me, and his hand was in my hair and I couldn’t have cried out if I’d wanted to, and Mom and Aunt Donna were too far ahead of us to realize what had happened. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, pulling my hair so hard I felt like my scalp was going to come off. “You’re a fresh-mouthed little girl and you’re in the middle of a very grown-up situation you don’t understand at all, something that’s a lot older and bigger than you are, and I don’t want you acting smart with me or anybody else. Do you understand that, Emma?”