Flying in Place (19 page)

For Myrna’s sake I kept
going to the therapy sessions, although I couldn’t see much point to it. Therapy was a charade in which kind people asked me senseless questions to which they, and I, already knew the answers. “How do you feel about your father?” Hateful and furious. “How do you feel about your mother?” Sad and sick. “How do you feel about yourself?” Not great.

It continued like that for months, through the last windy days of autumn and the anniversary of Ginny’s death and the first chill, rainy beginnings of spring, until the psychologist—a calm, quiet man serious and unsmiling as an owl, with wire-rimmed glasses and neatly manicured hands—asked me a question about the future, instead of the past: a question that required thought and invention, because I didn’t already know the answer.

“Where do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked.

“Huh? I don’t know.” It was a common enough question, one of those questions everyone’s supposed to ask you when you’re a kid, but nobody had in a long time, and I hadn’t thought about it much. I chewed a nail and stared out the window; it was a lovely day, one of the first warm days of April, when the beauty of the world is still shy and cautious and uncertain. “A park ranger, maybe. Then I could hang around lakes all the time.”

He pushed his glasses up farther on his nose, and nodded. “That would be nice, but that’s not what I asked you. Where, Emma, not what. Where do you want to be?”

“What?”

“Where,” he repeated patiently, not smiling. “Say it’s ten years from now: try to picture the place where you’d like to live, and describe it to me.”

“I don’t know! How am I supposed to answer that?”

“Try. It’s not a test.”

“Oh, all right.” I thought about it. “A big house with lots of people in it. Lots of kids and plants and animals. Dogs and cats and philodendrons and books everyplace, and everything kind of messy, and lots of food around for anyone who wanted it—”

I stopped, as surprised as if I’d caught myself reciting Tennyson. “I want to be Myrna Halloran when I grow up.”

My voice cracked when I said it, and that surprised me as much as anything else. Where had all that feeling come from, as unexpected as flowers in January?

But the psychologist only nodded. “Yes. And tell me how you’re going to do that.”

“I don’t know!” He raised an eyebrow and sat back in his chair, and I swallowed in embarrassment. “I don’t know if I can.”

“I think you can. Tell me how, just a little bit. Anything you know.”

I think I can, I think I can. That wasn’t one of the books Mom had read me. I squirmed in my seat; I didn’t know much. This was worse than a math test.

“I—” I stopped again, profoundly uneasy. “I’ll look in the mirror someday and like what I see. That’s what Myrna says, anyway. And so somebody else will, too, she says, somebody who’s not at all like Dad, but I’m not too clear on that part.”

“Stick with yourself. The mirror’s good: now what about the house? What else is in it? Who’s in it?”

“The people who like the mirror,” I said, feeling foolish. “People who love me. Is that possible?”

“Of course it is. People love you now.”

“If I get married,” I said cautiously, sweating—this was very thin hypothetical ice—“my husband will knock first whenever he enters rooms. Is that possible?”

“Yes,” he said positively, and for the first time I noticed the thin gold wedding band on his left hand.

“He’ll like lakes, too. Maybe he’ll be another ranger; maybe that’s how I’ll meet him, by looking for people who like lakes.” How had Myrna met Tom? I’d have to ask her. “My kids will know how to swim even if they’re fat. If I have girls I’ll give them baseball bats, and if I have boys they’ll have to learn first aid. I’ll teach them to grow vegetables. I don’t know. This is silly: all I’m doing is telling you about Myrna, and you already know that.”

“So do you,” he said, “but you don’t know that you do. That’s why I’m having you say it.”

I scowled. He didn’t usually sound like a Chinese fortune cookie. He pushed at his glasses again and said mildly, “Tell me about the house again. Myrna has a little room that’s just hers, right, where none of the kids can interrupt her? Would you have a room like that?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. What’s in it?”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture Myrna’s sanctuary, and because I knew so little about it I had no choice but to furnish it myself. “Well, it would look out on water or trees, or both. There’d be a big comfortable chair with a reading lamp, and a rolltop desk, Mom’s old one from her grandmother—I always liked that—and a little cot for naps. The cats could come in whenever they wanted to, but nobody else could.”

“What would you do there?”

“Write letters,” I said promptly, my eyes still closed. I could see myself writing letters, sitting at the desk with paper and pen, and a cat either on my lap or sitting on the paper and trying to play with the pen, the way they do; but who would I be writing to, with the rest of the house filled with all those people? Myrna never had to write letters, because she had everyone she loved around her.

And then I had it. Ginny, yes of course: I’d write letters to Ginny, even though I’d never be able to mail them. I’d write letters to Ginny and keep them in the rolltop desk. Dear Ginny: We went to Disneyland on vacation, and it was really great. Dear Ginny: Today I saw a fox come to the water to drink. I’d have written her a letter when I met the other park ranger, whoever he was, and when we got married and when I had kids. I’d have written her a lot of letters, so she’d understand everything I was doing and how much I wished I could share it with her and how this was the only way I could do that. If I wrote her letters I could give her all the things I wanted to be able to give her, and still have them for myself. I’d have to have them for myself, to give them to her at all.

I’d start writing her letters right away. I’d write her a letter tonight—no, sooner, as soon as I got home. “Dear Ginny: Today I invented the house I want to live in when I grow up.”

I opened my eyes, realizing that I hadn’t said anything for several minutes. What was the last thing I’d said? “Write letters.” And now the mild man opposite me would ask to whom I was writing, and I’d have to tell him about Ginny.

But he just watched me. I took a deep breath. “Do you think,” I said, “that I’ll be able to do all that?”

He smiled. “Yes, Emma. I know you will.”

It was long after midnight,
and Nancy long asleep, when I finished telling Bret the tale. We’d been interrupted by dinner, by putting Nancy to bed, by Donna calling to invite us to her beach house on Long Island for one last weekend before it got too cold. When I was done with the story Bret hugged me, hard, and held me for a long time, and said “I’m sorry,” his voice thick. He’d already known more of it than anyone except Myrna, but even he hadn’t known about Ginny. Now he knows all of it.

He’s asleep now too. That’s his way, not to say much at first, to mull things over and let them settle. I know he’ll come back to me in a day or two with questions, with reactions, with his own grief and anger. There’s no hurry.

I sit in the study, the door open, and look out at the river, much fainter in moonlight than it was in the afternoon sun. Rivers are roads, my social studies teacher told me fifteen years ago, and I think how the roads Tom built carried me away from home, to Chicago for college and then east, sweeping me to these old worn mountains, where I found a river instead of a lake and an accountant instead of a park ranger; where I became a carpenter and gardener and painter of houses and pictures.

In my own way, I’ve turned into Myrna, and I know the Halloran clan—now sprawled across the continent, Jane in California and brothers scattered from Texas to Maine, all of them with many children and animals—is proud of me. Hallorans visit whenever they’re near, descending in boisterous droves and leaving the house echoing and disordered for days afterwards. My mother would be horrified.

My mother died when I was in college, of a stroke. When I got the news I told myself that she’d be able to rejoin Ginny at last, but even if that’s true, it’s scant comfort. The two of them are dead, and my father’s still alive, still out there somewhere, like toxic waste and nuclear bombs and cancer: all the things that give you nightmares, the fears you grapple with daily and pray your children will never have to face.

Fifteen years later, he still terrifies me. He’s inexplicable, the puzzle I’ve never been able to solve, the cipher I can’t decode. My father’s sister Diane tried once, four or five years ago, after a decade of her own therapy. She’d written me to ask if she could visit me for an afternoon, and I agreed. I’d never really liked her, but I knew she’d been as horrified as anyone else by what my father had done, and she said in her letter that she’d figured out some things that might help me.

“I keep trying to make sense of it,” she told me, sitting stiffly on my living room couch. “Sometimes it seems like I hardly do anything else. And I’ve remembered a lot. Our father, your dad’s and mine, he was mean, Emma. Smart, like your dad, but mean. Boys weren’t allowed to cry, you know: your dad got the belt if he cried, and got it hard, too, and our mother went along with it because she thought that was what wives did.”

She looked at me, her face anguished, and said, “Your father’s first piece of surgery, when he was a very little boy, was to cut away all his feelings. And he never managed to sew them back on again. I don’t think he can feel pain anymore, or much of anything else. Other people are—they’re like artificial limbs for him, you understand? He can make them feel things he can’t feel himself. I remember how he loved biology lab, in high school. Sticking pins in frogs, cutting them up and getting A’s for it. He could be as mean to those frogs as our dad had been to him, and his teachers would praise him for doing it so well.”

“Nobody asked the frogs,” I said.

“No. But when you’re a doctor, people ask you to cut them up. They’re grateful to you for cutting them up, because you’re also keeping them alive. So even though you’re hurting them, they pay you lots of money for it and tell you how important you are.”

“Oranges,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“So—well, I think your father struck a bargain with himself: I think he told himself that it was all right to hurt people, as long as he helped them too. And I think he felt that way about—about his family. Because he was supporting you, keeping a roof over your head. I’m not defending him, believe me. Just trying to make sense of it.”

“I saw him cry once,” I said. “Talking about Ginny.”

Diane nodded. “He fell apart when she died. He’d always hated losing patients. It made him so angry—and now I think that was really guilt, underneath, because he hadn’t kept up his end of this bargain. Maybe I’m wrong. But when Ginny died—oh, it tore him apart, Emma. I don’t know if I can make you believe that. I don’t think he believed it himself, and it was so long since he’d felt anything, really felt anything, that he didn’t know what to do. So he got drunk, and there was that scene with Donna.”

“I think he did the same thing to Ginny he did to me,” I told her. I didn’t want to tell her about Ginny’s ghost. “It would explain a lot.”

“I know,” Diane said, and dug a tissue out of her purse and sniffled for a little while. “I hope—I hope I’ve done you some good, telling you all this. It’s helped me, understanding that much.” She finished wiping her face and said, “I had nightmares for months after the trial. I guess we all did. I guess you probably still do. But I’d always been so proud of Stewart, and suddenly I was terrified of turning into him.”

“Why didn’t you? You had the same parents.”

“I was a girl,” she said simply. “I was allowed to cry. Girls were supposed to be weak, you see, so our dad didn’t hit me as often as he hit Stewart.” She laughed once, harshly. It was a sound my father might have made. “And now—well, now I boss horses around.”

I don’t know how much of Diane’s theory I believe, how much it really explains. I worry about the little girls who live where my father does. Diane says he’s avoided children since the trial, and I hope she’s right. I’ve learned to live with his freedom, as I live with the danger of rockslides and flash flooding from spring storms. He doesn’t know where I am, and no one who does is likely to tell him. I have a different name now, a different life. It wouldn’t be easy for him to find me.

And even if he did, he’d never get his hands on Nancy. I can’t protect every child in the world, but I can protect my own. If he tried to touch her, I know I’d kill him. That hard, chill certainty comforts me almost as much as it frightens.

The ceiling above me creaks: Bret turning in bed upstairs, and the old house letting me know about it. Time to join him, and let the even flow of his breathing send me off to sleep.

Tomorrow I’ll tell Ginny that I’ve told someone else I love. I know I left her behind a long time ago, in my journey through a succession of landscapes she’d never recognize, and perhaps one day I’ll abandon the charade and just keep a journal, the way everyone else does. But not yet. “I’m as real as you are,” she told me, the first time I saw her. Somewhere, she still is.