Here to Stay (15 page)

He felt the same desire for her he’d always felt, a desire so ferocious that he curbed it always, needing to be gentle with her. He held her head gently stroking her hair, as they kissed.

Had he really almost lost her?

His tongue touched hers. He felt her breasts press against him, felt her wanting.

“Sissy,” he whispered, kissing her cheeks, her fine jaw, her beautiful chin, her throat.

He wanted her so badly, so much. She touched him, drawing him toward her, into her.

One with her, he tried to think how to banish what she called his aloofness even as he felt it rise in him. Part of him knew her as the person who hadn’t waited for him for marriage, who was spoiled thanks to a wealthy background, who demanded one thing after another from him and expected her demands to be met. Another
part of him knew all those things as his own prejudice, as something wrong in him, to expect anyone to meet his ideal of what was perfect.

She shuddered against him, clinging to him, crying his name.

Afterward, he held her close, her head against his heart, willing himself not to judge her.

Sissy said, “What did you do with Rover?”

Elijah didn’t answer immediately. Gene had been in the kennels when Elijah had taken the heavy work gloves, eighteen-inch tongs and Rover’s terrarium from his room. He said, “Put him in a Ziploc bag and ran over him with the car.” He could picture the headlines: Humane Society Investigator Murders Malaysian Centipede.

Sissy made a sympathetic sound. “Sorry you had to do that.”

Elijah said, “I had to do it.”

Afterward, he’d done what he should have done when Gene brought the thing home. He’d borrowed one of his son’s texts on arthropods and learned that the common-named Malaysian centipede could have killed Eddy and made any of the rest of them extremely sick.

He’d looked at the scorpion books, read the neatly typed labels on each of his son’s terrariums before euthanizing them.

Sissy had said Elijah was blind when it came to Gene, gave in to him when he shouldn’t.

Sissy had been right.

Words flew to his lips, but he would never say them. Instead, he stroked her smooth hair, rubbed her silky skin.

Please don’t leave me. Please never leave.

Children grow up and leave home. The family dog remains till death.

—
Among the God Dogs
, Elijah Workman, 1990

November 3, 1991

“I’
M GOING TO
E
UROPE
,”
said Ezra.

He was calling from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sissy and Elijah could not have afforded to send Ezra to Harvard, even with the help of scholarships, but Clark and Heloise had pooled resources to let him accept the place he’d won there. And now, in his senior year, he had just announced that he wouldn’t be coming home for Christmas, that he was going to Europe instead.

“How are you going to do that?” Sissy asked.

“Clark and Berkeley are helping. And Grandma. And maybe Grandma Workman will, too.”

“She doesn’t have money to send you to Europe, Ezra. Why do you have to go at Christmas? Christmas is a family time.”

And they had family traditions, Christmas traditions, and they would not be the same without Ezra there. She
was infuriated with her mother, with Clark, with anyone who had given him money when she and Elijah hadn’t seen him since early June. But she also realized that Ezra was an adult now—twenty-one—and she certainly couldn’t stop him going.

She even found herself thinking it was all Elijah’s fault for ever insisting that Ezra be told Clark was his natural father. She was forty-seven years old, and abruptly she was miserable and saw the coming Christmas, to which she’d been looking forward, as ruined.

She managed to get off the phone without letting Ezra know her real feelings.

Five minutes later, the phone rang again. She answered with a curt, “Hello?”

“Mom, it’s Gene.”

Gene had gone to the state university for three years, then dropped out to operate his own business full-time. He lived with Sissy’s mother, an arrangement which seemed to suit both. Heloise had a servant to cook for her, and she and Gene played card games every night at exactly eight p.m.

But Gene disliked using the telephone, and Sissy was immediately concerned. “Is everything all right?”

“It’s Grandma. I called 911.”

Sissy almost asked if this was one of his jokes.

But she didn’t. “I’ll be right there. I’ll come in the car. You wait for me. Can Grandma talk on the phone?”

“No.” He hung up.

E
LIJAH DROVE IN
just as she was leaving. Eddy was at a friend’s house and would be there till later that evening.

Sissy got out of her car and into his and told him what
Gene had said. Elijah turned his car in their drive and headed back out the gravel roads toward her mother’s house, the house where she’d grown up.

Neither of them spoke.

All Sissy could think was that her mother might be dead. After decades of arguments, after Heloise’s turnaround about Elijah, her continued censure of Sissy and Sissy’s kennel, and after Sissy had learned to accept that maybe she should be grateful for the mother she had, now this.

The ambulance had beaten them to the house, but there was no sign of hurry.

Gene was nowhere in sight.

Elijah looked about for him, suspected he was in the kennels, and went with Sissy to speak to the paramedics. But they could see a shrouded form on a stretcher, and both knew the truth.

Two weeks later

“C
AN’T YOU ASK HIM
to just come home for Christmas this year?” Sissy demanded of Elijah for the fifth time. “Can’t you ask it for me?”

She wanted Ezra home at Christmas because it would be the first Christmas she spent without her mother.

“Sissy, he’s going to grow up. He’ll marry, have his own family. He’s not going to keep coming home for Christmas for the rest of his life. Let’s give
him
the gift of the freedom to do what he wants.”

Elijah felt as though they were having the same argument again, the same one they’d had so many times from back when he’d insisted on telling Clark that Ezra was his biological son.

And it quickly became the same argument.

“You never wanted him here anyhow,” Sissy said, “after you found out he was Clark’s son.”

“That’s not true.” Elijah couldn’t believe she would say such a thing. Eddy was out of town again, at a gymnastics meet, which left the two of them alone in the house. In her will, Sissy’s mother had left her house to Gene, incredibly, but—even more incredibly—she had left her kennel to Sissy. So Elijah had spent every evening and weekend since his mother-in-law’s death moving her kennels to his and Sissy’s property and expanding their own facilities in every way he could to make room for ten more dogs. Too many dogs. Sissy knew they couldn’t keep them all, but in a display of regret for her long bickering with her mother, she had renamed her kennel Echo Springs Genesis.

Her mother’s fantastic bitch Delilah was gone, but her son Oscar, a handsome black-and-tan, had sired several nice litters, and Sissy looked forward to breeding him to her sable bitch Round-Off; Eddy had been responsible for that litter being named for gymnastics moves.

Gene had shown no dismay at the dogs’ departing from his grandmother’s house. He’d already mentioned to Elijah that he might put up an additional building. He had long since reestablished his arachnid business and was now thinking of expanding to reptiles.

Elijah had been listening to Sissy cry for days. He felt for her, felt for the pain she was feeling at the loss of her mother, a grief he knew would continue for some time. His own mother was ninety-four, still in possession of her health and her wits, still insisting on tending her own garden in the summer, raking her own leaves
in the fall. Cole, the husband of Elijah’s sister Maureen, had taken over the shoveling in winter.

Anyhow, now Sissy was truly an orphan, and she wanted her own children around her at Christmas.

“It’s not that I mind him going to Europe,” she said. “I just mind him going at Christmas.”

“Sissy, it’s going to happen sometime,” he repeated. He was reluctant to interfere. Didn’t Sissy realize that clinging to Ezra now, when he wanted to be on his own, would only turn him against her and make him resentful? One’s children were on loan from the universe, so to speak.

What was more, Elijah was impatient with her over her suggesting that he didn’t want Ezra around. No, more than impatient. It infuriated him.

She said, “I should have walked away from you when I knew I was pregnant with him.”

Elijah couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Not this sentiment that she should have left him at some point or another—maybe that was true, he sometimes thought. But if she had left him when she was pregnant with Ezra, then Gene and Eddy would not exist.

He reminded her of this rather acidly.

“Of course, I didn’t mean that!” she snapped. And burst into tears again. “Just leave me alone.” She grabbed her parka from a hook on the wall and stalked out to the kennels.

Elijah watched her retreating back before the door closed behind her, the bright blond hair he knew she had highlighted. He remembered that at some point Heloise Atherton had spent some time in a psychiatric unit. Surely this wouldn’t be necessary for Sissy? She was
just a little irrational sometimes, and he supposed that one’s children leaving home for good could make anyone feel that way.

He thought numbly of the Christmases past, of new bicycles he’d found a way to afford, of the Christmas when Ezra was eighteen when Elijah had found him a used World War II aviator’s jacket he’d so wanted. The train set he’d built for both boys (and whose boxcar Gene had loaded with scorpions).

Midnight mass, coming home and each child allowed to open one small present, the rest to wait for Christmas morning when they would learn “if Santa came.”

His own eyes started to water, and he followed Sissy out the door, pulling on his own coat as he crossed the snow-dappled lawn.

He could see the light in one of the kennel buildings, and he went inside to find her filling water buckets and crying.

He took Cartwheel’s bucket from her, hung it in the dog’s kennel run and took Sissy in his arms. “I want him to be here, too, Sissy, but can’t you see that we mustn’t make him feel guilty for doing what he wants to do? It’s not right. He’s his own person. He belongs to himself.”

Sissy said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said those things.”

Sissy rarely told him she was sorry, rarely seemed to have regrets about her own behavior.

“Thank you,” Elijah said.

He thought of something he’d wanted to wait until Christmas to tell her. He wasn’t sure now was the time. He’d gotten the royalty check a week ago, the check that had so exceeded his expectations for
Children and
Dogs: Interaction and Development.
He’d hated the title, primarily because he had no university degree and it sounded pretentious to him under the circumstances. But he had to admit, it did describe the topic. He’d called upon not only his experience with his own children, especially Gene, but also his decades of experience investigating animal abuse cases for the Humane Society.

He reflected that Sissy still intended to attend a dog show the following weekend, reflected on how complex the hunt for an excellent bitch was.

He said, “Can I give you your big Christmas present early?”

Sissy stilled, looked up, her face swollen with tears, her eyes unusually dark blue. “What? All right. I don’t care.”

She would, he knew. She would care. “My royalties were…larger than expected. You know that really perfect bitch you want to find?”

Sissy clutched his sleeves. She didn’t seem happy, nor unhappy, nor doubtful, nor sure. She looked up at him.

He nodded.

Tears leaked from her eyes again. “It’s going to be awful without him here. And what about when the others stop coming home?”

Elijah felt certain that one of their children would always come home for Christmas. Gene liked his family well enough and didn’t like other people very much at all. But Elijah believed he would always show up on Christmas Day, at least, to be with his family. If not, he’d at least let his parents go to him.

“Let’s enjoy the present,” he told Sissy. “All right?”

December 24, 1991

T
IME
, S
ISSY HAD HOPED
, would have taught her not to burst into tears when Ezra called from Boston that night. He was leaving on his flight early the next morning, and was spending Christmas Eve with Clark’s parents.

This Christmas, Elijah’s mother, Maureen, her husband, Cole, and their five year old, Silas, would be joining her and Elijah and Eddy. Sissy did not care for Cole and knew Elijah didn’t, either. Though he helped Elijah’s mother with yardwork, he held down no job. Maureen supported them with her job at the bank in downtown Echo Springs.

Also, Cole drank too much, and Sissy had already seen evidence that he was a mean drunk. She dreaded his nastiness being part of their Christmas, especially when she was mourning her mother and the absence of Ezra.

Gene had promised to come for dinner at 6:00 p.m. He had a car now and an unblemished driving record, though Sissy sometimes wondered at this. Still, he liked to drive to the courier offices both to pick up shipments for his business and to drop them off.

At 4:00 p.m., Elijah’s sister and brother-in-law and nephew arrived, Maureen carried in the bags of gifts, while Cole allowed Elijah’s mother to take his arm.

“They’re not smoking in the house,” Sissy murmured to Elijah, watching through the backdoor window right before opening it.

“They won’t.” Elijah bit down a sigh. He had invited his mother to live with him and Sissy years earlier, but Rosemary Workman wanted to live out her years in her own house. Consequently, Maureen’s family—or more
precisely, Maureen’s husband—made the rules in Rosemary’s house. This meant his mother and all her treasured possessions had been exposed to cigarette smoke in the last years of her life. Elijah had told Maureen his feelings about this, and Maureen had said exactly nothing.

Then he had understood that Maureen was afraid of her husband, that his own mother was, as well. And he wasn’t sure what to do about it. His mother wanted Maureen and Silas to live with them, and she accepted her daughter’s husband as part of that package.

Cole matched his already slightly unsteady steps to Rosemary’s as Elijah stepped out. He then moved away from his mother-in-law, saying carelessly, “Now be careful around the dogs, Silas.”

Elijah and Sissy exchanged wordless communication, and she followed the five-year-old across the snow. Sissy had never left children, her own or anyone else’s, alone with the dogs. Maureen and Cole were, in her loudly and oft spoken opinion, careless with Silas.

Elijah smelled the alcohol coming from Cole as he passed, and he glanced at Maureen to see what state she was in. His sister didn’t drink as much as Cole, but sometimes Elijah thought she drank just to keep Cole company. Her marriage to Cole was her second and somewhat worse than the first.

In her divorce from the first, Maureen had lost custody of her second child, Michelle. Maureen had never recovered from the fact that her ex-husband had been judged a more fit parent. She’d moved back home with her mother and soon after met Cole.

As Elijah helped his mother into the house, he also relieved Maureen of one of her sacks of presents.

“Oh, thanks, Elijah.”

He could smell stale cigarette smoke on her skin and in her hair and also all about his mother as he guided her inside, looking down at his hand on his arm, her knuckles swollen with arthritis.

“Hi, Grandma!” Eddy came into the kitchen to hug her.

At twelve, Eddy was compactly built, perfectly proportioned for gymnastics. She wore her blond hair short. Her hair was like Sissy’s but her dark eyes and eyelashes were Elijah’s. Now she had braces on her teeth, but Elijah could tell she was going to grow into an extremely beautiful woman.

Rosemary Workman put up her face with the small motion of the very elderly, and Eddy kissed her.

Eddy said, “Come and sit down in the living room, Grandma. I’ll take you.”