Out of the Blue (23 page)

“I’m sorry that I’ve been a jerk,” I said. “Let me see.”

She dug in her bag and produced some tattered photos of the five children, all with smiles just like hers, and her husband, Van. That was the shocker.

“I know, bald as a beach ball,” Dee said with a laugh. “It all fell out two years ago when I thought I was pregnant again.”

We sat for more than an hour while I gobbled up details about her life. Then she asked me if I ever heard from Bobby Zaklow. Bobby and I had gone out to dinner with Dee and Van a few times before the final break.

“No,” I said. “Not a word. Oh, God!” I wailed as the tears pumped out of my eyes in rivers. Thankfully, Jennifer and a few of her friends had left moments before. Dee just waited.

“Why don’t you call him?” she asked finally.

“Who, Joe?”

“Who’s Joe?”

We were beginning to sound like an old Abbott and Costello routine. “Oh, you mean call
Bobby.
Oh, God!” Again. My nose was running on top of everything. I tried to blow it, but my stomach muscles weren’t cooperating. Until you’ve got MS, you don’t appreciate what it means to be able to blow your nose efficiently. “I
hate
Bobby,” I said. “He’s pond scum.”

“You won’t get any argument from me,” Dee said. “Who’s Joe?”

I explained as best I could, winding up with the sad finale. “Please tell me you get it,” I said.

She thought for a moment. “I think so,” she said finally. “Being with him throws your MS into high relief.”

“Thank you. Spoken like an artist.”

I walked Dee to her car. She unlocked it and turned to me. “I was pissed at you,” she said. “You just disappeared out of my life.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you back now?”

“Yes.”

“Not going to head for the hills?”

“No.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

She hugged me gently, sensitive to the fact that I might be hurting, and hopped into her car. “Want a lift home?”

“That’s okay. I feel like walking. Dee, thanks for not giving up on me. Thousands would.”

She drove off, fluttering her multi-colored fingers at me out the window.

When I got home there was an innocuous-looking letter stuffed in our box in the lobby with the junk mail. I have since replayed this scene over and over in my head, along with everything else that followed. It was a plain white envelope with the address typed on an old typewriter that smeared the letters. The return address said:
Hartwicker, 220 Mill Road, North Lockville, New York.
That’s when I started to hear the pulsing crashes in my ears as if the Upper East Side were being rhythmically pounded by artillery. I tore the envelope open. A newspaper clipping fell out onto the floor but I let it lie there for a moment. I glanced at the bottom of the brief letter and saw the signature:
Steve.
Then I read it, not an easy task with that cacophonous thundering going on. By now I had realized that it was my heart making all that racket, but there was nothing I could do about it except hope I wasn’t having a coronary.

Dear Anna
, the letter began.
I know that Joe has been conflicted over whether to tell you about the enclosed. After giving the matter a lot of thought, I decided to relieve him of the responsibility. I’ll tell him I’ve written after I’ve sent this. He’s as okay as he can be under the circumstances. Hope you’re well. Best, Steve.

I bent down and picked up the clipping. It was from the
Lockville Dispatch.
Gus, a much younger Gus, was smiling at me. He had a neat part in his hair and was wearing a jacket and tie. I knew then that I’d better sit down. I crouched on the floor in the corner and read the obituary:

On March 12, Augustus Malone died when his handcrafted single-engine airplane crashed in the Adirondacks near Old Forge. Better known as “Gus,” Malone was born in Westmoreland, educated at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and served with distinction in the Vietnam War. In 1964, he married Celeste DeLand from Saratoga Springs. The couple had two sons, Frank and Joseph, both of whom work in the family business, AirMalone, the charter airline founded by Malone in 1975. A detailed obituary will appear in the Sunday
Dispatch.
Services are private. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to the Nature Conservancy or the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

I don’t know how long I sat there among the dust balls, the discarded catalogs and junk mail. Finally Big Bob appeared. I remember the effort it took to lift my eyes from his feet, big black shoes with a crust of mud dried around the soles.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m sad.” That’s all I could say. My heart had stopped pounding. Instead, it had begun to rain. It was raining everywhere, right here in the lobby of my building and in Palm Springs and Juneau and in Rio and Tokyo. It was raining on Mars and on Pluto. It was raining on the sun, and soon it would be extinguished with a big hiss and that’s the last we would see of the light. I just kept hearing the name.
Gus. Gus.

Big Bob reached down with his huge paw and lifted me up. “You just come with me, miss.” He took me with him to the front door and used the lobby phone to call my mother at the bakery. I don’t know how long it was before she came. I just knew it was raining hard. It was raining down on the broken plane, on the dark trees and the rocks and the melting snow.

Big Bob and Ma got me upstairs. “I want to go to bed,” I told Ma, and curled up in a tight ball. It was raining on my bed. All I could do was clutch my knees and let it pelt down.
Gus. Gus. Oh, Gus.

Ma just came in every now and then to check on me and leave a cup of tea beside the bed. The next morning, I picked up the cold brew and carried it to the kitchen. Ma was in there rolling out dough for biscuits, the plain ones I love to eat hot with a little raspberry jam. She held out her arms and I went into them. The terrain of her body may have changed but not that comforting scent. One batch was already out of the oven. We sat down at the table and ate and talked. She let me tell her again about the skis, listened to me describe the barn, though she’d heard it all before.

“I noticed in the obituary about the MS Society,” she said.

“Maybe it was Joe’s idea. Poor Joe.”

“Yeah,” Ma said, and again that thick silence. The vibrations hummed off her like a radio with the sound turned too low.

I crept around inside the apartment that weekend, feeling bruised all over. Ma left little plates of things around, hoping I’d nibble—grapes, cheese, chunks of currant bread. I stood at my window, facing east and watching the airplanes rise over Queens. The sky was a pale watery blue, the kind you see in April after it’s been raining for a long, long time. By Monday morning, Steve’s letter looked as if it had been through the laundry a dozen times. I kept staring at the word
Joe
—three letters that seemed impossible to grasp. A black cyclone had ripped through my brain. Nothing made sense anymore.

On Monday, I tiptoed back to school on feet that didn’t feel up to the job. Grant ran into me as I was walking to the library, keeping close to the wall for security.

“You’re looking furtive this morning,” he commented.

“Not up to snuff, actually,” I said. “Talk to you later.” It was easier to let him think I was ill than talk about Gus. I just wasn’t ready. The students also sensed my frailty and were hushed and respectful in class, even Eddie, who asked if he could fetch me a cup of coffee during break. Michelle was giving me penetrating looks. She and I had not yet discussed the issue of my employment. I wasn’t certain how to address it, and now I was having trouble thinking about anything but the woods, the plane, and the people left behind. I stayed late to grade papers, not that I was particularly reluctant to go home, merely that I was afflicted with inertia. It was such an effort to make any move at all.

I fastened my attention on the essays, taking comfort in the familiar exercise of removing and inserting apostrophes, hunting for structure in what seemed a morass of adolescent free association. But after an hour, the words began to blur into gray streaks and I realized that it was pointless to continue. The last bell had rung, the halls had emptied out, and I could hear the sound of the janitor’s mop clicking across the floor outside. I stuffed the remaining papers into my bag and shrugged on my jacket. Then I noticed the half-empty container of coffee, courtesy of Eddie, that had grown cold on my desk. There was a sink in the art studio. I would just empty the coffee on my way out.

The studio was dark. I snapped on the light and caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye. The art-supply door closed with a tiny click. I stared at it a moment, then approached and asked, “Who’s there?” No answer. I wondered if I was hallucinating, a symptom stimulated by grief, perhaps. I reached out and opened the door. Crushed inside amid the jars of paint and rolls of paper were Rudy and Michelle with their arms clutched around one another.

Rudy was the first to speak. “Hi, Ms. Bolles.” There on his face was that beatific smile, and on his neck a strawberry love bite.

“Are we in trouble?” Michelle asked.

I studied them, feeling the way I suspect Newton did, sitting under the tree and minding his own business when suddenly he got clonked on the head by an apple. Teachers are always mouthing platitudes about learning more from their students than they can possibly impart to them. I hoped that from now on, whenever I was tempted to think
impossible,
I’d remember the sight of Rudy and Michelle grafted together in that closet.

“I guess we should come out?” Rudy said. They were looking increasingly alarmed by my silence. But I was simply too stunned to respond.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it now.” Then I went home to call Joe.

The electronic voice on his answer machine in North Lockville said he’d be back tomorrow, Tuesday. I decided to take a chance and hopped in a taxi for the West Side. The doorman waved me in without announcing me, a first. I stood outside the door to Joe’s apartment and knew he was in there. I felt him breathing, felt his heart beating, felt him hurting. I rang the bell. He must have been just inside because he flung it open. He had a bag in one hand and another beside him on the floor. His eyes were red-rimmed, his hair shaggy, his face pale under two days of whiskers. He looked awful and wonderful.

“I’m so sorry, Joe,” I said.

He dropped the bag and wrapped his arms around me. Gradually they tightened until the muscles were like steel against my back. When he laid his cheek against mine, the stubble was damp with tears. “Oh, God, Anna,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I love you, Joe.” I didn’t care if he had moved on, if he was with Lola, even if he was married. Nothing mattered except that I could say these true things. The earth circled the sun, I was sorry Gus was dead, and I loved Joe. That was all.

After a while I led him to the couch. So far, he hadn’t spoken a word. We both sat down. I could see he was trying to talk, but he was so full of emotion that he couldn’t push any words out. I took his hand and held it to my heart.

“You gave him back to me, Anna,” he said finally. His voice was hoarse.

“I should have been with you,” I said.

“Yes, you should have.”

We clung together until we actually fell asleep all tangled up on the couch, both of us in our jackets and me with my handbag strapped around my shoulder. It was as if after all the months of fitful nights, we could finally rest. The numbness in my left side woke me. When I tried to sit up, Joe tightened his grip on me in his sleep so I shifted against him to relieve the prickly discomfort. Through sleep-blurred eyes I noticed that the apartment was barely recognizable. There were plants on the windowsill and the coffee table. A plaid Adirondack blanket was flung over the chair and there was a guitar leaning against the wall. I wondered fleetingly if he had a musical girlfriend. The most striking change was the photographs. A few of the old ones remained, but mostly they’d been replaced by portraits—color photos of locals from upstate, some of whom I recognized from the New Year’s party, all of them elderly. There was a luminous quality about them that reminded me of the Dutch portraits Joe and I had seen at the museum on our first date.

Joe stirred beside me. I helped him sit up and he almost smiled at me. “Then I wasn’t dreaming,” he said.

“Do you have to be somewhere, Joe?”

“It’s all right. I flew down to LaGuardia so I could pick up a few things. I have to stick around upstate for a while.”

“How’s your mother? Frank?”

“Frank’s okay. Eva’s been a brick. But my mother’s a mess. How am I supposed to leave now?”

“I’ll be here when you get back.”

There was a long silence.

“I will,” I said.

“I need it in writing.”

“You can have it in blood,” I said.

The haggard anguish lifted into a more convincing version of a smile. “Let’s drink something,” he said, and rose stiffly. He put the teakettle on and came back to sit on the arm of the couch.

“What brought you back?” he asked. “Was it Gus?”

“Gus and some kids in a closet. I’ll try to explain.” But the cursed fatigue was crushing me. I leaned back against the corner of the couch. He would be leaving me soon and there was so much to say, but my eyelids weighed fifty pounds apiece and my mouth was too weary for speech. In the distance I heard the teakettle whistle and I felt Joe breathing into my hair.

“I’m not like sports, Anna,” he said. “You don’t have to give me up.”

I fell asleep again and dreamed of Gus. It wasn’t a sad one, more like he was paying me a visit from someplace where the sun was shining. He took my hand and I could feel the calluses. I said to him, “I thought dead people were cold. How come you’re so warm?”

“Been sitting by the stove,” he said.

“But you’re in heaven. You’re an angel now,” I protested.

“Don’t go getting mystical on me,” he said. Then he gave me that little wave and walked off.

Joe brought the car around to the front of his building and tossed his luggage in the trunk. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on Central Park West so we sat and talked, mostly about Gus.

“We started flying together whenever I was home,” Joe said. “And we were working on a hinged door in the wing of the Stearman. He saw it was hard for you to get in and out of the passenger seat and it gave him the idea.”

“What went wrong, Joe?”

“Nobody knows. He lost power and stalled.”

For the first time, it occurred to me that Joe could easily have been in that plane. The nerves in the surface of my skin sent prickles from the back of my head down into my fingers.

“I don’t want you to fly anymore,” I said.

“I wasn’t in a hurry to get back in a plane,” he admitted. “It’s getting easier.”

“You could do something else for a living.”

“It’s too late,” he said. “You taught me that I like what I do.”

“I did?” I said. Joe had turned into the park to cross to the East Side. The trees were furred with green, and forsythia dripped from the stone walls along the road.

“I didn’t hate my job,” Joe said. “There was just something missing from the equation.”

“I’m not following,” I said.

“Appreciation,” he said.

“That’s pretty zen. I don’t get it.”

“You will. I’m just not explaining it very well.” We were only blocks away now. I was awake enough to suffer over his leaving. “How’s Norma?” he asked.

“Too chic for words.” I told him about her new figure. “Joe, when are you coming back?”

“There are lot of things to settle, and my mother is still on medication. She collapsed completely.”

“I guess I’m surprised at that.”

We drove up in front of the building. When Big Bob saw Joe’s car, he broke into a grin and saluted. Joe leaned over and gave me a kiss. I was trying to hide my panic. All I could think of was that I might never see Joe again. He would crash or there would be some terrible catastrophe. My eyes must have been the size of hubcaps. Joe gave me a sad smile. “We’ve had enough tragedy, Anna. I’ll phone you as soon as I get home.”

Ma was working late. When she came in I was watching a game show with my feet stretched out on the coffee table and a glass of wine in my hand. Ma stood in the doorway, her face swiveling from the TV screen to the wineglass. I could see the muscles in her jaw bulge with the effort not to ask.

“I saw Joe,” I said.

“And?”

“I don’t know what’s next.”

“What do you want to be next?”

“He said he’d call the minute he landed. That’s all I can think of.” I looked at my watch, then took another slug of wine.

“Did you eat?”

“No. Can’t. Later.” I glared at the phone. That bastard. Ring already.

After a while Ma sat down beside me with a plate of melon and prosciutto. The phone rang. Vanna White clapped her hands with glee.

“I’m here,” he said.

“In the airport or at your apartment?”

“Airport. There were delays at LaGuardia. The worst runways on the eastern seaboard.”

“Joe, will you marry me?”

There was a long silence. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

“At least it’s not a no.”

“It’s not a no.”

“So you’re going to think about it.”

“Yes.”

“You’re the love of my life,” I said.

“I knew that,” he said.

We hung up and I looked at Ma. Her eyes were full of tears.