Then Sings My Soul (2 page)

LATE OCTOBER 1994

South Haven, Michigan

CHAPTER 1

Nel Stewart pushed her bronze, wire-rimmed glasses up on her nose as she peered through the thick window over the wing of the plane and watched the sunrise turn the tops of the gray clouds golden yellow. The color reminded her of the aspens she'd hiked beneath the day before. She'd wanted to soak in as much of Santa Fe as she could, hoping the life she'd found there in nature and the art she loved so dearly would buoy her, if not brace her, for what awaited her in Michigan. She turned a grape-sized, turquoise stone ring around the fourth finger of her right hand. It was one of the first pieces of jewelry she'd made, setting it herself in a wide band of pounded silver.

She grimaced as she bit back the corner of her thumb's cuticle until it bled.

“Coffee?” the flight attendant whispered, leaning slightly over the sleeping bear of a man in the seat next to her. “This is my last pass before we land in Detroit.”

“Sure. Black, please. And do you have a bandage?” Nel raised her eyes apologetically.

“I do.” The flight attendant—Amanda, her name tag read—smiled as she bent toward the bottom of the refreshment cart. Nel studied Amanda's perfectly coiffed blonde hair pulled into a tight bun, with not a stray hair or split end in sight, and she felt suddenly insecure about her own long hair, loose, untrimmed, and uncolored for months. She'd felt proud of the salt-and-pepper grays at her temple, and the section on the side she'd allowed to form into a couple of dreadlocks, the way many of her artisan friends wore theirs in Santa Fe. Now she felt almost silly.

Amanda finished rummaging in the beverage cart and handed Nel a bandage.

As Nel pulled the beige strip tight around her stinging thumb, she thought about how she didn't feel forty-three. A couple of dreadlocks flopped toward her face as she reached forward to pull the tray table down from the seat in front of her.

Her mom loved to say, “You're only as old as you feel.”

Amanda handed Nel a napkin followed by a steaming cup of coffee.

Nel returned her gaze to the window and wondered if her mom, Catherine Stewart, had felt eighty-two, or if she'd gone right on feeling young until she died two days ago. Nel thought she'd been aware of how old her parents were getting, but in reality, she hadn't been. She'd failed them both in the worst possible way, not being there when Mom died. Nel pulled the shade down over the window as the sun glared through and made it nearly impossible for her to read and review the latest catalog featuring her jewelry designs. She should've been more cognizant of her parents' senescence, but each time they spoke on the phone—almost daily—her mom's voice had sounded the same as it always had, vibrant and wise, steadfast and kind. Definitely not doddering or declining. And for that reason alone, Nel was glad her mom had died suddenly. Nel doubted she could've handled watching her mom suffer through a long, cruel illness such as cancer or emphysema as so many of her friends' parents had, their faces once taut with joy eventually drooping with despair. And yet as glad as she was that Catherine hadn't had to suffer, she felt heartbroken and angry. She'd never have the chance to say good-bye.

Nel hadn't thought it strange the phone had rung early Wednesday morning. Jakob often called at that time of day, forgetting the time difference between Michigan and New Mexico. But she had been devastated by the reason for his call—that Mom had passed. Not that she didn't adore her father. But she always figured he'd pass first since he was twelve years Catherine's senior. Nel talked to him just as frequently as Catherine. At least once a week she sat at her kitchen table overlooking the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and listened as her parents passed the phone back and forth and bickered about whose turn it was to talk. Nel had noticed that, unlike Mom's vibrant voice, Dad's voice sounded old. Gravelly. As though he had a chunk of chicken potpie stuck in his throat but didn't care and kept talking anyway. That's how he had sounded Wednesday, and before she knew the reason for his call, she had wished he'd cough or clear his throat.

“Mom's gone.”

Nel had listened, dumbstruck, as he explained what had happened …

“She went to bed as usual last night …

“Didn't complain of feeling ill at all …

“Doctor gave her a clean bill of health a couple of weeks ago. Tweaked her blood-pressure medication, sure, but nothing more than that …

“No signs she wouldn't wake up this morning …

“Mattie is helping with the details …

“Mom had her wishes written up and taped to the inside front cover of her Bible. Hymns picked out and everything. Already paid for a plot for both of us in the cemetery …”

The man in the seat next to her stirred. He'd taken full advantage of the hospitality kit the airline provided, removing his shiny loafers and tucking them neatly under the seat in front of him, pulling the nonskid footies over his gold-toed black socks—the same sort Dad wore—crossing his arms as if he wished there were something, or someone, between them, and pulling the cobalt sleep mask over his eyes soon after the wheels of the plane left the tarmac. She noticed the thick gold band on the ring finger of his left hand and found herself wondering what his life was like. Did he have children? He was certainly middle-aged, the gray around his own temples giving that much away, but he was trim, lacking the paunch of extra weight common on so many of her peers. Had his wife aged along with him, or did she have to work hard now to keep the flesh beneath her skin taut and smooth? Was he a hard and detached businessman like many of her parents' friends, or had being born in the middle decades of the century softened and aroused him as it had her, growing up serenaded by the music of Buffalo Springfield and Arlo Guthrie, Bob Marley and Joni Mitchell and the like?

Nel thought of Dr. Sam Tucker, with whom she enjoyed her most recent and ongoing affair, though currently things were getting rocky between them. Sam hadn't been able to get off work to come to the funeral, and if she were honest, she was relieved. He was a doctor—an anesthesiologist—and quite good at it if one judged by his fancy car, designer clothes, and condominium overlooking one of Santa Fe's most beautiful vistas. She had been careful to avoid dating someone like him, cultured by most standards but essentially arrogant and materialistic. Up until she'd met Sam, she'd been content to enjoy informal but sensuous relationships with other artists like herself, affairs that almost seemed to be set to music, with Cat Stevens's songs and long monologues of Wallace Stegner and Walt Whitman playing in the background. She and her lovers would lie back on woolen Pueblo blankets under the golden canopy of autumn aspens of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains until the stars appeared, and then make love beneath the vast expanse of the Milky Way. She loved being surrounded by artists of all kinds, reveling in the undulation of a potter's wheel, the back-and-forth strokes of a paintbrush, like Georgia O'Keeffe's, bringing life to the deep, inner folds of desert flowers, or, as in Nel's case, the wrapping and stringing of beads, the rounding and polishing of stones, and the forming and hammering of metal.

Sam had been a major donor to Nel's artist colony, and as such, the guest of honor at a gala celebrating local folk artists at the New Mexico Museum of Art that spring. He'd caught her off guard as she stood, merlot in her plastic cup, swaying as she studied the way Cézanne had sketched the hard rock of the mountains along the horizon in his work
Les Baigneurs
. Cézanne's work so closely resembled the Rio Chama near Abiquiú that Nel wondered if the painter had actually been to New Mexico—though she didn't think so.

When Sam came over and introduced himself, she'd felt her cheeks redden—had it been from Sam or from the wine? Had he left her so immediately undone? Or was it the fact that they met near
Les Baigneurs
featuring six unclad men, while over her shoulder was the gesso-on-wood of Juan Amadeo Sanchez's
Christ on the Cross
—Jesus's downturned head, His simple expression, the horizontal lines of defeat.

Nel smiled to herself as she peered unseeing into the steaming cup of airline coffee she held with both hands. She remembered how Sam had placed his hand so gently on the small of her back that night at the museum, allowing his fingers to travel up her back and down again. As they walked to his car well before the gala ended, the summer wind had lifted her floor-length muslin skirt, causing it to billow behind her. It reminded her of the way Sanchez had painted Jesus's loincloth, as though the rags wafted against the Golgotha winds. Sam hadn't seemed to think anything odd of the fact that she was forty-three and had never married. No, Sam hadn't thought of her as an old maid at all. Quite the contrary, as he enjoyed every part of her that night and countless nights since then.

But those had been their best days. Until recently, through summer and into the fall, he'd been content to play by her rules: no commitment, no questions, no problem. The night before, they'd had another of the major fights occurring more and more often, but she was too worn out from the sudden news of her mom's death to make amends before she left town for the funeral.

Her ears popped, and she finished the last swig of coffee as the Fasten Seat Belts light illuminated and Nel prepared, along with everyone else, for landing.

CHAPTER 2

“How is he really?” Nel said over her shoulder as she reached for a suitcase that was about to pass by on the silver treads of the airport conveyor belt.

Jakob and Catherine's longtime next-door neighbor, Matilda—or Mattie, as she preferred to be called—had offered to pick up Nel in Grand Rapids that morning. Though she'd seen Mattie less than two years prior when she'd come home for Christmas, Nel was surprised by the way their old family friend had aged, deep new lines on her face, the way her lipstick—which she never went without—ran into the fine creases around her lips. Nel began to worry about how her father would look, and her mother, for that matter, in the casket the next morning. Nel recognized how absurd it was for her to have assumed time never advanced, that life and nature and thoughts and feelings in her hometown, no matter how long she'd lived away, somehow stayed unmoving and unchanged like a Polaroid photo.

“He's not well, Eleanor,” Mattie replied.

Eleanor.

The last time she'd heard someone call her by her full name, she'd been talking to her mom on Tuesday. She imagined Catherine then, standing in the kitchen, perhaps leaning against the aluminum-trimmed Formica counters, the red phone they'd purchased in the seventies and never replaced held against her ear, which most certainly smelled of White Shoulders cologne or Mary Kay cold cream, or both. Her toes might've been wiggling at the ends of the pair of fuzzy pink slippers Nel had sent her for her birthday earlier that summer. Catherine had been asking her to come home for Thanksgiving. Or Christmas. Or both.

“Come home, Eleanor Louise. I want to
see
you.”

Nel had felt the words sting. At the time she'd supposed the feeling had been regret. But in hindsight she realized it was more than that. It was grief, a premourning of all she'd lose when her mother passed, of all the things they'd never do—like sit on the porch swing and knit, have lunch or tea in town, spend a Saturday together watching old movies, and whatever daughters and mothers did when they lived close. Her mom had been right. Visiting once every year or two wasn't enough, and Nel deserved whatever guilt consumed her because she'd simply been too independent to come back to live in South Haven. If there was one thing she couldn't stand, it was disappointment in her parents' eyes, and she'd felt that when they'd spoken on Tuesday, even across a long-distance phone line.

Nel had tried to offer her mom an alternative. “I'll fly you and Dad out here in the spring, when the weather breaks up there. We'll visit the museums. You can see the O'Keeffes and the Beauregards, the—”

“Pshaw. I don't care about those right now. And I don't want to wait for spring. Besides, your father and I are getting too old to sit on an airplane for that long. Why, it'll take half a dozen stewardesses and wheelchairs to get us on and off the darn thing. Just come
here
, Nel-Belle.”

“I'll think about it,” she'd said.

The next morning, her dad had called to say her mom was gone.

Nel piled her two suitcases and two carry-ons into the trunk of the white Mercedes as Mattie fiddled with the heater controls on the shiny wooden dashboard. Mattie dressed as stunning as ever, wearing a black felt hat trimmed with purple feathers pulled quaint and snug over her head, a neat bob of gray curls resting precisely at the top of her thin shoulders, her protruding bones visible even beneath her mink coat.

“Brrrrr,” Nel said, plopping into the front passenger seat. The bing cherry–color leather matched the rest of the car's interior. She pulled off her fogged-up glasses and wiped them with the bottom edge of her T-shirt sticking out from beneath her surplus jacket.

“I'll say. Winter's coming early around here. Most of the leaves are already gone. The maples and ash finished turning last week.” Mattie turned up the defrost on the fogging front windshield. “Would you like to stop for a bite to eat, dear?”

“No—but, thanks. I'm not hungry.”

“You sure? I don't mind stopping.”

“I'm sure.”

As Mattie pulled away from the curb, Nel watched through the sliding-glass doors of the airport as the middle-aged man who'd sat next to her on the plane squatted and received two children—a school-age boy and a toddler girl—into his outstretched arms. A woman approached them, but she wasn't the toned, coiffed person Nel had imagined. Nor was she a dowdy, disheveled housewife. She was somewhere between those presumptions. Someone who looked real. Nel turned back toward Mattie, who had pulled off her hat and glanced in the rearview mirror to smooth her hair.

“So. About Dad.”

“He's a mess. Your mom's been worried about his mind for a while now.”

“His mind? She never mentioned anything to me about Dad's mind.”

“Little things, forgetting where he put something, the usual sort of fogginess, I think, for someone his age.” Mattie cast a glance at Nel, who was staring at her intently. “I'm sure if it was something to be concerned about, she would've told you.”

“I hope she would have. He didn't seem out of the ordinary when I was home Christmas before last …” Nel fished for details or assurance. The thought of Dad losing his mind was more than she could stand to think about in that moment.

“It's probably nothing more than his age, then.”

Nel would take Mattie's word for it. Besides, she'd see for herself soon enough how he was.

“Anyway,” Mattie offered, “losing someone after fifty-some years together, well, you can imagine it's taking a toll.”

Nel shook her head and tugged at a loose string unraveling from the bandage the flight attendant had given her. She couldn't imagine loving someone intimately for as long as her mother and father had.

“Yeah …” Her exhaled response created a circle of fog in the center of the passenger-side window.

Mattie reached over with a leather-gloved hand and patted Nel's knee as she had so many times when Nel was a young girl. “Tell me about you, Nel. What's new with you and all those exciting things you must be doing with your jewelry out in Santa Fe?”

Nel's weighted thoughts about her father lifted some with Mattie's gracious change of subject. “It's good. Really good. I design pieces for three national catalogs now, and I've been so busy with commissions I had to hire out a couple of apprentices to do my rock hunting and buying for me. It's nice having them around. They do some of the reproduction and prototype work too.”

One of her best apprentices, a young man named Matthew, had studied and even taught for a while at the William Holland School of Lapidary Arts in Georgia. He had helped her with the most recent design she was especially proud of, a ring formed from a thick and weighty band of silver hammered and then etched with the shapes of a tree, tiny birds in flight, and a small round sun. The design had gone to auction, several companies wanting exclusive rights and asking for similar pieces to match—bracelets, pendants, a wedding set. The ring would have to do for now, and she trusted that Matthew and the other freelance artisans whom the companies hired to make a large supply of copies would have enough work to keep them busy with this new piece, in addition to her other designs that were still in demand, and increasingly so as the holidays approached.

Her father was her biggest fan, and she'd grown up learning much of what she knew about gemstones, minerals, rocks, and the basics of jewelry design from him. Even though he was a hobbyist, his passion for lapidary far exceeded Nel's, and she imagined him as she'd watched him so many times, sitting at his table, open-bulbed lamps positioned around his faceting equipment just so, adjusting his magnification headband goggles over his eyes to amplify the angles and imperfections, the measurements and positions of the stones he carved, dismissing everything around him as he worked. Her earliest memories were of herself sitting on a high stool next to him watching his every move, every tool he used to cut and smooth cabochons, tumble and shine raw stones, and facet precious gems. As she grew up, she began to realize he was a bit different from other fathers, but she never minded. In fact, she admired the way he could hyperfocus on his hobby, a skill she also learned, which helped her achieve a great amount of recognition and high-quality work compared with her peers. She'd followed hard in his footsteps, sometimes literally stumbling behind him when she'd begged him to take her along to local rock shows, and when they had traipsed as a family down barren paths in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, where rusty dust swirled around their ankles and the earth's hills rose in waves as if straining to meet the sky above.

Traveling to rock and mineral shows with Jakob and observing his dogged pursuit of the perfect stone (or stones) were some of Nel's favorite memories. The shows were hosted mostly in fairground pole barns, flea market–style, with booth after booth and glass case after glass case of rocks and stones, raw and faceted, creating an endless maze of treasures and new things to discover. She remembered one man in particular who had a long white beard and wore overalls. At first glance, the stock he pitched and peddled at his tables appeared to consist of tree stumps and severed branches. Closer observation, however, revealed the specimens were pieces of petrified wood, aged circles of pulp hardened and solidified into rock-hard rings of rust and amber.

“Here, touch it. It's all right,” the man had offered, his beard rising and falling with each syllable. Her fingertips grazed the cold, inner concentric surface of the once-living piece of wood.

Nel and Jakob had continued to browse past massive hunks of the sharp-edged pink crystals of rhodochrosite; bright-orange carnelian; layered slices of chatoyant quartz (tigereye), agate, and jasper; emerald malachite as bright as the grass of their backyard when the sun hit it full on after an autumn rainstorm; fist-sized lime-green clusters of pyromorphite; deep-blue star sapphires streaked with white, which reminded her of the star of Bethlehem when finished into cabochons; fossils embedded with replicas of dragonflies, scorpions, and centipedes so perfect that Nel had wondered how they held so still for whatever massive event paralyzed them and then ended their fragile lives. Beyond the display cases and tables, rack after rack bent under the weight of strung beads in skeins that created a rainbow of colors before her—azure lapis lazuli, burning red hematite, sunny orange amber, and every shade in between; and an entire section of buckets overflowed with turquoise, her favorite then and now.

This is where they'd lost each other one particular day. She wasn't paying attention when Jakob stopped with a growing crowd of other rock hounds (as they called themselves) at a booth where a man who reminded her of a sideshow attendant dressed in a striped vest and bow tie demonstrated the newest Facetron laps—round stones about the size of a 45 vinyl record and used on the cutting machine for faceting. Rows of turquoise vendors were on one side of the main aisle, and the Facetron representative was on the other. Nel walked between the tables, stopping every so often to poke around in the heaping piles of nuggets, and by the time she realized her father had moved on, he was well out of sight, engulfed by a show hall now crowded shoulder to shoulder with people. She'd become so afraid, she didn't realize she'd stuffed into her dress pocket a pebble-sized piece of turquoise she'd been admiring when she'd sighted a security guard and pushed her way through the leggy crowd toward him.

It hadn't taken long for the guard to reunite Nel with her father. The guard had asked her for her father's name, and since her father was well known in the gem and mineral community, someone—an attendee? a salesperson? she couldn't remember—knew right away who and where he was.

“Daddy!” she'd cried, hot tears still moist on her flushed cheeks, knee bleeding through her white tights from when she'd tripped on a piece of carpeting bubbled up from electrical cords as she'd run toward the guard.

“There you are, my sweet baby bird!” He scooped her up and enveloped her with his great, solid arms. He cupped her face with his giant hand, wiping the tears from beneath her eyes with his calloused thumb. “I thought I'd lost you forever.”

That was the first time Nel had ever seen him so afraid, and the first time she knew a grown man's eyes could make tears.

She realized suddenly how much she'd missed him, too, living away for so long. Of course there was the everyday sort of missing him, like when she needed something fixed in her house, advice on turning a particularly difficult piece of stone, or the reassurance of his burly shoulder after a tough breakup. But this was more than that. It was, as with her mother, regret that she'd moved away at all. She'd chosen to live in Santa Fe on purpose when she left South Haven, because the town had been a favorite place for the three of them to travel when she was growing up. Part of those memories lingered there in her father's beloved Southwest, where rocks and gems could be plucked and found, as plentiful as blueberries at roadside stands in Michigan. But now, facing the loss of her mother, whatever original reason that drew her there—independence? the gathering of other artists?—dimmed in comparison to how badly she wanted to feel his hand upon her head again, to see the gleam of pride in his eyes that no other man had been able to replace. Not even the award-winning status she'd unintentionally garnered as a jewelry designer equaled how much her father's approval meant to her.

“Is he home?” Nel asked as they passed dried-up fields of corn, and others with the skeletons of sunflower stalks, their brown faces hanging lank. As they approached South Haven, Nel noticed how many storefronts had changed hands, new strip malls had been built, and everything felt bigger and yet smaller than she had remembered. She pushed her glasses up on her nose to get a better look as Mattie drove past the homes of her high school friends and others she'd hoped never to see again. Strange cars were parked in the driveways of old friends' homes. Young mothers stood talking on front-porch stoops where older mothers used to, and watched as toddlers pedaled trikes and Big Wheels and pink motorized miniature cars.