Things Worth Remembering (21 page)

That spring things were finally fairly normal, and one evening the following summer while we were eating dinner on the patio, she looked across the table at me and said, “I’m sorry I missed so much of your life last year, Maisey.”

I stood up and said, “No problem,” before I rushed into the house to get more ice. I like my drinks to have plenty of ice.

From the eighth grade on, my friends seemed to live at our house, especially Jackie. Mother continued taking me to Indy to shop three or four times a year, only now Jackie went too, and sometimes Heidi and Caitlin. They were always asking when we were going again. She was the mother who took us to concerts during the winter and amusement parks each summer. During those years, Mother always had to have a five-passenger vehicle—at least.

In the summer when the girls came over to swim, everyone took a turn sitting on a lounger by Mother, telling her a good story or asking her advice about something or other. She listened to them, and they listened to her. She was forever their teacher and friend. Sometimes I felt like telling them to go home, she was my mom—but then I’d remember what she had done, and I was glad someone was there to divert her attention from her only child.

My friends, my dad, and my activities were a buffer between my mother and me, and when I graduated from high school, a university two states away took over where they left off. But today, watching the water pour in sheets over the windshield, this thought has occurred to me: If I were dying and my life flashed before my eyes, the first thing I would see, and the last, is my mother.

Kendy

I do hope that’s the last pit stop before I get to the hospital. I’m making good time, despite two stops, and I should be at the hospital by three. I haven’t even turned on the radio or listened to CDs. I’ve hardly been aware of time passing, of miles covered.

I am aware, however, of the time travel I’ve
been doing since I pulled onto the interstate. Now I’ve landed in my dark bedroom, where much of a year was lost to me.

I have looked at it another way as well: During those many months,
I
was lost. I wandered in “a far country,” not really wanting to find my way back home. Home was too painful. Home was where I had betrayed my husband; home was where I had lost our baby boy.

I lost him on a Friday morning, the week Maisey was at camp. Luke had not yet left for work when the cramping and bleeding started. I was doing nothing more strenuous than making our bed. It didn’t matter that the chances of my becoming pregnant were so slim I never bothered with any type of birth control, and it didn’t matter that my doctor had said the chances of carrying the baby to term were minimal. I had seen my son’s heart beating on the ultrasound monitor, I had felt him moving inside of me, and I had already imagined Miller Luke’s chubby arms encircling my neck.

“Luke!” I called that morning, holding my stomach with both hands, as if that could keep our son safely in my womb.

We were at the hospital in less than an hour, but though I’ve heard of incredibly premature babies surviving, our son did not. He lived only long enough for Luke and me to see him, to hold for the briefest minutes his tiny form wrapped in a warm blanket, to say, “We love you, sweet boy.” To say good-bye.

If only I could have kept him safe inside of me a little longer. If only I had been restricted to my bed sooner. I must have repeated those
if only
’s ten times on the way home that afternoon, each time Luke nodding as though he had just heard it. I barely remember standing in the cemetery that Monday morning with Luke, Maisey, Miller, and Anne—all five of us crying, Maisey standing beside her dad, squeezing his hand. I stood between Luke and Miller, already beginning my journey to a place where I hoped no one could find me.

I hardly got out of bed the first month. Luke asked Miller and Anne to let Maisey stay with them until school started, not wanting her to see me so devastated. He told Maisey that I wasn’t myself, that I needed time to get over losing her baby brother. Luke had never seen me in such a state or anything remotely close to it. Most evenings he would come in and lie beside me and try to engage me in simple conversation about his day or Maisey’s. I’d lie there with my arm crooked over my eyes and try to listen, and then I’d turn toward him and listen to the sound of his voice with my eyes closed. I remember his hand on my shoulder, his kiss on my forehead.

I got up, of course. I had to go to the bathroom. I also showered some days but quickly and without fooling with my hair or applying makeup. When Luke came in from work, he’d check on me, ask if I’d eaten anything, insist I have something for dinner. I knew I had to cooperate to an extent or he would snatch me out of my hiding place and take me to a doctor or the hospital. I began to eat some of whatever he brought: soup, a sandwich, a salad, even a piece of fruit, if he would just let me be. “Thank you,” I’d say.

He studied as much as he could about depression. He decided I was having a major depressive episode, combined with postpartum depression (wouldn’t that be magnified if a mother didn’t bring her baby home?), and when winter set in, seasonal affective disorder. He sensed the effect gloomy weather might have on me even before he read about it. By the end of September he opened the blinds before he left for work, knowing how much I love the sunshine, and turned on the lamp by my chaise longue, hoping, I’m sure, that the light would beckon me that far from my bed. He continued to do these things long after he realized I shut the blinds and turned off the light as soon as he left.

He was also tenacious about asking me to let Paula visit. She had stopped by many times, bringing me flowers, books, notes from my former students. For weeks I was asleep when she came, or pretended to be. When Luke begged me to see her, I finally relented. Like Luke, she came in and lay beside me. “I’m sorry, Kendy,” she’d say. Eventually she began to say more than that on her weekly visits, and eventually I half listened as long as she talked about nothing that mattered.

By sometime in October, I put on one of my two sweat suits after my shower and gathered my hair into a wild ponytail. I’d pull the bedspread up and lie on top of it, covering myself with a throw. I hoped Luke would call this progress. I still wished to sleep constantly; that’s all I had energy for.

“I feel like a balloon that’s losing its air,” I said once, trying to explain to Luke how very weary I felt. It was a rather bad simile, but it was the best I could do. When I did wake up, I wanted to sleep again and found myself taking a sleeping pill even though I had already slept for hours.

When Luke complained of how many bottles of sleeping pills I was consuming, I told him they were over the counter and much milder than prescription sleeping pills. “Still,” he said.

So I began alternating sleeping pills with allergy pills, which contained the same ingredients but in smaller doses. Sleep served as Novocain to deaden the pain of guilt and regret and sadness, and it allowed me to spend my days wandering in the darkness, far away from home.

I tried to go to Miller and Anne’s for Thanksgiving, I really did, but as I told Luke and Maisey after I had dressed for the occasion and actually put on makeup, I just couldn’t do it, not yet. I had managed to go to church once before Thanksgiving, but the mere act of greeting people and trying to assure them I was better overwhelmed me. I told Luke I was sorry but to please tell anyone who asked that I’d be back as soon as I was comfortable in public again. “I’m just indisposed,” I said. “Tell them I’m indisposed.” Somehow he covered for me.

When December arrived, Luke broached the subject of decorating the tree. The task seemed insurmountable, and just thinking of it made me laugh. So the following week, having graduated to holding a book in my lap as I lay on the bedspread with a throw over me, I heard Luke and Maisey putting up the tree, the requisite Christmas carols playing on the stereo. Tears spilled down my face when I heard through my closed door the strains of “O Holy Night” and remembered what life had been like when I had loved living.

Maisey spent New Year’s Eve at church again and went to Jackie’s when the party was over. I heard her telling Luke rather tentatively to have a happy new year, and I got out of bed and came into the living room as she was collecting her things to leave.

“Maisey,” I said.

“Jackie’s mom is waiting, Mother.”

“I just want you to know I love you.”

“Okay,” she said, heading for the door.

“And, honey,” I said, exhausted by the effort of speaking to my darling child, “I hope you have a good new year.”

“Thanks,” she said, and she was gone.

Luke lay beside me that night. “We conceived our son a year ago tonight,” I whispered.

“I know,” he said.

I rolled over and soaked my pillow with tears. Luke curled up behind me, holding me, until I finally felt myself slipping into sleep, relieved that the worst year of my life was coming to an end.

“Better?” Luke asked the next morning.

“I hope,” I said.

I showered and stayed up much of the day. I even ate at the table with Luke and Maisey that night, listening to Maisey’s reports about the party the night before and about Jackie’s bursting into her parents’ room when they got home from it, clanging two pans together and shouting, “Happy New Year!” Luke said it was no wonder they agreed to let Jackie stay with us so often.

But it was February before I dressed every morning, tried to do a small load of wash every afternoon, and even fixed something for dinner several nights a week, if you call grilled cheese sandwiches dinner. Spring came early, and I put on a jacket and began to sit on the deck, soaking up the sun. I realized sometime in March that I wasn’t taking sleeping pills anymore, and when Paula stopped by, I joined in the conversation, at least asking questions and smiling when smiling was called for.

One day during Paula’s
spring break, she asked if I was going to try to teach the following year.

“I deserved to lose the baby, Paula.”

“What?” she asked.

“I deserved to lose the baby.”

“What do you mean, honey?”

“Nothing.”

Before too many more weeks passed, swearing her to secrecy, I gave her a summary of my time with Clay. “I thought I loved him,” I said, a summary of my summary.

“I don’t think losing your baby and crossing the line with Clay are related, Kendy. Could you give yourself that much of a break?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve started back to church. I’ve been listening to my worship music. I don’t think I’m well, but I’m better. In the last few weeks, a vivid image has comforted me from the time I wake up in the morning until I fall asleep at the end of the day: Ragged and weary, I’m caught up in the embrace of a tender Father who’s been watching for me, longing for me to come home.”

Paula’s eyes filled with tears. She got up from her chair to sit beside me on the glider, holding my hand until Luke came home and asked what we were up to.

“Girl stuff,” Paula said.

I smiled, but how I dreaded the day I would have much the same conversation with him.

Maisey

I hold my breath when we walk into a house that is eerily quiet. I hold it again when we enter the kitchen. I see a note on the kitchen table, my name scrawled on the envelope in Dad’s handwriting. Tearing it open, I read that Mom is running an errand and won’t be back for quite a while. Dad is at a meeting and should be back by five.

So the house is empty. What a relief.

I pour a soda and walk out on the patio, sit in the sun, and pray that everything can go on as usual, at least until the wedding is over. Marcus is returning phone calls and grabbing a book from his room before he comes out to chill awhile with me. These may be the last hours we’ll have to ourselves before we rush to my car and leave for our first night as husband and wife.

I wonder where Mother is. Maybe she’s avoiding me as I have been avoiding her.

That is very unlikely. She’s always been one to confront— me or anyone else in her “sphere of influence.” That would be one of her favorite phrases. Maybe it’s the teacher in her. When we were still in elementary school, maybe fifth grade, Heidi, Caitlin, Jackie, and I were out here dancing on the patio with Mother. She was trying to show Jackie another move besides the sprinkler.

“Girls,” she said, stopping her demonstration and walking over to our CD player. “Come here!” The four of us gathered around quickly; Mother seldom gave commands. She pushed Repeat and listened to a few lines, stopped the CD, skipped back again, and listened one more time. “Do you hear that?” We looked at each other and then at her. “Do you really think we need to be listening to these lyrics? This is trash. Really. And you’re not going to fill your minds with it on my watch.”

Jackie ran to her purse and pulled out another CD. “How about this one?”

We put it on and were relieved that one of our favorites received unqualified approval from the most important censor in our lives.

Of course the worst confrontation took place the night she came to my room after Dad tucked me in, wanting to discuss the “distance” that had come between us during the months she went on sabbatical in her room.

By the time Mother had returned to the land of the living, I was able to look at her without throwing up, but everything had changed, and by that summer I think she began to realize it. That fall she was teaching in another district and got home later than she had before, and I had started high school and was involved in so many activities I usually got home even later than she did. That seemed a good enough explanation for the “distance,” but when she sat on my bed that night in November and brushed the hair out of my eyes, I realized it wasn’t completely adequate.

“I miss you,” she said.

Not to worry,
I thought,
you have stupid Clay.
Of course I never saw them alone together after that day in the kitchen, but that didn’t mean anything; I hadn’t seen them alone together
before
that day either.

I didn’t say any of that, of course. Mother’s the confronter, not me.