Together Alone (3 page)

“Come on inside, Mom,” called her oldest, Carl. “We’ll take pictures in the living room.”

“Out here!” she called back.

“The light is dimming out there.”

Indeed it was. Dusk was imminent. But she wasn’t as dumb as they thought. “It’s still brighter here than it is inside.”

“We can use a flash in here.”

“You can use a flash out here, too.” She grinned. “It’s here or not at all, Carl. It’s
my
birthday.” The grin thinned. “You’ll have to tell your father we’re out here. Where is he? I thought he was puttering around the woodshed, but I don’t see him there. Find him for me, Carl?”

Carl retreated into the house, but only for a minute. When he returned, he wasn’t alone. The other sons were with him, and the daughters-in-law, and, trailing dutifully, the grandchildren. Before Myra could do more than pat her hair and check to make sure that her collar lay flat, she was surrounded by family, kneeling in front, sitting beside, standing behind.

In the crush came the thought that maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all, that the grass under the willow would be hurt, but it seemed too late to say that, and then there was the matter of Frank.

“Where’s your father, Carl?” she asked, looking around. She didn’t see Frank anywhere. “I want him sitting on this bench.” She tried to oust the grandchildren to her left, but they were packed in too tight.

Carl put the camera to his eye. “Look here, everyone.”

“Where’s
Frank?
We can’t take a picture without him.”

There was murmuring behind Myra and a snicker or two in front. She ignored them, sitting straighter, putting on the kind of starched face that Carl wouldn’t care to photograph.

“I want Frank here,” she insisted. “It’s only right. He’s part of this family.”

“Take the picture, Carl.”

“It’s getting darker.”

“Mommy, I’m bit!”

“On the count of three,” Carl said from behind the camera.

Myra sat forward, looking to see if Frank was off to the side, wading in the pond. He did that sometimes, when the air was warm.

“One…two…look here, Mom.”

“But your father—”

From behind her came a gentle, “Myra,” and Linda’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s all right. He’ll be along. What if you smile, and then we can surprise Frank with the picture?”

Unsure, Myra looked back at her. “Should we?”

“Definitely.”

“But he may be angry that we didn’t wait.”

“He won’t be angry. He’ll be pleased.”

Myra wanted that more than anything in the world. Pleasing Frank was crucial. It was the key to her survival. It was what made her steady that heavy load she carried, what made her turn away from death, even those times when she was so tired of fighting that she wanted only to close her eyes and succumb.

She lived on for Frank.

“Look at Carl,” Linda urged, and Myra was unsettled enough to do it.

“That’s it,” came the camera’s voice, sounding enough like Frank’s to put Myra momentarily at ease. “On the count of three, everyone say ‘cheese.’ One, two, three—”

There was a collective, “Cheeeeeese,” and a flash of light.

Myra neither smiled nor spoke. It wasn’t Frank behind the camera, after all, but Carl, and she wasn’t sure Frank would like being left out. If he was angry, he could argue with Carl.

But it didn’t work that way. She was the one who lived with him. She was the one who suffered.

The count came again, the collective, “Cheeeeeese,” and the flash, and then the crowd that had swarmed down on her so suddenly, as suddenly dispersed. The back door slapped again and again, until at last it was still and all was quiet.

Myra closed her eyes. She let the warm night breeze cleanse the space around her. Then, silent as always, she slipped to her knees and began fluffing the grass, combing it with her fingers, caressing the soil beneath. This was the most beautiful spot around. It was right to take a family picture here. This was a place for reunions.

P
ART OF THE BEAUTY OF HAVING A CHILD, EMILY
decided, was the reflection it brought to one’s own life. Through Jill, she remembered things that would have otherwise been lost—overnights with giggling friends, the fear of being left chairless when the music stopped, the warm, wet flush of a first kiss. As Jill experienced things, Emily relived them.

So, now, she relived leaving home. She relived the frantic shopping and packing, the last teary gatherings with friends, the fear of a faceless roommate, the terror of academic failure. She also relived the excitement, because, in hindsight, going to college had been the single most pivotal point in her life. She had met Doug the first week. They had been married within the year.

It had worked for her. But for Jill, she wanted more. She wanted four years of study and fun, a degree, traveling with friends, sharing an apartment, getting a job, building a name—then coming back to live nearby.

Thinking of Jill’s eventual return was one way to fight the sadness of her going away. Another was to keep busy, which Emily did readily in her capacity as laundress, social secretary, and cooker of favorite meals. Still there were times, as Jill whirled through her final preparations, when Emily stood watching her, wondering where the years had gone, wishing them back. There had been a solace in knowing how Jill spent her time and with whom. There had been a luxury in determining it.

Now she was losing her grip.

It had to be, but that fact didn’t ease Emily’s dread. The time was too short, four days gone in a flash. Before it seemed at all possible, Emily found herself behind the wheel of the wagon, with Jill’s eyes fixed on the turnpike ahead, and every inch of spare space behind them filled.

Emily tried to think of what might have been forgotten. “Do you have your bank check?” It represented Jill’s summer’s earnings and would be her spending money at school.

“In my wallet.”

“Your tuition receipt?” She had to show it to get her dorm key.

“In my pocket.”

“The campus map?”

“Right here,” held aloft in the tightest of grips.

“Careful. Don’t crush it.”

Jill relaxed her hand.

As they passed Springfield, Emily tried to think of last bits of advice. Time was running out fast. “You should be able to pick up curtains and a carpet at stores on the edge of campus.”

“I know. I have a list of places.”

“Go with your roommate.”

“Of course.”

“Don’t wander around alone.”

“I’ll be fine, Mom.”

They passed Worcester. As straight as the road was, Emily’s stomach swerved.

“Say no like you mean it.”

“Huh?”

“If some boy tries to pressure you. Be firm. Use your knee.”

Jill sighed loudly.

When they passed the Weston tolls and Boston materialized on the horizon, Emily felt a crowding of emotion, overlaid with hollowness, shot with dread. Then Jill took her hand.

They said little more for the rest of the trip, holding hands that way until they pulled off at the Cambridge tolls, and then life switched to fast-forward. They found the dorm and unloaded the car. They met Jill’s roommate and the girls across the hall, down the hall, and around the corner. They put things in drawers. They filled the closet, made the bed, spread Myra’s afghan. They set up a desk lamp and the answering machine and Jill’s computer.

Fast-forward ended abruptly, with the room as neat as it would probably be for the rest of the term, and nothing else for Emily to do. So they sat on Jill’s bed, just the two of them plastered side by side, and looked at the pictures Jill had brought. There was one of Jill and five friends, crowding together in laughter at the Davieses’ party, one of Jill and her two best friends, Marilee and Dawn, one of the same three girls and their mothers.

“I like this one a lot,” Emily remarked. The other mothers, Kay and Celeste, were her own two closest friends. She had a copy of the print on her kitchen corkboard. “And this one a
whole
lot.” It was a montage of five of the Larry prints, with Emily and Jill in varying states of connection.

“My sister,” Jill teased.

“Your mother.”

“They’ll never guess. Just think of all that you won’t have to do with me gone.”

Emily gave her a look. “Are you kidding? I’m spending the next month cleaning your room.”

“Don’t
touch
my room. I want everything the same when I go home. I’ll clean then. It’s only seven weeks ’til fall break, less if I get lonesome. Maybe I’ll take a bus home and surprise you some weekend.”

Emily’s throat tightened. She was losing her daughter.
Oh God
. “I want you to have fun here, Jill,” the rational side of her said. “These will be an incredible four years. I just know they will.”

“What about you, Mom? Will you be okay?”

Emily felt a thudding inside. She put an arm around Jill. “I’ll be fine.”

“I don’t like the idea of your being alone.”

“Your father will be home at the end of the week.”

“Yeah. For two days, before he leaves again. Can’t you get him to stay home more? It isn’t fair to you that he’s gone all the time.”

Emily swallowed her agreement. Loyalty to Doug made her say, “He has to work. He wouldn’t travel so much if it weren’t important.”

“I know, but you’ve always had me before, and now you won’t.”

“I’ll have Kay and Celeste, and John, and all the other people I know around town. I’ll have Myra, who loves to sit and talk, and if I can’t clean your room, I’ll clean the rest of the house, and when I’m done with that, I’ll do the room over the garage.”

“My playroom?” Jill asked in dismay.

“You haven’t played there in years. It has the potential for being a great little apartment.”

“My friends and I loved it. Can I live there next summer?”

“Not if someone else is paying for that privilege.”

“You’d really rent it out?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s
ours
.” Which was just what Emily had told Doug when he had first suggested it. As though hearing the thought, Jill said, “Daddy’s the one who wants to do it, isn’t he?”

Emily wondered if Jill resented Doug’s not being there at the dorm with them. Plenty of other fathers were. “Why do you think that?”

“Because he isn’t home enough to
care
whether some stranger lives in our house.”

“It’s the space over the garage,” Emily argued, as Doug had, “and it’s a good thirty feet from the house. It has a separate entrance, not even on the house side. We won’t see a thing.”

“
Was
it his idea?”

“I don’t remember whose idea it was,” Emily lied, because whose idea it was didn’t matter, “but it does make sense. The money will come in handy. Maybe then your father could stay home more.” She raised the last picture. It was another from the Larry batch. Doug was sitting on the front steps, Emily one step lower with her arm around his thigh, Jill one step higher with her arm around his neck.

Emily had the impression that they were restraining him, deliberately holding him there, which wasn’t all that absurd, given that he had run back to answer the phone again, shortly before the shot had been snapped.

“Nice picture,” Emily said, but suddenly she wasn’t thinking of Doug. She was thinking that the time had come, the inevitable last few grains of sand through the hourglass. She was hearing freshman sounds in the hall, knowing that Jill should be out there, not in here with her.
Oh God
. “I should go,” she whispered, and the tears came then, helpless tears that flowed with love. “You be good.”

Jill threw her arms around her neck and held on tight.

“Be good,” Emily repeated in the same choked whisper, “and have fun, and study, and call me.”

Jill was crying, too. Emily could feel the sobbing rhythm and hated it,
hated
it, but loved the warmth and the closeness.

“Call me,” Emily repeated.

“I will. I’ll miss you. I’ll worry.”

Emily held her back, startled by that. “Worry? About me?”

Jill nodded, but she didn’t elaborate, and Emily was on the verge of an all-out deluge, knowing that the longer she stayed, the worse it would be. So she stood quickly, gave Jill a last hug, and ran from the room.

She was barely out the door when she turned right back. She shouldn’t have done it, because Jill hadn’t had time to move. She was sitting alone on the bed, her face teary, looking forlorn.

“Oh God,” Emily whispered, then said, “I’m going straight to Grannick, but I may stop at the market before I go home. If you call and I’m not there, just leave a message, and I’ll call back. We may have to do that for a while, until you start classes and things settle down. I’ll be in tonight, but not tomorrow morning. I’m having breakfast with Kay and Celeste.” She caught her breath. “Oh God,” she whispered again. She ran to the bed and gave Jill a final last hug. “Want to walk me down?”

“
Go
, Mom.”

• • •

“It was
awful
,” Emily cried at the Eatery, emotional even twenty hours after the fact. “I have no idea how I found my way back to the car, and then I could barely see the road, I was crying so hard. She looked so
alone
sitting there on that bed.”

Celeste grinned. “And two minutes after you left, she was probably out in the hall having a grand time. Did you talk with her last night?”

Emily searched her pockets for a tissue. “Uh-huh.”

“And?”

She blotted her eyes. “Uh-huh. A grand time. Great girls, hot guys, quote unquote. How about you? Have you heard from Dawn?”

“Not a word, but that was the deal. She agreed to go to college in Grannick in exchange for my pretending she’s miles away. I can’t call her. She calls me. And she hasn’t.”

“That should only be my problem,” Kay mused, catching the eye of the waitress and pointing at her coffee cup. “Three times the first day, twice yesterday. The books say that’s normal. What they don’t say is that it costs. I was forewarned about tuition, room-and-board, and textbooks, but none of them mentioned the phone bill. I’ll have to pay it before John sees it. He’ll hit the roof. He still thinks she should have gone to UMass.”

“Hah,” Emily said. “John may make noise, but he can’t fool me.” She knew him well. She had been his friend before Kay’s, and both of those, before the girls were even born. “John is proud as punch that she’s in Washington. You wait. He’ll be looking forward to those calls.”

“Three times a day?” Kay asked and looked impatiently around. “I need caffeine. You do know that if I didn’t love you guys so much, I’d never be here this early.”

Emily knew about that love. Monday meetings with Kay and Celeste, sans spouses or offspring, were therapeutic. They had breakfasted through the summer and would switch back to dinners once Kay, who taught eighth-grade English, returned to work. “When does school start?”

“Thursday. Ahhh. Here she comes.” She extended her coffee cup to the waitress with a grateful smile, then, declaring a pre-school splurge, ordered a hearty breakfast.

Emily and Celeste ordered more modestly.

Celeste watched the waitress leave. “Seems like yesterday our kids were taking the orders.”

Emily knew what she meant. “It was, almost.”

“It’s weird waking up to an empty house. I keep looking into Dawn’s room, just to make sure she’s gone.”

“Do you miss her?” Emily wanted to know she wasn’t the only one who felt all hollowed out.

“She just left.”

“So did Marilee,” Kay said, “still I miss her. We’ve been separated before, and for longer periods of time than two days, but college is different. It’s significative.”

Emily thought that sounded right.

“It’s also about time,” Celeste avowed. “Dawn’s been my responsibility and mine alone—which is nice, when you think that I haven’t had to pander to her father all these years, and not so nice when you think of the work. I’m the one who’s had to nag and pester and bribe her to keep studying. That’s the down-side of single parenthood.”

Just as Emily was thinking it, Kay said, “It’s the down-side of
motherhood.
”

“Do I miss her?” Celeste asked. “Emotionally, yes. Practically, no. I feel relieved, like I got her where she is, and now someone else is sharing the responsibility.”

“Who?” Emily asked, eager for reassurance. She trembled to think of Jill alone in Boston.

“Whoever—the school, the adviser, the RA.
Her. She
’s responsible for more of her life. Finally.”

“Do you think she’ll do okay?” Kay asked, with good cause. Of the three girls, Dawn was both the brightest and the most impulsive. More than once, Jill and Marilee had kept her from doing things she would have come to regret.

Emily hoped she would find new friends to guard her like that. She worried about it even with Jill, who was eminently sensible. Jill thrived on being surrounded by friends. In the rush to align herself with a group in college, she might make a mistake. For all Emily knew, the girls on her floor, who had seemed so nice, might have been waiting for their parents to leave to show their true colors. For all Emily knew, they might want to drink themselves drunk every night, buzz-cut their hair, and snort coke. For all Emily knew, the guys would be cute and polite and thoroughly lecherous. For all Emily knew, serial killers staked out the cafeteria lines.

Celeste didn’t seem worried. “Dawn will be fine. She knows what I expect. God only knows I’ve drummed it into her enough. Actually, her father is making noises now. Isn’t that a hoot? The shadow takes form, after all these years. She got her brains from him, and now he’s footing the bill. Little did he know when he agreed to pay her college tuition in his rush to be free of me, what it would cost.”

“Little did any of us know,” Emily remarked. “It’s tough.”

Celeste eyed her strangely. “Doug does well.”

“Doing well barely meets the cost of the tuition.”

“But he’s a single-practitioner. He markets his mind and works out of the den. He has no overhead to speak of.”

“He has huge travel costs.”