Traveling light, p.28
Traveling Light, page 28
“It’s gorgeous, Abby. It’s a beautiful home.”
“It’s not a home at all,” she said, walking away from me before I could answer.
I followed her through the marble-floored hallway to a small dining nook where chocolate brownies awaited us on antique china and coffee in a sterling silver service.
We sat across from each other, and neither one of us knew what to say. I began to regret that I’d arranged this visit. I took a sip of coffee.
“You hate me, don’t you?” Abby asked.
I spat my coffee, spattering brown droplets on the ivory tablecloth.
“I don’t hate you,” I said, wiping my mouth with the cloth napkin.
“I can feel it, how much you hate me, how much you think it was all my—”
“Abby, I don’t hate you. I only wish you weren’t with Brad. I don’t understand how—”
“No, Summer, you don’t. And it’s none of your business.”
“Okay,” I said, more than happy to let this subject go.
“Todd never let up about that, you know, about Brad. Every phone call. Every letter. Even when he was gone—you know, traveling. Those postcards he sent us? He was even doing it then! Here, look.” She stood and pulled a tea tin off the shelf. Todd had brought it to her from India. “I’ve been looking at these every night for the last month and a half.” She pulled out the stack of postcards and handed two to me. One was of a monument in Innsbruck:
“And remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.”—Emily Kimbrough.
And the other featured sleeping lions in Kinshasa:
“The things which matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.”—Goethe.
“See?” she said, leaning over my shoulder. “It was years before I understood about the postcards. I always thought they were about him. That’s how I read them. But, see, he understood that I wouldn’t listen to him. All those postcards from all over the world. They were about me. He was still trying to give me brotherly advice all the way from Zaire.” She looked at the postcard and repeated “Zaire.” She looked up at me. “He went to Zaire. When it still was Zaire. I wish I could do something like that.”
“You could,” I said.
She shot me a look. “Not brave enough. Besides, I’m stuck here, in my little prison. You know, Todd never saw this house? I’ve lived here, what? Seven, eight years? And he was never once invited inside.”
This was not at all what I wanted this visit to be. “Um…he would have loved it,” I said, looking around, knowing I lied but not having the courage to say anything else. “It’s beautiful.”
She laughed, a harsh, one-note exhalation. “Well, all this beauty comes at a price.”
“Everything has a price, Abby. Everything.”
“Some people have to pay more than others. Like Todd.” She stared down at the postcards as her face quivered in her effort not to cry.
I stood up. I didn’t know what to say or what to do. A minute stretched out into a decade as I stood there.
“So I can pay this,” Abby said through her tears. “This one is easy.”
“Oh, Abby, no,” I said. I saw her with new clarity, as though a dirty window had been scrubbed clean. I crossed to her and took her in my arms. “No, no, no. Are you staying to punish yourself? You can’t do that. You don’t need to do that.”
“It’s all my fault,” she said.
“No. No, it isn’t. That’s such bullshit! You’re not responsible for Todd’s death. You’re not responsible for him getting sick.” She buried her face in my neck. I stroked her hair. I rocked her. “And you know who would be the first to say that to you?” I took her by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length. The years between us felt reversed. “Todd, that’s who. He’d say this was utter bullshit, Abby, and you know it.”
“But—but…” She sniffed. “But I told him—”
“You told him what? That if he told people he was gay, he might get beat up? He might be embarrassed? That we all might be embarrassed? You were probably right, Abby. What—because you were a few years older you were supposed to be an expert? You’re not a psychiatrist. You didn’t hold a gun to his head and say, ‘You must fuck Becka Maynard’—did you? Did you?”
She laughed just a little and shook her head. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her eyeliner.
“Well, then,” I said, “how can it be your fault?”
“I suggested it.”
“But he actually did it. Not you.”
“He regretted it.”
“Abby, we all do things we regret. That’s just life. We’re human. We make mistakes.”
“But it was a horrible mistake. I should have told him that it didn’t mat—”
“Abby, listen to me: Maybe you wish you’d said things differently. But the bottom line is this: You are not responsible for Todd having AIDS.”
She closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. She opened her eyes and blinked. “Say it again,” she whispered. I did. A change went through her body, as if she’d just stepped into a warm bath. She opened her arms. We hugged each other. “Thank you,” she whispered into my hair. “Thank you. I always thought you thought that.”
There’d been some years I thought I thought that, too, but all I said was, “No.”
And as we ate all the brownies, every last one, and drank wine instead of coffee, I felt so light, so buoyant. As though I’d float out of my chair if I didn’t keep a hold on the table.
When Abby and I stood on the porch saying good-bye, her mailman walked, whistling, up the driveway.
“Oh, good,” Abby said. “I like the chance to go through it all first.”
“Do you have something to hide? Or does Brad?” I asked.
She laughed. “Both.” I shook my head as she thanked the mailman and sorted through the mail. “Bill, bill, bill,” she said, going through the hefty pile. “Radiology lab, my ass.” She held an envelope up to the fading afternoon light. “Bastard.” She tucked the offending letter into the pile and stopped cold. She blanched so rapidly, her childhood freckles stood out on her white skin.
“Abby?” I asked. “Abby? What is it?” I moved to her side and saw the unmistakable, beloved handwriting on the envelope she held.
“How?” she whispered. “H-how—”
“Open it!”
She dropped all the other letters. Some fell off the porch onto the soggy spring ground. She opened the letter with shaking fingers, reverent in her attempt to keep every word written by his hand intact. Inside was a piece of yellow notebook paper. I thought I might have to grab the porch rail to keep from lifting right off into the sky.
She read it. She smiled.
“He’s still at it,” she said. She handed it to me.
My dearest Abby,
“Life is too short to be the caretaker of the wrong details.”
—Alexandra Stoddard.
Let it go. I love you.
Todd
I handed it back, and she pressed it to her heart, then looked at the envelope again. “This is postmarked yesterday. How did he manage it?”
I felt that sensation of bird wings fluttering against my ribs. “Nicholas!”
“What?” Abby asked.
Todd couldn’t be sure of a date when he’d prepared these. Our brother had been playing a bingo game of his own.
“The package he—Nicholas took it to the post office—Oh, my God! I have to go! I have to check my mail!” I ran to the car. I glanced in the rearview mirror at the end of the long, winding drive. Abby stood on the porch, her hair and the discarded letters lifting gently on the wind.
Chapter Nineteen
I sprayed gravel pulling into the drive at the farm, one foot on the ground before the car was completely in park. I fumbled with the metal post box by the road. I yanked it open. Empty.
I roared up the driveway, slammed the car door shut, and ran, my heels sinking into the spring ground, to the back door.
My parents sat at the kitchen table. They each held a letter in their hand. Yellow notebook paper. “Did I get one?” I asked, panting.
My mother nodded and handed it to me.
I opened mine. I wanted to tear it open but, like Abby, wanted to keep even my own name and address written by my big brother’s hand.
Inside was:
Dear Summer,
Don’t hurry with Chaos. She’s a lot like you. She’s out to prove things that don’t matter, and she misses the main point. It’s gonna take some time.
“The pleasure of love is in loving. We are happier in the passion we feel than in that we arouse.”—François La Rochefoucauld.
I love you,
Todd
I tried to call Nicholas. Again there was no answer. All I said, after the beep, was, “Call me, please? Or come over? I miss you.”
Jacob answered at his new number, though. He was working again. By the end of next month he’d be back on his old “daytime drama.” Big Ed Baker was leaving the cult in a Waco-like fiasco.
He had a letter from Todd, too. Todd had addressed it to their own old Dayton home, and Jacob regretted that a yellow forwarding sticker obscured Todd’s handwriting. His read:
My dearest love,
I have nothing left to tell you. We have no unfinished business. All I can do is thank you, and remind you:
“Wherever you are and in every circumstance, try always to be a lover and a passionate lover. Once you have possessed love, you will remain a lover in the tomb, on the day of resurrection, in paradise and forever.”—Rumi.
I’ll be waiting, lover.
He stopped twice as he read it.
I read him mine, and he said, “I might just have to come take that cat away from you if you don’t get a move on.”
“I’m trying, Jacob. Really I am. And you couldn’t take this cat from me if you wanted to.”
As if in answer, Cooper chirped and leapt into my lap. He was growing up big, as yellow tomcats often seem to get, complete with boxing-glove paws with the spare toe—all four of them white to match his bib and belly. He sat upright, stiff and formal, facing me as I talked to Jacob, his eyes level with my own. He watched my lips move as if he were a deaf person, sometimes even reaching a paw to my lips as if mesmerized by their movement.
“I miss Todd,” I said. I hated that I said it.
There was a long silence.
“Yeah, me too.” I felt stupid, knowing what a gross understatement that was. After another pause Jacob said, “But we’ve got to move on, Summer. Let it go.”
Move on. Let it go. Just phrases in a language I couldn’t speak.
As the weather grew warmer, Chaos began to shed her winter, chili-powder coat for a slick, sassy one of red pepper.
Kelly worked with us, and I marveled at how she managed to conceal her boredom. Our lesson on this particular May evening was trying to cajole Chaos into a relaxed walk. She wanted to trot, and to trot fast. When she stopped trotting, she didn’t really ever admit to walking. Instead she jigged—a nervous, staccato gait, like a marionette puppet of a horse. I exhaled. I tried to weigh more than I did. I envisioned myself a torso of butter melting down her sides. I kept my shoulders back. I left the reins long and low, my knuckles growing grimy with her sweat and shedding hair.
After an hour of jigging and prancing and fussing her way through serpentines and circles and diagonal lines, she snorted and walked. She seemed to gain two inches on each side of her ribs as she just relaxed.
“What a good girl,” I said, leaning forward to rub her shoulder with one hand. “See? It didn’t have to be so hard. That’s all I wanted.”
“That’s all she wanted, too,” Kelly said, smiling in the orange pink glow of the setting sun. “She just thought you expected something more.”
The warm weather brought trouble at school. The students were restless, weary, and mentally already long gone from this building, especially the seniors. Every day became a struggle just to capture attention spans, much less maintain them. Classes wandered in insolently after the bell—and I just stood, biting my tongue, trying hard to pick my battles in these last weeks.
Even Zack was worthless as a student. Our morning meetings remained routine, however, and I looked forward to them.
As I was heading to the parking lot one day after school, Zackery fell into step beside me. He giggled, and I looked over at him. He was almost skipping. “What’s up with you?” I asked.
“Look!” He handed me an envelope. “I just got it from the guidance counselor last period.” Inside was an acceptance letter from an out-of-state university.
“Congratulations! This is great!” We hugged each other and spun around. He gave me a big kiss on the cheek. “We have to celebrate,” I said. “What sounds good?”
He thought a moment. “Ice cream.”
“Ice cream it is.”
He went straight to my car and let himself in the passenger seat. It wasn’t until I backed out of my parking space that I saw our small audience by the door.
We indulged ourselves at an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor on the outskirts of town, where our waitress was a student from school who raised her eyebrows when we came in. Zack ate some monstrous thing that came in what looked like a fish bowl, complete with bananas, a giant crown of whipped cream, and not one, but five cherries atop the several scoops of ice cream and flavors of topping. I ordered a restrained root beer float.
Zack had pictures from the spring break trip he and Simon had taken to Cancún. In one photo Zack stared morosely at Simon, who had his arm around a tan blond babe with oiled breasts spilling out of her white bikini.
“Yikes,” I said. “Who’s that?”
“Some slut Simon fell in love with,” he said.
I looked up at his expression of desolation, every bit as raw as when the photo was taken. “It was Simon, wasn’t it?” I asked. “In the poem?”
He bloomed in red mottles and lifted one shoulder.
“I remember,” I said. “Simon worked set crew for extra credit for his theater class.”
“No,” Zack said with a bemused smile. “He worked set crew because Leslie Cambridge was in the play.” He sighed. “I worked set crew because he did.” He lifted his shoulder again. “I’m over it.”
“Oh, Zack.” I reached across to squeeze his hand just as our waitress brought the check. She could barely contain her curiosity.
“People ask me about us,” Zack said when she wandered away, looking back at us over her shoulder. “They all think we’re doing it in the bookroom every morning. I tell them you’re not my type.”
“Zack.”
“They just think I mean older women.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
He grinned.
“It’s a good thing I resigned before I got fired for having an affair with a student.”
“So, it’s true? I heard you were leaving.”
“Word travels fast.”
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Honestly? I have no clue.” I slurped my float. “I hope I’m back teaching at the School of the Arts in Cincy. I student-taught there and they wanted me to stay, but I needed to be closer to Dayton, for Todd.”
He nodded. “I’m glad you’ll still be teaching,” he said. He took another bite of his obscene dessert and laughed. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to tell you, Denny Robillard defended you the other day.”
“Defended me?”
“Yeah, you walked by at lunch, and some football players said, ‘There’s the fag hag,’ or something equally charming, and Denny told them to shut up. I was behind them in line.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, seriously. He said you were ‘cool as shit.’ I guess that’s a compliment. He said, ‘She’s the best.’”
The best. Neither of them had any idea the impact those words had on me.
I pulled into the drive at home just as my dad was walking back to the house from evening feed. He waved and opened the back door. Cooper cantered out into the yard in his cougarlike way. I called to him, and he ran to my feet, hugging my leg with his forearms. I lifted him like a child, under his armpits, and hoisted him to my shoulder. He purred in my ear as I strolled behind the barn to study my red mare in the early evening light.
Chaos stopped chewing and froze, muscles tensed. She raised her head, ears pricked at me. My heart melted when she nickered softly. I called to her, “I’m just looking at you, you pretty girl.”
I was discovering her bit by bit. I’d finally begun to understand her secrets. And my own.
Chaos nickered again and lowered her head to resume grazing.
Knowing her was the consolation prize of loss.
Cooper yowled, and a voice answered him, “Hey, Coop.” It was Nicholas.
“Hey, you,” I said, a thrill of adrenaline jumping through me. “What are you doing here?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and grinned. “You said to come over. I’m a glutton for punishment, I guess.”
“No, you’re a sadist. You like to punish me. I thought you’d dropped off the face of the earth.”
We laughed and let the unspoken remain so for a while longer. “So, how’s Chaos?”
“She’s good,” I said. “We’ve made progress lately. She’s really blossomed here. I hope once I move her, it’s not like starting all over again.”
Nicholas leaned on the fence. “Why would you move her?”
“I’ve been trying to talk to you about that. I left you a million messages. I—I’m moving back to Cincinnati.”
Something shifted in his face. He opened his mouth and stammered, “But—but, what’ll you do?”
“Well, I’m interviewing for a job at the School of the Arts.”
“You’re going to keep teaching?”
I shrugged. “I think for another year, at least. And somewhere besides Old Mill. To see how it is when I’m not dealing with…well, you know, without all that going on…you know what I mean.”
