News from Heaven (7 page)

“Can I come?” I finally asked.

“Regina, don't be silly,” said my mother. “It's a school day.”

“I don't care.” I felt suddenly alert, shocked awake by my own bravery. “We never go anywhere.” I held my breath because there was more I could have said: Because you're afraid of everything. I'm stuck here because of you.

Melanie took her plate to the sink. “Peg, let her come. She can go to school anytime.” My mother started to speak, but Melanie interrupted her. “Please, Peggy? I want her to be there.”

My mother studied me for a long moment. She seemed to be deciding something. Then a remarkable thing happened.

“All right, then,” she said.

Later I would understand her reasons, but at the time I was too excited to care. We set out in the station wagon, driving south and west. The air had turned cold overnight. Steam rose from the Yaegers' bean fields on either side of the road, a ghostly haze that parted to let us pass. Melanie drove with a speed and joyful carelessness that exhilarated me: the windows open, her long hair billowing in the breeze. She sang along with the radio, an AM station crackling with static:
You can't talk to a man with a shotgun in his hand
. My mother sat beside her, clutching the door handle. If my father had been driving, she would have scolded him:
Bert, slow down. You'll get us killed
. To Melanie, she didn't say a word.

We approached Pittsburgh at just before noon, which surprised me. I'd imagined it much farther away. The city itself was a revelation—the tall skyline, the Allegheny busy with boat traffic. We exited the highway and made a series of turns down busy boulevards. As we neared the city center, Melanie pulled over to look at a map.

“Let's stop here,” I suggested, staring out the window. Across the street was a public park, crowded with people enjoying the midday sun.

“Sure,” said Melanie, cutting the engine.

“Melanie, really,” my mother said.

“There's an ice cream stand.” Melanie pointed. “I want an ice cream.”

We got out of the car and crossed the street, my mother hugging her purse to her chest.

“Three strawberry cones,” Melanie told the man at the window. She reached into the pocket of her jeans.

“Save your money,” my mother said, opening her purse.

I spotted an empty park bench. Melanie sat in the middle, her legs tucked up under her. I did the same.

“Sit like a lady,” my mother told me. “Melanie, you're a bad influence.”

Melanie laughed. “It's comfortable this way.”

We sat watching people pass: men in suits, smoking cigarettes; well-dressed women toting shopping bags; black maids in uniform, pushing baby carriages. They were the sorts of people I didn't see in everyday life. I could have sat there for hours.

“It's getting late,” my mother said.

Melanie licked her fingers. “I could eat another one,” she said. “Gina, could you eat another one?”

“Definitely,” I said.

“We could, you know.” She laid her head on my shoulder. “We could eat ice cream all day long.”

“Melanie!” my mother said, so sharply that heads turned in our direction. Her anger startled me. I couldn't remember the last time I'd heard her raise her voice.

“Just kidding,” Melanie said, rising. “Jesus, Peggy. It was a joke.”

We crossed the street and got into the car. Melanie drove down a narrow street and then another, barely wide enough for one car. The closeness frightened and delighted me: the houses and storefronts abutting, with no space between buildings, the pedestrians—a different crowd now, young and long-haired—crossing at random, mere feet from our car.

“Where are we going?” I asked for the first time.

Melanie didn't answer. Finally my mother spoke. “Your aunt has an appointment.” Something in her tone, her way of referring to Melanie—
your aunt—
warned me. I didn't ask again.

“Look for number one-twenty,” Melanie said. “It should be on the left.”

I was the first to spot the building, a narrow brick house with a dilapidated porch. Melanie parked and we went inside. We climbed a graceful old staircase to the second floor. The steps were covered in hexagonal tiles no bigger than quarters. The spaces between the tiles were filled in with grime.

At the end of the corridor we went into an office. A brass plate on the door read
INTERNAL MEDICINE
. We stepped into a dilapidated waiting room: mismatched chairs covered in green vinyl, outdated magazines—
McCall's, The Saturday Evening Post
—piled on a table in the corner.

I'm not sure how long we waited after Melanie's name was called. My mother paged through a
Ladies' Home Journal
from front to back. Then she started over again, reading it back to front.

O
utside, the air had turned colder, the sky darkly clouded, as if the brilliant morning were something I'd dreamed. Slowly we crossed the street to the car, Melanie leaning heavily on my mother. I followed behind. They seemed to have forgotten I was there.

I watched as Melanie lowered herself into the driver's seat. When she turned the key in the ignition, the radio came on, a patter of muted trumpets. My mother reached to turn it off.

“No,” Melanie said. “I like that song.”

She drove us out of the city and onto the Turnpike. No one spoke. Then, suddenly, she pulled over to the side of the road.

“I'm bleeding.” Her voice sounded strange, low down in her throat. “I can feel it. Peggy, you'll have to drive.”

My mother stared at her, wide-eyed. “Melanie, I can't.”

“Why not?” Melanie turned to me, her eyes pleading. “Gina?”

I shook my head mutely, shamed by my uselessness. I wouldn't be sixteen for two months. My father had promised to give me driving lessons, but so far I hadn't so much as turned the key in the ignition.

“Peggy, please.” Melanie got out of the car, her hand low on her belly, and opened the rear door. I climbed out and took the passenger seat up front. I will never forget the look on my mother's face as she took the wheel. She found the lever beneath the seat and slid herself forward so that her face was inches from the windshield. Then she shifted into first gear and we rolled into the right lane. A shrieking sound as the car behind us slammed its brakes. My mother gasped.

“It's okay,” I said. “Just give it some gas. You're doing fine.”

In the left lane, cars whizzed past. My mother didn't answer. She kept a tight grip on the steering wheel, her eyes on the road.

“It'll be okay, Mom,” I said. “Just keep driving.”

For a long time neither of us spoke. Once, twice, Melanie moaned softly from the backseat.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

My mother shifted into third, grinding the gears. An eighteen-wheeler screamed past us, its headlights blazing. She shielded her eyes.

“It's hard to look,” she said. “Regina, I'm so scared. I just want to close my eyes.”

I
t was dark when we arrived back at the house. My father's truck was gone. Melanie went immediately to bed, my mother to the kitchen. She filled the percolator and took carrots from the refrigerator, a couple of pork chops.

“I'm not hungry,” she said abruptly. “Are you hungry?”

“Not really,” I said.

When the coffee was ready, she poured me a cup, something she had never done. Across the kitchen table, she explained how Melanie felt trapped with Uncle Dan, who had a terrible temper and sometimes hit her. “He's an animal,” my mother said.

I was as shocked as if she'd spoken an obscenity. I'd never heard her say an unkind word about anybody.

“That's no way to raise a child. Can you imagine? Seeing his father behave that way. It's for the best,” she said softly, the last words I'd hear her say on the subject.

My father's truck pulled into the driveway, and my mother busied herself at the stove, laying the pork chops in a pan. I poured my coffee down the sink. The smell nauseated me. I have not drunk coffee since.

When I came home from school the following day, Melanie and Tilly were gone.

I
t was time, my mother explained. They'd been staying at our house for nearly a month.

A change came over her after Melanie left. For two days, three, her bedroom door was closed when I came home from school. “She's feeling poorly,” my father said when I asked. “A humdinger of a headache.” Baking and canning seemed more effort than she could muster. The last of the tomatoes rotted on the vine.

I could have lent a hand in the garden, but I didn't. I was preoccupied with my own concerns. I went with Philip Schrey to see
The Towering Inferno
at the Rivoli Theater in town. We ate lunch together every day in the school cafeteria. We went to football or basketball games on Friday nights. This new dimension of my life occupied me completely. My mother's difficulties didn't interest me at all.

We never spoke of the trip to Pittsburgh. My mother didn't mention Melanie for months. A card arrived at Christmas with a Florida postmark. Inside was a single handwritten line:

Thanks for everything. Love, Melanie, Dan, and Tilly.

Y
ears passed, and I stopped thinking about that summer. Soon the slow August days were lost to me forever; it seemed, often, that I had no time to think. I went to college, worked, married a much older man, and moved to a different country, feeling always that the world moved too fast for me, that I'd been raised to live at a gentler pace. In my late thirties I looked up and noticed that my parents were gone, the farm sold. Every year I considered sending a hundred Christmas cards via airmail to the dozens of Yahner and Schultheis relatives, but I never actually did this. My reasons were laziness and lingering guilt. I had neglected to invite my aunts to my wedding, a slight that, if they'd known about it, would have hurt them. I understood this just as I understood that nothing—certainly not a secular city hall wedding—could have induced Velva or Fern to travel to New York. Thinking of them made me sad and ashamed, so I stopped thinking of them. It wasn't hard to do. My interest in family had died with my mother. Without her, I didn't see the point.

My first book was published the year we returned from Sweden—a slender collection of short stories that seemed, and was, destined for the remainder bin. My publisher made a brief effort at promoting it with a handful of signings at bookstores in the South and Northeast. It was at one of these signings that I saw a familiar face, though I couldn't place it immediately. The woman was slight and red-haired, my age or a bit younger. “Regina,” she said. “Do you remember me?”

I looked at her closely. Through her heavy makeup, I could discern a dark band of freckles crossing her nose like a bandage.

Tilly lived in Atlanta now, married to a linesman for Georgia Power. They had two daughters. She'd seen my photo in the arts section of the newspaper and recognized me at once, despite my unfamiliar last name. “I'm so proud of you,” she said. “Melanie would be so proud.”

Melanie.
After all these years her name affected me strangely, like the name of my first love. “How is she?” I asked.

“She died,” Tilly said.

Over tea in the bookstore café, Tilly told me how Melanie had battled polycystic kidney disease, the illness that had killed my aunt Elsie. “It runs in the family,” said Tilly. “You should have yourself checked.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“I'm sorry to lay this on you,” she added. “She was ill for such a long time. We looked everywhere for you. We thought maybe you could help.”

“I was living in Sweden,” I said automatically, not comprehending her meaning. “With my husband. I got married.”

“I guess that's why we couldn't find you. We didn't know your married name.” Tilly stared off into the distance. A bookstore employee was making a racket, stacking plastic chairs. “We tried her aunts, but Rosemary was too sick. And Velva wasn't a match.”

“
My
aunts,” I corrected her. Tilly wasn't really part of the family; it was understandable that she'd get confused. “They were Melanie's sisters.”

Tilly covered her mouth with her hand.

A
nd so it was Tilly who told me that Melanie was not my aunt. She was my sister. Melanie, dying, had needed a kidney, and the family had tried desperately to find me. They were certain that I'd be a match.

“I'm sorry,” Tilly said that day in the bookstore. “We all assumed Peg had told you.”

But Peg, my mother, had not.

The baby was born in May, the year my mother turned eighteen. A few years before,
Gone with the Wind
had opened in theaters, with Olivia de Havilland in the role of Melanie, a beautiful woman who also died young. It was my mother's favorite film. She saw it four times at the Rivoli Theater. That was before she quit school and became a homebody, canning and cooking and helping my grandmother with the new baby.

I imagine a boy from a neighboring farm, in love with my mother—a girl who lived for the movies, tall and red-haired and less shy than I'd been led to believe. Who was that boy, I wonder, and who was that girl? I have pieced together as much as I can. My mother and my aunts are gone now. There is nobody left to ask.

I've thought often of that trip to Pittsburgh, my mother opening her pocketbook to pay for our ice cream. For her it was a day of silent, anguished giving: to one daughter, a searing lesson; to the other, a second chance.

Peggy can do anything.

I can still see Melanie that day in the Ag Hall, her hands oddly gentle as she admired our mother's quilt.

Is this your sister?
the boy asked her.