Gathering my belongings, I prepared to bolt as soon as we came to a stop at the gate. As the plane shuddered into place, I popped out of my seat and hurried past six rows of seats before the aisle became crowded with passengers taking luggage from the overhead bins and waiting for the door to open. In first class, a male flight attendant was mopping his forehead and assisting an elderly woman who’d boarded with the handicapped passengers during the stopover in Houston. Hands shaking, the woman clung to his arm as he helped her gather her purse and move down the aisle.
I steeled myself for a slow exit. What I wanted to do was run past them, push my way through to someplace that wasn’t vibrating under my feet. Logic whispered that getting off the airplane wouldn’t solve the problem. The whole world was shifting, everything folding and faulting, threatening to crack.
I should call home
, I thought, then realized there wasn’t any point. Nobody would be there, except possibly Isha. Macey would be gone to gymnastics, and there wasn’t much chance that Kyle would be home at four fifteen. He probably wouldn’t answer his cell phone, either. This evening, he would stay at work late, checking and double-checking lucrative corporate real estate contracts and preparing for pending mediations—burning the midnight oil. Isha would put Macey to bed, and Kyle would wander in whenever he finished up at the office.
What if all those nights he said he was busy at the office, all those times I surrendered to exhaustion and went to bed alone, Kyle was really burning the midnight oil somewhere else? What if his tendency to let the cell phone roll to voice mail after hours wasn’t because he didn’t want to be interrupted in his work, but because he wasn’t alone? There was a time when I would have been in the office enough to know what Kyle was working on, but the past year of seeing to the Santa Monica boutique left to me in my mother’s will had caused me to do much of my work via dial-up. In some vague way, I knew that the office wasn’t the only place where distance had seeped in, but I’d convinced myself it was part of the cycle all marriages went through. Things got busy, life got in the way, you drifted for a while, then reassessed, decided to work harder, refocus, and come back together. . . .
What if Kyle had decided to move on, instead?
The exit line started progressing toward the front of the plane, and I watched passengers ahead of me sag with relief as they stepped onto the jetway. Behind a young mother, the elderly woman traded the attendant’s helping hand for a small three-wheeled walker, then politely shooed the attendant away, insisting she didn’t need a wheelchair. A frustrated businessman squeezed past me, hemming me in beside the woman.
“Well, that’s it. I shoulda taken the bus up from Houston,” she said, gazing toward me as we started up the jetway. “If God meant human beings to fly, he’d of given them wings.”
“I’ll second that,” I replied, and we smiled at each other, briefly linked in the kinship of survivors. I fell into step beside her, the need to hurry seeping out of me as I considered baggage claim, car rental, and what lay beyond—just across town now, rather than safely across the country. Only a short drive away, in the once trendy, then down-and -out, and now rapidly revitalizing area just east of downtown Dallas, was my father’s house.
Our
house, once upon a time, before everything changed.
For the past thirty-three years, it had been
her
house,
their
house. A place where I was supposed to spend a month of my summer vacation each year, according to the custody agreements. The plan met its end before lawyers and judges could ever rehash the wisdom of sending a twelve-year-old girl for summer visits in a house with the
other woman and her mentally off son
, as my mother put it. I didn’t put words to it at all. I just sat down in the entryway of my mother’s boutique and refused to go. My mother was pleased that I was firmly on
her
side. My father didn’t fight it. I knew he wouldn’t.
Victory is sometimes painful. In a hidden corner of my heart, I needed him to fight harder, to care more, to prove he loved me more than he loved
them
. That vague disappointment grew into a bitterness that made it easy to write “Return to Sender” on birthday cards and Christmas gifts I knew
the other woman
had picked out. It prevented my showing interest in my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis at seventy-three. When
she
wrote to me, I wrote back and told her to do whatever
she
thought was best. Hanna Beth was his
wife
, after all. Making appropriate arrangements was her concern. She’d asked me to come several times as the last two years slowly peeled layers from his memory. I declined, not always politely. She urged me to make peace with him while I could. I responded that I felt no animosity about the situation—it simply was what it was. She asked if there was anything she could do to convince me to come before it was too late. I admitted, quite frankly, that I didn’t think so.
I was wrong. When you’re notified by the police that your incapacitated father and your adult, but mentally challenged, stepbrother have been alone in a house for three weeks, and Social Services is one complaint away from taking over, you have no choice but to get involved. Hanna Beth Parker had suffered a stroke and landed herself in a nursing home at the worst imaginable time.
“That’s the baggage claim there,” the woman with the walker said, pulling me back to the present. I realized I’d been strolling down the corridor with her—not interacting or offering my name, just matching her slow pace, as if we were together. She must have thought that was strange.
“Oh, yes, I guess it is,” I agreed, angling with her toward the exit to the baggage area. “Sorry. I was a million miles away.”
Craning sideways, she studied me as I held open the door. “I could see that.” She concentrated on moving her walker across the threshold, then added, “But don’t worry. I was watching out for you, just in case one of them international criminal types might come along, or such.”
“Good thing,” I said, hiding a smile, not sure whether she was kidding. My mother had always been on guard in busy public places like airports. She’d watched too many TV crime shows and read the plethora of Internet forwards about potential schemes used by muggers, kidnappers, and human predators of all types. She’d always complained that work often took me to downtown LA,
where no place was safe.
Even in Santa Monica, the
homeless problem
made her uncomfortable, because
you could never tell about those people.
“Thank ya, sweetie.” The woman with the walker paused to turn her wheels toward the luggage carousel, then shifted directions with her body.
“My pleasure,” I said. The twang in her voice dredged up some old memory I couldn’t quite put a finger on. There was an unhurried cadence to the words, as if she tasted each one carefully before letting it out. My mother would have called it
gum chewing.
She said people in Texas talked like they had wads of gum in their mouths. After years of living all around the world, following my father’s job in the petroleum industry, she’d been less than thrilled when, the year I turned twelve, we ended up in Dallas, my father’s hometown. As always, my father was a man ahead of his time. He foresaw trouble ahead for oil families living in the Middle East, so he took a position in the corporate office. He was nothing if not a good businessman. Even Mother could never deny that fact.
“The pilot did a darn good job,” the woman with the walker said, pausing to grab her dangling purse handle and attempt, with shaking hands, to hook it over the arm of her walker. Her wallet, brimming with credit cards and a thick checkbook, was about to fall out. My mother would have had a heart attack.
“I’m just glad to be off the plane.” I hovered for a moment, watching her futilely reach for the purse handle. Would my retrieving it embarrass her? “I guess the emergency landing wasn’t such a big deal after all.”
Using an umbrella from the front basket of her walker, she deftly hooked the purse strap and hung it back in place. “It’s a bigger deal than people probably think. My brothers flew supply planes back in World War Two, so I know a little bit about such things. ’Course, with short runways overseas, you either got the plane stopped or you went in the drink. With these long runways, you got more space, but you got bigger planes, too. Lots heavier. Our pilot today was a crackerjack.”
“That’s good to know.” But it really wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe that we’d come close to potential disaster.
Luggage was starting to pop onto the carousel, and my companion gave it a concerned frown.
“Is someone meeting you here?” I asked. No matter how good she was with her umbrella handle, she couldn’t lift bags off the conveyor.
She checked her watch. “My grandson, but I guess he’s got held up in traffic. He’s a doctor. Busy man. My husband and I raised him after my son died. I come up from Houston to visit him every few months, get my medical tests done, hang around the facility and read to the patients. This time I’m gonna have a little of that orthascotic surgery—that’s why I had to fly in, instead of drive. Got to have a ligament repaired in my knee before I can drive again.” She looked around the room a second time. I tried to imagine what kind of a grandson would leave his elderly grandmother, in need of arthroscopic knee surgery, at the mercy of strangers and unable to get her luggage off the carousel.
But then, the anonymous concerned citizen who had contacted the city police on my father’s behalf was probably thinking the same thing about me. “Can I help you get your luggage? I have a cell phone. We could try to call—”
She cut me off with a quick hand chop. “No. No, now I’m fine. I’ll just go over there and get me one of them good-lookin’ skycaps to grab off my bags, and I’ll wait for my grandson. He’ll come. You don’t worry yourself over me, all right?”
“All right,” I said. “You’re sure?” I found myself wanting her to say no, wishing she would provide a distraction from my impending trip across town to the nursing home to see Hanna Beth.
“I’m fine, sweetie, just fine.” The woman started toward the waiting skycaps. “I’m not as helpless as I look. I know judo. Anybody gives me any trouble, I’ll smack ’em in the kazongas with my umbrella.” I blinked in surprise, and she glanced back over her shoulder, giving a saucy one-sided smile. “Soon as I get this darned leg in better shape, it’ll be,
Look out, world, here comes Ouita Mae Barnhill
.”
I stood for a minute watching Ouita Mae Barnhill disappear into the crowd and wishing I had her certainty about the outcome of the next few days. Finally, I stepped up to the baggage claim, grabbed my suitcases, and faced the fact that, willingly or not, I had arrived in Dallas.
As March went like a lamb into April, I was returning thirty days early, thirty-three years late, for my month of summer.
CHAPTER 2
Hanna Beth Parker
Every day at noon, Claude passes by my door, his slippered feet shuffling across the linoleum as he pulls his wheelchair along. He stops and tells me about the food in the dining room, as if that might entice me to get out of bed and walk down the hall. On rainy days, when the world outside the window is melancholy and dim, he talks about trains.
Claude drove lumber trains down in the Piney Woods of East Texas. He has the cloudy eyes of a poet when he describes the scent of steam rising off the engine, casting a gossamer mist over everything for just a moment until the train reaches speed. He tells me this story over and over because he can’t remember that he recounted it yesterday, the day before, the day before that. Life, he says, if he stays long enough to become philosophical, is a journey by train. Outside the window, the scenery is rushing by. If you look away for even an instant, something passes uncaptured. Far in the future, when you leaf through the photo album of memory, your finger, aged and crooked, will rub lightly over that empty space, and you’ll wonder,
What might have been there?
In your daydreams, you’ll return again and again, try to open your eyes for that single moment, but you can’t. This is the science of regret, according to Claude.
Life is a journey by train, and the engine’s always at speed.
Don’t close your eyes, even for a moment.
After World War II, Claude drove the trains that took the Jewish people home from the concentration camps. He should have known that sometimes the scenery outside is so ugly there’s nothing to do but close your eyes for as long as you can, and pray for traveling mercies.
I wanted to tell him that, but I couldn’t. Each time he repeated the story, all I could do was lie there and listen, until finally the young nurse’s aide, who wore her hair in a bun and dressed in long skirts and tennis shoes, found him. “Is he bothering you?” she’d ask sweetly, then adjust my pillows and smooth my hair while my eyes followed her movements. She’d smile sadly as she turned away, took Claude’s wheelchair handles, and said, “Come on, Mr. Fisher. Let’s go find you something to do. She needs her rest so she can get better.”
Had the doctors really told her I would get better, or were those nervous words only filling empty space during that uncomfortable moment when she pictured herself in my place? Occasionally, even the young look at these aging, crippled bodies and see the weathered wrappings of once-vibrant human beings—people who lived and loved, worked and dreamed. They see that you can be standing at the clothes dryer folding laundry one minute, planning a trip to the grocery store, thinking about what to cook for supper, and considering what sort of flowers you might plant in the beds this spring. And the next minute, you can be sprawled awkwardly on the floor, unable to move, realizing that a flower bed may have been an impossible presumption.
No one wants to imagine a moment like that. To imagine it is to realize the fragile nature of life. I know this, of course. I should know it better than most, but sometimes, I have been guilty of oversight.