Color the Sidewalk for Me (5 page)

“Mama, it's Celia.”

A long pause, a sharp breath inhaled.
“Celia!”

I heard background noise—footsteps, the receiver being pulled away—and Daddy was on the line, voice shaking, asking where had I been. Didn't I realize their worry? Didn't I know they'd been trying to find me? Would I come home? My throat was tight as I answered his questions, saying I was sorry I'd had to leave, that I couldn't bear to face Mama, then or now, that even hearing her voice brought it all back. My quiet daddy talked for a long time, urging me to “let God forgive you so you can forgive.” I found myself softening. But then Mama returned to the phone, her tone reserved, cold, the way I remembered her. “Thank you for the call,” she said stiffly, as if I were a distant relation. “I hope you'll stay in touch.” And I knew afresh that the wounds between us would never be healed.

All the same, during that call the guilt I already bore was deepened by the hurt in Daddy's voice. After I hung up, I simply could not deal with it, and it was a long time before I brought myself to phone again. Eventually I told my parents where I was, gave them contact information. “Sometime I'll see you,” I promised Daddy, “when I'm ready and Mama's ready.”

There were numerous ways I could describe my guilt, each symbolizing one of its different facets. Sometimes it was a glacial lake in a yawning cave, with a sucking whirlpool at its center. Sometimes it was a steel rod through my heart, red-hot from the constant blaze of regret. Most times it was a huge movie screen that forever replayed that instant of momentous decision, the camera whirring as it rolled, the horrific consequences of my wrong choice unfolding in slow motion, the audio a raucous blare. Over and over again, a million times in the past seventeen years, those scenes had played in my head. Sometimes the reason for the screen's appearance was obvious. Other times the memories came from nowhere. I could be in a meeting with a client or combing the hair of an elderly patient at Hillsdale. I could be driving. Showering. Falling asleep. Waking up.

Soon after that initial call to my parents I began volunteering at the nursing home, both in penance and in dread of facing future holidays alone. There I found a bottomless need for extra hands and compassion. Now, years later, I still spent two to three evenings a week plus Sundays and holidays with my aged friends, reading to them, helping them from bed to wheelchair, listening to life stories, rubbing lotion on dry, spindly arms. I loved making them happy. And I'd benefited as much as they—both from feeling needed and by filling what free time work left me. Keeping busy precluded me from thinking too much.

Sometime I'll see you, Daddy. Sometime ....

Staring at the brightening stars, I reflected on Quentin Sammons' words about my returning home.
You'll be happier for it.
How easy for him to say. I'd long imagined that any chance for my happiness would be as impalpable as a milkweed seed drifting by. And that, preoccupied as I was with the past, even if it should appear I would lack the keen-eyed delicacy to pluck it. A return to Bradleyville was anything but a weightless milkweed seed. The mere thought of it was heavier than lead. There were too many people there I did not want to face, too many wrongs to make right. And as for Carrie's talk of God giving me a chance to heal, I knew better. Even if my past didn't stand in his way, my mama certainly did.

Still, one fact remained. Daddy needed me. He was calling for me, perhaps even at that moment. How could I live with myself if I didn't help him? Hadn't I made enough mistakes for one lifetime?

Mamie's hair tickled my legs. I took a long drink of tea, now cold, and shivered suddenly despite the warmth of the spring night.

chapter 6

Q
uentin was hanging up the phone when I appeared in his office doorway Monday morning. His coat was off and dangling from a hook in the corner, his desk spread with an associate's draft designs for a car dealership. A mug of coffee had been set on the credenza behind him, where it could not spill on the artwork.

Taking a deep breath, I made my commitment. “I need to talk to you about that leave of absence.”

That day and the next were a blur. I met with one coworker after another, going over accounts, calling clients to explain that due to a family emergency, I was placing them in the capable hands of a colleague. I wondered about taking my computer, what it would require to set up a fax line in Mama's house. When I began asking assistants to copy files for me, Quentin quietly intervened.

“Remember what I told you?” he said. “Take care of your business at home. Call maybe, help with ideas, counsel us when we run into a snag. But leave the rest until you return.”

His gentle chastisement only heightened my anxiety. How could I stay in Bradleyville without work to occupy my thoughts?

I also had to say good-bye to every patient at Hillsdale, plus figure out what to do with my home and cats. Fortunately, Monica came to my rescue. The day I left she moved into my house, nodding patiently at my harried plant-watering instructions and petting Mamie and Daisy under their upraised chins.

“You're wonderful,” I panted as we lugged in her things. “Don't worry, I won't be gone too long.”

“Are you kidding?” she said, grinning. “A cute place and no roommate! Take your time!”

The insouciance of the young.

I forced down half a sandwich for lunch and left. I drove all afternoon, fighting my memories and losing the battle. The farther I got from Little Rock, the more my dread increased. It was as if I rode a time machine, the familiar present unraveling into an inhospitable past. When I could pull my thoughts back to Little Rock, it was only to remember what the consequences of Bradleyville had cost me there.

In seventeen years I'd had only two relationships with men. Roger, an attorney, had asked me out numerous times before I said yes. After three months of dating, he finally broke through my barriers enough to convince me to tell him all about my troubled past. And like all armchair counselors, once I capitulated, he knew exactly what steps I needed to take in order to heal.

For all his good intentions, he got nowhere.

“You have to get past that guilt of yours,” he told me with exasperation four months later over dinner at an expensive restaurant. “You need to see a therapist.”

I bristled beneath my red silk dress. “No, I don't. I'm handling it just fine on my own.”

“You call sobbing before a lighted candle all night handling it just fine?”

“That's none of your business,” I retorted. “It's only once a year. I told you to go home.”

“I wanted to help you.”

“I didn't want your help. You can't help!”

He reached for my hand. “But I want to. Please let me. You keep it all bottled up, but it's got to go somewhere. And where it's gone is right here, sitting between us, getting in the way of what we could have.”

Three years later Michael could do no better with me. I'd learned from the heartbreak with Roger and so had told Michael nothing. “You're so remote,” he said one evening at dinner after we'd been seeing each other for ten months. Frustrated hurt poured from him. “You just won't trust me with who you really are.”

On I drove. Around dinnertime I crossed the state line. “Welcome to Kentucky, the Bluegrass State,” read the large sign.

Soon afterward I left the interstate, heading east through familiar winding hills. After an hour darkness began to fall. The evening air breezed through my window and swirled my hair in floating spiderwebs around my face. Cicadas were singing among the darkened hills that cradled the narrow road. Massive, gnarled oaks jutted from those hills, their dignity heightened by their blackness against a clouded sky.

Tomorrow it may rain, I thought.

Turning the wheel, I rounded a long, sly bend that curved like the crook of a beckoning finger. Bradleyville was now less than ten miles away. Childhood memories rushed me like the shadowed road leaping to life at the wash of my headlights. For some reason I thought of a day twenty-five years before, when I'd dared the biggest jump ever out of the tree swing hanging from a thick branch of a wizened oak in our backyard. I remembered pushing away hard, scraping my fingers against the scratchy rope, the smooth board pulling from my thighs. The air had been warm then also. It whizzed past my ears and shot up my nose, snatching away all breath. Or perhaps my breathing had stopped amid the ecstasy, the sheer freedom, of flying. For a moment I, at ten years of age, was suspended above the world. The idea had flashed through my head that I could conquer anything, that I, who had the courage to launch into space, could transcend it all. I was giddy with elation. Grandiose. All-powerful.

Then I began to lose momentum, saw the ground rush up to meet me. Gathering my legs, I fell, tumbled, and immediately thrust to my feet, grinning like a warrior who'd just slain her fiercest dragon. “Did you see that?” I cried to Kevy, then four. “Did you see how high I got?”

His eyes were huge. “Wow! That was great!” He ran on short legs to throw his arms around my waist in unabashed worship. We giggled and fell over, rolling and victory-punching each other like two playful bear cubs. I was only vaguely aware of the window dully screeching open above us.

“Celia?
Celia!”
My mother's voice dampened the warm afternoon. Kevy and I ceased our scuffling. “Celia Marie, you do that again and I'll get a switch! Likely to break both your legs, you are, and with your brother watchin'!”

Kevy sat up, legs splayed, casting me a baleful stare. I was still on my back, raised up on one elbow. I tilted my head and squinted up at my brown-haired mama, registering the whiteness of her bare forearms, the natural blush in her cheeks. Something shifted inside me, like a stream's current backing up to flow around a sudden rock.

“You hear?”

I pursed my lips. “Okay, Mama.”

“All right, then.” She withdrew from the sill and disappeared.

With the budding awareness of a child, I'd sensed the incongruity of my mother's reaction. Now, cruising quietly through the night, I still found it illogical: to prevent hurt, she would inflict it.

I crested a long grade, the hills on either side melting away, and slowed at the sight before me. Bradleyville spread demurely in the valley below, its lights a tiny silver bracelet against the flesh of the shadowed hills. Winding through a bordering forest were the glimmering waters of the river. The buildings and machinery of the lumber mill built by my great-grandfather jutted into the sky above the riverbank, boldly silent against a scrim of nascent stars.

The otherworldliness of the scene was too much to absorb. Something was missing, something important. The squall of the town seemed so removed from that vista, the pulses of its rhythm fading long before they reached me. Yet for so many years the town's effect on me had been so strong. Looking down on Bradleyville, I wondered at its seeming insignificance.

Ten minutes later, trembling, I entered the town through the back way of Route 347. All was dark and quiet. Yellow streetlights, green lawns, old wooden houses. Everything I could see looked just the same. I pictured the outlay of the town, doubting that much progress had come to any of it. I imagined it still had only two stoplights, both on Main Street. Between them would be the post office. Past the second light would be the one-block downtown area with a few stores, the doctor's office, a tiny police station, and the town bank.

I turned onto Minton, our street.
There
. Long before I was ready, I saw our house. I wiped a tear away and passed it by, eyes straight ahead. It was a peripheral blur, white and boding, a porch light on—Mama's signal that she was waiting for me. Then I was at the first stoplight at Minton and Main, my mind snapping back in time as the pictures in my head began to roll. Their vividness left me nauseous.

The light turned green. I gathered myself, then turned right.

Even as I told myself not to go, I knew where I was drawn. After a few blocks I turned off Main and wound up Maple toward our old church. Easing up to the curb, I parked the car and stiffly got out. Beside the building, in a grassy cemetery dotted with gnarled trees and wildflowers, I found the grave. I stared at the headstone, barely able to breathe, then sank to my knees. My hesitant fingers traced the letters blurring through tears. The stone was so cold, sterile, void of life.
Dear God, how did we ever come from a colored sidewalk to this?

Moments later I tore myself away, unable to look at the inscription any longer. Numbly I sank behind the wheel of my car, driving on automatic, my head filling with memories of my childhood after I'd decorated the sidewalk for Mama. How many times had I yearned for Mama's affection, even while she loved my sweet little brother easily?

I turned off Maple back onto Main, the pain of those years washing over me. As a chalk-fingered child of six, I had worn my craving for Mama's love on my sleeve. But as I grew, that craving became cloaked in excuses and denial until slowly it sank beneath my skin to lie unheeded but vital, like the sinews of my framework. By the time I became a teenager, I thought the gap between Mama and me could not be wider.

And then Danny came along. . . .

~ 1977 ~