Winter Garden (14 page)

They never spoke of that day again. And when Dad came home, Meredith threw herself into his arms and cried until he said, What is it, Meredoodle?

Maybe if she’d said something, told him the truth, it would have changed things, changed her, but she couldn’t do it. I just love you, Daddy, she’d said, and his booming laugh had grounded her once again.

And I love you, he’d said. She wanted that to be enough, prayed for it to be enough, but it wasn’t, and she felt her own sense of failure blossom, take over, until all she could do was try to stop loving her mother.

She closed her eyes, rocking just a little. Nina was wrong. Dad would understand. . . .

A thump sounded nearby, and she looked up, expecting to see Luke or Leia in the room, tail thumping a quiet greeting, begging for a little attention.

Jeff stood in the doorway, still dressed in the worn Levi’s and blue crew-neck sweater he’d put on yesterday morning.

“Oh. You’re home.”

“I’m going,” he said quietly.

She didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed that they wouldn’t be together tonight. “Do you want me to hold dinner?”

He took a deep breath and said, “I’m leaving.”

“I heard you. I don’t—” It sunk in suddenly and she looked up. “Leaving? Me? Because of last night? I’m sorry about that. Really. I shouldn’t have—”

“We need some time apart, Mere.”

“Don’t do this,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Not now.”

“There’s never a good time. I waited because of your father, and then because of your mother. I told myself you still loved me, that you were just busy and overwhelmed, but . . . I just don’t believe it anymore. There’s a wall around you, Mere, and I’m tired of trying to climb it.”

“It’ll be better now. In June—”

“No more waiting,” he said. “We only have a few weeks before the girls come home. Let’s use the time to figure out what the hell we want.”

She felt herself falling apart but the thought of giving in to that scared her to death. For months now she’d been burying her emotions and God knew what would happen if she ever stopped. If she let herself cry she might wail like a banshee and turn to stone like one of her mother’s fairy-tale characters. So she held it together and nodded, said in as even a voice as she could muster, “Okay.”

She saw the way he looked at her then, the disappointment, the resignation. His gaze said, Of course that’s what you’d say. It hurt her almost more than she could stand, letting him go, but she didn’t know how to stop him, what to say, so she stood up and walked past him, past the suitcase at the front door (the thump she’d heard) and went into the kitchen.

Her heart was actually missing beats as she stood at the sink, staring at nothing. It was hard to catch her breath. Never in all their years of marriage had it occurred to her that Jeff would leave her. Not even last night when he’d let her sleep alone. She’d known he wasn’t happy—and neither was she, really—but that seemed separate somehow, an ordinary bad patch.

But this . . .

He came up behind her. “Do you still love me, Mere?” he asked quietly, turning her by the shoulders until they were facing each other.

She wished he’d asked her that an hour ago, or yesterday, or last week. Anytime except now, when even the ground beneath her felt unreliable. She’d thought his love was a bulkhead that could hold back any storm, but like everything else in her life, his love was conditional. All at once she was that ten-year-old girl again, being dragged out of the garden, wondering how she’d gone so wrong.

He let go of her and started for the door.

Meredith almost called out for him, almost said, Of course I love you. Do you love me? but she couldn’t make her mouth open. She knew she should grab the suitcase from him or throw her arms around him. Something. But she just stood there, dry-eyed and uncomprehending, staring at his back.

At the last minute, he turned to look at her. “You’re like her, you know that, don’t you?”

“Don’t say that.”

He stared at her a moment longer, and she knew it was an opening, a chance he was giving her, but she couldn’t take it, couldn’t make herself move or reach out or even cry.

“Good-bye, Mere,” he finally said.

She stood there a long time, was still there, at her sink, staring out at the dark nothingness of her yard, long after he’d driven away.

You’re like her, he’d said.

It hurt so much she couldn’t stand it, as he must have known it would.

“He’ll be back,” she said to no one except herself. “Couples take breaks sometimes. It will all be okay.” She had to figure out how to fix it, what needed to be done. She went to the closet and grabbed the vacuum and dragged it into the living room and turned it on. The sound drowned out the voices in her head and the erratic beating of her heart.

When Nina finished showering and unpacking, she went downstairs. In the kitchen, she found her mother already seated at the table, where a cut-crystal decanter waited. “I thought we’d have a drink. Vodka,” her mother said.

Nina stared at her. It was one of those moments when you glimpsed something unexpected, like a face in the shadows. In all her thirty-seven years, Nina had never been offered a drink by her mother. She hesitated.

“If you’d rather not . . .”

“No. I mean yes,” Nina said, watching as her mother poured two shot glasses full of vodka.

She tried to see something in her mother’s beautiful face, a frown, a smile; something. But the blue eyes revealed nothing.

“The kitchen smells of smoke,” Mom said.

“I burned the first dinner. Too bad you never taught me to cook,” Nina said.

“It is reheating, not cooking.”

“Did your mother teach you to cook?”

“The water is boiling. Put in the noodles.”

Nina went to the stove and poured some of her mother’s homemade noodles into the boiling water. Beside them, a saucepan bubbled with stroganoff sauce. “Hey, I’m cooking,” she said, reaching for a wooden spoon. “Danny would laugh his ass off right now. He’d say, Watch it, love. People’re goin’ t’ eat that.” She waited for her mom to ask who Danny was, but all that rebounded was silence, and then a slow tapping.

She looked back, saw her mother tapping a fork on the table.

Nina returned to the table, took a place opposite her mother. “Cheers,” she said, lifting her glass.

Mom lifted the small heavy glass, clinked it against Nina’s, and downed the vodka in a swallow.

Nina did the same. Minutes passed in silence. “So what do we do now?”

“Noodles,” was Mom’s reply.

Nina rushed back to the stove. “They’re floating,” she said.

“They’re done.”

“Another cooking lesson. This is awesome,” Nina said, pouring the noodles and water into a strainer in the sink. Then she dished up two plates, grabbed the salad, and returned to the table, carrying a bottle of wine with her.

“Thank you,” Mom said. She closed her eyes in prayer for a moment and then reached for her fork.

“Have you always done that?” Nina said. “Prayed before dinner?”

“Quit studying me, Nina.”

“Because that’s the kind of thing a parent generally passes on to their children. I don’t remember praying before dinner except at the big holidays.”

Mom began to eat.

Nina wanted to keep questioning her mother, but the savory scent of the stroganoff—rich beef chunks, perfectly browned and then simmered for hours in a sauce of sherry wine, fresh thyme, heavy cream, and mushrooms—wafted up to her, and her stomach growled in anticipation. She practically dived into this meal that so represented her childhood. “Thank God you have enough food in the freezer to feed a starving nation,” she said, pouring them both some wine. When silence answered her, she said, “Thank you, Nina, for saying so.”

Nina tried to concentrate on the food, but the silence got to her. She had never been a patient woman. It was strange; she could sit still for hours waiting for the perfect shot, but without a camera in her hand, she needed something to do. Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “Enough,” she said so sharply that Mom looked up. “I’m not Meredith.”

“I am aware of that.”

“You were too tough for us when we were girls, and Mere, well, she stuck around and she never changed much. I left. And you know what? You don’t scare me or hurt me so much anymore. I’m here now to take care of you. If Mere has her way, I’ll be here until you move into Senior World, and I’ll be damned if I’ll eat every meal under a cone of silence.”

“A what?”

“We must have talked at dinner when I was a kid. I remember talking. Even laughing.”

“That was the three of you.”

“How come you never really look at me or Meredith?”

“You are imagining things now.” Mom took a drink of wine. “Eat.”

“Okay, I’ll eat. But we are going to talk, and that’s that. Since you are a lemon in the conversation game, I’ll start. My favorite movie is Out of Africa. I love watching giraffes move across the sunset in the Serengeti, and I’m surprised to admit that sometimes I miss the snow.”

Mom took another drink of her wine.

“I could ask about the fairy tales instead,” Nina said. “I could ask about how it is that you know the stories word for word or why you only told them to us with the lights out, or why Dad—”

“My favorite author is Pushkin. Although Anna Akhmatova reads my mind. I miss . . . the true belye nochi, and my favorite movie is Doctor Zhivago.” Her accent softened on the Russian words, turned them into a kind of music.

“So we have something in common after all,” Nina said, reaching for her wine, watching her mother.

“What is that?”

“We like big love stories with unhappy endings.”

Her mother pushed back from the table suddenly and stood up. “Thank you for dinner. I am tired now. Good night.”

“I’ll ask again, you know,” Nina said as she passed her. “For the fairy tale.”

Mom paused, took a slowed step, and then kept going, around the corner and up the stairs. When her bedroom door thudded closed, Nina stared up at the ceiling. “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” she mused aloud. “Of what?”

Bundled up in her old terry-cloth robe, Meredith sat out on her porch, rocking in a wicker chair. The dogs lay beside her feet, tangled together. They appeared to be sleeping, but every now and then one of them whined and looked up. They knew something was wrong. Jeff was gone.

She couldn’t believe he’d done this to her now, in the wake of her father’s death and in the midst of her mother’s meltdown. She wanted to latch on to that anger, but it was ephemeral and hard to hold. She kept imagining one scene, over and over and over.

They would be at the dining room table, she and Jeff and the girls. . . .

Jillian would have her nose buried in a book; Maddy would be tapping her foot, asking when they could go. All of that teenage impatience would disappear when Jeff said, “We’re breaking up.”

Maybe that wasn’t exactly how he would say it, or maybe he’d chicken out and let Meredith say the poisonous words. That had certainly been their parenting pattern. Jeff was the “fun” one; Meredith laid down the law.

Maddy would burst into uncontrollable sobbing.

Jillian’s tears would be the silent, heartbreaking type.

Meredith drew in a deep, shuddering breath. She knew now why unhappily married women stayed in their marriages. It was because of the scene she’d just imagined and the pain of it.

In the distance, she could see the first copper glimmer of dawn. She’d been out here all night. Tightening her robe around her, she went inside, milled throughout the house, picking up objects and putting them down. The crystal award Jeff had won last year for investigative journalism . . . the reading glasses he’d recently begun to use . . . the picture of them at Lake Chelan last summer. Before, when she’d looked at that photo, all she’d seen was that she was getting older; now she saw the way he was holding her, the brightness of his smile.

She put the picture down and went upstairs. Though bed beckoned her, she didn’t even go close to it, not to that king-sized mattress where his shape lingered, and his scent. Instead, she put on her running clothes and ran until she couldn’t breathe without pain and her lungs felt like jelly.

At home, she went straight to the shower, where she stayed until the water turned cold.

When she was dressed, she knew that no one would be able to look at her and know that her husband had left her in the night.

She was holding her car keys, standing in her kitchen, when she realized it was Saturday.

The warehouse would be dark and freezing. Closed. Oh, she could go to work anyway, try to lose herself in the minutiae of insect and pruning reports, of crop projections and sales quotas. But she would be alone, in the quiet, with only her own thoughts to distract her.

“No way.”

She went out to the car and started it up, but instead of driving to town, she drove to Belye Nochi and parked.

The living room light was on. A plume of smoke rose from the chimney. Of course Nina was up. She was still running on Africa time.

Meredith felt a wave of self-pity. With all her heart, she wished she could talk to her sister about this, that she could hand her pain off to someone else who might find the words to soften or reshape it.

But Nina was not that person. Neither would Meredith tell her friends. It was humiliating and painful enough without the addition of becoming a bit of town gossip. And besides, she wasn’t the kind of woman who talked about her problems; wasn’t that part of the reason she was alone now?

She yanked open the car door and got out.

Inside the house, she noticed the lingering smell of smoke. Then she saw the dirty dishes piled in the sink and the open decanter of vodka on the counter.

It pissed her off. Suddenly. Sharply. Disproportionately. But it felt good, this anger. She could hold on to it, let it consume her. She attacked the dishes so loudly that pans clanged together as she threw them in the soapy water.

“Whoa,” Nina said, coming into the room. She was wearing a pair of men’s boxer shorts and an old Nirvana T-shirt. Her hair stuck out like a black Chia Pet and her face crinkled in a smile. She looked like Demi Moore in Ghost; almost impossibly pretty. “I didn’t think pot-tossing was your sport.”

“Do you think I have nothing better to do than clean up your messes?”

“It’s a little early for high drama.”

“That’s right. Make a joke. What’s it to you?”

“Meredith, what’s wrong?” Nina said. “Are you okay?”

Meredith almost gave in. The softness of her sister’s voice, the unexpected question . . . she almost said, Jeff left me.

And then what?

She drew in a deep breath and folded the hand towel in precise thirds before draping it over the oven’s handle. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t act fine.”

“Honestly, Nina, you don’t know me well enough to say that. How was Mom last night? Did she eat?”

“We drank vodka together. And wine. Can you believe it?”

Meredith felt a sharp pang at that; it took her a moment to realize she was jealous. “Vodka?”

“I know. Shocked the shit out of me, too. And I found out her favorite movie is Doctor Zhivago.”

“I don’t think alcohol is her best bet these days, do you? I mean, she doesn’t know where the hell she is half the time.”

“But does she know who she is. That’s what I want to know. If I could just get her to tell us the fairy tales—”

“Screw the fairy tales,” Meredith said, more sharply than she should have. At Nina’s surprised look, she realized she might even have yelled it. “I’m going to start packing her things for the move next month. I think she’ll be more comfortable there if she has her stuff around her.”

“She won’t be comfortable,” Nina said, and now she looked angry. “It doesn’t matter how neat and tidy and organized you are. You’re still putting her away.”

“You going to stay, Nina? Forever? Because if you are, I’ll cancel the reservation.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Yeah. Right. You can criticize but you can’t solve.”

“I’m here now.”

Meredith glanced at the sinkful of soapy water and the now-clean dishes in the strainer. “And what a help you’ve been to me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get some boxes from the garage. I’ll start in the kitchen. You’re more than welcome to help.”

“I’m not going to pack her life into boxes, Mere. I want to open her up, not close her away. Don’t you get it? Don’t you care?”

“No,” Meredith said, pushing past her. She left the house and walked over to the garage. While she waited for the automatic door to open, she had trouble breathing. It swelled up in her, whatever the feeling was, until her chest ached and her arm tingled and she thought, I’m having a heart attack.

She doubled over and sucked in air. In and out, in and out, until she was okay. She started into the darkness of the garage, glad that she’d controlled herself and that she hadn’t lost it in front of Nina, but when she turned on the light, there was Dad’s Cadillac. The 1956 convertible that had been his pride and joy.

Frankie’s his name, after Sinatra. I stole my first kiss in Frankie’s front seat. . . .

They’d gone on a dozen family road trips in old Frankie. They’d gone north to British Columbia, east to Idaho, and south to Oregon, always in search of adventure. On those long, dusty drives, with Dad and Nina singing along to John Denver, Meredith had felt all but invisible. She didn’t like exploring roads or making wrong turns or running out of gas. It had always seemed to end up that way, too, with Dad and Nina laughing like pirates at every escapade.

Who needs directions? Dad would say.

Not us, Nina would reply, bouncing in her seat and laughing.

Meredith could have joined in, could have pretended, but she hadn’t. She’d sat in the back, reading her books and trying not to care when a hubcap flipped off or the engine overheated. And whenever they stopped for the night and camp was set up, Dad would always come for her; while he smoked his pipe, he’d say, I thought my best girl would like to take a walk. . . .

Those ten-minute walks were worth a thousand miles of bad road.

She touched the shiny cherry-red hood, felt its smoothness. No one had driven this car in years. “Your best girl would like to take a walk,” she whispered.

He was the one person she would have told about what happened last night. . . .

With a sigh, she went to his workbench and looked around until she found three big cardboard boxes. She carried them back into the kitchen, set them down on the hardwood floor, and opened the cupboard closest to her. She knew it was too early to start packing, but anything was better than being alone in her empty house.

“I heard you and Nina fighting.”

Meredith slowly closed the cupboard and turned around.

Her mother stood in the doorway, dressed in her white nightgown with a black woolen blanket draped like a cape around her shoulders. Light from the entryway shone through the cotton fabric, outlining her thin legs.