A Long Time Gone Page 4

  The room had been paneled in a wood laminate, a guy’s interpretation of home decor, but even Bootsie wouldn’t interfere with Tommy’s self-expression, no matter how misguided. A basket of overflowing laundry sat by the side of the entryway, and I wondered if he now lived here permanently. The thought saddened me, not just that he lived alone, but that I didn’t know for sure. I used to wonder if Tommy had gotten married and if he had children. Then the disappointments in my own life had swallowed me, and Mark began prescribing pills to calm my nerves. After that, I discovered that I didn’t have to wonder or worry about anything at all.

  I stared out the dirty window, toward where Tripp and the other man crouched by the roots of the old tree. I looked back at my brother’s laundry basket, a sock with a hole in its toe floundering at the top. It created a mental image of our lives, like derailed boxcars sitting alongside a track where we had no idea of how to flip the switches to get us running again.

  I walked past the large desk with stacks of papers spilled across the top, along with three half-filled mugs of cloudy coffee and a desktop computer that looked like it should be in a museum, then toward the stairs. The steps had been rebuilt when Tommy renovated the building, but the actual stairwell was not expanded, so the stairs were narrow and steep. Bootsie had said Tommy had done this on purpose to discourage visitors to his private sanctum, where he liked to be alone with all the antique timepieces that were sent to him from all over the world.

  I paused on the landing, suddenly aware of a bright light from above. I looked up and saw a clear blue sky through the ragged edges of a hole that had spread like kudzu across the wall and toward the back of the building.

  Hugging the side of the undamaged wall, I climbed the remaining stairs before stopping at the top to survey the damage. The wall and floor near the gash in the ceiling were dark with saturated water. Leaves and papers and tiny plastic bags with various watch and clock parts, their labels smeared by water, lay scattered around the room as if they’d been stirred in a pot and dumped out. Antique and contemporary clocks hung on the remaining vertical surfaces, their pendulums moving side to side and their hands pressing forward as if to remind us that time stopped for no one.

  When Emmett had owned his antique clock and watch shop downtown, I’d spent hours as a child studying the different faces of all the old clocks and listening to their incessant ticking, wondering about the other lives the old timepieces had measured and marked off with each tick. For a long time I’d believed that if we wound our clocks before they stopped their measuring, we’d live forever. And I couldn’t help myself from wondering whether, if I’d been here when Bootsie got sick, I could have kept her watch moving forward and stopped her from dying.

  My brother stood with his back to me at the large wooden trestle table that had once been in the Main Street shop, a small stack of plastic bags in front of him. A large domed overhead light dangled above him, making his reddish-blond hair—just a shade lighter than mine—glimmer.

  “Hey, Tommy,” I said, taking in the slump of his shoulders as he attempted to sort through the pile. “Looks like you got lucky when that tree fell.” I continued to look around the room while I waved my hand in the air, as if to erase what I’d just said. “I mean, it looks like it could have been a lot worse.”

  I stayed where I was, wishing he’d say something. Wishing he’d tell me it was okay, just as he had when we were children. But he kept his back to me as if I weren’t even there. In another place and time, I might have been hurt by it.

  I tried again. “Who do you think those bones belong to? It’s a little creepy knowing they’ve been here all along. Remember the time we found that bone by the Indian mound and how scared we were until Bootsie told us it was a chicken bone?”

  He continued to study one of the larger bags and didn’t turn around when he finally spoke. “You got a death wish or something?”

  My mouth dried, the only sign my body allowed to tell me that his words had skirted a little closer to the truth than I liked.

  “What do you mean?”

  He wrote something on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the bag before dropping it into a box. “An old dog’s got enough sense to get out of the rain. Did it occur to you to seek shelter last night or didn’t you notice the weather?”

  I swallowed. “I wanted to get home. I didn’t really think about anything else.” I almost winced at how stupid I sounded.

  Continuing to ignore me, he said, “A tornado touched down in Moorhead and another near Yazoo City, and the sirens were blowing all night. There’s no cure for stupid, Vivi.”

  This was the brother I recognized, and I found my breath slowing with relief. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  He wrote something else on a piece of masking tape before affixing it to another bag and then dropping it into the same box as the previous bag.

  “Who’s Chloe?”

  He’d taken me off guard. “How do you know about Chloe?”

  “I saw it written on the back of that picture on your nightstand. And I saw the sonogram, too.”

  It was warm in the old building, but an icy chill filled me from the inside, making me wonder if my pain and regret were no match for mere chemicals. “You had no right to snoop like that.”

  Keeping his head bent under the large domed light, he said, “I went up to talk with you, but you were sleeping. I saw the photos, so I looked. We hadn’t heard from you in nine years; I figured I’d take the chance of finding out what you’ve been up to while I could.”

  “You had no right.”

  He shrugged. “We’re family, Vivi. You might have forgotten it, but I haven’t.”

  I remembered what Tripp had said—about how I’d left Tommy behind, too—and I softened. Even as children, Tommy had been the even-keeled one, always the cool head in tense situations. I’d always reasoned it a good thing, considering my own volatile nature, until he’d been the first person to run down the front porch steps to throw his arms around the mother I barely recognized.

  I sat down on a hard wooden bench, one I remembered from the downtown shop. “Chloe was my stepdaughter,” I said quietly, my mental haze allowing me to take the sting from saying Chloe’s name. And to stare at the back of Tommy’s T-shirt with a beer logo emblazoned across his shoulder blades, absently noticing that his hair needed cutting.

  His hands paused but he still didn’t turn around. “Was?”

  “Her father, Mark, and I are divorced. Keeping Chloe in my life wasn’t an option.” I tucked the memory of her sad, angry face as I’d left under the fuzzy pillow of my pills, where I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. “Mark and I were married for seven years—since Chloe was five. Her mother moved to Australia and had another baby with her new husband and kind of forgot about Chloe. I was pretty much all she had.” I swallowed. “When Mark divorced me, I didn’t even get visitation. I had to leave her behind.”

  He stared down at the mess on the table but his hands were still. “And the sonogram?”

  It sounded like somebody else speaking when I finally answered, probably because nobody had ever cared enough to ask. “I miscarried at twenty-eight weeks—a little girl. It’s one of the reasons why my marriage fell apart. I wanted the baby and he didn’t. But I guess everything works out in the end.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, his hunched shoulders telling me that he understood what it meant for me to want a child and lose her. And what it meant to leave a child behind. Because I’d always been the one to say that I’d be different.

  Quietly, he said, “I’m sorry.” He turned around, his light blue eyes from a father he never knew regarding me steadily. “You could have called, you know. Just once.”

  I straightened my shoulders, eager to move on from the hard pit in my stomach that threatened to break through my mental pillow. “And you could have found me if you really wanted
to.”

  He didn’t drop his gaze as we realized that we both spoke the truth, and how empty it seemed. As Bootsie used to say, if stubbornness were a virtue, we’d be shoo-ins for heaven.

  “What about Carol Lynne?” I couldn’t bring myself to call her Mama. Even in my memories I only thought of her by her given name. “Is she going to be okay?”

  He stood and rubbed his hands through his hair. “Jeez, Vivi. Where have you been? You don’t get better with Alzheimer’s, okay? She’s in her own little world right now, a world that’s gonna get smaller and smaller, and I’m not going to recognize her anymore. Most of the time she thinks it’s still the sixties and will wear some of her old clothes. Or she’ll borrow something from Bootsie’s closet. And you never know what’s going to come out of her mouth next. I don’t know if it’s the disease or just age, but all filters have come off.”

  He moved to the side of the table, where a folded blue tarp had been placed on the floor, and began unraveling it on top of the unmarked bags and small boxes on the trestle table. That’s when I noticed the stacks of corrugated boxes of all sizes leaning up against the side of the table and beneath it, all of them darkened with random water splotches. It was so much worse than I’d originally thought, and for one brief moment I really wanted to care.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “The water’s gone down a bit, so I’m going to ride out over the fields and see how they’re doing. Luckily we haven’t started the planting yet, but I’m hoping the water’s not too high that we’ve got to delay.

  My brain felt sluggish, as if muddy water were running through it, too. “Can Carol Lynne take care of herself? Is she okay in the house without somebody there?”

  Tommy tucked the tarp around the edges of the table and stepped back, the look on his face reminding me of the time I’d put bubble gum in my hair to see if it would stick and Bootsie had to cut it as short as a boy’s. “No. Not really. I’ve hired Cora Smith—Mathilda’s granddaughter—to do some light housekeeping and look after her. She used to come and help Mathilda some. Mama calls her Mathilda, and Cora doesn’t mind. I thought that was a good sign.” He glanced at his watch. “Mama usually sleeps until noon, and Cora gets here a bit earlier to get her to eat something and to make sure Mama doesn’t leave in Bootsie’s Cadillac.”

  I followed him down the stairs, a sense of urgency bursting through my numbness. “But isn’t there some sort of therapy she can be doing? Like crossword puzzles or something?”

  He turned around to look at me, and for the first time I saw how tired he was, how the dark circles under his eyes looked purple on his pale skin. “Have you ever known Mama to do a crossword puzzle? Me neither, but you’re welcome to give it a try. Most of the time she’s fixin’ to leave, her bags all packed, and the rest of the time she’s channeling Bootsie, about to give a big party. I’ve given up trying to make sense of it. Cora’s good with her—has all the patience in the world.”

  He grabbed a baseball cap off a hook by the door and stepped outside. I rushed to catch up, trying to keep my thoughts from wandering too far before I asked the question I needed to. “But does she . . . I mean, she knows who we are, right?”

  “Yeah, she does. She recognized you yesterday, although it was like she thought you were still in high school and had just been gone since morning.”

  I turned my head for a moment, seeing that the men were leaving, presumably to grab something to eat. I wondered if Tripp had a wife to go home to, and if she made him lunch. I’d done that in the early years of my marriage, at least until Mark stopped coming home for lunch and went directly from his plastic surgery practice to the golf course, and Chloe accused me of making her fat.

  Focusing on Tommy again, I said, “But does she remember enough to tell us that she’s sorry?”

  He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his keys and began to jangle them impatiently. “For what?”

  “For ruining our lives.”

  He stared back at me, the keys quiet in his hands. “I think she left that up to us.” He slid the baseball cap back on his head and began walking down the muddy drive. Over his shoulder he called, “I’ll be back around six for supper.”

  I made to follow him, then stopped, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. I turned and saw Carol Lynne, wearing familiar bell-bottomed jeans and a loose floral blouse with a drawstring tie at the neck. Her hair was down around her shoulders, thick and heavy and still the bright strawberry blond of my memory. People had always told me how much I looked like her, and I’d hated it, wanting to believe that she and I had nothing in common. But she was sixty-seven now and barely looked older than fifty. Maybe there was one good thing I’d inherited from her.

  She stood inside the caution tape, her bare toes stuck into the mud on the edge of the hole. It had been dug wider in the search for more bones and any other clues, the digging instruments laid out on a square cloth just like a surgeon’s instruments before an operation. More of the skeleton was exposed now, including what looked like part of a rib cage with some sort of filthy fabric still clinging to it. I looked away, not wanting to see anything that made it more real to me, made me imagine the bones as a person walking around above the ground.

  Crows cried from one of the nearby pine trees, but I didn’t look up. I moved to stand next to my mother, keeping my eyes averted from whatever lay in the ground just a few feet away. I tried to think about all the things I’d wanted to say to her, about all the hurts and pain her abandonment had laid at my feet as a child. How there are things you never forget no matter how far from home you run. I trembled with the anticipation of unburdening myself of all the pent-up emotions I’d carried for so long. She’d have to remember then; the force of my emotions would make her remember.

  “I think she never left.”

  The unexpectedness of my mother’s voice startled me. “What?”

  With one pale, slender finger, she pointed at the exposed bones. “She never had a chance to come back because she never left.”

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, but her shoulders had begun to shake, and to my horror and embarrassment she started to cry in great heaving sobs. I watched her, unsure of what to do. And then she put her head on my shoulder and I had no choice but to put my arm around her.

  But I kept my head turned so I couldn’t see her cry, seeing instead crows flying out across the wide, flat fields. I closed my eyes to block out the image, smelling the wet earth and hearing my mother’s sobs and the fading sound of the crows. I’ve been a long time gone.

  I pulled my mother away and back under the yellow tape, then led her to the house. I settled her on the family room sofa to wait for Cora before flipping on what I remembered had been her favorite soap opera. Then I retreated to my room and took another pill, wondering if I would have enough to get me through until I figured out what I was supposed to do next.

  Chapter 5

  Carol Lynne Walker Moise

  INDIAN MOUND, MISSISSIPPI

  AUGUST 5, 1962

  Dear Diary,

  Today is my seventeenth birthday. I think it’s ironic that the day I get my first diary is the same day Marilyn Monroe dies. She was my idol. I have her pictures taped up inside my closet door where Bootsie can’t see them and make me take them down because she thinks it’s tacky to put magazine pictures on my walls. Mathilda knows they’re there, but she’s good at keeping secrets.

  I’ve decided that I’m going to smoke my first cigarette today. I’m seventeen and it’s time to start acting like a grown-up. It’s a real gully washer outside, but I’ve got all the windows open. I figure it’s a lot easier explaining why the windowsills and floors are wet than why Bootsie might smell smoke.

  Bootsie is my mama, but everybody calls her Bootsie, including me. She ran away from home when I was a baby, leaving me with my daddy, who’d gone crazy in the war, and my daddy’s parents to take car
e of both of us. The war gave Daddy a bad case of nerves, making him shake all the time and not sleep much. The doctor visited a lot to give him medicine, but most of the time Daddy lay in his bed and screamed like the devil himself was in his head. And then one day it was quiet and he was gone. Everybody said it was a blessing, but I didn’t. It was wasteful, just like throwing out a piece of aluminum foil that’s only been used once. I didn’t cry at his funeral because I couldn’t. I’d never even known him, really. I guess if you have to lose a parent, the real blessing is that you didn’t know them enough to miss them.

  By the time Bootsie came back and we moved back into the yellow house, Daddy was dead and I was six and it was too late to start calling her Mama. I almost think she’d prefer me to call her Jackie, since it’s pictures of Jackie Kennedy she’d be sticking all over her walls if she didn’t think that was tacky. She dresses like her—even got one of those stupid-looking pillbox hats—and got her hair cut with a little flip at the bottom and a big puff on top. She’s even talking about dying her red hair dark. People always tell me how beautiful she is, and how her face looks like one of those new Barbie dolls. Mathilda says that all the women in my family are beautiful, but that it takes us a while to grow into it. I’m not sure what she means, and I’m still waiting to grow into mine. I want one of those new Jackie Kennedy haircuts, too, but Bootsie wants me to keep my hair in a ponytail like a little girl. If she had her way, I’d never grow up.

  I’m going to try a cigarette now. Brigitte Bardot looks so sophisticated when she smokes. I want to look like that—like I belong in some café in Rome or Paris or anyplace that’s not Indian Mound, Mississippi. I’ll be right back. . . .

  Mathilda walked in while I was coughing on my first cigarette. She brought me one of Bootsie’s ashtrays she uses for bridge club days and told me not to get ashes on the furniture or the bed and then she left. I know she won’t rat on me. Like I said before, she’s really good at keeping secrets.