A Long Time Gone (25 page)

“But you still left.”

And here I am.
I didn't say anything, hoping she'd be distracted by the night music.

“So why did you leave?” Chloe asked, her voice holding none of the weight of her question.

Because it was something I'd been born with, a poison in the blood I'd inherited from my mother and she from hers and way on back before anybody alive could still remember. Because I'd grown up to believe that my mother's constant departures meant that anywhere else was better than here. But every time I started to tell her, I stopped, the words suddenly as foreign to me as another language. After a few false starts, I said, “Because my mother came back here to live and I'd grown too used
to living here without her. And I wanted to see the world outside of the Mississippi Delta. I figured California was a good place to start.”

I felt her look at me. “That's lame.”

I turned my face to her but she was back to staring at the sky. “Yeah. I wish you'd been here nine years ago to tell me that. You would have saved me a lot of trouble.”

She was silent for a long moment. “In California we don't have trees that sing. Maybe if we did, I might miss being home.”

“But you have the sound of the ocean.” I watched a plane on its lonely trek across the sky, remembering Bootsie and me doing the same thing when I was little, making up stories about the people aboard, wondering if they were leaving or coming home.

I lifted my hands in the air, my index fingers and thumbs forming a triangle to put the plane in perspective, the metal-and-bead ring that Chloe had made for me reflecting the light of the stars. “Home means so many different things. It's more than the sounds and the smells, even though they're important, because it's what we remember most from when we're children.” I thought hard for a moment, still unused to the clarity of my thoughts. “It's where your people are.”

Her voice sounded very small. “But what if you don't have any people?”

I thought of her mother in Australia and her father on his honeymoon with his third wife, and how he hadn't bothered to call his only child. “Then you find your own.”

She sat up and I could feel her agitation, something the pills had always made sure I was immune to. “Yeah, well, the only ‘people' I found was somebody who could only stand to be with me if she was popping pills.”

I sat up, too, so badly wanting to tell her that I'd stopped, that I was here with her watching the stars because I wanted to. That some deranged part of my brain thought that I might be able to make a difference in her life. But I couldn't. Because then I'd have to tell her that I'd stopped the pills only because her father told me I couldn't.

Chloe pulled herself up. “Life sucks and then you die.” She stomped down the hill of the mound, her moods and hormones as winding as the path of the river.

I didn't go after her. Instead I wrapped my hands around my
drawn-up legs and pressed my forehead into my knees for a moment, wondering if shame could be fatal.

I lifted my head, watching her white nightgown make its way toward the house like a stealthy ghost. I knew there was nothing I could say to her that would make her think differently; she'd have to figure that out on her own. But mostly I didn't run after her because I wasn't sure that I'd convinced myself that she was wrong.

Vivien Walker Moise

INDIAN
MOUND,
MISSISSI
PPI
MAY
2013

M
y mother sat at the kitchen table with Cora, dressed like Jackie Kennedy and sipping coffee with white-gloved hands. I sighed inwardly. She was coming with Chloe and me to start organizing and sorting the historical archives from where they'd been stored in the basement of City Hall in preparation for the move to the new library building. I paused on the threshold a moment before anybody noticed me, watching my mother behave as if she were a regular person having her morning coffee—a regular person who remembered that her favorite color was red, and that her daughter wasn't in high school anymore, and that she'd spent most of her motherhood with a suitcase in her hand and an old yellow house and two children at her back.

I'd borrowed Tommy's computer to look up ways to help people with dementia and Alzheimer's, and had read in one study that looking at old photographs was good therapy, if not a cure. When Carrie told me that there were boxes full of old photographs in the archives inherited from the newspaper when it had downsized to smaller offices, I took it as a sign.

“Good morning,” I said, grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl and
heading for the coffeemaker. I was about to ask where Chloe was when she burst into the room. She'd reverted to the hair hanging in front of her face and her black T-shirt and jeans.

She flopped herself in a chair across from my mother and next to Cora, then glowered up at me through her heavy fringe of hair. “I'm ready.”

Cora put on what I could only describe as a “teacher face” and turned toward the adolescent. “You know, Chloe, I'd be happy to stay here with you and go through the history textbook section on manifest destiny and the acquisition of Texas. Or you can go help Vivien with the archives today. It's completely up to you.”

Chloe rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

I cleared my throat.

“Yes, ma'am.” She didn't mumble it, but looked up at the ceiling.

I pulled another banana from the bunch and placed it in front of Chloe. “Have some breakfast. It's the most important meal of the day.”

She sighed heavily, as if I'd just asked her to dig a well, but took the fruit and began to peel it with surgical precision. I wondered if she got that from her father.

“How's Mathilda?” I asked Cora.

“She's fine, thank you. Fit as a fiddle. I can only hope that I've inherited those good longevity genes.”

“Good to hear it. Please tell her hello from me. I'm going to try to stop by again soon. We didn't get to finish our conversation, and the last couple of times I dropped by I was told she was too tired or feeling poorly.”

Cora looked at me oddly. “Are you sure you were all talking about the same Mathilda? Because my grandmother hasn't felt poorly a day in her life.”

“That's what I thought, too. No matter. Just please tell her that I'll try again soon.”

“I certainly will.”

I turned to Carol Lynne. “You ready?”

“Sure. Where are we going?”

“To town.”

She looked over at Chloe. “Good. Because I think JoEllen needs to go shopping.”

Chloe glared at me as if I had control over what my mother said.

“Come on, then. I'll drive.”

“Is Bootsie coming?” Carol Lynne asked, repeating the same question she'd asked each time we were about to get in a car and go somewhere.

“Not today,” I said. “We'll catch up with her later.”

We drove for a while without talking, listening to the sixties station while my mother sang along. Chloe glowered from the backseat, making me wish for the sweet girl in the billowing white nightgown who'd listened with me to the music of the cypress trees.

“Where are we going?” Carol Lynne asked again.

Chloe interrupted her glowering. “To shop.”

I was grateful for not having to answer the same question again, but it also brought into focus that my mother needed to see a doctor whether she wanted to or not. Tommy said he'd tried, but I knew he wasn't one to push against a brick wall, especially when that brick wall was the mother he'd always worked so hard to please.

I wasn't one to push either, but I also wasn't one to give up too quickly. Whether it was persistence or sheer stupidity, I always seemed to be the person hanging on to the reins long after I'd been thrown by the horse. The pills had made me forget about that part of me, and for the first time since I'd stopped taking them, I was glad my mind was clear enough to remember something worth remembering.

“Carol Lynne, when was the last time you saw a doctor?”

She stopped singing, then looked at me as if surprised to find me sitting next to her. “Not too long ago, I think.”

I nodded. “I haven't had a checkup in a while, so I was thinking if you needed one we could go together.”

She frowned. “I'm not sick. I don't need to see a doctor.”

My attempted smile wobbled, then fell. “That's why it's good to go now, before you need one. Then if there's a problem, it gets spotted early, when there's still time to fix it.”

She crossed her arms over her chest just like Chloe did when she was getting ready to argue. “I don't want to go.”

I understood why Tommy would have dropped the subject at this point. We'd inherited more than just our red hair from her, after all.

“I know. I don't like to, either. It's just that, you know, as they grow
older people start having different health concerns. Like cardiovascular issues, or changes in bone density. Or memory problems.”

Her voice turned almost venomous. “I do
not
have memory problems. I remember everything perfectly. Just ask Bootsie. She's always saying how I never forget a thing.” She shook her head as if she were trying to convince more than just me.

She knows,
I thought. In the far reaches of her mind that still worked, she knew something wasn't right. She knew enough to pretend that everything was fine, and to react defensively if somebody tried to tell her otherwise. There was hope, then. Hope that there was memory there to remember what I needed her to.

“But there are medications. . . .”

“No!” She screamed the word at me, the sound reverberating in the small confines of the car.

Chloe reached up from the backseat and put her hand on my mother's shoulder, and if my mother's screaming at me hadn't already made me want to cry, Chloe's action would have. I flicked on the signal and began to turn, but my hands shook, causing me to run onto the shoulder before jerking the car back to the road.

After a few deep breaths, I faced her again. “I didn't mean to upset you. I'm sorry.”

She wore a wide smile when she turned back to me. “For what?”

Warring emotions bombarded me—relief, anger, confusion—all aimed at something I didn't understand and the woman I understood even less.

“Never mind,” I said softly, driving around the main square one more time, looking for a place to park.

Carrie met us in the marbled lobby of City Hall. Bo was in school, but Cordelia sat in a baby carrier on her mother's back. At least until she spotted me and held out her arms, shouting out, “Hold me, hold me.”

“Do you mind?” Carrie asked, shrugging off the shoulder straps. “If you'll just hold her for a few minutes she'll stop.”

“Sure,” I said, wishing I hadn't as soon as the little girl's arms were around my neck and her sweet smell wrapped around the rest of me.

“I've got to get back to the theater, but Carol Shipley—that's one of our most enthusiastic volunteers—is waiting for you in the basement to show you the ropes.”

“Mrs. Shipley? As in the high school librarian who had her index finger practically glued to her lips? And who hated anybody touching any of the books and messing them up?”

Carrie gave me an apologetic smile. “The very same. After she retired, she found she couldn't quite give up bossing other people around and making people lower their voices. She's president of the Friends of the Indian Mound Library. She does a great job, and she's real nice once you get to know her.”

I hesitated to remind her that I'd known Mrs. Shipley for four years in high school, and I was as afraid of her when I graduated as I was on the first day of freshman year.

She led us into an ancient elevator with a metal mesh screen for a door and pushed the B button after manually sliding the door shut. It shuddered to life like an old man jolted awake from a long nap and started to move downward with slow, arthritic jerks as Cordelia began to play with my hair.

“I think she likes the color of it,” Carrie said. “Or she's jealous that you have so much of it when she hardly has any.” She laughed. “Runs in the family, I'm afraid. My hair's curly, but it's fine and just frizzes in this heat.” Facing Chloe, she said, “You've got pretty hair. Nice and thick. I loved the way you had it in a French braid when I saw you at the restaurant. Maybe you can teach Cordelia how to do that when she's older. Or when she grows enough hair.”

As if she knew we were talking about her, Cordelia suddenly lurched sideways toward Chloe. With the quick reflexes of the young, Chloe caught her and hoisted her onto her hip. The two girls stared at each other through the thick fringe of Chloe's hair. With a
pfft
sound, Chloe blew air through her lips, pushing her hair into the little girl's face.

Cordelia chortled deep in her throat, the sound intoxicating. We all watched as Chloe did it again, creating a new waterfall of childish laughs.

“You'd make a good big sister, Chloe,” Carrie said.

The old elevator ground to a stop and I was relieved to be distracted from the wounded look on Chloe's face, and the memory of me telling her that she wasn't going to be a big sister after all.

Carrie led us into a thinly carpeted room that smelled like stale wood smoke and reminded me a lot of the final scene in
Raiders of the
Lost Ark
, when Indiana Jones is shown the government storage room where the Ark of the Covenant is buried. Except this room was filled with shelves and shelves of boxes and containers that went all the way back to the far wall. A line of metal folding tables filled the middle of the room, the tall shelves looming over them.

“I know it's a mess,” Carrie apologized. “When the fire broke out in the old library, firefighters and employees grabbed what they could and flung everything out the windows and doors. We were just so grateful that so much was saved, it didn't occur to us to wonder how on earth we'd be able to put it all back together.”

Chloe was spinning around in a slow circle, her mouth gaping open, but before I could ask her to stop, I realized I was doing the same thing. We stopped at an old schoolmaster's wooden desk—looking suspiciously like a remnant from the high school—and I read the small sign posted on the front:
UNAT
TENDED
CHILDREN
WILL
BE
GIVEN
AN
ESPRESS
O
AND
A
FREE
PUPPY
.
Next to that was a hand-drawn sign of a frowny face next to a crude depiction of a cell phone with a line going through it.

“Isn't this a little ridiculous?” I asked. “Seeing how this isn't exactly a library down here, but a storage facility for library materials?”

“I consider this a library.” The disembodied voice came from the other side of the desk. Leaning over, I found Mrs. Shipley picking up a scattered pile of small paper dots, apparently escapees from the upturned three-hole punch that lay on its side on the floor.

I wanted to point out that a vacuum cleaner would probably do a faster and more efficient job, but one gaze at her eyes behind her glasses transported me back to high school. She pulled herself up using the edge of the desk and I wondered how it could be that she looked exactly the same as I remembered. Even her stiff helmet of white-blond teased and sprayed hair remained the same. I thought the frames of her glasses had probably not changed since, either, but I couldn't be sure, since I'd spent a lot of time looking at the floor whenever she was in my presence.

“Vivien! How's my favorite student?”

I met Carrie's eyes over Mrs. Shipley's shoulder as she hugged me. “I'm fine, thank you. It's so great to see you again.” The entire exchange was said in loud, exaggerated whispers, even though there was nobody else in the room but us.

I introduced Carol Lynne and Chloe, also in loud whispers, and then Carrie took Cordelia from Chloe. “I have to get back to the theater now, but you're in good hands with Mrs. Shipley. And please let Tommy know that I'm doing a
Star Wars
marathon—all six prequels and sequels—this weekend. Mama's watching Cordelia and I'm bringing Bo. I know those are Tommy's favorite movies in the whole world, and I'd love for him to join us. Tell him I'll save him a seat with us, just in case.”

“I will.” We said good-bye as Mrs. Shipley, in her school librarian uniform of brown vest, houndstooth skirt, ankle socks, and sneakers faced us with her hands together. Carol Lynne sat down in one of the metal chairs with her purse on her lap, then slowly pulled off her white gloves finger by finger, just like Bootsie used to do.

“Are we here to eat? I think I might be hungry.”

Mrs. Shipley frowned, I assumed because we weren't whispering.

Chloe leaned toward my mother. “Not yet. We're here to help Vivien go through some pictures and papers. Then we'll eat.”

“Okay.” Carol Lynne smiled at her gratefully.

I looked more closely at the nearest shelf, where stacks of paper protruded over the open top of an unlabeled moving box. Continuing to speak in a loud whisper, I said, “Um, so, where would you like us to start?”