Beyond Molasses Creek (23 page)

After the nurses come in and take all his vitals and look all serious at him and curiously at me, Vesey seems especially tired. Looks like he might go to sleep, but I don't want him to. Part of me worries he won't wake up.

“We got to get you back on your feet,” I tell him. “I was hoping you could help me get some of Daddy's furniture back in the house.”

“Does that mean you found it?”

“I did find it. Right before I found you laid out on the ground.” I turn to him. “Vesey, you know I don't care, but I'm just wondering . . . Did I not tell you to have it sent to that warehouse in Georgia? I thought I did, but I don't remember.”

“No, you told me to do it. Gave me the address and everythin'.”

“So . . . why didn't you?”

“Well,” he sighs, “I took liberties. I figured you'd change your mind on it. You usually do. About important stuff . . . and small stuff . . . It ain't a bad thing, just who you are. What with you grievin' over your daddy and all, I figured you'd rue sendin' his things away and then I could be the hero, you know, say lookee here. Look, it ain't gone after all. Maybe it was selfish.”

“How do you know me so well?” It comes out more as a statement than a question. I am touched beyond belief that this man knows me so deeply, flaws and all, and still considers me a friend. How could I have ever questioned his motives? I'm a heel.

“Because we go way back, I reckon.” He winks at me weakly. “Way back to before time.”

“Yes, I suppose we do,” I say, turning back toward the window, trying to keep my eyes from filling up. “We go way, way on back.”

Vesey
1959

“I seen you sittin' over here,” I say to her, waving. “Wonder, you wanna fish with me? I got two poles, some big ol' worms.”

Miss Ally's quiet, and I itch behind my head.

“Or I can come back,” I say.

“No. No, I'd like to go. I'm just finishing up this picture. Wanna see?”

Miss Ally turns this book around and shows me a picture of a snail shell she done with her own hand. It's big and pretty and the snail is setting right there on the dock beside her. “How you learn to draw like that? You think you can teach me?”

She smiles, which causes myself to grin wide.

“Right now?” she says.

“No. Not now,” I say. “We goin' fishin' now.”

She looks at her house and thinks a minute. Then she turns round and says, “Okay.”

Truth be told here, I been thinkin' about Miss Ally a whole lot since that last boat ride. Things ain't been so happy on over to our house these days and I like to see somebody smile. I like her smile. I help her in the boat and she puts her drawing book under her rear and then nods at me she's ready.

“What would you say if I told you I was gonna have me a nice house someday, over yonder,” I say to her. I point and she looks at my hand. “See that there? See how the land juts out, on past the oyster bed, on out beyond Molasses Creek? I'm gonna settle my bones there someday. I can see it now, big ol' house with a big porch and rocking chairs and commodes that don't get stopped up. I'm gonna have me a great big house, a mansion even, just like your house. Then I'll 'vite you over someday.”

She stops looking off at the spit of land and turns back to me. “I'd like that. I can see your house there right this very minute. We can have a party. I'll bring over some . . . some sweet tea. And some Co-Cola cake.”

“I like Co-Cola cake. And boiled peanuts.”

“And Charleston Chews.”

“Mmmm. I'm gettin' hungry.” Mama had been real distracted in the days since my brother died and we didn't get regular meals no more. I had me a piece of bread and a little cold piece of chicken that morning. I had me the idea of fishing so I could eat some fish that night. These days I was having to plan ahead. I planned on having some fish all cleaned and ready for her to cook to make it easier on her. Mama'd had it pretty hard.

“Here now,” I said as we settled the boat and I hooked her worm for her.

“I don't mind doin' that,” she told me. My heart fluttered. A girl who don't mind hooking a worm. I handed her the rod and cast my own and we sat there as the warm sun baked our backs and the tops of our knees and heads. We caught three fish total, one for her and two for me, but when we got back home she told me to hold on to all three of 'em.

“I don't know how to clean 'em and I wouldn't know what to tell Daddy.” She turned serious all a sudden. “I don't think he would like me coming off like this.”

I didn't know what to say. I thought that was understood between us, that my folks didn't want me with a white girl and her folks didn't want her with me. So I didn't say anything. I just set her off on the dock, looking over her shoulder to make sure her mama and daddy didn't see my boat. When nobody came a-running, I held my pinky finger out and she hooked it with hers and we both smiled and spit on the dock. It was our secret handshake. I liked having a secret handshake. I liked having a secret friend named Miss Ally. It helped me get through the dark days.

FORTY-SIX
Enlightenment

Ally

T
HE YEAR 1973 HELD SOME OF THE DARKEST DAYS OF MY
life. There was no light whatsoever. I remember the flight home from Nepal. I remember sitting there in a comatose state, looking out the window and seeing little lights down below, so dim, so scattered. Every tiny light meant people, and where there were people, there was the possibility of someone who had my child.

I'd named her Constance because with my wandering spirit, she was the one constant I was going to have in my life. I had committed to having her on my own. I was committed to loving her and raising her and being her mother forever. But I had failed her. Her name had been a cruel joke. I'd jinxed myself—and her.

I'd been too stubborn. Why couldn't I have settled for Robert and become a housewife and mother? Why did it matter so much that he'd have girlfriends on the side? Why couldn't I have just fallen in love with Robert and not cared any more about Vesey's life? So what if he was married and had a child? I should have been okay with that. I didn't own him. I didn't have to run away. I didn't have to be so cowardly. Dang it all, I should have told Vesey a long time ago the way I felt about him, that I didn't give two cents what people would say about us being together. To heck with people. Yes, to heck with them.

It was people who talked me into leaving the States with my child. Many of my friends, now hippies, some of the same ones at Furman who had trekked to Woodstock, wound up hitchhiking through Europe with the purpose of reaching India and Nepal. I would run into them and see the stars in their eyes. They told me I had to go, and so I went to Nepal, desperate for peace in my spirit. Like my friends and the Beatles, I went seeking enlightenment.

I knew I needed some sort of help when I drove by Jasper Farms in the hopes of spotting Vesey and saw Beulah instead with her growing belly, how she looked so pretty and happy. I was eaten up with jealousy. I loved my child and should not have cared about another woman, another child being born to Vesey. I hated the way I felt. So I thought it was time to get over it all and bought a ticket for me and Constance for Kathmandu. I thought I was doing something good for our future, despite my parents' plea for me to stay. I was not going to hitchhike through Europe like the others. I was going to skip all that and go straight to the enlightenment part. Then I'd come home a new woman, a better mother, and the thought of Vesey having a family wouldn't hurt me a bit.

I came home a different woman, all right.

The only thing certain in those days when I came back stateside was I didn't want to live without my daughter. The only reason I didn't do myself in was the fact that I believed she was alive out there. She was alive and the only thing I could do for her now was to keep breathing and hoping and looking for her. The Hindus in Nepal believe in reincarnation. Depending on your past life, you come back in either a higher caste with more luxury or a lower caste with more suffering. I was beginning to wonder what sins my past life had committed. They must have been pretty terrible. I was paying for them now, suffering greatly. One minute I'm sitting in a café reading the menu with my child next to me, and the next minute she's gone. Vanished. I had
lost
my child.

We'd searched all of Kathmandu. I went to that café almost daily in the last few months after they said it would be nearly impossible to retrieve her then. That in cases like this, a baby might be sold to a black market adoption agency. That she had probably already been adopted out. That she could have been adopted back into the United States somewhere to some unknowing loving couple. Someone who'd have no idea she was kidnapped and my child. I clung to this possibility because the alternatives were grimmer.

I went back to Molasses Creek, but only to see Mama. She had lost her luster, her joy. But I didn't really grieve over that. I was in a dark, dark place, far from enlightenment. She doted on me constantly to the point of obsession. But Daddy, for some reason, got the brunt of it. Daddy had aged a good ten years in the months he'd been with me in Nepal. Mama insisted on feeding him to fatten him up on home-cooked meals, but I noticed he wouldn't eat his rice anymore, even when we had pot roast and gravy. He'd just shove it off to the side of the plate. Mama looked worried about him, but I knew why he did it. He'd eaten too much rice in Nepal.

I left home after a few months. I applied for a position as a stewardess on another airline, Worldways, and started over again. I tried to reset time and forget Robert and Constance had ever happened to me. It didn't work and was especially hard when I was having to be so nice to everybody. There wasn't a nice, happy bone in my body anymore and I wasn't fooling anyone. I was reprimanded a few times, came close to letting loose on a passenger or two, but I flew. I flew and flew and hardly took any time off. I racked up those miles as fast as I possibly could, passing the time in the air, in another city every day. I was based out of Atlanta again, but worked hard to avoid running into people I once knew. People who knew the old me.

I did see Robert again. I saw him in an Atlanta concourse and ducked, but it was too late.

“Ally!” he called to me. I turned and there he was, handsome, dressed in his uniform, same stripes, same everything. As if nothing at all had changed in his world. “How in the world are you?” He was so nice, so friendly, so blissfully unaware of what had been going on in my life. I'd never sent him any news of Constance's birth. In fact, after he asked me to marry him and left Mama and Daddy's house that day, he'd given up easily. Never called. Acted just the way I knew he would.

“You look great,” he said. “Are you working? Worldways . . .” He read my name tag.

“Yep, Worldways. More international flights.”

“Great. That's great. You look great.” He rubbed his hands. “The last time I saw you, you—”

“I lost the baby,” I said. It just came out, and I wasn't lying a bit.

“Oh. Oh, I'm sorry,” he said. His face looked genuinely pained. I imagined he liked the idea of knowing there was a child out there who shared his genes, that he was satisfied just knowing he'd helped bring a child into the world. That was good enough for him. But for me, knowing there was a child still out there, somewhere, was mind-numbing-crazing obliterating. It drove me to distraction. Part of me thought it would be easier if she had died. Can you imagine a mother thinking that? But at least I would have been able to grieve something definite. The fact that she could still be out there, that someday I could pass my child and not even know it, made me study people hard. Every family, every child I saw who was about her age as she turned one and two and three and four and ten and twenty and thirty . . . Well, the not knowing was the hardest part.

The not knowing still is the hardest part. But at this stage, not knowing is better than the alternative, I think.

I take the notes Daddy painstakingly tacked up on the ceiling for me and call Kat to follow me into the bedroom. I lie down on my side and turn the lamp on. Flipping through the notes one by one, I trace the letters with my eyes. Daddy's hand was here. He wrote this. He was right here. I find the one he wrote about Constance. The one that says for me to rest now, that she's up there in heaven with him, that I don't have to search the world over for her anymore, and I smile. Really I do, because I know what Daddy was trying to do. I'm his child, and he was trying hard to protect me, but he failed, just like I did. He failed and I failed and I'm grateful he doesn't have to deal with the abysmal loss anymore. Now it's only me here. Me and Kat.

I set the notes on the nightstand and turn out the lamp. Kat snuggles down on my feet, and I lie there in the dark thinking of Vesey. His daughter is with him, spending the night in the hospital. I said my hellos and then left them to talk things over, and now they're talking, teary-eyed, grim. I am hoping she can talk some sense into him. If we can just get him on his feet, then I'll stay on his behind about his medication. I will. And I won't let him ride out to his stand anymore. It's just too much for him. Never should have been doing it in the first place.

Yes, maybe they can talk some sense into him, although it sounds as if Daddy wasn't even able to do that. Of course, Daddy never could talk any sense into me either. Maybe Vesey and I are more alike than I ever suspected.

I close my eyes and picture Vesey in the hospital bed, looking all pale, which, for him, is saying something. And not anything good. Tomorrow I'm going to walk that bridge for Vesey. I'm going to finally walk right over the thing, over the water, over to the other side—a vigil for him to get well. And then I'm gonna tell him how nice it was and how he needs to get well so he can come walk it with me. That at this stage in my life, after just losing Daddy, I simply cannot bear, will not bear to lose my oldest friend.