Digging Out (26 page)

“I don’t have to leave.”

“You go on now,” she says. “I’m sure you both have a lot to catch up on.”

“I’ll come round early tomorrow,” I say.

“We’ll be here,” she says, up the stairs now.

Before we leave, I sneak a peek behind the closed door of the parlor. It is in shadows as the last light of day streams through the stained glass window that comforted me as a child. The white porcelain dog and the two brass candlesticks that belonged to Gram are still on the mantel where they always sat. There is nothing at all on the walls, not even one of Parry’s paintings. It remains sterile, unfriendly and formal. There are so many unpleasant moments I spent
in it. I still wonder why when we were children, they put the telly in this room, which we used only on rare occasions. So many things they did for show. It should have been in the kitchen or up in Parry’s room, as it is now.

Evan follows me out, shutting the door behind him. Once outside, I pause, shaking my head as I look up at the lighted second floor, so many conflicting feelings.

“Amazing,” I say.

“What?”

“I’m just surprised she didn’t want me to spend the night. She didn’t even ask where I was staying.”

Evan says, “I wouldn’t be too hard on her. ‘Specially now. She may have thought you were staying with me.”

He is such a paradox. His cold intense anger toward me and his gentleness and warmth toward my mother

“I’m not trying to be hard on her, Evan. I’m just trying to understand things. I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about why I had to leave and how it must have affected everyone: you, Gram, Da and Mam. At the time I couldn’t dwell on it—I just had to go, quick as I could. I can see how much damage it has done. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if Hannah or Dafydd left me like that. But if they did and then came home after a million years, I sure wouldn’t want them running off again so fast, even for the night.” I am thinking out loud, probably not even making a lot of sense.

“But you are not your mother and she is not you. Give her a few days to get used to you being back. You saw her as we left. She’s a mess. She probably needs to privately refuel.”

“I’m sure you’re right. I’m just impatient, only having these few days to cover so much ground.”

Evan’s expression changes. Even less friendly. “A few days? What can you possibly accomplish in a few days? You can’t really expect too much of anyone, can you now?” The bitterness in his tone, the harshness, is back.

“Evan, now what have I said?”

“Well, help me out, Alys. If you’re only home for just a few days, during a time when your mother is having to deal with your father’s imminent passing—no easy thing, as you know—you can’t be expecting her to entertain you. In fact, you probably shouldn’t expect anything.”

“I don’t expect her to entertain me.” He is attacking me again.

“So what exactly do you expect?” He throws his hands up in exasperation, looking at the sky, maybe at the North Star just come out.

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t really expect anything. I just want to be here. To see Da, to—”

“Do you think that you can just go away and not make contact with any of us for years and years, and then show up for three minutes and expect your mam to welcome you home with open arms?”

“Evan, I can’t believe that after all this time and now I’m finally here you choose to yell at me because of how long I’m staying?” His anger toward me is all around him.

“I’m not yelling.”

“You are. Perhaps we shouldn’t talk about this in the middle of the road.”

“Why not? What difference does it make where we talk? We’ve got so little time, better take advantage of every moment, middle of the road or not.” He turns to look at me.

“There’s no way we can have a reasonable conversation about anything. You’re so angry with me.” I look up at him, biting my lower lip. “Jesus, Evan. I’ve at least tried to explain—I have.”

Evan sighs.

My upper lip is trembling.

He turns away. “Okay. Okay. You’ve made a point.” When he turns back, he says, in a softer tone without looking at me directly, “The truth is, we all do love you, Alys. Your mother, your father, Beryl and I I’m betting you’ll get more than what you need from your mother if you give her half a chance, a little patience, and a lot of understanding, despite how long you stay. These are hard times for her.”

“And what about you, Evan?” I can feel the tears behind my eyes. I am determined not to give in to them. “I may have made a point, but you’ve kind of ignored it.”

“No, I haven’t. I just don’t want to delve into it in the middle of the road,” he says.

“Hah! See what I mean!”

He rolls his head and a smile of sorts appears at the corners of his mouth. “Caught.”

I clear my throat and swallow through the tears. “Can’t you see I am so sad about everything, Evan? There doesn’t seem anything I can do to make the past better. Despite the fact that I’m only here for a short time, I am here. We could take a stab at it.”

“A stab?”

“You know.”

He looks at me quizzically.

“We could try to at least have a conversation that’s not edged with innuendo, sarcasm and anger. These are hard times for all of us, it seems.”

A moment passes. Evan nods.

“Truce?” I put out my hand.

Another moment passes.

“Truce.”

We shake.

N
o one else is on the road. As evening begins to settle, lights go on in the terrace rows. Evan shows me a dirt path he’s found, a shortcut that leads up to the field behind his cottage. We branch off before reaching the field, heading instead toward the pub. Bending low under a weeping willow, I notice how the light is muting from twilight to dusk, our shadows growing, a full moon giving us more than enough shine to see our way. We come out from under low-hanging branches into the lights from the pub.

Evan asks quietly, “I would actually like to try and understand why you left me, Alys. Could you be more specific? Because I thought our being together—I mean, you sleeping at my flat—had helped.”

The question, so sudden and coming out of the quiet after the show of his anger, takes me aback. Part of me is almost afraid to answer him, as if he might be setting me up.

“Of course it helped, some. But it wasn’t just you, Evan. It was everything. It’s been so long I don’t know if I can really explain it. It was so many things. My relationship with Mam, my anger toward Da You saw me—I wasn’t functioning. For all intents and purposes I’d dropped out of school. Remember, I was hardly getting out of bed. And then I found out I was pregnant. It was all just too much for me. I think if I’d stayed another moment I might have ended up like Parry.”

“You didn’t give me enough of a chance.” Moonlight reflects in
his eyes like bright, hard crystals. I take a chance and put my arms around his stiff body, trying to hold him. He doesn’t relax any, but he doesn’t pull away, either.

It seems like hours we stand, me holding him. After a while, he moves a bit, and I let him go.

“Thanks. I appreciate the hug,” he says.

We manage to make our way into the friendliness of the pub, to a back table. Evan brings a Guinness and a glass of red wine from the bar. We sit quietly, glancing at each other and then awkwardly looking away. Soon one of the women behind the bar comes and asks us if we’d like something to eat. We both order chicken curry and a side of chips. I know it will come with mushy peas and overcooked carrots.

“And a carafe of your red wine, please,” Evan adds.

By the time the dinner arrives, I am ravenous.

“Let’s pretend I cooked it,” he says, trying hard to be friendly.

I look at his hands as he pushes a first bite of food with his knife onto his fork, remembering what a good cook he was when we were young

“Next time could you take the vegetables off the burner a bit sooner?” I tease, hoping to soften him a little more toward me.

He looks up at me and smiles.

Mushy vegetables or not, the meal is delicious. There is no french fry like a Welsh chip, crisp and greasy, moist in the middle. And as the Welsh are known to do at meals, we talk about the weather. A safe topic. Evan confides how it hasn’t been this beautiful in Wales in more than a decade. He lets me into his world a little, talking about his life as a teacher and a bit of how the choir started.

“Several months after you left, I was in the pub one night. A bunch of us had had too much to drink for a change. We were carrying on, and it turned into song as it sometimes does—you know how that goes. You remember the old saying ‘If you get two Taffys together they immediately form a chorus?’ “

I laugh, remembering how my da would break into song when he had a beer and there were friends over.

“I think it was Jack Ratchet who said, ‘Someone oughta start a men’s choir. That might put us right if anything will.’ Before I knew it we’d gathered thirty men. Then it was forty and we were using my
classroom for rehearsals. Once we were going strong, we all seemed to get something out of it. It filled our need to do something for each other and the village. And the men liking it filled me up.” He pushes his hair away from his forehead and leans back in his chair, enthusiastic and relaxed as he talks about how he has made his own way in the world. “Now we are fifty in number, with a waiting list.

“It’s miraculous, really. Never in a million years did I think we’d perform outside of the area. We’ve been all over Britain and who knows what lies ahead?”

Despite his enthusiasm, and how much he has helped the village, I can see in his eyes how hard it has been for him. “How do you find the time with your teaching schedule?”

“Saturdays, Sundays and substitutes.” He shrugs. “It’s good, mostly—I am enjoying my life. Once in a terrible blue moon I get to thinking about how tied down I’d be if I were hitched to someone, babies running around. And then I realize that it’s something I miss. Having not had my own children around.” He pauses, looking down at his plate, realizing perhaps he has strayed to dangerous territory again. But he doesn’t take it back; he just leaves it there. “What about you, Alys? How have you managed with all you’ve had to face? It’s a terrible lot you’ve had to deal with, and now your husband’s death.”

I try to think how to answer. There isn’t a simple answer to how I’ve managed, besides the many ways in which I guess I’ve learned to cope: denial, anger, regret and sadness.

I try to put some of it in words. “Before Marc’s death, I guess I just lived, making an effort not to think about anything unpleasant, particularly not my past. I just plowed through. That’s all I could do. I am beginning to see now it was a rather superficial way to get through life. Marc’s death has somehow changed all of that. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere for me to hide now. My defenses are down. It’s hard, and I am awfully lonely sometimes. I guess that’s my biggest lesson at the moment: learning how to be single. How to be in the world alone. That’s hard. But I have Hannah, and since she’s doing better, I guess it means, in some ways, I’m doing better. You know what they say about parents—’You’re doing as well as your kids are.’ “

“So I’ve heard,” Evan says, without affect.

Damn. My turn for an insensitive moment on dangerous turf.

“Hannah actually decided on her own to go to sleepaway camp.”

“Sleepaway?”

“For a month. It’s kind of a wilderness camp. You know, hiking, rafting. No parents, just kids and counselors. Her idea, totally I think she felt she needed a break from me, my heaviness, and from Los Angeles, the city in general—you know how it is. Initially I was against it, but she talked me into letting her go.”

“You’d never find parents here letting their children go off for a month, I don’t think. It’s an odd concept, young children going off without their parents.” He shakes his head. “And are you still writing?”

“Poetry.”

“Ah, of course, I wasn’t thinking. I knew that. Gram told me. Funny, Parry always thought you’d be a poet.”

“He did, didn’t he?” I warm, remembering.

After dinner we walk back to Evan’s. It’s been a very long day and I’ve had much too much wine. We’ve taken the roadway and I stumble on a rock. Evan puts his arm around me and helps me get my balance; he’s so close I smell the familiar lavender soap he’s always used.

“Steady there, Alys.” He rights me by putting my arm on his forearm for balance.

“The sky is so lovely, as clear as any Colorado night.”

“Is it? What do the Rockies look like?”

I tell him that they range around the state like arms, holding the sunrise and twilight, making me feel safe, or as safe as I can ever feel. “At sunset the light turns them violet, just like in the American ballad. Their ‘purple mountains’ majesty’ is just that. In places their peaks and valleys remind me of Switzerland.”

“You’ve traveled a lot, then?” he asks.

“Not nearly as much as I’d like.”

“Hmmm. When we were young my wildest fantasy was about taking you to Fiji—I don’t know why Fiji—maybe because it was so far away from here and so exotic.”

This fantasy somehow surprises me. That he’d really thought about a life with me. Traveling. Leaving Aberfan for any reason.

When we reach the top of his drive, where my car is parked, he says, “I don’t think you should drive back to Cardiff tonight. You’ve had too much to drink.”

“I’m fine,” I lie.

“You’re not.”

“I’ll be fine. It’s just a little jet lag.” I look up at the moon, which has now risen, full, over the Aberfan hills, and seems to be shining down directly on us. Hannah sees the same moon on the other side of the world. “I need to call Hannah.”

“So call her here. I’ve a wonderful little guest room. And you can get up early and see your mam and da first thing. I’m also on the telephone. When you left, hardly any of us were—do you remember? The whole village has come into the twenty-first century. You can actually call Hannah while sitting in front of a roaring fire,” he says, imitating a very stuffy Englishman. “I won’t take no for an answer. You’ve no choice, really, Alys. It would be absolutely dead-out irresponsible of me to let you on the motorway. I can’t allow it.”