Digging Out (39 page)

“Sweetie?”

“Hi, Mom.”

“Did I wake you?”

“Not really.”

“Listen, I want to scatter Marco’s ashes. It’s time.”

“Okay. When?”

“This weekend.”

“Oh, Mom. Can’t it wait until I come out on business? I’m right in the middle of a million different—”

“I haven’t been able to move ahead. I need to get on with my own life. I need to put Marc somewhere. I can’t have him hanging around in the dining room anymore.”

Dafydd laughs.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.”

“And there’s something we need to discuss,” I add.

“About what?”

“About Marco.”

“What is it?”

“Not now. When you get here.”

“Okay.”

“This weekend, okay?”

“Okay, Momma.”

I’d thought about gathering a group, having some of the same folks who’d spoken at the memorial service trek up the hill with us in order to say a few words; but in the end, it is just Dafydd, Hannah and I.

“Isn’t it against the law to throw ashes just any old where?” Hannah asks. “I can see it now. We’ll be spending Thanksgiving in jail.”

“Stuffing and water,” Dafydd adds.

We decide to hike to a spot in Temescal Canyon where as a family we’d hiked millions of times. We know the spot where we want to fling the ashes: about three miles up there is a view of the ocean in one direction and the Santa Monica Mountains in the other.

Hannah complains the whole way. Dafydd worries if we don’t hurry he’ll miss his twelve o’clock phone conference. Hannah continues to worry we’ll get caught by the “coppers.” Dafydd’s feet hurt and he is getting a migraine.

By the time we reach the spot, I am ready to throw the two of them off the cliff with Marco. So much for family. It serves me right for coercing them. I should have come by myself and just dumped the ashes.

We sit down and I open the blue velvet bag. Immediately I see that the brass box is screwed down tight with small brass screws. Why haven’t I scoped out the box before? Luckily I have put my Swiss Army knife in my bag. With it, I try to jack the screws out. They won’t budge. I use the awl on the knife and try to pry it open.

“Someone’s coming!” Hannah whispers. “I knew it. We’re done for now.”

I put the box under my bag and sit on it. It is a dog walker with half a dozen dogs.

“Howdy. Beautiful day, isn’t it?” the fearless leader says as he pauses for a moment, taking a water bottle from his rucksack and pouring the water into a small blue bowl. Each of the dogs has a lap. One of them comes over to me and puts his face on my knee. I rub his head. I am afraid they might sniff Marc out, but after each of the dogs has a little drink, they start on their way.

I try the awl again. “Help me, Dafydd.”

“Ah, please, Momma. I’m not very good at this.”

Which one of us is good at this?

Dafydd takes the box.

“I’m going to keep watch, okay?” Hannah says.

Seconds later she calls out, “Someone’s coming!”

It is an older woman. She has binoculars around her neck and is carrying a bird book. She pauses right near us and puts the binoculars up to her eyes. “Oh, my goodness, it’s a red-tailed hawk. The markings on the tail are unusual. We’ve actually been tracking them.”

I find a loose cigarette in my bag and put it in my mouth. I’m not starting up again; this is just a little slip because of stress, grief. It won’t last. Just a stray left over from the really tough days.

“Would you like to look?” the woman asks. Her head whirls around just as I strike the match. “You can’t smoke up here. Didn’t you see the sign down there? This is a no-smoking area!”

“Sorry,” I say, stubbing the cigarette in the dirt. I pick the butt up immediately and roll it in a tissue, then put it in my pocket so she won’t accuse me of littering. “That’s the only one I have, I promise. I don’t really smoke.”

She shakes her head, not seeing through on her offer to show me the hawk, and quickly walks away.

After she’s gone a distance, Dafydd hands me the box. “Here. It’s open. Careful. The screws are all loose.” Clearly, mine are, too.

“Hannah. We’re ready.”

The three of us gather round the box. “Which of you wants to start?”

“Start!” they both say at once.

“No, thank you,” Dafydd says immediately.

“Me neither,” Hannah says.

“Okay. But don’t you want to at least look at them?”

They both shake their heads.

The wind is light, but it’s blowing. Dafydd says, “Careful the ashes don’t blow back in your face like they did in
The Big Lebowski.
“

I tell them I think I should move a distance away from the path and just empty it over the side of the cliff. “Any objections?” They shake their heads. “Shall one of us say a few words?” They both shake their heads again.

“The fewer the better,” Hannah says. “Let’s do this quick, before we get arrested. Daddy wouldn’t mind. He always said he hated small talk.”

I walk up the path about ten feet and lean way over the side, the box poised to be emptied. For a moment I feel the pull of the space below and start to tremble, begin to lose my balance. I steady myself with the help of a nearby tree trunk and catch my breath. I put my hands in the box, feeling the ashes, feeling the light sandiness, feeling Marc, what is left of him. I lean closer and smell the sweet, pungent smell, take a finger full, and lick some of the ashes.

“This is the last time I will hold you. The last time we will stand together like this …”

Then, handful by handful, I start to throw him off the cliff. When I am through, I stand for what seems like the longest time with the empty box, and then I take my wedding band from my trouser pocket.

“Thank you for saving my life,” I say, and heave the ring like a heavy rock, as far as I can.

“Momma? Are you all right?” Dafydd calls.

“Mom? Let’s go!” Hannah is nervous.

I am covered in dust, my black trousers splotched in a fine gray coating of it.

Just after we return from the flinging, Dafydd and I are in the garden sitting on the two chaise longue chairs on the lower deck, looking out over the pepper trees that Marco loved so much and, beyond that, the miraculous view of the sea.

“Marc had a lover,” I say simply. “A longtime lover.”

“Oh, Mom …” Dafydd replies, as if it is something I might have imagined.

“Gabriella Purdue.”

“You’re kidding.” He lifts his eyebrows and takes off his sunglasses.

“I’m not. He also had a child with her.”

“No.”

I nod. “Her name is Isabel and she is just a bit younger than Hannah. I found out a few months after Marco’s death.”

I reach over and put my hand on his knee. “Someday I’ll have to tell Hannah, but not now.”

Dafydd’s face is full of pain. “Why? I don’t get it.”

I shrug. “I was not the perfect wife. He might have been lonely. He was not the perfect husband.” My eyes fill with tears. “You know, I don’t think there is such a thing, really. A perfect marriage. But I think, all things considered, Marco and I did a pretty good job of it. Mam says, ‘It takes a long time to make a perfect marriage.’ “

Dafydd’s eyes fill.

“He loved you very much, Dafydd. You know, sometimes I teased him that he’d really fallen in love with you first.”

Dafydd smiles. That is an old story among the three of us.

For weeks after my meeting with Gabriella, I go over the papers she’s sent me about Isabel’s school. I don’t ever have to be best friends with this woman, who had in some ways given Marc what I was unable to—but finally, I know I have to acknowledge what had come out of that relationship. Their child. Isabel. And so, I write Gabriella and tell her I will help pay for Isabel’s education for as long as I can. I let her know I have told Dafydd about them and what I am doing, but Hannah is still so young, I hope I will be able to stave off telling her for a few years—until she is a bit older, perhaps, and more settled with all that has come to pass.

This morning, Hannah sits at the piano, practicing for her recital tomorrow. She is playing Mozart’s “Rondo Alia Turca.” One phrase continues to trip her up. She stops, starts again and slowly moves over the phrase another time.

And here I am, too, on this glorious fall morning in November, in my kitchen slicing tomatoes from the garden. Welsh-born and living at the tip of America’s Pacific Ocean, still wondering how I came to be saved and what I will do, finally, with my saved life.

Gram used to say, “No one knows when the final tap on the shoulder will come. So luxuriate in every moment!”

I have just cut up a full, flat plate of tomatoes. There are six in all: one a papaya orange, another kiwi green with three black stripes. Imagine that, designer tomatoes. My favorite are yellow, the size of marbles. There are three shades of red, with seeds so petulant that when I bite into them, they squirt and run down my face, my chin, and onto my shirt, a taste that I imagine worms taste: dark, rich earth. Dirt—what I remember eating when I was six, walking
through my gram’s vines, the ones that grew upside our fence, just picking one tomato straight off and biting into it. Sometimes in the late California summer, when I eat a tomato, the only thing I see is Gram’s face, a sunbeam reflecting off fine dark hair framing high cheekbones, her smile and slightly yellowing teeth, her long thin arms around me. She is my whole world and everything I know and love, in that one bite of tomato.

“Lord!” I look down at the knife, the tomatoes and then at my finger, where the bright blue-red of my own blood drips. I put my finger in my mouth.

Hannah moves over the same phrase in the rondo.

My finger is bleeding quite badly now. It stings from the vinegar and lemon. I mop it with a paper towel. I go to the phone and dial Evan’s number. He answers on the second ring.

“Two eight two nine,” he says.

“It’s Alys.”

“Hello, Alys.”

“Listen, Evan. I’d like to come over after Thanksgiving.”

Silence on the other end.

“Elizabeth will stay with Hannah while I’m gone.”

Still, silence. I can taste the blood from my finger. It is running down my throat.

“Evan, please.”

After another moment, he says brightly, “Well now, this is sort of a coincidence. After Thanksgiving sounds fine, but I’d actually like to see you sooner if that’s possible. I just bought a ticket to L.A. to arrive next Monday. I was going to ring you this morning to ask if the timing was all right for you. I can’t stay too terribly long, but—”

“Next week?”

“I’m having a bit of a hard time without you.”

I can feel my face breaking into a smile. “Just a bit?” I am so excited.

“Well, perhaps more than a bit. I thought I should see how you live, as you suggested. No strings attached.”

“Omigod, that’s the best news I’ve had in ’ maybe ever,” I admit.

In the background Hannah goes over the Mozart piece for the twentieth time, this time with no mistakes.

“That’s lovely,” Evan says. “Is it Hannah?”

“It is.”

“Give her my love,” he says. “Tell her I’ll be seeing her soon.”

Perhaps I will always feel the quiet ache that the Welsh call
Hiraeth:
a longing for something indefinable, unattainable. Maybe in my case it is my home I will always be in search of, but more likely it is probably my buried innocence, and I will always be digging out.

But there is also the keen possibility of my being able to live boldly in the treasure of my saved life, “
to kiss away each hour of Hiraeth,
” as the song says—a growing faith that home is in every moment and everywhere I go, and that I can harvest those experiences that connect my life with other lives.

A lofty thought for first thing in the morning, but one I’d like to grow into.

Photo by Joyce Ravid

Katherine Leiner
is a longtime author of children’s books. She has two children and lives part of the year in New York City.
Digging Ou
t is her first novel for adults.