Even Now (26 page)

Like always, he checked the blanket dial. “I know you,” he said, and like always, he kissed me good night.

But the day, and the night, what had been and what almost was, churned my consciousness, resisting rest.

My own robe was plain, flannel, blue. For once Hal had forgotten to draw the curtains. I never did close them and never would.
In Cullen we even left our doors unlocked.
“Old habits die hard,”
Daintry had said that night at Ceel’s. So do old friends.

Not wanting to ever again hear Ellen’s recorded plaints for help, I pressed the playback button to erase the tape on the answering
machine. There were three new messages, though, the library with a book on hold, a stockbroker cold-calling Harold Marsh.
Then Wendy Howard. “Mark? Pick up . . . Mark? I thought you might like to . . .” Giggle. “You know, go out.” I quickly punched
erase. I didn’t want to hear that again, either.

I switched on the outdoor flood, checking more from habit than hope. Then stopped, pulled a chair to the window, and tucked
my feet beneath me. It looked like falling ash, so scant that I could count each tiny one before it drifted from the beam’s
reach. Stars are said to twinkle, but so do snowflakes under a light at night.

There is always something unattainable that shines and glitters and beckons. Should you summon courage enough, grow reckless
enough, it may be nothing but trickery at the bottom of the pool, an optical illusion. And even if it’s a piece of treasure—a
coin or locket, a silver button—and even if you retrieve it, it still belongs to someone else. You can hold it, you can even
keep it, but you’d always know it had first been someone else’s.

I barely exhaled, afraid my warm breaths might cloud the pane. When you least expect it, it finally comes. Snow at last. In
no rush, the flakes floated gracefully, increasing in number. Miraculous.

When Daintry and I watched
The Wonderful World of Disney,
our favorite part was the time-lapse photography of blooming flowers, the tulip and daisy and crocus unfolding incredibly
before our eyes. I knew about flowers. I knew about snow. So did Daintry, once. Fat, mothy flakes were prettier, but dangerous.
Big flakes meant temperatures were rising, and the snow would surely stop. But these flakes had grown even smaller as I watched,
become diamond dust in the light. It would snow all night, something I was finally sure of. The morning landscape would be
white, blanketed, cleansed. I drew the curtains, for Hal.

In Mark’s room, by the faint lights from the cassette player, the illuminated face of the alarm clock, the lurid lava lamp,
I could make out the stolen STOP sign, the posters on the walls of writhing rock stars. Their eyes were blank, staring,
Children of the Damned
eyes. We’d done that, too, Daintry and I, licked erasers and whitened out the pupils to blindness. The more things change,
the more they stay the same.

Wendy Howard would come again, and call again, and take him in again with her predatory and catlike slink.
“The Howards are getting one of Daintry’s kittens,”
Ellen had said.
“Can we?”
And maybe Mark would or maybe he wouldn’t do something he was too young to do with her. There’s no legal age or statute of
limitations on sexual stupidity, not for a son, not for his mother.

And if not Wendy, it would be some other girl who loved him, and I’d feel again that uneasy combination of dread and gladness
for my hurt and Mark’s delight.
“It’s bound to happen, Hannah,”
Hal had said.
“It happened to us.”
I leaned over my sleeping son and carefully removed the headphones from his ears.

Ellen clutched a sand-art pendant even in sleep, a homemade trinket she kept stashed in the velveteen case my pearls had come
in, her makeshift jewelry box. I pried it loose from the gaudy fingernails, Daintry’s handiwork, and bent to kiss one of the
baby plaits. Daintry, again. I kissed the forehead smoothed by carelessness, restored after a day of childhood’s anguish.

“Doesn’t it all boil down to diapering them and cooking for them and cleaning for them and driving for them and buying for
them?”
Daintry had said.

But those are temporary troubles. Temporary, like my move to Rural Ridge. Like my friendship with Daintry. She’d said so herself.
“When your children are young,”
my mother once said to me,
“you wear them on your feet. When they’re grown, you wear them on your heart.”

“I could never have children,”
Daintry had remarked.
“They’re too needy.”

Just,
I thought, and shut my children’s doors.

The sheets were chill with vacancy, and as I waited for the warmth to blossom and surround me, I cried, grieving for what
I’d nearly done. Cried for Hal, the husband I loved. Cried for Ceel’s childlessness, for my children’s growing up with all
its tender and terrible and unavoidable pain. Cried for my sickened, dying friendship with Daintry O’Connor.

As girls we’d collected Joan Walsh Anglund books, copied the chubby-cheeked, dot-eyed illustrations of moppet children in
Love Is a Special Way of Feeling, A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You.
I’d given Daintry another slim Anglund volume for graduation, this one a collection of short poems written for adults. Because
we believed we were grown then, at eighteen. Before wrapping it, I’d copied a verse into my quote book.
What matters? Very little. Only. . . the flicker of light within the darkness, the feeling of warmth within the cold, the
knowledge of love within the void.

I hadn’t known that when you cry lying down, your ears fill up with water.

The bed grew warm. When Ellen was born, I couldn’t hold her for shaking under the epidural’s anesthesia aftereffect. I was
freezing with teeth-chattering cold, my muscles rigidly contracted. The hospital bed vibrated with my shivering. Nothing helped,
not layers of pre-warmed blankets, not the nurses’ suggestions to relax. My fingers curled and my jaws ached from trembling.
Hal had climbed into the elevated bed, amid the sheets and blankets and pads, never mind the bloody gown and my clammy sweat,
and held me close, and tight, and whispered that I was wonderful, that it would all be fine.

Tonight as it snowed, my husband was a dark hump in our warm bed. Tonight there was no restless twitching. Hal was still,
and still beside me.

From Hannah’s quote book:

“And remember this,” he continued, “that if you have been hated, you have also been loved.”

—Henry James

T
he snow went as quickly as it came, no more than a memory now of the bright glare those few hours before thermometers rose
and tree branches dropped their melting weight and white blankets slid tiredly from sloping roofs. Peter had used that mid-South
miracle, the swift transformation into an early spring, as text for his Easter Sunday sermon.
“Listen to the words,”
my mother had said as we waited to follow the choir down the aisle at my father’s funeral. I’d been teary, afraid I’d collapse
with grief in that public procession.
“Listen to the words and you will be all right.”
Without looking at him or thinking of him, I listened to Peter’s words. Once, though, I glimpsed his eyes travel upward and
wondered if it was inspiration he looked for or the organ loft and Daintry.

Hal and Ellen and Mark went to Sunday school. So did Doesy and Bill Howard, so did Frances Mason and Maude Burleigh. So did
Ben with Ceel, who tried to persuade me to come, too. We stood outside beside a five-foot cross spilling flowers. At churches
everywhere children had brought spring blooms to adorn chicken-wire crosses. “It’s Speakout Sunday,” Ceel said. “The congregation
has an open forum to discuss what they want in a new priest.”

“On Easter?”

“Schedule change. Ben’s hired the new chaplain for Asheville Academy, and she’s going to fill in at St. Martin’s luckily,
since Peter’s leaving earlier than planned. You didn’t know?”

I tucked a sprig of redbud more securely into the wire and shook my head. We’d spoken only once since that day, by telephone.
Hurriedly, sadly.

“It was a—”

“Reaffirmation service.”

He was silent a moment. “Yes, last minute. The couple was afraid the snow would cancel their plane, a second honeymoon. How
did you—”

“Daintry.”

I envisioned his quick, rueful nod. “Should we . . . We could—”

“Peter.” There is and always will be that inescapable pull between the comfort of what is known and the lure of what isn’t.
“No, it’s. . . ”

“The children. If they—” But my silence stopped him.

“It’s . . .” How could I put this?

“Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I was thinking . . .” The afternoon was clear. I’d held a bedraggled forget-me-not; he’d held an abandoned bird’s nest. “I
was thinking of the time I asked you if being good meant always letting someone in your lane of traffic when they were waiting.
And you said, no, being good meant not thinking you were good for letting them in.”

“Hannah.”

“We can’t because . . . because I like the old light bulb.”

“I know,” he said finally, “I know you do. And English box in the churchyard.”

He’d remembered. I’d known he would. I slid down the slick chintz of the bedspread to the floor, knees to chin, cradling the
phone. “Remember me telling you at Ceel’s, and later in the columbarium, about wanting something new all the while you’re
fighting for the old? Or trying to tell you.”

Wanting to be outside and beyond Cullen, yet wanting the security of returning. The good girl longing for the outlaw boy.
And wasn’t part of Daintry O’Connor’s appeal—her house and her family and Daintry herself— the fact that I could always leave
her, walk across the street to home?

“The paradox,” Peter said. “The old conundrum.”

“Is it? Or is it just wanting your cake and eating it, too. It’s wrong.”

“No,” he said. “People grow when they’re pulled between poles. Children want to be gone, then want to be home. So do couples,
friendships. Even religion. People need to belong to something or someone, then they resent it. Finding a balance is hard.
It isn’t wrong to look for it.”

He couldn’t see me, but I smiled. Smiled at that sweet, insistent sincerity. The essential reverence beneath it all.

“Hannah, we—” His voice grew distant. “What is it, Maude?”

“Take care,” I whispered, and hung up.

Instead of Sunday school I went to the columbarium, a sodden mess after the snowstorm and winter weeks of absence. The soil,
so carefully prepared, had sunk. Puddles dotted the plot, the water staining my shoes. Moss had taken root in one quadrant,
seeded perhaps from droppings the afternoon Peter had helped me gather it. A few lonely daffodils were blooming, February
golds meant to withstand the cold. But they couldn’t withstand the snow, whose weight had cowed them, matting the buttery
heads to the dirt.

Mindless of my dress and stockings, I knelt to examine every inch of a plot that had looked desolate and barren from a distance.
Still, I found millimetered darts that would become Virginia bluebells, thin burgundy stalks that were the beginnings of peonies.
Though frost-heaved, the campanula had lived, enduring the winter, and the ridged leaves of primroses safely hugged the earth.
I’d done my autumn raking well; no crackle of leaves announced her approach.

“Hello, Hannah.”

I looked at her across the columbarium, a chasm between us. “Daintry.”

“You were expecting . . .” She paused as if I might volunteer an answer. “I know, the Easter bunny.”

There’s a formula for Easter’s date, Peter explained to me, established two thousand years ago. That formula hasn’t stuck
with me, either. Memory is selective, and my memory selected Daintry. “Remember sitting on the doghouse that Easter, eating
dyed eggs until we hiccuped?” Brittle pastel bits of eggshells had drifted down our legs like confetti as we straddled the
metal S&H Green Stamps sign bent to form a roof.

“I’ll tell you what I remember about Easter,” Daintry answered. “The O’Connor kids always had to borrow flowers from your
yard for the cross at church, because we didn’t have any flowers in our yard.”

She strolled around the columbarium’s perimeter, more careful with her shoes than I’d been with mine. “I came to see what
the great attraction—or inspiration— is. Doesn’t look like much.”

“No, not yet.”

She toed the flimsy foliage of a jonquil. “These the bulbs you bought at the pumpkin place? Looks like the snow ruined them.”

My knees were wet. “They’ll come back. That’s the thing about bulbs.”

“I heard your mother planted tulips for your wedding. A hundred tulips. Did they come back?”

They hadn’t. “You didn’t come,” I said. “Every minute of my wedding I kept thinking I’d look up and you’d be there.”

Daintry picked up a sweetgum ball, slowly touched each prickle as though she were counting the barbs. “My mother planted daffodils
in Nashville when I got married. Daffodils are cheaper than tulips, aren’t they.” She tossed the pod away, shoved her hands
in her coat pockets, and exhaled noisily. “He’s good, isn’t he, my husband?” She rested her foot on the stump where I ate
lunches all fall, sharing them with her husband. “And fatally charming, as well.” Daintry had inspired any number of emotions
in me throughout the years. But never this. Never naked fear. “Yes . . .” She sighed noisily. “A good preacher. Jean would
hate that word, wouldn’t she, your mother? So. . . déclassé: ‘preacher.‘”

My mother. Who’d manipulated Daintry’s dominance by acknowledging my dependence. Something I’d always known, after all.

“Peter’s never
bad.
He’s just. . . flawed. And what’s more attractive than a flawed priest?” She moved closer, towering above me; I smelled her
perfume. “He means so well. It’s hard not to love someone who means so well. Isn’t it.”