In Search of Eden (10 page)

The empty feeling that came with that knowledge was accompanied by a little pulse of excitement at the thought of going someplace new. Who knew what people she might meet or what she might do? Where would she go? She thought of the possibilities.

What was she in the mood for? Long, lonely stretches of wilderness? Montana? Wyoming? She shook her head with a shudder. Somehow her loneliness here in Minneapolis ruled that out. She thought of crowds and bustle and decided she wanted a large, friendly city. Maybe she would settle in Little Italy in New York. No. Not in the winter. Too much cold and snow. L.A., then? No. Too much smog. San Francisco? San Francisco! Now
there
was an idea, and for a moment she thought of cable cars and sunshine and Rice-A-Roni and a book she'd read about a single woman who lived in San Francisco and fell in love with a carpenter. Yes! San Francisco! She stared into space as she filled in the details of the daydream. Her apartment would be in one of those Victorian row houses on the hilly streets. Yellow with white trim, like the one in that movie she'd seen where Chevy Chase played
a police detective who's protecting Goldie Hawn. A batty old man lived downstairs, and Goldie worked in a library and drove a sports car along winding highways that hugged the ocean. There were marinas and vineyards, and she remembered a commercial she'd seen with a handsome man sipping wine, and in the background were long, rolling acres of grapevines. She remembered seeing dappled sunlight and happy people sipping jewel-colored liquid from fluted glasses. They'd been eating pasta. Well, she liked pasta. The spokesman had been handsome and sturdy looking, with a nice beard, and she became lost for a moment in the pleasant story she told herself.

She looked up. Janelle was watching her. “It's been nice knowing you, kiddo,” she said with a kind smile.

“I'm not gone yet,” Dorrie said, feeling somehow ashamed. She went back to her typing with vigor, but in a way she knew she was lying. She was as good as gone, and she could tell that Janelle knew it by the wise and oddly pitying look in her eyes.

The apartment was silent and empty when she arrived back home, and for a moment Dorrie hoped Frodo had managed to escape and run away. She had left the bathroom window open a few inches. No such luck. He jumped at her feet, as usual, and as usual, she startled. She fed him, tried to pet him, thereby subjecting herself to more of his ill treatment, then put her frozen dinner in the microwave.

She turned on her cell and saw two missed calls with her mother's familiar number. Odd. Dorrie checked for messages, but there were none. She frowned, trying to remember the last time her mother had called her. It had been last March, on her birthday, in fact, and she still remembered the message.
“Just called to see how you're doing, but you're probably out with your friends.”
Loud sigh.
“So you're twenty-six today. When I was your age I had a husband and a child and two jobs. Talk to you later.”
There had been no
good-bye, just the decisive click of Mother disconnecting.

But Mama was consistent, at least. There had been a check in the mailbox that day, as there was every birthday. For twenty-five dollars. The same every birthday and another one at Christmas, along with a generic card, both signed in her mother's firm, unadorned handwriting.

She thought about calling Mama back but decided to eat her supper first. She then fussed around the apartment for a while, and just as she had steeled herself to make the call, her phone rang. She went to answer it, feeling a sudden foreboding.

It was Mama, and she didn't mince any words. After a perfunctory greeting, she delivered her message.

“I've got cancer,” she said. “Breast, and it's growing like kudzu.”

Three days later the apartment was cleared of Dorrie's belongings, which had been dispersed to various places. Frodo had gone to the old lady upstairs, who already had four cats. Dorrie wished her luck. She hadn't exactly been sorry to quit at Mice B Gone Exterminators, but she would miss Janelle. She would catch the 5:50 bus to Nashville, but first she had one last thing to take care of.

Good Shepherd Lutheran School looked strangely different today, even though Dorrie had been away less than three weeks. Class had just dismissed for the day, and children were streaming from every door. She felt oddly self-conscious as she headed down the hallway and had a sudden image of a small vine tugged out of the soil before the bud could flower and bear fruit.

She took a deep breath and wondered if she should continue on, but the decision was taken out of her hands. For there down the hallway was Roger, standing in the doorway of her old classroom, holding today's artwork, blinking behind his glasses. A
tired-looking middle-aged woman, obviously another substitute, stood behind him.

“Teacher!” Roger's face lit like a candle, and Dorrie felt her heart lurch, coming precariously unbalanced. He came toward her and held out his arms, and before she could think, she was on her knees beside him, feeling his sturdy warmth.

“Where were you?” he asked solemnly, hug completed.

His round cheeks and earnest expression made her feel inexpressibly sad.

“I had to be somewhere else, Roger,” she said, giving one of those meaningless explanations that probably do not fool children in the least.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” he asked.

She paused and her heart felt too heavy in her chest. Everything in her wanted to lie.

“No,” she said, the truth landing like a rock on her heart. “I came to tell you good-bye. I have to go home and help my mother.” She wondered if that was the only reason she'd been able to come today. Because she had a real reason for leaving instead of just her usual whim.

“Will you come back again, teacher?”

“I hope so,” she said. “Maybe.” A lie. A bald lie, but she had to tell it, as much for herself as for him. She would, she promised herself, but knew she would not. She knew it because of the fierce pain she felt right now. It was as persistent as an ache, as sharp as a knife thrust.

Roger frowned and looked desolate. He glanced over his shoulder toward the new substitute with an expression that would have made Dorrie laugh if she'd been able to feel beyond her own emptiness.
He is not my child,
she told herself.
He is not my child.

Roger's mother came then, in her usual whirlwind of jacket and cell phone and purse sliding off her shoulder. Today she was wearing tight jeans and a blouse that didn't quite span the distance between midriff and hips. Roger greeted her, his face lit up again,
and Dorrie was stranded somewhere between relief and disappointment.

“Let's go, honey,” his mother said. “Carl's waiting for us.”

Who was Carl? Dorrie wondered with a twist of concern that Roger didn't appear to share. He put his hand into his mother's and followed her out the door, then turned and faced Dorrie again.

“Good-bye, teacher,” he said solemnly.

Dorrie held up a hand and waved. She couldn't answer.

This, she reminded herself, sniffing back hot tears, is why you should never say good-bye.

chapter
9

D
orrie had been home for a month now. She had found Nashville still the same and Mama still—well, Mama was still Mama.

She glanced up now and saw her mother coming out from the doctor's office. Dorrie set aside the book she'd been reading— an old Perry Mason novel she'd found in the glove compartment. She should bring something of her own to read when she chauffeured, but Mama was always in a hurry to go and impatient over any delays but her own.

Mama opened the door,
harrumphed
as she flumped down on the seat beside her, and pointed forward—Mamaspeak that Dorrie should start the car and leave. Dorrie obliged, driving a mile or so before she had the nerve to ask the results of the latest scan.

“What did the doctor say?”

“It's spread to my lungs and liver.” Mama delivered the news in a tone of outraged irritation more than shock or grief, as if the paperboy had skipped their delivery or she'd been overcharged at the grocery store. She seemed personally irritated at the doctor, the clinic, and now especially at her. Mama glared at her with those sharp granite eyes piercing her own, as if daring her to
express any emotion. Dorrie half expected to again hear her say,
“Don't you dare cry, or I'll give you something to cry about.”
So she stifled whatever jumble of emotion she was feeling and drove her mother to the supermarket, the pharmacy, and then home. And Dorrie did not cry.

Things seemed to be progressing fast. Mama had taken to lying down every afternoon and actually using on occasion the portable oxygen they gave her—an indication of how her equilibrium had been upset, a fact she would rather die over than admit. Dorrie shook her head at the wry irony of the thought. For die she would and probably soon. Mama's cancer had metastasized, and there was nothing they could do now but wait for the end. Mama was not dying particularly well but with the same demanding energy she'd lived.

Dorrie helped her mother out of the car, into the house, and upstairs to rest. She then checked her watch. She had taken the whole day off to take Mama to the doctor, and it was already one o'clock. There was no point in going into the Sip and Bite, since her shift would end in an hour. She had applied for a job as a teacher's aide at a local school, but Mama had discouraged the idea. Her mother hadn't approved of the idea of her going to college to begin with and had been triumphantly vindicated when Dorrie's half-finished teaching degree fell victim to her impermanence.

“You should have just gone to work at the Sip and Bite,”
she had reproved. She knew Myra Jean needed help at the diner and thought it was ridiculous that her daughter would think herself qualified to teach. If Dorrie pursued any higher education, Mama wanted it to be at Françoise's School of Beauty, her own unfulfilled dream. One of many. She heard her mother's voice scolding her.
“Surely you don't think you're qualified to see to children, Dorrie? They have their teachers. They have their mothers.” They don't need the likes of you,
she might as well have added. Dorrie shook her head. Not only was she talking to herself, she was answering back. She wondered if Mama's voice inside her head would outlive Mama's
life on this earth, and suddenly she felt a desperate fear that it would.

She looked around at the house. It was immaculate, as usual. Nothing had changed for as long as she could remember. Off-white carpet, shampooed on schedule every six months for the last thirty years, gold-and-green sofa and chair set, with matching pillows artistically scattered about. Well, Mama was consistent. You knew what to expect from her, and Dorrie supposed that was worth something.

Dorrie sat down in the recliner, feeling a little rebellious for usurping her mother's chair. She looked around. There was the clear plastic placemat protecting the Formica end table. Her mother's nail file, pencils, and pens were handy in the small vase she set beside the remote control for the television set, and a new addition—a little cluster of pill bottles on the polished tabletop with Noreen Gibson's name on each one. Take as needed for pain. There was her crossword puzzle book, neatly folded back and held in place with a rubber band, beside the novel she was reading. Dorrie knew without looking that it would be a lurid romance with a pink and scarlet cover and a bare-chested gorgeous man bending back a nearly bare-chested gorgeous woman in a passionate embrace. She smiled a little at her mother's taste in literature, out of character as it was. But who really knew who lived behind Mama's stern façade? Dorrie certainly did not, and she wondered again who her mother might have been if her life had gone a little differently.

She hadn't had it easy, that was for sure. Dorrie knew that much, even though Mama never talked about her early life. She thought back to when the recorded history of Noreen Gibson began and tried to remember what her mother had looked like on her wedding day. She vaguely remembered the photograph that used to sit right there on the brick mantel beside the china figurines. She'd worn a simple white dress, and her red hair fell in lush waves. She was tiny, curvy, and beautiful with her gorgeous dark blue eyes, her pretty mouth curved into a smile beside her
husband, who was dark and handsome in his roughshod way. His people were Basque, he bragged, proud and mysterious, and even his name was flashy and vaguely dangerous. Thomas Orlando DeSpain. And he had bestowed an equally dashing name upon her.
“We'll call her Miranda,”
he'd told her in one of his endless repetitions of the story.
“Miranda Isadora DeSpain. A name fit for a princess.”
Apparently Mama had balked, but Daddy had been one person she hadn't been able to push around.