Mourning Becomes Cassandra (12 page)

Mrs. Hillard clapped then to get everyone’s attention. “Welcome again, everyone, to our home. Before we get under way, we just want to go over some basic sailing terminology and safety requirements, so if I could please have your attention. How many of you have sailed before?” Puking in a bag on my way to Capri surely didn’t count, so I kept my hand down. Only a few of hands were raised, Louella’s among them. “Just so,” said Mrs. Hillard. “We don’t expect much from you all except to duck if we say duck and practice some basic safety measures.” She went over these—the main one being to keep one hand for holding on to the boat so that we wouldn’t lose our balance—and indicated which parts of the boat were good for clutching onto: rails, side stays, mast, lifelines.

Nadina sidled over to me and muttered, “This is too much to remember—I’m just going to hang on to you, Cass.”

“Good luck with that plan,” I replied shortly.

In the event, our little cruise didn’t require us to test our new knowledge. The Hillards did most of the work, with occasional help from the few experienced sailors; the rest of us were free to enjoy the breeze and sunshine and sparkle off the lake. The mountains were out—Rainier glowed blue-white and almost within reach. Something big must have been going on at Husky Stadium; we saw the cars backed up on the bridge, and the traffic jam added to our feeling of freedom. It was impossible not to relax; Nadina shrieked with laughter whenever the boat heeled unexpectedly, Sonya spotted a flipping fish, the grumpy older man Ray pointed out landmarks familiar to us all from childhood, and I even saw Kyle smiling. Maybe because we were the only two mentors there under 50 years old, James and I frequently caught each other’s eye when one of the kids did or said something humorous and would look away before we could laugh.

Too soon it was over, but the good spirits carried over to the barbecue. Mark Henneman had us play a game where each mentor and mentee had ten minutes to find all the things they had in common, the crazier the better, and he gave us a list of possibilities to get us going: favorite books or movies, places we had been, names of people we had dated, shared talents or physical characteristics.

Nadina whipped the list out of my hand and moaned, “We’re gonna lose! We won’t have anything!”

“How do you know?” I countered. “We just have to be creative. Where were you born?”

“Bellevue. But they’re both in the same county. We’ll say we were born in the same county. And your boyfriend is Mike. I dated a Michael in high school for two weeks.”

“That’s two things. You’re married, right? What’s your husband’s name?” Nadina asked, getting into it.

“Troy,” I said, after hesitating briefly. Is there ever a good time to mention someone is dead? Surely I could be forgiven for not squelching all Nadina’s enthusiasm for the icebreaker.

“No way! Before I met Mike I really liked this guy named Troy who was on the Winslow Homer basketball team. He kind of liked me too, for a while.”

“My Troy played high school basketball, too,” I said. Nice that her Troy was also in the past tense.

By the end of ten minutes, when Mark asked us to wrap it up, we had compiled a respectable list.

“Okay,” said Mark, “how many of you pairs found at least ten things in common?”

Several raised their hands. Nadina grabbed my arm and held it up in the air with hers. “Fifteen things?” A few pairs put their hands down. “Twenty things?” Only we and Kyle and James remained. “Twenty-five things?” James put his hand down.

“Whoo hoo!” yelled Nadina, punching the air. Mark asked us to share some of the things we had discovered, but when I reached for the list to edit a few of them, Nadina whisked it away. “Let me see…Cass and I both thought we might puke today. We both have moles on our ass—” (She danced away from my hand.) “We both dated guys named Mike, but her Mike dumped her, and we both dated guys named Troy who played basketball, only my Troy dumped me, and hers married her.”

At least her phrasing was vague enough that you didn’t know if Troy was alive or dead. If I added any more people to the Elvis-lives list, I would have to stage Troy’s death on national TV to set the record straight. Mark Henneman must have noticed my quandary because he quickly moved on to the others. Nadina and I unearthed the most things in common, but not the most unusual, unless you counted the mole. Sonya and Louella could both tie a cherry stem in a knot with their tongues; Ray and his student Tan were both in a hot-dog-eating contest; and Kyle and James each won the same geeksta rap CD at some video game conference in Seattle last month.

“If you both won the same CD at the same conference, did you run into each other there?” I asked.

James slapped Kyle on the back, I kid you not. “I dunno, Kyle—were you one of the eight hundred guys wearing glasses and a fanny pack?”

“Dude,” rasped Kyle, “I thought that was you.” He actually smiled again—twice in one day!—while James laughed heartily.

“I didn’t know Bateman ever talked,” Nadina remarked on the ride back. “He never talks in school. He must like his mentor guy.”

“I think he does,” I answered, smiling to myself. “They’re both smart and know lots about video games and
StarWars
and such.”

“Yeah…” she played with the window control, up down up down. “Mike doesn’t talk much to me, but he talks to his guy friends about the music stuff. Does Troy talk to you?”

I took a deep breath. Time to take the bull by the horns. We were pulling up at the school, and I deliberately waited to answer until I shut down the engine, so that I could look at her. “Nadina, this is kind of weird, but Troy doesn’t talk to me at all. Because he died about fifteen months ago. I’m a widow.”

“Shut
up!
” she shrieked. “That is not even funny to joke about.” I grimaced apologetically but didn’t know what to say. For some reason, maybe because my secretly-dead husband was beginning to loom comically large in my Camden School doings, I didn’t feel that treacherous tightening in my throat.

Her mouth popped open, then shut. She made several attempts to speak, all unsuccessful. I put my hand on her arm to reassure her. “It’s okay. I don’t know what to say either. He had a heart condition no one knew about, and he just died very suddenly while he was driving. We had a little girl, who was with him in the car, and—and—she’s gone too.” Nadina’s mouth continued to work, and some objective part of my mind noticed she looked a little like a fish after it’s been landed on the boat deck.

“You’re all alone?” Nadina finally managed. “That really sucks.”

“Not all alone,” I said hastily. “I was alone for a while, but now I’m living with some good friends, and I still have them and family and church and even my in-laws.”

She looked at me skeptically. “Really,” I persisted. “The last month has been the best since the accident, and today was so fun I almost forgot about it. Let’s not end the day on this note. Are we hanging out Tuesday?”

Nadina continued to stare at me, and I wondered if she would want a mentor trade-in. Maybe it was too much to ask: not just—surprise! I have a dead husband—but wait, there’s more! My daughter also died! I underestimated her, however, and what she had been through herself.

After another moment Nadina shrugged and started to get out of the car. “Works for me. See you then.”

“So what was your daughter like?” Nadina asked me one afternoon, some weeks later.

It had taken her some while to return to the subject, but I discovered talking about Troy and Min to someone who didn’t know them was unexpectedly easier. I found myself lifting the lid on those boxes of memory I tried to stuff under the bed: what Min had been like and what I had dreamed of for her; how Troy had been my husband and best friend.

We were at the lake again, having walked Benny. Nadina and I spent most of our weekly time going for walks, with Benny whenever I happened to have him—Benny, who showed improvement for every hour spent with Nadina. (Phyl remarked on it, and even Jason complimented Phyl on finally showing dominance over Benny: “I’ve always told you, Philly, you weren’t aggressive enough. You’ve got to show dogs you’re the alpha. Glad to see you’re finally getting some backbone.”)

When it rained we got coffee at Tully’s or walked to the Palace. No one was ever home at that hour, and Nadina got a kick out of exploring my natural habitat. “It helps me to picture you,” she said, “Not sobbing into your pillow every night but living in a big house with a view.” This October day was glorious, however, clear and blessedly dry. Clyde Hill’s many maple trees had flamed into gold and russet, and we were perched on our favorite bench looking across the water to downtown Seattle.

“Min was a split between Troy and me,” I remembered. “Everyone said she looked like me but she acted like Troy. Even though she was so little, she already liked to tease me. Like how I was about pacifiers. She would hear me preaching to my mom or someone about how I didn’t like pacifiers, so whenever she came across one at someone else’s house, she would instantly stick it in her mouth and come show me, just to torture me. She’d be grinning so hard around it that it would almost fall out.”

“Cass, you’re such a hard-ass. What’s wrong with pacifiers?” Nadina asked.

“Oh, I had ideas about not messing up her orthodonture. I had lots of ideas you’d call hard-ass: no pacifiers, no sweets, no television, but it all didn’t matter after all, did it?”

“If you had another baby, would you still say no pacifiers, no sweets, no television?”

In my stomach I felt a sudden tensing, like the tensing I felt when Joanie bugged me about dating again, only more severe. “No more babies,” I said, before I thought.

She stared at me. “What do you mean, ‘no more babies’? Weren’t you just telling me all these things you liked about Min? You don’t want to have a kid again someday?”

That airless feeling was back, and I found myself stretching my chest to fight it off. “It’s because I liked Min that I don’t want any more babies,” I said. “It doesn’t matter anyhow—I’m not married or even wanting to date again—” I trailed off when I realized I was saying this to the girl who had been both unmarried and pregnant. I don’t know if she made the same connection, but she was silent for a long time.

To change the subject I asked, “How has Mike’s music research been going?” Although I’d never met him, I pictured him as a giant oaf, taller than she, with hair hanging in his eyes and matting the backs of his hands, the kind of savage beast only calmed by music. This imagined-Mike lumbered around Seattle, haunting nightclubs and pubs from Belltown to Pioneer Square.

Her face closed off, and she shrugged. To give her time to think, I gingerly picked up Benny’s slobbery chewy and launched it down onto the beach for him to fetch. This was an activity I used to avoid at all costs, even when Benny would come and bludgeon me repeatedly with whatever toy was on hand, but it was less onerous now that, when he returned, he would drop it on command.

“He hasn’t talked about it lately. Sometimes I’m not sure if he even likes me anymore,” Nadina said finally.

Like he liked you before? I thought sarcastically, thinking of him urging hard drugs on her, knocking her up, and then convincing her to get an abortion. Out loud I said, “Why is that?”

Another long pause before she answered. “He tells me I’m a drag now because I’m in school and I’ve been trying to use less.”

While my first urge was to find stupid Mike and wring his neck, I realized this was the first time Nadina had ever mentioned her drug habit to me, and I had to tread carefully. “What would he like you to do?”

“He says I was more fun when he met me. I would do the hard stuff with him, and I wasn’t going to school, so I was making more money and hanging out with him more. He doesn’t like that I do stuff with girls from Camden and that when I’m home I haven’t wanted to party unless it’s the weekend. Drop it, Benny.” Nadina threw his toy for him again, while I waited for her to continue. “And he—he doesn’t like that I hang out with you.”

“Me?” I exclaimed, “He doesn’t even know me!”

She looked a little sheepish. “Yeah, but I’ve told him about you. He thinks you’re the reason I’ve started being a drag.”

At another time I might have laughed at her teenage tactlessness. “What do you mean?”

“Well, he thinks I might be trying to use less because you’re trying to make me be a goody-goody like you.”

Resisting the urge to swell up with indignation, I said as calmly as I could, “That’s weird, considering I’ve never said one picking thing to you about using or not using. We haven’t even talked about it until now. What do you think?”

She squirmed a little. “I don’t know. I guess you haven’t talked about it. It was more the counselors at school.”

“Then why would he think I’m a goody-goody? What have you told him about me?” I persisted.

Nadina tugged on the toy in Benny’s mouth, and he gave some delighted growls.

“I don’t know, Cass. He doesn’t like you or the school. Let’s go because my butt is getting cold on this bench.” Clearly, the borderline-intimate talk was over, and I kicked myself inwardly for pressing too hard. But at least I had learned a few things: she was trying to cut down her drug usage, she was committed enough to school to irritate Mike, and somehow I was becoming a lightning rod in their relationship.

Only Phyl was home when I got back, sorting through the recycling in the garage. Joanie and I were not completely clear on which items went into which bin, and Daniel didn’t even try, so Phyl was always digging Starbucks cups out of the recycle and tossing them in the yard waste, or picking Tetra-Paks out of the trash and throwing them in the recycle.

My relationship with Nadina was not the only one to deepen that fall: Joanie and Phyl and I grew closer as well. I hadn’t realized how friendships suffer after you have a baby. Everything with Min was so new, so all-involving; not only had my marriage shifted and re-adjusted around the new person in our lives, but my friendships unconsciously dropped in priority. Certainly Joanie and I had managed to see each other or to talk every couple weeks—once a month, at the worst—but I spent most of what little social time I had in playgroups, mom’s groups, stealing a little adult conversation while the kids toddled around, fighting over toys and swapping germs. Renewed friendships weren’t a replacement for my loss, but they were a precious gift in themselves, that daily involvement in each other’s lives and concerns.