5. Louise
5
LOUISE
As the sky gleamed a cerulean blue over the rolling mountains, Louise and Bobbie pulled onto the dirt road that led to her grandmother, Camille’s orchard. It had been over a month since her last visit, and in that time the orchard had transformed as it always did, from bare and brown in late spring to a lush, green, summer landscape dotted with peach and apple trees. On one side of the road were strawberry and blueberry patches, where several people picked the plump fruits off the vines, baskets at their feet. On the other was a small market. Louise caught a glimpse of Caroline, her childhood friend, standing near the outdoor register as she handed a family with two small toddlers a basket and pointed them in the direction of the peach trees.
“Trees are looking healthy,” her mom muttered as they entered the gravel parking lot next to the market stalls. She had grown tenser with every mile.
Louise’s instinct was to give her mother an escape route. She always tried to be a buffer between her and her grandmother, because anytime they were forced to interact, her mother seemed to dim like a collapsing star. Only now, there was no alternative, because Louise needed them to sit down together, explain to her what it meant that she was a healer, that they were all healers.
At the warehouse behind the market, Jim, the orchard’s general manager, stacked crates. He had been an immovable presence there Louise’s entire life, usually off among the trees, inspecting each one for signs of disease. He was quiet and gruff, and barely tolerated the tourists who streamed in from Charlottesville or Richmond. But he loved the orchard as much as her grandmother, had been there since Camille was a teenager, and was devoted to the family as much as to the fruit trees. Jim didn’t have a spouse or children and practically lived at the orchard, often stopping by the house after his shifts for dinner with Camille. When Louise was younger, she used to wonder if Jim was a little bit in love with her grandmother. Even as a child, she could sense there was something tender about their relationship. She had hoped they would fall in love like in a movie, that Jim could move into the house so her grandmother wouldn’t be alone anymore. But that had never come to pass.
“Is that Jim? Oh, come on. We have to go say hi. I haven’t seen him in ages.” Bobbie unbuckled her seat belt.
“That’s because you’ve refused to come here ever since I got my driver’s license,” Louise said under her breath.
“I heard that, Louise.”
“Mom.”
“What?”
“We came here to see Grandma. You can’t stall forever. We’ve already stopped twice.”
“I’m not stalling,” Bobbie said, obviously lying. “I just want to go say hi, see how he’s doing. You know I used to be so terrified of him when I was a little kid, but I think I wore him down over the years. He started to talk to me when I was in college. I finally realized he’s just not big on children. Or teens, I guess.”
Bobbie got out of the car. Reluctantly, Louise followed.
The market had expanded over the last few summers from when it had been a simple folding table loaded up with baskets of fruit. There was now a large tent set up beside the storage barn, under which were multiple wooden tables, along with a sign advertising prices for pick-your-own fruit as well as gallons of cider. Louise hung back at the first table alongside her mother, noting boxes of doughnuts and baked goods, jugs of peach cider and jars of preserves.
“Local peach jam, fresh-baked peach doughnuts, blueberry honey…” Bobbie murmured as she put her sunglasses on her head. “There’s no way your grandmother is making any of this stuff.”
“We outsource,” came a gravelly voice from a few yards away.
They both looked up as Jim walked toward them. When Louise usually saw him in passing on her visits to the orchard, he’d give her a small nod or a few mumbled words of greeting. But he approached Bobbie with a genuine smile on his leathery, bearded face.
“Hey, kiddo,” he drawled. “It’s about damn time I see you around here.”
“Nice to see you too, Jim,” Bobbie said as Jim wrapped her into a quick embrace. “I know, it’s been a while.”
His gaze traveled to the bruise beneath Louise’s right eye. “Pretty nice shiner there. I heard about the accident. You okay?”
“A little bruised but okay.”
He turned to Bobbie. “How about you?”
Bobbie put her sunglasses back on. “A little emotionally bruised, but also okay.”
“Got it. No need to say more.” Jim picked up one of the jars of preserves. “Apparently there’s a market for local peach chutney.” He emphasized the word chutney in his lilting country accent. “Lots of changes here, Bobbie. We also have interns from the university.” He rolled his eyes. “I guess we get some kind of tax credit.”
“Are they that bad?”
Jim cocked his head to the side. “You should know. You used to be one of those yahoos.”
“Wahoos.”
Jim waved his hand dismissively. “Same difference.” He rolled the chewing tobacco to the other side of his mouth. “They’re not like I was when I was a kid.” He glanced over at the register where Caroline stood. Louise waved in greeting. Though Louise rarely ever saw her except in passing, they had remained friendly over the years, though Caroline now studied the screen in a way that made Louise feel like she was being ignored. “She’s not so bad though.” He put his hands in his pockets and surveyed Bobbie. “You’re here to drop off Louise?”
Bobbie’s expression immediately tightened.
“She’s here for a visit, actually,” Louise replied at her mother’s silence. “She’s staying.”
Jim’s eyes widened. “Well, isn’t that something.”
“It is,” Louise said before her mother could disagree, or diminish it. Despite the accident, she also felt the tiniest spark of hope, that maybe after all these years, this would be enough to bring them back together again. Her mother was there, at the place that had been their home, and for once, she couldn’t run away.
Jim leaned toward Bobbie. “It’s a good thing you’re here, kid. She misses you. And she needs you, even if she’s too damn stubborn to admit it.”
Bobbie looked up at him, her mouth half-open, forming a question, but Jim just patted her arm and strode away.
Louise turned to her mom, grateful for Jim’s words. “No excuses now. Let’s go.”
After a short walk up the gravel drive, the square white house came into view, nestled into a clearing at the base of the mountain.
There was a long and never-ending list of updates the old farmhouse needed, central heat and air, new windows that didn’t let in every single draft, a new front porch to replace the one that practically hung off the house, half its boards loose or rotting. Whenever Louise would gently try to ask her grandmother about it, Camille shook her head and said she liked things as they were.
And so, the house stayed as it was, as it had been for almost a century, before Camille, before Louise’s great-grandmother, Helene, before Helene’s Irish father-in-law bought the land in 1922.
“Would it really kill her to pave this thing?” Bobbie said as they stepped over large puddles on the driveway from the previous night’s rain. “It’s like some kind of contest, isn’t it, like she wins a prize for letting her house collapse around her. God forbid she hires someone to do anything. You know my uncle Daniel told me that the last time he visited, he found her up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters. At nearly seventy . She’s as stubborn as a mule.”
“Mom.”
“What?”
“Please be nice to her.”
“I’m always nice to her.”
Louise made a face.
“I always try to be nice to her.”
“Try harder.”
Just then the screen door slammed. Camille walked out onto the porch, her curly white hair loose and long around her shoulders. She wore green linen pants, an oversize white button-down top, and tennis shoes, her face lined and freckled from years working in the sun. She hurried down the stairs, her movements, even at seventy, athletic and confident.
Camille gripped Louise’s shoulders and looked her up and down. “You’ve got a black eye.”
“Just from the airbag.”
“Will it hurt if I hug you?”
Louise smiled. “I think I’ll survive.”
Gently, Camille pulled her in for a hug. Then she turned to Bobbie.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, Barbara. It’s good to see you here.”
There was a long pause that seemed to hold the weight of years.
“Come, come,” Camille said. “It’s not even noon and it’s hot as hell out here.”
They followed Camille up the wooden stairs, careful to avoid the board on the second step that had been missing since Louise was in middle school, and the others that were loose or splintering.
The porch was crowded with an assortment of Camille’s shoes, mud-caked boots and flip-flops and garden clogs, as well as umbrellas and a stack of unopened packages.
“You want me to bring any of these in, Mom?” Bobbie asked with a nod to the packages. Her eyes narrowed as they traveled over the rest of the porch, the rocking chairs with peeling paint, the mugs of coffee and iced tea glasses left on tables.
“Oh, no, no, leave them,” Camille replied as she opened the screen door. “Most of them are for Jim anyway. They tend to get lost when he sends them to the business PO box.” She motioned for them to come inside. “Come on, I’ll get you something to drink.”
They trailed Camille through the living room, with its worn couches and chairs and window air conditioning unit blasting in the corner.
As they passed through the old dining room, which Camille had converted to an art studio that spring, Bobbie stopped. “What…?” she began to ask, looking around at the canvases stacked all over the room, the brushes and jars of paint scattered over a folding table, the paint-splattered drop cloth on the floor under a large easel. Her mother hadn’t seen the room since Camille moved the table and chairs out a few months earlier. Now, every time Louise visited there were a dozen new canvases lying out to dry.
“I told you about this,” Louise said beside her mother, whose eyes were trained on a large canvas propped against the fireplace. It was an abstract landscape of a mountain, a swirling world of color, blues and greens and pinks.
Camille followed Bobbie’s gaze. “Oh just thought it made sense, I have more time now with—” She stopped abruptly. “I don’t do as much gardening because of my back. And you know I’ve always liked painting. I just used to keep it all in the shed when you guys…”
For a moment, they were all quiet, transported back to a past where they had been together in that same room, gathered around the table for Louise’s early birthdays, the space filled with balloons and glitter and streamers, or for holiday meals, Christmases with carols blaring from the speakers, Thanksgivings where Jim always brought a massive turkey he deep-fried at his house, only to wave away all the fuss her great-grandmother tried to make about it.
“Anyway,” Camille said hoarsely, moving on. “Excuse the mess. It’s all very amateur.”
They reached the kitchen at the back of the house. “What would you girls like to drink? I have iced tea, coffee, water?”
“Iced tea would be great, Grandma.”
“I’ll take some coffee,” Bobbie said. She walked to the window and looked out toward the little two-bedroom guest cottage near the creek, where they had lived until they relocated to Richmond when Louise was six.
Camille handed a mug of coffee to Bobbie and a glass of iced tea to Louise. “How about we go sit on the back porch?”
The porch was cool and dark, shaded by the large magnolia tree in the center of the yard. Louise sank down onto the wicker couch, which shuddered slightly with the weight. Many of her recollections of her early life at the orchard were faded, blurred at the edges, but she had vivid, Technicolor memories of sitting on that wicker couch after she got home from kindergarten, on the days her mother was at work. She would play with dolls or color as her great-grandmother, Helene, sat in the rocking chair across from her, listening to country music or thumbing through the pages of an old red journal, talking to herself in French, which always sounded to Louise like a song. It wasn’t until years later that Louise understood that her great-grandmother was already sick with dementia by that point, that this was the reason she never went out by herself, why Jim would sometimes appear in the house, musing about orchard business when in reality he was there as a favor to Camille, to sit with Helene when she and Bobbie were both gone.
“Thanks for the tea,” Louise said, her throat tight at the sight of the familiar stenciled brown leaves of her iced tea glass. All these years, and nothing here had changed, not a single detail. Camille had been living by herself in this crumbling old house for nearly twelve years. Her brother, Daniel, a dentist who lived in Pennsylvania, helped the orchard financially, but the day-to-day operations of the orchard, and care for Helene, had been left entirely to Camille. Louise felt a rush of gratitude for Jim, for the fact that he had at least been present, when her mother couldn’t be.
Her grandmother glanced between Louise and Bobbie, the expectation of what needed to be said so thick it felt like something solid between them. “Barbara,” she said at last, “why are you here?”
“The car accident,” Bobbie said. “Her friend Peter was in the car too.”
Camille stilled, her eyes almost vacant, but then she blinked and focused again. “He was hurt,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“He was gone,” Louise said. “He was thrown from the car. He…he died.”
Camille’s face registered a thousand emotions before finally settling into understanding. “And then…”
“He came back,” Louise said, as the numbness again descended like a curtain, the knowledge of what she had done clouded by the certainty that it was impossible. “I brought him back.”
Camille rested back in her chair and folded her hands on her lap.
“I told her you could explain it,” Bobbie said. “Because it’s your truth after all, isn’t it?”
Louise watched her grandmother carefully.
“I wasn’t expecting this,” Camille said. “You could have warned me over the phone.”
Bobbie shook her head. “You don’t get to decide how this happens.”
Camille visibly blanched. “Barbara, I’m not… I’m simply trying to process all of this. You’ve sprung this on me, without any warning, without—” She stopped abruptly.
“Hard, isn’t it?” Bobbie said quietly. “To not have any warning.”
Louise felt a rush of frustration at both of them, for not being able to put their issues aside, just once, for her. “Stop, please. Both of you.” She addressed her grandmother. “Mom said I’m a healer. That we are all healers. So please, explain it to me. Tell me what that means.”
Camille cupped her glass of iced tea and looked at Louise, her eyes searching. “You really brought him back?”
Memories flickered across Louise’s vision like lightning strikes, Peter on the ground, the angle of his neck, the blood at the corner of his mouth. She nodded slowly.
“I’m not…” Camille looked at Bobbie, almost pleading. “I’m sorry but I’m not feeling quite well.”
“Mom, you don’t get to do this. You don’t get to avoid it, not with her. Not this time.”
Her grandmother’s eyes grew unfocused again, and her hands trembled as she reached for her tea and then put it back down. “I think you know what you did. I think you knew from the minute you felt it.”
Slowly, Louise nodded. “I saved his life.”
“You healed him.”
Her grandmother’s words sunk into her skin, filled her lungs up like smoke, heavy and almost unbearable. “How?”
Camille raised her hands. “Touch,” she said as she turned her palms to face Louise. “You put your hands on him. That’s where it is, where it all comes from, the gift you have carried since the day you were born.”
Louise inspected her own hands. They seemed ordinary, unremarkable.
“I can’t explain it.” Camille leaned forward. “I could talk for hours but it’s not really going to mean anything. But if you’ll stay here tonight, I promise I can show you. I have a home visit scheduled. Tomorrow. You can come with me. Would that be okay, Barbara?”
Bobbie bit her lip. Louise knew she was struggling with the idea. In the years since she quit nursing, if the subject of her former career ever came up, Bobbie immediately shut down. Louise learned to never mention it, to pretend as if that part of her mother’s life never existed. She stopped carrying around her mother’s old stethoscope. And even though it was always her favorite make-believe game, something she used to occupy herself with for hours at the orchard, bandaging up her dolls and stuffed animals, she was careful to never play nurse or hospital unless she was at Peter’s house, away from where her mother could see.
But Bobbie had brought her to Crozet for a reason, and Louise knew that for once she couldn’t say no, even if it meant letting Louise enter the world she had long ago walked away from.
“Please, Barbara,” Camille asked at her daughter’s silence. “Stay here. One night.”
Louise could feel all the years of silence accumulating around them like snowdrifts, the holidays and birthdays spent apart, the awkward interactions at Louise’s piano recitals and school events.
“It’s why you came here,” Camille continued. “Let me help. Let me show her.”
Louise faced her mother. She refused to let their history stand in the way of her learning the truth. Her mother’s happiness, and comfort, couldn’t be the driving force behind every decision.
“Please, Mom,” she said. “Do this for me. I never ask you for anything. I’m asking for this.”
Bobbie’s features softened. “Fine. We’ll stay. One night.” She turned back to Camille. “You promise you’ll be able to show her, explain it all?”
Camille nodded. “I promise.”