Chapter 39 #2
“It made the pain go away but also made her want the medicine so much that she would do anything to get it. She took too much. It killed her.”
Stella, wide-eyed, said, “Was it bubblegum medicine?”
“No, baby, nothing like that. Don’t worry.”
“Does Gen have a sister?” said Connor.
“There’s only Nella. When she dies, Gen will feel very alone. That’s why I wanted to come to Ohio: so that Gen won’t be so alone. Will you be patient, even if it gets boring to stay here?”
“Okay,” said Connor. Stella nodded.
“I’ll be gone a lot but I’ll take you to the playground. There’s a library. A pond for swimming. A farm nearby with horses. Grandma will take care of you when I’m helping Gen.”
“I like Grandma,” said Stella. “She’s funny.”
“She is?”
“She got mad at a neighbor for roaring his motorcycle early in the morning. She opened the door and yelled at him. She was like, ‘I’ll fix you !’ I said he wasn’t broken. She said he would be, when she got through with him.”
“She gave us doughnuts,” Connor said. “She said it’s a secret, though. She doesn’t want to get in trouble.”
“Doughnuts are okay,” said Emily. “There’s something else I need to tell you.
” The longer she avoided this, the more it felt like lying.
She told them about the divorce. She explained it as a simple fact with no details.
She used a tone of finality. The reaction was as bad as she had feared.
Stella cried. Connor pleaded, “Mommy, don’t. I’ll be good, I promise.”
“You are good. The divorce has nothing to do with you or Stella. It’s about me and Daddy and how we can’t be together.”
“Try to be together,” said Stella. “Try.”
“We tried for a long time. Some things don’t work no matter how hard you try.”
“But we don’t want a divorce.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Then don’t do it!”
“I have to.”
“You have to try harder,” Stella insisted. “Daddy said so.”
“I can’t.”
“You can!”
“I don’t want to,” said Emily. “I’m sorry.”
“Then it’s your fault. Daddy said it was. He wants us to be a family and you don’t.”
“You are my family,” she told them. “Always.”
Connor had grown somber. His eyes looked older than they had a few minutes before.
Stella said, “But it’s not the same! It’s not the same!
It’s not—” Connor took Stella’s hand and his sister went silent.
Emily realized that her children belonged to each other in a way that they didn’t belong to her.
It was hard to see them look to each other for comfort and to be the cause, but she also hadn’t wanted them to have her childhood—that scrounging for affection—or to be like Gen, solitary in her loss.
Emily had always wanted more than one child. She wanted each to be the other’s ally.
Connor said, “What will happen?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know.”
“All I know is that I will always love you.”
They accepted this in miserable silence.
“There’s something I’d like to do with you,” she said. “Will you help me?”
Connor said disdainfully, “I don’t want to be distracted .”
“It might feel good.”
“Okay,” said Stella, wiping her face.
Emily’s mother was gone from the couch, though the television was still on. Over it, Emily heard the sounds of her mother taking a shower. She fished the coffee cup out of the trash, rinsed it, and handed it to Connor. She gave a spoon to Stella. “Will you fill that cup with dirt from outside?”
When they returned, Emily showed them the worn pack of marigold seeds.
The image on the pack had faded, so Emily explained that the flowers would be yellow and orange, like little suns.
“I’m not sure they’ll grow. The seeds are old.
But some might.” The instructions on the pack were illegible, so Emily looked them up online and handed the phone to the children.
Carefully, they plucked seeds from the open pack and set them in the dirt, then added water from the tap.
Emily Saran-Wrapped the top and rubber-banded it.
Connor poked holes in the taut Saran Wrap.
“I hope they grow,” said Stella.
“Me too. Go put the cup in a sunny spot.”
Connor said, “Do you think they’ll grow?”
“Seeds can live a long time. We’ll have to see.”
Emily returned to Nella’s chicken coop, collected eggs in a basket, and brought them inside through the farmhouse’s side door to the kitchen, where the nurse was making coffee. “Nella’s awake,” said the nurse. “She’s feeling pretty good. Gen said that if you came over, you should join them.”
Gen and Nella didn’t notice Emily enter the living room. Nella said to Gen, who sat in the chair next to the hospital bed, “The doctor shouldn’t have called you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I could’ve watched you compete from here. I have that big TV. I wanted to see you do what you love.”
“Why did you lie to me? Why did you do that? I would have come home sooner.”
“I know.”
“You shouldn’t have done that! I thought you were okay!”
“Sweetheart. You’re going to have to forgive me.”
“I do, but—Gran. Gran.” Gen’s voice deteriorated. “I don’t want you to go.”
“The doctor said I might not speak right later so listen now. I wish I could stay for you. Sometimes I wish I could be here until it’s your time, so I could make sure you’re okay to the very end.
But that would be too hard. It would be too hard to bury another child.
I lied to you and I’m not sorry. Still, I’m glad you’ve come home.
Maybe that’s selfish. It’s good to have you, even though it cost you. ”
“Stop talking about the cost!”
Quietly, Nella said, “Your Emily is here.”
Emily had frozen while they spoke, sure she shouldn’t be listening to their conversation yet worried that if she moved and they noticed, that would interrupt what they were saying, and then they might never say it. Gen looked at her. She looked lost.
“Go for a run,” Nella told Gen. “You need it.”
“I’m not a dog you have to let out.”
“You told the nurse not to let me watch anything but Hallmark movies. You think I can’t be high-handed with you, too? Go on. You haven’t run since you’ve been home. Take your phone. Emily will sit with me. Won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Emily.
“Some people listen.”
Gen gave her grandmother a wan smile, kissed her cheek, and left.
“You’ve grown up,” Nella told Emily.
“I wasn’t that young when I saw you last. I was eighteen.”
“A baby. An infant. Bring me that blanket. The unfinished one. It bothers me.” Emily brought the striped blanket to Nella, along with the pink ball of yarn attached to it.
“I’ll tell you how to fasten it off.” Emily did as instructed.
She crocheted it closed and cut the blanket free from the ball of yarn.
Nella said, “I’m tired. Need to close my eyes. I want you to do one more thing.”
“What is it?”
“Take care of her when I’m gone.”
Emily heard the dogs outside bark. She left the air-conditioned house and stepped into the hot sludge of the day.
Gen patted the excited, writhing dogs. She did it intently, as though this was work that required careful attention.
She glanced up. Her expression of effort intensified as she held Emily’s gaze.
Emily wondered if, for Gen, being around her was hard.
The thought made Emily sad. Maybe it wasn’t helpful that she was there, and Gen had agreed to it only because she’d been confused by the shitstorm of grief, or she had felt obligated to offer an invitation to the farmhouse once Emily had flown in. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
Emily felt too overwhelmed to say what she had been thinking—and, once her head cleared, she believed that to say it would be wrong. She didn’t want to seek reassurance from someone who was suffering. She chose a specific apology. “I’m sorry I overheard your conversation.”
“I’m not. It means a lot to me that you’re here. I couldn’t bear this alone. I’m not sure I can bear it anyway. The doctor said we have a few weeks. That’s all. That’s what’s left. How long”—anxiety crossed her face—“can you stay?”
“As long as you need me.”
It was several days later that Gen said, “ How are you here?” She said this as though coming out of a daze.
They were at the kitchen table. Gen hadn’t touched the food on her plate.
“You brought Connor and Stella…and Jack doesn’t care?
You’re staying with your mom? I thought you didn’t talk with your mom. ”
“How much do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
Emily told her about the conversation with her mother.
She described the dinner with her father, her lost manuscript, the bruise.
Gen made a sound that stuck in her throat and started to speak but Emily shook her head.
Gen scraped her chair back from the table and went to the sink.
She turned on the faucet and took a glass from a cabinet but didn’t fill it.
She stood before the running water, shoulders slouched, staring into the sink.
Slowly, as though she didn’t trust herself not to break it, she set the empty glass on the counter and ducked her head under the water.
She remained like that for a moment, hands braced on either side of the sink, water running through her hair and over her neck until she turned it off and straightened, dripping.
“It’s hot out,” said Emily.
Gen’s voice was rough: “You know that’s not why.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway.”
Gen stared at her, shirt wet, her brown hair black and matted to her head. “It doesn’t matter ?”
“A photograph of a bruise is no proof of how I got it.”
Gen had such an awful expression that Emily went to her. Gen pulled her close, arms tight around her. A trickle of water ran down Emily’s back. Gen said, “I want to kill him.”
“That wouldn’t be good for your image. Killers don’t go on Wheaties boxes.”
“Don’t joke.”
“What’s crazy is that I used to almost hope it would happen. Then it would be obvious that there was something wrong. But when it actually happened, it didn’t matter.”
“Please stop saying that.”