Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
Evelyn
November 1992
Sandstone Lane is veiled in the densest night when we turn into our neighborhood, our headlights cast an eerie glow. The tires crunch on the thin layer of snow iced over our driveway. Joseph is visible in the light emanating from the dashboard as he surveys the blackened landscape. “The storm must’ve knocked down a line somewhere.”
“Looks like it.” I can’t even manage a nod, exhausted from the day spent greeting and hugging and accepting sympathy. My mother’s funeral felt like a strange, bleak party, most of the guests were friends of ours, or our children, everyone in black as they spoke in hushed tones, but no one broken by grief, no raw emotion pulsed in tightly gripped hugs. The priest gave a generic reading, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as I stood on aching feet, wondering how my mother had outlived so many others.
What a strange tradition, the way we say goodbye, kneeling over a casket, tiptoeing around small talk and muted circles, somber and bowed by decorum, how one’s own mortality emerges naked and emboldened in the forest of faces, stalking through the room. It seems too late, detached from the real experience of loss, how it lingers, the sharp pangs that follow: a familiar scent, a song on the radio, a memory plucked out of thin air while washing dishes.
Joseph eases the car into the garage and I wait as he disappears in the darkness, fumbles for a flashlight on his workbench. The beam clicks on and I follow him inside, my body at once weighted and emptied. We dig through the cabinets for candles and matches and carry them upstairs, hollow in this big house for the two of us. We light the blackened wicks until the room is cast in a flickering yellow glow, and we undress and brush our teeth in the half-light. Joseph kindles fires in the hearths throughout the house, and I yank some extra blankets from the closet in case the heat dissipates through the night.
My last visit to see my mother in her nursing home morphs into a cloud of guilt and sadness, dragging me under. The hallway reeking of rubber, mothballs and bleach, a kind of place that will never quite be a home, the last conversation we ever had.
It started with her rant about Maelynn, how wild and selfish she always was, how she never visited her own sister. Clearly, in her mind that day, Maelynn was alive and well. Like Tommy was sometimes, and my father. I envied her naivety. I wish I could not remember, to believe everyone I ever loved was out of sight for the moment, in the other room perhaps, or too busy or selfish to visit. I should’ve let it go, should’ve left, but I couldn’t. So tired of her screaming, so tired of her illness, so tired of being rational and calm and patient, never rising to her bait.
My voice deepened to a growl, the iron teeth of my buried resentment splayed open like a bear trap. “Why did you send me away to live with her, if you thought she was so terrible? Were you sick of me? Did you only want Tommy at home so you could pretend I never existed?”
She closed her eyes tight, as though in pain, but when she opened them, there was something new, something raw and wounded, in her gaze. “Is that what you think?”
Her lucidity struck me silent, my chest heaving.
“If I was hard on you...it was because I was afraid for you. You reminded me so much of her...” She trailed off again, and I had trouble breathing evenly, her coherence as jarring as her screams when her mind slipped away. “Neither of you were ever satisfied with the life in front of you. I thought...I thought Maelynn was the only one who could make you see what I never could.” She blinked, gave me an odd look, like she was trying to place me. “I didn’t know what else to do, Tommy. Part of me hoped if Evelyn met her, she would see through her. The other part was afraid she’d fall for her, like everyone else. But at least if she did, she’d be with someone who understood her, who could be there for her in ways I never could.”
Even in her confusion I heard her perfectly clear, aware of my salty tears only when they reached my lips. All this time I had been so angry. “I...”
“I thought I made a big mistake, that you got the worst of her. You left me, when Tommy died...but look, you’re here now. At least you visit me.” A tight smile passed over her lips.
I considered explaining why Maelynn didn’t come, but there was no use, no need to tell her who had been dead for decades, when I would have to remind her again next time. Instead I stammered, “Thank you, for telling me.”
“Telling you what?” She blinked, disoriented, her face shadowed with distrust. And like that, she was gone. I stood, taking my cue, my eyes stinging with tears.
She muttered something, turned away from me. Then she pivoted back, one knotted finger pointed at me. “You. What are you doing here?” Who I was to her then, I couldn’t be sure. Her body trembled, her gaze darting back and forth, searching me. I apologized for disturbing her, assured her I must be in the wrong place as I backed out of the room. The last thing I saw were her terrified eyes as I shut the door with a soft click, the image of her shaking under the covers, so small and alone, seared in my mind.
I get into bed with a sigh, and Joseph crawls under the quilt beside me and asks, “You alright?”
I rest my head on my elbow, curved to face him. My tears had found me the day I left her trembling in her room, once I was alone in my car. While washing my face in the sink, I see my lined eyes in the mirror resemble hers. And rolling dough for biscuits the way Mrs. Myers taught me, my hands are spotted with age. How little I understood...but today I was spent, wrung dry. “We knew this was only a matter of time.”
“I know.”
“I keep replaying the last time we found her wandering outside. She was so afraid, helpless...” I pause, remember her clutching me like a child as I slid a nightgown over her bare, bony shoulders. “What if I get like that? What if you do?”
“I don’t know.” His brow furrows and even in the shadows I make out the worry lining his temples.
My back is sore from standing all day; my legs tingle, restless, and I struggle to get comfortable. “I don’t want to get forgetful, I don’t want one of us to go to a nursing home. I want to stay here, like this, forever.” Joseph veers on seventy, and I’m not far behind, our aches vocal but tolerable, our days still our own to spend how we choose, but for how long?
“Unfortunately, my love, I think that one is out of our hands.”
I shift closer to him, our knees touch beneath the flannel sheets. The light flickers behind him, a candle burns out.
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” he asks. I fall silent, my fingers toy with a hole in the blanket. “You can’t be the first to go, Evelyn. I’d be so lost without you... I couldn’t stand to be in this big house by myself.”
“Well, you can’t either. I’d be lost too...” I trail off, my chest fills with the visceral fear of something looming, one of us crumpled over a casket, crawling into bed each night alone. I shake the images from my mind. “You think any of them are watching over us?”
“Who knows.” Joseph shrugs. Then he asks, “Do you think your father was happy to see your mother?”
Surprised by the question, I laugh. “He may have liked the break these last couple of decades.” The picture I have of my father is vague after all these years, but I can still see the bushy mustache, the cigar clenched between his teeth. I can’t help myself, imagining it fall from his mouth in shock at her sudden arrival after years of solitude.
Joseph joins and our laughter in the darkened room is a release, a knot coming loose. He asks, “And Tommy?”
“Tommy? He’s too busy with all the girls to notice. I bet he winks at all the angels and tells them they have the most beautiful wings.”
“What about Maelynn?”
“I bet she and Betty are riding their chariot too fast and disrupting all of the harpists.” The thought of Maelynn and her one true love, a woman whose image I concocted only from her voice on the phone, bowling over an angel choir makes my eyes tear up with laughter.
“And my parents?” Joseph barely gets the words out.
“They tried to start an inn up there, too, but no one in heaven sleeps so they have the whole place to themselves, and they spend all day cuddling in each room.”
Joseph pulls me toward him, my head tucked below his chin. “Sounds like heaven to me.”
We sink into the peaceful silence that follows, the images we created swirl in my mind. The candles burn lower and Joseph strokes my hair with his fingertips.
“You know... Maelynn and Tommy, they wouldn’t have wanted to get old. They wouldn’t have been able to take it.”
I swallow hard. “Still doesn’t make it easier, does it?”
“No, it doesn’t.” He is quiet, and then asks, “What will become of us?”
“If we’re lucky, a little cloud home where we can cuddle and kiss and never be apart.”
“I hope that’s true.”
“And if it’s not?”
“Then I don’t want to waste any more time wondering.” He shifts his body over mine and kisses me. I run my fingers over his shoulders, press him against me. His hands explore the same paths they have traveled these many years, only the surface has shifted and changed with time. He makes love to me gently, and I give him the same love in return, tender and earnest. I try not to think of cloud homes, of chariots or harpists or all the things I have never been sure enough of to believe. Instead I think of his skin on my skin, his lips on my lips, the soothing repetition of our bodies’ rhythm. I think of that rhythm as we lie together, breathing deeply, loosely entwined. I think of that rhythm as I fall asleep, tucked against him. I try not to think of chariots, of fire, of darkness, of dirt, of all that awaits us when the greater rhythm stops.