Summer Snow (5 page)

Her eyes were deep and lovely and sad—they looked at once unexpectedly warm and disquietingly fathomless. But the almond-eyed beauty stopped at her sweeping lashes. The rest of her face was worn and beaten, tracked with lines and carved by hollows that proclaimed a life of hardship I could scarcely begin to grasp. Torn clothes draped her fragile frame like an ill-fitting costume on some child playing dress-up. A shoulder peeked out here. A wrist there. I could see the delicate bones of her collar and the beginning of brittle ribs curving in to her achingly straight spine.

She stood tall—erect and unexpected among the many children gathered around—maybe even a little proud, as if to proclaim in the face of her scars:
I am a survivor
. But I didn't believe her. Splayed wide in protective defense, her fingers pressing the tattered fabric as if white knuckles alone could shield and save, her hand both sheltered and exposed the arc of her pregnant belly. The baby would be born soon if the desperate lay of her hand was any indication.

And while the paternal benefactor assured me that I could change her life for a mere dollar a day—enough to feed, clothe, and even educate her—I wasn't moved to reach for my checkbook. She didn't want a handout, and I didn't want a long-distance balm for my battered conscience. Money was not enough. Nor was a new dress, a goat to provide milk, or even a clean hospital in which to have her baby.

Sitting in the rectangle of dim light cast by the television, warmed by hot dry air from the groaning furnace and satisfied with a meal that would surely be nothing less than a feast for her wasted frame, I just wanted to hold her. I would gently touch my fingers to the back of her head so she'd lay her cheek on my shoulder. I would stroke her matted hair and shush her as if she were my child although she was likely much older than me. I would whisper, “It's okay. Everything is going to be all right.” And though she wouldn't speak a word of English, she would
know
because I could see in her eyes that it was what she was dying to hear.

I would say, “You are not alone.”

Since my Sunday school days, I have seen more pictures of women like her than I could ever begin to tally. And while I'd feel stabs of guilt followed quickly by an indescribable and unlikely fear, it was impossible for me to relate to those bone-thin children and desperate mothers when I was a little girl. What did we have in common? I ate three square meals a day and snuck Pringles in between—Oreos if I was lucky and Dad had felt indulgent at the grocery store. But tonight, with the look in her eyes matching the anxious pounding of my heart, she was my neighbor—my sister. If I wanted to, I could reach out and touch her weathered fingers. We inhabited the same space.

Of course, I realize that the vast oceans and sweeping continents of our stunningly fashioned earth span tens of thousands of square miles that I could never in all my life hope to explore. I have been taught that there are species of plants and animals that have been formed for nothing more than the pleasure of God as the human eye will never be blessed with the opportunity to perceive their beauty. I know there are corners of creation that remain as pure and untouched as a patch of newly fallen snow in the hollow of a tree where no one could ever hope to run a finger across its glistening splendor. I appreciate the fact that the world is a very big place indeed. I am little more than a gnat in the scope of such enormity. But
she
has caused me to believe that the world is a very small place. Ghana to Galapagos, India to my own pastoral Iowa, we are all the same. We all want the same thing. Don't we?

Her picture stayed with me for days, hidden discreetly against the backs of my eyelids so that she was with me when I slept. I thought of her baby when I tentatively placed my palm against my own bare belly. Did she have a husband? a mother? someone to help her carry the burden? A trembling thank-you swept through me at the thought of my own grandmother. And then I let myself utter the tiniest, gravest word I could fit my mind around:
help
. For me, for her. Just
help
. I suppose it was a sort of obsession, a surrender, the kind of fixation that would have had Grandma worrying far more than her blood pressure could allow if only she knew about it. Maybe it was unhealthy.

I was thinking of her later, when the wind was howling in the single-pane windows and a winter storm was brewing in the west. It was fierce outside, but inside the kitchen it was a balmy oasis and positively resplendent with the aroma of Indonesian rice, a childhood comfort food that had become my one pregnancy craving. Grandma indulged me at least once a week, and in anticipation of sambal oelek and diced pickles, I had already changed out of my work clothes and donned a pair of ratty sweatpants with an unraveling drawstring. The gray rope barely held together but made it possible for me to cinch the waistband below the baby curve that was beginning to make all my pants uncomfortably tight. The fluorescent lights of Value Foods made my eyes bloodshot and dry, and since we were in for the evening, I had gone so far as to remove my contacts, wash off my makeup, and sweep my hair into a bedtime ponytail. We had locked the doors, turned off the outside lights. Guests were not in the plan.

We were talking about unimportant, happy things, but my heart was heavy and I had to push away my thoughts with cheerful chitchat and busy hands. I was almost relieved when a pair of headlights glared off the porch window and I could turn my head to watch.

“Is someone coming up our driveway?” Grandma asked. She made it sound as if we got visitors about as often as Sleeping Beauty snoring away decades with every breath in her impenetrable tower.

I laughed. “It's probably the Walkers. Mrs. Walker was so worried about your ankle.”

Grandma hobbled around the table as if to prove my point. An oversize black bootie concealed the slim but sturdy cast beneath. She had said it was just a twist. Dr. Morales had assured us it was just a stress fracture.

“If she is bringing us food, so help me, I am sending her right home with it!” Grandma furrowed her eyebrows menacingly, but there was a blush in her cheeks that betrayed how very much she appreciated the attention.

“Sit down. I'll go see who it is. I promise if Mrs. Walker has brought over a banana bread, I'll toss it right back at her.”

“Well, Julia, don't be rude—”

“Kidding, Grandma.” I winked at her. As I made my way to the door, someone knocked twice—two determined, even raps instead of the friendly scuffle of hits that Mrs. Walker always showered on our leaded window.

Before I disappeared into the mudroom, I shot a bemused look at Grandma and shrugged as if to say,
Who, then?

By the time I had switched on the porch light, she was already standing with her back to me. Her hand was on the banister above the five wide steps to the ground, and her head was angled toward her car as if she wished she were back inside it. The wind was making a tangle of what little hair peeked out from beneath her raised hood. From the rigid peak of her head, her shoulders visibly slumped and pointed forlornly to her toes as if her balled-up fists concealed weights that strained every muscle along her narrow arms. Her hands were empty.

There was surrender in her bearing, and though I didn't know the cause of her defeat, she cut such a sorry silhouette backlit by the half-moon that I wanted to take her inside, listen to her story. I had no idea who she was, but the need to help welled up in me so strong that I put my hand on the door to let her in. I wanted to do for her what I couldn't do for the woman with the dark eyes. I softened my face for her and opened the door.

She turned to me slowly, and before I had time to blink, I realized that I had seen this woman before. A little ripple of surprise tore through me. The dirty jean coat, the dishwater hair, the beaten posture—the woman from the store. The Braeburn apples. I made a little noise of confusion.

She glanced up at me, and her eyes in the glare of the porch light were inexpressibly sad.

Every gasp of air in my body drained from me in what can only be called a moan.

The woman smiled. A thin, tight-lipped, careful smile. She looked at the ground. “Julia.”

I was mute, though my mind exploded on her name with blinding, throbbing force.
Janice
. And then, in its wake, another word—a word that hadn't passed my lips in a very, very long time:
Mom
.

Reunion

“I
SHOULDDN'T HAVE COME,”
Janice said haltingly, stealing a glance at me. She waited a moment for me to respond, but whatever she was expecting from me, I did not deliver. I just stared.

In my memory, Janice remained the eternally lovely and incomprehensibly remote woman who smiled girlishly and waved good-bye with dancing fingertips even though she knew she was abandoning her only child. She had been an ice queen—perfectly chiseled, beautiful, cold. I could remember the indistinct outline of her lavender mohair sweater and the scent in her hair when the updraft from the almost-slammed door came over me: tobacco and Suave strawberry shampoo. Her face had been fresh and unlined, hard and cool in its powdered perfection.

It was forgivable that I had not recognized her in Value Foods. The ten years since I last laid eyes on her had not been kind ones. The woman who now stood before me was not the same one who had left. A part of me recoiled from the way she tore through my memories of her and left them as mere husks of pathetic, childish illusion. I was startled to find myself sorry at the loss of my carefully preserved remembrance of a young mother—because I hadn't allowed myself the luxury of looking back, I never realized that I regarded her with anything more than a fine and well-deserved contempt. But here she was and so changed I was unable to breathe. Limp hair, lined skin, gaunt shadows where attractive curves had once been. My lungs ached. I gasped shallowly, a fish drowning in the clear, cold air.

“I'm sorry; I shouldn't have come,” she said again quietly, but she daringly searched my face as she said it. She seemed surprised at what she saw there, and her lips dipped and trembled. She started down the steps backward.

When she stepped away from me, I could feel the pull in my gut. It was as if in that one small moment of realization she had sunk a part of herself deep inside me, set a hook in my being so that we were held together by a thin but indissoluble strand of what should have been. I couldn't help but move with her, fall forward to match her withdrawal so there was no more space between us than before. I didn't want to follow her; I couldn't help it.

“Julia,” she breathed, again trying out her faltering voice on my name as if tasting it—savoring it slowly while I was still close enough to hear it. There was a sudden boldness in her now that she was leaving, and as she slid slow-motion down the steps, her gaze took me in almost hungrily. She examined my hair, the curve of my cheek from chin to brow, my misshapen form beneath the baggy clothes.

Almost subconsciously I pulled at the wrists of my sweatshirt and looked away from her, grateful that the bulk of the fabric hid any evidence of my condition.

When I dared to steal a glance again, I found Janice smiling at me from the bottom of the steps. Her expression was a study in regret, though I was almost sure I could find something akin to pride mingling with the water in her eyes.

She would have left then with nothing said between us save an incomplete apology and the three soft syllables of my name. I would have let her go. I would have watched her car drive away and then stumbled back into the house a very different woman than I had left it. But in the seconds of standing with my long-lost mother and feeling her draw me toward her against my will, and even desire, there was a very small and hidden part of me that knew I would mourn if she left. I
wanted
her to go. I longed for her to turn around and disappear, to sever whatever cord she had tied me with in those few moments on the porch. And yet I wanted her to stay to do nothing more than answer the question that had burned inside me for ten years:
Why?

Footsteps in the mudroom broke the spell that had been cast over me. Though Grandma had fled my mind the moment I opened the door, I suddenly, sinkingly understood that I was not the only one who would have to deal with the advent of Janice. I was filled with a need to protect the woman who had protected me, and I swung to the door, willing Grandma back into the house with every ounce of my being. I prayed silently, wordlessly,
vehemently
.

But there was the click of the rusty handle and then: “Julia, it's freezing! What are you doing out here in the cold?”

I moved so that I filled her vision and meant to smile nonchalantly at her. I tried to say something like, “Wrong house, Grandma. I'll be inside in a minute.” But my voice would not be liberated, and the heat in my eyes betrayed that there were tears waiting there instead of the composure I had hoped to convey. My face was a contortion of disbelief and pain.

Grandma hardened and brushed past me with an almost fierce defensiveness. I tried to block her way, but she gripped my arm and stepped past me, ready to confront the person who had left my eyes so desperate. I watched my grandmother turn to stone, and when she had stared for far too long without blinking, I threw a look over my shoulder at Janice. The broken woman was rooted to the spot, and from the self-loathing hang of her head, I guessed that she was pleading with the frozen earth beneath her to split and swallow her whole.

Although I half expected the moon to fall from its orbit, the porch, the encounter, was momentous for us alone. Nothing more significant happened than the rustling movement of some animal in the grove. The storm continued its slow progress, erasing stars from the sky with a cruel, black line of threatening clouds. Dots of light peppered the horizon and defined the farms of our neighbors while the families inside—comfortable and warm—went about their lives none the wiser that ours would never be the same. We were small, forgettable points of life in a world much bigger than our personal sorrows. Yet I felt the ground beneath me as if it had been created for the sole purpose of holding me up in this one moment in time.