The Time of Her Life (10 page)

Avery left before the ice had completely thawed, and Jane came home the next morning, just a week before Thanksgiving. Maggie
drove her home because the freeze and sudden thaw had turned the path through the meadow into a rivulet that flowed straight
to the Tunbridges’ side door, trickled between the earth and the old stone foundation, and came sluicing down the cellar wall
in a narrow, steady stream of water that triggered the sump pump in the dirt floor. The Tunbridges’ house reverberated ever
so slightly even on the second floor to the whir and thud, whir and thud, of its emergency drainage system.

In the whole of Lunsbury water ran everywhere. The ditch from the golf course overflowed and churned beyond the banks of the
Secret Feather River, dislodging and carrying with it debris and ragged sheets of ice that surfaced like tag ends of Ivory
soap bars, opaque and dingy. All over town people struggled with waterlogged carpets in their rec rooms, sodden woodwork and
water-streaked walls and ceilings in their finished basements.

Claudia moved through the rooms of the house she and Avery had built, aware of the silky whisper of trickling water. When
she put her ear against the wall, she could hear the water sliding down behind the foil-covered sheets of Styrofoam insulation,
and she could see there were areas of pale gray carpet that had turned a wet slate color where moisture had seeped out along
the baseboard. But Claudia did not struggle with it as her neighbors did. She made no effort to stanch the flow; it didn’t
seem to her that there was anything she ought to do about it. The slight stab of elation that had pierced her for a moment
when she considered Avery’s leaving had never returned now that he was really gone away from her. And he had planned it this
time. She was afraid to let herself remember that it was not the usual passionate and frantic departure. He had considered
it with some care. Her elation had been a sensation connected only to possibility, not to actuality. She was as deluged with
apathy as her house and the town were deluged with the running water that poured through the gullies, down hills, and under
the leaves that choked the square drains set into the city’s streets. There the water paused and spun in tepid pools until
it filtered through all the washed-up foliage and found its proper depth.

Claudia was astray in her own house. She didn’t know about experience, about accumulating it, except on the most elementary
level. Her very own history provided her with only a random illumination; she had never learned to cull from it a linear clarity.
Because she had never mastered the technique of understanding how she got from her past to her present, she had no way of
seeing how she could get from the present to the future.
She had no manner of dealing with this loss of Avery, who had been hers one way or another for all the time she could remember.
She wandered the rooms in a self-imposed stupor, because for all she knew of her life it was just the living of it with Avery
that had required all her heat and cunning.

Jane occupied the same rooms in an entirely different frame of mind. She worried, and she badgered her mother for information
about the state of their lives. She was as relentless as the water in her determination to find a stopping place. But she
could not get past her mother’s lack of animation, anger, or enthusiasm. Claudia’s passivity had always been ameliorated by
her passionate immediacy, but with Avery gone from the house so suddenly she only drifted, uninterested in the days. It made
Claudia cross when Jane pressed her for answers.

“What will we do? If Dad’s got an apartment, will we have to move, too? I thought he would just go to a hotel. Are we going
to stay here? Won’t Dad come back?”

“Oh, sweetie, he’s just getting settled in his apartment. Of course he’ll be back and forth. He’s got lots of things to pick
up.” This was not said to give comfort; Claudia was prickly when Jane asked these questions. They set her in motion. As soon
as Jane spoke, Claudia was up from the table or out of her chair and walking off down the hall, where she turned off into
the bathroom and took a shower, or into the bedroom and took a nap. The answers she gave Jane were only shreds of sentences
tossed over her shoulder as she scurried away from the unnerving insistence of her daughter.

Mostly Claudia slept and slept. She slept late into the
day; she fell asleep curled at one end of the dark red couch, and she went back to sleep in the afternoon. When Jane came
home from school, she didn’t wake her mother; she just fed poor Nellie and made a sandwich for herself. She and the dog would
eat in the kitchen, and Nellie would follow Jane wherever she went because she was so glad to find someone stirring about.

Claudia ate now and then during the day. Jane found her plates in the sink and jars left out on the counter, and she put them
away before she made dinner for herself. So much sleep had made Claudia’s face swollen, and her skin was blanched white under
her eyes. She was irritated when Jane asked her anything that might require her to wake up, and for several days she didn’t
answer Jane sufficiently.

The day before the Thanksgiving holiday began, Jane herself was infected by her mother’s fatigue. She woke up and couldn’t
imagine that it would be possible to spend a day surrounded by her friends and answerable to her teachers, so she didn’t go
to school, although Claudia didn’t know it. In fact, Jane lay in bed awake while Claudia slept away the morning. When she
heard her mother get up and go to the kitchen she followed her there, and Claudia didn’t appear to think it was unusual that
Jane was home. Jane settled at the table and began to hector her mother in a querulous tone that Claudia couldn’t ignore.

“What are you going to
do
, Mom? Can we call Dad? I don’t even know his number. And we’re almost out of milk, too. We need to go to the store.” Jane
was so intent upon this that it made Claudia angry.

“He doesn’t have his phone in yet, Janie. Maggie called last night to give me the message. It’ll be hooked up
day after tomorrow and he’ll call you. Why don’t you ride over to the Mini-Mart to get us some milk? You could take your backpack
and just get one quart, couldn’t you? I really don’t feel good. I don’t feel like getting dressed, Janie.”

A tremor went through Jane from head to toe, a violent shudder. She could not make a dent on the events that were moving her
life along one day to the next. No one asked her advice or even wanted her point of view. She only thought of one tiny way,
that very instant, to regain a little control over her own fate. She sat at the table with her hands curled tightly as though
she had slammed them against the surface with a thump. They were white and tensely clenched.

“Don’t call me Janie! I hate being called Janie, and you don’t have the right to call me that!” She jumped up out of her chair
and stood in the center of the room, trembling and shaking her head as she spoke. “You don’t
do
anything! You don’t do anything at all! And I want you to call me Jane! And I mean it. Don’t you ever call me Janie! Not
ever again. Don’t you dare!”

Jane’s fury was so startling that it surprised Claudia out of her hazy lethargy. For one instant her senses registered the
possibility that Avery might be gone for good. She had not heard from him except through Maggie, who taught her class in the
same building that Avery taught his. She sat up straight in her chair and looked back at her daughter, who was shivering and
shivering right before her eyes, and Claudia started to cry with a low moan in her throat. She only sat up straight and cried.

Jane stared back because she knew so little about this. She had seen her mother be sad, but she had never seen
her mother cry from sadness. Now she observed her mother cautiously, and she remembered what Maggie had done when Celeste
had come home crying because she had had an argument with the boy she was in love with. Jane did the same thing because it
looked as if her mother might die of the loss of so many tears. Claudia made so little noise, and the tears flowed down her
face like all the moving water in the world outside. Jane went over to her mother and put her arms around her, although she
was afraid of doing this. The two of them had rarely taken the liberty of touching the other. With one hand she turned her
mother’s face against her shoulder while her mother cried, and she stood like that for a very long moment in her life. And
at that instant Claudia thought that no one could ever be so kind to her again as long as she would live. She cried even more
for this miraculous child who had somewhere learned compassion.

“Oh, Janie, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t ever plan on doing things, you know.
I don’t know what to do about Avery.”

That evening from the phone in her father’s study Jane called Maggie to say that her mother had the flu and hadn’t been able
to shop or cook and could they have Thanksgiving dinner at the Tunbridges’. In the morning she woke her mother up fairly early
and told her that Maggie had phoned to invite them over for the holiday dinner.

By Thanksgiving day there had been three days of mild but steady rain, the kind that in the spring is called a million-dollar
rain by the farmers. In late November,
however, when the ground had begun to freeze, it was disastrous, especially on top of the melting ice, and there were flash
flood warnings for the low-lying areas. But as the rain droned on that afternoon, Claudia came fully back to attention. She
took notice once again of exactly what she was doing, although she was groggy with the recollection of the past week that
had moved by her while she wasn’t counting the time.

She wasn’t sure, as she stood there whisking lumps out of the gravy while Maggie drained the green beans, if the Tunbridges
had invited her to dinner or if she and Jane had simply turned up in their kitchen. It never mattered in Maggie’s household,
and Claudia took care with the gravy and was simultaneously almost at the point of tears with gratitude at having friends
so capable and generous. Maggie’s house at Thanksgiving was always filled with interesting strays, whom Maggie had collected
from one place or another. People to whom, at some time, she had offered solace. Claudia was dazzled, as she usually was by
any Tunbridge event, and she beheld the scene with a liquid and blurred perception.

Maggie could orchestrate confusion; she had mastered the art of turning chaos into spontaneity—the shade of difference between
the two was so very pale. Claudia admired her as she managed the kitchen. She was tall and lanky and lovely-looking in her
straw doll kind of awkwardness, thought Claudia. Maggie would motion with her sharp hands and arms and scissor across the
kitchen in long strides, never wasting a movement. She marshaled her forces with sweet efficiency. She nudged people gently
this way or that. It had turned out that there were fourteen people gathered at her
house for this meal, and they had grouped themselves either in the kitchen or in Vince’s study, where the football game was
turned on. Jane and Diana had been helping all morning, and now they were sitting at the kitchen table out of the way eating
slivered, toasted almonds. Claudia was filled with a fragile, sentimental delight when she took into account her daughter
sitting at the table seeming content while Maggie deftly directed all the movements in this sturdy household.

Claudia did notice with a twinge of sorrow that Jane’s hair was hanging limply around her face and needed washing and that
she was wearing a pair of old jeans and an orange sweat shirt that said “Missouri Tigers.” Diana sat next to her at the table
in the same attitude of clumsy repose, but Diana was as smooth and polished in the way she looked as a satin-textured stone
taken from a stream. Claudia studied her briefly and tried to figure out how she had achieved it. It might be her shiny dark
hair braided down her back. This was the sort of detail of other people’s style that Claudia always tried to remember and
get right, but that generally eluded her because she could never sustain her interest.