A Month of Summer (5 page)

From where I was lying, I couldn’t see the end of the parking lot because of the forsythia bushes, but I laughed anyway.

“Looks like she’s gonna change that thing herself,” Claude went on. “Probably won’t have any trouble. She’ll just haul that car up with one hand and slap the tire on with the other. You ever wonder if she’s
always
been a woman?”

I coughed and gasped, then choked on a swallow of air.

“Well, she’s got the jack, and she’s a-lookin’ for a place to put it. I could give her some ideas about that.”

My body convulsed with laughter, until somewhere in the melee of strange sounds I heard an occasional fragment of my own giggle. A sense of joy, and hope, and possibility spun around me.

The blind zinged downward suddenly, banging the windowsill with a thunderous smack. “Oh, darn, I think she seen me watching,” Claude gasped. “Come tomorrow, she’ll fold me like a paper wad, chew me up, and spit me out.”

Peeking carefully through the broken slats, he continued the play-by -play of the activity outside. When Gretchen finally drove off, he began the train story again. “Did I ever tell you I was over fifty years with the Angelina and Neches Railroad? Drove them trains down in the Piney Woods. . . .”

Somewhere far into the forests of deep East Texas, where the smell of pine, coal smoke, and fresh-cut lumber was thick in the air, I fell asleep. I dreamed I was on the train, the windows open, the breeze caressing my cheeks, the sun high and hot. At the front of the car, Teddy was just a little boy, pretending to drive. Teddy loved mechanical things of all kinds. Clinging to the window frame, he stood on his tiptoes, trying to see out.

“Be careful,” I said, but he couldn’t hear me. Stretching my arms, I tried to move closer, but I was trapped in my seat, pinned by something heavy and solid I couldn’t see. “Come sit with Mommy,” I pleaded, but the engine and the wind were too loud. The train rushed faster. Teddy inched higher, pulling himself up on the window frame.

“No, Teddy. Don’t do that. Get down,” I called, careful not to startle him, remembering the time I’d hollered at him for climbing impossibly high in a tree at the playground. When he saw me below, he let go and fell all the way to the ground. It was the first time I’d ever allowed myself to fully comprehend that Teddy might never be able to see to his own safety. How could a child almost eight years old not understand that a fall so far would be dangerous?

My dream moved suddenly to the playground. I was running toward the tree, watching Teddy’s body smack the branches, falling, and falling, and falling, while I remained powerless to stop it. My legs were leaden, refusing to move normally. “Teddy, no!” I cried. “No!”

“Mrs. Parker . . . Mrs. Parker . . .” A voice came from somewhere in the distance, luring me away from my struggle to reach Teddy. “Mrs. Parker . . . It is all right. ’Tis all right. You are having a dream, missus. Wake up.”

I can’t,
I thought, fighting to get back to the park, but it was slipping away as Teddy fell.
I have to reach Teddy. I have to help him. Can’t you see he’s in trouble?

The voice called to me. “Wake up. ’Tis only a dream, missus.”

Dragging my eyes open, I saw the second-shift nurse, Ifeoma, standing above me, checking my chart. “You cried out in your sleep just now. Do you feel pain?” she inquired in the thickly accented English of her home country, Ghana.

“Noh-oh-o-o,” I answered, trying to make the sound emphatic, even though a part of me wished she would bring a sedative, so that I wouldn’t hear the moaning of the patient down the hall, the nurses clanging by with their carts, the clock softly ticking away the hours.

Ifeoma paused to reposition my body, then straightened the coverlet, something she didn’t normally do. “Your daughter is here, missus. She is in the administrator’s office just now.”

The muscles in my legs tensed, or maybe it was only my imagination. A soft groan passed my throat. Ifeoma raised a brow, then efficiently smoothed a last wrinkle from the cover before turning to leave the room. “I am certain she will come to you soon.” She left the door partially open, in anticipation of a visitor.

I wanted to rise from the bed, go over and close the door, tell Rebecca that she wasn’t welcome, wasn’t needed. Why, after all these years, did she have to come now, when I was like this? I couldn’t possibly face her in this condition.

CHAPTER 3

All the self-assurances that I was ready to face Hanna Beth Parker couldn’t stop my heart from hammering as I prepared to enter her room. Despite the fact that I was an adult now, and she was elderly and powerless, my fingers froze on the door frame, and I stood unable to move forward. I was the twelve-year-old girl waiting beside my mother’s car on the curb of what had been my front yard,
our
front yard. My life lay scattered in pieces on the lawn—bicycle, antique French-white desk and chair, the frame to the four-poster that had once made me feel like a princess but now seemed ridiculous. Boxes of clothes and dolls, various paintings, vases, carvings, and dishes from our time in Iran and Saudi. My mother had claimed those exotic treasures in the divorce, and my father hadn’t argued. He felt guilty, no doubt. He deserved to feel guilty. A forty-two-year-old man who suddenly ditches his family for a woman ten years younger should feel guilty.

Hanna Beth came onto the porch unexpectedly. My mother stiffened, swiveled toward Hanna Beth with her mouth slightly agape. She hadn’t imagined that we’d drive up and find
the woman
already there, already settling into
our
house before the transport company had even finished removing
our
things. But it figured that
she
would be there, on the porch gloating. She’d won, after all. She had my father, our house, our life. She had everything. It figured that she would be the one supervising the movers. My father was probably at work, safely detached.

My mother swept past Hanna Beth, went into the house without a word. Hanna Beth didn’t follow, just stood out of the way by the railing. She was smaller than I’d anticipated, not the formidable enemy I’d pictured. Her slender, willowy body was clothed in a lightweight sundress too summery for the early March day. She was beautiful, with large brown eyes and auburn hair that hung in ringlets down her back. The dress swirled around her long, slim legs as she walked. The workers took note, passing by with their boxes. She stood uncertainly at the top of the stairs, the sunlight glinting on her hair, outlining her form beneath the fabric.

At any other time, in any other place, I would have liked her, admired her beauty, the way she moved, her steps silent and graceful, like those of a dancer, unassuming, as if she wasn’t aware of the picture she made standing there in the yellow dress. She held a flowerpot in her hands, and there was dirt on her hem.

She was planting flowers in
our
garden. I hated her like I’d never hated anyone. I wanted to dash across the yard, throw open the back gate, and rip the flowers from the ground one by one. I wanted to shred them into tiny pieces, destroy the roots, poison the ground, so that nothing could ever grow here, so that Hanna Beth could never make a beautiful life in this big house, while my mother and I were moving to an apartment in Santa Monica, California, a place I’d only visited on occasional vacations to see my mother’s family.

Teddy came out the front door, pushing one of the moving dollies, making the men laugh, because, even at fourteen, he was clumsy with it. Spotting me by the curb, he let the dolly fall upright, then waved and hollered with a big, stupid smile, like he was trying to catch someone’s attention from a half mile away. I was glad my friends were in school, the street quiet. Before his mother could stop him, Teddy dashed down the steps and started across the lawn in a gangly, lumbering run, still waving. “Hi, Bek-ty, hi, Bek-ty. Bek-teee, hi-i!”

Hanna Beth bolted after him, catching up as he reached the car. I’d backed away, grabbed the door handle, uncertain, afraid.

Hanna Beth took his flailing hand, encircled it with hers, calming his frenzied movements. Patting his fingers, she smoothed tangled blond hair from his forehead. He tipped his chin toward her, and for just an instant he looked normal, like the boys I went to school with. But if Teddy had been in my school, he would have been in the
special
class—the one they kept hidden off the end of the gym, where they taught things like making ham sandwiches and buttoning your own shirt.

“Rebecca, this is Teddy,” his mother said, and smiled at me like she was making a presentation. “Teddy’s been very eager to meet you. We both have. We’re very much looking forward to your coming this summer.” The words were proper, crisp. She sounded like a teacher, which she was. She worked as a live-in at the
special
school a few miles away, where brick buildings from another era crouched behind a rusty iron fence. The kids I hung around with made jokes and told Frankensteinian stories about deformed children locked in the basements when we passed by that place. My father frequented the coffee shop across from the gates, which was how he’d run into Hanna Beth, a little over six months ago, now. By unfortunate happenstance, they’d renewed an old acquaintance, initially formed in childhood when Hanna Beth’s father worked for the oil companies. He wasn’t an engineer like my father and grandfather, just a rig manager. Her family lived
off
Blue Sky Hill, in the neighborhoods of small three-bedroom bungalows the residents of Blue Sky Hill thumbed their noses at during dinner-party conversations. Hanna Beth and my father had always known each other, and when they crossed paths in the coffee shop, they knew each other again, and our lives were ruined.

“I got f-owas,” Teddy said, his face contorting as he worked out the words. “Plant in f-owas deep.” He nodded earnestly, making the motion of digging a hole, and putting in a seedling, then flailing his free hand toward the backyard. “Wanna see?”

I yanked the door handle so hard it ripped through my fingers, bending the nails backward. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get away, get into the car and lock the door, lock
them
on the other side of the glass.

Hanna Beth didn’t protest, but just stood there holding Teddy’s hand, looking sad. Turning him away, she started toward the house. He smiled and waved cheerfully over his shoulder, too stupid to understand what was happening. “Bye, Beck-tee, bye-eee! Have fun!”

I hated him.

I made up my mind that he and Hanna Beth might have everything else, but they wouldn’t have me. The courts could do their worst—lock me in jail, throw me in juvenile hall, line up custody orders from here to California—but I wasn’t coming back to Dallas this summer, or any summer. It wasn’t as if my presence in
his
house, in
their
lives, would be missed. My father and I had become strangers who passed in the hall. I doubted he would fight to enforce the custody agreement. He proved me right, of course.

Now Hanna Beth’s stroke had accomplished what thirty-three years and a court order could not. I’d come back.

Unfortunately, the pain had traveled with me across the country, across the years, and as I stood outside her door, it was as fresh and as much a part of me as it had been that twelfth summer. It stabbed as sharply now as then—like a chronic injury, reawakened by a careless movement, a sudden strain caused by the burden of picking up something too heavy. Its intensity surprised me. I’d expected, in this adult body, safely entrenched in a life that was completely separate from that of Hanna Beth and my father, to be able to maintain a comfortable detachment, a reasonable objectivity. Instead, I wanted to lock myself away someplace quiet, and nurse the raw spot until it stopped burning.

In the midst of that realization came a new one. Was this what lay ahead for Macey? Would she stand outside a door someday, halfway through her life, a grown woman with a damaged little girl inside? Would she feel for Kyle what I felt for my father? Would her confident smile, her openness, her self-worth slowly diminish until she found trust a struggle, faith a chore? Would she always feel vaguely inadequate, unworthy, as if she had to prove something, to be more than she was, because no one could love her just for herself?

I didn’t want Macey to feel those things.
I
didn’t want to feel them.
You’re forty-five years old, Rebecca, it’s time to grow up,
I told myself. Some part of me sensed that, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, closure of a sort might lie beyond the door, in Hanna Beth’s room.

Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself and stepped through the opening.

The room was quiet, with a stale, medicinal smell. I moved into the alcove between the bathroom and the wall, let go of the door. It creaked partway closed behind me, then hung ajar. I paused at the sound, waiting to see if she would say something, ask who was there. It occurred to me that she probably couldn’t. The nursing center administrator had referred to her as having suffered a stroke in the brain stem, resulting in a coma of short duration. She was making progress since being transferred from the hospital to the nursing center, but she would require ongoing rehabilitation in a supportive and low-stress environment. The administrator looked pointedly at me when she said the words “supportive” and “low-stress,” letting me know she suspected that our family situation wasn’t conducive to either of those things. The remainder of our discussion was clinical, to the point, yet I walked into Hanna Beth’s room expecting to find a formidable enemy—the beautiful woman in the yellow sundress. In my mind, Hanna Beth was unchanged by the passage of time. She was still that ethereal, but devastating vision.

When I turned the corner, the woman in the bed was small—a pale, white form, wrinkled and twisted, bleached out like a paper doll wadded up and left in the sun. She seemed as much a part of the bed as the sheet and coverlet themselves, as if she’d been there long enough to have been absorbed by those inanimate objects, to have taken on their characteristics.