Digging Out (16 page)

“Oh, I don’t know.” He tilts his head and squints to watch a gull.

“She’s asking for them. She wants you to teach her.”

“Not me.” He sounds emphatic. He bats a wasp away angrily. “I’m not a teacher. I’d ruin it for her.”

“Why do you say that? You’re a wonderful teacher. You’ve got patience. You’ve got —”

“Forget it, Alys. I’m not going to teach her. Why should I chance it? I’m not even sure she’s ready.”

“Well, how will you know?”

“She’s six, Alys.”

“Why are you getting angry, Marco?”

“I’m not angry. I’m just tired. I wish I could just listen to the waves break and watch our daughter without planning for her future. It’s Sunday. Let’s just give it a rest.”

But he is angry. He has been short-tempered and angry with me for a while now.

P
ART
II

S
ANTA
M
ONICA
A
PRIL 2003

E
ight months later and Marc’s ashes are still in the box, sitting inside the Chinese cabinet in the dining room. I had this idea we would scatter them in the garden on the first day of spring. But Dafydd isn’t available and Hannah doesn’t want to do it without him.

How can we move forward without Marc’s body put to rest? I feel him watching me all the time. Several weeks ago I came downstairs naked, cutting through the dining room on my way to fetch the morning newspaper, and actually covered myself as I passed the mirrored cabinet. “I hate you,” I said out loud, shaking my fist at the cabinet doors.

I insist the “flinging,” as I call it, must happen soon. I tell Dafydd and Hannah enough time has passed and we need to do something with their father’s remains. It is unsettling for all of us. But it feels false, my trying to press them. They are not yet ready. Perhaps none of us is ready yet to let Marc go.

One morning after Hannah is off to school, I come in from the garden to find four messages on my answering machine. The first message is a voice like velvet, lush and sexual like a baritone sax, rolling her rs thick as tar on hot cement.

“Alys, please, it is Gabriella Purdue. It seems unfair that I have to be tracking you down. I know it is hard for you to understand my life with Marc, but losing him is perhaps just as difficult for me as it is for you. I know Phillipe has told you Marc and I have a child
together. She is just eight. But I want to talk to you, to see you. I have not spoken to anyone about my life with Marc except Phillipe. Marc and I kept our life extremely quiet. Please let me speak to you. You can reach me at…” And then she signs off with “I am begging you to call.”

So the child is a girl. Another daughter.

Aside from everything else, this woman must have no sense at all. What if Hannah were home? What if she were standing next to me when I played my messages? My body temperature has risen at least ten degrees. I pace, want to scream, shake someone. Marc. Gabriella. Both of them. I am ashamed of the intensity of my anger and my jealousy, knowing I should at least care about the child. The little girl is innocent and she is Marc’s flesh and blood. But because she is connected to Gabriella, she doesn’t seem innocent. I punch the DELETE button and don’t listen to the rest of the messages. I break a glass while doing the dishes and leave the broken pieces in the sink.

Ed Meyers has told me Gabriella called him more than once requesting I ring her, threatening to come after me if I don’t. Friendly. Phillipe, too, passed on a message that Gabriella wished I would ring her. Her call on the machine this morning is more than an intrusion. It is an invasion.

My lawyer assures me in no uncertain terms there is no way in the world Gabriella can extract money from Marc’s estate, either for her or her child. The trusts Marc and I created for each other and the children are the final word. Binding, irrevocable.

Hannah asks me if she can spend a month—“four weeks, exactly”—at camp. “Alone. I can do it. And I want you to take me and pick me up,” she adds.

Deerwood Camp is outside Durango. It is the same camp she spent two weeks at last year. But last year Marc and I were at Elizabeth’s, our home away from home, close by.

“I swear I won’t get homesick. I just know I won’t.”

She is certainly in better shape than she was eight months ago. In the weeks soon after Marc’s death, Hannah wouldn’t even talk to her best friend, Heather. She wouldn’t return her phone calls or see her. Last week she played at Heather’s twice and slept over on Friday night.

I suppose I am still afraid for her to be out of my sight for such a long stretch. What if she has one of her nightmares or sleepwalks? What will happen to her without my ever-present watchful eye, my constant warnings? I’m not sure how Hannah is really dealing with her loss. At the moment it seems to be a little-by-little letting go. But I still worry about some major explosion, some huge emotional reaction when I am too far away to be of help.

I have to admit that part of what really frightens me is what
I
will do without Hannah’s steadying presence in my life. Four weeks is a long time—an eternity for me to be on my own, without my safety net.

But Hannah is so intent I agree to let her go. I wash her clothes, taking each piece of clothing from the dryer, each garment larger than last year: wooly long Johns, knickers, a pile jacket, T-shirts, shorts, rain pants and jeans. I sew name tags into each piece, wishing I could sew one on her arm, tattoo her, implant a locator chip—any kind of protection against loss.

While packing her purple trunk, I say a silent prayer over each item. “Keep her safe, keep her safe …” I put in Winnie-the-Pooh, stamped postcards, seven little knickers with the names of each day of the week, each wrapped separately in colored tissue. And finally a flashlight and a small Swiss Army knife—presents she will find from time to time. She catches me putting a photo of Marc in and asks me to take it out. “I don’t want to think about Daddy,” she says.

Having not flown since Marc died, at the airport I force myself up to the role of “the good mother,” the calm mother, taking her child to camp. No one knows anything about our lives. No one knows what we have been living through. In public we are ordinary folks with quotidian problems, and it feels good.

On the airplane, seat belts fastened, Hannah confides, “I’m afraid of flying.”

“Don’t be. It’s safer than any other form of transportation. It’s much safer than driving.” I don’t believe a word of this, of course. I close my eyes and say a prayer.

In Phoenix we change from the large plane to a sixteen-seater, so small we have to bend down to get through the door. We’ve flown on these planes a hundred times and I know it might be rough, especially over the Rockies. When the plane starts to waggle about, I
breathe deeply. When we reach peak altitude and the plane dips a bit, I clutch Hannah’s arm.

“I’m used to it now,” she says confidently, adding what Marc might have said: “Just pretend you’re on a bucking bronco.”

“Yeah, right.”

Safely in Durango, I rent a car, and an hour later we are at Deer-wood Camp with dozens of other parents and kids who have flown in from all around the country. We shake hands, help to make beds, mill about uncomfortably, and then it is time to say our good-byes.

“Don’t cry, Mommy, please,” Hannah whispers when she sees my eyes fill and I pull a tissue from my sleeve. She sounds like Mam and Beti. “This is a good thing. I’m going to have fun!” I smile through my tears. “Write in your journal, Mama-loo. When we meet up in four weeks I want you to be able to remember every single moment so you can fill me in.” I know she is mimicking me.

“But seriously,” I beg, “if you should get homesick—write me, okay?”

Hannah smiles and waves.

“I’ll miss you!” I manage to choke out. I take a long last look at her before turning and walking down the dusty hill past the mess hall and the swimming pond to my rented car.

Before going to Elizabeth’s for the night, I take a walk along
El Río de las Ánimas Perdidas
, “The River of Lost Souls,” better known in Durango as the Animas River.

On this soft, warm summer day, the sky seems to be everywhere. I reach my arms up as if to touch it. I wish I were staying longer than just the night. I wish I were going off to camp.

Near the river’s edge, I pick up a river rock, smoothing it between my fingers. When Marc and I first came to Durango, we picnicked right here, in this very spot. We’d just seen the cabin.

“If we can get a loan, let’s buy it. We can spend Thanksgivings and Christmas, Easter break and summers. It’ll be good for our writing. It’ll be good for our lungs. It’ll be good for our marriage,” he’d said.

Our marriage. I hadn’t known just how much trouble our marriage was in. I throw the rock into the river, aiming at nothing, throwing it straight and hard.

The next stone is small and sharp.

Our first Christmas we’d cut a tree from the woods out back and dragged it to the house, making a trail through the deep, newly fallen snow. “You want to tell me again why we had to cut one so big?” Marc asked breathlessly.

That had been the first time Hannah saw snow. I’d found little tin candleholders and brought them with us and put candles on every arm of the tree. When we lit them several days later, one of them caught fire; before long one side of the tree was aflame.

“I guess your instinct was right. If we’d cut a smaller tree, we’d have nothing left. Good choice, Alys.” Marc laughed. Fortunately, he’d bought a fire extinguisher, which we’d put next to the tree.

This stone follows the first into the river.

It catches the current, then disappears. So quiet, wind through the trees, the soft swing of tall blades of grass, the full sweep of life around me. Just now there seems such a sweet purity to it all.

Each of us collected rocks. Marc’s collection was the largest. They lay in ceramic bowls on every surface, and we’d left them with Elizabeth when we sold her the cabin. That last summer we had a discussion about the difference between a rock and a boulder. I thought a boulder was a huge rock. Marc told me that a boulder was any rock that was moved from the parent rock by weather or any other natural force, and was bigger than a breadbox.

I reach behind myself and pick up a larger rock and heave it into the river. What a satisfying
plop
! One by one, twenty rocks, heaved with all my might. We’d been together for twenty years—twenty good years, I’d thought. Who can I trust now?

Walking away from the river, I look around, hearing the sound of Marc’s voice, loud and clear.
I love you, Alys,
he says. Of course, there is no one there. “No one but the River God,” Hannah would say. I look up at the bare, burned limbs of the tree Hannah and Marc named the “Buzzard Tree.” It is covered with huge, crouching black buzzards, their red-crowned bald heads shining under the glaring sunlight. Their slow downward dive for flesh makes me cringe. I clap my hands, causing most of them to spread their wings wide and fly off. Then I put my palms together and bow low to the River God and to my memories of Marc, and I walk away.

I spend the night with Elizabeth. This is our first time together since Marco’s death. Although I’ve often considered confiding in her
about Gabriella—even had the phone in my hand to call her—I can’t go through with it. Elizabeth has her own deep feelings for Marc, who had been her friend for nearly all the years he and I had been together. In fact, her being in Durango is because of Marc.

“It’s an easier place to live. You don’t need as much money, and it’ll be a change for you,” he’d told her.

After Elizabeth graduated from high school she left Texas to seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles. I had just quit working for Beti. Elizabeth took my job. We’ve been friends since.

Recently, Elizabeth had a brief affair. Too late, she learned her lover had invented everything he had told her about himself. Too late she learned he was a married ex-con who had gone to prison for fraud. One of the reasons she misses Marco so much is because of his honesty. How can I ruin him for her?

Elizabeth serves up her amazing Guatemalan rellenos with lots of roasted hot peppers and guacamole, one of my favorites. We sit contentedly under the black-and-blue sky, watching our shadows grow longer on the surface of the Animas River, roaring just feet away. She has opened one of her precious bottles of Chianti Riserva, and when she raises her glass, she says, “I predict a trip over the big waters, where you will find …”

I look over my wineglass. “Don’t say ‘another man.’ “

“You’ve got something against men?” she teases. “No, I don’t think this is about a man. Actually, I was going to say, I predict you will find
yourself
.”

“Ah.”

Elizabeth claims to be psychic, has studied tarot cards for years. “Remember, it’s in my Indian blood.”

I laugh, loving her good intentions. “Okay, Elizabeth, who exactly is this sitting across from you if it isn’t me?”

“Oh, it’s you all right, Alys,” she says. “But I’m talking about what’s going on inside you.” She tilts her head as if I am acting silly and must surely understand what she’s on about. “Or perhaps what’s
not
going on inside of you,” she adds. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve been ‘outside of yourself,’ as k.d. lang would say, for a long, long time.”

“Outside of myself?”

“Don’t you think? Not just in the last year because of Marc, but
ever since I met you. Part of you living and the other part of you always off somewhere else pretending at life?” She knows quite a lot about my childhood, the disaster, my lack of relationship with my parents, Evan.

“I feel like you’re on the verge of something different. I don’t know.
Profound
maybe. Perhaps you’re ready to fly.”

“Literally or figuratively?” I am trying to throw her off my trail. “Exactly how do you know this, Lizzie?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “It’s just a feeling. A hunch. You know how I am about these things.”

She’s empathetic in the deepest sense, and her ability to share in my emotions, thoughts and feelings is of course one of the many reasons I love her.