Home Safe (17 page)

twenty-six

S
ATURDAY MORNING
, H
ELEN SITS AT THE COMPUTER USING THE
last of her frequent-flier miles for a trip today to San Francisco. An early evening flight, returning on Monday night. She waits for the confirming email and prints out the itinerary. Then she calls her daughter.

“Hi, Mom.” Tessa's voice is clipped, a bit impatient.

“I know you're working,” Helen says. “I just wanted to let you know I'm taking a trip today, and I'll be back Monday night. I'll have my cell.”

“Where to?”

Helen doesn't want to tell her. But how can she not?

“It's … private.” She waits for some sort of explosion, but all she hears is “Oh. Okay. Have a good time.”

Helen sits for some time staring at the phone after she's hung up. That's
it?
Then the phone rings, and Tessa says, “Wait.”

“Fine, San Francisco, but I'm not moving there. I'm just going there. I'm not moving there.”

“Why are you going?”

“I have to take care of some things about the house.”

“Are you selling it?”

“I need to go and see it again.”

Silence. And then Tessa says, “Stop by here if you want, when you get home.”

“Okay.”

“Mom? I just want to say … It's your house and you have to be the one to decide. I understand that. Whatever you decide is all right with me. Really.”

Helen pulls the phone away from her ear and looks at it. Then she says, “Listen, it's been great talking to you, but could you put my daughter on?”

“Very funny,” Tessa says. “I have to go back to work. I'll see you Monday night.”

Helen hangs up the phone and sits with her arms crossed, thinking. Something is going on with Tessa. She is too soft, lately. Too accommodating. Too generous. This is different from the overly solicitous behavior people can show each other after a funeral, a death. And then Helen sits straight up in her chair. Tessa's in love! Oh, she can't wait to hear all about it. Tessa might not tell, but Walter the doorman will. Helen will bring him some toffee chip cookies so he'll tell her everything about who has come in the lobby door to visit Tessa, and maybe even at what time he has gone out of it.

The softness of the air outside is nearly an assault. Helen stands at the curb outside the airport, waiting for Tom Ellis, and takes off her coat. She'd gotten sleepy on the plane, but now she's wide awake. She looks at her watch, still set for Chicago, where it is 10:00
P.M
. Here, it is only 8:00—she's younger! A blue Prius pulls up slowly in front of her, and she bends to see if the driver is Tom. It is not; rather it is a man about her age meeting a woman who appears to be his wife: the woman moves to the trunk of the car for the man to put her suitcase in, and they kiss hello with an old and easy affection that brings tears to Helen's eyes.

She hears her name being called and sees Tom a few car lengths away, waving at her. She has a sudden thought that maybe she'll make her apologies and then go right back inside and take the next flight home. When she'd told him she'd be fine coming out here, she thought she would be. In the last couple of days, whenever she imagined seeing him, being alone with him, it was with a kind of schoolgirlish eagerness and excitement. But here he is now in the flesh, a man she hardly knows, walking toward her and smiling, and she feels no sense of eagerness but instead a kind of panic. Her odd impulse is to smack him. But she smiles back; he takes her suitcase from her, and by the time she sits in his car, she has relaxed somewhat. Enough to breathe, anyway.

“Nervous?” he asks.

“No!” She laughs in a tittering, Aunt Pittypat kind of way and then, embarrassed, turns to look out her window.

“Yes, you are. I am, too.”

She looks over at him. He's wearing khaki pants and a black sweater, the sleeves pushed up. Loafers, which Helen happens to love, but who wears loafers anymore? “What are you nervous about?” she asks.

“Well, truth be told, now that I've said I'm nervous, I'm a little more relaxed. You?”

She smiles. “Yes.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Want to get something to eat?”

“Yes.”

“Are you always this agreeable?”

“Yes.”

“You're lying, right?”

“Of course.”

As they drive toward the Golden Gate Bridge, she looks out the shadowy outline of the hills. It is awfully pretty here. Credit where credit's due. She looks down and sees that her blouse is rumpled up around her midsection, and when she's sure Tom's not looking, she straightens it.

If the measure of the man is the restaurant he takes you to, Tom Ellis is her kind of guy. This place, Sonny's, is just the right size: about ten tables, and a counter with eight stools. There are homemade pies in a glass case, and there's a chalkboard menu featuring comfort foods. “I want everything on there,” Helen tells Tom, and he says, “Let's get it, then.”

She laughs, and he says, “I mean it. We'll have some now and then we'll both have meals for the next couple days. You're staying until Monday, right?”

“Well, yes, but …”

“And we'll stop for breakfast things for you at the grocery store before I take you home.”

“Why are you being so …
nice
?”

His face changes and he looks down at the table, then up at her. “I liked your husband very much.”

She nods, her throat tight.

“And …” He shrugs. “I like you. I feel like I got to know you from building that house—I like the way your mind works. Anyone who saw that place would want to know who
thought
of all those things. And here you are.”

“I didn't think of everything.”

“You thought of most of it.”

Helen cannot think of what to say next. “Thank you,” she manages, and then, “I guess you sort of have an unfair advantage.”

“In knowing more about you than you do about me?”

She nods.

“I'm an open book.”

“Nobody's an open book,” Helen says.

“You're right. But I'll tell you the truth about anything you ask me.”

A young, red-haired waitress comes over, a pleasant girl seemingly unaware or uncaring about her great beauty, and Tom places their order. “Really?” she says. “Everything on the menu? A lot of people say that, but they never
mean
it.” She tilts her head, pointedly appraising this older and quite attractive man, then says “Cool” in a way that sounds like
Call me
.

After she leaves, Tom says, “We need a new word for
cool
. You're a writer. Can you think of one?”

“Awesome,”
Helen says and he smiles, and there are his laugh lines. His hands cupping his coffee mug. If Helen could pick one part of a man's anatomy that she loves most, this is it: hands. Unbidden, the image comes to her of waking up beside Tom, a wide ray of sunshine lying across them as they turn to each other and blink good morning. She looks away, at the older man seated hunched over coffee and pie and the newspaper at the end of the counter.
What's his story?
she thinks in a way that is automatic, and an answer starts to come to her: his long-dead wife, his crush on the waitress, his dishwasher mended with duct tape, the magic tricks he performs for the boy next door. She is content; she is hungry and food is on the way. Also, she has not been with a man for a long time, and Tom Ellis is so very pleasant to look at, to talk to.

By the time they have finished eating, though, Helen's mood has changed; she feels tired, unsure of herself, a little foolish. Lost. She looks at her watch, and Tom says, “It's late, I know. Why don't I take you to the house.” Then, before she can even start to worry about what that might mean, he says, “I'll just drop you off, and then you're on your own. But you can call me if you need anything.”

They drive in silence, the delicious smells of their food the only things talking. Then they are there, in deep darkness, the front of the little house illuminated only by the car's headlights. “I won't come in,” Tom says. “But why don't you make sure everything's okay before I take off?” She takes her suitcase and packages of food, refusing Tom's offer to carry some of them for her, and uses the headlights to find the lock and turn the key. Once inside, she turns on the lights and checks quickly for—what? Killers? Raccoons? Ghosts? In any case, there is nothing there but the inviting rooms of the place. She goes outside to signal to Tom that everything's all right. He leans out the window to say, “I'm ten minutes away if you need
anything
.”

“Thank you!” she calls, waving, and goes back inside. She stands still for a long moment, her hands clasped, just feeling the place. Then she walks slowly around the house, taking in the rooms in a way she was unable to before. She puts away the food into the fancy new refrigerator, touches the rocks that surround the fireplace, looks through the mullioned windows at the backyard, dimly lit by a shrouded moon.

In the bathroom, she turns on the shower briefly, and she then goes to the bedroom. She flicks one of the switches and the constellations light up. She crosses her arms and leans against the doorjamb, shaking her head. What he missed, by not being able to show her all this! What
she
missed, by not getting to see his face as he saw hers.

She moves slowly through the house, all but holding hands with Dan's spirit, thanking him for this and every other beautiful thing he ever did for her. When she gets back to the bedroom, she lies in the middle of the wide, wide mattress with her coat for a blanket, meaning to rest for a minute, then get up and change into her pajamas. She stares out the French doors at the night sky, at the stars, much clearer here than at home. She closes her eyes to listen for night sounds, insects, the wind, and feels herself drifting down toward sleep.

•   •   •

Morning in the house is like something Helen has never seen. She goes to the kitchen and makes coffee, the small sounds amplified in the silence, and then drinks it from one of the diner-type mugs; the weight and the feel of the mug is as perfect as she imagined it would be. She moves to one of the living room windows and takes in the Easter egg colors of dawn, purer here, somehow.

She puts on her coat against the early morning chill and goes out to the tree house, carefully climbs the dew-wet stairs, and sits in a deck chair at the bow of the boat. She can smell the pencil scent of the tree she sits in, along with the sharper smell of eucalyptus beads that lie scattered under a tree nearby. In the distance are gently rounded, high, green hills, and above them a plane moves slowly across the sky.

Despite the bit of chill in the early morning air, the sun feels warm against her face. For the first time in a long time, she is outside without gloves, and the pleasure in this is immense. Only two days ago she was walking to the mailbox with her head down in a fierce wind, her eyes watering from cold. Here, people come out of their houses in February wearing no coats and stretch their hamstrings before jogging past trees and flowers. Putting aside the issue of how Tessa might feel about her mother moving to the same area she's moving to, Helen closes her eyes and tries to think objectively what it would be like to live here. Would she be able to work again? If she got what she thought she could for her house in Oak Park, she wouldn't have to earn much money. She could take a part-time job in a bookstore and be all right. She sees herself in some small but well-stocked store, comfortable armchairs set out for browsing, a tabby cat moving from one customer to another, his back arching in pleasure with each person's affections. She would look different, she would look like she lived in California. She would wear a wide silver bracelet, many rings. Her gray hair would be permed in a hip sort of way, her clothes a kind of yoga cool. She sees herself assisting a customer with finding something good to read. How pleasant it would be to only be a reader again! She could work in the store a couple days a week and spend the rest of her time puttering—that was part of the fantasy she had described for Dan when they talked about retiring. It
is
possible to do it. It is.

She thinks about the unnecessary clutter she has in her house, how she would have to get rid of so much of it, and the notion aggravates and discourages her. Then she remembers a woman on her block who moved out and gave almost everything away. She'd told someone that she'd thought about trying to sell things, but it just seemed like—and in fact was—so much
work
. But to give things away—that was fun! There was a secondhand furniture store she'd always liked and she made a deal with the owner: take everything she didn't need for her new, vastly smaller house, but take it all—then it's free. She had a lot of pantry staples, and a woman three doors down said hell yes, she'd take her vanilla beans, her garlic chili sauce, her fusilli and cumin and adobo peppers in sauce. And the woman moving loaded up her son's red wagon with those things and took a walk down the block, her heart light. Every day, Helen thought, so many people tap the bull on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me. I'm just going to grab your horns.” Why doesn't she? Why
doesn't
she? As for Tessa being displeased about her mother following her, well, Tessa will be in the city, not living with her. And Helen is allowed to make a decision that is for and about herself, is she not?

She settles back against the chair, sips her coffee, and fills her mind with only the sight of the hills and the sky and the trees. There is a bird making its call over and over, and to Helen it sounds like
Here! Here! Here!
Now comes the whistle of a cardinal, and Helen leans forward and whistles back. She is alone, and not lonely. If you leave one home, you can find another. Here? Here? Here?

twenty-seven

S
ITTING AT HER AIRPORT GATE, FINISHING A TURKEY AND AVOCADO
sandwich she is eating out of boredom, Helen stares into space, seeing the little house she locked up this morning, then kissed the front door of, before she made her way to the end of the driveway to wait for Tom. It's cloudy today, rain is expected, and Helen is glad for it. It would be even more heartbreaking to leave on a beautiful day.

Tom had a meeting with new clients and could not take her all the way in to the airport, but he did take her to Manzanita, the stop where she could catch the Marin AirPorter. The big bus had a rainbow painted on the side, and Helen loved that. The seats were high and comfortable, the view from the oversize windows was fine, and the driver was a happy man who greeted each passenger as though he or she were a close friend. It felt less like public transportation to the airport than a safe carnival ride.

Before she boarded the bus, she kissed Tom good-bye, a chaste kiss, and their first; but she believes they both felt the promise and the intention in it. They hadn't had much time being together—Helen had wanted to be alone in the house, and Tom was busy with his work. But the time they had was deeply satisfying: they talked without awkward pauses, laughed easily, and discovered that they had a great deal in common. Birthdays in May. An aversion to science fiction. Dog mania, although Tom was between dogs, having recently lost his fourteen-year-old golden retriever. They both also love chickens. Dan could never understand her affinity for chickens, but Tom thought they were beautiful and funny.
“Funny
, yes, that's it!” Helen said. They were on the Tennessee Valley Road, walking toward the ocean when he said that. Turkey vultures circled overhead and the fields were full of wild-flowers. They brought a picnic of meat loaf sandwiches (still happily eating the diner's leftovers) down to the water's edge and for a long time simply watched the foamy waves race onto the sand, then get pulled slowly back out to sea. They talked about the art of Mary Cassatt, they talked about how their mothers still hung clothes on the line, even in winter; and they talked briefly about why Tom had never married. He told her about finally meeting the woman he fell madly in love with at age thirty-five, and how they had lived together for many years, eschewing marriage. Then, one Sunday afternoon when they lay together on the sofa reading the “Vows” column, they decided to take the big step themselves. On the Tuesday before the wedding planned for Saturday, September 15, 2001, she was in New York for a business meeting and went to have breakfast at Windows on the World at the Twin Towers before she took her flight home. It was still hard for him to talk about it. Since then, he'd not had any kind of relationship. He put his head down, shrugged; then, turning toward her, he said, “I
guess
there's still time,” and she noticed how his eyes matched the sky at that particular moment, how his voice was rich in timbre and kind in tone. Looking down at the sand in which she was idly drawing lines with a stick, she remarked on the quality of his voice and asked if he would read aloud to her sometime. “Of course!” he said, as though he'd been just about to suggest it himself.

Tom Ellis
, she thinks, and sighs, looking down at her boots.

Not long after Dan died, she and Midge were talking about the prospect of Helen dating again, and Helen was saying that apart from thinking she might never overcome this sorrow, she wasn't sure she was at all interested in dating. So much work. So much awkwardness. And the idea of sex! Helen and Dan had enjoyed an active sex life, but to be with a new man that way? Helen couldn't imagine it. Didn't want to imagine it. Now, though, she can imagine it. She begins with a very dark room. Preceded by a bottle of wine.

Twelve more minutes until boarding time. Helen leans back in her seat and closes her eyes, recalling last night when she was in the house, sitting before a fire she'd built herself, which was probably the reason it kept going out. She fed it with paper from the Sunday
Examiner
she'd bought at a coffee shop she'd walked to that morning. She'd sat there for a while, watching the people she guessed lived nearby ordering their drinks, trying to gauge her compatibility with them. No one spoke to her, but then she didn't initiate any conversation, either. She left feeling awkward and disappointed: age six or sixty, it was hard to be the new girl.

Last night, sitting on the sofa in the living room, she stared into the flames thinking about everything her marriage had been—and had not been. In the time since Dan died, she had recalled often enough the wonderful times they had together, the appeal of his easygoing nature. But last night she considered the other side: the colossal argument they'd had one Thanksgiving Day when he decided she was getting bitchy from trying to make too many dishes, and he dumped the pumpkin pie filling she'd just made down the garbage disposal, saying, “Stop it! You do this every year and it is not
worth
it!” She stood there for a moment, her eyes wide, and then she ran up to the bedroom and slammed the door. She sat on the bed, fuming, realizing that he must have been thinking this for years and yet never said a word. She thought about how she had scraped her knuckles badly while grating nutmeg for a pie filling that was now making its way to the sewer. Then, as long as she was at it, she thought about every other thing that was wrong between them. And at that time, there was plenty wrong. Television had begun to dominate their evenings. Dan was spending too much money gambling on sports games. They argued regularly about what to do when they went out. “I never saw the point in listening to live music, so stop asking me to do it!” Dan said one night, nearly shouted, after she'd suggested they go to a blues bar. “If I like a musician, I want to listen to their CDs, not live music, with everyone
talking
. And I don't like these girlie movies and plays you drag me to, either.”
“Les
Misérables
?”
she shouted back, about the play they'd most recently gone to.
“Les Misérables
is a
girlie
play?”

Things were so bad around that time that she had suggested counseling, and Dan had said—oh, she'll never forget this—Dan had said, “For all the good
counseling
would do, you might as well write our problems on a piece of paper, put on a costume, have a ceremony, and burn them.” So she did that. One morning after he left for work, she wrote out all the gripes she had with her husband, put on a change of clothes in lieu of a costume, said a Hail Mary in lieu of having a ceremony, and then burned the list in the kitchen sink. On that list, in addition to the other complaints, was the way he volunteered to clean the kitchen and then only half cleaned it: left the grease on the stove, the crumbs on the counter. The way he picked at his teeth in public. And especially the way he dressed so carefully for work at a time when, at an office picnic, one of Dan's women co-workers warned Helen that another woman co-worker was spending an awful lot of time in his office, the door closed. When Helen had confronted Dan with this, he'd said, “I am not doing anything, I swear to you. She flirts with me, okay? Is that so bad? Don't you like it when men flirt with you?” She had stood before him in her breast-milk-stained nightgown that morning, her hair uncombed, her glasses filthy with specks of who knew what, and quietly said, “Just who do you think flirts with me these days, Dan? Even you don't.” And he had checked his watch and said, “Look, Helen, I have to go to work.”

Sitting there in the house Dan had built for her, she fed the fire and continued thinking of things that were not so perfect in their marriage. Why? To clear the way for a new love in her life? She admitted to herself that such was probably the case, then wept loudly—wailed—for what she hoped was the last time over a man who was just a man, no more perfect than any other man, a man she had married for love, yes, but also because of timing and circumstance. Another man might have done as well or better in a marriage with her, who knew? Still, something stubborn stirred in Helen's stomach, resisting that most practical thought. Dan may have been just a man who happened along, but he was also her love. Her own. She let the fire go out, and went to bed.

When she boards the plane, Helen sits next to a woman who is the image of Helen's fantasy of herself as a California woman: she has loosely permed hair, wears an artful, asymmetrically cut suit, and many interesting rings. “Going home?” the woman asks, and Helen rankles against being so easily pegged as a midwesterner.

“Yes, but I might move here,” she says.

The woman nods. “Might want to consider that pretty carefully.”

“Oh?”

The woman laughs. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Well, actually I did, I guess, but it's certainly not my place to tell you where to live!”

“It's okay,” Helen says. “I appreciate your honesty. But … why did you say that?”

The woman looks past Helen's shoulder, out the window, where rain has begun to dot the glass. “I miss Chicago in a way I never knew I would. The city itself, which I happen to think is beautiful, and also has just about anything anyone could want; but mostly I miss the people. There's a kindness in the Midwest that you don't get out here. Oh, not that the people in California aren't nice, but …” She shrugs. “I don't know. I guess I wish I'd thought things through a little more, maybe lived out here on a trial basis before I sold my house.”

“Did you ever think of trying to buy your house back?” Helen says. “I've heard stories about that happening.” Her own house appears in her head, her airy bedroom, the window above her kitchen sink, the bird's nest built at the curve of the gutter.

“Yeah, I've heard about that, too. I tried it. I went right up to the door and asked if there was any way the new owners would sell it back to me. I asked them to name their price.”

“What did they say?”

“They said no, they didn't want to sell it. Not at any price. Then they invited me in for dinner.”

Helen laughs. “Did you eat with them?”

“Almost. But it would have made me too sad to see things so changed. And to know I couldn't have back what I wanted so badly.”

“What about another house?”

The woman smiles, shakes her head. “It was all a pipe dream, really. What I wanted back was a whole life I had purposefully lost. It's … Well. Never mind. It's more than you want to hear, believe me. But I do suggest that you think hard about moving. Once it's done, it's hard to undo.”

The pilot interrupts them, saying they're going to be delayed taking off. The woman rolls her eyes and takes a neck pillow from her oversize purse. Within a minute, she's snoring, a dainty ruffled sound that makes Helen smile as she stares out the window at the rain, coming down harder, now, so that the drops hit and then bounce back up.

When she arrives in Chicago, it will be cold and dark. The wind will whip around her and rush up under her coat as she waits for the cab. But she will be home. She thinks about all she would miss, if she were to leave. The way that spring feels like a miracle every year, how she spends the first warm days sitting out on the front porch steps, willfully paralyzed, watching robins hop heavily across the lawn. The conversations on the el, the miniatures in the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute, the bar at the top of the John Hancock, the changing colors of the lake, the high quality of the many small theaters. Midge, of course.

She looks over at the woman sleeping next to her, someone who regrets a rash decision. Then she imagines herself in the little house, bringing in the mail and sitting at the lovely new table to read it. Then she thinks about having her cab stop at Superdawg in Chicago on the way home, where she might get two Whoopskidawgs, she loves them and she loves the
fact
of them. She's pretty sure there are no Whoopskidawgs in Mill Valley.

Oh, it's impossible to make the decision! On the one hand, the house is a miracle offering that she simply can't refuse. On the other hand, it was meant for Dan and her, the two of them. And in addition to Chicago being home, it seems her life there is beginning to change in ways she is only now starting to understand. Shouldn't she see it through?

Tom. Well, he has said that his favorite city next to San Francisco is Chicago. Maybe he'll move there. She thinks of them walking down Oak Park Avenue together, hand in hand, and something inside her seems to revolt at the notion. She thinks of him sitting at the breakfast table with her in the little house in California, and that doesn't feel any more comfortable.

There is nothing to do but not decide right now. A solution will come of its own accord. She has to learn patience and trust. At some point.

She stares out the window, wondering if she is too old to learn certain things. Is it true that one can become so fixed in one's ways that it really is impossible to change? Or are there preordained stages in life—altered somewhat by each person's eccentricities, of course—but preordained stages through which people must pass, meaning that one is changing all the time whether one wants to or not? She remembers the day Tessa turned seven and at breakfast said to her and Dan, “This is the first old age, right?” She and Dan had found that so amusing, but now she wonders if there wasn't some preternatural wisdom in Tessa's remark, if there
isn't
some rule of definitive change that accompanies each interval of seven years, no matter who you are, or where you live.

When the plane finally begins to taxi down the runway, gathering speed, she turns away from the view. If she does sell the house, she will personally interview anyone who wants to buy it. It has to be the right person, it has to be such an exceptional person.

She's not selling it. She's going to live in it.

Somehow.

She'd better sell it.

Enough!
She closes her eyes and tries to disconnect from herself, to switch from this ping-pong turmoil in her brain to sleep.