One Heart (19 page)

“You all right?” they'd ask me, but it was with suspicion in their eyes, not concern. They had never figured I'd turn out completely normal, I suppose. There were times during that first year with Wendell that all I wanted was to be someone else.

I had never known until that day in the car why it was that the loss of Wendell was in some way harder for me than the loss of Ann, even though I held myself accountable for Ann's death, even though I had not forgiven myself. It's morbid to compare the two, but I always did, in some faraway region of my heart. Maybe because he was a son, I reasoned, or because I had known him longer. But those explanations never convinced me. The reason I think his loss was harder was because he was mine, my baby. I knew what a mother knows then, not a father. It had been Wendell and me alone for the first three years of his life. He was my teacher, the child who taught me how to father. Ann was Gladys's baby. I loved Ann more deeply that I could say, but Gladys and Ann, they were the real pair. Inseparable. Which was why I allowed myself to go to sleep at the pond that day. I knew Gladys never would, because I had seen Gladys stay completely focused on Ann for three years. Another man might have blamed Gladys for this reason, but I never did. That may have been because she so badly blamed herself.

Wendell was thirteen when Ann was born; he and I spent those long days together, just the two of us, throwing the baseball, or walking in the woods. He had my love of nature, my love of peace and quiet. In the car that day was the first time I remembered that about him, his love of quiet, how he would request, “turn it down, please,” when anything got too loud, how he had to leave the gymnasium at school during loud basketball games just to step outside and hear the quiet for a minute, as if he feared it would vanish, and noise would take over the world.

Pie got into the car with her cone that day, and offered me a lick. She seemed less familiar to me now, alongside the memories of Wendell. She was in first grade now. She appreciated our time together, but when I took her home, she was glad to see her father. She jumped into his arms. “Why can't you live here too?” she asked me many times. “There's room.” The adults laughed good-naturedly.

I left the explaining to Nicoletta. And I left Pie a long letter when I decided to leave New Orleans, a few months later, when I understood that she would, of course, be perfectly fine without me. I could too easily imagine her mother's voice saying
If you think she'll fall apart without you, you have a mighty inflated opinion of yourself
.

As I drove north I felt like I was driving myself out of a long dream, a long sleep. I was driving toward an idea of home, home to a camp in New York State where Gladys would be cooking a big meal or reading a book on the back stoop.

I loved a little girl almost like I loved Ann, and it tore me up again, Gladys.

And unlike Nicoletta, Gladys wouldn't say,
Just let it go
.

Would she?

But Gladys wasn't there when I pulled into town.

When she showed up, when we went to the pond, I should've told her then what I knew. I should've told her that I wasn't thinking as much about Ann as I was about Wendell. I was seeing how he'd looked that day, sixteen, dripping wet, his girlfriend by his side. I was seeing him running and diving into the water. I was hearing his voice, still in the process of changing. I was seeing his wet boy face coming out of the water, his eyes closed, then opening and asking me if I was going to come in and swim.

Maybe if I'd looked at Gladys and told her what I was really thinking that day, she would've returned the favor. How could there be any moment of truth between us when I had withheld so much? And how could anything good come about in the absence of truth? I knew, thinking of this at that window in Muriel's house, that I needed to see Gladys again.

I watched that Canada goose day after day, then watched the goslings hatch one gray morning. They were a handsome yellow color, and bright-eyed. I watched them for nearly an hour that morning. Ivy came in and watched with me.

She hadn't noticed the distance opening up between us; at times I thought she was capable of deliberately ignoring it, that she insisted on not leaving the island of contentedness she had created for us. I had already left—if I was ever there. I felt her standing beside me, but I was far away, and whenever I looked at her, a knowledge that I'd used her would overwhelm me, so that I found it hard to say anything.

She had been my refuge. She had allowed me to figure some things out. She had made for me a warm place where I could stop and think back. Now I wanted to go back and see Gladys, not because I was interested in any kind of life with her, but because I wanted, somehow, to tell her what had happened at the pond. I wanted to explain my withholding. I wanted to tell her how I'd come to feel about Wendell, and to ask her what those years had been like for him, those years after I left, those last years of his life.

I watched the goslings line up and get ready to jump off the roof, then walked outside and followed them as they followed their mother down the pine-lined road toward the lake. I followed as if I were just another hungry goose, and before I knew it, Ivy and Muriel had joined me.

The day was blue, the sky seemed closer to the earth than usual, the sun was so brilliantly present I felt when I walked I was kicking pieces of light.

We watched the goslings enter the water. “Wheeooo,” they said. “Whee-ooo.”

Ivy said she had never seen anything so sweet in all her life, and when I looked over at her face, her eyes were teary, and she wouldn't look my way. When Muriel walked down along the stony beach, Ivy said, still looking at the geese, “Don't think I don't notice we're not like we used to be, James. Don't think I'm blind, deaf, and dumb just because I know how to stay cheerful.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “If I hurt you, I'm sorry.”

“You hurt me,” she said. “But I expected it all along. Part of why I came here with you was to push us into the future so we could lose each other. Because I knew it had to happen. I think it's probably time you took me back home.”

She looked over at me finally, and smiled, and I wanted to change my mind about her, almost did change my mind, almost said, No, Ivy, I'll come back to you, I'll come back to that world we had for a while.

But I didn't have the ability to return, and I knew it. We stood and waited for Muriel, then the three of us headed back down the road.

By the time we packed up our car the goslings still couldn't fly. Both Ivy and I felt an urgency about leaving.

“I wasn't lonely before you got here,” Muriel said. “But you can best believe I will be when you leave.”

“I'll come back and visit you,” Ivy said.

“You'll both be back,” Muriel said. “You won't be able to stay away.” She smiled, and we got into the car. Ivy rolled down her window, and the two of them had their last conversation.

“You remember what I told you,” Muriel said to her.

“I will.”

“You remember that every day,” Muriel added.

I didn't ask what Muriel meant. I didn't have the right. I drove off, with Ivy waving out the window until Muriel was out of sight.

Ivy was quiet for hours. The land rushed by us, and a kind of bravery returned to me, a kind of optimism that I can't help but feel when I'm on the road in a car, as if all the motion, which has always seemed to me like an illustration of how time flies, all that knowledge of the shortness of our time on earth just weeds out everything complicated in a man, weeds a man's soul until what's left is something simple and good. Because time was short, I drove with hope for everyone I knew, even as I knew the source of that hope would disappear when I stopped the car, when the world and time slowed down, became what it was.

Ivy was asleep, and didn't wake up until I stopped for gas.

She looked at me, got out of the car, went inside to the rest stop, and returned with popcorn, which she sat between us on the front seat. We were careful to avoid each other's hands now.

When I asked Ivy why she was so quiet, she said she had nothing to say. That was the moment when I recognized the loss of her, a necessary loss but not an easy one for me, either.

It was late at night when we got to Gladys's, but a light was on. We sat in the car for a moment, and I wanted to say something to her as we looked at that light in the window.

“Ivy,” I said, “thank you.”

She didn't say anything at first. She waited a while, then got out of the car, then just as quickly got back into the car.

“That's a terrible thing to say,” she said.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean it that way.”

“Don't thank me for loving you, James. A person can't help who they love, and you should know that by now. A person is absolutely
helpless
when it comes to who they love.”

She got out of the car again, gently closed the door, and walked toward the house.

I
SAW THE END OF ME AND
J
AMES COMING AT ME ALL ALONG
, just coming right down the road like truth in a truck, rattling closer and closer until it stopped at my feet, and then everything under those cold blue skies got real quiet up there. Even though the early birds of spring were whooping it up in the tops of pine trees and waking me at four in the morning, it always seemed quiet. There must be a certain quiet that comes into a person's world right before someone they love is about to say good-bye.

I knew days before James said anything that our love was over, because I could feel how he wasn't really in his hands anymore when he touched me. It was like he somehow found a way to keep himself out of his hands, so that they were like the reluctant hands of a stranger, and yet even as I knew that, they were also the same hands I loved, with their hard, lined knuckles, their short, clean nails, their thick-skinned palms. I liked being touched anyway, even if his spirit was elsewhere, so even though I knew it was over, I couldn't bring myself to say a word. When he kissed me one cold night in his flannel-lined coat down by the lake I thought,
This is the last kiss, drink it in
, and every time he touched me that week, whether it was accidental in the kitchen when his arm brushed mine to reach for butter, or on purpose in the bedroom when he ran his hand through my hair I'd think,
This is the last touch
. I'd try to memorize the way it all felt, because I was afraid he'd be the final lover in my life, maybe because I wanted him to be.

Then he went and got all involved with a pregnant Canada goose that was out there on the roof at Muriel's. It came to me one day that I couldn't compete with that goose, and if a woman can't compete with a goose, well, I'd call that a problem too big to fix.

It was a sad ride back home, sad, dark, and quiet, and when he dropped me off I asked him not to come in, and he agreed to see Gladys some other time and I was grateful because it would've been more than a little awkward with me, James, and Gladys sitting in that kitchen. When I got out of his car I took my shoes off and stood on the grass and felt the cool earth on my bare toes while he backed away. I'd been wanting to take my shoes off the whole time I was in that car, but somehow it seemed like a personal thing to do, another thing I wouldn't do anymore with James, so I kept them on. My feet felt good that night in the cold dark grass, and since they were the only part of me that felt good, I tried my best to concentrate on them while he left.

When he beeped a small good-bye it was like the sound of the horn was a hot coal in my throat, but I looked up at the moon and said to myself, “You will be fine.” And I walked across the cool grass and smelled the spring and then out of nowhere, I found myself whistling the song “That's the Night That the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” a song I hadn't even thought of in over five years, and when I raked my mind I couldn't come up with one reason why such a tune came to me in that moment, but I kept on whistling. I didn't want to face Gladys, because I felt like a failure and I knew I was right where she'd expected me to land. Another part of me wanted to face her and get everything out in the open.

I walked into the house, feeling the oddness of being there but still whistling and the kitchen was empty and orderly, with the clock ticking and the old foreign dolls that Louis had sent me lined up on the shelf. I went and picked each of the dolls up, one at a time, then put them back. “Hello, Gladys?” I said to the empty living room. I flicked on the light. The couch and chairs were exactly where they always had been, but for a second they looked littler to me, and the one blue chair that I always thought of as Gladys's chair looked worn out and faded like a five-dollar item in a garage sale, and I wondered why I never noticed before. Beside the chair was a biography of Harry Truman and on top of that book a white rock. The rest of the room looked pretty much as usual only on the table near the window was this little statue of a boy with a bluebird on his shoulder, something I knew had to be a gift because Gladys weren't a knick-knacker and never would be. I'm by nature a knickknacker, but Gladys never did permit me displaying my items. Years back we went through a time where I'd try every so often to set out some cute little china statues of dogs I collected, and she'd try to live with them for a few days, then she'd end up saying, “Ivy, about those dogs?” and that was my signal, I knew they were driving her crazy, so I'd box them up and try again a few months later, but she never changed.

I went and picked up the statue of the bluebird boy and looked out the window, like maybe Gladys would be marching toward the house out there in the dark, but all I saw was the moonlit air, and the black trees in the distance on the far hill, and then my heart started pounding because I hadn't checked the bedroom yet and somehow I started thinking Gladys might be sick. I hadn't even talked to her for months. I actually even thought she might be dead to tell you the truth, and I can't explain why I got that feeling, but it made my hands and face go cold and my heart pound and as I walked to the bedroom door I didn't breathe. First I knocked. Then I opened the door and the first thing I see in that dark was the wind puffing out the white curtains, new white curtains I noticed, I could tell they were whiter and nicer than the old ones even in the dark. The rest of the room was completely the same as far as I could tell, and when I flicked on the light and saw how much things hadn't changed I felt both relieved and disappointed. And I looked at my old twin bed and something twisted in my heart. Because I'd be going back to being a person in a twin bed, after so many nights in a double. And then I looked at Gladys's bed and imagined her sleeping here all these nights alone, and I wondered about what state she'd be in.