The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (26 page)

Sarah and I did not become lovers right away. It was not anything that I ever expected to have happen. But when it did, on a summer night after a wild day in court, it seemed as natural as breathing. Sarah had called me as a witness in an abuse case, and she did a marvelous job of making the suspect look as guilty as if he had committed the crime right there in the courtroom.

We had become nearly inseparable, Sarah and I. Working on cases, eating out, sharing books, calling each other twelve times a day, solving the social ills of the world one sad person at a time. It had never entered my mind that I was already in love with Sarah. My sons were busy preparing for adulthood, and I was overly involved in my own professional world.

The evening following Sarah's wonderful performance in court, we celebrated our one small victory over a quick dinner and a not-so-quick few bottles of wine. I was lying on the couch, playing with her hair as she sat on the floor and looked through a stack of legal files. Sarah never stopped working. The stereo was on, it was my favorite time of day—when light faded as the entire world dipped into the arms of the night and shadows began to form outside the window. Just then, Sarah placed her hands on the side of the couch, lifted herself off the floor and bent over to kiss me.

She offered a long kiss, and I remember thinking that if I could, I would swallow her right inside of myself. No one had ever tried to kiss me like that, I had never let anyone kiss me like that. Her hair swept against the side of my arm, and I raised my hands to her face. I followed the pull of her arm, and by full nightfall we ended up in a tangled mass of legs and clothes and skin and fingers dancing lightly everywhere between the sheets on my old wooden bed.

If I could have chosen a moment to die, it would have been right there with Sarah. Sarah with her legs wrapped around my hips, her mouth moving from one breast to the next, her fingers sliding everywhere at once, and everything about her soft and warm. The countless times when I had let others touch me and hold me and rock me into orgasm had never moved me like this. For the first time in my life, I cried while I made love.

I kept on crying, tears of unspeakable joy because Sarah and I were barely clothed or apart for more than a few hours following that evening, later that night, the following morning on the bed, on the floor, in the shower. We spent three entire days together, never left my apartment, called out for food and talked and touched in a marathon that I wanted to last the rest of my life.

It didn't take me long to realize that Sarah was the first person I had really loved, and the intense longing and lust that captivated every single fiber of my being made me weep for joy and in realization of all that I had missed with all the others that had come before her. Sarah, I was wise enough to realize, could have been either a man or woman, but Sarah, the woman, came into my life just then, and she loved me in a way I know for certain that no one had ever loved me before. I was suddenly alive and sure and so incredibly happy I could barely breathe. I also came to know that a woman's love for another woman is what made our relationship move me, center me, bring me home. I had always been attracted to women but I had ignored what could have been permanent feelings because, in spite of my Bohemian mother, I was so programmed to the social standards of society that I refused to listen to my own heart.

Sarah moved in with me right away, sold her own condo, packed up every single thing she had bothered to accumulate in between her legal cases and personal causes, and from the beginning our relationship was no secret. My mother knew, the boys knew, Peter knew, pretty much the entire world knew, and they all seemed just as happy about us as we did. To say that my life was suddenly perfect then would be as true as anything. I was floating, and for the first time since I was a little girl, there were no questions in my heart.

During those years with Sarah, I had a friend who—before she finally found the right medication—lived her life in total fear that any second something brutal and tragic was going to happen to her. She would get into the car with me and say, “Sandy, we could be hit by the next car that drives through here,” or “What if this is the last time we'll ever see each other?” Even with Sarah in my life, I continued to be a “live for the moment” kind of woman, and I thought how sad for my friend that she couldn't enjoy a simple moment without worrying. If only I could have known how true this friend's fears were.

Although my life was far from horrible and most of my mistakes and sorrows were caused by no one but myself, I never dreamed after I met Sarah that I would ever be unhappy again. I never dreamed that after eleven magical years with her, my entire life would come to a dead end and that I would have to start all over again.

Sarah and I were on our way to a gourmet tea store to get our monthy stash of our favorite drinks—what we called “our medicine.” We were lucky enough to have sustained that lustful, physical, “gotta-have-you” part of our relationship, and we were holding hands that day in May. I really don't remember most of what happened next and for that I will always be grateful, but what they told me later, just after Sarah's fingers slipped through mine and they pulled her out of the car already dead, was that a drunk driver barreled into us at 50 mph, smashing directly into Sarah's door and killing her instantly.

In the accident, I suffered broken windshield glass embedded in my face, up and down my arms, and one large hunk that totally changed my hairline. My left leg was broken, one rib punched a hole in my lung, and the only thing that saved my left hand was the fact that it had been holding Sarah's hand when we were hit.

It took me days to wake up from that mess, to my mother, slipping softly from her chair and with tears streaming down her face, putting her beautiful long hands on my lips and telling me that Sarah had been killed. “Oh baby,” she said as her own tears dripped onto my face and ran down my neck. “I'm so sorry, so sorry.”

Sorrow consumed me in much the same way that Sarah's love had. Her memorial service was held in my hospital room, and I kept her ashes in an urn that sat on the air conditioner by my bed. I wanted to die, I willed myself to die, I cursed everyone and everything that tried to keep my spirit in the land of the living. I refused to believe for weeks and weeks that Sarah was not going to come through the hospital door and slip under the sheets with me and place her lips against that one private spot at the corner of my eye.

My recovery was slow and incredibly painful. My mother took me home and let me wallow in my misery for one and then two months. When I could walk again, after the last of my plastic surgeries, when it was time to either move forward or simply stop living, my mother took me on a long drive into the country. She stopped at a spot where we could look out over the Fox River and miles of rolling hills in Frank Lloyd Wright country. She placed her hand on my arm, and then slowly took a long silver chain from around her neck. She had worn this chain ever since I can remember.

“Betsy gave me this.”

“You've always worn this chain, Mom, but I had no idea it was from Betsy.”

“Put it on.”

“It's yours.”

“I don't need it anymore, sweetheart. You wear it.”

“Mom?”

“Sarah won't come back, you know that, but she gave you so much, she's still here. You'll always love her, you'll always have her love inside of you, and you have to realize that you'll never get over this. The rest of your life, every moment that you breathe, you will remember her.”

The chain in my hand was warm from my mother's neck, and I moved it from one hand to the next, not daring to put it on. I knew I had to decide right then what I was going to do. I held the chain up to the light and saw little places where all the years of wearing had caused the metal to become as thin as fine thread.

“How do you ever feel good again, Mom? It feels all the time like a knife is moving up and down inside my stomach and cutting right through my heart. I was just so happy for the first time in my life.”

“Remembering helps. You think of something wonderful that Sarah did, the way she touched you, the way you felt as if you could tell her anything and it would be okay. It's true too, what they say about time. It helps. The ache will never leave, and I know it's hard to imagine now but you will love again. You will do that because she taught you how to love.”

“Whatever happened to Betsy? Did you ever see her again?”

My mother looked out the car window then, away from me for the first time in weeks. She pushed her fingers through her hair and then let her hands drop slowly into her lap, forming a perfect circle, the fingertips touching.

“No, I never saw her again.”

I took the chain then and set it on the top of her fingers. It slid down into the palm of her hand where it came to rest, where her fingers closed over it just as she closed her eyes.

“Oh Christ, Mother, all those years when I was trying to find something, someone and then it finally happens and then it's gone. You keep this chain. You've already given me way more than I deserve. I know Sarah is still here, and I have you, and it's time I kick myself in the ass and get on with living.”

Mother looked into my eyes, and a veil of sadness moved across her face. It was a visible pain that made her entire body shudder.

“It won't happen like that. It will hurt you for a long, long time. I can't tell you how many times a day I think of your father, how little things like the way you tip your head make me see him all over again. There's Betsy too, such a long time ago for me, but she's in my heart, always in my heart.”

I was only kidding myself that day with the idea that I could simply say my life was going to move forward, and I could live and be happy again without Sarah. I eventually moved back into my house in Madison, though every single thing that I saw and touched brought my love for her right back to life again. As much as I already admired my mother, my feelings for her took on a whole new level of respect. She had truly loved my father and Betsy both, lost them both, and somehow managed to find love again. By God, she was a heroine to me.

Eventually my body healed, leaving me with a few kinky scars and some aches and pains that kick in every time the wind shifts. The progress of my heart has been an entirely different matter. While I gradually inched my way back to the gnarly wild person I have always been, it has been close to impossible for me to open myself up from the inside out again.

Two years after Sarah's death, I had a quick and quiet affair with a man from my office. The thought of another woman, loving me and touching me like Sarah, had seemed unimaginable, but after my passionate love for Sarah, it was obvious that a man would never be able to satisfy me again. It was the last time a man ever touched me.

Those who keep track of me will want to know about my third marriage, which often pops up when people look at me and try to imagine all this kinky sex I supposedly had. Three years after Sarah's death, I married my dear friend Robert, an old man really, whom I had befriended twenty years earlier when he was one of my clients at Walworth County Social Services. Robert was a sweet man who never married before our nuptials, when he was seventy-one years old. When we met, Robert wanted to make certain that his few material assets went to someone who had cared about him, and I was the only person he could think of who had been a significant part of his life. He also didn't want to die as a single man because he said his mother would be pissed off when he saw her again in what he called heaven.

Robert had come into my life following a fall that took out his left hip. While I transitioned him from the hospital to a nursing home, we talked about his life as an English teacher, his lost dreams of writing the great American novel, and how sad he was that he never had any children. He had a brilliant mind, a kind heart, and he wanted to leave his money to help me put the boys through college. I could not say no when he asked me to marry him. It was his last wish.

One of Sarah's associates married us about a week before Bob died of cancer—fifty-five years of smoking will do that. I held his hand while he took his last breath, which included a smile and a thank-you that made his last moments gracious and sweet, and that managed to open up a small fresh spot in my wounded heart.

I moved to Granton three years ago when a position opened up in Wilkins County, mostly because there would be less of a chance I would run into ghosts of my past life in Madison. I really didn't know anyone in my area, but I gradually let my heart come to rest in the hands of all these women, my friends, who have managed to talk me through every bad day I have had since I started this new phase of my life. My mother is having the time of her life with her new mate, Margaret. She is convinced that soon, very soon, I will meet someone, another woman who will fill me and touch me and make me happy again.

It's been close to impossible for me to totally move forward since the accident. I know before that can happen, I need to release my own heart, I need to fling my remaining seeds of sorrow into a higher wind.

My mother is right. There will be a woman in my life again, but first there are the rest of these miles to walk and the rest of my seeds to scatter. This walking now is for Sarah, for what she taught me. And it is for my mother, who held my hand throughout this incredible journey. And it is for me, finally, at last, forever and ever to have the courage to follow my heart.

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