The Language of Sycamores (3 page)

I left a message for James, trying to sound as if my spur-of-the-moment visit to the farm were a perfectly normal thing. “Hi, honey. Change of plans for the weekend. Kate called and said you were going to layover at the farm, so I decided to catch a flight there for a couple days.” As soon as James got the message, he would know something was up. It wasn’t like me to suddenly decide to go to the farm. I considered telling him about the Lansing layoffs via voice mail, but then I realized that wasn’t a good idea. He would show up at Kate’s and want to talk about it, and then everyone would know.

Everyone’s going to have to know, Karen.
Why did that bother me so much? Why didn’t I want anyone to know about the layoffs or the test results at Dr. Conner’s office?

Someone sat down in the seat beside me and I glanced away from the window.

Stuffing his backpack under the seat, he smiled. “Hey. How are you?” He was young, probably a college kid, wearing a Les Paul T-shirt, with his light brown hair pulled back in an unkempt ponytail.

“Fine, thanks,” I said, turning back to the window. I didn’t feel like talking, especially not to some college-aged rebel without a cause.

“So where ya headed?” He fished around in his backpack and came out with a Snickers bar.

“Kansas City.”

“Cool.” He sounded surprised. “Me too. You visiting someone there?”

“In Hindsville,” I replied flatly, still hoping he would get the hint and decide to talk to the guy in the aisle seat instead of me.

“Hey, I know Hindsville.” I realized I’d said the wrong thing. Now we had something in common—a reason to chat. “We did a performance there last summer—at the park with the bandstand. You know, the one right downtown on the square?”

It seemed odd to hear “downtown” and “Hindsville” in the same sentence. Curiosity nudged me out my sullen mood, and I found myself asking, “In Hindsville? A performance of what?” I couldn’t imagine what this shaggy-haired kid with the loop in one ear would be doing in a conservative Baptist bastion like Hindsville.

“Jumpkids,” he answered, as if it were self-explanatory. “Ever heard of it?”

I shook my head. He seemed disappointed, and for some reason, I felt bad. “No, but I don’t get to Missouri much.”

“Oh, we’ve got groups all over the country. Our foundation is actually headquartered in New York.” He sounded like he was trying to sell me something. “We set up summer mini camps for kids who don’t have much to look forward to when school’s out—teach them music, art, dance, theater. Give them something to keep them off the streets, something to feel good about, you know? We finish up by doing a musical theater performance. I teach theater and guitar, and last year, baseball, but the music is really my thing. I’m not sure what I’ll teach this year or which towns we’re going to. Some of the schools are out earlier than usual, so that changed the schedule.” He extended his hand to shake mine. “Keiler Bradford, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

“Karen Sommerfield,” I replied. “That’s great about the music program. Sounds like a really good thing.” I honestly meant it. There was a sense of enthusiasm, a sparkle in his eyes that was contagious—the diamondlike luster of a true believer with a noble cause. “So is this a full-time job for you, or do you just do this in the summers?”

“Just summers.” He paused for a minute, his lips pursed thoughtfully as he glanced out the window, watching the plane shove away from the gate. “This’ll be my last year, I guess. I’m a senior at NYU, so after this summer, I’m off to the real world. Unless I decide to go to seminary. I’m really not sure where I go from here. I may just take next
winter off—maybe get on at a ski resort, work the lifts by day, play music by night. That kind of thing.”

I smiled at the aimless uncertainty of youth. I couldn’t remember ever being as lost as Keiler. The very idea of spending years in seminary or summers traveling around spreading music and goodwill was completely foreign to my experience. In my family, everything had to have a purpose, everything had to be part of
the plan
.

“Hey, I’d stay in school,” I said, but I couldn’t believe I was giving him that advice. How many times had I told summer interns at Lansing the exact opposite? Get your degree, get out, get on-the-job experience, start climbing the ladder. “The real world stinks.”

Keiler looked shocked.
The nice lady in seat 21A is a cynic.

His expression made me chuckle, and I felt a need to apologize. “I’m sorry. It’s been a pretty rotten day so far.”

“Oh,” he said, seeming relieved. Apparently, I didn’t look like a cynic.

Our conversation paused while the flight attendant went through the safety procedures. By the time she was finished, the plane was in position on the runway. The attendant sat down, the pilot announced takeoff, and the plane rocketed down the runway and into the darkening evening.

I was on my way to Missouri, and all of a sudden, I panicked again. What in the world was I doing? What would I do when I got to the farm—make small talk for two days, act like nothing was wrong? I didn’t want to talk to anybody, much less my sister and a long-lost cousin I’d never even met.

Worse than that, I didn’t
want
to go back to the farm. Ever. I hadn’t admitted that to anyone. I’d just made excuses every time Kate invited me. When she called about having a family gathering or getting together for a holiday, I told her I was tied up with work or that I had a business trip. She’d say that she understood, but somewhere behind the words there was a wounded sound. Kate had a vision of all of us back together as a family—the kind of family that flew home for holidays and christenings, that sent cards and called for the weekly chitchat. She hated that I wasn’t falling in line with her plan. Or maybe she didn’t hate it as much as she was
disappointed
by it.

She took it personally, I knew. The truth was that it didn’t have a thing to do with her. It didn’t have a thing to do with the fact that, at some point in my teenage years, I’d affirmed a growing suspicion that Hindsville was the most boring place on Earth. Compared to the happening scene in Boston, where my parents’ involvement in our lives seldom went beyond report-card checks and recital attendance, Grandma Rose’s constant scrutiny was agonizing. Her desire to teach us to cook and sew and can vegetables seemed out of step and largely ridiculous, considering that we lived in a posh row house in Boston, where we could walk in Boston Garden, but there wasn’t a vegetable patch within ten miles.

My reluctance to return to the farm now had nothing to do with how I’d felt about it in the past. It had to do with me and Grandma Rose and the last time I saw her. The day she passed away.

I hadn’t told anyone about that.

That day, she lay silent on the bed in the farmhouse, all of us gathered around her. She opened her eyes just before she passed from this world to the next, and she looked at me, and I swear she said my name. I glanced around the room, and it was obvious that no one else heard it. Then I looked back at Grandma, and she said,
“There’s a whisper in the sycamores—can you hear it?”

I had no idea why she would say that in those last moments of her life—to me and only to me. No one else flinched or looked up or noticed. She’d used the phrase from time to time over the years, when she had a little secret and she wanted to tease us with it.
“I heard a whisper in the sycamores,”
she’d say.
“They told me someone is about to have a birthday
.
They told me it’ll come a snow tomorrow
.
They told me someone’s found a special boy. . . .”

Whenever Grandma heard a whisper in the sycamores, it meant something was going to change and she knew what it was. As I sat there watching her on her deathbed, I wondered what she’d heard this time, and I knew it was too late to find out.

Oh, God, right then, I wished I had listened before. I wished I’d sat in her kitchen and snapped peas or sliced okra or peeled potatoes all those years I was young and she was full of stories. I wished I’d come to
her bedside those last few months, sat with her as Kate did, and listened to her speak in barely a whisper. But I didn’t, and that last day, I lowered my face into my hands and wept, because it was too late.

One such realization should be enough to change your focus, but I was always way too much like Grandma Rose. Stubborn. Proud. Set in my ways. I cried like a baby the day we buried her; then I went back home to my normal life. In my mind, she was still at the farm, gathering onions and picking blackberries, baking pies, bread, and banana-nut cookies. She wasn’t gone, and she hadn’t delivered that silent message to me.

The truth was that I hadn’t returned these past two years because I was afraid. That moment at her deathbed had knocked me off my rock-solid foundation, and I didn’t like the way it felt. I didn’t want things to change. Change was not welcomed. In the business of wires and switches, bits and bytes, uncertainty is the enemy. You must know where every bit of information is coming from, where it’s going, and what it means. There can be no nebulous whispers.

Now, sitting on the airplane speeding toward the farm, I wondered if Grandma knew that changes were coming, whether I wanted them or not. Had she been trying to prepare me?

“So, you want to talk about it?” Keiler leaned his head against the headrest, his face sympathetic, soft, filled with the hopeful sense of someone who thought he could save the world and the cynical fortyish lady in seat 21A.

I sighed. “It’s a long story.”

“I know.” He smiled and glanced at his watch. “I’ve got . . . one hour and forty-seven minutes.” He held out the smashed candy bar. “Want a Snickers?”

I couldn’t help smiling. Something about his laid-back, raveled-jeans, ponytail-wearing presence was comforting. “You know what? I do.”

I took the candy bar, and he pulled another from his bag, and the two of us sat eating Snickers like old friends. I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. The knot in my stomach began to work its way out, and all of a sudden, I started talking. I sat there on an airplane headed to the last place I wanted to go, with a stranger who looked like the last person I’d
ever want to know, and I told him everything. I started with the doctor’s appointment, went through the management meeting, and ended with me wildly playing the piano for the first time in fifteen years.

As the plane was touching down in Kansas City, I finished by telling him about Kate’s call. “And you know, my mind was saying no, but the next thing I knew I was telling her I was coming. I don’t even know why I said it. I don’t know why I’m going. I think I’m having a breakdown.”

Keiler smiled. He wasn’t a good-looking kid, but there was a serenity, a kindness in him that made him beautiful. “I think we all want to head home when there’s trouble,” he said with calm assurance. “Sometimes you need that soft place to fall. That’s your family, your faith. The stuff that doesn’t change when everything else does.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” It seemed he had a wisdom I lacked. Strange, considering how young he was. “You know, you really ought to think about seminary school. You’re good at this.”

He squinted like he wasn’t quite sure I was serious. “I might. You know, right now I’m just waiting to see. I almost died two years ago during surgery, and I guess that changed how I feel about things. I’m not in such a big hurry to get from one place to another anymore. Once you learn that you can never really plan your destination, you stop worrying so much about being on the map. I figure I’m still here for a reason, and that reason could be anywhere, you know?”

A sense of peace filtered through me as the plane docked at the gate.
Stop worrying about the map,
I thought. “You know what? You’re right.”

We walked up the gateway together and stood for a moment at the end.

“So what kind of surgery was it?” I asked. The question seemed out of the blue and insensitive, so I added, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.”

Keiler only grinned. “Brain surgery.” He parted his hair, and I saw the large crescent-shaped scar. “I probably shouldn’t be giving people advice. I’ve only got half my marbles.”

I laughed, slipped a hand over his shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “I’d say it’s the right half. Thanks for listening to me.”

He shrugged off my gratitude, letting his hair fall back into place.
“Hey, no problem. If you end up in Missouri this summer, come see our Jumpkids.”

“I will,” I said, and strangely enough, I meant it.

As I said good-bye to Keiler, I had a feeling that a lot of things about this summer were going to be different.

Chapter 3

A
s I left the airport and slid into the neon-lit rush of a Kansas City Friday night, I tried not to think of anything but the road, the next mile in front of me. The clock on the rental car dash flashed midnight. Normally, I would have already fallen asleep on the sofa, and around now I’d be waking up and stumbling drowsily off to bed. If James were home, he would wake me up after he watched the late show.

But as I drove out of Kansas City, it didn’t feel like midnight. A nervous energy zipped through me, pure adrenaline, preventing my pulse from slowing to a normal rhythm. My mind churned through the events of the day in fast motion, replaying everything that had happened. Everything that was wrong. Without the music of the piano or the comforting closeness of my unusual flight companion, it was hard to block out the disturbing litany of reality.

How am I going to tell everyone? What will I say?

A sense of failure filled me, an odd feeling of shame, as if I had something to hide, some guilty secret I didn’t want anyone to know. It didn’t make sense, yet it was like a passenger in the car, hissing critical whispers, telling me it was my fault that I’d lost my job. Telling me that when the family heard what had happened, they’d know I was really a failure masquerading all these years as a success.

I could picture my father pointing out that I should have gone into
the medical profession, as he and my mother had wanted. He’d remind me that the medical industry is recession proof—
Good times or bad times,
he’d say,
people still get sick.

Kate would give me
the look
—the sad look that women who have children give to women who choose not to. The look that says,
Oh, you poor thing. All you have is your career, and now look where that has landed you. You’ll never be truly happy. You’ll always be incomplete.
Even if Kate never said it, even if she didn’t do a thing to intimate those words, I would perceive them, and it would be a wedge between us. She would wonder, like she always did, why we weren’t closer, why we didn’t do the sisterhood thing very well.

And since we didn’t do it very well, we would confine ourselves to small talk and job talk. Sometime during the visit, I would put in a plug about how happy James and I were, how Kate’s life was right for her and mine was right for me, and it was good that we had both found fulfillment. I would be sure to point out that, for James and me, not having a family was a choice. Obviously, even after the miscarriage and my partial hysterectomy, we could have sought out other ways of building a family, if we had wanted one. We certainly had the money to pursue adoption or surrogacy. The fact that we had never explored those options just proved that our lives were busy and full and complete just as they were.

Only right now, my life was falling apart.

I couldn’t admit that to my family. This visit was a mistake. The worst place for me to be right now, when things were definitely not wonderful, was at the farm trying to show everyone how wonderful my life was.

“Oh, God, what was I thinking?” I muttered, raking a hand through my hair, pulling dark shoulder-length strands away from my face. Breath caught in my throat, and my heart hammered painfully against my chest. I shouldn’t have come. Coming to Missouri was only going to make things harder.

I pulled into the parking lot of a motel and rolled down the window, trying to think. Tears crowded my eyes and I wiped them away impatiently, taking a deep breath. The air smelled of spring, heavily
laden with new grass and the sweet, pungent aroma of blackberry vines blooming nearby. I drank it in like wine, sensing my childhood, wrapping it around me like a blanket sewn from those long-ago summers at the farm—the early ones that I could barely remember. The summers when I looked at the world through the eyes of a little girl, before I reached adolescence and middle school and began to see that I didn’t quite measure up to my parents’ standards.

At some point around eleven years old, when my body started to change and my awareness began to broaden, I realized that I wasn’t particularly brilliant for the daughter of two high-profile doctors. I remember the day it happened: sixth-grade math, an honors class, another C on a test; only this time, Mrs. Klopfliesh didn’t tap the paper and say, “I expect better than this from you.” She only gave me a sympathetic look and moved on. I realized she no longer expected better. She knew I’d studied, done my homework, and this was what I was capable of.
Average.
Not nearly good enough.

It’s funny how a little incident can change your perceptions of everything afterward. My parents hired a tutor, I worked harder, the grade came up, but it didn’t alter my new reality—it only helped to hide it from everyone else.

The next summer when I came to the farm, all of Grandma Rose’s storytelling and advising and instructing suddenly seemed like criticism. I felt claustrophobic. I couldn’t relate to the place or her anymore. Somewhere inside me, there was a vague sense of loss. Childhood’s end, perhaps. The drifting away of a time when peace was as simple as the night air floating through the farmhouse windows, the insects lulling me to sleep with their ancient rhythm, while far off in the distance coyotes sang to the moon.

Music was all around me those early summers, before the epiphany of adolescence. Grandma Rose knew I heard the melody of the land and the air and the trees. Sometimes, when she was on the porch at night, I would sneak downstairs and sit with her. We’d rock back and forth on the swing, the cool breeze stroking our faces, and she’d whisper, “Just listen, Karen. Listen to that music.” My father didn’t like it when she talked about music and whispering sycamores.
To him, there was no music at the farm. There was only the memory of a childhood he was trying to rise above, the constant struggle with Grandma’s attempts at manipulation and the pressure of his obligation as her only son.

“I don’t hear any music,” I’d reply, out of loyalty to my father. Above all else, I wanted him to approve of me.

“Yes, you do,” Grandma insisted. “Just listen.”

I heard it then, just as I was hearing it now. The sounds of traffic faded away, and there was nothing but the scent of the night and the music of the Ozarks. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been still and just listened. If there was no other reason to go to the farm, there was that one. I needed to reconnect with myself, to drop off the map for a while, to find the little girl who disappeared that eleven-year-old year in Mrs. Klopfliesh’s class.

Slipping the car into drive, I left the hotel parking lot and pulled back onto the interstate. The night air rushed in the window, washing over me, filling my senses and quieting my mind as I left the neon-lit city. My thoughts settled like salt sifting to the bottom of a pan as I turned off the interstate onto the two-lane highway, passing the last of the city suburbs. The houses on both sides of the street were silent, lights mostly turned out for the night. Suddenly, I felt exhausted, but I didn’t want to stop. I knew if I did, I’d only start trying to think things through again.

Stop worrying about the map.
Keiler’s words.

Just see what the weekend brings,
I told myself.
It’s only a couple of days. If nothing else, the rest will do you good.

If nothing else. But I was hoping for something else. In some hidden part of myself, I could feel it.

By the time I drew near Hindsville, the rhythm of the road and the caress of the breeze had lulled me almost to sleep. I stopped next to Town Square Park and climbed out to stretch, then stood looking around the silent streets, reliving my normal teenage reactions. Too slow, too quiet, no shopping district, no favorite hangouts, no friends. Grandma Rose would fuss constantly about all the dirt we were tracking in and the water we splashed around the bathroom. She’d lay on the
guilt trip about how we didn’t call often enough, write enough, visit enough. Then she’d complain about how our being there would surely drive up the electric bill, raise her monthly grocery charge at Shorty’s Grocery, and put the septic system in danger of overload. She would let us know she was exhausted by all the baking and the cooking and the cleaning up. Yet when we left, she’d stand on the steps and cry.

There was some comfort in the idea that it was nothing new for me to feel lost and confused here. I could almost pretend it was just because I was at the farm, not because I’d lost my job and the doctor was telling me I might have cancer again. I could almost pretend Grandma would be at the house.

Climbing into the car, I drove the six miles out of town, slipping back in time, so that when I pulled into the driveway I had almost forgotten everything. I felt like a little girl again, coming there for a visit. Winding slowly up the gravel drive, I gazed at the old two-story farmhouse, shimmering white on the bluff beneath the low-hanging moon. The windows were dark, and I felt relieved. I’d been worried that even though it was two in the morning, Kate might be up with the baby, waiting for my arrival. I was glad she wasn’t. I wasn’t ready to talk yet.

Turning off the headlights, I stopped the car behind the garage, by the little cabin that had once been a hired hand’s place. In the months before she died, Grandma Rose had moved out there and given the main house to Kate and Ben. I stood looking at it, thinking of her last Christmas, when the family gathered at the farm. Gazing at the darkened windows, I could almost see her sleeping inside. I could feel her close to me—something familiar and solid, unchanging. Grabbing my suitcase, I walked around to the porch of the tiny house and went inside.

I didn’t turn on the lights or change clothes. I did nothing to destroy the illusion that she was there. I just walked across the room in the spill of moonlight, lay down on the sofa, and slipped into sleep.

In the morning, I heard someone moving around the kitchen.
Probably Grandma Rose cooking breakfast for all of us,
I thought. I stood up and walked to the kitchen, and she was there, standing at the old gas stove, scooping hot grease over fried eggs, sunny-side up. She glanced
at me and smiled. “Good morning, dear one,” she said. “Oh, you’re finally back! I had some things I wanted to talk to you about. I heard a whisper in the sycamores. . . .”

I stood staring at her, afraid to say anything. Part of me wanted to sit down at the long maple table and talk to her. But in the back of my mind, something was telling me this was wrong, this couldn’t be. . . .

My body jerked fitfully, and the vision disappeared like vapor. Opening my eyes, I looked around, and I wasn’t in the farmhouse kitchen. I was in the little house on the sofa. I wondered if that was just another layer of the dream—if I was really at home in Boston in my bed.

Closing my eyes, I tried to think, to establish what was true and what was fantasy. The realities of the previous day crept slowly into my mind and I lay there wanting to deny it all. I wanted the dream of Grandma in her kitchen to be real, and the realities of the day before to be a dream.

Gazing around the room, I surveyed objects in the dim light—an empty notepad on the desk, a hairbrush and a string of pearls on the entry table, a white straw purse on the chair by the door, a pair of slippers underneath. Grandma’s things, just the way they were when she was staying in the house. For whatever reason, Kate hadn’t cleaned out the place, even though it had been two years since Grandma’s death. The house smelled musty and unused, as if it had been closed up, left untouched since the days after the funeral.

The distant sound of singing drifted into my thoughts, faint at first, then louder, until finally I let the thoughts fall away and just listened. I couldn’t make out the words, but the melody was one of Grandma’s old church songs, the title beyond the reach of my memory. The voice was a girl’s, not Kate’s. It had an ethereal, dreamlike quality, as if it were something from the past, something that wasn’t really there.

Walking stiffly into the bedroom, I peered out the window into the dawn gray. The backyard was empty, framed by a wall of fog rising from the river below, the melody drifting from somewhere in the mist. Pushing open the heavy wooden window, I listened as the sound grew faint, then faded like the call of a bird flying away.

When it was gone, I closed the window and sat for a while on the edge of the bed, caught between the need to stay and the irrational urge to jump in the car and leave before anyone saw me. Finally, I opened my suitcase, pulled out a shirt and some slacks, and washed up in the tiny bathroom with its old pedestal sink and half-sized bathtub. I didn’t bother to fix my hair, just pulled it back in a hair clip and stood looking at myself as the dark strands around my face slipped free and fell forward.