“What? Do what?” she asks.
I pick up the book and the shears, hold them out to her. “Just do it, chop it to bits. Here.” I slip my fingers and thumb into the handle of the garden shears just like I did this morning, but this time I feel no fear, just that wild, pulsing, pissed off yes coursing through me as I take a cut of a book that I’ve underlined and annotated, a book that is creased and soiled with years of me, years of river water, and summer sun, and sand from the beach, and sweat from my palms, a book bent to the curves of my waking and sleeping body. I take another cut, slicing through chunks of paper at a time, through all the tiny words, cutting the passionate, hopeless story to pieces, slashing their lives, their impossible love, the whole mess and tragedy of it. I’m attacking it now, enjoying the swish of the blades, the metal scrape after each delicious cut. I cut into Heathcliff, poor, heartsick, embittered Heathcliff and stupid Cathy for her bad choices and unforgivable compromises. And while I’m at it, I take a swipe at Joe’s jealousy and anger and judgment, at his dickhead-him inability to forgive. I hack away at his ridiculous all-or-nothing-horn-player bullshit, and then I lay into my own duplicity and deceptiveness and confusion and hurt and bad judgment and overwhelming, never-ending grief. I cut and cut and cut at everything I can think of that is keeping Joe and me from having this great big beautiful love while we can.
Gram is wide-eyed, mouth agape. But then I see a faint smile find her lips. She says, “Here, let me have a go.” She takes the shears and starts cutting, tentatively at first, but then she gets carried away just as I had, and starts hacking at handfuls and handfuls of pages until words fly all around us like confetti.
Gram’s laughing. “Well, that was unexpected.” We are both out of breath, spent, and smiling giddily.
“I am related to you, aren’t I?” I say.
“Oh, Lennie, I have missed you.” She pulls me into her lap like I’m five years old. I think I’m forgiven.
“Sorry I hollered, sweet pea,” she says, hugging me into her warmth.
I squeeze her back. “Should I make us some tea?” I ask.
“You better, we have lots of catching up to do. But first things first, you destroyed my whole garden, I have to know if it worked.”
I hear again: I can’t be with someone who could do that to her sister, and my heart squeezes so tight in my chest, I can barely breathe. “Not a chance. It’s over.”
Gram says quietly, “I saw what happened that night.” I tense up even more, slide out of her lap and go over to fill the tea kettle. I suspected Gram saw Toby and me kiss, but the reality of her witnessing it sends shame shifting around within me. I can’t look at her. “Lennie?” Her voice isn’t incriminating. I relax a little. “Listen to me.”
I turn around slowly and face her.
She waves her hand around her head like she’s shooing a fly. “I won’t say it didn’t render me speechless for a minute or two.” She smiles. “But crazy things like that happen when people are this shocked and grief-stricken. I’m surprised we’re all still standing.”
I can’t believe how readily Gram is pushing this aside, absolving me. I want to fall to her feet in gratitude. She definitely did not confer with Joe on the matter, but it makes his words sting less, and it gives me the courage to ask, “Do you think she’d ever forgive me?”
“Oh, sweet pea, trust me on this one, she already has.” Gram wags her finger at me. “Now, Joe is another story. He’ll need some time…”
“Like thirty years,” I say.
“Woohoo – poor boy, that was an eyeful, Lennie Walker.” Gram looks at me mischievously. She has snapped back into her sassy self. “Yes, Len, when you and Joe Fontaine are forty-seven—” She laughs. “We’ll plan a beautiful, beautiful wedding—”
She stops mid-sentence because she must notice my face. I don’t want to kill her cheer, so I’m using every muscle in it to hide my heartbreak, but I’ve lost the battle.
“Lennie.” She comes over to me.
“He hates me,” I tell her.
“No,” she says warmly. “If ever there was a boy in love, sweet pea, it’s Joe Fontaine.”
Gram made me go to the doctor
to see if there was something wrong
with my heart.
After a bunch of tests, the doctor said:
Lennie, you lucked out.
I wanted to punch him in the face,
but instead I started to cry
in a drowning kind of way.
I couldn't believe
I had a lucky heart
when what I wanted
was the same kind of heart
as Bailey.
I didn't hear Gram come in,
or come up behind me,
just felt her arms slip around my shaking frame,
then the press of both her hands hard
against my chest, holding it all in,
holding me together.
Thank God, she whispered,
before the doctor or I could utter a word.
How could she have possibly known
that I'd gotten good news?
(Found on the back of an envelope on the trail to the forest bedroom)
When the tea is in the mugs, the window’s opened, and Gram and I have relaxed into the waning light, I say quietly, “I want to talk to you about something.”
“Anything, sweet pea.”
“I want to talk about Mom.”
She sighs, leans back in her chair. “I know.” She crosses her arms, holding both elbows, cradling herself. “I was up in the attic. You put the box back on a different shelf—”
“I didn’t read much … sorry.”
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I’ve wanted to talk to you about Paige these last few months, but…”
“I wouldn’t let you talk to me about anything.”
She nods slightly. Her face is about as serious as I’ve ever seen it. She says, “Bailey shouldn’t have died knowing so little about her mother.”
I drop my eyes. It’s true – I was wrong to think Bailey wouldn’t want to know everything that I do, whether it hurts or not. I rake my fingers around in the remains of Wuthering Heights, waiting for Gram to speak.
When she does, her voice is strained, tight. “I thought I was protecting you girls, but now I’m pretty sure I was just protecting myself.” I lift my gaze to meet hers. “It’s so hard for me to speak about her. I told myself the better you girls knew her, the more it would hurt.” She sweeps some of the book to herself. “I focused on the restlessness, so you girls would wouldn’t feel so abandoned, wouldn’t blame her, or worse, blame yourselves. I wanted you to admire her. That’s it.”
That’s it? Heat rushes up my body. Gram reaches her hand to mine. I slip it away from her.
I say, “You just made up a story so we wouldn’t feel abandoned…” I raise my eyes to hers, continue despite the pain in her face. “But we were abandoned, Gram, and we didn’t know why, don’t know anything about her except some crazy story.” I feel like scooping up a fistful of Wuthering Heights and hurling it at her. “Why not just tell us she’s crazy if she is? Why not tell the truth whatever it is? Wouldn’t that have been better?”
She grabs my wrist, harder than I think she intended. “But there’s not just one truth, Lennie, there never is. What I told you wasn’t some story I made up.” She’s trying to be calm, but I can tell she’s moments away from doubling in size. “Yes, it’s true that Paige wasn’t a stable girl. I mean, who in their proper tree leaves two little girls and doesn’t come back?” She lets go of my wrist now that she has my full attention. She looks wildly around the room as if the words she needs might be on the walls. After a moment, she says, “Your mother was an irresponsible tornado of a girl and I’m sure she’s an irresponsible tornado of a woman. But it’s also true that she’s not the first tornado to blast through this family, not the first one who’s disappeared like this either. Sylvie swung back into town in that beat-up yellow Cadilla
c after twenty years drifting around. Twenty years!” She bangs her fist on the table, hard, the piles of Wuthering Heights jump with the impact. “Yes, maybe some doctor could give it a name, a diagnosis, but what difference does it make what we call it, it still is what it is, we call it the restless gene, so what? It’s as true as anything else.”
She takes a sip of her tea, burns her tongue. “Ow,” she exclaims uncharacteristically, fanning her mouth.
“Big thinks you have it too,” I say. “The restless gene.” I’m rearranging words into new sentences on the table. I peek up at her, afraid by her silence that this admission might not have gone over very well.
Her brow’s furrowed. “He said that?” Gram’s joined me in mixing the words around on the table. I see she’s PUT under that benign sky next to so eternally secluded.
“He thinks you just bottle it up,” I say.
She’s stopped shuffling words. There’s something very un-Gram in her face, something darting and skittish. She won’t meet my eyes, and then I recognize what it is because I’ve become quite familiar with it myself recently – it’s shame.
“What, Gram?”
She’s pressing her lips together so tightly, they’ve gone white; it’s like she’s trying to seal them, to make sure no words come out.
“What?”
She gets up, walks over to the counter, cradles up against it, looks out the window at a passing kingdom of clouds. I watch her back and wait. “I’ve been hiding inside that story, Lennie, and I made you girls, and Big, for that matter, hide in it with me.”
“But you just said—”
“I know – it’s not that it isn’t true, but it’s also true that blaming things on destiny and genes is a helluva lot easier than blaming them on myself.”
“On yourself?”
She nods, doesn’t say anything else, just continues to stare out the window.
I feel a chill creep up my spine. “Gram?”
She’s turned away from me so I can’t see the expression on her face. I don’t know why, but I feel afraid of her, like she’s slipped into the skin of someone else. Even the way she’s holding her body is different, crumpled almost. When she finally speaks, her voice is too deep and calm. “I remember everything about that night…” she says, then pauses, and I think about running out of the room, away from this crumpled Gram who talks like she’s in a trance. “I remember how cold it was, unseasonably so, how the kitchen was full of lilacs – I’d filled all the vases earlier in the day because she was coming.” I can tell by Gram’s voice she’s smiling now and I relax a little. “She was wearing this long green dress, more like a giant scarf really, totally inappropriate, which was Paige – it’s like she had her own weather around her always.” I’ve never heard any of this about my mother, never heard about anything as real as a green dress, a kitchen full of flowers. But then Gram’s tone changes again. “She was so upset that night, pacing around the kitchen, no not pacing, billowing back and forth in that scarf. I remember thinking she’s like a trapped wind, a wild gale imprisoned in this kitchen with me, like if I opened a window she’d be gone.”
Gram turns toward me as if finally remembering I’m in the room. “Your mother was at the end of her rope and she never was someone with a lot of rope on hand. She’d come for the weekend so I could see you girls. At least that’s why I’d thought she’d come, until she began asking me what I’d do if she left. ‘Left?’ I said to her, ‘Where? For how long?’ which is when I found out she had a plane ticket to God knows where, she wouldn’t say, and planned on using it – a one-way ticket. She told me she couldn’t do it, that she didn’t have it right inside to be a mother. I told her that her insides were right enough, that she couldn’t leave, that you girls were her responsibility. I told her that she had to buck up like every other mother on this earth. I told her that you could all live here, that’d I’d help her, but she couldn’t just up and go like those others in this crazy family, I wouldn’t have it. ‘But if I did leave,’ she kept insisting, ‘what would you do?’ Over and over she asked it. I remember I kept trying to hold her by her arms, to get her to snap out of it, like I’d do when she was young and would get wound up, but she kept slipping out of my grasp like she was made of air.” Gram takes a deep breath. “At this point, I was very upset myself, and you know how I get when I blow. I started shouting. I do have my share of the tornado inside, that’s for sure, especially when I was younger, Big’s right.” She sighs. “I lost it, really lost it. ‘What do you think I’d do if you left?’ I hollered. ‘They’re my granddaughters, but Paige, if you leave you can never come back. Never. You’ll be dead to them, dead in their hearts, and dead to me. Dead. To all of us.’ My exact despicable words. Then I locked myself in my art room for the rest of the night. The next morning – she was gone.”
I’ve fallen back into my chair, boneless. Gram stands across the room in a prison of shadows. “I told your mother to never come back.”
She’ll be back, girls.
A prayer, never a promise.
Her voice is barely above a whisper. “I’m sorry.”
Her words have moved through me like fast-moving storm clouds, transforming the landscape. I look around at her framed green ladies, three of them in the kitchen alone, women caught somewhere between here and there – each one Paige, all of them Paige in a billowy green dress, I’m sure of it now. I think about the ways Gram made sure our mother never died in our hearts, made sure Paige Walker never bore any blame for leaving her children. I think about how, unbeknownst to us, Gram culled that blame for herself.
I remember the ugly thing I’d thought that night at the top of the stairs when I overheard her apologizing to The Half Mom. I’d blamed her too. For things even the almighty Gram can’t control.
“It’s not your fault,” I say, with a certainty in my voice I’ve never heard before. “It never was, Gram. She left. She didn’t come back – her choice, not yours, no matter what you said to her.”
Gram exhales like she’s been holding her breath for sixteen years.
“Oh Lennie,” she cries. “I think you just opened the window” – she touches her chest – “and let her out.”
I rise from my chair and walk over to her, realizing for the first time that she’s lost two daughters – I don’t know how she bears it. I realize something else too. I don’t share this double grief. I have a mother and I’m standing so close to her, I can see the years weighing down her skin, can smell her tea-scented breath. I wonder if Bailey’s search for Mom would have led her here too, right back to Gram. I hope so. I gently put my hand on her arm wondering how such a huge love for someone can fit in my tiny body. “Bailey and I are so lucky we got you,” I say. “We scored.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, and then the next thing I know I’m in her arms and she’s squeezing me so as to crush every bone. “I’m the one who lucked out,” she says into my hair. “And now I think we need to drink our tea. Enough of this.”
As I make my way back to the table, something becomes clear: life’s a freaking mess. In fact, I’m going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: for those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because Gram’s right, there’s not one truth ever, just a whole bunch of stories, all going on at once, in our heads, in our hearts, all getting in the way of each other. It’s all a beautiful calamitous mess. It’s like the day Mr James took us into the woods and cried triumphantly, “That’s it! That’s it!” to the dizzying cacophony of soloing instruments trying to make music together. That is it.
I look down at the piles of words that used to be my favorite book. I want to put the story back together again so Cathy and Heathcliff can make different choices, can stop getting in the way of themselves at every turn, can follow their raging, volcanic hearts right into each other’s arms. But I can’t. I go to the sink, pull out the trash can, and sweep Cathy and Heathcliff and the rest of their unhappy lot int
o it.
Later that evening, I’m playing Joe’s melody over and over on the porch, trying to think of books where love actually triumphs in the end. There’s Lizzie Bennet and Darcy, and Jane Eyre ends up with Mr Rochester, that’s good, but he had that wife locked up for a while, which freaks me out. There’s Florentino Aziza in Love in the Time of Cholera, but he had to wait over fifty years for Fermina, only for them to end up on a ship going nowhere. Ugh. I’d say there’s slim literary pickings on this front, which depresses me; how could true love so infrequently prevail in the classics? And more importantly, how can I make it prevail for Joe and me? If only I could convert him to messessentialism … If only I had wheels on my ass, I’d be a trolley cart. After all that he said today, I think that about covers my chances.
I’m playing his song for probably the fiftieth time when I realize Gram’s in the doorway listening to me. I thought she was locked away in the art room recovering from the emotional tumult of our afternoon. I stop mid-note, suddenly self-conscious. She opens the door, strides out with the mahogany box from the attic in her hands. “What a lovely melody. Bet I could play it myself at this point,” she says, rolling her eyes as she puts the box on the table and drops into the love seat. “Though it’s very nice to hear you playing again.”
I decide to tell her. “I’m going to try for first chair again this fall.”
“Oh, sweet pea,” she sings. Literally. “Music to my tin ears.”
I smile, but inside, my stomach is roiling. I’m planning on telling Rachel next practice. It’d be so much easier if I could just pour a bucket of water on her like the Wicked Witch of the West.
“Come sit down.” Gram taps the cushion next to her. I join her, resting my clarinet across my knees. She puts her hand on the box. “Everything in here is yours to read. Open all the envelopes. Read my notes, the letters. Just be prepared, it’s not all pretty, especially the earlier letters.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“All right.” She removes her hand from the box. “I’m going to take a walk to town, meet Big at The Saloon. I need a stiff drink.” She ruffles my hair, then leaves the box and me to ourselves.