11
The next morning they rose late and ordered room-service continental breakfasts that Leah signed for at the door then carried the wide silver tray into the bedroom and set it in the middle of Jodie’s bed. She then climbed in beside her niece and they spent the next half hour nibbling on the various pastries and fruit salad as they watched a local variety show that included a field trip to a tulip farm and tips on how and where to hang a summer hammock. Neither of them were quite sure if they were sisters sharing an upscale version of Saturday morning cereal while watching an adult version of Saturday morning cartoons (neither had ever watched cartoons, for divergent reasons—the animated chaos too silent for Leah, too loud for Jodie) or mother and daughter engaging in some “quality time.” Or aunt and niece on an idle frolic with a not so idle purpose.
At the end of the meal, Leah suggested they use the balance of the morning as “personal time.”
“Like apart?” Jodie asked, propped up on a wall of cushy pillows mounded against the headboard.
“Is that O.K.? I really need to check in with Whitfield and Jasper and a few others.”
“Mom?”
“I thought I’d give her a call, yes.”
“Tell her I said hi.”
“I’ll call her now. You can tell her yourself.”
“I thought I’d go running, work off some of these carbs.” To enforce the statement, she swung her legs over the edge of the bed then headed for the bathroom.
“Run off a few calories for me,” Leah said as she sipped the last of her cool coffee beneath the drone of a TV ad for age-defeating facial cream.
After Leah had dressed and completed her calls to Whitfield (“When will I again wake to you beside me?” “A few more days, please?”) and Jasper (leaving a message, again—was he always in class?) and Momma (safely back with Father at their home in a retirement community along the coast) and Brooke (“You’d love Dave in his little French maid outfit. “I guess that means you’re feeling better.” “Better every day, now that I’m home.”) and Billy Erwin, her Green Ways project coordinator deep in the fray of their busy spring season of plantings and upgrades (“Sorry to be away so long at a bad time, Billy.” “Take as much time as you need, Mrs. Monroe. I’ll hold down the fort.” “Leah.” “What?” “I’m Leah, Billy.” “I know.”) and made a to-do list for whenever she did get home, and Jodie had returned from her run on a trail along the river and taken a shower and dressed in her jeans and U of W sweatshirt, Leah called down to the concierge for a hotel courtesy car to take them to The Fan section of Richmond.
The car dropped them off in front of a neighborhood eatery called simply Joe’s at just past noon. Last night over a light dinner in the hotel’s café, they’d decided to make an outing to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which was not far away in The Fan. When they asked the concierge if there was a restaurant in the museum, she said yes but then suggested this “quaint little pub” just a few blocks away. They were seated at a tall booth in narrow and dim “old side” by a perky receptionist. A smattering of locals sat at the nearby bar eating French fries and sandwiches and drinking dark beer from frothy mugs.
Jodie looked toward the bar and said, “That looks yummy” under her breath.
Leah looked in that direction to see a tall dark-haired man in his forties with a ball cap and a sawdust-flecked denim shirt lifting a dripping monster burger to his lips. “The guy or his food?” she whispered.
Jodie laughed. “You guess.”
“I thought you were a vegetarian?”
“Only till I get a hankering for a juicy burger.”
Leah shrugged. “You surprise me every day.”
“Why didn’t you think it was the guy that I thought was yummy?”
“Do you?”
“He is kind of cute” then added with a wink, “For an old guy.”
Leah looked again at their subject, who’d polished off his burger with startling speed and was downing the last of his beer. He reminded her of Billy in his rugged masculinity. “I’ll take that as a no.”
Jodie said in a tauntingly loud voice, “Bring me the burger all the way, hold the guy” to both her aunt and the young waitress approaching their booth.
The waitress said, “Guys are only on the dinner menu,” which freed them all to laugh. Then they ordered lunch.
After lunch they walked the few blocks to the museum past beautifully restored and brightly painted row houses, passing parents pushing infants in strollers under the warm spring sun, including two sets of clearly homosexual couples—one male, one female—as well as young mothers pushing their carriages alone and maybe one nanny, based on the age and ethnicity and reticence of the attendant adult. On the museum grounds they wandered the outdoor sculpture garden for a short time to extend their enjoyment of the sun before finally surrendering and entering the cavernous and sparkling glass and limestone building. They meandered through the diverse collections at a leisurely pace, sometimes together, sometimes separated, rarely speaking and then only in whispers in the hushed halls. As yesterday at the capital, there were few others touring and the guards far outnumbered their visitors.
Near the end of the tour, Leah caught up with Jodie who was lingering in front of a painting by Jackson Pollock.
“What do you think?” Jodie asked.
“Abstract doesn’t do much for me.”
“That’s because you don’t let it in.”
“In where? To my nightmares?”
Jodie laughed. “Into your soul.” She proceeded to give a brief summary of Pollock’s action painting approach and the abstract expressionists’ view that their paintings are eternally imbued with the energy of its creation and its creator. “It’s meant as a living thing,” she concluded.
“I guess I still prefer seeing living things over feeling them, at least in my art.”
“That’s funny,” Jodie said. “I thought you named your son after the artist.”
Leah laughed. “No, from the verse ‘walls of Jasper’.”
“What verse?”
“In Revelation.”
Jodie was still perplexed.
“The last book of the Bible, Silly. The writer has a vision of Heaven with streets paved in gold and walls of jasper. Didn’t they teach you anything in Sunday school?”
“I quit going at age seven.”
“Brooke let you?”
“She had no choice. The teacher threw me out.”
“Why?”
“I kicked him in the shin.”
“Jodie!”
“He deserved it. He called me a little heathen.”
“Maybe you were.”
“I didn’t know what a heathen was, but I didn’t like the way he said it.”
“So you never went back to Sunday school?”
“Not to church either.”
“That couldn’t have sat well with Brooke.”
“What did she care? She had all her chubby little angels to keep her company.”
“Cherubim.”
“What’s that?”
“Chubby little angels.”
“Oh. What’s jasper?”
“A green gemstone much prized in the ancient world.”
“And always thought my cousin was named after a gay contemporary painter.”
“Another expressionist?”
“No, quite the opposite. Johns strives to hide his ego beneath optical tricks and cultural symbols.” She grabbed Leah’s coat sleeve and gently led her the few yards to the exhibit’s lone painting by Jasper Johns, a monochromatic display of dark cubes and angular lines. “Rather than trying to project his will and life force, he plants his painting like a seed inside you, to grow into whatever you and it deem appropriate. He said ‘to view a painting is one thing, to interpret it quite another’.”
Leah smiled at her niece, startled by her learning but even more impressed by her passion for her design vocation. Then she looked at the painting. “I prefer walls of jasper.”
Jodie
shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I’ll still think of my cousin as named after a gay neo-dadaist.”
“What’s that?”
“Don’t even get me started,” Jodie said over her shoulder as she headed for the museum’s atrium and the exit beyond.
Leah lingered in front of the dark painting for just an instant before following two strides behind.
Back at the hotel they stopped at the front desk before heading up to the room. That morning Leah had made dinner reservations at the hotel’s main restaurant titled simply The Veranda, a large and bright room off the main lobby decorated in an Edwardian theme. She stopped now to check if there was a dress code for dinner at the restaurant.
“Business attire or nicer requested for dinner,” the young woman said in a well-rehearsed monotone.
“Business attire,” Leah repeated.
“Or nicer,” the desk clerk said with emphasis.
Jodie glanced down over her clothing as if seeing it for the first time. “I guess jeans and a sweatshirt don’t quite measure up.”
The clerk frowned but said nothing.
Leah said, “We can switch reservations to The Grill”—another hotel restaurant on the lower level.
“They’ll take anything,” the woman said then raised her hand to her mouth. “I mean, there is no dress code.”
Jodie gazed at the clerk calmly, almost serenely, more amused than offended.
“Or, if you wish,” she added quickly, “You can visit our clothing boutique downstairs. They have some beautiful dresses and eveningwear. I know because I’ve looked.”
Leah looked to Jodie. “What do you think?”
“Sure,” Jodie said. “Let’s try to clean up the street urchin.”
The clerk blushed. “I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant.”
Jodie beamed a bright smile to the young woman’s eyes. Something about her reminded Jodie of her sister. “I’m just teasing. I could use a new dress to fill out my spring wardrobe.”
Leah nodded and said, “Thank you. We’ll check out the boutique.” A few seconds later as they crossed the ornate lobby toward the stairs leading to the shops, she whispered to her niece, “Do you have a spring wardrobe?”
“I’m wearing it.”
“And your last dress?”
“Not counting the wedding?”
Leah nodded.
“None.”
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the two enjoyed themselves as Leah draped dresses one after the other over the dressing cubicle’s saloon-style doors and Jodie tried them on in rapid succession, modelling each with bare feet in the dim space in front of the doors before ducking back inside to try the next. Jodie had a perfect size 4 model’s lean figure and the shop had an ample inventory of dresses in her size.
They settled on three favorites from the dozen or so she sampled. Jodie leaned toward the two in colors—salmon and turquoise—mainly because they had short sleeves that covered her shoulder tattoo. But Leah preferred a black sleeveless evening dress that beautifully set off Jodie’s fair skin and, yes, her tattoo.
“You don’t think they’ll stare?” Jodie asked, studying the person reflected in the full-length mirror mounted between two racks of blouses.
“At someone as beautiful as you? Of course they will.”
“I mean the tattoo.”
“So what if they do?”
Jodie continued to gaze into the mirror, as if looking at a stranger.
Leah added. “I packed a black shawl you can borrow, in case the evening’s cool.”
Jodie nodded. “That’ll be good.”
That evening in the lavish dining room tended by waiters in tuxedos and wearing white gloves, Jodie was stunning in her black dress with her dark hair pinned up on her head by Leah to show off her graceful long neck. She kept the shawl draped across her shoulders as she walked the length of the large room with an insouciant confidence and sat primly on the cushioned chair that the maître d’ slid gently under her. Though there weren’t many in the restaurant on this weeknight, Leah noted with pride that everyone there did look up and stare at the striking woman crossing the room. She couldn’t help but think of the younger Brooke, though that Brooke never wore an evening dress or sat in such a dining room. There was that same devil-may-care haughtiness and magnetism. Where had Jodie kept it hid all these years?
After communicating their choices for each of the five courses from the prix-fix menu to their waiter named Royster (“Not to be confused with rooster”), a gentle and dignified black man with snow-white hair, Leah looked across the table sparkling with its crystal and gleaming silver and asked, “So which are you?”
Jodie said, “I’m innocent” with a sly grin then added “Which ‘which’ are your referring to?”
“Of the modern paintings—the one that reaches out and grabs you or the one brooding behind the surface of the canvas?”
“Pollock or Johns?”
“Yes.”
Jodie donned a provocative air of mystery. “Which do you think?”
Leah thought to herself that at just that moment—with the shawl just starting to fall off her tattooed shoulder, with the striking contrast between the dark dress and her fair skin, and with her confident but enigmatic expression—her niece would make a marvelously complex subject for the right portrait painter: a highly skilled and realist artist, no room for abstraction here. Though she wasn’t exactly sure how to respond to this new and gently ironic Jodie, she responded as she always had to Jodie’s queries—with unvarnished honesty. “I always thought the one brooding behind her surface, but just now I’m not so sure.”
“Why the change?” Jodie asked, holding her cool aloofness a little longer.
Leah paused as the wine steward brought the bottle of champagne she’d requested and patiently went through his routine of showing her the unopened bottle, uncorking it with the always tense and viscerally exciting pop!, pouring her a small but very fizzy sample in the tall tulip-shaped flute, and nodding stone-faced to her smile of approval before pouring a glass for Jodie, the bubbles almost but not quite running over the rim, then topping off Leah’s partially full glass. Immediately after the steward set the bottle in its silver ice bath and draped the neck with a napkin then silently disappeared, Royster showed up with their first courses—paper-thin smoked salmon for Leah and chick-pea croquettes with a chipotle dipping sauce for Jodie.
After Royster departed, Leah raised her champagne glass. “To expressionism.”
Jodie laughed as she tapped her aunt’s glass over the candles at the center of their table. “I thought you didn’t like abstract art.”
“I’m coming around. I’ve got a good tutor.”
In the pause between their second course—pasta putanesca for Leah, pasta primavera for Jodie—and entrée—pine-nut encrusted grouper for Leah, grilled Portobello mushroom “steak” for Jodie—Jodie asked, “Do you remember when I showed up on your doorstep when I was twelve?”
Leah laughed. “And said nonchalantly ‘I just happened to be in town so I decided to stop by’ even though it was ten o’clock at night and you were soaked from walking in the rain and I had no idea you were coming?”
“Yeah, that time.”
“No, I don’t remember,” Leah teased.
“You never asked how I got there.”
“I figured you’d tell me what I needed to know.”
“I’d bought a ticket for LA but got scared a few hours into the trip. So when the bus stopped in Atlanta, I got off and walked to your house.”
“I assumed it was something like that.”
“You never scolded me or lectured me.”
“What good would that have done?”
“And Mom?”
“If she was missing you, I would’ve been the first one she called.”
“She never knew. She thought I was spending the weekend at Jennifer’s.”
“I dried you off and put you to bed.”
“We went to the zoo t
he next day, then the arcade.”
“I put you back on the bus on Sunday morning.”
“I cried all the way home. I wanted to stay with you and Uncle Whit.”
“I called Brooke that night and at the end of the conversation asked to speak to my favorite niece. She yelled for you to pick up the line and we talked for an hour but never once mentioned your unplanned visit—talked about school and boys and your new interest in drawing.”
“It was like we both pretended it hadn’t happened.”
“I was so sad after I hung up. I told Whitfield I wanted a child. Jasper was born about a year later.”
“Because of my visit?”
“I guess. We’d talked about having children before then, but I wasn’t certain till that weekend.”
“And me?”
“I was worried about you Jodie, at times even terrified. Jasper helped distract me from those fears once he came—had enough to worry about with him. And I made sure to keep in touch and remind you that you were always welcome in our house. But I’d learned from growing up with Brooke that you couldn’t force someone to change. You could only be there to help out when called upon.”
“Why didn’t Mom take that attitude?”
“She had her hands full.”
“Yeah, I know—the Boy Scout troop and mascot.”
“And don’t forget Dave,” Leah said with a laugh.
“But what about before then, when it might have made a difference.”
“I figured you hardly remembered those days. You were so young.”
“I remember being left with you and Grandma a lot. I remember wondering why Mom went out so much.”
Leah sighed. “That was a tough time for Brooke. She’d lost her dream and her pride. She was starting over.”
“Except for the one little loose end named Jodie.”
“I’m sorry if you felt neglected or confused. If it helps, I can say in all honesty you were the most loved child I’ve ever known.”
“Except by the one whose love I needed.”
“Jodie, cut your mom some slack. She did the best she could with a bad situation, and she rebuilt her life.”
“She caused the bad situation. And she abandoned Dad.”
Leah hadn’t thought about Onion for years. “Do you still see him?”
“Every summer.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Not good. Island sickness.”
“What’s that?”
“Alcoholism.”
“Is he alone?”
Jodie shook her head. Her face had lost its animation some minutes earlier, but now it went slack in sadness and regret. “He remarried, but she’s not a lot of help. His parents are still alive, but his dad is worse off than him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Does he know about Mom?”
“I don’t know. Brooke never mentions him.”
“I don’t think they’ve talked since I moved out of the house and she stopped coordinating my summer visits.”
“Would he want to know?”
“He’s still in love with her.”
“He says that?”
“No, but I can tell. You should see his face when he talks about the summer before I came along.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Not to him.”
“Are you going to tell him about Brooke’s cancer?”
“Nobody else will.”
“How?”
“I need to tell him in person. And I need to tell him before there’s another crisis and it’s too late.”
Leah nodded. “Can I help?”
Jodie thought for a minute. “How far out of your way is it to drop me at the ferry slip?”
“Not that far,” Leah said (actually, it was the better part of a day’s drive).
“I think I should go and see him.”
“I thought you had a full slate at work.”
Jodie grinned sheepishly. “That might have been a little fib.”
“No need to rush back?”
“I was working as a stage hand between design gigs. I told them I needed some time off and they hired a replacement the next day. I was looking for an excuse to go back to Seattle anyway.”
“I take that to mean you don’t have a return flight booked.”
Jodie laughed. “You’re so twentieth century, Leah. Nowadays you book your flight in the back seat of the cab—”
“Or Uber car,” Leah interjected.
Jodie nodded then continued. “—on the way to the airport.”
“And if the flights to your destination are all full?”
Jodie shrugged. “You’ll be surprised how comfortable three airport seats can be, if you get your legs turned just right.”
Leah shook her head, trying hard to keep the image of her niece sleeping alone in an empty airport terminal from lodging in her mind. “So you want to go see your father?”
“I think I need to,” Jodie said, suddenly looking older and more responsible than at any time in Leah’s presence.
“When?”
“Tomorrow?” she asked with a hint of apology. She knew Leah had booked their room through tomorrow night.
“O.K.” Leah said. “We’ll tell the front desk on our way back to the room and check the map for the best route between here and the ferry.”
“The phone will give us the directions,” Jodie said, her voice regaining its earlier lilt. “Do I need to teach you everything?”
Leah managed a grin and said, “Apparently” but was already beginning to miss her newfound niece.
Despite Jodie’s suggestion, Leah insisted on getting the road atlas she carried in the trunk of the car “to verify the Internet directions.”
Jodie rolled her eyes in her best recollection of adolescent petulance then burst into laughter to show Leah she was just teasing.
So after stopping by the front desk (attended by a new clerk—a handsome thirty-something man who eyed Jodie with keen but polite approval) to cancel their reservations for tomorrow night, they walked out to the parking garage to retrieve the atlas. On the way back Leah pointed toward a bench in the garden adjoining the entry circle, and the two sat for a few minutes in the still warm spring twilight.
Staring across the low rooftops to the rust-colored line that marked the earlier sunset fading now to mauve then navy then black where the evening star—surly a planet, almost certainly Venus—glowed bright, they felt in unison the wave of the recent past break over them—not just the delicious and elegantly served lavish meal or their full day or the full trip here, but the entire previous ten days’ mix of high emotion, dark fear, and subtle affirmations since Leah had stood her first overnight watch and Jodie had initiated that transcontinental text exchange. The still unfolding complexity of that experience—risks, both imposed and accepted, survived; rewards garnered and stored—combined with the all that rich food and the champagne left them in a sated daze. Leah knew she was happier than she’d been for years, maybe since Jasper’s birth. And she would’ve been content to sit there for minutes or hours in silent thanks, till the world did what it always did and pushed her forward.
But Jodie wasn’t nearly so reticent. “So did I pass?”
“Pass what?”
“My put-on-a-dress-and-act-ladylike-in-a-fancy-restaurant trial.”
“With flying colors! You were the most stunning person in the restaurant. Brooke would’ve been so proud.”
Jodie looked back toward the distant horizon, now almost completely black. “I doubt I could’ve done it for Mom.” She added after a few seconds, “Don’t ask me why.”
“But now?”
“Too soon to tell. Check back in a few days.”
“Hold on to the dress,” Leah said.
“And the shawl?” she asked. It again draped her shoulders in the cooling night.
“Keep the shawl. But in case you’re wondering, I think you’re prettier without it.”
“More Jodi
e.”
Leah’s silence was taken as affirmation by both.
Leah had planned a daytrip to Williamsburg and Jamestown, about an hour east of Richmond, for their last day in Virginia. On checking her trusted road atlas when they got back to the room, she discovered that the most direct route from Richmond to the ferry embarkation terminal for Shawnituck (as she recalled, a two-room modular building next to a tire-cushioned dock carved out of the otherwise unspoiled vast coastal marshes) took them directly past the museum and excavations at the Jamestown Settlement. She checked the distances and did a little math. “If we get an early start,” she told Jodie, “we can take a quick tour of Jamestown and still get you to the three o’clock ferry with time to spare.” She’d spontaneously unlocked the ferry schedule from some tiny compartment in her brain and was pleased to have her memory confirmed by the Ferry Schedule box to the side of her road map (who needs those stupid smartphones, anyway?).
Jodie said, “How early?”
“Nine?”
Jodie laughed. “No problem. I thought maybe you were talking about five or something.”
Leah shrieked. “I’d be more useless than you at that hour.”
“We’d both be lost.”
“Together.”
So they settled on an itinerary and rough schedule. Jodie confirmed her plans with a series of text messages to her step-mom Stephanie on Shawnituck. Leah rounded out her revised schedule with a decision to ask her parents if she could stop and spend the night. It was either that or a lonely motel somewhere along the coast, as the drive from the ferry to Brooke’s house would’ve had her arriving around midnight—maybe not too late for Brooke under normal conditions but too late in her current recuperation, and in any case too much night-time driving for Leah.
Without pausing to consider her choice, she pulled up her parents’ number from her phone’s directory and hit send. In the few seconds it took for the phone to make the connection and the line at the far end to pass through three familiar purrs, a wave of anxiety passed over her as she couldn’t decide if she were more frightened of a night with her faltering parents or a night alone in some anonymous motel. Her thumb moved to end the call. Her hand, her whole body, was shaking where she sat on the side of the bed. She dropped the phone in her lap. She looked around and was glad to confirm that Jodie was in the bathroom, couldn’t see her in this unprecedented condition. She took several deep breaths to try to calm her pounding heart and ease her shaking.
Suddenly her phone lit up, both vibrating and ringing in her lap like a live creature. She jumped at the triple assault to her senses. The words Mom-Home broadcast by the phone’s screen calmed her only slightly. She picked up the phone after several rings, as much to quell its chaos as speak to her mother. “Hi, Momma. I worried I was calling too late, so I hung up.”
“You know I don’t close an eye till the eleven o’clock news signs off, dear. It’s getting to the phone that’s a little slower these days.” Her mother’s voice was as clear and sharp as ever.
“Sorry to make you get up.”
“Don’t be silly, dear. I’d walk from here to Atlanta if it meant hearing your voice—might take me awhile, though.”
“Thanks, Momma. How’s Father?”
“Snoring in his chair with the TV blaring. Can’t say which is louder. Can you?” She held the phone out to the room.
Leah heard only an ambient murmur and static.
“See?” Momma said.
“Sounds normal to me.”
“He is, more or less,” her mother said, with the briefest of pauses before continuing. “Is something wrong with Brooke?”
“She sounded fine when I talked to her this morning.”
“Jodie?”
Leah laughed. “She’s great, Momma. We’re still here in Richmond. We’ve had a great visit.”
“Then why are you calling, dear?”
“I’m going to drop Jodie at the Shawnituck ferry tomorrow afternoon and was wondering if I could stop and see you and Father, spend one night before heading back to Atlanta via Brooke and Dave’s.”
“That would be wonderful, Leah. I felt we hardly talked at the hospital.”
“I know, Momma. Me too. I look forward to spending time under less hectic conditions. I should be there around dark tomorrow.”
“I’ll save you a plate. I’d say we’d wait, but I believe your father would perish if he didn’t get his supper at exactly six o’clock.”
“That’s alright, Momma. I can grab a bite on the road.”
“There will be a plate of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and butterbeans warm in the oven when you arrive. The cornbread I’ll heat up once you get here.”
“O.K.” Leah laughed. “Thank you.”
“Are you alright?” her mother asked.
“I’m fine, Momma. Couldn’t be better. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“That’s good.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Leah.”
Leah ended the call and released a long slow sigh. Her shaking had ended anyway but was replaced by a vague sadness. Neither the anxiety nor the melancholy were familiar emotions. What was going on with her?
Suddenly the bed quaked violently as Jodie jumped on the middle and gave her aunt an impassioned hug from behind. “Thank you so much, Leah. You’re the best third mom a girl could ever ask for.” She kissed Leah’s cheek.
Jodie’s face felt soft and smelled of moisturizing cream. Her hair, released from its pins, flared out around Leah’s head in the soft feathered curls that Leah had snuggled endlessly when Jodie was a toddler. Leah’s vulnerable emotions didn’t know if this hug marked a beginning or an end, but her heart didn’t care. She bowed her head to kiss her niece’s beautiful long fingers loosely twined at her chest.