A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [36]
I saw the life that might have been Lizzy’s moving along the dark horizon. She was round and rosy, and her mother always did her best to dress her up. She might well have been in the pack of girls who in kindergarten start out with clapping games and jump-rope stunts and end up years later as cheerleaders and student-council members. She might have been just as we all dreamed to be. I could see her at sixteen in the tall grass behind the baseball diamond, willing the boy to kiss her, it being worth the jigger bites.
Maybe Dan and Theresa knew what they had learned from Lizzy, but I couldn’t think what lesson there was that might even begin to compensate for her loss. I stood watching the bedroom lights going out, one by one, until there was nothing but the halos from the yard lights, meant to frame the burglars as they tiptoed away with the VCRs. Surely there was a formula: If I do —, Lizzy will come back. The act of contrition was just beyond my grasp. If I stared at the pond, at the haze of insects fluttering over the surface, it might come to me. I will close my eyes, I thought, and wish hard. I will hear a noise, like a fish jumping, and when I look I’ll see Lizzy, coming to the surface, shaking off her pink scales, finding her new arms to do the breaststroke to shore.
Four days after the funeral Nellie announced over the lasagne she had made, Howie’s favorite, that tomorrow she would have to go. “I’m not sure I should leave you,” she said as she walked around the table, putting a hunk of garlic bread on each of our plates.
“We’ll be fine, Mom,” Howard said.
“I could call tonight and tell them—”
“We’ll miss you, but we’ll get along. They’re counting on you.”
At the end of the meal Emma was inching her hand toward Claire’s place mat, and Claire, uncharacteristically, let out a gorgeous and savage scream.
“Girls!” Nellie breathed.
Howard reached for his J.I. Case cap on the counter and said in his usual terse way, “You two. We’re going for a ride.”
When the car started, the muffler sounding its call, Nellie cleared her throat and adjusted herself in her chair. She and Howard had planned this time for our little talk. I knew it, could see the pleasure of conspiracy in her big sincere face. “Alice, dear,” she said, wiping her mouth with a napkin, “I can’t help worrying about you. You’re going to hurt yourself, sweetheart. You’ve just got to be more positive. You’ve got to stop thinking such black thoughts.” I knew what she was going to say next. The words were going to barge out of her mouth: In a time like this, Alice dear, a woman still needs a mother, and if there’s anything you want to talk—
“I had my Aunt Kate,” I said, before she could speak. “She wasn’t mother but I adored her.” I pulled on my sandals, huaraches they were called, with soles made in Mexico from old tires. They looked like something a dog had gnawed and buried and dug up and gnawed again. “She bought me these sandals at a folk fair and they’re still good after fifteen years.”
It wasn’t nice to say to poor Nellie. She loved everyone to look their best, to be brushed and clean and polished and polite. I was curse to her, I knew, disheveled, beaten down, nothing that a good attitude couldn’t improve if only I would try.
“I’m going out,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders, wishing one gesture could make amends.
At the water’s edge the mosquitoes bit my forehead and flew up my nose. I closed my eyes and listened for the slightest ripple, for the break of water. We would someday swim in the pond again, but it was hard to imagine how we’d have the nerve to break the taboo for the first time—it was horrifying to think of putting our mouths to that particular water, letting it touch us. Theresa, I thought, probably wouldn’t ever be able to walk down the lane or maybe she wouldn’t want to come to the farm at all. When the gnats became intolerable I made my way around the pond and into the woods. It was an old growth forest, the burr oaks,