A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [38]
“I know, I know,” she said, “just a few now and then, when I’m alone. It’s a habit from my bad girl days at St. Ben’s, sneaking a pull in the john. It’s helpful right now, like an old friend.” She put the cigarette to the corner of her sagging bottom lip, struck a match against a cardboard match paper, and managed, when the flame was almost to her thumb, to get it started. She leaned against the tree in the next row. I didn’t know what else to do but edge my raw back to a resting position against the McIntosh. It was an odd thing, to be stuck with someone, as if we were in the confines of a stalled elevator, when we had four hundred acres, plenty of cover, any number of good hiding places.
“It’s hard for me to see you right now,” she said quietly. “It hurts so much. I sometimes come down to sit near the pond, but I mean not to disturb you. I called the other day and when the phone was ringing I realized that I couldn’t talk to you at all. It’s something I’m struggling with, along with everything else, this business of how to take up life, how to start out again. I’m praying half the day.”
I wanted to apologize, not only for Lizzy’s death, but for the disturbance at the funeral, and for scaring her just then, making her think there were ghosts in the orchard. “I’m sorry—”
She was exhaling and waving her hand back and forth. “There’s nothing to say—that’s one of the terrible things for both of us. I know you’re sorry, and like the good girl I was raised to be I’m even sorry you’re sorry. I haven’t been able to think too much about you, Alice, but I know I will, that the time will come when I’ll probably feel your pain too. Father Albert talked with me about you; he made me take note. I do know your pain is there, that it must be fierce. I hurt so much I can’t even think.”
“I know,” I whispered. I started to sidestep away because there was clearly nothing to be done. I had thought that I’d been as good as dismissed, that our unexpected meeting was over, that there would be no more visits for a long time. But I was held there, not only by her very real presence but also by the idea of her. I thought that we had sometimes seen ourselves in the other, that we were more alike than we acknowledged, that we started from much the same lump and might have turned into something quite like the other if we’d been switched at birth. I had been brought up to be off-balance and was; and she had been raised to hold all things in perfect equilibrium, something that was so unusual it too was beyond the norm. I yearned to keep myself straight and in order, but of course never could, and she longed, without any success whatsoever, to let herself go, to let everything occasionally fall to pieces. We were leagues apart on the outside and I think we were amused by the differences, the variation that had been wrought perhaps most of all by circumstance. We had understood one another, felt a sympathy, an affection, as well as been critical of the other’s idiosyncrasies. We were friends in a deep way, in a way that involved obligation and trust, a solid faith in the other’s love. I had never had a friend like her and I felt her life moving alongside of mine in much the same way I felt my husband’s days and passages to be a complement to my own. Only with the prospect of her letting me go had I begun to realize how important she was.
She took another pull and choked. “Damn,” she said, between her hacks. “I’ve forgotten how.”
“You’ll remember,” I said, the first words of comfort I had offered her since Lizzy’s death. “You’ll remember,” I said again, coming out from the trunk.
She began to talk, apparently not realizing that I was trying to take my leave, that she had said I should go. “It’s awful,” she said, “losing my daughter, and feeling that I’ve lost you too. I don’t feel that you’re gone exactly, but that you’re—misplaced. I’ve never felt so alone. I keep thinking, I’ve got to tell Alice—and then I realize that