Big Cherry Holler - Adriana Trigiani [37]
I never told Jack why I came up here. Any discussions of Joe’s death were just too painful. And I couldn’t tell him about The Dream, the real reason I came up here each night. I could hardly wait for night to come so I could have The Dream, the same dream, night after comforting night. Joe and I would run through the house. And we would laugh and laugh. The laughter was so real. It sounded like him, and it sounded like me. And then, as we were getting pains in our stomachs from laughing so hard, the roof tore cleanly away from the house, leaving no jagged edges, as though it were the lid of a pot being lifted off. Then the sky above our house filled with fantastic colors, usually shades of rose and deep blue that striated and glistened and moved like iridescent folds of oil in water. And then Joe opened his arms … it was always the same … he’d look at me and smile and say, “I love to fly!” And he would lift off the petit-point rug in the living room and ascend up and out of the house and into the swirl of fantastic color overhead. And he would fly around in it. I would try really hard to fly so I could join him, but I couldn’t get off the ground. It was like my limbs had turned to stone. I would call to Joe but he had flown away. Sometimes in the distance, I heard his voice. And then the sky became a blueprint, the colors fading away like pencil lines, and it turned a flat blue like construction paper, with no movement and no depth, just a flat color, and I’d keep trying to fly, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get off the ground. I even climbed the walls of the house, but I kept sliding back down onto the floor. And I kept climbing and then I’d slide. And I’d wake up exhausted, but I didn’t care. I was happy, because all night I had been with Joe, and it felt real. And it was, for the most part, a happy dream; he never cried or took a needle or slept. He was all mine, and we were together, mother and son, even though the background was skewed and strange; we were together.
“Ave?” The sound of Jack’s voice startles me.
“Hi.”
“Hi.” He sits down on the toy chest. He folds his hands and looks at them.
I know my husband. He’ll just sit there and look at me until I say something. Why is it always the woman’s job to pull the information from the man? Why can’t he tell me what he’s feeling? That’s just the way it is, and I’m certainly not going to try to change this worldwide dynamic tonight. So I take a deep breath and look at him. “Where’d you go?”
“I went up to Big Cherry Holler and walked around the lake.”
Before we got married, we spent a lot of time up on Big Cherry Lake. We’d lie on the bank, or Jack would row me around in a canoe. That’s the place where we really talked, shared everything we’d been through with each other. It was a magical place for us, totally private, just clean blue water as far as the eye could see, surrounded by a clean wall of regal pine trees.
“We haven’t been up there together in a long time, Jack.”
“Years.”
“Maybe we should go sometime.”
“Maybe.”
Jack’s one-word answers are typical. But typical isn’t going to work tonight. We’re in bad shape, and we have to talk about it.
“You know, I don’t mean to hurt you. Somehow I always end up doing the wrong thing. I just want you to know that I don’t set out to do that.”
“I know,” he says quietly, leaning against the window.
“I just don’t know how to talk to you. Maybe I never did.” Why am I using words like “never”?
“No. We got along good in the beginning.”
A wave of panic goes through me. This sounds like the windup on one of those “I’m leaving you” speeches. “In the beginning” usually leads to “We’re at the end of our road.”
“Why do you stay?” I might as well ask him, since we’re finally speaking seriously to each other.
“I love you, Ave Maria.”
“You do?”
“Of course I love you.”
My eyes