This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [111]
“Papa will give us piggybacks,” I said. “Yay!”
We drove past Hoffman’s Cove and the wide-open view across the sea to Pond Island, where it looked like you could walk across the water into the blue spaces around the islands, the sun warm and yellow coming through the windows. Dust kicked up on the dirt road, and I hung excitedly between the front seats, almost in Mama’s lap. She didn’t tell me to settle, just smiled back at me. Clara sang, “La-la-la-la-la-lap. Lap.” I no longer felt the need to pinch her.
When we emerged into the open space of the blueberry field across from our driveway, Mama pulled the car to the side of the road just past the place where the trees opened up to Heidi’s grave. She looked back toward that opening, and her face shifted, became dry again.
Don’t lose your grip, Mama.
“I’m going to see Heidi’s grave,” she said. “Stay here in the car.”
Mama walked down the road behind us, disappearing into the trees as Clara and I fell into a waiting space. We heard voices through the open windows of the car and watched as two people came up to the Vegetable Garden sign to change the placards. Gerry held a TOMATOES sign that Mama had once carved and painted and varnished. She looked over at our car but did not see us inside, did not recognize the car. Clara started to moan for Mama and began picking at the door handle.
“Wait,” I said. I could feel a shape like a cloud, twisting over me, over the car, over the farm, blocking out the sun. I turned to see Mama coming back from Heidi’s grave, walking step-by-step the way she did after meditating at Marpa House. Gerry looked over from the sign to see Mama. Their eyes met and recognition passed across Gerry’s face. Her olive skin burned dark.
Mama got in and closed the door. She took a deep breath that seemed to suck all the air out of the car, and when her breath released, we were surrounded by her sadness.
Fall came, apples ripening and shriveling in the Holbrook sanctuary, no longer to be smuggled home by Mama and Papa. Most days I walked across the garden and past our orchard to the campground to visit Papa in the log cabin where he was staying with Gerry, while Mama lived in the house with Clara and me. To say it was not an ideal situation was an understatement, but no one knew what else to do. Papa had been offered a job at a farm in Massachusetts, but couldn’t start until after he and Gerry returned from the third European farm tour in November. And Mama had nowhere else to go, she said. Papa, remorseful for sending her away before, decided to let her be, and we cradled the hope that somehow life would return to normal.
If Papa wasn’t at the cabin, Gerry would tell me stories about her life in Wytopitlock with her husband, Zeke. “One time Zeke was driving on his motorcycle behind a logging truck when one of the logs slid off the pile toward him,” she said. “He watched as the log shot forward like a cannonball, likely to knock him and the motorcycle over and leave him for dead.”
She paused, with a slight smile for effect.
“But the end of the log landed upright in front of him like a tree, pausing there for a second as he hit the brakes, then bounced over his head and off the road!”
She said he kept driving for a few minutes as if nothing had happened, then had to pull over to the side of the road because he was shaking too much. She talked so fondly of Zeke, telling me things like this, but not the reasons why she was now here. Looking back, I see it must have been hard for Gerry on the cape, our small community frowning on her for trying to take Mama’s place.
Gerry had a lot to learn, so I began teaching her, giving her spankings when she did something wrong. “What did I do?” she asked, as if it was a funny game. I had to come up