What We Keep - Elizabeth Berg [51]
“How do you know?”
“I woke up a lot. You were never here.”
Suddenly I remembered my mother, outside in her nightgown. “Sharla, did you see what Mom did last night?”
“When?”
“Last night, out in the backyard, when I was out with Wayne.”
“What do you mean? She wasn’t outside. She was sleeping before you ever went out there.”
“No, she came out, and she was walking around flapping her arms and acting crazy.”
“What are you talking about? She didn’t do that. You dreamed it.”
“I saw her, Sharla! Wayne did, too. Ask him!”
“Well, that would be pretty hard to do, since he left this morning.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged, returned to her magazine. “A car came and picked him up. I saw. He got in with a suitcase. He’s gone.”
I stood up, then sat back down on my bed. Something inside me felt pulled in two directions, being slowly ripped. “He didn’t say anything about leaving. He didn’t tell me.”
Sharla picked up a peach pit she’d put at the side of her bed, sucked on it with noisy satisfaction. “Well, he’s gone.”
But I loved him, I wanted to say. Of course I did not say it. The words were too big for my mouth. Everything I had felt—and learned—about Wayne was too big for me, and I knew it. So although the suddenness of his departure made for a caved-in feeling, I also felt a kind of buoyancy of spirit, a return to the safety of the self I knew. I felt the kind of relief you experience when you yank your gaze away from staring too long at something, becoming hypnotized by it; becoming, in fact, nearly lost to it.
Later that day, I went into the teepee to think about things. I saw a rock just inside the entrance, holding down a piece of paper. Ginny, it said. I have to go. You know why. You know everything. Don’t forget anything. At the bottom of the note were two parallel lines within a circle, identical to those we’d drawn in the dirt. I pressed the note to my chest, then against my forehead. I cried a little. Then I brought the note inside and put it away in my secret box. I knew I would never see Wayne again. That note was the only proof I had of having learned something essential: how to be properly loved.
The plane tilts suddenly to the left, then rights itself. Why? I imagine the captain taking his hands off the wheel to stretch, then saying, “Whoops!” But no one else is reacting, at least as far as I can tell.
I close my eyes, rub my temples, think again of Wayne. I wonder what he looks like now. I wonder if he ever thinks of me and our little ceremony. It’s hard to imagine it didn’t mean something to him, that incredible exchange. I hope it did; it certainly meant a lot to me. I’ve tried to explain how it felt to a few people, but it always gets reduced to a that-summer-at-the-lake story, and that’s not what it was. I don’t know quite how I could have believed in so much so soon, how I could have taken such chances. Well, he was a compelling character. Charismatic—Jasmine’s son, after all. If he hadn’t so abruptly left, I wonder what else I might have done with him.
I suppose in my pied-piper delirium I might have subconsciously been imitating my mother. I’ve seen things like that in my own daughters, God knows—over and over, I’ve seen behavior in them that parallels my own, in one way or another. Sometimes I think what you say to kids doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. It’s all in what you do. It really is. It is all in what you do.
In Monroe’s lingerie department, Sharla held a nightgown up before me. It was pale blue, decorated with stiff-looking lace around the neck and armholes. “How about this one?” she asked, but she was not really asking. She was demanding. We’d been looking at things for over an hour, and she was tired of it.
“Fine,” I said. I was tired, too. More than that, I felt really sick: dizzy and weak, and my head throbbed.
Sharla paid for the nightgown, then turned to me and said, “Do you want to go and get it gift-wrapped? We have enough.”
Her words sounded as though she were speaking underwater. I stared dumbly at her.