Travis
I put on my coat and slipped out the back door. I had been here less than two hours with my mother, three of my siblings, and my niece and two of my nephews; and already I needed a break. They’re much easier to handle in smaller doses. During previous visits, I’ve had Mom all to myself or visited with only one or two of them. I doubt if any of them felt the same way I do. They all still live here within minutes of each other. They’re accustomed to seeing each other once or twice a week.
Mom has always done a good job of keeping me caught up on things via the telephone when I couldn’t be here. A conversation with Ellen or Sebastian on the phone rarely lasts longer than five minutes. Martin and Clare never call. But hearing about the lives of your loved ones from a voice on the other end of the receiver just isn’t the same. Email is a little more personable to me. Someone has to actually sit down and type it, but no one has time for that either. Instead, I usually have a mailbox full of jokes and forwards from Mom. Ellen sends the same ones to me because she doesn’t notice that Mom already copied me on them too. Of all things, family should feel the closest, but when we are actually close we don’t have much to say to each other.
Mom’s cat, Marcus, circled my feet. He meowed a few times and purred loudly, the most anyone had said to me since being here. I knelt to scratch him under the chin before walking out into the yard. Looking beyond the snow covered trees, memories of all of us picking apples in the fall or having snowball fights in the winter played out before me. I found Martin and Marline’s initials carved in a heart on one of the trees from back when they first started dating. Sebastian’s old tire swing hung motionless. The orchard looked like some wintry canvas where a painter had captured the foundation of all of our lives here. Only we had changed. I envied Mom for getting to wake up to it everyday.
Her contributions to the yard had stayed much the same as well, as if she tried hard to preserve it just the way it was back then. Her birdfeeders were the same and in the exact same places. The little koi pond lay motionless, frozen beneath a sheet of ice. I brushed the snow from the ice to somehow look through it, wondering if those were the same fish she’d had for years. Marcus had stayed on the back porch until I knelt next to the pond. He bounded through the snow and stood on the ice watching my hands carefully as if I was going to be his accomplice in getting to the fish down below.
“There’s only four or five koi left down there. I’ll probably have lost another one by the time the ice thaws.”
I looked up to find Mom standing there over me with a gentle smile on her face. The snow had silenced her footsteps, or she had snuck out the backdoor deliberately so I wouldn’t hear her approaching. Marcus leapt over to her to rub against her boots.
“Are they frozen in the ice? I can’t see them,” I asked.
“No, there’s a dip in the middle at the bottom where they go because it doesn’t freeze completely. They are probably hibernating in some way, if fish do that.”
The thought of the fish in their icy grave saddened me, but I guess it wasn’t a grave at all. Like the flowers, they rebound in the spring. The daffodils, the leaves on the trees, the fountain in the koi pond, even the birds all spring back to life. It seemed childish for me to wish humans didn’t have to die. What if we could just hibernate in a hole in the ground until the ice over our life melted?
“Is something bothering you, Travis?” Mom asked.
“I just stepped out to get away from all the noise. It’s so peaceful out here so I thought it would be nice to enjoy the back yard for a few minutes. I was remembering all the fun times we had out here.”
“It’s the only reason I won’t let Martin cut down more of the trees. Half of them are dying. You can’t tell now because all of them are leafless, but some of them look pretty spotty come spring time.”
“Everything dies,” I said with a sigh.
“I’m afraid so, dear.”
“If you could go back and live any part of your life over again, Mom, would you?”
“Nah, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Travis, there were so many bad days. I couldn’t wait for them to be over.”
“What about the good ones? What about Dad? You wouldn’t want to see him again.”
“Of course, I’d love to see him again, but in a way he never left. Your dad is still here, the house, the trees; he’s still here with us. He’s in here,” she said placing a hand over her heart.
She placed her other hand over mine.
“I’d give anything for one more day with Justin,” I said grasping her hand in mine.
“Just one more day?”
“Well, maybe two or three…months,” I said with a smile.
“Are you going to go see him?”
“He’s such a sad pitiful looking man. He’s really let himself go. I see him at church, but I haven’t seen Helen in a year or so.”
“Do you ever go to the cemetery? For Dad?”
“At first, I went all the time. Then, I was going at least once a week. I make an effort to go about every two weeks or once a month now.”
“Do you talk to him?” I asked.
“Travis, I talk to him here. I don’t have to go to the cemetery and see his name on a marker to speak to him. The body we buried beneath the soil was your father’s, but it’s not who he was. His soul is a lot more than that. It’s never left me.”
“Mom, you have such a calm way of dealing with things.”
“Calm? I’m a mother, dear. All I know is calm, at least now that all you kids have moved out of the house,” she said with a laugh.
“I don’t know how you do it.”
“Travis, it’s okay to grieve and there’s no reason to feel guilty for not going to visit him everyday in the cemetery. I think you are doing fine. If you weren’t, you would have gone to the cemetery as soon as you got into town, instead of coming here.”
“Yeah, I guess you are right.”
“Of course I am. I’m a mother. Now let’s go back inside before the others come out here looking for us and try to start a snowball fight.”
She picked up some snow and packed it into her hands and threw it at me. I jerked my shoulder to dodge it but it hit me on the back anyway. I pretended to lean down to pick up some snow. With a laugh and an apologetic plea, she hurried over to dust the snow from my back. I put my arm around her waist and wrapped hers around mine. We walked across the yard to go back inside.
* * * *
Clare and Sebastian were entertaining the kids with a board game on the floor in front of the Christmas tree. The warm glow of the lights on their faces would have made a great picture. Thinking the same thing, Ellen grabbed her camera from her purse to snap a photo. Mom, Ellen, and I stood there for a few minutes watching them letting the kids win. It was good to see Clare and Sebastian smile.
Mom disappeared into the kitchen to position the foil wrapped plates and bowls of food Ellen had brought in, adding them to the buffet line of food on the counter, dividing them according to how she thought everyone should eat them. The ham and my turkey would go first, followed by rolls, salad, deviled eggs, yams and other vegetables. Desserts were on a small card table across the room.
I crept away and walked upstairs like a sneaky kid with the house all to himself. I walked room to room opening the doors and turning on the lights to look inside for a few seconds, expecting Mom to have put up new wallpaper or painted a bathroom. Maybe she bought new furniture or bed linens for herself. But everything was just as it had always been, like the backyard, and I found that soothing. I noticed the small tabletop tree on the nightstand between the twin beds in what had been mine and Sebastian’s room. The tree was decorated with matchbox cars and tiny gift bags intended for jewelry size items. I walked over and peeked into one of the bags. There was a chocolate truffl
e inside wrapped in shiny gold paper. I turned around to see if anyone was watching from the doorway, like a kid about to take a peek at his gifts under the tree. With no one there, I dug my fingers into the bag to pick up the candy.
This routine was well-known to me and reassuring, a longtime tradition from our childhood. I remember us emptying all of the bags by the end of each week, but they were magically filled again when we came home from school. I sat down on one of the beds now to enjoy the rich sweet candy. I peeked into another bag to find a piece of peppermint. I hated peppermint now. Mom kept pieces in her purse when we were kids to appease us during a car ride or while sitting in church. The teller at the bank or the secretary at the doctor’s office always had a jar of mints for us to pick from too. I don’t think I ever really liked it as a child. I just accepted the treat and its sweet flavor as a free piece of candy.
A small green army man was in another bag. I lifted him out and stood him up in the palm of my hand. He was down on one knee and aiming a grenade launcher to the sky. There were probably two or three more in other bags hanging on the little tree, more pieces of my past that had never changed. I always swore that when Mom ran out of things to fill the bags, she just dug the army men out of our toy closet to make us think we were getting new ones.
Back then, Sebastian enjoyed the army men more than I did. We had hundreds of them, and they were always popping up between the cushions of the sofa, clogging up Mom’s vacuum cleaner, or becoming mangled out in the yard after being run over by Dad’s lawnmower. Blowing them up with fireworks in the backyard on the 4th of July was practically a rite of passage for all three of us boys. Eventually, I preferred the GI Joe and Star Wars figurines with jointed and movable arms and legs. Their costumes and rugged faces were much more appealing to my imagination.
“Aren’t you too old to be playing with those?” Ellen asked, standing in the doorway.
I blushed a little having been caught in the act.
“Have you checked the tree in your old room?” I asked.
“Stickers, paper dolls, and—”
“Peppermints!” We both said at the same time.
“You hate them too?”
“I’ll give them to the kids,” she said.
“You are just like Mom.”
“Scary, isn’t it?” Ellen walked over to the tree and began to look in a few of the bags on the tree. “No fair, you got chocolate.”
“There’s more?” I asked with excitement.
“You’ve already had one?”
“Yep. A truffle.”
“I think I’ll have a truffle too, if you don’t mind,” she said digging it out of one of the other bags and sitting down on the bed opposite me.
“Go ahead. We should raid the other trees before anyone else comes upstairs.”
“Good idea.”
We were quiet as Ellen enjoyed her chocolate. Then, she spoke up again as the silence became awkward. We both knew what the other was thinking.
“You aren’t going to ask me about Mark?”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to.”
“Did Mom tell you that?”
“Not really.”
“Well, she just doesn’t want any of us to put a damper on the holiday by discussing our problems. It’s the one day of the year we are supposed to pretend nothing has ever happened in our lives.”
“I’ll still be in town the day after,” I offered.
“The 26th? I’ll see if I can pencil you in. I think Kwanzaa begins that day though.”
“Kwanzaa? Don’t give Mom another excuse to try to get all of us together!”
“True. So, how are you doing?”
“I’m good,” I said with a shrug.
“How are you really doing?” Ellen asked reaching over and putting a hand on my knee.
Before I knew it, I’d spilled a rant of words that must have been bottled up inside of me, and only because I knew Ellen didn’t mind listening. I had always been closest to her out of the four of them. I told her about how much I missed Justin, and how lost I felt without him. He had been my first true love, the only person I’d spent any length of time with that mattered. I didn’t know how to start over. Right now, I didn’t know if I even wanted to start again.
“There are few second chances in life, Travis, and the ones we do get are only at things that don’t really matter. We only get one really meaningful true love in our life. Sure, we’ll find love again, but we’ll compare all the others to the one that meant the most.”
“You said we?”
I felt a bit selfish, taking into account her own looming setbacks, but I went ahead and asked her though Mom had already filled me in on Mark.
“Mark wants a divorce.”
“Why?”
“He says I’m still distant, which I am. I know he’s my husband but I just don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust the touch of a man again. Mark can’t even come up behind me and kiss me unexpectedly on the neck without me flipping out. When I do let him hold me, he says I still feel tense.”
“Doesn’t he know these things take time?”
“It’s been two years. I guess he’s tired of waiting. I can’t blame him. I’m tired of waiting too.”
“What are you waiting for?” I asked.
In my mind, I expected her to answer with something prosaic like waiting for her dignity or self-respect to come back, maybe she was waiting for the day she’d wake up and find that it was all just a bad dream. None of us are that fortunate. Instead, she looked down to her lap and just shook her head. Like me, she didn’t know what she was waiting for.
“I have no idea,” she answered with a soft exhale.
“I know it sounds horrible to say this, but I thought things might have improved for you when the Judge died.”
She thought so too, and said things were actually looking up as soon as the trial was over. A bit of the burden had definitely been lifted from her back, and the stress it had on their marriage had finally begun to cease. She kept the entire newspaper from the day a story about the Judge, the trial, her, or any of the other women involved didn’t grace the front page.
When she was told about the Judge’s death, a sigh of relief did escape her. However, her days of knowing he was safe behind bars were over. The questions racking her brain began again. What if the judge faked his death to escape prison? What if he came back to Ruby Dregs to seek revenge? They were far fetched ideas, but they easily planted a seed of worry in her head. Ellen had to go to his grave to prove to herself there was no reason to worry. Then, the dreams started.
Every night, if she was lucky to get to sleep at all, she relived those horrific sessions in his office. She felt his hands crawling on her and she’d wake up screaming and kicking the covers off the bed. He had to be dead, haunting her from the afterlife, but still she had to go to his grave for reassurance. Mark thought she was sick. He refused to go to counseling. And so, he too waited, taking two years to decide that the best solution was to distance himself from the problem.
“I’d preferred if he’d just left me. He could have just skipped town and changed his name without telling any of us. At least then I would have felt I wasn’t the only one going mad because of all of this. I could have blamed Judge Railen for one more thing instead of blaming myself.”
Ellen broke into tears.
“Don’t say that,” I said taking her hand. “Mark didn’t do that because he loves you.”
“Mark blames himself. If he had not lost that factory job, I would have never gone to work at the courthouse.”
“And the judge might still be on the bench and taking advantage of other women if you hadn’t.”
“It drove one of the other girls to suicide, having to sit there in a courtroom next to another judge and verbally say all the things Judge Railen did to her, while Railen sat there across the room looking at her. She hung herself that night after giving her testimony. I’d be lying if I said I never thought about doing it too, Trav
is. The kids, and Mark at the time, were the only things keeping me going.”
Seeing Mark in the restaurant with that other girl immediately popped into my head. My conscience was telling me Ellen needed to know. I imagined a small devil on one shoulder and a tiny angel on the other. But weighing the consequences, I wasn’t really sure if telling her would be a good or a bad thing. Besides, it was Christmas and now was definitely not the time.
Instead, I got up and moved over to the bed beside her. I cradled her gently in my arms. She took to my shoulder, pushing her face into my collar bone, and let go. They were the tears she’d needed to cry for a long time while someone held her.
Clare
Recently, Ellen had let me baby-sit Robbie and Rachel for her. I liked being called Aunt Clare. I would always be older than them, someone they could look up to; and at last it felt like my own siblings had stopped looking down on me. I would always be their baby sister, but I hated being called the baby. I rolled my eyes when Mom called me “baby girl.” Her baby girl had a baby of her own now.
Keeping my niece and nephew helped me to realize I wanted to have at least one more child. I wanted Jake to have a little brother or sister. I’d do it right this time. I’d get married and have a loving man by my side during the pregnancy. We’d raise our kids together in a stable home, like Mom and Dad raised me. Maybe he’d have a good job that could afford me to be a stay-at-home Mom.
I liked my independence for now. But at the end of the day when it was just me and Jake going home to our tiny one bedroom apartment above the old downtown drugstore, it still felt like something was missing. Even now, sitting here on the floor beneath the tree, entertaining Robbie, Rachel, and Jake with Sebastian just felt comforting.
“Do you ever want to have kids?” I asked Sebastian.