Chapter Thirty-Seven
I rested among the nocturnal until the first rays of a new day cut through the twilight hours. Soon enough, Henry found me under my tree. He sat down beside me before he spoke. “I’m glad you’re okay.” He stopped and ran his hands over his whiskers. From the looks of things, he hadn’t shaved that morning nor slept that night. “I wish you wouldn’t have left like that. I was so worried.”
I didn’t speak. Maybe that’s how I had gotten there to begin with: I hadn’t said anything. Or at least I hadn’t said enough. What if I’d spoken up for myself more? What if I’d better explained how I was feeling, that something wasn’t right—would that have changed things? Maybe I wouldn’t have been sent to that place, been shocked, missed out on weeks of Wesley’s life.
But shouldn’t he have noticed even if I didn’t say anything? Mama had.
But he had been so busy at work, trying for that promotion that no longer seemed important. At least not to me.
“How are you feeling? Are you hurt, tired, hungry?” I wondered if he wanted to know if I had seen visions of Esther. “Did you know your father had lupus?” he asked. I shook my head no. “I can’t…I can’t make any sense of this. I’ve been thinking about it ever since—” He didn’t finish that thought. “How did we get here?” That was a good question. And one neither of us had an answer to.
An acorn plopped onto the ground beside me. I took it in my hand and ran my finger over the smooth and rough textures, the combination of barriers
meant to protect the seed, the potential for a new tree.
I didn’t know how any of this had become who we were, but I did know one thing for sure: “I’m not going back.”
“Lulu—”
“No!” I threw the acorn into the distance so it bounced along the ground and toward a squirrel that foraged at the edge of the woods. “That doctor’s an idiot.”
Henry and I had never been the type to fight, but perhaps we would become that couple. Or maybe the answer would be that we would become the type to live apart. Maybe he would have to go back to Greenwood without me. Surely Mama would take me in. She had been Georgie’s caretaker. Perhaps now she would also be mine. All I knew in that moment was that if he thought he could take me back there, I would no longer remain silent. I wouldn’t smile. I wouldn’t be complacent.
I kept watching the squirrel at the edge of the woods, her anxious tail twitching as she held the acorn in her paws. She looked around, not trusting her surroundings, keeping an escape route in mind if a threat got too close. I knew those woods better than Henry. The path had probably changed over the years, but I could find my way through the forest if I needed to.
“You’re right,” he said. I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, but I knew better than to get too hopeful.
“You agree?”
Henry searched my face, finally noticing my rash. “How could they have been so wrong? And then to do what he did. I’m sorry.” He dropped his face into his hand, covering his eyes as if he couldn’t look at me any longer. “I’m so sorry.”
And he should have been. He hadn’t listened to me. He hadn’t seen me, not until that moment and only after Mama had figured it out. We sat together in the growing shade as the sun rose higher in the sky. How long had that tree
stood there? How much had it seen? How many seasons had come and gone as it stood rooted in that one place, growing and dropping leaves, rebirthing and releasing year after year after year? How many times had the first beams of sunshine illuminated its languid branches and shimmered its dancing leaves, casting wavering shapes that shifted with the changing hours? I used to resist the dark places, but now I knew that the fullness of life includes all of it: the light, the dark, and the shadows that creep between.
The truth was, Henry had missed things. He could’ve been more attentive.
But he hadn’t caused my visions. He hadn’t given me this disease. And he hadn’t given me a lobotomy either.
“Well.” I decided I wasn’t going to be Nora. I wasn’t going to yell or fight.
And I also wasn’t going to flee. But I wasn’t ready to comfort him yet. “What did you expect when you took advice from Gary?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw the note,” I told him, but he looked at me, confused and uncertain of what I meant. “I found it in your suit jacket. The doctor, he was Bitsy’s. The one who lobotomized her.”
“You heard what Gary said. She wasn’t lobotomized.”
“And you believed him?”
Henry shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then his voice dropped low as he said, “I don’t know what to believe anymore.” That made two of us.
“Well, he lied.”
“Lulu, you can’t accuse—”
“I’m not. It’s the truth. Nora told me when she visited.” He still looked uncertain. “Bitsy told her. I’m not making it up.”
Henry ran his hand through his hair. “Well, he didn’t give me Ruthledge’s name. My mother did. He’s the husband of someone in her women’s club.”
Of course Marian had been behind all this. “We thought he could help. If we
had known—” How many things would we change if only we’d had the benefit of knowing? “But you don’t need to worry about Gary anyways.
They’re moving.”
“What?” Apparently, the restless soul of the place had gotten to the Betsers, too. “So he didn’t get your job?”
“No. They’re moving closer to the boys, for a fresh start.”
“I thought that’s what Greenwood was. So does that mean you got the job?” He nodded. “Congratulations.” If we had been ordinary, news like that would’ve meant a celebration and special dinner. But instead of joy, we sat broken in the dirt. I did decide to give him a little gift, a bit of levity. “You got the job even after the bowl of Jell-O vomit?”
He flinched as I said it. Maybe it was too soon to joke about that evening.
There were certainly moments that would never be funny, but cottage cheese floating in a pond of orange cream wasn’t one of them. I laughed first, and then Henry joined in.
After a moment he said, “I’m sorry for all of it. That dinner, the late notice, Gary. You were right to serve me that dessert.” He forced a chuckle that quickly faded. “The past few months, all of it, it was too much. I should’ve seen it.”
He was right. It had all been too much. And there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t continue to be.
Then he asked a question I did not expect: “What do you want?”
I turned toward my husband, those brown eyes of his looking too similar to my own, showing too much defeat. Absent of assurance, he seemed so afraid.
But what he seemed to fear most was me.
The tears began to gather, but before they could shroud my vision, I said to him with the utmost honesty, “I want her.”
As that last word caught his ear, I saw his body react, shudder, as if a current had rattled him deep inside. He scooted close to me, and I opened the
blanket to him. He put an arm around me and rested his cheek on my head so that soon enough his tears began to dampen my hair. As his body shook, I remembered something I had forgotten: Esther wasn’t only mine. She was his, too. We never talked about it. We never spoke of her. We never discussed the loss. I suppose we had our own ways of coping, of retreating from a reality we couldn’t face. But what would’ve happened if we would’ve retreated together?
As the tree roots pushed against us and the breeze blew cool, we held on to each other. And I felt it. For the first time in a long time, I felt something outside myself. I felt the pain in my bottom, the goose shivers across my arms, the cosmos above, the arm around me, the heave of his shoulders as we sat and watched and cried and finally mourned together.
As morning moved toward noon, I asked, “Do you know what I really want?”
When I arrived the day before, I had looked around at the peach trees, the barn, the house lurching on its foundation. It looked the same and yet so different. It had been the picture fully developed in my mind as to what home looked like, but my eyes had adjusted to Greenwood Estates, to the carefully appointed houses with the freshly poured concrete and warm streetlamps, the self-defrosting Frigidaire and even the Mobile Maid. The picture of home had changed over the years, but really it wasn’t about any sort of house or structure—it was more than that. It was Henry and Wesley, Nora across the street, Hatti and her optimism. It was a place of hope and hauntings. And it was where I wanted to be.
As we held on to each other, I told him, “I want you to take me home.”
“Are you sure?”
I reached for a leaf that had landed on the ground beside me. I picked it up and began feeling it, the variations of the sides, one smooth and the other with roughness, as if it held a braille message of some sort. Maybe some
answer to the mysteries of the seasons, if only I knew the language. Maybe it could tell me the future or even the past. But I couldn’t decode it. All I could do was try to trust.
With Mama’s blanket still wrapped around us both, I leaned my head against my husband’s shoulder and said, “Absolutely.”
