May Day

 

The car stereo is tuned to a station you never listen to. You’re not surprised that you have no idea who spun the dial. Perhaps it was your daughter, or one of her friends. You had driven Meghan and her six gangly, sticky-fingered friends to and from the movie theater the day before. One, a red head with freckles, had hit the trunk release button until you were tempted to drop her off on the highway. Three-times you watched the trunk pop up in the rear-view mirror, compromising your back-window vision already tainted by spindly legs and arms waving like branches across the sky. After flattening your body against the car so as not to be taken out by an 18-wheeler, you closed the trunk again, wondering why you volunteered for this. Only a crazy woman would drive her ten-year old daughter and six pre-pubescent friends to and from the movie theater in the midst of a scorching summer, especially one so terrible that kneeling on the floor to dry heave in a silent bathroom was her favorite blessing. Well, perhaps not her favorite, but weighed alongside of the other option, clutching the toilet bowl was far more innocuous. None of the other parents would be caught dead doing it. And here you are the day after the car pool, startled by the blast of rap from the speakers, aggravated by traces of lollipop fingers on the dash, and made nauseous from the smell of cheese fries and a lingering scent of cherry perfume emanating from the back seat.

You spin the dial back to NPR. It’s an interview with a female, a writer who is also a widow. Silently, you correct yourself. You’re not a widow, and he may very well pull through this. If sheer will and love for your family could be medicine, he’d have been cured months ago. You drive slowly, scanning the street for neighbors who might recognize you. There is a shame, but also a sense of anticipation, building inside of you as you turn the corner onto Baker Drive. You know the road so well you could close your eyes and still arrive intact, but you’re always nervous. Each curve in the road brings to mind the unmistakable shape of a woman. The road is smooth and you know you have many reasons to stop and turn around, but you don’t. You hit the button to your sun roof and it opens in one fluid motion. Above you see a lush canopy of green trees and a blue tint of sky. The warmth of the sun and the cool wind soothes you, and a single strand of hair blows into your mouth. You remove it, and look into the rear view mirror.  Your hair still grows in blond, but the streaks of grey are many. Your eyes, green, are tired, and the skin sags beneath them it seems more each day. These days, you’re almost too close to tears to continue. To continue anything. How did your life become this? In your mind you’re driving an S Class Mercedes, and not a Ford station wagon covered in dog hair and sugar-prints from inconsiderate hands. You imagine you’re a young, single woman �" maybe an urban fashionista living in New York City, not 45 and living your particular life.

            The night before, you lay beside your husband, who seems to be growing more frail by the day, and listened to him cough until the sounds became so guttural you had to shake him to hand him a tissue. Into it, he hacked thick green mucus streaked with red and then fell back, worn out from the pain and the relentless cough. You reached for a few more pills and a glass of water and held the drink to his lips, which were cracked and lined with dried blood.  You spooned some viscous purple syrup laced with codeine into his mouth and within a few minutes he returned to a complicated, fitful sleep. You turned out the light and clung to him like you were a piece of tape stuck to his back. In his ear you whispered, “Take me with you,” but you knew he’d soon leave you and your ten year old daughter, Meghan behind. You tried to imagine his dreams, if they revealed to him images you had no business yet seeing �" like a map through the clouds to a destination only revealed in one’s final moments, a cirrocumulus route heavy with precipitation and sunlit ice, and heavenly figures encased in magnificent colors never revealed to the earthbound. You knew you wouldn’t ever want to be with another man, though your husband told you 6 months before, after the last time you’d tried to make love, that he’d send you someone as soon as he met someone worthy. That someone, he said, would come with a six-figure job, sapphire eyes and raven hair. A gentle smile played on his lips, and he kissed your forehead. You told him you’d rather he send you a case of fresh macadamia nuts -- that in your mind, you’d always pictured heaven as lush and floral as Hawaii. Your reply had worked. That smile you’d always felt down to your toes spread across his pained, yet handsome, face.

 

But, here’s where things stop making any sense. Your husband is dying of cancer, and your daughter, ten, is a normal pre-pubescent girl asking for a pony for Christmas and in love with the Jonas Brothers. All necessary tasks, such as funeral planning, insurance questions and financial organization, will stretch out for months ahead and will require your attention. You should be able to acknowledge that they are looming. You dread the steady flow of family, friends and macaroni salads. The thought of hundreds of faces looking at you with helplessness and sympathy makes you queasy. What the hell are you supposed to say back to those people? For months, since the diagnosis, you haven’t known where to place your hands, where to move the piles of accumulating mail and paperwork. Meghan’s last report card isn’t even a memory. You have no idea how your one and only child is faring in school. How is she handling the knowledge that her father is so sick he can’t even muster the strength to hug her anymore? What can you do to guide her through this when you know getting out of your own bed won’t even be a priority? And what about your husband’s neckties, that huge group of striped and spotted ties hanging in the closet, Brooks Brothers, Dior and Lauren. Over the course of the marriage, the only expensive items he had ever coveted - and received - were sumptuous silk ties. He wore the Mickey Mouse and Tasmanian devil ones given to him on Father’s Day and Christmas by Meghan just long enough to pull from the driveway. Within a block or two, he’d pull over and slip the Disney tie from his collar, swapping it for bold orange and navy stripes, or a bright Abercrombie paisley. Next, he’d bring his coffee cup carefully to his bottom lip to test for temperature. The thought of all of this, his routine, his ways, the mock surprise on his face when he opened another of Meghan’s hideous ties, cripple you inside.  What if, after he leaves you, you become a woman made of stone? How can you mother Meghan, muster up the joy for her first dance or prepare for the hours ahead of teenage angst, her crying over one boy or another, or else what seemed like a coming-of-age ritual �" the betrayal of a best friend? And when all of these thoughts hit you during the day, when you don’t know whether to vacuum the sink or mop down the carpet, you sink into a chair and cry, and after a few minutes, you get into the car and make the drive, taking the slow, careful right onto Baker. A place you probably shouldn’t be. A place you swore you wouldn’t drive back to after the last time, one week ago Tuesday. That time, you drove home, and you were nervous, feeling shocked and invigorated by your behavior. No one would understand, you know this, but how many really know what it’s like to watch the love of your life die in front of you, especially when you feel that the rest of your entire identity is about to die along with him?

 Instead, more you believe to be an act of desperation than forethought, you’d recently fallen into a relationship with someone who seems to understand the grief. For that reason, you’ve been reluctant to call it an “affair.” You’ve never been the type of woman to have pondered such a thing, and over the years had outright eschewed anybody who’d engaged in such a selfish thing. But, you attempt to tell yourself that this is different; it’s not about sex or even a desperate need for companionship. Heck, it’s not even with a man. Does is matter that the arms you’ve fallen into are those of a woman? Does that make it a lesser act? Wouldn’t people understand that it began for the sake of survival? Why else would you trade in your soul and substance for all of this�" this road, this drive you now make several times a week, and the forgiving, female skin you’ve been growing used to? From the minute that the doctor revealed his diagnosis, after a gasp slipped from your mouth without warning, you knew that you’d never be with another man. And a woman? That couldn’t have been a more remote thought. When Gary said he’d send someone to you once he “settled in upstairs,” he’d never specified gender. Only someone with sapphire eyes, a good heart and reasonable income. Was this what he meant? Did he consider that the arms of a woman could save you�" did he somehow understand in his rich way of knowing that a woman could carry you forth like a man never could? Did the thought of another man’s ties hanging in the closet seem as impossible to him as it did to you? Could he, too, not see it likely that Meghan would ever rest her soft cheek against another man’s scruffy face while being read to? These thoughts spin inside of you like a top. There is an entire orbit around your head, and this Universe is too new to wholly embrace or discard. And while all of these thoughts come, and your eyes begin to burn from impending tears -- you arrive. It happens every time, like a forward motion supported by the passing of time, as if the car is carried by an angel who knows more about healing than you. And before you even step from the car, she opens the screen door for you. You are hesitant, each time, awkward even, and consider running back to your car, locking the door and heading home where you’re needed �" where you should be. Instead, you’ve fallen into a new kind of routine, stepping around her into a kitchen that always smells like banana bread and Noah, the shaggy dog who follows her around like a pull toy. You take in the familiar way her dark hair falls in question marks against her fair skin and the way she remains so open, her arms pulling you in without pause. You settle into her, slipping your tears deeply into her skin, your salt seeping into her neck �" the culmination of tears you’ve wanted to reveal to your husband, but just can’t. The tears you haven’t brought yourself to even cry alone, even though you’ve tried, storing them like a bank, hoping to release them all at once while he’s sleeping and Meghan’s at a friend’s. But it’s never worked. Here, however, they spill in torrents.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “Ssshhhh,” she whispers, gently running her fingers through your hair, all the way to the strands that brush your shoulder. She kisses your forehead, your cheek, taking in your tears.  “You’re safe, you’re OK.”

You mumble something back, something like “I’m sorry,” offering an apology for your emotions. You let go of her embrace, attempting to shake off your neediness and return to the stoic stance you assume each morning when you pull from bed. She hands you a tissue, and dismisses your concern away with her other hand, then motions for you to follow her into the kitchen. A pale green, hand-painted tea pot waits beside two matching cups. You smile when you realize that one of these cups is for you, placed in the advent of your arrival. You are present in the mind, the thoughts, and intentions of another -- a thought that encircles you like a belt.

When she pours you tea, you notice the new absence of her wedding band. You wonder if it has something to do with you or if it’s just a progression of her grieving process �" a new step toward letting go of the physicality of her partner who passed from leukemia the year before. You wouldn’t be surprised. You’d admired her strength since you first met her a year ago, when you’d both spent hours in the waiting room at the oncologist’s office and soon after, the hospital where both of spouses took in the massive doses of chemicals aimed to render extinct thousands of abnormal, aggressive cells. Your husband at that point was so new to his diagnosis that you felt almost frozen, treating it like a bad cold and something that could clear up with some rest, some tea and honey. Cancer was just a tiny stumble, right? People beat it all of the time. He hadn’t even told the Dean about the diagnosis and the reality of his permanent resignation from the department chair position he had worked so hard to attain after twenty years of teaching college biology.  While you and he worked so hard to avoid the reality of his condition, veering off the course of acceptance like it was simply a gravel-covered detour from the highway, you’d watched her and her partner, Patricia, practice a certain kind of levity, become more firm in their devotion, and even more fervent in their relationship with cancer. Neither woman ran and hid from it like it was a children’s game, while you and Gary tried to dodge it daily. When both Gary and Patricia were in the same wing of the hospital, you’d seen Terri bring to Patricia’s bedside one hand sewn head scarf after another, then hear them both laughing over Terri’s lack of sewing prowess �" the number of wonky seams and fraying edges. They denied most visitors, instead crafting letters together, one for each friend and family member. Terri carried in bag after bag of art supplies �" a range of stamps and ink pads, markers in every shade possible, and reams of construction paper. You’d made a joke one time about sniffing the paste, did it make everything easier, and for a moment you were pulled into their levity �" something so far away from you it might as well be on another planet. No matter how far you reached above or to the side or beneath, comfort stayed elusive.

”Beth, I had a dream this morning. I wish I could say this with certainty, but in my dream, he lives. You all make it. You, your family, saved by something none of us can see…”

You wait, shocked not so much by the dream, and not by the tears that immediately filled her eyes without threatening to spill over. Dreams happen for a variety of reasons unknown, but somehow you’re uncomfortable with her serenity, that to her you’re seemingly no loss at all. She continues to talk while your thoughts ravel, then unravel. You have no idea how to feel.

“…you even had another baby in the dream -- a boy who summersaults inside of you, he’s so happy to be born.”

She pours the tea. You feel frozen. You glance toward the mirror in the hallway and for a moment, don’t even recognize your reflection. Your eyes have changed, the way you hold your body. You take a deep breath and hold it, like you’re trying to swim beneath the surface.  With all of this, you’ve known there will come at least two causalities, now you’re thinking there may be three or four. A line of dominos, each falling not into one another’s’ arms, but each into its own place. Meghan, Gary, you, and now, she. Terri. You and she for living lives forever changed by cancer, for Gary and Patricia for their either loss or survival, and now you realize, you and she -- for each other. Your possible win, Gary’s survival, you’d always supposed would be her loss. She’d be the sole causality. Now you’re not so sure.  It occurs to you that perhaps she’s maybe just a better person than you are, so unselfish she’s willing to part with you for the sake of your husband, and the togetherness of your family.

With sadness you never expected, you drink your tea while she gets up to boil more water. Before getting up, she takes your hand and kisses it with a reverence, an adoration you don’t deserve. You picture the white bedroom where she’s held you for weeks, and the blue bathrobe that hangs on the hook of the bathroom door -- the same robe that she’d been slipping around you for months, beginning just weeks after she lost Patricia. She’d swaddled you and held you, just like you’ve done for Meghan since birth. The last time you were here she simply drew you a bath, filled it with warm water and added a few drops of lavender. You soaked for an hour, staring at your pink-painted toes poking up through the water, and wondering why she had taken you in like this, and where it was all going. What if she wants to take care of you if Gary dies? What if she doesn’t, what then?  Both thoughts brought a different kind of lump to your throat, and for a moment you could barely catch your breath. Shaking those thoughts from your head, you glanced at a black and white picture by the mirror, its subject a girl running in the grass holding behind her a long ribbon on a string. It looked like May Day, with the sensitive to what must have been the sun. Her feet were bare, her arms lifted to the sky. The ribbon trailed behind her as an afterthought, and you knew you had to accept that some things are to be left behind, some things trail behind us just for a moment, much like a fluff of a dandelion in the wind. Stepping from the bath, you’d gone to find Terri, not noticing the trails of water you were leaving behind you on the wood floor. She met you at the top of the stairs, and gently turned you around, walking you back to the bedroom. She handled you a towel to wrap your soaking wet hair in, swaddled you in her blue terrycloth robe and pulled you close.

You started to cry, not just an ordinary cry, but the kind of sobs that threaten to pull us from our own skin, our bodies wrecked so severely by the outpouring of that level of sadness.  For months, the level of tears had risen inside of you, gagging you, bloating your flesh, changing everything, the way you held yourself, your posture, your ability to go limp in a second, like a spider trying to outfox its prey by remaining perfectly, completely still.

Her eyes met yours. “The picture,” you said, croaking out the first words you’d spoken in hours, “in the bathroom…is it of May Day?”

“Yes.”

“Is it you?”

“No,” she said. “It’s Patricia. She was five. Her kindergarten held a May Day parade and she refused to march.”

You laugh, feeling once again the levity of their partnership, wishing you knew more. Wishing you could hold that same type of key, the one that unlocks acceptance, no matter the outcome.

“The teacher didn’t know what to do with her, and gave her a long, baby blue ribbon. Patricia ran for hours, skipping, rolling in the grass, swinging high on the swings, but she never let go of that ribbon. The teacher couldn’t take it back from her. She ended up dragging it home.” Terri smiled as if she were remembering the scene exactly, as if she were there. Perhaps she was. It occurs to you there are so many things you’ve never asked about her, that you’ve offered yourself to her solely in need, and she wholly accepted you as you are.

“She was special,” you offered, “for you to love her, she must have been extraordinary.”

“Do you want it?” she asked, getting up from the bed. “The picture. I don’t need it; it’s all in here,” she said, tapping her temple. “You can take it home if you’d like.” In the corner of the bedroom you see a row of cardboard moving boxes. Suddenly, you have so many questions �" for example, what caused the scar by her left eye �" but it never seemed the right time to ask. And what about the boxes? Were they still to be unpacked? Or just recently packed? You had no idea.  It was as if she didn’t want your time together to be about her, and her stories, her private joys and sorrows. Instinctively, you both knew there was a distinct measure to your time together, and its purpose was just slightly more than singular. You went along with it, though one day you had carefully picked a rose alongside of the road for her, and she put it in a vase on the table. Aside from that, you always came to her empty handed. There had to be a better way to thank someone for being exactly what you’d needed. And here she was, even dreaming about you, and even beyond you, of your family, of the road as it wound far beyond her. Beyond this house, beyond her and the girl in the picture running with the ribbon.

And even after all of this, it had become clear. You knew it deeply that this would be the last time you’d see her. You’d let the picture be.

She provides more about the dream, but you hear it almost at a distance, like the echo from a shell. She says that she saw your husband and two children by the shore, playing by the beach grass. That your husband was near the children, and drawing into the wet sand with his finger. “What he wrote,” she said, “I couldn’t see. I wish I could have.”

You listen and allow clarity to come over you like a wash of cold water. You need a promise, a square deal with a handshake from God, something more than a dream, but you’ll take it.

You offer an embrace and she accepts it. She brushes the side of your face with her finger, and her eyes fill with water. “You call if you need to,” she says. “I’ll be here.” But you both know you’ll never be calling. You lower your eyes, and climb into your car, shaking your head at the lollipop fingertips. This is your world, for better or for worse.

You return home and light the burner for tea. The weather is turning and you welcome the rain. This is where your story should remain �" you, your husband, and your child, trembling together and facing an uncertain future. You look around the kitchen and grab the first thing your eyes fall upon, deciding it’s the perfect time to offer it to him. You ascend the stairs quietly.  The hallway smells like warm flesh -- perhaps he’s broken a new fever �" and you open the bedroom windows to circulate fresh air. He stirs from sleep, sits up against his pillows, his bed-head rising from his scalp like a tidal wave. You walk to his side of the bed, sit down and place the can of macadamia nuts into his hand. His face breaks into a wide smile, getting the joke. He reaches for you and you roll on top of him. He looks into your eyes, and then at the can he still holds in his hand. “How about,” he says, “how about we eat every damn one of these together?” You begin to laugh with him as you look down, noticing that you’ve worn the same clothes for at least three days.

 

Beyond you lay the unrevealed world �" a hope for treatment, your daughter’s graduation, one day her wedding. Perhaps another child, a tiny boy stumbling by the shore, his hand clasping a red sailboat. One day, perhaps, you’ll share with someone the odd configuration of your learning �" how, in the grasp of another, a woman you knew almost nothing about, that you learned exactly where you belonged -- but how easy it had been to slip away, to search for something that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else, much less yourself. How tempting freedom can be and perhaps a gift well deserved, but how stoic we are called to be in our lifetime. The choices we are asked to make shake us to our core, and at times, almost kill us. We may have to settle, to find a way toward acceptance, and perhaps make a choice to give ourselves away to another. But, either way, all we can hope for is that peace can be found within such choices.

Still, on the following day, when Gary is sleeping, you’ll pen a brief note. It will be the message, the one that Terri saw scratched into sand, written in the air, something she claimed that she could barely see.  But for you, the message had become clear. You saw a bigger picture, in ambers, greens and gold with a blue ribbon running through it. As you closed your eyes and concentrated, the picture reduced down smaller and smaller, until it was as tiny as the head of a pin. Like an Impressionistic painting, the whole was made up of hundreds, thousands of pieces. And no piece was even, but the message was clear just the same. It’s a message you’d carry with you forever. You both would. You knew she’d soon see it too, if she hadn’t already. And then you’d fold the note, carefully, pressing down the creases with intent. Sealing the envelope delicately with wax, you run to the box to meet the mailman. Placing the letter into his hand, you’ll note the surprise on his face when you say Thank you. Thank you for taking this from me, your eyes spilling with tears.