Joan held a magazine and a flashlight near her face. It was after two in the morning and she couldn’t get back to sleep. Her phone vibrated under a stack of magazines on the nightstand. She hoped it wasn’t her brother asking to be picked up at the bar, or worse, at the police station. She didn’t want to leave the comfort of her bed. Balancing her flashlight on her knees, she lifted the magazines.
Henry slept like a hibernating bear next to her. Still, she tried to be quiet even though he had slept through all of her recent tossing and turning, her sighs and blanket pulling. If his own snoring didn’t wake him, then a few papers rustling wouldn’t be a problem.
The text read: It’s raining. It’s always raining. She listened for rain on the roof, but only heard the house creaking and Henry’s breathing. It was from her mother’s number. Her mother’s old number, she reminded herself. She closed her eyes and ran her hands through her hair. She turned off her cell phone. Not tonight, she thought. Not again.
She looked at Henry, his mouth open, eyelids fluttering. She ran her index finger over the stubble covering his head. She envied his sleep, the off switch he was able to flip each night. She couldn’t remember the last night she slept through.
Most of her friends were equally as sleep deprived, but they were waking up to heat bottles and change diapers. Meanwhile, she was sifting through piles of Us Weekly, watching infomercials, and eating cold pizza in the dark. Not exactly the kind of suffering her friends could sympathize with. They told her to be thankful she still had time to read, thankful that she wasn’t dieting to lose baby weight. She envied their unwashed hair and stretched stomachs, but she would never tell them.
***
Joan jumped awake at the blare of Henry’s alarm. Always at 4am. Always the insistent mechanical pulse that made her dread the daylight – or near daylight. Drool plastered her face to the side of an open magazine. At least she got some sleep. Her ribs hurt where the flashlight had rolled beneath her, still switched on, but dark, the battery drained. She pulled herself from bed to make breakfast and feed the dog.
She showed Henry the text when he came downstairs for his toaster waffle and coffee.
“Do I need an umbrella?” he asked.
“Tommy is still using her phone,” Joan sighed as she sat across the table from Henry. He shrugged and sipped his coffee. He wasn’t much of a morning person. Neither was she these days. She didn’t feel like much of a person any time of day.
“He needs to let her go.” Joan sighed again.
Henry swallowed the last bit of his waffle. “He misses her. You won’t admit it, but you miss her, too.” He kissed her on the forehead and ran out the door with is coffee before she had the chance to argue.
After Henry left for work, Joan took Harley for a walk. She let him pull the way as he had become accustomed in the last few weeks since she started her FMLA leave. She was too tired to lead. Too tired to think or act or make a decision. Harley probably had a better sense of where they were going than she did anyway. She felt like she had lost her sense of direction years ago without even realizing it.
***
Joan stared at her phone. She should call Tommy, but she didn’t know what to say. She needed him to stop pretending to be their mother, to stop with the strange texts and weather reports. How could she help him heal when her own feelings were so muddled?
Joan hadn’t thought she would miss her mother, not after everything they had been through. The last three years they only talked when Joan took her to the grocery store every other week. Short sentences with short replies. The bare bones of niceties that held up the pretense of civility.
“How are you?”
“Good, you?”
“Good.”
There was nothing more to be said. Silence filled the car like cigarette smoke.
Joan read fertility books in the car while her mother went into the Save More Grocery. Once she watched her shuffle up to the store. Her shoulders stooped. Her short gray hair blown by the wind. She looked twenty years older than she was.
They went to a family therapist after Tommy tried to kill himself at fourteen, tried to mend what was broken. Tommy cried. Joan hugged him and held his hand while their mother stared out the window.
She promised to quit drinking. And she did, but not before her liver quit working. Anyone who says forgiveness is free has never paid for years of therapy.
From her own private sessions, Joan had gleaned that her mother’s behaviour was learned, just as Joan’s had been learned from her parents. Letting herself off the hook meant also letting her mother off the hook. Something she tried to do many times. But who was to blame then? How far down her family tree did she have to go to find the dysfunctional beginning? How many people would she have to forgive? She couldn’t wring that much forgiveness from her heart and still have anything left for herself, so she stopped trying.
***
Nine years ago, after her grandfather died, after his estate was settled, his farm sliced up like an apple pie, after all the papers were signed and money and land doled out, after her aunts and mother were unhappier and less satisfied than before, they stopped talking to one another. No birthday cards. No phone calls. No visits. No more holiday gatherings.
Even when she called her aunts to tell them her mother was in the hospital, no one came. Her aunts still called Joan occasionally after the settled estate and before her mother’s funeral.
For women who claimed to want nothing to do with one another, they couldn’t stop talking about one another. “In college Aunt Beth had an illegitimate child. She gave him up for adoption without your grandparents even knowing.” “Aunt Diane drove her husband to kill himself. No one knows it, but he took a full bottle of sleeping pills.” Her mother told her so many stories she had never heard before that she started to wonder if any of it was true.
Her aunts told her even more stories about each other and her mother, “Your mother ran off with the Metzger boy for six months during her senior year. Just about killed your grandmother.” “Your mother drove away more men than just your father. Mean from the day she was born.” “Your mother…”
Nine months after her grandfather’s funeral Joan stopped answering her phone. By then she held more secrets than Montezuma’s tomb. She was so saturated with their secrets that hers were on the brink of spilling out into her life.
***
She had considered going back to work several times over the last few weeks, but the thought of her teller station, her drawer filled with ones, fives, tens, and twenties knotted her stomach.
She only had two weeks of FMLA leave left. She spent the first two weeks planning her mother’s funeral, signing paperwork, cleaning out the house, and putting it up for sale. She had convinced her psychiatrist that the responsibility and loss of her mother were suffocating. That she needed a break from work to compose herself, to reestablish the healthy habits that quelled her panic attacks. She had been medication free since she started trying to get pregnant six years ago and didn’t want to take steps backwards.
During that time she and Henry had done everything they could to conceive. They had sex every day. They abstained from sex to increase his sperm count. She charted her temperature. She stood on her head after sex. She paid a hundred dollars for false unicorn root. No old wives tale was off limits.
Even modern medicine failed them. After thousands of dollars in tests the doctor declared both Henry and Joan healthy, fertile, and functional.
Just as her period informed her monthly that she had failed again, every paycheque taunted her with the five months of sick leave she had saved. When her mother died, Joan figured she’d never get another chance to use it. She was past the dark side of thirty-five. Henry had given up hope and she was praying for miracles she didn’t believe in. She wondered if somewhere deep down in her genetic coding, her body didn’t want to procreate, didn’t want to continue her family’s dysfunctional legacy.
***
Joan walked out into the August sun. She walked to the bar at the end of the street thinking a beer and people watching might lift her mood, distract her from her dead mother, nonexistent baby, and cracking brother.
The roots of her hair were damp. The sun was a warm salve on her face. A slight sheen of sweat covered her skin. Her muscles smiled with the movement.
She walked past the bar, past the flower shop a block north, past the Polish diner five blocks from her house. She could walk forever.
She smiled at people as she walked past them. The old man carrying a plastic bag from a gas station. The teenage girls walking in a group, moving like one entity, laughing as they looked at their cell phones oblivious to the adulthoods of alternating boredom and suffering awaiting them. The skateboarder with her hat turned around backwards, the bill flat.
Joan revelled in her body’s strength, her endurance. For the first time in a long time she didn’t feel like a broken machine, failing to produce the one thing she was meant for. The one thing she wanted more than anything.
***
When she was twelve, Joan walked twenty miles along the railroad tracks to Dellroy. She set her eyes on the grain mills and didn’t look back. Her intention had been to run away, but when she got there, it looked exactly like Cherrville. The only difference was that the high school football team mascot was a bulldog. So, in place of eagles painted in every store front window were hulking blue bulldogs. She knew then that she would have to go much farther to escape her little town and her mother.
She walked into the first store she saw – a hardware store – and asked to use the phone to call her mom. The man behind the counter gave her a popsicle while she waited.
For six hours she sat on the hardware store steps. She could have walked home in less time. But her mother said she would come. And she did. But not until dusk had settled firmly on the town and the streetlights lining main street came on with a soft glow that only made the street feel emptier.
When he closed up for the night the hardware store owner asked if she wanted a ride home, but she declined. She knew her mother would come. And if Joan was not waiting when her mother arrived she would have been in more trouble than she was already.
While she waited Joan worked out what she was going to say. She was sorry. It would never happen again. She knew the railroad tracks were dangerous. She didn’t realize how far she had walked until the glint of the sun off the grain elevators blinded her. She hadn’t meant to go so far. She loved her mother and she was really, really sorry.
When her mother finally arrived she smelled like whiskey and fresh cigarette smoke swirled inside the car. Joan threw her bag in the back seat, rolled down the passenger window, and climbed in the front next to her mother. “I…” she started.
“You, what?” her mother glared through the smoke. “You want to leave like your father did? Leave me and Tommy? You think there is something better out there waiting for you?”
Exactly, thought Joan. All the excuses and apologies she had devised hitched a ride on the cigarette smoke drifting out the window. If only she could get them back, shove them in her mouth and make them come out right. But all her words were gone.
***
Joan inhaled deeply, trying to rid herself of the anger she had carried for far too long. Anger that had made her strong with its weight, but was now useless.
She looked up into an endless blue sky for rain clouds. A sudden summer shower would feel great she thought. She almost wished Tommy’s text was more than an homage to their mother’s obsession with the weather.
Sweat trickled down her legs and pooled in the dip of her ankle. Her clothes clung to her like a blistered second skin. She instantly felt ridiculous. A grown woman wandering the streets without a purpose or a destination. She wasn’t even paying attention to where she was going anymore. She had gotten lost in memories. Memories that had nothing to do with her present.
She had a good life. A happy life. She had nothing to run away from now. She started to turn around but realized that she didn’t recognize the neighbourhood.
Rows of storefronts lined the street. Mid-century brick buildings of varying heights connected like row houses. A rim shop reflected sun from a corner where it stood next to a bakery. She didn’t see a gas station for blocks.
Joan slid her hand over her flat front pocket. She left her cell phone at home. She hadn’t intended to go any further than the bar at the end of her street. She hadn’t meant to get lost.
She spied a small convenience store sandwiched between a nail salon and a cigar shop. The glass door was clear of any smudges and the front stoop was freshly swept. The metal door frame and handle sparkled despite the apparent age of the building.
She walked quickly to the pay phone in the back. Something that looked like peanut butter covered the receiver. She hoped it was peanut butter and didn’t investigate further. She grabbed a bottle of water and walked to the front of the small store. As she paid for her drink, she asked the store owner if she could use his phone. He responded with a shrug and pointed to the pay phone as he placed her change in her hand.
She had better luck with the ladies at the nail salon next door. She imagined an unspoken camaraderie, a mutual understanding of being a woman alone and lost in the world. Smiling with gratitude, she picked up the receiver and looked at the number pad.
Her fingers hovered above the keys as she realized she didn’t know Henry’s cell phone number. She never called him. And Tommy always called her. She never had a reason to call him. She hadn’t called any of her friends in months because they never had time to talk anymore. Her childhood phone number, the one that always brought her mother to pick her up, flashed through her mind, but that number was disconnected years ago when her mother got sick and she and Tommy moved across the state to live closer to Joan.
She forced a smile and dialed seven random numbers. Pretended to speak with someone. Thanked the ladies and left the salon. She sat on a bench across the street to rest and watched the two women getting their nails done. They talked and laughed like old friends. Two little girls spun in the open space of the shop. Their dresses swirled around them.
She wondered if her mother ever took her to the salon before her father left. If, before Joan was born, her mother felt the yearning that Joan now felt for a child of her own. Of a small face that looked just like hers. Of a small body to hold and to protect from all the monsters that live in the night. Of a daughter who would sit on a bench in the middle of August, remember her and long for her in return.
Joan tried to imagine herself in the scene, getting her nails done while her daughter toddled about in a pink, ruffled dress. She tried to imagine laughing again. How long had it been since she laughed a happy laugh? Not the maniacal, grief induced laugh that escaped at her mother’s funeral.
She wished her misery had a body other than hers. Then she would have someone to call. Misery was very dependable these days.
***
She stood to begin the long walk home. Her legs felt like rubber chickens and suddenly her back started to ache. I don’t have enough energy to get home, she thought. She felt panic atoms colliding in her chest. The mass grew larger. She imagined her lung fibers tightening, all her blood rushing to her heart. I’ll die in the street. No one will find me. She wondered how long it would take all of her body’s blood to reach her heart, would it explode? These were old thoughts. Stop. Stop. Stop, she willed herself. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She pictured Henry’s face and the panic started to subside. She unclenched her hands, opened her eyes, and kept walking, taking deep breaths until she felt lightheaded.
***
When she met Henry it was love at first sight. She believed in things like that back then. She trusted the Universe to lead her to the places and people she needed. When she saw his smile, his attention focused solely on her, the mass of people between them turned into the swirling colours of a Van Gogh painting.
He was nothing like the other boys she had dated. He wasn’t in college. He didn’t have a plan for the future. He was happy in the present and seemed to have enough. The only things he wanted was beer and a good laugh.
Joan, on the other hand, always wanted more. Everything was never enough. First, she wanted out of her little town. Then, she wanted a college degree. She wanted an executive job at the bank, but she was always passed over for promotions. Her mother got sick and Joan took on a lot of her care. So, she modified her desires to include a house, a dog, a baby. She got nearly everything she wanted.
The past six years while they had been trying to conceive, she had spent a lot of time thinking about the child they might have. His blond hair and green eyes. His easy smile and the braces he would eventually need. She hoped for Henry’s athleticism and her love of reading.
Her child most likely would have developed one of the myriad of mental illnesses coursing through the limbs of her family tree – anxiety, depression, bipolar, OCD, hypochondria. For this reason, she sometimes accepted their inability to conceive as a blessing, but she didn’t believe in the will of the Universe anymore.
Somewhere along the way she had developed a will of her own. A stubborn will that sometimes couldn’t look at her friends’ babies without turning green and raging internally. She imagined a dragon with fierce claws tearing deep into the muscles surrounding her heart.
***
Fatigue settled into Joan’s legs. How long had she been walking? Going home always seemed to take longer than leaving. This was true for vacations and apparently for reliving one’s childhood sense of adventure. She tapped her empty water bottle against her leg. She couldn’t remember the last time her body was this tired. She used to test her limits more, how far she could run, how much she could remember, how late she could stay up, how much she could drink. Had she gotten lazy or simply busy with life? Were they the same thing?
A few blocks away, Joan saw the outline of an angel between two trees. The cemetery meant she was close to home. Maybe another mile. When she reached the entrance, she hesitated. It would be nice to sit down for a while. Maybe a quiet place to think was what she needed, somewhere away from the noise of the street.
She should go home while her legs still worked. But the tombstones and grass offered a quietude the city lacked anywhere else. Even the parks only emanated an illusion of natural stillness. Families, dog walkers, and kids playing football always covered the lawns. It was just another place for people to crowd. The noise pollution in her own backyard was often a distraction, too. Basketballs bouncing, small children screaming, and dogs barking drowned out the birds and crickets.
The cemetery, however, was serene. In a world so focused on life people ignored death. The tree branches swayed ever so slightly when the wind blew. A true resting place. And Joan needed to rest. She wanted to rest. If her mother were buried here she could pretend to visit her, but she had sent her body back home to be buried with Joan’s grandparents in the family cemetery. It’s what her mother had wanted.
***
Four months after their dad left, when Tommy was eight, Joan found him in the town cemetery walking up and down the rows of headstones. Joan watched him for a long time before she walked up to him.
“Whatcha doin’, bud?”
He kept walking, looking at each headstone before moving on to the next. “Looking for dad.”
“He’s not here, Tommy.”
“Mom said he should be.”
“Mom’s just really sad.” Even then Joan knew her mom wasn’t just sad. At twelve-years old she didn’t know the words, the definitions that explained her mother’s conditions. She wouldn’t begin to understand until she was well into adulthood.
“Dad can make her better. That’s why I need to find him.”
She and Tommy walked silently through the rest of the cemetery. She couldn’t make him stop. She didn’t want to. He still had hope and she couldn’t take that away. She couldn’t fix anything, but she could walk beside him and hold his hand.
After reading the very last tombstone he looked up at her and said, “I guess you were right.”
***
She stepped through the gate and walked to the center of the cemetery where an angel stood above a row of family markers. They appeared older than the other stones. Perhaps it was the heart of the cemetery. The heart of the dead. Engraved on the angel’s base was a blessing:
May the dark not follow
May the rain cease
May you find love
May you find peace
She sat against a tombstone. The granite cooled her warm skin. Her mother’s funeral had been less than peaceful. Her mother had a lot of friends from town who showed up to give their condolences.
Joan suspected that her own high school classmates stopped by just to see if she had gotten fat. She spent the day telling person after person that she didn’t have kids.
All the while Joan tried to keep an eye on Tommy, make sure he didn’t drink too much from the flask he kept hidden in his suit pocket. His mood swings in the days leading up to and the day of the funeral went from punching holes in walls to uncontrolled sobbing. She worried he would cause a scene.
Then her aunts showed up. Both of them. At the same time.
When they started asking her about her grandmother’s pearl necklace and antique candlesticks Joan opened her mouth and all of the mean and hateful things she had been told over the years spewed forth like a flood of biblical proportions.
Aunt Beth’s illegitimate child was born for the town to see and Aunt Diane’s husband committed suicide in front of everyone. Joan made sure to smother every last ounce of her family’s dignity.
When she finished the funeral home was silent. She didn’t know half the people standing in the viewing room. Her voice was a raspy whisper.
She didn’t know how long Tommy had been whispering, “Sis,” and pulling on her arm. She didn’t stay for the service. She ran out, left Henry with her crazy family, and drove into the country where she sat in her car next to a cornfield until well after her mother was put into the ground.
***
Henry was stretched out on the couch watching a baseball game when Joan finally made it home from her walk. She felt like Pinocchio. Her limbs stiffened with every step she took. Would she become a wooden woman? Was she already? “There you are,” he said cheerily as he glanced from the TV and back again in a single sentence. Harley jumped off the couch to greet her.
That night Joan slept longer and more soundly than she had in two months. She dreamed about her mother. Joan was a child again, five or six, maybe. A warm July rain dropped fat prisms of water from the sky. Rainbows fluttered everywhere. The sun shone so brightly the rain seemed impossible.
Joan splashed in puddles, her feet bare. Then she was spinning. Her face turned to the sky. Water filled her mouth, her eyes, her cupped hands. She lifted from the ground, still spinning, filling with water.
She thought she should be afraid, but the sun was so yellow and the water so warm. She melted into fat prisms of liquid. She felt light refracting rainbows throughout her atoms. The separation and recombination of matter was exhilarating. She felt like a science experiment.
And the falling wasn’t like falling from a cliff or tripping down the stairs. She coasted on the wind. She moved softly from one plane to the next.
Below, she saw her mother, younger, prettier, happier. Joan hadn’t seen her mother this happy since before her father left. Now, her mother was spinning, her pink, ruffled dress floating on the air, her face turned up to the sky, her arms held out like a child pretending to be a ballerina. She laughed and called Joan, Joan, Where have you gone?
Joan slipped through the sky. She sparkled with lightness and a feeling like happiness. She vibrated the word mother. Mother. Joan spun toward her mother. She landed on a crow’s beak, midflight. The bird spun fast toward the ground like a suicide bomber. Her mother’s laugh turned to a shriek and her teeth elongated and sharpened, her eyes narrowed and she swooped up, toward the bird.
Joan fell into her mother’s mouth, past the pointed teeth, into darkness.
She woke to Henry’s hand on her shoulder. Her side of the bed damp with sweat.
***
The next day, driving to Cherrville, Joan’s stomach groaned, her intestines shifted. Every fifty miles or so her body protested her journey.
She imagined a tumor of emotion growing tendrils that dug deeper into her muscles with each mile she passed. She didn’t want to go home. She didn’t know why, but she had to. She listened to her father’s Alabama “Roll On” CD that was in her CD player the night he left.
She arrived at her family’s section of the cemetery just before noon. She didn’t bring flowers. Her mother wouldn’t have appreciated flowers. Would have complained they weren’t practical. She pulled the weeds from around the base of her grandparents’ tombstones. The dirt over her mother’s plot was still a soft mound. New grass pushed through the dirt like fine strands of baby hair.
She laid Harley’s backseat cover over her mother’s grave. She reached for the peace she had felt the day before. All she found was the anger that still burned inside her despite years of therapy. For the last time she spoke all the angry words she had to her mother. She railed at the Universe for what would not be the last time. She felt no relief, just the gravity of grief holding her in place. Even though the sun warmed her face, Joan felt sprinkles of rain dot her arms like manna from heaven. Like a blessing or a touch of love from a woman who lived her life in a dark cloud where she only allowed rain to form. Maybe Tommy was right. Maybe it was always raining. But it was her choice to let the rain drown her or to use it to grow like a tree reaching for the sun.