Chapter Thirty-One

 

After the funeral, Steve returned to Oregon, and the children flew back to their respective colleges. Lillianna planned to spend another week with Greg and Sarah at their house on the bay in Dagsboro to go through their father’s things and to come to grips with the enormity of their loss.

When she unpacked the bag with the clothes her father had worn to the hospital, Lillianna laughed out loud at the purple shoelaces he’d woven into the orthopedic shoes he’d worn for nearly fifty years. And she knew instantly that she’d take one of those shoes home to Oregon, have it bronzed and re-laced with those purple shoelaces. It was the perfect symbol of his struggle and the tenacity with which he fought to save his leg. Tenacity was his lifelong gift to his children. He’d so clearly demonstrated it in the way he’d never given up on his dream to be whole. Lillianna could only hope that she’d pursue her writing dreams with the same fervor with which her father had pursued his.

* * *

One week turned into two. Lillianna had always loved the ocean in late October when most of the autumn had passed.

While her brother and sister-in-law worked, she drove into Bethany Beach. Its sand was empty of the summer rows of colorful umbrellas and beach towels. Only a few stragglers strolled the shore. An occasional small child dug in the moist sand. The air draped cool and silver over her shoulders as she trudged the shoreline for miles along the Atlantic. And somehow those walks brought her back to life. There was something regenerative about the ocean. Something larger than the little lives we all spent inside ourselves.

Bethany had a small boardwalk. When she finished walking, she sat on a bench at the edge of the wide wooden walkway and turned her face to the cool wind off the Atlantic. It blew her hair away from her face. She watched a young woman sketching at the water’s edge, her back against an abandoned lifeguard stand. A few yards further up the beach, a man jogged along the white sand with his dog, a beautiful German Shepherd.

A middle-aged couple sat on a blanket and drank wine from a bottle they passed back and forth between them. He wrapped his left arm around her waist.

Five old women posed in the surf while one snapped a picture, positioning the group, so the cresting ocean formed a backdrop.

What brought them all there?

The living must find ways to comfort themselves and beaches provide a kind of solitude, even with other people around. Maybe it was the sound of the waves curling shoreward and repeatedly breaking, drowning out voices and other sounds. Maybe it also drowned out the longing for something more. The ocean was complete onto itself.

With her unobstructed view, she took her journal from her purse and opened it on her lap.

Would she return to this place, maybe twenty-five years from now? If so, she’d walk more slowly, perhaps a little bent over, wearing wide-legged pants, sensible shoes and a sweater. Maybe she’d pose for a photo with her brother and Sarah or some friends. Would she see a woman sitting alone at the edge of the boardwalk writing in a journal and remember herself? Or would she find an old man in a wheelchair, eating a chocolate ice cream cone, and live again those hospital days with her father? What did we learn by taking mental photographs of the strangers we passed?

Perhaps we learned about ourselves and our own placement in the vast world.

A young woman walked on the beach, holding her son’s hand and Lillianna saw herself with Zack, more than twenty years before. Felt the pressure of his small, damp hand and the granules of sand between his fingers, as his tiny footprints indented the shore next to her own.

Able to observe, like on a huge screen with three movies playing at once, she saw where she’d been, where she was now and where she headed.

A little girl in a yellow slicker ran by her, chasing a seagull and kicking sand onto her journal. Lillianna stopped writing and smiled as the gull took flight. For an instant, this little girl merged into Lillianna’s daughter, Cassy, and her brown eyes smiled back. Perhaps we remembered to prove the past still lived inside of us.

Greg believed this quiet week by the ocean would provide a place for her to heal. And he was right. She walked the beach during the day, and at night she sat by the big window in their living room with the lights out and listened. Even in the darkness, the waves broke radiant and full.

Each morning, she saw the same crane, his long, graceful neck arched as he fished for breakfast in the shallow bay waters outside her bedroom window. He’d be there just after dawn when the sky split into long, willowy fingers of light.

On the weekend, she and Greg made a trip to Rising Sun to visit the old farmhouse that had once belonged to their great grandparents. From there they drove the short distance to Farmington and saw their father’s birthplace, the old barn where he’d hidden the toys he’d whittled for his brother and sisters. The house was vacant, and as she walked up the rutted drive leading to that ramshackle old farmhouse, she looked up at the attic. There she saw the little boy gazing out his bedroom window, where his mother had taken him to see the stars.

Driving north, she had the sudden urge to go back herself—to return to the house in Collins Park. “Do you mind, Greg? It’s not far out of the way.”

“Not a bit.”

She drove down New Castle Avenue, past the Collins Park entrance, to the place where Colored George’s store once stood. When she discovered it had been torn down years ago for a gas station, she made a U-turn in the parking lot and headed back.

When she and Greg were small, they’d believed the walk from their house on Single Avenue to the school crossing was at least ten miles. In reality, it was only a few blocks, and Lillianna came to the right turn for Single Avenue long before she anticipated it.

She backed the car up and looked at her brother. “The memory plays tricks on us.”

“Not the way you thought it would be, huh, Em?”

She hadn’t been back to Collins Park since they moved the summer she turned fourteen. The streets were narrow and cars lined both sides with houses clumped so close together their front yards looked like postage stamps. Even so, Lillianna was propelled by a deep and immutable sense of home. Though in fact, she owned nothing, the place remained hers in some very significant way.

“It looks so much smaller,” she finally said.

“I know,” her brother agreed. “Pop felt that way about the place in Farmington the first time I took him back.”

There was something universal about that feeling, and it descended upon her, the smallness of things returned to—things we have left behind.

In the woods behind the houses on Single Avenue, a few green leaves still remained on the maples, waiting for their turn to redden and fall to the ground, where the snows would soon blanket them.

Lillianna understood this all seemed small to her now because her world had grown so much larger and she, too, had learned how to wait. And how to return. She parked along the curb in the only available spot, a few houses up from number 317 and got out.

“I was here with Pop last year. I’ll wait in the car while you have a look.” Greg leaned the seat back, ready for a nap.

She walked down the sloping sidewalk under a cool, mostly gray sky. Now and then the sun found a clear spot among the clouds and shined. As she stood in front of the house, a breeze lifted her hair, and the crabapple tree her mother had planted erupted into motion, its branches still heavy with apples. Shouts from schoolchildren on the hillside, where she and Greg had played hide-and-go-seek, drifted down with the wind.

Another memory rose, and she stared at the concrete steps in front of the house as if she’d seen a ghost standing there. And to her surprise, she laughed out loud.

It was 1956, and her father had come home drunk. The next morning, deciding she’d finally had enough, her mother packed his underwear, socks, and shirts into an old wicker suitcase, with a maroon band around the center. Emma, about nine years old, stood in the bedroom doorway as her mother’s frantic hands raced between the dresser and the suitcase, stuffing piles of white cotton garments inside.

Unable to close the case when she’d finished, Cassandra summoned Emma to sit on it while she clamped it shut. Together they lugged the bag down the hallway to the living room.

“What are you going to do with this, Mom?”

“I’m going to throw it out the front door. And him, too.” Her mouth looked tight. “I’ve had just about enough of his drunken rages and his taking it out on us. All I ever did was try to help and stand by him. But enough is enough. Wouldn’t you say so, Em?”

Emma nodded, too shocked and frightened to speak.

Her mother yanked open the door and flung the suitcase into the yard. As it sailed over the concrete walkway, the latches opened, and his undershirts, pants, and socks floated onto the neighbor’s yards, drifted down into the lower limbs of the willow tree and stuck to the thorny rose bushes and hedges, like giant white blossoms.

Embarrassed, Emma glanced around for signs of neighborhood kids, then up into her mother’s face as her lips curled into a slow, widening grin. Her shoulders jiggled, and she burst into gales of laughter.

Emma laughed, too. They wrapped their arms around each other and convulsed until they dropped, still entwined and giggling. Tears streamed down their faces as they rolled around the small patch of grass that marked their front yard.

“I guess we’re not gonna get rid of him that easy, honey.” Her voice sounded funny, and Emma didn’t know if her mother was still laughing or if she’d begun to cry.

When her mother started to gather up the clothes, Emma headed for the rose bushes, picking up socks on her way. Each time their eyes met, they started to giggle again. With his clothes neatly restacked in his drawers, Emma and her mother returned to the front steps, where they sat until the sun set, gold, and pink, in the sky in front of them.

Her mother had wrapped her arm around Emma’s shoulder. “I reckon the Lord’s trying to tell me Calvin Miller has been thrown out enough.” It was then Emma realized her parents’ lives were tangled together in far more complicated ways than she could understand.

Now, as the sound of their long-ago laughter washed in through the screen of memory, Lillianna wondered why she’d never returned to this site of so much of her childhood. An explicit recollection of her bedroom in every minute detail flooded her, and she stared up at its window.

“What you looking at, lady?” The voice of a young black boy on the front steps startled her.

“I’m looking at this nice house.” She smiled. “I used to live here. A long time ago. My mom and dad bought it, brand spanking new. I was just a baby. See that window... right next to the front door? That was my bedroom.”

“That’s my room.” He cocked his head, stood up and moved closer, looked her straight in the eyes. “You sure? You ain’t jiving me, are ya?”

“I’m positive. I can prove it.”

“How?”

“You still have wood floors in your room?”

“Yeah.” He cocked his head.

“Well, if you look carefully a few feet in front of the window, you’ll find a dark circle about the size of a quarter. It’s a burn mark.”

“Yeah. I seen that spot.”

“I did it with my magnifying glass. When the sun came through the glass, the floor got so hot it almost started a fire.”

“I bet you got your tail whupped for that.”

She laughed. “I probably did. I know something else about your room. Something only a person who sleeps there could know.”

“What’s that?”

“If you leave your door and the bathroom one open at night, the trees make funny shadows on your walls. They scared me. I thought they were bogeymen.”

The boy grinned. “It don’t happen if you shut the bathroom door. I always ask my mom to close it when she goes to bed. Sometimes she forgets, and I seen ‘em, but I ain’t scared like you was.”

She planted her hands on her hips, gave him a searching look. “So, do you believe me now?”

He nodded, and she thrust out her hand. “My name’s Lillianna. What’s yours?”

“I’m Charlie. Charlie Barnes.” He smiled back, two brand-new white teeth just coming in. He shook her hand.

“It’s good to meet you, Charlie. Good to meet someone who has my old room. You taking good care of it?”

“I ain’t burned no holes in the floor. But Mom’s always yelling at me to clean it up. I got a sister. She’s fifteen. I hate her.”

“You’ll like her better when you’re grown up. You still got that little creek out back?”

“Yeah, me and Tim, he’s my friend, we got this neat fort in the woods. Hey, you wanna see it?”

“I’d love to see it, Charlie.”

Charlie took her on a tour of the backyard.

Lillianna had spent more than a decade of her life here. She watched as the bare willow branches swayed and bent into graceful curves like wiry ballet dancers. A few stubborn leaves whispered, and for a fleeting instant, she thought she heard music. From the woods behind the house, the long, slurring sound of her own clarinet rose and disappeared. She was washed in a swell of nostalgia that broke over her so suddenly it snatched her breath away.

The picket fence was gone and a four-foot cyclone one stood in its place. The yard sloped down to the woods and was smaller than she remembered, too. But the trees were huge. A radio played on the back porch her father had built. Maybe that explained the clarinet she’d thought she heard.

The big old oak tree, where Greg hung a rope for her to swing all the way across to the other side, still arched its thick branches over the creek. Charlie leaped onto the rope and demonstrated. She’d forgotten all about the big knothole where she and Greg had left secret messages until Charlie thrust his hand inside to check and her heart dropped an extra beat.

What a curious form this journey home had taken for Lillianna. Perhaps the act of going back automatically altered the things for which she searched. But what she did find, through her chance meeting with Charlie Barnes, was something she’d never even considered. The house had changed, the neighborhood altered, nearly beyond recognition, and Lillianna and her father had transformed as well. But that old oak tree remained exactly the same as in her memory.

As they meandered back toward the house, Charlie reached up and took her hand. “Ya wanna come inside?”

“I don’t want to trouble your mother. She might not want a stranger traipsing through her house.”

“You ain’t no stranger,” he said incredulously. “You used to live here. She won’t mind.”

“Why don’t you ask her. I’ll meet you out front. Maybe your mom would want to come out and meet me first.”

Charlie raced across the yard and inside his back door. Lillianna opened the gate and waited on the front pavement. Within a minute or two, his mother appeared on the step.

Lillianna introduced herself. “My parents, Calvin and Cassandra Miller, were the first owners of this house. I live in Oregon now, and I guess I just wanted to see the old place again. As you can imagine, it has a lot of memories.”

“We all wants to go back. But my family home ain’t there no more. All Buttonwood was torn down. Brand spankin’ new houses in there now.”

“Do you remember George’s grocery store?”

She smiled. “I surely do. He had the best penny candy for miles around.”

“He was a wonderful man. One of my best friends when I was a kid.”

“No kiddin’. Old George was a friend of yours?”

Lillianna nodded.

“I reckon everyone who grew up around these parts knew him. I went to his funeral. Long time ago now, but you shoulda seen all them white folks. It was amazin’, especially then.”

Emma’s friendship with Colored George must have warmed the woman. “You wanna come inside and have a looksee?”

“I’d love to. That is if it isn’t a lot of trouble.”

“It ain’t spick, and span, like I’d a had it if I knowed you was comin’, but you’re welcome just the same. My name’s Sally.” She flung open the door.

And the first thing Lillianna saw was the paneling her father had hung more than forty years ago, tongue and groove, knotty pine. The wood had aged and turned darker, but it was still there. She remembered how all the neighbors came by to admire the work with its built-in and lighted stained-glass panels. Her father was so proud. And the kitchen cabinets he’d made from the same wood still hung, the woodgrain colors more vivid and deep than she remembered.

“My father hung that paneling, Sally, and he made the cupboards when I was just a little girl.”

“That wood’s plum beautiful, Miss Lillianna. It’s the main reason me and Gilbert... he’s my husband... wanted this house. There was a cheaper one up the street. Gil says they don’t make paneling like this no more. Says it’ll be here long after we is dead and gone.” Sally smiled and showed Lillianna the rest of the house.

She didn’t need to see anything else, though. Just knowing that old paneling and the cabinets he’d made still hung on the walls rose goosebumps on her arms. Lillianna wasn’t sure she completely understood, but it had to do with his leaving something of himself in that old house he’d once shared with his wife and children.

Something beautiful.

* * *

On her flight back to Oregon, Lillianna cradled the box holding her father’s shoe and thought about the trip she and Greg had taken to the old neighborhood. She wondered how she could give Zack and Cassy the realization of what their childhood home might someday mean to them.

Perhaps they would have to come to that awareness on their own when time made its perspective available to them. Would Cassy roam the desert behind their old house and remember the gray stuffed animal, her favorite mouse, she’d buried and then couldn’t find. One day, it washed up after the monsoon rains—muddy, but intact. And after a cycle in the washing machine, Mousy was as good as new.

Would the two of them pause among the creosote and sage bushes to listen to the ghost-like sounds of their Big Wheel vehicles roaring through the Sonoran desert, a cloud of golden dust behind them? Would Zack laugh out loud when he gazed up into the rotted wooden boards of his treehouse and remembered the sign his sister painted, NO BOYS ALOUD?

Lillianna understood they’d have to discover for themselves how much they would come to miss the very things they hurried to escape in growing up.

She tucked the box under the seat in front of her, nestled against the side of the plane, the wall cool against her cheek, then pulled the nearly-filled journal from her purse and made one last entry, attempting to put those days with her father into perspective and help herself understand what they’d meant.

From the other side of the country, the other side of my life, I came to that place—The Johns Hopkins Hospital—to be with him. And each day, for more than two weeks, we greeted the morning together.

It was in those moments I came to understand, I mean really understand, how far my father and I had journeyed together and how much I was able to reconcile the separate truths of that voyage. My father was a man I came to love in an intricate and irreversible way. Now that he’s gone, I can’t yet conceive of his forever absence from my life.

But if time could magically cease for my father and me, I know that is where I would stop it—in that place, at that unlikely time in both our lives. That time when our roles reversed, and I became the parent of my father. It was a wondrous, unbelievable time, especially the way we were in the morning.

And that is what I want to remember—to remember always. The two of us, father and daughter, shadowed by the first light. Momentarily alone together, our breath rising into the morning air and him, lying there, telling me for the first time, the story of his life. The story of the man who was, after all, my father.