Northampton
June 10th 1971
‘My room. What have they done to it? My ceiling rises and falls. My posters buckle. The stuffed dog on my easy chair sways and sighs and my mother’s voice wafts over me like a wreath of smoke. Sometimes she is in the room, checking my temperature, changing my sheets, feeding me water, penicillin, aspirin. Sometimes she is on the phone in the study next door, and sooner or later, she will come in and tell me what I did wrong.’
She’d been home for three days when she wrote that. She’d stepped off the plane with a fever of 104. But even as her ceiling rose and her posters buckled, she would have known her mother held nothing against her. It was her incorrigible ex-husband that Nancy Wakefield felt like strangling. How dare he put this girl on a plane in this condition? It was his duty as a father to explain the damage done. It was her duty as a mother to hold him to it.
Especially during those first few days. She couldn’t help it! Anger was coming out of her head like smoke. But to no avail. The consulate wouldn’t say where he was. The State Department wouldn’t either. ‘I just got through to Amy,’ she told Jeannie one evening. This was when she was well enough to sit up and try some soup. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Amy and I just had a pretty long chat, and I must say I’m a little disappointed. Because you know, we had many pleasant conversations over the past year, and I had come to think of her as a friend. But this time…well, something’s definitely come over her.’
Nancy Wakefield sat down on the foot of her daughter’s bed. ‘So anyway. It was about 9 pm their time when I finally got through, and a man answered. A man who couldn’t speak English. Don’t you think that’s a little odd?’
She patted her daughter’s knee. ‘You still there, lambie?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Anyway, when I asked Amy about this man who answered her phone, she said he was her bodyguard. So of course I wanted to ask. Why would you need a bodyguard? But her tone was so sharp I just asked if she knew where we could find your father. She then told me she’d be the last person to know, as she had severed all connections with him. Severed all connections! Can you credit that? When I asked her why, she got pretty huffy! All she’d say was that – to the best of her knowledge – he’s back in the States. But I’m sorry. I’m just not going to accept that. You leave it to me, lambie. I’ll get to the bottom of this.’
Off she wafted. To make another phone call? Her voice was softer now. She did more listening than talking.
‘I’m finally getting somewhere,’ she said later that night.
The next morning, when she sat down on the end of Jeannie’s bed, her eyes were red. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘So, so sorry. I should have stood my ground. I should never have let him take you.’ She clenched her little fists. ‘The lies he fed me. The things he didn’t tell me! Well, I sure know now. What a name for a tree. Boy am I going to give that father of yours an earful.’
When Jeannie asked who she’d talked to, she said, ‘Never you mind.’
When she asked if she’d talked to someone called Sinan, her mother said, ‘Sinan. That’s his name, is it?’
‘You talked to him?’
‘I believe that the…’ She folded her arms and swallowed hard. ‘I believe I spoke to the boy’s uncle.’
‘Which one?’
‘Oh lambie, you don’t expect me to remember that, do you? They all have such strange names.’
‘What’s happened? Don’t tell me something bad’s happened!’
‘Of course something bad’s happened! Look at you!’
‘I didn’t mean me, I meant Sinan.’
‘Are you talking about that boyfriend of yours? Well, there’s a change! Jeannie, I can’t tell you how hurtful that was. To find out you had a boyfriend but didn’t trust me enough to tell me. I’ll bet it was that father of yours who talked you into that. I’m right, aren’t I? I can just hear him. Best not to tell you-know-who you have a boyfriend. Well, some boyfriend he turned out to be!’
‘He said he was okay, though?’
‘Oh, yes, indeedy. He’s just fine.’
‘But someone else isn’t? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?’
‘How the heck am I supposed to know?’ Seeing the tears streaming down Jeannie’s cheeks, she said, ‘I’m sorry, lambie. I didn’t mean to upset you. But really, you can’t expect me to ask about people I don’t even know. Listen, let’s just take it slow, okay? Whatever happened out there, it’s over. The important thing is that you’re home. Let’s just concentrate on making you better.’
But she wouldn’t be better, couldn’t, shouldn’t, until she heard his voice.
The floor looped and buckled as she struggled to the phone.
This time Jeannie got Sinan’s mother. For the longest time, she could hear only her breathing. ‘Why are you calling?’ Sibel asked finally.
‘I need to speak to Sinan.’
Another long silence. An echo. Then a click.
‘You may not be surprised to hear this,’ Jeannie’s mother told her when she made it downstairs for supper. ‘But your father has still not graced us with a call. Judging by his track record, we could be in for a long wait. But if he does call, you are not to speak to him. You are to hand the Postcard Man straight to me. Understood?’
As if.
‘Sit down, lambie. I’ve made us macaroni cheese.’
Over supper, they fell back into their old pattern. Her mother told her about everything that had happened to her over the past year – her job at the library, her foray into night school, the woman’s group she joined and abandoned, the boyfriend who hadn’t worked out, and the new one she wasn’t sure about. Jeannie asked her why and she explained. She told Jeannie how it felt to fall in love when she was still smarting with hurt from the man who’d come before, and how it felt to sit in a room with a group of women who were even angrier with men than she was. How walking into her first night class had been like stepping off a cliff. She told Jeannie how bored, how suffocated she felt every morning when she went into work, how the dread of being stuck there forever was what had kept her going to that night class and then she confessed that when Jeannie had left last June she was ‘quite simply, bereft’. ‘Nothing prepared me for it. I’d actually been looking forward to a little time alone. Because you know, lambie, you’d been so difficult. So critical. So unappreciative. All you wanted to talk about was leaving.
So I thought, well. Why put off the inevitable? I knew I was going to miss you. But that first morning when I came down here? I felt dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jeannie said meekly.
Triumphantly, her mother took her hand. ‘You mustn’t say that, lambie. The important thing is that you’re back. Now you’re back, I can breathe again.’ And Jeannie nodded, smiled, commiserated. She kept her talking, hoping she wouldn’t remember that a mother ought to stop talking about herself now and again, and do some listening.
When Jeannie stood up, her mother handed her a jar with a pierced lid. ‘Really, Mom. You’d think I was eight.’
‘Well, just this once,’ she said. ‘Just for old time’s sake. It used to make you so happy.’
‘I cried when they died.’
‘They don’t live long anyway. You know that!’
So Jeannie took the jar outside.
And there they were – the fireflies. Hundreds and thousands of them circling through the night. As she stood on the lawn with her jar, she could hear the teenagers horsing around the pool next door.
She would never laugh like that again.