21
IT WAS SNOWING OUT, and Tim was back home recuperating. I didn’t know the temperature, but cold is cold in Colorado. Tim was going to get back most of his life. But it had returned to him in an entirely different shape. The physical therapist told Meredith and Tim that he would walk again without the aid of a crutch in six months.
I gave Tim a novel for a welcome home gift. “It’s about a man who almost dies,” I said. I thought it would inspire him to carry on.
He was propped up in his bed. The TV blared, and he stared out the window. Meredith crossed the backyard in a sprint, taking out the garbage. She talked over the fence to a neighbor, a man most likely inquiring about Tim’s recovery.
Tim said to me, “Gaylen, you are slow to come out of hiding. But once you do, you’ll be surprised.”
“I’ll find myself, you mean?”
“No. That’s not it.”
“Tim, like you, I’m resilient. I’ll be fine.”
“What does ‘fine’ mean anyway? It’s being stuck and telling everyone you don’t mind being stuck.”
There was a new layer of cynicism snowing down on Tim’s jolly disposition.
“Do you need your meds?” I asked.
“Tell me, were you surprised when you cheated?”
“Never more surprised.”
Tim was chipping away at me again, but in his current state of misery, I let him go. It would be therapeutic for him to think that he was helping me. “It was like watching someone else going through the motions. But I felt dead until the moment that I succumbed. Suddenly my feelings were alive. It was exciting in the early stages. Better than being numb.”
“But now?”
“Sheer misery, old chap.”
“The human heart is deceitful.”
“I understand what you mean.”
“Do you?”
“Give me a little credit, Tim. I have been exposed to all things religious. My mother took me to every church in town.” I said it as gently as I knew how. “I’m not a Sunday school greenhorn.”
“Sunday school was a place to tell kids sunshine stories.”
“You need a pill,” I said.
“But Gods a valley sitter. I don’t hear him too good when the suns shining. But in the valley, he comes through loud and clear.”
I was hoping this was helping Tim. It seemed to place him in a better mood so I humored him.
“He allowed his creation to kill his boy. He sat and watched. That had to be hard,” he said.
“It never made sense.”
I wanted it to. “I haven’t heard a word from God, Tim. What do you do when there’s nothing from heaven but silence?”
“Get out of the noise, Gaylen.”
I shook out his next dose and put it on the tray in front of him.
“Can you get me one of those cookies that Meredith brought home?”
“I can. Then I have to go. My sister is calling me every night. Delia is lost without me.”
“I hope you help her find her way home.”
The last painted dress leaned against the small bedroom wall, casting no shadow, for the night had enveloped the room. I had not noticed the smallness of the apartment when I agreed to the sublease. The young Wilmington woman named Alice Poe who was my new roommate was a career woman who, like me, had decided to rent temporarily until deciding where to buy a home. She had left me a note on the corkboard in the kitchen telling me how to set the alarm and where to park my car. She was off on a summer vacation to France, and I would have the place to myself for two weeks.
I napped on Alice’s small tweed sofa, too tired to get ready for bed. My suitcases sat out in the middle of the floor. I lay contemplating where and when I would continue my education. I made a mental list that included visiting Delia in jail that afternoon and then soliciting schools for brochures. But I could not feel anything but anxious and for the life of me could not shake the nerves.
My guiding belief had been that once I had made my fortune, I would be at ease. It had not occurred to me that my father, driven by manic compulsions, was storing up a small fortune that would be my lot to manage. But the worry of how to care for the inheritance troubled me. Then there was the burden of how best to help Delia, whose money was being eaten up in legal costs. I fell asleep finally and woke at three in the morning to hear a faint shuffling noise.
Since I was unfamiliar with Alice’s neighborhood, I imagined it to be an overhead sound at first. A child getting up in the middle of the night and padding across the floor might make that sound from the overhead unit. I was drifting back to sleep when a sharp sound caused me to sit up.
I stood up, and just about the time I pulled on my robe, there was a dull knock against the apartment door.
Through the window, the streetlights flooded the landing enough to expose a figure standing in the common area. A hood covered his head. He knocked again. Finally, he said, “Gaylen, it’s me, Braden.”
Behind him, the flow of interstate traffic whispered faintly through the copse of trees. I let him in, and he was wet from a rain mist that followed him from his apartment in Wilmington to mine.
He pulled off the damp hooded sweatshirt and left it on the linoleum entry.
“It’s early,” I said.
He explained the intrusion. “I woke up, and you weren’t there.”
“Because Im here, Braden. I got my own place now.”
“You liking it here?”
“Until I buy a house.”
“I guess not.”
“Some for you too?”
“Are you staying that long?”
“A bit, if you’ll let me.”
I stepped aside to let him pass. “Are you okay?”
He looked around the place as he turned on the lights in the kitchen. Alice had the cute kind of tastes found in home-crafter’s bazaars, every small decorative piece hot glued with a bow. “Tim, how was he? I mean, I called, but he was sleeping. They got him doped up, Meredith says.”
“He’s got to depend on Meredith to get around. He gets sore lying in bed. She helps him move and roll over. You could go see him.”
“Yes, yes. I should do that.”
“The coffees in the fridge, just like home.”
He found the bag and made a half pot, very black and caffeinated like he liked it.
“You can sit if you want,” I said.
Braden took a seat at the small glass-top kitchen table. “Your sister getting any better?”
“Depends on what you mean by better.” I imagined Delia in jail and I felt sorrier for her at that moment than I had ever felt. “The attorney can get her off, he thinks, on an insanity plea.”
“That’s a logical direction.”
“She’ll go into an institution, Braden. The system here is out of whack.” It was all sad to think about. She was a woman beyond help or repair, but in that instant it came to me that I could love her and resign myself to the realization that if that was all that existed between us, I’d accept it. She had no gauge for loving back. My mother had believed that by withdrawing affection, she could force Delia to reach for sound reason. But Delia could not be forced to grow normal roots. She was a frail cactus incapable of roots, dependent on the desert elements for succor. “Delia will die in a place like that.”
“Truth is I didn’t come here at three in the morning to talk about your sister.” He had always wanted to iron things out in the middle of the night.
“How about you take the sofa, get some z’s, we’ll figure it out in the morning,” I said.
“I want to know about your brother, Truman.”
“So did I, Braden. Don’t set yourself up for disappointment.”
“Give me one detail about him. One thing you haven’t told me.”
“What good is it?” I asked.
“Maybe some good. Maybe not.”
“The nightmares. They were about him.”
He did not say much. He filled a cup for me and then one for him. “How do you know for sure what happened?”
“I put it all together, Braden.”
“How have things changed then, since you did all that?”
“Why are you here?”
“I think you lost your feelings for me, but I think they’re still there.”
“What’s that got to do with Truman?”
“Maybe he’s the cause of you losing your way.”
“What’s your excuse then?” I asked.
“I was mad at you.”
“Mad. Is that what you call it?”
“Back to the first question. How have things changed since you chased down your ghosts?”
I knew only one thing for certain. “I don’t have the nightmares anymore.”
“You ever think about me?”
“Yes.”
“In a good way?”
“Sometimes.”
“I miss you, Gaylen.”
“Were a mess together.”
“Would you be willing to let me date you again, no hope of anything else?”
“You’re asking me on a date?”
He pulled a book of poetry out of his shirt. He handed it to me. It was a small collection of traditional rhyming verse. But on the cover, a daisy. He touched my tattoo. “I realized you must like them.”
The sky lightened, and it was morning. Braden left once I agreed to a Friday night dinner. Sea gulls flew over the balcony. I was longing for the day to pass until Delia’s hearing. I walked out onto the balcony and sat down to read the book of poetry.
“Gaylen!” It was a good sound, the sound of my own name.
“Deputy Bob?” I said.
He was grinning from below as if he had won first prize at a bass tournament. The next person I saw was my husband. He was pale and looked as if he had come straight from his bed. His shirt was nicely rumpled, and the circles under his eyes gave him a desperate look that was a more comely look than I had ever seen on him. “There’s a new development in your sister’s case,” he said.
“Sophie Deals’s home was raided on a drug bust. Found a closet full of cocaine,” said Deputy Bob.
“She must have come home and bolted when she saw the heat outside her place,” said Braden.
“She’s got to report as a witness for the prosecution in Delia’s case,” said Deputy Bob.
“That’s good news then,” I said. “Today’s the day.”
“Let’s go for a drive before the hearing,” said Braden. “Clear your head and all.”
Stretching up and down the landscape on either side of the road lay a salt marsh full of an entirely hidden world of birds and marsh creatures. The long road that led out to a rarely traveled highway, except by the locals who lived along that Outer Banks inlet, gave Braden more time to talk.
“I thought today was my day to lose a sister,” I said.
Braden kept telling me, “Hush. Don’t talk like that.”
“You care about Delia then?”
“If you do, then I do.”