Someone said to me, “You jumped off the edge of the earth. You went back home and you lived for two and a half years. What did you learn?”
Well. I suppose I’m at war with my spiritual self. I still can’t manage to pray. It’s not because I don’t think God is there, it’s just my earthly needs and his way of delivering his take on them rarely match up, so why bother? The Buddhists believe we would live more peacefully if we gave up hope, and I can see their point. But there’s just something about that feeling of hope, the adrenaline rush of wanting so badly for a situation to turn out a certain way. Even that feeling you get when those hopes are dashed. Just comes with the territory.
Looking back, I suppose I lived everyone’s worst nightmare, watching something horrible happen to someone so close to me. And I guess what I would have to say is this: When faced with some dreaded path—and chances are, at some point you will be—jump valiantly, feet first, into that hot fiery hell, eyes wide open.
For me, within the awfulness lie things that will, for the rest of my days, defy description: brief snippets of light, love and terror, of ugly dogs and chemo nurses, macrobiotic gurus, bayou healers, and handsome carpenters. And hard as I try to put it all together, to create a sum out of all the parts, the most I know I will ever get is a nudge, a hunch, a phantom voice from some far-off place counting backward for all of us.
* * *
We had a memorial for Tina at the First Baptist Church in Jackson. Regardless of her ambivalent feelings about the place, Tina had many friends in the congregation, all of whom had been kind to us in those last days. After Garrett nixed the notion of anyone singing any sad old hymns, my cousin Raquel played and sang everything from Bach to Joni Mitchell and Aretha on the big pipe organ. In the receiving line outside the church, Caroline, wearing a long wool coat far too warm for the Gulf Coast in any season, pressed my hand into hers as she gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“Frances called me. I’m so sorry,” she says.
Caught between my present reality and the old one, I wonder for the briefest moment what part she played in my life. I recognize her, but almost three years have passed since I’ve seen her bright, fresh face and touched her warm, delicate hands, her fingers longer than mine.
“My God,” I say, realizing that my time gone has added a couple of crow’s feet around the edges of her big brown eyes. “When did you get here?”
“This morning,” she says, pulling me close.
“Well, you’ll stay at the house.”
“I’ve got a room, don’t be silly,” she says, proceeding to Garrett and Sis on the other side of me.
My former high school English lit teacher led the graveside service. With elegance and grace, she asked the gathered to offer up a hand of applause for my mother’s faith in Christ, hereby, I’m sure, paving Tina’s way into the next world despite the top forty rundown inside the church.
I looked out over the hills of the sprawling green grounds of the cemetery, wondering if I would one day be planted here with Garrett, Sis, and Tina, or if I’d be burned and scattered over the Pacific or other parts unknown.
As Caroline whispers, “Why didn’t you tell me your father was so handsome?” Jewel Ann and two other bluehairs say the service was interesting. Tina would have loved that.
* * *
At the end of the longest day of my life, my father asked me to sleep with him. No fanfare, no hemming and hawing, just him showing up in the doorway of the bathroom as I’m washing my face for bed. “That’s a mighty big bed in there without your mama. I mean, if you wanted to come take up the other half of it, I suppose that’d be all right.”
Minutes later I’m lying next to him in the same spot Tina had taken for forty years, staring at the outline of the wobbly ceiling fan above us.
“I met her when she first moved to town,” Garrett says, his deep voice cutting the silence of the night like a sneeze in church.
“We were thirteen. Class? Good God, boy, she was class all the way. I’d never even seen a green salad till she came on the scene.”
As the movie of my prepubescent parents meeting cute plays in my head, my father’s voice cracks with emotion. “I took her hand. I took her hand every night before we fell asleep.”
Ten seconds pass before he reaches down and takes mine.
“You’ll never know how much I worry about you,” he says. “Neither you nor your sister can keep anybody. And I want to know there’s somebody looking out for you out there. If I had my druthers, I’d want it to be a woman. But I just want you to find somebody.”
I want so badly to turn and see what his face looks like when he says something so uncharacteristically progressive. But my eyes are frozen on the whirling blades of the ceiling fan.
“I had to take two ibuprofen for the headache,” he says. “Too much crying, I guess. They’re on the table next to you if you need ’em.”
I stayed with my father for three months after that. He took my hand every night before we fell asleep.