Chapter Six
Every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.
Gerald M. Edelman and Guilio Tonini, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
Dad still lived in the family home and as Colleen drove Shane’s rattling Jeep toward it she intuitively knew every bend in the road. Long leaf pine, magnolia and live oak lining the street reached up and over, forming a canopy. She passed a wooden stand where peaches were piled in pyramids, golden and ripe, as an engine revved in her chest, mimicking the Jeep. She had no time to stop. Something must be done.
Something.
Anything.
She pressed harder on the gas pedal and the car lurched around the first corner. The siren was annoying, but Colleen drove to the right to allow the police car to pass. Instead the blaring lights flared in the rearview mirror and Colleen parked on the soft sand shoulder under a tree and dropped her forehead to the steering wheel. She did not need this.
The knock was quick on the driver’s-side window and she rolled it down to stare into the face of a high school friend, Brad Young. “Oh, Brad!”
“Driver’s license and insurance,” he said so sternly that she laughed.
“Seriously?” she asked and tucked her hair behind her ear. Maybe he didn’t recognize her.
He nodded, his blue hat bobbing. He straightened the billed cap and stared at her.
“Brad. It’s Lena Donohue.”
“I know, Ms. Donohue.”
“Stop with the formality,” she said, aiming for a flirty, fun grin. “I know I was going too fast; I was trying to get to my dad.”
“You were going sixty in a thirty.”
“Oh . . .” She cringed. “I’m sorry; I didn’t realize. It’s been a hell of a day, and I was rushing.” She paused. “I just flew in and I think my driver’s license is in my suitcase. I don’t drive much in New York and . . .”
“I know where you live, Lena.”
“So I guess you can take me to the Watersend pokey. I was going thirty over, and I have no license with me. This is Shane’s car and I have no idea where the insurance is.” Colleen opened the driver’s-side door and stepped out to stand next to Brad. She put her hands behind her back. “Get it over with.”
He tried not to laugh but she saw the curl of his smile as he shook his head. Together they walked to the back of the Jeep and leaned against the bumper. Cars eased past, slowly, the occupants craning their necks to see what was happening. Perfect fodder for gossip at the Bible study group or book club, for the neighborhood lawn party or bridge club.
“How’s your mama?” Colleen asked.
“She passed last year.” He placed his hand on his chest and patted over his heart. “It was a tough good-bye.”
Brad, a friend since second grade, had been a small kid who excelled at the violin, who’d kissed Hallie in truth or dare in seventh grade and beat Colleen at the archery contest at Summer Fun Day in the town square. And she hadn’t known his mama had passed.
“I am so sorry. I never heard.” She touched his blue-uniformed arm and squeezed.
“How could you know?” he asked. “You left a long time ago.”
“I come home sometimes,” she said. “And I wish someone would have told me.”
He took off his dark sunglasses and gazed at her directly. “If you come home, no one knows about it.”
“I scoot in and out.”
“We sure do miss you around here.”
“Thanks, Brad. But . . .” Colleen shifted her feet, dry dirt scattering like bugs, and she looked down the road, focused on anything but the reason she hadn’t returned: cars passing, a buzzard swooping down toward prey she couldn’t see, the sound of the palmetto leaves swaying against each other in the breeze in music like rain on a tin roof.
“I know. We all know. But still . . .”
“How’s Cindy?” Colleen asked after his wife, a woman he’d met in college, a woman Colleen had never met. She wanted to change the subject, avoid references, however indirect, to Hallie.
“She’s great. We have two kids now. Did you know that? Two boys.”
“That’s really sweet. I’m so glad.”
“You know, you were always such a good friend. So much fun.”
“I still am.” She smiled but felt the edges of it slide toward falseness. Was she still a good friend? Was she still fun? Some people might disagree.
A squawking noise emanated from a radio in his car and he nudged off the bumper. “Need to go.”
“No ticket? No arrest?”
He laughed. “Slow down. Remember where you are now.”
The flaring police lights came back on, the siren emitted a quick squeal and Brad drove away, leaving Colleen at the roadside. Remember where you are. But in his deep southern accent, which seemed to have become pronounced in her absence, he might just as well have said, Remember who you are.
Colleen leaned against the bumper of the Jeep, closed her eyes and raised her face to the naked South Carolina sun. She and Hallie had always believed that it was their sun, made for them, shining on them.
I know who I am, don’t you worry, mister, she wanted to holler at Brad’s fading taillights. I’m a New Yorker. A travel writer, and a damn good one.
After a dismal job hunt spent traipsing up and down the streets of New York that first spring, from one interview to another, the spent cherry blossoms dusting the sidewalks like pink snow, Colleen had refused to give up and go home. She’d been relentless, undeterred, returning again and again to those who’d told her no, as if the intimate rejection of her sister and Walter had padded and softened other rejections, rendering them inconsequential in comparison. Eventually, she’d landed her first job, writing for the Daily News about local getaways for New Yorkers. She’d sold her engagement ring at a pawn shop and got by on small jobs until, one by one, in what felt like agonizingly slow succession, she’d been hired for better jobs, and bigger publications, able to leave Maggie’s basement.
In the decade since then she’d compiled a record of every locale she’d visited and every article she’d written. For a long while she’d collected bumper stickers, not to put on a car, but as a reminder of where she’d been. Now she carried in her mind a watercolor montage of travel. She couldn’t tell someone if she’d gone to Poland before or after London, but she could describe the emotional impression of each city, each landscape imprinted in her personal geography.
If she wanted the longitude and latitude, the name and coordinates, of every place she’d been, she could dig through piles of papers and notes and final published articles. But what she actually remembered was visceral and palpable. The window of her hotel room in Zermatt had framed the Matterhorn as it thrust from the earth in a pinnacle of glory, its snowy crown white and glistening. At a Navajo dance around a campfire in Arizona the flames had seemed to lick the stars, wanting to eat them alive. At the observatory at Mauna Kea in Hawaii the earth had faded away, overtaken by the sky with its multitude of stars and bringing to life the ancient belief that gods were hidden within the constellations.
What she’d wanted from those travels was to become someone else altogether, not to crawl out of her body but to claw her way out of the memories that threatened to define her. Somehow she believed that if she constructed a rich, full present and an even more exciting future, she could bury the past.
But it hadn’t worked that way.
No excursion or new setting had soothed her heartache; no first-class flight or five-star hotel had defined what “home” meant to her. Her job had blessed her with adventure and purpose, but it had never done what she’d intended—sew up the torn places where her family’s absence was felt.
Without her express permission, her heart continued to seek what she’d lost, what she couldn’t stop loving.
Her family didn’t know this side of her—the professional, voyage-trekking woman who’d experienced people and places they’d be hard-pressed to imagine. But didn’t they still know her better than anyone else? Who cared what her eyes had seen or her body had sensed if those experiences had no connection to what really mattered?
One place she’d never been; one job she’d never been assigned from any magazine—Ireland. And always her dad asked, “Ireland yet?” And she would tell him, “No, Dad, the next one is Argentina.” Or it could have been California or Idaho or Maine. They weren’t always exotic locales, but they were continuously fascinating.
Colleen stepped into her brother’s Jeep and drove another few miles before pulling into the family home, up the long pebble driveway with the overgrown azaleas crowding the edges. She hadn’t seen them in bloom in years. If pressed, she couldn’t remember the colors of the blossoms.
The front of the one-story white brick house faced the street and stretched out sunbathing on the wide green lawn where ancient oak trees spread their limbs like a crocheted blanket across the sky. Spanish moss hung from those trees, catching and holding on to the summer light, hoarding it for the coming fall.
The driveway curved from the road to one side of the house between the house and detached garage. In that space, Colleen parked the Jeep and stared directly into the backyard, where the sloping green lawn rushed toward the river. A dilapidated tree fort clung to the largest oak with the last of its rusted nails. The back of the house possessed a small screened-in porch on the left side and to the right a set of three stairs and small concrete porch covered by a striped blue awning where a screen door opened to the kitchen.
Colleen absorbed all of this in the time it took to blink twice, and then it was the tree house her gaze sought by instinct. Nestled between the branches of an old oak, the tree house was tilted, half-drunk. The roof had long ago collapsed. Dad had once mentioned fixing it up, bringing it back for the nieces, but nothing had happened except that the tree reached higher, and the house inside of it had warped with the growth. Colleen turned away, feeling the swish-wash of sorrow for all that was lost. Then her gaze found the dock of her memories and dreams, hovering over the pewter water.
She found herself at the end of the dock before she knew she’d decided to walk that way, sitting with bare feet dangling and her red high-tops by her side. A midday shower threatened in the gray clouds that blurred the horizon like a flock of black birds. The water crested and fell to the rhythm of an outgoing tide. It was all so familiar, so achingly familiar. Would it always be this way for her dad or would even this place become strange, just another dock, another river, another tide? Things were special in their specificity to the soul, this much she knew.
This was where her childhood had taken place, where her dad had taught her to throw the shrimp net and fish with live bait. This was where she’d experienced her first kiss, where her mother had told stories of mermaids and sea creatures that Colleen believed in longer than she believed in Santa Claus. This was where Walter had proposed . . .
With a jolt, she stood and wrapped her arms around her belly for protection, as if the memory could punch her.
Walter stood at the far end of the dock, his hair awash in twilight and a big smile on his face. Colleen walked toward him, wondering how she’d been so lucky as to love a man like him. Sure, she’d had her fair share of good-looking and wonderfully goofy boys in high school and college, also experiencing heartbreak and angst that echoed a Taylor Swift song, but Walter was in a category all his own: both funny and sincere, both manly and sensitive. They’d met at a fund-raiser for a museum in Savannah and had barely left each other’s side during the six months they’d been dating; an invisible cord connected them.
She’d heard about love at first sight, of course. She’d read about it. But she hadn’t believed in it until Walter. They didn’t fight. They didn’t disagree on anything that caused more than a moment’s pause—he didn’t like avocados and she put them on everything; she despised salmon and he knew twenty-five ways to cook it. But even those small things had made them laugh. “Let’s eat avocado and salmon every night to prove our love,” he’d once said.
That evening as she walked toward him on the dock, Colleen felt her heart quicken. Something was different—his shoulders set back and a determined smile on his face as if he were posing for a photograph. When she reached him, he took her in his arms. “This is your favorite place in the world, right?” he said.
Look how well he already knew her.
“Yes,” she said and kissed him. “Here, and the pub.”
Then he dropped to one knee as if she’d written a childhood play about a romantic proposal, and he’d read it. “You are the woman for me, Lena Donohue. I love you, and you alone. I never dreamed I’d meet someone like you. All the days I have, I want to spend them with you. Will you please spend the rest of your life with me?” Then he handed her a perfectly gorgeous aquamarine ring, square cut with tiny diamonds surrounding it because somewhere along the way she had casually mentioned that she didn’t want a big diamond and adored aquamarines.
“We will stay here in this magical land, create our own little family. You won’t have to leave your river, and I will never leave you.”
Colleen dropped to her knees also. They would always be a team, just like her mother and dad: equals. And it would begin with her in front of him, not looking down at him. The sun set just as she said yes. He’d timed it perfectly. And somewhere in the yard, Mother took the photo that Walter had asked her to snap at just the right moment.
It was a photo Colleen had had printed the next day and placed in a silver frame to set on her bedside table. On the wedding day, after she’d returned to the house to grab the suitcase she’d packed for their honeymoon to Napa Valley, she’d thrown that picture into the river.