Home Safe

  When it's Donetta's turn, she says she has always remembered overhearing a conversation between her parents when she was a little girl lying on the sofa, where she'd fallen asleep. When she awakened to the sound of her parents' voices, she kept her eyes shut and listened.

  She reads in her soft voice, imitates the pleasure and flirtation in her mother's voice: I thought you's the handsomest man in the room, but I for sure didn't need to say so; you already taking care of that. Flexing your muscles to that crowd of women. Shining your smile so hard in their faces, flashing your dimples. I thought, That man needs to be taken down a notch. And I'm the woman to do it. I may have a crooked smile and a no-count booty, but I got personality. I knew if I could only get you to look in my eyes, you'd be a goner. And didn't I get you to look, you know I did.

  Helen looks around the room at her students' faces. They are listening so intently, with such obvious enjoyment. In this little room, at least, a love for the written word is alive and well. An appreciation for the effort and the artistry. Helen finds it funny that she is paid for such pleasure, for such validation; she should pay them.

  Claudia has not come today, and Helen wishes she could hear this. She wishes, too, that she and the others could have heard what Claudia might have written. Maybe she'll call her later, and tell her that they all missed her today. And she'll tell her that she's very much enjoying her manuscript, and has in fact slowed down her reading dramatically in order to savor everything there—some of the pages she's read multiple times. It's hard to know, with someone like Claudia, how much to offer. Helen worries that too much attention might scare her away.

  Henry reads next. His efforts are less successful, but talk about an A for effort; the man should be onstage.

  “You made this?” Helen says.

  Tessa does not dignify Helen's response with an answer; instead, she simply serves her more of the chicken.

  “What's in the sauce?” Helen asks.

  Tessa sits at the table. “I'll give you the recipe. A friend gave it to me. It's his mother's signature dish.”

  His. Helen does not ask who the “he” is. Does not ask.

  When they have eaten the pie Tessa serves for dessert (bakery, but still), she clears the table and puts before her mother a map like the one she sent her in the mail, but this time the names of streets are absent. She hands her mother a pencil and says, “You have five minutes.”

  Helen looks at the map, then up at her daughter.

  “Go,” Tessa says.

  Helen starts to laugh, and Tessa says, “Mom. Remember when I fixed your garbage disposal? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? This is a favor I want you to do for me. Fill in the streets. Start with mine.”

  Helen, smirking, writes in Tessa's street, then the street at either end of her block. Then, though there are only six other streets to name, she is stuck and she begins to feel the kind of stomach-clenching anxiety she used to feel when she was given a math test. Ridiculous. She looks over at Tessa, rinsing off plates and then putting them in her little dishwasher, and it comes to her why Tessa is giving her this quiz: her daughter is moving away. And this “favor” is not for her, but for her mother. “Tessa?” she says. “I need help.”

  Tessa doesn't even turn around. “You can do it,” she says.

  “You got the job, huh?”

  “Yup.” She stays focused on her task, the running water, the dishes.

  Helen gets up from the table and puts her arms around her daughter and Tessa begins to cry. “I have to go, Mom.”

  Helen strokes her daughter's hair and in a voice whose calm does not surprise her after all, she says, “I know you do. I know you do. It's fine. It's good! I'm very proud of you.” Tessa gently pushes her mother away and says, “Finish your quiz. Your time is almost up. Before I leave, you're going to know every street in this city.”

  Helen finishes the quiz, getting only two streets wrong, then talks animatedly with Tessa about what her new job will entail. It's a good job; Tessa will be doing more of the kind of writing she has always wanted to do. Helen talks about how exciting it will be for Tessa to meet new people, to learn a new city. After she leaves Tessa's apartment, she goes to her car, slams the door, puts the key in the igntion, checks the rearview to back up, and sees the sorrow in her eyes. She's pretty sure Tessa saw nothing like that.

  When Tessa was fourteen, she came home from ice-skating with a huge gash in her chin. “I think it might need stitches,” she said, and pulled away the washcloth the rink had given her. She needed stitches all right. Dan grew pale and fumbled in his pocket for car keys to take them to the ER. Helen sat in the back of the car and talked to Tessa about who was at the rink that night, about whether or not Tessa had mastered the jump she had wanted to. While Tessa lay on the table to get stitched up, Dan sat in a chair all but wringing his hands (actually, he kept cracking his knuckles until the doctor asked him to stop). Helen stood beside Tessa, her fear of blood gone, her fear of anything gone. She kept Tessa occupied by talking to her, once nearly making her laugh, for which she was admonished by the doctor, and though she was staring into her daughter's eyes, her hand on Tessa's hairline, she was also watching every single move that doctor made. It wasn't until hours after the event, when she and Dan were in bed, that Helen heaved a sigh of relief so great it prompted Dan to ask, “What? What'd I do now?”

  She tightens her hands on the wheel, switches lanes, and accelerates so that she has to pay attention to the road before her.

  “Why do people have to turn into grown-ups?” she'd once asked her mother. She'd been seven years old, sitting on the kitchen floor playing jacks, and she was miffed that Eleanor wouldn't stop peeling potatoes and play with her. Eleanor had smiled down at her and said, “Sometimes they want to. But mostly, they need to.”

  twenty-three

  SATURDAY MORNING, HELEN ANSWERS THE PHONE THICK-VOICED, and hears a man say, “Oh. Sorry. Were you sleeping?” Tom Ellis.

  She looks at the clock: ten-fifteen. She'd been up until after two, and had almost finished Claudia's manuscript. It was longer than she'd thought—the pages were double-sided, and for some reason the latter half of the manuscript was single-spaced. Twice, before it had gotten late, she had tried calling to tell Claudia how much she was appreciating—and admiring—her work; twice there had been no answer and no voice mail for her to leave a message. It compounded the sadness she felt about Claudia; there was something so defeated about someone not having voice mail, as though the person might have thought, Ah well. Who would call? But then she reasoned that Claudia might simply be smarter than most people, eliminating the need to check one more thing. Email had almost replaced telephones, anyway. But she didn't want to send Claudia an email, it couldn't convey the kind of enthusiasm she felt, and besides, she wanted the immediacy of the response from her student, who had been so nervous about handing her work over. She decided to wait to talk to her personally, after class.

  “I'm awake,” she says. “Hi, Tom.”

  “Hi, Helen.” A beat, and Helen feels it as a moment of telephone flirtation, the silence more provocative than anything he might have said, and then, “Listen, I have an interesting proposition for you. A couple out on a walk passed your house and … Well, they shouldn't have, but they looked in the windows. They looked in the windows and went in the backyard, and were out looking at the tree house when your neighbor spotted them. She came over to see what was going on. She told them you hadn't moved in and she didn't know if you were going to. If there's any way these people can live there, they want to.”

  “You mean … they want to buy it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But … at what price?”

  “Almost any within reason.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, they just called me—your neighbor gave them my number; I met her when I first started work on the place and I gave her my card. But these people are just over the moon about the house.”

  Over the moon, Hele
n thinks. Who says that anymore, besides me?

  Call waiting. Helen asks Tom to hold on and switches over. It's her mother. “I'll call you right back,” she says. “I'm in the middle of a major real estate negotiation. I might change my name to Trump.”

  “Helen, I need to talk to you now.”

  “Okay, just let me … I'm on the other line. Hold on, I'll be right back.”

  She switches to Tom. “I'm sorry; I have to go; it's my mother. But for the meantime, the answer's no.”

  And yet she had been going to tell him to show the people the house, to solicit an offer. Why has she suddenly changed her mind? “I'll call you tonight,” she tells Tom, and switches back to her mother.

  “Okay, I'm here.”

  Silence.

  “Mom?” Some knowing cold moves into her stomach. “What. Is it Dad?”

  Eleanor begins to cry. “You know, he was fine last night. And this morning I got up and made coffee, and read the paper a little. And he didn't get up so I went in to check on him, and … It was in his sleep. It was in his sleep, honey. He didn't feel anything. The doctor said.”

  “But … what was it?” Helen needs a face for this enemy. She needs to insulate herself with facts so she doesn't have to confront the feelings.

  “A stroke. Isn't that funny, when we were all so scared of cancer.”

  Helen swallows, and turns to look out the window. It has begun to snow; she may not be able to get a flight.

  “I might have to drive up, Mom, it's snowing pretty hard here.”

  “Here, too. Don't come right now. There's nothing to do.”

  “But—”

  “I'm fine, Helen. Really. I can call someone if I need to. But I think I just want to be by myself for a while. The weather is supposed to clear here tomorrow; come then. We'll have the funeral on Monday.”

  Helen might have expected that her mother would want time alone. She was always deeply private about things that hurt her. She mended alone and in her own way, usually not even seeking consolation from a husband who would always have been more than happy to provide it. Her father once told her about a time he came upon his wife leaving the bathroom, her face splotchy from crying. When he asked her what was wrong, she said, “What do you mean? Nothing.” When he said he could tell she'd been crying, she said, “Well, I'm not crying now. What do you want for lunch?” Helen isn't sure where her mother got that kind of fortitude. The gene had certainly missed her.

  Helen takes in a great gulp of air, and begins to rock back and forth.

  “Helen?”

  She makes her voice light. “Yes?”

  “Sweetheart, I'm so sorry we can't be together right now. But listen to me, listen to me; it's all right. I mean it. We had quite a life together. It's all right.”

  “I know,” Helen says, though she feels at this moment that she doesn't know one single thing.

  She sits holding the phone tightly until they have finished talking. When she hangs up, she starts to call Tessa, then does not. Instead, she stops rocking and simply sits there, her hands on her knees. She remembers her father saying earnestly to her when he was first diagnosed with cancer, “I'm not afraid.” He said, “Hell, I never expected to live this long. Don't think I don't know how lucky I am.” She remembers him teaching her to whistle, bending over her palm to remove a splinter, standing on the porch, his hands in his pockets, watching her drive off with David Peters on her first date. She remembers him eating the first thing she ever made out of the Junior Cook Book he bought her—French toast—and saying, “Holy smokes. This might be the best thing I ever ate.” She remembers his pants hanging low on his waist, and the way he leaned onto the kitchen counter this last Christmas Eve, unaware that she was watching him from the living room. His arms were trembling a bit, but he steadied himself; he pushed off and rejoined the party, smiling.

  Helen gets off the bed and kneels beside it. She holds back a sob long enough to say, “Thank you for my father.” And then she lays her head down and lets go.

  Out loud, she condemns her circumstances. She knows that there are far worse things happening in the world—if not on her block—than have lately happened to her, but at this particular moment, that makes no difference at all. Not at all. She pounds on her mattress, grinds her teeth, and for one satisfying and painful moment, pulls on her hair so hard it hurts her neck, too.

  At eleven o'clock, she calls Tessa. When her daughter answers the phone, she says “Hi, Mom,” in a clear, unweighted, friendly way.

  “We have to fly to Minnesota,” Helen says. “Tomorrow. Bring a nice dress. Okay?” So much for the speech she had planned: Grandpa was old, he had a good life, he was prepared; for everything there is a season; now we must turn our thoughts to Grandma. She cannot do it. She cannot say the words. She can barely speak.

  There is a long silence, and then Tessa, understanding, says, very calmly, very gently, “Okay. Want me to come over?” What is Helen's love for her daughter right then? She wouldn't even try to say.

  “That's okay,” she says. “I'll pick you up tomorrow around noon.”

  Later that night, Helen calls Tom and tells him what has happened. They have a kind of abbreviated memorial service for her father: Helen shares a few choice anecdotes about him, and Tom makes the usual sounds-like-a-swell-guy comments. Then Helen sighs, and says, “Oh, Dan.” She realizes her mistake immediately. “Tom, I mean. Sorry.”

  “Don't be. It's fine.”

  “I guess I …”

  “I'm flattered.”

  “So, I'm coming out there next weekend,” she says, and another part of herself says, Oh? “I know I have to decide what to do with the house.”

  “You have some time,” Tom says.

  “I want to see it again,” she says. “I can do it now.”

  “Send me the itinerary,” Tom says. “I'll pick you up.”

  “Again?”

  “Of course,” he says, in a way that makes her laugh.

  “It's a date,” she says, and it occurs to her that in a way, it is.

  She hangs up the phone and then sits still at the kitchen table for a long while, looking at everything around her as though it belongs to someone else. Then she goes into the living room to turn out the lights. First this one, then that, and then they are all out and the room is lit only with the milky light of the moon. Enough to see by. But barely.

  twenty-four

  HELEN AND TESSA DO NOT SPEAK MUCH ABOUT FRANKLIN ON THE plane; there seems to be a tacit agreement that to do so will make for emotions that do not fit into seats 11A and 11B. Instead, Tessa leafs through a magazine, offering commentary on this dress, that lipstick. Helen points to a blond man astride a motorcycle in an ad for jeans, and says, “Do you think he's handsome?”

  “Don't start,” Tessa says. “Or I'll sign you up for Internet dating.”

  “I only asked if you thought he was good-looking.”

  “You want to know what I think?” Tessa says. “I think he's gay. I think every man in here is gay.” She closes the magazine and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Helen picks up the magazine and flips through it. Tessa is probably right. But not all men are gay. Where do men who are not gay go? How does one meet them? Oh, how does one meet anyone these days? It seems to Helen that people have given their real lives over to virtual ones, that they spend most of their time asleep or interacting with screens. What exactly does Tessa do about the need for … touch? “Oh, God,” Midge said when Helen once talked about this. “You didn't ask her about sex, did you?” And Helen said no, as though she were outraged at the notion of having done so, even though the truth was, she had thought it.

  “I think you need to take up needlepoint,” Midge said.

  Tessa comes back to the seat and puts the magazine in the seat pocket. “Remind me to check around my seat for my personal belongings before I exit the aircraft,” she says, and Helen smiles. Then Tessa sighs and asks, “Did Grandma and Grandpa really meet in the back of a dime store?”
and Helen tells the story they both know so well: how Franklin bumped into Eleanor and made her purse fall down, how they knocked heads when they both bent to pick it up and then went out for ice cream sodas, then to a movie, then for dinner, for a walk that lasted until dawn, and then separated to go get ready for work, but met for dinner again that night.

  When the plane lands, they both fall silent, and Helen imagines that they are both thinking about the same thing: going into a house where Franklin no longer is or will ever be again. She remembers Tessa saying about Franklin, when she was six years old, “He's my favorite grandfather.” Never mind that he was her only grandfather; Dan's father had died before Tessa was born. Helen knew what she meant: he was her favorite grandfather of all possible grandfathers. As he was Helen's favorite father.

  With Tessa sound asleep beside her, Helen looks at the clock: a little after two. She herself has not yet been able to sleep at all, and now, downstairs, she hears her mother running water in the kitchen. She'll be making herself a cup of tea, no doubt.

  Helen quietly gets out of bed and makes her way down. From the darkened dining room, she sees Eleanor standing before the sink, staring out the window, the teakettle in her hand, the water running and running.

  “Mom?”

  Her mother jumps and then turns to her, and for a moment Helen has the terrified thought that her mother does not recognize her, that something has happened to Eleanor, too. But it is only that she was so deeply caught up in her reverie; she laughs, now, and says, “Want a cup of tea?”

  “Sure.” Helen comes into the kitchen, squinting against the light; not long ago, Franklin had installed a bright overhead to help with his failing vision. “Your mother can't see like she used to,” he said, and Eleanor only rolled her eyes.

  “Can't sleep?” Eleanor says, when they sit at the table together, and Helen shrugs. “Me neither.”