A Long Time Gone (4 page)

I took two steps down and stopped, placing both hands on the newel post at the bottom of the ornate stairs, remembering the day my mother had come back for the last time and everything changed.

Shaking away the memory, I began to search for my brother, hoping that he would at least remember the girl I had once been and thought I could be, but half-worried that he had forgotten her as much as I had.

Vivien Walker Moise

INDIAN
MOUND
, MISSISSIPPI
AP
RIL 2013

T
he morning had given way to the heat of afternoon by the time I stepped outside again, finding my muddy shoes neatly tucked by the kitchen door next to the high-heeled pumps I'd seen my mother in earlier. A drainpipe hung loose from the porch roof, its paint long gone, its edges rusting. Water dripped into a large puddle from the gutter onto the corner of the porch, the wood floor buckled as if the rain had come in unchecked for more than just a single spring.

When Bootsie had lived here, flowers flourished on every walkway, by every door, and on every surface inside the house. Her vegetable garden rivaled that at any nursery, her plants green and lush, each stem hanging heavy with a bountiful harvest almost year-round. Fresh corn, watermelons, beans, okra, onions, squash, and cantaloupe were staples on our dinner plates, the taste and smell of them so pungent and authentic that nothing else would ever taste as good.

Even such a utilitarian place was beautiful to the eye, with raised sections for better drainage placed with architectural precision. I'd been told that the first Walker woman to live in the house had designed the vegetable garden, and each generation had added to it or changed it in
some way, as if trying to prove to her mother before her that it could be done better. The women in my family could make things grow even in the middle of a drought, although it appeared that the gift had skipped my mother.

Ever since I could walk, I'd accompanied Bootsie while she gardened, holding baskets of seedlings and pruning shears and torn sheets. But I'd never bent next to her in the dirt, or stuck my hands in the soil. Even then I'd known not to make my mark here, to create roots I couldn't sever.

Ignoring the activity surrounding the cypress tree, I stepped off the back porch and walked toward the fenced enclosure of the garden. I felt Bootsie's loss here more than if I'd been standing by her grave. Most of the scalloped white fencing was missing, and what remained had been stripped of almost all its paint and hung listlessly, as if it couldn't summon enough interest to simply fall onto the muddy ground.

Fingerlike stalks reached up out of the earth surrounded by dead leaves and debris; the spots where the outdoor chairs had been sat empty without even weeds to keep them company. I turned my back, unable to look anymore. I found myself facing the fallen tree, saw tire tracks in the mud leading to the site and a hearse pulled near with its rear doors open. I recognized Tripp squatting down next to a man in uniform, pointing at something inside the hole. For a brief moment, I envisioned going back inside and packing my bags before heading out the front door.
I've got no place else to go.

I looked down at my muddy shoes, the words loud inside my head. I thought of Chloe and the storybook she liked me to read to her when she was small and still enjoyed things like sitting in my lap. I hadn't seen her with anything but a cell phone in her hand in a long time, and I wondered if things might have been different if I hadn't given up trying.

Thinking of Chloe made me stumble, and I had to catch myself on the fencing. The storybook had been about a little girl who'd been given life's instruction book as a birthday gift. I wished for something like that now, something that would tell me what happened when there was no plan B, and when your only refuge had a No Vacancy sign on the door.

Squaring my shoulders, I slogged across the muddy ground,
stepping over the tire grooves in the grass. The site had already been staked off with yellow tape. But even though a side porch of the old cotton shed and part of the roof had been clipped by the falling tree, the front door stood open, and I saw my brother in the doorway.

As soon as he spotted me he stepped back inside, which only made me walk faster. He was almost a decade older than I was and six inches taller than my own five foot ten, but I'd never been intimidated by him. We'd always known that we had each other no matter where our mother was. We had each other, and Bootsie, and Bootsie's cousin Emmett, the house and the farm, and that had been enough for both of us. Until my mother reappeared, reminding me that there was a world beyond the Mississippi River that must be better than what we had here.

Damp, warm air hit me as I stood inside the doorway, my eyes blinking as they tried to adjust to the darkness. When Tommy had inherited Cousin Emmett's antique watch and clock repair business, he'd moved it from the Main Street location closer to the house so he could oversee the farm and the business simultaneously. He'd taken over the old cotton shed and extended the second story beyond the attic, along with electricity, air-conditioning, and modern plumbing. He'd moved the farm's office of operations downstairs, and all the old watches and clocks found a new home upstairs. Then he'd added a small kitchen and bedroom, where he'd stay during the planting and harvest times, with their long days and short nights.

The room had been paneled in a wood laminate, a guy's interpretation of home decor, but even Bootsie wouldn't interfere with Tommy's self-expression, no matter how misguided. A basket of overflowing laundry sat by the side of the entryway, and I wondered if he now lived here permanently. The thought saddened me, not just that he lived alone, but that I didn't know for sure. I used to wonder if Tommy had gotten married and if he had children. Then the disappointments in my own life had swallowed me, and Mark began prescribing pills to calm my nerves. After that, I discovered that I didn't have to wonder or worry about anything at all.

I stared out the dirty window, toward where Tripp and the other man crouched by the roots of the old tree. I looked back at my brother's laundry basket, a sock with a hole in its toe floundering at the top. It
created a mental image of our lives, like derailed boxcars sitting alongside a track where we had no idea of how to flip the switches to get us running again.

I walked past the large desk with stacks of papers spilled across the top, along with three half-filled mugs of cloudy coffee and a desktop computer that looked like it should be in a museum, then toward the stairs. The steps had been rebuilt when Tommy renovated the building, but the actual stairwell was not expanded, so the stairs were narrow and steep. Bootsie had said Tommy had done this on purpose to discourage visitors to his private sanctum, where he liked to be alone with all the antique timepieces that were sent to him from all over the world.

I paused on the landing, suddenly aware of a bright light from above. I looked up and saw a clear blue sky through the ragged edges of a hole that had spread like kudzu across the wall and toward the back of the building.

Hugging the side of the undamaged wall, I climbed the remaining stairs before stopping at the top to survey the damage. The wall and floor near the gash in the ceiling were dark with saturated water. Leaves and papers and tiny plastic bags with various watch and clock parts, their labels smeared by water, lay scattered around the room as if they'd been stirred in a pot and dumped out. Antique and contemporary clocks hung on the remaining vertical surfaces, their pendulums moving side to side and their hands pressing forward as if to remind us that time stopped for no one.

When Emmett had owned his antique clock and watch shop downtown, I'd spent hours as a child studying the different faces of all the old clocks and listening to their incessant ticking, wondering about the other lives the old timepieces had measured and marked off with each tick. For a long time I'd believed that if we wound our clocks before they stopped their measuring, we'd live forever. And I couldn't help myself from wondering whether, if I'd been here when Bootsie got sick, I could have kept her watch moving forward and stopped her from dying.

My brother stood with his back to me at the large wooden trestle table that had once been in the Main Street shop, a small stack of plastic bags in front of him. A large domed overhead light dangled above him, making his reddish-blond hair—just a shade lighter than mine—glimmer.

“Hey, Tommy,” I said, taking in the slump of his shoulders as he
attempted to sort through the pile. “Looks like you got lucky when that tree fell.” I continued to look around the room while I waved my hand in the air, as if to erase what I'd just said. “I mean, it looks like it could have been a lot worse.”

I stayed where I was, wishing he'd say something. Wishing he'd tell me it was okay, just as he had when we were children. But he kept his back to me as if I weren't even there. In another place and time, I might have been hurt by it.

I tried again. “Who do you think those bones belong to? It's a little creepy knowing they've been here all along. Remember the time we found that bone by the Indian mound and how scared we were until Bootsie told us it was a chicken bone?”

He continued to study one of the larger bags and didn't turn around when he finally spoke. “You got a death wish or something?”

My mouth dried, the only sign my body allowed to tell me that his words had skirted a little closer to the truth than I liked.

“What do you mean?”

He wrote something on a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the bag before dropping it into a box. “An old dog's got enough sense to get out of the rain. Did it occur to you to seek shelter last night or didn't you notice the weather?”

I swallowed. “I wanted to get home. I didn't really think about anything else.” I almost winced at how stupid I sounded.

Continuing to ignore me, he said, “A tornado touched down in Moorhead and another near Yazoo City, and the sirens were blowing all night. There's no cure for stupid, Vivi.”

This was the brother I recognized, and I found my breath slowing with relief. “It's good to see you, too.”

He wrote something else on a piece of masking tape before affixing it to another bag and then dropping it into the same box as the previous bag.

“Who's Chloe?”

He'd taken me off guard. “How do you know about Chloe?”

“I saw it written on the back of that picture on your nightstand. And I saw the sonogram, too.”

It was warm in the old building, but an icy chill filled me from the inside, making me wonder if my pain and regret were no match for mere chemicals. “You had no right to snoop like that.”

Keeping his head bent under the large domed light, he said, “I went up to talk with you, but you were sleeping. I saw the photos, so I looked. We hadn't heard from you in nine years; I figured I'd take the chance of finding out what you've been up to while I could.”

“You had no right.”

He shrugged. “We're family, Vivi. You might have forgotten it, but I haven't.”

I remembered what Tripp had said—about how I'd left Tommy behind, too—and I softened. Even as children, Tommy had been the even-keeled one, always the cool head in tense situations. I'd always reasoned it a good thing, considering my own volatile nature, until he'd been the first person to run down the front porch steps to throw his arms around the mother I barely recognized.

I sat down on a hard wooden bench, one I remembered from the downtown shop. “Chloe was my stepdaughter,” I said quietly, my mental haze allowing me to take the sting from saying Chloe's name. And to stare at the back of Tommy's T-shirt with a beer logo emblazoned across his shoulder blades, absently noticing that his hair needed cutting.

His hands paused but he still didn't turn around. “Was?”

“Her father, Mark, and I are divorced. Keeping Chloe in my life wasn't an option.” I tucked the memory of her sad, angry face as I'd left under the fuzzy pillow of my pills, where I wouldn't have to look at it anymore. “Mark and I were married for seven years—since Chloe was five. Her mother moved to Australia and had another baby with her new husband and kind of forgot about Chloe. I was pretty much all she had.” I swallowed. “When Mark divorced me, I didn't even get visitation. I had to leave her behind.”

He stared down at the mess on the table but his hands were still. “And the sonogram?”

It sounded like somebody else speaking when I finally answered, probably because nobody had ever cared enough to ask. “I miscarried at twenty-eight weeks—a little girl. It's one of the reasons why my marriage fell apart. I wanted the baby and he didn't. But I guess everything works out in the end.”

He didn't say anything for a long time, his hunched shoulders telling me that he understood what it meant for me to want a child and lose
her. And what it meant to leave a child behind. Because I'd always been the one to say that I'd be different.

Quietly, he said, “I'm sorry.” He turned around, his light blue eyes from a father he never knew regarding me steadily. “You could have called, you know. Just once.”

I straightened my shoulders, eager to move on from the hard pit in my stomach that threatened to break through my mental pillow. “And you could have found me if you really wanted to.”

He didn't drop his gaze as we realized that we both spoke the truth, and how empty it seemed. As Bootsie used to say, if stubbornness were a virtue, we'd be shoo-ins for heaven.

“What about Carol Lynne?” I couldn't bring myself to call her Mama. Even in my memories I only thought of her by her given name. “Is she going to be okay?”

He stood and rubbed his hands through his hair. “Jeez, Vivi. Where have you been? You don't get better with Alzheimer's, okay? She's in her own little world right now, a world that's gonna get smaller and smaller, and I'm not going to recognize her anymore. Most of the time she thinks it's still the sixties and will wear some of her old clothes. Or she'll borrow something from Bootsie's closet. And you never know what's going to come out of her mouth next. I don't know if it's the disease or just age, but all filters have come off.”