A Simple Thing (28 page)

“You never talk about her.”

“I was just talking to my mom about her.”

“Was that her on the phone?”

“Yes.” Susannah closed her eyes. “I needed to talk to her. I really needed to figure out some things about the day your Aunt Janie died. My poor mom—” Susannah shook her head. “Anyway, I figured out a lot. And everything,
everything
is going to be better from now on. I mean it.”

Katie looked at her out of the corners of her eyes, her face cautious. “Okay.” She tilted her head back and looked up at the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling. “You mean you won't freak out every time I want to do something?”

“Right,” Susannah said. “At least, I'll try. I'm really proud of how you handled yourself on the boat. I couldn't have done it without you. When I got nervous, you were fine. That's one of the many things I love about you. You don't get scared easily; you're willing to take chances. You're very capable.” Susannah reached over and put her hand on Katie's leg. “You could work a little on the whole thinking-before-you-act thing.” Susannah held up her thumb and forefinger so they were an inch apart. “Just try to be
this
much less impulsive if you can.”

“You mean like giving you a pot cupcake? I'm sorry.”

“I know.” Susannah shook her head. Her anger seemed to have evaporated along with her fear, and her guilt. “You could be nicer to Quinn, too,” she said. “He's a good kid. He actually looks up to you, you know. You're a lot of the things he wants to be—brave, outgoing, adventurous.”

“I'm not
that
mean to him,” Katie said. “God, he's my little brother; it's not like we're going to be best friends.” She put her hand up to her head and twirled a strand of hair, unconsciously echoing Quinn's own habit. “Quinn isn't that bad, really. I mean, he is way more interesting than most kids his age. He just doesn't get how to act, you know? How to fit in. And I hate that; I hate feeling like I have to protect him all the time.”

“Yeah, I know,” Susannah said. “What do you think it's like to be a mom? To feel like you have to protect your kids all the time?”

“Well, there's being a mom and then there's
you,
” Katie said, but her voice was affectionate.

Susannah glanced at her watch. Quinn had been in surgery more than half an hour already.

“They should be done soon,” she said. She looked at Katie again. “Do you want to go home?” she said. “I mean, back to Tilton?”

“No.” Katie's answer came more quickly than Susannah had expected. “I wouldn't want to live here forever, but I'm glad we came. It's different here.”

The doors to the waiting room flew open and a nurse stepped out.

“Mrs. Delaney? We've finished the surgery. The doctor is ready to talk to you about your son.”

 

“Susannah!”

Susannah's eyes snapped open. She'd been dozing in the chair next to the bed where Quinn lay sleeping, his mouth slightly open. Katie was asleep on a folding cot across the room. Susannah had gone in to see Quinn in recovery, and listened as the doctor explained the surgery. The infection had spread, and Quinn would need to be in the hospital a few days for IV antibiotics. But he was fine, would be fine. She had kissed him and squeezed his hand, promised to take a picture of his scar later (which elicited a pale smile), and then collapsed in the chair when he was finally wheeled into the room.

“Susannah!” Matt stood in the doorway to the hospital room. He wore rumpled corduroys and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. Dark circles of fatigue bloomed under his eyes, and a rough stubble of beard covered his cheeks and chin. “He's okay?”

Susannah nodded. “I was with him in recovery and I talked to him. The surgeon said he had to make a three-inch incision, so I promised to take pictures of his scar. He liked that.” She stood up, wincing at the stiffness in her back from sleeping in an odd position on the chair.

“You've been up all night,” she said.

He dropped his duffel bag and parka on the floor.

“Yeah, I've been up all night. I've been on a red-eye, wondering if my son was dying of peritonitis.”

He walked over to the bed and stood looking down at Quinn.

“He's so pale.”

“He's fine. His fever's gone. He'll need the IV for another day or two for the antibiotics, but he's going to be great.”

Matt put his hand to Quinn's forehead, stroked his lanky curls. His eyes ran from his son's face, down the IV in his arm, and over the blanket covering Quinn's thin frame, so small in the big hospital bed.

“He hasn't been in a hospital since he was born,” Matt said.

He turned around to look at Susannah and did the one thing she had never expected him to do: his eyes welled with tears.

“Matt!”

She crossed the room to him in a step and put her arms around him and hugged him fiercely, fiercely, but he pushed her away.

“I want my family back,” he said. “You need to come home and bring the kids home. I can't do this.”

She stood across from him, her arms hanging empty at her sides. “I want to come home,” she said.

“I finally understand things,” she continued. “I don't know, these last weeks on Sounder I've been thinking about Janie all the time. And then when I was driving the boat today with Quinn and Katie I hit a wave,
hard
. The impact was like hitting a wall. And I realized that no one,
no one
could have held on to Janie through something like that:
It wasn't my fault
. I know you've told me that a million times; so have my mother and brother. It's just that tonight—I
felt
it. I finally understood it wasn't me.”

Matt sat down on the edge of Quinn's bed, his eyes on her.

“I thought I couldn't survive it if it happened twice, if something bad happened to someone I loved again, on my watch. So I've tried to protect the kids—”

“I'll say,” Matt said. He rubbed a hand across his forehead.

She ached to make him understand. “But it wasn't just making sure nothing happened to them. Katie is so impulsive—I had to make sure
she
didn't make a mistake like I did, do something she had to feel guilty about for the rest of her life. You see?”

Matt looked at her. “Yeah, I see.” He rubbed his hand through his hair, which was already wild and uncombed. He looked around the room, searching for the right words.

“Look,” he said, and he gazed back at her. “You and I are very different. I am not a complicated guy. I like my work, I love my family, I like to drink a beer and watch a baseball game. It's hard for me to relate to worrying about stuff the way you do. But I love you, so that's all part of the package. You're the most generous-hearted person I know. And I never tire of your company. I can deal with the rest.”

“Matt. I'm sorry.”

“God! Don't be sorry! Don't you see—that's the point?
Don't be sorry
. I never blamed you for Janie. Sure, our family is messy. Quinn's a different kind of kid, and Katie can be a huge pain in the ass, and you worry too much, and I could probably be more involved. But the bottom line is, I'm fine with all that. I love all that.
It's us
.”

She looked at him, his face tired and puffy after his long night and the long flight, but the beauty still there beneath it all, the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the broad forehead. She loved knowing his face now and remembering it at age ten and fourteen and twenty. All those years, and she had been part of them, too. She saw the scar from the hockey blade on his cheek and reached forward and ran a finger across it lightly. She gazed into his blue eyes, the color of the ice in glaciers, and he didn't turn away. And she felt as she had all those years ago in that little cabin by the lake in northern Michigan, felt something rise in her, swirling and full and warm. Even now, after all these years, he
still
loved her like that. And after it all—after this last hard year of everything—she knew she loved him like that, too, and herself with him.

“Thank you,” she said.

Matt's eyes searched her face, and he smiled, a sweet, reassuring smile—so like Quinn's that her heart lurched. Quinn shifted again in the bed, rolled onto his side. Matt stood up at the sound, and bent over him. But Quinn slept.

Matt walked over to look at Katie, asleep on the cot on her stomach—one leg tossed wide, her dark hair tangled on the white pillow.

“She's okay?”

“She's fine. It's been a wild ride this past twenty-four hours.”

“It's been a wild ride since the day she was born.”

Susannah came and stood next to him and put an arm around his waist. He turned to her, and his arms encircled her, and she buried her face against his chest.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you and the kids and our family more than anything.”

“I know,” she said. “I love you, too.”

He held her tighter, and this time, for the first time she could ever remember, she was the first to let go.

Chapter 29

Susannah 2012

The day of the funeral was sunny and clear. After a long, rainy spring, the air was warm and loam scented, and now, in late June, everything was lush and green. At the edge of the cemetery, two hummingbirds sipped at a blooming tangle of morning glory, and bees buzzed in the wild nootka roses. Above them, a pair of flickers pecked away at the deadwood of an old white fir, digging out a nest.

Barefoot wore a clean pair of black trousers and a warm gray sweater and no shoes, of course. The trousers were the only ones Betty had been able to find that didn't need to be pinned together in the front, and while he probably had a pair of shoes somewhere, he had never worn them in life, so it didn't seem right that he should wear them now. Quinn and Katie had found him curled on the floor of his farmhouse, on a rug next to the woodstove, with Toby at his side. The medical examiner said he had probably died peacefully in his sleep; for whatever reason, his heart had stopped. When Susannah and Jim had arrived at the farmhouse in response to Katie's call, after frantically driving across the rutted roads and then running pell-mell to the farmhouse, they had found Quinn and Katie kneeling on the floor next to Barefoot, hugging Toby, surrounded by a dozen coffee cans filled with earth and little seedlings.

“Barefoot always kept his plants next to the stove at night so they'd stay warm,” Quinn had said, raising a tear-stained face to Susannah. “How can they be alive and he be dead?”

Now more than a hundred people clustered around the grave, including every single one of the islanders and friends from as far away as Ann Arbor and San Jose. Betty, too weak to walk more than a few steps, sat on Dorothy Watson's bench, across from the grave, with her oxygen tank at her side. Jim had carried her there before everyone arrived. She didn't want the other islanders to see the extent of her weakness. She wanted to do Barefoot proud.

Susannah and Matt stood a few feet from her, next to the grave. Quinn sat several yards away in the shade of an aspen tree, petting Toby. Katie stood close to her mother. After Quinn's surgery and recovery, they'd decided to finish out the school year on Sounder. The life they had begun to build here was changing them, and they wanted to see it through, to give those changes time to become something tangible they could take back to Tilton. Matt had been back and forth to see them every month, and Lila had spent two weeks with them this spring.

Susannah pressed against Matt's shoulder as Jim began to read the eulogy he'd written for Barefoot. Jim's husky voice broke several times as he recalled the man who had befriended him as a child, who had taught him to swim and to love plants and growing things, to appreciate works of art and fine things—the man who had been, in all but biology, his father. He talked of Barefoot's work—the thirty thousand plants he'd collected for the University of Michigan's herbarium, the disease-resistant wild melon he'd discovered in Calcutta that had saved the California melon crop one year, the medal he'd won for his contributions to world agriculture. As he spoke, Toby got up and walked over and sat next to Jim, gazing up at him with his head cocked to one side as though he were listening, too. Quotes from Goethe, Mencken, and Dumas, Barefoot's favorite authors, were sprinkled throughout Jim's speech, each one calling up such a vivid image of Barefoot that Susannah almost expected him to sit up in his casket and tell Jim to stop yammering on.

Jim read a quote from Mencken: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” The crowd laughed, and Jim talked about the adventures of Barefoot's past, the wild ride on horseback across the plains of Uzbekistan in search of a rare variety of wild pomegranate, the robber he'd surprised in Tunisia, the wild boar—named Judy—he'd kept as a pet in Iran.

“ ‘Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words,' ” Jim read. Every day, Barefoot had wiped his bare feet on a beautiful, richly colored, hundred-year-old Baluch prayer rug, and eaten homemade apple pie from delicate nineteenth-century Minton porcelain plates, painted with white roses on a rich dark blue ground. He had loved beautiful things and surrounded himself with them and enjoyed them every day.

One by one, the other islanders stood to share their favorite remembrances of Barefoot. Evelyne Waters's mother, Andrea, recalled that she had once brought Barefoot a bottle of fine French wine as a thank-you for some seedlings he'd given her.

“He told me, ‘Take that swill back home,' ” Andrea said, as laughter rang out.

“Because it wasn't a Riesling,” someone called out. “He only drank
sweet
wine.”

Susannah shared the story of her first boat ride with Barefoot, how he'd taught her to handle the boat, easing her nerves with a slug of his “heart medicine.” Fiona, back from India for six months now, told a story, too, about the gift Barefoot had given her when the twins were born: a book on Far Eastern birth control methods.

When the last person had had her say, Jim stepped back up to the head of the grave. He took a deep breath. “I can't finish talking about Barefoot Jacobsen's life without also talking about my mother, Betty, and what she and Barefoot meant to each other,” he said.

Susannah looked at him in surprise, and then at Betty, who sat erect, her face glowing.

“Barefoot and Betty were lifelong friends,” Jim continued. “Beyond that, they shared a love so rich and full that, honestly, it humbles me to talk about it.” His voice grew thick, and he stopped for a moment.

Tears filled Betty's eyes, but she smiled.

“It is hard for me to imagine my mother without Barefoot, or Barefoot without my mother. It's not because they were inseparable—indeed, they spent large chunks of time apart. But they were so connected that you couldn't be around one of them without feeling and knowing the other. If a relationship is defined by what is created in the space between two people, then Barefoot and Betty created something filled with trust, acceptance, generosity, and passion.” He looked at his mother, his own eyes full.

“I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that, in many ways, Barefoot saved my mother's life after my father died. But I believe she saved his life, too, by grounding him, and also by letting him bloom. They were both most fully themselves with each other. They gave each other joy, and said so.

“They showed me what it really means to love”—Jim looked at his wife, and then at his sons, and his voice broke—“and I try every day to live up to their example.”

Betty closed her eyes, and nodded—in thanks, in acknowledgment of the truth he had spoken.

“I found a quote Barefoot wrote on the back of a photo of my mother that he kept in his wallet,” Jim continued. “They're words from Willa Cather's
My Antonia,
and seem a fitting way to close.” He cleared his throat, and read: “ ‘I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.' ”

Susannah felt the wind pick up, rustling the leaves in the trees arcing overhead, lifting her hair. She heard the rattle of metal and turned to see the sea-glass halo on her Janie angel spinning in the breeze. A few weeks ago, at Betty's request and with the agreement of the other islanders, Susannah had installed three of her scarecrow sculptures here in the cemetery. The first, the Janie angel, stood next to a tiny, freshly planted rose bush near the entrance to the cemetery. The second, another angel, stood on the spot Betty had picked out for her own grave. And the third, Susannah's junk metal version of Katie's pony-tailed God, stood in the center of the cemetery, with rainbow-colored pants made of copper and legs that danced now in the wind.

The sculptures were beautiful—wild and free and exuberant, all the things Susannah had never felt herself to be. But looking at them now she thought,
They are me, too
. She was both happy and fearful about going back to Tilton at the end of June: happy to be with Matt again, fearful of falling into old patterns, old terrors. Katie would be in high school this September, Quinn in middle school. They would face the same risks, the same temptations. So would she.

But the kids were different people now; she was a different person now. She looked at the sculptures and thought,
I could not have created those a year ago.
She thought about the words Jim had just spoken, about being dissolved into something complete and great. She thought, with her husband and children at her side, about letting go.
It's like falling without a net,
she thought.
But it's so much better than being bound up in one.

Hood began to sing. He had a beautiful, pure alto, and sang the spiritual Barefoot had requested in his will: “Ain't Got Time to Die.” Susannah saw Betty smile and shake her head as Hood sang the chorus. As he finished singing, six snow geese, which had been honking in the scrubby field across the dirt road from the cemetery, suddenly took off and flew overhead, their wide white wings and black wingtips flapping in unison, almost as if it were timed.

Susannah looked up, following the geese with her eyes as they became smaller and smaller in the distance until they were no more than tiny black dots against the cloudless blue sky.

“Did you see that?” Katie said.

Susannah nodded.

“It would be amazing, wouldn't it? To be able to fly?”

“Yes.”

The crowd started to disperse. People clustered around Betty, their hands on her shoulders, murmuring words of comfort.

Susannah turned to follow the crowd. Matt was ahead of her, talking to Quinn. Katie stood still.

“You coming, Kate?” Susannah said. “The party for Barefoot at the Laundromat is now.”

“I know,” Katie said. “I'll be there in a little bit. I have to—I wrote something for Barefoot.”

“You did? I'd love to see it.”

Katie shook her head. “No. It's just for Barefoot. I want to go out in the kayak and read it, just alone. Then I'll come.”

Susannah looked at her. Alone in the kayak with dusk coming on, with every soul on the island at the Laundromat, with no one around to hear her if she lost her paddle or got swamped by a passing boat or caught in the current.

“Go,” Susannah said to her daughter. “Fly.”