Dreams for Stones (26 page)

He shook his head, rubbing the finger Ted
had broken. “Some bruises, a black eye. No big deal.”

“Meg wasn’t the only brave one.”

He shook his head, looking from the Vasarely
to the fish circling their tank. Meg had been the one to take a
stand. He’d gotten involved only to save her.

“Did you ever talk to Meg about that day?”
Angela asked.

“She claimed it wasn’t bravery. When she saw
Ted push Rosita, and Rosita started to cry and no one lifted a
finger to stop it, she was so angry, she didn’t even consider the
consequences before she jumped in. She said bravery is when you
know exactly what you’re facing, know you’re likely to get hurt,
but you still choose to do it.”

“Do you agree with that?”

“I think she knew what could happen.” Meg
simply ignored those kinds of calculations when she saw someone in
trouble. But he didn’t. Except when Meg was involved, and then he
too simply acted.

“Tell me what you did, Alan. After Meg was
trapped.”

He’d known therapy would be difficult, just
hadn’t realized it would be this difficult. He took one breath,
then another.

“Meg was about ten feet from the bank. I got
as close to her as I could, and we talked while the team worked to
free her.” He stopped speaking, trying to shut off the
memories.

Angela spoke softly. “What did you talk
about?”

I can’t do this
. The words were a
scream of anguish inside his head. Frantically, he tried to focus
on the Vasarely. Failed. Meg, raising her face to his. The tide
turning. The rescuers scrambling to get out of the way.

Meg, turning to look at the water, and his
voice. “No. No. Don’t look. Look at me. Look at me. I love you. I
love you.”

He found he was rubbing his head, hard. He
had no idea how long Angela had been waiting for an answer,
watching him with those clear blue eyes that seemed able to read
his most private thoughts. It could have been ten seconds or ten
minutes.

“Do you ever think about your relationship
with Meg before that day?”

“I try not to.”

“Does that work?”

“Nights are bad sometimes.” Especially when
all he could remember was how Meg had looked after they’d freed
her. It was why he’d hung her picture in his bedroom. To counteract
that awful image.

“So you’ve pushed all your memories down
deep inside, only they refuse to stay there,” Angela said, jerking
his thoughts back again, as if he were a foal she was halter
training.

Angela let the silence stretch before
speaking more briskly. “Our time is up for today, Alan. What I want
you to do this week is write about Meg. Start with when, where, and
how you met. Then write down whatever you remember about your time
together.”

No. He couldn’t do it. Wouldn’t do it.

Kathy slowed to a walk, her breath coming out in pants. Cheesman
was deserted this morning except for a man walking a dog in the
distance. When she pulled in a deep breath, it made her chest ache.
August, but the early morning air was already chilly.

How much longer was she going to continue
this way—dating one man but unable to stop thinking about another.
Stuck in neutral. Kept from moving forward by regret and the
feeling there had to be something she could do to help Alan.

She knew Jade was right in saying he had to
choose healing for himself. But there must be something she could
do to encourage him to make that choice. It had to be right there
on the tip of her mind, if she could just grab hold of it.

Your heart needs to heal as well.

The words were as clear in her mind as the
command to write the Bobby story had been. Shaken, Kathy stepped
off the path. She caught her breath, then turned toward the center
of the park and started running, picking up her pace until she was
sprinting as fast as she could, up and down the grass covered
slopes, to the very center.

There she stopped, bent down, and sucked
deep gulps of air into her burning lungs. Then she straightened and
began turning in a slow circle.

Surrounded by a huge, modern city, yet alone
in this wide, silent expanse. Still turning, she looked up at the
sky, at contrails crisscrossing the blue, seeing it clearly at
last.

She’d focused on Alan and his wounds,
avoiding the bruises on her own heart. Not one essential loss, but
years of small losses, wearing away at her, until it had become so
much easier to let go than to hang on. The pattern formed by too
many goodbyes when she was still too young to notice. A pattern
that had eventually distorted all her relationships.

She’d called Greg dishonorable, and he had
been. But she’d been dishonorable, as well. Doling out her love for
him. Waiting to make sure it would come back to her before doling
out more.

No wonder he’d fallen in love with someone
else.

Loving Alan had changed that, changed her.
She loved Alan without counting the cost, and just like Jade said
she would, she had no doubts that love was wholehearted.

She was exhausted from trying not to feel
the pain of that certainty. A pain that intensified every time she
thought of what she’d said to Alan the last time they talked. Words
she now knew were not true.

Which would be worse? Letting him go without
a fight, or reaching out and having him turn away? Either would be
painful, but they were the only choices open to her. The real
question was whether she had the courage to take a chance.

If she did, it would then be Alan’s
choice—to accept her love, or to live in the past with the memory
of the woman he’d already lost.

Excerpt from the diaries of Emily Kowalski

1954

I am still trying to paint the sunset Bill and I shared so many
years ago, but somehow I am never satisfied. I have also tried to
paint Bobby over the years, but I can’t seem to capture his gentle
spirit, with paint or pen. I’ve been more successful painting the
animals, and those are the pictures I think Bobby likes best.

Today has been a typical Cincinnati winter day. Cold, dark, somber.
I took Bobby with me when I went to feed the animals, but as soon
as we finished, we came back inside to warm up.

I made us hot cocoa and settled Bobby by the
fire. As a special treat, I read him once again the story that
seems to be his favorite,
The Little Prince
.

I often wonder what my dear Bobby thinks of
this life of his, and I wish that we could talk about it. All we
have, though, are looks and touches.

It isn’t enough.

Still, in spite of everything, he brings me
so much joy. I know if I were to say that to anyone other than
Jess, that person would think I was demented, but I love Bobby so
very, very much.

1956

Once again I have been unable to write, as I struggle to find my
way. When I descend too far into sorrow, language deserts me. It’s
as though I’ve been set down in the middle of a vast plain of sand
that sifts around my feet, holding me fixed from my attempts to run
for help and silencing my cries with its vastness.

The last time I picked up a pen to record my
thoughts, it was winter, and Bobby sat beside the fire, waiting for
me to read to him. Now it is summer, and the flowers on Bobby’s
grave bloom and dance in the breeze that cannot dry my tears.

Brad is gone too.

My life, which was filled with activity, is
now empty and quiet, and I have no heart to play music or paint.
Once again, I can hear the clock snipping the hours into little
pieces.

I didn’t want to hold on to Bobby any
longer. He had been trapped in his poor, frail body so long. It was
cruel to hold onto him. But I never expected to miss him so. How
can it be that I miss him so?

Even the goats have been subdued. They
skipped their annual predation on the cemetery’s roses, as if they
know it is where Bobby has gone.

I look out the window and see in my memory
as clear as the day it happened, the black goat dropping petals in
Bobby’s lap. Only later when Father Larry came by to complain his
roses had been stripped did I understand what I had seen.

I smile as I write this, and I wonder if
that is proof the darkness will eventually fade.

As it did before.

In order to meet with Angela, Alan was spending more time in Denver
that summer than he usually did. It meant that after his second
therapy session, he returned to his apartment instead of the ranch,
resisting the assignment Angela had given him, to write about
Meg.

After a restless night, he decided he had to
at least try. That way he could tell Angela with a clear conscience
he'd tried but was unable to do it. She’d just have to come up with
another suggestion. That was her job, after all.

He pulled out one of the old notebooks he’d
used in the past to write down his story ideas. Without looking at
what he’d written when Meg was still alive, he turned to a fresh
page and picked up a pen. After a moment of hesitation, he began at
the beginning.

I met Meg Adams the first day of school when
we were both six years old.

The pen stopped moving, and he sat staring
at the page, adrift in memory.

In the beginning Meg had been like a second
sister. His mom called the three of them the tootling trio, Meg’s
mom called them the gruesome threesome. They’d shared everything.
Bikes and braces. Horses, homework, and 4H projects.

Without realizing it, he’d begun writing
again, the words pouring out in spurts and runs, long convoluted
sentences and short fragments as the memories flashed, and he
grabbed at them before they could fade.

Meg, always drawing. Everywhere they went,
even out to round up calves, she’d have a small sketchbook tucked
in her pocket. How many hours had he spent, watching the quick,
sure movement of her pencil.

A rabbit frozen into immobility next to a
tumbleweed, one of the horses, head up, checking the wind for rain,
a calf bawling for its mother. When she closed the book and smiled
at him, he'd counted that full payment for his patience.

When hunger and fatigue forced him to stop
writing he closed the notebook without looking at what he’d written
and went to the kitchen, opened a can of soup, and turned on the
television for company.

He ate and stared at the movements on the
screen without any memory afterward of what he’d eaten or seen.
When it was late enough, he went to bed.

He stayed in Denver another day and spent it
writing as well, stopping only to open a can of something when his
stomach growled and going to bed when he could no longer keep his
eyes open.

At the end of those two days, looking at the
filled pages, it hit him. He was writing and had been for two days,
scarcely lifting his hand from the page.

His hand ached, something he hadn’t noticed
until now. He gently bent it back, stretching out his fingers and
wrist to ease their stiffness—a good stiffness, a good ache.

“I’ve written about Meg.”

Sometimes Angela made no attempt to help him
out by responding immediately. This was one of those times.

“I think it’s helped.”

Still no response.

He sighed. “Writing about her, I’ve been
able to remember some of the good times again.”

“Do you know anything about the grief
process, Alan?”

He shook his head, relieved to let her do
her share.

“When we lose someone we love, most of us
react at first by denying it’s happened. We say things like, ‘I
don’t believe it’, and ‘it can’t be real.’ Then when it becomes
real, we get angry. At God. The universe. Ourselves.”

Alan sat still, letting Angela’s words fill
the space between them.

“Some people get stuck in the denial phase
or the anger phase. Blocked, if you will, from moving on. Sometimes
that block is guilt. It’s only after the disbelief and anger fade
that we’re able to begin to accept. And it’s only after we accept,
that we can live again.”

He knew she was looking at him, but he kept
his eyes on the aquarium behind her.

“Alan, is Meg buried here in Denver?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever visit her grave?”

He shook his head, still staring at the
aquarium.

“Perhaps a good place to think about your
grief would be Meg’s gravesite.”

“You’re telling me that’s what I should
do?”

“No. I’m asking you to think about difficult
issues. And suggesting a place that might help you with that
thinking.”

“I can’t.”

“This work you’re doing, Alan. To overcome
grief and guilt. It’s difficult. As difficult as getting stones to
float.”

“You’re saying it’s impossible.”

She shook her head and refused to say more.
It was one of the maddening things about Angela. She never argued
and rarely explained. All she did was plant these squibs that would
later explode just when he thought he’d managed to forget them.

He bought another notebook and spent more time in Denver writing
about himself and Meg. As he wrote, Angela’s suggestion that he
visit Meg’s grave hovered at the edge of his conscious thought. By
the time he filled the second book, he was tense, irritable, and
sleeping poorly.

He awakened Friday morning at five, still
exhausted, but knowing he’d be unable to sleep anymore. Resigned,
he got up, made coffee, and sat down to write more about Meg.

No words came.

He sat staring at the blank page, his vision
blurring with sudden rage. It was too hard. All of it. And there
wasn’t a scintilla of evidence that any of it was doing any
good.

Changing what one thought about something
was easy. But changing what one felt. . . that was like trying to
change the course of a river.