The Language of Sycamores (17 page)

Kate’s eyes flew wide, and she clung to the chain-link fence, blinking at me. “What?”

“I’m unemployed. Laid off. Jobless,” I admitted. “Lansing’s in financial trouble. Last Friday they cut my department and they cut me.”

“Karen,” Kate breathed, as if someone had just died. In a way, someone had—her imaginary big sister with the perfect life. “Oh, my gosh, I’m sor—I mean, you’ve been at Lansing forev—” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know what to say. I know this must be really hard.”

The sympathy was completely genuine, her horror over my situation absolutely heartfelt. I knew what she was thinking.
What will Karen do without Lansing Tech? It’s her life. How can she survive without the bonuses and the promotions, the high-powered meetings and the big, fancy incentive trips?

She was reacting exactly as I’d thought she would. The strange thing was that I didn’t feel the way I thought I’d feel. I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed or worried that Kate finally knew. I was relieved. For the first
time in . . . well . . . ever, I didn’t feel like I had to build myself up into something I wasn’t. I could just be who I was.

Kate was doing a little mental algebra. “That’s why you sounded so strange when I called Friday night. Geez, Karen, you should have said something. We could have talked.”

“I wasn’t ready to talk about it.”

Kate nodded, her brown eyes filled with understanding but also a hint of disappointment. She obviously wished we could have sat down and shared a good girl cry. “But if you need somebody . . .”

“I know,” I said quietly, and then the strangest thing happened. I felt as if Kate were not just my sister, but my friend. “I’m sure I’ll get to that point, but for now I just want to hibernate.”

“And that’s why you finally came back to the farm? To hibernate?”

I searched Kate’s face, wondering how to tell her that this trip had been so much more than that. “I just wanted to feel . . . grounded.”

“O.K.,” Kate said quietly, and slipped her arm around my shoulders. “You’re officially grounded. Anything else I can do?”

“No.” Stepping closer, I rested my head against hers. “Lay off the perfection thing a little, O.K.? I can’t take the competition right now.”

“I will if you will.”

“Deal,” I whispered, and we stood there leaning on each other, basking in the biggest epiphany of our lives as sisters. Both of us turned back to the game, because there wasn’t much more to say.

On the field, James was pitching a no-hitter. Suddenly, Sherita stood up from where she’d been sulking and marched past the dugout. Yanking a bat away from Edwardo, our chubby little future lion cub, she walked to the plate.

In the parking lot, the church van started honking and Brother Baker called for the bus kids to load up so he could take them home.

Meleka grabbed her stuff and hollered, “C’mon, Sherita, we gotta go!”

Sherita never looked away from the pitcher, just narrowed her hazel-gray eyes and said, “This won’t take long.”

“Oh-ho!” James coughed, then said to the outfield, “Back up, boys. We’ve got a hitter!”

Pursing her lips, Sherita gave him a sneer. After a whole day of sitting around being nothing, she wasn’t in the best mood. “Gimme a pitch.”

James lobbed a ball across the plate, and she swung. The bat connected with a metallic ping, and the ball sailed over the heads of the outfielders, who hollered, “Woah!” and “Awesome! She’s good!”

Sherita didn’t even flinch, just gave a little head jerk and challenged, “Gimme a
real
pitch.”

He did, and she sent that ball to the outfield, too.

“Not bad.” James braced his hands on his hips.

Sherita tried not to seem pleased by the comment. Tossing the bat by the fence, she gathered her things, then glanced back at James. “You gonna be here tomorrow?”

James paused. I could tell he wanted to say yes, but he knew he would be heading to Kansas City in the late morning for his next trip. “No. I have to leave tomorrow.”

“Figures,” she said flatly and headed for the van without looking back. There was a world of anger and disappointment and dropped expectations in that one little word.

James watched her go as Kate helped herd the remaining kids into the van. “Guess I wish we didn’t have to head out tomorrow,” he said as we stood by the fence.

I didn’t miss the
we
. “I was thinking I’d stay through the day tomorrow, at least.” Bracing my hands on my hips, I stretched my back. Kate may have thought I didn’t have a hair out of place, but every muscle in my body was aching.

He reacted exactly as I thought he would, with a look of concern that said I ought to be getting back home and back to business. “You sure you’re up for another day?”

“Yeah.” The truth was that I felt good. Exhausted, but good. It had been years since I’d ended the day with such a profound sense of accomplishment. I thought about all the kids who’d filed through our class, learning to play simple string and percussion instruments. Occasionally, they tried a smattering of piano or guitar. Some, like Dell, pushed for more and more and more until the class time was over.

What would those kids have been doing if they hadn’t been at
Jumpkids camp—watching TV, playing video games, wandering idly around town, sitting in foster homes wondering how long it would be before someone came for them? Instead, they’d had a day that was completely out of the ordinary. Off the map. Music, dance, art—but it was more than that. It was a chance to express themselves, to accomplish something, to be special. Who could say where that might lead?

Who would have ever guessed that part of me would be secretly glad I’d been laid off, so that I could spend the day a thousand miles from home at a camp for kids? Who knew I’d cross a major bridge with my sister while standing on the sidelines of a baseball game? Some things defy logic. . . .

“You’re in another world.” James was waving a hand in front of my face, and I hadn’t even noticed.

“I was just thinking.” I had the strangest urge to tell him what was on my mind.
Maybe it’s time for a change.
What would he say?

Keiler caught up with us from behind, and the moment was lost. “It was a good day.”

Both James and I nodded, and James said, “It was good—a little tiring for the over-forty crowd.”

Keiler slapped James on the shoulder. “Too bad you’re not going to be here tomorrow. We could use you in recreation. You sure made some points with Sherita.”

“She’s a good ballplayer.”

Keiler nodded. “She’s good at a lot of things. You should see the essay she wrote to get into camp. It’s ten pages long, and she wanted to try everything—singing, dancing, playing an instrument, you name it.”

“Then why isn’t she doing it?”

Keiler sighed, shaking his head slowly. “She changed foster homes since she wrote that essay. That’s hard, especially in your teenage years. You start thinking nobody’s ever going to want you for good.”

Something in his voice told me he was speaking from experience. That surprised me. I had pictured Keiler as an Ivy League kid from a good family who nursed him through brain surgery, who loved and encouraged him despite the long hair and rumpled clothes. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” I said carefully.

“I was a foster kid from the time I was ten.” The words were matter-of-fact—like “I have brown eyes” or “I’m five foot eleven.” “When I was fifteen, I got lucky. I found someone who wanted to keep me.” He grinned. “Of course, they didn’t know they were going to end up paying for an NYU education and brain surgery, but hey, by the time that happened, they were already attached.”

The three of us chuckled together, and even though Keiler was making light of his past, I felt a new level of admiration for him. “I guess that’s why you’re so good with these kids.”

Pointing a finger at me, he turned to head into the church. “Better watch out, Karen. You’re starting to sound like a true believer.”

James gave me a thoughtful frown as we stood alone on the curb, waiting for Dell to carry an armload of baseball equipment into the building. “He’s right, you know. You haven’t exactly been sounding like yourself these last couple of days.”

I stared into the trees at the edge of the parking lot, thinking. “I guess I’ve been having sort of an identity crisis since last Friday.” How could I explain what I didn’t understand myself? “I feel like I’ve lost some parts of myself these last few years, like I’ve just been getting up and going through the same routine because . . .” Because why? Because we couldn’t talk about losing the baby? Because it was easier to just let time pass? “Because I didn’t know what else to do, I guess,” I finished lamely. Dell was coming out of the building with Jenilee and Caleb. Now wasn’t the time to talk.

James seemed reluctant to leave our conversation unfinished. He was about to say something when the others walked up.

Jenilee gave us a questioning look, noticing that they had walked in on something. Slipping her hand into Caleb’s, she gave a little tug toward his truck. “Well, we’re going to go on over to Poetry to stay overnight and do some visiting before we head back to St. Louis. I promised Kate I’d ask Mrs. Jaans if she knows anything about your grandma and my grandma and the other sister, Sadie, but I think if she knew anything, she would have told me by now.”

“It’s worth a try.” My mind wasn’t on the past. It was on the present, and the conversation James and I had left unfinished. Were there
things he wanted to tell me as well? What if he wasn’t happy with our life, either?

Jenilee shifted uncomfortably. “Oh . . . Kate said to tell you she had to rush off to go get the kids, and she’d see you at the farm whenever.”

Dell piped up before I had a chance to answer. “We’re goin’ on a tractor ride out at Karen and James’s land.”

“That sounds fun.” Laying a hand on Dell’s shoulder, Jenilee leaned down a little so that they were face-to-face. “I guess I won’t see you again until Memorial weekend. You sounded great on the piano today. I think your only problem is going to be deciding which part to do in the show. You’d be good at all of them.”

Embarrassed, Dell threaded her arms together. “You’re gonna be back for the Jumpkids show?”

“Oh, you bet we are,” Jenilee promised, her face filled with a tender affection that made me think she would be a very good doctor. She knew how to connect with people. “I’m trying to get my whole family to come for Memorial weekend so that we can all see your show.”

Dell looked terrified by the idea, but halfheartedly said, “Cool.”

We hugged good-bye, then Jenilee and Caleb left. James, Dell, and I decided to leave my rental car at the church overnight and drive home in his. We slid wearily into the seats.

“Buckle your seat belt back there,” James said as we pulled out of the parking lot. Dell was too tired to argue. Buckling her belt, she yawned and sighed, resting her head against the seat and closing her eyes. By the time we reached the edge of town, she was drifting off to sleep, her face turned toward the breeze from the window.

“Been a big day,” James said quietly, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, it has,” I agreed, laying my head against the headrest. “James, we need to talk.”

“You’re right, Karen.” His words seemed flat, calculated. “We do.”

Chapter 17

M
y heart skipped, then jolted back into action as we rattled over a row of potholes, leaving the blacktop for a gravel back road that would take us around the far side of the mountain. The car began to hum to the rhythm of the old road. I wanted to lose myself in the song, just close my eyes and drift away. . . .

“Karen?” Why, now that James wanted to talk, was I so afraid?

The car went silent, passing over a short stretch of pavement on a bridge. In that one soundless instant, I understood the source of my fear. Our lives were comfortable—filled with a steady white noise, like the car on the gravel road. It was easy to be lulled into complacency. Friday the white noise had stopped, and I was alone in a quiet I hadn’t experienced in years. The hush of my own soul.

Out of that silence came my first question to him. The hardest one of all. “James, are you happy?”

“What?” He lowered his brows, blindsided.

“Are you happy?” I repeated. “With our life, with the way things are. Do you feel”—I searched for the word, and ended with—“stagnant? Like maybe you’re just going through the motions, and the years are passing, and you’re experiencing life through a layer of insulation?” He didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. I went on, trying to put words to something I didn’t really understand. “Because that’s how I feel. It’s
like I just get up every day and I go through the routine, making sure I do all the right things, stay busy, get a lot accomplished. I feel like I’ve been gorging on job promotions and big corporate deals the last few years, only to wake up and realize I’m starving to death.” Tears stung as I felt that hungry part of myself come so close to the surface—the emotional, vulnerable part that needed family, love, a life with meaning beyond just satisfying worldly desires.

James sighed, stroking a hand roughly through his hair, combing the smattering of premature gray at the temples. When he said we needed to talk, he undoubtedly hadn’t anticipated anything like this. “Are you talking about us, or are you talking about your job?” As usual, he was going to dissect the situation, whittle it down to a manageable size.

“Both,” I said.

He glanced in the rearview mirror at Dell’s sleeping form. “I’m not sure now’s the time—”

“It’s never the time,” I rushed out. Outside, the dappled shadows of oaks and sycamores slid silently by, slipping over the car, seeming in no hurry at all. “It’s never the time. We’ve been through eight years of not the time, ever since”—I forced out the last words—“ever since we lost the baby.”

His hazel eyes took on a fog of confusion, and he craned to look at me. “I don’t see what that has to do with the way things are now.”

“It has everything to do with the way things are now.” Didn’t he see it? Didn’t he realize that was the day we stopped discussing the future and started marching blindly through our routines? “Don’t you ever wonder why we never talked about losing the baby, or what we wanted from life after that?”

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I thought we decided that.”

“When?” I shot back. Dell stirred in the backseat, and I lowered my voice. “When did we
decide
anything? We just let time go by and let life happen.”

He thought for a minute, measuring his words. “That’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?” There was something just below the surface. A truth he didn’t want to say out loud.

“No, it isn’t the same thing. It’s a coward’s way out,” I bit out, trying to bait him. “I’m not saying that we made the wrong choices. I’m saying that we never
made
a choice. I’m saying that I wanted to talk about it—to talk about how you were feeling and how I was feeling. What we wanted in the future, whether we wanted a family or not. Every time I’ve brought it up over the years, you’ve changed the subject. I guess I just kept thinking you weren’t ready yet, that at some point there would be a perfect time for us to talk about the baby we lost and the future. I thought we’d grieve together and then move on. Now it’s like I woke up and realized eight years have passed, and we’re still stuck with this huge taboo subject between us.”

Exhaling through pursed lips, he shook his head slowly, as if he had known for a long time that this moment would finally come. “I didn’t have all the feelings you wanted me to have, all right? How was I supposed to tell you that? How was I supposed to tell you that when you miscarried, when the doctors found the cancer and said they could operate to remove it, all I felt was relief. We hadn’t planned the pregnancy. We both knew we weren’t ready for a baby at that point. It just seemed . . . like things happened the way they were meant to, I guess. All I could think about was what would have happened if you hadn’t lost the baby. What if the pregnancy had gone on five more months? The doctor said it was probably the change in hormones that prompted the cancer to develop. What would have happened in six more months? How far would it have spread?” He sighed again, the shadows passing over his face. “I’m sorry, Karen. I suppose I thought that if we avoided the issue, over time it would just . . . fade away. I thought it would be better that way.”

The past and the present swirled through my mind in a tempest of emotions—grief over the loss of the baby, anger at the doctors for performing the surgery that meant we’d never have one, anger at God for letting cancer grow inside of me when I was only in my thirties, anger at James for not grieving with me. How could he sit here now and say it was best that things happened this way? How could that be his excuse for not grieving the loss I still felt so intensely? “There’s no way to know if . . .”

“If the cancer would have spread?” He finished the thought, his lips set in a hard, determined line. “There’s no way to know that it wouldn’t have.” I felt the car slow, come almost to a stop as we wound through a valley of overhanging pecan trees. He turned to me, his look intense. “How could I tell you that every time you wanted to talk about your grief over the baby, all I could think of was what if the baby had survived and you hadn’t? I know the baby was real to you. You felt it. You imagined the person it would become, but to me it was still just a thought, an idea, something I hadn’t planned on in my life. I was willing to give up that idea for you to be healthy and here with me. I knew you wouldn’t be able to understand that. I knew if I told you, you’d look at me just the way you’re looking at me now.”

I stared at him, tasting the salt of tears, feeling betrayed. “I would have . . . understood. I would have figured out how to understand.”

“No, Karen, you wouldn’t have.” He focused on the road as we wound up a hill into the afternoon sunshine. “You haven’t even forgiven me for not
talking
about grieving for the baby. How would things have been if I’d told you I wasn’t grieving—I was relieved that you were going to be all right? I helped my father raise three kids after my mother died of cancer, Karen. I watched how it consumed him. It exhausted him. I know it may be selfish of me, but I didn’t want that kind of life.”

I wiped my eyes, then let my hands fall into my lap as a new rush of tears came. Outside the window, yellowbonnet flowers swept by like an ocean. “That’s why you never wanted to talk about losing the baby, about possibly having a family through some other means—because you were afraid I might not be around long enough to raise a child?” I muttered, dumbfounded.

Nausea spiraled through me, and I rested my head against the seat belt, gulping in the thick, pollen-scented breeze. What would he say if he knew about the tests last week in Dr. Conner’s office?

“I don’t know,” he admitted, sounding weary, confused, scrubbing his forehead as if to wipe away the thoughts. “It was never anything that clear-cut. I never put it into those terms in my mind. It was just easier to let time go by.”

I nodded, understanding.
Easier to let time go by.
Hadn’t I thought
the same thing myself? Only now I was waking up and realizing that sleepwalking through life, never facing the risks and the realities of human existence, wasn’t a solution. The time that had drifted by was lost, like water down a river. My fears were still with me. I was older and still afraid. Living, really living, was about stepping out in spite of fear, about taking a leap of faith.

“We’ve done this too long,” I said softly. “We’ve spent too many years just making a living, but not really making a life—with your family and my family, with each other. We go on a vacation every once in a while. We see your dad, your brothers and sister and nieces and nephews every couple years. Until you started coming to the farm, we never saw Kate and Ben. We’re not really making a life, making real human connections. I had a sense of it on September 11, but I didn’t grab on. I knew those weren’t your flight numbers on the news, but when you finally called me and told me you were on the ground in Denver, I was so relieved. I thought,
When he gets home, we’re going to take a long vacation. We’ll just get in the car, and we’ll go see all the places we always wanted to see. We’ll go visit the family instead of sending Christmas cards, and not just for a day or two. This time we’ll really stay.
Shaking my head, I wiped my eyes again. Two years ago, I’d had a wake-up call, and I’d let it slip away. “By the time you got home, I was already back at work, figuring out how Lansing could get into the homeland-security business.” A rueful laugh pressed my throat. “A lot of good that did me. I should have taken the time to be with you, to figure out what was right for us.”

He nodded, but he didn’t answer. Stroking a thumb back and forth on the steering wheel, he scanned the horizon slowly, thoughtfully. We turned from one road onto another. I recognized this one. It was the old road that led around the mountain and past the back side of the farm.

“So is that what’s behind this sudden interest in Jumpkids camp and teaching piano lessons?” he asked. “A latent sense of needing to do something meaningful with your life?”

I thought carefully about the answer. It was hard to tell from the question how he felt about it. “I don’t know,” I admitted finally. “That
could be some of it, but there’s more.” How could I explain to him? How could I show him this part of me that he never knew, the part that was locked up in the attic, in an old trunk with various recital costumes, old sheet music, and a stack of ribbons from teenage music competitions?

Taking a breath, I plunged into a reality I had yet to explore to myself. “When I sat down at the piano the night I was laid off . . . when I started to play, it was like a door had been thrown open inside me and the music came rushing out. I remembered how much I loved it, how much I lived for it. I remembered how I gave it up when I got to college, when I was struggling to get through the engineering degree. And I thought,
Why did I do that? Why did I do that to myself? Just because my parents thought music and theater were a waste of time, or because my professors told me I needed to devote myself to the engineering curriculum?
Why was I so afraid to be who I was?” I glanced at Dell, sleeping in the backseat, so unaware of the tempest traveling in the car with her. “And then when Dell came along, I saw how the music brought her out of herself. I realized how special her talent was, and all she needed was someone to tell her that. And while I was telling her, she was telling me the same thing.”

Looking at Dell, I suddenly understood the connection between us. “I realized that the parts of me she admired are the very parts I had decided didn’t matter. These kids don’t like me because I have a six-figure job and a big title. They like me because I can play the piano and do a bad chicken dance. It’s a powerful thing to realize that someone can like you for who you are—not who someone else wants you to be or tells you to be. I don’t want to give that up.”

Craning his neck at me, he drew back a little. “So what are you saying, exactly?”

“I’m not sure,” I admitted. I felt like I was groping through a dark, unfamiliar place, trying to find the light. “I don’t want to go home and just blindly soldier on, type up a résumé, beat the pavement until I find another job with another Lansing Tech. I want to take some time to . . . to really think about . . . life.”

He started to talk, to analyze my plan, and I held up a hand to stop
him. “I know you’re going to say that doesn’t make sense.” He nodded almost imperceptibly, and I went on. “But everything doesn’t have to be logical. It’s not the end of the world if things don’t make sense. Some things you just feel and you don’t know why. All I know for sure is that I haven’t been this exhilarated at the end of a day in years. It’s like I’m operating on pure oxygen, like I can breathe all the way to the bottom of my lungs.”