The One That Got Away (21 page)

As the car follows the curving gray ribbon of road toward my home, the pull of memory becomes so strong it rivals gravity. The way the woods open onto a meadow, here. That pond at the base of that muddy field, there. The black and brown cows grazing near the water's edge, flicking their tails lazily around their craggy hip bones. This is where I come from. Where I was a child. Where I was part of a family. And after this is over, I'll never see this place again.

The farmhouse I grew up in clings to the top of a hillside, at the end of a long, rutted lane that I always dreaded having to drive in the dark. My stomach flops over at the sight of John's battle-worn old truck, parked out front, red Virginia mud still spattered over the wheel wells from the last time he navigated the driveway in the rain. At the thump of my car door, his golden retriever, Maggie, trots out from behind the house, her plumy tail swishing in welcome. Janet's planning to take her home with her when she goes back to Harrisonburg. The truck's going to his best friend, Dave. That's what we're here to do—pack away, redistribute all the leftovers of his life.

Since I only see it once a year, I'm never prepared for how utterly unchanged the house is. The whiskey barrels on the porch, still overgrown with petunias withered by a recent frost (John plants—no, John
planted
—them too). The wide-plank pine floors, smooth with age, that still creak in the exact same spots that they've creaked for at least the last thirty years. I'd tried at one point to convince John to make some sort of a change and paint the shutters a different color—dark blue instead of dark green—but he'd just shrugged.

Inside, my mother is everywhere. There are not many photos of her, but her personality and her memory are still impressed upon every room in the house as clearly as a handprint in concrete. Her artwork covers the walls, her books line the shelves, and her thrift store treasures clutter the surface of every table—all of them chosen for the same quirky beauty she loved to find in the world. We never directly spoke about it, but I know why John couldn't bear to part with any of it—it would have felt like throwing a part of her away.

I find Janet at work in the kitchen, emptying out the cabinets. I dump my coat and bags on the Windsor bench in the hallway, like I used to do every day when I got home from school, and join her. We talk intermittently as we work—her family, my job—but both of us skate around mentioning John directly. At one point she asks me if my boyfriend will be able to get time off to attend the wake. Without even thinking about it, I tell her no. I've been avoiding calling Noah back; I need to let him know what has happened, but the truth is I'm dreading talking to him. Trying to pretend that I feel comforted and sustained by him from five thousand miles away. Right now, I just want to focus on getting this house cleared up so I can head back home.

By the end of the day, we have finished sorting most of the first floor. My shoulders and back are tight and aching by the time I climb the swaybacked stairs to the upper hallway. The door to John's room is closed, for which I am grateful. Janet must not be able to face it, either, because instead of sleeping there, she set up a nest for herself on the couch downstairs.

I cross the hall to the room where I slept as a child. It looks exactly the same: the low, sloping ceiling; the bookcase crammed with peeling paperbacks; the bewitching watercolor portrait my mother painted for me of Anne of Green Gables, my childhood idol. It even smells the same, just like the rest of the house does: stale woodsmoke and old paper and a hint of the Murphy's oil
soap we always used to clean the floors. With a tired sigh, I sink down on the creaky twin mattress and pull the scratchy wool blankets over my shoulders. Beyond the open window, the branches of the dogwood tree are black against the moonlit sky. My throat is throbbing with the urge to cry, but I don't give in; I'm already tired of crying, and it's only been two days. I have four more to get through, just in Virginia. And then all of the days back home. I remember how this goes.

Before I fall asleep, I reach for my phone and reread Eamon's last message.
Give me an update when you can. Thinking of you. Wish so much that I could be there
. Before I can think twice, I tell him what I was too scared to say to him the night before:
Wish you were here too
.

Birdsong wakes me, easing me into the day almost apologetically. It's just after sunrise and the air is damp and cool, sweetly redolent of dry leaves and woodsmoke. Mist clings to the treetops in the valley beyond the house. The trees are glowing with autumn color, still subdued in the early-morning light, and the lines of the rolling hills, tumbling westward like waves, flood me with affection for my home. Strange to think that the suburban tundra where Eamon grew up is even part of the same state.

I scrub the grit from my eyes and rub my forehead, trying to ease the band of tension that's already tightening there. My heart pirouettes slowly in my chest as I reach for my phone to check what, if anything, Eamon has written in response to my text from last night. But instead of a message from him, there's a send error waiting for me on the screen. Apparently the virtues of the Blue Ridge don't extend to cell reception—my message never got sent. In the bald light of morning, I'm feeling much less courageous. I delete it from my outbox without resending.

The next three days meld together into one long blur of packing and sorting, sorting and packing. Janet and I take turns running carloads of donations to the Salvation Army in Christianburg when one of us needs to get out of the house for an hour. Despite my best intentions, the “Sarina” pile in the living room has been growing steadily. I thought I'd only find a few things that I'd want to keep, but I guess I underestimated how many physical objects in this house would have memories clinging to them. Memories I'm frightened I will lose.

Like the tattered patchwork throw cushions that my mother made during one of her sporadic flirtations with sewing—the foam filling is lumpy with age, and they don't work with a single damn thing in my house back home, but I can't let them go. The same story with the goofy hand-painted wooden chicken statue that used to have pride of place on top of the kitchen cabinets, and the battered steel thermos that John used to take with him to job sites. Always filled with a toxic sludge of coffee so strong I could never understand how his feet stayed planted on the ground after he drank it.

And then, before we realize it, we're done. The house is totally cleared out except for the few pieces of furniture I want to leave behind to stage the place for sale—although I know part of it is that I simply can't bear the thought of seeing those rooms utterly vacant and cold. The final thing to get through is the wake, which I have been dreading. The last few days have been, strangely, like a vacation from my grief; with hard work to throw myself into, I haven't had time to sink into it. Packing up John's house has become a project that's almost disconnected from his death. But the wake is going to wreck me. All of his lifelong friends together, sharing stories, making music. I'm going to drown.

The ache in my chest as I drive into town that evening does not bode well. Janet is driving with her husband and kids, who have come down from Harrisonburg for the wake. So I'm by myself,
watching the last of the color fade from the early-darkening autumn sky as I drive. I guess when I was packing back in Austin, I must have been refusing to acknowledge that I might have to attend some sort of occasion such as this, because all I packed was jeans; so I'm wearing an old Stevie Nicksesque gypsy skirt of my mother's that I found in a closet, with my Fryes hiding underneath. The fifteen-year-old elastic in the skirt's waistband is shot, so I improvised with safety pins. One of them is digging me in the belly right now.

By the time I reach town, there are no parking spots left anywhere near the Country Store; I have to park at the back of the courthouse lot two blocks away. As I walk, I pass the tidy clapboard house where my high school boyfriend's parents still live. On their porch, a forlorn jack-o'-lantern lists drunkenly to one side. Not unlike the actual boyfriend, the last few times I saw him.

I can hear the rush of noise even before I reach the door to the Country Store; I invited about forty people, but it sounds as if more than twice that number are inside. It sounds as crowded as it is for the usual Friday night concerts. No sooner do I step through the door than I'm swept into a hug from Ellie, the wife of the Pickers' banjo player, John's closest friend, Dave.

“Oh, child, we're going to miss him so much,” she says, pulling me against her spare frame. I feel tears like darts behind my eyelids. Was that even a full minute?

“Yeah,” I say unsteadily, and she pulls back to look at me, hands on my shoulders.

“Lord, I can never get over how much you look like your mama. Leigh, the spitting image. Isn't that so, Susan?” she adds, addressing another friend of John's who has come to greet me.

I have heard this a thousand times, since even before my mother died. When people would say it to the two of us, she would grin proudly, wrap her arm around my shoulders, and hip-bump me. Then she would deliver her favorite smartass response:
“Yep, I figured out the key to human cloning. She's something, huh?” Everyone always laughed, even if they'd heard the joke before. She was like that. Impossible to resist. Not unlike Eamon in that respect, it suddenly occurs to me. They would have adored each other.

“Oh yes. Same green eyes and everything,” says Susan, cupping my cheek.

I drag in a ragged breath, wondering what the ever-loving hell possesses people to say things like that at times like this. Ellie hooks me by the elbow, steers me over to the refreshment table, and presses a mug of spiked cider into my hand with an understanding smile.

“Drink up, my sweet. I promise, it'll help you get through it.”

I tip the mug back and down the cider in three long gulps.

After a while, I stop trying to hold back the tears. They just keep coming. With every joke, every toast, every piercingly sweet bluegrass tune, John's Dobro parts deliberately left empty. As I look around the familiar pine-planked room, glowing with light and music, I'm so saturated with love and sorrow that I can barely breathe.

By the time I say good night to the last of the guests, my head is throbbing from so much crying. I am shivering on the sidewalk with Janet and her family, trying to delay the moment when I have to go back to the empty house alone.

“Well, that was lovely,” I say.

Janet tucks her hands up inside her coat sleeves. “It was. I'm sure he's outraged that he missed it.”

“Yeah, it doesn't seem fair to the man, does it, to go and throw him a fantastic party after he can't be there to attend?” I say this, pretending to participate in the fiction that John is, somewhere,
drolly put out at being prevented from attending his wake by the minor inconvenience of his own death.

Janet laughs and glances down at her younger son as he does a Pez-dispenser yawn, belatedly remembering to cover his mouth with his hand. She sets a gentle hand on his head. “Well, we better get going. Have to get this crew back home tonight, and it's a pretty long drive. Will you be all right at the house by yourself?”

I make a dismissive gesture. “Of course. Go. Get these boys home before they pass out standing up.”

“You know,” she says, glancing at her husband, who nods, “we'd love to have you with us for the holidays—if you don't have any other plans, of course. Just 'cause Dad is gone doesn't mean you're not still part of our family.”

It's like someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. “Thank you, Janet. That means a lot to me. I was going to spend Thanksgiving with my boyfriend's family in Dallas, but it would be really nice to be with you guys for Christmas. I think I will.” We share a smile for a moment, then she pulls me in for a hug. “Don't be a stranger, girl.”

“I won't. And thank you again for all the help with the house. I couldn't have done it without you.”

There is a loud chorus of goodbyes from the boys, and then they pile into their car. The older boy carefully scoots John's dog, Maggie, into the backseat before climbing in after her. The back window is a flurry of waving hands and wagging tail until the car drops out of sight beyond the streetlights.

As I make my way back to the parking lot, the wind scuttles dried leaves across my path, and the sight suddenly fills me with sadness. This will be the last time I'll ever see this street, which I drove or walked on nearly every day of the first eighteen years of my life—tomorrow morning I am starting the long drive back to Austin, with all the last earthly remnants of John's and Leigh's lives heaped in the back of a rented moving van. This was the last
time I'll see all of those kind people at the Country Store tonight. Though I've avoided this place for years, it's unexpectedly painful to accept that I'll never have a reason to come back here again. My last reason is gone. From now on it will only exist for me in memories and photographs. And in the occasional homeward turn of my voice, when I get too sleepy. Or too sad.

When I unlock the door of the house—for the last time—I immediately begin turning all the lights on. They're supposed to make me less lonely, but somehow they make it worse. Sighing, I turn most of them off again. But the silence is terrible. I turn my iPod's tiny speaker on, set it on the kitchen counter, and open the bottle of wine I found in the cereal cabinet. Inside the refrigerator, only a misshapen lump of cheddar and a few strips of bacon huddle together on the top shelf. I toss them into a pot with some grits—John's favorite dish. I saved them for tonight on purpose; it felt like the right thing.

There is something I have been putting off doing. On our first day of cleaning, I found a big cardboard box, its sides sagging with age, with the words “MY GIRLS” written on top in John's distinctive all-caps handwriting. The flaps on the top were heavily creased, as if they had been opened and refolded many times. From the weight of it, I could tell it contained papers. And I was pretty sure I needed to be by myself to see them.

When I was a kid, my favorite spot in my room was the dormer window that pops through the sloping roofline opposite my bed. John built a window seat for me that spans the width of the niche, and I spent untold hours there, sketching, with my knees bent in front of me and my back resting against the wall. As I got a little older, it became my hideaway for long phone calls with my high school boyfriend. I can still see the lines where I wrote our
names together over and over again, practicing my architectural lettering. Predictably, I had to erase it later. But the marks never fully faded.

I heave John's box onto the window seat and angle my desk lamp so that it throws a beam of light across my lap. As soon as I open the box, I smile. They are file folders. Each of them with a year written on the tab, beginning with the year Janet was born. I pull out the ones that date from the years before he met my mother, and set those aside so I can mail them to Janet when I get home. Then, hands trembling, I pull out the folder from the year Leigh Mahler hired him to do some work on her dilapidated old farmhouse.

The wine is bad, and slightly skunky (John was a beer drinker), but the level in the bottle drops steadily as I thumb through the papers, one folder at a time. It is a treasure trove I could never have imagined. There are little scraps from my childhood that had long since sifted out of my memory—sketches, cards, proudly excited postcards from my class trips to Washington and Charlottesville.

But the real jewels are the things that relate to my mom, most of which I've never seen before. Photographs, letters, silly notes they wrote to each other. Poems with rhymes so deliberately stupid that I can almost hear her chiming with laughter as he read them aloud to her. I lose track of time completely as I pore through the box, only taking my eyes away from it to add another item to Janet's pile.

The year I was a junior in high school was a particularly good one for photographs. A regional newspaper decided to do a feature on the burgeoning Floyd bluegrass scene, so they brought a photographer down to shoot one of the Pickers' Friday night concerts. Somehow John must have gotten ahold of the photographer's film and developed some of the best shots. There's one in particular that catches my attention: John and my mother are
dancing, and he's pulling her toward him by their clasped hands. She's laughing up into his face as he smiles down at her. At that moment in her life, she had one breast and one jagged scar. Radiation had permanently reddened the skin on her chest and made it difficult for her to raise her right arm. But you would never know it to see the joy that is glowing out of both of them. I've never even seen the photo before, but it is so purely
them
that it feels familiar.

The folders from the more recent years are, somehow, more difficult than I expected. Unbeknownst to me, John had been printing out my emails, especially the ones that related to my work. He had magazine clippings in here, from features on bars and hotels I'd worked on at my old job. There are a couple articles I'd sent him from local Austin blogs that reviewed Albion and Clementine. He even—and I don't know how the hell he figured out how to do it, but he did—he even wrote a Yelp review for Balm, about how pretty the space was. And then, for posterity, he printed the page with all the reviews.

I drop the Yelp page on the box and bow my head as a fresh round of tears swamps me. When it subsides, I smear the moisture off my cheeks and reach for the last folder—this year. It's full of Janet's boys' school photos, emails from her about their progress at piano lessons and baseball. A card they wrote him for his birthday—“Dere Grandpa.” A few random emails from me; the postcards I mailed him from Argentina. And then, the floor plan of Eamon's house.

It's so disorienting to be sitting there in my little nook, in Virginia, studying the pattern of those lines I've known by heart for months now, those lines that are guiding a house back home in Austin. But it's not just any house. It's Eamon's.