Things I Want to Say (30 page)

“Your uncle Del can be a really nice guy,” she said slowly, wary of painting her brother too black and therefore making him that much more attractive to a teenager. “But he hasn’t always made the best choices in his life. Financial or personal.”

“Well, yeah, but he’s got a great girlfriend now, and a cool truck.” He looked at her sideways. “A fancy house isn’t everything, you know.”

She stifled a groan of aggravation. Of course a sixteen-year-old would think a great girlfriend and a cool truck were the height of personal success, but could she help it if she’d hoped for a little better perspective from her son?

“I’m not saying a fancy house is everything. And neither is a girlfriend and a truck. What’s important is to spend some time right now, before you have to make choices, deciding what you want to do with your life. If you start on the right path when you’re young, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.”

She said the words with only a twinge of guilt. What did she know about choosing the right path? Almost nothing she’d set out to do in life had turned out quite as she’d imagined, from her choice of vocation, to the kind of marriage she’d have, to the relationship she’d have with her parents and her children. She was over forty and still trying to get things right. Who was she to preach to Casey, except a mother who hoped he’d do better at figuring things out than she had?

He tossed the blade of grass to the side and plucked another
one, and began tearing it into tinier and tinier pieces. “Yeah, that’s what everybody says, but really, what’s so wrong with making mistakes? You learn things that way.”

“But you aren’t the only one your mistakes affect.”

He dusted his hands together and stood. “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not going to end up a bum. But if I did, at least I’d be a happy bum.”

She made a face. “Those aren’t exactly comforting words to a mother’s ears.”

He picked up the binoculars she’d dropped and focused them on the pond. “Parents worry too much.”

“Children don’t worry enough.” She studied him, seeing Tom in the strong curve of his jaw and the fullness of his bottom lip. But she was there in his face, too, in the narrow nose and high forehead. She wanted so much for him—money, love, good health and freedom from worries. But most of all, she wanted him to be happy. “Isn’t there anything you’ve thought about doing for a living? Anything that interests you?”

He lowered the binoculars. “I think I might like to be a writer.”

“A novelist?”

He shrugged. “Maybe movies or plays. Or nonfiction stuff. Articles. Things like that. But I’d like to travel around some first, you know, to gather material.”

She had a sudden recollection of a summer day when she and Tammy were working on their tans on a bluff overlooking the Trinity River. They’d been sharing deep thoughts and Karen had suddenly announced that after graduation, she was going to join the Peace Corps and work helping people in Africa. Where this sudden burst of altruism had come from, she couldn’t have said, and after a few months, her noble ideals had died a quiet death. She’d gone to work for the hospital, met Tom, and so the rest of her life had played out.

But what would have happened if she’d held on to that impulse? How might her life have been different? She stood and put her arm around her son. “I think you’d make a great writer.”

He flushed. “You do?”

“I do. You’re smart and you have a good heart.” Important things to remember when worry got the best of her. Maybe those things didn’t add up to the kind of success she always envisioned for her children, but they surely couldn’t hurt.

As for the mistakes she’d made, who was to say any of her other options would have turned out any better? It was nice to imagine she could have been a world traveler or a great humanitarian or a more devoted daughter or more passionate wife, but would any of those things really have made her any happier?

Was the answer, instead, to appreciate more what she had, or to reimagine her fantasies to closer fit her reality? Like the good memories of her childhood she was only beginning to unearth, maybe there was more to her life than she thought. Maybe the restlessness she was feeling now was only the beginning of discovering she was better off than she’d imagined.

Mary Elisabeth agreed to sit with Martin one afternoon so that Karen could take Casey to buy new shoes. No one consulted Martin about the arrangement; Karen presented it to him as a
fait accompli.
He said nothing about it one way or another. It was a sad thing when a grown man had to have a babysitter.

But he could do worse than this young woman. Whatever else he could say about Del, he couldn’t fault his taste in women. This one was designed to make a man think about sex, from her thick-lashed dark eyes to the fall of brown curls around her shoulders to the breasts that swelled her too-small
T-shirt to the tight round bottom scarcely covered by her cutoffs.

She wore too much mascara and a ring in her navel, and he’d caught a glimpse of a butterfly tattooed over her left breast. In his younger years she’d have been deemed
fast
but he supposed nowadays she was just a normal young woman. They didn’t try to pretend these days that they weren’t as interested in sex as men always had been. There was something to be said for that kind of honesty.

Just as well she couldn’t read the thoughts in his mind. It would probably shock her to know a man his age still contemplated such things. To her he was merely a dried-up husk in this wheelchair, incoherent and harmless.

Not that she’d have anything to fear from him even in his prime. He’d always been a man more inclined to thought than action, at least when it came to women. And he had enough dignity left not to make a fool of himself over a woman young enough to be his granddaughter.

“I thought maybe we could listen to some music,” she said, looking through the bookshelves in his bedroom. He’d managed to get himself out of the bed and into his chair before she’d arrived, but he hadn’t yet made it into his office when she swept in on a cloud of floral perfume. She flipped through the stacks of cassettes, then looked back at him, eyes wide. “These are all birdcalls.”

He nodded. He would have liked to explain how he used the tapes to lure birds to him, but complex sentences were beyond his powers of speech at the moment.

“I guess you use these to learn all the different calls.” She straightened and looked at him. “I’m here to keep you company, so what would
you
like to do?”

“Office.” The word came out slurred, so he tried again, concentrating on shaping his tongue to make the correct sounds. “Of-fice!”

“Karen said you like to spend a lot of time in your office.”
She took hold of the wheelchair and maneuvered him through the door and down the hall. The dog joined them, tail wagging, tongue lolling. Apparently Del had talked Karen into taking in the animal. Martin had never approved of dogs in the house, but as with everything else in his life these days, he had little say about it.

“Is over here by the desk all right?” Mary Elisabeth asked, parking the chair in front of the computer.

He nodded, and shifted onto his left hip. He’d lost weight and sometimes it felt as if his backbone was trying to poke through his skin. Mary Elisabeth noticed him fidgeting, and worry lines formed on her perfect forehead. “You need a pillow at the small of your back.” She plucked a small pillow from the love seat by the window and arranged it behind his back. “And if you raise this footrest just a little…” She bent and adjusted the footrests, then straightened. “That will help take some of the pressure off your spine.” Skeptical, he settled back in the chair, but found that he was, indeed, more comfortable. He looked at her. “How?” How had she known this?

“Oh, my mom was in a wheelchair.”

“Why?”

“She had MS. Multiple sclerosis. I can hardly remember when she wasn’t in a wheelchair.”

“Hard.” Hard on a kid to have a parent who was crippled that way.

“Yeah, it was hard sometimes. I used to wish she was more like other kids’ moms, until I figured out they all had problems, too.” She shrugged. “Life is what it is. You have to make the best of it.”

It was the kind of trite advice that usually annoyed him, but coming from her, it had the ring of truth. He studied her again. Her hair was pulled back from her face with tiny clips shaped like butterflies, and she wore half a dozen rings in each ear. When she smiled, dimples formed on either side
of her mouth. No one looking at her would ever guess she was anything but carefree, even frivolous. “Your mom…alive?” he asked.

She shook her head. “She died when I was sixteen.”

Too young. “Casey’s…sixteen.”

“Yeah. Kind of a tough age for a kid. You’re trying to figure things out.”

Plenty of people spent most of their lives trying to figure things out. For instance, he couldn’t figure out why he’d been felled by a stroke in the prime of his birding career, or why his children too often seemed like strangers to him. Del hardly spoke to him, and Karen’s words didn’t always match the expression in her eyes. All his years spent observing wildlife around the globe hadn’t prepared him for dealing with his adult children. When they were small, he’d told himself he’d be able to relate to them better as adults. They’d be more like peers, less dependent on him, less needy.

Yet now they accosted him with a whole different set of demands, still bound to him by blood and obligation, expecting to be treated as more than peers, needing him in a different way than they had as children, but seemingly needing him no less.

His eyes met Mary Elisabeth’s. “Miss her?” He meant her mother.

“I do. It sneaks up on me sometimes. I’ll be doing something and I’ll wonder what she would have said or thought, or I wish she was with me. But I knew for a long time before she died that she probably wouldn’t be around to see me grow up. It was hard, but it also made me appreciate the time we did have.”

“Life…short.” Her mother’s life, but so many others, too. And the older you grew, the shorter your life ahead became. He had never contemplated such things before his stroke; now there were days when such thoughts blotted out everything else.

“It’s a cliché, but true.” She took hold of his hand and held it in hers. She had cool fingers with neatly manicured nails, painted shell-pink. “Enough morbid talk. You’re going to be around a long time yet. And your talking is getting better. I don’t have any trouble understanding you now.”

She understood a great deal. Lessons some people never learned.

“So tell me about your bird-watching. I see all these awards on the walls.” She turned to look at the plaques. “But why do you do it? Is it that you just like birds, or is there more to it?”

Yes, there was more to it. The fact that she got
that
made her rise another notch in his opinion. He wrinkled his face, trying to think how to explain. But his limited powers of speech failed him. He turned to the computer and typed.

Birding is a challenge. Something I can do others can’t.

She nodded. “Like people who climb mountains or run marathons, or things like that.”

Yes. But it is about the birds, too. They fascinate me.

“They are fascinating. And there are so many of them. Always more to discover.” She turned her attention to the map that bristled with pins marking all the places he’d recorded bird sightings. “Look at all the places you’ve traveled. All the countries you’ve seen.” She smiled over her shoulder at him. “I’d love to travel that way—to see all kinds of people and cultures.”

He didn’t tell her he’d spent most of his time in those countries away from people, searching for birds. Other than those he associated with through his work, he hadn’t gotten to know the natives of the countries he’d visited.

Except one time.

Perhaps it was being here with Mary Elisabeth that brought the memory back to him, sharp and bright. He’d been in
Thailand, ostensibly to do research for his employer, but he’d made sure to allow time on either end of the business trip to look for birds. At the airport alone he’d added three new birds to his life list.

A meeting had ended early and he’d gone to the beach near his hotel, thinking he might find a few shore birds to add to his list, bringing the total to 2,027.

He had found no birds, but had met a young woman. She was Polynesian, but she spoke softly accented English. She had approached him, and struck up a casual conversation. He’d decided she was a prostitute, but didn’t discourage her company.

He had ended up spending the evening and the night with her. She had been like Mary Elisabeth, with much more depth than her appearance had led him to expect. They talked about everything—nature, politics, books, life. Sitting with her he’d felt something come alive inside him. She had awakened him to things that might be missing in his life.

He’d returned home later in the week determined to pay more attention to those around him. The possibilities had excited him. But it was too late. His attempts to connect with his wife and children were met with indifference. He had waited too long and they had learned to live without him. Rather than try to overcome their resistance, he had slipped back into his old ways, focusing on his work and his lists of birds, self-contained and unemotional.

He was like a man who had stood by a campfire and enjoyed its warmth, but when the fire had died down, he’d been content to sit in the coolness. The warmth had been nice, but maybe it wasn’t for him.

“What should we do now?” Mary Elisabeth perched on the corner of the desk.

“Music.” He clicked the appropriate icon on the desktop and a Haydn concerto swelled from the speakers. It was too
loud for conversation, allowing him a convenient excuse to retreat once more to silence. He was comfortable here, if a little cold.

A few days after his shopping trip with his mom, Casey called Matt and asked him to sell the guitar Casey had gotten two Christmases ago and send him the money.

“Why?” Matt asked.

“Because I don’t like being broke.” He leaned back on the sofa, feet dangling over the edge, phone cradled to his ear. “I hardly ever play the guitar anyway.”