When Autumn Leaves: A Novel (20 page)

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Authors: Amy S. Foster

BOOK: When Autumn Leaves: A Novel
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Autumn had each of them bathe quickly but separately. Neither one talked: the spell was beginning to work and their individual minds were caught up in hiding those secret hours. They said good-bye with a long embrace, then Autumn led Finn to his car, laying her hands on his face to make sure he would get home safely. Then, as Ana rocked back and forth in a rocking chair, Autumn changed the sheets. When she was done, she put Ana in a cotton shift and led her to the bed. She tucked her in as if she was a child, blew out the candles. Ana was asleep before Autumn even closed the door behind her.
Finn awoke at 8 a.m., much later than usual. Not even the strong shafts of sunlight through the window had managed to rouse him. He rubbed his eyes and reached across the bed, remembering suddenly that Ginny was at her parents’. He had slept well and deeply, not remembering the last time he had slept a full night so soundly and without interruption. He remembered he had dreamt something, something wonderful and exhilarating, but the dream eluded him. He got up and went down the stairs to the kitchen. He drank his morning coffee to the sounds of the birds outside and the clock above the stove ticking away. He was alone. With a pang of guilt, he realized he liked it.
“I’m home!!” Ana called out as she walked through the door. She had a sudden feeling of déjà vu, as Jacob and Russ were almost in the same exact places she had left them the day before.
“Hi!” they answered in unison.
“So how was it? Did you go to the maypole?”
“Yeah, it was so cool, Mom. People were dressed up in, like, clothes from the olden days, and there was music and hotdogs and I got my face painted.”
“Sounds like fun. I’m almost sorry I missed it.”
“What about you, honey? Do a lot of female bonding?” Jacob asked.
“Loads and loads. I’m all estrogened out, as a matter of fact. Thanks, though, for giving me the day off.”
“No problem. I’m glad you had fun.”
“I’m going to take my stuff upstairs. I’ll be down in a sec.” Ana climbed up the short flight of stairs and into her bedroom. She looked through her bag, and then looked again. She had a feeling she had forgotten something at Autumn’s, but she shrugged it off, knowing her friend would tell her about anything she found. She looked at her alarm clock. 9:09. She checked herself briefly in the mirror. “Hmmm,” she thought. Hmmm, and hmmm, and hmmmm.
My dearest Finn,
What an adventure . . . It seems fitting that this first part of our story will end in a kind of miracle, because everything so far between us has brought me that much closer to God. I am not a writer, I am not a natural observer of things. I tend to let life happen all around me, and take those happenings as a given. But since the day I met you, I started thinking and wondering and questioning; you have done that, you have made me break through the surface, push my hands through it and pick through the things on the other side.
We have work to do, you and I, we have the threads of many lives to reweave. I have faith, so very much faith, that we can do this. When the web is rewoven, we’ll find those strands that we thought were too fragile and incomplete, and they will lead us on a clear and steady path to each other.
Already I have made a space for you inside. I imagine a wild summer garden. Lilacs and honey-suckle and great bushels of lavender line intervals of stones to a willowed trellis. You stand there, like a sentry, watching for the first sign of my arrival. I will come to you, I will find you again. You are the love of my life and when you read this, you will know I was waiting for you all along . . .
Three days after Beltane, Autumn pulled her mail from the mailbox and was nearly astonished by a plain white envelope that fell from the usual packet of catalogs and flyers. It was a security envelope, the thick white ones used for business transactions, and the unfamiliar handwriting had marked no return address. Autumn didn’t open it until she was in the privacy of her study.
Dear Ms. Avening,
You could hardly be expecting this letter of interest from me; we’ve barely had anything to do with each other over the last eight years. This is mostly my fault. I’ve never made an effort to reach out to you, although you surely would have helped me assimilate better into this town. That’s part of the reason I’m writing now, applying for the position as your protégé, I guess. I am not from Avening, but I’ve always loved it, and I always wanted—this will sound weird—for it to love me back. I realize now that will take some work on my part. So I want to be more involved; I’m ready to surrender, I guess, to Avening.
My marriage is failing. That’s my secret. I know you would never say anything. But sometimes I’m sure it must obvious to anyone who sees me in the street how unhappy and trapped I feel. My life is my husband’s: my job is ancillary to his, since I just do the books on what’s really his dream. He shares every worthwhile moment of my personal history. Even my child, the actual product of my body, is his. I have nothing of my own—and there’s the other reason I’m writing to you. I desperately want something of my own. I don’t know much about magic, but I do believe you do it. I hope that’s not offensive to you. Your book, your ideas—however unlike me they might seem, they’re something Finn just couldn’t touch. They’d be all mine, something I could give myself to.
Reading over what I’ve written, I sound pretty angry to myself. I guess I am a little angry, but maybe writing this letter is the first step to breaking out of whatever poisonous life patterns I’ve gotten stuck in. Even if you don’t pick me—I can’t imagine you will; the choice seems unlikely, even to me—I hope maybe you’ll have some advice for me about making myself matter in Avening.
Sincerely,
Ginny Emmerling
Well, Autumn thought, drumming her fingers on her desk. Now things were getting very interesting.
August 1: Lughnasadh
T
O PIPER SHIGERU, MIDNIGHT HARDLY MATTERED. It could be one o’clock or two or four. There wouldn’t be any real sleep for her. She longed for it, ached to fall into the black of temporary unconsciousness. Instead, she stared at the black ceiling, lying in the bed she had shared with her husband for more years than she had fingers to count. There were many lifetimes woven into a single life, and she had passed a happy one inside that house.
Piper shifted, moving slowly, pulling the covers away from her thin form. She glanced down at the wreck that had once been a body she was proud of. She looked like a prisoner of war, and she supposed that in the strictest sense of the words, she was. It was her own body she was fighting, and losing to.
Before the treatments began, her denial had been enough to push her through the days. Like homecoming, like a first kiss, she thought back on that time with a nostalgic fondness now. She was sick then, but she hadn’t felt sick, so she could pretend and forget and be stoic. But after the doctors, the hospital, and the poison, a mirror had become her cancer’s greatest weapon. She hadn’t been smart enough to banish mirrors—she was afraid that she would come across as vain, of all things—so now she saw in them, with a kind of fascinated helplessness, that she was truly wasting away.
After Piper’s hair retreated, the psychological warfare ended and the physical battle began in earnest. To be sick, to be ill: Piper was offended at the vocabulary. There were no words invented yet in the English language to convey the kind of suffering she endured. Perhaps this proved something about the hopefulness of the human condition. If we could not name it, then maybe we would be spared it. But Piper knew better.
The fact is no one is ready to die, even those with the greatest faith that they are being taken on a journey to a better place. To lose your body is one thing; to lose your mind is quite another. Every time she had one bout licked, the cancer regrouped and found another place to attack until, finally, it had amassed itself inside her brain. There were no more lies, no more hope. When she saw her children looking at her with both revulsion and desperation, Piper was filled with violent, biblical anger. No mother can tolerate seeing her children hurting. To know that she was the cause of their suffering was the worst part, far worse than the pain, and she hated herself for it.
The bonus to being sick, she supposed, was that she could look back on her history without pride or ego. Piper saw herself now for what she truly was. She was born and raised in Avening to middle class parents. She was never just an average person, though in fairness few who call Avening their home ever are. She excelled in school, both socially and academically. Things came easy for her, maybe too easy. Piper had always felt like a cheater, like she didn’t work hard enough to deserve all of her achievements.
She tried not to take these things for granted: the popularity, the awards, the praise. She tried to look at all of them as blessings, to remember their value. She knew with karmic clarity that somewhere, somehow, down the line she would have to pay a price.
Piper went to Yale. She would have liked to have gone to a more liberal college, a smaller, more artistic, less expensive one, but she just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go to an Ivy League school. She had a gift for both words and illustration, and although her professors tried to lure her into academia, Piper wanted nothing more than to write children’s books. She imagined she could create stories that would endure, characters that would last generations.

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