Home Leave: A Novel Read online

  * * *

  There’s one human quality that I’ve never come close to grasping. How they manage to wring beauty from their pain, or even throttle it until joy comes out. It’s perverse. But I’ve seen it a million times. The sadder things got here around that time, the tighter the family’s harmony grew when they sang Baptist hymns, especially Ada, Elise, and Ivy, like they were reaching out for each other, desperate, protecting each other with their voices, unable to do it any other way.

  Or the laughter. I’m telling you, on the very worst days, when Charles was treating Ada worse than a stranger or a servant, when Paps was up to no good, and Ivy was drawing into herself like an overgrown forest, and Elise had turned her back on her mama and reinvented herself as a religious nut, those were the times when high giggles escaped at the dinner table, and Dodge’s uncanny imitation of Mr. Hardy mowing the lawn made Elise wet her pants. I never could fathom it. The sudden shining, the addictive cascade of laughter—easing everyone and tiring them out with joy until the clouds drew in again, just as dark and just as close.

  * * *

  Later on in her life, Ada took to watching Law & Order. At first I was skeptical, but then I got hooked too; who wouldn’t? She’d watch four, five episodes a day, and dream about them too, her face taking on the dismay and horror in sleep that it had in front of the screen. It was even more extreme when they’d have marathons a few times a year. She’d barely turn off the TV then, just microwave some Lean Cuisine and watch them catch the crook.

  At first I was ashamed that that was the only noise inside of me, after so many years of piano practicing and butter sizzling and whispered prayers, but then I grew to like it, started feeling like those detectives and the funny folks on Frasier were my real inhabitants, just as Ada must have felt like they were her friends, or family, even. But I knew it was lazy, too. I saw how Ada breathed a sigh of relief as soon as the show got started and her mind could switch to their troubles, not hers. Is it cruel to say I begrudged her that happiness? Perhaps. But in the end I felt like she had her own crime stories to work out, so why waste time watching other ones get solved?

  Of course it’s not as simple as that. I know: I’m no prefabricated house you plunk down on a lot, dumb as its own faux timber. It was just that Ada would get so close to it sometimes, the truth I mean, or some kind of solution, ugly as it was. I’d see it in her eyes, hear it in her quickening breath. She might be looking up from washing her face in the bathroom, or entering the living room from the hallway, and there it would be: a stark realization of former events, of what they signified and how they might have played out differently. It was as though all her failures were seated on the couch, chatting with each other, pouring sweet tea and eating cheese straws, like the ladies in bridge club used to every fourth Wednesday. Ada’s face would take on a kind of rapture. Then it would close with shame and she would back out of the room or march to that TV and flip it on, until all the failures shrugged at each other and took their leave, hugging each other at the door, trying to hug Ada, who just turned a cold shoulder and turned up the volume.

  * * *

  In the last few years before Elise moved Ada out (and, in so doing, sentenced me to my own slow death, like a spinster aunt whose final prospect has just taken the last train out of town), Ada and I would religiously watch the six o’clock news. Monstrous, most of what they’d show on there. But I recall one clip that caught my attention, a report on a new educational effort called “No Child Left Behind.” I don’t presume to grasp politics, but I loved the name of that program, and all the children they would show hard at work in those schools, frowning over their math books, the walls trying to whisper the formulas to them, they loved them that much.

  And that’s what I always thought about Ada, until the very last day: How could y’all leave this child behind? They all did, one by one. Elise was as good as gone after Ada called her a liar. Ivy departed the day she picked up a guitar, even if she lived at home until she was twenty-five. The boys went off to college. Charles died of a sudden heart attack while bowling, as I said, at the age of sixty. Typical of him, to bow out like that, so painlessly. I realize I’m being unfair.

  After her initial five-year boycott, Elise was the only one who called regularly. She had every right to hate Ada, and in some ways, I think she did. There was a chronic tightness in her voice, an accusation that wouldn’t lift, which joined the guilt echoing in Ada. Not that Ada would admit to that perpetual trial, worse than Judge Judy. Often, Ada treated Elise with a seasoned criminal’s wariness and contempt. In her last years, Ada wanted peace, and the sight of Elise just stirred too much up.

  For a while, after Charles’s death, though the kids were worried about her living alone, Ada bloomed, as though she had a new lover. But I knew better: it was the pure delight of not having to explain herself anymore. Charles was a faithful husband, didn’t drink, and came home each night at seven. But he was fanatic about saving money. The one time Ada asked him if they might go out for supper, he wouldn’t speak to her through the whole dinner, which just made her dreamed-of steak taste like sand. After his passing, she deposited flowers on his grave weekly and went shopping. She bought lots of clothes, some in leopard print. She left me for weeks at a time and returned smelling like suntan lotion and margaritas.

  That’s when I felt sure things would get solved. I don’t even know how I thought it would happen, exactly, maybe something like they have on televangelist shows, the witnessing, “come to Jesus” part of the service, where people fall on their knees before the rest of the congregation and sob. I pictured it taking place at Christmastime, after the grandchildren had gone to bed and the grown children had loosened themselves with a little wine.

  I wasn’t sure who would go first, but I tried to catalyze the chemical reaction, tried to make the lighting appear both reassuring and urgent, kept the room at a temperature where they wouldn’t get too sleepy, tried to take on the colors and mood I’d had for each of their Christmases as small children, so that their memories would stir and they’d begin to speak.

  Instead, they avoided one another’s eyes and played with the toys that had been opened by their own children earlier that day, went to the kitchen and made coffee, or turned on the ball game. And what would they have said to one another, anyways? I never knew what happened to the people who confessed their sins or shames on-screen, if they went and had a burger after the service, or sex, or found a VCR and watched the tape of their moment of fame and honesty, over and over. What I’m trying to say is maybe it wouldn’t have done any good, or maybe it wouldn’t have lasted.

  But they each dreamed about the unsaid that night. I spied with all my eyes, and sure enough, there was Elise in a river, trying to drown her mother and resuscitate her at the same time; Ivy, swinging at snakes in the ravine; Dodge, dreaming about long-dead dogs; Grayson, dreaming about his father yelling at him on the football field; and Ada, dreaming about sitting on her father’s lap, her legs concrete so she couldn’t move.

  * * *

  My Ada. My Elise. Elise couldn’t get far enough away from Vidalia, or, let’s face it: me. My smells, my rooms, my locks. Charles had decreed that she would go to a Baptist college in Mississippi. Blue Mountain College was near Tupelo, just an hour up the Natchez Trace Parkway, but you would have thought the girl was in the North Pole for all we saw of her. Charles shouldn’t have worried about Elise losing God once she left Vidalia. Soon as she hightailed it out of town, the only father she paid attention to was the Lord.

  At first she made excuses about not coming back for Thanksgiving (exams) or Christmas (traveling with her contemporary Christian band, Jericho!), until finally she stopped calling and just sent nondescript postcards on campus stationery. Doing fine, much love to everyone at home. —Elise. Infuriated, Charles stopped paying her tuition, but Elise’s summer job as a counselor at Camp of the Rising Son, a modest scholarship, and waitressing during the semester helped make ends meet. The only person Elise wou
ld see was Ivy. They met for milk shakes in a town halfway between Vidalia and Tupelo, and Ivy would come back from those secret meetings loaded with prayer pamphlets from Elise, which she threw straight in the trash. If Jesus was Elise’s salvation, pleasure was Ivy’s. Both were gorgeous singers, and their harmony gave you goose bumps. When she was fifteen, Ivy ditched church choir and took her heavenly soprano and flaming red hair to nearby honky-tonks, where her older biker boyfriend kept her supplied with RC Cola and rum and fended off burly admirers, often on the same nights that Elise was singing Christian pop in bell-bottoms in church basements across the country.

  * * *

  Ada always wondered what prompted Elise’s return to Vidalia, but it was no mystery to me. Paps had been buried for a full year. Elise had skipped the funeral (which Ivy had attended high as a kite). When I saw Elise, I was shocked by her change. In order to stand being back home, she’d had to seal something off deep down. She was back in Vidalia, but she might as well have been in Tibet. It killed Ada, but she was too scared to say anything: didn’t want to drive Elise away again. But Elise left anyways, married a Yankee, Chris Kriegstein, then went even farther away: Atlanta, London, then Germany, of all places. Gave Ada a hell of a time trying to figure out the calling codes and time zones.

  For a while Elise and Chris were back in Atlanta, and then we were getting Christmas cards from China and Singapore. Ada told everyone in town that Chris and Elise were doing Baptist missionary work in Asia, a distinct lie: by that time Elise was a stark agnostic. She had two little girls—the younger one, Sophie, looked just like her mama: same beautiful blond curls. Having those children inside me, when they would visit during the summer, nearly made up for their mother’s departure, and I guess Ada felt the same way. Then, one year, during their annual visit, it was just Elise and Leah, her older daughter. Chris was working in Singapore, I gathered, but Sophie was absent, and Elise was walking around with a look of doom, worse than she’d had in the Paps years. That summer was the first one since she was fourteen that Elise let Ada hug her properly, but Elise’s eyes held an eerie unfocus, as though there was a word on the tip of her tongue that she was trying to remember, and if she could just recall the word everything would go back to normal.

  * * *

  The day Ada left me began warm and clear. It was May, not too hot yet, my favorite kind of weather. I had known she was leaving for weeks, months, even—the brochures, the boxes—but hadn’t quite believed it until she stepped outside of my walls for the last time. Sure, there had been times when I wanted her gone, times when her confessions had crawled up my walls like termites. I tried to summon all my old resentments in response to her gaze, so her walking out would hurt less.

  And then the surprise—as the car rolled off, as the tangerine sunset hit my naked walls: the lightness. I always thought I’d want to be a house that was occupied, even if it meant being haunted by homeless people or teenagers looking for somewhere to have sex or get high. Instead I felt a huge burden shrug off of me, and it felt good when the mold started growing and the rain began moisturizing my interior. That’s something Caro can’t understand; she urges me to stop slouching, reminds me that the For Sale sign out front won’t ever go away if I don’t make more of an effort.

  Some houses have generations that pass under their roofs. Some see several family cycles. I only had my one, and there’s something beautiful in that, too. Ada. How I envy the simple path her body took: out of breath, then underground. I felt it when she died, even though she was all those miles away. It mimicked the feeling I used to get when the power went out.

  Given my strong brick and my storm glass, I’m not going to fall apart anytime soon. But I find I am entering a state I thought only possible for humans: I have begun dreaming. I drift most of the time; I see deep summer thunderstorms in winter and then it’s Charles at the dinner table and the chicken and dumplings not being ready yet. I only stir, briefly, at Caro’s insistent chatter, and then I doze off again. I will wake one day, I suppose, to my eventual disassemblage, or, Sleeping Beauty–like, to the kiss of new heartache repairing me, moving the unspeakable back inside.

  Wittenberg Village

  Chariton, Indiana

  A high school kid calls up, asking is Chris Kriegstein still in town, or nearby. They’re doing a “Chariton High Athletes: Where Are They Now?” feature in the school paper, Tiger Tracks, and he needs to know how can he get in touch.

  “Aren’t you on summer vacation?” I ask.

  “Summer school,” he says, and sounds so down about it that I give him Chris’s cell phone and office numbers and email address, even though Chris and Elise have repeatedly asked me to keep them private. I warn him that Chris is pretty hard to track down; half the time he’s in Saudi Arabia or China or God knows where. The kid mumbles his thanks and hangs up, just as I’m about to ask him about our team’s chances for regionals this fall.

  “Frank,” I yell from the kitchen, putting down the phone, “where’s Chris this week, you know?”

  “Dubai until Thursday,” yells Frank. He always knows. He gets these updates on our email from Chris’s secretary, and he reads them as close as the weather and the obits. You want to know who died of what and how Tuesday’s gonna be and which time zone his son is in, you just ask Frank.

  I join him on the patio outside, carrying two frosty Diet Cokes; he’s watching across the street, where the county fair is in full swing. “Best seats in town,” Frank likes to say when anyone calls, asking us how it is to be living at Wittenberg Village. If they’re friends of ours, still living in their own houses, they sound smug. If they’re our kids, they sound guilty. Tomorrow will be three weeks since we left the farm.

  It must look strange to anyone who pulls into the parking lot: all of us out here on our tiny porches, staring out across the highway like we’re at a drive-in movie. Most of us in bathrobes, though Frank and I are still wearing the clothes of the living, as I like to say. Frank doesn’t like it when I make jokes like that, and I think his forced cheer about moving out here is bullshit. But the anger that used to rise up in me at him has lulled now; before, when we were young and he’d say something to rile me, it would be like a rattlesnake in the room, something I had to either kill or escape from. Now it’s just like an old fly buzzing around in August that you tolerate because you’re too hot and lazy to get out of your chair.

  All of northeast Indiana has had a terrible drought this summer, and the fields fringing the fair are a tawny brown. Frank frets about it, even though we sold off our corn- and bean fields shortly before we moved here.

  “Only chance is winter wheat,” he says to me now. We sit in quiet after that, sipping our Cokes.

  My stomach rumbles and pretty soon his does too. We’re both hungry, but we’re putting off going to the cafeteria for lunch; meals are the most depressing times of the day. Vegetables for vegetables, I call it, another joke Frank doesn’t appreciate.

  When his grumbles for a second time I say, “Why don’t I just heat up some Campbell’s? We have a stove.”

  “The meals are already paid for, Joy,” Frank says, with a dead determination in his voice.

  “You got a point,” I tell him, because you can only contradict your husband so many times in one day without starting to feel like you’re on your own, and Frank and I need each other now, badly.

  * * *

  Three days later, the kid calls again, sounding whiny and desperate. It turns out the article’s due tomorrow and if he doesn’t get a quote from Chris he’ll fail the assignment and have to repeat tenth grade.

  “Well, there’s no use asking me to make up a quote about him,” I say sternly, going into recess monitor mode. I performed that duty for twenty years at the elementary school, and I never liked it, making kids play nice. He’s silent on the other end of the line. I start feeling bad for him again.

  “I can tell you about Chris,” I say. “What do you need to know? You got the records of his best season?”


  “Yeah, I got that,” the kid says, grumpy. “It’s posted on the plaque outside the cafeteria.” As if I should know.

  “You want a picture?” I ask.

  “Can you scan it?” the kids says.

  “Can I what?”

  “What do they want?” Frank hollers from the patio.

  “Something about Chris playing ball at Chariton,” I yell back, covering the receiver. The kid starts explaining scanning to me, and then Frank’s in the kitchen, waving a newspaper clipping in my face. It’s the one he always carries in his wallet about Chris’s senior basketball season. I’ve got the kid yammering about resolution something in one ear and Frank shouting about regional high scorer in the other until I yell, “I get it!” and they both shut up.

  I hear the kid rustling some papers and then he says, very softly, “Could you at least tell me what he’s doing now, please?” And I hand the phone over to Frank because the truth is I don’t really know what my son is doing.

  Frank takes the phone and barks “Frank Kriegstein” into it, as though he were speaking to the president of the United States. “Who wants to know?” he says next, suspicious, and then calms down when he hears it’s just the school paper. “He’s the CEO of a company called Logan,” Frank says proudly. “What do they make? Instrumentation. Well, if you don’t know what that means, get a dictionary.”

  I realize, for the first time, that Frank doesn’t understand what Chris does, either, which gives me no small satisfaction.