Читать книгу The Lighthouse - Mary Schramski - Страница 11

I’m standing on the porch, looking through the living room window. My father is sitting in his chair, holding my mother’s picture, and his expression is so despondent, it hurts to look at him.

My plan, after I left the café, was to come home, borrow Dad’s car and go Christmas shopping. But then, a moment ago, as I was crossing the porch, I noticed Dad through the living room window.

He glances up, sees me. I smile and give him a little wave. He walks over to the fireplace and puts her picture back on the mantel.

“How was your walk?” he asks, coming out onto the porch.

“Okay, until I went to the park. It reminded me of Mom, so I left and went over to the café and drank too much coffee.”

He doesn’t say anything, just looks at me. Were our conversations always this stilted or did I just never notice when Mom was around?

“Maybe it was seeing the lighthouse, too, not just the park,” I say. “You know how Mom loved the…” The anguish in his eyes stops the rest of what I was going to say. I want to tell him that everything—the house with all of her things still out, the park, even the air—reminds me of her. But I don’t. He looks like he’s hurting, plus we don’t have the kind of relationship where I can bare my soul.

“Hey, I ran into someone I knew in high school at the café. We talked a little.”

“That’s good.” Dad looks out past the front porch to the lawn.

“You were holding Mom’s picture?” I gesture toward the window.

His gaze comes back to me. “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about her a lot.”

“I have, too.”

He rubs his lips. “Her two big things in December were trying to get you to come home and putting me in the Christmas spirit.”

My heart pounds. I cross the porch, place my hand on his forearm. “Mom knew us pretty well. Sometimes I had to work, so did you. You two were together a long time. She understood.”

“At times…”

I wait for him to finish, then realize he’s not going to.

“At times?” I urge, then pat his arm, feel the warmth under his shirt.

He shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“Dad, Mom…” It feels good talking to someone who knew my mother, who loved her. I miss that in Tucson. Yet the way my father looks, I think this talk might upset him.

“Your mother what?” he asks.

“She wouldn’t want you to be sad. She wasn’t like that. Maybe you should think about the good times. That’s what I try to do.” This isn’t true. My memories come at will, dodge in and out, like sunlight in between the trees on a windy day.

“It’s not that easy. I keep thinking there are things I should have done.”

“I know. Me, too.”

He looks at me, squints. “What do you know?”

“Mom called me the night before her accident, and I didn’t call her back. How…stupid was that? I regret that.”

“She always called you. Worried when you didn’t call back. You should have been more responsible when it came to your mother.”

“I know,” I say, and my chest starts to ache.

He turns, studies the yard again, and I wish our lives were the way they used to be—my mother standing between us, keeping my father and me apart.

“She wanted you to go to college, get a good education,” he says quietly.

I think about how my mother used to send me money when I was job-hopping, little notes about how I should go out and buy something fun. She probably never told Dad.

I walk to where he can see me. “No, that was you who wanted that. And I think I’ve done pretty well for myself. It just took some time.”

“I wanted you to be something.”

I try not to feel angry, but it’s impossible with old hurts surfacing. “I am something! At least Mom thought so.”

I wait for an answer, but his eyes hold so much loneliness I have to look away. Before I can say another word, he goes inside.

“Hi,” Sandra says. “I was hoping you’d come by.” She leans against the front doorjamb and smiles. “It’s good to see you.”

I’m standing on Sandra’s porch. She looks the same—long red hair, creamy skin, sweet expression.

“Good to see you, too,” I say.

“You look great.” Her smile widens.

“Thanks, so do you.”

“Oh, I do not. I’m as big as a horse, but I don’t care.” She pats her stomach and laughs. “I’ve been on every diet known to womankind and none of them work. I’ve just decided I’m going to be fat.”

“You aren’t fat.”

“Right, now if you add You’re just a big-boned girl, you’ll sound just like your mother.”

She laughs again and I start to, but something happens inside me. I look down, study the porch floor, feel like I’m going to start crying, but I manage to swallow back the tears, look up and smile.

“Tine, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Well, come inside. It’s been so long since you’ve even been over to the house. Get in here.” Sandra draws me into the house, and we stand in the middle of her parents’ familiar living room. More nostalgic feelings rush through me. The house is the same, homey as ever. Sandra’s mother, Josephine, loved antiques, deep burgundies and dark wood, the opposite of my mother’s taste, yet just as pretty.

“Are you having a nice visit?”

“I am,” I say, still feeling like an idiot for almost breaking down in front of her. I certainly don’t need to lay my problems on her. She has enough of her own.

“I’m glad. I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas. Where has the time gone? Let’s go into the kitchen.”

We walk in the kitchen, and Sandra extends her hand as if presenting a grand prize on a game show. “Still the same old place. I haven’t changed much, haven’t had time. Sit right here.” She pats the 1940s café booth her parents found in an alley behind a restaurant years ago. “You want a drink?”

I laugh. “It’s not even two.”

“So? It’s 5:00 p.m. somewhere. Let’s have a drink to celebrate you being home and actually coming over to see me.”

“I don’t think I can handle a drink right now. Too early.”

“How about some hot chocolate?”

“Sure.” When we were little, Sandra’s mother used to let us practice our cooking skills on Saturday afternoons in her crazy warm kitchen. When Sandra’s grandfather passed away, we made a gloppy mess of chocolate syrup, milk and maraschino cherries for Josephine, brought it to her while she was sitting on the couch looking out the window. She smiled, hugged us both. That was the day she taught us to make hot chocolate from scratch.

“I still make it like Mama did.” Sandra turns from the stove, milk in hand. “Remember?”

“Of course. How could I forget that?”

“You look great. I swear you never change.”

“Oh, God, I look like hell. Last week I worked fourteen-hour days so I could come home for the holidays, so I’m worn out.”

“That’s a lot of hours. You must really like your job.”

“Oh, yeah. Love it. I’m the top-selling Realtor in my office.”

“I’m the top receptionist in my office, but I’m the only one so it was easy to be first.” She smiles wider. Sandra is big in every way. Always has been. She is three inches taller than I am. Even her hair is big—curly red, four inches past her shoulders and wild.

She turns the heat under the milk down low. “Do you really want hot chocolate or were you just being nice?”

I shake my head. “I’ve had about a million cups of coffee this morning.”

“Then you certainly don’t need any more liquid.” She snaps off the burner, takes the saucepan and shoves it in the refrigerator. “We’ll have it later.”

She walks over to the booth that is wedged in the bay window and sits across from me. “Since I’ve moved back home, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of you. Just the other night I was thinking about how we used truth serum to tell all our secrets. Remember that?”

“How could I forget?” I laugh. She was sixteen-and-a-half. I was thirteen. Friday nights were truth-serum nights if Sandra didn’t have a date. We’d pour Coke in a juice glass, add five teaspoons of sugar, drink it down in one gulp. And then we’d laugh our butts off, probably from the sugar high.

She’d tell me secrets about the kids she went to school with, the boy she might be dating.

“Remember what you told your mother one time about Tommy Bradford?”

I shake my head, try to remember, then suddenly the memory comes pouring in. I told my mother Sandra let her boyfriend touch her breasts.

“Will you ever forgive me?”

“No.” She shakes her head. “My mother wouldn’t let me date him again.”

“Whatever happened to him?”

“Tommy’s selling shoes at the Del Amo Shopping Center. Been married and divorced three times, has four kids, and last I heard, but this is from a not reputable source—read, Tiffany Brown—he was living at the Torrance YMCA.”

“Maybe I did you a favor.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks. My mother put me on restriction for a month. You know how long a month is to a sixteen-year-old?”

My mother was tucking me in bed. I was a late developer and she was explaining that soon I’d need a training bra. I whispered that Sandra’s boyfriend touched her titties. Her blue eyes widened, but she didn’t say a word.

“Okay, speaking of dating, are you? I promise I won’t tell Jake any of the details.” Sandra grins.

“No. I don’t date, I work. And Dad doesn’t seem to care what I do. We had a small blowout on the front porch a little while ago.” This slips out, and I shake my head.

“About what?”

“I’m not sure how it started, but it got around to how he wanted me to go to college years ago. I got angry.”

“Oh, that’s just him.” She waves her hand toward our house. “He was always that way.”

“True, but it doesn’t make it any easier.”

“Did you end on an okay note?”

“He walked into the house, and I walked over here. Do you mind if we talk about something else?” I don’t want to think about my father’s sad face, or the anger I couldn’t hold back.

“Of course not. So you aren’t dating anyone?”

“I haven’t had a date in probably a year. I’m too busy. How about you?”

“How are you defining a date?” She grins.

“Drinks, maybe dinner,” I say.

“Not a date, not a meeting, not even an intimate handshake. Who’s in this town to date?”

We both laugh and, for a moment, I feel like years ago, when we’d sit in the kitchen and talk for hours.

“That reminds me. Guess who I saw at the café?”

“What is this, twenty questions? Who’d you see?”

“Adam Williams.”

Sandra stares at me. “Who the hell is Adam Williams?”

I laugh again, feel good. “I went to school with him. So did you. Don’t you remember? He was the guy who used to walk around the school with a calculator doing square roots.”

“Brown hair, tall, average looking, pimples?”

“Yeah the brown hair, but no pimples.”

“They all looked like that.”

“He always gave teachers crap about what they didn’t know. Really smart.”

“Yeah, and?”

“I walked over to the café this morning, and he was there. He’s an engineer. Still different, very nice, though.”

“And why did you walk over to the Lard Yard early this morning?”

“Oh, I needed fresh air, some exercise.”

“Don’t we all.” She looks out the window.

I close my eyes for a moment, to get centered, tell myself to quit thinking about missing my mother. Then I look at Sandra.

“Is your dad okay otherwise? I don’t see him much.”

“He seems lonely. He hasn’t changed a thing in the house, except it’s a mess and he’s walking at night, which I think is weird.”

“Hey, walking is good for the heart,” Sandra says. “You know when my dad died, my mother got a little…” She stops. “Oh, hell, let’s not talk about this stuff. It’s too depressing.”

“Okay.”

“Just remember, it takes a long time to get over a death. Jake’s probably still dealing with a lot.”

“Probably,” I say, knowing this is true. “I just thought I’d come home and we’d connect because Mom is gone. You know, there wouldn’t be friction.”

“Maybe you need to give it more time.”

“We’ve had forty-some years. And I didn’t realize how coming back was going to affect me. I miss my mother a lot.”

“I miss her, too. Remember how she used to put on her makeup just so?” Sandra brings her hands to her face, strokes the sides.

And for a moment, I fall into a memory. My mother sitting at her vanity, looking back and smiling at me.

“It took me two years to feel okay after my father passed away, and I wasn’t as close to him as you were to your mother. Hospice says it takes time.”

“Are you still working there?”

She nods. “I’ll be there forever. I guess it’s my way of making the world a little better. They don’t pay me enough, but I stay. And the office is up on Western, close to Mama.”

“How’s she doing?” I ask.

“She’s hanging in there. The nursing home is nice, well, as nice as it can be. But every day when I go into her room, I feel guilty. But I remind myself I have to work.”

“It wouldn’t be safe for her to be alone.” I try to reassure her, but I’m not sure how. What does it feel like to be responsible for your parent?

Sandra nods, smiles a little. “You know, when I made the final decision to put her in the nursing home, I found her five blocks away, standing in the middle of the street, and she didn’t know where she was.” She sighs, rubs her eyes.

I think about Josephine, how I loved her. She was always so concerned, warm.

“What?” Sandra asks.

“I was just thinking about your mom.”

“Yeah, I do that a lot.” Sandra gets up and looks out the window to the backyard. “I see your dad once in a while, working around the house. He seems okay. Sad, distracted, but I guess that’s to be expected. I mean, anyone who knew your parents knew how crazy he was about your mother. And to have it happen so fast, not be able to say goodbye…” She stops, turns back to me. “I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s okay.” I take a deep breath. “I’m doing okay. You know years ago, did you think we’d be sitting here talking about this?”

“No.” Sandra walks back, taps the table, smiles. “How many boys did we moon over at this booth?”

“I miss those times. First, boys, then worrying about parents. What’s next? Our own aches and pains?”

“Oh, God. You know what we need?”

“A second-base date?” I say, laugh, and she does, too.

“Well, yeah that, too. It’s almost Christmas, how about a little brandy? Oh, God you’re going to think I’m an alcoholic. I’m not really. Just so happy you’re here. It’s nice to see you again.”

One time, when Sandra came home from college, I’d just graduated from high school. She bought two bottles of champagne to celebrate for just the two of us. Her parents were gone for the weekend. We got drunk and passed out on the living room floor. My mother found us the next morning throwing up.

“Do you remember the champagne episode?” I ask.

“How could I forget? I still can’t drink champagne.”

I hold up my hand, like I’m making a toast. “Hey, to second-base dates and brandy before five.”

Sandra goes to the cabinet where Josephine always kept the liquor. “I’m glad we ditched the hot chocolate idea. Brandy is a much better drink.”

Jake crossed the dark porch and went down the steps. A moment ago, he felt like he was going to explode if he didn’t get out of the house.

He walked down the street. When he got to the edge of Point Fermin Park, he stopped and studied the sky.

The stars looked close, bright. Visibility had to be at least fifty miles tonight. Dorothy had read him a poem on a night just like this.

Jake sat on the hard curb and tried to remember more of that evening, hoping none of the details had faded.

That night, they had taken a walk, and when they’d gotten back to the house, Dorothy had come into their bedroom holding a thick book. She’d placed it on the nightstand, carefully took off all her clothes and lay next to him.

A moment later, she picked up the book and turned to a marked page. Her voice was soft, smooth, as always.

“And as silently…” Jake whispered the few poetic words he could remember.

Anguish and hurt gripped his body. The poetry book was still in the house. He hadn’t given anything away because he couldn’t bring himself to do that. He’d find the poem, read it aloud, and maybe more of the memory would return.

Jake fought his tears by turning his face up to the night sky. Looking for a poem his dead wife read to him wasn’t going to do any good. He needed to accept that memories would eventually fade.

But that night, when she lay beside him, naked except for the white sheet, he hadn’t paid much attention to her poem. Even at his age, all he could think about was her naked body close to his.