I have a photo of Dale from that time. In it he is smiling broadly, lit by a silver lamp clipped to a doorjamb. He is young and handsome, and he’s holding a small silver pistol, displayed proudly at an angle. His blue eyes are lit up like a summer lake, and look directly into the lens. Behind him is a screen of familiar, jagged green leaves—the side business that augmented those state checks. I spent hours in the basement with Dale while he trimmed his plants, keeping him company in the closet where he kept them, light spilling out onto the cement floor and walls. He and I placed tiny plastic frogs and turtles on little posts among the leaves, like two old ladies decorating their garden with windmills and gnomes.
I had been thrilled when we got a hot tub—it was so luxurious and exotic. Now I realize it was probably a cover for the sky-high electricity bills produced by Dale’s grow lights. My music teacher was scandalized, but suspected nothing, when I gleefully sang the chorus to the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones” on Favorite Song Day. I must never have mentioned Dale’s basement garden to my friends, or asked why they didn’t have one—it just didn’t cross my mind. Maybe I considered it a private family ritual—the cultivating, the fertilizing and pruning. Even the process of drying and trimming had a cozy, secretive feel to it. For years after, I didn’t even think about Dale’s plants. It was only when I finally ran across this square, faded snapshot that I could make sense of the forest, and see the plants for what they were. But it’s not the drugs that bother me now so much as the gun.
I do remember feeling uneasy when I saw Dale in the kitchen, bent over a large mirror, pulling gel capsules apart and mixing them, counting them, obsessing over them. He never talked to me as he worked on the pills, and this made me suspicious and a little afraid. Now I know that despite her love for Dale, Mom was afraid, too. She kept telling Sandy, “What if he gets caught? I don’t want them to come take Sarah. Because I have nothing to do with it.” She knew better, though. Even if she intercepted every counselor letter, something was bound to happen. She had to have known her time with Dale was limited.
* * *
These years later, the moment of Mom and Dale’s final parting haunts me. It seems to represent the end of some kind of happiness that she and I could never quite find again, and I’d like to know more about why they couldn’t make it through. I can’t ask Dale; for a while now he’s been a hard man to track down. The truth is, I haven’t looked too hard: I’m not sure I’d find the same man. Instead I rely on Mom’s friends.
A woman who seems jealous of Mom’s beauty and youth says that Dale threw her right out after she cheated on him and sauntered back the next morning, unrepentant.
Another, kinder woman says that Mom just made a stupid mistake, and Dale knew that, but he couldn’t forgive her, no matter how hard he tried.
Another says that she was just bored with Dale, wanted him to “get off his ass and get a real job,” and for some reason, this explanation hurts me the most.
Her Christian friends don’t mention the cheating at all, but focus on the drugs. Mom demanded that Dale stop growing and selling, and he refused, so she turned her back on him to take her child out of that environment.
Most all of this is true.
* * *
One evening during the months of Mom and Dale’s fighting, I stood alone in front of the wide window facing Otter Pond, looking down through the trees. Blue evening light was gathering over the water, and all was quiet. After a moment the silence was broken by a shrill scream threading up through the woods. That first lone call was joined by another, and another, until the air rang with an uneven, warbly chorus. Hysteria bounced among the voices, passed around in a cacophony of urgent cries. Each call vibrated in my limbs, echoed in my thumping blood. In my mind, I saw children down there, playing some game gone terribly wrong, plowing through the shallow water and running for the shore in fear. But there was a frenzied power to the sound that told me it couldn’t be children, that the voices weren’t just reacting but broadcasting. Long before I learned that it was the mating calls of loons that rang out all over the pond, those sounds reinforced something I already knew: that love can sound like insanity and rage.
14
* * *
after
“By the time you’re old,” Mom would sometimes say, “they’ll have figured out how to make people live forever.” Still, she admitted that she didn’t think scientists would figure it out in time for her. So she was sure of her own death, but not mine. A fact I had tried not to contemplate. A world without her seemed impossible, immortality rendered unbearable.
So when my aunts asked me what Mom would have wanted done with her body, I knew, from these roundabout conversations about death. She had never wanted me to linger on the idea of her dying, but she had wanted me to understand that someday, many years later, I would have to go on without her. I told my aunts, firmly, that she wanted to be cremated, not buried. I’d heard her mention it a few times.
Carol went to the funeral home to make the arrangements, and Gwen and Glenice took me to the Flower Pot, on Main Street, to pick out flowers for the service. When we got there, we found several news crews in front of the shop—women with sleek, polished, mid-length hair gripping microphones, men with huge cameras perched on their shoulders, one foot planted in front of the other as though ready to pounce.
“Just ignore them,” Gwen said, but her voice shook.
“Stay inside until I come open your door,” Glenice said, anger edging her words. I did as I was told, and when I stepped out, I pulled my long curtain of hair to one side and hid behind it. The cameras were trained on us, but they didn’t approach. They had probably come intending only to get reactions from people on the street, but at the time I felt hunted. They knew who we were.
The Flower Pot was a tiny, cool space, with baskets of green plants on the floor and flowers lit up within tall glass coolers. Little light reached in from outside, and no more than ten people could have stood in there. It had always seemed like an enchanted spot, and I had visited only on happy occasions—Mom and I buying flowers for Grammy’s birthday, Dale bringing me in with him so he could get a rose or two for Mom. Now the woman behind the counter looked at me sympathetically—she, too, knew who I was. I was beginning to understand that everyone in town knew who I was, would always know.