“He broke up with you because he saw no way out,” Eli said. His hands were spread in front of him, as if he were trying to explain something puzzling, something almost incomprehensible. Theoretical physics. “He saw no way through Martha’s anger, no way that your mother and I could be together, no way that the two of you could ever be happy in the middle of it all.”
The sight of my mother and Asa across the kitchen table from each other, that night when the air was thick with words that had already been spoken, words that neither of them would ever recount to me, rose up in my mind. No way out. The words, little dark knives of hurt, severed by.
“And he knew how much you loved your mother, and he didn’t want to hurt you any more than he felt he had to. He didn’t want to say anything bad about her to you.”
“He didn’t have a lot of perspective,” I said. “Neither did I. I know that now.”
He turned his big hands palms up, then laced them together. They sat quietly on his lap, a giant lump of laced-up fingers.
“Perspective,” he said. “The gift of growing up.”
I hitched myself a little closer to him and laid my hands on top of his. A complicated Jenga tower rose up in my head. It began with four people who loved each other, me and Asa and Tamar and Eli, and it ended when Asa yanked the middle block from the stack and it all came tumbling down. We sat together in silence until Eli spoke.
“How’s your mother?”
“She’s okay.”
“Is she?”
I shook my head. No. She wasn’t. She was going away, faster and faster every week now, and he knew it as well as I did, because he didn’t say anything else. There was so much I wanted to say to Eli, so much I wanted to apologize for, but everything I wanted to say was translating itself into another language, a wordless one that he already understood.
* * *
The next time I went to Annabelle Lee’s house, dark had fallen. Early, the way it did in December. I drove up the driveway and parked next to the Impala. Her double-wide shone bright in the car headlights. It still looked brand-new and had looked that way for all the years I’d known her. It was lit up like a ship, and when the door opened, the smell of fresh bread wafted out. Annabelle Lee wore a Kiss My Blarney Stone apron and The Doors were belting out “Riders on the Storm” from the enormous speakers that doubled as a coffee table. I stood on the rickety stairs and breathed in the warmth.
“What?” she said, at what must have been a look on my face. “You think choir directors go home and listen to hymns all day? Let go of your preconceived notions, Clara. They’ll be the death of you.”
“I came to tell you I’m sorry,” I said.
“What are you sorry about?”
“For a lot of things, starting with my mother thinking I was a lonely child. She told you I was a lonely child, right?”
She nodded.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “I wasn’t lonely. I had the old man. I had some friends at school. Later I had Asa. And I had books.”
“Books you did have,” she said. “She always called you her word girl.”
I pushed my hand down in my pocket and held onto the silver earring. Yes. I had been a word girl. Her strange child, her word girl.
“But mostly?” I said. “I had her. I had my mother. I had Tamar Winter.”
Annabelle Lee nodded and I tipped my head back to keep from crying. An old white pine towered at the edge of her lawn, close to the road, just like the white pines at the cabin on Turnip Hill Road. Starlight filtered through the crown of the pine like lace against the navy December sky. Annabelle shut the door and leaned against the stair rail—it swayed—and looked up too. The two women who knew my mother best, standing together in the wintry air.
“I know you did,” Annabelle said. “She was always there.”
It was true. Tamar had been there, chopping wood outside the storage barn, anytime I looked out the kitchen window. She had been in the kitchen eating out of jars and cans with her cocktail fork. She had handed me book after hardcover book about a child facing the perils of the world and overcoming them on her own. Every step of the way, she had been there. None of those thoughts came out, though, because they were monkey-minded together in a clump in my brain. Messing up my words. Messing up my ability to talk.
“I wish I had told her how much I missed her when she made me go so far away,” I said.
“You can still tell her.”
I could hear Sylvia’s voice telling me the same thing. That there was power in the voice. That hearing remained when the other senses had faded.
“I wish I had told her a long time ago.”
“There are things I wish I’d told my mother,” Annabelle said. “And things Tamar wishes she’d said to hers.”
“How did my mother do, after I was gone?”
Annabelle shrugged. “You know your mother.”
What that meant was that she had toughed it out, the way she toughed out everything that came her way. My heart quickened and the look on Annabelle’s face softened.
“For what it’s worth, I think she knew how much you missed her.”
“You do?”
“You know how she always called you on Thursdays?” I nodded. “She used to be relieved when you’d get annoyed at that whole phone shtick she used to do. She took that as a good sign. ‘She’s making her own way in the world,’ she used to say. ‘That’s good.’”
Orion, the archer, and Cassiopeia were visible now. The Big Dipper, its arm obscured by the red pine. Constellations of the Northern Sky for $800, please. Annabelle Lee and my mother and I were all three of us northerners, all three of us familiar with the northern sky.
“She woke me up once when I was four years old,” I said, “and she brought me downstairs and onto the porch so I could see the northern lights.”
“Did she?”
“She did.”
“And? Were they beautiful?”
Yes. They were beautiful, in a strange and unearthly way.
* * *
The next time I went to visit Tamar I signed her copy of The Old Man.
To Tamar Winter, with admiration and love.
My full name I wrote out in careful script, the way a name deserved to be written. No slashes or curls or undulating waves standing in for multiple letters, the lazy way out. The forces of evil had to be fought with all the means at our disposal, and if you were a word girl, then names were distilled words and had to be treated with respect.
On the windowsill, the hammered-metal bookends that she called the iron claw held the one book that still mattered to her: Jonathan Livingston Seagull. All her other books were stacked beneath the window, the worn hardcover edges of each perpendicular to the one above and below. A pile of book-logs to see her through the winter. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was the only book in the whole room that hadn’t belonged to me first. It was the only book I ever saw my mother read, and she read it over and over, until the edges of her small blue paperback copy were worn nearly off.