“It wasn’t all about Devon. I need you to know that. I wanted good things. Sometimes you fall in a hole and you keep yelling until someone comes to get you, except nobody comes. You start to wonder if anybody’s coming. Sometimes they don’t.” Sylvia wasn’t sure what else she could say. If he had not forgiven her then they would part. They were not family and they could walk in different directions and never again look back. Do people ever really do that?
“Mrs. Sylvia.” His face clouded, his voice thick with unshed tears. He cleared his throat. Sylvia thought he was moments from rubbing his eyes like he was waking from a dream. “You’re here,” Marcus said, cupping his face. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
44
Jay had the dream again.
Ava and Jay are at home. No one doubts that they are in love, even after all these years. The house is showing the wear and tear of decades of busy life, but the imperfections and scuffs and scratches on floors and walls don’t disguise that theirs is still a nice house. All of their children are coming. They are empty nesters now, but a few times a year the riot returns and they all eat, talk, and play together. Let me see you. Ah! Just like your mama. Keep those kids away from the pool, you know how they are.
The house is a little run-down now, the sheen of new gone, so many goings-on rubbed up against the edges of it. Tastes have changed; people have yearned for different amenities and options— the house is far from in style. Ava loves pictures and they are everywhere. She poses in a few of them, self-consciousness on her face. She is too fat or too old or not dressed well; but she looks fine; she looks beautiful. Everyone says just that. The grandparents are gone, but how loved they’d been, especially the grandmothers. The youngest grandchildren will never remember them, but there are pictures to fill in the gaps and stories that comfort even as they confound.
There are so many more lights in their little town. And my how big the trees are on Development Drive. Once from this vantage point you could see some houses, churches, the curves of some roads. How it’s all grown. Growing. But don’t ask the locals about that. Nobody around here is too happy about all the outsiders. They like it the way it is, the way it was. Or at least the way they imagined it was. Just visible during the thick of the day are wisps of gray smoke from the furniture plants, or are those cirrus clouds? Probably smoke. There are new businesses in town, coffeehouses, bars, and restaurants where young people like to be. The older grandkids will make it down the mountain there before the day is over. You can’t expect them to sit with a bunch of old people for too long.
Ava is in her element with the busy, the noise, the preparing, the great clamor of life in the house that she has looked forward to for weeks. Her children are celebrities or visiting dignitaries and they prepare for them like they’d never screamed them awake on a school day or wiped their behinds. For JJ the moment when the kids and grandkids are all gone, when the residual presence of them, the feeling of all they’ve done and seen together lingers in the air with a freshness like dew, the walls still humming with their sounds and movements, the house a tuning fork, when the kids have all left them again and the house is empty except for the comfortable movement of the two of them, is the moment he craves. He senses Ava even if she isn’t in the room, a feeling he will carry with him all his life. He looks out the window to the deck. The past is finally behind him. Ava is closed off, content, lost in her own thoughts. He will let her be. She loves these hours to worry over the day, relive the moments by herself. In time she will tell him what she’s made of it all and he will feel the sound and timbre of her voice, though he won’t be listening to her words. That is all to come, but now they wait together. He feels finally collected and connected, this land really his land. Peace, peace, Jay Ferguson. Nothing can hurt you. Nothing at all.
And Jay will feel peace. Ain’t no stopping us now, isn’t that how the song goes. Nothing can hurt us here at all. We follow the path we can, the only one we can. Going home is easy if you can find it. JJ didn’t find it there, but know this, there is more than one home for the seeker for the hustler, for the grown-up looking for refuge. Haven’t we always done this trick? If you can’t get what you want, want something else. See that the something else is good too.
But for now we dream. For a moment, a blink that can stretch over a lifetime, look out over the valley JJ, take it all in the points of light for miles and miles. God help me, God help me, the seeker says many times at the dead end, the crossroads, the fork in the journey. Help me bear it. God help me remember this. Help me take in the wide open forever, the endless yes. Help me love it as I live it. Help me see today what the richest man sees.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the support of Ben Furnish and BkMk press. What a lucky life to have you in it. I am forever indebted to the Mrs. Giles S. Whiting Foundation, the Baton Rouge Foundation and Ernest J. Gaines Award, PEN/Hemingway Foundation, Chautauqua Institute, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. These foundations and organizations gave me a writer’s greatest gifts: time and validation.