A Little Hope(67)
Darcy opens her eyes and takes in the dark room, the nightlight from the hall bathroom sending a reassuring glow. She runs her hand across the summer quilt she switched to in May, the tulips and blue rings stitched carefully into the squares.
As her eyes adjust to the dimness, she sees everything as it should be: the matching crystal lamps on either side of the bed, the tufted bench at the foot, her oak dresser with the carved mirror and the framed pictures of her children on either side. Long ago, she had their senior portraits put into nice frames, and they remain her favorite photographs of them. She loved that time: the world still full of possibilities, she and Von in their prime, each of their parents still alive. Mary Jane with her longer hair then and the strand of pearls around her neck that Darcy insisted she wear, her straight white teeth from those years of braces, her promising smile and sincere brown eyes. And Luke with his sweet smirk of a smile. His white collar and tie. How he shrugged out of that sports coat immediately after the portrait session was done. How he yanked off the tie.
If she looks closely at the picture, she can see those two freckles on Luke’s cheekbone, and now, as she lies in her floral sheets, she wants to flip on her light and look for those freckles. She doesn’t know why. Oh, Luke. My wittle Wuke, she used to say when he’d get hurt, even though he grimaced at her baby talk. She hates when her mind comes back to what she’s lost, and she hears him playing his drums in the basement. She hears him shutting his bedroom door after Von died in that slow, painful way. She sees him that day they put Von’s car in storage, driving behind her, his mouth so hangdog. Now she turns in bed and flaps the sheets to get some breeze.
Tomorrow she is taking Mary Jane and Lizzie to the festival of kites, the day where the retired men who run the kite club encourage all the people in the town to show up, and they help the children fly whatever kites they bring, whether it’s a cheap kite from the five-and-dime or an elaborate box kite. She has bought Lizzie a perfect kite from the toy shop on Walnut Street: a classic red one with a rainbow tail and thick line. She imagines standing behind her granddaughter and watching the kite climb into the sky. “Now you’ve got it,” she’ll say. She imagines Lizzie’s eager eyes as she runs with the spool reel and watches her kite in the air, one of the kind old men nodding or whistling as it takes off.
Every time she sees those men and their kites, she thinks of Von. Would he have been the type to join that club? Would he be watching his granddaughter tomorrow leading her kite into the air? Go get ’em, tiger, he’d say. How can it be he never met Lizzie? How does he not know this new part of her life—the part where she’s a grandmother, the part where she’s a widow, a mother who lost a son?
She lies still and tries to count something: imaginary kites in the sky, a school of fish, one at a time, swimming by. She starts to settle. She pretends Von is in the kitchen, pouring Hershey’s syrup into a tall glass of milk the way he used to do when he got hungry late at night. She pretends she hears the sound of the spoon against the glass, and she can see the white milk turning dark. My God, she can see him so clearly, standing there in his blue pajama pants, his V-neck undershirt. Something about this image of her husband standing there, the light from the refrigerator, the glass he will leave in the sink, soothes her.
She thinks of the kite in its bag sitting on the kitchen table. She likes plans. She likes that Mary Jane and her family will come back to the house afterward (maybe they’ll decide to stay a second night?) and she’ll pour fruit punch for Lizzie and put coffee on for the three of them. She stands now and slips into her robe and walks the hall. She feels like a night watchman at a museum. The house is so silent. She faintly hears Alvin snoring from the bedroom, and tiptoes to the living room where she sees Lizzie sleeping, the dog on the edge of the sofa by her feet. Darcy smiles at how peaceful she looks, her little mouth open, her head back, her wrist moving slightly as if in her dreams she’s already flying a kite.
Lizzie scrunches her closed eyes, and Darcy is startled because there is an echo of someone else in her expression: a little Von, a bit of Luke. The beauty of science. A hint of a feature just continuing on and on and on, and this satisfies her. Her chest heaves, and she is sad, but she feels grateful, too. She will hopefully have years to tell Lizzie all the good things about these men their family lost. She will say they were golden, one of a kind. She will make them unforgettable.
Suddenly, Lizzie’s eyes open, and she looks up to see Darcy standing there. She worries her presence will scare Lizzie, but Lizzie smiles and sits up.
“Grandma, I was supposed to sleep in your bed tonight.”
Darcy reaches down to smooth her messy hair in place. “You were indeed, dear,” she whispers.
“I fell asleep before I could.”
Darcy holds out her hand and Lizzie takes it. “Then let’s get to bed,” she says, and smiles, and side by side, the dog following them, they make their way down the hall, Lizzie asking her questions about the kites. Will there be enough wind? Will the sun shine? Will the kites climb and climb?
“We’ll soon see,” Darcy says, and they settle into bed.
Freddie Tyler holds the wheel of her husband’s Mercedes as she drives in the middle of the night, only big trucks on I-80 West as she switches lanes and sips her coffee. She has the radio on low, and it’s just mumbling the way Darcy Crowley’s radio at the cleaners does, and she stops to think for a second that they are over eight hundred miles from Wharton—eight hundred miles and counting as they breeze through Indiana. She has never seen Indiana before. She tries to look around to get a sense of it, but it looks the same as Connecticut, as the Pennsylvania and Ohio highways looked.