Commonwealth(90)

Sometimes Holly came into the guest room at night, the same room she had slept in when she first arrived twenty years before. She liked it in there. Teresa scooted over as far as she could in the little bed to make a place for her. The two lay together on their sides, the only way there was room, and talked, two women who hadn’t talked in bed with anyone for years.

“Do you think you’ll stay here?” Teresa asked, pulling up the blankets over their shoulders. It was freezing at night. Holly was forty-five, and while this life was all very beautiful, if she was ever going to want something else, a husband or a job, she had to think about that.

“I won’t stay forever,” Holly said. “I don’t think I will. But I’ve never come close to figuring out how I’d leave. It’s like I expect destiny to throw open the door of the Dojo one day and say, ‘Holly! It’s time!’”

“Call me when that happens,” her mother said.

“You should see how pretty it is here in the snow.”

They were quiet for a while, maybe both of them nearly asleep, and then Holly said, “Do you ever think about staying? You could be one of those people in the guest room who we think is going to leave and never does.”

Teresa smiled in the dark, though she realized then she couldn’t exactly imagine leaving either. She put her arm around Holly’s waist and thought of her body as something she’d made, something that was so completely separate from her now. “I don’t think so,” she said, and then they did both fall asleep.

On the eighth day of her eleven-day visit to the Zen center, Teresa went to morning meditation, sat down on her cushion next to Holly, closed her eyes, and saw her oldest son. He was so clear it was as if he had been in the room with her all this time, as if he had been with her in every room she’d ever been in in her life and she had simply failed to turn her gaze in the right direction until now. She wasn’t having a dream or an out-of-body experience. She understood that she was still in the chalet, still sitting, but at the same time she was with Cal and his sisters. She was with the Keating girls, Caroline and Franny. She saw the five of them going out the kitchen door of Bert’s parents’ house, the door that she had gone through countless times when she and Bert were dating, when they were planning their wedding.

Ernestine, the cook, is telling them not to be a bother to Ned down at the barn and to do what he tells them, and the girls say yes ma’am. She gives a half bag of withered carrots dug out from the bottom of the refrigerator and two small apples to Jeanette, who in return gives her a grateful smile. No one ever gave things to Jeanette. Cal is already across the porch. He doesn’t say anything to Ernestine. He doesn’t wait for the girls.

“Cal!” Ernestine calls out through the screen. “Where’s your brother at?”

He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t turn around. He shrugs his shoulders and lifts up his hands, keeping his back to her. Cal, Teresa wants to say, speak to her! But she says nothing. She is watching a day that happened thirty-five years ago, a half a world away. She cannot correct his behavior. She cannot change the outcome. She is only allowed to sit and watch, and that is miraculous.

The five of them walk down the blacktop drive out the back, then turn onto a dirt road that eventually becomes not a road but two rutted tracks, the grass growing up in between the two halves to form a median. Holly and Caroline are chattering while Jeanette and Franny listen. Cal is off in front, walking fast enough that from time to time the girls have to break into a trot to keep up. They want to stay together without staying with him, and all five of them have a sense of what is close enough. Cal is tall and blond like his father, his eyes the same blue, his skin brown from the summer spent outside. His expression is one of simmering fury, but then it always is. He doesn’t want to be in Virginia, doesn’t want to be with his sisters, with the Keating girls, with his stepmother, with his grandparents. He doesn’t want to curry the horses, to be bitten by the flies and mosquitoes, to stand in the stink of shit and hay, but there is nothing better to do. That’s the trouble with being fifteen—all he can think of is what he doesn’t want. He’s wearing a UCLA T-shirt and Levi’s though the day is hot. If Cal’s wearing long pants it means he’s taken the gun again. All the children know that.

Jeanette had told Teresa that Cal kept the handgun tied to his leg with bandannas. Jeanette had told her mother everything a long time ago, in that year they lived alone together in the house in Torrance. Without Holly and Albie around she was free to talk about the day Cal died, how they’d wasted the Benadryl to put Albie to sleep, the route they took to the barn, how they had ignored Cal while he was dying, thinking that he was playing a game so that they would come close enough that he could hit them. They had waited a long, long time, sitting in the grass making daisy chains to show him they weren’t falling for it. Jeanette had told her all of this but Teresa didn’t see it then. She had never seen anything before.

Holly, who has the nicest voice of all the girls, the nicest voice in her school, starts to sing, her arms swinging back and forth, “Goin’ to the chapel, and we’re—”

“Gonna get married.” Caroline and Franny join her.

“Goin’ to the chapel and we’re—”

“Gonna get married.” Caroline and Franny. Jeanette doesn’t sing at first but she’s moving her lips.