Never Coming Back(76)

Someone looking at me on the porch might have seen a woman sitting still as wood in a chair in the night, but that would be only the chalk outline of the beaten body. Because when you go back, back, back down the back roads of your own time on earth, it takes all your energy. It takes all your focus. It takes almost more than you can bear, to feel your way into the heart of someone you loved and still love.

It was when I had made my way fully back into the heart of those conjured-up years that I knew when he had found out, and what he had done. The last of the missing puzzle pieces came to me on a lidded platter carried by a sorrowful servant, who set it silently down.

Asa would have blamed his father and Tamar for his bitter mother’s departure. He would have been furious and bewildered and filled with desperation. He would have seen no way out—his girlfriend’s mother? His own father? His mother? With me, his girlfriend, entirely in the dark?—and he would have cut himself out of the picture. What Asa would have done was exactly what he did: break up with me, enlist in the army, leave the next week for basic training and years as an army mechanic, and then, after the Twin Towers fell, go to Afghanistan.





* * *





And Tamar?

I went back in time with her too. I imagined my mother the way she had looked fifteen years ago. Not much different from now, if now had not traded so much balance and clarity for bewilderment. I imagined her in the kitchen of that house in the foothills, that house she had lived in all her life. Looking up from the work schedule she was trying to plot out for the week, her every-Sunday task, trying to keep to her normal routine even though earlier that night Asa had come by and told her he knew, he knew what was going on with her and his father, and how could she, what was she thinking, what about his mother, so what if she and his father had always had problems, and what about Clara, what about Clara, what about Clara, what about me and Clara, did you ever stop to think about us?

Asa.

Next day Asa was back, standing in the driveway with her daughter. Something was happening. I pictured my mother pulling the curtain aside with one finger, just enough to see out. A cool fall day, a hint of winter to come on the edges of the breeze. She had watched me stand in front of Asa, arms out, saying, “Why? Why, Asa, why?” She had watched Asa shake his head. Back and forth and back and forth. “Why, Asa?” Back and forth. “Why, Asa?” Back and forth.

My mother had watched Asa break up with me. Worlds were coming apart, and so was her child.

This was where it got harder. I had to be my mother, imagine myself into her with the knowledge that I now had, the knowledge that she and Eli Chamberlain had loved each other. What happened inside her, when she pulled that curtain aside and knew that Asa and I were no more?

Correction: This was where it should get harder. This was where I should go back and forth in my mind, trying to imagine exactly what went on inside my mother, the trying to figure out what to do now because Clara and Asa weren’t but she and Eli were. Could she and Eli keep seeing each other? Martha had moved out by then, a divorce was in the offing or soon would be; would somehow the children be okay if she and Eli, at some point in the future, were in the open? Could it all work, somehow? That scenario was what I should be trying to conjure up, what I should by way of imagination and empathy be ferreting my way into, except that there was no such scenario.

I already knew what had happened that day. What happened was that my mother witnessed the breakup, watched Asa try but fail to start his car, called Eli to come get his boy, and then called it off with Eli.

At that moment my heart clawed at itself the way Eli’s heart must have when my mother told him it was over. The sense of a man bent over his kitchen table, fingers clutching it for dear life, kept coming to me and I couldn’t shake it. He lost so much. His son. My mother. And me, too, the girl who, he told me once after he and Asa and I took the brewery tour and he had drunk the two beers they give you for free in the old-time parlor afterward, was like a daughter to him.

I got up from the porch and loaded my quilt-wrapped self into the Subaru, the way Annabelle Lee loaded herself into her ancient Impala, and I drove to Annabelle’s trailer. I told her what I thought I knew and I watched her eyes shift away from mine, up to the ceiling, then finally back to me.

“So?” I said. “Is that the way it went down?”

“Well,” she said, “you know your mother.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s the way she told me it happened, yes.”

“Why did she break up with him?”

“Because in the wake of what Asa had done she could not see any way to stay with Eli,” Annabelle said. “‘I can’t hurt my daughter. I can’t hurt her more.’ Exact quote.”

But the way she said it, the words she could not see any way to stay with Eli translated and retranslated themselves in my mind as She did it for you and then It broke her heart and then It broke his heart too.

“She thought it was the only way she could spare you yet more hurt,” Annabelle said. “You know your mother, Clara.”

“I don’t know if I do.”

“You’re trying. I’ll give you that. Late in the game or not, you’re trying.”





* * *





Why the army? The Chamberlains weren’t a military family and the military had never been part of Asa’s plan. His plan was to drive truck for Byrne Dairy and maybe buy his own big rig someday and be his own boss, be a long-haul trucker. That way he could see all fifty states. Hawaii he would have to fly to, but it was possible to drive to Alaska, if you had the time, and that way you could knock off a vast portion of the west. A big map of the United States hung on his wall, colored pins stuck in all the states he’d been to so far. Only eighteen. Barely over a third.