“Eli,” I said. “Eli is his name.”
I listened to my voice saying his name and I listened as Frank Dutton kept talking in exclamation marks—Of course that was his name! How the hell is Eli, anyway! Is he coping with the whole thing okay? I’ll admit to you I was worried about Tamar when she drove up with him because, you know, she’s a hell of a woman, which of course YOU know because she’s your mother! But hell if she didn’t end up with a hell of a guy even if I only saw him just those few times all those years ago! Sorry for all these hells but you’re Tamar’s daughter, you can probably handle them!—but my brain hadn’t caught up to the information yet. Yes, it’d be great if you sent me the sneakers and her Dairylea jacket, and no, she isn’t with me or Eli at this point, she’s living in a care facility, actually, and yes, I sure will tell her, and yes, I will for sure stop by if I ever find myself up in that neck of the woods, and thank you so much. My voice kept speaking answers to his questions but my brain was on autopilot.
“She sure did talk about you, Clara,” was the last thing Frank Dutton said before we hung up, the exclamation marks gone from his voice. “Talked about you all the time, all those years. That spelling bee you won, that fancy college you got into, that book you wrote. I never saw a woman so proud of her kid.”
* * *
If the day ever came when I got the test and found out if I had or did not have the gene mutation, maybe it would feel the way this did, as if you were standing at the top of a peak that had been shrouded in clouds, and the clouds had broken suddenly. Behind you, all the way that you’d climbed, was your past. Ahead of you was your future. Here at the summit you held the jigsaw puzzle piece that placed pattern to chaos. The puzzle piece that gave you the information you needed to figure out certain things: A child or not. A spouse or not. A future that stretched out or didn’t.
Eli Chamberlain and Tamar Winter.
I sat on my chair on the porch, wrapped up in the quilt, and held the puzzle piece in my hand and looked back. Not thinking so much as reconfiguring. The times Eli had stopped by our house to bring Asa something he needed, the times the four of us had sat at the kitchen table and played blackjack or rummy. The times when, after Martha left, Tamar had given me a ride to Asa’s house and stopped in for a while. The times we had run into Eli at the gas station or the post office or the bank or the grocery store. The times we had been sitting in a booth at Crystal’s Diner and watched him push the door open and smile and wave.
All this time.
How long?
I did not know. There was no way to tell from the conversation with Frank Dutton.
I tried to imagine my way back into the way we were then. Asa and me. It had been a long time, and at first the same memories that conjured themselves up in my brain were the same ones that always did: Looking up from the pits below the bleacher to see Asa looking at me from the concession stand. Driving around the back roads late on summer nights, all the windows open and my hair blowing back in the breeze, him driving one-handed with the other hand holding mine. The notes that, before he graduated, he used to stick through the slats in my locker, each one a heart. A heart in crayon, a heart in pencil, a heart in pen, a heart made of tiny pieces of duct tape carefully angled together to form the necessary curving swoops.
All those images came to me the way they always did. They had long ago worn grooves into the pathways and circuitry of my brain. They would be with me forever, and even if I had the gene mutation they would be among the last to go, because the disease tended to rob your memories backward.
Knowing what I knew about Asa, what did he go through when he found out about his father and my mother? I tried to imagine my way into his mind and his heart. It was like a Words by Winter assignment x 1,000. Go back in time, to a time that was filled with so much confusion and hurt that you can’t bear to think about it, and think about it. Put yourself in your own place and then put yourself in another’s. This was when being the Winter of Words by Winter became unbearable.
I did it anyway. I sat on the porch and felt my way back into the darkness. High school. Asa had graduated. His mother had moved out. I conjured him in the rooms of the house he lived in with Eli, that house I knew so well, moving from kitchen to living room to bathroom to bedroom. I conjured up plates of food, the hiss of beer cans popped open, Eli watching over him, cooking for him, saying goodnight to him. How many days or weeks or months went by before Asa found out about his father and my mother? Feel your way back, Clara.
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?