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The day lightened.
Within minutes I sat in the warmth of my room, typing a letter to Peter on my Braille writer. Please, meet me tonight. Warren may be out, so be careful. I tucked the letter into Risa’s pocket when she arrived, and for the rest of the afternoon Mother, Mildred, and I sat on scratchy living-room chairs to play an agonizingly slow game of whist. When the living room floorboards shook just a bit, I knew Risa had opened the front door.
“Let’s go upstairs,” she said when she reached me at the card table. “I have something for you.”
I pushed my chair back
“You’ll stay right here, Helen. I want my eyes on you.” Mother put her hand on mine.
My fingers trembled just slightly in Mother’s palm when I told her I had to work with Risa. I had letters I had to answer.
“You may certainly attend to your duties,” Mother said.
When Risa and I left the room, I felt confident that Mother was satisfied that if I stayed busy, my future with Peter would also be kept at bay. Then Risa leaned toward me with a note from Peter.
Dear Renegade,
Well, they’re hankering for a fight, aren’t they? All right, then. Fight we will.
Be outside at two a.m. No one will be awake then, Mrs. Fagan. And if Warren does go out searching the woods, he and that mangy old dog will limp up the front steps into the house by two a.m., tired of tramping through the woods.
I’m betting on it.
My life flashed before my eyes last night, and once was definitely enough.
Yours,
Peter
At two a.m. Mother was asleep in her room, and while I couldn’t be sure, I hoped that Warren was asleep beside Mildred in their room across the hall from mine. I relaxed my whole body and paused before walking downstairs. I was sorry to leave Mother and Mildred, but my way ahead was clear-cut.
Suitcase in hand, I closed the front door behind me. Stars must have shone down, lighting up my face as I stepped out onto the porch. My hands shook as I set down my suitcase and stood poised for the vibrations of Peter crossing the yard.
That long first hour of waiting, the warm Alabama wind sweeps past, and I clench my teeth, telling myself his car must have stalled. By the second hour I shift in the rocking chair, turning left, then right. Where is he? As five o’clock comes, I ache for his mouth on mine. Now the early-morning sun warms my arms. My heart pounds; blood, rushing to my throat, thrums in my ears.
I strain over the porch railing, my whole body a vibroscope. I imagine Peter writing his note, scoffing, like he always does, at the threat of my family. But then I remember the last line: “I saw my life flash before my eyes, and once was enough.” Has he finally felt the weight of the dark I live in? My eyes blink. Who would have the strength to come into my world forever?
All through the dawn I push away the truth of what is happening. But when I feel daylight’s heat on my arms I know. The crack of a twig, of trucks rumbling up Seventh Avenue, the faint flutter of birds move over my skin like dark rain.
I have lost Peter. I cannot stay still for fear of breaking apart, but I cannot move either. I have nowhere to go. And I can’t return to my room, not yet. The sun has fully risen. My breath comes in short clips.
How I ache to get away. Peter is not going to walk up the steps, and the Montgomery daybreak seems a selfish thing, bristly, in its chill.
Now there is a slight sssnaap at the front door behind me. When I turn, a hand falls on mine.
“Helen, Warren sent me to bring you back into the house.” Mildred tries to help me up.
I sit in the chair like a pillar.
Chapter Thirty-nine
Say God is blind and deaf, his hands rubbing the bark of earth’s trees, searching for someone to hold him close, rock him in his sightless, mute world, warm him in a mother’s arms.
Say God feels fear. A cold, moving thing.
The morning Mildred led me back into the house I paced my room in devastation, refusing to speak to Mother, Mildred, or Warren. My mind raced. Had Peter been run off? Or had he simply gotten frightened? Had he stood at the edge of the woods, suddenly aware of the weight he would shoulder by marrying me—the unrelenting care he would have to provide for the rest of his life? Did he start to cross the lawn and then, seeing the house in its towering darkness, feel the hostility of my family toward him, and realize for certain that they would never truly let me go? I knew he loved me. If he had come, his face would have been contorted in sorrow as he withdrew and stepped back across the yard, watching me and knowing even he could not take me out of my isolation.
Maybe he was afraid of the same things I was: loneliness and oblivion. And he simply couldn’t enter into them with me.
But if Peter could not really come near me, who then?
I am a floating bit of ash.
In my small room I move to the desk by the window and back, restless, trapped in my craven desire, my need to see him. When I fall into a sudden, uneasy sleep the dream comes. The one where I have the deathlike feeling I first felt a few weeks ago when Annie said she had tuberculosis and was going far away.
In my dream I soothe Annie with my hands, trying to erase the White Death. Not true, I say in the dream. Do not leave me.
And God rocks high above the blind universe, sorrow on his tongue.
When I wake up I feel vibrations in the hallway. Warren, Mildred, and Mother all pace in the hall, but I don’t allow anyone in my room.
I lie awake all afternoon, the sheet over me like a shroud.
That night a sudden freeze descended on Montgomery’s avenues and fields, covering everything with frost. When I woke up not in my honeymoon cottage but in Mildred’s guest room, I was freezing cold. Mildred came in and tried to warm me by putting quilts on the bed.
“Get some coal for the fire,” I said.
“We have no coal.”
“Please, Mildred.”
“You have to go back to Wrentham. Mother wants to take you tomorrow.” Her hands shook.
“No. I want to stay here. He may still come.”
“No,” Mildred said.
“Was Warren … out last night?”
“He hunted the woods until dawn, Helen. But he found nothing. Nothing at all.”
“Nothing?”
“No.” Mildred waited a long time. “Not a living thing. And Warren can track prey as well as anyone can.”
A chalky darkness filled me. Heavy, that dark, as if I could take it into my mouth.
It occurred to me then. Perhaps Peter had not made it to the edge of the yard last night. Had Warren run him off with a gun? Had that stopped Peter, finally, from coming for me? Perhaps at daybreak he sat on the edge of his bed, listing the reasons to be with me. A woman like Helen needs to be loved. And at the top of this list, finally, he put the reason to stay away: to save his own life. A life not entwined with mine. A life where he could rise, or fall, on his own. He knew I would be devastated, there would be no deeper hurt. Nevertheless, he had to let go. I imagined him standing up, pulling at his frayed shirt cuffs, locking his suitcase, and closing the door behind him.
“Helen, a letter came for you today.” Mildred hesitantly took her hand from mine.
“Is it from—”
“I can’t tell you, Helen. I’m under strict orders not to show you anything.”
“What?” I sat up. A rage moved through me. Peter had not come, but he had loved me, treated me like an equal, and I had become louder, more combative by knowing him. And I liked that. I pulled the covers off and stood by Mildred, my anger mounting.
“Mother said—”
“Re
ad it, now,” I demanded. I might still win. Mildred read:
Washington, D.C.
My Dear Helen,
Congratulations, darling girl, on your upcoming marriage. I am delighted to read that you finally heeded the advice I gave you so many years ago. May you and Mr. Fagan, if my New York Times is right in the spelling of your fiancé’s name, have all the pleasures of this blessed institution.
As Mark Twain once said, you truly are the eighth wonder of the world. May your beloved always treat you so.
Sincerely yours,
Alexander Graham Bell
I am a human being, with a human being’s frailties and inconsistencies, I once wrote in a book. As I held the letter in my hands, Mark Twain’s words reverberated within me. When I was younger, unaware that a man would ever love me, Annie and I had visited Mark Twain in his white Connecticut mansion. We walked into his cigar-scented living room that cold December night and sat by the fireplace as he read aloud to Annie and me.
Later, he led us up the thick-carpeted stairs to our bedrooms. I turned to go into the first one, on the left, but he quickly shut the door. “No, not that one.” Annie spelled into my hand that it was the former bedroom of his beloved daughter, who had died young. At nineteen, she had fallen deathly ill in that very room while Twain was away in Europe; he was rushing back to her, his ship halfway across the Atlantic, but she died before he arrived.
The next day we stood with Mark Twain outside in the snow, waiting for our car to return home. I knew that his fame was worldwide, his humor unending, but as Annie and I said good-bye, his voice under my fingertips felt rough as stones. When we drove off, Annie turned and saw Twain alone, white hair blazing. She said he looked back at his empty mansion as if yearning for a sound he no longer heard.
Now I know what Mark Twain wanted.
For the one you lost to call your name.
I traced over the note with my fingers. Mildred took it from me and packed it in my suitcase. All night I lay awake. We had no coal. The stars were dead, the universe stalled. I had no burning thing at my center.
