“I didn’t do anything about it.”
“What did the doctor say?”
She looked at me then. “The whole thing scared me to death.”
“So what happened?” My brain insisted on hearing it in the past tense,I had a lump in my breast once.I couldn’t understand that this was something that was happening.
“I thought I’d wait for you to come home,” she said. “You’re always so good at figuring things out.”
“I’ve been home three months.”
But she had found the lump a year before, and taped a gauze square over it when it started to leak. When I looked at her again I could actually see a disruption in the pattern of her dress. That’s how big it was.
Once we started making the hopeless rounds of oncologist appointments, the past broke away. All the things I’d thought about myself before—I am an actress, I am not an actress, I was in love, I was betrayed—disintegrated into nothing. I made bowls of Creamof Wheat she wouldn’t eat and then scraped them into the trash once they turned cold. I managed the schedule of people who wanted to come and see her, her two sons and two daughters—one of those daughters my mother—my father, my brothers, all my cousins, all her friends. I made sure no one stayed too long. I sat by her bed and read to her. I read herOur Town, doing all the parts, and we cried at the end when the Stage Manager talked about the planet straining away to make something of itself and how we were all so tired. I told her about Uncle Wallace then, not that he had died but what a wonderful Stage Manager he had been. She held my hand and later I held her hand. I called her Nell in those days because Nell, which was her own name, was all she answered to.
“You know who’s here?” Nell said to me, her eyes closed. She had been asleep all afternoon and I was sitting there turning hems because, unbelievably, people were bringing their sewing by, thinking it would give her something to do while she was dying. She wanted me to finish it.
“Who?” So many people came in and out.
“Brian. Whenever I wake up now he’s sitting at the foot of the bed.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“He hasn’t changed. I always wondered if he would grow up but he didn’t.” She was looking out the window at the snow, or maybe she wasn’t. Her eyes were clouded.
“Do you want a pill now?”
She nodded a little and I poured a glass of water and helped her sit. When she was asleep again I went to the kitchen and called my mother to ask her who Brian was and she told me the story of her brother who had died in the snow. All those years and I’d never heard of him.
“It was too sad,” my mother said.
I found Brian in the cemetery once I knew to look for him,one more Kenison among the many. We buried Nell beside him. I stayed in New Hampshire for a long time after that. There were things to look after, of course, and I didn’t have anyplace to go. The family took what they wanted: a sewing machine, a Christmas tin full of buttons, the dining room set. I cleaned out the rest. I found the five copies of theMonitorin the bottom of her blanket chest, the review of the play, the picture of me as Emily in high school. The cousins came over and we painted the house room by room, fixed the floor in the bathroom, paid someone to fix the roof and paid someone to take down the half-dead oak that had leaned precariously over the back porch for so many years. We did all the things we should have done while she was still alive. I was in good stead with my family and had plenty of invitations to stay once her house finally sold, but once her house was gone that was that. The one person I’d stayed in touch with from Tom Lake was Cat, and Cat knew a costumer in New York who was looking for a seamstress. After I got the job, one of my uncles packed my things in his car and drove me there.
Of the years in New York there is nothing to say. I worked hard. I had a few friends. I went to rehearsals sometimes with the designer to take the actors’ measurements, the yellow tape measure around my neck. I made costumes, refreshed costumes, got house tickets to plays if there were seats available an hour before curtain. I sewed on countless thousands of beads. I thought about night school or even going back to the University of New Hampshire. Every now and then someone in line at the deli would look at me hard and ask if I wasn’t the girl inSingularity. I told them no. I told them I got that question all the time.
Then one day I was in a theater basting long clumps of tulle to the waistband of a young woman’s skirt because the costumer wanted a sense of how things would look from the back of the house if her skirt were fuller, and I heard a voice say, “Emily?”
I took the pins from my mouth and slipped them into thepincushion corsage I wore on my wrist. I couldn’t see anything because the house was dark and the stage lights were on. I didn’t know who was out there or who he was talking to. For all I knew the girl I was pinning was named Emily.
“Emily,” he said again, but this time it wasn’t a question.
And I knew, and I had never been so glad to hear the sound of another voice saying a name that wasn’t mine.
“Did you know right away that you loved her this time?” Maisie asks.
Joe has come by on the Gator to pick up the lugs. Once he realizes we aren’t talking about Tom Lake anymore, he switches off the ignition and stays. “This time, yes,” he says. “Right away.”
I nod in agreement. In the city where people thought I might have been the girl in a movie, I’d been found by Joe Nelson, the one person who actually knew me, the one person I knew. When we left the theater together that afternoon we were laughing. He told me he’d been brought in the week before to try to save a lousy play. I told him it had never been my intention to work in theaters, to be with actors, but I needed a job and this was where Cat had sent me. We felt like we were picking up something that had started a long time ago. But we hadn’t started, had we? I told him I could just as easily have been taking measurements for some other show, or been pinning tulle on the underskirts of wedding dresses in a bridal salon. He said he should have been back in Chicago but then he never would have found me. And then what? It would have been a different life, one that I will never be able to imagine. A life without Joe and the farm, without Emily and Maisie and Nell.
“Did you come back to Michigan after that?” Emily asks. She is sitting in the grass, we all are, and no one minds that the ground is damp.
“Not right away,” Joe says. “I didn’t ask her. I was always afraid of scaring your mother off.”
“When we came back to Michigan the next summer to see Maisie and Ken they pretended I’d been your father’s girlfriend all along, like we’d been together for years. God, she was good to me. She put out those napkins I’d brought her.”
“Did you stay in the little house?” Emily asks.
I look at Joe. “We did, didn’t we?” We slept in the lumpy double bed that Benny and Emily got rid of. We kept the windows open. The noise of the frogs would wake us in the middle of the night and then sing us back to sleep.
