The Burning Side(76)
He will clear his throat and say, “I’d like a moment alone with your mother.”
So our kids will gather their belongings and shuffle toward the front door. I’ll hear Josie say—just like when they were small and shrimpy and lisping through missing teeth—that the last one out is a rotten egg. April will playfully shove her sister, and the door will close behind them. Then the two who started this will be left to finish it.
Billy will lead me to the back deck, seeming young.
He’ll pull me in, my head landing gently against his heart as memories begin to play like music, with their swings and repeats and accidentals. Grilling and nightcaps and bocce ball. Snowmen and sunsets and Texas thunderstorms. Flash floods and summer droughts. Training wheels and roller skates. Frisbees and chalk. Bird’s nests and anthills. Neighbors and children.
After a few minutes, Billy will extend an open hand and say, “Onward?”
My chest will radiate with emotion as I look up at the man who came here with me and our youth and our young, the man who is responsible for my little life’s greatest joys. I will place my hand in his, a vow renewal without airs. A choice I’ve made every day since the shotgun shot of our wedding, and even still.
“Yes.” I’ll nod and whisper, “Onward.”
We’ll go back through our house to the front yard, where our family will stand waiting. We will walk slowly down a sidewalk that remembers the thump of the morning paper, beneath trees that remember toilet paper thrown by stealthy and not-so-stealthy teens, and beside the perennials I planted with my own two hands. I’ll look up at the wisteria vine, no longer in bloom. But the season will come again. Soon, a young family will unpack their new couches and rambunctious children and career aspirations. And when the time is right, they’ll come outside to discover a burst of dazzling, fragrant purples. Like clusters of amethyst dangling from the vine.
They will gasp. Pause. Smile at each other.
And the scent will saturate the neighborhood with the tenacity of new life.
LEO
September 3, 2022
MY CLASSES HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED for the new school year, and my marriage has effectively ended. April and I have started to negotiate settlement terms. In a few days, I’ll move to a nearby apartment with a month-to-month lease. A rental with someone else’s cheese burned to the bottom of the oven, someone else’s cough drop stuck to the back of a drawer.
A small vase of white roses sits on my little table in the trailer, dropping petals. Deb sent them with a brief note: Remembering Ana with you. I touch them now, these soft-petaled tokens of memory. I feel Mami’s absence. I miss the Odessa mud. We live in homes until we leave them, and then they live in us.
I step outside for some air. The midday sun blazes down on me. The grass crunches as I take a circuitous path around this barren property, this theater of family where the set has been struck, all actors gone home except me.
I pass the bare slab where our home once stood, and I walk toward the creek. My toes press against my shoes on the downhill, and I scan for poison ivy. There’s plenty of it. Also milkweed, greenbrier, and wild prairie roses climbing up a cottonwood tree. Something else is growing at the base of the tree, though I’m not sure what. Out of habit, I almost turn to April—the secondary losses of divorce are infinite.
Billy’s face will not leave me. The long vacancy when he looked up and asked, Which one is Deb? The neuroplasticity life requires. The restructuring of thought demanded by new events, new information, new wounds. The way Deb responded to fire with hospitality, divorce with generosity, and to her husband forgetting who she was with an invitation to dance. She seems to have mastered the wild economy of marriage.
And there’s a seismic difference between a thing imagined and a thing lived, none of us able to know how we’ll respond until that thing comes to pass. In reality, my marriage was plainer yet more epic than I could have imagined. And my divorce is more gutting yet more survivable. I’m awash with heartache, but I am no longer afraid to be alone.
I touch a prairie rose and think of Nathaniel, the storm we shared. The way he told me in the Wendy’s drive-thru about his own fractured family. Are there flowers wherever he is now? The colors of these petals seem more vivid than ever, the sky more expansive, the movement of leaves more comforting, more personal. Standing here now, I want to guzzle this earth, to hold the good of a place while I can. It’s strange how suffering can make beauty more beautiful.
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important. When I first read The Little Prince, I googled the translation of that line, because wasted? Really?
C’est le temps que tu as perdu pour ta rose qui fait ta rose si importante.
El tiempo que perdiste con tu rosa es lo que la hace tan importante.
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
Yes—wasted. Expended to the point of no more use, progressively diminished until gone. Not wasted on, but wasted for.
Alone beneath a shade tree on our land, a memory flutters toward me. It’s a small one, unimportant in the grand scheme. But every grand scheme is simply a collection of decisions, every life a collection of days.
At the materializing of this memory, I frown.
Then I turn on my heels and start uphill, faster and faster.
As I rush back toward the trailer, grasshoppers fly up from the ground, stridulating, clearing a path.