Willow
My great grandfather liked to talk about the old days, especially when he’d smoked too many stogies and had too much bourbon.
“It’s not the same, Buttercup. It’s not how it used to be.” Normally “it” had something to do with the government and the mess politicians made of it. But my grandfather wasn’t a typical grumpy old man. He didn’t bemoan the world because he missed the way things were in the past. He complained because we still, in his view, hadn’t gotten our shit together.
“Two hundred years and only one black president and still, after all this time, no women. If I had my way…”
He’d go on and on, hours sometimes and then, when he had gone quiet, when the fire had gone out of him, he’d sometimes talk about the things that normally were shut up inside of him My great grandfather was the last. After him there’d be no grandparents on my father’s side of the family. He knew it. Often, he’d apologize about it.
“No man should have to bury his children or his bride, Buttercup and I’ve done that more than once.”
Those nights he’d gotten quiet and the anger and loneliness inside him had rushed through him like a windstorm. Those were the nights he’d played Coltrane loud and told me about his childhood. “No one should live the way they made me. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy and, cher, I’ve had plenty.” That also came out when he drank a lot—the hidden French words he never used when sober. The childhood back in New Orleans had done something to him, but it had never left him completely. That’s the way of things, I guessed. We never really lose who we are.
“Who would be your enemy, Gramps?” I’d asked him, not understanding how this gentle old man could ever piss anyone off. “You’re the best of them all.”
“No, Buttercup. Not by a long shot. That was your granny, God rest her. Your granny and our sweet girl.”
He never talked much about either of them. Only when the bourbon came out and Coltrane came on and even then, it was the same stories—the time his daughter had learned to ride a bike; the day his wife came down the isle of a tiny Berlin church wearing a borrowed dress and her hair up in pin curls. “Perfection,” he’d called them and he’d meant it. I’d always wondered if anyone would ever think that of me.
I almost thought Nash had.
The boxes were pushed one on top of another, as tight in my car as I could get them, with quilts and throws tucked between them and the seats as I stuffed my things inside. The decision to leave had come after my mother promised to clear out the old cottage on Lake Winfred. It would be warmer there, warmer than the city had been. I had never liked the winters in New York. Something set in my bones made me long for a lake and the peace inside a cottage no one knew about.
“You can have it for as long as you want, sweetie.” There was a pause in my mother’s voice, something that told me she was worried. “But why do you want to give up that apartment in the city? I thought you liked Brooklyn. I thought you were doing well with your booth at the Farmer’s Market, and you'll never find a rent control like that again, you know.”
If I’d told her the truth, I’d spend an hour on the phone promising my mother my heart wasn’t as broken as it felt. I’d have to lie to her and say that Nash hadn’t hurt me, that what I felt between us was one-sided and stupid.
“Just want a change of pace,” I’d told her, knowing that she’d pick up my tone, that she’d hear the small lie behind the elevated, forced inflection.
“Willow…”
“Mom, I promise.” Another pitch higher this time and I threw in a laugh. “So tell me about the trip to Costa Rica this spring.”
She had. My mother had gone on for twenty minutes about the group of teenagers she and dad were bringing with them to help build wells in the thick of the jungle, while I pushed my clothes, my dishes and books into boxes. Already I planned to walk away from Brooklyn because staying hurt too badly. It wasn’t enough that the dreams consumed me. They kept me up. They blocked my sleep patterns and diluted my aura. I felt it heavy on my skin. Like a bruise that covered my entire body.
Those memories soaked into my mind like oil—clinging until there was only the sight of Sookie holding that rope and the horror I felt, the terror on her beautiful face as she stared down at me. I could still smell the thick smoke choking me, I still heard Sylv’s prayers as he said them over and over. Then, she fell and part of me, of Dempsey, died. I felt it slip away like a second skin. I felt it leave and knew it wouldn’t return.
And Riley…my God. The slip of her world as it went away, the soft weight of her baby on her chest. The warm press of Isaac’s sweet kiss against her…against my mouth.
“God…”
This was not the time to think of it. Not when there were taxies zipping through the streets and a construction crew coming closer to our building; tar from their truck puffed great swells of thick liquid into the air and the smell made me a little queasy. I had a lot to do anyway miles and miles to go tomorrow before I made it to Lake Winfred.
I ran the back of my wrist against my eyes to dry my face and picked up another box, stuffing it between three frames and my father’s old turn table. It was an ancient thing, something Grandpa Ryan, my father’s father, had given to him, something I was sure he’d gotten from his dad, my great-grand daddy O’Bryant. It had been broken for years when I found it after Grandpa Ryan’s death and my father wanted me to have it. “A family heirloom,” my father had joked, handing it over to me along with old Fats Domino and Muddy Waters vinyls. “Use them well,” he’d told me.
Now that turn table was snug on the floorboard of my car, ready to go with me to the cottage. There would be no neighbors to disturb with my music and, God willing, no memories to haunt me when I got there.
“Where do you want these?” a mover asked, motioning with the two lamps in his hands.
“Those can go in the van. They’re headed to storage.”
No need to bring those along to the cottage, when my mother had likely already seen to it that the place was outfitted with food, dishes, and toiletries, not to mention lamps. The rest of my things would go to a storage facility in the city. My rugs and tapestries, many of my books, most of my cooking supplies all would be there, forgotten until I’d licked my wounds for an appropriate amount of time and decided where I’d start over again.
I shut the trunk of my car and opened the passenger side door, pushing the seat back to feel around for my cell when my elbow shoved against something I thought was my jewelry box, but instead turned out to be the small wooden box my parents dropped off just a week ago.
The clasp was gold and there was a heavy inlay of filigree along the sides and at the corners. Fleur de leis from the look of them, all faint with age. Opening it, I felt the soft fabric that lined the box, the silk pattern and heavy threads and wondered where my granddad had found it and what had made him keep it.
There were dozens of pictures, some I’d flipped through the first night I got it, smiling at all those images of great-grandpa and great-grandma Nicola when they were young. He was so handsome, his eyes bright even in the dull black and white photo. She’d never smiled as widely as him or laughed as much, but then her childhood and what her family had endured during the war was something not easily forgotten.
Among those pictures were others I hadn’t had a chance to go through and letters, mostly from my great-grandmother's cousins in Poland after the war. There were pieces of jewelry, some that Gramps had made, others that looked store bought. At the bottom of the box was a small journal. Flipping through the pages, I caught sight of the dates, some going back as early as the late thirties, all in my great-grandfather’s tight, precise handwriting.
I debated looking through it, despite all the noise around me and the activity of moving. The movers were nearly done and another small voice in my head told me to toss the box in the van, send it and the memories away to storage while I tried to run from them, from the dreams and from Nash. I stood up and a rush of emotion came over me, as I caught a glimpse of another picture, this one clear, the faces in it laughing. I knew one face. Had seen it before, months before when I moved to Brooklyn. He’d given me the key to the apartment. He’d swore I looked just like my mother…
“What are you doing?”
Nash’s voice pulled me out of my shock and I blinked, squeezed my eyes tight to refocus as he moved closer. A swift breeze picked up and the smell of Nash’s cologne whipped around me like a snake, firing up sensation and heat and all the things I was trying to avoid with this move.
“What do you want?” I asked him, closing Gramp’s box and shoving it under the passenger seat of my car. I would shoot for aloof, impassive, I told myself. I would pretend that I wasn’t affected by the heat from his body as he came up next to me or how the low, deep lull of his voice when he whispered my name didn’t make my heart skip a beat or my palms sweaty.
“Willow.” It was a low, sweet sound, like music. It remind me of the piercing moment in a chord change, when the saxaphone player took a breath, the way your body goes still, how anticipation keys up your senses until you arent’ sure how wise it would be to wait for the next note.
“Nash, I need you to...”
“What do you need? Tell me. I’m...I’m sorry for leaving.”
“Leaving?” I asked, stepping out from the car to slam the door shut. I fished my keys from my pocket and turned on him, not caring that the sidewalk was thick with people moving by us, that the movers had slowed to watch the exchange. There was a construction crew a few feet behind my car and the heavy scent of tar grew thicker. “That’s why you’re sorry? Because you got freaked out and left me out on the roof?”
“No. I don’t mean…”
I hadn’t realized just how much anger I was holding inside, but now that I let some of it loose, the rest couldn’t be held back. “Not that you made me feel like I was insane for…” one of the movers took out a cigarette and lit it, his attention on us and not his co-workers who awkwardly moved a large chest of drawers toward the van. “You made me think I was insane for…thinking what I think. For believing what I believe in. You called me insane, you called me a witch, you pretty much told me I was fucked any way you look at it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, holding up his hands. For a second I thought he might reach out, try to touch me and I prepared myself for it, ready to push him back. “I don’t think you’re insane. I don’t. I just think there is a lot of…” Nash looked around the sidewalk, nodding me away from the car to get us out of earshot of the nosey mover. “There’s a lot of things that can’t be explained.”
“They can,” I said, a little louder, my temper returning with the frown he gave me and the stubborn way he looked away. “You just happen to call the explanations crap.” A few small, indiscernible words came out of his mouth, but Nash didn’t repeat them loud enough for me to hear.
“Can we go upstairs?” He nodded toward the building, even took a step toward it before I shook my head. “Why not?”
“I don’t live here anymore.” It was true. I’d sent Mom’s university friend, Mr. Lewis my key that morning. The Super would find another tenant and I’d be gone soon, gone for good.
“Willow. Please. I don’t like this…” he waved between us, finally scrubbing his face when I folded my arms over my chest. “Where are you going? How long…”
“That’s not important. It’s not…don’t worry about it.”
This time when Nash looked at me, his large hands moved to the back of his neck, rubbing hard, as though he needed to release the tension that had grown there. “It’s damn well important to me, Will.”
I wanted to smile at him then. I wanted Nash to open his arms and tell me he loved me. I wanted him to admit he believed me…that he simply believed in things he couldn’t see, things that didn’t make sense to the logical mind at all. But he had let me just walk away. He didn't try to fight, he didn't try to think outside the box he’d put himself in. He’d turned his back when coincidences couldn’t be explained. Worse yet, he’d accused me of trying to trick him, even though he had felt the very same things I had. Those dreams were memories—we shared them. Even if we didn’t understand how, they meant something, and rather than being amazed, he’d run from them. From the truth. He’d run from me.
I tried one last time.
“Why, Nash? Why is it important to you?”
Say it, I thought. Please. Tell me you love me. Say, ‘Because of everything’ and mean it.
“I’d…damn…” Nash shrugged, looking uncomfortable, looking a lot like a kid standing in front of a grown up being asked to explain why he'd misbehaved. But Nash wasn’t a kid. No matter if he'd acted like one often enough. He took to rubbing his neck again before he dropped his hand, smiling, but with no conviction. “I’d hate to see you go. The place would be too quiet without the noise you make and then there’s the cupcakes…”
He stopped joking when I lowered my shoulders, gripping my keys in my hand as I stepped back into the street, meaning to yank the door of my car open to show just how angry I was. I heard the first syllables of my name come from his mouth, then screams to my left, the screech of tires and the blast of a horn. The stench of street tar was all around me, thick and metallic, heavy and cloying. The smell, it was awful and still it enveloped me, poured up into my sinuses and wound its way inside my head, and for a second, I let the smell take me…