Chapter 41
Nan
“Grace?”
I turned my head to press my ear against the door. I couldn’t hear anyone moving inside, but her car was parked on the street. I knocked again, insistently enough, I hoped, so she would realize I wasn’t leaving until she answered.
“Grace, open the door. You can’t spend the rest of your life pretending you’re not home.”
At last, I heard movement, footsteps, the yip of a little dog, the click of a deadbolt lock. Grace opened the door. She was wearing a bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her head.
“Hi,” she said. “I wasn’t avoiding you. I just got out of the shower.”
“But you’ve been avoiding my calls. And Luke’s. He’s been calling me instead. He’s worried about you. So is Billie. She called and said you told her not to come in to work this week. Are you all right? You’re not sick, are you?”
She shook her head and then waved me inside.
“What are those?” she asked as I put down my bag and set a foil-covered plate down on the dining-sewing table Luke had made for her.
“Peach turnovers,” I said, removing the foil. “I just baked them.”
Grace smiled wryly. “The grief prescription, huh? Is it as bad as that?”
I pulled one of the stools out from under the table and sat down. “You tell me.”
She paused for a moment, then took a turnover from the plate.
“I should make some tea.”
Grace carried two mugs in from the kitchen and sat down at the table.
“I haven’t been avoiding you,” she said. “I’ve been busy working.”
I looked around the apartment. Everything looked very tidy, no pins or needles or fabric scraps strewn about, and Grace’s sewing machine was inside its case.
“Not on the dresses,” she said, answering the question before I could ask it. “I’ve been working on the blocks for Jamie’s quilt. I’d like to finish it.”
She gestured toward a small stack of blocks on an end table, lying next to a wicker sewing basket and a small white cardboard box.
“Jamie’s ashes,” she said, indicating the box. “They were delivered a couple of days ago.”
The ashes. I nodded. Now I understood.
“Grace, do you know why I started doing pet therapy, volunteering to help people work through their grief?”
She gave me a curious look. “Well . . . because of Jim, I assumed. Because you’d been through it yourself.”
I shook my head. “It was because of Dani, my youngest daughter.”
Grace tipped her head to one side. “You’ve never really talked about her.”
“No,” I said quietly. “I never have.”
For the next few minutes, I told Grace all about the daughter I never really discuss. I told her about how Dani and Jim had been joined at the hip, how deeply Jim’s death impacted Dani, and how the intensity of her grief, and my inability to help her move through it, started her on a path to chronic depression, self-medication, and addiction.
I told her everything, about Dani and about myself. When I was finished, Grace reached for my hand.
“It wasn’t your fault, Nan. You did everything you could for her.”
“Did I? I tried. But could I have done something more? Something different? If I had, would it have made any difference?” I shrugged. “I’ll never know for sure. I try to help other people because I couldn’t help Dani. Because I know what can happen when people are unable to confront their fears and feelings in the wake of loss.
“I’m not saying that what happened to Dani will happen to you. But when a deeply loved one dies, sometimes the people left behind want to die too. They might not say so out loud, they might not even be aware of what they’re feeling, but it’s there just the same. They start pulling back, turning inward, disconnecting from people and things they used to enjoy before or might enjoy now, living in the past and hiding from the future because they are so afraid of what it might bring.”
Grace turned her head, staring out the front window of her condo. Outside, two girls wearing pink bike helmets cycled past, but I’m not sure she really saw them.
“When Malcolm fell,” she whispered, her voice rasping and her eyes distant, “it was like I was right back there again, on the mountain, watching Jamie fall and not being able to stop it or help him. Life is so uncertain, and cruel. You can do everything right and still everything can go wrong. If something happened to Luke . . .” Grace swallowed hard and turned to face me. “I can’t go through that again, Nan.”
“Yes,” I said. “You can. And if you inhabit this earth for any length of time, chances are you will.
“Jamie took a long time leaving this world. He fell down that cliff and started dying by inches, and because you loved him so much, because what the two of you had was so wonderful and rare, you tried to die by inches too. But you couldn’t do it. Because there’s too much life in you, Grace—too much life, and love, and joy—and all of it is meant to be shared.”
I looked toward the coffee table to the plain white box with Jamie’s ashes and the quilt blocks lying next to it, scraps of cloth and memory stitched into a story.
“Grace, when you’re sewing those blocks, thinking about Jamie and how much you miss him—do you ever stop to think how lucky you are to have had someone to miss? Do you ever think about what your life would be like if you’d never met him, never loved him, never let him love you back?
“That’s the thing that truly does kill people by inches, Grace—the lack of love. For all that you’ve gone through, that’s one thing you’ve never suffered from.”
“That’s true,” she said softly. “Not since Jamie. He loved me. I don’t know why, but he did.”
“I bet Luke could tell you.”
Grace looked at me with liquid eyes. She smiled sadly but didn’t speak.
“Every love story turns sad eventually, Grace. If someone loves you and you decide to love them back, at some point you are going to get hurt. The only way to avoid it is never to love in the first place. That’s the deal. I know that and so do you. That’s why this is so hard.
“Luke truly loves you, I have no doubt about that. Do you love him? If you do, we both know it’ll be worth it—a hundred, a thousand times over. But that’s a question only you can answer.”
Grace walked me to the door and I said I’d see her on Monday. “Monica should be back by then. It’ll be interesting to hear how she handled a whole week of rest.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. I can’t come next week. Don’t worry,” Grace said, reading the concern in my eyes. “There’s just somewhere I need to . . . something I have to do. I’ll be back the week after. Promise.”
“Okay. But you call me if you need anything.”
“I will. Tell Luke I’ll call him in a few days.”
“You don’t want to tell him yourself?”
She shook her head. “Not now.”
* * *
After Dani stole my purse, I had to buy a new one. It’s much bigger than my old one, too big really. So when I left Grace’s house and I reached into my purse to find my keys, I couldn’t. I started walking with my head down in the direction where I’d left the car, rooting around in my bag in search of the missing keys.
Finally, a block and a half later, I found them inside a small, interior pocket I’d never known existed until that moment, and looked up just in time to avoid tripping on a homeless woman with dirty blond hair and a vacant expression, wearing a full-skirted dress of a very familiar style.
“Dani?”
Her movements were so slow and her reactions so delayed, it was almost like watching someone who was underwater. Finally, her eyes cleared enough to recognize me.
“Hi, Mom.”
I squatted down so I could speak to her at eye level.
“Dani, what are you doing here?”
“I live here,” she said, spreading her arms wide, her fingers stretching toward two concrete planters. “Sometimes. I’ve been gone for a few days, maybe a couple of weeks. A friend of mine had some—”
She stopped in mid-sentence. I wasn’t sure if it was because she’d lost her train of thought or because she decided that whatever she was going to say wasn’t any of my business.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Visiting my friend, Grace. In that building, in the next block.”
A smile slowly spread over Dani’s face. “You know Grace? She’s really nice. I like her.”
“So do I. Dani, did Grace make that dress for you?” She nodded. “And does she call you Sunny?”
“Everybody calls me Sunny. Remember how I always liked that stuff, that drink? SunnyD.”
“The orange drink. I remember.”
“When I first got out on the street people started calling me D, then SunnyD, then just Sunny. Everybody calls me that now.”
“Would you rather I called you Sunny?”
“No,” she said, answering quickly for once. “To you, I’m Dani.”
“Okay.”
Dani started to cry, her eyes filling and spilling over so suddenly that it was like someone had turned a spigot on inside her. She covered her face with her hands.
“I stole your purse, Mom. I’m sorry. I am. It’s just . . . I get so sick. Sometimes I feel like I want to rip off my own skin. And if I don’t get—I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry.”
“I know, Dani.” I laid my hand on her shoulder. “I forgive you. Do you want to get well? Can I help you?”
She lowered her hands. Her eyes were dilated pools of pain and shame. “I want to get well. But I don’t want to quit. I can’t. I wish I could. I wish I were somebody different. If Daddy saw me like this—”
“He would love you,” I said. “Just like he always did, like we both did and I still do. I hate seeing you in such pain, baby. And I hate thinking of you in danger. But I will never, ever stop loving you.”
I reached inside my new bag, into a pocket I’d never had occasion to use but knew very well, and pulled out a card I had been carrying with me for weeks.
“Here, Dani. Put this somewhere so you don’t lose it. This is my cell phone number.”
After staring at the card for a moment, she slowly lifted her head.
“You hate cell phones. You always said that anybody who knew you would know enough to call you at home.”
“But I’m not always at home.” I pulled my new phone from my new purse. “Dani, I’m going to keep this with me day and night. There’s only one person who has the number, and that’s you.
“But I need you to understand, I am never, ever going to give you money. And unless you’re clean and sober, you can’t stay at my house. But if you’re ever in trouble or hurt, you can call me. If you’re hungry, I’ll bring you food. If you’re cold, I’ll bring you warm, clean clothes. And if you ever, at any moment of the day or night, decide you want to quit, I’ll be there. I love you.”
Her eyes swam again. She looked so hopeless and defeated.
“Why?”
“Because I do. Love isn’t something you negotiate. It just is.”
Dani leaned forward and I wrapped her in my arms. She smelled of dirt, and pot, and sweat, and God only knew what else. And I never wanted to let go of her.
Because love just is.