Never Coming Back Read online

  “Maybe she’s met a man,” Sunshine said.

  “She already has enough men in her life,” Brown said. “Between Jack and Dog, who needs any more men?”

  “How sweet. A bottle of whiskey and the ashes of her departed dog.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Rudeness.”

  I willed the bartender back behind the curtain, and I willed the scorch mark not to fail me, but fail me it did. The bartender kept opening the curtains to poke his head through and smile. I wrapped my arms around myself so that the thin dark wire, invisible under my shirt, would hold me together. It had been seven years since I got that tattoo and I knew exactly where to put my hands and how to crook one forearm into the other so that the beginning of the wire would meet the end of the wire. It was a technique of last resort.

  “Sunshine, she’s doing the wire thing again. She’s holding herself together with ink.”

  “I see that, Brown. But why? What’s she holding in?”

  “Rudeness times two,” I said again. “Rudeness squared. Speaking of someone in the third person when she’s right here. Demerit.”

  “There it is again!” Brown said. “I swear to God she sounds happy-ish.”

  I clutched each arm with the other but the laughter was coming on strong, and “Screw you both,” I said. “I met someone, okay? This guy.”

  “Whoa!” Brown said. “Did you hear that? Has she ever told us she met someone?”

  “Nope. But here she is. Look at her, smiling.”

  “Where could she possibly have met this guy? What do you think his favorite color is? Do you think he’s an eggs man or a cereal man?”

  “Is he a boob man or a butt man? Or a mostly-neither man, given Winter’s physical configuration?”

  “I bet he’s a lumberjack. You know she’s always had a thing for lumberjacks.”

  “Hellooooo,” I said. “Still right here.”

  “Oh,” Brown said. “What do you know? She’s right here. So where’d you meet this guy? Did you go to a party and not tell us?”

  I shook my head. “A bar. He’s a bartender.”

  “A bartender? Free drinks!”

  The bartender materialized again in my mind. He stood behind the bar, slicing limes into thin wedges. Sunshine and Brown were talking about the drinks they would order when they met the bartender. They would go big because the drinks would be free, or should be free, because weren’t drinks always free if you were with the bartender’s girlfriend? Wasn’t that like an unwritten rule or something?

  “He’s not my boyfriend. I just met him.”

  “Can you imagine her and her boyfriend in the tiny cabin?” Brown said. “Where would she put him? Maybe she could turn him into a piece of furniture too. Or artwork! A human-size sculpture made out of a human.”

  “There would be room if she made room,” Sunshine said.

  “Are you speaking metaphorically, Sunshine?”

  “I am, Brown.”

  Brown turned to me. “Sunshine is speaking Metaphor,” Brown said, as if it were a nearly forgotten language and he a professor instructing me in its ways. “And she’s also speaking Literal. Kind of like simulcast.”

  “Stop,” I said. “It’s not right to talk about this kind of thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “You know. Happy-ish things.”

  “Why not?” Sunshine said.

  “Because. It’s not the time or place. We’re here to talk about Tamar, not the bartender.”

  “Of course it’s the time and place. We can talk about Tamar and we can talk about the bartender.”

  “Simulcast,” Brown said helpfully. “See?”

  “Happy-ish things don’t stop because Tamar has Alzheimer’s,” Sunshine said. “Being a cancer survivor gives me the right to say that.”

  She tilted her head and smiled her brave-cancer-survivor smile and we automatically tilted our heads and smiled our brave-cancer-survivor-supporter smiles back at her. Our smiles were closed-mouthed and flat-eyed. We had invented them long ago, when people started referring to Sunshine as a cancer survivor, which was a term we all hated. It put the cancer first and Sunshine second, and if we couldn’t get rid of the cancer entirely we at least wanted the wording to be the other way around.

  * * *

  “But enough of happy-ish things,” Brown said. He had the ability to pivot like that, and we pivoted with him. “This meeting is called to order. First order of business: other than that there was at least one moment in her life, corroborated by mysterious photographic evidence, that she was wearing a non-woodcutter-type shirt and she looked pretty, what have we learned about Tamar Winter since last we convened?”

  Was that an existential statement? Or a rhetorical question? Question marks scrolled across the bottom of my brain. ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Curlicued little sea serpents hunching along in search of answers. Sum up what you do know about your mother, Clara.

  “Tamar Winter is my mother. She applied and unapplied decals for Dairylea for thirty years. She was justice of the peace for fourteen. She was a choir singer who never sang in church. She is a fan of firewood, food eaten straight out of the jar and Jeopardy! She was also a fan of Asa. At least until the night before he broke up with me.”

  “Asa,” Sunshine said. She always said his name wrong, with a z sound instead of an s sound. “Asa Chamberlain. I wish I’d known him. I feel as if I’d know you better, if I knew what he was like.”

  “You would have loved him. Everyone did.”

  “Why?”

  “He was one of those people.” Asa appeared in my head, standing in the doorway of an unfamiliar room, smiling. A lump rose in my throat. I wanted to tell them more about him, about the unicycle he taught himself to ride, about the way he used to sing me to sleep, but the words wouldn’t come out. All I could manage was “He was a good singer.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yes. He used to go up to Fairchild Continuing Care and sing to the residents. Hymns.”

  “So he was religious?”

  I shook my head. No, Asa was not religious. Unless he was all-religious, in that way that some people are, where everything in the world has meaning, and everything and everyone is worthy. “Asa said that hymns were just songs. He had a magical ability to remember the words to any song. He used to sing Leonard Cohen songs to my mother.”

  “Her man Cohen? She must have loved Asa, then.”

  “Yes. Which is why I will never understand what went down between them that night I came back and he was so upset.”

  “She never talked about it? Ever?”

  I shook my head. They had heard bits and pieces about Asa over the years. A little when we were freshmen getting to know one another. More when he was deployed—Sunshine had been there when my mother told me the news over the telephone—and then those blurry weeks and months years ago, after the Humvee he was in blew up. That was it, though. There had been a lot left out.

  * * *

  He was a senior and I was a sophomore, but time goes slower in high school. So the two years I was with Asa, from fall of sophomore year until fall of senior year, were long, long years. They stretched out from morning, when I woke up and lay in bed picturing him, until night, when I undressed in the dark and lay down between cool sheets imagining that he was with me.

  Sometimes he was. When Tamar was asleep and the pre-Asa Clara would’ve been too, when it was way into the night, he’d drive over and park on the logging road and then walk up to the house and brush his hand against the screen of my window. “You up?” he’d whisper, and I’d press my hand against his through the screen, and then he’d ease open the never-used front door instead of the always-used kitchen door off the porch, and then there he’d be. In my room.

  He was like a miracle. This living, breathing boy, this boy I loved who loved me back.

  “Are you real?” I would ask sometimes.

  “As real as the Velveteen Rabbit,” he would say. His favorite book from childhood, which he gave
me a copy of for my birthday and which, because of him, I tried to love too, but couldn’t. Too sad. Too hard.

  We were together even after he graduated from Sterns High and started driving truck for Byrne Dairy, the rival company to Dairylea. He didn’t want to go to college, which made his mother angry. His parents were struggling with each other, had always struggled, according to Asa. By the end of his senior year his mother had moved out and Asa lived with his father in Sterns.

  “Martha Chamberlain is a tough nut,” Tamar said once.

  “Takes one to know one,” I said, because wasn’t Tamar also a tough nut? But she just looked at me. No comeback.

  What was she thinking? What was going through her mind back in those days? She loved Asa Chamberlain, that much was clear. “That boy has the voice of an angel,” I once heard Annabelle Lee say to Tamar. “And the looks of one too, in a lumberjack kind of way.” Tamar didn’t say anything back—maybe she nodded, but I was eavesdropping from the living room so I didn’t know for sure—but the choir director was right on both counts. Once he knew how much my mother loved Leonard Cohen, Asa used to serenade her with his songs. “Hallelujah,” especially, because it was her favorite. I could still hear his voice in the kitchen of the house that used to belong to my mother and me, singing about those chords and that baffled king composer. She used to have this look on her face when he sang, a look I couldn’t read.

  Now I wondered: Was that look happiness? Did Asa make her happy in a way that I didn’t?

  His father, Eli, was not a tough nut. He might have given the impression of tough-nut-ness, but he was anything but. He was a tall, rough-looking, rough-speaking man, but you should have seen the way he used to pick up his dog, Miss Faraday, named after his kindergarten teacher, and smooth her already-smooth fur. Eli had found Miss Faraday in a ditch outside Watertown when she was a puppy, some kind of nameless pit-husky-boxer mix, as far as we could tell, and driven home with her on his lap.

  He was the same way with his son.

  “Clara, do you and Asa talk about what will happen after high school?” my mother once asked me. She had that look on her face, that same unreadable look.

  “Sure. I’ll go to MVCC, he’ll drive for Byrne Dairy and everything will be the same.”

  “You’ve decided all that together?”

  “Not in so many words. But yes.”

  I had already mentally rejected all the SUNY schools on a too-far-from-Asa basis. Oneonta, Cornell, Geneseo, Plattsburgh, Binghamton, New Paltz, Albany, all within three hours but still too far. I couldn’t stand the thought of being farther than half an hour away from Asa, who was happy exactly where he was. Happy with me, with his job, with Sterns.

  And I was happy with him.

  * * *

  “Why did Asa enlist?” Sunshine said, still with the z sound instead of the s. “You’ve never really talked about that.”

  “Asa. Not Aza. Get it straight. And I couldn’t talk about it.”

  “But why not?”

  I wanted to swat away the sound of her voice, the confusion in it. Calm down, Clara. Focus. It was a long time ago.

  “Because it was right after he left me,” I said. “It all happened so fast. It’s still a jumble in my head. We broke up, and he enlisted, and I went away, and then he died. He’s dead.”

  “Tell us more about Asa, then,” Sunshine said, after a long pause. “About that time.”

  She was still saying it wrong. Could she never get it right? Could she not hear? Was there a problem with her ears? S instead of z, Sunshine. S for sweet, not z for razor. Sunshine was a word person but not enough of one, it seemed, to know the profound difference between s and z.

  “Everything changed after the night I came home and they were talking,” I said. “He broke up with me the next day. Then he enlisted. He was an army mechanic. And then she made me go away. And if he hadn’t enlisted, then ​—”

  “Maybe he would be alive?”

  I nodded. My heart fluttered in my chest, on the verge of a stampede. Too thin too dehydrated too stressed. The three toos, any two of which would bring on episodes. A long-ago cardiologist’s voice echoed in my mind, lecturing me on the specifics of my condition. Shhh, Clara. Shhh.

  “Is that why you don’t talk about him?”

  Yes. That was why I didn’t talk about him. Why I tried not to think about him. All these years. Fifteen of them, now, since we broke up. And Asa gone from the earth the last seven of them. Maybe I thought there would be time to put it back together. If not me and Asa as a couple, then the puzzle of what was broken. Understand how that time and those decisions—to do as my mother said, to leave my home and venture into a new world, to go forth without Asa—changed my life. Set pattern to it in ways that I could not have known back then.

  Would we have broken up anyway? Would time have worked its sorcery on us, pulled us apart? Probably, the thirty-two-year-old me whispered to the seventeen-year-old former me. Admit it. You might have made it a semester, or a year even, and then you would both have known you were headed down different paths. But that ending would have been better than what actually happened, because it would have been natural. Sorrowful, but natural.

  Even after he left me, I felt in my body that there was a force between the two of us, and I imagined that one day when I was home visiting my mother and out for a walk, he would drive by and pull off to the side of the road and turn off the ignition. Get out of the car.

  We would talk.

  I would tell him how sorry and sad I still felt about losing him, and he would nod and hold out his hand.

  We would figure it out together. That happened in life, sometimes. The long-divorced parents of my friends growing up, who loathed each other, who hated being around each other at holidays and graduations and funerals, were suddenly glimpsed in their children’s wedding photos, dancing and laughing and clinking glasses. How it happened was time, maybe. Time melting away the edges. Time making you forget the awfulness.

  Asa was my only boyfriend.

  When he ended things with me, on that day he kept shaking his head and saying he was sorry, something broke. Something fundamental, so that the air itself broke around us, so that ever since the air I breathed came from a different country, a country I was still trying to figure out.

  * * *

  “I think about it,” I said. “I think about it more than you know. Because the world, it would be a better place if Asa were still in it.”

  Sunshine and Brown kept their eyes straight on me, wanting more. The width of the wide table separated us and I was the field mouse and they were the hawks, listening with their eyes, ready to plummet from a mile high with claws at the ready if I stopped talking.

  “And he’s not,” I said. “And my mother, she’s going now too. And what if I had stayed in Sterns? What if I had been close by her all along?”

  “Would things be different now?” Brown said.

  “Maybe.”

  I put my hand over the scorch mark, beacon of burn in the middle of confusion. The memory of the day we found the table, when we hauled it back to their new, unfurnished place and somehow managed to shove it up four narrow flights of stairs, and then somehow managed to jimmy it into the apartment, where we all sat on top of it and ate take-out Chinese with chopsticks, came washing back over me. It was an easy memory, a memory full of laughter and adventure and possibility. Not like the memories of my raging words, flung in darkness at my mother, and that look in her eyes when she switched on the bedside lamp, and not like the memory of the look in Asa’s eyes when he broke up with me.

  “What was The Fearsome’s reaction to you and Asa breaking up?” Sunshine said.

  “Nothing. Nada. Zip. On the outside, anyway. I’ve never been able to make sense of it.”

  “I can’t imagine my parents saying nothing.”

  “Your parents are normal. Mine is not. It happened, and then she banished me to New Hampshire. She showed me the acceptance letter and the scholarship
and the grant. Annabelle Lee and she had filled out the application and pretended to be me. They used an old essay I wrote for Honors English, about wanting to go to Hong Kong someday.”

  “Seriously?” Brown said, admiration on his face. Respect for Tamar’s deviousness.

  “Seriously.”

  Blue Mountain appeared in my mind, standing over me in the Arts Center while I waited for my heart to revert. Is your mother proud of you? There was no question that Sunshine’s mother was proud of her. All you had to do was look at her in the photo on their wall, standing on that sun-kissed dock, a yellow cardigan tied over her shoulders, smiling down at Sunshine. She was like an ad for an affluent, white New England college mother.

  “Look,” I said. “I was never a bad kid. I worked so hard—at school, at everything. And she kicked me out. I screamed at her, I mean screamed at her, the first time I ever did something like that. The only time. And we didn’t talk about that either, and then I went away to school the way she decreed, and then”—I stopped talking. Lump in my throat.

  “And then what?” Brown said.

  The hawk hovered above, silent and deadly, waiting for the mouse. I kept my hand pressed over the scorch mark.

  “And I loved it,” I said. “I loved college. It was a whole new life and I loved it and I loved you guys and after a while it was in the rearview mirror, all of it. I left her behind.”

  My mother and Asa had, in their separate ways, launched me into action. That was the way it felt.

  “And I never went back,” I said. “My life is the opposite of my mother’s.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Brown said.

  Sunshine was silent, which meant that she agreed. Why? How? I was nothing like my mother, my mother in her lumber jacket, raising the maul in the air, bringing it down on chunks of log. My mother, with her beautiful voice, heading out to choir practice but never, not once, appearing in church. My mother, one hand on the steering wheel, driving me to New Hampshire and then driving back again alone.