45
MEMORIZING THE FUTURE
When Grace got home, her first stop was at the
remnants of the small woodpile Crawford had given them after
chopping up the elm tree branch. The previous winter hadn’t been
very cold, so they hadn’t used much firewood. It wasn’t cold this
night, either. She just craved the coziness of a fire.
Inside, she stacked the wood in the
grate and tucked a few twisted newspapers left over from packing
around the logs as kindling. She intended to go to the kitchen and
fix something to eat, but the flames mesmerized her. Her mind
wandered randomly through memories: of the hospital waiting room
where she had spent the night before, and of riding her tricycle to
Peggy’s, and of a giant Styrofoam boulder collapsing at a prom
she’d never attended. She might have sat there hypnotized all night
if someone hadn’t knocked.
When she opened the front door, she
found herself face-to-face with a massive red poinsettia. Her
spirits lifted on the assumption that this was Ray, so that when
another man’s face poked over the top of the plant, disappointment
crept into her voice. “Oh. Wyatt. It’s you.”
Her lackluster greeting did nothing to
dim his smile. “Yes, it’s me, Wyatt—coming to wish my favorite
neighbor happy birthday.”
“If a pretty coed moved into the
student house next to you, I’m guessing my most favored neighbor
status would be rescinded instantly.” Nevertheless, she let him in,
closing the door behind him to keep the chill out. “How did you
know it was my birthday?”
“I woke up this morning and the birds
singing outside my window told me.”
She crossed her arms. “How did you
really find out?”
“I ran into Muriel Blainey today.” He
laughed. “Hell hath no fury, Grace. You’re the talk of the town
today. Or at least the talk of the street.”
“Muriel didn’t know it was my
birthday.”
“Actually, Crawford went over to
Dominic’s house and came back with the news.” One of his eyebrows
shot up. “But then I saw you poking around your woodpile, puttering
around all alone on your birthday, and I decided to run out and
remedy the situation.”
It was a thoughtful gesture. There was
even a card buried among the leaves. “Did you write me a poem,
too?” She pulled the card off its plastic stick to
see.
He frowned in confusion.
“Oh—wait!”
He reached out to grab the card, but
she feinted to the side and read aloud, “ ‘Mary
Jo—Forgiveness is divine. Yours, Wyatt.’ ” She laughed. “I’m
touched! You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble.”
“Okay, Mary Jo flew to Denver before I
could give this to her.” He looked shamefaced. “Still, it’s a
perfectly good plant. You wouldn’t want it to go to
waste.”
“No, it’s not the poinsettia’s
fault.”
Behind them, there was a knock, and,
still laughing, she turned and pulled the door open. Ray, holding a
slightly lopsided cake with a single blue candle in it, looked
surprised—then dismayed—to see Wyatt standing behind
her.
For a moment, the two men gazed from
poinsettia to cake, measuring up their respective
gifts.
Wyatt greeted him with a terse
“West.”
“Hello, Wyatt.” Ray turned to Grace.
“Happy birthday, Grace.”
“Should we sing?” Wyatt
asked.
“I would be unbelievably happy if you
didn’t,” Grace told them. “When did you get back,
Ray?”
“This evening. They released Lily this
afternoon.”
“Is she doing okay?”
He nodded. “She’s still exhausted and
zonked from the painkillers they’ve given her—especially from the
morphine shot last night.”
“Poor thing.” Wyatt shook his head and
addressed Ray. “Crawford told me what happened. You probably want
to get right back to Lily’s bedside.”
“I think she’s actually fairly content
now that it’s all over,” Ray said. “She’s over there now, propped
on the couch and giving people orders. Crawford was going over to
visit her as I was leaving.” He turned back to Grace. “Anyway,
Dominic and Jordan made this cake for you this afternoon. It’s
white with chocolate icing, I think.”
She looked into Ray’s eyes, and the
memory of kissing him by the river came back to her. The desire to
kiss him again surged in her. So did the desire to get rid of
Wyatt.
She and Ray both looked at him, and in
his eyes they could see realization dawning. In the battle of plant
vs. cake, cake had won.
“Well!” Wyatt said, handing the
poinsettia over to Grace. “I should be running along. Got phone
calls to make tonight, evidently.”
She opened the door for him. “Good
luck.”
When she turned back to Ray, he asked,
“I hope I wasn’t interrupting . . .”
“Only from Wyatt’s perspective, and I
don’t think he really minded. When it comes to romance, his skin is
as thick as rhinoceros hide.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t buy flowers for
you.”
“Don’t worry—Wyatt didn’t, either.” She
led him toward the kitchen. “And the cake is even better. I was
just about to resort to making dinner.”
“You haven’t eaten?” He started
searching through all his pockets.
“What are you looking
for?”
“Matches.”
She laughed. “That’s okay.
Honestly.”
“No, I promised the kids that I would
do this right. Even if you won’t let me sing . . .”
It seemed strange suddenly that Jordan
and Dominic, or at least Dominic, hadn’t come over to present the
cake in person. “Dominic didn’t want to come over and have a
piece?” she asked. “Or Jordan either?”
Ray finally found an old matchbook that
he’d obviously dropped into the breast pocket of his shirt for this
purpose. “They said they wanted to watch a movie.” He struck the
match and lit the candle. “There. Make a wish.”
For the first time in her life, Grace
didn’t know what to wish for. All the things she wanted—for her
father to be well, to not lose the house—were out of her
grasp.
She wished for them anyway and
blew.
She cut off two hunks of cake and put
them on plates from the set of everyday china that would soon be
boxed up like everything else. “Why don’t we eat in the living
room?” she suggested. “Next to the fire.”
From the leftover furniture, Grace
dragged an old end table to set up next to the martyr’s chair.
Another chair—an unmatched replacement chair that had been in the
dining room before the dining room table had been hauled away by an
antique dealer Muriel knew—she brought in for herself.
“Oh!” Ray dug into a jacket pocket and
pulled out a small wrapped cylinder. “From Jordan.”
She took it from him. It weighed very
little.
“I’m sort of curious to find out what
it is,” Ray said, encouraging her to open it. “Jordan wouldn’t
say.”
Grace unwrapped the package—although
unwound it would have been a better term.
The paper was rolled around the small object, and when she pulled
it away, she found herself holding a push puppet of a tall man with
brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses.
Laughter bubbled out of her. Mystery
solved.
Ray frowned. “What is that?”
She pushed the plunger, demonstrating.
“Actually, I think it’s you.”
She handed it over to him and smiled as
he inspected it with a sort of wonder growing in his eyes. “Where
did she get this?”
“She made it.” Grace pointed to the
mantel, where the parallel push puppet neighborhood Jordan had been
fashioning resided at the moment. “She made all of those,
too.”
Ray inspected them. “Jordan did these?” he asked. “How?”
“She’s an artist.”
He smiled. “I think she must be.” He
pushed Iago’s plunger and laughed. “I’ve wondered what she’s been
up to, locked up in that crazy room of hers. I never would have
guessed this.” He looked at Grace. “Did you know?”
She shook her head. “I only
suspected.”
“You think you understand people,” Ray
said, “even your own kids, and it turns out you’ve barely nicked
the surface.” He sat down in the armchair. “I’m sorry I don’t have
a real present for you, Grace.”
She smiled at him. “Don’t let it go to
your head, but just your being here is a sort of gift. I’d resigned
myself to the fact that I was going to have a lonely birthday night
at home with my cat. How pathetic does that sound?”
His gaze held hers. “You miss your dad
already, don’t you?”
“More than anything,” she said, choked
by a jolt of sadness.
Ray leaned toward her in sympathy. “I’m
sorry. I wish there was something . . .”
She shook her head and lifted a forkful
of cake. “Eat cake. It’s good for what ails you.”
As they ate, they talked about what had
happened at the hospital after she left, and about chauffeuring
Lily home with her in the backseat requesting he change the
satellite radio every five seconds until they came upon the Sirius
audiobook channel. They had hit the middle of Wuthering Heights and Lily had made him listen to it
all the way to Austin, even though they had missed the beginning
and Ray really didn’t have much idea of what was going on. And then
he’d missed the end.
“It couldn’t have turned out well,” he
guessed.
“It didn’t,” she confirmed. “Unless you
think being ghosts, wandering the moors and creeping people out
generally is romantic fulfillment.”
“No, I don’t. Lily said you do,
though.”
She laughed.
“After that, we finally arrived home
and discovered the dog had moved in and Dominic had made a cake. I
didn’t remember it was your birthday.”
“Did I ever tell you?”
“Well, no.” He shrugged. “It just seems
like one of those things I should know about you. One of many
things. Sometimes I feel there’s the relationship I think we have,
and the relationship we actually have. Does that sound
odd?”
She laughed again. “I’ve felt the same
way too. Maybe it’s just proximity that does that to people. The
neighbor thing.”
“That’s not what I meant.” His
expression was serious. “I always felt that there was a connection
between us.”
“The first couple of times we met, you
barely seemed to remember who I was,” she felt compelled to remind
him.
“Really?”
She nodded.
“But later,” he continued quickly,
“once we started talking—I can’t tell you what that meant to me. I
probably bored the stuffing out of you, but sometimes it felt as if
you were the only person in the world who I could talk to. And you
seemed to understand me and what the kids
were going through. You were like a magnet for all of
us.”
“A grief sponge.”
“No.” His hand covered hers. “Maybe I
should stop talking about the past.” He stood up and coaxed her to
her feet, too. “Could we take up where we left off
yesterday?”
“Isn’t yesterday the past?” she
joked.
“Grace . . .”
She looked around the room. “I’m sorry.
I’m in a funny mood. I haven’t felt so unbalanced since I was a
kid.” She pulled away from him, remembering. “When I was seven and
my mother was moving us to Oregon, I remember I came and stood in
this room and tried to memorize everything. I put my hands up like
this—like a camera lens—and tried to stare at everything, every
nook and cranny, so I could memorize it. I worried I would never
come back.” She dropped her hands to her sides. “But now I’m here,
and the house I knew is slipping away from me anyway.”
“Try this.” Ray moved behind her and,
reaching with his longer arms, lifted her hands again, keeping them
locked in viewfinder position. “Look at the shelves and see your CD
collection there, and your books, and your puppet collection on the
mantel.” He turned her slowly. “And the furniture—well, it would
probably be a mishmash of old and new, but everything comfortable,
just how you want it. Definitely keep the chair. And over there, at
the dining room table, there are a couple of kids playing Yahtzee,
and a black-and-white dog underneath waiting to catch any crumbs
that fall off the table.”
Her heartbeat quickened. “You want to
buy my dad’s house?”
He lowered his hands and wrapped them
around her waist. “I want you, Grace. In this house, or any house,
mansion or hut.”
She exhaled a nervous laugh and turned
in his arms so she could look into his eyes. “Are you out of your
mind? Just yesterday I was wondering if you had a thing for
Muriel!”
He shook his head. “That would be an
indication to me that you were out of your mind,
actually.”
She laughed again, amazed to find
herself so tempted by the ideas he was spinning. “We hardly know
each other.”
“We’ve known each other for a year and
a half. Maybe house hunting would be premature. But surely a year
and a half is long enough to start thinking about kicking a
relationship up to the next level?”
He smiled and brought her to him for a
kiss. She floated into him, letting herself sink into his arms. The
kiss tasted of chocolate icing and optimism, a tantalizing
combination.
He pulled back, looking worried. “But
of course, I realize I’m not exactly a dream guy. My kids . .
.”
“I love Lily and Dominic,” she said.
“Of course, there’s also . . .”
“Jordan.”
The anxiety in his eyes made her
laugh—as if he thought his other daughter might be a deal killer.
“She brought us together, didn’t she?”
His worried expression turned to
astonishment. “I hadn’t thought about it. I guess she
did.”
“Jordan and I have made our peace. In
fact, I think she’s starting to make her peace with the
world.”
He shook his head and encircled her in
his arms again, squeezing her in a supportive, tender embrace. “You
work miracles, Grace.”
“Not me,” she said. “Time works
miracles. Time, and love, and belonging.”