In the Shadow of Alabama Read online

  “Ain’t you never gonna call her back?” he asks.

  “Maybe later,” I tell him, then pause currying mid-stroke to look at him. “You must think I’m awful, not answering.”

  He shrugs. “It don’t make me no nevermind,” he says. “I never take calls from kinfolk.”

  * * *

  Early that afternoon, I return to the house and sit down at my desk to write. The voice mail is filled with messages from Sandra, ascending notes of impatience coloring her voice. The phone rings again, but now the caller ID reads Stanton, Brodie, and Brodie, and I snatch up the phone. That’s where David works.

  David is not my husband. Though he has asked me to marry him a thousand times over the years, I have always said no. Getting married and “making it official,” as David says, I think burdens love. Taking in love should be voluntary and spontaneous, like air. You can’t have “official” air.

  “I won’t be home tonight,” he informs me, and I get the familiar clutch in my stomach. “I have to catch up on some work. I’ll just crash in my office when I’m done.”

  “I see.” But I don’t. He’s been getting home later and later. Finishing briefs, reviewing cases, busy with work, busy, busy, busy. I try to sound good-naturedly unconcerned. “No problem,” I say, then force an indifferent yawn. “I have a lot of work myself.”

  “Talk to ya,” he says and hangs up. Not “love ya,” not “miss ya.” “Talk to ya.”

  “Yah,” I reply to the dial tone. I hunch forward in my chair, dropping my face into my hands. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear at all. He used to say, “I love you.” He used to say, “I’ll be thinking of you,” and I liked hearing that. I wanted to tell him to come home. To just come home.

  The phone rings again. “Hello?” I grab it before I look and answer breathlessly, hoping it’s him again. Oh no, the caller ID catches my eye. The number belongs to my mother.

  “Rachel!” my sister blurts. “I’m in Phoenix. At Mom’s. Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get you for a few days now. Dad’s in the hospital.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask calmly. My father has been a frequent flyer at the veterans hospital this past year, so I am not terribly surprised. Or upset. There is no love lost between my father and me.

  “His heart,” she says.

  “Did they call in a geologist?” It’s an old joke between Sandra and me that his heart is made of stone.

  “He needs a pacemaker,” she says, which is old news. His doctors have been suggesting the procedure for nearly a year. “He passed out three times this week alone. Mom wants you to come. Here’s Mom.”

  I doubt my mother wants me to come to Phoenix, but before I can protest, my mother takes the phone.

  “What do you want?” she asks me.

  “Hi, Mom,” I reply patiently. “How are you?”

  “My feet hurt.”

  “Well, do you want to chat for a minute?” She doesn’t respond. “You know,” I add reassuringly, “it sounds like it’s time Dad got his pacemaker. Just like the doctor said.”

  “We don’t trust doctors,” she replies. “You know how they are. They just want to get you in their clutches.”

  “Doctors don’t have clutches,” I tell her. “Cars have clutches.”

  * * *

  It’s been a losing battle, trying to get my father to allow them to install a pacemaker. For the past few months, I would call my parents and spend fruitless hours trying to convince them to go ahead with the procedure. I hated calling, because I always had to wait through some twenty-five rings before my mother picked up, then go through the tricky process of defrosting her, because she was always a little angry that, no matter when I called, I should have called sooner. Another half hour would tick by while she summoned my father. After shuffling to the phone, he would abruptly hang up without even saying hello. I used to think it was because he has a hearing loss and wasn’t comfortable talking on the phone, but at some point I realized it was just his usual display of antisocial graces.

  We called dozens of times, David and I, but after a while, my parents stopped answering. We could never leave a message, because my mother won’t have an answering machine in the house, certain that voice mails steal your identity. Nor would she leave a message on mine.

  In a final gesture, David even had his best friend, a cardiologist, call from New York to personally explain the procedure. My father remained unconvinced, and even half-joked at one point that we might be trying to kill him so we could inherit his old penny collection. Defeated, I stopped calling them.

  I never understood my father. That he had to be so spiteful, he couldn’t allow himself to be helped.

  “A pacemaker is pretty routine,” I tell Sandra, after she gets back on the phone. “They do pacemakers all the time, and the VA’s been wanting to put one in at least forever.” I glance at the clock, hoping our conversation wasn’t going to last two hours.

  “Well, Mom wants you to come and help convince him that now’s the time,” she replies. I know this is Sandra’s fantasy, that we are a loving family. I, the voice of cynicism, know better.

  “He won’t listen to me,” I protest. “Besides, you know how he hates doctors. His dying will be their ultimate punishment.”

  “Well, I just wanted to let you know,” she says. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to. At least he’ll have one daughter here who cares about him.”

  * * *

  She does care, that’s the thing. She genuinely cares, and I don’t get that, either. When we were growing up, our father was always ferociously angry. Angry at everything, angry at nothing. All day, every day. He would make caustic remarks about Sandra’s chubbiness, her lack of academic ambition, her taste in friends, as well as her lack of proficiency in keeping the house in order while our mother ran her little gift shop. Sandra was all of seven, I was five. Incensed, I would defend her, until the criticism was turned on me, my relentless waste of time reading, my undeveloped culinary skills, my terrible attitude. As things ratcheted up, I would safely duck into our bedroom to weather the storm. Sandra always ended the argument with eyes blazing and a barrage of sharp words.

  “Why can’t you try harder?” she would scold me when I burrowed under my blankets at night to cry myself to sleep. “Don’t get him so mad. Then he’ll love you.”

  I would shrug her off, because I knew that he was angry about things that had nothing to do with us.

  I was dimly, primitively aware, then grew certain as I got older, that somehow my father was broken, too broken to love anybody.

  The secret that I had yet to learn was why.

  * * *

  Sandra finally hangs up after half an hour, but I knew she would call me back. She so badly needs to spin our threads together and knit us into the family she always wanted. Plus, she hadn’t yet given me her weekly installment of the Sorrows of Sandra, which include complaints about her indifferent husband, her belligerent stepkids, the sloppy dental work she got on her back molar fourteen years ago, and the ungrateful cat she adopted who pees on her pillow. She keeps herself in a constant state of unhappiness, so she is never disappointed with life. Sometimes I think if I were the cat, I would pee on her pillow, too.

  * * *

  Malachi and I are sitting on hay bales in the barn, eating sardine sandwiches and drinking tea. He made the sandwiches for our lunch, along with his old beat-up pale blue thermos filled with tea, flavored with very tiny, sweet figs. We take turns sipping from the metal cup. Of course, I cook for Malachi, as well. I bring him his favorite macaroni and cheese, or bowls of chili, or homemade soup, to make sure he eats something substantial.

  “I’m not going to Phoenix,” I say defensively, between bites of sandwich and shooing away another enthusiast of his sardine sandwiches, Misha, the barn cat.

  “Your father is meaner than a trapped possum,” Malachi comments. He had met my father years back, when we first bought the farm and my father was still able to travel. My father
automatically hated the farm, calling it the biggest waste of real estate second only to Washington, D.C., and pronounced Malachi a con artist for leading me to believe that a horse farm was capable of making a profit.

  Malachi takes a sardine from his sandwich and dangles it over Misha’s head. The cat bats at it with a striped gray paw and purrs while his sister, Lulu, sits quietly behind him. “If he’s dying, you gotta go,” Malachi says in a matter-of-fact tone before neatly dropping the sardine right into the cat’s mouth. He tosses another one Lulu’s way, and she sniffs it delicately before walking away.

  “No,” I say. “It’ll just lead to more arguments.”

  He takes a long sip from the cup, then pours out more tea and hands it to me. He looks dapper in his tan cap and blue sweater. Immaculate. But then, he never really seems to get soiled. Even when he’s wrestled a horse to the ground to medicate it, or has spent an hour shampooing the mud from its four crusty legs, he walks away without a smudge on him. “You could call him and wish him a speedy recovery,” he says.

  “He won’t talk on the phone.”

  “Then send him a get well card.”

  “He rips up cards.”

  He ignores my remark. “Some of them even play songs now,” he adds. “I seen them in the supermarket.” He throws his head back and sings off-key, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . .”

  “He’s not my sunshine.” I finish the tea in one last gulp. “He rips up cards and he hates music.” I study the remnants of a fig in the thermos cup, wishing I could read my fortune in them. “I just can’t go,” I add. “I’ve invested a lifetime in being pissed at him.”

  “Mmm-mm.” Malachi stands up and wipes his hands on a napkin pulled from his pocket, brushes off the hay that is clinging to his pants, takes my paper plate, puts it with his, and throws them out in the gray plastic pail we use for trash. Then he carefully screws the thermos back together. He is meticulous about things. “Lissen up! You got to go. You got to do it for you, not for him. Because if he dies and you didn’t go, you will spend the rest of your lifetime being pissed at yourself.”

  I don’t answer him, but I know he’s right.

  Malachi steps out of the barn, and heads toward the big field, before turning to me. “Maja is due any day now,” he says. Maja is my prize mare. Well-bred and elegant, and very much in foal.

  “All the more reason for me to stay,” I reply, grabbing at an excuse.

  “I can foal her out, been doing it for the past ten years,” he protests. “Don’t need you.” We’ve only owned Maja for four years, but I leave his statement alone.

  “By the by, you know that colt out of Umberta could use some weight,” he says meaningfully. “He’s a bit ribby. Gonna be hard to sell if he looks like a skinner.”

  “All her babies are ribby until they finish growing,” I say, then realize what he is thinking. “No poison,” I say. “Absolutely no poison.”

  * * *

  Later that night I help Malachi tuck the barn in. It is my favorite chore. We feed the cats, top off all the water buckets, rake the dirt outside the barn doors into a pattern of looping swirls, and turn the lights out.

  The barn phone rings and I lunge for it, my heart beating hard. But it’s only Sandra.

  “Rache,” she says, her voice pleading. “So, what do you want me to tell Mom?”

  “Tell her that I can’t come,” I say. “That there’s nothing I can do for him that she can’t do. That I’m on a deadline to finish my book. And I have a horse farm to run. Two careers.”

  “Did you forget I also have two careers?” Sandra’s words quicken with indignation. Retired from accounting, she is now a school crossing guard and also sells stuff from yard sales on eBay. “And I put them both aside to come here.”

  “But you’re the good daughter,” I reply. “They expect you to be there.” All right, that was a bit too sarcastic.

  “You can be a good daughter, too, Rache,” she says softly, waits patiently, then tries again to change my mind. “It’s not too late.”

  “Yes, it is,” I reply.

  “No, it’s not.” She waits. “Rache?” she says again. “You might not get another chance. You know, at some point, he really will die.”

  “Humph,” I reply. We hang up. But she is right.

  Malachi is watching me, waiting in the darkening doorway, the dusky sky draping around his shoulders like an evening coat.

  “You worried ’bout more than your father, I ’spect,” he says, tilting his head to one side, which he does when he is about to say something I won’t like.

  I give him a suspicious look. Malachi knows more about me than he has a right to.

  “Uh-huh,” he says. He grabs the big sliding door and pulls at it. It moves slowly, inexorably across the opening, and I squeeze through before he finishes closing up the barn. “I can keep an eye on David.”

  I avert my face so he doesn’t see the quick collection of tears.

  “Hey,” he says, and I look up at him. “You forget, or maybe you never learned.”

  “Forget what?”

  He gives me a sardonic grin, then leans over and gives me a kiss on the top of my head. “Lissen up,” he says with a half smile, “for the next time he proposes. You gotta tie a rope on a horse, else he don’t know you want him to stay around.”

  Chapter 3

  Boarding pass. Wristwatch. Boarding pass. Wristwatch. Ten minutes to boarding, and I am being obsessive, patting my hip, glancing at my watch, patting my hip, glancing at my watch.

  It isn’t nerves. I have flown all my life. In fact, I spent most of my childhood around airports, because my father worked for American Airlines and frequently took me and Sandra to the airport when we were kids. LaGuardia Field was our playground. Long before airport security locked down those places for good, we would play tag in the lounge, or stand outside on the observation deck and watch the planes fly right over our heads, the wind blowing our curls into swirling knots, the noise rattling our skulls and drowning out our shrieks as we waved to the passengers. And while the cleaning crew readied a plane for its next flight, we were allowed to play in its narrow aisles, scampering in and out of the gray tweed seats, even to sit in the cockpit, where we touched the dials and pretended we were flying. I was once given a small pin by a friendly stewardess—which is what they were called then—a pair of tiny, cheap tin wings with JUNIOR PILOT stamped across, and I thought I was practically crew.

  Long ago.

  Long before my father had become difficult.

  I take that back. He was always difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel, always explosive. There came a time when he became too difficult to bear, and at sixteen, I finally turned my back on him and ran away.

  The boarding pass is in my left pocket. My watch says six more minutes.

  * * *

  I like window seats. The ground rushes past, tilting away at a disconcerting angle, then drops down, away from us, no longer able to comfort us with its proximity.

  I stare through the thick window glass as the trees and trucks and yellow ground markings get left behind, miniaturizing, then disappearing behind drifts of white cloud. We are aloft, vulnerable, all alone in the skies. I didn’t take out insurance, because I have supreme confidence in the miracle of flight.

  But I do have a will. David will get the farm, even though we are not married. I bought the farm with the advance and royalties from my first book and kept it in my name alone. We have been together for fifteen years, and David used to propose to me every night before we went to sleep. When did he stop proposing? I try to remember. I guess it was months ago. Why did he stop? It was something I needed from him, this guarantee that he still loved me enough to propose, even though I could never say yes. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. He will still get the farm.

  * * *

  I am smiling at the clouds. Flight is a miracle. The contest of the plane against its own weight, the subtle tilt of the plane’s nose, that enthralling
moment when gravity relents and the incomprehensible magic of thrust and lift kick in. I love the race against the air, our speed forcing it to push up against the huge wings, carrying the plane despite itself, carrying it upward and still more upward. It still amazes me that it always works, even though my father spent hours drumming it into my head, how the shape of the wing and the speed of the airflow create forces. He would lapse into lecture mode, and I would try to concentrate, to learn these things, because, really, it had been the only relationship we had. I tried to absorb, assimilate his technical interests, his wonder at how flight had been somehow teased from nature. The Coand effect of gas attaching itself, then streaming along a surface, Bernoulli’s Principle of gas and decreasing pressure, Newton’s third law of motion. “As long as birds can fly, planes will fly.” He always ended with that. I listened, because I wanted to please him, but I had no interest in the mechanics. I just liked seeing the aircraft chasing along the runway, like a loose horse, fighting to capture the wind.

  About five months ago. Right around Christmas. That’s when David stopped.

  * * *

  Sky Harbor Airport. We land as smoothly as a swan on glass. I’m trying to gather together all my stuff when my cell phone rings. Sandra. We had made plans for her to pick me up.

  “Will you be all right getting a cab?” she asks. “I just don’t feel good leaving Mom alone and driving all the way out to the airport.”

  No problem. No problem to drag an overnight bag and a large suitcase that totals the weight of the Queen Mary because it is filled with the requested two dozen New York bagels, three pounds of corned beef resting on an ice pack, six knishes, a certain kind of chocolate marble cake to be found in only one bakery in New York City that David graciously picked up before I left, and six bottles of Skin So Soft, because my mother can’t find an Avon rep in all of Phoenix that she gets along with. No problem lugging it all down two ramps, navigating the long, narrow escalator and across the huge lounge, over to the cab station, where, hungry, tired, and cranky, I wait forever for an available taxi because there’s some NASCAR meet going on at the big track. No problem at all spending two hours to get to my mother’s house, when she only lives ten minutes away.