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A Month of Summer

By Lisa Wingate

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During an anniversary trip to San Diego, I stood on a second-story balcony above a Japanese garden and watched the gardener comb a bed of red gravel and gray stone with a long wooden rake. Shaded from the rising sun by a wide straw hat, his body arched against the tidal breeze, he patiently drew intricate curves and swirls, which the tourists walked by without noticing. From their vantage, his work would go largely unappreciated, but he seemed unfettered by this fact. He kept at his task with a certain determination, a resoluteness—as if he knew each stone, knew where it must go, exactly how it must lie to complete the proper picture. A leaf blew into the garden, and he danced across the gravel on the light, silent feet of an acrobat, removed the leaf, then repaired the damage with his rake.
On three separate days, I stopped to observe the gardener. Each time, the pattern of stones was different. One day a running swirl of ocean waves, one day a sunburst of rays originating from a single center, one day a series of concentric circles, as if God had touched down a fingertip, rippling the crimson sea. A leaf drifted from overhead, landed in the center, and the gardener left it.
How did he know? I wondered. How did he know that this time, the leaf was meant to stay?
Taking up his tools, the gardener strolled away, disappeared down the boulevard, a small man hidden beneath the shadow of his hat, at peace with what remained.
I had always wished to be like the gardener, to see the larger canvas, to know which leaves should go and which should stay, to be at peace with the stones left behind.
Unfortunately, I was not.
They haunted me.
I combed the gravel of my life again, again, again, creating artificial shapes, patterns that became habitual, yet felt incomplete.
Perhaps I was always waiting for the leaf to fall and complete the picture.
But when it did, I didn't recognize it.
At first.
It drifted downward from a plane that had been circling Dallas for what seemed like an eternity before dropping through a March thunderstorm to find the runway. By then, the pilot had confessed that we'd been burning off fuel on purpose, due to a malfunction in the plane's braking flaps. He would still be able to land using wheel brakes and ground spoilers, he assured us, but we should assume crash position, just in case. The flight attendant demonstrated the procedure, then we began our descent, hugging our knees, the guy beside me praying under his breath and me fumbling for the air sickness bag, thinking, I hate flying. If I survive this, I’ll never get on a plane again. I’ll drive. Everywhere.
In the back of my mind, I remembered Bree, the law clerk who’d given me a ride to the airport, saying, “You know, Mrs. Macklin, statistically flying is much safer than driving.”
“I don’t care,” I told her. “I’d much rather travel by car, where I can be in the driver’s seat. If they’d let me pilot the plane, then I’d like flying.”
Bree giggled, the sound too light and childlike for her tightly French-twisted auburn hair and trying-to-impress dark suit. “Control is an illusion,” she offered. “I’ve been reading Ninety-Nine Principles Of Everyday Zen, and that’s the first one. You can’t achieve Zen until you relinquish control of the universe to the universe.”
Glancing at the visor mirror, I tucked a few strands of dark hair behind my ear and met the red-rimmed hazel eyes of a woman who was tempted to say something sharp, world-weary, and cynical. Why it was that young law clerks were always seeking the deeper meaning of life in self-help books? “Be careful what you buy into, Kid,” I advised, as Bree pulled up to the curb in the airport drop-off zone. “A good lawyer can’t afford to be Zen. You’ll get mugged at the negotiating table.” By the way, are you sleeping with my husband?
Bree laughed again.
She could be, I thought. She’s beautiful…
Closing my eyes as the plane bounced against the runway, then went airborne again, I saw Bree's face. Then it faded into the face of the woman lounging at a sidewalk table with a fresh frappe from my favorite Santa Monica coffee house. The woman smiled at Kyle, her long blond hair lifting in the saltwater breeze, her eyes sparkling. She slid a hand across the table and into his, while I sat in the right turn lane, not four miles from our home. Hadn’t it occurred to Kyle that I might pass by, driving Macey to school? Didn’t he wonder what would happen if I saw? If Macey saw? Macey would know exactly what was going on. Southern California kids aren’t stupid. Even nine-year-olds understand what it means when a married man is sitting in a sidewalk cafe with an ocean view, in broad daylight, holding hands with a client.
Fortunately, Macey was looking out the other window, her head jiving to whatever downloaded song was playing on her Ipod.
The light turned green, and I drove away, my hands shaking on the steering wheel, the café scene playing over and over in my mind until it seemed like a bad movie rather than reality. One of the hazards of living within proximity of the movie capital of the world. Everything seems like fiction. Even your own life.
Macey reached for the door handle as I pulled into the school’s drop-off lane. I tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned back to me, pulling out her ear buds. “Bye, Mom.” Leaning across the car, she hugged me, her long, honey-brown hair, her father’s hair, tickling my shoulder. “Have a good trip.”
“I will.” Closing my eyes, I held onto her until finally she wiggled away and frowned at me while pushing her hair behind her ear. “Be a good girl, Mace. You’ve got your routine down, right? Isha’s going to pick you up from school every day except Wednesday, because that’s her day off.” Thank God for the new au pair. “Dad’s supposed to come get you on Wednesday.” What if he’s sleeping with the au pair, too? “Kendalyn’s mom will give you a ride to school in the mornings, and to gymnastics Tuesday and Thursday, and…”
“And on Friday--if you're not back by then--Grandma and Grandpa Macklin pick me up, so I can stay with them at the beach for the weekend, and on Monday afternoon--if you're still not back--I’m riding to dance class with Pesha, but Pesha doesn’t do dance on Wednesday, and Wednesday’s Isha’s day off, so this Wednesday, Brooke Strayhorn’s mom is gonna stop by for me—Brooke’s annoying, you know. All she talks about is video games—but anyway, after Dad drops me at home, if he has to go back to work, I’m supposed to lock up and stay in the house until they come to get me for dance class. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t answer the door. Stay inside.” Swiveling her head slowly, she blinked at me over her slim shoulder, then smiled. “I’ve got it, Mom. Don’t worry about me, OK? I’m not a baby.”
Leaning across the car, I touched the side of her face, smoothed a hand over her sun-lightened hair. “I know, sweetheart. You’re amazing.”
“Moh-om,” she sighed, rolling her gaze toward the window to make sure no one was watching. When the coast was clear, she leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. Opening the door, she hauled her backpack off the floorboard, then stepped onto the curb, turned around, and hip-butted the door shut in one efficient movement. I sat a moment longer, watching her disappear, thinking of how amazing she was, how confidently she moved, her body tightly muscled from gymnastics and dance, pre-teen gangly and still filled with girlish confidence. Why isn’t she enough? I wondered. Why aren’t she and I, a beautiful home, a thriving law practice, enough for Kyle? How could he put everything at risk? How could he risk destroying her? If he leaves, she'll blame herself. No matter what we tell her, no matter how many of her friends' parents she's seen get divorced, she'll think he left because she wasn't good enough.
That reality sank over me like the salty mists of a cold winter day, ached with the dull familiarity of an old injury newly awakened. A part of me knew how it felt to see your father walk out the door, into another life, into another family, and never look back.
Watching Macey bound up the marble stairs, her steps buoyant and light, I had a dawning awareness that, somewhere in the hidden recesses of my consciousness, I'd been waiting for this to happen. I'd been waiting for the day Kyle would leave, and the world would come crashing down around us, and Macey would walk up the courthouse steps one at a time, suddenly a tiny adult....
The plane bounced against the runway again, and across the aisle a little Hispanic girl screamed, then tried to unbuckle her seatbelt and crawl into her mother’s lap. Macey wouldn’t do that, I thought. Macey would have more sense. She’d handle this like a pro.
Hugging my knees, I hung on as the plane careened down the runway. The scene next to me took on an odd sense of slow motion, the moments stretching and twisting as the mother pulled the screaming girl back into the seat. Pushing the armrest out of the way, she pinned her daughter’s flailing hands, curled her body protectively over the little girl’s.
Outside, the plane tapped the pavement, bounced, then came down hard again. The engines roared and the wheel brakes squealed underneath us, the plane fishtailing back and forth.
Over the noise, the mother across the aisle sang close to her daughter’s ear—a lullaby in Spanish.
I would do that for Macey, I thought. If Macey were here, I’d fold myself over her and sing to keep her calm. She would probably think I’d lost my mind.
“Mom,” she’d say. “Chill out. It’s gonna be all right. I saw this on an episode of CSI, and they got the plane stopped right before it fell off the runway. It was so cool….” Then she’d give me some made-for-TV lesson about landing planes at zero flaps.
For a perverse instant, I wished Macey were with me, sitting in the middle seat, where the bald man in the rumpled suit was bent over his knees, his breath coming in winded gasps that ended in bits of prayer.
If it weren’t for Macey, I wouldn’t care whether we made the landing or not…
It was a startling thought, and as soon as it came, I pushed it away, stomped it down and buried it under piles of more practical mental dialog. Of course I’d care. Of course I care about my life. It’s just been a strange week. Too many things spinning off-kilter at once. But even as I thought it, I wanted to close my eyes and never come in for a landing—just glide, and glide, and glide.
That’s crazy. If a client said that to you at the office, you’d tell her she needed to go see somebody, maybe consider taking a mild antidepressant. It isn’t normal to want to check out of your own life.
Is it?
Combing back a curtain of dark brown hair, I pressed my palms over my ears, drowning out the grinding of the breaks, the roar of thrust reversers, the squeal of rubber on asphalt.
Seconds stretched out endlessly, until finally, I felt the motion around me slow, the plane lurch up, then down, then turn to the left in what was obviously a controlled maneuver.
I took a deep breath and crawled back into my own skin, into my life. A glance out the window told me we were veering toward a taxiway, passing a haphazard conglomeration of fire trucks and airport emergency vehicles, deployed for our landing. The crews waved casually as we went by. Overhead, the speaker crackled and the pilot came on, his voice calm and self-assured.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our apologies for the bumpy landing. We’ll be taxiing to the gateway, expecting arrival at the gate in about… uhhh… six minutes. Sorry for the slight delay, but we welcome you to Dallas Forth Worth. Ticketing personnel will be standing by to help with any missed connections. If you’ll be traveling on from here to a final destination, please take note of the following gate information…”
A flight attendant came on and began reading off flight numbers and gates, and inside the plane, passengers glanced at each other with bemused expressions, thinking, no doubt, the same thing I was thinking. Were we huddled, only moments ago, in crash position, or did I dream that? The frantic thoughts of the past half hour seemed ridiculous now. Beside me, the bald businessman cleared his throat, straightened his suit, and smoothed the few baby-fine wisps of hair that had fallen over his forehead. He glanced at his watch as if to say, Piece of cake. I wasn’t worried. What—you thought this was a real emergency?
Gathering my belongings into my lap, I prepared to bolt as soon as we came to a stop at the gate. As the plane shuddered into place, I popped out of my seat and hurried past six rows of chairs before the aisle became crowded with passengers taking luggage from the overhead bins and waiting for the door to open. In first class, a male flight attendant was mopping his forehead and assisting an elderly woman who’d boarded with the handicapped passengers during the stopover in Houston. Hands shaking, the woman clung to his arm as he patiently helped her gather her purse and move down the aisle.
I steeled myself for a slow trip up the jetway. What I really wanted to do was run past all of them, push my way through to someplace that wasn’t vibrating under my feet. Logic whispered that getting off the airplane wouldn’t solve the problem. The whole world was shifting, everything folding and faulting, threatening to crack.
Behind me, a teenage girl with a cell phone told her boyfriend about the landing. She made it sound more thrilling and dramatic than it really was.
I should call home, I thought, but then realized there wasn’t any point. Nobody would be there, except possibly Isha. Macey would be gone to gymnastics, and there wasn’t much chance that Kyle would be home at 4:15. He probably wouldn't answer his cell phone, either. This evening, he would stay at work late, checking and double checking lucrative corporate real estate contracts and preparing for pending mediations-- burning the midnight oil. Isha would put Macey to bed, and Kyle would wander in whenever he finished up at the office.
What if, all those nights he said he was busy at the office, all those times I surrendered to exhaustion and went to bed alone, Kyle was really burning the midnight oil somewhere else? What if his tendency to let the cell phone roll to voicemail after hours wasn't because he didn't want to be interrupted in his work, but because he wasn't alone? There was a time when I would have been in the office enough to know what Kyle was working on, but the past year of seeing to the Santa Monica boutique left to me in my mother's will had caused me to do most of my work long distance. In some vague way, I knew that the office wasn't the only place where distance had seeped in, but I’d convinced myself it was just part of the cycle all marriages went through. Things got busy, life got in the way, you drifted for a while, then reassessed, decided to work harder, refocus and come back together...
What if Kyle had decided to move on, instead?
The exit line started progressing toward the front of the plane, and I followed along, watching passengers ahead of me sag with relief as they stepped onto the jetway. I stopped next to the pilot as a young mother took her baby stroller from among the stowed carry-ons. Behind her, the elderly woman traded the attendant's helping hand for a small three-wheeled walker, then politely shooed the attendant away, insisting she didn't need a wheelchair. As I stepped off the plane, a frustrated businessman squeezed past me, hemming me in beside the woman.
“Well, that’s it. I shoulda taken the bus up from Houston,” she said, rolling her gaze toward me as we started up the jetway. "If God meant human beings to fly, he’d of given them wings.”
“I’ll second that,” I replied, and we smiled at each other, briefly linked in the kinship of survivors. I fell into step beside her, the need to hurry seeping out of me as I considered baggage claim, car rental, and what lay beyond—just across town now, rather than safely across the country. Only a short drive away, in the once trendy, then down-and-out, and now rapidly revitalizing area just east of downtown Dallas, lay my father's house. Our house, once upon a time, before everything changed.
For the past thirty-three years, it had been her house, their house. A place I was supposed to spend a month of my summer vacation each year, according to the custody agreements. The plan met its end before lawyers and judges could ever re-hash the wisdom of sending a twelve-year-old girl for summer visits in a house with the other woman and her mentally-off son, as my mother put it. I didn't put words to it at all. I just sat down in the entryway of my mother’s boutique when it came time for me to leave for Dallas that first summer, and refused to go. My mother was pleased that I was firmly on her side. My father didn't fight it. I knew he wouldn't.
Victory is sometimes painful. In a hidden corner of my heart, I needed him to fight harder, to care more, to prove he loved me more than he loved them. That vague sense of disappointment grew into a bitterness that made it easy to write return-to-sender on birthday cards and Christmas gifts I knew the other woman had picked out. It prevented my showing interest in my father's Alzheimer's diagnosis at seventy-three. When she wrote to me, I wrote back and told her to do whatever she thought was best. Hanna Beth was his wife, after all. Making appropriate arrangements was her concern. She'd asked me to come several times as the last two years slowly peeled layers from his memory. I declined, not always politely. She urged me to make peace with him while I could. I responded that I had no animosity about the situation—it simply was what it was. She asked if there was anything she could do to convince me to come before it was too late. I admitted, quite frankly, that I didn't think so.
I was wrong. When you're notified by the police that your incapacitated father and your adult, but mentally-challenged, stepbrother have been alone in a house for three weeks, and Social Services is one complaint away from taking over, you have no choice but to get involved. Hanna Beth Parker had picked the worst imaginable time to have a stroke and land herself in a nursing home.
"I think that's the baggage claim there," the woman with the walker said, pulling me back to the present. I realized I'd been strolling down the corridor with her—not interacting or offering my name, just matching her slow pace, as if we were together. She must have thought that was strange.
"Oh, yes, I guess it is," I agreed, angling with her toward the exit to the baggage area. "Sorry. I was a million miles away."
Craning sideways, she studied me as I held open the door. "I could see that." She concentrated on moving her walker across the threshold, then added, "But don't worry. I was watching out for you, just in case one of them international criminal types might come along, or such."
"Good thing," I said, hiding a smile, because I wasn't sure whether or not she was kidding. My mother had always been on guard in busy public places like airports. She'd watched too many TV crime shows and read the plethora of Internet forwards about potential schemes used by muggers, kidnappers, and human predators of all types. She'd always complained about the fact that work often took me to downtown LA, where no place was safe. Even in Santa Monica, the homeless problem made her uncomfortable, because, you could never tell about those people.
“Thank ‘ya, sweetie.” The woman with the walker paused to turn her wheels toward the luggage carousel, then shifted directions with her body.
“My pleasure,” I said. The twang in her voice dredged up some old memory I couldn't quite put a finger on. There was an unhurried cadence to the words, as if she tasted each one carefully before letting it out. My mother would have called it gum chewing. She said people in Texas talked like they had wads of gum in their mouths. After years of living all around the world with my father's job in the petroleum industry, she'd been less than thrilled when, the year I turned twelve, we ended up in Dallas, my father's hometown. As always, my father was a man ahead of his time. He foresaw trouble ahead for oil families living in the Middle East, so he took a position in the corporate office. He was nothing if not a good businessman. Even Mother could never deny that fact.
“The pilot did a darn good job,” the woman with the walker said, pausing to grab her dangling purse handle and attempt, with shaking hands, to hook it over the arm of her walker. Her wallet, brimming with credit cards and a thick checkbook, was hanging dangerously close to the edge. My mother would have had a heart attack.
“I’m just glad to be off the plane.” I hovered for a moment, watching her futilely reach for the purse handle. I wondered if my retrieving it would embarrass her. “I guess the whole emergency landing thing wasn’t as big a deal as they made it out to be.”
Snatching an umbrella from the front basket of her walker, she deftly hooked the purse strap and hung it back in place. “It’s a bigger deal than people probably think. My brothers flew supply planes back in World War II, so I know a little bit about such things. ’Course the old prop engines are different than these big jets. Some of them short runways overseas, you either got the plane stopped, or you went in the drink. With these long runways, you got more space, but you got bigger planes, too. Lots heavier. Our pilot today was a crackerjack.”
“That’s good to know.” But it really wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe that we’d come close to potential disaster. It was much more palatable to think that the fire engines and ambulances were merely a security precaution.
Luggage was starting to pop onto the carousel, and my companion gave it a concerned frown.
“Is someone meeting you here?” I asked. No matter how good she was with her umbrella handle, she couldn’t lift bags off the conveyor.
She checked her watch. “My grandson, but I guess he’s got held up in traffic, maybe. He’s a doctor. Busy man. My husband and I raised him after my son died. I come up from Houston to visit him every few months, get my medical tests done, hang around the facility and read to the patients. This time I'm gonna have a little of that ortha-scotic surgery—that's why I had to fly in, instead of drive. Got to have a ligament repaired cleaned out in my knee before I can drive again.” She looked around the room a second time. I tried to imagine what kind of a grandson would leave his elderly grandmother, in need of arthroscopic knee surgery, standing around an airport, at the mercy of strangers and unable to get her luggage off the carousel.
It occurred to me that the anonymous concerned citizen who had contacted the city police on my father's behalf was probably thinking the same thing about me. “Can I help you get your luggage? I have a cell phone. We could try to call…”
She cut me off with a quick hand-chop in the air. “No. No, now I’m fine. I don’t want to burden anybody. I’ll just go over there and get me one of them good-lookin' skycaps to grab off my bags, and I’ll wait for my grandson. He’ll come. You don’t worry yourself over me, all right?”
“All right,” I said reluctantly. “You’re sure?” I found myself wanting her to say no, wishing she would provide a distraction from my impending trip across town to the nursing home to see Hanna Beth.
“I’m fine, sweetie, just fine.” Swiveling her walker around, the woman started toward the waiting skycaps. “I’m not as helpless as I look. I know judo. Anybody gives me any trouble, I'll smack 'em in the kazongas with my umbrella.” I blinked in surprise, and she glanced back over her shoulder, giving a saucy one-sided smile. “Soon as I get this darned leg in better shape, it’ll be, Look out world, here comes Ouita Mae Barnhill.”
I stood for a minute watching Ouita Mae Barnhill disappear into the crowd and wishing I had her certainty about the outcome of the next few days. Finally, I stepped up to the baggage claim, grabbed my suitcases, and faced the fact that, willingly or not, I had arrived in Dallas.

As March went like a lamb into April, I was returning thirty days early, thirty-three years late, for my month of summer.

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