“I always try to think of it that way,” he said, after a minute. “He had a big adventure up here, and then went home.”
Leander, he would mean. My spleen started to ache when I thought of Hallie fertilizing the tropics. Thinking about how much she loved stupid banana trees and orchids. I said, “I have this idea that if I don’t stay here and cry for Hallie, then there’s no family to absorb the loss. Nobody that remembers.”
“And that’s what you want? For Hallie to be forgotten?”
I couldn’t have said what I meant. “No. I just don’t want to be the one that’s left behind to hurt this much. I want to be gone already. If you’re dead when somebody stabs you, you don’t feel it.”
“Leaving won’t make you dead. You’ll just be alive in a different place.”
“This place has Hallie in it. When I lived here, I was half her and half me.”
“Going away won’t change how you feel.”
“I won’t know that till I’m gone, will I?”
He picked up my hand and examined it as if it were a foreign object, which was just how it looked to me. He was wearing a green corduroy shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and I felt I could look at that shirt for as long as Loyd might choose to stand in my door. There were all those small ridges, the greenness, the nap of the cloth. If I kept my focus minute enough I could remain in the world, knowledgeable and serene.
“Anyway you’re wrong,” he said. “There’s family here to absorb the loss.”
“Doc Homer, Loyd, he’s…I don’t think he understands she’s gone.”
“I wasn’t talking about Doc Homer.”
I shifted my field of vision to include the lower part of Loyd’s face and the blunt dark ends of his hair. A whole person seemed an impossible thing to take in all at once. How had I lived so long and presumed so much?
“I’m sorry about everything, Loyd.”
“Listen, I know how this is. You don’t think you’ll live past it. And you don’t, really. The person you were is gone. But the half of you that’s still alive wakes up one day and takes over again.”
“Why should I look forward to that?”
He turned my hand over. “I can’t answer that.”
“Well, I’m sorry, Loyd.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“Well. You’ve got to go to work.” I avoided his eyes.
Loyd took my face in one hand and put the other hand on the small of my back and he kissed me for a long time. His mouth felt cool as green corduroy, a simple thing I could understand. We began the kiss standing up, and when we finished we were sitting on the step.
“You have to go,” I said again. That was the last thing, my last words for Loyd.
When he and Jack were gone I stood for a long time looking out at the rambling jungle of the courtyard. A hummingbird, possibly the same one that had inspired Nicholas to learn to walk, was hovering at the red funnels of the trumpet vine climbing my wall. I watched the bird move stiffly up and down over an invisible path, pausing, then moving left, then up again and back, covering the vertical plane with such purpose it might have been following a map.
I felt Emelina’s presence. She stood in her kitchen door, shading her eyes, watching me. I waved, but she didn’t wave back. Her face was drawn tight with mute, unarmed rage; it must have been the worst thing she was capable of aiming at a friend. She didn’t know my tricks, that you could just buckle up your tough old heart and hit the road. My course must have been as indecipherable to her as the hummingbird’s. We are all just here, Emelina, I wanted to say. Following our maps, surviving as we know how.
The kitchen door closed quietly and I understood that it was her kindest goodbye. The sun was strangely bright on the whitewashed wall and the hummingbird hung in the air, frozen inside its moment. A photograph of the present tense.
All morning on my last day people came pecking softly at my door like mice. A legion of mice bearing gifts. It was mostly women from the Stitch and Bitch. No one else was as succinct as Emelina. They wanted to know what I would be doing, where I would live. I mentioned the art school, but wasn’t specific.
“We sure do love you, hon,” said Uda Dell. “I packed you a lunch. There’s yellow banana peppers in there from the garden. They’re not as big as some years but they’ve got a right smart bite. Stay another year,” she added.
“Do you have a good winter coat?” Norma Galvez asked me. “It snows up there. You’d just as well stay here.”
In their eyes my life should have been simple, purely a matter of love and the right wardrobe. It was as if I had fifty mothers.
In the last hour before I left I had to go through Emelina’s kitchen to retrieve a pair of jeans from the laundry room. John Tucker was folding laundry. He told me Emelina was lying down upstairs with a bad headache.
“You got a baseball game today?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry I won’t be around to see you win.”
He smiled. In a year I’d watched him grow into his elbows and lose the better part of his shyness. His voice was beginning to crack. “Mom’s really going to miss you. She’ll be a witch for the next month. She’ll make us clean out the chicken pens and stuff.”
“It’s all my fault,” I said, grabbing a runaway corner of a sheet and helping him fold it. “You guys can send me hate mail in Telluride.”
He laughed. “Okay.”
“If it gets too bad you can run away from home. Come up and see
