Without You Here

Circa 1960

Twenty Years

Before.

NONIE’S PLAYING TIGHTROPE on the floor while her mother pays bills at the table beyond the counter. The kitchen smells like the fried chicken her mother made for her bridge ladies the day before. If Nonie squints her eyes right, the floor tiles line up, and the seam between them becomes the rope. She feels herself aloft, senses a city street below, with its different smells of bus exhaust and restaurants, plus crowds milling, beginning to gather, craning to see the little girl so far above. They jostle, whistle, and cheer for her, hoping she won’t fall.

Nonie, why don’t you go play outside?

Her mother’s voice startles her, and she almost slips. The crowd gasps, jumps apart, as if making room for her to crash.

And then they’re gone. Nonie can’t see them anymore.

I’m being very quiet, she says. Her mother always wants her outside, but right now the tightrope beckons. She concentrates to get it back, to recall the people, the height, the distant sound of traffic.

Nonie has heard talk of people who run away to join the circus. She doesn’t know how they know where to go. Do they have to wait until a circus comes to their town? Is there an office somewhere? She pictures a tall, round man, balding with a black fringe of hair at his ears, sitting behind a desk in a crisp, clean suit with a flash of red at the breast pocket. He’s a circus man, so it could be a magic handkerchief, one that pulls and pulls and pulls and changes color, makes people laugh, but his face is serious. He isn’t used to girls no taller than his waistline presenting themselves for work.

I’m very good at the tightrope, she tells him.

A girl so small as you? His face crinkles in doubt.

I’m not so small anymore. I can wash my hands at the kitchen sink without a stool. I can see over this countertop right here. Though the man probably can’t see the counter, since he’s not in the kitchen but in the circus office, so she pictures drab brown walls pinned with flyers featuring clowns juggling, horses wearing feathered bridles, and ballerinas pirouetting on elephants’ backs.

I can walk across any rope, she says. No matter how high.

At mention of the word, the seam between the floor tiles transforms back into a tightrope, and she and the circus man now stand near the ledge of a tall building from which the rope extends, connecting to the ledge of another equally tall building across the street. People gather once more, shuffling and clamoring below. Their noise reaches Nonie as a muffled hum.

I’m not sure I should let you do this, the man says, rubbing his chin and shaking his head, keeping his distance from the edge.

I can do it, sir, Nonie says. I’m not afraid.

Nonie! Her mother’s voice is sharp. I can’t think with you muttering away in there.

Nonie ignores her. The circus man’s face pinches. He holds both her hands in his and levels her with an important look. You must be very careful.

I’m always careful, she says. I’m very good at this.

She drops the man’s hands and makes a T with her arms, gently places one foot on the wire. It wobbles, wobbles. She places her other foot. The crowd whoops. The rope swoops, then steadies. She places one foot forward. Then the next. Repeats.

You’re doing it! the man calls from what seems very far away. She knows better than to look back or to look down. She must look only straight ahead, at the end of the rope where the last step will deliver her to a group of excited reporters. They jump up and down waiting for her. Cameras flash.

Nonie. Enough!

Her mother’s words let loose a surge of unease. The crowd below has lost its faith. Now they wish for her to fall. Clouds shift outside, and sunlight knifes across the kitchen floor, carving a whole new line that slices the kitchen tile pattern in half. Splitting her rope in half.

She sees and can’t look away. She can’t fix her eyes on her destination anymore, and she knows a great height stretches below. Ahead of her, the floor, one half bright, one half dark, and her broken rope dangling. There is no choice but to fall. Wind seems to rush as if Nonie is plummeting. She wraps her arms around herself. Mommy, she wants to say, help me, but she is falling already, the way she always falls, time after time.

The tightrope is long gone, along with the circus man, the crowds, the reporters. Out of her mouth comes a wordless growl, and the shivers hit full force. She calls the feeling the shivers because they make her feel cold deep inside. They start in her toes, then creep upward and erase one piece of her at a time. An emptiness that fills her up, from her toes to her shins, her rib cage, the heart beating inside, until none of it belongs to her any-more.

Objects around her lose definition, as if she’s dropping slowly down a well, but her body remains still, and her mother’s face remains clear. Her face saying how taking care of Nonie is too much work. That her other children never taxed her this way. Ruth with her tennis, Brynne with her track, and both with their good grades and teachers who say how wonderful they are. Nonie’s the one who ran the full half-mile home the only time her mother dropped her at a Brownie troop meeting. The one to hold her breath so long at swim team tryouts that her lips were blue when she surfaced again. The one whose body loses itself with no warning.

She screws her eyes tight. Squeezes her fists against her head, trying to squash the shivers out of her. Something pries at her arms, and she holds herself tighter, afraid whatever it is that barrels up inside her now also towers over her from outside. But it’s her mother, clamping her hands around Nonie’s wrists, trying to pry her to standing. The sunlight splits her face in half, too. Half fear, half anger. She won’t let Nonie turn away.

Do I need to send you across the street again? she says. Or can you settle on your own?

Her mother thinks she’s stubborn when she doesn’t answer, but Nonie can’t speak until the feeling lets go of her. She wants to say, No! Don’t send me away! Just hold me! But the words don’t come. They can’t right now, and anyway, her mother wouldn’t understand such a plain request. If she scrapes her knee, her mother props her up, brushes her off, swats her bottom, and says, Right as rain, as if that phrase soothed scratches, wiped blood, eased pain. Nonie stomps her feet. Her mother thinks she’s angry. She just wants her feet back. Wants her body back.

Go, then, her mother says, wadding a five-dollar bill and sinking it into Nonie’s fist. Go sit with Mrs. Mackey until you calm down. I don’t know how she can stand you when you’re like this, but thank God she can. Go on now.

If only telling her to go could make her body work again. Nonie tells herself to move all the time. To calm down. Scolds herself from inside about what a worthless child she is so her mother doesn’t have to, but she can’t cross the room, walk out the door, take herself to Mrs. Mackey on her own. She never could.

Can’t you quit this by yourself, one time? Her mother huffs a disgusted sound, then turns toward the stairway and shouts, Ruth! A few beats later she shouts again, then a rainfall of footsteps patters down the stairs. Take her.

Ruth knows where, but she kneels on the kitchen floor beside Nonie first.

Don’t coddle the child, Ruth. Just get her out of here.

You okay? Ruth whispers in Nonie’s ear, lifting a twist of curls out of her eyes and winding them around her finger. When she does this, the curl tightens and behaves. Ruth stands again but keeps hold of one of Nonie’s hands. She’s scared, Mother. Can’t you see? Nine years older at fifteen, Ruth spurted to nearly their mother’s height within the past few summer months. Her new tallness fits her like oversized pants, and she always seems to be pulling herself upward to fill it.

Scared of what? She has to learn to get a grip on herself. You can’t reward her for falling apart.

She just needs to collect herself.

Hogwash. My parents were forever warming milk for my baby brother when he got upset. Closing curtains in the middle of the day. Telling the rest of us to hush when we were playing. A lot of good that did. The world can’t adjust to you, you have to adjust to it. Their mother crouches behind Nonie, nudging her shoulders forward. Hup, two, hup, two, she says like a drill sergeant. Get this show on the road. Collect yourself at Mrs. Mackey’s.

Ruth slips her hand underneath her mother’s to unlatch her from Nonie’s shoulders. Stop it, Mother.

Their mother spins toward Ruth. What did you say?

I said stop it. She’s just a kid. A scared little kid.

Their mother’s arm flies backward, then lashes forward across Ruth’s cheek. She’s often distant, often fierce, but never physical. Ruth claps her hand against the spot and holds it there, staring at her mother in disbelief.

Two things I will not abide are weakness and insolence.

Ruth stands rigid as a wall, but Nonie feels her fear. She feels her mother’s anger, too. She feels every feeling present in a room. It’s exhausting.

Now take your sister to Mrs. Mackey’s and don’t ever talk back to me again. Their mother’s words are short, sharp blasts, but, from her face and a shift in the air, Nonie can tell the slap surprised her, too.

Still, their mother’s impatience electrifies the air, and Nonie would give anything to move away from it, but the shivers plunge her farther into their dark farawayness. No matter how hard she struggles to come back to herself, they suck her away from whatever room she’s actually in, keep her from doing what’s expected of her.

Somehow Ruth manages to drag her across the threshold into the front yard. Here, she says and points to the edge of the row of azaleas by the front porch, bright with coral blossoms. She lets Nonie rest there, beyond the vantage of the front window.

The grass soft beneath her, Nonie curls into a ball and hugs herself as tight as she can, waiting for the shivers to swallow her. Swallow her whole and be done with her forever. She always thinks she’ll die this way, never thinks the feeling will ebb, but slowly it does.

She doesn’t know how much time has passed, but when she comes back to herself, Ruth waits beside her. A cool breeze laps Nonie’s hair, and the sun that was too bright moments before warms her face.

Do you have the money? Ruth asks, taking up her hand again. Ruth is always patient and gentle with her, but she also sticks to business.

Nonie uncurls her other fist to show the now-sweaty ball of a five-dollar bill. One day she’ll be so bold that she’ll manage to leave by herself when her mother tells her to, and instead of walking to Mrs. Mackey’s, she’ll march the extra few blocks down to the newsstand. At the store she’ll unwrinkle the money onto the counter and ask for as many fireballs as it will buy. There’ll be so many she won’t be able to stuff them into her pockets. She’ll have to make a cradle of her hands to hold the rest. She never imagines a bag. Tidiness would ruin it.

Today, though, Ruth takes a first step toward Mrs. Mackey’s house, and Nonie follows, one foot in front of the other. One, two, one, two. Just like on the tightrope. Ruth waits for Nonie to ring the doorbell, then nods and turns away, goes back to doing whatever she was doing before.

When Mrs. Mackey answers, her face is neither kind nor unkind. Her shoulders crouch forward, and a gnarled gray cardigan hugs her shoulders. She opens the creaky screen door for Nonie, and the smell of her house escapes, close and cabbagey. She accepts the sweat-wrecked five-dollar bill. The metallic scream of the door closing behind them scrapes at Nonie’s nerves, threatening to set off another round of shivers. From the shadows, Mrs. Mackey’s evil Chihuahua snarls, and the scar on Nonie’s thumb throbs with memory. She knows better than to try to make friends with the dog now.

The tail end of Mrs. Mackey’s soap opera fills the TV screen. Nurses, doctors, a patient lying prone and dead looking. Smoke from endless cigarettes fogs the edges of the room. Nonie sits straight with her hands folded neatly in her lap on the soft chair where she always waits for her mother. She eats the stale vanilla wafers Mrs. Mackey offers her on a plate. She’s always so very tired after the shivers come and go. She would like to lie down to sleep, but she’s sure that would break some kind of rule, and she doesn’t want to embarrass her mother any more than she already has.

April 1999

Nineteen Years

After.

NOREEN LOUNGES WITH Evie under the giant oak tree in the front yard on an old purple bedspread that belonged to her aunt years ago. Chubby clouds inch overhead, and a warm breeze flutters bright green leaves above them, tossing Evie’s curls, her hair not the white blond of Noreen’s childhood but yellower, like George’s from the few toddler pictures she’s seen of him. Bluebells droop along the sidewalk. The ridges of Church, Hogback, and Knob Mountain ripple like wavelets against the horizon, and the sunshine is warmer than usual for April.

A sliver of gravel road peeks back at Noreen through a break in the overgrown boxwood hedge. It’s five more miles before you hit pavement. Evie’s tug at her elbow makes her realize she’s been lost in a phantom image of the two of them driving those five miles, then turning left toward Harrisonburg. Or right toward Route 64 and beyond? Either way is good enough, just getting them the hell out of here.

There’s nowhere to go without a car though, so she scoops Evie into her lap, tickles her belly, and coos, Wiggly fingers! Wiggly fingers! Evie laughs on cue, but Noreen feels like an imposter.

The house’s remoteness hadn’t bothered her right away. Singer’s Glen, the name for this loose scattering of homes and farms, sounded as peaceful and idyllic as it looked, and she fell as hard as George had for the foothills and the sunshine and the trickle of stream down the hill. The old farmhouse sits on about ten acres, a solid twenty minutes from Harrisonburg and James Madison University where George now teaches. At first, the drive felt luxurious. Twenty scenic minutes of Virginia trees and hills, the Blue Ridge casting its sheen along the horizon every time it dipped into view.

Back then, the never-ending home improvement projects felt wistful and clever—replacing doorknobs, repairing and repainting cabinets, stripping and restaining old hardwood. The work let them put their own imprint on the place and kept them busy until Evie came. Noreen remembers calling it the perfect place to raise a family. That was a long time ago now, and remembering is different from feeling the same way.

Her gaze drifts back toward the road she thinks of as The Road Out of Here, and she wonders if she’d leave George if he didn’t drive their only car twenty miles to work every day. An adamant yes would be as helpful as a decisive no, but no answer comes.

Wiggy finger! Evie says now, poking her grass-stained fingers into Noreen’s chin.

With Evie, Noreen’s love is certain. The first time Evie opened her own pale green eyes and met her mother’s looking down at her, the biggest love Noreen has ever known gawped its mouth and swallowed her. She could tell Evie recognized her at once as the person whose heartbeat and voice she already knew from the inside. So, days like today—days Noreen calls her cloud days, when she loses traction on the present—she has no patience for herself. Evie is in this world, not some ghost world down the way, she reminds herself. She knows too well how exhausting it is to coax someone back from that place and hopes never to put Evie in that position. Two now, she talks in spurts of words and phrases, making the kind of sense toddlers make, and Noreen assumes she’s savvier than she can say.

Wiggly fingers, Noreen says back, but this time even Evie looks doubtful.

A second car would help, would give them other places to be and other things to do, but doing without was one way to economize while Noreen stayed home and cared for Evie. They’d made the choice together, their first real family decision, and most days it still feels like the right thing, but she wishes their move here hadn’t interrupted the last requirements of her teacher certification. Doing without a car is harder than she expected, and whenever she lobbies to reconsider, George ticks off their latest mortgage balance, plus the number of years until he might be granted tenure and the raise that comes along with it, hefty enough to cover new debt. When she offers to finish certifying so she could return to work earlier than planned, George chuckles and reminds her that putting her back in school and Evie into preschool at the same time, and buying a new car to make all that possible, costs yet more money. Then he might say, We could always ask my father—the human checkbook whose expensive gifts come with invisible strings and unfulfillable expectations. George’s shiny new midnight blue Volvo sedan was his PhD graduation gift, replacing the used Volvo he’d gotten for his high school graduation, both gifts payment for years of weekends his father lured him home, stealing him away from his studies, time and again, to look after him if he was feeling poorly or to help him move offices at work or to hang pictures at home or whatever other handful of uses he might put his son to.

How about a visit this weekend? At least one of the cars I bought you should get you here, she can imagine him saying with his usual teasing bluster that somehow brooks no disagreement. His fatherly love is a yo-yo, spooling George out only to whir him back in again, and George hasn’t figured out how to untie himself from it yet.

The same sort of family knot she’s still untying herself, so she can’t blame him. Not completely. Her family’s yo-yo is the old worry that she’ll turn out like her aunt who died from suicide almost twenty years ago. It’s hard not to be bound by things families believe about who you are and what you owe them.

Evie squirms from her mother’s lap and lumbers toward the edge of the purple blanket, turning back toward Noreen with the widest smile on her face when she reaches the grass. Noreen loves how Evie always smiles when she sees her, even when Noreen can’t muster the energy to smile back.

The phone rings, snapping her back to the moment yet again. She takes Evie’s hands and puppet-walks her up the front porch steps, swaying her side to side and humming a made-up tune, Here we go, up the stairs, up the stairs. Evie bounces along with her mother’s rhythms and parrots the song back to her, as if it were real.

Inside is dark after the sunniness out front, and the old house holds onto the chill of winter like a deep inhale. Spring will hurry forward, and soon enough summer’s heat and humidity and throngs of insects will bear down on them again, making Noreen long for this drafty coolness, making her forget how empty and unwelcoming it actually feels.

On the phone, her mother says, Have I caught you at a good time?

A good time feels laughably inept to describe the heaviness she carries with her today, so she says, I can talk. It’s Wednesday, her mother’s half-day at Charlottesville’s central library downtown for as long Noreen can remember.

Charlottesville’s only an hour away, and Noreen and Ruth speak by phone often, but Noreen would visit more if she had that blasted second car. On a day like today, Evie could play in the sunny front room of Ruth and Hugh’s new-to-them home on Lexington Avenue while Noreen and Ruth sipped tea. Or Noreen could slip away to read her book for a few minutes without waiting for Evie’s nap. Or walk by herself down the streets of her childhood. She wishes she could like George’s dad more, interpret his gifts more as kindness than burden.

Easy to blame him. If Noreen really snuck off for time alone during a visit with her mother, she’d risk triggering the next round of Nonie comparisons or thinly veiled assessments of her mental stability. No matter where she goes, or stays, the afternoon will feel the same.

Nearby, Evie churns her tub of blocks, eventually upturning the whole bin. One more thing to clean up. Noreen’s to-do lists self-generate all day, and George wants her sole attention once he walks through the door. She clenches the phone against her ear and rubs her forehead with her free hand.

The dryer was making the strangest noise earlier, her mother says. Not like fingers on a chalkboard because that’s only a quick screech, then it’s over. This kept going. Unnerving really.

Unnerving. Sure. Noreen’s attention unmoors, flits between Evie and the specks of dust sparkling in shafts of afternoon sunlight.

It was after I read the paper this morning. I wonder if yours ran the same article. Have you read today’s paper yet?

Noreen glances from the living room into the dining room at the mound of the week’s papers, still bound, in the center of the table. The news bubbles over with stories about people she’ll never meet in places she doesn’t go. Horrible things happen to them, or they accomplish feats Noreen hardly has energy to imagine. George insists they take the paper and spends an hour each Sunday clipping coupons she doesn’t use. He chooses things that must seem useful to him but bear little relation to food they eat or cleaning products Noreen prefers.

No, I haven’t read it yet.

There was a story about this man who charged at a police station, swinging a handgun in front of him, the paper said. Shouting nonsense.

Evie adds a half circle to the top of a precarious tower, then chops into the middle of it, cracking the tower in half and clattering the blocks to the wood floor.

Are you sure you can talk? her mother says. I don’t want to keep you if Evie needs you.

She’s okay. Just building, you know the way she does.

She’s a regular little destroyer, isn’t she? Noreen can picture the proud look on her mother’s face.

She is that.

Her mother picks up with the story of the man in the police station, how he had tinnitus from flying corporate jets for twenty years, and the sound never left him. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t think. When I heard that noise in my dryer, it made me think of him. Probably it was a zipper, scraping around as it spun. She explains how she went in to listen, up close. First, she laid her head against the machine. The warmth made the scratching noise more bearable, but being so close made it louder too. So she tried lying down, closer, on the cold floor.

You were lying on the floor? To listen to a zipper? When Noreen feels bleary on the inside, any conversation can be a challenge, but she suspects her mother’s anecdote would confuse her on the best of days. She doesn’t sound upset exactly, but there’s a hint of emotion Noreen can’t place yet, something not quite right.

Hugh must have thought I’d gone crazy, finding me like that. Her mother chuckles into the phone while Noreen imagines her mother’s husband double-taking at his wife, prone on the utility room floor. But I was just testing it out.

Another tower succumbs to Evie’s marauding fist. One of the blocks bounces into her chin on its way to the floor, and she looks at Noreen to share the injustice of it, tears threatening. Noreen makes a funny face and shakes a scolding finger at the offending block, which sends Evie into a trill of giggles instead.

What do you mean you were testing it out? Noreen says.

You know, seeing what it was like up close.

The noise in your dryer?

Yes, the noise in the dryer reminded me of the man. Her mother articulates each word as if Noreen were having trouble hearing. Then she self-corrects. This must not be a good time. I’m sorry, Noreen. We can try again later.

It’s okay. Noreen kneads her forehead again. When Evie naps, she savors those few hours of not having to think of anything to say to anyone. She’ll tidy the blocks, clear away dirty dishes from breakfast and lunch, then maybe relax on the sofa and melt into a book. Live someplace else for an hour or two. No, she doesn’t want her mother to call back later. So, this sound in the dryer made you think of the man from the paper?

Yes, because of the tinnitus. When he stormed the police station, Noreen, they shot him down. Right there in front of everyone.

Lord, Noreen says. Did this happen nearby? Proximity might explain her mother’s fascination, but sensational news stories don’t usually grab her interest, no matter how shocking.

No, no. Hampton Roads, maybe? I’m not sure, but later, they found a note. It said he couldn’t take it anymore, the ringing in his ears. He actually left a note. They’re calling it suicide by police.

The word suicide zeroes Noreen’s attention. Her mother’s baby sister, Nonie, was twenty-seven when she died from suicide. Noreen’s age now. The purple velvet bedspread she’d been sitting on in the yard? It was hers when she died. One of many things Noreen has learned unwittingly. Snippets overheard as a child when relatives forgot she might be listening nearby. Imagined scenes to answer questions she didn’t know how to ask. Things no one would have told an eight-year-old that she’s never had the courage or prurience to resurrect through conversation since. When she was still very young, it felt like Nonie whispered some of the stories straight into her dreams. Dreams so vivid, she woke with the flowery fragrance of Nonie’s shampoo fresh in her nostrils. There’s a sound that goes along with the stories, too, a heaving rhythm that a pendulum of body and cord might grind out against a pipe. She’d heard it earlier today, in fact, when a strong gust rollicked across the yard and set something, somewhere, swinging. Eerily familiar, it always chills her with the cold of a soul passing.

I wanted to know if that’s what it was like for Nonie, her mother says. A feeling so constant and annoying she couldn’t ignore it, no matter how hard she tried.

Noreen wishes no one else would ever kill