Chapter 33: Picturesque

When I showed up at the front door of my house in suburban New Orleans, which looked like a shoebox compared to where I had been staying for the summer, I held my breath. Mama hadn't heard from me since I called her toward the start of my internment. I remembered the last words she'd said to me: "You're gonna see the world. It's gonna eat you up and spit you right out. You're not strong enough for that, Becky. You're gonna come running home to me, crying like a child. But I won't catch you."

Here I was, chewed up and spit out, running home to her and crying like a child. I had nowhere else to go. Holding up a shaky finger, I pressed the button of the doorbell, hearing the familiar chime come from inside the house. It was early in the morning. I just gotten off the plane and got a taxi straight home.

I waited for several moments. She might not have even been awake yet. I was about to ring it again when suddenly the front door opened.

From behind the mesh of the screen door, I saw her. She was in her light pink robe, glasses sitting on her nose. Her hair was shorter now, with specks of gray in it. Did it have gray before? She looked so much older now, though it had only been a few months, and I suppose I did too, because it looked like she didn't recognize me at first.

I think maybe she had expected someone else at the door, someone like the soldier that came to her door when she was pregnant with me. I think she thought I was a messenger coming to tell her that her daughter was dead just like her Daddy, until she realized it really was me.

I felt a little self-conscious as I realized how I probably looked. My hair was messy, and my face was puffy and bright red from all the crying I had done. Everyone at the airport looked at me like I was crazy, some girl sitting in the corner sobbing into a stuffed bunny. Mama's eyes widened, a small gasp coming from her mouth. She looked over me for a moment.

"Becky?" she whispered on the other side of the screen door as I just stood there plainly, tears welling in my eyes. I had missed my Mama so much. I had been through so much in the prior couple of days. I felt stupid because the world had eaten me up, chewed me, and spit me out, and now here I was at her doorstep, crying like a child. And she was going to turn me away, just like she said.

She saw the tears running down my face, and it moved her. It was almost like fear as she saw the grief and pain in my face, how badly I had been hurt.

"Oh," she gasped, pushing the screen door open and stepping onto the porch. She even seemed shorter than me now. She looked up at me, and I was prepared to run away until she said in a wavering voice. "Oh, baby, it's okay. You're home."

I never told Mama what happened with Jo, and she never asked. A part of me thought that somehow she knew, just from the pure pain in my face, what had happened. She brought her arms up around me and I fell into her, sobbing into the soft plush of her robe, smelling the familiar scent of the shampoo she had always used since I was a child. She squeezed me so hard, as if she was prepared to never let go again.

After Mama brought me inside and I cried more into her robe, her gentle hands rubbing my back until I could breathe, she instantly started to make me breakfast, gently telling me to go unpack and take a calming bath while she cooked. I went back into my room, and it was like a warm hand wrapped around my heart. Those four plain walls in that tiny room, my tiny bed, that had seen me through so much pain in my life. It didn't see me through the worst pain in my life that I had just experienced, but the room was welcoming as I came back to it, unpacking my things right where they had been when I left.

As I sat in the tiny bathtub in our bathroom, I sobbed. I sobbed like I had just lost my own limb, like I was a mother who lost her baby. When I stepped out of the bath and slipped into my robe, I picked up my hairbrush and froze.

Long blonde hairs, still tangled with my brown ones in the bristles of the brush, from when I had brushed Jo's hair that night on our bed, before our first time together. I started to cry some more. I wanted to leave them there, as if that was the last part of her that I had, but I plucked them out and threw them in the trash.

But it wasn't the last part of her I had. Because when I went back into my room and started organizing my desk, I lifted the heavy typewriter box out of my bag and put it on the wooden surface, opening it up. The scratch papers from when we had practiced using it were still in the box, the random letters and sentences and the spaces we whited out.

A part of me wanted to throw away the typewriter, but it was the best gift I had ever gotten, and I didn't want to part with it. So I put the lid back on the box and pushed it to the corner of my desk, deciding that I would save the typewriter until I finally had a good story I wanted to write with it. I taped the picture of Greg back to the wall, hurting a little when I realized I didn't have any pictures of Jo.

A week later, I got a letter in the mail from Marty enclosed with a check. It was twice as much as I had been told I would be paid. He only put a small note in the envelope:

You are a good girl, Becca. Jo loved you more than anything. Holly and I would be happy to have you back next summer, no matter what.

I was comforted by his letter. Though Katie despised me, and Jo probably did too now, Marty still wanted me to come back. I never knew if Katie told him the details of what happened. I could envision her lying and saying that I just ran away out of nowhere. Either way, he still loved me whether he knew the truth or not. I knew I could not go back next summer. I knew it when I promised Holly. I could never go back, not after the way Jo screamed at me to leave.

It was 36 years later when I finally went back to California. Mary had always wanted to go to the beaches in Los Angeles, and as much as I fought with her about it, knowing that she knew my feelings about that place, I went anyway. I was nervous when Mary started to drive through the neighborhood where the Donnelley estate was. I asked her to stop, but she didn't. She pulled into the driveway that still had the sign above the road, up the hill to large house I hadn't seen since I left.

To my surprise, Mary had been in contact with Holly. When she helped me out of the car, my 57-year-old knees aching as I stood, I looked up to see a blonde woman coming through the front door. My heart almost gave up on me when I thought that it was Jo. It was Holly, a grown woman now, 42-years old. Two little boys, one almost as tall as her and one that came only to her hips, came shyly walking out after her.

"Holly," I exclaimed, taking gasping breaths.

She grinned the Donnelley grin that I hadn't seen in years and hugged me tightly. I was shocked that she still remembered me, and that she was so happy to see me after I never came back.

Holly led me into the house, and I met her husband and her children. There were three of them, an older boy, a younger boy, and a toddler girl who was playing with blocks in the living room as we walked in. She told me her name was Rebecca.

Holly owned the house now. She had become a teacher, as it turns out, teaching at the local elementary school. I nearly fell over when she told me she was teaching French. Her husband seemed like a nice man, his hair dark and his smile bright. She told me how Marty and Katie had died. Marty had a heart attack sometime in his 60's, and Katie suffered from lung cancer and died not long after. Judd had gone on to play professional football, and now he was coaching teams across the country.

She wanted me to stay for the afternoon. She and Mary were in the kitchen talking and making tea as I wandered out of the room, looking at the walls, the floors, the ceilings, how everything looked exactly the same. The only difference was that there was a flat screen TV in the living room now and computers in the classroom.

As I walked through the house, I couldn't help but see memories of Jo flashing before my eyes. Us sitting on the living room floor, playing blocks with the children. Us, Marty, and the kids dancing to the Beatles on the Lionel record player. I trailed onto the back patio and looked at the pool that was bigger and deeper now, remembering that night we were in it together. Then my eyes glanced beyond the yard, and I saw the little white bench sitting against a tree.

My walk from the patio to the bench was slower than it was when I did it nearly every day that summer. It felt like a much longer walk now. My hands traced over the bench that wasn't white anymore. It was old and cracked, stained with dirt and moss that grew over it. The bird fountain no longer had water in it.

I remembered the night before I left. As I looked up at the tree, way high up, I almost thought for a moment that I saw her sitting in it like she had been that night. As my eyes trailed back down, they caught some markings on the bark.

I leaned closer. The word STUPID was still carved on that rosewood tree in pink, though some flakes of bark had grown back over it.

I hadn't cried in years, but seeing that word carved on the tree made tears well in my eyes. They just turned into a smile.

I never thought that walking through the front door of the Donnelley Estate that day in late summer of 1964 would be the last time that I saw her. I deeply believed that she would come find me, that we would get that apartment somewhere in Los Angeles, that I would receive a letter a few days after of her spilling her heart out to me, that she would call me with tears in her voice. She never came, nor did a letter, nor did a phone call. I never saw her again.

In 1969, Jo died in a hospital in California from an overdose. Marty sent me a letter about it when it happened. No one knew if it was an accident or intentional. She was only 27.

Now I am 80. I am old. My hair is grey, and my face is lined with memories in fine wrinkles of time embedded on my skin. I have seen wars and revolutions. I have seen love and hate, crime and passion. My veins bulge from my hands in green rivers babbling with a lifetime of rushing adrenaline and the chemical injections of unfiltered human emotion. There is pain in my bones and a universe in my soul. I ache and crack, I sleep and shiver. Yet Jo remains untouched by time. Her hair is still glossy and blonde. Her eyes are still alight with that ever-remaining charm and mischievous youth. Her smile is bold and persuasive. Her teeth are ivory and sharp. Her voice is loud and unwavering. Her laugh rings in my ears like a church bell. She jumps on a horse's back with ease and mobility like a trained soldier. She runs like the wind carries her. She cries like a child. Her feet are steady, and her hands soft. She will never get old.

Jo died the way she lived—utterly and completely picturesque.