Susan Meissner - Why the Sky Is Blue Read online

  “She is half yours,” he had said.

  Katie was crying as she handed Lara to me, and together we walked over to Ed and Rosemary. I kissed my little girl and placed her in Rosemary’s arms.

  “You know you are welcome to be as much a part of her life as you want,” Rosemary said, tears streaming down her face. “I will send you pictures; I will send you anything you want. Whenever we come home on furlough, we will come visit you, or we can send Lara to you alone when she’s older. Just tell us what you want, Claire.”

  I want to be free is what I thought. That’s what I wanted. But I did not say this.

  “I don’t think I can say goodbye to her more than once,” I whispered. “It would kill me a little more every time, and I have to live.”

  “They should just take her and go,” Katie said softly, surprising me. “I don’t want to see her anymore.”

  “You let us know if you ever change your mind,” Ed said gently.

  I nodded.

  Katie placed her hand on Lara’s head and rested it there for a moment, then she turned and walked past Dan and Spence and got into our van.

  I leaned down and brushed my cheek against Lara’s. It was softer than down. She didn’t look like me. She didn’t look like Kate or Spencer. I was glad she didn’t.

  “When we have the court hearing to make this final,” I said, tucking Lara’s blanket around her legs, “please don’t bring her.”

  Ed and Rosemary promised they would not.

  Lara slept through the exchange. She was as much unaware of the moment she passed from my life into Ed and Rosemary’s as I was aware of it. It was a moment that scraped my newness like a razor.

  I could not help but flinch as they drove away.

  *

  The following day, I left Dan, Katie, and Spence in Minneapolis and drove with my mom back to Saint Cloud, back to the place where I grew up. Back to the place where I had flown for cover once before, though I cannot remember it.

  Elizabeth’s motor home was spacious enough for the three of us, but the closeness of the walls began suffocating me within moments of our arrival. My mother was quick to pick up on this. The motor home was parked in the driveway of the house where Gene’s funeral reception had been held, so my mom hastily made arrangements for me to stay inside the house with Leo and Margaret Talbot. I remembered them vaguely from my childhood as being good friends of my aunt and uncle, but they seemed like strangers to me, even after having spent a day with them the month before when my uncle died.

  I liked it that way. I liked it that they barely knew me and I barely knew them.

  Dan had asked me to call him when we got there, which I did. I talked with Spencer for a little while and with Katie for only a few minutes.

  When Dan got back on the phone, he asked how I was doing. Did I want him to come get me?

  I didn’t know how to say that if he came right then, I would come, and if he didn’t, I wouldn’t care. The truth was, nothing seemed right. Being in that strange house didn’t seem right and going back to Minneapolis didn’t seem right, even if we did stay in a hotel instead of at the house.

  “I’ll be all right. Eventually.” I said to him. I figured that much was probably true.

  I couldn’t sleep when I finally went to bed. I was sore physically and emotionally, and I was restless. I got up.

  The house was dark, and the Talbots were fast asleep as I made my way downstairs into their living room, which seemed strange and uninviting to me.

  I went into the kitchen and to a back door, which led to a screened porch. Pale cushions on a set of wicker furniture glowed like pearls in the moonlight. I sat down on one of the chairs, and it squeaked a greeting.

  I didn’t have my Bible with me, and there was no light, so I couldn’t escape into the Psalms like I suddenly wanted to do.

  I was alone with my pain and my God. Both overwhelmed me.

  For the first time since I had been attacked and left for dead, since I learned I was pregnant and knew we could not keep the child, I sank to my knees in supplication.

  I suppose I had been afraid to be completely and brutally honest with God, to truly lay my heart bare before him in my own words, because I knew it would reveal to me my displeasure with him. And that scared me to death. I didn’t want to acknowledge that I was mad at the God of the universe.

  And I was deeply afraid to admit I had grown to hate Philip Wells for what he did to me, what he had done to my marriage, and how he had come between Katie and me.

  I don’t know how long I cried out to God. I just know that I awoke at six o’clock on the sunroom floor stiff, sore, and utterly drained. I thought I had been emptied before, in those hours after Lara was born, but that emptying had only been at surface level. During the night of prayer I had gone deeper. I had poured out the last ounce of my tortured being.

  I felt exhausted and refreshed at the same time. It seemed like something untouched and unblemished was beckoning me after the long night of sorrows. I stepped out of the porch and onto the backyard lawn, which was wet with morning dew. The cool wetness sent a shock through me, and I felt an even sharper sense of rawness than I had before. Night was slipping away, birds were beginning to sing, and the stars were fading into the approaching light.

  I was no longer in the abyss. I was on the threshold of something white, blank, and new. The journey had ended. It was finished.

  The dawn was breaking free all around me. In every direction I looked, everything looked new. I watched in silence as the sun peeled back the night and then broke across a cloudless, blue sky.

  A cloudless, blue sky.

  The new day had begun.

  PART TWO

  Kate

  2003

  18

  Sometimes when the house is quiet, when there’s no sound except for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, when Michael is so still next to me that it feels like I am alone in our bed, I sneak outside—careful not to make any noises that would awaken Olivia or Bennett from their childish dreams— and resume my ongoing rendezvous with the night sky.

  If it’s a wintry night, I wrap myself in one of Grandma’s quilts. If it’s an airless night in July, I slip out in only a thin nightgown. Draped or not, I take my place on the north side of the porch and watch the stars shimmer in their appointed places. And I imagine I’m watching that same sky from the railing of a New York high rise or from a bungalow porch on a Carolina beach or from a cabin deck in the damp woods of the Pacific Northwest.

  I stay for as short as a minute or as long as it takes for dawn to find me and chase me back to my bed. When the sun comes up, the sky no longer holds my interest. It no longer beckons me to imagine any life other than the one I am living.

  I can paint almost anything except the sky at night. I have tried. The depth of the velvet expanse always eludes my brush and my brain. I simply cannot capture starlight on any canvas.

  On those nights when I escape to the porch at midnight, I absorb the image as one memorizing lines for a play, and in the morning, after Olivia and Michael are at school and while Bennett watches cartoons or pesters my mother at our shop, I try to transpose the image onto my easel. I just haven’t been able to duplicate it.

  And I can’t seem to stop wondering what it must be like to look at that same unharnessed, starlit sky from somewhere else, though I am learning not to dwell on that.

  It’s not that I am unhappy with my life. I am happy. But the sheer vastness of the heavens suggests—every time I look at it— that the world is bigger than what I have seen of it.

  When I was a little girl—when we still lived in Minneapolis—I used to dream that one day I would live in New York City or San Francisco and wear gloves and hats that matched and be married to a concert pianist who would make little old ladies weep when he played, and we would have twin girls we would name Kristin and Megan. I never pictured myself staying in Minnesota, certainly never imagined living on an acreage that disappears into drift
s every time it snows, and it never crossed my mind that I would go into business with my mother.

  I’ve never been to New York or San Francisco. I own no dress gloves. The only hats I wear are made of polar fleece. My husband teaches agricultural science at the high school we both graduated from.

  Michael can’t read a note of music, but I love him anyway.

  We don’t have twin daughters, but I’m crazy about Olivia and Bennett, the kids we do have.

  And I don’t mind being in business with my mom. We’re actually doing quite well. Between her knack for books and literature, my talents as an artist, and Michael’s mom, Nicole’s flair for culinary masterpieces, we have a highly successful book, coffee, and art shop.

  Minnesota has always been my home, so I cannot truly miss living in other places, because I have lived nowhere else.

  I have a beautiful home. A husband who loves me. Two amazingly wonderful kids. A successful business. It doesn’t seem thinkable that I could be unhappy. And yet I am haunted by the night sky. And by all the possibilities it conjures in my mind.

  It started long before I married Michael.

  I suppose my attraction to the stars began when we moved from Minneapolis to the country when I was twelve and I really saw the night sky for the first time, completely unpolluted by city lights. It was so dark and heavy with stars that I felt for the first time that the universe above me was bigger and grander than the world surrounding me. Until then the world only seemed huge and expansive to my right and left and in front of me. That first night, when I really saw the heavens for the first time, I realized it stretched endlessly above me.

  I was getting my first glimpse of God as bigger than I had imagined.

  That first year in our new home in Blue Prairie was unremarkable. It was neither good nor bad. My parents assured me I would make new friends, and I did. They assured me I would love living on a hobby farm and getting my own horse, which I did. They assured me that time would heal our collective wounds, that the pain over losing Lara, my half-sister, would diminish a little more each day.

  And I suppose it did.

  For my brother, Spencer, who was seven back then, that pain diminished so easily and quickly that within a year’s time he quite forgot why we moved there. He barely remembered that Mom had been attacked and that she had borne a baby that wasn’t truly ours.

  My father never said Lara’s name again. I know he felt badly for my mom; he often spent quiet moments holding her when she gave in to the temptation to grieve over the child she had given away. They both tried to conceal those moments, but they couldn’t hide them all from me. I saw my mother’s suffering. She was terrible at hiding it. And I honestly don’t know when the pain of losing Lara diminished into something my mother could live with. Because the whole thing—the attack, the pregnancy, the adoption, Lara, her adoptive parents—all of it became a great mass called That Which We Do Not Discuss.

  Those few occasions when I did bring up Lara’s name or even her adoptive parents, Ed and Rosemary Prentiss, my parents would nervously try to shift the conversation away from what was to what is. I don’t know how many times I heard them say they did what was best for everyone, but I got ridiculously tired of hearing it every time I mentioned my sister’s name. I wasn’t asking them to defend their actions; I just wanted someone to talk with me about how I was feeling.

  There was no friend to bounce anything off of. My new friends didn’t know my mother just had a baby and gave it up for adoption, and I was told that’s how it should stay. My old friends knew, but I saw them so infrequently in the beginning and then not at all.

  Occasionally, I would call and unload on my grandparents in Ann Arbor. I figured they would understand since Lara was their granddaughter. I spent a couple of weeks with them the following summer and then every summer after that. They did indeed understand, but they never quite knew what to say. I think they were hoping I would outgrow my curiosity about Lara and leave the whole matter alone.

  The older I got, the more I realized pretending Lara didn’t exist was my parents’ and my grandparents’ way of not reopening old wounds. It took a few years, but I eventually fell into pretending as smoothly as they did.

  As far as I knew growing up, my parents never spoke again to Ed and Rosemary after the adoption was final. The Prentisses left for Ecuador when Lara was five months old. They sent us a postcard with their new address before they left just in case my parents changed their minds about keeping in touch. When I was doing my household chores one day, I found the postcard in the upstairs bathroom trash, folded neatly and shoved to the bottom. I took it out and placed it in my diary where it stayed between pages eighty-two and eighty-three for more than a year.

  One day, when I was feeling particularly brave and daring and very much fourteen, I wrote to the Prentisses in Ecuador and asked about Lara. I told them to use my friend Carly’s address to write me back because I didn’t know if my parents would like my writing to them. I told Carly the Prentisses were friends that had a falling out with my parents, but that I still liked them. I asked Rosemary to send me a picture of Lara, who would have been two then.

  Rosemary’s letter arrived at Carly’s house about a month later. Carly called me as soon as I got off the bus to tell me the letter had arrived, and I had to beg and cajole my mom into taking me back into town so Carly and I could “study together.”

  I don’t recall everything Rosemary said in her letter, I do remember feeling guilty after reading it for going behind my parents’ back in writing to her, and yet none of Rosemary’s words were accusatory.

  She did not send a picture, but she did describe Lara to me in such specific detail that it may as well have been a picture. She also told me what a good daughter Lara was, so eager to please, so easy to correct, so willing to be taught. Right about there is when I began to feel bad. Rosemary also told me that she prayed for me and my family every day and that I could do the same for her and Ed and Lara but that I should not write again unless my parents gave their blessing. She concluded by telling me that someday we would all meet again, if not here on earth, then surely in heaven, and then Lara and I would truly be sisters in every sense of the word.

  I kept that letter for a long time, stuffed in my Bible between the pages of Hosea—as safe a place to hide something as any, I thought.

  And I did what Rosemary said. I prayed for them. For a while. And I never wrote them again without my parents’ blessing, which, of course, means I never wrote them again at all.

  *

  I met Michael the first day we moved to Blue Prairie. He was fifteen and incredibly tall and handsome. I fell for him right then and there, even though I was only twelve and a half. My dad’s new partner at the veterinary clinic, Wes Gerrity, and his wife, Nicole, who would be my mom’s business partner several years before she was my motherin-law, came with a pan of lasagna the day we moved in. They also brought Michael and Andrew, their sons. Andrew was ten, and though Spencer was three years younger, they found plenty to do together, leaving Michael to me whenever our parents got together, which was often.

  I don’t know when he fell in love with me. I am sure it was not the day we moved in. But by the time he graduated from high school three years later, we had secretly betrothed ourselves to each other.

  The day he left for South Dakota to go to college, my mom sat down with me and told me that a lot could happen while Michael was away at college, that it might be wise if I dated other people. I was only a sophomore; I had my best high school years ahead of me, she said. And Michael would be facing new situations of his own.

  I knew she meant well, but I was mad at her for weeks after that. She was suggesting Michael would want to date other girls. Unthinkable!

  As it turned out, Michael did date other girls. That spring, in his second semester of college, he broke up with me, telling me we needed time to make sure we were meant to be together. That summer when he came home to work for our fathers at the vet clinic, he
told me he had made a mistake, that I was the only one for him. Would I take him back?

  I made him wait a week before I told him “yes.”

  That was the end of my dream of big city life, matching hats and gloves, and a pianist husband. When I graduated in 1992, I went to college in South Dakota too, only because Michael was there and it was his senior year. I took a year’s worth of generals, and then we got married. He came back to Blue Prairie to teach ag at the high school. And I came back with him, of course.

  By then, my mom and Nicole had this great little business going. Their little shop started out as an idea for a small used book store that my mom wanted to open. She wanted to call it Tennyson’s Table. She has always been crazy about Tennyson. She bought this little nineteenth-century writing table at an estate sale once, and a box of old books came with it. By the time she came home with her purchases, she already had this idea in her mind.

  The table wasn’t really Tennyson’s but it looked like it could have been. It was old enough to have been his, was English, and was definitely a writing table. My mom started buying old and antiquated books everywhere she went, and just about the time she was ready to open her bookshop, Nicole offered to go in with her and make it a book and coffee shop. Nicole is an incredible cook, can make anything from scratch, and never needs a recipe. They bought and cleaned out an old Victorian house right next to Blue Prairie’s renowned twin bed-and-breakfast inns and opened Tennyson’s Table on August 5, 1989, which would have been the celebrated poet’s one-hundred-and-eightieth birthday.

  They placed the writing table in a bay window overlooking a butterfly garden that Nicole dreamed up. Anyone who wants to use the table to write at can do so, and they get all the coffee they want for free. But they have to be writing something to qualify, even if it’s just a letter to a friend. It was a great idea, my mom’s, of course—ever the teacher. All the downstairs rooms except for the kitchen and formal dining room are devoted to rare, old, or out-of-print books. The upstairs bedrooms were turned into rooms for book clubs and writing groups to meet. When I was a senior in high school, there were four clubs meeting. There are ten these days. Nicole also started offering cooking and gardening classes.