Daykeeper, page 9
I don’t know what these words mean to either of us in the context of our relationship, as we are still hiding from public eyes.
“I’m glad you said that,” she responds. “Or better yet relieved. No one wants to be the only one in that boat.”
I nod. “True.”
“I know we’ve been talking around a lot of things since we started spending time together, and I’m tired of doing that. I want to be able to tell you what I’m really thinking and know that you love me enough to not judge me.”
“I understand. What’s on your mind?”
Tanya takes a deep breath before she begins. “You asked me about my father a while back, and I told you I didn’t deal with him. I just wanted to tell you why.”
My stomach tightens anxiously as I fight not to let my imagination get ahead of her.
“I led you to believe that it was just my mom and me and that I didn’t have any other brothers or sisters. That’s not true. I have a half-sister. She’s four-years-old.” She pauses again. “See, when I was in high school, my father became involved with my best friend, Carrie. I didn’t know it was going on, but when she got pregnant, she confessed to me that it was my dad’s. Needless to say, that situation destroyed our home. My parents got divorced, Carrie had the baby, and my father ended up moving out to Seattle, leaving all of us behind.”
I don’t know what to say to her as I listen to her explain how she hasn’t seen him in years and has never met her half-sister, as she and Carrie don’t talk anymore. She goes on to explain that her mother has started dating a guy, who, in Tanya’s opinion, is far too young for her. I want to remind Tanya that I am a little over twice her age, but I don’t. There are clearly a lot of unresolved issues throughout her entire family, everyone desiring to be with someone whose age is so far from his or her own that it begs the question of whether there is any psychological damage resulting from the father’s initial transgression. And now I am willingly enmeshed in this curious situation.
“Do you think you are attracted to me because, in a way, you want to get revenge for what your father did to you and your mother?” I ask.
“No. I really care about you. I think it’s all coincidental.”
“It’s a big coincidence.”
“I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking that I’m seeking a father figure and that I’m subconsciously trying to be closer to my father by being close to you,” she says. “I’ve thought about us a lot, and I just don’t believe that has anything to do with it. I have known for a while that I loved you, but I waited until tonight to tell you because I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t trying to make this something that it wasn’t.”
“Then why are you telling me all of this now?”
“So you’ll never have to wonder,” she responds, then adds, “and it gives you the freedom to tell me that you’re not with me just because I remind you of your late wife.”
This time it is I who takes the deep breath. “I can’t say that you have never reminded me of her, but I can honestly say that I have come to love you in a way I never thought possible since Charlotte passed away. It hasn’t even been a year, so I can’t say that she’s completely out of my system, or will ever really be, but I can say that my time with you has opened up doors in my heart that I thought were sealed shut. I don’t know if that’s what you want me to say or not, but I know it’s true. And it’s true that I love you and that I’m here for you.”
She nods her head knowingly, as if my words don’t surprise her. “So here we are,” she finally says, “two broken people trying to mend each other.”
She laughs and I laugh along, although we both know there is nothing funny about her words.
“So what do we do now?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Do we continue our midnight escapades or so we move this relationship into the daylight?”
“I want to,” I start, “but I have to be careful. We have to be careful, at least until you graduate.”
Tanya nods. “Yeah. I keep forgetting about the professor/student thing.”
“Yeah. And I’m up for tenure next year. I’m not sure this situation would go over well with the committee.”
“Why is tenure so important to you?” she asks.
“For fifteen years I dragged Charlotte all over the South, from school to school, and the goal of it all was to get tenure somewhere. Ellison-Wright is the only school that has offered me this opportunity for security. If I get tenure here, I will have a job until I retire, and that was what Charlotte and I had been working on. It feels like, by finishing the process, I won’t have wasted all those years of her life, all those sacrifices that we had to make.”
“I see,” Tanya responds. She is quiet for a moment. “I guess you’re right,” she finally says. “I guess I should be careful, too, since I’m on scholarship.”
That’s when it hits me. Oreetha Hendrix is one of the recipients of a presidential scholarship overseen by my committee.
“I don’t know why I didn’t put this together sooner,” I say, floored by the extra level of inappropriateness that has been added to our relationship.
“What? My scholarship?”
“I was actually assigned to the Presidential Scholarship Committee after I returned from my sabbatical. We are the ones who renew your scholarship each semester. I swear I didn’t know. Since I met you, you have always been Tanya to me. It never crossed my mind that the committee would know you by a different name.”
Tanya chuckles uncomfortably. “Well, things continue to get more interesting, don’t they?”
I reach out and pull her face closer to mine. We kiss, and the sun rises slowly behind us, shedding the first light on what we have become.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Shortly after Charlotte and I moved to Fairburn, we made a drive to Savannah to tour the city. Charlotte had recently re-read John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and insisted that we go and see the place in person, since it was only a few hours drive away. I thought we were going to see the architecture of the antebellum houses and maybe checkout Savannah State University’s campus. It turned out that Charlotte’s primary interest was to go to a cemetery to see a statue of a little girl holding bowls. She referred to it as the “bird girl” and after staring at the image of the statue, framed in Spanish moss, on the book cover, she insisted we go there.
“But that’s a cemetery,” I offered to little avail. “Someone is probably buried beneath that statue.”
“I just want to see it up close.”
When we got to the cemetery and circled around it several times, I became convinced that the statue wasn’t even there anymore.
It didn’t take long for us to realize the statute had been moved to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah because the family had tired of people casually socializing on their family plot. In the end Charlotte got to see her statue, but the macabre setting she had anticipated was severely muted by seeing it in its new environment.
The following morning, on the way back to Fairburn, I asked her, “What was it about that statue that made you want to see it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “When I first saw the book cover, I didn’t think the girl was holding bird feeders. To me, it seemed like she was holding scales and that she was actually being tilted toward one side. I just always imagined if those scales were representative of good and evil, then which one was she leaning toward? I just thought seeing her up close might help me to know.”
The trip, rather than being romantic, felt more bizarre after her explanation. To her there was a beauty to the Southern Gothic, whereas I saw a graveyard and, later, a weird sculpture of a skinny white girl.
Even though that trip was several years ago, I still remember it as if it happened last week.
On Monday, after watching Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with her roommate, Tanya mentioned to me that she would like to take a trip to Savannah for the weekend in lieu of sticking around town for the homecoming football game and various school events. When she mentioned her suggestion, a chill ran down my spine. How could it be possible that both Charlotte and Tanya were drawn to the same place for the same reason? It was definitely possible given the popularity of the book and film, but it felt like an eerie coincidence, nonetheless.
I am not looking forward to returning to Savannah, but I feel as though I owe Tanya for being so patient with me and the extreme level of privacy we are forced to cloak ourselves in here. And besides, we can’t just keep going back and forth to Birmingham. To keep relationships fresh, you have to sometimes step outside of your comfort zone.
So if she wants to go see the “bird girl,” then I guess we are going to see the bird girl.
“I am so sorry,” Tanya says when she arrives with her overnight bag. “My period is coming on, so we won’t be able to do anything this weekend.”
“That’s all right. We don’t have to have sex every time we see each other. We can just chill. How are you feeling?”
“I’ve been cramping a little.” She puts down her bag near the couch in the den. “In fact, I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Sure,” I say, not really knowing what else to say. “Maybe we can send out for dinner. I’ll dig up some menus online and we can talk about it when you come out.”
“OK,” she responds, grimacing slightly.
As she walks away, I open my laptop and start sorting through Yelp, looking for some positive reviews of restaurants nearby, preferably ones that deliver. While I comb through reviews, I wonder if Tanya will still feel up for going to Savannah tomorrow morning. Even though I would love to spend time with her away from Atlanta, I wouldn’t be heart-broken if we didn’t go there. I just don’t want my memories of being there with Charlotte to interfere with forming new memories with Tanya.
“Ed,” Tanya yells from down the hall. “Come here. Please!”
I run to the bathroom in the hall and push open the door. Tanya is seated on the toilet with tears in her eyes. Something is wrong. Really wrong.”
“Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I’m bleeding a lot. It’s like bright red. I think we need to go to the hospital.”
She asks for her overnight bag, and I bring it to her. She then tells me to go and warm up my car, while she cleans up.
Within minutes, we are dashing to the emergency room at the hospital a few miles from the house.
“It’s going to be all right,” I offer, my ignorance of what is going on more than obvious.
“I just don’t know if it’s my period or something else. My body just feels funny.”
I continue talking to her, trying to buoy her mood as best I can.
We arrive at the emergency room, which is partially packed with all manner of accidents, injuries, illnesses, and other craziness that one would expect in the suburbs of Atlanta. After we sign in, we find seats against the back wall.
The room looks sterile, but the sounds of people talking fill the space in a way that makes it feel almost polluted. I help Tanya fill out the paperwork. And then we wait.
When the nurse finally comes out to get Tanya, I ask, “Do you want me to come with you?”
She considers this for a moment, before slowly shaking her head. “I’ll be fine. I’ll tell them to come back and get you if it turns out to be serious, OK?”
I nod and offer a weak smile.
Watching her walk away, I try to think of all of the possibilities of what is wrong. Not being a doctor, my guessing abilities are fairly limited. All I can do is fixate on her saying that her body felt funny.
I take out my phone and google “bright red blood” and “period” and am flooded with a plethora of websites, but one group of websites sticks out: ones detailing miscarriages. I sit up in my chair and take a deep breath. Tanya had mentioned she was on the pill and after that first time we never bothered to protect ourselves. I can barely catch my breath as I allow myself to ponder the possibility that she was pregnant with my child. My face flushes with disbelief and a crushing sadness. Charlotte and I had never attempted children again after Ed Jr. was stillborn. Losing a child fills you with a sadness for which there are no words and we just didn’t want to go there again. We had to fight our way back from the bowels of Hell, and every now and then I slip into the darkness a little when I think of my son. When Charlotte became sick, I knew that I would never have a child, and I made my peace with that, choosing instead to focus on my relationship with her. There was no way I could raise a child without her, even if we adopted. In those last years, all of my love was aimed at Charlotte and making her life as comfortable as possible.
As I sit in the waiting room watching patients leave and come in, I notice a large television in the corner of the room. Some syndicated sitcom is running and the volume is turned all the way down with no closed captioning. The minutes pass slowly, as if a miniature man crawled inside of the clock on the wall and held the second hand back with as much force as he could muster before it eventually pushed forward ticking the inevitable change.
Maybe I’m wrong about the miscarriage, but in my gut I don’t think that I am. I can’t help but to wonder what would have happened if Tanya were still pregnant. What would our lives be like? We are already sneaking around. If we had a child together, there would be no more sneaking, no more hiding. It would also complicate Tanya graduating on time and complicate virtually every aspect of her life. I would probably need to resign from my position at Ellison-Wright and seek out another school to teach at. But even in spite of all those issues, there is a part of me that would have welcomed having a child with Tanya, and I can only believe that it is because I have fallen in love with her.
I stare at the hallway Tanya passed through nearly an hour ago, still waiting, waiting, waiting.
I begin to think that maybe I just got it all wrong. Bleeding could be the result of a heavy period or maybe there was an inflammation of her hemorrhoids. There are probably even more explanations than what I can think of, but my mind keeps falling back on the miscarriage.
I stand and pace around the waiting room before stepping into the hall outside of the emergency room. Restrooms line one side of the hall with a vending area off to the side. A little farther down is a chapel. Directly across the hall is a pharmacy. In the other direction is a bank of elevators and a series of doors that lead to lord knows where.
I walk back into the waiting room and take a seat in the same spot as earlier. Moments later, Tanya walks out, her eyes red and swollen, and I know as she walks up to me and hurls herself into my waiting arms that my worst fears have come true.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
No. 45
We are the fallen wings of Icarus
Oh, fuck it.
I offer for Tanya to come and stay with me while she recuperates, but she declines, choosing instead to return to her apartment. I have no idea of what her roommate knows about the situation, or even about me in general. In our last conversation she told me that she needed some space and time to think. To that end, she has avoided all contact with me: no phone calls, text messages, instant messages, or even “accidental” encounters at the school. It’s as if she is quickly doing away with everything that we have. I want to be there for her, and, frankly, her presence would help mend some of my own sadness over what has happened.
Still it is Tanya who had the complete miscarriage, not I. If she wants space to process things, then I have to respect that, although it has not stopped me from leaving a short message on her cell phone each day to let her know that I love her and that she is not alone.
Weeks later when I finally do hear from her during the middle of December, our relationship is not the focus of the conversation. This time it’s about her scholarship.
Tanya is sitting on the couch on which we made love numerous times, but she is not here for that. There is no overnight bag resting by her feet, only the pensive look of a person trying to solve a riddle that she is ill-equipped to solve alone.
“I was able to make arrangements with most of my professors and make up work that I missed while I was out of class, but Professor Donaldson only let me make up part of my work. He ended up giving me a ‘D.’ I was hoping that the worst case scenario would have been that he would give me an ‘Incomplete.’ Now I have a 2.98 and do not qualify for my scholarship.”
I don’t want to press her about why she didn’t attend her classes, especially since I know why. I just wish that she had reached out to me much earlier. I could have probably done much more for her before the grades were issued. At Ellison-Wright College the administration makes it difficult to get grade changes, and when scholarships are lost, they are pretty much lost. But two-hundredths of a point? Surely there was something that could be done.
“The committee will be meeting in a few days before the Christmas break,” I say. “I will see what I can do. This is the first time you’ve ever had any problems with your grades, so they should cut you some slack. Even if you don’t have the exact grade point average, your cumulative average is well above the requirement for maintaining your scholarship.”
She sighs. “You can do that?”
“I can definitely try really hard.”
“Ed, if I don’t get my scholarship back, I’m going to have to transfer somewhere else or sit out a semester or more. My mother and I can’t afford tuition here without some kind of assistance.”
“What about student loans?” I ask.
She shakes her head, lowering it. “Not an option, not since Congress changed the rules for how to get them. Man, I can’t believe I really fucked this up.”
