Blue Wide Sky Read online

I take a left and follow the road at the mountain’s base. It winds and narrows until I spot the sign for Hayden’s Marina on the right. It’s been updated. That’s the first thing I notice, its colors muted and appealing as the backdrop for the words:

  Boat Slips for Rent, Gas, Grill, Picnic Supplies and More! Turn Here!

  I pull off the road and find myself gripping the steering wheel, hard.

  Gabby Hayden.

  I say her name out loud then, and it sounds odd against the brrrrr of the Explorer’s engine. I haven’t let myself say it in so long that it almost feels like I’ve committed some kind of grievous faux pas in doing so.

  What would I do if she came driving up right now, spotted me sitting here like some kind of dazed stalker?

  Twenty-five years have come and gone since we were both those sixteen-year old kids falling in love for the first time.

  How is that possible?

  A lifetime has unfolded since then. One we have lived without each other. There was a point in my younger life when I never would have believed that was possible. Living without Gabby.

  I sit until the sun sinks behind the mountain, and, for the first time since I left England some thirty hours ago, I let myself admit that my trip here is about more than seeking my brother’s opinion or seeing this place I’ve never forgotten.

  It is also about seeing the girl that I once loved with ever fiber of my being. The girl I have never forgotten.

  You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.

  ~ Desmond Tutu

  Gabby

  I don’t know if there has ever been a day when I’ve woken up to the kind of sunrise now creeping up behind Smith Mountain and not marveled at its beauty. Even when I was a child, I loved to watch its steady climb from my bedroom window. On spring mornings like this one, it is nothing short of extraordinary.

  When I was seven or eight years old, I remember thinking that God must have the sun on some kind of invisible pulley that connected with one of the clouds up in heaven, raising it every morning and lowering it in the evenings. It made sense to me that something that incredible could only be delivered from a place so wonderful that my imagination couldn’t do it justice.

  One morning when my daddy and I were out fishing on the lake, I’d offered up my theory, and he had explained to me how it really worked. He’d told me how the Earth spins on its axis toward the east, and that’s why the Sun and the Moon rise in the east and move westward across the sky. I’d said oh, and he must have sensed my disappointment, because he said, “But you know what, honey, I like your version way better. I imagine the good Lord does too.”

  I think of that conversation often enough that it’s the go-by I’ve looked to for my own parenting with Kat. Some things are more important than being right.

  She’s up already, an early bird like me, rolling her wheelchair across the dock flooring to the marina gas pumps where I’m hosing pollen from a customer’s pontoon boat seats.

  I lean over and she gives me a kiss on the cheek. “The Morgans are going out today?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I answer, rubbing her silky blonde hair between my fingers. “Susan called last night to see if we could have it ready for them this morning.”

  “Nice day for it,” she says, and I think, as I always do, how mature she is for her ten years. It’s there in the calmness of her expression. Her whole demeanor, really, is more that of an adult than a child.

  But she’s been that way since the day I met her in a Siberian orphanage when she had just turned three years old. Her Russian name is Ekaterina, and she’s actually the one who shortened it to Kat.

  I can only guess at the life she lived before she came into mine, a life that shaped her unusual maturity. I know bits and pieces about the broken bones she’d suffered as an infant, and the diagnosis that had led her impoverished mother to relinquish her to the orphanage when it became clear she would never be able to meet her daughter’s needs.

  I know that she was held as little as possible by the caretakers for fear that another bone would break, and that they might somehow be blamed.

  I know too that the minute I laid eyes on her, even though I had never seen her before, there was no doubt in my mind that I had come all that way just for her. And that she had been waiting for me.

  “I can hose it if you like,” Kat says now.

  I hand the nozzle to her, and she takes up where I left off, rinsing the green dusting from the boat. The pollen pools in the lake water like a thin coat of paint.

  “I’ll get our breakfast,” I say, and head inside the marina cafe where a host of regulars occupy the wood tables and leather booths. The dress code ranges from bib overalls to Nike golfing shorts and shirts, since our community is a mix of farmers and vacationers. Buck Finley, part of the farmer mix, throws out his usual cheerful good-morning and compliments the coffee.

  “Pour you another cup?” I ask.

  “Myrtle’s taking care of me,” he says.

  “Always, Mr. Finley,” Myrtle Biggs calls out from the kitchen where she is frying eggs on the griddle. She throws me one of her wide grins, her teeth whiter than white against her ebony skin. She’s got her hair all fixed this morning, but then it’s Wednesday, and she goes straight to choir practice as soon as she leaves here.

  “That smells good,” I call out.

  “Two plates coming up,” Myrtle says, flipping the eggs and then buttering two slices of toast. “That child’s gonna put us all out of a job,” she adds, glancing out the front window at Kat. “She’s a worker, that one.”

  “To the point where I feel guilty about it sometimes,” I say.

  “Oh, no, don’t be doing that. It’s who she is. She likes being helpful.”

  “You’re right,” I say, because it’s true. There’s nothing that makes Kat happier than helping. “You had your breakfast, Myrtle?”

  “Coming up, right after yours,” she says.

  “The morning paper is on the table if you want to see it.”

  “Thanks,” she says and slides the two plates across the counter to me.

  I take them outside to the picnic table, and Kat rolls over to join me at one end. It’s barely seven o’clock, and the air feels cool and clean, the way it does in early May. We join hands and Kat says the blessing. Her prayers are always ones of thanks. For the rain. For warmth. For food and shelter. For peace. She never asks for anything for herself, and if she does ask for something, it’s a need she’s heard someone else express. Healing for old Mr. Harrison’s arthritis, safety for Myrtle’s son who’s serving in the military.

  Her prayers always make my heart contract in a now familiar way. I think as I often do that she is too good for this world, and I say my own prayer that my daughter’s bones will grow strong, that the daily pain in her back will disappear. I know that would require a miracle, because every doctor we have seen has concluded it is something she will have to live with. But I am not too proud to ask.

  I tuck into my food while Kat takes a half-hearted bite of toast and cuts up her egg, only to relocate each piece on the plate instead of eating any of it.

  “Not hungry this morning?” I say.

  “Not really,” she says.

  I put down my fork. “Everything okay?”

  “Yep.”

  I finish off my plate in a deliberate effort to let her elaborate on that, and when she doesn’t, I say, “What’s going on, sweetie?”

  She’s quiet and then, “I’ve been having those dreams again. When I’m asleep, I think I see her face, but when I wake up I can’t remember it.”

  The conversation is a painful one, for Kat, and for me too, if I’m honest. The dreams started when she was seven, and there have been times when she would go long stretches without having them. In the beginning, she would wake up screaming in fear, and I would lie on her bed, holding her as tightly as I dared while she sobbed as if her heart were breaking.

  For a long time, she couldn’t
put words to what the dreams were about. When she was eight, she began to tell me they took place in the apartment where she had lived with her mother before she’d left her at the orphanage.

  I take her hand now and give it a gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  She shrugs. “Yeah.”

  We sit, quiet, while four white ducks hover at the edge of the dock, hoping for our leftovers. I toss them the crust from my toast, and Kat tears off pieces of hers and throws it their way.

  “Think I’ll go ahead and start my schoolwork,” Kat says, rolling her chair away from the table.

  “Need any help this morning?” I ask.

  “Not right now,” she says. “It’s easy.”

  This is true. Kat is really smart. She absorbs information, facts, figures, theories with enviable ease, and I am thankful that this part of her life at least is not a struggle.

  “I’ll come check on you in a bit,” I say, while she rolls toward my office just behind the cafe and grill where we keep a computer for her homeschooling. I’ve thought many times about the benefits for Kat going to regular school, being around other children mainly, but she prefers being here. She’d attended the local public school for kindergarten through second grade and seemed to love it, until one day she’d come home and asked me if I would homeschool her.

  The only reason she would ever give me was that she was bored, and, although I know this was true, I suspect there were other reasons that she kept to herself.

  Myrtle ambles out of the cafe, stopping to give Kat a kiss on the head. I hear her ask if they’re on for their cooking lesson at eleven o’clock, and Kat smiles and says yes. It’s a funny thing these two have going. Kat has become a near-expert Italian cook just from watching cooking shows and reading cookbooks and blogs. Myrtle does Southern like nobody’s business, and so a couple of times a week, they teach each other a new dish in between breakfast and lunch. Whatever they fix ends up being on the specials board for that day, Fried Grits and Gnocchi Pesto. Gingered Peach Cobbler and Tiramisu. Cornbread Casserole and Spaghetti Bolognese.

  They’ve actually developed a following of sorts, an eclectic local bunch who’d initially complained about all the fancy words they couldn’t pronounce and just as quickly became converts who told everyone they knew to come out to Hayden’s Marina for the Blue Plate Specials. Never knew what you were gonna get, but it was always worth the trip.

  I head back outside and glance over the Morgan’s boat, just to make sure she’s all ready to go. They’re good customers, have been so for a dozen years, never complain, and tell everyone they know who’s coming to Smith Mountain Lake about our marina. I’ve always thought it pays to work a little harder to keep customers like that than spend a bunch of advertising dollars on new ones who might not live up to their standard.

  The boat is all but spit-shined, so I move on to the next project, the picnic tables I’ve been repainting. I decided over the winter to put umbrellas in the center of each of the tables to encourage boaters to stop in for a meal, even when the weather is on the hot side. The umbrellas are bright orange, and I’m covering the tables’ former faded gray surfaces with a fresh coat of white paint. The result is cheerful and inviting, exactly what I had been going for.

  I get the paint bucket from the nearby storage closet and start on the sixth out of twelve tables, spreading the brush across the surface with long, quick strokes. My daddy taught me how to paint when I was around Kat’s age. It became my job to keep the dock pylons, window trims, wood doors and such touched up throughout the year. Daddy always told me if I was going to do anything, to do it right. I had taken pride in showing him that I could.

  The window to my office is cracked, and I can hear Kat practicing her Russian. With homeschooling, she is able to do this along with her other subjects, and I’m glad that she has decided to renew her memory of the language.

  When I first brought her home, she spoke only Russian, but as she learned English, the Russian began to slip away, and when I had tried to reintroduce it, she’d cried horribly, sobbing so hard I could not console her. I could only guess that maybe hearing the language made her think she would be going back, and so for several years, I left it alone altogether. Sometime last year though, she had asked me if I would find a program for her to relearn the language, and she is picking it back up again with a natural fluency, only with a Virginia accent. I love hearing her pronounce the words with the dialect she has absorbed here.

  A flock of Canadian geese land in our cove just out from the dock area. They glide across the water’s surface, headed for the grassy area next to the boat slips where they usually spend an hour or two hunting and pecking. They aren’t the most popular creatures in this community. People complain about the large amounts of poop they leave behind, but I’m partial to them, I guess. They’re beautiful to look at, although what I love most about them is their devotion to their loved ones. If a goose’s mate or baby is injured or sick, it will stay and guard it until it gets well or dies.

  I don’t know any better example of one of God’s own creatures living out what it means to love someone or to be a parent.

  Kat comes out just before eleven o’clock and says she’s done with her schoolwork. Her expression is somber in the way she gets when her back is hurting a lot.

  “Need some medicine, sweetie?”

  “Maybe so,” she says.

  We go inside my office where I pull the prescription bottle from the desk drawer, grab a bottle of water from the mini-fridge in the corner and hand a pill to Kat. She swallows it dutifully, even though she dislikes taking the medicine because it makes her sleepy.

  We head for the kitchen then where Myrtle has the ingredients for her recipe already assembled on the countertop. “Grits and collards is what I’ll be doing today. What’re you gonna teach me how to make, Miss Kat?” she asks.

  “Pappa di Pomodoro,” Kat says casually.

  “Say what?” Myrtle shoots back.

  “Italian tomato and bread soup,” Kat translates.

  Myrtle harrumphs in the way she always does when these two exchange their recipe of choice. “Well, all right then.”

  Kat starts to pull ingredients from the cabinets: canned tomatoes, olive oil, cloves of garlic, onion.

  I pour myself a glass of iced tea and hang around until my daughter’s face is no longer tight with pain, and laughter fills the kitchen. And then I head outside to paint another table.

  I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

  ~ Louisa May Alcott

  Kat

  Myrtle is one of those people who just make life brighter because she’s around you. She takes her cooking as seriously as I take mine, but we do plenty of joking around when we’re in the kitchen. Only today, I don’t feel like laughing as much as I usually do.

  “Do I need to make you one of my coconut cream pies to get a smile out of you, child?” she asks, while I’m sautéing onion and garlic in a pan.

  “I wouldn’t complain if you did,” I say.

  She puts her hands on my shoulders and turns me to face her¸ taking the wooden spoon from my hand and placing it on the counter. She looks in my eyes and says, “You having those dreams again?”

  I start to deny it, but it wouldn’t do any good with Myrtle. I nod.

  She turns off the stove, ushers me over to a barstool at the counter and says, “Sit. Let’s chat a bit.”

  “I’m okay, Myrtle.”

  “Tell me what you’re worried about, sweetie.”

  I look down at my hands, twist them for a few seconds and then say, “I keep dreaming that something is going to happen to Mama. And I won’t have a family anymore.”

  Myrtle looks at me for a long moment, her eyes welling with tears. “Oh, sweet girl.” She reaches out and pulls me into her arms, saying, “No one could blame you for worrying about it. Not with everything you’ve already experienced in this life. But your mama is a healthy young woman who has no intention of g
oing anywhere that doesn’t include you.”

  “Things happen to people all the time though,” I say. “They get sick. Or in car wrecks.”

  “This is true,” Myrtle says. “But that’s where our faith comes in. We have to trust that God’s got it all worked out. How else would your mama have come all the way over there in Russia to get you? That’s just nothing but a miracle.”

  I nod because I have to agree. “I just wish I would stop having the dreams.”

  “With time, honey, I think that will happen. Fear can work on us, even when we’re sleeping.”

  “I guess so.”

  “But here’s what you need to know. Your mama loves you more than you can even begin to imagine. Every time you start to feel worried, just think about that.”

  I nod and lean over to give her a hug. “Thanks, Myrtle. I love you.”

  She hugs me back, extra tight. “I love you too, sweetie. Now don’t we have a competition to finish?”

  “We do.”

  She slides off her chair and says, “Don’t be thinking I’ll be cutting you any slack just because we took a time out.”

  I smile. “I won’t, Myrtle.”

  Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

  ~ Buddha

  Sam

  I wake up to what sounds like American Idol for blue jays, carried out by a series of songbirds who continue to one up the previous competitor in volume if not substance. The show started at six a.m., and at seven, I shake off the jet lag and head for the shower.

  The house is showing its age, or rather lack of use, and the pipes are no exception. They rattle in protest at my request for function, churning and chugging before complying with a reluctant surge and then a steady, if unimpressive, stream.

  Ben and his family visit a couple of times each year, but other than that, its care has been left to a local couple who check in once a month and make any obvious house repairs that are needed.