Two weeks pass and I decide to sit by the camellias again. I wait until Libby goes to the booty class and the boys are in school, until the sun looks like it’s balancing on the tops of the trees. I push the door open. My body cringes from the resistance but it’s easier for me than it was the last time. I step out onto the grass barefoot. September is a hundred degrees, the leaves wilt in the middle of the day, but the ground is steady, strong, and ice-cold under my toes. It agrees to hold me up no matter what happens.
I walk toward the flowers, expecting nothing from them, but something steers me away.
Magnolia fuscata.
I say it out loud. “Magnolia fuscata!”
It soaks the insides of my nostrils and I swear I can see tendrils of smell floating through the air. I taste the banana smell in the back of my throat, feel the soft yellow buds on the hairs above my lip. It carries me toward the tree in the corner of the yard and I grab a glossy, honey-covered leaf between my fingers. I rub my cheek against one of the last petal clusters of the season and watch as it slowly, beautifully tumbles to the ground.
Magnolia fuscata.
The memory comes. I close my eyes and my daddy is there. We’re on the farm and the smell is all around us. I see the tree covered in more flowers than it can hold, all of them the color of fresh Amish butter. It’s his favorite. The red-spotted dogs are barking, bounding around him as he wipes his forehead with his handkerchief. He walks from his garden and wraps me in his arms.
“I love you more than God can count,” he says to me.
I don’t leave his arms for a while. I fall onto my knees and sit in my daydream, taking sips of fresh, sweet-smelling air. When I open my eyes, I can see. I can feel.
As I stand in the yard by the fragrant tree with waxy leaves, the numbness of the drugs starts to go away. The feeling of God starts to come, but it isn’t the God they taught me about. She’s motherly and tender and ever-loving. She’s Mrs. God: poet, dear friend, and teacher. I decide that’s what I’ll call her for now. I recognize her from my walks in the woods at DeSoto and from the sweet-and-sour perfume of that baby I loved. I recognize her from the femininity of the Bible; the long, beautiful verses that curved and meandered; the light and song of worship. She’s never left my side; she just looks different than they said she would. The white male preachers I’ve grown up listening to see depravity over virtue, original sin over original love, original goodness, and original purity. I don’t see things that way anymore. This is my new church and all are welcome here.
The birds sing their summer carols and the tree leaves shrivel on the bottom branches that hang above me. I pluck a bud off the tree and stick it up my nose and it feels sacred, like prayer. Joy lives here; pain lives here too. As I smell the sweet blossom and heat swells up my side, I invite them both to coexist in me.
* * *
A few days later, Jack calls. He’s coming back to Nashville for a weekend and I know that I need to go see him. Lile and Libby encourage me to go see him, though I’m not sure I’m ready to go away yet. Jack and I are in trouble. I can see it very clearly now. I buy a plane ticket, nervously curl the ends of my hair, and a memory comes.
I’m seven. My mom is finally making me get glasses. They’re as big as windshields, with thin wire frames, and I hate them immediately when the doctor balances them on the tops of my ears. I don’t like the weight of them or the look of them and I can tell they’ll be a lot of work, something to push up my nose and hold in place on the monkey bars. I’ve decided that they’re an obstacle to the important work of childhood, but I quickly learn that they’re the gateway. I walk out into the parking lot afterward and I can see. I can see so much more of the world. There are bits of glitter on the parked cars and ten-color puddles underneath them. Noticing the silhouettes of birds floating miles up in the sky, I realize they’re dozens of shapes, there are dozens of different bird shapes! I point and squeal and let my jaw hang low, in awe of the beauty all around me. My mom giggles and glows and the sky gets brighter and brighter. Everything is clear.
It’s time to go to the airport. I look in the mirror once more, patting a ribbon of hair and rubbing my lips together. For the second time in my life, I’m starting to see again—pain, beauty, truth—and I want to share all of it with Jack.
* * *
I get back to Nashville in the early evening. The Honda is covered with leaves and sitting in its special spot by the curb. I call Lile as soon as I open the door like he made me promise to and I take myself on a tour of home.
The pretty yellow house is stuffy and strange, as though it’s been left for an entire season instead of just five weeks. The kitchen is empty, the dining room table is dull and gray, and the couch is stiff. I walk into the bedroom and flop on the bed. There are little crumbs from all my snacks and my computer sits open like a dead clam. I roll onto Jack’s side and trace a little heart into his pillow. I imagine our bodies lying side by side. It has been so long since we’ve been next to each other and so much has happened. The pills I have left rattle around in the bottom of their canister as I take them out of my purse and set them on the table where they’ve always lived. I can see a perfume bottle. It’s been obscured by orange plastic and candy wrappers and it’s so pretty, angular and made of thick, expensive glass. I fall asleep feeling guilty about it, about all the horrible things it must have seen as it stood watch there all of these years.
Jack arrives the next morning at half past nine. My body is yowling from yesterday’s plane ride but I do my best to deaden the noise with hope—today isn’t about me, it’s about us. I hear him lug his suitcase onto the porch and catch a glimpse of the top of his head out the window. I’m anxious and nauseated and consumed by a lovely kind of fear that I remember from the first time I climbed into the passenger seat of his car, not knowing where we would go but wanting to go anyway.
The door opens slowly and I squeal when he crosses the threshold, covered in backpacks and rumpled in all the right ways. He’s exhausted from twenty-four hours in economy, flight hopping from Sydney to Nashville, and maybe just a little bloated from a touring diet of beer and Rold Gold pretzels. I am happy to see him, I think.
He throws a rigid smile at me through the jet lag and we hold each other for a long time. It’s more of an awkward stuckness than an embrace. Our limbs loosen every so often, but we let the history of eight years hold us together and convince us that we are not strangers in this moment. Eventually, he steps back and the sounds of our breath bounce off the walls.
“You look really good,” he says.
He doesn’t really look at me, though. His eyes dart from my face to the floor to the back window. For two people who have been to opposite ends of the earth and dug into the deepest parts of themselves, we have very few stories to tell. There’s a heaviness about him. I’m not sure he wants to be here, and I’m not sure that I blame him.
I giggle as he tries to untangle himself from some of the backpacks and he jumps a little, shaken by the sound of joy from me. A long pause happens and I smile at him.
“Hey, do you mind if I go to bed?” he asks. “I’m so fucking tired.”
“Go!” I tell him, nodding my head and trying my best to sound airy and bright and all the things that I think he wants me to be.