The irony that the US has the latest weapons and technology at its disposal but a jimmy-rigged mine killed his friends haunts my husband.
War is war. No shades of gray there.
I take a deep breath to steady myself. I am exhausted, but I must soldier on: the house has to be in order before I start my new job in a week. And Lily must meet new friends in a new city this summer. I look at Cory: I’ve yet to tell him I have signed Lily up for nearly every camp and class I could find, from swimming to sailing. I don’t want him to think that I don’t trust him, but the truth is, I don’t. He loves Lily more than his own life, but that would not keep him from drinking too much, or passing out, or simply forgetting she was in the yard playing.
My husband is but a ghost of who he was.
I inhale again.
The living room smells of floor polish and beer, just like The Twilight Inn, the dive college bar where I used to work. On Mondays I’d mop the floor and throw away all the bottles and plastic cups, attempting to eradicate the history of the weekend. But it still always smelled like floor cleaner and beer.
Cory moans.
The ghosts always remain, I think.
I eye a window on the front of the house.
I need to air out this room, I think. Give the ghosts a chance to escape.
I tiptoe toward the beautiful antique double hung window. There are two such antique windows in the living room and two in the dining room, the original windows encased in beautiful molding thick with white paint. I run my hand over the wavy glass and the pretty panes.
The stories you could tell.
I pull up on the frame, but it refuses to budge. I squat and put my back into it, the window moving—oh, an inch, perhaps—my vertebrae cracking so loudly that I actually shush them. I stop and study the windows.
You may be pretty, I think, but you’re old and cantankerous.
The windows have the old sash cords. The frames are swollen from the water and humidity from the lake. I lower my glasses onto the end of my nose and peer down where the rope enters the side of the window frame. These work by using old-school counterbalance weights, which sit in the cavities beyond the window jambs. When you raise or lower the window, the weights—attached to the cording—move up or down and keep the windows open without a need for a stay.
Fascinating, these old inventions, I think, before chuckling at myself. Aren’t engineers fun?
The sash cords are frayed, and I’ll need to work on them. I take a deep breath, position my hands under the frame one more time and push upward like a strongman at a carnival. The window suddenly flies open as if we’re on the moon and there is no gravity.
I can hear Cory stir. I turn around, holding my breath again. He rolls into the couch and snores.
I exhale and take a deep breath. I pivot in my running socks to return to the kitchen and grab a broom and dustpan to clean up the broken glass in the living room but stop midmotion and swivel back toward the window, my nose in the screen, sniffing like an old dog. In just a few days the lake has already become a familiar smell. The woody, watery scent has a powerful effect on me as if I was always meant to be by the water and have finally come home. The smell of fresh water mixed with pine carried on the breeze calms me, even more than the antianxiety meds Cody’s doctor administered to both of us and which we both refuse to take.
But there is something else in the air tonight, a perfumed scent that is so sweet and familiar, so overwhelming that I can’t help but close my eyes and inhale again.
Lilacs!
I am immediately transported back to my grandmother’s house in suburban Detroit. Every wall in Grandma Midge’s home was painted a shade of pink or purple.
“It’s like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol blew up in here, Miriam,” my dad used to say to my grandma.
“Your entire world is beige,” Grandma Midge would reply. “Beige is not even a color.”
And she loved her favorite colors: her bathroom was painted dusty rose and her kitchen hot-pink. Pink depression glass and desert-rose dishes filled cupboards, and Hummel figurines and glass birds graced corner cabinets. But walking into her bedroom was like walking into a room filled with her favorite flowers: soft purple walls with a slightly pinkish hue, a white headboard painted with lilacs, floral drapes and purple shag.
When we would visit her for Mother’s Day, her lilacs were usually in full bloom. She would wait for me to come before cutting the fragrant flowers.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if our arms were lilac branches?” my grandma would ask. “How beautiful would life be?”
My grandma lived in an old neighborhood filled with families whose husbands were lifers in the auto industry. Over time, however, the rows of tiny homes perched just an arm’s length away from one another became occupied by widows, all of whom it seemed had a penchant for growing lilacs and playing bridge.
“Lilacs require a pretty vase,” my grandma would instruct me. “Life requires a pretty vase.”
She would lead me to one of her many corner cabinets and give it a soft kick with her slipper to pop open the sticky door. We would pick out her most beautiful McCoy vases, ones in the shape of hyacinths or towering vases of aqua designed with birds and branches.
We would smell nearly every lilac before cutting armfuls of blooms and carrying them into the house. We’d fill countless vases, placing them in every room, until her house smelled as if it had been soaked in heavenly perfume.
And when I’d go to bed, she would lift the vase from the nightstand and hold it to my nose.
“Dream of flowers, my angel,” she would whisper. “Dream of lilacs.”
Cory rustles on the couch, and I sneak away from the window. I tiptoe through the kitchen, grab a flashlight and quietly open the door that leads into the large porch overlooking the lake. There is a bright moon, which shimmers on the lake, making me feel as if I’m in an old movie awaiting my husband to return from sea. The moon is not quite full, but getting more illuminated every night. I’ve learned already from local meteorologists, who seem to be obsessed with moon phases on the western side of the state, that we’re in a Waxing Gibbous phase, the one that precedes a full moon.
Lilacs catch my attention again, and I follow my nose, which leads me onto the deck and then down the stairs into the ramshackle yard. It is a relatively warm May night by Michigan standards, meaning I am not shivering without a jacket, nor can I see my breath. I thought I’d be colder by the lake than I was in Detroit, but the lake water has warmed more quickly than usual and that serves to keep the surrounding lakeshore a touch more temperate.
At least until the lake water turns over again, the local meteorologists said on TV.
Our new backyard is fairly large, but consists mostly of dirt, sand and weeds. There are lake-stone borders where it looks as if gardens once stood, and random concrete birdbaths and decorative garden globes that are crumbling along with rusting metal stakes, all of which are unable to survive the harsh Michigan winters forever.