The Year We Left Home: A Novel by Jean Thompson

Author:Jean Thompson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary, General, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 1439175888
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Iowa

JUNE 1989

She had six grandchildren now. Six! It was bewildering to think how everything changed, fast and slow all at once. She couldn’t get her mind around it. If only you could grab hold of time like the end of a string, follow it along, roll it up into a ball until you got where you needed to be. Baby pictures of each grandchild hung in circular frames over the fireplace in the family room. Anita’s two and Blake’s three and the newest, Ryan’s little girl. She stared at them and they stared back. Six wrinkled baby faces looking out at the world in perfect incomprehension. Of course most of them weren’t babies now. Matthew was twelve, and Marcie and Kyle were nine, and so on down the line. Or maybe Marcie was ten. She hadn’t thought about it in a while and it was possible that some birthday had slipped past her. Who would imagine you could forget a thing like that, your own granddaughter’s birthday?

But she did forget. She didn’t always pay attention to everything that people assumed you paid attention to. Sometimes she just got tired. So many things piled up in a life, after a while you felt them as a weight. So many babies, hers and everybody else’s! They took too much out of you. All the excitement and worry of their arrival and the suddenness of their needs. She must have felt all the right things at the time, happy and fond and anxious. But looking back, she couldn’t remember feeling them. Some part of remembering, or feeling, had been blotted out in her.

People said, I don’t know how you manage it, and you told them that you just did the best you could, day by day, which was what they wanted you to say. They didn’t want you to say that sometimes you locked the door to your room and stayed in bed all day and it didn’t matter if there was screaming on the other side of the door, screaming and kicking and swearing, you did not get up. Fuck fuck shit, shittin cunt whore. Where had her daughter learned such language, and why was it one of the things she remembered?

Some days were sad days and they cried together, as if all the salt tears in the world could change a thing.

Some days were good days when Torrie sat quietly, looking at magazines. She liked National Geographics best because of all the pictures. Jungles with tiny, vivid, poisonous frogs perched on leaves. Bedouin on camels, frozen waterfalls, beaches with frills of turquoise water, with sea turtles and sharks and puffins. At such times Audrey watched her and wondered if her daughter was still in there somewhere, in a far country. Or was she lost inside the pictures?

How is she doing, is she doing any better now? And Audrey always said Yes, thank you, she’s a little better, and people were So glad to hear it, because then it meant they didn’t have to do anything else.

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