Grady and Alice Bell’s twenty-year-old daughter Hope has died. They’re home alone after the funeral and the burial and after the distressing but obligatory reception for family and friends here at the house. Alice is slumped in a corner of the sofa, a sweater draped over her shoulders. She’s blotting her swollen eyes with tissues and holding a porcelain teacup in her hand. Grady sits in a ladder-back chair, elbows on his knees, staring at his left hand in which he grips a fistful of dirt he’s taken from Hope’s grave. He believes that if he had been listened to, Hope would still be alive. People are like dirt, he remembers his uncle Elwood saying. They can nourish you and help you grow or they can stunt your growth and hasten your death.
He wraps the dirt in his handkerchief and slips the dirt into his pants pocket. Grady’s black silk tie is stuffed into the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He has a milagro, a religious folk charm used for healing purposes, in the shape of an eye, pinned to his lapel. Grady has glaucoma. He bought the milagro and a tin of sacred dirt from a woman outside the Santuario de Chimayo in New Mexico. Rub the dirt on your eyes before you sleep, the woman told him. When he told her he also wanted a milagro and a tin of dirt for his daughter, the woman said, What’s wrong with her? He said, What isn’t?
Alice’s black hair is cut in bangs, streaked with gray, and held off her face with turquoise barrettes. When the sweater slips off her shoulder, Grady sees the tattoo of a flaming heart on her right arm. On the coffee table there’s an emblem of their loss, a photo of baby Hope at Amelia Island, sitting on a beach blanket, blue floppy hat on her head and zinc oxide on her nose. Beyond Alice, Grady sees the staircase that leads to Hope’s bedroom. He’ll get up there, he thinks, before long, to see what clues to Hope’s secret life he might uncover. Hope was a drug addict who’d robbed her parents blind, gone in and out of detox, rehab, and urgent care facilities, and died of a heroin overdose, alone, in a vacant lot.
Grady sees a thread of gold under the coffee table and picks it up. It’s a necklace, the one he’d given Hope on her sixteenth birthday. How did it find its way here? And when? Alice rests her teacup on a copy of Garden & Gun. Shadow, their sleek and disorderly black cat, chews on the petals of the potted Easter lilies on the windowsill. Grady pictures Hope at fifteen, brunette braid over her shoulder, Hollywood smile, and hands on her hips, like she’s ready to astound the world. He stifles a sob and reminds Alice that he’d been against throwing Hope out of the house after her last relapse. “You wanted her to hit bottom,” he says, “and she did!” Alice feels like she’s been clubbed in the face. She smashes the teacup on the tile floor and calls Grady a monster. Shadow leaps from the windowsill and blasts off into the kitchen. Alice weeps until she can’t catch her breath.
Grady knows he should go to her, but he’s frozen with anger and overcome with shame. Alice bolts for the door. Grady tries to stop her. She pushes him away, runs out to the driveway, and screams—the neighbors peek out their open windows. After Alice leaves, he drives to her sister’s house, Grady climbs the stairs to Hope’s room, opens the door, and turns on the light. Shadow follows him. They both lie down on Hope’s disheveled bed. Shadow rubs her head against Grady’s face. Grady tells Shadow that Hope is not coming home. Shadow purrs and curls into a fuzzy ball in the crook of Grady’s arm. They sleep. Grady dreams that he is standing, or is planted, ankle deep in heavy clay and mulch and cannot free himself. His feet have put down roots. He wakes feeling ashamed.
Grady calls in sick to work. He’s a high school science teacher at St. Jude’s. He arrives at Alice’s sister’s house and finds Alice out in the garden planting bulbs. Her fingers are buried in the damp soil. Grady knows that gardening can be a restoration of numbed senses and an exercise in optimism. He also knows that the dirt is full of death and full of life. After the funeral, Father Collins told him that nothing that dies is dead for long. Grady believes, however, that death abides or it is not death. Grady’s here to apologize for his indefensible remark and to convince Alice to come home where she belongs. He needs her forgiveness. She tells Grady her home was with Hope. Before he thinks, he says, You threw her out when she needed us most. Alice stabs her trowel into the flower bed and says, Hope was never going to stop using as long as she had a safety net. The argument escalates.
A week later, Alice agrees, finally, to meet Grady for lunch at the Boulevard Diner. She tells him she’s rented an apartment. He’s incredulous. Shouldn’t he have been consulted, at least? He says, We need to talk about Hope. She says, I don’t. I won’t. I can’t. I never will. Not to you. Not to anyone. When Alice comes by to pick up her clothes and some furniture, Grady is helpful and understanding—he’s going to take this opportunity to persuade her, yet again, to stay. She arrives with her pal Austin from the radio station where she works, so Grady never gets a moment alone with her, despite his ineffectual wrangling, and the whole move is over in twenty minutes.
That night Grady’s at his kitchen table poring over photos in the family album, trying to discern the moment when his daughter decided, To hell with ballet and tennis; I’m going to be a derelict. His heart is broken. His resolve is wearing thin. Maybe he should let Alice get on with her life, and he with his. No, he can’t let his despair stop him from trying to save their marriage. Love abides, he believes, or it isn’t love. He calls Alice and leaves a message on her machine. Please, he says, let’s try marriage counseling. You owe us that. He wonders if she’s listening to him as he speaks. He wonders if she’s alone.
In Hope’s closet Grady finds a pile of Moleskine notebooks on the floor beneath a tangle of blouses. He carries them to the bed and sits. Forty-two notebooks, most with one or two entries. Grady imagines that each notebook must have symbolized the beginning of a new life for Hope. Always starting something; always moving on. But each of her aborted attempts at redemption only emphasized how hard it is to leave the sickening past behind. The single entry in one notebook read: Before you kick me out of the house, please talk to me like I’m a human being who does in fact have feelings for you. Stealing is shitty. Lying is a strategy. If you don’t want to talk to me then my life might as well be over. Buried in the middle of an otherwise blank notebook, this: Irregardless (a prose poem) 30 mg is usually enough.
When Grady decides to put the gold necklace away, he finds the tarnished milagro of a praying woman and the unopened tin of sacred dirt in Hope’s jewelry drawer. He mixes the dirt from her grave into the Chimayo dirt, buries the milagro in the dirt, and hides the tin on the bookshelf downstairs behind Teaching High School Science Through Inquiry and Argumentation.
At marriage counseling, Grady makes it clear he’s here to save the marriage. But when Dr. Strout asks Alice what she wants, Alice says she wants a divorce, a new life. She tells Grady she loves him but can no longer live with him. We need each other, he says. We suffered together and we’ll heal together. Alice closes her eyes and weeps. When Grady holds her, she shrugs him off. Dr. Strout tells Alice to stay there, to feel the anger, the rage, the pain, the injustice. Alice tells her to please be quiet, please. Everyone in this office is helpless. Everything is broken. The session is a disaster that leaves Grady bereft. But then, before the session ends, Alice agrees to come back home. We’ll see how it goes, she says. Dr. Strout does not ask why. Grady is victorious but knows the struggle to save the marriage has just begun.
Alice sits on the sofa reading by lamplight, but she’s been on the same page for an hour. When Grady looks at her in the light, he sees a halo around her head (his glaucoma). St. Alice, he thinks. When he notices that the baby photo’s not on the coffee table, he realizes Alice is holding the photo behind the book, punishing herself with the image of her loss. In that moment Grady understands that time will heal some wounds, and he’ll eventually get over the loss of Alice, but he also understands that in one case time will make no difference, and he will never recover from the shattering loss of his child. Coaxing Alice home has shown Grady the futility of their decision to live together, to continue their mutual journey, mired as they are in the muck of the past.
John Dufresne has written two story collections and six novels, including Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He’s also written four books on writing, two plays, Liv & Di and Trailerville and has co-written two feature films. His stories have twice been named Best American Mystery Stories. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and teaches creative writing at FIU in Miami. He is a co-editor of Flash Fiction America.