Here on Earth

When Hollis came in to announce he had quit all his jobs, he felt he had never before been free. He had worked off his debt to Alan with the help of a gelding named Sandpaper who had run a race with twenty-five-to-one odds at the Olympia track, and who had amazed all bettors, including Hollis, by managing to win. Now, he could walk away, clean and clear, ready to start over. It was the most important day in Hollis’s life: the moment he’d been working toward ever since Henry Murray had died, but March didn’t realize this. Lately, Hollis had been working so much she’d gotten used to missing him; she’d begun to look elsewhere for companionship. She was going next door to the Coopers’ for dinner; she’d become friendly with the daughter, pale red-haired Belinda, and was thinking about nothing more than what she might wear that evening. Her blue dress came to mind, and so she didn’t have room to pay as much attention to Hollis as she might have.

“Would you rather be there with them or here with me?” Hollis demanded to know.

His question had taken her by surprise as she was choosing a pair of earrings from her jewelry case, and she answered too slowly—she must have, because he grabbed her, something he’d never done before.

“Stop it,” she said to him. He’d always been jealous of her friendship with the Coopers, but she’d never paid much attention, until now. He was twisting her wrist; as soon as she shook free, she backed away. “Leave me alone,” she said.

March had never spoken to him this way, and her irritation came as a shock to both of them. It was just that he wanted so much from her; she never had a minute to think.

“Are you making a choice?” Hollis said to her then.

“No,” March had spat back, not considering how easily hurt he could be. “You are.”

It is always a mistake to tell someone, Don’t you dare walk out that door, and a far worse mistake to actually cross the threshold and walk out on someone you love. Ever since that day, March has wondered what she could have done differently: Stayed home from the Coopers’? Thrown her arms around him? Admitted that all day long she’d been planning her future with him? Halfway through dinner, she sensed how wrong she’d been; she left and ran all the way home, but it was already too late.

After he’d gone, she waited upstairs at her window, day after day, week after week. There were no letters, not even a postcard, and by the time March graduated from high school, she no longer bothered to walk down the drive to check the mailbox. Still, each spring the doves who nested in the chestnut tree in the yard returned, and March took that as a sign of Hollis’s loyalty and his love. The girls she’d gone to school with went off to college, or took jobs in the village, or married boys they loved, but March stayed by her window, and before she knew it the pane of glass had become her universe, the empty road her fate.

After three years, she no longer recognized herself when she looked in the mirror. She wasn’t certain how it had happened, but she no longer seemed young. At last, on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, March Murray did not go to her window. She never found out whether or not the doves returned that year to nest in the chestnut tree. She didn’t hear the peepers call that spring or smell the mint which grew beside the door. Instead, she packed her suitcase and waited while Mrs. Dale called for a taxi to take her to the airport. Alan had lent March the money for a round-trip ticket to California, but while she was waiting to board, March went into the rest room and tore the return section of the ticket into pieces, then tossed it into the trash.

March had spent a lifetime up in her bedroom, waiting for Hollis, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong. She’s spent another lifetime since as a wife and a mother; she is a completely different person now. Here she is, making up the beds in this cold, empty house on Fox Hill where she hasn’t been for so long. Her hands are quick as she pulls the clean bed linen over the mattress. It was a young girl who came to this bed, one who cried easily and counted stars instead of sheep on nights when she couldn’t sleep. March doesn’t cry now; she’s far too busy for anything like that. Still, there are mornings when she wakes with tears in her eyes. That’s when she knows she’s been dreaming about him. And although she never remembers her dreams, there’s always the scent of grass on her pillow, as if the past were something that could come back to you, if you only wished hard enough, if you were brave enough to call out his name.

3

Every evening at this time, Hollis checks the perimeters of his property. He can do it on foot or in his truck, he can do it blindfolded, if need be. Like any poor relation, he knows precisely what belongs to him. Even those blueberries are his, although it gives him some deep, bitter pleasure to watch the squirrels and raccoons enjoy the fruit. They can eat their fill, as far as Hollis is concerned, without ever once having to beg, as he used to each and every day.