The Best of Friends Page 23

  As twilight surrendered to dusk, then slipped into a brilliant Australian evening, Sandy and I contemplated the stark beauty of the Southern Cross, the clarity of all those stars winking and twinkling. Our voices stilled against the emptiness. I thought of the New York skyline I loved, its jagged neon outline obscuring any celestial view. There was a tranquillity here I craved. And suddenly I understood how Ginger had left home for a country and a way of life, rather than a person. Away from the noise and chaos of a big city and a busy life, it almost seemed possible to feel the pull that guides a compass. Thousands of miles from home and in the southern hemisphere, I realized I might finally be figuring out where true north really was.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, lying side by side in our tent, Sandy and I exchanged confidences.

  “So you’re in the same spot?”

  “We’re trying to figure things out, too. But at least we’re in the same city—not to mention the same continent.”

  “Do you think you’ll work it out, Sandy?”

  “I think so. How about you and Andrew?”

  “I wish I knew. We were broken up. He’d had another girlfriend, I’d had another boyfriend. But when he came to New York a few months ago, he dropped by for lunch and stayed for a week.”

  Sandy gave a wicked giggle I’d only gotten to know on this trip.

  “So you guys are great together except for the fact that you’re never together.”

  “Exactly. The situation is impossible, and somebody’s got to do something because I’m too old to waste any more time on this.”

  “Then it’s good that you’re getting together. You can see if it will work or not.”

  “We’ll see. Thank goodness we have another story to do first.”

  INTERVIEWING DEB CHEETHAM felt like talking to one of my friends back home. She was attractive, smart, and single, a teacher and opera singer who’d grown up in a middle-class Sydney suburb. Early on Deb’s parents had told her they’d adopted her from an orphanage when she was three weeks old.

  “They’d told me I’d been abandoned. And that I’d been found by a Salvation Army officer. In a cardboard box in a field,” Deb explained as we stood in the front yard of the rambling house which had once been the orphanage. She looked down, kicked a clod of dirt. “That kind of means I was left to die, doesn’t it?”

  But Deb wasn’t finished. She was telling me about how, a few years before, she’d given a concert that had changed her life. “I looked out into the audience one night. And I saw a woman who was the spitting image of me.”

  It turned out the woman was Deb’s cousin, and they were both Aborigines. While the first white convicts came to what was then an English penal colony in the late 1700s, the Aborigines are the original people of Australia and have lived on the continent for forty-five thousand years. The cousin took Deb to her birth mother, who gave a dramatically different story of Deb’s adoption. Monika Little explained that she’d been an eighteen-year-old mother, abandoned by her husband, when a woman at the orphanage offered to care for her newborn while Monika earned money for essentials. A heavyset woman with a face that had mourned a thousand sorrows, Deb’s birth mother could barely speak as she told us what happened when she returned just a few weeks later. “I had clothing for her. And a brand-new pram. I was so happy. I turned up to get my baby and she was gone.”

  “Shh, shh,” Deb crooned, stroking her mother’s hair as the tears rolled down Monika’s face.

  As we discovered, Deb was just one of an estimated 100,000 children who’d been taken between 1900 and 1969—some torn from their mothers’ arms, some spirited off from school—in a comprehensive and, for many, devastating attempt to assimilate the indigenous population. In the view of the patrician white government and church leaders of the time, it was in the best interest of the children to be removed from what was officially considered a doomed culture, and instead placed in orphanages or adopted by white families.

  But of course the Aborigines hadn’t vanished, and recently the policy had been widely criticized as a human rights violation. Meanwhile the now-grown men and women—dubbed the “Stolen Generation”—were left to sort out a complicated past as best they could. I couldn’t help but ponder how in this magnificent country, past injustice had sown seeds of modern woes, just as was true in America.

  “What did you lose by having this happen to you?” I asked Deb.

  “My identity. I was given another one, it just didn’t fit. You ever walked around in shoes that were too small for you? That’s what I did for twenty-nine years.”

  Deb knew she’d received significant material advantages by virtue of being adopted. Her mother flinched but Deb did not when I asked, “What do you make of those people that say we were just trying to do the right thing?”

  “You can say we were just trying to do the right thing but you must finish the sentence,” Deb replied with great passion. “We were just trying to do the right thing but we were wrong.”

  And then, in the dusty yard outside that house of shadows, Deb threw her arms around her mother and they rocked back and forth, locked in a fierce, desperate embrace—an embrace to make up for all the months, all the years they hadn’t had, to hold fast to a love lost, then found.

  I turned away, overwhelmed. To have a second chance. A second chance at life, at love. The chance to say everything you felt. If you dared. To show who you were, how you’d changed. If you were brave enough. But sometimes reinvention takes two. My toes were curling in their boots again. I had to be bold enough to tell Andrew how I felt, all that I hoped for, regardless of my fears.

  The thought of our upcoming reunion sent a bizarre electrical current coursing through me, a reckless giddiness, short-circuited by trepidation. What I’d just witnessed was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to be embraced just like that. I wanted to be held by someone who would never, ever let me go.

  INSTEAD WE SAT side by side in the car, silent. We’d just spent a week together, and after a quick visit with his folks had lolly-gagged our way along the Great Ocean Road, giving a cursory nod to the stone obelisks just off the southern coast known as the Twelve Apostles, before zeroing in on each other. We’d gotten sunburns, eaten Thai so hot we sweated, discovered time hadn’t diminished our mutual attraction, and each said the three words which acknowledged our passion had proved enduring. But “I love you” wasn’t enough anymore, and so far Andrew had managed to evade any remotely serious conversation. Now we were driving northeast from Melbourne to Canberra, where I’d meet Andrew’s colleagues and enjoy a few more days of fun before I flew home.

  But I was sick to death of fun. All I wanted were answers.

  I took a deep breath and plunged in. “So, Andrew, what do you think? Are you willing to move to the U.S.?”

  He paused a long time, eyes on the dead-straight road ahead, considering. “No.”

  I took a deep breath. There it was. An answer, but not the answer I wanted. I felt the stomach punch of unexpected disappointment, but it was surprisingly brief. Because I also felt like my hair would burst into flames, I was so white hot with anger. This had been our second chance, a chance I’d been willing to take. But there wouldn’t be another. “I understand,” I said, controlling my voice with the greatest effort. “Then please take me to the airport. This instant.”

  “Calm down; keep your shirt on,” Andrew replied, reaching out for my arm while keeping his gaze on the road.

  I yanked my arm away. “You’d better drive to Sydney, now. I’m catching the next plane to New York.”

  “Listen, Sara, don’t be rash—”

  I shook my head, my mouth a tight line, fed up. “Andrew, we can’t continue to see each other every few months. It’s not enough. I’ve had it.” He looked over, and in that instant his expression told me he knew I was serious.

  There was another long pause. Then, as if he’d changed his mind about something as trivial as whether to have sugar in his tea, Andrew said, “All right, yes.”

  �
��What?!” If possible I was even angrier now, because it seemed he was toying with me.

  “Yes! I said yes,” Andrew repeated. Even more infuriating, he was smiling.

  But I was suffering whiplash and was unwilling to accept his new answer, even though it was the one I’d wanted all along. “Andrew, I’m not trying to force you. I do not want to hear later how you’re miserable and you’ve ruined your life by following me. If you come, this is your choice. No recriminations.”

  “Listen, Sara, I love it here,” Andrew explained with annoying self-control. “My family’s here, I’ve got a great job, I love the place. It’s a lot to leave.”

  I took a deep breath. I thought of Ginger, raising a child in Africa. I thought of how I already felt bewitched by this ancient, beautiful country. I thought of how a career I adored meant little if I lost the man I adored even more. I weakened. “Andrew, I love it here, too, and if you want me to move—”

  “Look, as we’ve discussed, it’s easier for me to move to the States. I can get work as a journo there—I’ve already done it once—and it’s going to be harder for you to get established in Australia with your funny accent…” The grin got bigger, and he patted my hand. “But if we do wind up getting married, down the road I want to come home to Australia.”

  I felt breathless and shaky, reeling from a conversation in which dreams had been shattered only to be resurrected. Slowly, I nodded.

  “And there’s one more thing.”

  It figured. Just when we’d nearly signed the deal. “Which is?”

  “Where do you want to be buried?”

  This time I was stumped. What did death have to do with it? With us?

  “I have to say, I haven’t given it a lot of thought. I don’t really care.”

  “Good.” His relief was obvious.

  “May I ask why?”

  “Because I want to be buried in the Muckleford Cemetery. My ancestors are there. It’s my family’s land. I already have a couple of burial plots there. I know it may sound dumb, but I have an Aboriginal-style attachment to that land. It’s where I’d have to be. And I’d want my wife buried with me.”

  My guy. My lighthearted, funny guy. My guy who looked handsome in a suit, who was successful and connected. But down deep my guy was first, last, and always the son of a farmer—the son of eight generations of farmers, all of whom had raised their families within a stone’s throw of the Muckleford Creek. I thought of the cemetery only a field away from his parents’ farm. I thought of Muckleford with its tawny fields, the occasional roo helping himself to hay in the back paddock, of the musical sawing of the magpies, of the shrieks of the galahs and cockatoos as they showed off their stunning plumage. I thought of dirt, of that antipodean earth, old bones decomposing in an old land. I thought of spending eternity in Australia rather than Virginia or New York and realized that was okay with me. I wasn’t from one place, after all, but several. I thought of being with someone and his whole family forever and ever. That was okay, too.

  Joy seeped slowly through me, tentative but undeniable, a tapped spring allowed to flow at last. We’d have to figure out the rest at another time, in another country. But we’d taken the first clear steps, and I almost felt like singing. “I can’t think of a better place to be buried.”

  Apparently that cheery postscript to our complicated conversation had sealed the deal, and Andrew wasted no time. By the time I was New York bound, he’d met with his understanding editor in chief, Peter Blunden, and worked out the details. Andrew would quit his job, even though his career was on the rise, to come to the Big Apple and the uncertain world of freelance. He’d have his place, I’d have mine. No promises. No guarantees. But I was elated. I knew we were taking a chance, but I think part of me had known all along that Mr. Right Now was really Mr. Right.

  23

  GINGER (1997–1998)

  WELCOME HOME!™ I yelled, flinging open the door to Sara’s apartment and embracing her.

  “Oh my God, Gin, you’re fat.” She laughed, pushing me back to arm’s length. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you fat.”

  “I’m nearly five months pregnant! I have a right to be fat! Now come in and tell me everything!”

  I’d been in New York working on the edit of the Bushmen film, staying in Sara’s apartment with no Sara, counting the days until she returned from Australia. Finally she was back and my home away from home felt complete. She dropped her bags in the middle of the Oriental rug and sprawled beside them. As spent as she was after the twenty-four-hour journey from the other side of the world, Sara beamed.

  “So how was it?”

  “The stories were interesting.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Right.”

  “Steve Irwin may be crazy, but he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Yeah, okay, I’m waiting.”

  “And the ‘Stolen Generation’ story I told you about is utterly heartbreaking.”

  “Sara, don’t you always caution me not to ‘bury the lead’? Tell me about the stories later, first I’ve got to know what’s going on with you and Andrew.”

  She rolled over, rested her head in her hands, and smiled a weary, giddy smile.

  “Nothing much. Except—he’s moving to New York!”

  This was what the past two years had been leading up to. Two years of dancing around each other, then moving cautiously together, hand to hand, cheek to cheek, before letting the force and fear of their feelings propel them apart. Sara and Andrew were going to try again. This time it would be different. No more mention of the age gap, the continental divide, the cultural differences. Those issues that had kept them apart had been dealt with either over the phone or in the quiet of their own hearts, or had been pushed aside as if ultimately unimportant. And this time they’d be in the same city, where they would confront the not-so-simple question of whether they could make their relationship work, day to day, week to week, year to year, approaching the “till death do us part” part.

  “One of his friends told him I’m a ‘good catch,’” she laughed. “I guess he believed him.” A roller coaster of emotions, fueled by jet lag, took her plunging back to earth. “He’s giving up a lot to be with me. Stepping off the fast track at work, leaving his family, his country, and moving to New York. Andrew’s not exactly a fan of big cities.”

  Then she gave a smile that told me the ride was going up again.

  “If it all works out, later we’ll move to Australia.”

  Said so confidently, so innocently, that I nearly choked. I couldn’t say a word. Like a record scratched and skipping, a painful refrain played over and over again in my mind: You’ve made a pact with the devil, you’ve made a pact with the devil.

  We’ll move to Australia, the refrain echoed again. For a week, a year, two years, a lifetime? I thought about the eighteen hours I’d spent crying on the plane when I’d returned from Africa to say good-bye to my grandfather. I didn’t get to hug him, to feel the scratch from his unshaven face on my cheek, to smell the richness of earth on his clothes. I had arrived in time to meet my mother dressed in black and join the crowd of mourners at the church, to say good-bye to a body in a box. I thought about my godson Trent, the Little League games and church choir performances I’d never been to, and about his sweet little sister, Elisa, children I loved but barely knew. And there was my beautiful niece, Maggie, crawling, growing, walking, and I’d seen it all in pictures. Returning home every year or two, changes that are imperceptible on a daily basis resonate. More gray hairs. Laugh lines etched deeper. Slower down the steps. Having to “speak up.” Age taking its toll on all of us. The only person who never changed was Tish. Her medications might vary, she might have a new counselor or a new roommate, but her illness kept her trapped in the life of a needy child. What would become of her, of my parents, of Marsha, of Dona and her family? And where would I be? Had I consciously run toward a new life or run away from the old, escaping my share of responsibility, choosing the role of distant sister, daughte
r, aunt, rarely home to help, to play a more meaningful part?

  Was love worth this cost? Did love plus adventure—a two-for-one bargain—make it somehow more palatable? When I’d married Nad, I’d said yes to him, his life, and his world. Now our baby would be born in Africa, which meant he’d feel his strongest connection to the earth on a continent that wasn’t my own. With our families thousands of miles away, our child would grow up without the protective envelope of an extended family. Who would cheer and clap their hands when our baby took those first memorable steps? Who would hold her when she fell? Whose history would my child absorb that would help define the person he or she would become? As much as I’d made peace with my decision, I also knew that home, a real home, meant having roots and vines which twisted and trailed through generations, drawing you back, and half my child’s birthright would be far, far away.

  “Gin, I said, aren’t you happy for me?” Sara held my hand, a worried look on her face.

  How could I presume to decide Sara’s fate? She was my best friend, not an appendage. Just because I suffered from the feeling of estrangement, even when I was happiest, didn’t mean she would, too. These were my fears. She knew them all, had heard them too many times. To hell with continents and cultures, to sisters becoming mothers and parents growing old; sometimes love is all you need. I didn’t believe it, of course, but this time it was Sara’s choice, her chance to grab happiness and spin it into life. I wouldn’t ruin it.

  “Yes, of course I’m happy for you. Now get some sleep and we’ll talk later.”

  She patted my belly and said good night.

  The next morning I slipped out while Sara slept. Underground, waiting for the N/R train to Times Square, I started to feel dizzy. When the doors of the subway opened, I was caught in the crush of people getting off, pushing me so far back into the masses that when I finally boarded the subway and searched for a vacant seat, I was met by stares, people looking up at me and without expression looking back down at their newspapers. Maybe they also thought I was just fat.