Carla Neggers - Tempting Fate

Just before dawn, her last peach safely in the freezer, Dani gave up on trying to sleep. She kept seeing her mother waving to her from the basket of Mattie’s hot-air balloon and feeling herself catapulting across her own bedroom, feeling the terror of not knowing who’d pushed her, who’d burglarized her house.

And she kept seeing Zeke’s dark eyes and thinking about what great shoulders and thighs he had. He was the kind of man who could make a woman melt.

Could make her melt.

She’d tried listening to the tree toads. Sometimes yoga helped, or a hot bath, or hot milk. But she knew nothing would work tonight. She threw on a sweatshirt and jeans and headed outside with a simple multicolored flat kite made of nonconductive plastic, slipping quietly into her meadow. The sounds and smells of the night and the cool, damp grass on her bare feet, between her toes, eased her tension.

She estimated the wind speed at five or six miles per hour. Fine for kite flying.

With the wind at her back, she tossed the kite into the air a few times, until finally she felt it pulling and let out some line. It rose above the usual ground-air turbulence, higher, higher. Then it was soaring.

She let out more line, grinning, not thinking about her mother, her loneliness, not even hearing the tree toads.

The sun peeked over the treetops in streaks of orange and red, edged with pale pink. In its center her kite was a bold dot of color.

Staring at the dawn, she suddenly could see her mother with more clarity than she’d been able to see her in years. Her generous mouth, her blue saucer eyes, her smile. She could smell her mother’s French perfume and hear her laugh, not her delicate Chandler-lady laugh, but the throaty, exuberant laugh of the woman she’d wanted to become. It was as if she were telling her daughter not to hold back, not to let anything or anyone stand in her way, but to dare to go after what she wanted.

But I have, she thought. She had the springs, the Pembroke, her friends.

She didn’t have intimacy. There was no lover in her life. Zeke should have been the last man to remind her of the absence of romance in her life, but he had. Yet her mother had had a husband and a child, and they hadn’t been enough.

Her kite continued to gain altitude, riding the wind from Dani’s fingertips.

She could hear herself now as a little girl, promising to keep her mother’s secret. She’d never tell anyone, she’d said, sincere, frightened as her mother towered over her, so beautiful, so frightened herself.

The memory was so vivid, Dani might have been back on that cold, dreary December afternoon when she’d visited her dying grandmother-her mother’s mother. Claire Chandler had withered from an elegant society matron into a skeleton wrapped in sagging yellowed skin. Yet she retained her commanding presence, receiving her only grandchild in the cavernous living room of her New York apartment. She’d had her thinning hair fixed and wore a green silk robe, embroidered in red and gold at the sleeves, the one she wore every Christmas, not just this one, her last. It was way too big for her.

Dani remembered the strength in her grandmother’s voice when she’d called her young granddaughter to her side. Christmas carols had played softly on the stereo. “The First Noel” and “Joy to the World.” A huge Christmas tree, strung with hundreds of tiny white lights, awaited decorating. Big white boxes, brought in from storage, were filled with ornaments of handblown glass, painted toy soldiers, fragile angels, silver snowflakes. Dani was permitted only to hang the wooden ornaments. She’d eyed the nativity set carefully arranged on a polished antique table. She wanted desperately to play with the beautiful Madonna and the little baby Jesus, and the sheep and the Wise Men, but even touching the English porcelain figures was forbidden. Also off-limits was the New England village set up on another table, with its steepled white church, colonial houses and old-fashioned carolers. Ordinarily Dani would have pressed her case, but her mother had asked her to be especially nice that afternoon.

Dani had dug into the pocket of her wool blazer and produced a paper snowflake. “I made it myself-it’s origami. You can hang it on your tree if you want.”

Even now, she could remember her grandmother’s trembling, bony hand as she’d taken the origami snowflake. “Thank you, dear. It’s lovely. You’re such a thoughtful child.”

The snowflake, Dani had known, would end up in one of the scrapbooks her grandmother kept, put up on a shelf to be preserved for Dani’s own children. Her parents had stuck dozens of her origami snowflakes on windows, the refrigerator, hung them on the tree. But that was their style, not Claire Chandler’s, and Dani had made the snowflake for her because she loved her, not because she wanted praise and recognition.

“And how was school today, Danielle?” her grandmother had asked, regal even in illness.

“Good. All the kids call me Dani.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because I asked them to,” Dani had said without fanfare. “Danielle’s such a prissy name.”

“Now, wherever did you get such a notion? Danielle’s a perfectly lovely name.”

“Mattie said it sounds kind of prissy-”

“Mattie? Danielle, where are your manners?” Claire had coughed, her skin going from yellow to red to white in the course of a couple of minutes. “Next you’ll be calling us all by our first names.”

“Oh, I’d never do that. It’s just that Mattie hates to be called Grandmother.”

“Well, she is one, even if she’d rather not admit it. We all get old. We all die.”

And Dani had asked her, “Are you going to die?”

Her grandmother’s sickly blue eyes had widened for a moment, then softened. “Yes, dear, I’m going to die-sooner, I’m afraid, rather than later. Please don’t be sad. I’ve led a full, wonderful life, even in the relatively few years I’ve had on this earth. I wish only that we’d had more time together.” She’d smiled gently even as Dani’s eyes brimmed with tears. “You’re a remarkable child. I should have told you that more often. I should have told my own daughters that more often. It’s not always easy…One does one’s best.”

A maid had brought a tray of hot cider and gingerbread cookies, and Claire Chandler had permitted Dani to play with the New England village, although the nativity set was still forbidden, on the grounds that playing with religious figures was improper. Claire’s only requirement had been that Dani gather up all the pieces and play with them on the carpet next to the couch, close to her grandmother.

By the time her mother arrived to pick Dani up, Claire had fallen asleep. Dani had leaned over and kissed her grandmother’s sunken cheek, something she’d never done on her own before. “Goodbye, Dani,” her grandmother had said, and she seemed to try to smile.

On the elevator down to the lobby, Dani had noticed that her mother was crying. “Did Grandmother die?”

“No-no, not yet.”

When the elevator’s polished brass doors opened, her mother had rushed out, sobbing. “I’m not going to end up like my mother, I swear I’m not.”

Left to follow, Dani had joined her mother on the street. The temperature had dropped, and the wind had picked up; a light snow was falling. Her mother had taken Dani’s hand and began walking briskly in the opposite direction of their building.

“Where are we going?” Dani had asked, the wind stinging her cheeks.

“The subway station,” her mother said tightly.

Dani had made no response. She often rode the subway with Mattie, who would spout off about the virtues of public transportation and conserving the world’s resources, but never with her mother.