A Name by Whitney Justesen

A Name

By: Whitney Justesen

She wasn’t the kind to leave without saying goodbye.

She had written a note with her cherry red lipstick across a napkin, which she tucked beneath a cookie jar adjacent to the powder blue telephone. I’m sorry, John, it said, in bold cursive letters. I’m sorry I couldn’t make you happy. Goodbye, Audra.

She slipped her trembling hands into her white lace gloves and stared around the kitchen one last time, breathing in the familiar scent of cleaning solution and rust. Tears rose in her eyes, but she swallowed them back again, for now was not the time for weakness. Weak: that was the word that had described the condition of her heart for months now, the word that had come to define her very being.

Everything was ready for her to be gone, but as she stood gaping at the hushed room, she did not know if she was truly ready to leave. This had been her home for the last six years, after all. This was the place where she had spent some of her happiest moments, before tragedy and sadness had come to inhabit these walls. Everything was still and quiet, perfect in its arrangement—not one item of furniture was out of place. It was almost a mockery of the broken, endlessly flawed life they lived those days.

She looked behind her again at the note, which fluttered with the breeze from the open window. She couldn’t have it blow away; that would ruin everything. She slowly tread across the creaky wooden floorboards and tucked the note under the cookie jar just a touch further. Now all that could be seen at first glance was her name. Goodbye, Audra.

 She was named after her mother. It was the same name she gave to her baby girl, who lived only six weeks before they buried her in a miniature casket in the backyard. The doctor called it whooping cough; it was the only name he could put to the hacking lung convulsions their daughter had suffered for days before her cries went silent and her skin went pale.

Audra Louise Galloway had been born a beautiful infant, with feather-soft blonde hair and warm, rosy cheeks. She was so vibrant and full of life, in spite of how small and fragile she was from the beginning. She had her mother’s eyes, of course, and the tiniest feet her proud parents had ever seen. She was enchanting in every way, a first child for both her mother and father, the product of a whirlwind romance and an ensuing compulsory marriage. Even the illegitimate nature of the child’s birth could not make her any less perfect in her parent’s eyes, and they loved her with reckless ardor.

But now, her cries haunted the rooms of the small home in Birmingham, Alabama. Her little coughs echoed through the walls, reminding them always of the short, cruel illness that ended her brief life. The child’s death was difficult for them both to bear, and John turned to the bottle to drown his heartache. She would hardly see him for days on end, and some mornings he would stumble in with a bruise on his cheek and gunpowder in his hair. He’d lay in bed, comatose for hours. She didn’t have the heart to tell him to just stop this, you’re acting like a child. There is nothing we can do to change what happened and we’ve got to move on. She didn’t even know if she wanted to listen to her own advice.

He blamed his wife when he wasn’t blaming God. He stopped going to church altogether, and that left her to explain to the pretty sympathetic faces of the crinoline-garbed ladies that my husband is simply feeling ill, and he will be returning soon. When? She didn’t know. She prayed for his soul more than her own these days.

It looked bad in their community for a young woman to have a drunken husband and no children, so she stopped going to tea with the other women to avoid the embarrassment. She couldn’t bear the feigned looks of compassion, the contrived words of comfort, while all the time those women looked down their noses at the sad, pretty girl from Santa Fe with a scandalous past. She wouldn’t have been a good mother anyway, was the judgment she read in their lash-lined, powder-dusted eyes.

Years passed and hardly anything had changed around their home. She grew quieter and he grew more sober, and they rarely spoke to each other across the long dining room table. Soon she wondered if he loved her anymore, and she began to think she never loved him at all, even from the beginning. After all, she was only seventeen when they met, and in a year they were married with a baby on the way. Maybe love had never been a part of it. Maybe they were both just young and stupid and didn’t want to take the time to really think things through. Maybe their daughter’s death was the only thing that could have made them realize it.

Soon she realized she could not be happy like this. He deserved someone who could make him smile and give him healthy babies, and she deserved someone who could protect and love her. They were just two starkly different people, and life wasn’t going to go easy on them. Not like this. Perhaps they were better off apart.

And so, she decided to go. Perhaps back to New Mexico, where she had once spent sultry Indian summers in the great organic desert of the south. She had lived on a ranch and her horses were everything to her. She had named them all after herself as a child, for they were one; they were free and so was she. They loved her and they needed her, and she cared for them with all the compassion in her heart. She would spend days riding bareback in the summer heat, conscious of the sweat on her tanned skin and the freedom in her spirit. It all changed when a sweet southern boy came to their town and wrote songs about her and told her she was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. Before she knew it she had been whisked away to a far away place, a place she would never really learn to call home. A place where she would cut and curl her hair, squeeze into satin dresses, and spend enough time indoors for her skin to lose its warm brown tint.

She decided that she was going back there, to New Mexico. She had planned for months and everything was going to go according to plan. She would find the ranch again and spend her days alone with her horses, and she would be happy. After all, she had never said goodbye to them, and she was sure they missed her. There she could be a mother to the majestic creatures she loved so dearly, for God wouldn’t take them away from her so cruelly; no, not this time. There she would stay until the end of her years, and oh, she would be happy.

Audra glanced up at the clock on the wall one last time before lifting her bags from the floor. It was 3 o’clock and John would not be home for two more hours. That would give her plenty of time to take a cab far past the outskirts of town, and she would be gone like a candle extinguished by a cool breeze. Certainly he would reconcile her departure in due time; to her mind, he probably would not miss her at all. But she would miss him. Sometimes in the quiet chill of the night, she would miss him.

She wasn’t the kind to leave without saying goodbye. But her cursive name written in cherry red lipstick was all the farewell anyone would ever need