Returning Heroine

All great quests begin and end in the same place, the heroine’s hometown. The heroine is compelled to take on a task that is larger than life. She reluctantly leaves and embarks on an epic journey full of thrills, dangers, ups, and downs. She then returns once more to the warm embrace of home and her loved ones, completing her adventure. The heroine recounts her tales and can live the rest of her days happily in the halls of her beloved home, in the company of those whom she loves.

Tess tried to remember that as she rode the bus across the country. Returning home is not something she had planned on doing. She had never thought of herself as a heroine before and certainly did not feel like one today seated in the cheapest seat on the cheapest bus she could find. The bus loped along the highway through mile after mile of interstate and mile after mile of cornfields passed by the windows. Tess  was heading home for the first time in 10 years. She had not had an especially nice childhood and so home  was not a place she held particularly dear in her heart. Her parents divorced when she was six. Her mother had left her and her father. She had run off to New York to get, as she had told her daughter, “my big break”. Mom had aspired to be a Broadway actor. She felt she had the talent and skills to make it big. Tess was too young at the time to realize that her mother had no chance. To six year old Tess her mother was a gifted and talented actress. She had even seen her on stage! Tess’s mother worked with the local theater and had had a few supporting roles, though none were that well received. 

Tess’s father had tried to  be supportive of his wife but, when money got tight after he was laid off, he could not abide supporting her dreams any longer. “You just have to get a paying job! We can’t afford to live like this anymore!” Tess had heard the shouts at night in her bed. She was supposed to be asleep. Her parents always tried to wait to have their hard conversations when Tess was asleep. They didn’ realize that she could hear them. They didn’t realize how loud they could get. Tess had made the mistake once and only once of sneaking down the stairs to see what was wrong. The sight of her mother and father, their faces full of anger and tears, was too much to bear. So Tess would hug her stuffed animals and try to block out the sounds but it didn’t always work.

After her mother left it was just her and father. He was a good father but not a great father. Mostly he worked. After he lost his  job at the mill, something many of her friend’s fathers had  experienced when the mill closed, her father was forced to take on whatever work he could. It would have been easier on him and Tess had her mother stayed and worked. Two incomes split between two parents would’ve been preferable to two jobs for one parent. Tess had spent a lot of time at before and after school programs. She spent a lot of time by herself. Her father simply did not have the money or time to invest in after school activities. While her friends went off to soccer, gymnastics, cheerleading, field hocking, drama, public speaking, and  whatever else their parents could think of, Tess would head to after school care at the Y and then home with her father who was usually so dog tired he would fall asleep almost immediately after coming home, his feet up on the coffee table, something Tess’s mother never let him do. 

Tess got her  first  job  when she was fifteen. She worked at the ice cream shop between her house and school. She was finally making some money of her own. She had tried, at first, to offer her father the money. She wanted him not to be so tired. She wanted to help put food on the table and roof over their heads. Her father refused. She was hurt by this. She could not understand why he would refuse the money. Why he would refuse to let her help him. He explained that she had been denied so much in her life already because he was always tired and never had enough money that she deserved to keep that money for herself. That she was going to earn the fun he never could. Tess didn’t want any of that. She didn’t want fun. She wanted her father. And that was something he never understood and she could never explain. If she told him what she really wanted he would feel sad and guilty for having not been around. The truth would only bring heartache.  She used some of her  money for clothes and to go to the movies with her few friends but for the most part she saved for a life away from her small town and away from the heartache of her empty home.

Much of Tess’s childhood had been spent inside books. The library was free and full of adventure. Even her father, who rarely was home, loved to read when he could. Tess’s best memories of her father were of him reading to her. It didn’t happen as often as she would have liked and, she suspected, he felt the same way. But on the nights when he could read to her they were both the happiest they could be. Even as a teenager her father would read to her when he could. His favorites were the classic tales of adventure - Robin Hood, The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer.  He read these tales over and over to her. Tess knew them in their entirety, just like her father. When she turned 19 and had graduated high school Tess decided  that she would like to become a writer. She would write  the next  great adventure. She would write something that a lonely girl and her father could read together.

She had bought a car from her neighbor, a 20 year old foreign compact. It burned almost as much oil as gasoline and the inside smelt of mildew and old cigarettes. Tess didn’t mind. With some hard work and time she was able  to make it look, well, if not new, certainly less abused. There was nothing she could do about the oil leaks except listen to her father and keep a few quarts in the trunk and check the level regularly. He watched her practice and would nod approvingly when she correctly found it low and added just enough oil to top off the engine. She took that car across the country leaving her father and her home behind. She took that care to California and to her dreams.

Five years later and Tennessee was no closer to being a writer than she was before she had left. She had abandoned her childhood nickname  and began using her given name, Tennessee, hoping that an agent  or publisher would draw a parallel (even an unconscious one) between her and the great writer of the same name. So far it had not worked. She had had a very rough start, five years ago, when she came to the coast. The money she had saved did not go nearly as far as she had hoped. At home an apartment, utilities, food, all would have been paid for out of her reserves for a  few months. Here she had found it would barely last a month. She lived in her car, showered at the Y, and found that work, any work, was hard to come by. 

In her sixth year away from home she first got published. It made her no money and was not in a particularly popular magazine. But she did get published and that’s what counted. She was still stocking shelves at the grocery and cleaning out offices on the weekend. But she could say she was published. She could finally call herself a writer. In her seventh year she got paid. It wasn’t much but she could cut back to one  job for  a while. She could write even more. She continued to see  marginal success that seventh year. Just enough to keep her dream alive. And then nothing. She kept writing for a while but had lost her spark. She lost that excitement that  had kept her dream alive. Tennessee became depressed. She was tired. Tired of working two jobs. Tired of living with roommates she didn’t particularly like. 

She  hadn’t planned on going home. Even with her depression she had imagined staying in California. She had hoped to find better work. She had hoped to find someone to love. In short, she hoped to start fresh. She hoped to abandon her dream and find  a new one. Fate, unfortunately, can be fickle. She received the call that brought her home not long after she had decided she wasn’t a writer  anymore. It was her father. They hadn’t spoken in a few years. They had talked a lot when she first moved but, over time, they had less and less to say. The calls became shorter and less frequent until one day they just stopped. When her dad called he  didn’t sound like the father she knew. He sounded small and frail. He didn’t have much longer to live, he explained. The cancer was in his lungs and his liver and his blood. The smoking hadn’t helped but the doctors, he explained, were treating lots of men his age for this cancer. They think it was from the mill. The mill. The place that had ruined Tennessee’s childhood by closing was now ruining her life a second time by taking her father from her. 

There hadn’t been anything her father had wanted except maybe to say goodbye. He never even asked to see her again. This had made her mad. Mad like she had been when she was a teenager and he wouldn’t accept her help. He wouldn’t ask for or even accept what he really needed and what he really wanted. Tennessee made a choice that night after speaking with her father. She chose to return home and support her father through the end of his life, however long that may be. She chose to do what a teenage Tennessee couldn’t do, ignore her father and do what was best for him even if he didn’t want it.

She had packed a few belongings, sold what she could, and discarded the rest. She  had long  ago abandoned  her car in favor of public transportation. She bought the cheapest bus ticket on the cheapest bus line she could find and headed for the station. As the bus  rumbled out of the  city she  had  made another choice, to abandon the name Tennessee and resume her identity as Tess, a girl from a small town. It wasn’t the rebirth she  had envisioned. It wasn’t the new dream she had wanted. And despite her trepidation about returning home she had found that becoming Tess once  again was freeing. She was leaving behind the life that no longer served her.

The bus stopped by the football stadium, home to the local high school team. It had the largest parking lot in town and was the  natural choice for the bus to unload its few passengers. The few people disembarking besides Tess were being welcomed by friends and family. There were tears and hugs. There was laughter. But for Tess there was no one and nothing but the cool fall air, the lengthening shadows signaling  sunset, and the long, empty road that led home. She pulled all her worldly possession behind her in one large suitcase and on her back in one large pack. She took her time as the light faded, walking the streets that felt at once familiar and foreign, like the memories of a vivid dream. She walked past the ice cream shop where she  used to work, where her dreams of writing had been born. It was closed for the season and looked no different than it had ten years ago when she had last seen it. She walked down streets full of children playing and laughing. Children being called to home as the street lights flicked on. She turned onto the street where she had grown up and walked to the home she had wanted to leave forever.

The  house was mostly dark, save for the light spilling into the side yard from the kitchen window and the flashing blue light of the television. She rang the bell as a stranger would. An uninvited guest to her own home. She heard coughing and wheezing and the shuffling gait of an old man coming to the door. Her father stood before her as the door swung open. A shadow of his former self. The once strong and handsome man she had known as her father was bald from the chemotherapy. His skin was thin and hung loosely from his bones. His eyes were sunken in his skull, their once  brilliant green now a pale gray. Oxygen tubing hung round his ears and was stuffed into his nostrils. His lips were pale and cracked. His chest heaved from the  effort of walking to the door. 

Tears welled up in Tess’s eyes. Her nose began to run and her face felt hot. She could not believe this was her father. She could not believe she had not been here for her. She could not believe he had not told her sooner. She was angry and sad. In a cracking voice she called out to her father as she stepped across the threshold and  grabbed him in a hug. His voice, raspy and dry, coughed out her  name. He would have cried had he been able to still produce tears. 

Tess took her old room. It was covered thickly with dust and untouched since the day 

she had left. She cooked for her father, though he barely ate. She read to him from the same well worn copies of the books he had loved to read to her. She sat with him while he napped in his chair. She sat him as the hospice nurses gave him medicine to dull his pain and ease  his breathing. She sat with her father as he died, his last breath used to say he loved her. 

Her homecoming had  been less triumphant than those she had imagined on her bus ride  across the country. She had no stories of conquest to tell and no one to tell them to. She had not made plans past her father. She had not considered what would happen once he was gone. With time, however, she found the new life she had been hoping for. It was not glamorous and it was not in some far away land. But it was good  and full. She found a job. She found love. She raised a family in a home full of laughter and joy. She grew old with her partner. She was the loving and present parent she never had. She was Tess, heroine of her story.