She crawled toward the river through the smoke, the house and barn engulfed in flames, the apiary already gone, smoke and embers and ash everywhere.
A plane roared overhead, and then a shower of liquid hit her, washing her skin crimson, the river running red as blood, fire retardant drenching the charred landscape, smoke rising in reedy tendrils from the ruins left behind her. But it was too late. It would always be too late. Closing her eyes, she curled tight against the anguish, this new, blooming pain so raw she couldn’t breathe. What a fool she’d been to trust it could ever be different than what it’d always been.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Date: May 1, 2000
Title: In Eden
Subject: Honeysuckle Bonsai
Medium: Watercolor and graphite on cold-press
Size: 8×10
Dearest Eamon,
I sit outside in the dry heat of this desert spring, the landscape a ruddy expanse of flesh-colored stone and dirt and bluff, green studded with stunted brush and trees—wild bits of bonsai in the making. I have escaped back to Santa Fe—the place I called home after you, after Trawler. From the island to the desert. I’m nothing if not a picture of extremes.
I remember your story of the honeysuckle, your mentor gathering it in the wild from the base of Mount Fuji, drawn in by the lush fragrance of its blooms, and I think of your hands shaping, shaping, shaping it—all these years. All future growth directed by the vision of your sight. I wonder if it still looks the same now—twenty years later. If the lovers are still visible in its trunk, if we would still be able to see ourselves there. I remember it like I remember you—with a kind of clarity that hasn’t waned. If I close my eyes, it’s right there at arm’s length, next to you, next to me—a reflection of our past, a presentation of our present, a casting forward to our future.
I painted it my first day free. It’s like a rebirthing, coming into the light after being submerged for so long in the blackness. I have been able to do nothing but paint—filling one canvas after another after another, as if those months captive in the compound are spilling out in a long, wavering scream. The girls haunt my dreams. I left them there, half of them pregnant already—although that was the carefully curated plan, of course. High enough numbers that the rate of return pays off. It doesn’t matter that one suffered an early miscarriage, or that a few others are medically at a high risk for complications, or that others will die in childbirth just like Shoshanna did before them, or that many of their babies won’t make it past their first years for one tragic reason or another.
Faith got me out in the dark, taking me down to the river. I only hope she didn’t suffer the consequences. Len was sure of his power over me, sure that, given enough time, enough wearing down, I, too, would become his, bowed to his authority.
Instead, I am here, trying to find healing, find my voice, enact my own version of recompense.
I have decided to send you my original twelve paintings—the Maidens of Almost Paradise. And also this art magazine showing you what has become of “In Eden” as it heads your way, one gallery at a time. A message in a bottle. Though I will keep these letters, this journal—not that I’m unwilling to share the depths of my tangled heart with you. I’m only afraid that once I do, there will be no coming back from it. From all I’ve done. A lifetime of running from myself. A lifetime of lostness.
I have put your packet in the mail—paintings of the girls and the art-show magazine with “In Eden.” But I am afraid you won’t answer, afraid that it’s too late for me, for us—too late to ask for forgiveness, to ask for understanding, to ask, again, for your love, for a family of our definition, our own making.
I can only bare my heart here in these unsent letters, and on this cold-press paper run wet with watercolors—the color of my soul, of my longing, of my sorrow and my reclamation. The color of my love. My heart forever and always will be held here, for you, Eamon.
All my love,
Isabelle
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
AUGUST 2001
She didn’t remember anyone coming for her, or the journey to the hospital. Didn’t remember anything but a series of colors shaping an amorphous world, like fresh paint bleeding over its own edges. Nurses talking to her, asking her questions she wouldn’t answer, prodding her with cool, dry hands, quietly checking her vital signs, the room’s blinds drawn, the lights dim. She refused to speak, refused to open her eyes until they left, day and night indistinguishable, everything an undeviating routine of beeping darkness.
They told her she had a concussion, that she was being treated for smoke inhalation, exposure, that she needed to rest without light. How could she when all that came was a flashing set of nightmares—scenes from hell, a torment real enough to send her cartwheeling into the fiery dark? She had no emotion left, only a sense of deafened blindness—a woman drowning in poisonous waters. Opening her mouth to accept her fate.
They told her Nick was in the ICU with a head injury, the pilot and Ted hospitalized as well. Said it was a miracle they’d all made it through—the fire, the rest of it, too.
A boy with his arm raised, standing hand in hand with Len Dietz. Feeling like she’d been thrown from a great height and was plummeting through a black void, tumbling down through a vortex with no end in sight.
She curled herself into the cloistered dark, her vocal cords tangled into a mass she didn’t have the strength to unravel, her voice a thing so long in the past it seemed she’d never spoken—born mute and numb, without feeling or thought, and set adrift in the world, a foreign body forever without a home. Her room was rife with the same sounds and smells of the room where Eamon had died, memory bearing down—the nurses’ garbled voices, their lips moving out of sync, their eyes blinking ponderously, like puppets. Under the covers, she pressed her hands hard against the ridges of her hipbones, holding on to what was left of herself.
When they finally released her, she felt light, tippy, as if the floor were a tilt-a-whirl set into motion. When she looked at herself in the mirror, there was no recognizing the woman who stared back at her with blank, haunted eyes, the woman whose hands shook as she opened the door to leave, the woman she’d become, overtaken by grief until that was all there was. A scent in the air attached to her like a trailing.
She made her way to the ICU, hesitating a moment before walking in past the drawn curtain, Nick’s face pale against white sheets, his head bandaged, the scar on his face red and angry. Old wounds newly made. Tubes, wires, blinking machines—the shock of the past and present colliding in breathless waves that crashed over her again. White carnations perched on his bedside table, machines beeping green lines on monitors, spiking and falling, making record of this moment, each heartbeat and breath. Three chickadees on a card singing, “Get Well, Get Well,” from their open beaks.
He lay with his eyes closed, didn’t move when Silva went to his side, his face battered and bruised, as though he’d grown tired of himself and tried to finish what had been started long ago—his father’s leaving, his mother’s death, Len’s claiming of a brother lost and then found again. A life never truly his own to make.
She sat in the chair next to his bed and reached out to gently stroke the top of his hand, covered in a deep purple bruise from knuckles to wrist, as if his hand had been pressed between pieces of iron—a torture device cranked tight. What words could she say that would make any kind of difference? How she’d been too late, everything gone—what they’d worked so hard to shape. What Nick’s life might have been if he’d known, if he’d been able to claim his brother as his own, raise him in the way he should have been raised. The missing blood link, genetic code like intimacy, matching alleles like love drawing you forth. This is where I belong, this is who I belong to.…
“I’m so sorry,” she finally said, her voice as weak and broken as she was, but he didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes, his body flaccid under her hands. Then, ever so slowly, he drew himself away from her touch. Turned his head and
body until his back was to her like a wall.
“It’s all over. You should go,” he said, facing away from her, his voice distant, as if it didn’t belong to him anymore. A rejection of everything she’d thought might be possible.
She knew it then with a cold, hard sinking finality of her heart. Len had won. The fire had taken Nick from her as well.
* * *
She tried to imprint the way the sky met the hills, brand this picture forever in her mind, driving away. She had never stood a chance. None of them had. Wood stamped with the date of completion, ink bleeding into the grain, following the lines of growth. Wood turning to stone, turning into a solid mass of atoms—one element shifting into another, into a thing that once was. Bodies grown together as one torn up by the roots and burned into ash.
Corner inertia pulled her toward the river, and how easy it was to let the wheel follow—a brief instant of shoulder gravel, then weightless freedom, black water. A soundless river journey, her body stroking the silted depths of green shadows, just as her mother had, just as the woman had, the waters taking her before she could destroy anything or anyone else.
An eighteen-wheeler bellowed by, horn blasting, shaking her back to her own side of the line, that safety net of yellow, her fingers laced tight against the steering wheel’s play. The road was lined with dry husks, ready to ignite; the blacktop like soft goo, entrapping the imprint of her tires, tracking her home.
She was the only one with windows down, the air a backward furnace sucking stands of her hair out the window. The cars she passed were air-conditioned tombs, their occupants waxen copies of people, immune to the heat as a steady rivulet of wet snaked down the gully of her backbone, a small river in its canyon of vertebrae and ribs.
The wavering road miraged into a lake ahead, masking ruinous scab land that radiated heat. Burned-out signs advertising cheap cigarettes, beer, and fuel. Shrunken towns replete with run-down trailers and dirt lawns, dented cars parked as if the drivers were in a hurry to nowhere—a fling with the neighbor, a snort of crank before the night shift. Small towns Silva hated, with their self-important speed limits, their empty cop cars parked at city limits as a warning. A double-wide on the bottom of a rise with a distinct line of black surrounding it—the hills blackened, the fence posts ringed charcoal, burned narrow at the ground. She gripped the wheel tight, feeling the panic and the heat, the dark-rolling smoke—people frantically digging fire line, snaking garden hose to wet their claim, save what was theirs, even if there was nothing left to save.
Each semi that passed sent the Dodge rocking, the roadsides littered with empty cans and broken beer bottles. She put her foot down, the needle lodged and quivering, the Dodge speed-rattling, threatening to fly into pieces and join the desert, nothing left but chunks of rusted metal. As though eating through the miles could redeem her, could save her from the ruin of her life.
The sage was interspersed with trees and creek-size rivers toting oversize names—Raging, Dead Man. The sharp points of distant mountain ranges showed in bas-relief against the sky, the land like a green memory. In an hour, she would be across the pass, back to what had always been.
* * *
By the time she got to the terminal, the last ferry was scheduled and the night mist had settled in deep layers of seeping wetness. She breathed in deeply as she paid for her ticket at the booth, the ticket man as tired and gray as the fog. Driving into the ferry lane, she clutched the receipt tight in her hand—Trawler Island: passage for one adult, 1 vehicle under 20 feet—the blanket of fog pulling her hair limp around her shoulders, the unaccustomed wetness chilling her to the bone. What this moisture could have done in the canyon—what it could have saved.
At the end of the dock, an old woman stood creased over her rod, crabs overlapping one another’s slow movements in the bottom of a bucket next to her, the Sound still but for the quick slip of a seal, little swells rippling out behind it, shells and beer cans washed green under eight feet of water, battered pilings lining the shore—wet, brown pillars spatter-painted in gull guano, each one topped with a seagull or cormorant, perched there as if carved into the salt-raised grain.
No place had been able to save her; no place had been able to save anything after all.
Through the fog, the last ferry came, looming larger each minute. She wrapped her arms tight and stood on the dock a minute longer before getting in the Dodge, waiting for the ferry attendant to wave her on board the lower deck. She parked behind a Mercedes with gold Bellevue plate frames whose vanity plates proclaimed JensLuv. Silva set the Dodge’s brake, left it in first gear, imagining it kicked loose, battering into the back of the car as the ferry started its slow plow through the Sound.
She walked slowly up the stairs to the upper passenger deck, winded, her seared airways aching. A wall of windows bordered empty rows of caramel-colored booths, the mainland already a blurred green haze outside, hidden in the mounting drizzle, the ferry’s heat blasting in stifling gusts as passengers settled in with their coffee, glancing Silva’s way as she passed.
On the deck, she lifted her face to the mist, the jolt of wet air dizzying, a balm for her scorched lungs. Nick. She resisted sinking to her knees, gripping the ferry’s railing, clenching her jaw against crying. She wouldn’t give herself the release of sorrowing. Not now. Not again.
She watched the horizon, cheeks tingling and damp. The wind blew her hair out in wet strings, plastering her mouth and neck. A gull sailed in front of the captain’s upper window, wings outstretched. Others joined in, coasting above her, hitching a glide from the mainland. A group of boys ran around the deck opposite her in the mist, holding their arms out as if they were air-bound, too, their faces turned toward her like bright camera flashes.
The ferry docked at two other islands, letting passengers off, until only Silva and a handful of others were left on board. She didn’t look up for fear she might recognize someone. Anything more, and she would lose the tenuous hold she had; the choking feeling would rise again, and her lungs and airways would sear closed despite the moisture imbuing the air, the water all around her.
When the ferry was close, Trawler right around the bend, she went back down to the bottom deck, the Dodge rocking back and forth as they docked, an attendant in work boots and reflective gear waving cars forward impatiently.
It was misting as she drove off the ramp. She rolled down the window and let in the wet, salted air. Manzanita lined the road, cedar and fir tall behind it. Shreds of rotting kelp purulent in the warm brine of tidal pools, the wavering arms of anemones, sea rocks covered in barnacles. Things she’d once known as well as herself. A blip in time, swallowed in an impression of memory she grasped at like a drowning person trying to hold on to a piece of waterlogged jetsam.
Everything looked the same—the red-and-white hotel above the cove, the café and gift shop, the Bait Shop’s blackboard specials. The trees, the road, the smells. Everything that had once been all she thought she would ever want or need.
She drove with her window down, the air peppering her face. Streetlights hummed in the gray-fogged air and hatches of gnats clouded the lights. She drove down the rolling streets, past the docks, the cannery, and farther, until she found the cabin’s overgrown turn by habit.
She wound through the massive cedars’ trunks, damp forest duff mounded deep, moss and maidenhair ferns thick alongside the twin indents of the road, the familiar wet smell of humus and green things, the surrounding cedars like giants—roots pulled up from the earth, heartwood hollowed out. It was only a matter of time before they, too, toppled.
At the end of the drive the forest opened up, and there was the cabin, the trees, the shore.
She pulled up and turned off the truck. The magnolia off the porch gone wild, moss growing on the step planks and the roof, rusty needles covering the front lawn. Leaving ruin lying in her wake had become a repeated chorus to her life.
The front door lock had rusted, and it took her several tries to get the key to
catch, the pin to turn. The thermometer hanging from the porch timbers read fifty-seven degrees. It was starting to rain—a quick deluge that soaked everything, dark stains seeping into the wood.
She stood in the middle of the empty living room. Above the kitchen sink, a steel wool had crumbled into a heap of rusted ash. A few blue enamel coffee cups and chipped plates still held place on the counter where she’d left them, dried heaps of dead bugs in the corners, the overhead light illuminating dust particles that drifted thick. Outside the window, chickadees twitted in the branches of the crabapple. She thought of Nick’s get-well card, those birds singing their directive—Get Well, Get Well, as if you could just choose such a thing, deciding the path of your recovery.
She turned on the faucet, and it spewed bits of rusted iron, water that tasted like a wound. Water and blood, blood and water. Her own body. Her mother’s body. The woman in the river. The girls in the compound.
She walked back to Eamon’s room—the familiar corduroy of the log walls, his bed with its striped mattress, his old bonsai desk as filled with nature as the rest of the cabin—collections of nests and feathers, mosses and lichens, cones and dried fronds.
Finally, she went out to the woodpile and selected a smooth-grained cedar round. The dampened wood stack seemed insubstantial, the axe still chunked in the chopping block with its map of three-inch incisions, years of use spelled out in the chop marks. She split a rack of kindling and took it inside. The hearth was smooth and cold against her thighs as she crumpled damp newspaper, tilting kindling pieces into a teepee over top. She struck a match and cupped flame to paper, watching as it flared blue and then peaked into smoke. Tried not to not think of Nick sorting through the ashes, the black char left behind, sifting for whatever was left. Tried not to think of Juniper, swallowed by the canyon, like everyone and everything else.
Sins of the Bees Page 30
