by Cai Emmons
“You could move back here, couldn’t you?” says Lanny. “There’s nothing holding you there anymore.”
Bronwyn has considered this, has wondered if she might find a job in New York or New Jersey. It’s unlikely that most people here would have read that stupid article. But frankly, New York and New Jersey seem ugly to her now, too much concrete, too many exhaust-spewing cars, so much affronting the natural world. Even Cambridge feels too urban. No egrets and owls. No nearby beach.
“I love my place by the river. It’s all I have now.”
“It’s pretty sweet. But here you’d have me. Someone in your camp. I could be your agent and make you famous. There everyone’s against you.”
“Only Stuart really. The other people who are against me, like Vince, are elsewhere. Anyway, I’m not looking for fame. That article shows where fame would lead. Nothing but humiliation.”
“Still, moving would be a great reset.”
Moving holds only the illusion of improvement, she thinks, only the false promise of change. It wouldn’t alter anything fundamental. It wouldn’t restore Earl. She shakes her head.
“You can’t crawl into a hole. You can’t pretend this isn’t happening to you. I won’t let you.”
The hole to crawl into doesn’t exist. The task of forgetting is thankless. Impossible. Reminders lurk everywhere. Back at Lanny’s quaint craftsman house they watch Gone with the Wind, holding off on dinner until Lanny’s husband comes home. They want to cry over the movie and use their tears to slide back into their adolescent selves, but the movie seems a bit stupid now—Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable both overacting—and Bronwyn and Lanny don’t cry. After the movie the weather report comes on the TV, unavoidable. It silences them. They could turn it off, but they don’t. What strikes Bronwyn is the phrases the man uses, the same phrases she herself has spoken so many times. And his report is only a tiny fragment of the full weather picture. The next few days will be hot, he says, and there is the possibility of thunderstorms. Sure, sure. But he doesn’t mention—perhaps he doesn’t know, how could he really?—that the temperature will be higher next week, significantly higher, and it will stay that way for close to a week. This man is jovial and reassuring, exactly as Stuart always wanted her to be. Lanny raises an eyebrow at the mention of thunderstorms, but says nothing.
Bronwyn has entered a new phase. Every so often, unpredictably, a rush of sound comes over her, swarming in her ears and subverting all her ordinary senses. It’s the Earth speaking, inchoate, but demanding her full attention. Her limbs tremble, her hands flutter. She hears nothing but full-throttle whispering that rises to a roar. She excuses herself to the guest room to wait it out. It takes a minute or two for the roar and trembling to subside. When everything is quiet again meaning takes root. She can say then, with remarkable accuracy, as she did in Kansas, what is soon to arrive.
Lanny finds her after one of these episodes. “What’s happening? You have to tell me.”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“What are you going to do? You have to do something. Learn about this. See a doctor. Anything. But something.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
Lanny gives her a look and leaves the room.
A thunderstorm does arrive one evening, just after they’ve come home from their day’s jaunt. Bronwyn stands at the living room window looking out to the back yard. Heat lightning flashes, thunder cracks directly overhead. The rain’s jaunty rhythm brings calypso to mind. She is overwhelmed with nostalgia. Home is out there, swaying in the trees.
“Well?” says Lanny, coming up behind her. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”
Bronwyn continues to stare out, smiling now. “No. We’re perfectly safe.”
Each day arrives bearing a host of new questions. Some of them she buries, or tries to. She brings her coffee to the back yard where Lanny’s morning ritual includes lifting weights. Lanny, the queen of late sleeping, has been getting up early to get a workout in before the heat gets serious. She has always been impressively muscular, even back in high school, but when she went to college she began to work on her body more concertedly with weight training, running, protein drinks. The results are visible. She is strikingly symmetrical now, and her long leg and arm muscles are chiseled as those of a fit man. She lays down her weights, does a quick set of push-ups, comes to sit with Bronwyn, and goes to work kneading one of her quadriceps.
“When I woke up this morning I thought of something—you should go talk to your teacher.”
“Diane?”
“Yeah, her. She’s always been good to you, hasn’t she? She might be able to help you figure this thing out.”
“I can’t do that. She wouldn’t get it. She’s a completely rational logical person. She has no room in her head for this kind of thing. She’d probably disown me.”
“She doesn’t own you in the first place.”
“I know. But she, of all the people I know, is the least likely to be able to understand that what I do would ever be possible.”
“What if she saw you in action?”
“Even then. And I couldn’t do anything in front of her. I’d be way too nervous.”
“I think you’re underestimating her. She’d have to take you seriously—she’s practically your mother.” Lanny sighs, stands, raises her arms overhead in a stretch. “I have to tell you, girlfriend, these seizures you’ve been having, or whatever they are, they’re making me nervous. What if you’re dying?”
“I’m not dying.”
“But you don’t know. You might be.”
Day after day of impossible heat, but nevertheless they stay on the move, visiting their old haunts. At Cape May they stroll on the beach. At the Delaware River they hike in the woods. They take the bus to New York and walk from Soho to Central Park. The scissoring of their legs helps them remap their youth, walking as memory and walking as medicine. But nothing is the same.
On a fire hydrant someone has scrawled: Ain’t nothin scares me.
On 34th and Broadway: a snake with the girth of a fire hose drapes a man’s neck. A crowd has gathered, titillated, nervous. A cop, keeping his distance, tells the man to put the snake back in its cage, but the man refuses, laughing.
At Columbus Circle the feeling comes over her, the roar and the trembling. She sits on a low wall by the fountain, waiting it out as traffic tears by.
Lanny speaks of her husband, how different they are in so many ways. He despises exercise, would rather read, and he doesn’t require much talking. They like each other a lot, but will these differences undermine them over time, Lanny wonders aloud.
Bronwyn listens, preoccupied, restless. She’s being summoned, it seems, but to what exactly? How does one find a purpose when there are no models that have gone before? Who can she emulate? Vince’s Native American woman perhaps? Maybe that woman, inspired by ancestral spirits, was doing exactly what Bronwyn does. If only Bronwyn could find her, but to do so she’d have to contact Vince who didn’t even seem to remember the woman’s name. She wants to embrace this talent of hers, but it has turned out to be so fraught. How lonely she’s become inside this skin of hers, even around Lanny.
“Can you break this heat?” Lanny asks. “We’d all love you for it.”
She might be able to, but it doesn’t feel right, changing the weather for reasons of discomfort, altering who knows what else in the process.
She awakens on the eighth day knowing it’s time to leave. She can’t wait any longer. This isn’t her home anymore. Lanny protests. “I’ve loved having you here.”
“You don’t need me,” Bronwyn says. “You were doing fine without me.”
“But you need me.”
27
She travels north through New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, on roads she has traveled countless times during breaks from college and when her mother was sick. She knows all the landmarks, road signs, mileages. She knows where the ocean will come into view and when it will no longer b
e visible. She can drive these roads without giving a thought to the task of driving, scarcely realizing she is driving, the car regulating itself. She passes the exit that would take her north to New Hampshire and instead continues east toward Boston, as has been her habit for so many years. Oversight or intention, she honestly can’t say. Route 2 takes her past Fresh Pond to Memorial Drive along the glistening Charles. She turns into the residential streets, and as her vehicle slows her heart speeds. She looks for a legal parking place, hard to come by on these narrow leafy streets of Cambridge’s most patrician neighborhood.
Once parked, she walks a few blocks to Diane’s house, amazed by her own boldness. How is it that she, always a judicious and cautious young woman, is now running on impulse and instinct? It is perfectly possible that Diane is not here on a summer Saturday afternoon. She might be in Maine with Joe, or at work, or out doing errands, or on a business trip. Bronwyn stands on the sidewalk staring at the front door, Chinese red with a brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head.
This is the pelvic floor of summer, heat throbbing through every organic and inanimate object with the intensity of a bad fever. All up and down the street the prized, shade-giving maple leaves droop and curl into themselves, as if giving up on photosynthesis. Bronwyn pushes through the wrought-iron gate, up the walkway and front steps. She knocks with her knuckle and waits in an epic hush. Ear to the door, she listens for remote interior movement. Nothing. This time she uses the knocker and its thunk echoes stridently down the quiet street. Still nothing. Obviously no one is home. She collapses on the concrete step as if she has endured some extreme exertion. She’s a little relieved. She hasn’t prepared properly. With a person like Diane, a meeting should be scheduled in advance. Her time should not be wasted.
The door opens. “I can’t believe you’re here! I thought I heard something. Come in, come in!”
Diane looks as Bronwyn has never seen her, bleary-eyed and truly startled. She pats her uncombed hair, apparently reading Bronwyn’s assessment. “Oh, I look terrible, don’t I? I was napping, sorry to say. This heat just ruins me.”
“I can come back . . .”
“Certainly not. I’ve been dying to talk.”
They go inside and stand in the foyer while Diane gets her bearings, peering into the dim living room strangely, as if she isn’t entirely sure where she is. Bronwyn is a bit embarrassed for her, though Diane doesn’t appear the least bit embarrassed for herself.
“We can’t stay inside. It’s too stuffy in here. I’ve never wanted air conditioning, but recently I’ve been rethinking my position—let me pull myself together and I’ll bring some iced coffee to the back yard. I’ll meet you out there.”
She disappears before Bronwyn can offer to make the coffee. But she would feel flummoxed making coffee in Diane’s kitchen with its marble countertops and top-of-the-line appliances. She wouldn’t know what cups to lay out, or where to find a tray, or how much ice to use. So many decisions required in such a simple offering.
She passes through the dining room to one of the doors that leads outside. The deck, a relatively recent addition, runs the full length of the house. Stairs descend to the yard which, though not large, is Bronwyn’s idea of a perfect outdoor urban space. At the far end is a venerable maple with a massive trunk and unusually symmetrical branches. From one of the lower limbs a swing hangs. Along the periphery of the wooden fence are fruit trees—pear, apple, cherry—that bloom in the spring, and bear fruit in the fall, and offer a modicum of privacy from neighbors. Along the side of the deck are hydrangeas in various shades of blue and purple, and a small vegetable and flower garden occupies the yard’s sunniest corner close to the house.
The yard, Diane once told her, was supposed to feel like a “secret garden.” “You know the book?” she said. Bronwyn was not familiar with The Secret Garden then, a fact which shocked Diane, so Bronwyn immediately found the book and read it and loved it, and she agreed that Diane’s garden recreates the secluded feeling of the garden in the book. She likes that Diane and Joe aren’t overly fussy about this outside area. It has clearly been designed, but it’s not forbiddingly tidy, and therefore it’s a perfect place to relax.
Relax is the last thing Bronwyn can do now. How can she deliver her news and solicit advice in language Diane will find palatable? The language of science has become such an anathema to Bronwyn. In that language facts are only worthwhile if they rest on the steadfast pillar of airtight experimental proof.
She heads to a triangle of shade at the back of the yard and sits in the maple tree’s swing, heart sprinting despite her deep breathing. Her brain is hostage to the heat, slow and sodden and listless—how can she possibly find a coherent way to explain herself. She gazes up through the maple’s canopy. She associates this tree with the Founding Fathers, men who would disapprove of the primitive, unsocialized woman she has become. Kernels of sky interspersed with the leaves form a matrix that looks two-dimensional. Here she is in Diane’s back yard, and all the bravado that has brought her here seems to have drained away. A terrible thought occurs. What if she has lost her ability, just now, at the very moment she intends to face Diane?
The weight of the sky and the heat iron her chest, and she clings to the swing’s ropes and lies back, feet outstretched like a child. The world spins and blurs. The hum surrounds her, enters her. She rises through the canopy, evaporating into it, stirring the molecules of stagnant air out of their inertia. Wind, at last.
Abruptly, mindful of where she is, she sits back up. She shouldn’t be doing this. She didn’t mean to. Or maybe she did. At least she can. Regardless, the air has begun to move again deliciously, the leaves warbling against one another like waking siblings. Goosebumps spring up along her forearms.
And there is Diane scuttling down the stairs of the deck, looking revived in fresh clothing, and carrying a tray which she sets on a small wooden table next to a pair of Adirondack chairs.
“It’s so good to see someone using that swing,” she calls. “Joe put it up with the romantic notion that he’d use it to nurse his ideas, but he never uses it for that purpose, or any other.” She sighs and lifts her chin. “Oh my, doesn’t that breeze feel good. What a surprise.”
Bronwyn slides off the swing wondering if claiming the breeze would be a good way to begin. Perhaps not, she thinks. Diane pours iced coffee from a pitcher and the tinkling ice reminds Bronwyn of shooting stars, ephemeral and delicate, here and gone. There is food, of course—there’s always food with Diane—this time a plate of tiny blueberry and custard tarts. “I’m sorry to say I didn’t make them. I couldn’t turn on the oven in this heat.”
“Is Joe here?”
“He’s in Maine. He never comes down here in the summer if he can help it.”
They sip their coffee under an illusory membrane of ease. Bronwyn feels the aeolian rustling of the hydrangea leaves. How does one introduce two foreign worlds, two world views that have no use for each other, that have always been estranged?
“So, that ghastly article—I’m assuming you’ve seen it?” Diane says.
Bronwyn nods. So Diane has seen it. It seemed unlikely that she would find an article in The Meteor, a publication Bronwyn is sure Diane reviles as much as she does, but the urgency of Diane’s recent calls made Bronwyn consider the possibility.
“What’s at the bottom of all this foolishness? Joe just happened to see it at the little Mom-and-Pop store we go to in Maine.”
Bronwyn sighs, stalling, wishing for a different conversational tone.
“How terribly humiliating,” says Diane. “Who wrote the thing? Was someone trying to harm you?”
“They just want to sell their papers, those people. They’ll say anything, even make things up.”
“But why would they—I mean what prompted an article about you in the first place?”
Bronwyn takes a blueberry tart and shoves it into her mouth, tries to swallow without chewing and almost chokes. She coughs, spewing crumbs. Diane hands
her a napkin. Bronwyn wipes her mouth, head bent to her lap to mollify her embarrassment, and to resist the open invitation from trees and sky to evaporate back into them.
Recovered a little, she slides forward in her Adirondack chair. “I have to tell you—I’m not who you’ve always thought I was. I’ve never really been that person.”
Diane watches her with a mute, impassive gaze which often passes for objectivity. It is not objectivity, Bronwyn thinks. There is no such thing as objectivity.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“That article was humiliating, but not for the reason you think. It mocked me, as if I’m a fool. But I’m not a fool—”
“Of course you aren’t.”
“—I can do those things.”
Diane frowns. “What things? Be specific.”
“Changing the elements. Stopping storms and tornadoes. Working with the Earth’s energy.”
Diane impassive face tumbles into laughter that rocks and shivers her whole body. “Oh, you’re priceless. Truly priceless. Tell me you’re pulling my leg.”
“I’m not. That’s the thing. That’s why I’m here.”
The laughter is gone without a trace. Diane turns to the fence and rubs her chin hard, as if to file away a divot.
Bronwyn floats. She knew this would be hard; she can’t back down now. Strangely, she isn’t tempted. Seeing her difference from Diane is like gazing into a mirror in which she sees the new Bronwyn Artair coalescing more clearly.
“I came here for advice. Not to have to prove myself.”
Diane’s forefinger traces figure eights around and between her lips. She isn’t usually given to nervous gestures. “We’ve known each other for a long time, Bronwyn. I’ve watched you mature, as a woman and as a scientist and I—I cannot understand why you would make a claim like this. Something you couldn’t possibly prove. You’ve studied atmospheric science, you know all the forces at play to form a storm system or a tornado. Each element can’t be isolated easily. How could you possibly think that, in the midst of such forces, you could personally have an impact? I’m sorry, but it isn’t possible. You know that too. Any scientist would agree.”
