What's Worth Keeping

by Kaya McLaren

  Paul

  Lying in Rae’s guest bed, Paul replayed the thunder and the tree crashing through the roof in his mind. A new shot of adrenaline coursed through his veins. The comfort he craved to calm himself down was the same thing that had eventually worked after his days of work at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing—holding Amy in his arms. Since he couldn’t have that, he tried calling her, but she did not pick up, and when her voice mail message came on and then beeped, he froze. Every word was too small to represent this feeling. All the words together were still too small. Too small and mixed up. He didn’t know where to start and was certain he would fail to truly communicate what was going on inside of him. It was just easier to hang up.

  His mind floated back to the sifting, the digging, trying to find pieces that would move and could be removed to get to what and who was underneath, wondering whether he was standing on anyone, pushing them over the edge and into death. Panic surged through his veins and sped up his heart. He remembered looking up at the other officers who were searching, occasionally meeting eyes, the sense of despair he saw in theirs mirroring what he felt.

  He tried fast-forwarding his memory, to the part where he drove home. It smelled like apple pie, like another world. The toxic smoldering still lingered in his nose, but the smell of the pie got through anyway. Amy greeted him in sympathetic tears or maybe tears of relief or both, embraced him, took his hand, and led him to the shower. She started the water, undressed them both, and, when the water was hot enough, guided him in. Exhausted, he just stood there as she lovingly lathered him with sweet-smelling soap, massaged his back, massaged his scalp as she worked suds through his hair, touched his face so tenderly as she washed it as well. Amy never had the ability to hide what she was thinking or feeling. It had always been on her face for the world to see. In that moment, he saw the odd mix of concern, gratitude, and respect. I’m just in awe of you, she used to say in those moments when she saw a tiny hint of the ugliness he had dealt with. On that day, when she had seen far more than just a tiny hint, when she had seen the full live coverage on the news, she just said it with her eyes … I’m just in awe of you. She knew he could not have a normal conversation, and so she did not ask that of him. She just loved him. She pressed her beautiful body against his and embraced him, nuzzling her face into his neck. He closed his eyes and tried to fathom how he had come from the lowest level of hell all the way up to this level of heaven in the space of less than an hour.

  Just thinking of it now calmed him and slowed his heart.

  She had turned the water off, pulled a towel from the rack, and dried him off and then herself. After she held up his robe for him to slip his arms into, she stepped into him and pulled the sides of the robe around her back, looked up at him with the purest love he had ever seen in his life, and said, “You’re home with me now.”

  And that was when he finally broke down and cried, cried for all of those children buried, all those living people who were still buried, cried for all the children who had been orphaned that day, cried for all the people who had lost someone they had loved. As he cried for all of the tragedy and suffering, he felt guilty that it had not been him. He did not know why. It seemed unfair that in hundreds of households that very night, people were crying for the ones they would never get back in this lifetime, and here he was with his beautiful wife wrapped in the safe cocoon of his bathrobe with him. How could that be? How was that fair? Her love poured over him like heavy rain on clay. He could not begin to absorb it all. Most rolled right off of him because he felt he did not deserve it.

  After putting on her own robe, she led him to the kitchen. He peeked into Carly’s room as he followed her down the hall. There she was, sleeping, and the small noises of her breathing filled him with gratitude and relief beyond measure and, again, the irrational guilt.

  Amy pulled roast, mashed potatoes, and gravy out of the oven where she had been keeping it warm. He touched the crisscrossed stripes of crust on top of the pie that sat on the stove. It was still warm. He guessed she had made it just for him after Carly had gone to sleep.

  She dished him up hefty servings and slipped in behind him on his chair, resting her cheek on his back as he ate, her arms around his belly as if they were riding a motorcycle. She loved him so much.

  Only when he looked back now from Rae’s guest room did he see with pristine clarity the survivor’s guilt, the walls that went up, the love rolling off of him. Surviving had been no reason to feel guilty. It was okay to survive. His girl deserved a dad. His wife deserved a husband. And true, “deserve” was a pointless word because so many people did not get what they deserved—whether that be bad or good. But in his moment of pristine clarity, he watched the memory of himself as he would watch a movie, eating roast at the dining room table, and he felt immense compassion for Amy, loving him so, and immense compassion for himself, picking through that wreckage, seeing things that would haunt him the rest of his life, yet somehow functioning every single day that followed. One hundred sixty-eight dead, fifteen of whom were babies. More than six hundred eighty injured survivors, six of whom were babies. Babies no different from his own. It really was a miracle, he thought, that someone could dig through that horrific destruction and somehow function every single day that followed.

  He reached for the pillow next to him and, imagining it was Amy, held it tightly.

  Amy

  Judging by the pain in her abdomen, Amy had overdone it on her little hike on Monday. She resigned herself to spending the day in or near the campground. Other campers had mostly left for the day to explore other places in the park, leaving Amy and a handful of others to listen to the breeze in the trees while they read books, sat by the river, or took peaceful naps in their reclining lawn chairs or on blankets.

  Unable to concentrate on anything she attempted to read, Amy simply listened. She listened to the wind. She listened to the birds. She listened to the river. She listened for an answer to the question that she could not extract from her heart: Why?

  And after she cycled through all of the possible stories again, she stopped herself, simply noticing everything around her—all of the living things. And then it struck her that maybe there was just nature, where things were born and reproduced, and sometimes cell division went according to plan and sometimes it went rogue, where sometimes mutations were an evolutionary advantage and sometimes they were a disadvantage, where survival was a species-wide effort as much as it was an individual effort and being part of the genetic variation was just part of the deal. Maybe that was all there was to it. In that moment, it gave her peace of mind to believe that, to believe she hadn’t been forsaken by God or done anything wrong … to just observe that despite the societal belief that somehow humans were above or apart from nature and that this whole planet was created just for humans, it turned out that human beings were very much just a part of nature. And in nature, living things were born with mutations. Living things suffered and died. And it didn’t mean they did anything wrong. It didn’t mean they failed. It just happened. It was the most sense she could make of her experience.

  Listening as hard as she could for the voice of God, she heard only the wind, the birds, and the river.

  * * *

  The next day, after another unsuccessful attempt at reading, she found herself wishing for a sketchbook and colored pencils, and so she took a trip into Packwood to find and purchase them.

  While she was in town, she checked her messages. When she listened to Paul’s voice mail about being in Chama for a while because of a situation at work, she could not make sense of it and knew something wasn’t right. Her finger was poised to hit “Call back,” but he hadn’t asked her to, and she didn’t want to. It sounded like there was a problem and she had no capacity to take on any more. There had been another call from him, this time with no message at all.

  Alicia had sent an email with links to articles on the virtues of hyperbaric oxygen chambers in cancer treatment as well as UV treatm
ents, all prefaced with lots of statements about how Big Pharma didn’t want anyone to know about these things. She read about the oxygen chamber and then did an internet search for information to the contrary. What she found was an article out of the United Kingdom that said in fact some cancers had been cured by this, however others had been made worse because some cancers grew in an anaerobic environment and others in an aerobic one. Not all cancers were the same. People had trouble grasping that.

  Opting not to reply, she wondered how she was going to preserve her relationship with Alicia if she didn’t knock this off. Her sister loved her so much. She did. But good intentions did not mean they had positive impact. Alicia thought she was saving Amy. It was the same as if Alicia belonged to a different church or different religion and believed she had to convince Amy to see the light her way in order to save her soul. This perpetual breach of her boundaries was maddening and exhausting.

  * * *

  Back at camp, she found a pretty spot near the river and sat, leaning back against a big cedar. She began to draw the little things she saw, a meditation on the tiniest details—the veins that ran through petals and leaves, every curl of a bit of lichen, the wings of a beetle. As long as she drew, she did not obsess about the things she often obsessed about. Thoughts of them crossed her mind but didn’t stick. They couldn’t when she was noticing this shadow and that curve and where the color lowered in intensity.

  A junco scratched the forest floor nearby, and she tried drawing it as quickly as she could, but it flew away before she finished. A black moth whose wings had fuzzy edges flitted by too quickly to draw, but she stopped and admired it anyway.

  Days passed this way, lying back, enjoying the sweet songs of birds and the cool air filling her lungs … sleeping when she felt tired—at least until the next hot flash woke her … going for little walks among the big trees when she felt strong or simply restless … drawing small miracles when she needed help emptying her mind. It was exactly what she had come for.

  When she went back to the visitor center for more postcards, she noticed the large slice of a log where different years were labeled. It had been there since she had been a kid. Out of all of those years, only one ring was blackened. Just one two-hundredth of its whole life. She thought about how her cancer treatment was in actuality less than half of a year. One ninety-fourth of her whole life. That was all. Who defined herself by something that was such a small fraction of her life? She supposed Olympic athletes and lottery winners did, but she didn’t want to. It was true that she would live the rest of her life without breast tissue and nipples, but that didn’t have to define her. After all, Nick Orem from high school lost part of his finger in a lawn mower, but to the best of her knowledge, he hadn’t spent the rest of his life identifying himself as a lawn mower survivor. He was just Nick who made his friends laugh, rode his bicycle down the Pacific Coast Highway, was modestly successful in business, was a good father and husband, and—oh yeah, decades ago lost a finger in a lawn mower.

  * * *

  By Thursday, she was ready to walk to the falls again, hoping this time that stopping to sketch what she noticed would slow her down, allow her to rest, and prevent her from overdoing it. On her way to the falls, she sketched a red flower bud that hung on the end of a cane-like stem. It had long, slender, whorled leaves, somewhat leathery and serrated along the edges. It was not a plant she knew. She could identify it later, along with another she had sketched, one with just a single heart-shaped leaf.

  She noticed black spots on many trees and wondered if they were in fact colonies of fungus, but she didn’t choose to sketch those. Instead, she simply walked by the sickness and continued on down the trail.

  She crossed the bridge over the Ohanapecosh River and walked up to an overlook. There, she noticed tiny plants clinging to the cliff next to the falls and found them both tenacious and elegant.

  Voices caught her attention, and looking up the riverside, she spotted the kayakers on a rock. One began to walk away from the group with his kayak over his shoulder, back up from where he had already paddled. She did not particularly want to watch him go over the falls as she had a few days prior. Something about watching a person be so careless with his life when she had endured so much to keep hers was a bit upsetting to her, so she walked on. The trail went farther upstream before turning back toward camp, though, and as she followed it, there were times when she could see him below her. She watched him for a moment as he prepared, turning her back when he peed before stepping into his boat. He cracked his neck, put on his spray skirt, then pushed himself back into the little inlet tucked behind a boulder several times before blowing his whistle to signal readiness and finally going out into the giant aqua streak of frothing, churning water, into the force so much greater than him. Immediately he tipped, rolled, and continued on. She waited to hear cheers, but the river was too loud.

  Moving on, she noticed how fresh the air was, the trill of birds, a small spider hanging from a tree.

  The kayaker’s roll played over in her mind as she walked, and it occurred to her that he could perform at that level only because of that ability to roll, that ability to bounce back from a moment of imbalance, that ability to let go of the mistake and let go of the past instead of replaying it over and over in his mind. He had to completely turn his attention to the present moment and the future in order to be immediately ready for the next obstacle. She needed to be more like that.

  “I am healthy, I am strong, I am full of vitality,” she whispered to herself. “I am alive. It is good to be alive. I am alive. It is good to be alive. I am alive. I am happy. I am alive. I am happy.” She tried different affirmations until she found one that worked and repeated that to herself softly over and over as she hiked.

  She noticed the medium-sized Douglas fir cones and the structures between seed scales that looked like the forked tongues of snakes. Since she was ready to rest, she stopped to sketch the pine cone, trying to capture all of the tiny shadows in its form.

  Just then, clouds rolled in and everything but the vine maples went dark. They glowed, as if lit from within.

  At the rock overhang, Amy paused to appreciate the little maidenhair ferns that grew out of it, the Oregon grape above and below, and the vanilla leaf, a three-leaved plant that looked a little like a moose’s head complete with antlers. She leaned in and studied moss closely.

  With each breath, she tried to inhale all of this life that was around her, all of this green. She imagined a forest like this living in her heart, in her core, in her head, imagined that those spaces were rich and teeming with purity and life instead of looking and feeling like wastelands where nuclear bombs had been tested.

  A wren sang. A tree trunk squeaked as it bent. She passed a stagnant pond, walked down a hill, and crossed over a land bridge between two swamps filled with tall grasses, skunk cabbage, and fallen logs. In the distance, a dog barked. The overwhelming scent of roasting marshmallows filled the air, and she wondered how every bear in a two-hundred-mile radius did not find its way here.

  Descending into the campground, she smiled at a very old couple wearing matching sun hats and carrying trekking poles and exchanged pleasantries with them as they passed. Unlike her, they had no chance of living thirty or forty more years. Their future was more certain. Their time was running out. She turned around and watched them walk on behind her. They were here. Together. Smiling. They were living. Today. They were living today. Yes, they had today and each other, and apparently, it was enough.

  She wanted that. That peace. That grace. That acceptance. And the love between them. She wanted that too. For the first time since she left, she had a pang of missing Paul, although it wasn’t really missing him as much as it was grieving for him, grieving for how things had been decades ago.

  Back at her car, she noticed the progress she’d made in accepting things exactly as they were—particularly Paul. She reached in the little paper sack of postcards and drew one out at random. On it, she w
rote,

  Dear Paul,

  What I couldn’t tell you before I left was that I found the file last November when I was looking for my insurance policy. THE file. With THE papers. I haven’t known what to say or do. And no matter how hard I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to unsee it. I think I’ve been holding very still, just hoping it would pass and we would both forget it. But I can’t forget it. You get full credit for helping me this winter instead of leaving then. But when you text me that you’re thinking of me, I don’t know what to do with that because, well, you were thinking of me when you tallied up our assets and filled out those papers.

  Not knowing whether to sign it “Love, Amy” or just “Amy,” she did neither. She affixed a stamp to the card but then realized she didn’t know how to send it. Paul was back in Chama, where mail came only to P.O. boxes, and they didn’t have one. She didn’t dare send the postcard to Aunt Rae to deliver. It was far too personal for that. So, she put the card back in the bag for the time being.

  * * *

  On Friday, when it was time to leave Ohanapecosh Campground again, she found a spot at White River Campground. It was only twelve miles away from Sunrise, a part of the park where they had lived during one of their many summers up here. It remained covered with snow until July and had large patches even then, but she couldn’t wait any longer. Tomorrow would be her day.

  The campground had showers that were in little stalls with no mirrors. Prior to this year she would have never dreamed that would make her so happy. Even though the wrapping paper had been kind, it had also been a reminder that something was wrong. It was like using earplugs to cope with Paul’s snoring. It made the noise manageable, but the adaptation wasn’t something she could lose awareness of. She saw it, and even though he never said anything, Paul saw it. Her inner struggle was right there on the mirror for him to see. The first time Paul used the bathroom after she had put up the paper, she felt extremely exposed, but after that, she didn’t care as much.