Bottomland

by Michelle Hoover

  “Yes dear?”

  “Arlene’s sick. Can I take up a bowl for her?”

  Charlotte’s spoon bangs the pot.

  “Of course,” I say. “I’ll bring it up myself.” The door swings closed between us.

  “That girl is sick every other week,” Charlotte says.

  “I was sick every other week.”

  “Well,” Charlotte says. “Here’s hoping this is different.”

  After supper, the girls carry in their dishes and line up at the sink to give them a good rinse. At the end of the day, their feet hurt and they lean against the wall. They aren’t so terribly talkative now. I take up the soup for Arlene, leave it outside her room on a tray. The new girl’s door is closed, but her music trails out loud enough. I’m not one for knocking to bother her. At the top of the stairs, I catch my breath. There’s a flutter under my fingers when I touch my throat, the hard bone above my breast—it goes away as quickly as it came.

  Down in the kitchen, I wash the table and hang the rag on its hook. Charlotte stays at the sink and sends me off with a wave. After so many years, she knows my habits as well as I know hers.

  I step outside. In the alley, the light lists like a ship. It’s the time of day I like best. In the summer, the sun lingers for a good hour after the dishes are done and the air is precious.

  The lake is ten blocks. I make my way through the alley, past the iron works. On the other side of the river, some of the factories are closed. Some aren’t even factories now but condominiums, though I’d never wish to live in one. “Not good enough for a dog,” Charlotte says. But when I was young, the factories were everything. Work to keep a girl busy. Money of her own. Mother had once said the same of New York. There are other places. So many people. She took my hand and placed it to her heart. The streets, the buildings, every week when I walked a mile to the market with my earnings, I could feel them beating.

  Later, I told Esther what Mother had told me. It was the first time Esther looked at me as something more than a sister. We can go anywhere, she said. I’ll take you myself.

  The years after Esther left did us some good. The beds were full. The factory gave Charlotte a raise, and Mrs. Keyes had meat enough for the table. Soon, Mrs. Keyes stayed in her chair in the kitchen and Charlotte and I ran the house. Late at night, the three of us sat to talk numbers and recipes. The work was something we chose. It was my word or Charlotte’s that sent the girls to bed, the shopping lists written in my own hand, the three of us with keys no matter the hour. I thought of home only when the days grew quiet, one winter passing into the next. Wait for me, Esther had said, but I couldn’t do much else. A train ticket, it was more than three months at Charlotte’s wages. For the two of us, it was almost twice. I had no money for myself, save the few dollars Esther sent. Half a room and meals, that was more than Mrs. Keyes could afford no matter how many girls we had. After a while, Esther’s letters went empty of dollars. The bank wants Father’s acres by the river, she wrote. Nan says we’ll lose more if the weather doesn’t turn. Ray and Lee will make themselves sick with the work, she says. But they do it together, I tell Nan. Not a word about why she didn’t come back. Worse yet, those letters never said if anyone at home asked about me.

  I wrote dozens of letters myself. Her name is Greta. She’s fair like me, but sometimes she roars. I hope to be good at mothering, and you a good aunt. How much longer will you be gone? I never sent the letter, not that one or the next. When I tried so much as write the address, my face grew hot. Though I believed my sister would keep the contents of my letters close, still I imagined Tom capable of any kind of knowing. And what if he learned of Greta? Would he try to take her for himself?

  I shut the paper away in my desk. Still Esther wrote every few weeks. Nan’s got a daughter. She married Carl McNulty not long after we left. They’ve got that house of his, but they’re always with us. And now Agnes is married too. He’s tall as Lee and can carry her under his arm. Over the years, Nan had another child, a boy named Lee, and Agnes had three girls of her own. As quick as rabbits, Esther wrote. That’s what Ray says. He eyes Patricia and her empty skirts when he does. But the way Patricia frets over them, you’d think they were hers. Three, I thought. Now another girl wouldn’t be so precious. Another wouldn’t be welcome at all. I imagined Nan or Patricia discovering any letter I sent and cutting it open with a knife to read aloud at the dinner table. Then they all would know—that their sister had gotten herself in trouble. She’d only be a burden to them.

  But if I didn’t send word about myself, I could be anything they wanted. I could be better—the one who got away, living a grand life in such a grand place, no longer willing to play youngest. And Greta would be safe, no matter what. Before she left, that’s what Esther had always said about us.

  It was three years before Esther sent the letter about Father. She’d written it on a single sheet of paper, the print too small to read without a looking glass.

  Ray was the one who found him in the dugout. We don’t know when he snuck out. Nan says it doesn’t matter a wink that no one went to the funeral except us, but Patricia was all done out about it. Lee didn’t say a word to the preacher. Neither did I.

  I shut myself away in our closet. When I closed my eyes, I heard only the blood in my ears and the river rushing above my head. I didn’t breathe. I couldn’t feel the cold or wet. When I opened my mouth, I could taste the snowmelt from the hills, and it tasted like home. Riding the current, I passed our yard as it had always been—the house, the dugout, the barn. The yard was there with its florid green, the patch of grass, always burning, and Father on the bank, striking at the water with his cane. When the sun came out, Greta floated at my side. Are we fish now? she asked, her eyes clear and bright. Are we dead? I said, Yes.

  Father, if I told you what’s become of me, would you understand? You locked us in that house, as if you worried we’d leave without a look back—the way you and Mother did. But locks don’t stop a girl from thinking. And nails do even less. From the beginning, we believed that river would swallow us. More and more, Julius, I heard Mother say. When is the land we have enough? To lay your stake, you convinced Mother to follow you to the farthest place trains could run. Father, I have never had so much as a room of my own, in Chicago not even a bed—but Charlotte is the difference. Sometimes the person who never knew you or where you came from is the best kind.

  We can go. It was Nan who said it first, months before Esther and I left. I woke to the sound of cracking, a draft. When I opened my eyes, Nan was sitting on the edge of my bed. She made sure I heard what she did. The thud of the nails as they fell and the window pried open, the sudden wind. She held a hammer in her lap as if a prized possession. You can go if you want, she whispered. We all can. When I sat up, she looked at me as if she hadn’t expected me to have questions. It isn’t natural, living in a box.

  The letter about Father should have ended it, but I kept my promise to wait for several years more. Chicago was notorious then. That’s what Esther would have known. But for the rest of us, it was only so much noise. We were dollar to mouth, the streets cold for walking in the winters, and the summers hot enough to drive us to the lakeshore. There were race riots near the stockyards and meatpacking plants, and Leopold and Loeb, the Übermenschen, were arrested like cowards for the murder of young Bobby Franks. Esther’s letters slowed to one every three or four months. They were always the same. A half-page at most, scribbled with ink, running with names and events I didn’t understand. Agnes says little Martha might have broken her finger. Or, Nan told Patricia straight out she shouldn’t say another word about the plates. Or, Old Tensley finally built his own shed, can you believe it? No matter who Martha or Tensly were, or why Patricia worried about plates. Esther never did bother with explanations.

  Greta was five years old when the last letter came. I opened it alone at my desk. The paper was flimsy, too small a piece to hold in a win
d.

  Dear Sister,

  I’m sitting for once, hardly time to breathe. I picture you in that house, all cozy. Say hi to Charlotte for me. And Keyes, is she always in your business? Agnes and those brats of hers are about to drive me crazy, and I’m working from dawn to sleep and bored stiff.

  Around here, Adam Haskett is the gossip. Remember him? He finally married a girl. They have a baby, and that baby is older than it should be by five months They only married last year. There was a big to-do over it. Of course Patricia goes running her mouth. People think a baby forgives everything, she says. But that’s Patricia, all angelic like. It only makes things worse, she says. Think of the child!

  My pencil’s a stub. Got to run. Nan is calling.

  You can’t be mad forever, can you? Write me! Remember what you promised?

  E.

  Greta stood in the doorway. “Mother?” With her quickness, the girl could slip between shadows. She gripped my knees until I lifted her into my lap.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I wiped my face. “Reading letters.”

  “From who?”

  “An old friend.”

  “Do I know her?”

  “She should have known you, yes. But she lives very far away. I’m afraid she’s not much of a friend now.”

  Greta turned the paper over in my hands, trying to make out letters, names. “Why do you read them?”

  I folded the letter in half and slipped it back into its envelope. “I don’t know.”

  “Auntie says it’s time for dinner. You’re late.”

  “Does she?”

  “She says you must be feeding the birds up here for all she knows.”

  “Go on with you. I’ll be right there. Just have to splash some water on my face.”

  The girl pouted, pulling my arm.

  “Greta, go on.”

  At last she went, rushing down the stairs so fast I imagined her falling easy as a feather. Greta was as fierce as Esther, fiercer even. But Greta was kind, while Esther seemed to be growing less. Remember what you promised, she had written. And I remembered. I had waited for her even after Father went. A baby. It only makes things worse, Patricia had said. Esther was sure to pass the message on.

  I shook the dust from her letters in my closet. There were dozens of them, some opened, some not. I tore them from their envelopes, skimming her awkward hand. Wait for me. She’d said it one way or another in each of those letters. Then what she meant but didn’t say, nearly every time: I’ll never come. With a pair of scissors, I started cutting. A corner from the first, another in half and half again. Soon I was cutting those letters into strips. Sister, dear sister, she had written. But none of those sisters were me. They were Nan and Agnes. Even Patricia. I had plenty of sisters here for myself. In only minutes, those letters lay in pieces at my feet, except one.

  I sat at my desk and sealed the envelope again. It was dated only the week before. Return to sender, I wrote across the front. No one here by that name.

  The next day at the courthouse, I asked for a form. There’s more to you than they think, Mother had said. Twenty years and counting, I would have told her. When the form asked for the change of name, I wrote, “Norma Byrne.”

  Without even looking, the woman behind the desk struck the form with her bloody stamp.

  I can’t say I never imagined going back. After the country got on its feet again. After another war filled the factories with girls. Mrs. Keyes took to her bed and soon she was gone—I could have tried then. But no matter how often I wondered about home, Chicago was more. Before she went, Mrs. Keyes had left the house to us.

  It would have taken a day on the train, a half for the drive. Every mile that passed, I knew I might still turn around. When I reached the house, I imagined myself too afraid to step out. Only the smell of dust and pigs when I rolled down the window, the whine of the weather vane on the barn.

  A girl called to me from the porch. “They’re all at the wedding.”

  I could picture her there, hiding behind one of the porch posts, almost as if I saw her myself. She wore her hair in a kerchief and pigtails, tall as a stalk. The buckets in her hands clattered at her thighs. The girl would never have known a stranger to visit the house.

  “Whose wedding?”

  “Why, Darlene’s of course. Aunt Agnes made her dress.”

  I opened my door and stepped out, the heat of the sun in my eyes. “And your name?”

  “Renie.” She stood in the yard, awkward as a boy. Soon she was telling me her thoughts on weddings and dressing up in all sorts. “I’m not going,” she said. “Any day, I’d rather do chores.”

  Of course. Her eyes had a sureness I knew. With her height and her cheekbones, the girl had to be Nan’s.

  “Weddings,” I answered. “You know what they say. Never make too much of something. . . .”

  “Mother says that too.”

  “Your mother, does she have many sisters?”

  The girl stuck a knuckle in her ear. “She has two. But she used to have another one. As pretty as me, she said once.”

  “Did she now?”

  “Very pretty, Mother said. But the sister drowned.”

  The yard rose up. I leaned against the hood of the car. I’d imagined the visit dozens of ways, but this one always repeated itself. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure what?”

  “That her sister . . .”

  The girl tilted her head.

  “Never mind.” My hand burned on the hood and I shook it off. The wind struck, the barn door swinging. There wasn’t anything but the dark hayloft and a bell ringing from an animal’s collar, a curl of rope in the dust.

  “What’s your mother’s name?” I said.

  “Why, Nan of course. What’s yours?”

  “Something of the like,” I said. “Some called her Nan. Some Margrit.”

  “That’s a funny thing, to have two names.”

  The girl lifted her buckets again and made her way to the barn. The buckets banged as she walked, though she couldn’t help but look back. I stood by the car under the sun. I had little energy left to explain myself. Before the girl disappeared again, I called out, “You tell your mother that her daughter loves her, you hear? Her youngest one. Tell her, her daughter loves her very much.”

  The girl stopped. “But I’m her daughter.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What did you say your name was again?”

  “Norma.” My voice grew hoarse. “Norma Byrne.”

  “I’ve never heard Mother talk about you.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have. She might not want to remember me now.”

  The girl shrugged. The buckets must have been heavy. Her fingers reddened where the handles cut. “You sound like her, you know,” she called back. The cows lowed in the barn, and she hurried to answer them, the door behind her swinging shut. Like Nan? I thought. I imagined myself following the girl, asking her to explain—but I didn’t dare step away from the car for fear it might disappear altogether. Besides, what more could I say?

  I drove. Out along the river, where the water ran full and loud. On the banks were violets, sweet williams, bluebells, and bleeding hearts. The Elliot house was gone, nothing but planks in a dry bit of grass. When I passed the Clarks’, three women stood on the porch in matching dresses. They had grown as large as their mother, the Clark sisters, and unmarried by the look of it, but maybe they were happier with that—they had their sisters, after all. When I raised a hand to them, they turned their heads to watch me as I drove on.

  If I tried to imagine it again, I might take more time before I left. I might be sure to drop a stone at the door of Lee’s shop. That stone, it would be clean and white. Large enough he would pick it up before he stepped inside. With Lee, I always wanted to tell him no matter what h
e did, he did right.

  But it all must be a dream. The kind I have in the dark when I can’t sleep, and there’s only Charlotte to tell me whether it’s true or not. Because a river only runs in one direction, no matter what.

  III

  I walk to the lake. The boardinghouse is behind me, my arms snug to my ribs. There’s a chill, worse than usual for this time of year, but I won’t stop yet. The sun sits far in the west. I turn my back to it. Blocks away, the old Chicago Theatre is long closed, but there’s talk of opening it again. Overhead, the sky has grown dark. When I raise my eyes to look, it blurs. I wonder if it’s a summer cold I have coming on or something more.

  “Hello, Mrs. Byrne. How’s that girl of yours?” It’s Josey. He owns the flower shop. Short and squat without a hair on his head, his smile turns his cheeks to baby fat. The shopkeepers like to talk to a person whether they’ve had a bad day or not and they always talk to me—I’m not in a rush.

  “She’s not so much a girl anymore, but she does all right.”

  He smiles. “I saw it in the paper, her show in London. A director now! I always took a liking to her singing voice, myself.”

  “Now she can do both.”

  “Sorry her own father can’t see her. I know if she were my daughter, I’d be there in an instant. But you’ve done her straight.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t had much to do with it.”

  A widow. That’s what they know me as, thanks to Mrs. Keyes. With her rosary, she prayed the lie would take—and for her, I never said otherwise.

  “I’m sure her father misses her now,” Josey says.

  “I’m sure he would.” In truth, I have no idea what has become of Tom Elliot, alive or not. Esther’s letters never said, and I’m not sure I care anymore.

  Josey hands me yesterday’s newspaper and a single tulip, without its leaves. The newspaper has its coupons cut out, but I’m grateful for it.

  “They’ve got a story about the Chicago in there.”

  “The river?”

  “‘A triumph of engineering,’ they call it. Can you imagine, reversing the current like that?”