Not a soul in sight. A line of Canadian geese arced overhead, a slow purposeful procession heading east. Off behind him, a train, probably the one running parallel to Timberline, mourned its own passing. Between the honking and the sad whistle, something caught up with him, almost as if he’d been fleeing it. He sat on the riverbank, his bike lying beside him, and felt the grief return, grander and more terrible than ever. Did it never end, never let go of you? The feelings wracked him, brought on weeping, and he found himself talking aloud to the river, but also to his dad. Anger, resentment, which surprised him. Why did you leave us? You were always so there for us. What kind of love did you feel for us, really feel, that could let you, do this? You didn’t love us; you never loved us. Pretended to, is all. Lying bastard, in it for yourself, all those years.
The words went on, sometimes stopped by sobbing, but then coming up again. Good thing he’d shoved some folded tissues into his back jeans pocket. A little fragile but unblown upon, they did the trick.
He heard a sound, real distant, like a deflated ball being bounced against a basketball court. When he looked up, she was there. White-haired old lady in a bright red jogging suit, marking time on the path. She wore a smile but it softened when she saw his face. Gesturing at him, she stopped jogging and joined him on the grass. “Hello, my friend,” she said.
“I want to be alone, please.”
“No, you don’t. You want to be with me.’’
Wacko lady. “Suit yourself,” he said, looking away, hoping she’d take the hint and buzz off. Her white Nikes showed upbrushings of grass stain along the sides.
“So what’s the problem?”
He ignored her.
“There’s always a problem. What’s yours?”
“Being bugged by strangers.”
“Oh, I got me a live one! No, now seriously. We’ve got little enough time on this planet to be wasting it on sarcasm and putdowns.” Her voice, though small, was full and resonant. “I usta be shy. Can you believe it?”
“Not hardly.”
“I was. I’d see people I wanted to meet, and say hi or nothing at all. Just let them walk away forever. But all it takes is one major upset to teach you a big lesson fast, and I had three of them.” She shut up. He bit. “Yeah, so what were they?”
“I had a coronary, my nothing lunk of a husband died on me, and my dog got run over. Sure, you can smile like most folks do about Tavish, but I don’t hide my sentiment anymore. We were close and it was worse losing him than the cold fish I’d clung to for decades.”
“I wasn’t smiling.” Well, maybe a little inside for just a second. She was funny, all right, but not in that impossible way you just want to shut out; she seemed with that gleam in her eye to be amused by herself as well, in on the game.
“I don’t hide anything anymore. I don’t sugarcoat, I don’t whitewash. And I have no patience for those that do. So stop hiding the problem, young man. Out with it, and let your granny of the moment deal with it.”
He told her. He watched her face as he told her and saw not a ripple there. Almost like a wise Indian woman, unreadable wrinkles, except that this woman was all-white and her eyes shone a deep blue.
When he was done, she nodded. “Losing a parent’s an eye-opener, all right. I lost both of them when I was ten and then I got adopted and lost both of them a year later in a car wreck. Double whammy.”
“That must’ve hurt.”
“It did. I walked on eggs around my last set of ’em for a good year or two, didn’t smile, didn’t say much. I had this wound inside and it needed to heal, was all. So I can’t know what you’re feeling precisely, but I know of a kind what it must be like.” She looked away, almost as if drawing something from the sky, then back, jabbing the air with her index finger. “You’re a strong young man, I can tell. You’ve got plenty of brainpower upstairs”-she tapped her head-“and your heart is good. So I say this: Love your mom and tell her you love her, not just with an eye or a hug, but with words. Life is too damn short not to tell your loved ones you love them and to mean it more each time you say it. Sit with your grief, let it simmer like a tea bag in boiled water, then sip it down, slowly, small conscious sips, so you can savor its bitterness, so you can taste every lesson it has to offer.” She nodded, seeming satisfied with those words. Then she rose. “You hear what I’m saying? You’ll do it?”
“Sure.”
“We have a deal?”
“I guess.”
“Don’t just guess. Swear to it.”
A laugh escaped him. “Okay, okay, I swear it.” She looked askance. “There are swears and there are swears. But sometimes the light ones turn into the other kind, so I’ll be on my way.”
“You can stay longer.”
“Nope. I’ve had my time.” Her feet had started the jogging again, even though she was still on grass. “Your turn now. Bear the torch, bear it high, then pass it on. So long.” She gave a little salute, which he returned as best he could, and angled off, her little red butt moving above the flapping legs of her jogging suit.
He put a hand to his head. Slight headache. Funny. He hadn’t felt stressed with her. But there-as her form shrank along the bikepath, gray sole alternating with red leg-it persisted, the kind that needed lying down and an aspirin to shake off. Conner righted his bike, glanced a backward glance at the river, and headed home.
***
August second. Full moon. Lyra’d been all huggy to see her, Joseph holding off in his T-shirt and drawstring pants in the kitchen. To Katt’s relief, they had no plan to visit the cabin tonight but yes she was welcome to the key, in fact, here was an extra and anytime she wanted to use it, she should just go ahead. Felt odd, just sailing in after long absence, asking this favor, then taking off again-Lyra thrust a flyer at her on the way out, she was giving a lecture at Healing Pathways, a week from Friday. Yet her friends were accommodating, if weird. No mention of Marcus at all, though they surely knew. Death was, to them, one more aspect of nature. And nature was good.
Now here she was, alone, stripped of all clothing, a fire raging in the fireplace, and that beautiful aroma of pine in the air. She sat crosslegged on a sheepskin rug, right beneath the skylightand facing the fire-the couch having been pulled aside to allow her that view-watching it twist and sway and seethe over the sculpted lengths of wood. Her mind had been like that these past ten days, a glance eternal at Conner, hugging him, not probing as his headache complaints persisted, receding, returning, never growing stronger. Like curls of flame over stubborn wood, her awareness had danced upon him.
The cabin, as always (whether energy vortex or not), sharpened her thoughts. They’d been fuzzy, confused, all in a mangle since Marcus’s death. But out here, far from all noise and unnatural light, just moonglow overhead and the radiance of firelight warming her, her thoughts began to clarify along simple lines.
There was Marcus. Dead now, buried, but still alive in her mind. No guilt, none at all, and she wondered how that could be. Her mind and her spirit-though it hadn’t occurred to her in the house-were lighter, breathing far freer in his absence. This, despite the aghast recall of what she’d done. In her body, when she let the ingrained dictates of conventional morality go, it felt natural and right to have guided him toward and into death. Yet here was an autonomous being, a man she had loved and promised to care for-and she had done a horrendous thing to him.
It didn’t scan.
Were others so disjointed, so inconsistent, in their inner lives as she? Or did they follow a script, simple, dependable, reliable, thoroughly by the book? Keep it on him, she thought. Keep the focus on Marcus. It mattered not at all what others did. The notion had first come to her right on this very spot, and from that moment, it had felt right to initiate it and to persevere to the end. A law, any law, always had exceptions, and Marcus, in a way impossible to explain, had fallen through a loophole into his death. Every relationship revealed unique pockets of peculiarity: This, their most peculiar, had perhaps always bee
n hidden, waiting, inevitable.
But Conner. A log popped, and Katt trained her gaze upon the supple flame. Though the moon shone full above, she knew she only fancied a cone of light encircling her. But it was strong in fancy and met an upsurge of chthonic power, sure solid impacted firmness radiating through her buttocks and body. Delusion, scoffed Katt. There was no Earth Goddess. The crystals hanging everywhere were mere baubles. And yet the power of suggestion was strong here, and from her inmost depths to the crown of her head, she received messages. No voice sounded, nothing that crude. But she became aware of her uterus, resonating as soft as a low distant bell. She felt him inside her there, those long months nearly forgotten, drawing life from her, flat belly bowed and bulging taut as a drumhead, his gestation mutually transforming and then the painful
bond stretched agonizingly out of her and broken. Laid upon her breast, bloody eyes closed, lips working to milk her. The strong shell of protective love had enveloped them, stayed about them through his infancy. Had it attenuated? Or had it, like so many precious things lost, gone invisible through force of habit, through a taking-for-granted, followed by a forgetting? Sad how often the marvelous became mundane in the midst of a bustling world.
But here, in this place of refuge-here where Joseph and Lyra, for their own odd reasons, methodically circled the cabin a hundred yards out, loosening the earth deeply in one spot, then moving on-she felt the bond to her son as strong as it had ever been. Whatever had entrusted to her the power to heal now filled her anew, slipped bursts of new energy into her hands through the arms, as if they were limp gloves being stiffened with ethereal flesh. In her eyes appeared tears of strength, her lungs working at their crying and keeping up with the influx of power from below. The hearthfire rose and danced to the rhythms she felt course through her.
Conner’s face came to her. She’d allowed their bond to loosen. His face had had an easy confidence about it, the light brashness of a young boy secure in his place in the world, in his family. But now the skin had loosened, had become wavery and uncertain. It was monstrous, being his destroyer. How could she have done such a thing? An agitation seized her, ate at her, tormented her.
She had to heal him. No two ways. Yes, he looked a little like Marcus, but he was uniquely Conner.
The sins of the father stopped with the father, as the sins of the mother stopped with her. She’d rise soon now, dress, and drive out of the foothills into Fort Collins. Don’t ask, she’d say. Just let me touch your head. And for as long as it took, she would enfold his brow from behind in both hands, and bend all her will to undoing the awfulness she had let loose.
***
He heard his question repeated: “How does she seem?”
“Yep, that’s what I asked.” He was on the hall phone but Mom was downstairs doing laundry, out of earshot.
“Um, okay, I guess.”
“You’re holding out,” he accused.
Sherry paused. “You don’t miss a trick, do you? I’d say she sounds… disembodied. You know that word?”
“Sure. I’m not stupid.” Only plagued with migraine.
“Sorry. Like she’s withdrawn from the world, holding it off somehow.”
“Yeah, she’s been like that for oh a week and a half, ever since she went to Lyra’s cabin.”
“She told me about that place.”
“Yeah so she comes back and I’m in bed, just finished reading, just turned out the light, but she knocks and she waits a bit-so’s you can get your finger out of your nose or whatever-and then she’s inside and I switch on my lamp for her. She looks in a hurry about something and sort of out of breath without being out of breath. So I tell her, as she’s zipping across the room and sitting beside me and raising her hands to feel my frigging headache-” Concerned: “You still got that?”
“Comes and goes, but yep, I do. Won’t go away.”
“Jeez, it’s been a while. So yeah you told her, what did you tell her?”
Ugh, this felt icky.
“Well, this ancient old jogging lady, she said to say I loved her-”
“To say you loved the jogging lady? That is weird.”
“No, no, to say I loved Mom.” He heard Sherry laugh. “Oh I get it. You’re joking, you’re razzing me, having me on.”
“Just a little tease among friends,” she said. “Okay so you told Katt you loved her. That’s great!”
“Yeah, but it did something to her. She looked at me real funny, well it was just a flash really but it doesn’t take much with your mom-”
“Right.”
“-and she felt my forehead but real lightly like one of those limp-wristed handshakers who come on as if they’d like to crush your hand but have no energy in them when it comes to the grip.”
“Hey, listen, Conner,” she said, almost as if she were reining in a horse, “telling someone you love them doesn’t do stuff like that. It’s gotta be a coincidence.”
“Yeah but I vowed a vow to my old lady jogger, and it feels good to keep saying it, gets easier and less icky to say. Ever noticed that?”
Sherry said she hadn’t, and Conner could tell, by the way she said it, that maybe she’d never said it to anyone. That was too bad if it was true.
“So anyway I’ve seen that weird thing fire off in her a few times, when she comes home from work and I hug her a little and tell her you-know. She even says it to me, but I can hear something else there.”
“It’s good that you’re telling your mom you love her. I think your jogging lady must be very wise. As to what’s up with your mom, I just don’t know. Listen. Why don’t I come over and hang out with you guys?”
It’d been ages since Conner had seen her. Funny, how some faces got lost in memory when they weren’t there, but sprang up in an oh-yeah when they were. Sherry’s was like that. “Okay, great. I’ll tell Mom.”
“No, don’t. Let’s surprise her. I’ll bring flowers. You be ready to answer the door.”
“I dunno.”
“Come on. Let’s try it. Maybe it’ll draw her out of her grief. The worst she can do is send me away like that weird uncle of yours from Minneapolis.”
So he agreed, and he sat in the great room, massaging his head, waiting. What’re you doing, his mom asked in an idle way. Nothing, he said, just looking at the sun. And I love you, Mom. I love you too, Conner, she said, a daze in her eyes. She passed by, carrying a basket of clothing to be folded and put away.
***
Sherry’s car pulled up, a white sporty thing with odd crap on the back, some nonfunctional upraised bar over the trunk. Looked stupid to him, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. She carried a green wrap of Uny red roses and he could hear her heels, tap tap tap, on the sidewalk. A sound from upstairs, his mom descending. “Someone there? You expecting someone?” But he had already bounded up to open the door before she rang the bell, and he pulled the door open. And the red was bright red, and the green was an impossibly bright green, and Sherry stood behind them, colors sweeping her face like alarmed searchlights.
Then, without moving, she came forward. Her opening face broke apart in beauty and there were hands coming to him and falling flowers and something warm behind him, at his back. He fell, helpless, back into the warm thing, a zone of comfort and support, and knew no more.
***
In the two days since, Katt had relived his collapse, almost as if it were an image burnt on her retina: Sherry on the doorstep, inching forward as if held back by a wall of water. The heaviness of Conner’s fall coming down like lead weights as his fade suddenly shifted into unconscious collapse. And there she’d been, maternal embrace ready to support him, nearly knocked off-balance. Heal him, said a voice of strength and urgency; heal him now, right in this doorway with Sherry looking on. But the cloud of inaction that had held her back for day upon day, a suspended state of dither and do-nothing brought on and sustained by his I love you in just those shy coy Marcus tones-that terrible paralysis of will persisted, even with her son unconsc
ious in her arms, even knowing in that rush to the hospital the diagnosis Doctor Bein would give.
Swimming up into consciousness, seeing her there, her and Sherry, I love you Mom had been the first thing out of his mouth, brave boy, caught and held by the tight band of sheets across his chest. She wanted to come forward, heal him, hold him. But her hands wouldn’t obey her, the awful cloud about her still. Instead she took a lifeless chair, clutching his fingers, then grasping his right hand in her hand, an inept squeeze. I’m so sorry, she’d said, and she had been in so many ways. And monstrous and self-berating and amazed at her inability to act.
For two days, a frenzy lived and grew inside her. No sleep at night-or, if a little, then light and deceptive. Sherry kept coming back, a deep warm concern in those eyes that had been so cool and dead when they’d first met. The car, the hospital room, Sherry’s hello on the doorstep and her solicitous hugs when just needed, when the demons were about to overwhelm her-these cycled in over and over, the clock a meaningless toy, the sun rising or setting without point. When her friend picked up the folded pink paper on the kitchen table and said something, Katt, in a new build of agitation, couldn’t fix on it until she repeated it. A lecture, Lyra’s lecture. Sacred Abortion its title.
***
Sherry asked her a question.
“Excuse me?” Ratt said.
“I said,” said Sherry, “is this the same Lyra who lias the cabin with the weird energies?”
“Yes.”
“The one who loosens the earth around her property to let the Goddess breathe more freely?”
“She has a good heart.”
“Hey, this is tonight. Let’s see. Artemis, the role of the church in baby-killing, and women’s sacred right to end pregnancy. Sounds like something I want to hear.”
“No, really, I-”
“Come on, this is your friend. She a good speaker?”
“She’s okay. Lots of passion. Pretty articulate. A book grabs her, she embraces it, chews on its ideas, spits them out. But I’m not really in the mood for-”
Walking Wounded Page 13
