He smiles and sits down next to me, pulls some cigarettes out of his pocket and lights one.
“I’d like one, too,” I say, so Lex hands the pack to me and I pull one out and he lights it with the matches from his pocket.
“Lena,” Lex says, breathing in, looking up at the stars above us.
“Lex,” I say, and the sound of his name ricochets against my tongue.
“You want a ride home?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t want to go home.”
Lex keeps looking up at those stars and takes another drag from his cigarette, and then he grins and says, “Me either.” So we drive.
His truck is a ’45 Chevy, and he turns the radio on and I crank it loud, so loud the music from Harvey’s Jubilee fills the car so that there is no space between the music and our bodies and our minds. We go careening around back roads until we hit the pavement of Route 5, and then we are flying north faster than I’ve ever been, past cornfields and barns and motels and trees, the windows down and the night’s breeze streaming through my hair. Once in a while we come to a spot where we can see the Connecticut River to our right and it is dark enough to reflect moonlight under those stars, and I can smell it through the open windows, its sand and moss-covered banks and languid sigh. New Hampshire winking at us from the other side, with its granite ledges and brick factories and hillside farms just like ours.
Lex fishes a bottle out from under his seat, pulls off the top, and hands it to me. I take a sip and my mouth turns crimson hot, then mellows to a golden glow.
“From Kentucky,” Lex says, and I take another sip and feel its heat go all the way down to my toes.
I cackle. Screech out in that night. My teeth old bones the light gets through.
Lex swigs from the bottle, too, and laughs, then starts to sing along with the music. His voice is off-key and high and full of sorrow, singing along with Kitty Wells’s “Making Believe.” The dashboard lights up his face, and I can look at him now with the darkness hiding me, his long neck and pronounced Adam’s apple and receding hair and high cheekbones and crooked nose. Full of a kind of joy I can see from here, while Kitty sings about love and imagination.
Lex hands me the bottle again and I take a drink and feel my body grow sleepy with its golden glow and lower myself into the seat and close my eyes and then I feel the car slowing, and turning, and hear its wheels crunching over gravel, and then it rolls to a stop, and Lex turns the engine off and the air is suddenly alarmingly quiet.
I open my eyes and look up. We’re on a high spot facing the river. It is so still and wide, that river, that you can see the stars reflected on its black surface. The water moves slow, making those reflected stars shimmer, and the crickets are suddenly loud through the open windows. Lex is leaning his head back on the seat with his eyes closed, his body emptied of sound, and in that silence his sorrow is as loud as anything else in that car. I reach over and touch his hand.
“Lex,” I say.
“Yes.” He doesn’t open his eyes.
“This river is beautiful.”
He smiles without opening his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “It is.”
“I want to go swimming.”
He opens his eyes then, looks at me and holds that gaze. Fear tangled with sadness.
“Come,” I say, and then I am climbing out of the truck and clambering down the bank toward that cool, black water.
Vale
OCTOBER 2, 2011
She finds a job at a small inn a few miles away. It’s a place she can walk to—through the woods and along back roads. She makes the beds, washes the dishes, sets the tables for breakfast, makes ten dollars an hour.
She needs the job. It’s been a month of driving around the roads of Nelson, re-pasting her mother’s photo to every surface she can find. Why does she stay? Her legs won’t walk her to the bus station. Her hands won’t buy herself a ticket.
Her bank account is empty. She’s lost five pounds. She forgets most mornings to brush her hair.
“Do you know my mother?” she asks strangers.
They turn away quickly, and Vale realizes, in those instants, how Bonnie felt walking these same streets: a person whose pain is to be avoided.
She reads in No Word for Time: “There is no word for time in the Micmac language, nor in most Algonquin tongues . . . time is relative and elusive in nature, just as Einstein proved, and as quantum researchers are discovering.”
No word for time. No Bonnie. No bus ticket.
And so the inn; the inn is her salvation.
THE GUESTS COME FROM ALL OVER, SAY, “THE DAMAGE around here is phenomenal.”
Vale nods at them, these couples with their coiffed hair and bright eyes, sipping coffee and reading the New York Times. She considers sitting down and telling them about the Commission for Country Life with its institutionalizing, sterilizing, and corralling; its cutting up and clearing out what was unruly, nonwhite, native, wild, until it was just these white houses, these black and white cows, these sweet-smelling white pines these visitors have come for. But she does not.
They ask her why she’s here as she pours their coffee. Vale says, “Back for a spell,” turning.
They say: “So beautiful, despite the storm,” and Vale says, “Yes,” not mentioning Oxy, owls, bridges, heroin.
AFTER WORK VALE WALKS THE LONG WAY HOME—OVER Heart Spring Mountain, past the old Emerson cellar hole, the foundation sprouting ferns amid the shards of broken glass, chimney brick, and rusted metal. She kneels for a moment in a field of hay-scented ferns. Feels the cool ground below her body, the hot sun across her face.
She and Danny came here once. A week ago she got a postcard from him in Guatemala: “You’ve always been a star, Vale. I’m so very sorry. Sending you all my love. D.”
He used to sing Leonard Cohen songs in the hayloft of the barn that summer he was seventeen and Vale was eight.
“Hear this one,” he would say, a hand-rolled, unlit cigarette between his lips (not going to catch the barn on fire), a guitar in his hands, and she would close her eyes and listen, the words rushing over her, leaping into the dust-thick air. She liked the songs, yes, but also his voice—gravel and rust—and the sounds of the ticking of sunlight on the roof and of an airplane, somewhere, overhead. “Bird on the Wire,” he sang. And “Suzanne.”
“You like that one?” he asked, turning toward her, and she said, “Yes,” and he said, “Me, too. Here’s another.”
I’m in love, she thought then, at eight. Laughing. “Sisters of Mercy.” “So Long, Marianne.”
Vale rises from the ferns and grass and leaves. Keeps walking.
At the camper she pours herself a glass of gin. Downs it quickly. She wonders where Danny is now; pictures his sunburnt and dust-caked face in Guatemala. Vale pours herself another glass and steps outside. Imagines the dark-skinned or light-skinned, young or old woman he is with there.
“Danny,” she whispers into the night. She is half-drunk. No one can hear her.
She wants to tell him about Marie, their great-great-grandmother.
A line from No Word for Time pops into her head, something she read earlier this morning: “Anywhere you stand should be sacred because the entire earth is sacred.” Vale closes her eyes. Feels the solid and teeming ground below her feet, hears the soft rush of water over creek stones ringing in her ears.
Stephen
JUNE 6, 1975
He picks her up hitchhiking by the side of Route 100. Early June, that fluorescent green blush in the trees. She wears men’s tight jeans and a flannel shirt, carries a leather bag slung over her shoulder, filled with groceries. As she climbs into the front seat of Stephen’s truck she tells him she’s looking for a ride to Farther Heaven, one of the local communes.
Her dark hair is tied back with a piece of twine; her wrists are pale, freckled, sturdy.
“You headed that way?” she asks, a slight fever in her eyes.
“Yeah,” he lies. “I was going that way.”
She rolls down the window as he pulls out. He turns the radio on to fill the silence. It’s the country station, playing Merle Haggard, whose voice Stephen loves and whose politics he can’t stand. She beats the toe of her boot to the rhythm of the music, taps her fingers on the door handle.
“You live on the commune?” he asks.
She turns toward him. “Yes. One year now.”
He likes her. She is grounded. Wary. Unlike how he’s imagined hippies to be, watching them from afar.
He asks her what it’s like, and she warms, visibly. She tells him it’s awful. Lovely. Complicated. Ridiculous at times. All those idealists, she says, crammed into one house, vying for authenticity and purpose, for meat and protein, but that she loves it, too. “More than I’ve loved anyplace before.” She tips her head back and laughs—loudly. Without reserve. A loud bell. Overflowing. Then turns to Stephen. “Do you love it here, too?”
Does he love it here? What an absurd question. He’s been a few other places—Boston, Montreal, New York once, where he got too drunk in a friend’s apartment and wandered around the city that night, lost and terrified. He’d stopped for a spell halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge, wondering if and how he would ever make it home, and whether he wanted to. He could just keep going, he realized then, and never go back to that hillside where he was from. His mother and Bonnie. Be free. But he sobered up a little before dawn, found his friend’s apartment, took the Greyhound back home. He’d never really considered living anywhere but here, other than that one moment. He’d never wondered why until this woman got into his truck. Her long limbs and dark hair and gray eyes and quick hands moving incessantly from her lap to the door handle and back again. Her absurdly simple question: “Do you love it here?”
Her eyes settle on the red, blunt tip of his right pointer finger, and she leans toward him, asks what happened.
Stephen winces. Turns toward the window—a barn, a silo, a wind-driven pine. But when he looks back toward her she’s got her eyes straight on him and is holding steady there. So he tells her about his draft card and his knife. The blood in the oak leaves.
He has to force his eyes back to the road and the trees he was headed toward.
“You did the right thing,” she says quietly.
“You think?” He still dreams of Vietnam. Images pulled from newspapers, come to life in his dreams.
She puts her thumb on that still-tender tip of his finger and holds it there for a moment, then pulls away and looks out the window. “You don’t want to be part of that killing.”
“No, I don’t,” Stephen says, keeping his eyes pinned on the road.
WHEN HE DROPS HER OFF AT THE COMMUNE SHE LOOKS straight at him before leaping out of the truck. “Come back sometime,” she says, smiling.
Stephen nods but knows he won’t. He isn’t one of them—hippies. Dreamers. And they aren’t one of him—tied. Beholden. To Bonnie. To Hazel. To the land. He fears entering a conversation he wouldn’t know his way around in. Full of smoke and words that twine. “Okay then,” he says, and nods.
Deb waves and walks up the hill toward the house. He doesn’t want to stare but finds himself not wanting to leave, either, watching her strong legs moving up that hill—the determined stride of them.
He looks around, too. He hasn’t been to any of the communes before but has always been curious. It’s what he imagined it would look like—the old house surrounded by cars, a school bus, various buildings in various states of decay. A young guy dressed in rags sits on the farmhouse porch playing a banjo. South of the house two women are bent over weeding a vegetable garden in cutoffs and white tops. He can just see the blueish tint of their nipples through the thin cotton. He looks away, backs the truck up, and thinks of his mother’s life, of the way her shoulders are bent now, the way her hips hurt when she walks. There is an ease to the way these people see the world—something he both admires and despises—like this landscape is a place they can own, buy, inhabit for a spell, love, and then leave, not a place they are indebted to, tied to like a tree’s roots are tied to bedrock. What a thing, to see and know and inhabit the world like that, Stephen thinks, putting his truck into gear and pulling away.
Lena
JULY 6, 1956
Water—
I take off my boots and socks and then pull my sister’s old dress up over my head. I don’t wear anything underneath, and I know I am mostly obscured by the darkness of this moonless night, but I also know the darkness isn’t complete. I hear Lex stumbling down the bank, and then I walk into the water. Its coolness shocks my shins, my thighs, my stomach, and then I leap in, my head fully submerged, and feel the current pulling me south and the pressure against my eyes and the pulse of the water inside my ears. When I pull my head up for air I can see Lex up to his waist in the river, looking my way.
“Whoo-hoo!” I call out. “Goddamn glorious!” My sister’s husband’s body is beautiful in this slivered light—slender, delicate, full of grace. I think for a moment of her loving him, but the scene dissolves. He dives under the water and I put my head under, too, and feel myself drifting downstream and let go of all resistance to that pull, so that I am floating on my back under those stars, anchored by nothing.
Soon he is there next to me, reaching for my hand. “Lena! We have to swim up,” he says. “Or we’ll never make it back to the car.”
I don’t want to swim. I don’t want to struggle against this current, but he is still holding on to my hand and he is paddling hard, so I join him. It’s more work than I imagined. I kick and push my hands through that dark force, and when we finally make it back to the bank near the car I am exhausted. I climb onto that sandy stretch on my belly like a seal, and then I am laughing. Lex lies down next to me on the sand and smiles at my laughter. “We made it,” he says, breathing hard.
“Yes,” I say, still laughing. I don’t know why. The air is warmer than the water, and it holds me. Then Lex reaches his hand over and runs his thumb down the bones of my spine.
“Lena,” he says. His face is serious and full of that sorrow again, and he is staring into my eyes. I roll over onto my side to face him. His eyes drift down my body.
“Lena,” he says again.
I often think I am the loneliest person alive. But that might not be true.
I take Lex’s hand where it lies in the sand and bring it to my breast. His fingers bend around the small curve, his thumb touches my nipple. “Lena,” he says again.
“Lex,” I say. I have never been touched by a man. I never imagined it would feel so much like earth and like water. Like lightning.
His hand reaches up around my shoulders and neck, touches my face. He runs the back of his hand down my body between my breasts, over my belly, settles between my legs and a wave of heat rises and a sound escapes my lips.
“Lena,” he says again, and it is a question and an apology and an expression all at once. I have been found in the dark.
“Lex,” I say again, and then I pull him to me, and only much later do we drive home.
Vale
OCTOBER 10, 2011
There’s a man drinking at the inn’s bar who has recently returned from Iraq. Neko, dark-eyed, a few years older than Vale. She remembers him vaguely from years ago—slender, a mother from Mexico, wheelies in front of the post office.
He and Vale are the only ones there. It’s 10 P.M. and Vale has just finished cleaning the kitchen, setting the tables for breakfast. The owners have gone to sleep, left Vale in charge of locking up. She’s come to love the late walks home—back roads, her phone’s light illuminating the way.
Tonight the old house creaks around them. The inn’s strange night music: toilets flushing upstairs, the hum of the dishwasher.
Vale hasn’t thought about Neko in years, but here they are: Scotch and wine on the counter before them, Gypsy jazz playing quietly on the radio.
He tells Vale he’s a photographer, that he’s sp
ent the last two years photographing the war in Iraq for Reuters, that he flew back from Baghdad a month ago for a break and to spend time with his mother.
He takes a sip. Tells Vale that his mother, Carmen, came here from Mexico when she was eighteen, married Neko’s dad, and has sat huddled next to the wood stove, eyes on the TV, all winter long for thirty years. He spins the glass on the bar’s counter. “A unique version of happiness, eh?”
Vale nods. “The winters can be long.”
Neko takes a slow drink. “Yes. Long.” He looks at Vale. “And you?”
Vale eyes his wrists, the blue veins that quiver there. Crooked teeth. One chipped one. Beautiful face. Beautiful cheekbones.
“Me,” she says, turning from him and sipping her wine. “No story. Back home for spell.”
He nods, eyeing her.
“Isn’t that,” he says quietly, nodding toward the poster with Bonnie’s face on it pinned to the wall near the door, “your mother?”
Vale doesn’t look at the poster. Of course he knows. Everyone knows. She closes her eyes for a minute, imagines slamming her glass against the bar counter, having it shatter into one thousand pieces. Little shards in the carpet—impossible to clean up. “Yes. That’s Bonnie.”
Neko nods. Takes another sip of his drink. “She’s beautiful,” he says, quietly.
“She is,” Vale says, a sudden ache in her gut and thighs.
Neko takes another sip of his Scotch and tells her that he came back to be with his mother, yes, but that he also needed to be somewhere quiet for a while. “Away from the madness. And then Irene happened.” He laughs into his drink. “The fire will find you anywhere, won’t it?” he says.
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