by T. Greenwood
She needs to get outside of her body, because it is about to destroy her. And so she crawls on hands and knees, lowing like an ancient beast, as she makes her way through the broken wall. The rain greets her with its cold hands, pulling her, even as it pushes. She lies in a pile of wet leaves, presses the cold wet mud against her skin, and opens her eyes until the rain fills them, until she is not only mute but blind as well. And, for a moment, there is respite. Cool rain on hot skin; the fire sizzles even as it smolders on. She feels as though someone is tearing her body apart, as though she is being ripped down her center, just threads holding together a seam. The girl is gone. When did she go? Was she ever there at all? Maybe Nessa dreamed her, conjured her. Maybe she is feverish, delirious, foolish, and deluded. She might die here, she thinks, and this thought is punctuated by a loud, wild creaking and the sudden and momentary certainty that something terrible is about to happen.
Ruby tries to open the back door, but the wind pushes back, resists like a child on the other side who doesn’t want them to come out. She pushes harder, pressing her shoulder into it, leaning with all of her weight. The door swings open and she stumbles down the steps. When her eyes adjust to the darkness, she feels like she’s stepped into a dream.
The first thing she notices is that the river is no longer the quiet creek it was yesterday. It is wide and high, and it roars like the engine of a car. She takes the flashlight and shines a weak spotlight into the distance. It doesn’t seem possible, but the river has come closer to the house as well now.
She turns around to see if her mother is following her. But her mother stands in the doorway, her old red coat wrapped around her, her arms wrapped around her waist. She is looking at the river too. Suddenly, Ruby is overwhelmed by a memory of her mother standing at the edge of the river after they finally found Jess. She had stood like this then too. She was soaking wet, and someone, one of her dad’s friends, another paramedic, wrapped his arm around her shoulders. But she’d only stood there, shaking, staring out at the water in the same strange way. As though she were watching the world end and was powerless to do anything about it.
“Are you coming?” Ruby says to her mother, afraid of her answer. Afraid that she will only stand there just as she had that night, staring out into the darkness like a statue.
But instead her mother pulls the hood of her coat up over her head, pulls the drawstrings tight and nods at Ruby.
“Quick!” Ruby says to her. “We need to cross here. Upstream it’s going to be too hard.”
The rain pounds down on them, and Sylvie has to will her legs to move. She feels as though she is a tree that has grown roots in this spot. That she is tethered to this house by a strange underground network of nerves, intricate and complicated. Is this paralysis from her own stubborn unwillingness, she wonders, or inability? What if she was wrong? What if she is simply incapable of leaving this house, this little plot of land? What if this sentence, this exile is not self-imposed at all, but rather inflicted upon her? Mandated. What if there are greater powers than her own fear at work here?
The rain is loud as it hits the hood of her jacket; it pounds against her ears like a heartbeat.
Ruby is standing at the place where land becomes water, waiting for her. Her face is blank, neither hopeless nor hopeful. Just waiting.
This moment is a gift, she knows. It is being offered to her—by Ruby, of course, but perhaps, even by the universe. If she refuses, if she turns away from this cosmic generosity, she is suddenly certain that something terrible will happen. And that terrible thing will be that she never sees her daughter again. And so when Ruby hollers into the storm, “Hurry, Mom!” Sylvie wills her legs to move, her body to respond. She can feel the network, the nervous system resisting. It is electric, magnetic even. But she wills herself forward, one step at a time. Her legs feel thick and heavy, as though she is tearing roots from the ground. As though she is ripping her own body from the earth. But then she is walking toward Ruby, and then she is running toward Ruby, and the house is behind her.
And nothing is happening.
She is not being sucked back into its clutch, there is nothing stronger than her own wish, her own desire, her own yearning. She wants desperately to be free of this, and then, suddenly, miraculously, she is. She just is.
“Take my hand,” Ruby says. “We need to cross here. It’s too deep up ahead.” Ruby extends her tiny hand out to her, and Sylvie grasps it. How many times has she held her daughter’s hand as they crossed the street? There was always something so pacifying about the moment when palms touched and fingers locked in this way; as long as she was holding on to Ruby nothing could happen to her.
They move together like one strange multi-limbed body, first running and then leaping across the narrowest part of the river. It rushes against their ankles, tugs at their legs, but they are still able to cross and get to the other side. Sylvie can feel the cold water seeping into her pant legs, even her coat. It should weigh her down, but here, staring at the backside of her house from the opposite embankment, she feels lighter. So much weight lifted.
“Come,” Ruby urges, and pulls her hand, a gentle reminder that this journey has only started.
They make their way through the dark woods, Ruby leading the way. The storm feels like something alive, a beast howling into the night. It is raining so hard now, the air feels like it too is alive. But rather than frightening her, it seems, rather, to urge them on.
Ruby carries the flashlight, and the weak beam bobs and dips as they run, illuminating nothing but rain and trees, spruce and fir and cedar, their evergreen scent heady and thick. Maple, birch, beech, elm, and ash with their tender leaves. But despite the darkness, Sylvie feels overwhelmed by all of her other senses: the heady scent of the trees, the snapping of twigs and crush of leaves under their feet as they run, the howling of the wind and the roar of the rain and the river behind them. She is disoriented, but Ruby seems certain; she is not forging a new path but following along one she already knows by heart.
Ruby rushes ahead and then stops, turning as if to make sure that Sylvie is still behind her. In the dim light of the flashlight, Sylvie can see the relief in Ruby’s face. It tears at her heart. Ruby had expected her to disappear. That she would fail, again. Somehow, this makes Sylvie’s resolve grow stronger. She will not abandon her again. She will never leave her.
“This way,” Ruby says then, her words being sucked into the wind. “In the sugar shack.”
You wouldn’t know it was there if you weren’t looking for it. It is a crumbling sugarhouse enveloped in foliage. One side has sunken into the ground, and the roof is caved in. It doesn’t look as though it has been used for years. It’s like something from a childhood fairy tale. Like something from a dream.
Ruby shines the flashlight toward the door, which has come off of its hinges. “She’s in here,” she says but hesitates at the doorway, as though afraid of entering, as if she is second guessing her decision to bring Sylvie here.
“It’s okay,” Sylvie says. “I’m right here.”
And so Ruby pushes the door gently open and Sylvie follows close behind. They step through into the dark room, and for a moment all of the smells and sounds are silenced here. It is a quiet dark cave. But as Ruby scans the room with the flashlight, she becomes frantic. The room is empty.
Ruby scans the room with the flashlight, terrified that Nessa has tried to leave on her own, gone out into the storm to find help. She sweeps the room with the light, as if she has missed some dark corner where she might be cowering, hiding. But there is nothing in here. No girl. It’s as though she never existed. As though she only dreamed her.
“She was just here,” she says to her mother, who stands shivering in the doorway. “I swear. Her water broke right here,” she says, gesturing to the floor. She drops to her knees and presses her hand against the floor. And it is wet. But it could just be rain that has come through the cracks in the roof overhead.
Ruby feels like she migh
t vomit. She looks at her mother, afraid that she will think that she was trying to trick her. That she will be angry. But her mother just kneels down next to her.
“Where do you think she’s gone?”
“I don’t know,” Ruby says. “I don’t know why she would have left. I told her you were a midwife, that you could help her.” Ruby feels her entire chest expanding, her heart swelling inside of it. She sits down on the floor and looks into the dark abyss of the shack.
Her mother sits down next to her, puts her arm across her shoulder, and says, “It’s okay. We’ll find her.”
Ruby sets the flashlight down on the floor. It creates a narrow beam of light which points outside into the storm, into the night. “I’m sorry I brought you here,” she says.
Her mother shakes her head. “No, no . . .”
“I know you didn’t want to leave.”
“It’s okay,” she says and pulls Ruby in tighter. “Listen, we’ll find her. She’ll be okay.”
Ruby breathes the scent of her mother, and the scent of woods and rain and river transport her. She is sitting on the embankment as they pull Jess’s body from the river. That night, her mother had stood at the edge of the river by the broken bridge, refusing to go home. Finally, Bunk came and pulled her away, and she fought and fought.
“You don’t understand!” she kept screaming. “There was another car! There was another car! It was coming toward us, but then it just disappeared.”
Ruby had not seen another car. She had been so lost inside her book, so lost inside the story, she hadn’t realized they were falling until she saw the river outside her window, until she heard the horrific sound of her father screaming. But her mother insisted that there was another car, even as her father said, No, no. She must have been mistaken. It must have been the way the rain hit the streetlights. An illusion. Because there was not a single shred of evidence that there had been any other vehicle near the bridge that night. It was an accident. That is all. Robert had been distracted. There was a storm. The tires were bald, and the bridge was old. That is all. Sometimes the world is cruel. Sometimes it conspires against you, no matter what you do.
“What’s her name?” Ruby’s mother says softly.
She looks up at her mother’s face, sees how this year has changed her. There are lines around her mouth and at the edges of her eyes. The deep circles beneath her eyes are like strange shadows.
“It’s Nessa,” she says.
She nods then and stands up. “Okay. Then let’s find her. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far.”
They go back out through the front door of the shack, calling her name. They circle the shack, widening the perimeter like any good search team. But it feels as though they are looking for a ghost. The sky is furious, and the wind is nearly deafening now. The entire world seems to be made of water. Below them the river rushes with a new purpose, toward what, she isn’t sure.
Even if they were to find her, Sylvie doesn’t know what they can do for her. This was not part of her midwife training. Every single child she has brought into this world has been ushered into clean sheets and warm arms. Into soft light.
She tries not to think about the possibility that there is no girl. That this is all just a dream of Ruby’s, a delusion. She tries not to think about the distinct possibility that she has passed on her own paranoia. That she has infected Ruby with her own irrational fears, her terribly vivid imagination. She needs to believe her, because the alternative is unbearable. But still, there is nothing here but woods and rain and river. The entire search seems ridiculous, futile. They are chasing a dream girl, a chimera, a ghost.
Ruby slips around to the back of the shack, taking the only light with her, and Sylvie is enveloped in a roaring blindness. She relies on sound alone to guide her back to her daughter. She runs and trips on a stump. She hears the fabric of her pant leg rip, and then feels the shocking cold of the rain against her exposed skin.
“Ruby!” she hollers, stumbling blindly toward the place where she disappeared. She uses the edge of the shack to guide her, and then she is on the other side, staring at the back of Ruby’s head. She is squatting on the ground. She turns to Sylvie, and cries, “Mom. Come here.”
Maybe it is just this overwhelming pain, but the only memory Nessa has now, the only one there is room for, is of the night she left. It was the reason for leaving, but now it is the reason for coming home. It has driven her back here. It has pulled her back like some sort of invisible thread. Each day since then like a bead, but the thread is too short, and she has to keep pulling and pulling to get more slack. And now, here she is, all those beads have slipped off the strand, and she is somehow back where she started, at the hard metal clasp that holds it all together. She is delirious, covered in wet leaves, but she knows that this is her only job now: to fasten this metal clasp. To bring things, everything, full circle.
When she opens her eyes again, they fill with rain, but she sees that Ruby has come back. She is overwhelmed with relief. Gratitude. This girl, with her ratty braids and tiny hands and gentle eyes. She kneels down next to Nessa on the wet ground and puts her hand on her forehead, as though she is Nessa’s mother. Her skin is so cool against the furnace that is Nessa’s flesh. She smiles, even as the pain rips through her again.
“I brought my mom,” the girl says. “She can help you.”
Nessa focuses her eyes on the place behind the girl. Into the dark abyss of the storm. She can see the dark shape of a person, a woman. Ruby turns to her and shines the flashlight so that she is illuminated. She is wearing a jacket with a hood, and she can only see her face. But in the bright beam of light (the headlights, flicking on suddenly, suddenly) the recognition is absolutely certain.
She can taste the metal in her mouth. She can hear the click, click of her teeth. The pain is beginning to take the shape of a connection, and she is electrified as the two points of metal touch. She bites down, bites hard, her teeth grinding into each other, her mouth flooded with the tastes of gold, silver, platinum, and rust. She squeezes her eyes shut, bears down, concentrates on the clasp, holding it open just long enough to slip the loop in, and releasing it. And at once, everything is connected.
Here is the night the world changes, your world changes. A night of passages. From summer to fall. From childhood to adulthood. From careful whispers to total silence. You have left so much behind already, but tonight you will leave the rest behind for good. You will burn bridges tonight. You will barely stop to wonder at the flames.
Here is a man. Here are his hands. Here is his face you can barely recollect anymore. Here is the cold seat of his car, the cold wind through the crack in the window. Here is a song on the radio that sounds like the hollow insides of a tin can. Here is the joint he passes you that you put to your lips. It crackles and hisses, and the fire burns your throat before the calm descends.
Here is your body, though it doesn’t feel like it belongs to you. He has claimed it somehow, made it his own. He has annexed your ribs, your skin. Here is your body sore and weeping. Seeping. You can smell him in your hair and on your hands.
Here is the book he has given you, his words pressed into the fleshy paper. A souvenir? A token. A reminder. Even before it is over, it has already begun to end. He thinks he will let you go quietly. That this letting go will be an easy thing. He doesn’t know then that it will not be gentle, this severing, but violent. How could he?
Here is a river. Here is rain and a girl and a man in a car. Here you are, realizing that one day soon he will drop you off and never come back to get you again. And because you have been left before, this feels inevitable, though certainty and predictability doesn’t make it hurt any less; it only makes it hurt more.
The rain taps its condolences, its reassurances against the glass. And as you lean into the cold window, it could be any window at all. It could be the window of that one apartment where you lived with your mother, with its black-and-white floors like a checkerboard, the brown cookie jar, the curt
ains with the pom-poms on the hem. It could be the place you stayed when you were seven: the room in the big yellow house next to the school, where you sat at the window and watched the children get dropped off by their parents. Longed for those kisses and the brightly colored lunch boxes and rain boots. It could be the window in the motel where you stayed one summer, the one that smelled of cigarettes and mold, but that also had a broken vending machine where you could get free Pepsi whenever you wanted one. It could be the window in your classroom, any classroom, in any of the towns and cities where you lived. It could be the window in the classroom where you first met him when he came to talk to your class. Where until the day he walked in, you’d spent most every day staring out the window, waiting for the scenery to change.
Here is a man who does not belong to you. You should be accustomed to this, to this borrowing. To the temporariness of all things. Everything you have known has been yours only on loan, on lien. Your mother has taught you that anything, everything, can be repossessed.
But the sting of your body echoes the sting of all those other departures. And for a moment, you wonder if you might still have a chance to change everything.
Here is the rain, here is the river, here is the man who does not love you. Here is a girl, a stupid girl, clinging to the words he has offered as consolation.
Here is the bridge.
In this body made of pain, Nessa is once again sitting next to him in the front seat of the car that night. She is not wearing her seat belt so that she can sit closer to him. He is bringing her to the barn where he lives; his hand is up her skirt, playing. She can feel his fingers parting her, as though he is trying to find something. It hurts and feels good at the same time. And as they approach the bridge, she can feel the crescendo that precedes the diminuendo, the thrumming ache across her abdomen.
