This Life Is in Your Hands

by Melissa Coleman

  “Stop, you’re ruining our home.” We often played make-believe for hours until something—hunger, fatigue, or irritation—jolted us out of the imaginary and back to reality.

  We’d been to the July 4th parade in Harborside earlier that day with some apprentices to watch the bicentennial festivities, but the games and costumes had left us tired and overstimulated.

  Heidi tipped the bucket toward the castle again.

  “If you do that you’ll die,” I said in a singsong voice. I don’t know exactly when or why I started saying that to her, but I said it often that year, as her three-year-old precociousness began to get the better of me. It was the only threat severe enough to get her attention.

  That day Heidi looked at me with those pale blue eyes. Something in her was always a bit of the prankster, as if she could afford to take life less seriously. She tipped her bucket forward, and the sand castle gave way beneath the flood.

  “Oh, now look,” I said. “Our home is ruined!”

  I hit the remaining lump of castle with my shovel, flicking wet sand in her face. She rubbed it off while backing away, then ran across the yard and out toward the gardens.

  The path to Paul’s tree-house-in-progress led past the pond, a mystery of darkness after rain, hiccupping with frogs calling you to them. The frogs laid clusters of gelatinous sacs, each with a black dot in the center, attached to grass and twigs along the edges. The eggs hatched into hundreds of squirming pollywogs that became miniature frogs by the time the dimples of water-bug feet dented the water. Heidi and I often stopped to try and catch them when heading along the path to check on the tree house.

  “Here we come, wittle froggies,” Heidi chirped as our bare feet sank into the cushions of sphagnum moss. The frogs lay half submerged at the line where water met earth, their knobby skin an iridescence of greens, yellows, and browns, rounded eyes unblinking. We stood on a shallow ledge where you could see through to the sandy bottom, the warm water up to the middle of my calves and to Heidi’s thighs.

  “Catch me a frog,” Heidi begged. If we were too sudden, they sprang into the water and breaststroked out of reach. It annoyed me when I couldn’t catch one, cupping my hands on emptiness as the frog shot away. I wanted to feel the thump-thump as it jumped inside my closed palm like a beating heart.

  “Stupid frogs!” I kicked the water, splashing Heidi. Some days she annoyed me, too, the reasons building a house in my heart. There was always the underlying grudge that she got to go with Mama last spring. And Heidi was the one Papa carried on his shoulders—I was too big, he said. She had such a funny way about her, the apprentices loved her best, but she drove Mama crazy, always into trouble.

  “I catch one,” Heidi said, wading farther in.

  “You’re too little to go deeper,” I said. “You can’t even swim.”

  Sandy had been teaching us how to swim down at the coves, but only I could stay afloat, though the cold water of the ocean made practicing less than appealing. Heidi kept moving forward, so I splashed her. She turned and splashed me. I splashed her again and she stepped back into the water, fell, and slipped under. The water was the color of pale tea near the sandy edge, so I could see her open eyes register the shock. She came up and immediately began to wail, sucking in air between the sputter of exhales.

  “You got me wet!” she gasped.

  “You have to listen,” I said, then turned and leaped across the softness of moss to the tree-house path, bumping past Pam as I ran.

  Chapter Ten

  Loss

  Sue, Lissie, and Heidi on the beach in Westport, Massachusetts, while visiting family (Photograph courtesy of the author.)

  “Heidi. Hi-di. Heidi Ho. Ho-di.”

  Again and again Mama called, breaking into the train of my story about the mountain people. “And the little people were hiding behind a rock because they didn’t want to get hurt. The big people were coming and the little people were scared. ‘The big people are coming, the big people are coming,’ they called, ‘Run and hide in the cave.’ ”

  The loft was stuffy and hot, the floorboards printing their grain on my leg. I shifted position and wiggled my tongue in the hole left by my lost tooth.

  “Lissie,” Mama called. My muscles clenched in place. Big people. Hide. “Lissie!” Again. She peeked up from below.

  “Oh, there you are,” Mama said. “Skates is here. Where’s Heidi?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come say hello to Skates.”

  My body unbent from the crouch and shuffled backward down the ladder. It was a little cooler below, but no breeze, air thick as molasses. The swing hung unmoving from the ash tree. I listened for words from the leaves. Nothing. Then I heard Mama’s scream.

  Just that morning the gardens were bustling as usual with apprentices and customers and vegetables needing to be picked. It was a humid-hot day, a Saturday near the end of July. Baby Clara was strapped to Mama’s back in Heidi’s old sling, sleeping mouth-open as Mama cooked lunch, skin glowing and tan from summer. Skates was coming to visit, and Mama needed time to clean the house, to hide from her mother-in-law the chaos her life had become: Bess and Papa having breakfast together that morning, mud tracked in from the gardens, piles of laundry to be washed by hand, Heidi and I running around the small kitchen pulling each other’s hair and screaming.

  “One more scream, and you’re out,” Mama yelled, her mind tumbling over itself.

  “Pull my hair, and you’ll die,” I said to Heidi.

  She pulled my braid. I screamed.

  “Out.” Mama pointed to the screen door, sweat shining on her forehead from the heat of the wood cookstove. Around the stone patio of the farmhouse, the daylilies panted their orange tongues in the heat. Rain had fallen the night before, and the air was heavy, as if waiting to rain again.

  “I’m going to the woodshed,” I said, marching away across the yard and climbing up the woodshed ladder to my perch in the loft.

  Heidi followed me, reaching up the ladder that she was afraid to climb alone. “Uppie.”

  “No,” I said, but after a while she came back again with a little red boat in her hands.

  “Come an’ play with me,” she begged.

  “No,” I said. “I’m busy.”

  When the workday ended—at noon on Saturdays—some apprentices hiked down to Redman’s Cove, accessed from a path across the road from the campground. They swam and relaxed on the beach, and Sandy started on one of her marathon swims. By the time everyone headed back up the path, Sandy was just the arc of an arm far out in the sequined water. Pam and Paul were sitting in the cool of the gravel pit by the road when someone came running over from the campground.

  “Heidi’s fallen in the pond!”

  Sometime after Mama’s scream, I remember the silhouette of a woman coming over the rise from the garden. A few minutes later? An hour?

  “There you are,” she said. Was it Bess? Nancy? Michèle? She bent down to put her hands on my shoulders. Her eyes were not right, too bright.

  “Come with me,” she said. “Let’s go into the farmhouse.” She took my hand and pulled me up the patio and through the screen door. It slammed behind us. The house was hotter than outside, the cookstove still burning low.

  “Come sit here and let’s read a book,” she said.

  “Where’s Mama?”

  “She’s down at the pond.”

  “Where’s Papa?”

  “He’s down there, too.”

  “Where’s Heidi?”

  “Down at the pond.”

  She began to read one of the books. It was a kid’s book, Heidi’s now, but I didn’t care, I could never get free of books. When their pages opened they pulled me in, even if I’d heard the story a hundred times. The apprentice’s voice sounded funny. I looked up to find she was crying as she read, tears rolling down her cheeks. One sp
lattered on the page, and she stopped reading. Sniffled.

  “I want to go,” I said.

  “No, you have to stay here,” she said.

  “I want to go check on Heidi.”

  “No, that’s not a good idea. You should stay here.”

  “I’ll go down to the pond by the long way, so by the time I get there she will be okay,” I said.

  “No,” she said. But after a while, it seems I was alone.

  I slipped out of the farmhouse and onto the path to the spring. It was cooler in the woods, but the indent of the path was sweaty. Down a little ways was a turnoff to the tree house, and then another turn toward the pond. I walked slowly. “By the time I get there, everything will be okay,” I repeated to myself. The light came into the woods from the clearing of the pond. I peeked around a bush, the moss spongy beneath my bare feet.

  The pale shape of Heidi’s body lay on the ground by the edge of the water, a circle of people around her. “What are you doing?” I cried. They all looked up at me. Someone grabbed my hand and pulled me away through the gardens to the farm stand. Other apprentices were standing around, talking in hushed voices.

  “She threw up water,” someone said. “That’s a good sign.”

  Mumbles. Sighs. The sun bright on the gardens. Lettuces wilting in the farm stand. Then I was stumbling along a path in the woods with Mama to call the ambulance from Jean and Keith’s phone. Mama wailed Heidi’s name into the forest, and my toes clenched from the sound as I scrambled to keep up. Then I was behind the woodshed with Papa in the dusk of late afternoon. He was holding a blanketed shape in his arms as the afternoon sun burned the tops of the pointed trees around the clearing. Rocking back and forth, crying in a way I’d never seen before.

  “But Papa,” I said, “but Papa, you’ve got to uncover her face. She can’t breathe.”

  “Lissie,” he said. “Heidi is dead.”

  The lines of Papa’s face were blurred with tears, the curve of his steel hair gone flat. He rocked her in that tight embrace. His body didn’t understand such pain, the arch of his back was fetal. Up though the path in the woods came the sound of Mama wailing Heidi’s name. But Heidi had to be okay, she had to wake up, I didn’t mean it when I said she would die. She had to be okay so I could help her up the ladder next time. But around the farm the light began to fade, and the daylilies closed up into fleshy clothespins that looked like the fingers of praying hands.

  “You’re not taking her,” is what Paul remembers Papa saying to the EMTs, responding with fury when the ambulance finally arrived and they tried to put her on board. He wasn’t going to let an undertaker touch her, pump her full of chemicals. That’s when the ambulance driver radioed the police. And that’s when Papa slipped Bruce and Paul a piece of yellow-lined legal paper with handwritten instructions on where and how to dig a grave in the woods.

  “Whatever happens,” the note said in Papa’s distinct scrawl, “just keep digging.”

  Pam, Paul, Barry, and Larry were all there with shovels in the graveyard where the Colson child had been buried a century before. It seemed to Paul to take an eternity to dig that grave. Sandy still hadn’t returned from her swim, and Larry wondered if he should look for her. The grave site was bookended between the road, the parking lot, and the path to the stand. They heard the sounds of wailing, sawing, and hammering—Papa building the small pine coffin. Then, through the opening to the road, they saw the cruisers go by, one, two, three, four police cruisers and maybe four state troopers.

  “It’s a siege,” Paul said, counting the cars.

  “Keep digging,” Bruce said, down in the earth.

  Darkness fell on our little house in the woods with a final sigh, until the pale flashing lights destroyed it. I’d never seen a light like it before, filling our clearing with ghostly fury. Popping and flashing reds, whites, and blues, making the trees into black skeletons in the paleness out the window as engines and radio static ripped the silence of the forest and vibrated on my skin.

  “Stand back, stand back,” a voice crackled, and fast hands pulled me across the room to the back addition.

  “What, Mama, what?”

  “Shush, quiet, Lissie.” Her hand on my mouth. Clara was lying next to me in Mama and Papa’s bed, soft and mewing, tiny fingers clenching and unclenching. Mama pulled at us, pulling us to her, the trembling of her jaw against my arm.

  Across the room, the small shape on the padded benches, still wrapped in the blanket.

  “Get the fuck off my property!” Papa’s voice was loud at the door.

  “Please come out of the house,” said a man’s voice. Mama was whimpering into my hair.

  “Papa!” I pushed free and stumbled up the step to the main part of the house. Don’t let them hurt Papa. That strange pale light flooded through the open door, snapping red and blue around the distinct shape of Papa in the space of the doorframe. He summoned all his vitality to stand taut and bowlegged like a cowboy, his head thrown back, shoulders wide. Someone later claimed he braced in his arms the old shotgun for scaring coons, but I don’t remember the shape of that.

  “Leave her alone. Leave us alone and get the hell out of here.” His voice had no trace of hesitation. Outside, the dark shapes of men stood near a thick car topped with those eerie flashing lights.

  “Papa,” I moaned, my stomach filling with heat.

  “Get her back,” Papa said without moving from the door.

  Mama pulled me to the addition, fingernails cutting into my wrist. Let me go, let me go, but she held me on the bed.

  “No, Mama,” I cried.

  “Listen, Lissie, listen, the police are trying to take Heidi,” she said over me. “They want to take her away. We can’t let them. She has to be buried here. On our land.”

  When Papa’s anger subsided and the pain returned, he agreed to go down with the deputy and use Keith and Jean’s phone to call the commissioner.

  “This fellow here wants to bury her on the farm,” Jean remembered the deputy sheriff telling the DA. “Doesn’t he need to take her to a funeral home? Doesn’t he at least need to take her to a regular cemetery? Doesn’t she need to be embalmed? Aren’t there laws about this? I don’t know. I’ve never had one like this before.”

  As it turned out, the district attorney was Jewish, and Jews don’t embalm the dead, preferring to bury the body within twenty-four hours, so the DA said fine, as long as there was a historic grave site like the one we had at the farm. All Papa needed was a permit.

  It was nearly midnight by the time we put her to rest. A few of the apprentices acted as pallbearers, carrying the little coffin into the woods and lowering her down into the hole they had dug. Everybody was standing in a circle, holding candles and lanterns. It was beautiful and eerie at the same time. There were words spoken, tears, maybe a guitar. Anner sang “Simple Gifts.”

  “After what was a horrendous day,” Paul would say later, “the likes of which no one had seen before, there was a richness and a victory, certainly, that Heidi could rest at last in the earth of the farm.”

  Around the cape, the sea swelled and retreated with the ancient comings and goings of the tide, small waves shushing on the pebbles and erasing the footprints of birds and humans alike from the sandy coves.

  Larry found little peace in the rituals of the ceremony. A voice in the back of his head kept repeating Sandy’s name, the velocity increasing until it became a scream. “Sandy!” After the burial, he and Barry searched along the roads and paths with lanterns and called out into the night, but to no avail. Where the hell was she?

  Sandy liked to swim out to the islands almost, the steady pace of arms and legs moving in unison to soothe the anxieties collected in her mind over the course of the day. She swam away the strain of hard work, the fatigue of waking early to bake bread, the social tension of living so closely with a group of people. The cold water felt e
specially delicious in the humidity, the pulse of adrenaline warming her as she settled into the rhythm. Who knew where the time went when you were in that place? An hour later, maybe two, she stopped to get her bearings and realized she had come clear around the head of the cape from Redman’s to Ames Cove.

  By the time she returned to Redman’s and stepped ashore, the sun was sinking behind the peaked edge of spruce and fir surrounding the cove, the rocks purple in the fading light. Sunset was still a couple hours away, but the light had disappeared from the deeper places of the forest.

  Sandy remembered the path leaving from the top of the cove, but it wasn’t where she’d thought it should be, so she located her overalls and shoes and set out bushwhacking for it. When she hadn’t found her way after an hour, the darkness began deepening around the moss and trunks of the forest floor. She knew the head of the cape was surrounded by sea on all sides, meaning she couldn’t get too lost, so she kept forging on, the branches scraping her skin and her overalls chafing with salt. Soon she could see the silver sickle of the waning moon rising above the trees, and that served as her compass as she climbed up and down the rocky undulations of the forest.

  When she began to tire, she decided to lie on the pine needles beneath a tree to rest. She shivered and hugged herself with her arms, having no protection from the surprising coolness of the night, as mosquitoes complained and trees creaked. Unable to sleep, Sandy continued to pick her way through the woods and eventually found herself on one of the old trails. She felt the way home with her feet, finally limping into the campground just before dawn, hair tangled with twigs and skin scraped by branches. Limp with relief, she crawled into her familiar rubber sleeping bag next to Larry, who woke with a lurch and furiously hugged her to him. Warming her hands with his own, blowing on them, he began to cry, his reddening eyes exposed without glasses.

  “What is it?” Sandy asked.

  “I’m glad you’re safe,” he said, but the words sounded hollow compared to the magnitude of his emotion. This was the woman, he knew in that moment, with whom he wanted spend the rest of his life. When he told her what had happened, Sandy felt it like a fist in her stomach—she had just the other day been trying to teach Heidi how to swim.