by Silas House
She didn’t wait for me to reply before she went into the house to get me some pillows and covers to make a pallet. I would wait until tomorrow to tell Edie how I felt about Anne Frank. Then I realized what comforted me about the book: even though Anne Frank was dead now, it was even bigger that someone as strong and brave as she was had once lived. That was enough. She had been a child of war, like me, but she made sure that she was more than that. I had to do the same.
One morning Nell awoke and decided it was time to move on.
That’s the way she operated, my mother said. “She’s a gypsy, always has been.”
I was devastated, of course. I couldn’t imagine the rest of my life without her on that screen porch, without finding the pitcher of sweet tea she had left out on the counter, the empty toilet-paper roll she had failed to refill, the sound of her songs playing on her little green record player sitting in the grass. I kept thinking that she was leaving so she could go off and die of cancer. So I was terrified. And I was mad.
But there was no changing her mind. She packed, biting on the end of a cigarette that sent smoke washing up over her eyes, while I sat on the bed, watching.
“You go back to school in two days, anyway,” she said. “You won’t even miss me once you get back in class.”
She made me sit on her suitcase so she could click the brass latches, then tousled my hair and put her palm flat against my forehead, pushing me back onto the bed, where she was able to tickle me until I nearly peed on myself. The cigarette remained clamped between her teeth the entire time as she laughed.
Then she allowed me to sit up, and she produced a double-record album. The White Album by the Beatles.
“Some of the songs on there might freak Loretta out, so don’t play it too loud,” she said, her face very serious, as if she was giving me instructions of proper living. “But ‘Blackbird’ is on there, and ‘Mother Nature’s Son.’ And ‘Rocky Raccoon’ — you love that one.”
“And ‘Bungalow Bill’?”
She nodded. “And ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’ All the best ones.”
I gave her my copy of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. She sat down and ran her palm over its cool cover. “What a beautiful gift,” she said. “There’s no better present than a book.”
More than anything, I would miss looking at the cover; Anne Frank’s good face looking out at me over the years, her eyes saying I am here just as clearly as the trees always did. “It’s sad, though,” I offered. “It’s about a little girl in World War II.”
“I know,” she said. She dropped her cigarette into the half-inch of Dr Pepper that remained in my bottle. Mom hated when Nell did this, but she always washed the bottles out without saying anything. “It was one of my favorites when I was little. But I don’t have my own copy, so I can’t thank you enough.”
I knew that I was about to cry, but I didn’t know that it was showing on my face until I felt my lip trembling.
“Eli? What is it?” Nell said, touching my face. “What’s wrong?”
“I know about you having cancer,” I stammered. “I’m afraid I’ll never see you again.”
“Oh, God,” she said, and pulled me to her. “It’s all right. Hush, now. Hush.”
We sat like that for a time. Then she held me out in front of her by the shoulders. “I am not going to die, Eli Book. You mark my words. It’ll take more than cancer to get me down.”
“But it’s bad,” I said. “I heard you tell Daddy.”
“Yes, it’s bad. But so am I.”
I knew she wanted me to laugh, but I couldn’t, even though I did believe her. She was too strong, too fierce, too alive. It would be much later before I overheard my parents talking about how she had come home to die but had decided to fight it harder instead. I liked to think that being with all of us caused her to want to live more than she had before.
Nell stood and clapped her hands together as if we should move on. She snatched up a box of books that had her green record player sitting atop it. “Get my suitcase,” she said, and stomped out of the room as if carrying a great load.
My mother had just loaded a box of albums into the truck and met us at the back door. Josie sat on the porch glider, distraught. Daddy was standing out on the yard, bathed in a crimson light that caused him to look much older than he was. He was peering out at the garden as if something there held great interest. I watched him while Nell hugged Josie and put her thumbs into the corners of Josie’s eyes, wiping outward. She told her to quit acting foolish; she’d see her soon. I wonder now if Josie was privy to the knowledge of Nell’s cancer. She was crying with such devotion that she must have known, now that I think back on it. But everything was always like a movie to Josie. My mother always said she could cry anytime she wanted to. Josie had changed in the last few days, a straightening of her whole body that made her seem more elegant and adult than she ever had before, but this part of her would never die out. Somehow, I am glad for this.
Daddy glanced back once and our eyes touched. He looked sad, too. But lately he always looked sad.
We left Josie on the porch and sauntered out to the truck, where I struggled to bring the suitcase up to the pickup. Daddy finally had to take it from my hands — one pluck from his big, curled fingers — and place it there. I stood silent as my mother embraced Nell, running her hand around Nell’s back in a perfect circle.
“You call me and I’ll be there, sister,” Mom said. It was clear they had already discussed this at length. “You know you don’t have to do this by yourself.”
Nell nodded, her eyes glassy. “I will. I promise.”
Then here came Edie, scampering across the yard with her Chuck Taylors plomping on the dry grass. Nell leaned down to hug her.
“Good old Edie, the best girl I ever knew,” Nell said in a singsong voice, almost like a verse from the Beatles, then kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll see you on the flip side, hellcat. Don’t take any crap off the boys.”
“I won’t,” Edie said, her face fierce with understanding and remorse. My mother put her hand on Edie’s back and led her away. I suppose Mom couldn’t bear to watch the truck leave, afraid she might not be called to Nell’s bedside once she was needed. Daddy got into the truck but didn’t start it. He accepted that Nell had to tell me good-bye properly.
My anger had built by this time, since it was becoming more and more clear that Nell was actually going to leave. I couldn’t believe her gall.
“But why do you have to leave?” I said. My voice came out scratchy and raw. “Why did you even come if you were going to run off and leave us?”
She gave a little laugh, a simple exhalation of joy or frustration; I couldn’t tell which. “I had to come and see you all,” she said. “I told you, I was missing home. I was missing the trees.”
“So don’t leave,” I said. I implored. “Stay here and let us help you.”
“I’ve got to move on. This is the first time in my life I don’t actually want to, but this time I have to, baby.” She stuck a knuckle into my belly and smiled down at me. I didn’t know that she was going back to DC for the better hospitals there. Or that I would get to go there before long to see her. “You’ll understand eventually, Eli the Good.”
Even though she had addressed me, it seemed she wasn’t even talking to me by this time. She was announcing this to the world, to the leaves. But then she squatted down on cracking knees and she gave me a single kiss on the forehead. I could feel its mark standing on my skin.
She said she loved me, the words a solid thing that drifted out on the air so that I could see their letters against the darkening sky. All around me the sound of the cicadas rose up. “Keep watching; watch everything,” she said.
I stood for a long time in the dirt driveway, long after Daddy’s truck had passed from my view. And then I was aware of my mother standing behind me. She put her hands on my shoulders. “Come on in. We’ll have whatever you want for supper.”
“I’d like
some Manwich,” I said, and she laughed a little in the back of her throat and said this would be okay. I walked around to the back porch with her, leaning into her side.
My mother’s red notebook was lying on the table, so I took my Prince Albert cigar box of pencils and crayons out of my room and came back to the kitchen to draw. Josie was in her room, playing her Mamas and Papas record that Nell had given to her, and this sound drifted down the hall and joined us. “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” Mom hummed along as she fried the hamburger. I was surprised by her happiness in the wake of Nell leaving, but maybe she was just trying to make things cheerful for me.
“I always loved this song,” Mom said. She had turned toward me and she leaned on the counter, her hands resting on its edge. She closed her eyes on the word love, like someone savoring a particularly good taste. Then she swayed toward me and held out her hand. “We ought to dance, Eli. It’s been a while.”
“I don’t feel like it,” I said, and barely glanced up from my coloring. I was drawing our house in winter. Winter seemed to have not happened in ages. This summer had been the longest one of my life. I had added a chimney with a curl of smoke even though we didn’t have a fireplace, and a snowman on the front yard.
I kept coloring a bit before I realized that she was still standing there with her hand out. But when I looked up at her, she seemed to be someone else, as if her body had been left behind, her feet planted as if nailed to the kitchen floor, while she herself floated somewhere out over the hills, dipping and occasionally rolling over on the air as she flew in the evening sky. She was staring at me.
“Mom?” I said, and her eyes snapped into focus.
“Eli, don’t you know that I’d die for you?” she said. She put her hand on the back of my chair and leaned down to where I was turned to face her, looking me in the eye.
“No,” I said. Her question seemed like the kind that needed answering properly.
“Well, you should know that. I would. I’d kill for you. You and Josie are my world. You do know that, don’t you?”
I gave one quick nod. I did believe her, instantly. But I had been waiting to hear this said to me, proven to me, for a very long time. I turned back to my coloring. I filled each of our windows with yellow light. She turned on one heel and walked back to the stove, where she flipped the sizzling hamburger. Down the hall, Josie put the needle on the song once more, then again, and again, and we listened to it four more times. On the last play, my mother started dancing by herself at the stove, closing her eyes and moving around on the linoleum with one hand flat against her belly, the other out in the air as if holding on to someone. I went to the refrigerator and attached my winter picture with four plastic fruit magnets. And then I joined her.
And so now I am grown. I stand on the ridge above our house, and little has changed to the naked eye. My mother and Stella still share a garden patch. The clothesline is still there, the screen porch. The snowball bush that held me and Edie like a flowery womb. The river that will never change, going about its business as usual, but filled with fewer swimmers now. The road has been widened and blacktopped. The bicycles are showy and have painted flames on their bars. And the children don’t ride as much as they once did. I doubt there are any silent little boys who sit in the roots of this beech tree anymore. The woods is a lost place to them all, a fact that grieves me.
I am also grieved that my own child has not known this place as I did. She is only ten — the same age I was during the summer of 1976 — but all the years of her life she has known nothing but New York City, a noble place in its own right but one that doesn’t possess trees half so noble as the ones of my childhood. And now she is a child living through a war. Perhaps she is not fully aware of this yet, but a part of her is. She eyes gleaming airplanes with suspicion. The little plastic army men she likes to play with are colored a yellowish brown instead of the green ones I always had. The cheap tanks that come in the packs are camouflaged for the desert instead of the jungle. Maybe she doesn’t remember what it was like to be evacuated from our apartment on Fourteenth Street or the way the ash piled up and people wore masks when they walked the streets and how my parents begged me to come home and how I wouldn’t because that would have felt like defeat to me. But a part of her knows this. It has become a part of her history. I have raised my daughter in the city that knows this new war all too well, the city that saw pumping towers of smoke drifting out over the harbor for three days, smoke that is now replaced by twin beams of blue light when the anniversary of tragedy rolls around. This is my daughter’s history now.
I have come home to Refuge for a new part of that history. Daddy has passed away.
He has died of a heart attack. Not suicide, not the effects of Agent Orange, nothing like that. But my mother still believes the war killed him. “All that in his mind,” she said when I first saw her. “It was too much for his heart.” I don’t know whether this is true, but I know that he carried the war around all the time. In his heart, surely. But also in his back, in his feet. The war was always there, in the lines of his face, in his voice, in everything. War seeped in and never let go.
When Josie called and told me that our father was dead, I was alone in my apartment in New York City. After I told her I’d be home and said good-bye, I dropped the phone to the floor. I didn’t really notice when it crashed onto the tile and broke, the batteries skittering across the room. I stood at my bedroom window, looking out onto the brick wall that had been my view for the past ten years. There was nothing but the brick. But just over that wall was the purpling sky above the harbor, where night was fixing to spread tight and black. The gloaming.
The next thing I knew, we were on the quiet train: me, my daughter, and Nell. The train dropped below the harbor — all that churning, gray water — and the sounds became heightened, every clank and screech of metal, every long, hollow expanse of darkness made audible. Then we were out again, the train surging forward one car at a time until it gained momentum again, and before I even realized it, we were at the airport and then on the plane. The windows were pocked by specks of rain that tapped like gravels against the glass. The beads of water wouldn’t allow me to see out as we left New York on that stormy night of high summer.
I was glad; I didn’t want to see.
As the plane took off, I held my daughter’s little hand and closed my eyes for a short prayer, as I always did when I flew. This time, though, I didn’t open them for a long while, drifting off into some grievous place between sleep and awareness.
I haven’t been comfortable flying since 2001, when the world shifted and became off-kilter, blurring everything. But I was less terrified this time. My mind was too full of my father and of the summer I first truly knew him, back when I first saw the war inching its way beneath his skin, behind his eyes.
And I also saw that a person never does know anything, really, until they have lost someone they love completely.
When I was a child, I had thought that life was as simple as black and white. But all at once, sitting on that plane, I knew that we are a people forever caught up in grayness.
Despite the circumstances, I am glad to be home.
I will see Edie for the first time in more than two years, back when she came to New York and I realized that I had never really gotten over her existence. We had walked the streets of Manhattan for hours while she hugged herself against the cold, pulling her topcoat tightly about herself and studying all the faces we passed, saying how beautiful everyone was here. I had shown her all the missing persons posters that still hung in the windows of Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Many of them already had yellowed or faded from only a year of sunlight.
“They’re letting them age naturally,” Edie had said, putting her finger on the window. “That seems right.”
We had ridden out to Ellis Island together on the coldest day of the year, and I had given her my gloves because she hadn’t brought any. For a brief moment when we passed the Statue of Liberty, she had looke
d at my face too long, her eyes more revealing than she intended. We stood that way a minute, and then she leaned on the metal railing and peered back out at the harbor, the silence an understood thing between us. We were freezing, but the sky and the water were both gray and beautiful, and all I kept thinking was that she was the only person who had ever truly known me, who could read my mind.
We have not seen each other since then.
I haven’t brought my daughter’s mother because our marriage is over. It only lasted three years, because my wife and I didn’t know each other at all. I am blessed that it ended on good terms. We are clichés, the divorced parents who are able to get along. We both attend Shelby’s birthday parties, live within walking distance of each other, talk the way we did when we first met at Vanderbilt. I have even had lunch with her new boyfriend, a lawyer from California who seems like a good man, despite being slightly annoying.
When I see Edie this time, I will see her with new eyes. Who knows what all will happen, for life too has a way of taking up residence, of doing its own thing. I feel as if Edie is already down there at the house, too. Perhaps she is sitting on the screen porch, and any second she will rise and sway out to the steps she knows better than her own, peer up at the woods with her eyes trying to find me among the leaves that are glowing green with the remnants of the heavy rain. A late-summer rain makes the woods turn electric, lighting up the leaves and setting the secret world of the woods into activity. After a good rain, the ants are out and about, salvaging their goods. Deer and foxes venture out to drink from the little freshets that burst out of the mountain. As I look down at the house, the woods are alive with dripping music all around me.
I’m betting that Nell is down there on the screen porch, but no longer smoking. Just like she promised, Nell did not die at the end of that summer. She lost both her breasts to a surgeon’s knife, but she lived. She chose life and went on living, raising all manners of hell during the last presidential election, marching in the pink-ribboned protest for better research. We have flown from New York together, taken the long quiet ride from the airport together, entertained by my daughter. I can’t see her from up here, but I know she is there. I imagine she is reading one of her thick books and slowly trying to forgive herself for anything that was left unsaid between her and my father.
