The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  Then we pictured our house. It was filled it with priceless Native American artifacts. Stuff that should be in museums, stuff in glass, stuff you couldn’t touch. As if our family hadn’t transplanted from Chicago just before we started kindergarten. Mom couldn’t care less about Native Americans. She just thought it was cool to decorate her Colorado mountain home like that. The peace pipe over the fireplace, the kachinas on the built-in shelves, the beaded moccasins hanging above; all emitted this energy that whispered bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and it creeped us out.

  “I’ll go with you,” we said, planning to gather facts to toss in Mom’s face.

  Mr. Handler beamed. “Excellent!” His eyes matched his shirt.

  Lunch took forever, so we arrived at the session minutes before it started. People spilled out the doorway, obviously planning to watch from there.

  “Great,” we said, like this sucks.

  Mr. Handler peered in, between the folks in the door. “There’s space on the floor,” he said.

  We rolled our eyes.

  “Come on,” he said and disappeared into the room.

  The people in the doorway parted and gawked at us. What could we do? We weaved between standing bodies along the room’s wall, squeezed between three rows of chairs arranged in a big circle, and stepped over laps on the floor to where Mr. Handler was settling in. As usual, eyes bored into us.

  Time was, mirrors reflected the slight up-curve of our nose, our high cheekbones, our big chocolate eyes, how these features played off each other like singing voices melding in a harmony worth sighs. Anymore, though, our reflection was metal screeching against metal, and everywhere we went, eyes seemed to cringe.

  Just as we sat down, a stocky guy with a crew-cut stepped to the microphone. He nodded to Mr. Handler, and Mr. Handler nodded back.

  “Dr. Myron Benson teaches at Sego Ridge School and is our flute master,” the crew-cut guy said. He sat back down and bowed his head.

  Okay, we thought, that’s different. Usually some windbag introduced the sessions. The lights dimmed, and Dr. Benson rose in front of his chair but did not go to the mic. With his hair drawn into a long braid, limbs sinewy even through his clothes, he hunched forward and lifted a wooden flute to his lips, but he held it like a clarinet.

  A reedy note leaked out that reached across the room and yanked up goose bumps on our flesh. The flute rose to a higher note, then a lower one. Graceful. Simple. It moved into a tune like nothing we’d ever heard, like a conversation with the dirt beneath this concrete city. Every note demanded our attention and reached into a place so deep we felt drunk. I know this sounds weird, but it took us to the aspens and pines around our house, while at the same time sending a sparking charge out our limbs. It was sound-wave honesty, and we felt we’d crumble to pieces.

  As Dr. Benson sat down, we realized we’d pulled our knees to our chin like a little kid, so we lowered our legs in the sliver of space. The room was body-heat steamy and pin-drop silent.

  “Wow!” Mr. Handler whispered.

  The crew-cut guy stepped to the mic again, and we noticed a row of Native American students seated behind him. “Our students will now read for you,” he said and sat down.

  One of two long-haired girls stood and held out a piece of paper, brilliant white in the low light. Her eyebrows were vivid arches. The natural curve of her mouth matched her eyebrows. Energy rippled through the room. We felt our listening heart.

  The girl spoke in a foreign language, her voice soft, lilting. “I am Angel Davis of the Fort Defiance Navajo,” she translated. “I will read an essay.” She cleared her throat. “I hold in my hand four feathers.” She held up her hand, and out the sides of her fist were the ends of long feathers. “Gifts from my grandfather. Each feather for a good thing I’ve done.” Angel read about how her grandfather was Lakota Sioux while her grandmother was Navajo. She described each of those good things: grad­uating middle school, attending the Sego Ridge School far from home, completing a summer writing program even farther away, and reading at this conference. She didn’t candy-coat things; she just described each challenge she didn’t want to do at first, and how after, her grandfather walked with her to a sacred place behind their house where he gave her a feather. Her sentences filled our body till we smashed a tear like a mosquito and smeared it away.

  The feathers had belonged to her grandfather’s father, his father before that. “I must respect these feathers and treat them with care. Through them the spirits of these birds live on. Through me the traditions of my grandfather’s people live on.” Angel sat down, and the crowd went wild.

  We closed our eyes, crossed our arms, and traced our ribs’ structure, willing them not to crack wide.

  “We are people who survive in two worlds.” It was the crew-cut guy’s voice. “We are of our tribe, yet we are of the United States.” He said “United States” like he was careful to enunciate each letter.

  His voice blurred as we pictured the self Mom expected us to be: beautiful, brilliant daughter, never veering from the beeline of her future at Yale. When had we stopped wanting that? And why? Who did we want to be? We knew who we’d become, knew every morning we pried ourself out of bed from beneath that heavy thing pressing our chest. We couldn’t try in school, in soccer, with friends. Nothing.

  Mom said it was rebellion against her. She was so wrong. Emptiness had swallowed us. The only thing that mattered was Gabe, but we weren’t honest enough with ourself to admit it.

  We remembered last Christmas, when our grandparents, Mom’s parents, bickered with Dad and bullied Mom over presents, over dinner, mean air filling the house till it felt like we breathed bullets. No feathers handed out there, just a Kindle, a cashmere sweater, and some new skis. We scanned around the conference room; it would be embarrassing to leave.

  A hulking, broad-faced guy was speaking of his grandmother, who for months sewed his dance “regalia.” We gulped his words as he spoke of traveling to powwows, of how when he danced, he danced for his grandmother, and for his ancestors. Ancestors? Was he kidding? The guy wore a white Oxford shirt with short sleeves and a tie. Dorky by any standard, yet when he finished, the applause and shouts were wild. We considered our ancestors, and everything stretched to slow motion. We stared straight down a screeching well.

  The self we pictured split to thirds: the view of who our family wanted us to be, the view of who we thought we were, the view of us right then.

  We couldn’t breathe. We shot up, lurched over bodies, squeezed between chairs, and plunged like a drunk through the people in the doorway. In the bright hall, we staggered to the bathroom, found an empty stall, and locked the door. Our palms pushed back the skin at our temples and our mouth stretched in a silent wail, gasping at the air like a fish. We wished for Mom to cradle us, rock us, but we blinked it away. And Dad hug us? What a laugh. He was always working. In Chicago. Our family lived in a seven-million-dollar house, had a maid, Range Rovers, a Porsche, a private jet. We had everything, yet nothing. Oona Antunes: nothing. From nothing.

  When we emerged from the bathroom, Mr. Handler was leaning against the wall. Our eyes were puffy, our nose still running.

  “Pretty intense, that session,” he said.

  We looked away.

  “Oona,” he said, making us look at him, “I’m always here to listen.”

  We snorted and wiped our nose with our sleeve.

  “Really. Keeping whatever it is bottled inside won’t help.”

  “I’m okay.” We shrugged.

  “No, you’re not. Anyone can see that.”

  “Please,” we said, “not now.”

  “Soon?”

  We nodded to get him off our back. Each day since then, we’d spiraled toward that frosty trail.

  Three

  From Oona’s journal:

  For water to exist, two hydrogen and one oxygen atom desire to congr
egate, cooperate, to be together. What makes them come together? Could it be love?

  —Viktor Schauberger

  Angels. That’s what I’d hoped we’d wake up to. Heavenly chiming all around with pastel light and clouds cradling us. Instead Mom’s harpy face glared down. The bones under her pale jaw sharp as an arrow. I fled to the ceiling, felt sorry for Corpse, who had to face her.

  Corpse lifted her hand, dangling a tube and a wire. A heart monitor whined bleep-bleep-bleep. A plastic bracelet circled her wrist that read Oona Antunes. Still us. In hell.

  Her other hand, her right one, felt weird. The first and second fingers and thumb were normal, but the rest were wrapped in gauze, and where her pinkie and ring finger should have been was air. She gaped at her hand, could feel those two missing fingers wiggle. Her right shoulder and arm were wrapped in gauze too. She threw back the thin blanket and sheet over her legs, and where pinkie toes should have been were empty spaces. Below her blue hospital gown, gauze patchworked her legs.

  Her face itched, and she realized a cottony, metal smell. She brought her hand to it, trailing the wire and tube, which led to a clear bag of liquid hanging from a pole behind her. Bandages covered her nose. She reached up. Of course, the crown was long gone. I pictured her arriving on a stretcher with that pink dress flowing over the sides and that crown twinkling on her head. A nurse stomped into my image and called out in a New York accent, “Wheredaya want the princess?” Corpse swallowed back bile.

  “At least they could fix your nose,” Mom said. “A graft from your rear. Seems fitting, somehow.”

  Mom had this clear, ringing voice that had developed a little scrape in it over the last few years, and her words hung in the air. She seemed to hear her words and sort of barked. A laugh, I guess. An unrefined sound that must have appalled her, and she walked to the window and stood like a stone. I studied her blonde hair’s silky side-part, the way its ends collapsed against the soft place before her shoulders. She didn’t seem so tall, so ominous, from up against the white ceiling panels. Her temples resembled blue-veined granite.

  Corpse saw Dad, then; Mom had been blocking him. Perched on a metal chair in the corner, he wore khaki pants and a bulky sweater instead of a suit, and that drove home more than anything else how long we must have been unconscious. Dad’s plane wasn’t supposed to even land till we got home from the dance.

  He inched to Corpse’s side. He pressed his forehead to the bed and shuddered. Corpse gaped at him. Usually Dad was all edges, making your eyes skim off him.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” Corpse’s normal deep voice was so high, so like a kid, that it jolted me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Mom spun from the window. “And what about me?”

  Corpse shook her head like she’d lost control of it. The drugs pumping through that tube blurred things, and even without them, we had only a vague sense of why we’d tried to kill ourself. Figuring it out was like peering for a needle through ice.

  “Don’t!” Mom said. She stood there like she’d shatter if you tapped her in the right spot.

  Dad faced her. “Don’t what, Muriel?”

  I felt sick for him. For her. They stood, not moving, like gladiators preparing to hack away at each other. Dad’s hair along the back of his head was a perfect line above a thread of pale skin, and Corpse imagined him in a barber’s chair as a razor buzzed along his neck, his sideburns. Such an ordinary thing, yet we could count the ordinary things we knew about Dad on one hand. Make that our right.

  Mom and Dad kept glaring, and the width of his back, though he’d turned fifty, was narrower than Gabe’s. Then Mom sagged, her hand covered her mouth, and she rushed out the door.

  Dad turned to Corpse, almost soft again. His eyes had always seemed black; now they were chocolate. Matched hers. It was freaky, those puddle eyes, yet they seared every inch of her face.

  “Things are going to get better, princess.” He lifted his palm over her hair, but that hand just hovered. He returned it, carefully, to the bed. Never had he even come close to petting us. He’d called us “princess” all our life, though. A hollow word. As if saying it when he was home one day a week made up for the wide stretches of time he missed. As if it were some sort of replacement for holding us in a blue moment, or listening to us complain about something dumb.

  “Don’t, Dad,” Corpse said. “Just don’t, okay?”

  Mom’s “don’t” still hung in the air, and Dad’s and Corpse’s eyes met.

  “I mean it, Oona,” he said. “No more Chicago. I’m working remote from now on. I’m a new man.”

  “Don’t.” That child’s voice again.

  “You’ll see,” he said, like she hadn’t spoken.

  Her invisible fingers and toes screamed. She gnawed her bottom lip and rocked a little.

  “How did you fi—” she said.

  “My plane had just landed. Gabe phoned your mother in a panic, had been searching for you for nearly two hours. She phoned the police, thinking you’d been abducted—you’ve always been so pretty. We’ve always worried about that. But never this.” Dad buried his face in the blanket then, and we felt about as low-down as a person could feel. Finally he sat up, eyes raw but dry, and said, “The bus driver heard about it on his radio, and he called in that you’d ridden to our stop.”

  We remembered the driver’s owl eyes in that wide rearview mirror.

  “Your heel marks on the trail were a dead giveaway,” Dad said. At “dead,” his eyes flickered with something that made Corpse look closer. The machine’s translation of her heart sped up: bleep-bleep-bleep.

  “Oona, that was the worst night of my life. Never do that again.”

  That was saying a lot, since his parents had died when he was ten. Dad kept mum about it like it was a national secret, like everything to do with his life. Anyway, that’s how he’d come from Portugal to live with his uncle in America.

  Corpse stared at her bandaged hand. These were the most words we’d ever heard from him at once, and we needed to let them seep in.

  “Oona.” He made her look at him. “Promise?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Please, princess.”

  “Don’t call me princess anymore,” she said. I couldn’t believe she’d said that. Especially since Dad was trying.

  His mouth sagged open, a little to the left. He straightened. “Okay. If you promise.”

  I willed her not to make that promise, not to offer anything to anyone.

  “Okay, princess.” He rose. “Gabe and Ashley are in the waiting room.”

  “No! Dad!”

  He studied her.

  “I can’t see them yet. I just can’t. Not here. Not for a while.”

  “Oona, it’s been ten days.”

  “Ten?” She shook her head. “I just can’t.”

  I was with her on that. We hadn’t planned to still be alive, and witnessing how much we’d damaged everyone else hurt worse than our wailing fingers and toes. Ash had been our best friend since kindergarten, though anymore, she was exactly the kind of person we’d killed ourself not to be.

  And good, honest Gabe. How would we ever face Gabe? We’d only allowed him into our life after we’d started to lose track of ourself. Otherwise, we’d have always known we weren’t worthy. Corpse pressed her head into the pillow and wondered how she would live without him. She inhaled the rusty smell trapped in her nose. Who would want the monster she’d become?

  “I’ll go tell them, then,” Dad said, and as he walked to the door, his shoulders, steely as a rule, stooped like the guys’ at school when they sucker-punched each other in the halls. I could almost hear lockers slamming.

  “Dad?” Corpse said.

  He paused, hand on the knob.

  “I promise.”

  Our first promise to Dad. Our first anything with him. Ever.

  F
our

  From Oona’s journal:

  Birds do not fly, they are flown,

  fish do not swim, they are swum.

  —Viktor Schauberger

  When Corpse asked what happened after Dad, Gabe, and the police found us snoozing under the moon, the doctor popped his stethoscope from his ears, stepped back, and handed his clipboard to his nurse. He looked at Corpse with stern gray eyes that matched his hair and told her she’d had no pulse.

  Yet the paramedics had wrapped her in blankets, strapped her to a stretcher, and rushed her along that narrow trail to an ambulance. The hospital was five minutes away, and on the trip there, and after she arrived, her heart said Nope. So the ER doc and nurses performed “cardiopulmonary bypass for re-warming.” Basically, they’d cut slits in her groin and slid tubes into her that pumped warm saline every ninety seconds. For seven minutes, no heartbeat. Then they detected a pulse. Guess her heart wouldn’t beat unless her body warmed up. He estimated she was dead for twenty minutes.

  Gangrene had set in “uncannily fast,” he said, so they amputated her fingers and toes. Mom insisted they reconstruct her nose and cheek right away, which, from the doc’s expression, was also unusual, but I guess since the hospital’s largest financial donor was asking, they did it. All this lay in murky, painkiller memory.

  He told Corpse she might feel uncoordinated for life. He told her she might have brain damage. He told her she’d probably get pneumonia. He said her temperature when she was rescued was 74 degrees. He said it was a miracle she’d lived. He didn’t mention the crown.

  Live? She wasn’t sure how to do that, so she just endured each breath.

  We finally rode home in Dad’s Porsche, to our Tuscan villa filled with Native American artifacts on a golf course in the Colorado Rockies. Go figure. But I guess the White House was modeled after ancient Greece, so whatever. Except weren’t they going for that democracy theme? What were our parents going for? Look how rich we are? Look at our castle in the mountains? All we knew was it felt like a swanky hotel. Home? No way.