The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  Corpse felt how her body fit against Gabe’s, and I searched for but could not find a memory of our parents in an embrace.

  “He’s working at home now,” Corpse said. “That’s a start. Give him some time.”

  “How much time, Oona? How long do I keep waiting?” Mom’s skin was so fair, so different from Dad’s and Corpse’s. Against her temple zigzagged a purple vein.

  “Just a while longer. Please?”

  Mom smiled weakly. “Is this a sign you’re planning to live?”

  “I guess so.”

  Mom sighed. “Graduation, Oona. I’ll give things till then.”

  Three months.

  They were quiet for a while, their minds zooming around.

  “Mr. Handler invited me to go visit a Native American school with him.”

  Corpse had planned keep mum about this, had held it inside for days. I considered Corpse and trust, and felt acutely her awareness of the hollow space I’d left.

  “A what?” Mom said.

  “He’s going as a guest counselor to a school for Native American kids. I saw them speak at that leadership conference I went to in the fall.”

  “I thought all you did there was shop.”

  “Yep. Sorry. But I did go to this session, and the students from there, well … ” Corpse searched for words to express the profound thing that had happened. “They were cool.”

  “For how long?”

  “A week.”

  “When?”

  “Next week.”

  “I love Native Americans,” she said.

  “You think I should go?” Corpse worried about what might happen between our parents without her there; hated to give up a minute, with only three months to set things right.

  “There’s a saying, something about not regretting the things you’ve done, rather the things you haven’t done. I’d have liked to be an anthropologist.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “Never allowed myself to fully realize it until this past month.”

  “So that’s why there’s all this Native American stuff around the house?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  Mom looked so solitary, so beaten down. Corpse rose, limped behind her chair, and wrapped arms around her. I drifted closer, lingered at the fireplace.

  “Oh, you’re cold,” Mom said, and she covered Corpse’s hands with her own.

  “Don’t worry. It’s just the new me. Things are going to get better, Mom. I promise.”

  I remembered being in that bathroom stall at the leadership conference, wishing Mom would comfort us, just like Corpse was doing now. Corpse closed her eyes and hugged Mom tighter.

  Later, Corpse couldn’t sleep. She took our journal from our nightstand and once again read through its pages. Every day leading up to the winter formal had an entry about water, yet now she hardly wrote in it. Why?

  She read page after page and saw we’d been flailing for a key to unlock our spiral. It came to me that I’d been the one recording these things. She sat straight and sensed me sensing her. She came to the last written page: orbits, breathe, and home. Words she’d written. Without me. She stared at that page a long time.

  Before I knew it, she’d tugged on her robe and limped to the mudroom. She slid on her boots, their sheepskin soft against her bare feet. She tugged on her coat, went through the garage door, and walked to the driveway’s end. Ten steps down the street, she stood at the spot where Gabe’s father had repaired the wall.

  She traced the rocks with her eyes and thought how instinct had led her, that day last May. She cursed how I love you would not pass through her lips. I thought how last May she’d caught me off guard, how I was what had blocked those three words. She took a gulp of icy air and regarded the stars.

  A car approached. An Audi. It slowed and stopped.

  “Ash?” Corpse said.

  Ash rolled down her window. “My parents are having another knock-down-drag-out. I couldn’t sleep.” She shrugged. “I was thinking about you.”

  Corpse reached in and rested her palm on Ash’s flannel shoulder. She wore a robe too.

  Ash trained her eyes down the road. “It’s almost over, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Living at home.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Our parents suck, Oona. They always have.”

  Corpse sighed. “Mine are getting better. I think. At least Mom is. Dad’s going to take some figuring out.”

  A tear trickled over Ash’s cheekbone, rushed down her cheek. “Every college I applied to will probably turn me down. Guess I should have tried harder in school. Like you.” She pressed her lips. “I need to go away. Far away.” She glanced at the stars. “Maybe the moon isn’t far enough.” A laugh-sob rushed out of her.

  Corpse squeezed Ash’s shoulder gently. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s things change. What seems awful now might not be so bad a few months down the road.”

  “Right.”

  “No. Really.”

  They were silent but for Ash’s sniffle. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Ash, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to hurt you. I just can’t go back to how things were.”

  “Honestly, Oona.”

  Their eyes had a conversation:

  Ash: Isn’t that a bit dramatic?

  Corpse: I’m not like you.

  Ash: Whatever.

  “You act like I’m the devil or something.” Ash rolled up her window and drove away. Corpse watched her taillights till they disappeared on the road’s curve.

  Inside, she toed off her boots and hung up her coat. She started toward her room but stopped. She crossed the kitchen and limped down the long hall to the observatory. Dad lounged in his recliner, staring at the sky with that depressing woman singing.

  What did he see up there? Maybe it wasn’t those points of light that captivated him, but the void between. Corpse tried to construct a world through Dad’s eyes but she couldn’t, and she felt fully how little she knew him. She tried to make herself enter, speak a word, but her heart sped and that day in his office with LIFE was a wall. Instead her feet turned and limped to the living room.

  She settled on the couch in the dark, gathering her cold legs beneath her robe. She studied the murky outlines of the peace pipe over the fireplace, the moccasins hanging on the wall above the bookshelf, the kachinas below. They still whispered bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, but she realized the bullshit had been her own assumptions about Mom.

  She scanned the peace pipe’s long shank, the rawhide strips dangling those feathers. I thought how smoke rising from its bowl would not look so different from the steam rising from the creek each morning as Mom drove us to school. Or from Gabe’s breaths as he waited for us to arrive.

  She thought about college. A dorm? A roommate? Studying hard for classes? No way. She pushed college from her mind, and there was Mr. Handler’s offer. It kept whirling around in her head. She liked him, but going alone with him into a foreign world? She heard Mom’s voice with that little catch. It triggered that flute music, and its notes swelled around her. She shivered as it summoned the three promises she’d made. The one to Dad, to stay alive? Not excruciating anymore. The promises to Sugeidi and Mom? Those were a challenge. Heal people? Make life better? Three months.

  She studied the pipe again, thought of the inhalations rushing through that carved eagle-head bowl and along that shank. It occurred to me that the flute’s music was nothing more than the master’s exhalations released as notes. She wondered at the notes of ordinary breaths. Was there some creature that heard breath’s music? Maybe the stars listened. Or maybe that inky space between them.

  Corpse bolted up, listening to her breaths, and moved to the fireplace. She lunged up onto the hearth, gripped the carved mantle
, and reached high with her right hand. Her two fingers grazed the pipe’s bowl. She hopped and hit it with her fingertips. The bowl bounced off its nail and struck the crown of her head. She caught the trailing rawhide with her clumsy two fingers and thumb, and it raced through them till her grip closed on the feathers. She lifted those feathers to her face, rubbing her head, and grinned.

  Part Two

  To Die Of Thirst

  Twelve

  From Oona’s journal:

  Water must change and transition and renew itself.

  —Viktor Schauberger

  Mr. Handler exited the highway and barreled down a ramp that led to nothing. Literally. Corpse couldn’t even see a road. Just endless Utah desert. Panic crept down her neck. She swallowed against how people at school would gossip about her leaving with Mr. Handler. DEAD GIRL SUCKS UP.

  The ramp’s asphalt ended, and Mr. Handler’s Prius bounced onto dirt that hooked left, under the highway in a one-lane concrete tunnel. They burst into light at its far end, and still there was nothing but junipers, piñon pines, and sagebrush. Here and there a skiff of snow yawned in a tree’s shadow. On a sign faded from blue to mostly white, Corpse read through bullet holes the name Sego Ridge, and, beneath it, Pop. Sego Ridge’s population was just a shot-out hole.

  Mr. Handler glanced at Corpse as he gripped the steering wheel with both hands and navigated the washboard road, veering around rocks like land mines. An open bag of pretzels skittered off the console and hit Corpse’s feet. She retrieved it and set it in her lap.

  The road started climbing, growing steeper, steeper, till it seemed they drove into the sky, the dash inches from Corpse’s chin. She listened to the blood rushing in her ears, the tires’ thump over washboard. A steeple appeared, and as the road flattened, it became a tiny church sagging toward the dirt, faded beyond any hint of color. A pink house-trailer stood two hundred yards to the right. A rusty tin shed was tacked to its side. A beat-up orange truck, one rear panel primer gray and its back bumper wired on at an angle, was parked out front. A mammoth cottonwood stretched its winter limbs over the trailer and the truck.

  As the Prius climbed again, Corpse leaned forward for balance till the dash neared her chin again, and then the road leveled off. Here perched two more house-trailers, one faded yellow, one faded green, worn tires scattered over the roofs. The rusted-out bodies of old cars surrounded both.

  At the yellow trailer, a sheet of plywood covered a big window, probably the living room, and the front door was open. Two kids stood outside, one in just a diaper. A skinny black dog sprinted to the Prius and chased it with vicious barks. The dog gave up and Corpse twisted round, looking through me, to watch it out the rear window. It barked and bared its teeth.

  I thought of the trailer park down the valley, where Sugeidi’s kids lived. Where she spent her days off. Though we’d never visited Sugeidi’s family, we’d studied that park as we’d driven by it. Those trailers were painted cheery colors and had little patches of lawn. The only time we’d seen poverty like this was on vacations, when we’d ridden with Mom and Dad in limos from foreign airports to five-star hotels. We’d never considered that people lived this way in America.

  Just before the road curved left, a crisp black-and-tan sign announced Sego Ridge School. A paved road branched right, and Mr. Handler turned onto it. The Prius bucked, tires ringing, over a cattle guard. Sudden loud silence filled the car. The asphalt’s smoothness was unsettling.

  Corpse closed her eyes and tried to slow the rushing in her ears. She rubbed her eyelids, and the ache of her fingers and toes returned.

  The Prius tilted down.

  Corpse opened her eyes to a panorama of successive pine ridges, each a shade lighter till they merged with the horizon. A valley lined with reaching bare branches rose around them. On the right, nestled against the earth, an adobe building materialized. It matched the dirt’s red color so closely she might have missed it if she wasn’t watching. Another low building appeared on the right. Another. A common area, the lawn dormant, with a dry swimming pool and tennis courts bordering it.

  “This looks like one of Mom’s spas,” Corpse said.

  Mr. Handler nodded. “It’s a corporate retreat. They’ve leased it to the school as a tax write-off.” He steered the Prius left into a five-space parking lot in front of a building crowded against the hillside. A white sign above its door read Office.

  “Okay,” he said and unbuckled his seat belt. “Home sweet home.” He climbed from the car and stretched the six-hour drive out of his limbs. Leaning down into his open car door, he said, “Come on.”

  Corpse scanned around for students. Staying right there in Mr. Handler’s Prius might be just the plan for the whole week.

  “That dog back there might bite you, but nobody here is going to,” Mr. Handler said.

  He knocked on the screen door of the office. Corpse set the pretzels back on the console and climbed out. She squinted up and saw wings circling, blocked the sun with her palm. I tried to make out what type of bird it was but could discern only its silhouette.

  “Well hello, Perry!” a woman said. “Welcome back! You don’t have to knock.”

  “Oona?” Mr. Handler held open the screen door. Corpse eyed his black golf shirt. She closed the car door and walked toward him.

  The office had a reception counter across the back like a hotel. Perpendicular to it was a desk with a computer on one side, piles of papers and college brochures balanced on the other. Two upholstered chairs occupied the lobby’s other side. A copy machine and printer were stuffed behind the counter.

  A stout woman in a purple broom skirt and a white blouse said, “You must be Oona. We sure can use the help.”

  Corpse glanced at Mr. Handler. How was she supposed to help anybody, wreck that she was? She hadn’t agreed to anything.

  “I’m Louise,” the woman said. “Just Louise. No Mr. or Ms. in here. Right, Perry?”

  Mr. Handler nodded.

  “Not much has changed since you were here last. You’ll be in this back room again.”

  I hovered just above the beaded barrette that clasped Louise’s ebony hair in a bun as they followed her into a small office with an empty desk. Shelves brimming with college brochures lined one wall. Corpse tried to place Louise’s familiar, clean smell: Ivory soap.

  “You were such a help, such a great mentor last year. I’m really looking forward to this,” Louise said. “Do you need to put anything in here now? Otherwise I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  “Show us our rooms,” Mr. Handler said, glancing at Corpse, who looked like she might run for the hills. “I’m sure Oona could use a rest.”

  “Do you remember where the dorms are?”

  “I do,” he said.

  “Drive on over. I’ll get the keys and meet you there in a minute.”

  When we were in the Prius, inching past the common area, I slunk to the back seat. This was going to be a long week.

  A woman in a blouse and jeans and a man with a dark braid bisecting his gold T-shirt strolled along a sidewalk that bordered the common area, deep in conversation.

  “Isn’t it late to be applying to college?” Corpse said.

  “They’re just doing research now. It would be great to come in the fall and help out, but it’s a madhouse during that time back home.”

  The road forked as the valley fanned out, and Mr. Handler followed the left side that hugged the mountain and climbed gradually to two single-story adobe buildings. They faced southwest and looked like hotels, with tall, south-facing windows and sliding doors to patios that were bordered by waist-high adobe walls.

  “Where is everybody?” Corpse said.

  “In class. They should be out soon.”

  “How many students go here?”

  “Around forty. Just juniors and seniors.”

  “Why?”

 
“They apply from schools across the country. Most are from reservations; most want to go on to college.” He pulled into a parking space against the mountain, sighed, and looked at his lap. “They’re just kids. Trying to figure things out. Like you.”

  “Like me?” Corpse said.

  He nodded. “Like you.” He climbed out of the car. “It’s gorgeous here, isn’t it?”

  She got out. The sun was warm but the air had a cold bite.

  Mr. Handler took a deep breath. “Smell that juniper? There’s nothing like it.”

  Corpse heard voices and looked up. Louise and a group of Indian students were walking along the road toward us. Shoes scuffed. Laughter rose. A swan-like girl slapped a boy’s shoulder, more of a caress, reminding me of Ash. Maybe half the school was there. They wore jeans, cords, T-shirts, jackets, sneakers; could have been kids from anywhere in America. Corpse kept the Prius between her and them. I sunk behind her.

  “Perry!” one girl said.

  “Hey, Perry,” another one said.

  “Lone Ranger,” a boy said.

  “He no sabe,” said another, and they all laughed. A joke I had no clue about.

  The girl from the reading, the one who’d held the feathers, stepped out, and Mr. Handler put his arm around her in a half-hug. “Angel,” he said.

  The girl who’d slapped the boy stepped forward, and he hugged her too.

  “You’re gonna be mad at me,” she said.

  “Uh-oh, Roberta,” Mr. Handler said.

  “Uh-oh is right,” said the boy she’d slapped, and she slapped him again. There was muffled laughter.

  “It’s good to see you all,” Mr. Handler said. “I can’t wait to hear how things have been. And I look forward to meeting you juniors.”

  A few glances skidded across the Prius’s maroon roof to Corpse.

  “This is Oona,” Louise said. “She goes to Perry’s school back home. She’ll be helping out in the office.”

  Things got quiet, and it took every bit of strength Corpse had to stand in their scrutiny. Recognition sparked in Angel’s gaze. In the gazes of a few others.