Inch by excruciating inch the day passed. Tamar came home from work and we ate beans and corn and pickles out of cans. She was alive. She was alive, and tired, and hungry. She was not hurt.
But you were hurt, Clara. That was my thought as I made my way up and up and up, through the bare and muted trees. You were hurt. All that worry hurt you, and all that fear. All that wondering how you could possibly stop whatever was going to happen from happening. A foreshadowing of loss to come. But loss came to everyone. The bus careened around the corner, the sheet of plywood fell from the overhead stack, the gene mutation revealed itself.
“It’s best to have low expectations,” I said once to Sunshine.
“It’s best to have no expectations,” she countered. “Best, but impossible.”
I thought about that sometimes. Like now, where the final part of the trail turned to rock. Almost at the summit now. Not far to the Rondaxe Fire Tower. Asa had been with me the last time I climbed the tower. We had stood at the top—it was rickety back then, rusty and neglected, not restored the way it was now—and watched the sun sinking against the western sky. A mile back down to the trailhead but neither of us wanted to leave.
No one else was out today. Too late in the day, too late in the season. Tomorrow they would thread the wires through my veins and into the heart of my heart, and then they would set it on fire.
The summit. That vast expanse of sky and mountains and trees stretching all around me. The valley spread out below. To the west were the Adirondacks, my home, and to the east, beyond the smoky purple-blue horizon, were the Green Mountains. Beyond them were the White Mountains, where I had gone to college.
Be fearless, Clara.
I turned and started back down. Daylight was fading and by the time I reached the trailhead the sky would be a red glow. I pictured my heart the way it would look tomorrow, lit with fire from the inside in that one tiny, misfiring place. I pictured Asa all those years ago, running ahead of me down the mountain. I heard the sound of my own voice calling to him, laughing but also afraid. Of what? Falling? He had run; why hadn’t I? How hard could it be?
Not at all, as it turned out.
Maybe running down the trail felt to me the way flying felt to a bird. I remembered that first airplane flight, back when I was seventeen, from Syracuse to Ohio, how I had looked around for someone who felt the way I did and found the businessman looking at me with recognition in his eyes. It’s a miracle, isn’t it? That was what he had said to me, and all these years later I could still hear his voice in my ears. I flew down the last slope of the trail, arms held out to touch the trees as I passed, and then I signed my name in the ranger’s book and called Chris. Heart Surgery for $1600. The Daily Double.
* * *
Do you have a ride home, and if your ride home is a cab, someone needs to accompany you in the cab. If you notice bleeding from the insertion points, press down firmly using a towel. If there is still steady bleeding after an hour, then have your companion bring you to the emergency room. Avoid sex for at least two weeks. If you notice your heart still accelerating, or trying to, do not worry. Do not panic. Sometimes it takes your heart time to understand what happened to it and that it can’t do that anymore, that it no longer has the ability to outrace itself.
“And who are you?” the nurse said to Chris. “Boyfriend, brother, husband, paid escort?”
“Bartender.”
“A personal bartender. Now that’s something I could get behind. Your name?”
“Chris Kinnell.”
He squeezed my hand. The nurse watched us, smiling. “You guys are cute,” she said. “How’d you meet?”
“She came into my bar one night,” he said, “and ordered a gimlet.”
“Did you make her a good one?”
“He did,” I said. “Two, actually. Extra lime.”
It felt like a long time ago, that night with the high-top table and the martini glass beaded with condensation. The heavy door, opening and closing. The sound of cars and trucks on the gravel parking lot. Gayle with her tattoo. The bartender mixing drinks and pulling beers. The darkness of the bar and the darkness of a day that began early, with the quilt exhibition at the arts center and the children cross-legged on the floor. Blue Mountain and his singular question.
The door opened and the blue-scrubs people herded in with their clipboards and their instruments and their needles and IV pole and their smile-crinkled eyes above masks. The nurse jotted something down on the form. They tucked a blanket around me. “We’ll take good care of her,” they said to Chris. “You can see her as soon as she’s in recovery.” And then they wheeled me out.
There were things I wanted to say on that speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace ride down the hall to the operating room, things that I would talk to Jack about if it were me and him sitting on the porch, the way we kept doing, even though it was truly cold now. There were things I wanted to say to Asa, and to Eli, and to my mother. To Blue Mountain and to the others who walked among us, their hearts beating outside their bodies. But the drug was trickling through me and the words formed themselves in the air above my head and did not get spoken. It’s short, I was thinking. It goes fast. Do everything you can while you can, because it’ll be gone before you know it. The lights overhead, fluorescent tubes of lights, flash-flash-flashed above my eyes as they pushed me along. I thought of the night the bartender dragged the chairs over and lay down so that we could look at photos of Sunshine and Brown together. If I were Blue Mountain’s mother I would be proud of him. If I had a baby girl I would name her Grace. If Jack were let out of his bottle he might turn into a genie who held inside him all the secret thoughts I had told him. My thoughts would be big and free then. They would be in the world. They would float from cloud to cloud in a high-white-pine sky. The last thing I remembered was a girl in the trees who looked the way I used to look, and she was looking down at me.
* * *
There were things I couldn’t forget.
Like the feeling in me when I looked up from The Depths and there was Asa at the concession stand, watching me, and even though I didn’t know anything that was about to happen, the loneliness started melting out of me.
I went back to that feeling sometimes. That memory. When someone like Blue Mountain appeared, one of the skinless, with his unanswerable question and his shadowed eyes, I conjured up that memory of Asa and I sent it out into the world. There will be someone for you in this life, was the message I sent, someone who will look at you and know you and love you.
Other things, if only. If only they could disappear.
Like the way Asa still appeared to me, his face contorted the way it was when he told me it was over, we were over. The way he shook his head and just kept shaking his head and telling me he was sorry.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Is it because of college? Because we can make it work, Asa.”
“I’m sorry.”
Asa, who I had never seen cry until that day, stood there before me, crying. It was unbearable, what was happening. I turned my head to the left, toward the edge of the house, where something caught my eye. A curtain, moving. Pulled aside and then let drop. My mother.
“Asa. Why are you doing this?”
“I’m sorry.”
Minutes passed, him shaking his head and me crying. “Is there someone else?”
“No.”
“So you just don’t love me anymore? Is that it? You stopped loving me?”
His head kept shaking back and forth and it was bewildering. He turned and got into the beater he used to drive around in, that we used to drive around in. How he kept it going nobody but he knew, but he knew that piece-of-crap car like a mother knew her baby, what it needed and how to soothe it, and somehow, always, he could make it work. Except for that day. I could still see him, grim-faced behind the wheel, fingers turning the key and the engine moaning like it was in pain, over and over, quieter each time until it was silent. And there he sat, me st
anding there, him sitting there, the air between us strange and distant, air that lived in two separate countries.
Then there was the sound of a truck coming through the woods, the shortcut road that only locals knew about, which meant that it was someone I knew, and it was. Eli Chamberlain in his truck. He drove into the driveway and threw it into park before it was ready. He walked up to Asa’s dead car and opened the driver’s door.
“Come on, son,” he said.
Asa got out and Eli put his arm around him and walked him back to the truck and opened the passenger door for him and kept his hand on Asa’s shoulder as he put one leg and then the other onto the step and disappeared inside. Eli shut the door and looked at me. What was in his eyes? On his face? Sadness. That was what I remembered.
“Goodbye, Clara,” he said, and then they were both gone.
It wasn’t true that Asa had stopped loving me. I had felt it then and I felt it now. But the thing I hadn’t known when I was young and lacked perspective was that his love would always be with me. It was part of me forever. A room inside a room inside a room, a room that was always warm and bright. I could go and sit in that warmth whenever I wanted.
I hoped it was like that for my mother too.
* * *
A talisman was waiting for me when I came home after the surgery. She stood on the window ledge where Jack usually kept vigil, a slender, wood-chopping woman carved out of red pine. A tiny ax was gripped between both hands, held high above her head. A pile of miniature split firewood logs was scattered around her, and she wore a lumber jacket painted in a checkerboard pattern of orange and red and black. The carver who had posed her like that, who had taken a pocketknife and drawn the lines of her body so that the grain of the wood became sinew and muscle and bone, who had raised up my mother’s arms in the sky, ax clenched between her hands, the master carver of this miniature scene was someone who had seen through to the essence of my mother. Tamar Winter, queen of the northland, in her prime. And off to the side, cradled between the boughs of a miniature white pine, was a girl, watching.
“What kind of wood is that?” I had asked the bartender, that night when my heart went pinballing off the rivers and highways and byways of my body. Woods of the North for $200.
“Red pine.”
Chris was already a hundred yards down the rutted dirt road. He had driven me the fifty miles back to the cabin from the hospital in darkness complete but for the sweep of the headlights. He was quiet and I was quiet and my burned heart was quiet in my tired chest. The places where the electrodes had been were smooth now. I put two fingers on the side of my neck, in the familiar hollow where so often a racing heart fluttered. An artery pushed up against my fingers: One. Two. Three. They had found the faulty place and burned it. Part of my heart had died. That was the kind of thought you couldn’t say out loud, or write in a book, because it was too dramatic. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Chris had gone to get the car out of the parking garage while I waited in the doorway of the hospital. My clothes were back on, my sneakers tied, and on my head for good luck, the same too-big scallion hat that I had been wearing that freezing day we wandered around Old Forge. The tiny silver hammer brushed against the wool and I slipped it out of my ear. Back into the pocket, little hammer. They all said goodbye—the doctor, the nurse, the techs, the receptionist—and out I went. Age of miracles, I said to the invisible cold air. We are living in an age of miracles. The faces of Sunshine and Brown and Chris and Tamar hung in my mind, all of them alive and living in this world, all of us together in the age of miracles.
He pulled up in his big white car and he pushed the door open for me and waited until my seat belt was buckled. Then he put the car in gear and we drove in silence until we were past the Utica floodplain, heading north.
“We get two of so many things,” he said. “Two eyes, two ears, two kidneys, two hands, two legs, two feet, two arms. But only one heart. You know?”
I knew. Only one brain too. His right hand stretched across the giant expanse of seat between us and I took it.
“This car feels like a grandmother car,” I said.
“That’s because it is. She left it to me.”
“Did you love her?”
“I loved her completely.”
The vast expanse of seat and the pressure of his fingers in mine. The darkness of the night sky with no stars. I remembered the night my mother woke me up and took me downstairs onto the porch, cold cement underneath my bare feet, the aurora borealis pulsing overhead.
“My mother is leaving me,” I said. “She’s going somewhere and I can’t go with her and she’s never coming back.”
He was steering with his left hand, and his right hand was laced in mine, and he kept nodding and not looking at me, maybe because I was crying. My heart was quiet and beating evenly, even though it was missing a tiny piece of its original whole.
“You’ll miss her,” he said. “You’ll miss her and you’ll love her.”
“Is that how it is with your grandmother?”
“Yes. She’s still with me, though. That’s the way it will be with your mother.”
“Things get winnowed down,” I said, and he nodded. “The less time, the more winnowing. If you’re lucky, some peace. Some happiness. Love. You know what I mean?”
“It’s like panning for gold at the Enchanted Forest,” he said. “Did you ever do that when you were a kid? My grandmother took me there once. You must have gone all the time.”
No, I had not gone all the time. But yes, I remembered holding my pan of dirt in the stream of running water and shaking it back and forth, letting the sand wash away. Glints of gold beginning to appear, until gold was all that was left. He and I had been children at the same time. We had both stood at the same stream, strangers on the lookout for treasure.
When we got to the cabin he didn’t leave until I had fished out the key and opened the door and flipped on the lamp by the kitchen table. I hadn’t noticed the woodcutter talisman yet; that would come later. He put the car in gear and I watched the taillights recede down the dirt road. I wished I had told him about the night my mother woke me up in the wee hours to show me the northern lights. I wished I knew what he was thinking right at that moment, whether he would stop at the bar before he went home, check in and see how the night had gone.
I was past the part of my life where long before now we would have taken our clothes off and flung ourselves onto a bed. That day would come—we both knew it—but it was not now. We pass through each stage of our lives unknowingly, until the day comes when it is behind us.
* * *
“Do you think you’ll write a book about Tamar someday?” Brown said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because then that’s who she would be. She would be a woman in a book instead of a living, breathing woman.”
Or instead of the living memory of a woman who used to live, who used to breathe, who used to be set down so firmly on this earth. That was the danger, if you were a word person. It went with the territory, if your territory was words, and sentences, and paragraphs that turned into chapters that turned into books. When the old man died I built him a house of words to live in, and he would live within its walls forever. He was kept alive in there and yet he was still dead, despite the fact that there were questions I never got to ask him because I hadn’t thought them up yet. The world was a place where people were and then they weren’t. We remade ourselves so that we could keep living in it.
“You might write about her someday,” Sunshine said. “Never say never. You’re her word girl, after all.”
I talked to my mother sometimes now, in the dark of night, when I was far away from the place where she lived. It was easier to talk to her bundled up on the porch, with Jack next to me and Dog in his urn inside and Sunshine and Brown a mile away. I asked her questions and I waited for the answers to come floating up the hill, from the dirt road, from the huge and silent tr
ees that surrounded me. Answers like fireflies, floating up out of the darkness.
“Ma?”
Sometimes she answered. Sometimes she didn’t.
“Ma, I don’t know how to handle this.”
“Yes, you do.”
Immediate and clear. An answer unlike the not-answers she used to give me when I was a child.
“You’re already handling it,” she said, “even if you don’t know you are.”
“Handling it how? Driving down to visit you? Watching Jeopardy! with you? Talking to Annabelle and Eli? Hanging on to Sunshine and Brown? Reading to you from the seagull book?”
“Yes.”
“‘Yes’? That’s all you got? A one-syllable answer?”
“Yes.”
Then she was gone. You could feel when someone was with you and you could feel it when they left. Three yesses in a row. If my mother said I was handling it, then maybe I was. Maybe this was what handling something—something huge and overwhelming, something with no way in and no way out—felt like.
Maybe Sunshine was right, and the day would come that I wrote about my mother. Things that I remembered about her, things that were caught inside me, trapped and wanting a way out. Maybe I would sit here on the porch, with a notebook and a pen, and build a house for my mother. It would be a house for me and her, a house with plenty of wood for the winter, cupboards filled with jars and cans, Dog curled up with his stuffed monkey, a place where we could live forever. When my mother thought I wasn’t there she would lie down on the floor and listen to Len. She would read her seagull book for the thousandth time. She would think about the dreams she had for her life, the dreams I never knew she had. Dreams that I still didn’t know about, because I never asked. She would tell me about Eli, maybe, or maybe she would keep the memory of him for herself alone. When Leonard Cohen sang “Hallelujah” she might start to cry. She might play that one song over and over again, because she was alone, and who would know? Who would care?
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