Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  It was early December. Outside the first snow had already fallen, melted to a hard crust of ice and been covered by a second, deeper fall which tamped the world down to a still, hard place. Icicles rimed the eaves of the houses and ice sheathed the limbs of the trees, so when a wind did blow, the trees gave off a faint clinking, like spoons rattling together in the back of a drawer. Occasionally, a limb would snap below the weight of the ice and the sound echoed between the mountains like a rifle shot. It was a cold time, dark.

  Inside, however, in Thingy’s room, I felt like I had been buried in a chest deep under the loam of the forest floor. Eventually, after years of humid darkness, the wood of the chest had rotted away and roots and new sprouting shoots had tugged and turned me up and up until there was only the thinnest scrim of dirt between me and the gold and the green and the rustling and the damp, expectant air. Mrs. Clawson was forcing paper whites on Thingy’s sill, but the bulbs were old and the faint, oniony smell of their decay only heightened this impression. I loved Thingy’s room—any one of her rooms—and I would be sad when this was no longer a place where I could come. Not so long now. In the summer all would be lost.

  “Give me your hand,” said Thingy. While I spoke, she had sat and looked down at her lap. She drew one finger around and around the dome of her ankle where it rose between the cuff of her jean and the top of her white, cotton sock. If I hadn’t known her better, I would have thought she wasn’t listening, but I knew that the slant of her shoulders, the furrow that deepened between her eyes indicated deep concentration, all her attention focused on me. Not that there was too much I could tell her: how far along, that the father didn’t know and wouldn’t. But not who he was—I never told her this, though who’s to say she didn’t guess—and not what might happen next because that I didn’t know.

  “I’ll tell your fortune,” Thingy said, and when I didn’t respond at first, she laughed and shifted toward me until our knees were touching, pulled my hand out of my lap and unfurled it into her own. Thingy smoothed her fingers over my palm and stroked my wrist where the veins stood blue and branching in my thin, winter skin. She stretched each of my fingers and then bent over my hand until all I could see was her wild, zig-zagging part as she squinted at my lines and creases like a watch-maker intent on the tinkering gears, the tiny jewels and threads of gold that make the clock tick and lurch.

  “Ok,” Thingy said, straightening up and looking me in the eye. “See, it’s not so bad after all. Here’s your life line and your love line.” She traced her finger down the center of my palm and back up, flattening my hand again as if to see more clearly. “And here’s your marriage line, which means you’ll have one, and if you make a fist and look here, you’ll see how many children, and look, only one. So that means you’re getting it out of the way.” She smiled at me and pulled my hand even closer to her face. I could feel the puff of her breath when she spoke, almost her lips there on my rough, red palm.

  “If you look close enough, Alice, you can tell just about anything from a person’s palm,” Thingy said. “See, look here, I can see your future house and oooh, it’s a pretty big one.” She looked up again, serious, her eyes so wide and intent it seemed as if she might cry at any moment.

  “See Alice,” Thingy said, tracing shapes on my palm with one light finger, “here’s your garden and your greenhouse, here’s the garage and two, no three stories, and here, right here. . .” She pressed and dug in a nail. “If you look really closely right here you can even see your pool, regulation length, a diving board and everything.” She kept her finger in the center of my palm, as if saving her place and looked up again, willing me to play along.

  “Don’t you see it, Alice?” Thingy asked and, even though I knew what came next, I said, “No, I guess I don’t.”

  “Well, let me show you then,” she said, triumphant, but instead of spitting in my palm, which was how this game was supposed to end, she laughed, brought my hand up to her cheek and scooted around so she was lying on her side with my hand pressed under her head, pulling me after her until we both lay on the bed with the pillows heaped around us, laughing and looking out the window.

  We lay like that for a long time. Eventually, we were quiet. The room was quiet and the house quiet around us save for a muted ticking as the wooden beams of the roof shifted and popped, and the faint rustle of Mrs. Clawson moving rapidly from room to room, bent to her own purpose. At any moment, I thought, Thingy would start asking questions and I didn’t know what I would tell her. How could I not tell her the most central fact—who? says the owl though the forest will not answer, who? who? who?—when every other part of my life had been her story as much as mine? But she was still, her hair filling my nose with its bright, eucalyptus scent, perhaps even asleep with her body pressed into mine as if she were the one who needed comfort.

  I didn’t begrudge her that. Even then, as it would for the rest of our lives together, there was something growing between us. “The size of a beetle,” said the book I had read in snatches in a seldom used corridor of the library. I was too afraid to check it out because the librarian, Miss Fawcett, went to the nail salon Rosellen was currently running, and because she was a soft, bleary-eyed woman who told me when I was nine that if I ever needed a place to stay I could always come and live with her for awhile. No questions asked, she said and laid a finger directly in the center of her pale, chapped lips.

  I don’t know what she imagined she was rescuing me from. Poverty, perhaps, or beauty in the form of my father who, when he came to the library to pick me up, seemed incapable of seeing her at all. As if Miss Fawcett were rendered invisible to him by her kindness and her instinct toward self-sacrifice, the soft, flinching way she took the books from my hands as he stood behind me and stamped each one carefully in the allotted space.

  So, a beetle then. Membranes over the eyeballs, paddles instead of hands. “Congratulations!” said the book. “Soon your uterus will be the size of a softball. Some things you might be feeling this week: fatigue, a sense of unease.”

  Outside, a shelf of snow fell hissing from the branches. The wind caught it and it pattered against Thingy’s window as if asking admission, politely tapping with white gloves against the glass. No, Thingy would have said, then and now. No, she would have sternly said, leveling the intruder with her cool gaze, casting him out.

  Oh Thing, come back! Come back to me!

  We were facing the back yard, the slope, the stone wall, the empty dog pen and the rusty, snow-heaped dragon. My house, my own window, curtainless and occluded by the stickers Thingy and I had saved over the years, but from where we lay I could only see the sky crossed by a craze of glittering twigs as it deepened from pearly white, to violet, to slate. The room grew dark and Thingy sighed and pressed closer against me.

  She was looking for warmth as all animals do, for comfort in a world where the wind blows and the ice cracks. Every year it does and there’s no using hoping this time it will be different, no use at all forbidding entry to what would like to visit or stay. Between us there was something else and for the first time we couldn’t get close enough to each other to share a skin.

  That wasn’t you, Ingrid, not exactly, but given time, years from that day, it would be. It was, at least, the possibility of you, the will of you, something of your stubborn heart, the size of a poppy seed and already beating. What happens next is complicated, but right then it was simple. Thingy and I were asleep, snug in our burrow while outside the wind blew and the ice cracked, the mountain held still and the night came down.

  “I,” Said The Sparrow, “With My Bow And Arrow. I Shot Cock Robin.”

  Sometimes I treat you as if you were blind, Ingrid. As if I were your eyes rather than just a memory you don’t happen to possess. You must understand, I’ve been put in a difficult position. I am not in your mind, but I imagine it a cool place, supremely architected. How can I know this? I assume it because of Thalia and what she taught me, but if I didn’t know by now that Thalia w
as not an honest tutor—untrustworthy, loyal only to her own essentially reptilian concerns—then I would be more of a fool than anyone could have thought.

  So really, though Thalia is responsible for the root of my ideas, what I think of you, dear Ingrid, is no different from what any animal might think of an element of the world it has lived in so well and inhabited so thoroughly. A world it has both observed and remembered from season to season, storm to storm.

  I assume your interior because I knew Thingy and Dax, Rosellen and Luke, the Sainte Maria, the Nina, the luckless Pinta who just last week I saw at Abbot’s, finally fat in a purple dress, filling her cart with broasted chicken and stacks of firewood. I knew Thalia and the Clawsons, Jacob and Daniel, others even than them who came into my essentially solitary life and swirled it around. Others who laid a mark on me that I, in turn, lay on you, writing and writing as I do through all these sudden mornings and late, weeping evenings. Scribbling through a whole season—so much time! last year’s acorns have rooted and sprung, the touch-me-not is bobbing in its bower and the lobes of the mayapples are thick and green between the trees, their flower already swollen into fruit—to record the events of an entire life. The one life that is mine and Thingy’s. The one life that is also yours, at least so far.

  But none of this is to say I really know you, Ingrid. That is becoming more and more apparent as you grow.

  For example, today, when I gave you your morning bottle, I realized your eyes have changed. I don’t know when it could have happened. It must have been sudden, perhaps even overnight. I admit to a moment of foolish panic. I stripped you out of your cotton singlet and turned you over in my hands, held you at arm’s length as you kicked convulsively, the seams of your joints raw from the heat even that early in the day, and examined you. I went so far as to lay you on your back in the middle of the table and stand in the doorway peering in, as if from a distance, lulled into security by the still shortened reach of your senses, you would slip up and give yourself away.

  But, after all that, it was still you. There is a mark on the sole of your foot, as if you had trodden on a thorn, that is unmistakable. There is a certain scent about you, milky and yeasty like a sweet roll baking; an undertone of citrus as if someone had grated rind into the dough. So you, now with green eyes—more challenging, less lucent. Showy, like the underside of a young leaf or, in certain lights, the band of feathers at a mallard’s neck. You now, who blinks more often, lowers her brow.

  A few nights ago, as I crept about the house, I came into your room to check on you, or simply to stand in your presence while you were away, traveling through the intricate corridors of your mind. I often do this. It soothes me to have a destination and there is nowhere else in this house I do not either associate with the past or the enduring present. The bedroom which looks out into the forest I share with Jacob who snuffles in his sleep as if he is tracking something over rocky terrain. The bedroom which looks out over the clearing, over the henhouse, cemetery and creek, is Daniel’s alone now, but Thingy is there too—in the spread of the floorboards, in the rumpled valleys of the sheets. Every movement toward order is countered by one toward chaos. This is at the heart of everything Thalia taught me. In a way, it is all that Thalia taught me: how to see the invisible world in all its fixed certitude and whirling bedlam. How to stick a finger in there, stir things up.

  The rest of the house is made of rooms of work or rooms of echoes. The kitchen, the parlor, the dining room, and cellar. On the third floor, the low room under the eaves. It will be yours when you are older, Ingrid, but today the door has swollen in its frame from lack of use and, snug against each window, is a little bed draped in a soft white sheet. Dust has settled on the sheets’ hummocks like the fur of trees on the mountain’s flank. The last time I was up there, I saw a pane in the window was broken. The star come at last? Hurtling through the glass no bigger after its long journey that a dry fall pea? A bird had hopped in through the jagged gap and been unable afterwards to find it again for an exit. It lay dead at the foot of the one of the beds, head cocked, wings spread around it like the skirts of an actress dying on the stage.

  No matter. I was telling you a story.

  Before you were born, some nights I would leave the house and go into the forest. I always did this with great secrecy and haste, no telling who could be watching, but once I had eased the back door shut behind me and skirted the exposed meadow, I was in the pitch-black shadow of the trees and could not be seen.

  There is no exit like the final one, Ingrid. I know that. When the doors of the mind slam shut one by one, when the draft they make stirs up the dust and fallen leaves, the sheets of notebook paper (yellow, with their endearing red margin line) and piano tablature, the candy wrappers, scraps of fabric, neon wristbands still curled in the empty shape of the wrist; when the self is driven before them, bothered, her hair a fright, and every time she turns to rally, regroup, another door—since when have there been so many? and all different sizes and shapes: one silver, one oak, one pierced with vents like a pie safe, one thick as a vault, twice as dull—another door slammed in her face as if it were she who has intruded and not this wind, this raw blustery thing whisking and whisking her onward, harried, out of breath, until there’s nowhere left to go and still another door slammed shut behind her, a key in the latch.

  Out the nose, Ingrid. That’s where the soul exits. A last hot exasperation and she’s forever gone.

  Even when I was very young, when the moon was full and I was full and we seemed to have a kinship in heaviness I knew my exits were nothing like this final one. For one thing, I could go back. For another, I could take something with me to eat along the way. There is a story necessary to tell any story. It is a chain that way, only loosely linked, but binding. I went into the forest many times, and one time I saw something I should not have. One time, I left something there behind me. When I was seventeen, there was a sheep on the news every night. My father, who had broken his thighbone sliding off the steep pitch of a roof he was patching after a mid-winter storm, sat with his leg propped on the coffee table and made dire pronouncements.

  “But what is it good for,” he finally asked, gesturing toward the news video of what looked to be a perfectly normal animal chewing hay in a perfectly normal pen while a crowd of beaming scientists surrounded her as if she were a plaque or an oversized check. One of the scientists, a woman, kept reaching over the stall partition to stroke the sheep’s ear, rubbing its velvet nap between her fingers The sheep’s eyes were yellow and blank. A blue tattoo was inked inside one of her ear’s grey folds. This animal was the future, I understood, but I wasn’t sure what that meant about the future itself, or, more specifically, what that meant about me, a denizen of the future as surely as I was of the past. Which is to say not surely at all. Which is to say not all borders are permeable. Some stop you short.

  “I guess think of all the lamb chops,” Rosellen said from the doorway, her breath pluming with cold and smoke. “Think of all the wool sweaters.”

  Later that year, a princess died and, against expectations, did not arise refreshed from her centuries long slumber. In fact, she never got up again. When her face came up on the television screen, Thalia would snort and change the channel.

  Later that year, some people in America shot a rocket filled with the remains of other people in America into space. When Thalia saw this, she sat up and leaned forward in her chair.

  “The fools,” she said, perhaps to me, perhaps to something else that was still in the house, though it should not have been. It was hard to tell with Thalia which world she addressed. Often, it didn’t matter.

  “Out of reach,” Thalia said, “but not forever.” And, in fact, she was right. Eventually every rocket stops its blue whirling and falls back home. They come back as rain then, as haze or scouring particles in the wind. “What a mess,” she said, her cold eye scanning a future that was getting hotter and louder with every passing year. She was right about that, too.


  This is to say that nothing ever passes that doesn’t come around again, but at seventeen I couldn’t know that. Even now, thirteen years later, I don’t quite know that. I only think I do, and I speak the words I believe will fix it all in place—the hot, loud mess that heaves and pulses all around us—as if to say if I could only see it, get just a second of silence to focus on a few of its individual parts, I could divine the right pattern, prepare myself. But that was Thalia’s talent, never really mine. I can tell you the past, Ingrid, and after that I am all but blind.

  When I first came to Thalia’s house, it was winter and night. I rode up the mountain in the passenger seat of the old green truck Thalia seemed to drive through force of will rather than by an application of pedals and gears. The woods to either side of us glittered with ice, reflecting the moonlight and our headlights with such dedication that, though the night was very bright, it was also very hard to see. There was no heat in the truck. My breath rose before me in a thin, anemic thread, but Thalia’s breath as she hunched over the wheel smoked and rolled until it washed up against the windshield like a wave roiling up the side of a concrete damn. Then it subsided. She didn’t talk to me. Some kind of animal slipped darkly below our wheels and flowed to the other side of the road, our wind in its tail were a passing fancy, of no account.

  “Where are we going?” I asked her.

  “Up the mountain,” Thalia said, rolling her eyes at me as if surprised to hear me speak. I had a thin coat on, no gloves. The beds of my fingernails were so blue they looked like cornflowers nodding in the ditch in summer time.

  “I know, but, to the house?” I asked.

  “To the house,” she said.

  “The house where my mother grew up?” This was the point, the only real question.

  “The house where your mother grew up,” Thalia said and leaned further forward over the wheel in a way that made it clear she was done talking. At least to me.