Safekeeping

by Karen Hesse

  I wonder if she’s really thinking about the APPs or if she’s thinking about the man from the diner. Or maybe the creep in the car. Or the thugs who pushed down the barn. I remember the waitress in the pizza place, and the woman who threw her sandwich at me from her car, and the night of the fists. I’m quiet for a while.

  Finally I ask, “Ceil, would you turn back time if you could? Do things differently?”

  “You’re crazy, Rad. Nobody can do that. Anyway, I don’t like to look back.”

  “The future isn’t going to be all that pretty either.”

  “I suppose not. But, Radley, I definitely don’t want to live my life over again. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I nod. Of course I do.

  But that doesn’t keep me from wanting to live my life over.

  “When we took family vacations,” I tell Celia, “we never went to the same place twice. We were always looking for something new, something we’d never done before.”

  “Well, your parents should be enjoying the heck out of all this then,” Celia says.

  I throw a handful of grass at her. Ashley and Wynonna cackle and chase the floating green blades in a chicken-and-grass ballet. Jerry Lee, who usually resists barking, emits a muffled chortle of doggie glee.

  And the tension is broken.

  I look skyward at yet another flock of migrating birds.

  “The geese,” I murmur.

  Celia sits beside me on the schoolhouse step.

  “I’m certain it’s too early for them to be on the move but three days in a row now…”

  “Maybe they know something,” Celia says. “Maybe it’s a sign…”

  In my constant search for food, in my ever-widening circle of exploration, I come upon a pond ringed by willows.

  I sit on the bank and decide that even though it’s a long walk from the schoolhouse, I will bring Celia here. There is something about this place. The pond, the trees, the reflection of leaf and sky; the green air is as good a gift as any I could make her.

  For an entire afternoon I sit beside the water and forget my melancholy, my fears. My heart has a lightness to it as I imagine different ways in which the world might still come out right in the end.

  On my way back to the schoolhouse I gather sweet grass and seed heads and berries, all things the chickens like to eat.

  I bring them for Wynonna and Ashley. I bring them for Celia, too.

  Celia and I walk into the dawn, into the sleepy arms, into the pink fields of sunrise. I know the patterns of this place. I know when it is safe to be out, where it is safe to be out.

  Celia comes with surprisingly little resistance and after a mile or so, after she’s come fully awake, we begin to talk easily, walking side by side.

  When I was young, I loved talking with my mother while she drove the car. Conversations in profile. I loved the freckles across her cheek, and her lashes, so long even without mascara. I learned more about my mother on those drives, she about me, than we ever managed across the dining room table.

  When at last Celia sees the pond, she stops and puts her hands on her hips. Her eyes widen and she is completely silent.

  “It’s for you, Ceil,” I say.

  “I love it here,” she says.

  I nod. I’d hoped she would. There are so many beautiful places I want to show her. And now, at last, I think she’s ready.

  The next afternoon I draw Celia out again and this time we ease our bodies down between corn rows in a field about a half hour’s walk from the schoolhouse. The sound of geese surrounds us. Knots of geese feed and gossip as they gather amid the towering stalks. We are almost asleep when a large dog on the far side of the field begins barking. Jerry Lee is instantly on his feet. With a single gesture, Celia commands him to get back down, to be silent. And he obeys.

  In a wild frenzy the geese lift at once from the ground, their wings beating hard to escape the hold of gravity. They honk furiously.

  We lie very still. The strange dog does not catch our scent. Or maybe it’s not interested. We listen as it romps in the direction of the disgruntled geese who flee at a low altitude, furious at being disturbed.

  In the distance we hear the come-here whistle of a human. Jerry Lee trembles as the invading dog responds to the sound, bounds off. The barking fades after a minute more.

  High above, geese circle, circle, then slowly return, one group after another, settling back to their meal, grizzling all the while about the rudeness of uninvited company.

  I wonder what they think of the three of us.

  Another newspaper from Our Lady of the Barn. This one is full of stories about the overcrowded prisons.

  The Canadian journalists report that from the beginning the insiders in the American People’s Party expected to arrest a handful of people. Certain popular bloggers. Certain well-known political agitators.

  The APPs simply wanted dissenters out of the way while they “righted the wobbling ship of state.” But once they started messing around with the Internet and with phone lines, such a hue and cry arose that they had to jail far more people than they ever imagined.

  According to the paper, there have been numerous resignations, the arrests have stopped. And prisoners are starting to be released.

  I’ve convinced myself that this is the fate that has befallen my parents, that they were probably some of the first to be arrested, that they’ll be sent home soon.

  Maybe it’s time for me to head home, too.

  But the high-voltage wire that rarely stops humming in my brain says, Not yet. Not yet.

  The day dawns so softly. The air is as gentle as a fawn’s breath. A brilliant blue sky wears a veil of thin clouds and the trees flounce in their new autumn colors.

  I want nothing more than for this moment to last forever. How strange.

  The APPs have entirely lost their grip. Even in our hiding place we sense the shift.

  “I think it’s over,” I tell Celia.

  “How do we find out for certain?”

  “I’ll ask someone.”

  “Can you risk it?”

  I nod. “I can.”

  Celia is dead set against my going to Sutton so I use my pocket knife to scratch the question “Over?” in the barn directly above the place where Our Lady leaves her gifts for us.

  When I return there is a package with a dress, a train schedule, and money for a single ticket. And there is a bouquet of wild flowers in a glass jar.

  Written beneath my single question is a single answer.

  “Yes.”

  It is now, only now, with the gift of the single dress, the single fare, that I realize Our Lady has no idea there are two of us. If she had known, would she have left more? I think, yes, she would have.

  “The ticket should be yours,” Celia says.

  “I’ll buy a second one for you. It’s possible to use my charge card now, I think. No one will put me in prison this late in the game. Not when they’re letting everyone else out.”

  “I don’t need a ticket, Rad,” Celia says. “I’m not going back.”

  “I can’t stay here with you, Celia. You know that. I have to go home.”

  “I know,” Celia says.

  “You can’t stay here alone. Not in an uninsulated, abandoned schoolhouse. Not through a Canadian winter.”

  “No,” Celia says. “I know that. I’m not certain what I’ll do. I just know I don’t want to go back.”

  I try to persuade Celia to change her mind.

  “Rad,” Celia says carefully. “We both know I’m going to have a baby. I want it to be born here. In Canada.”

  I take a deep breath, let it slowly out, step forward, and take Celia in my arms, feel the tiniest bulge against the concavity of my own body. “How long have you been certain?”

  “I think from the beginning,” Celia says.

  At some level I think I’ve known from the beginning, too.

  “But how can I leave you?”

  “I’ll be okay. I’d al
ways taken care of myself until you came along. I can do it again.”

  “It’ll be different once you have a baby.”

  “I’ll figure it out, Rad. Go home to your parents. It’s all you’ve ever wanted to do. Go. I’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  The last thing I do before walking away from the schoolhouse is to gather Wynonna and Ashley into my arms, one at a time. With Jerry Lee trotting beside us, we make our way to Our Lady’s farm. It is the first time Celia has come. It is the last time I will go.

  Knocking gently at the farmhouse door, I wait for our protector to answer, so I can thank her, so I can know her, so I can fix her forever in my memory, but just as it has always been, she doesn’t show herself.

  “Maybe she’s not home,” Celia says.

  “Maybe.”

  Celia’s plan is to wait in the barn until our benefactress appears, explain about the baby, and ask for her advice.

  In Our Lady’s barn I spread a little grain for Wynonna and Ashley. The sound of their scratching makes me smile.

  Cradling Celia’s face in my hands, I kiss her once on each cheek and then on her forehead. It was what my mother always did before she sent me off on a trip. Scrappy Celia allows me this demonstration of affection.

  “Be safe,” I tell her. “Be well.”

  She nods.

  Sunlight catches in her lashes.

  “Come back if it doesn’t work out with your parents,” Celia says.

  “I will.”

  As we embrace, I inhale the scent of Celia.

  Words are left unspoken. It is not the silence we knew in the beginning of our time together. That was the silence of weariness, the silence of wariness.

  This silence now is the silence of grief. This is what Monseiur Bellamy tried to spare the children at the orphanage when he begged me not to go.

  At last I understand.

  I’ve taken Jethro’s bear with me, zipped back into his old familiar pocket, because, in the end, the bear belongs to Jethro, only Jethro, and I must see to it that my tattered little companion returns to his rightful owner.

  But I’ve left my mother’s photographs back at the schoolhouse for Celia. I won’t need them anymore. Soon I’ll be home.

  * * *

  I watch from the train window as scores of people make their way south on foot. Celia and I, it seems, were part of a flood of Americans who sought safety over the Canadian border.

  The train crosses into Vermont in no time. I study the faces of men, women, children travelling in large groups, and sometimes there will be a profile, a tilt of head that looks familiar. But I do not see my parents.

  I’ll find them at the house. This time they will be waiting for me.

  part three

  The railroad tracks pass through a wonderland where rain, and sun, and cooling nights have made the countryside a tapestry of color.

  It is so beautiful. It is so bountiful. It is so unreal.

  * * *

  We are instructed by the conductor to report to our town clerks the moment we arrive home so we can be included in some “record of returnees.”

  Who do they think will comply with such an order?

  After all we’ve gone through, who do they think would willingly put their name on any list?

  * * *

  For months Celia has been beside me.

  Now I am taunted by an empty seat. The train contains strangers. No one with whom I’ve shared a bed, no one I’ve starved with, and shivered with, laughed with, and cried with.

  One man across the aisle turns his shoulder, rotating his entire body so I can’t see him eating. There is something so pathetic about the angle of his torso. Something so rodentlike about the way he holds and chews his food. I wonder if he has always eaten this way. Or if this twisted consumption is a result of hiding from the APPs.

  I do not eat at all. I have no hunger.

  I try to ignore the perspiration under my arms, between my breasts. A heated train. I’d forgotten what artificial heat felt like …

  I try to see the quiet beauty of Vermont, the landscape denied me these many months. I try to reclaim it as my birthright. But I know now there is no such thing as a birthright. Anything can be taken from you.

  It is just missing Celia that makes me so grim, I think. But soon I’ll see my parents. Then I can begin to breathe again, to live again.

  In Brattleboro the familiar backside of Main Street greets the train.

  I climb down the steps, hike my limp backpack up onto my shoulders, and start walking toward home. I don’t even try calling in advance. I want to surprise them. To show them how I’ve changed.

  The traffic grumbles noisily up and down the hill. Many of the storefronts stare blankly out on a late, gray afternoon. I am surprised at the number of businesses that have closed down in the four months I’ve been gone. But I’m also surprised at how many are still open.

  I cannot walk fast enough. I’d forgotten so many of the sights along the way, but they rise before me like old friends: the mountains, the steeples, the flaming maples.

  And then, there it is, standing before me. Home.

  The autumn garden swirls before my eyes.

  Home.

  Just to see it again.

  Home.

  But the scene that greets me as I climb onto the porch squeezes the hope right out of my chest. Windows shattered. The front door hanging from a hinge.

  My father cannot possibly be back yet. He would have fixed the door right away.

  Inside, much of the furniture is gone. What remains is soiled, broken. The art has vanished from the walls. The shelves are empty. When I came back from Haiti everything had remained intact. Now I hardly recognize the house. The irony is that the house was unlocked when I arrived from Haiti. Anyone could have walked in and taken what they wanted. But no one had. When I left for Canada I locked the door behind me. Maybe I should have left it the way I found it.

  I climb up the stairs to my parents’ bedroom. The painting of the woman at her breakfast that hung over the fireplace is gone. My own room is destroyed. The bed and furniture, the clothes and books, my posters and prints, they’re all gone. Only a rumpled blanket remains, squat in the middle of the floor.

  Up in the attic my mother’s desk has disappeared, too, her filing cabinets, gone. Everything, vanished.

  I open the secret door in the wall, holding my breath, wondering if anything remains from the pile of things I squirreled away for safekeeping.

  And it’s all there, exactly as I left it when I fled to Canada in May. At least this much is preserved.

  When I see the things I secreted there, waiting innocently under a thin film of dust, I grow furious at myself for not hiding more.

  Why is no one here waiting for me?

  The house is as empty as a lost soul.

  After hours spent exploring the upper floors, I find the spinning wheel in pieces in a corner of the basement. It’s so shattered that at first I don’t know what I’m looking at; only a tangle of parts remain. But surely Dad can fix it. He can fix anything.

  Where is my dad? I notice, for the first time, in the back of the yard, his garden tools and gloves. Everything is covered with rust and mildew. Dad never left his tools out, no matter how much of a hurry he was in.

  Bringing the basket of tools back inside, a shiver runs the length of my spine. I place the rotting basket into the basement beside the remnants of the spinning wheel.

  In an effort to make myself feel at home in a town that now seems so alien, I head toward the marina. I take my time, soaking it all in. This was always one of my favorite walks. My mother loved it, too, and often photographed it.

  The restaurant is gone, burned to the ground. The boats that once bobbed and dipped and nodded at their moorings have also disappeared. Even the pier floating on its hollow casks has vanished.

  But the giant chair remains.

  I remember a father with his son and his daughter. My mother photographed
them. The girl’s fair hair capturing sunlight. An aura of gold floating around the child, like a saint’s halo. Pressing against the back of the seat, the girl looked directly into my mother’s camera, defiant. Her little brother’s short blond curls danced in the breeze. He held a toy car in one hand. He never saw my mother taking his photograph. He saw only his father, who reached out to the boy, caught him, and lifted him down from the high seat. My mother captured the bliss on the boy’s face. She also caught the complex expression of the daughter as her father helped her down. A self-conscious child resenting my mother’s lens, demanding her father’s total attention.

  Where are those children now, I wonder. And where is their father? Was he able to lift them safely out of the horror of these last months?

  I don’t know why I suddenly remember something I forgot in all the stories I told Celia. My lunch bags. Every day of elementary school my father drew a picture on a brown paper lunch bag for me.

  Often it would be a funny face with a clever turn of phrase pouring from its mouth into a speech bubble. All around the lunch table my friends wanted to see what my father had drawn that day.

  I never thanked him. In fact I pretended to be embarrassed by him.

  My father drew those faces only to delight me.

  And I never thanked him.

  * * *

  Hunger drives me out each evening and I realize not much has changed. I am still in a holding pattern, still waiting for my parents to come home.

  I can’t use my credit card. The account has been frozen by the bank.

  The Dumpster at the Putney Road Market provides food enough, just as it did before I left for Canada, though the owners are different now, and so is the menu.

  I eat what the Dumpster offers.

  I know I should look for a job.

  After my parents get back … then I’ll start looking.

  I was healthier when I lived in the schoolhouse with Celia. Better fed because of Our Lady of the Barn. Because of the gardens that surrendered a potato here, a tomato there. Because of the kindness of the people of Sutton. Because of Ashley and Wynonna and their wonderful eggs. Because of the fresh fish cooked on hot rocks.