by Jon Cohen
“Did they stop the bleeding, Ronnie?” From what wound? A hand? An arm? Maybe Dean got out of his truck to pee and he slipped on the ice and broke his leg. The EMTs are with him.
Ronnie began to cry. “Amanda. Oh Amanda, Amanda.”
“No!” Amanda dropped the phone, pushed through the white ring of nurses and ran to the ER entrance to meet the ambulance. The Harford EMTs did not at first understand her hysteria when they opened the doors for her, revealing an old woman who’d fallen in her bathroom and broken her hip.
Twenty minutes later, the New Milford crew brought Dean in. Not to the ER, there was no point, but to the hospital morgue. They stepped back as Amanda stared at her husband. There was not a mark on his beautiful bluish-white form. They hadn’t even punctured a vein to put in an IV. He’d been dead two hours before the EMTs even arrived. Amanda did not break down again. She held herself together with a fearsome power.
“Get Ronnie,” she said.
Ronnie came into the morgue, pale and shaky. He said it happened like this. He and Dean had been in their trucks doing the crisscross of back roads north of Mountain View High School, Ronnie plowing the upper road that went past Maplewood Cemetery, and Dean plowing the lower road along Martin’s Creek. They were supposed to meet for lunch at Jim’s Diner, but Dean didn’t show up and didn’t answer his cell phone, which could have just been the reception, always spotty in the valleys. Ronnie ate his lunch and got a hamburger to go and drove along the lower road looking for Dean’s truck.
“When I found it, the driver door was open and the motor was running, but Dean wasn’t nowhere around. Just his tracks in the snow,” Ronnie said in a jittery whisper. He was scared because Dean was dead and Amanda with her thick blond hair and hazel eyes was so beautiful, but dangerous somehow too with her held-in grief. He really wanted a drink, but she made him tell his story right there in the morgue with Dean laid out on the stainless-steel table between them, his red cap at his side. Before Ronnie had entered the morgue, Amanda had combed Dean’s wavy brown hair and placed a sheet halfway up his chest and arranged his big hands on top. She would not draw it over his face.
Ronnie couldn’t look at Dean, and he couldn’t look at Amanda, so he talked to the ceiling, which was low and oppressive, with the steam pipes overhead sighing like it was Dean trying to start up his breathing again.
Ronnie said, “Tracking his footprints in the snow, I had this bad feeling in my stomach, this awful feeling. I musta gone a mile, straight across Martin’s Creek then through a patch of scrub woods, then up into the big field below Brian Taylor’s place. And that’s where he was, Amanda, that’s where I found him, on his back in the middle of all that snow with his arms out at his sides.”
Ronnie stopped. Amanda was staring straight at him, but she’d reached for Dean’s big hand and was holding it. Ronnie was moved almost to tears, thinking how he’d seen them last August strolling hand in hand through the fun and noise of the Harford County Fair.
“Keep going, Ronnie,” Amanda said.
Ronnie swallowed. “Like I said, his footprints just stopped, and there he was.” Ronnie took a long breath and closed his eyes, seeing it. Trembling, he said, “Laying there in the snow, Amanda, his arms stretched wide like that, Dean looked like a kid, you know what I mean? Like a kid making a snow angel.”
Amanda stared at him, then asked him to leave the room. When the morgue door clicked shut, Ronnie leaned against the tiled wall in the hallway and hugged himself as he listened to her muffled, unbearable sobs.
* * *
That beautiful, strange detail—snow angel—Ronnie repeated it over and over that night to Walter and Stu and Cliff and the rest of the regulars who sat on their red vinyl stools around the big oval varnished bar in Green Gables Tavern & Restaurant. Soon everyone sitting in the booths in the adjoining restaurant, and then in the blink-and-you-miss-’em towns along the curves of Route 11 and up its dirt road tributaries in the double-wide trailers scattered in the hills and the dairy farms down in the valleys, knew about Dean Jeffers dying like an angel.
At closing time, Ronnie didn’t want to leave Green Gables, but Tom the bartender finally placed two hands on Ronnie’s thin shoulders and guided him out the door. Ronnie was anxious about the snow, which for this night at least was inextricably linked to Mysterious Death. He tiptoed through the parking lot to his truck, afraid to plant his foot too heavily in the moon be-glittered stuff, as if it might do to him what it had done to Dean. He swerved his way up and down back roads to his little A-frame cabin deep in the woods and stumbled out of his truck. It was the last thing he remembered.
At dawn, he opened his eyes and saw bright sky through the high bare branches of the sugar maples. He sat up, teeth chattering and fingers blue. He had passed out in the snow but somehow didn’t freeze to death. Squinting at the snowdrift in front of him, he gasped in amazement. A long tan-and-black feather stood on its tip in the snow like a quill balanced in an inkwell. A feather! Angel Dean had made a visitation and saved his life! Never mind that it was a turkey feather (but who could be certain, because the icy wind whipped it away into the woods) and never mind there were three-toed turkey footprints all around him in the snow. Ronnie had a fresh story to tell that night at Green Gables, and it earned him two free rounds of Genesee Cream Ale (they were out of Yuengling, his regular) and a shot of Mr. Jack Daniel’s.
* * *
Dean as a snow angel was such a compelling and gentle image that when Amanda told Oriana about Dean, she used it. “The angels came for your father, do you understand what I’m saying, Oriana? Daddy died—we’re not sure why yet. The doctors will find out. Daddy lay down in the field like a snow angel to greet the other angels who came for him.” Really, it seemed the only way to explain the death of such a powerful, alive man as Dean. He’d been suddenly drawn to angel heaven because they needed him.
But as soon as she saw the look in Oriana’s stunned eyes, Amanda regretted her words. It was right there, with that nonsense about angels, that the nine-year-old girl was lost to magical thoughts. Right there, her father was never quite dead for her, or he had died in a manner suggesting he was capable of reappearing in the same way that he left the earth, on wings. Amanda had given Oriana hope where there was no hope. That night, Oriana cried and cried, and Amanda thought, Good, cry yourself dry, sweetheart, that’s the way. Thinking, She understands.
But the next morning, Oriana was not in bed beside Amanda. Amanda jumped up and searched the house, stopping cold in front of the big picture window in the kitchen. Outside, Oriana was lying on her back in a clean patch of snow making a snow angel.
My God, what have I done? Amanda thought.
No matter how she explained it or how often, there was no reorienting Oriana. The autopsy revealed that Dean’s right cerebral artery had burst. “Daddy was strong, but he had a tiny weak spot there was no way of knowing about,” Amanda said. She took out an old nursing textbook and showed Oriana a drawing of the vasculature of the brain. “Right in there, that’s the place, do you see?” Oriana nodding yes, but not allowing the medical facts to impede her father’s imminent return as an angel.
It was all angels that first month, angel books and angels on the computer and angel stickers on her door. She’s working it through, Amanda thought. This will pass. For the last days of winter and into the mountain spring, each time it snowed Oriana spent hours outside making snow angels until she was dazed with the cold. As the weeks went by, her belief that her father had died magically, and that he’d return in some equally magical way, drifted beyond angels. She began to immerse herself in fairy tales and elves and princesses, anything that opened the door between the real and the unreal so that Daddy, be-winged and aglow, might someday return through it.
4
Oriana had lost a book. She’d left a book behind in the forest. And not just any book. It’s very special, Olive Perkins, the ancient libra
rian at the Pratt Public Library had told her. Somebody had made it by hand. When Olive gave it to Oriana, she almost couldn’t let go of it. There was a look in the old woman’s eyes Oriana had never seen before, a fleeting indescribable expression. Then Olive suddenly did the opposite, pushed The Grum’s Ledger into the young girl’s hands and moved her briskly toward the oak doors.
“But there’s no due date,” Oriana said. Olive still stamped her books the old-fashioned way, with a rubber stamp on the Date Due slip pasted on the last page. She was a tiny, bird-boned woman, but that stamp hit a book like John Henry’s hammer.
“It’s due when you’re done with it, child,” Olive said. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And remember. You are my favorite reader, and now you are my most important secret keeper.” The big library doors closed behind Oriana.
It was wonderful. A secret. Tell no one about The Grum’s Ledger. Oriana loved how Olive trusted her. Most grown-ups don’t know how to trust children.
And now it was lost. Of all the books to lose! Oriana hurried across her backyard toward the forest. Was it up in the birch tree where she often read? A little farther in on the old stone wall? Had she left it by the creek? And what did it mean? Because everything was a possible clue. A book, a special one, had been lost in the forest. Was it a test? You had to pay very close attention. Everything meant something. Something could mean everything.
“Oriana entered the forest,” Oriana whispered to herself.
The word she used for the wooded acres behind her house was forest. Sometimes she underlined it in very light pencil in the books she borrowed from Pratt Public Library. Forest. In the year following her father’s death, she had borrowed 112 books. Olive had to scour the county library system to keep up a fresh supply. Oriana didn’t care that some of the fairy tales and fantasy books were too young for a ten-year-old and some too grown-up. Every story had something to teach her. Persevere against all obstacles. See what others can’t see. Believe what no one else believes. The best of the stories, the most important ones, took place in the forest.
“Oriana’s Forest,” she whispered.
“Don’t go far,” her mother called to her.
Oriana rolled her eyes. That was exactly what they said to you in the stories. Don’t go far into the forest, child. And of course you went far. How could anything happen if you didn’t go far? She felt the quick sting of tears. She’d lost the book. She despised tears. She swiped at her eyes and thrust out her jaw. Persevere. See. Believe.
She paused at the dark line of lichen-specked tree trunks at the forest’s edge. Glancing back, Oriana could just see the big log house her father had built with his bare hands, and in the side yard her mother hanging a blue bedspread on the clothesline. Her mother’s blond hair was blowing in the wind. Like mermaid hair, thought Oriana, tendrils of hair floating in the current. She couldn’t remember the title of that one. Good pictures, but it was a sea story. Sea stories, sky stories, castle stories—she had to read them all, just in case, but they weren’t as important as forest stories. Or stories that had creatures with wings. She had to find The Grum’s Ledger. The grum lived in a forest.
A distant truck groaned up the big hill out on Route 11. Oriana raised a hand and waved to her mother and turned and faced the forest again. You knew when you entered the forest because the light changed and the sounds hushed in on you and everything disappeared: the house, your mother, the tree swing, the shed, the truck sounds.
Oriana crunched through the leaves and stepped across the rounded stones dotting a small creek. She walked past the raspy trunk of a tall white oak, brushing it with her hand as she glided by.
“...half an hour,” came her mother’s faraway voice.
And then the light shifted and the sounds hushed. Oriana was in the forest.
* * *
Amanda collected the laundry flapping on the clothesline, watching as Oriana hopped across the creek. The cold April wind blowing east through the Endless Mountains had stiffened a towel, and when the icy corner whipped Amanda’s cheek it stung. That was the cost of living in the Endless Mountains. Endless winters and springs that stung.
“Oriana, half an hour,” she called. “Homework before supper.” Amanda saw a flash of red sleeve as Oriana waved and disappeared into the woods. That red coat of hers—it stung, too. Oriana had to have it when they saw it on the rack at the Goodwill store last fall.
“If she wants to be Red Riding Hood, then let her be Red Riding Hood,” said the therapist up in Montrose. Amanda had sought out a grief therapist for advice. Not for herself, but to discuss Oriana. “Two months from now,” said the therapist, “it will be a different coat and a different story.”
Well lady, thought Amanda, you said that in the fall and now it’s spring. Same damn coat, same tromping off into the woods.
The woods, Amanda thought.
The woods that were sometimes full of hunters. Not huntsmen, like in Little Red Riding Hood or Snow White, real hunters, with real rifles. Hunters, and tree limbs that fell, and the abandoned quarry a half mile in with big slippery mounds of shale. Well. Amanda tried not to waste time fretting over such dangers. She would not baby Oriana just because things happened. And things did happen; Amanda knew the dangers of the world. But it was not the ordinary dangers of the woods that most worried her. It was Oriana’s consuming need to be in them.
And was Oriana, with all her fairy tale obsession, trying to be Little Red Riding Hood? Or was she wearing red because it had been Dean’s favorite color? Red for Dean. It was so hard to figure out her complicated, grieving child.
Amanda squinted in the wind, then reflexively turned her mind as if it were a physical thing she could grab and point in another direction. Supper. What would they have for supper? It was a cold afternoon. She had two loaves of sourdough bread baking in the oven. Venison stew would be perfect. Stew and fresh hot bread.
She started across the backyard to the freezer in the garage. Suddenly remembered. They would not be eating the venison stew because last week, in one of Oriana’s books, there had been an enchanted deer that turned into a woman in a long white dress.
“I don’t eat deer meat anymore, Mom,” Oriana had said, pushing away her slice of venison roast.
A million deer up here, more deer than oxygen, and now she won’t eat venison. Great, Amanda thought, flipping on the garage light. An extra expense, now I’ll have to buy more beef. That is, until she reads a story with enchanted cows in it, then there goes hamburgers and chili.
“I’ll eat the stew then, and you can have grilled cheese,” Amanda said out loud. She felt her skin flush. She tried hard not to be upset with Oriana. Amanda stared at the big Frigidaire chest freezer against the back wall of the garage. The heat in her face grew. But this time her daughter was not the cause—it was the thought of pulling the last bag of venison stew out of the freezer. The last of the stew from the last deer Dean had killed over a year ago now.
Amanda hesitated, then raised the heavy lid of the casket-sized freezer. She moved aside bags of frozen peas and wild blackberries, going deeper and deeper, starting to panic, pushing past the Popsicles and the cookie dough and the frost-hazed bags of cut corn. A bag fell to the garage floor and split open. Icy blueberries scattered like marbles.
There it was. On the very bottom, a frozen brown lump in a quart bag, the venison stew. She lifted it slowly into the dim light of the freezer lightbulb and saw in Dean’s blocky handwriting, “3/7/2016 V. Stew,” and gave a pained little gasp. The rock-hard bag may as well have been Dean’s engraved tombstone, because he had died days after recording that date.
What do I do? she thought. Over the last year, with Oriana howling in protest, Amanda had given away her husband’s boots and overalls and his arrows and two hunting bows. She had sold his big Stihl chain saw and his quarry tools and his beloved cherry red ATV, getting rid of thing after thing because they w
ere just that, things. They were no good to her or Oriana, and they were no good to Dean because he was dead and buried.
It’s just supper, Amanda thought, still gripping the bag. Food. A thing. She held the bag in her hand so long the frost on the bottom began to melt. A heavy drop of water formed, quivered and fell.
She tossed the bag back into the freezer, buried it beneath the other frosted bags and containers and slammed the lid shut. She leaned back, shivering in the cold, and looked out across the backyard and into the distant trees, the bare branches lit by the afternoon sun.
She pressed her lips together. Oriana, out there wandering among her trees. That’s how Amanda perceived Oriana, as a wanderer through the forest of grief.
What of the long year of Amanda’s own grief? Well, what of it? There was no wandering, the line was straight. Dean was gone forever. Yes, she missed him, at times unbearably, but she would not indulge her sadness. Right from the beginning—at Dean’s memorial service—even then she would not abide grief. When her mother said, “He was so strong,” Amanda’s reply was quick. “Not as strong as death, Mom,” she said.
And when Pastor Jim said, “If I close my eyes I see him walking through this door. If it’s hard for me, I know how hard it is for you and Oriana, Amanda.”
Amanda was quiet a moment and then she spoke in an unwavering voice. “Open or closed, my eyes see an ordinary church door, Pastor Jim, which Dean is never walking through again, and I’m not going to spend one second wishing for it.”
She squeezed Oriana’s hand tight, knowing Oriana was staring at the church door, certain that her father might step from the shimmering magic light into the world again. Amanda would never admit that on some dawnless nights she wished just as hard as Oriana that Dean would come shimmering back to them. But she had to be solid as a rock. Solid and there for her daughter.
