This Broken Road

by A. M. Henry

  “I was trying to look like a Viking.”

  She laughs. A hard laugh that says she’s seen it all before and nothing can surprise her. “Vikings.” She sighs. “Our ancestors rode on to Valhalla. We rode all the way to the end of nowhere, Pennsylvania.”

  “Don’t you like it here?” Her parents settled the family here. Grandma has never tried to leave, as far as I know.

  “Love it here now. I used to hate it. In my wild youth, I thought it was more like a prison than a home. I s’pose you grow complacent in old age.”

  “Life feels like a prison sometimes.” I say it without thinking.

  “Yes, it can.” She takes my free hand and squeezes it. “How are you, love? I know what your parents tell me, but how are you really?”

  This time I think before answering. How am I? A lot has changed, even in just the last month. “I think I’m okay.”

  “Are you happy?”

  “I am.” I think I mean it. “Can’t complain.”

  She laughs. “I’m sure you can, and do it well.” She puffs on her cigarette. “Your mother says you’re dating the captain of the football team. How the hell did that happen?”

  I can’t help but laugh at the look of horrified disapproval on her face.

  “I’m not sure, actually,” I answer. “We had a fight after school back in October. I punched him, he hit back, and here we are.”

  “Match made in Heaven, clearly.” She finishes her cigarette and stubs it out on the stone step. “Come inside. I want to show you something.”

  Grandma brings me into the house, into her bedroom. She rummages through the closet and finds an old leather bound photo album, which she opens in her lap when she sits down on the bed.

  “That’s your great-grandmother there.” She points to a photo on the first page. “When she was about your age, and still Hilda Rasmussen.”

  My breath catches in my throat for a second. Two women stand side by side in a black and white photo, smiling and blinking in the bright sun. I stare at the woman on the right—it’s like looking in a mirror.

  “And that’s her sister, Bertha,” Grandma says. “They still lived in Norway then.”

  Bertha looks sort of like Mom and Mairéad, with Casey’s innocence in her wide eyes. She looks plain next to Hilda, with her radiant smile and hair styled into chin-length white-blonde curls, like Marilyn Monroe. I wish my hair could do that.

  “She had big dreams, my mother,” Grandma says. She turns the page—more photos of Hilda, my great-grandmother on horseback, fishing out of a little boat with spectacular landscape of cliffs and forest behind her, arm-in-arm with a handsome young man with Grandma’s eyes. “Her own great aunt went to America back in the 1870’s, to go west. My mother wanted to do the same. She couldn’t get enough of the Wild West.” Next page, now Hilda with a pair of small children in her arms. Instead of pretty dresses, she wears a plain work shirt and dark trousers. “She fell in love with the Appalachians instead. They settled down here in 1932, right before I was born.”

  Another page, Hilda standing in front of a little farmhouse, three children standing beside her, and a baby in her arms. The house looks run down, and the kids look pretty scruffy, but Hilda still looks beautiful. And happy.

  “Hardly any money,” Grandma continues. “Hard times in those days. No one had any money. But she still thought of life as an adventure.”

  More pages, more photos, the children growing older until the youngest is finally recognizable as Grandma. At the end, a photo of Grandma’s wedding, Hilda still beautiful.

  “She finally went west after that,” Grandma says. “Moved out to Denver.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “No, she died nearly twenty years ago. Dropped dead—heart attack they think it was—hiking in the Rockies.”

  Sounds like a good way to go.

  “Can I borrow some of these pictures?” I ask.

  “Sure you can. I should take some out, now I think of it, and frame them.”

  27.

  Grandma has lots of photos on her walls—all of our school portraits, lots of baby pictures, some group shots of holidays and weddings. But one face dominates every room: Aunt Gracie.

  We never met Gracie; she died a week before her twentieth birthday. Doctors found a lump in her breast, and it killed her six months later. If you look closely, Grandma has turned the house into a shrine. Every room has pictures of Gracie’s pretty, smiling face. She looked a little like me—the same sleek pin-straight blonde hair and grey-green eyes. Her horseback riding ribbons cover the living room walls. The blankets she knitted hang over the back of sofas and chairs. Her bedroom still stands exactly as she left it, the reason eight of us have squeezed into two spare rooms and a pullout couch.

  I can map Gracie’s life from Grandma’s walls—her academic accomplishments, her artistic abilities (painting and sculpture as well as knitting and embroidery), her ribbons and trophies spanning more than ten years of horseback riding. She wanted to go professional, Grandma has told us, and ride for America in the Olympics.

  I have no idea what Mom’s and Mairéad’s childhood dreams were. They have no ribbons or trophies on display, no paintings or knitted blankets, no photos of them on the walls unless they pose with their children or with Gracie.

  The truth of Mom and Mairéad’s relationship dawns on me as I stand in the living room looking at a photo of all three sisters opening Christmas presents. Mairéad and Mom, maybe thirteen and nine years old, don’t quite smile, each of them holding up new sweaters. Gracie, about eleven, sits between them grinning from ear to ear, holding up a brand new navy blue riding jacket that looks tailored to exactly her size.

  Did they always live in her shadow? Or did Grandma just lose sight of them after Gracie died? Mairéad went through law school on scholarships, got hired into some big Manhattan law firm, and ended up marrying the senior partner. Mom put herself through college and got a Master’s in business, got her real estate license and started up her own brokerage, and worked hard to achieve everything she has without help from anyone except Dad.

  But their dead sister still stands in the spotlight.

  I think I might actually feel sorry for my mother. Sort of.

  *

  I wander into Grandma’s bathroom early Thanksgiving morning, searching for toothpaste that doesn’t taste like bleach. Everyone in my family is obsessed with whitening their teeth, and I forgot to bring the normal toothpaste.

  There, on the middle shelf in the medicine cabinet: a prescription bottle.

  Oxycodone, 30 mg, the prescription three months old. I don’t know how long I stood there staring at it.

  Obviously Grandma doesn’t take them. The label says they gave her sixty pills, and the bottle looks like it still contains at least half of that. She’d never notice if I took a handful. She probably wouldn’t notice if I took the whole thing.

  I take the bottle down from the shelf and open it. The gag rises in the back of my throat at the sight of the blue pills—an automatic reaction, classical conditioning from snorting opioids for so long.

  I take a deep breath. My hands shake and I feel almost feverish. I put the lid back on the bottle and march out to the kitchen before I have a chance to change my mind. Grandma stands by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil, and I thrust the bottle into her hand, not caring that Dad and Rachel and Carlee all sit at the kitchen table.

  “Put these away,” I tell Grandma.

  I go back to the spare room, put on my headphones, and blast Holy Grove until I stop thinking. A while later, I feel the mattress shift as someone sits down next to me. I open my eyes to find my father sitting there. I turn off the music and sit up.

  “I’m proud of you,” Dad says.

  I hesitate a moment, debating whether or not to say what I’m thinking. “I almost took them.”

  Silence a moment, then Dad says, “I know. That’s why I’m proud of you.” He kisses my forehead, something he hasn’t done in s
o long I don’t actually remember the last time.

  “Thanks, Dad.” I lean into him and for a second I feel like a little girl again, the little girl from before Irae left, the one who would stand at the upstairs window from five o’clock onward, waiting for her father’s car to pull into the driveway.

  The thought makes my eyes burn, so I push it away.

  28.

  The post-Thanksgiving dinner walk: a tradition in my family since the beginning of time.

  We actually had a pleasant dinner, with minimal display of claws and teeth from Mom and Mairéad. I kept up conversation with Rachel, Casey, and Grandma to avoid any potential awkwardness with the rest of the table.

  No matter how cold or rainy or windy it gets outside, we still take the after dinner walk. After everyone has finished eating, we bring all the dishes into the kitchen, pile on sweaters and coats, hats and scarves (or just sweaters in the case of Dad and Rachel, who are freaks of nature), and venture outside. At our house, we get a walk through semi-rural suburbia, but here it feels like wandering into the wilderness.

  It’s freezing outside, with a bite to the air that hints at snow. Grandma sets off at a brisk pace, heading around the back of the house, walking towards the woods across the field. Mom and Mairéad follow close behind her; then Rachel, Dad, and Carlee. Casey, Sarah, and I bring up the rear, but Casey quickly falls behind, taking pictures with her iPhone.

  Attempting to ward off awkward silence, I ask Sarah, “So where do you want to go to college?” Seems like the sort of thing you ask a high school senior.

  Sarah shrugs. “I’m applying to a bunch of SUNY schools. I don’t really know where I want to go.”

  “Me neither,” I say.

  “Weren’t you left back?” she asks. I expect mockery in her tone and feel surprised when it isn’t there. “You have another year to decide, right?”

  “I guess. I’m not doing the extra year, though. I’m taking the GED in spring. Then maybe I’ll take a year off to work. I don’t know yet.” Only after I tell her all that do I realize I haven’t told anyone else yet, mainly because I wanted to wait for the right time to break the news to my parents.

  “You’re dropping out?” Sarah’s eyes go wide.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  Shit. Now I have to tell Mom and Dad before she tells my aunt and my aunt then tells Mom that their delinquent daughter is about to become a high school dropout.

  “You’re not worried that your parents will freak?”

  “At this point, I’m so used to them freaking that I’d be more worried if they were okay with it.”

  Sarah lets out a laugh—that weird guffawing laugh I remember from when we were younger. I wonder if she remembers getting drunk at that wedding five years ago. I can’t help but laugh with her. I notice Grandma turning around and smiling when she sees us.

  Rachel falls into step beside us and I have a sudden moment of anxiety wondering how much she heard.

  “Whatcha guys talking about?” she asks, now walking between me and Sarah.

  I can tell from her demeanor she didn’t hear anything about me dropping out of school, and I immediately relax.

  “College,” I say. “Sarah’s looking at SUNY schools.”

  “I applied to Oneonta,” Rachel says. “What are you thinking of majoring in?”

  Sarah shrugs. “I dunno. Maybe graphic design?”

  “That’s cool,” Rachel says.

  They start talking about college—Rachel telling Sarah about Princeton and life in the dorms, Sarah talking about different courses in all the schools she’s looked at. I fall back a few feet, feeling like I have nothing to add to their conversation. The idea of college seems like something in another dimension. I do not have the faintest idea what I might want to study in college.

  I slow down until I’m far enough behind them that I can’t hear them. I can’t hear anything except the wind and distant cries of blue jays.

  *

  We circle the edge of the field on Grandma’s neighbor’s property and then head back to Grandma’s house. I’m a good twenty feet behind everyone else and I don’t even notice Rachel standing in the field waiting for me to catch up until I almost run into her.

  “You okay?” She asks.

  I’ve overthought myself into a funk. I feel tired.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “No you’re not.”

  I shrug. Rachel hesitates for half a second before throwing her arm around my shoulder. She presses her cheek to mine and I don’t remember the last time we did that. At home, we probably have enough photos of little Rachels and Angelas huddled together cheek-to-cheek, we could probably fill a few albums. I think of the one photo in the living room—me six years old, Rachel just turned eight, we stand outside the front of the old house knee deep in snow, bundled up in a million layers of clothes and gloves and hats, our rosy cheeks pressed together, and huge smiles on our faces. I have no front teeth and Rachel still wears big glasses instead of contact lenses.

  “I miss when we were little,” I say. “Remember when we used to play in the woods behind the house and pretend we were wild mountain women?”

  Rachel and I both remember the first time Dad took us for a hike in the woods. I was four years old, Rachel almost six. We both loved the woods, loved how the sun shone down through bright green leaves, loved picking wildflowers, loved to get a better look at bugs with the magnifying glass from Rachel’s butterfly garden kit.

  Dad decided to take us hiking one spring, and the second we left the car Dad grabbed Rachel and me by the wrists and knelt down so he could look both of us in the eye.

  “You have to stay close to me, okay?” he said. “If there’s a lot of people around us, you hold on tight to my jacket, okay?”

  “Okay,” Rachel said as Dad fussed with her scarf.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Well, if you really want to know… you promise you can keep a secret?” Dad said in a dramatic whisper.

  “Promise!” I said.

  “I promise,” said Rachel.

  “There are wild mountain men in these woods,” Dad told us. “If you wander off, they could snatch you right up, and take you home to eat. So you stay close to me always, okay?”

  Rachel and I laughed about that for years. And for a while when we were little, playing wild mountain women was our favorite game. It turned into an ongoing joke whenever we went hiking or talked to Dad about hiking.

  “One day,” I once told Dad, “a wild mountain man will sweep me of my feet while I’m out hiking.”

  “Me, too!” Rachel jumped up and down with excitement.

  “Oh man, I forgot about the wild mountain women,” Rachel says with a cute little laugh.

  After Dad’s warning about the mountain men, Rachel and I became obsessed. We couldn’t think of anything more exciting than living wild in the forest. We made up an entire world in the woods behind the backyard—a dense forest where we lived in a hut we built ourselves (Dad built it), and hunted for food, ran into dragons and unicorns, and went on grand adventures.

  “Why did we ever stop playing wild mountain women?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Rachel replies, “but we totally should have kept playing. Forever.”

  I realize that Rachel and I haven’t felt this close since long before the accident.

  “You were right, you know,” I say. “About me needing to deal with everything. And not pushing things away.”

  “I know.”

  I give her a fake punch on the arm. “It sucks most of the time.”

  “And it’ll probably suck for a while.”

  29.

  Rachel and I leave the house at ten o’clock on Friday morning to walk into town, me carrying a stack of the photos of our great-grandmother. I get a text from Ryan as soon as we return to the land of cell phone service: Would you think me a giant pansy if I said I missed you?

  I type back: Yes.

  “Really nice,” Rach
el says, laughing as she reads over my shoulder.

  Another text when we near the library: What are you doing?

  I reply: Our history project.

  He answers two seconds later with: NERD.

  “You guys are literally the same person,” Rachel says. “I never thought anyone could be as talented at sarcasm and assholery as you.”

  I silence the phone when we enter the library, and we set off in search of a copy machine. For such a tiny town out in the boonies, Wellsboro has a pretty nice library. Three times the size of Harrowmill’s. While Rachel sits at one of the computers screwing around on the internet, I photocopy twelve of the photos of Hilda—all of the ones from the 1930’s. I have no idea what I plan to do with them, but I feel like they’re important.

  Part III

  The morning comes

  I’ve not yet closed my eyes

  Cold and bright as I need it

  The sun does rise

  - Wovenhand

  30.

  “Hey.”

  Derek’s voice sounded far away, like he called out from the other end of a tunnel. As I looked up from my history textbook—trying to finish a week’s worth of homework during lunch—Derek pulled up a chair and sat down next to me. Sunlight poured in through the tall cafeteria windows, but I remember it was bitter cold outside.

  December, before the accident.

  “You okay?” Derek asked.

  He stared at me a little too intensely and it made me uncomfortable. I wondered if I looked high. I’d seen other junkies when we went into Newburgh to buy—pallid waifs with dark shadows under their eyes who slurred their words when they spoke, like they were drunk.

  I wasn’t like that. Not at all.

  At least, I didn’t think I was. Now I’m not so sure.

  “I’m fine,” I told Derek. “Just trying to catch up.”

  A pause, more staring, and then, “You look like shit.”