Mother Nature

by Sarah Andrews

  Frida poured us each a cup of cocoa and brought them to the kitchen table. Kitty had set out sticks of cinnamon to stir them with, but Frida pushed these aside with a snort and shoved a bag of marshmallows at me instead. “So then what happened?” She put her feet up on a free chair and began to chew on a chocolate chip cookie.

  “After the deputy was done reading Mrs. Karsh her rights?” I asked, staring into my steaming mug. “She turned and looked at me, and her eyes took on this weird light. She said, ‘Sonja darling, you know I’ve missed you, don’t you?’ It was spooky: She took my hand and held it with both of hers to her chest, as if I should comfort her. And then she turned back to the Sheriff’s deputy and said, ‘Isn’t it nice? Sonja’s finally home.’”

  The rest I couldn’t explain. Still clinging to my hand, Mrs. Karsh had begun to smile like an angel. Charm shone from her face, rolling back the years, showing me the girl that had bought Will Karsh’s soul.

  I had said, “You can’t sell this to us. We know damned well you know who I am, and we know why you’re doing this, too.”

  Detective Muller gave her a lovely smile. “This is not your daughter, Mrs. Karsh, this is Em Hansen. You remember Em. You drove your son over to her motel room the other night.”

  “Me? Oh, surely you have me confused with—”

  Muller said, “No, it was you,” like he was only making light conversation. “We found someone by the liquor store who saw you in your car.” Muller chanced a quick look at me, enlisting me in his deceit.

  Dierdre Karsh smiled innocently. “Oh, that night! That was an accident. Little Matty got carried away, you see. He was only supposed to scare her!”

  Muller had turned toward the uniformed officer and flicked his wrist, consigning one more person to the courts and the penal system. Her eyes had gone as dead as her son’s, the world and all its troublesome young women locked out.

  Remembering this in the safety of Frida’s kitchen, I shook my head. “You know, when she took my hands like that, I looked over at Matthew. They had him locked in the backseat cage of a police cruiser like he was an animal. He wasn’t even shivering, but his eyes had gone empty, like two tunnels leading nowhere. And you know, for a moment I felt his pain.”

  Kitty touched my shoulder in sympathy. “You’ve a big heart, Em, and twisted as Matthew is, he deserves your sympathy.” She shook her head. “I remember when my son was born. You have a baby and your confidence is shattered, your world changed. Every irritation with your mate widens into a wound. But here’s this little one whose absolute innocence and dependence on you fills his eyes with adoration. When he’s hungry, he, needs you. When he’s cold or tired or hurting, he needs you. You are his comfort, his heaven on earth, and before too long, the temptation to chuck the father and build your world around the son grows huge. Think of what you can do with a slave like that, especially when they grow up big. But a decent woman, a woman with any maturity, bites the bullet and leaves the poor thing to his innocence.”

  I set down my mug of cocoa and addressed my aunt’s lover: “Kitty, I remembered something, just like you said. It was when he was trying to drown me.”

  Kitty nodded.

  A motion caught my attention: Frida’s head jerking as she squeezed her eyes shut.

  I began to tremble, and fought an almost overwhelming urge to lay my head in Frida’s lap like I was a little child. “You were there, weren’t you, Frida? Please tell me.”

  “They said you’d never remember,” she whispered. “You were so little.” She wouldn’t open her eyes. Perhaps it’s easier to tell these things with the shutters to your soul tightly closed.

  Watching the remembered pain etch her face, I said, “I remember going down again and again underwater, something—someone pushing me.” I closed my eyes, too. A chain of memory uncoiled then, bits and pieces flashing by at high speed, remembered thrashing in the water. “Then Mother was angry, and I’m running. Then I’m hiding, and I can hear her telling me it’s not my fault.” I opened my eyes, and was reassured to find that Frida was there; still aging, wise Frida, not the younger Frida she would have been then. “What wasn’t my fault, Frida?”

  Tears squeezed out from Frida’s tightly closed eyes. “My God, that was a terrible day. I thought your father’d die when he saw that boy dead, stone-dead, all the meanness gone from him. He looked like an angel.” Frida opened her eyes now, and the tears slid freely down her cheeks. “Em, to lose your husband is a terrible thing, but God help you, you should ever lose a child. You think it was easy for your mother to lose her only son? Mad as she was at him for throttling you and pushing you under and holding you down like that in the irrigation ditch? He near to killed you—and would have, if you hadn’t of dove and wiggled away from him like you did tonight. You always were the survivor. You bet your ma was angry, and if some of it seemed aimed at you … well, no one’s perfect.”

  I had to run her last words through my mind several times before their meaning came clear, so lost was I in the memory of that day, nearly thirty years before, when my brother had gotten just a little too rough to show his little sister what jealousy and wrath he held for her, had pushed me down just one too many times to show his cousins how tough he was. “And the hiding?”

  “We couldn’t let the picnic finish, what with what he’d done. Swimming was over for that day. Your ma was terrified, and Abe and you was crying. Even my little Jed got to screaming, though he was just a year and couldn’t of known what was happening. The whole day was ruined. When we got you all back to the house, your brother took one more swing at you and you lunged at him, and your mother had to break up the fight. She sent you to her bedroom. If only it had been a bigger house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then she would have sent him to another room, but there wasn’t one, they hadn’t built it yet. And he was still spitting like a wildcat, real spiteful, so she did the only thing she could think of. She opened the door and threw him out, told him to stay out there until he was ready to behave.” Frida sighed and hung her head. “Em, that boy wasn’t much for behaving, never was. He had to show us all.”

  This part of the story I knew, the cleaned-up, tell-the-neighbors part of our family’s history. My brother had gone back out to the irrigation ditch by himself—God knows why, my dad had always said—and thought he’d take another swim. And he had drowned.

  Somewhere along the way, as Frida’s tears dried, and my trembling quieted to a fine tingling, I whispered, “I’d always thought it was because she drank.”

  “Why would drinking make him drown?”

  “Like she was out cold and he went for a swim.”

  Frida shook her head. “No, Em, it was the other way around. Your ma used to take a good swig now and then—hell, all those girls from the East could put away a highball like it was ginger ale—but I never did see her drunk until your brother was in the ground.”

  I touched my cup where it rested on the table. The cocoa had gone cold. As I began to pull my hand away, Frida took it up in her dry, warm hands and said, “And now your daddy’s gone, and she’s had to face it all.”

  I shook my head, bewildered. “And all these years I thought it was because she loved him better.”

  40

  So that’s how, it all ended. Matthew Karsh pleaded innocent of murder by reason of temporary insanity and stood trial, to the greater horror and entertainment of the county and half the country, and I wound up with an apology from Deputy Dexter, very nicely if somewhat stiffly delivered. At first Jaime supported Mrs. Karsh in her plea of ignorance, her main defense against charges of accessory to murder and conspiracy to commit murder, but when he learned she had tried to lay the whole thing on him—Sonja’s death, and Janet’s—he opened up and told Detective Muller everything: about arriving for work in the predawn mists both times to find her waiting with corpses, about Mrs. Karsh’s careful instructions regarding disposal of the bodies, about his frail attempt to dress Janet’s death up like an
accident when he didn’t have a handy grave to bury her in. He had a witness to this later crime, or partly so; his cousin Eduardo of the County Planning Department, who had insisted on taking those terrible pictures, damn his eyes, and then sold them to some cabeza loca from out of town! Ay Dios! He had gone home, washed down the truck, and set out for church to pray for the soul of the dead woman before going to the bar in Miwok Mills to get drunk. Ask his wife! He was with her the entire night before, just like always, and after the grisly disposal, she’d seen how scared he was with the ghost clinging to the truck like mist.

  All of this made me ponder a few things. When I held Dierdre Karsh up to my own mother, I could see a difference: My mother had not condoned my brother’s fury, nor fed it. She had simply come up against her limitations with a difficult child, had made her mistakes, and had paid for them bitterly. And no matter how I tried to change the past by rethinking the present, my father, with all his frail intentions, was gone, and nothing would bring him back. A piece of my past I’d been too young to understand had surfaced, just like that great tank floating up in the flooded night of the Laguna. In rising, this piece had changed from a nameless, life-shaping monster to a thing I could mourn, and I began to feel better. A scar had been lifted from my heart, leaving it to beat more softly in the knowledge that the past does not have to control the future.

  In this vein, I asked a boon of Detective Muller. I asked if, when Sonja’s remains were recovered, a ring had been found encircling one bone of the left-hand fingers. He acknowledged that there had been a ring, an inexpensive thing, the sort of ring that teenage girls give each other in celebration of their friendship. They had puzzled over it while the medical examiner probed the bones of the neck for strangulation fractures we knew he’d find, wondering if it might help identify the remains as they waited for Sonja’s dental records to be located in a retired dentist’s garage. I suggested that Muller take the ring to Suzanne Cousins for identification. I didn’t go along; I figured my presence wasn’t necessary on an errand such as that, but when I saw him next, Muller said it was the strangest thing: Suzanne had dug like a madwoman through trunks and boxes in her closets until she found a tiny jewelry case, and there inside, in somewhat better shape, was the ring’s perfect mate.

  So what’s next? After I visit Pat Ryan at the hospital where he’s drying out, I’m going to look up Arnie at the Pedal Pusher and take him the last bits of Janet’s bicycle gear from her boxes, as a memento. Together we’ll pick out something for crazy old Duke. Janet’s Filson vest, I’ll keep for myself, and we’ll give her books to a school and take the rest to a homeless shelter. Maybe they can figure out what to do with her truck. And I’ve promised Jim Erikson, I’ll drive out along the Russian River to Jenner with him as soon as he’s able, so he can show me the Pacific Ocean.

  And what else? There’s the rest of January, then three more bitter months until the spring warms Wyoming, and my mother has a herd of cattle to keep alive. She knows how; she worked alongside my father for ten years before the drink took her, but I reckon she’ll need a bit of help just the same. I won’t say I trust her, exactly. There’s been too much pain between us, and too many years of caring have been lost to forget the damage just like that, but at least I have a mother who’s shown the willingness, however late in the day, to face her losses and start to grow again.

  You see, I’ve decided to accept her apology for all the years she lacked the courage to love me. In deciding that, I’ve had to accept the painful fact that she’s a real person, not a monster, and I’ve had to see that she owns that ranch, not I. But I will offer her my assistance; humbly, too, because I have to face my own losses, and admit a tender need for a place to be while I prepare for my next beginning.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I went to work for a small environmental services firm in Sonoma County in 1989, the day before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Working that job was a painful experience for me, not unlike taking a long walk in tight shoes, and it was destined not to last, but it did put me standing next to a ten-ton drill rig and service truck watching the mast shake and the fluids in the decontamination tanks leap sideways as the ground began to roll. I knew it was a big quake by its amplitude and wavelength, and I judged by the rubbery feeling of the shaking that the epicenter had to be some ways off, but I didn’t know whether the shaking was coming from north or south. I remember turning to the geologist next to me—a young buck not a bit less irascible than my fictional Adam Horowitz—and saying, to state the obvious, “An earthquake!” The guy raked me with eyes hot with fury and resentment, as if to say, I’ll be the judge of that!

  In the ensuing weeks, the quake was all anyone talked about. I described my experiences of watching the drill rig rock and witnessing the cloud of smoke that coiled over San Francisco that night as the Marina District burned. My cousin Greg in Santa Cruz told of his escape from a liquor store as bottles sluiced off the shelves and doing “tai chi break dancing” in the parking lot outside, and a friend who was driving down the ramp from Highway 101 onto Fell Street in San Francisco likened the experience to “skiing down a mountain made of Jell-O.” Most eloquent to my ears, though, was the experience of a painfully shy woman who had been riding the BART train through the tunnel under San Francisco Bay when the temblor hit. Something of a claustrophobe to begin with, she found herself under ground that was underwater, halfway between Oakland and San Francisco, in the dark and in a dead train. In the company of strangers, she walked out. She had this to say: she felt that Mother Earth had betrayed her.

  Now, it’s a peculiarly human habit to anthropomorphize nature as we do, and more human yet to take the motions of inanimate objects personally, so I think I know what she meant. I find that California’s geology follows a negative female archetype in its personality: She is capricious, moody, given to fires and floods and earthquakes, entirely too ready to rid herself of the humans who persist in building along her shores and valleys. She is the very image of the Hindu goddess Kali, as viewed through the lens of Western patriarchal cultures. The geology of the Rocky Mountain province, where I trained as a geologist, seems by contrast to follow a more masculine archetype: the craggy, unchanging old man reigning stiffly over the androgynous plains.

  I find it interesting that Kali is viewed so differently by cultures older than ours. She is indeed considered ferocious, but not disenfranchised from her anger as are women in our society. Her anger rises naturally as she moves to crush that which threatens her children. She is not a demon but a slayer of demons, a balancer of the unbalanced, and, it is said, those who find the courage to embrace her will transcend their fear and discover the greatest bliss.

  I find these things interesting because as a culture, we move to control nature, denying its overwhelming power and increasing our numbers at the cost of its nonrenewable resources (which ultimately include clean water, air, and soil), rather than humbly seeking harmony within it while we still have time.

  I dream a dream for my generation, a mother’s dream. I dream that we are learning to raise our sons and daughters with Kali’s ferocious love, not stunting their growth with toxins born of our disappointments and impacted anger. Our daughters will grow up strong, directing their passions in mature ways, neither scorned for their anger nor shamed for their desires, ready and able to use these energies to birth an even better world in the generation to follow. And our sons will grow up knowing how to grow, delighted by the strength of their sisters and their wives-to-be, responsible for all their acts and feelings, mature and wise and strong.

  It is a fine dream. In it we find the humility to admit our shortcomings in the way we’ve been treating our Mother. On waking, we embrace our limits and her vastness, and learn to live in harmony with the natural laws of her love.

  HIGH PRAISE FOR SARAH ANDREWS MOTHER NATURE

  “Snappy dialogue and fully realized characters, especially the immensely appealing Em, turn the field of geology into a fascinating background for mystery
.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The most enjoyable part of this series is Hansen herself, an extremely appealing young woman … She narrates the story with an irresistible mixture of humor and old-fashioned suspense. An ideal mystery for readers who value strong characters.”

  —Booklist

  “Surprisingly, the geological aspects of the story are not dry, but extremely fascinating. Sarah Andrews’s third Em Hansen novel, like the previous two tales, will be enjoyed by fans who enjoy an engaging mystery with a geological background.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  A FALL IN DENVER

  “The author’s scientific explanations make geology come to life; Em’s first-person narrative gives the prose added punch. With this cliche-free plot and memorable supporting characters … Andrews solidly establishes her series.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  TENSLEEP

  “TENSLEEP is a winner! Sarah Andrews combines the best elements of the mystery and the novel of the contemporary West to bring us a fresh-voiced new heroine. I want to see more of Em Hansen—and the sooner the better.”

  —Marcia Muller, author of the Sharon McCone series

  Other titles from St. Martin’s DEAD LETTER Mysteries

  CRACKER: THE MAD WOMAN IN THE ATTIC by Jim Mortimore and Jimmy McGovern

  THE COLD HEART OF CAPRICORN by Martha C. Lawrence

  QUAKER TESTIMONY by Irene Allen

  KEEP STILL by Eleanor Taylor Bland

  NO BONES ABOUT IT by Donna Huston Murray

  BIGGIE AND THE MANGLED MORTICIAN by Nancy Bell

  WAY DOWN ON THE HIGH LONELY by Don Winslow

  DIAMOND HEAD by Charles Knief

  MURDER AT MIDNIGHT by Elliott Roosevelt

  NOTCHES by Peter Bowen