“I was working on getting him some shows, some interviews,” she said. “We were talking about getting married.”
I was surprised by the stab of jealousy I felt. I remembered the way she had kissed him that New Year’s Eve. Maybe they had been together all along. Maybe they had plotted out our first kiss at Nationals; maybe my mom had thought getting me laid would loosen me up on the ice, would get us more publicity. I was ready to confront her, but then I saw the pain on her face, the love on her face, as she stroked Nathan’s hair.
“I’m so sorry,” she said over and over again, and even though she was looking at Nathan, I could tell she was saying it to me.
I HELD MYSELF together until I got back to my room and all my limbs turned to water. I lay back on the pillow and wept until I was empty.
“You okay?” the woman on the other side of the drape between our beds asked. “You need me to page the nurse for you?”
My head ached so much, I thought it might split open.
“You know when you graft a pear tree?” My mouth seemed to have a mind of its own now. “You graft the branch of a new tree onto the roots of an old tree? And you think you’re creating something brand-new, but the old tree is still there, down to the roots?”
“Come again?” my roommate asked.
“You know that skater?” I took a deep, shuddery breath. “That skater who poisoned that other skater?”
I HAD TO tell my story over and over again the next few days.
To Quinn, who turned very quiet, so quiet I wasn’t sure if she would ever forgive me for keeping such a huge secret from her, the person I loved most in the world.
To the police officers and FBI agents who came into my room in a steady stream, at some point handcuffing me to the bed.
To Lance’s parents and sister, who flew out from Utah. They were in tears as they came into my dim room. I was so startled by their sudden presence, my pulse almost strangled me. It was strange to see Cindy as a grown-up—she looked almost the same, just taller, filled out. The years had dulled her cuteness a bit; at twenty-four, she had a middle-aged vibe to her, a suburban housewife vibe with her sensible short haircut, her floral blouse buttoned to the neck. I could easily see how Lance would have looked if he had been given these nine years—he would have filled out, too, but his features would have gone from cute to handsome, maybe even rugged.
I started to say “I’m sorry,” but they stopped me before I could even get out a syllable.
“We’re here to say we forgive you,” said Mrs. Finkel, sitting on the edge of my bed. She had aged a lot, her hair gray, her face worn. “We know you didn’t mean to hurt our Lance.”
I nodded, my cheeks drowning in tears. She took my hand. “We’re so glad you’re alive,” she continued. “It would have been tragic for two young lives to have ended needlessly.”
“I have a little girl now, too.” Cindy pulled a picture from her wallet of herself holding hands with a toddler in a puffy pink snowsuit, both of them in ice skates. “Lancey. She’ll be two in November.”
“Adorable.” I sniffled. She looked just like Lance and Cindy did when they were younger—fresh faced, eager. Trusting. A pang of grief and remorse shot through my chest.
“We know Nathan didn’t mean to kill Lance, either,” she said. “He couldn’t have known Lance couldn’t handle barbiturates. We didn’t know it ourselves until the autopsy—a metabolic issue.” Her voice, so eerily calm until now, started to break. Mr. Finkel put a hand on her shoulder, and the three of them started to tear up again.
“We’ve asked the police to drop any charges against you,” Mr. Finkel said. “There’s no need to punish you more than you’ve already punished yourself.”
AFTER THE FINKELS left, the policemen removed the handcuffs. I grabbed a teddy bear from the nightstand and held it to my chest, sobbing. I wondered what I’d do with all the flowers and stuffed animals that had started to fill the room. As word got out, old fans had started to send gifts the way they used to throw them on the ice. I supposed I could donate the ones Quinn didn’t want to the children’s ward, just as I had done with the surplus years ago. The occasional angry letter and phone call came, too, people telling me I should rot in hell, I should be put away for life; the hospital apologized for letting these messages get through, but I was actually glad for them. They made the guilt flare inside me like phosphorous, the guilt I needed to let myself feel. Some part of me wasn’t ready to be forgiven.
THE DOCTORS EVENTUALLY said I was free to go home. Wherever home was going to be. I felt completely raw inside, completely stripped bare. All the sounds of the hospital—the beeps and whirs and pneumatic wheezes, the footfalls and intercom bleats—felt amplified, making my nerve endings prickle and wince.
Sam came into my room, holding a vase of lilies, as I was waiting for Abcde, Ben, and Quinn to come pick me up. I wanted to be happy about her visit, but I was too exhausted.
“I wish I had known you were someone,” she said, flashing her brilliant smile. She was wearing the blue sweater she had on at the party, the one that brought out the color of her hair and eyes, and I wondered if she had dressed up for my sake.
“Why?” I said. “So you would have been nicer to me?”
Sam laughed nervously. “It just would have been nice to have known.” She tried to find a place to put the flowers, but every available surface was already covered with gifts.
“Everyone is someone,” I said, and closed my eyes until she left the room.
ABCDE FINALLY SHOWED up with some clothes for me to change into while Ben and Quinn waited in the hallway. I was so happy to see her shaggy dreadlocks, her layers of gypsy clothing, a welcome contrast to the sterile hospital environment.
“I saw your writing in the hotel.” She sat on the edge of my bed, patchouli wafting. “You can write, girl. You need to write your story.”
“But it almost doesn’t feel like mine,” I said. “It feels like it belongs to two different people.”
“Then write it that way,” she said, stroking my hair. “Write it as if it’s two different people.”
AS I SLIPPED on my jeans, I wondered when I had really made the shift from Karen to Izzy. When I took on Isolde Jones’s ID, I still felt like Karen inside—the new name felt like a mask for quite a long time, like something to slip over the real me, something to hide behind. When Quinn was born, I definitely became someone new, but it was a nameless newness, an ineffable change. Maybe it was when I took my first picking job, when I introduced myself as Izzy to the foreman at the broccoli farm in Mississippi, baby Quinn strapped to my chest. Maybe I became Izzy as I bent over those bumpy green plants, sun and exertion burning Karen out of my muscles; maybe I became Izzy when I realized this would become our life—the constant movement from crop to crop, state to state. When I thought if we kept moving forward, the past would never find a way to catch us.
BEFORE WE LEFT the hospital, I took Quinn to Nathan’s room. I tried to hold her hand as we walked down the hallway, but she pulled her hand away. When we stepped into the room, I could feel her stiffen, could feel her start to reach for me, but then she steeled herself, arms straight down her sides, hands in fists. I had never been more scared for her, more proud of her, in my life.
Nathan was conscious, but drugged; his eyes were half shut, lids dark and puffy. My mother wore a pink blouse with a plunging neckline, the same ivory slacks and heels as the day before. Bringing Quinn near them felt like bringing her into the bar at Rogelio’s, someplace unsavory, someplace children should not go. Still, these were her people. She deserved to know them. Whether they deserved to know her remained to be seen.
“This is Quinn,” I said, and I could feel a tremor go through her. “Your granddaughter. Your daughter.”
My mother looked her up and down, a move I was all too familiar with. If she had said Quinn needed to lose weight, I would have throttled her, but she grew teary and said simply, softly, “You have your father’s eyes.”
Quinn walked up next to Nathan’s bed and peered at his face. Nathan looked terrified, bewildered, as if she had sprung from his chest like some sort of alien.
“You killed someone?” Quinn asked.
“Not on purpose.” He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
Quinn turned to my mom and said, quite firmly, “I don’t have his eyes. I have my own.”
MY HEAD STILL ached as Ben drove us back to the orchard. Everyone had checked out of Rogelio’s and moved back into the house, Abcde and Quinn sharing the guest room.
“I wore nightclothes, don’t worry,” Abcde assured me.
“You can stay here as long as you need to recover,” Ben told me when we were inside his kitchen. His parents nodded. All charges had been dropped against Mr. Vieira, too. It appeared that he and Roberts had patched things up quite nicely since the levee break, even though the flooding had short-circuited Roberts’s robot and destroyed a large swath of his orchard. Mr. Vieira had even vowed to help Roberts with the cleanup; Roberts had told Mr. Vieira he was sure he would have been a goner if my fellow workers Tomas and Vincent hadn’t fished him from the water. The fact that he had used their names was a major improvement. I wasn’t happy with how I had let all the workers at my various farm jobs blur together in my own eyes—I had ignored their individual stories, their essential someone-ness. Maybe now that I no longer needed to hide my own story, I could start to pay more attention to others’.
FOUR PEOPLE DIED in the levee break: three spectators—Carrie Angstrom, a forty-two-year-old hairdresser from Guerneville, Timothy Hu, a twenty-eight-year-old math teacher from Sacramento, and Maxine Bayliss, a seventy-three-year-old retiree from Oregon—plus Miguel Lopez, a thirty-five-year-old worker from Oaxaca, one of Roberts’s men. I wanted to attend the public memorial service for all of them at the community center where the festa had been held, but didn’t want to be a distraction; I wanted any press coverage of the event to focus on those who had lost their lives, not on me. I was receiving enough coverage as it was, even though I hadn’t agreed to talk to any reporters yet. Ben tried to show me some of the articles, but I wasn’t ready to read them. I sent lengthy condolences to the families of the victims. I knew I hadn’t done anything to harm the four who died, but I hadn’t saved them, either, and this gnawed at my gut. When I thought about the whale, I just about doubled over.
Bartlett had been carried away on a cargo freighter. Biologists determined she had died from a heart condition, not the wound from the houseboat, which, despite the copious amounts of blood, had turned out to be fairly superficial. Still, I couldn’t help but feel responsible. I wasn’t sure if it made me feel better or worse to imagine she may have died of a broken heart as her baby swam farther and farther away. Seckel had last been spotted gliding under the Golden Gate Bridge, headed out to sea.
OUR OWN NEXT move was a big question mark. Ben had started to field offers for me from magazines, talk shows, cable networks, publishing houses, even ice shows, people wanting to pay me obscene amounts of money to give them the rights to my story. Ben joked that I should hold off and join the celebrity boxing circuit, like Tonya Harding. My mom offered to be my agent, but I told her no thank you; I was going to do this on my own, on my own terms.
“It’s your story,” said Abcde before she left for her workshop in Squaw Valley. “Make sure you find the right venue. Don’t let anyone sell you out.”
“Maybe you can come back when you’re done.” Quinn was inconsolable. She had started talking to me again, but still hadn’t forgiven me entirely.
“I’m going back to Perth, love,” said Abcde. “Going to try to see my boys. But we’ll see each other again, I know it.” Abcde gave Quinn a huge hug. “Always be cheerful, dig?”
“Dig.” Quinn smiled through her tears. “Exactly.”
———
I TOOK ABCDE’S advice and started to write my story, Karen’s story, dedicating it to Lance’s memory. I held off selling the book until I knew I could actually write the whole thing, myself—I didn’t want any ghost writers, didn’t want anyone to shape my life to their liking. The Vieiras were kind, letting us stay in the guest room as I recuperated and wrote, though I tried to help out as much as I could around the house, around the orchard. The future of the orchard was still uncertain—the Vieiras had taken a real loss, but they had some insurance to tide them over, and talked about replacing part of the orchard with corn to keep up with the growing need for ethanol.
“Not that it’s the best renewable fuel source,” said Ben, “and not that I want to be part of the whole corn industrial complex, but it could help us get over the hump.” He talked about setting up some sort of subscription service so green-leaning yuppies could buy a share in the orchard, get bushels of pears when they were in season, maybe come help pick with their families. He talked about joining with other farmers in the Sacramento area to create a community-supported agriculture co-op, assembling weekly boxes of produce for people who wanted to eat local and organic. I knew that once I was ready to sell my story, I’d be able to help Vieira Pears, too.
In the meantime, Ben stayed home to do whatever he could to get the farm back on its feet. I moved into his room with him a few months later, giving Quinn her own room for the first time ever, enrolling her in the local school. She was so thrilled to have a lunch box, a backpack, a school bus to step onto each morning. We visited my mom and Nathan, who had moved to Los Angeles, a couple of times; it was awkward, and Nathan was frustrated with his rehabilitation, but Quinn seemed grateful to know she had more family in the world than me.
I started to long for my own roots, as well, my muscles aching for movement, for speed. I could hear the ice calling me. It wanted my blades to scratch its long smooth back. It wanted to feather into soft clumps under the sideways swish of my hockey stop, break into snowflakes that melt quickly against the steel. My beautiful masochist, the ice, open as a heart, willing to give itself over again and again. It forgave me, it forgives all of us, the Zamboni sealing up the wounds, smoothing over the abrasions, restoring its placid dignity.
I did some searching and found a rink in Stockton, just half an hour away.
“I can’t wait to see you skate, Eema,” Quinn said as Ben drove us past one cornfield after another, past one marina after another. I had shown her a couple of competition videos online; she could barely believe I was the person on the screen.
“I won’t be able to do what I used to,” I warned her. “Especially not on rental skates.”
When we walked into the small rink, the clean, sharp, unmistakable smell brought tears stinging into my eyes. The ice was blindingly white, only a few kids lurching around its surface. I was glad there wasn’t a big audience for my comeback.
“We don’t have to do this,” Ben said.
“No, it’s okay.” I blinked the tears away, felt the give of the rubber floor beneath me, the chilled air against my skin. “This is home.”
WE TIED UP our brown floppy-ankled rental skates, my fingers thrilling at the familiar rub of the laces. I knelt before Quinn to make sure her skates were tight enough. As soon as I was done cinching her up, she saw a friend from school. “Can I go skate with her, Eema?” Quinn asked.
“Of course,” I said, and Quinn took off, stumbling a bit, ankles bowed, but managing to stay upright. My sweet Delta girl.
“You ready to do this thing?” Ben asked, and I suddenly had a flash of Nathan asking the same question before Nationals. Nathan, when his legs were still strong. Nathan, who was slowly learning to walk again, slowly learning how to be a father.
I let out a long breath, a breath I must have been holding for years. This time, the decision to skate was my own. This time, I had chosen my partner, my pairing. Even with dull blades, flimsy boots, I felt more ready than ever.
I smiled and grabbed Ben’s hand and we stepped, together, out onto the ice.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
HUGE HEARTFELT THANK-YOUS:
To Stephan
Silveira for telling me about growing up on a pear farm in the Sacramento Delta; I never would have known about the area if it hadn’t been for you.
To Tim and Laura Neuharth for so generously sharing the ins and outs of running an organic pear farm—my time with you at Steamboat Acres helped bring Vieira Pears to life.
To Colin Page for mentioning his mom had a student named Abcde and sparking a whole character. To Cati Porter for letting Abcde borrow part of her amazing double abecedarian poem, “A Feline Fine, Oh Kitty Kitty Mine” (from her equally amazing collection Seven Floors Up).
To Brian Henne, for all the great houseboat information.
To Elizabeth Brandeis and Laraine Herring for giving such helpful feedback on early drafts of the novel. This book has your lovely, wise fingerprints all over it!
To Anika Streitfeld for being such a fabulous editor in the early stages of the novel. To Lea Beresford for being such a fabulous editor for the next leg of the journey. I am grateful to both of you and your thoughtful, enthusiastic, whip-smart notes. Everyone at Ballantine has been wonderful. (I need to give a special shout-out to Kerri Buckley for swooping in like a superhero toward the end of the process!)
To Arielle Eckstut for first bringing me to Ballantine. You rock (and not just socks)! To Ellen Geiger for being in my corner now—I am very lucky indeed.
To all my friends, family, students, and colleagues who have given me so much love and support over the years, with special thanks to my parents, Buzz and Arlene Brandeis, for always encouraging me, never pushing me (and for giving me a lifetime love of skating, writing, food, and whales); to my kids, Arin and Hannah Brandeis-McGunigle, for being patient with their flighty writer mom; to my husband, Michael Brandeis, for all our Pear Fair memories and all our memories to come. And to Asher Brandeis, the brand-new fruit of our love.
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