Since we had moved here, I had been grieving, unsettled, unsure of who I was anymore, but after my grandmother’s death, I had become fragile in a way I had never been before. I had a hard time concentrating. I couldn’t remember my phone number or the kids’ phone numbers or my ATM password. I cried a lot at odd, unpredictable times. I needed to do something. I knew that. And the only thing I could think of was to go somewhere new, start a new job, a new life. So with only a casual mention about it to David, I began applying for teaching jobs out of state.
For years, I had been using an online database, HigherEdJobs, to search for positions in our area, but now I expanded my search. I would take a job anywhere in the country, anywhere that would hire me full-time. I could start immediately. I would load up my mountain bike and my dog and my Chacos and be gone, far away from here, from all this sadness. Somewhere else, I might be able to sleep without a night-light. Somewhere else, I might be able to remember things. Somewhere else, I might feel sane.
The place that would hire me, it turned out, was a university in Macomb, Illinois, a school that heavily recruited students from both Midwestern farms and inner-city Chicago. The day after I posted my resume, the composition program coordinator contacted me to set up a Skype interview. The next day, I did the interview, and the following morning, I had an offer. The job was temporary, just for the semester, but it could be extended, perhaps even become permanent. The program director seemed nice, her teaching philosophies in line with my own. The pay was good, way better than what I was getting as an adjunct at the college here, and it would be a change of scenery. Classes were set to begin in less than a week. I had twenty-four hours to make a decision.
When I told David, he was leaning with his back against the kitchen counter, waiting for a pot of coffee to brew. Already, living at the cabin had been good for him. He was still doing accounting, but when he was home, he was spending more and more time outside. He was now trim and muscular and tan, and he had a certain lightness about him. He talked more. He joked more. And he waited more often to hear what I had to say. Now, he looked at me as he had been looking at me a lot lately—perplexed, alarmed.
“Huh,” he said. “That sounds interesting. Is that something you want to do?”
We were just a few feet from where the copperhead had been. Both our sons were home. Eli had not yet left for college, and Aaron had a few weeks off from work before heading back to school. Their belongings were scattered all over the kitchen—computers, backpacks, guitars, rain coats. Eli was sitting at the kitchen table, eating chips and finishing off a container of guacamole while watching a movie on his computer. Aaron was upstairs doing the same thing with a container of hummus. I wandered around the kitchen, wiping things down, hanging things up, putting things in the dishwasher, tossing cans and bottles in the recycling while I considered what to say.
David loved living here. He loved the quiet, the privacy, the fact that it was always ten degrees cooler at the cabin than it was in town. He loved chopping wood and building fires. He loved the fact that our rent was so cheap.
“Two hundred and fifty dollars!” he would say each month when he wrote the check. “I just can’t believe it!”
David’s enthusiasm for the cabin, however, was not contagious. I was still struggling to adjust. One night, when I was eating dinner at Rocky’s Hot Chicken Shack in Asheville with my book club, one of my friends had asked me what I missed most about our old house. My friends had all been kind and supportive. No one had said, You’re a total idiot. What did you think would happen, walking around all those years with your eyes closed? Instead, they had listened to me cry, helped us move, prepared us meals. And they had been full of suggestions about what to do: Leave David. Stay with David. Move in with my grandmother. Move to Costa Rica. Live alone in a yurt in the woods. But this was the very first time anyone had simply acknowledged my grief: What hurts most?
Seven women watched me. We were eating spicy fried chicken on Texas toast. My eyes burned. I took a swig of my beer. Don’t cry, I told myself. Do. Not. Cry.
“The light,” I finally said. “I really miss the light.”
At the old house, my desk had faced a large window overlooking the alpaca and cow pasture. I had a view of the mountains. I had watched the school bus pull in every afternoon, the neighborhood kids skateboarding up and down the hill outside. But at the cabin, my desk was in a dimly lit room full of dark wood.
We had torn out the low, white, industrial ceiling, hoping to replace it, but for now, the ceiling was basically a black tarp covering the insulation. On rainy days, water leaked onto my desk and into my coffee mug, and the only lights were long, bare, fluorescent tubes—business lighting. When we first moved in, David had talked about putting in skylights, but like so many other improvements on our list, that had never happened. There just wasn’t enough money. And even if there had been, it would have seemed silly to spend a lot of money renovating a rental home.
Throughout the day, I alternated between states of despair and rage. I was furious when David forgot to check the gauge on the hot water tank, and I had to take a cold shower. I was embarrassed by the fact that my clothes, my hair, my jackets, my blankets and towels all constantly smelled like a campfire because of the wood boiler. I was depressed by the unfinished ceilings and floors, frightened by the gunfire we occasionally heard in the woods outside our house.
David and I had known each other since we were kids, and he was a loving father to all three of my children. And yet, I didn’t want to live in an old, ramshackle cabin with snakes and spiders and mice, in a house full of painful reminders of my grandmother. I didn’t really want to move to the Midwest, but I didn’t want to stay here either.
While I considered how to respond to David’s question, I opened the kitchen door and threw a handful of empty beer bottles into the recycling bucket outside. They made a deafening crash.
“I think so,” I finally said to David. “Yes. I want to go.”
If David had said don’t go, I might have reconsidered. If he had promised me that I would feel better soon, that we would be better soon, I might have said, Okay. Let’s try it a while longer. But he didn’t. He said, “Go then. If you want to go, you should go.” Later, he would say that he did not know what to say then, that he was afraid if he told me not to go, I would be even angrier than I was already, that I would blame him even more. So he told me to go, and I went.
Three days later, I grabbed a few essential items—my mountain bike, my computer, Hester—and loaded my Mountaineer. Aaron and Eli and David stood in the driveway together and waved goodbye as I drove away.
Hester rode shotgun as we drove through torrential rain all the way from North Carolina, through Tennessee, and over the rolling hills of Kentucky. Then, just as we hit Indiana, the rain eased, the sky grew wide and clear, and Hall & Oates came on the radio. I rolled down the windows and cranked it up, and Hester and I jammed all the way through the Hoosier National Forest. Finally, we were passing mile after mile of corn and soybean fields. I did not yet know whether the decision I had made was the right one. I only knew that it had not felt like a decision at all. It had felt a little like freeing myself from an intricate web. Every few miles, I felt a little less trapped, less ensnared. The blue sky deepened. The air smelled greener. My lungs expanded. I could breathe.
Admittedly, the Midwest is an unlikely place for a pilgrimage. In the vast and wide-open landscape, one doesn’t have the sense so much of going inward but rather of being exposed, flayed open like a trout. I had lived my entire life in the Appalachian Mountains, and the only things I knew about living on a grassy plain I had gotten from Little House on the Prairie.
As I looked across the varying hues of green that grew deeper and darker before finally dipping into the horizon, that information seemed a bit dated. Eventually, I passed some signs of civilization—gas stations, signs announcing village populations (four hundr
ed, eight hundred, twelve hundred), a hotel, a billboard promoting the university, and then a row of high-rise dorms. Looking at those stark dorms with their bleak, concrete façades, I considered for the first time that I might have been too hasty in choosing this place.
“We have made a mistake,” I told Hester. “A really big mistake.”
But there was no time to reconsider. Moments earlier, the writing director had called to make sure I was on the way to sign my contract. My first class was at 8:00 the next morning. I turned left at the campus, eased up the hill past the cemetery, and followed the directions to the renovated boxcar where I would live for the next five months.
Before I left home, I had looked at the structure on Google Earth. Flat and oblong, it was a Lego project in progress. When I had zoomed out, the Legos—and the tiny town around it—became an island in an immense sea of fields. Now, I could see that the building was low-lying and red. On one side, a fenced yard was full of lovely, untamed things—a sagging fence bordering a bed of wild, overgrown asparagus, an unruly thatch of mint that brought to mind a really strong mojito. On the other side of the house, hundreds of thick, ripe tomatoes hung from a vine wound through the fence.
The boxcar was actually what remained of three railway boxcars that, years ago, a homeless man had hauled over from the nearby railroad station. He had sawed and hammered and nailed until he connected the cars in such a way that they made a house. Sort of. The Hobo Arms, the neighbors dubbed it. Eventually, the “hobo” decided to build a church onto one end, so he sawed off part and added on, creating a “sanctuary” where he proselytized to his family and anyone else who would listen.
Years later, the structure was divided into a duplex, and in the 1970s, a rock band called the Rainbow Riders lived in the back apartment. They had large, rowdy rehearsals in the front yard and a pet goat that occasionally wandered over to the neighbor’s pool. Everyone I met here had a story about this place. People had smoked weed there, dropped acid there, made love there. The boxcar was not just a makeshift house. It was a character in a richly complex story, a fascinating piece of local lore.
I pulled up to the entrance and opened the door for Hester. Inside the boxcar, the bathroom was separated from the kitchen by only a curtain, but there were wood floors and plenty of large windows and a nice kitchen with pine countertops. There was also a gas stove that had to be lit with a match, and while I quickly got the knack of lighting the burners, I never did learn to light the oven, so I bought a Crock-Pot on sale at Aldi and resigned myself to living off food that could be prepared in a slow cooker—soups and stews and whole roasted chickens. I set up my computer on a desk overlooking the neighbor’s tomato-laden fence, my mountain bike in the entranceway. Most mornings, I rode over the railroad tracks and past the rows of frat houses to campus. I rode home at lunchtime but then drove back to campus as it was too hot by then to ride back for my afternoon classes.
Of course, had I researched the climate before leaving, I would have known that summers on the prairie were sweltering. I would have known that north didn’t necessarily mean cooler, and I would have packed shorts and sundresses instead of sweaters and wool pants. As it was, I sweated constantly. I showered two or three times a day, and my sheets dried on the clothesline in the time it took me to run inside and eat a tomato sandwich. One day in late August, when the temperature peaked at 112 degrees, I found myself standing in front of the Redbox at Walmart. My shirt was drenched in sweat, my breathing heavy, and for a moment, I considered getting into my car, picking up Hester, and heading back to North Carolina. Maybe this had been a bad idea. Maybe it had been, as my grandmother used to say, a bad miscue. But the heat made me sluggish, unable to think straight, and leaving then would have taken more energy and initiative than I had. So I chose three movies and spent that afternoon watching them, back-to-back, inside the air-conditioned boxcar with all the blinds closed.
In the evenings, when the temperature dipped to the upper nineties, Hester and I, downright giddy, headed to Lake Argyle in nearby Colchester. The lake was surrounded by the steepest hills I had seen since Kentucky. Prairie grass stirred in the hot, thick wind, old ladies fished for walleye from the bank, and teenagers stretched on blankets by the water, cans of beer and bottles of sunscreen scattered among their prone bodies. Hester and I walked along the paved road and across the dam, retracing the steps of the coal miners who had lived and worked here in the 1800s. At dusk, we made our way to a dirt road where we stood in the fading light and watched the sun sink over the prairie, a hot, red orb that turned pink, then orange before dipping below the horizon.
During the day, I was so busy, I thought of little else except for my job. But on those evenings by the lake, after those long walks, I no longer thought of how many papers I had to grade or how I was going to manage an unruly student. Instead, I thought of my grandmother. I could not yet think of her in the earlier years, when she was healthy and happy and whole. I was stuck in the memories of her last weeks and days, of everything I didn’t do and should have done on the last night she was alive. In recent years, as she had become increasingly frail, my mother had devised a complex schedule that provided my grandmother round-the-clock home care. I had been the person staying with her the night before she died, and that night, she was extremely agitated. The instant I walked in the door, she began a line of questioning that involved a missing suitcase—Was it mine? Where had it gone? Did someone take it? And on and on and on. I tried distracting her, but to no avail.
It’s the Case of the Missing Suitcase, I texted Alex.
A geriatric Nancy Drew, she texted back.
If she doesn’t stop this soon, I’m going to have to unplug her oxygen machine.
It wasn’t funny, really, certainly not in retrospect. But it was an ongoing joke, albeit a very dark one, something we said sometimes to get us through the evenings when our efforts to pull back the witty, compassionate woman we had known failed. When I tucked my grandmother into bed that night, I took the hearing aid from her outstretched hand, pulled the covers over her, and patted her legs.
“Good night, Mamaw,” I said. “Sleep well.”
“Good night, Jenn,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, the good Lord willin’.”
It was how she always said good night, how my grandfather had always said good night—not a prayer exactly, but something like one. I pulled her door halfway closed, then went into the kitchen and poured a big glass of merlot. The suitcase line of questioning had left me drained, and I was worried, not in a specific way, but in the general way you worry about someone who has been sick for a long time. And then I heard sounds coming from my grandmother’s room. Wine glass in hand, I stood in the hallway and listened. She didn’t seem to be saying actual words, so I moved to the recliner in the living room and waited.
“Oh!” she said. “Oohhh.”
It was not a loud cry but more a soft moaning, as if she had a cramp in her leg or a catch in her side. Maybe it would pass. And it did. In a moment, she was quiet.
The next morning, I woke at daybreak. Though she was usually up by six or seven, that morning she was still sleeping, her oxygen tank humming. I made myself coffee and turned on the local news. From my grandfather’s old recliner, I could see the outline of her body. She was curled on her side, her head resting in the crook of one arm.
When she wasn’t awake by eight o’clock, I made her breakfast—oatmeal, French toast, coffee. I set out sugar and syrup and prunes. When she wasn’t awake by nine, I went in the bedroom and stood beside her. Her breaths were long and heavy, her mouth slack, her chestnut hair dipping like waves onto her cheeks. She seemed deeply asleep. Increasingly uneasy, I checked her oxygen tube. When I determined the air was still flowing, I went back to the living room.
Finally, at 10:30 a.m., I called my mother. Something was wrong. In a way, I understood that. Still, although my grandmother had been in hospice care for almost a
year, although she was ninety-two years old and weighed less than seventy pounds, although in the preceding weeks she had become increasingly weak and short of breath, I thought maybe she was just exhausted. Or perhaps coming down with something—a stomach bug or a cold.
“Should I try to wake her?” I asked my mother over the phone.
“I think maybe you should,” she said.
And that’s when I knew.
Later that morning, when the hospice nurse stopped by to officially pronounce her dead, I stood outside under the maple tree in the front yard. The tree had been pruned so thoroughly, it looked naked. When I was a kid, my grandfather used to lift me up to reach the lowest branch so I could climb up and up until finally I dangled over all of Canton, over the white, clapboard houses and the stone garages and the Pintos and Novas lining Trammel Avenue. I was a robin. A shape-shifting cloud. An angel.
“Are you Jennifer?” the nurse asked. She stood next to me, her hand pressed gently on my forearm. Her eyes were soft blue. “You must be Jennifer.”
She waited for me to say something, but my body was no longer my own. My hands looked odd, wrong, someone else’s hands. My feet were someone else’s feet, my lungs, someone else’s lungs, breathing in and out against my will. The nurse watched me for a moment, then continued.
“I wanted to tell you that your grandmother chose to die when you were there, and that is very special.”
Cardinals circled and dove around us, brilliant red flecks against the harsh June sun. The air swished between their wings.
“Well, that was not very nice,” I finally said.
She laughed, a gentle trickle of a laugh. She was a kind person. In the few, brief moments I had known her, I could tell that. Still, I didn’t believe her. I had been one of my grandmother’s caregivers as long as she had needed help. She had almost always preferred my company to anyone else’s, but in the weeks before she died, she had repeatedly asked for someone to be with me when I stayed with her. And now I believed this was the reason: she didn’t want me to be alone with her when she died.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 8
