“Ah, sweetheart.”
“I think I’m staying as much for me as for Emily.” I don’t even really know what that means, and it’s probably not a kind or fair thing to admit to the husband and children I’ve more or less abandoned, but now that I’ve said it, it feels true. Bella moves against me and I wonder whether in any sense she knows I’m here, and whether it matters.
“I do not understand.” When Martin stops using contractions and his voice takes on that brittleness under its tropical lilt I know he’s hurt. Or about to be.
I don’t understand, either, and the thought of trying is exhausting, but I have to offer something to this loving and beloved man. Tucking the receiver against my shoulder, careful not to put pressure on any part of Bella’s flaccid little body, I hug myself in an attempt to stop the trembling. Bella makes a small noise. “There are secrets here, Martin. Secrets I have to know. Something having to do with Emily and Galen and Will and Vaughn and me, and the baby, and Daddy.”
“Family secrets,” he acknowledges. “Family legends.”
Martin’s family secrets are long ago, far away, and far-reaching. Well before we met he’d unearthed all that needed unearthing, so I heard about them in the past tense, already made into legends colourful and settled, if in some instances horrific, whose meanings were no longer open for interpretation or debate.
With what looks now like unbelievable naiveté, I’d thought mine were settled, too: “I come from a crazy family,” and, “My mother left us when we were small and we never heard from her again,” and, “My father’s a control freak,” had seemed all there was to it, with the handy summation, “I’ve learned to keep my distance.”
In the beginning, when the subject of parents and siblings came up, Martin would assume a silence that I knew was inviting, or he’d prod a little, but I never had much to offer. I began to claim that his family in the Congo and his cousin in New York were my family, and in important ways they are.
For the adoption social workers I trotted out happy and sad and telling anecdotes from my childhood, all of them true, and described my sporadic and cursory contact with my family of origin in terms that made it sound regular. I didn’t mention my mother’s abandonment or my father’s powers; there was no way they could know anything about my past if I didn’t tell them, and these things were just too complicated—not painful or distressing or important, mind you—to get into.
When Ramon, and more often Tara, have asked about their aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents on my side, I’ve had a few standard responses. “Your Grandpa Alex is a strange man. We’re not very close. You have three uncles and an aunt and a whole slew of cousins. Maybe you’ll meet them someday. I don’t know when. Maybe someday.” What’s happening now, to my intense surprise and discomfort, is that a legend is taking shape on the spot, with me in it.
“Why must you know?” Martin inquires, perfectly reasonably. “Why can secrets not remain secrets?”
Taken aback, all I can come up with is, “I feel as if I’m on the brink of something,” which isn’t an answer.
“A precipice, perhaps?” He chuckles, one of the most beautiful sounds in the world.
I laugh, too, but it hurts. “Will you catch me if I fall off? Or pick up the pieces?”
“You betcha.”
That makes me laugh again, less painfully this time. Bella stirs. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Martin. I don’t know what I feel so goddamn compelled to find out.”
“That’s why you will stay a while.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need for sorry. We’re fine.”
“Really?” Part of me doesn’t want them to be doing “fine” without me.
Martin, bless his heart, knows exactly what to say. “We miss you. We all miss you. Things aren’t the same around here without you. But we’re okay.”
Mollified, I move the conversation along. “I heard you took Tara and her friends for a hike in the mountains. You are a brave man.”
“I had to pull over to the side of the road only twice to persuade them to control themselves in the car. Perhaps it was the absence of guardrails that finally caught their attention.”
“Tara said you saw bighorn sheep.”
“I wouldn’t have thought she noticed.”
“I haven’t talked to Ramon since I’ve been gone.”
“I haven’t talked to him much myself. He most definitely has his own life.”
“I guess that’s what we did this for, isn’t it? If you do a good job as a parent, they leave you. How fucking fair is that?”
We laugh ruefully. It’s only after we hang up—exchanging “I love you’s,” arranging a time for tomorrow’s conversation, bemoaning our astronomical phone bills but not letting that stop us—that my own observation, that being a parent by definition means you’ll be abandoned, makes me think of Daddy. And of Mom, who took the initiative and abandoned us first. I seem to be thinking of her a lot these days. I don’t want to. She doesn’t deserve to have any of us thinking about her.
I’m supposed to have Bella at Emily’s in six minutes. I’m going to be late. Not that Emily will notice or care. I change Bella’s diaper, though it’s hardly damp, and bundle her into the baby pack, wishing again it went on my chest instead of my back. I have visions of her falling out or being snatched by a huge and silent bird of prey or dying back there and I wouldn’t know so I’d keep on trudging through the damn yellow woods with a dead baby or an empty pack on my back. She’s even stiffer than usual this morning and I have to forcibly bend her tiny limbs to get her in. Her complaints are vague, part of her general distress with being in the world. “There.” I kiss her soft cheek. “Ready to go see Mommy?” Her pale blue eyes don’t even flicker. I don’t know what I expected.
Taking more care not to jar her than is probably necessary, I slide the straps of the backpack over my shoulders and straighten to adjust the weight, though there isn’t much that couldn’t be accounted for by the pack itself. I crouch, slide the straps off again, gently set the pack down, with some trepidation crab-walk to inspect. She’s still there. I haven’t lost her yet. All the way to Emily’s she makes little noises that can’t be mistaken for birds or creaking branches or the gurgles of any other baby or anything but what they are.
“How is she?” I greet Earl. Poor guy, I ought to at least say good morning, but that seems too personal for the kind of relationship we have.
Busy getting the kids off to school, he looks over at Bella but doesn’t speak to her or come any closer, and certainly makes no move to take her from me. “About the same,” he says of his wife. His normally lean face is haggard in the yellow morning light, and his words, always few and clipped, are edgy.
“How can I help?”
“Erin can’t find something. I don’t know what. Every morning it’s something.” Sort of helplessly, he gestures toward the stairs.
“I’ll go.”
By the time I get to her room, Erin has found the lost homework assignment and has turned her attention to Evan, who’s not dressed. They’re facing off in the hallway, yelling at each other. The sight of Bella—I assume that’s what it is—makes Erin retreat into her room. Awkwardly with the baby still on my back, I kneel to help Evan tie his shoes. But my ministrations seem only to make things worse. He squirms and complains until finally I give up altogether on the idea of double knots.
The fact that no one directly acknowledges Bella’s presence rekindles my paranoid fantasies that she’s not really among us. I see to it that Erin and Evan get themselves downstairs and then, before entering Emily’s room, I take off the pack, remove the baby from it, check that she’s still breathing. Like an amoeba, she recoils when I touch her. Her glassy blue eyes scan me without so much as a blip of interest. Her mouth works to no particular purpose. Her subtly abnormal little face scrunches and smoothens and stretches in what I know are no more pre
cursors to human language than the inchoate noises that come out of her.
I stand here in the dim yellow morning light of the hallway, holding in my two hands away from my body this little creature that suggests but doesn’t really approximate a human baby. For a hideous moment I want nothing more than to lay her on the grey linoleum outside her mother’s bedroom door—which, I notice, is slightly ajar—and just slink away. I would lay her there gently; I wouldn’t throw her or let her drop.
In the slough of that impulse, I’m not thinking about Emily or about Bella herself. It’s Daddy I’m thinking about. “Fuck you,” is what I’m thinking. “I’m not doing this. I don’t accept your gift or curse or whatever the hell it is. Take it back, you hear me? Stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
The baby sways in my grasp like a sack almost but not quite empty. When I bring her in to my chest, she responds no more and no less. From the smell of her she needs a diaper change, but she, of course, isn’t fussing any more or less than usual.
Using my fists and the baby’s body to push open the door, I step into Emily’s room. It smells of bananas, urine, sweat, strawberry-scented candles. “Emily,” I say, though I don’t yet see where she is. “I’ve brought you your daughter.”
She doesn’t say anything, but I hear her breathing. Then I make out her form, curled up on the floor, just outside and under a shaft of drizzly yellow light. The window is bare because the curtains have been pulled down; the rod hangs by one end, catching pale sunlight here and there along its dented surface. Noticing that rather dramatic detail leads to awareness of others: the iridescent streak of a crack across the bottom pane, the natter of a radio turned low, debris underfoot and against shins, furniture disarrayed, the overhead light illuminating nothing beyond itself at this time of day.
I take a few careful steps toward Emily, over and around things. She has wrapped herself in the curtain, and I find this particularly horrifying—so desperate and minimally functional it seems, so patently crazy.
I’m tempted to take Bella as far away as possible, but this doesn’t seem a real option. Instead I cross with her through the mounds of clothes and books and food-encrusted dishes, kneel in front of her mother, my sister, make sure my one-armed grasp of the baby is firm and put my other hand on Emily’s knee. “Em?”
There’s not even a pause. From her crouching position she flings herself against me—awkwardly, without much force, but full out, knocking me backward and jarring the baby. The baby, in fact, grunts; this may be the first time I’ve observed her respond directly to any stimulus. She doesn’t cry. Emily and I are crying. With Bella between us, we are in each other’s arms.
Eva Marie left us forty-three years ago today. I have always marked the anniversary in some way. My children have not. Momentous as this day was in all our lives, they have treated it with their characteristic inattentiveness. Not infrequently I ask myself how these can be my offspring.
In the early years, I would imagine her returning on this day of all days, emerging through the yellow wood as if she had never lived here or never been away. Sometimes in these fantasies I would sic Herpie on her. Sometimes I would rush to meet her and kneel at her feet, present her with what I had been holding back from her, and then, in a transcendent act of love and sacrifice, send her away again. Most often I would simply be waiting.
She never came back, of course. Conjuring has never been my game.
The tenth year, I began the book, and writing it became my anniversary reaction. In a black spiral-bound book the size of an infant’s palm (an image which, predictably, leads today to the image of the reflexive opening and closing of the infant Bella’s deceptively perfect hand), I write a poem on one day every year; the preceding 364 days I will have been writing and re-writing the same lines in my head, in a quest for perfection equally deceptive. I prepare now to make another entry in the poetic narrative, perhaps the last.
All of this year’s mental composition seems to have quite missed the point. I have forgotten almost all of it; only insipid snippets remain. At mid-morning on the appointed day, no inspiration has struck. I have been up since well before dawn, sitting in my chair, losing myself in my own house in my own thoughts, wandering in the dark wood and its dim counterpart the cave, all the while fingering the ballpoint pen and tiny notebook in my pocket against my straining thigh but never once removing them to put one to the other.
Now I sit on the yellow porch, on the single metal folding chair left from a set of six, not so uncomfortable that I am willing to expend the energy to remove the sticks and leaves that have accumulated in its seat. The notebook open and still blank on my knee, I sit with my eyes closed, waiting. It is not inconceivable that Eva Marie might come this year, might come today.
Cold-blooded Herpie, adaptable to a fault, is sunning and shading herself in the green-gold at the edge of the porch. When Vaughn arrives, clattering and clanging most unmusically, Herpie hisses, Vaughn utters a childish profanity, and I tell them both to go somewhere else if they must bicker. Neither leaves, but they do settle down.
Vaughn asks me, “How are you doing, Dad?” The peculiar gentleness in his tone causes me to wonder if he does realize what day this is—he of them all. However, I do not know what, if anything, is the point of his inquiry, and rhetorical questions are a waste of time, so I do not answer.
On the upturned page of the opened notebook, someone has written “Dear Sandi.” Of course it must have been I who wrote it; no one else has had access to this book. But I have no mental or kinesthetic memory of having done so, and I think perhaps Sandi, whoever that may be, has somehow written it herself, written a salutation to herself as a prompt for me. To do what I cannot guess. It is decidedly un-poetic.
“Emily . . . Em, are you okay? Are you going to be okay?”
She is sobbing and shaking. Her head moves against me. She smells dirty and her hair is greasy against my lips. Bella, redolent of bath powder and poop, stirs meaninglessly between us, closer to me than to her. The curtain makes a brown-and-gold tent over the three of us until my sister gathers it again around just herself.
“Sweetie, come on. You can’t stay in here forever. Your husband and children need you. I need you. I came all this way to see you. I have to go home to my own husband and kids soon.”
None of this makes any perceptible impression on her; to me, too, it’s hopelessly scattershot. What I’m going to say next is brazen, but I’m going to say it. Holding the baby across my knee with one hand, I reach out to touch my little sister’s cheek with the other. She doesn’t pull away, emboldening me to let loose of Bella and take her mother’s face in both my hands. “Emily. Listen to me. Bella needs you.”
Emily’s eyes are huge, but they do not take in her daughter wedged in my lap. She whispers something I don’t understand, repeats it only slightly more loudly. “Needs what? Needs what from me?”
I’m starting to get mad now, I shake her a little. “How should I know? But she’s your baby. You need to take care of her. It’s not my job, Em.”
When she still doesn’t make any move toward Bella, I lose patience altogether, let her go with a gratuitous little shove, and none too gently grab the baby. Her mewling is like the sound of the radio—just barely audible, not quite white noise. Her neck arches dangerously under the weight of her unsupported head.
“Here!” I all but snarl. Emily recoils. “Here, goddammit, take your fucking kid!” When I throw the child at her, all three of us scream.
My other sons have appeared now, the three of them positioning themselves like a Greek chorus at what appear to be choreographed stations on the porch. Neither of my daughters is here. Why is that? Vaughn absentmindedly strums something stringed. Will carries inside my house a basket of tomatoes, their fragrance still on him when he returns. Galen speaks.
“Dad, we have to talk to you about something.”
I will not discuss the deformed infant. It
has no relation to me. They can do with it as they please. I make a show of writing in the notebook, though what I am inscribing there is gibberish.
Galen blusters. “Dad. Listen. Will you listen for once?”
Will wheedles. “Please, Dad. This is important. We really need you to hear what we have to tell you.”
It falls to Vaughn to convey their message, in fits and starts with accompanying harmonica blasts, bell jingles, fractured drum rolls. “Mom—” a swish of strings—“wants to—” a rattle of castanets—“see you.”
Emily has somehow managed to break Bella’s fall with her own swaddled body, and for just a moment it seems this protective instinct, whether maternal or not, is a breakthrough. I’m backing away. But she comes after me, stumbling over the curtain, crashing against the bed and dresser, knocking over a lamp, backing me against the door I haven’t been able to get open in time.
She shoves herself hard against me with the baby pressed too tightly between us. Her breath reeks. When she lets go of the baby, flinging her arms wide, I have no choice but to replace her hands with my own. Bella is now howling and flailing.
Emily is howling and flailing, too, shrieking at me to get out and leave her alone and stay away and go fuck myself, throwing things. Something breaks against the wall over my head. Something small and hard bounces off my forearm, another, another. The radio suddenly blares, an assault.
Because the door opens inward, I’m forced to move toward my raging sister in order to get away from her. The knob is loose and doesn’t readily turn. By the time I get out of the room, Emily has collapsed, Bella is hysterical, and something like fury propels me headlong down the stairs shouting, “Earl!”
Bella by now is nothing but her panic, which I imagine to be a sort of primal organismic response to a global threat. Her cries are guttural like something out of a bad horror movie. Her bugged-out eyes, showing more white than blue, roll from side to side and up and down and even back into her head. Her body contorts with a strength that seems preternatural, limbs spinning and striking out, torso arching backward and then forward so forcibly she almost sits up. Her head lolls wildly as if her neck has broken.
The Yellow Wood Page 11
