Claude, had he been there, would have been pleased with Pierre’s shenanigans—like father, like son. Celine, on the other hand, was oblivious not only to Pierre’s high-wire act, but her own presentation as well. The morning had begun optimistically enough; they’d had fun styling her hair, applying makeup, and choosing just the right outfit. For some reason, Celine felt it important to appear virginal. She’d dressed so primly—a getup with buttons to her neck, sleeves below her wrists, and a hemline reaching mid-calf—she looked like an ex-nun who hadn’t quite embraced the good life. But no amount of Vatican camp could mitigate her battered stare. Below her eyes, where exhaustion and sadness coalesced, a stack of dark bags were evidence enough that if anyone looked more than three times, Celine would have been suspected of some degree of drug use. Which made Pierre’s ability to nuance the absurdities of the morning all the more admirable. He dealt every authority figure a full deck of three-card-monte misdirection. Sandra now glanced at Pierre, his chin stuck to his chest, his pug nose snuffling in fits, very much just a boy. Few adults could have pulled off a sleight of hand such as Pierre had that morning.
Daylight suddenly vacated the sky, the way it seemed to do only in Maine. Sandra flicked on the headlights and noticed that while she’d been absorbed in thought, her speed had dipped below the limit. A few cars sped past her on the right, honking to encourage a move to the slow lane. Instead, she stepped on the gas and Pierre jolted awake, rubbing his eyes.
“Are we home?”
“No, it’s only been about ten minutes,” she said.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a few nuts left over from earlier in the day. “I’m hungry. Can we stop somewhere to eat?”
“We shouldn’t. I told your mom we’d be back by ten. But I think there’s an apple in my bag on the backseat.”
“I’ll wait,” Pierre snapped.
“Did you like the piece the soloist played?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s from a movie called Schindler’s List.”
“I know. I read it in the program.”
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Okay. What else did you like?”
“I can’t remember. Remember?”
“Sweetie—”
“I’m not your sweetie. I’m supposed to be my mom’s sweetie. Except now she’s calling me honey …,” he said, his voice shaking.
She felt Pierre’s stare fixed on her face, expecting either sympathy or admonishment, maybe both. Then it struck Sandra; he was testing her. Pierre was trying very hard to collapse, and where, but with her, could that happen? His parents had given him no such space.
“Tell me,” she demanded.
“Tell you what?”
“What’s got you so upset?”
He shook his head vigorously, red hair flopping about.
“Is it about the concert?”
“No.”
“Something about this morning at the hospital?”
“Not really.”
“The Ringleader?”
“Yuck. No!”
“Look,” she said with some frustration. “I can feed you a hundred questions. Or you can just tell me.”
“It’s you.”
“Me?” She couldn’t help but spit out a laugh.
“It’s not funny. I’m mad at you.”
“Why?” she asked, incredulous.
“Wait. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it …,” Pierre said, backtracking.
“No, no, Pierre. Keep going. I can take it,” she said.
Pierre sighed like an ancient man. “You’re starting to act like my parents.”
“What?” This not only shocked Sandra, but she was ashamed to admit that she was offended. “In what way?”
“You’re not being honest.”
Now she felt herself getting really defensive. “About what? How’ve I lied to you?”
“It’s not lying, not exactly. It’s more like …” Pierre paused and seemed to be considering his words carefully. Maybe he’d picked up on her sensitivity. Sandra, now thoroughly disgusted with herself, wondered who the adult was.
“My parents won’t talk,” he finally began. “They go around all day not talking about anything. No matter what happens, they don’t talk about it. And it’s really, really weird. But I know I’m the reason, so I guess I shouldn’t complain—”
“Okay, hold up a minute,” she interrupted. “I’m getting that you wish your parents would talk. And that you think it’s your fault. Which, by the way, it absolutely is not. But how am I like them? Because we talked nonstop on the ride up.”
“Yeah, we talked. But not about the most important thing.” Pierre crossed his arms in defeat, as if he had no faith that she could ever guess what it was he needed.
“Just say it, Pierre. I really don’t know what you’re upset about. What’s this important thing?”
He continued to sit very still, embedded in his frustration.
“Look,” she said. “Sometimes you have to help adults—we’re sort of dumb, you know.”
He seemed to like this notion, the dumb part, because she detected a chuckle.
“I’ve gotten some memory back. You noticed it on the ride home from the hospital. I saw it in your face. You had the whole trip to Portland to ask me about it. But you didn’t. And I was waiting,” he said, whispering the last sentence, almost ashamed.
Sandra saw a ramp to a service area coming up in a quarter mile. “Let’s get you something to eat. I’m pretty hungry too.”
They snaked into a Wendy’s drive-through, ordered chicken sandwiches and Cokes, and got back on the highway. While they ate, they chatted more about the concert, and she answered his questions about what it was like to play in an orchestra. All the while, Pierre blotted her chin of any sauce dribbles as she drove. And he behaved as if satisfied with the way things stood: that he hadn’t necessarily needed an answer, rather only to voice an injustice. How she’d hurt him. Which deeply saddened Sandra, because she then realized that Pierre didn’t actually expect that anything would change. Such a reasonable outcome, especially with regard to the adults in his life, was not part of his current daily experience.
“I did notice that you were remembering. And I’ve been very excited about it. But I didn’t want to pressure you, so I suppose that’s why I didn’t say anything. I was waiting for you, and if that was a mistake on my part, I apologize.”
“It’s fine. I’m over it,” Pierre quipped with finality. He crumpled all the sandwich wrappings and empty cups into a wad, stuffed them in the Wendy’s bag, and tossed it into the backseat. Then he switched on the radio and tried to pick up any station that could break through mountain interference. After zeroing in on an all-sports talk station, which she knew held no interest for either of them, Sandra brushed his hand away to turn off the dial.
“Okay, here’s what I think,” she continued. “You’re exactly right. When I noticed you’d remembered, I should have said something. If not then and there, then yes, on the ride to Portland. That was very, very wrong of me.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Kimbrough. Really.”
Again, he accepted her rephrased and more direct apology with his usual good nature. Yet all the subtext remained unspoken. What did the recovered memories mean to him? And who would be his sounding board to work this through? Not his doctors, certainly. Clearly, not his parents. Sandra wanted to be that one and only person. But, as Pierre had pointed out, she wasn’t so very different from Celine and Claude after all.
“Look!” Pierre cried. “The deer eyes.”
Indeed, families had gathered on the roadside, their phosphorescent eyes glowing.
“Better than the gophers from this morning, right?” she noted.
“They were cute,” Pierre defended.
“I suppose.”
“Mrs. Kimbrough, there’s something I can’t get out of my head,” he said.
“Gophers?”
; “No, nothing like that. Something much weirder.”
“Gophers are pretty weird.”
“No jokes!”
Once again, she was failing this boy’s heart. “Tell me.”
“Memory. It’s not working for me.”
“Your photos and papers? Your method?”
“I gave that up a while ago,” he said with a brush of his hand.
“But it was so great—”
“It was stupid.”
“Why stupid?”
“Because when I used the method and did remember things, almost all of the memories were about stuff that I didn’t really care about. It was all busywork and useless. Because there’s nothing you can do about the past. And the future’s exactly the same. So why even bother? See, that’s what I figured out. I don’t want to remember anything, and I don’t want to worry about what’s going to happen next. All it does is make you nervous. And sad.”
On any other day, with any other person, Sandra would have argued his point as if defending Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court. But Pierre had landed on the essence of something so obvious: every person she knew, including herself, was sad. At times, intolerably so. Preoccupation with the past and future seemed to do that to people. There was no possible rebuttal to his beautiful logic.
“I can’t say I disagree.”
“You don’t?” he asked, surprised.
“No. What you say is true. The past and the future are just ideas, or constructs.”
“Constructs? What’s that?”
“It’s a bit complicated to explain, but let me put it another way. One of the reasons I like to play the violin is because music isn’t in the past or the future. It’s right now. And it’s okay to feel the sadness in music, because in the very next phrase there’s joy. Plus, lots and lots of other emotions in between. Everything’s very immediate in music, and I bet that’s one of the reasons you like playing violin so much, too. We’re lucky that way, Pierre.”
“Maybe …”
The exit merging onto the county road heading toward Oslo appeared. Sandra immediately engaged the high beams, as she now drove in pitch dark. For a novice to the area, the brake pedal would have been overused. But Sandra slid into turns with ease and plenty of gas. And they were at a higher elevation now, so the next leg of the trip would yield good radio reception.
“You can get something now,” she said. “Try 98.7.”
Pierre dialed it in. They caught the end of the Boston Pops concert at Hatch Shell on the Charles River Esplanade, just as all hell was breaking loose with the conclusion of the 1812 Overture. It was one of the first CDs Sandra had given to Pierre, and he’d gotten hooked on Tchaikovsky’s bombast. They sang along, Sandra on the violin part—no easy feat—and Pierre with melodies from the brass and winds. There was something heroic and uplifting about their voices saturating the interior of the car. Almost as confirmation that music itself could compel two people driving in a car to sing louder and louder, trying to obliterate the orchestra. Trying to grab the joy. Then, Pierre dropped out, leaving Sandra’s voice wailing with an abandon worthy of an embarrassing karaoke moment. He held his stomach, gasping with laughter.
“That’s not fair!” Sandra cried, also laughing at herself. “You have a much better voice. And perfect pitch—”
Suddenly Pierre was thrown into her lap and then just as quickly landed back in his seat. The car whirled to the left and she immediately corrected out of instinct. Then it slammed the other way, so she pumped the brakes, which caused a hard shudder. Pierre braced his arms against the dashboard, then swung back and reached behind to grab on to the headrest. His only sound was: “Whooooa!” Sandra felt her body decompensate. Sweat poured out. Her hands slipped off the steering wheel, her arms like limp noodles. A queasy fear caused her belly to do a roller-coaster drop. For some reason, her nose filled and started to drip. Then, as the 1812 Overture was concluding with cymbal crashes and chiming bells, safety-glass pellets from the back windshield flew around the inside of the car. All of this happened within a few seconds, and she could only ride it out while listening to fireworks miles away in Boston until the car came to a stop.
Pierre immediately turned the radio off and the sudden silence felt a relief. The only sound was the engine pinging as it normally did after a long drive.
“I think we hit something,” he offered tentatively.
“Are you okay?” she asked, grabbing his hand. “You didn’t buckle your seat belt when we left the Wendy’s.”
“It doesn’t matter now. I’m fine.”
She twisted the key to the battery position and switched on the inside roof light and headlights.
“Your nose is bloody,” he said, dabbing at Sandra’s upper lip to show her.
She smeared the blood off with her fingers and wiped it on her black concert pants. Fingertip callouses on her left hand had grabbed the burgundy color and she remembered her violin. Sandra quickly pulled it to the front and found it intact. Thank God, she thought to herself. Their instruments, aside from the land, were the only material things she and Jim owned of any value.
“Stay where you are, Pierre. I’ll see what’s happened.”
The car stood at an angle across the road span. Pellets of glass from the back windshield crunched as she walked around the car a few times. Then she noticed some thin trees broken at the side of the road, literally bent just above the roots. That’s when she saw an animal’s rump a few feet down a shallow embankment. She approached tentatively and poked her toe into its back end to see if it was alive. The animal yielded to the pressure without otherwise moving. She pushed harder and held the pressure, this time with the entire sole of her shoe. Not a twitch. Sandra knelt down, placed her hand on its still-hot rump, and ran her fingers down a long back leg. She pulled her phone out of a sweater pocket and with the aid of the flashlight, was able to make out distinctive scarring on the animal’s flank. She gasped to herself. “Oh no, please no.” The fact that she could exactly identify this moose pained Sandra, and the adrenalin of fear now rushed through her body. Pierre had become attached to this moose, as it often came around when he took his lessons.
Sandra left the moose and began to inspect Pierre’s side of the car more closely, which had suffered the most damage. The rearview mirror had been sliced off, and she noticed tufts of fur caught on some of the metal detailing. But other than a dented back door and the missing windshield, the damage was miraculously minimal, most likely because of the size of their ancient Oldsmobile sedan. That Jim had stubbornly refused to part with it all these years probably saved their lives that night. She got back in the car and turned off the lights.
“What is it?” Pierre asked.
“A deer. The good news is it’s dead, so it won’t suffer.”
Her call to Jim went unanswered, which wasn’t a surprise, because he didn’t believe in the current trend of availability at all times of the day or night. She tried a few times in succession as a signal for him to pick up, which he didn’t. She figured he must be in the tub soaking his back. Either that or he’d taken a pill and was asleep. Not wanting to alarm him, she left a voice message that they’d been in a small accident and would be home soon. But now her mind raced ahead, realizing that she also needed to call in the incident to the police. As much as she didn’t want to think of it this way, the dead moose was a windfall. With an official claim on the animal, she and Jim could live for a year on the meat, and they needed it as badly as anyone in Oslo. She looked at Pierre as he examined some glass pellets he’d scooped up from the backseat. He’d been unusually quiet, and Sandra wondered if his calm was a kind of shock. She’d wait till later to call the cops.
“They’re kind of pretty. Like jewels. Don’t you think?” he said, displaying them with both hands.
“Yes, they sparkle. Can you buckle up, please? I’ll see if I can drive this old hog.”
She turned over the ignition and the engine engaged after a few sputters. The car shook a bit but sett
led down once she gave it more gas. They proceeded toward Oslo at a surprisingly good speed. Shortly, they came to a fork, one path circling the lake, the other leading toward Sandra’s house, still at least fifteen minutes away. But then she saw Edna’s house across the black water, lights blazing from the first floor.
“Pierre, I have an idea. Let’s go to Edna’s. It’s just a few minutes from here, and I want to make certain you’re okay.”
“Sure. But there’s only a few scratches from the glass bits,” he said, displaying his forearms.
“I’m worried about the car, too. It’s pretty old, and those steep hills closer to our houses might be a problem. Anyway, it’ll be safer this way.”
HER CALF HAD finally been able to rise, so the moose would now make her pilgrimage. She approached the white-furred female’s area. There, she’d observed things that were not typical of other humans. Such as the female’s mate sitting on top of their structure. She heard noises from inside, something like birds. These songs continued day after day. She roamed there for several hours, circling their structure, breathing in the white-furred female’s violet odor, which the moose had come to associate with safety. This had been a place where she could eat and rest with little fear.
The other area, though still dangerous, was also necessary to revisit. She climbed up and over the mountain, where she then saw the massive structure that made a foul wind. She passed the spot where the snake had prevented her from moving. Where she could not drink water. Where her calf had become quiet inside her. Where humans dragged her to a place of no sky and no earth and no horizon. Where she’d smelled a past of torture and death. Where she’d listened to the risen-animal world call with warnings. And where, to be free and save her unborn calf, she had inflicted damage and pain on the small human with red fur.
Night had come and the moose, having completed her pilgrimage, now roamed on the path around the large water. She heard a grinding noise in the distance. She turned to look up the hill and saw a long metal container. It sped faster as it approached. Closer. The sound grew in her ears. Closer. She gathered her legs. Closer. Now she ran. Ran as never before. Ran from the natural world. Ran from all dangers. Ran toward her dead calf. Now. The moose met the long metal container. Now. The moose rose. Now.
Oslo, Maine Page 14
