by S. M. Hulse
He lets his fingers graze a few keys without sounding them. I anticipate the music, miss it when it doesn’t come. “I stood up before my congregation this morning and told them that God has a plan. That everything that happens is part of something larger, that it’s all working for the good, even if we can’t see how. That even in difficult times—the most difficult times—there is comfort to be found in trusting that what happens in this world is God’s will.” He waits until I meet his eyes. “I’ve never felt like I was lying to them before, Jo.”
He wants me to say something. I wish I could give him words that would satisfy, comfort. But I don’t know what those words are. Don’t know if they exist.
“I want to believe what I told them. I want to believe there was a reason. You can’t tell me what it is, okay. Then just tell me about Samuel. Catherine’s parents don’t even want to hear his name, can’t read any of the newspaper articles that mention him. Maybe that’s better. Maybe that’s normal. But I sit in that hospital room beside Em and look at her lying there, hour after hour, day after day, and I can’t help but want to know why she’s there.”
“Is it…” I choose my words carefully. “Is it okay if I ask how she is? Your daughter?” I close my eyes. Emily’s smiling face from her school photo waiting there in the darkness. “I think about her a lot.”
Asa steeples his hands, then folds them like a child in prayer. “Have they told you anything?”
I remember Devin’s words: They say it could go either way. I shake my head.
“When the bomb exploded—” He blinks hard, like someone trying to clear a bad dream upon waking. “When the bomb exploded, the big plate-glass windows shattered inward. I was facing the congregation, and I saw them, all these pieces of glass glittering in the air. One of them cut her here.” His voice catches on the last word, and he draws a hand along his throat, beneath one side of his jaw. “There was so much blood. So fast.”
Already I wish I could stop listening. Wish I hadn’t asked. Wish he’d turned aside my question with a brusque Okay or No change. It makes me a coward, I know. Asa doesn’t get to choose not to face the full reality of what Samuel did; why should I? But every word whittles away at the brittle resolve I’ve been relying upon these last couple weeks, and I want nothing more than for Asa to go so I can return to packing and try to pretend things are different.
“The doctors call it a hypoxic coma,” he says. “The result of hypovolemic shock, which essentially means massive blood loss. Her heart stopped. The paramedics got it going again, but she hasn’t woken up. The MRI results have been … not good. They say she’ll probably have, um, neurological disabilities. But sometimes children with bad MRIs have good outcomes; the neurologist told me that.” He looks up at me. There’s something pleading in his expression.
“I hope she does,” I tell him. “Have a good outcome, I mean. I really hope she does.” An impossibly insufficient response. The fact that the words are truth—the rawest, fiercest kind of truth—makes them no more worthwhile.
“She’s never even had a broken bone before.” Asa looks around the living room as though seeing it for the first time, lets his eyes linger on the bare mantel and the packing boxes lined up beneath, the stack of flat boxes still waiting to be taped together. “Is it just because you’re losing the house?” he asks. “I don’t mean that it doesn’t matter, but is that the reason he did it?”
“It tipped him over the edge, maybe.” As honest as I can be. “But he … I don’t think it’s the only reason.”
“I’m glad,” Asa says. I wonder why. I can’t believe that any reason or combination of reasons Samuel might have for what he did could matter to Asa when balanced against Emily’s life.
I try to hold both of them in my mind at once, Emily and Samuel. I think I’m hoping that if I do, I can stop caring about Samuel. That if I can remember—always remember, really remember—what he’s done, and who he did it to, then I won’t love him anymore. Then I won’t have to wonder if caring about Samuel means I don’t care about Emily, or her father. But it doesn’t work. They’re both there, and so are the truths that go with them: Samuel set off the bomb that injured Emily. Emily will never be the same. I want her to recover, to be whole. What Samuel did was wrong, so wrong. I still love him. So much.
Asa notices the books still occupying the top shelves of the bookcases. “Is anyone helping you pack?”
“No.”
Asa stands, starts moving books from the top shelves to the lower shelves I’ve already emptied. I think about asking him to stop, but maybe he needs a task to focus on. And besides, as Asa has so plainly drawn out, there is no one else. Hawkins, maybe, but after our last conversation I’m no longer sure of that.
“Samuel’s my only family,” I say quietly. “My father died in a mining accident when I was very young. I don’t remember him.” Strange to be telling someone this. Everyone in Prospect lost someone in the Gethsemane collapse, if not a family member then a friend. And everyone in Prospect knew what happened to my mother. I’ve almost never had to tell anyone about my parents. “My mother died when I was ten,” I continue. “Samuel raised me after that.”
Asa has moved almost all the books. “How old was he?”
“Seventeen.”
He turns. The top shelves bare. “Young.”
“It wasn’t official until he was eighteen.” What those six weeks in the mountains were about. Waiting for Samuel’s birthday, when the state might legally let me live with him. I remember the worry. Even more than the grief for our mother, the grief for my working legs, I remember the worry. Samuel wasn’t supposed to have taken me from the rehab facility; we weren’t supposed to be in the mountains. Don’t think about the mountains. Don’t think about hiding in the mountains. What if people were mad at us, what if we were in trouble? What if we went back to Prospect and they sent me to foster care anyway, kept me away from Samuel forever? I echo his reassurances now, reassurances Samuel couldn’t have been sure of at the time, but turned out to be true. “We wanted to stay together, and the social workers had better things to do than take a paralyzed kid away from a relative willing and able to care for her.”
“So you were already…” Asa nods to my chair.
Most of the time, if people ask about my chair, I simply say, “An accident,” which is almost entirely a lie. But even if I don’t owe Asa the whole story, I owe him more than that. I can’t give him the answers he most wants about Samuel, but I will give him what answers I can. “Wait here.”
I go to the closet in my bedroom, push aside clothes until I find my mother’s camel coat, which she once told me made her feel sophisticated. She wore it rarely, and only to what passed as special occasions in a small mining town: school plays, spaghetti dinners at the Elks Lodge, Christmas Eve services. I pull a pair of newspaper clippings from the coat’s pocket. One is the obituary, which I return to the pocket, and the other is the article that ran two days after my mother’s death. I cut them from the Miner and Chronicle archives at the library when I was a teenager, and felt only a little guilty for doing so.
I go back to Asa, hand him the article. He unfolds it carefully, turns it to catch the light. There is a slight tremor in his hand, and the paper flutters lightly.
I wonder whether it’s really a kindness to share this with him. Whether knowing more about Samuel is truly what he wants. Whether this is for me rather than him.
I watch his face as he reads. He inhales sharply at one point, and I wonder which detail has struck him hardest. The article starts with our mother: Marian Faber, forty-one, widowed in the Gethsemane collapse. Shot nine times, deceased. Then my brother: not named, seventeen. Tried to defend his mother, shot once, treated and released from the hospital. Then me: also not named, ten. Hidden in a closet, struck by a stray bullet that passed through a wall, airlifted to Elk Fork in serious condition. Finally, the ex-boyfriend: Benjamin Archer, forty-six. History of substance abuse, restraining order, deceased. There’s one li
e in the article—one omission—but I don’t mention it.
Asa folds the article, closes his eyes—keeps them closed too long for a blink, Is he praying?—then looks at me. “A couple weeks ago, I would’ve had something to say,” he tells me. “Some phrase I would’ve thought was appropriately compassionate. But no one’s said anything to me about Em that actually helped.”
In its way, that admission is itself a sort of comfort. I reach for the clipping, but Asa holds it up in front of him. “Is this the reason?”
I put my hands on the handrims of my chair, push myself away. “No.” I hear the defensiveness in the terseness of the syllable. I wish I’d tempered my tone, but I don’t think I’m wrong. It wasn’t because of the house. And it wasn’t because of that night. Not just the house, not just that night. It isn’t that I don’t see the temptation. Either one is an excuse. Not a good excuse—I can’t imagine what a “good excuse” for setting off a bomb might be—but it would be comfortable, in its way, to be able to say, Yes, that’s it, that’s why. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think Samuel is that simple.
I would have seen something simple.
I take the clipping back, fold it into a neat square. “It’s part of the reason, maybe,” I amend. The best I can offer. “I told you before I can’t tell you why, Asa. I can tell you about Samuel, but I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why.”
He opens his mouth and I brace myself for another challenge, but then he presses his lips together and nods.
I feel I should give him more, especially since I can’t—won’t? can’t—give him an apology. And I could line up the evidence for him, sketch the profile I’m sure Devin has crafted by now: early trauma, distrust of government for reasons X, Y, and Z, the influence of friends and acquaintances with extremist views. But none of it should have added up to the explosion at the courthouse. I still wake each morning stunned by the reality of what Samuel has done. If he walked through the door this minute, the first thing I’d demand to know would be, Why? Probably wouldn’t matter what answer he gave me. It wouldn’t satisfy. And if Asa wants to play the same game, if he, too, wants to try to rearrange the pieces until they make sense, so be it—I understand the impulse—but he’ll either end up as bewildered as I am, or he’ll settle on an answer that’s a partial truth at best.
Asa sighs, leans forward on the couch so his knees rest on his elbows, hands folded before him, index fingers steepled. He can’t be much more than thirty, but gestures like this make him seem older. “Do you—” Asa hesitates. “Do you have a picture of him? Samuel?”
“You must have seen the ones in the papers,” I say. “Or on TV.”
“I want to see the one you’d choose to show me.”
I find the ten-by-ten canvas behind a stack of larger paintings in my room. I asked Samuel to sit for a portrait for years before he acquiesced a couple summers ago, and I painted it hurriedly, afraid he might grow impatient at any moment. No brushes, just knives. The result is almost impressionistic, with sharper streaks of color along Samuel’s jawline, cheekbones, the bridge of his nose. His eyes carry the most detail. Gray, with shaded hints of azurite and cobalt. Pupils the starkest black. I told him he didn’t have to look at me while I painted, but he did, and I managed to capture the fullness of his expression: the hawkish intelligence, yes, the defensive arrogance that goes along with it. But also the wariness he tries to hide, the weariness he never entirely manages to shake. The gentleness that has become harder and harder for me to find, but is always there if I look long and hard enough.
In the living room, I hand the canvas to Asa. He holds it carefully by the edges. I didn’t sign it, but he asks, “You painted this?” and I tell him I did. He studies the painting for what seems like four or five minutes. I wait to hear his verdict. To learn whether seeing Samuel through my perspective makes any difference, whether Asa finds the same things in the painted eyes I do.
The longer Asa looks at the painting, the more uneasy I feel. I start to wonder whether it’s possible I did the same thing with this portrait that I do with most of my paintings: softened hard edges, tempered features, cast the subject in the best possible light. Did I paint what was there? Did I see what others didn’t because I was willing to look more generously, more patiently? Or did I paint not what was, but what I wished was?
I worry Asa will sense my turmoil, but he just looks at the canvas silently and, when he’s finished, hands it back without comment. “I should get back to Elk Fork,” he says, and stands. “When do you have to be out of the house?”
“End of the month.”
“I could help you pack,” he says, glancing toward the stairs. “I’d like to.”
My first instinct is to decline. Asa seems like a good person, sure, maybe a little stiff the way preachers can be. He helped with the tree when it would have been easier in so many ways for him to refuse. But when he’s in the room, I feel myself edging closer to panic or breakdown with each passing second. I’m not entirely surprised by his offer, because he’s still looking for answers, still thinks he’ll find them in this house, in me. But I can’t fix what has gone wrong, and whatever Asa might think, anything I can tell him about Samuel isn’t going to fix it, either. I don’t particularly want to be there when Asa realizes that.
Yet I can’t pretend I don’t want answers, too. I don’t think we’ll find them here. I don’t think we’ll find them until someone finds Samuel, and I’m not ready to face the question of whether I might be the one who can find Samuel. But it’s excruciatingly clear I don’t know my brother as well as I thought. Maybe Asa will see something I can’t. Maybe if I help Asa understand Samuel, I will understand him, too.
“I’d appreciate the help,” I say. “If you really don’t mind.”
“It’ll give me something to do,” he says. “And it would be nice to think that something positive can come of all this.” He seems to realize how feeble it sounds, adds, “However minor.”
He’s trying so hard to reshape the circumstances, force them into some kind of sense. He smiles, and even that is tentative, wavering. I think again of Samuel telling me it’s not okay to pretend things are different than they are. But right now I really want to pretend that Asa and I can be friendly toward each other, that it isn’t impossible to care for Emily and her father and also for my brother. So I do my best to match Asa’s smile, unsteady though it is.
* * *
I’ve used up all the other states. North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho. Covered all of them—at least the portions on this map—with my handwriting, which I’ve made smaller but not small enough. There’s room on the other side, but the ink bleeds through, and the index is there, so anything written there would be words on top of words on top of words. Now I’m venturing into Montana. I started this letter at the eastern border, just below the blue vein of the Missouri, and I’m winding my words along its banks.
I hope you’re okay. I worry about you. Not because I think you’re helpless or can’t take care of yourself. I know you can; you’ve proven it time and again. But because there are things you relied on me to do, and now I can’t do them. Because the goddamned house has stairs and I never managed to build that elevator we used to joke about. Because you’re my little sister and I want you to be okay.
Is Hawkins helping you? He likes you, so he must be, though maybe his being sheriff has made it difficult for you both. Because of what I did. He’s probably not even shocked. He’s never looked at me the same since that night with Mom. And everything since then, every decision I made he didn’t agree with, it’s like none of it surprised him. Like he almost expected it of me. You’ve never disappointed him, though.
I know the bomb made him think of Kev. I thought about him, too, when I made the decision to do it. The bomb I built probably isn’t much different than the one that blew him apart. I worry it’s where I got the idea. Do you think if Hawkins knew I’d thought about Kev, it would make him feel any better, or would
it just make him feel worse?
Has he asked you where I am? I never told you this, but I think he might have seen me once when I went back to the house that summer. I tried to be careful, but the second time I went, there was a bag by the back door with food—granola bars, dried fruit, that kind of thing—and some lantern batteries and a blanket. I didn’t touch it, didn’t bring it back here. But he’s never believed we went to South Dakota. If he’s asked you, what have you told him? Have I made you disappoint him?
I hope you’re okay, Jo, truly I do, but if I’m absolutely honest, I have to admit there’s a tiny part of me that hopes you’re not. I read over what I’ve just written, about Hawkins and Kev and the bomb, and I think you’d be horrified. Since I’ve been back up here, I sometimes get these split-second flashes of how others must see me. Split seconds in which I wonder if I’m wrong, if what people think and say about me is true, if I’ve become someone I’d never have recognized as a younger man. They don’t last long, but they’re terrifying. Sometimes I’m not sure what happened. How I got here. I’m not sure of things I thought I was sure of.
What I am sure of: The Samuel Faber who cared for his little sister was a good man. You needed me, and I was there for you, on that first night and ever after. You are a good person—I have no doubts about that, Jo, split-second or otherwise—and I had something to do with making you into that good person.
As long as you need me, Jo, there is something in me that is worthwhile. Worthy. As long as you need me, there is a part of myself I don’t have to doubt. So I hope you are okay, because I am your brother and I care for you. But I hope you will forgive me for also hoping you are not okay, because if you are—if you truly don’t need me anymore—does that worthwhile part of me still exist?
Look at that. I’ve buried the eastern plains in words.
* * *
Monday I go to work and sell two made-in-China Montana mugs to a Canadian tourist on her way home from Yellowstone. There’s just one other customer while I’m working, and I spend most of my shift restocking the candy shelves, ripping the display tops off new boxes, consolidating the leftover M&M’s and Reese’s from the old.
