by Amy Hempel
Within days, he was released on bail and put under house arrest. I saw nothing except the garbage containers at the end of their drive on Wednesday night for pickup on Thursday morning. There were a couple of lights on in the house, but the curtains were closed. The mother of the girls was rumored to have returned. And then, a week to the day of the scandal breaking, the man next door drove to a local fishing camp and rented a canoe. He paddled out onto the gator-inhabited lake, and stayed on the lake all night through a storm. In the morning, he paddled toward the shore, presumably to return the canoe, but when he saw the police waiting, he pulled out a gun and killed himself.
Those of us who would like to help the girls don’t know where they were taken. Of course the police cannot reveal their safe location. Their job is to protect those girls, as their parents did not.
*
Shocking the pool did nothing to clear the new red algae, and now the pool is also leaking. No telling where the water is going, but if it floods the nearby Presbyterian church, I’m sure the congregation will let me know. Overnight, even in rain, banana spiders craft a strand of strong web across the front door at the level of my sunburned face.
*
I told my old friend Julia that Tropical Storm Julia had just slammed into the Georgia coast. She said, “We’ll have to watch me closely as I seem to be gathering strength.”
*
What I don’t have anymore: a sense of direction, an interest in art, a New York license plate.
What I need: board shorts, rash guard, flip-flops, SPF, battery-powered radio, three days’ worth of water.
A difference here: The Village, singular, is an assisted-living community. The Villages, plural, is a plush retirement community a couple of hours south. The Villages mails brochures to people fifty-five and older. There is no targeting of “seniors” for The Village that I am aware of. Several of my patients live in an assisted-living facility that is not as nice as The Village, singular, but is still a pleasant place with heated pool.
*
In the market, I ask the clerk for jicama, then pronounce it two other ways before he knows what I want. There is tangerine juice on ice for one month a year, but which month is that, I keep meaning to ask.
*
In the morning, an inversion layer, and a note from Julia: “I’m just headin’ off the coast aimlessly. I haven’t had much impact. Nothing but depression. Tropical, but nonetheless, depression. Headin’ out to sea. Good-bye, Georgia, good-bye, Carolina.”
*
Armadillos seen dead in the road since my arrival: twenty-nine. Night-blooming cactus I’ve seen flower on the one day a year that they flower: one. But it still was luck.
A month before the scandal involving the attorney next door, I saw him pulling weeds out of the forested line between our houses. I was driving by when I saw this odd sight, odd because he was on my side of the property line, and by the time I had circled back he was gone. I found out a couple of days later when I interrupted his run that he had been pulling not weeds but an invasive species of plant that, he said, was poised to take over the landscape if we didn’t do something about it. But it’s pretty, is what I said. I had cut sprigs with the small purple berries to place in a short crystal vase. This was the way I learned that he cared for the local ecology or, put another way, he was practicing despoiling what was beautiful that had come from somewhere else to take up residence on his turf.
Those girls did not have to end up with him. One traces back the variables: had the neighbors made the trip a month later, had they not made the trip at all, had they visited an orphanage in this country instead. We in the neighborhood still want to do something for the girls, wherever they are.
The employees at the home assured us that our babies would be raised in good families. They needed nothing more than our permission to be taken in by these kind people.
*
Driving with the gospel station on, the one that comes in or not depending on the weather, when—happiness. Tasha Cobbs is singing, “There’s a miracle in this room with my name on it . . .” She incites her audience to joy with her song “Put a Praise on It.” She is a powerhouse, a minister all can follow, making the case that anyone can be healed.
*
In what must have been one of the owners’ boys’ rooms before I moved in, I peeled rocket ships off the walls. Before I touched them and realized they could be peeled off, I had thought I would have to spackle over the gouges in the wall I would make. I had not bothered to get permission from the owners of the house. The plasticine decals came up without pulling off the paint beneath.
In the little girl’s room down the hall, there is a decal of a tree, and it’s going to remain on the wall. I thought it was a dogwood at first, but I looked in a book of trees and it is, in fact, the tree of life. I felt chastened, and would rather it had been a dogwood. But there is no arguing with what I now see should be capitalized, the Tree of Life.
*
On the whiteboard at the wetlands preserve has been added under “Sightings”—“one park ranger.” She is patient and kind, so I’m glad to see her acknowledged. She will help people who can’t walk get into her dune buggy and then drive them along the pebbled paths that a wheelchair can’t manage so that those who can’t get around on their own can still see every part of the park. Shovelers have been sighted, according to the board, as well as four cottonmouths. Can’t these strike from the plantings along the paths? Unlikely, the park ranger says—they prefer to be closer to the water, she says instead of saying no.
*
When a guy in a pickup drives up and offers to blow the leaves off my roof for a very low price, I ask him if he is insured, knowing he will lie. I tell him to go ahead, but before he positions the ladder he says he did some work at the house next door the day before, and the woman there offered him all of her husband’s clothes. She offered him his shoes too, he said, but the shoes were the wrong size. He did not know why she had offered to give him her husband’s clothes, and in telling him, I have become a gossip.
His is not the only truck I have seen parked next door. A carpet cleaner spent a day out front, as did an air-conditioning installation van and a yard maintenance truck and trailer from the company Lawn and Order. What I’m watching for is a For Sale sign in the yard.
Many years ago I went to a friend’s fiftieth birthday party. She lived in the Midwest—it had been forever since I’d seen her—and her mother threw the party in the house my friend had grown up in. All those years later, her mother was selling the house, but she took it off the market that week so everyone would have a place to stay. I could see the holes the stakes had made where For Sale signs had been replaced: banners with my friend’s name flew there instead for days.
There was a guest wearing a mannish canvas coat; she suggested we walk up the nearby hill to a burned-out estate. There is a kind of weary peace that comes with getting to a place long after others have discovered it. Even someone’s burned-down house, the stone footprint grown over with ivy and trumpet vine. It was a party I was glad to have traveled to. When I left the house after midnight, I felt like I had been home.
*
It would be nice to have raspberry canes in a backyard; a girl could learn to pick the berries without getting poked. A father or mother could show a young girl how to do this.
In Maine, the artist’s wife would sometimes sunbathe on their dock in a white bathing suit, then leave the still-dry suit hanging from a hook on the pier. Her husband said he liked to see this—the dry white bathing suit moving in a breeze, his wife having gone inside to read.
*
The wedding is off, and I will not have to write Mariah Carey anymore.
*
Next week I am going to see another psychic. This person lives down the block from Lois, so I can go right over on Tuesday morning. After I see the psychic, Lois wants me to give her a recap over tea.
The psychic is likely to tell me that I will fall in love.
This is what everyone thinks one wants to hear. But I don’t want to fall in love in the sense that a psychic might mean it. I don’t want a romance, if that is what she predicts. But love—sure, keep it coming. In another form. Not a man and not a woman. An animal, a place, or a cause. I would like to fall in love again with any and all of these.
So many people need help right now, and one doesn’t need to be in love to give it. Helping is love; that is what it can look like. That is one way you know when love is near. No psychic needed for this. Still, I am going to pay the psychic to tell me what she wants me to know. Then I will have a cup of tea with Lois, and entertaining her is a good enough reason for me to see it through.
*
I remember being surprised to learn that asking for help is a sign of strength. Someone who knew what she was talking about set out to convince me of this when I told her I had failed to gauge the point at which I had to stop asking for help, had to figure something out for myself. Why was it hard to see this as strength? I’d seen people all my life who felt it was a matter of character to puzzle through a problem by themselves. Self-sufficiency as a point of honor—I was persuaded by this. But help could come in so many forms.
Help came in the form of water over and over. Hot water in a cup of tea, warm water in a pool with no one else wanting to use it, surf covering your feet at an ocean beach when the tourists had left and you no longer needed to buy a day pass.
The day before the appointment with the psychic, the storm we were warned of hit hard. Just before midnight, I heard a tremendous crack, and the power went out. Nothing to do till morning, when I called the fire department to put out the smoking tree that had cracked open near the ground, an enormous oak that fell onto power lines and spewed smoke from its hollowed core. A burning tree, and then the psychic who, it turned out, spoke of past lives, notably the one that ended when I died in the London Fire of 1666. She said I was forced to jump from a burning building, a body falling from the sky—we did not have to say aloud what that image conjured. She said I did not need to be afraid of flying because the thing I feared had already happened. I had not told her that I was afraid to fly.
At Lois’s house after, we ate salted grape tomatoes and I told her about the visit. The following week, I brought each of us a marbled black and white notebook; the psychic had suggested writing down what our younger selves wanted to say. How much younger? The psychic had suggested four years old. But I didn’t know any four-year-olds, didn’t know what they had to say. Humoring Lois, I pretended to “hear” my four-year-old self, but the voice I tried to hear was the voice of the girl in the apple tree, a girl who had grown into an apple tree in the orchard at the home. That girl, she asked how it was that nobody saw them. I took her literally—I pictured these babies buried in the orchard becoming part of the roots of the trees. “And the children in the apple-tree/Not known, because not looked for.”
*
“Five ducks provide eggs to feed a family for years.” Five ducks cost fifty dollars. This from the World Vision catalog that showed up in my mail. “A goat and two chickens supply a steady supply of protein to feed children and transform futures.” A goat and two chickens cost $110. A dairy cow: “One cow can give up to 5,000 gallons—or 80,000 glasses—of milk in its lifetime.” One dairy cow costs $700. Education for girls has three choices: $150, $75, and $40. “Studies show that when a woman has an education, her whole community benefits.”
I will bring the catalog along to show the CEO. He can afford it all.
*
Driving past a general store in a rural county, I come upon a Hispanic kid hoisting an old boom box, a Keith Richards guitar solo blasting, the kid yelling, “Keef! Keef!” A brush with greatness.
*
The home allowed us the illusion for a while that we had done the right thing. A selfless choice, which might come to be a comfort when we questioned ourselves later, when our strength had returned, and the milk had dried up, and maybe we had found jobs and not-bad places to live. Maybe we would tell everyone we got to know about it, and maybe we would never tell anyone ever. What would we look for in a person we might tell? Did we override a sense of unease because the home was the only place that welcomed us? And wasn’t it pleasant to walk along mown paths through tall grass? And when we left, we found an apple wrapped in a napkin for the trip had been placed inside our totes.
But the employees who suddenly quit, the fire, the ruinous truth.
The journalist, the author of the book, born there.
*
I watched a true-crime show with difficult Mr. Davis about a murder: A woman’s body was found in an orchard. Her husband had killed her, and tried to make it look as though his wife’s horse had thrown her. He said she must have been killed when her head struck a rock where she landed. But detectives noticed that the rock was the only one in the orchard. They did not accept the theory that the dead woman’s husband put forward.
The only dumber thing the husband might have done would be to have placed the side of the rock with which he had bashed in his wife’s skull, the side covered with blood, facedown beneath her head. He had wanted the money from her life insurance policy. He wanted to spend it on someone else, but he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
Before the detectives failed to find a single other rock, did the man feel apprehension or anticipation? Were his thoughts about the future fueled by fear, or did the urgency come from the courage to act, to do anything required to be with the one he loved? Stendhal wrote, “If it were necessary to commit a murder that I might see you, I would become a murderer.”
*
Macouns had been my favorites, but you couldn’t always get them in stores. Or you thought you were buying them when really you were buying McIntosh, mislabeled. The flesh of Macouns is not as soft. The Macoun has a taste of berry to it; it has a short growing season, and a high susceptibility to powdery mildew and cedar apple rust. Neither kind is as good for you as a green Granny Smith.
I only trust an apple I can pick from a tree, but since reading the reporter’s book, I won’t be doing that again.
Though if I were to visit the orchard at the home, I’ll bet I could find a single rock to rest my head against.
Acknowledgments
With great thanks to my editor, Nan Graham, for her close attention, galvanizing suggestions, and unerring wisdom; to Susan Moldow, for her valuable support; and to my agent Liz Darhansoff, for her good judgment and longtime friendship. My thanks to Tamar McCollom, Kara Watson, and everyone else at Scribner who had a hand in bringing out this book.
For various kinds of help with the creation of these stories, I want to thank Jill Ciment, Martha Gallahue, Allan Gurganus, Chiu-yin Hempel, my brothers Gardiner and Peter Hempel, Bret Anthony Johnston, Pearson Marx, Jill McCorkle, Rick Moody, Laurel Nakadate, Paola Peroni, Roger and Ginny Rosenblatt, Julia Slavin, Pat Towers, and Lou Ann Walker. Thank you, Syd Straw, for the very thing that allowed me to finish “The Chicane” thirty years after I started it.
I thank my fellow members of Compassion Care, who remain inspirations to me as they work to save the lives of dogs in extremis, in particular: Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, Jeff Latzer, Yolanda Crous, Laurie Daniels, Carol Rothschild, and Dr. Evelyne Cumps.
And I thank the always generous Chuck Palahniuk for telling me about the Butterbox Babies and Bette Cahill’s book about the little-known, horrific crimes in Nova Scotia. His research had shown him that he could not write about this because “there’s nothing funny about it.” So he offered it to me in case I could make something of it. This gift was the beginning of “Cloudland,” which takes its title from the haunting painting by Gloria Vanderbilt.
More from the Author
The Dog of the Marriage
The Collected Stories of…
Tumble Home
About the Author
© VICKI TOPAZ
AMY HEMPEL’s four story collections The Dog of the Marriage, Tumble Home, At the Gate
s of the Animal Kingdom, and Reasons to Live are now in a single volume, The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel. Hempel is the coauthor, with Jill Ciment, of The Hand That Feeds You by A. J. Rich, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vanity Fair; GQ; and Tin House, and have been widely anthologized. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She teaches in the Graduate Writing Program at Bennington College and at Stony Brook Southampton. She lives near New York City.
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Also by Amy Hempel
Reasons to Live
At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom
Tumble Home
The Dog of the Marriage
The Collected Stories
With Jill Ciment, as A.J. Rich
The Hand That Feeds You
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