by Abi Maxwell
“ ‘Henrietta!’ I called,” the teacher told us. “ ‘Henrietta, I know it’s you!’ ” But this girl, this supposed version of my sister, she’d simply shrugged, then run off to board the Ferris wheel. Then, from the highest point in the sky, she’d yelled back down to the teacher.
La, de, da, the teacher claimed the girl had yelled.
“Fucking liar,” our mother said once the teacher had left. “Fucking woman has always been a drama queen.”
Our father wasn’t so devoid of hope, though. He left his job, packed his bags, and went to Montana. He spent two months out there, wandering the streets, while at home my mother and I sank alone. Finally he came home only to return the very next week. He stayed for another month, and when he once more made his way back—this time in an old truck he’d bought out there instead of by plane—my mother sent him straight to a therapist. After that, our father spent the greater part of one year sleeping and taking antidepressants, and I practiced erasing that French teacher’s story from my mind.
* * *
—
In my final year of high school I made a close friend. I have long since lost touch with her, but back then she broke me free a little bit. She had moved to our town from New York City and she liked to steal my mother’s marijuana and she liked to gaze at the sky. Once, as we leaned together against the granite in the sunken hole that used to be the barn and smoked one of my mother’s joints and watched the dark and beautiful clouds, I realized that so far as this friend knew, I had never even had a sister.
On my birthday she gave me a copy of her favorite novel, and because I loved her I read it. It was a story of a small town, a sad young man and his sad young siblings, an impossibly obese mother. It was fantastical, ever so slightly it was. I read it three times. Since the end of my family, she was the first person to view me innocently. To love me in that way. But of course she knew nothing of the real me.
“Apply to college,” she used to tell me. “Don’t you want to leave this town?”
And didn’t I? Instead, I graduated high school with straight A’s and then went home. My only friend went to college in Colorado, and I never responded to her letters, and eventually her parents moved once more. I was busy enough while she was still home, but once she was gone my father started to take notice of me sitting blank-faced on the couch. He began to ask me questions—what did I plan to do, what did I want to be. My mother joined in, and together they put their collective foot down: Get a job or enroll in the community college in the next town over. I signed up.
Before I chose my classes, I had to meet with the professor who would be my adviser. So far as I know, she had been chosen at random, but it was the kind of chance choice that makes me wonder about the organization of the universe. She was slight and gentle, and when we spoke she offered me mint tea with milk warmed in her office microwave. Her shelves were filled with old novels and volumes of poetry bound some one hundred years earlier, and they were lined up perfectly, and alphabetized, not one title—so far as I could see—out of place. She asked me what I liked and I shrugged. She asked me if I wanted to study math or science or English or maybe a foreign language. I shrugged again. She asked me why I had decided to go to college—all of these questions given so kindly, with no pressure, I felt, for a response. I felt so good in that sun-filled office, so comforted. That smell of old books and sweet milk and cool air welled around me, and suddenly I found myself looking up at her, pointing to her desk, and saying with every ounce of untainted heart that I had left, “I love that book.” It was a small, green, hardback copy of The Scarlet Letter that was so old it did not even have a copyright date. She handed the book to me and asked why I loved it. I thought of those mystic woods. I looked up at her and I said simply, “Hester survives.”
She gave her copy to me, and I still have it today. So it was that I began to study English literature, and I even signed up for one creative writing course. I passed through it, and the rest of school, quietly. My father urged me to get certified as a teacher or to continue my studies. He had visions of his remaining daughter becoming some kind of scholar, or, I suppose, some kind of anything. But I had no such hopes.
* * *
—
The day I graduated from college, I walked in my black cap and gown because my father wanted me to. It had been nearly ten years without my sister, yet as I stood there among my classmates, strangers all of them, I cataloged the black-haired people in the audience. Henrietta, mid-twenties Henrietta, I was so sure just then, would have black hair, long and bohemian. She would have rings on her fingers and large silver earrings. She would clap for me, would lift me up, would hold my face between the press of her long, thin fingers and she would say, Look at you. My god, Jane, look at you.
We drove home quietly, the three of us. My mother asked me if I might like to go out to eat, or if I would like them to cook up something special for dinner. Is this depression? I wondered, simultaneously shocked that anything on that day should feel particularly worse than all the others that had come before. Yet it did, because Henrietta, of course, had not come for me. I had done all my duties; I had finished school and gone on to college and I had finished that, too. Now an unplanned life that I was expected to enter on my own stretched endlessly before me.
* * *
—
With no other prospects, I took the simple path my parents suggested: I applied for and eventually accepted a job as the new receptionist at the dentist’s office in town. The dentist had cleaned my teeth and given me fluoride and filled my cavities my entire life. He was a good employer. He paid me well enough and he gave me health insurance, and I had an hour off for lunch each day, after which he always told me to brush. He cleaned my teeth for free. I answered the phone and called patients to remind them of appointments; I kept track of his calendar. His office was in the front end of an old colonial in town. A family lived upstairs and an accountant worked in the back half. It was a small office, only the two of us. My desk sat just inside the front door, sandwiched by filing cabinets. The records, I suppose, were private property. I had never been asked to touch them. But one morning a few months into my job he was running late. I didn’t have a key, so I waited on the front step. We always unlocked at 7:00 a.m., with the first appointment at 7:30. It was 7:20 by the time he pulled in. He said, “You get the records. All the way through to noon, please.”
I knew what he meant—every morning, he made a pile of the records of all the patients he would see before lunch, each in their manila folder. After lunch, he did the same.
“Carol Clark,” I said. “I can’t find her.”
“She’s in there,” the dentist said. He said she might be out of place, but she would be in there somewhere. “Twenty years,” he said, “I haven’t gotten rid of one record.” And then, “That just might be your next task, Jane.”
It occurred to me then. I opened the drawer for A through C once more and I did in fact find the file I’d missed, but I left it right there, pretended not to see it, and just began opening other drawers. D through F first, and then X, Y, Z. Eventually I dared open the drawer with O inside. I flipped through slowly. I felt terrified, as though I was about to encounter my sister, real and whole, after all this time. We were all alphabetized, so my father came first. Olson, Charles. I had recently had an appointment—it was how I knew about the job opening. I had leaned back in the chair and the dentist had sat down on his stool, and as he positioned the overhead lamp he had asked me what I was up to. “Looking for a job now?” he’d asked. Which means that, for that appointment, he had just gotten my file. It had to have been him, because his old assistant had already retired by then. I never knew why he hadn’t hired someone earlier. Anyway, the fact that he had gotten my file means that he had flipped past my sister in order to do so. She would have been second. What had he thought as he flipped that folder forward? Had he thought, Henrietta, DEA
D? and just gone on and saved it anyway?
I put her folder at the bottom of my pile for him, and then I placed Carol Clark’s on top, and then I set the whole pile down and then I picked it back up, leaving Henrietta’s folder still in place on my desk. I moved my datebook atop it, and then I delivered the rest to him. Later, while he filled a cavity, I pushed the folder into my purse, which, luckily, was oversized. At lunch, I transferred it to my car.
* * *
—
That file I stole, it wasn’t as good as a real tooth, but it was filled with X-rays of the living mouth of my sister. I held them to my window and stared as though they were her entire being. I memorized them. I knew that tooth 3 and tooth 19 had fillings. I touched the spot in my own mouth where these would have been. I guessed how much her wisdom teeth would have grown by now. I memorized the contours of her molars. For a while, those X-rays, the strange comfort they gave me, stood in place for my mercurial sister. But then they had another effect, too. They didn’t just remind me of her. They pulled that ghostly form of her that I had done so well to squelch right back up into the woods.
* * *
—
It was late one afternoon while my parents were out that I walked to the living room as though in a trance and withdrew the old history book from the built-in shelf. It had been years since I’d touched it. I still remember the heave of it on that particular day, and its familiar weight on my lap. I felt I was doing something wrong and did not want to be caught, so as I opened the book and sank down in I kept a corner of my mind buoyed above, attuned to any sound that might signal my parents’ return. I flipped ahead, feeling it was inevitable to return to that story, as if I’d come home in a way I’d always known I would. I had tried to teach myself, since the day I’d woken up in my bed after nearly freezing to death, to believe, as Henrietta had, in nothing at all. To believe that life added up only to death. Yet as I breathed in the dusty pages of that book once more I began to feel the events of the past as currents that sprang forward to echo into the future. I began to read and reread that old shape-shifting coyote story and to feel, more strongly than anything else, that my life on our land could have been no other.
PART TWO
Elspeth
I
IN HER old life, she never rose before the sun came in, even if it meant her mother would scold her. But her sister, Claire, would cover for her anyway. Her sister had understood her—or, if not understood, at least loved her so completely that she accepted her faults, supreme laziness among them. Half the time her sister would do all the chores for them. She realized, in her new life, that it must have been a terrible burden—when she listed it, it all sounded like so much: Collect the water, clean the floors and windows, clean the laundry, tend the gardens, tend the chickens, buy the food, cook the food, that sort of thing, all on top of the spinning. Spin the flax, spin the flax, spin the flax until you lose your mind. But back then, even when she did keep right up with her hardworking sister, it never felt like so much at all. Never near as much as the burden she felt since she’d crossed the ocean.
But even she had to admit that this new life wasn’t so terribly bad. For years she had kept a routine that her sister could scarcely believe—she rose with the 4:30 a.m. mill bell, and once her husband set out for work she sat at the table with her candle and wrote letters home until daybreak, when her boys stirred. Letters to her sister, to her parents, to the friends she’d left behind. It astonished her, sometimes, that there was an entire ocean between them, and sometimes it astonished her that there was only an ocean. She could just get on a boat, she thought sometimes. It was the 1850s, she thought constantly toward the end. People crossed the ocean every single day. She herself had crossed the ocean. To get back would not be impossible. Not like trying to cross into heaven or hell or some other realm she couldn’t believe in.
It was in the morning, with her letters, that she had thoughts like this. It was when her boys—the three of them—were still sleeping. The oldest and the youngest slept silently, but she had always been able to hear the middle one’s labored breath at night. It wasn’t a snore, but something at once softer and more hard-earned. “He sounds like a damn river,” her husband once said, but that hadn’t seemed accurate to her, because a river never sounded like it had to try quite so hard.
She didn’t mind the sound, though. Years ago, she’d asked a visiting doctor what might be the problem, or if in fact it was a problem at all, but he had said that in order to find out, her little boy would have to spend the night with the doctor for observation. That had been the end of that. Eventually the sound became a light blanket to her, a kind of steady comfort in this new world.
Her husband had come over first. Lots of people were doing that at the time, and she hadn’t wanted to be like them in that way—or in any way, really—but it had been decided. He took a boat over, but when he arrived he learned that the mill he had meant to work for had just suffered a great flood, and so he followed another freshly arrived Scot north, to the country, to a small town with a new mill, where he found a job and home at once. Hardly three months later she received a letter saying he was settled in a place called Middlewood. She wasn’t sure if it was luck or fortitude, but either way she was proud of him for getting there.
With that first letter, he had also sent a real present across the ocean for her—a brooch made of seed pearls. She had never owned such an exquisite piece of jewelry—not any jewelry at all, in fact—and the gift told her that mill workers in the new country were not like mill workers in Scotland; that in the new country they were of another class; and that when she left her home she would enter not only a new world but a new self entirely. That letter and those gifts gave her the sense that she would no longer be of the weavers but a woman in a grand house with a library and a china tea set, woolen carpets, canopy beds, and artwork from France hung on the walls.
But it was all only daydreams. She liked to imagine it, but she never truly wanted such a life—it could not possibly be enough to make up for such loss. She didn’t want to go. In those final days before she went she would walk up to the edge of the sand and lie right down—as much as she could despite her belly—and dig her fingers through the sharp grass, all the way into the ground. She would splash the ocean water on her bare face and hair. She would smell everything in those days, too—that grass and sand and water, but also the table they ate on, the spot of earth where the rosebushes grew, and the roses themselves, of course. Her mother’s neck and her sister’s neck, her pillow, her blanket, even her cottage wall. Cataloging it all before departure. It turned out that she would wish she hadn’t done that, because those smells had been stored away, yet she would never be able to quite reach them. In the new country, it was enough to drive her mad sometimes.
Why hadn’t it felt that way to her husband, too? He had come from the very same place. Surely he had known the land as much as she had. Yet not as she had, she came to realize. The land of home had never been his dream. Business, that’s what he was interested in. You’d think she would have known it when they began, what with the way he’d talked about running the foundry one day, but then she had scarcely known a thing. There had never been a time they hadn’t been acquainted, but then one day when she was sixteen years old she’d noticed he was standing across the street, behind the blooming lilacs, watching her as she pumped the water. The next day she noticed he was back again. “What do you want?” she had asked him. “Why aren’t you working?”
“Lunchtime.”
“Why aren’t you at lunch?”
“I came to tell you something.”
“Out with it, then.”
“I love you,” he had shouted across the oddly empty street, and she had laughed. He went red, of course, yet amazingly he had not skittered away, so she crossed over to him and apologized. Together they walked back toward her house, and when they got near enough they ducked into
the yard. She had done plenty of reading by this time. Romance and horror, mostly. She thought of the helpless people in those stories and she looked at him and willed him to be brave, but nothing happened. She was due back with the water, but she didn’t want to go back after such a letdown. She said quickly, “If you love me, kiss me,” and he had. The kiss seemed to go on and on, though perhaps it was only one second. The bell for the foundry rang and he ran off to work. She picked up her water pails. Light as feathers, for she had been lifted right up. She practically skipped in the door. Practically spilled the water, too. Her sister scolded her but it did nothing to lower her mood. She hummed.
After that day the two of them met everywhere, every free moment they could find. They lied to their families to do it, of course. Said they were visiting this or that friend, or said they were slowed down with an errand because of this or that mishap. They met on the beaches; they met in the woods. She wanted to tell her sister, but then her sister might have called her a sinner. Though her whole family attended church, so far as she saw it was only Claire who prayed daily. Only Claire who dusted and polished the cross. Elspeth herself felt no such calling. Anyway, was love a sin? And if she were a sinner, why would she feel so wonderful? She promised herself that she would marry Thomas, and she comforted herself with the fact that though they would never admit it, her father and even her mother seemed to care more for Wordsworth than for the Bible.