by Abi Maxwell
Her job had kept her going, anyway. Early on, after she’d bought the little ranch house, she’d had the sense to know that the money wouldn’t last, so she took the first job she found, at a coffee shop in the center of town. She’d thought she’d stay only temporarily, just until she figured out a way to go back to school. But then it turned out she had loved that calm little shop with its coffee bar and regulars who came in and sat at the booths every day. At first, Charley went to daycare while she worked, but it cost her nearly her entire paycheck. Luckily—actually, it seemed much too great for luck alone—when Charley learned to walk her boss took a liking to him and offered to have him come into the shop for half of the day. He’d been allowed to climb up on a stool and help wipe the counter, that sort of thing. Somehow, for the most part, it worked, and Charley kept coming back. Customers liked him and he had been entertained by all the activity and treats, plus his trucks and crayons. The other employees were good to him, too, and they helped Henrietta out in that way. They’d take him for walks on their breaks, and one particular woman would even take him to the park if she finished before Henrietta. It had been a good sort of life. In fact, Henrietta had more or less loved her life.
Yet when Charley started kindergarten, she had seen that other mothers didn’t like her. The way they looked her up and down, the way they nudged her right out of conversations—those mothers made her feel as skinny and poor as she had in her old life. She was some ten or even twenty years younger than the rest of them, and she felt certain that in their eyes, she couldn’t possibly be a good mother.
But even then, she had a good time with her son. They’d swim together in the rivers, and sometimes they would eat too much ice cream together. They’d go to the movies, they’d cook, once they’d even painted pictures all over his bedroom walls. She had never known such happiness. But oddly, not so much loneliness, either, particularly when things were rough. When Charley was sick or inconsolably fussy or when she was exhausted. Sometimes she felt so much loneliness that she’d find herself looking out the window that faced east and thinking of her family and wishing she could leap across the land right back to them.
But how to ever go back? How, how ever, to cross such a distance?
* * *
—
Charley finished the book from Annika in three days, and when he was done Henrietta picked it up, read the back, and asked if it had reminded him at all of the story about the coyotes that she used to tell when he was a boy. She couldn’t recall the last time she had told it to him, but it had probably been when he was about six or seven, and had learned to read and wanted to go to bed on his own, with a flashlight and a book. Now it shocked her to hear that he didn’t remember the story at all. She said, “But it was our story. You loved it so much.”
Charley shrugged and said, “Tell it, then.”
“Don’t you be rude to me,” she said, and then she told him that she had come from a farm where coyotes stalked the woods, and that the story she had told him had actually been her father’s favorite story, though when he was young she’d told him her own version of it.
“Tell me the real one,” Charley said now, and so she did. She told him that the temperature had dropped—she even said what her father had, that the mercury had begun to plunge—and the wind had blown in the windows and the father had gone for help; she said that the neighbor had returned to find no family, but five coyotes instead. “The father was gone, too. Cold Friday, 1852. It happened in the woods behind my childhood home. The neighbor in the story is the man who lived in my house back then,” she said. Then, because her son had been so cocky lately, and would probably point out that the story was impossible, that coyotes hadn’t even been out east back then, she said it herself. But he had no response to that. He just sat there, transfixed in that way that he, and she and Jane, had been in childhood.
“I don’t know what I think about the coyotes in the story,” she said absently, and it was as though she fell down into her childhood dining room as she said it. Those overgrown plants hung in the windows, blocking the light; the maroon stencils at the borders of the walls, which her mother had painted one winter in a fury. She could almost hear her mother, that soft but aggravated way she would chide her father when he told it. About the coyotes, Henrietta had never believed or not believed. But the story itself was another matter. She told her son. She said, “I always imagined that the family just ran away.” She’d told him that before, of course, but now, when she said it so plainly, it split her open. Her mother. “My god,” she said. She was talking to herself, not even quite sure her words were coming out. “My mother would have thought those poor fools had been eaten.” Her eyes welled up as she said it. How could she have gone on this long and not realized that simple fact? All these years, what would it have meant for her mother? Sylvia was not a religious woman, and there would be no memorial for her daughter. Would there be pictures? Would she still be searching for a body? “Charley,” Henrietta said urgently, suddenly overcome by a need to hold her son. He had wandered to the far side of the kitchen by now, and when he came back within reach she pulled his tall frame onto her lap and tried to take in that smell of him, as she had when he was young. It was buried beneath so many other smells now, but she could still find it, that essence of her one boy. But he wouldn’t let her, of course. He pulled away and, put off by her sudden neediness, headed out of the room. He was almost to the hallway when she stood up and said, “My sister. Oh my god, Jane.” Charley watched as his mother looked frantically about the room, as though she expected to find someone there. All color had drained out of her. She sat back down. Jane had thought those people had transformed into the coyotes, she had always thought that. She could see her sister now, pacing the woods, calling out, looking for some shape-shifted version of the sister she had once had. Would it have ever even occurred to Jane that Henrietta had simply left?
Charley was heading back to her side, at least. She was hunched over, her elbows on the table and her head in her hands, but she heard his footsteps and now she could see his feet out of the corner of her eyes. Those long, broad, masculine toes. She’d paid sixty dollars for the flip-flops he was wearing and they were already fraying. She thought he might place a hand on her back or offer to get her some water or crackers, but he just stood there. Finally she gathered herself up and asked him what he should have asked her. She said, “Charley, are you okay?” He didn’t answer, but he wouldn’t stop staring, either. It unnerved her. “What?” she said. She sat up straight. She was still so good at shifting gears. Like riding a bike, she thought a bit darkly. “Do you sort of remember the story now? That’s really not the way I used to tell it. I used to say the people tempted the coyotes in and then ran away. That they set up the whole thing.” Every word took effort, but something in his eyes told her that she had to keep going, had to find the right thing to say to pull him back up. “Goddamn it, what?” she finally demanded.
That did it. For a moment before he spoke she thought stupidly that he might tell her which version of the story he believed. She wasn’t prepared for his anger, and in fact had never quite experienced that sort from him before. The kind so pure it was glacial. He kept his eyes right on her and his voice completely steady as he said, “You have a sister?”
“Yes,” Henrietta said plainly, realizing what a fool she had been. She looked out the window, stood up abruptly, and then walked out the back door, into their flowerbed, where she fell to her knees and began to weed.
* * *
—
Charley had read the book about wolves in July, and in September Henrietta saw a flyer in the coffee shop—a wildlife biologist, coming to give a lecture on wolves and coyotes at the university. It wasn’t such a coincidence; out here the wildlife biology department was exceptional, and she thought she’d probably seen this sort of flyer on the bulletin board of her work at least a few times a year ever since she’d first arriv
ed. Still, it struck her as unusually lucky. She wrote the speaker’s name down, went to the college, and bought her son a copy of his book plus three tickets—she, Annika, and Charley would go to the lecture in two weeks.
During those two weeks, she assumed her son read the new book, though he really didn’t say anything about it—he was too busy in a sudden spell of fights with Annika. Yet, even though her son wasn’t talking about that book, Henrietta found herself entranced by the man’s flyer, so much so that when no one was looking she quickly ripped it off the bulletin board and folded it up and put it in her purse. At night she would take it out and smooth it against her pillow and prop herself up on her elbows to stare at it as though it were a painting. In the picture, the man stood at the edge of a field. A faint outline of a stone wall was just behind him, and decidedly eastern woods rose above. Those woods, that particular sugar maple—no, it couldn’t be. Still, the flyer had the ability to send her right back. She would place it beneath her pillow, and lie atop it, and close her eyes, and sink.
* * *
—
Charley, during this time, had begun to ask about his father. Henrietta believed that his sudden questioning on the subject was somehow connected to her recent retelling of the coyote story, which had obviously reminded him that his mother had come from somewhere, had fled from somewhere. He had asked about his father before—first when he was just a young boy hearing about other fathers at school. Back then she’d been able to deflect the questions with simple distractions—an offer of an ice-cream cone, a trip to the park. But then when he got a little older she’d been forced to give a legitimate answer. At first she’d gotten angry and snapped at him, told him to stop prying and just leave her alone. He had been totally dumbstruck. Finally, a few days later, she’d said, “He was smart, but at least back then he wasn’t kind.”
“I don’t want to find him,” eight-year-old Charley had said immediately.
Around the same time, though, he’d also begun to ask about his maternal grandparents. He wanted to know if they were alive, and where they lived. “It’s hard to explain,” she had said for a while, and then, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and finally, because she wanted to be better for him, “New Hampshire. I am from New Hampshire. I had a hard time as a teenager, and in order to take care of you I had to leave.” That had seemed like enough information. But now, suddenly, he was asking if he could go back east, if he could see where she was from, if he could look for his own father. So far, she had not responded. What in the world could she even say? She would have to start with the first pregnancy, the one that had been terminated. But where to go from there?
I do know what it’s like, she imagined herself saying to him. I know better than you. To love someone, she meant, though even as she thought that she wondered at its validity. Was what she’d felt at fifteen anything even close to what love truly was? To be physically sick with thoughts of someone, to lose all interest in anything that had ever sustained her before, to dream up paths for destruction and then throw them right out, was that truly what love was? In those days, her entire self had been eclipsed, but then Kaus had never seemed to feel as she felt. He had never seemed to lose what direction he had, not until they took it from him. Her son didn’t, either, though she worried that Annika might. Was this the path of girls, then? Obsession, and complete loss of power? She had been trained for such a fate, she thought sometimes. All the stories had trained her for it.
Still, though, she remembered that time with Kaus as a true, shining seed that she could cup in her hands. She would not ever have traded that time, would not ever let go of it. She still had his letter, his very last one, stuffed at the back of her closet, in the duffel that she had left home with. She hadn’t read it in years, but now she found herself crawling to the back of her closet and reading it there, on the floor, in secret. Dear Henrietta. Why had he written it in pencil? Had they not allowed pens in that place he’d been sent? The years were making the words fade. Eventually the entire thing would be blotched out.
I got your letter. I don’t think it is a mistake that it happened. It was only three weeks ago that I came home for the weekend so are you sure? Even though it is so early? I still mean I want it. Maybe it is saying something that it happened again. I mean maybe we were meant to have a child Henrietta. You are right they can’t do that to you again and I will do whatever you need. I earned another weekend home for good behavior so my mother is picking me up and I will be home on Friday night of next week. November 15, don’t forget the date. Meet me in your woods where we met in October. I can sneak out like last time. My grandmother doesn’t go to bed until after 10 so meet me at midnight just to be safe. You don’t have to do it again. We can figure out what to do and we can find money. I know it is tiny in your belly but it will be our child and I will not let them do this to you again. I don’t have much longer here and then I can work. I don’t care what I do all I care about is you. You are too brave to be scared so don’t.
Reading it now, she wondered at the fact that she hadn’t burned it rather than carrying it around all these years as though it held some clue as to what had happened to him, when what had happened was so totally obvious: He had abandoned her. That night, out there in the woods with that briefcase of money, she had laughed at the fact that after all, it really was she who was the braver one. She had never quite believed it. Of course, over the years she had changed it in her mind a little, had rearranged things so that he knew she stole the money, knew that she planned to escape. In truth he didn’t know anything of that. He knew only that she was pregnant with his baby again, that she intended to keep it, and that she was in the woods, waiting for him to show up. He never did.
The woods—Henrietta even got her son’s old magnifying glass out one night to look more closely at that flyer, to no avail. Another night when Charley was out she went into his room to look for the book the speaker had written, but she couldn’t find it. At dinner on more than one occasion she said, “Have you enjoyed that new book?” and “Can you tell me about that book I bought you?” and “Where, exactly, does it take place?” But her son would only shrug and look at her as though she had lost her mind.
And maybe she had, because when the night of the lecture arrived, Henrietta felt sick with nerves. Thank god her son was going with her. But then he almost didn’t go—another argument with Annika, who refused to come along.
“You go,” Charley snapped at Henrietta. “Why do I need to go to some mind-numbing lecture?”
“Charley,” she said. “Charley, you’ll love it.” And then, finally, “Damn it, Charley, you’re coming with me.”
Anger, at him and in general, had been a very, very rare occurrence, and when it happened it always shocked him a bit, made him listen. So he went along with her, but while they sat there side by side she wondered if she might have done better to come alone anyway. She felt oddly nervous, and out of place in a way that she thought she’d outgrown. There were at least one hundred people around them, and they all seemed to be students or professors. She and Charley had arrived early, and while everyone in the audience seemed to talk comfortably to each other, Henrietta just pried at a loose string on her sleeve while her teenage son stared at the ceiling and now and then turned his head in her direction to ask her why the hell she was being so strange.
“Strange?” she repeated like a fool.
Finally, the man walked out onto the stage. He was larger and softer than she had expected he would be, and his plaid shirt wasn’t tucked in quite right. He walked slowly to the podium and he said, “I’ve always wanted to come out here,” and then, after talking for a bit about how beautiful the rivers and mountains and big sky were, he said, “Back in New Hampshire,” and Henrietta felt her heart stop. She thought of this later that night. That stopping heart, it was almost like a second premonition—the first being the way she’d stared at that flyer—because really she had met
others from New Hampshire; it was no great thing. It was an entire state, after all. But her heart had been right to be warned, to seize up, because the next thing he said was “I live on a sheep farm,” and then, “used to be the home of the largest barn in the county, but that burned down in 1991.”
“Oh my god,” Henrietta said, and clapped her hand over her mouth. The young couple in front of her turned in their seats to look at her and her son slapped her leg. She stared forward. Had her family left her? If she were to return home now, would she find this strange man in her home? Or was this man her family?
Yes. Yes, of course. She had never considered what sort of man Jane would end up with, if any man at all, but now as he stood there bumbling about the book he had written and the animals he studied, she knew. She stood up in her seat and her son tugged her back down. She looked behind her, to all sides. Suddenly she felt dizzy. She leaned forward, put her head between her knees. Was Jane the sort of wife to travel with her husband? Would she sit in the back row or the front? Henrietta sat back up and held her hand to her heart. It was beating so fast that she worried she might have a heart attack. Her father’s mother had died young of a heart attack. If that were to happen to her right now, who would take care of Charley? Before it happened, before she died right here, could she somehow leave a message for her son that told him his family was onstage? Could she tell him to follow this man back east to that farmhouse?
“Stop,” she said aloud, by mistake.