by Abi Maxwell
Her son nudged her again. He looked at her, leaned over, and whispered. “Mom,” he said. “Mom, are you okay? You’re sweating. Mom?”
Finally, she thought, and she felt tears emerge. Finally her son was at least being kind for a moment. He hadn’t been kind in a few months. “Charley,” she whispered back to him, but of course she couldn’t say any of it. She put her hand on his leg, gave a little squeeze, and then moved back into her own space.
Okay, she was whispering to herself. You can do this. Just as she had said to him those years ago. But this time, what was it she was saying she could do?
“Mom,” Charley said. “Mom, get up.” She looked around. The lecture had ended. The clapping had turned to a trickle and the people were standing, filing out. Those in her aisle were waiting for her to move. She cleared her throat and stood and said loudly, “Do you want your book signed?” When he didn’t answer she said, a bit too enthusiastically, “Well, I want it signed!” and she rushed away.
In the lobby they were greeted by the contained echo of all those milling bodies. This July there had been forest fires, and the smoke had hung on in the valley for two weeks, and she felt now as she had felt then. Breathless, like no matter how hard she pulled in air there just was not enough oxygen available.
“Are we getting in line?” her son asked her. She scanned the room, searching, and then she pointed to the far side.
“Wow!” she said, and dragged him over. It was a taxidermy moose head that she had no real interest in but thought she could stall Charley with, but it turned out that of course he had no interest in it, either. “Hors d’oeuvres!” she said, trying again, and she pointed back across the room. She dragged him that direction, to the table of crackers, cheeses, and grapes. “Charley,” she said as she filled a plate, “do you want some wine?”
“I’m seventeen,” he said blandly. “Can we get in line already?”
The line for the book signing snaked around the room, and it took them some time to find the end of it. “Forget it,” Henrietta said once as they walked, but thankfully her son didn’t hear her. She really couldn’t forget it. Charley was carrying the book. When they finally took their place in line she pressed her little paper plate of cheese on her son and told him to give her the book. She held it against her chest. She imagined that its heft would hold her heart in. She saw her sister everywhere. Her long braid in front of them in line, the top of her head at the front of the room, her sandaled feet standing there by the drink table. She heard her sister’s voice.
The line moved slowly, and a few times when people got behind them she surreptitiously moved out of her spot and back to the end of the line once again. Charley rolled his eyes at her every time she did this, but she just shrugged and said, “What? I want to be last.” Eventually, though, there was no place to move. The line tunneled its way to the front tables. First she saw the display of books and then, of course, the writer.
She already had one book in her hand, but now she reached for another, and then a third and a fourth.
“Hush,” she scolded Charley, though he hadn’t even commented yet. With the stack of books in her arms she inched her way over one more foot until she stood face-to-face with the man.
“Oh, no,” she said to him.
“Hello,” he said. “Did you enjoy the lecture?”
“I just realized I don’t have cash,” she said, and she put the three new books she had picked up back on the table. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I love your book. I mean, I didn’t read it yet, but this one is already mine. I already bought it.”
“And who would you like me to sign it to?” he asked. His voice was so plain and kind. His face. It was so open, so unassuming, that she could practically fall right into it. It was like her father’s, in a way. It reminded her of her father. This man knew her father.
“Jane,” Henrietta said, and suddenly the room seemed to go silent. Whatever weight on her chest that had been pressing in seemed now to fly outward; a thousand birds flew outward from her when she said that.
“What are you talking about?” Charley said.
“That’s my wife’s name,” the man said.
“Oh my god,” Henrietta said for the second time that night, and then she grabbed her son, pulled him in front of her like a shield. “This is my son,” she said frantically to the man. “This is Charley.”
“Mom,” he snapped at her.
The man closed her copy of the book and stood up slowly. He put his hands out in front of him—proof of his harmlessness—and he said, “I’m sorry. This is going to sound crazy.” Then, with great care, as though she were a horse who could be spooked, he began to come around to her side of the table. Outside, the clock tower struck.
As he approached, Henrietta imagined her feet sinking into the tiled floor. She imagined staying put, not running. Slow, she told herself. Breathe. Charley was still in front of her and she squeezed his arms as tightly as she could.
“Ouch,” he said, and suddenly the spell was broken. No, she thought, and then she said it aloud. “No, no.” She had to unfreeze her feet. She had to not be caught. All these years. No, it would not happen like this. It would not happen on someone else’s terms. “No,” she said, and she grabbed her son as tightly as she could, turned around, and ran them out of that building.
* * *
—
“Jesus fucking Christ,” her son said when they finally stopped on the far side of the campus quad, beneath the shadow of the mountain.
“The wind’s shifted,” she said plainly, as if nothing had happened. “A few days ago. Did you notice? True fall is here.”
“Don’t talk to me,” he said, and so she didn’t. They drove home silently. He called Annika when they got there. Henrietta went to her room and took from her shelf one of the very few things she still had from home: Jane’s copy of Flowers in the Attic. Over the years, when she was in her better states, the book had made her laugh a little bit—why couldn’t Henrietta have been wiser, chosen a kinder, homier sort of story to carry with her all these years? Why couldn’t Jane have left Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie in the closet while she snooped?
She lay with her head on that book as she had so many times before, and thought once again of that night she had left. Long ago, she had tossed the briefcase out. She’d thought of throwing it in the river like some criminal—which, of course, she was—but finally she’d just put it in her trash bag and, the next morning, watched it get thrown into the garbage truck with all the rest.
Since she’d left, she’d thought often of the doctor. Had he ever looked for her? He had been the first one she told. He was friendly, he liked her, and she’d always felt seen by him. He was a doctor who would know about this sort of thing, and on top of that, from what she understood, whatever she told him would have to be kept confidential. So one night in October she’d sat in his car while her sister stood there on the porch imagining some secret love affair between the two of them, and she’d said plainly, “I’m pregnant and I don’t know what to do.” He’d said he could help her. Right away he’d said that, without even missing a beat. She’d gone on, told him what her parents had made her do the first time, and he’d practically shouted. “That is not okay!” he’d said. “How is that okay at all?” When he’d calmed down he’d said again, “I’m not that kind of doctor, but I could help you. Whichever way you choose.”
Whichever way. She had waited for a path to open, pretending she didn’t already know her path. But if she didn’t understand the passing of time, her body did. Every day she felt it change and she knew she could not keep waiting. Finally one day after school she just did not get on the bus. Instead, she walked straight to the hospital. She told him she didn’t have a choice, not under her parents’ roof. To that she had watched his face go tight with rage and then sink back to its normal state. He told her he woul
d talk with them, and when she said no he’d said, “You’re your own person, you know. You could do this on your own.” And then, “I have money, Henrietta. I could help you.”
“Okay,” she had said, as though the deal was sealed, though of course there were no plans laid. Still, over the years she had liked to tell herself that the briefcase of money had been what he’d meant that day at the hospital. She knew in her heart that couldn’t be true, but by now she was so good at making herself believe. She thought of his words often, of how her fear of being chased or caught with the money had always been minimal, because of those words. With them, since the day she had left, she could always imagine Dr. Hennessey out there in the world, wishing her well.
She opened her eyes and stood up. To think that she could have been brave enough for all that and not this. The letter at the back of the closet wasn’t anything for anyone; it was just a teenage love letter from a boy. Still, it was something. It was all she had. She trembled as she carried Kaus’s words to her son’s room.
“Here,” she said. “This is from your father. You weren’t born yet. It’s the last I ever heard from him.” And then, after he’d taken it into his hands, “You could find him, if you want. You could try. I could help you try.”
Jane
AFTER I saw Kaus, a year passed quickly. In it, Clarence finished his book, found a publisher, and soon became a big deal in his field. He began to tour the country, giving lectures at colleges and universities. While he’s gone, there are always the fences to take care of at night. First I have to herd the sheep in, and once that’s through I have to slowly walk the perimeter of the field, spreading a thin line of the day’s urine out. I do this with a watering can. It used to disgust me but now it is habit, as is the daily collection. I like living like this. With every passing year, I want to go more deeply into the land. What if we stop driving, I wonder sometimes. Stop flying, stop buying anything that has come to us by flight? How much water do we really need to use, anyway, and how little waste can we produce in a month? I have started to measure. On the calendar, I marked the day that I put a new trash bag in the bin that sits on the back porch. My goal is to not fill that trash bag for at least a month.
Two months ago, my husband called me in the middle of the night. He was in Montana. It was midnight for me, ten o’clock for him. Late September, freshly cold, with that ghost-filled wind that I always feel arrives in fall. I had finished with the sheep and the fences some three hours before and had been sound asleep for at least two.
“You need to come out here,” he said without even saying hello. He had said this for months before his trip, that I needed to come with him. You’ll love it! he had said. He’d wanted us to make a vacation of it, to visit Glacier, Yellowstone. I had refused. What about the sheep? I’d said. It had been my mainstay. But now, on the phone, after once again saying I needed to get out there, he said he was sure he had met my sister. He told me to get on the next plane.
“No,” I said plainly. We have a portable next to the bed. I didn’t even have to sit up. I had left the western window open to feel that crisp air on my face and now I had the sense that he could float in through that window and catch me in the full lethargy of my response. It was like a fresh abandonment of her, but still I pressed on. “What about the sheep?” I asked him.
“Jesus, Jane,” he said. “Do you even hear yourself? I’m serious.”
“It’s not her,” I told him. I didn’t even miss a beat. I had imagined this moment so many times; even just this month I had imagined it repeatedly. From the dining room, over and over again, I had caught a glimpse of a person in the backyard, felt my heart lurch, and turned to see the empty clothes on the line. A shadow had moved across the curtained windows that looked out to the front yard and I had frozen until I realized that the shadow had been my own. It seemed fitting in this season when the trees exploded that one thing should appear as another, but the insistence of that tendency this year had thrown me. When my husband called it was almost as though I’d known he would. I was armed. I said, “You don’t even know what she looks like.” As I spoke, I felt I could see myself. I felt I had left my body to hover somewhere near the ceiling and watch myself.
“She has a son,” my husband said. “He’s a teenager, Jane. His name is Charley.”
I hung up the telephone after that. Even though the bedroom that had formerly been my parents’ room is much bigger than my own, Clarence and I never moved into it. Instead, we keep it as a guest room for when Clarence’s sister and her husband and daughters visit, and we sleep in the room that I spent my entire childhood in. I thought of that as I stared at the ceiling. Of all the hours I had spent staring at that very ceiling, wondering if my sister would appear. I was not going to do that this time. When the phone rang again I let the machine pick up. I could hear the beeps and then my husband’s voice rise up through the heating vents that led straight to the kitchen, where the answering machine was.
I got up, got dressed. In the kitchen I listened to his message: “Jane. I’m sorry. For Christ’s sake, Jane, pick up the phone.” I went to the barn. All the animals were in. I sat down in the middle of the floor, between all the stalls, and listened to their breath. I hadn’t turned on a light. Even though our barn was relatively new, it still had that familiar barn smell of animal and dust and sweet hay. I lay back on the dirty floor and gazed upward. This new version of the barn had no cupola, and no eastern and western lofts that you had to crawl on a ladder to cross. But it had been built on the same old foundation, and to me that meant the same old ghosts still haunted it. I imagined my sister on the floor above me, rifling through her blankets, searching for her cigarettes. I imagined her looking out the high window, waiting for her lover to appear on the horizon. Had Josiah Bartlett looked out that very same window? And what for the people of our woods? Had they worked in this space? Or made love in it, as Henrietta had? There was scarcely any wind that night, but still I imagined a gust sweeping through to pick all of us up, every single one of us, those people of the story and my family, their coyotes and our coyotes, and carry us all along, furled together, one breathing mass.
It wasn’t a new vision. I had daydreamed it so many times over the course of the past year, when, while Clarence busied himself with his book, I’d decided to take his advice and search for records of that family of The Den. For a while, I’d gone almost daily to the State Library a half-hour away to sift through the files on their computer program. I hadn’t spent much time on a computer before, and in that room I discovered that when I turned it on my mind entered some dark, directionless vacuum that I could scarcely escape. Thomas and Elspeth Ross, born in Scotland, emigrated to America, probably in their thirties or forties in 1852—it wasn’t a lot to go on. There were so many with their name. Sometimes, as I opened file after file—birth certificates, marriage certificates, passenger lists—I wondered what in the hell I was doing, why I was wasting my life in this way. Other times, before Clarence’s phone call from Montana, I would close the ancestry program down and look around the room to make sure no one was watching me, and then I would open the Internet search engine and type in her name. Henrietta Olson. It was the first time I had ever allowed my mind to actually imagine the possibility of some real-life trajectory for her. I would scan all the results quickly, terrified that I might find one that matched. Most were obituaries, and now and then I opened them up to see if my sister had died. But I never found anything that sounded even remotely like her, and I always returned quickly to searches for that family.
That night of my husband’s call, I rose from the barn floor, said good night to the sheep and chickens, and walked back across the yard, toward my house. Enough leaves had dropped by then to give a slight view of the Hennesseys’ former home. I could only see the upper floor, and suddenly I thought of all the hours I had spent up there with those twins, chanting and trying to call the spirits. But who, or what, had I bee
n searching for back then, when my sister had still been in my midst, real and whole and full of breath?
Inside, I brushed my teeth again, cleaned my face, took my barn clothes off, and lay down in bed once more, just like any other night. I read for half an hour or so and then I turned out my light and slept. But at around 4:00 a.m. I sat up with a jolt. There was no need to call on some spirit, not now, not anymore. In fact, there never had been. My sister existed. I had wasted all these years in a delusion in my woods when the truth was so simple, so obvious, that it made me sick to realize: Henrietta stole a briefcase of money and she just left. She had even left a note to say so. Now, today, I could open a map and point to the exact place upon which Henrietta stands. I could buy a ticket and fly across the country and exit the plane into that circle of mountains and know that my whole, real sister breathes somewhere within them. But alongside that knowledge would have to be the simple fact that she had chosen to leave, and that she had never chosen to return.
I went downstairs again, turned the dim kitchen light on, and filled a glass with water. I was not cold but shivering, my shoulders hunching forward, my whole body closing in on itself. I spilled half of my water down my front. I picked up the phone and began to dial my parents’ number, but kept pressing the wrong buttons. I put the phone back on the hook. Next I took the phone book out of the drawer once again. It had been a year since I’d thrown that wood at his dog. I accidently tore a few pages as I flipped forward into the book, to his name. I found myself reading his address again, as if I’d forgotten where he lived. I flipped back to the town’s street map and held it right up to my eyes, a way to steady myself. I found Mountain Drive and I imagined myself on it, passing by that woodpecker and continuing to his driveway, walking all the way up. Knocking, going in.
* * *
—
Clarence returned from his trip that evening. I had spent the bulk of the day on the couch, just staring at the wall, but in preparation of my husband’s arrival I mustered all my strength and got up and cooked a pot of chicken soup. As we ate I spent some time telling him about the books I had read while he was away. Mysteries, a series that takes place in England that I thought he would enjoy. He didn’t really listen, though. He snapped, “Jane.”