by K M Cholewa
“Remember that man in the coffee shop?” Geneva said, back in her apartment. “The one who wrote something on your homework?”
“Kind of,” Rachael said.
“Well, we’ve become good friends,” Geneva said, heading for the kitchen. “He has lots of land. I told your father we can put your Aunt Tatum’s ashes out there.”
“And we’ll leave it out there?” she said.
“We’ll bury the ashes,” Geneva said. “I buried Ralph out there too.” She pulled a box of Ziploc bags from a drawer. She extended her hand for the paper dolls.
“Is it like a graveyard?” Rachael said, handing them over.
“It’s a wonderful place,” Geneva said. “A nice, quiet place.”
Geneva slipped the cutouts into a plastic bag for safekeeping and handed them back to Rachael. Then they headed for the living room. Geneva sat in the wingback with the old deerskin throw. Rachael sat across from her on the sofa. She fingered the plastic bag in her lap.
“Remember when you told me I should get a more interesting sofa?” Geneva said. “I think you were right. Maybe we can do that while you’re here.”
“I also said you should get a TV.” Rachael looked out from under her brow.
Geneva wagged a finger at her. She was glad to see that part of Rachael’s spirit was intact. But then Rachael’s face went solemn.
“Where’s Paris?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
“Did he move out because of Vincent?”
“I’m not sure why he moved out,” Geneva said.
“But he knows.”
“He knows,” Geneva said. “Remember? He was there.”
“Was he upset?”
“He was very upset,” Geneva said. “He loved her.”
“Maybe he needed some time to be alone.”
Just like Rachael’s father said he did, Geneva thought.
Rachael rubbed the plastic bag between her fingers, fanning out the paper dolls within.
“What about Vincent?” she said. “Does he know?”
“He does.”
“Is he going to talk at the funeral?”
“I asked him not to come,” Geneva said. “I thought it would be nice to keep it intimate. I thought Paris would be here.”
Rachael looked up from the bag.
“And he wouldn’t want to be with Vincent.”
“I had that feeling.”
“At first, when you said she died,” Rachael said, “I thought she killed herself.”
“She didn’t,” Geneva said.
Rachael looked off to the side. Her legs dangled from the edge of the sofa.
“We might move,” she said.
Geneva cocked her head.
“Who?”
“Me and my dad. He thinks it would help us.”
“Help you what?”
“Be happy.”
Geneva wanted to say it right then and there: come live with me. Protocol be damned and parental permission too. But she knew she had to wait. She intended to make Rachael the offer no matter what, no matter what Lee thought of it. He could put the kibosh on it, certainly, but Rachael was going to know it was out there. A place for her. With Geneva. And a place in Montana that was hers, solid and permanent.
That part had been John’s doing. Geneva had been nervous to tell him of her intention to invite Rachael to live with her. God knows, she hadn’t been excited at first at the prospect of a child in her life, and in that case, the child was just living across the hall. But she had to do what she had to do. Open her hand and let fall what may. Stand in love and see who stood with her.
She and John had been in bed listening to the night sounds, the owls and crickets. Geneva had taken a deep breath and then told him her plans. By the time she was done, both had their heads propped up on an elbow facing each other.
“I have to do this,” Geneva said, “for whatever it turns out to be.”
John puckered his lips. Then he rolled onto his back. He made a face like his neck was bothering him just a bit. Geneva continued to look at him. His eyes were closed. Then she nestled into the sheets too.
“Clans happen,” he said.
Geneva took his hand beneath the covers.
The following morning, Geneva had opened her eyes to find John already awake, arm behind his head and gazing at the exposed beams above.
“We ought to give Rachael a couple of acres,” he said. “That way, no matter what her father says, she knows she has something here that’s hers.”
Geneva eased herself into a sitting position, leaning back on her arms.
“We?” she said.
“Why not?”
Geneva stared at him. She adored his face. The strong jaw. The clear, blue eyes. She reached out and touched the morning stubble on his cheeks.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she said.
John rolled his head in her direction, and she laughed. At herself.
Of course he was sure.
Geneva looked at Rachael where she sat on the sofa. She has a place here, she thought. She was excited to tell her.
“Being happy sounds like a good plan,” she said.
The sky was solid, black and gray. Was it smoke or clouds above him? Lee couldn’t tell. But because there seemed to be a pressure inside of it, an intent to fall rather than rise, Lee suspected rain, or even hail.
He bumped along the gravel road in his rental car, following Geneva’s directions. The urn was in a box on the floor of the passenger’s side and safe against the jostling. It held Margaret and Tatum both. He had shipped Margaret to the mortuary in Montana and had the two packed together. It seemed an elegant solution as to what to do with Margaret’s ashes. Lee fully expected to get the job in Denver. Scattering Margaret here in Montana together with her sister would keep her closer. Since Geneva and Rachael seemed to have a relationship, Lee figured Rachael would be back. Her mother would not be far. Rachael could visit her, even if she didn’t know it.
Lee looked out at the flat prairie and distant shrouded mountains. It was strange, he thought, how things turn out. It was as though all this was the reason he had not known what to do with Margaret’s ashes, and the reason, too, that Rachael had gone to Montana with her aunt. Maybe his mistakes were not mistakes at all.
Lee pressed the brake as he passed a small hovel of a building. He looked into the rearview. He saw Geneva and a large, older man sitting in folding chairs on the western exposure. He backed up and pulled through the gate.
Geneva rose from her lawn chair and began her approach before Lee got the engine shut down. He lifted the urn out from the box on the floor and opened the car door.
“Rachael’s collecting rocks,” Geneva said, “to mark the site.”
It seemed an abrupt greeting to Lee. The previous night, he had spent only fifteen minutes with her dropping off the half-asleep Rachael. The woman seemed different than when he had met her on his last trip. At that time she had sat behind big, black sunglasses and was flanked by Indians. She’d seemed remote, of another world. On the phone after Tatum had been killed, she was helpful. But when he looked at her now, standing with the shack and the man behind her, he sensed something different. He instinctively stiffened, slightly on the defense.
“I’d like to talk to you real quick,” Geneva said, “if you don’t mind. I’d also like to be frank. Rachael is welcome here anytime,” Geneva said. “Long term. Short term. The door’s open. I wasn’t going to say anything until you got back from Denver but then thought that maybe having a few days to chew on it would be helpful.”
Lee shifted the urn into the elbow of his right arm. He had chosen it over the phone. It seemed overly shiny juxtaposed to the surroundings, the shack and the dust.
“But,” Geneva said, bringing her palms together as though in prayer and pressing her index fingers to her chin. “I’m not sure how to say this so I’m j
ust going to say it. I wouldn’t want her shuffled here against her will.”
Lee’s feelings of defensiveness reinforced themselves. The good feeling he had in the car seemed to form into one large drop that was slowly escaping him.
“I don’t mean I’d be unwilling to help out when you needed someone to step in,” Geneva went on. “I just meant, if she were to stay with me long term, it would have to be because she wanted it.”
Lee looked beyond Geneva’s shoulder toward the shack and the large man sitting there looking out at the land. Lee had an impulse to drop the urn into the dust, get back in the car, and hit the road out. To hell with all of them. He’d brought his daughter home, given her everything she could want, brought her to Montana for her aunt’s funeral, and made sure her mother’s ashes would be as nearby as possible. What was the great crime he had committed?
“Have I asked you for something?” he said coldly.
Geneva shook her head.
“No, you haven’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I know it didn’t work out for you before, and that’s why she was living with her aunt. I just wanted you to know that if it didn’t work out again,” she paused and sighed. “Actually,” she said, “it doesn’t matter to me if it’s your choice or hers. She’s welcome here.”
“We’re doing fine,” Lee said crisply, his exterior remaining cool. He stepped around Geneva and shook his head as he walked. It was happening again. The judgment. It was an insult wrapped in an offer of help.
Rachael then appeared coming around the side of the shack carrying rocks in her folded up shirttail. Lee noticed her eyes flit from one adult face to the other. She gathered the rocks in her shirt closer to her belly and hurried toward him.
“I got some rocks . . . ” she started, but her eyes got tangled on the urn tucked in his arm.
The large man stepped up behind Rachael, extending his hand to Lee over her head.
“I’m John,” he said. “Good to meet you. Thanks for coming. We figured we’d have the service first, and then I’ll make us all some supper, and we could sit with the evening for a while.”
The man had broken the tension of the moment. Rachael slipped off to drop her rocks into a bucket and then went to Geneva’s car to retrieve her Ziploc bag of paper dolls. She rejoined the group, and they started off — Rachael with her plastic bag, John carrying Rachael’s bucket of rocks, and Lee carrying the urn. The sky above had a strange weight, loaded at once with smoke and moisture. John sidled up to Lee as the small group crossed the prairie. He told Lee of the work it took to put in a well and of his plans to build a permanent structure on the distant slab.
“There’s twenty acres, total,” he told Lee. “Eighteen pretty soon. We’re giving a couple of acres to Rachael.”
“What?” Rachael said from behind them.
“Two acres of this is going to be yours.” He smiled over his shoulder. Geneva put a hand on Rachael’s back. John looked back at Lee. “We’re drawing up the papers,” he said. “It’ll be held in trust for her until she’s twenty-one. Then it’s hers to do with as she wishes.”
“So then I’d come live here?” Rachael said.
“You could,” Geneva said. “Or you could just let it sit here and be. You could sell it if you wanted to. It’s yours.”
Lee watched as Rachael’s gait shifted. She took longer steps and hit the ground more solidly with the bottom of her foot, exploring the surface of the earth.
“It’s a gift,” John said to him, in a man-to-man sort of voice. “Something solid.”
Lee saw nothing to distrust in the older man’s eyes. There were no grounds on which to protest. In fact, he envied Rachael the gift. Not in terms of dollars or real estate, he envied what it meant. He knew what they were offering. They were offering something they did not believe he could.
They reached an open area and the freshly dug trench, a grave the size for a large baby doll. The mound of clay and cobble sat near by with a shovel dug in and standing straight at the ready. John put down the bucket of rocks. Geneva stepped up to Lee and reached for the urn.
“Do you mind?” she said.
Lee hesitated. It was Tatum. That’s all Geneva knew. He handed her the urn. It was hers.
“Help me,” Geneva said to Rachael and each took a side. Geneva opened the lid, and they shook out the ash along the trench. Lee wondered if Geneva noticed anything amiss about the volume of ashes. But she said nothing. When the urn was empty, Geneva placed it to the side. The four stood around the trench.
“I couldn’t find Paris,” Geneva said. Then she closed her eyes and sniffed suddenly. She touched the back of her hand to her face, held it there for a moment before letting it fall as she reopened her eyes.
“It is in your Aunt Tatum’s name that we give you this land,” John said to Rachael. “On her behalf.”
Then he pulled the shovel from where it had been planted. He tossed the first spadeful over the ashes. The two sounds took turns, the thick pith as the spade dug into the mound, then the hush sound of clumps of dirt, sand, and small pebbles spraying over Tatum’s ashes, filling the spaces between them and building the ground back skyward. When he was finished, Geneva went down to a knee. She pulled a rock from Rachael’s bucket and started to outline the small trench. Rachael dropped to her knees to help.
Lee watched as rock by rock a rectangle took shape around the mound of dirt. It was Margaret’s funeral at last. He felt a sinking from his throat to his chest, his organs migrating back to where they belonged. He didn’t know it but he was being dislodged in time. He watched Geneva and Rachael working in silence. He wondered, given the choice, whom Rachael would choose? Whom did he want her to choose? He didn’t want to know the answer. Not to either question.
Impulsively, he reached down into the bucket. He withdrew a single rock and placed it in line in the nearly completed rectangle. Geneva looked at him over her shoulder. Rachael turned away from the rocks to her plastic bag of cutouts. She pulled out one of herself, one of Geneva, Paris, her mother, and Tatum. She pulled out Vincent too. She placed Tatum in the center of the grave. Then with the other pictures she created a circle around her. Tatum’s orbit. Lee watched her create the design, weighting each paper doll with a small stone.
Lee looked at the cutout of Margaret, his bride, and felt the weight of her disappointment. Then his eyes made their way around the circle. His own picture was not among them. He eyed the Ziploc. He was there inside.
“Rachael,” he said. She looked up from her work.
“Geneva wants you to know you can come here any time and stay with her. You can even go to school here, if you want to.”
Rachael was on her knees, looking over her shoulder. Behind her, Geneva bristled and shot him a look.
She put a hand on Rachael’s shoulder. Rachael turned her head to face her.
“Rachael,” she said. “We all want you to be happy. Be with your dad. Be with me. Or do both. Anything is okay. We all love you,” she said, and she liked that the words had slipped from her. “I love you,” she said. “I think you’re super.”
Rachael turned her face back to Lee and slowly rose to her feet. Lee looked into his daughter’s face, vaguely knowing that now he was the pull, the dismantling force.
Then, Rachael turned her back to him.
“I think I should stay with my dad,” she said to Geneva, backing into Lee’s legs.
Geneva smiled and nodded firmly. “Let’s all do a prayer,” she said.
They gathered then, all four, on one side of the grave. Errant splotches of rain, big as spit, began to plop on the ground around them. The drops were cold and promising, but there was no need to run for cover. Not quite yet. John’s arm slipped around Geneva’s shoulder. Lee held tightly to Rachael’s hand. Between the two men, Geneva and Rachael stood side by side.
Then, without thought nor eye contact, expectation nor obligation, Rachael’s hand lifted up as Geneva’s reached down. One acti
on did not lead to the other. There was no cause and effect, just simultaneous reaching out — Rachael’s hand up, Geneva’s down. The hands clasped in the space between them. No one gripped too tight. Yet, they held firmly. On the prairie, surrounded by the fires and the promise of rain, they stood beside each other.
They stood together.
49
The ground appeared only as Paris’s foot came down upon it. Above him, the valley was sealed. After he left the duplex that terrible day, he walked, forgetting he had a car and forgetting he had no home. A bird’s broken wing on the sidewalk caught his eye, and he saw the ants carrying their dead. But they were far away from him. In another world. They minded their own business and didn’t look back.
Paris was alone. He didn’t know how it was that he hadn’t realized it before. He was transparent. No outside. No in. Without edges, he was unable to touch the world.
His blind march led him to the concrete stairs that led beneath the barbershop. It wasn’t until he reached the bottom that he realized he no longer lived there. It stopped him just for a moment. He reared back and kicked in the door.
The apartment smelled of work, dirt, and sawdust. Paris stepped in and walked along the stacked piles of boards. Buckets of nails and screws, different buckets for different sizes, lined up where he once would sit untying his boots. A stainless steel sink wrapped in heavy plastic sat beneath the window where the moonlight, both real and false, had poured through the rails above. Three hard hats were stacked beside his closet door.
Paris took a deep breath. He stifled a scream. He knew better than to kick the buckets.
He bent over and placed his hands on his knees.
Tatum was gone.
Tatum was gone, and God forgive him, part of him was glad.
It was an awful truth. Paris did love her. But he had drawn her in and then asked her to change. She had drawn him in too. But the place into which she had drawn him was not a place he wanted to stay. He had entered just to reach her. He thought it was a place they would leave together. He thought he could show her the way.