“I’m still working out where I’m going, but staying here doesn’t feel right.” She realized how grateful she was to be able to talk to him about this. “Annie’s in a mental institution in California. I talked to her doctor.”
“Whoa. That’s heavy. What kind of crazy is she?”
“She’s been depressed for years, I guess. Sometimes she doesn’t talk for weeks. The medicines don’t help much. The doctor wasn’t sure if she’d know me. He said a visit from me might help her or it might make her worse.” Without saying anything about it, they’d gotten up from the steps and begun walking toward the forest trail. She reached out and took his hand. “Honestly, I don’t know if it would help me or make things worse for me either.”
Pat stopped and pulled her to him.
“Yeah, if you aren’t sure, maybe you just need some time. Maybe you don’t have to decide right now. About anything.”
***
The nights had turned chilly and the maple leaves had begun dropping their green masks. In front of the Bullhook, Pat watched Walt lower the hood of his truck, slapping it down hard till the latch caught.
“I checked her over good. She shouldn’t give you any trouble. She’ll make it to the airport and back fine.” Walt reached out to drop the keys in Pat’s hand.
“I can take her in my truck, Walt. There’s no need for this.” Pat kept his hands tucked in his pockets.
“Lordy, boy, you got to let me do this. Every other person in this town scraped the bottom of their wallets to give Parrot the money for this trip. This truck is what I got.”
“Yeah? But you organized this whole thing. Blew her away how you did that. Handing her the check and all. If you got to do something more, how about you weather-strip those windows in the cabin while she’s gone? That’ll make it easier for her to stay through the winter. Don’t you think?”
Walt folded his fingers over the keys and put his hand in his jacket pocket. He squinted up at Pat. “You think she’ll come back? After she gets a taste of the tropics?”
Pat laughed. “I don’t know. But, if she does come back, I want her to be warm.”
***
Mexico City. Wasn’t it always hot and sunny there? Should she even pack her jeans? After fretting all day over what to take, Grace tossed a few T-shirts and a couple of pairs of shorts, along with her underwear and toiletries, into the largest compartment of her backpack and cinched it up. Into the front pouch, she tucked her current diary, a pencil case with a selection of colored pencils, her Spanish-English dictionary, and the new binoculars Rose had given her.
Shauna and Jenn had been checking on her over the last month, trying to keep her spirits up. When she told them about her decision, they hadn’t hesitated.
“Well, it’s about time,” Shauna joked.
“You deserve this, Parrot. You’re gonna make us proud!” Jenn’s voice had a catch in it and Grace thought for a second that she might be crying.
“You’re not mad?” Grace asked. “Oh, that is such a relief. I was so afraid you’d be furious at me.”
“Are you kidding? We’ve always known you’re a fantastic artist. You were the only one who was in the dark about that.” Shauna sounded honestly happy. “I’m just relieved you haven’t decided to move in here with us, ’cause we’re full up now. Jenn’s boyfriend is moving in.”
“Really? Wow, Jenn!” Grace felt a twinge of regret at missing out on the next steps in her friends’ lives. “I hope he’s a good guy.”
“Oh, Shauna’s checked him out. He wouldn’t be moving in if she had any doubts. Plus, he’s studying to be a vet and not remotely interested in logging. I’m so happy!”
They’d wanted to take the day off work and meet her at the airport, buy her a drink, and send her off in style. But she told them she needed the time with Pat; saying goodbye to him was complicated.
“I’ll send you guys lots of letters. I promise. I’ll be back at Christmas, but you’ve got to write and tell me everything!”
Now Grace took a look around the cabin. Lyle had dropped off a bundle of get-well cards and laid the letter from Jane prominently on the kitchen counter. Reluctantly, she reached over, picked it up, and stuck it in her pocket.
How would this place look next time she saw it? A fantasy of showing it to her mother one day had begun to play in her mind. But Grace would not let her imagination spin that story out—she wanted to stay in the present moment for now. Inhaling Prosperity deep into her lungs, she whispered her thanks. Then she picked up her suitcase and walked out of the cabin.
***
Grace had had another conversation with Annie’s doctor. Then she’d called Rose.
“She says they tried shock therapy a couple of years ago; it didn’t work. Her memory hasn’t been good since then. The whole thing sounds awful.”
“Well, your life doesn’t have to be about Annie, dear. It needs to be about Grace.”
“What does that mean? That I should abandon her, now that I know she’s alive? Just forget she exists?”
“Of course not. But you don’t have to rush to her side, either. Didn’t the doctor say this has been going on for years? She might not even know you. What do you want to do? Ask yourself that first.”
It had surprised Grace when the answer to that question came to her almost as soon as Rose posed it. “I want to paint. I want to go to art school.”
“Ah.” Rose’s voice on the phone was a soft murmur, hard to distinguish from the one inside Grace’s head. “That sounds right.”
“And I don’t want to go to Seattle. I want to go somewhere away, far away. Maybe I should go to the tropics.”
“Grace?” Rose spoke louder now. “Is that your desire, or something you picked up from Annie?”
This question shook Grace’s confidence. All the rest of the day it nagged at her. She studied the walls around her; her fingers curled as they reenacted the process of painting each creature; her mind filled with faint echoes of the imagined conversations she’d had with Annie as she’d worked. That Annie, that fantasy mother, had guided her. But that Annie didn’t exist, probably never had.
When Pat came over that evening, she told him about her conversation with Rose and the one she’d had with herself.
“I made her up in my head. She was never the mother I believed she was. She liked that bird book, but she didn’t show me how to draw those birds.”
“No, Parrot, she didn’t. You did that yourself.” He gestured around the cabin. “And you did all this yourself.”
Grace rubbed her finger over the green head of the first frog she’d painted, the one in the corner by the door. She tapped the dot of white that animated its eye. “It’s still hard for me to believe that, even though I know you’re right. I was so convinced it was her spirit guiding me. But I painted it, all of it, myself.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled at Pat. “I’m not ready to meet her yet. I have to know what’s real first before I can step into her crazy world.”
He nodded. “Good plan.”
***
After she tucked her backpack under the seat in front of her and fastened her seat belt, Grace pulled Jane’s letter from her pocket and read the short message:
Parrot,
I believed what I did was the best thing for you and for my brother. We don’t get a rule book for how to decide the hard stuff.
We just have to trust our instincts.
Love,
Jane
Grace smiled and tucked the note back into the envelope. Her dad told her the same thing a long time ago. It had taken a while, but she was beginning to understand what it meant to trust her instincts.
She stuck Jane’s letter into her back pocket. Then she checked again to assure herself that she had the other envelope, the one she’d stuck in her front pocket along with her passport. The letter of acceptance to the Instituto Allende, the art school in Mexico City, the letter offering her a full scholarship. It was a crazy idea, but she was betting on the possibility
that sometimes crazy isn’t bad.
When Walt explained how the town had chipped in the money to pay for a trip to L.A. to see Annie, Grace was stunned. The people who had fostered a fiction in order to protect her from the truth now wanted to help her find it. This gesture of love brought tears to her eyes, and she hated to think that she was going to disappoint everyone. It had taken all her strength to tell him, “I can’t take it.”
“But why? You want to find Annie, don’t you?”
“No, not yet, Walt.” Grace could only hope that he would understand. “I need to find myself first.”
He put the check in her hand and nodded. “You take this, kiddo, go where you need to go and come back to us when you’re ready.”
The flight attendants gave their safety announcements and the plane headed down the runway. Grace held her breath as they left the ground. She looked out the window, expecting to be terrified, but the bird’s-eye view calmed her. The world was both bigger and smaller than she’d ever imagined.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this book has taken me on a long journey and many people have aided me as I traveled it. I’m sure I will inadvertently leave out some of you without whom this story would never have seen the light of day, for that I apologize sincerely.
My deepest thanks go the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts for existing when it did. I will be forever grateful for the stellar, supportive faculty, especially Wayne Ude, Bruce Holland Rogers, Kathleen Alcala, and Sarah Van Arsdale, my fiction mentors (wasn’t I lucky?), as well as Ana Marie Spagna, Carmen Bernier-Grand and Bonnie Becker, all of whom made this manuscript better. My cohorts and writing buddies who kept the fire going year after year: Frances Wood, Connie Connally, Iris Graville, Stephanie Barbé Hammer, Jackie Haskins, Janet Buttenweiser, Kim Lundstrom, Mattie Wheeler, and Sandy Sarr; my most generous readers, Molly Gloss and Karen Fisher; and my writing partner, Vicki Robin, who watched this thing grow from a seed and nourished it with her support the whole way. Thank you to my cousin, Cheryl Sindell, for writing alongside me and believing in me. Thanks to my friends who have watched me morph from a psychologist into a writer as my hair got grayer, and who never doubted I’d get a book published one day (or if they did they never told me), especially my book group of 30+ years who kept me reading widely and wildly.
The research aid I got from Cristy Lake at the Snoqualmie Valley Historical Museum was essential, as were the personal histories of the many woodsmen and their families I was privileged to interview and to treat. Thanks to many others for sharing their experiences, including Tom La Bell, Mike and Marsha Bartholomew, Jim Ward, Dan Brisbin, Eric Warren, Bill Denzel, and Randy Peak.
My offspring, Aaron Casson Trenor and Eden Ruth Trenor, have been essential guides on this journey; their reverence for the earth continues to inspire me.
All that said, I could not have written this book without the limitless support of my husband, Mel Trenor, who read every revision and kept on loving me.
About the Author
Deborah Nedelman is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, University of Washington, and the Northwest Institute for Literary Arts. She holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and an MFA in creative writing. Co-author of A Guide for Beginning Psychotherapists, and Still Sexy After All These Years: The 9 Unspoken Truths About Women’s Desire Beyond 50, her short stories have appeared in many venues including Concho River Review, Literary Orphans, and Contemporary World Literature. What We Take for Truth is her first novel.
Deborah first saw the Pacific Northwest in 1969, when she drove up I5 from Los Angeles. It was on that drive that the early seeds of this story were planted. Sharing the highway with logging trucks whose beds were filled with enormous logs, captivated her imagination. Soon after settling into her graduate work she began spending as much free time as she could hiking in the forests of the Cascade Mountains. Years later, when Deborah worked a therapist in Everett, Washington, families whose stories centered around those forests began to show up in her waiting room. While the newspaper headlines filled with stories of the conflicts between loggers and environmentalists, Dr. Nedelman was learning about the deeply painful toll the families of woodsmen and millworkers were paying as our society’s values shifted. What We Take for Truth is her exploration of the human side of this shift and the attempts we make to shield ourselves from the consequences of change.
The town of Prosperity, Washington does not exist but is based on the small logging towns established when the giant trees of the Cascades were considered a limitless resource and logging was a highly valued industry. The characters in this novel have lived in the author’s mind for years and have long backstories only alluded to in this book. None of them is based on a real person, but their individual attitudes and agonies are drawn from the many people who have passed through the author’s world.
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