Far from Here

by Nicole Baart

  “You’re back.” Eve’s smile was tentative, but she hurried to Dani and gave her a quick, enthusiastic hug. “I saw your sign.” She hitched a finger over her shoulder to indicate the discreet neon invitation hanging in the window.

  Dani nodded. “If I have anything to come back to.”

  “Oh, you do.” Eve’s eyes glinted. “Is your morning booked?”

  Dani’s laugh was brief but genuine. “Not exactly.”

  “Then you have to squeeze me in. I ran into Kat at the gas station and saw what you did to her. I think I’m ready to go short.”

  “Don’t you have to be at the bakery?”

  “Mark’s there. He’ll manage.”

  It was hard at first for Dani to settle into the persona that her clients expected of her. The weather, local gossip, and Eve’s ongoing complaint about the grocery store’s new bakery line were topics of conversation that seemed as complicated to Dani as debating the fine points of foreign policy. But the routine was old and familiar, and her hands worked instinctively. Her mind slowly followed.

  As she cut Eve’s hair, the phone began to ring. Dani got so sick of running back and forth from the styling station to the front desk that she ended up propping her scheduling book on the counter beside her. Her days began to take a patchwork shape, minutes and hours filling in with work for her hands and people to distract her mind. Her heart.

  “I love it,” Eve said when Dani was done. Then she tipped her double the amount she usually did, pressing the folded money into her palm and closing her fingers tight around them both. “We miss Etsell so much, honey. But we’ve missed you too. Welcome back.”

  July evaporated in a humid haze of mundanity. It was a season of tedium for Dani, of remembering details and forcing herself to function and determinedly placing one foot in front of the other. Because Dani felt obliged to follow Hazel’s lead, she did her best to pick up the pieces of her life, but the motions were rote. She considered herself little more than an automaton, a well-oiled machine that was capable of performing her daily routine with almost seamless precision—and with only the occasional hiccup. But it was a two-dimensional life, the existence of a paper doll.

  Two weeks after Dani picked herself up, a thunderstorm rolled across the prairie sky and dumped nearly two inches of water on Blackhawk. The day was dark as night and the roads rushed with water that ran gray from the rich topsoil of surrounding fields. It was oppressive to Dani, heavy and thick with the suggestion of things unseen, of power and fear and loss, pinning her to her bed until the storm broke by midafternoon and the sun poked tentative fingers through the clouds.

  She didn’t go to work that day. Didn’t even bother to call her appointments and reschedule. The first few people came and found La Rue locked tight, but word spread quickly and the rest of her clients didn’t show up. No one ever mentioned that an entire day had slipped through Dani’s hands unnoticed. They simply phoned in later and set new dates for their highlights and perms, their French manicures and foils.

  “You’re different,” Char told her one night over Mexican.

  Dani glanced up from her carne asada tacos, but she couldn’t tell if Char thought different was good or bad. She shrugged, peeled a corner off one of her corn tortillas, and popped it in her mouth. “Does that make you happy?”

  “Does that make you happy?”

  Dani didn’t know how to respond. Happy? Was that even a possibility anymore? “I’m fine,” she said, so that Char would stop looking at her like that.

  But Dani’s mother didn’t seem impressed by her answer. “Fine?” Char balled her napkin in her fist. “You can’t be fine, Danica. I’m fine. Natalie and Kat are fine. You’re . . . you’re more than fine. You have to be.”

  “What in the world is that supposed to mean?”

  Char’s eyes were tortured, her fingers stiff as she worried the paper napkin until bits of fiber and dust crumbled onto her half-eaten plate. She looked haggard, old. Dani wasn’t used to seeing her mother fall so tragically short of the sensuous, engaging woman she always tried so hard to portray. Her roots were showing again, and she had applied powder to her cheeks with a heavy hand—there were deep crevices around her eyes where the makeup had caked.

  “Mom,” Dani said—using a designation she rarely used with Char—“I just lost my husband. I’m a . . .” she was going to say “widow,” but the word got stuck in her throat. “I think I’m doing okay, considering.”

  “But I don’t want you to be okay.” Char shook her head. “You have to be better than okay. You’re the only one who got out intact.”

  It was the first time Dani ever heard her mother express anything other than a sort of defiant pride for the way their lives had unfolded. Char was the tough single mom who managed to raise three equally tough girls. Girls who weren’t drug addicts or incarcerated, but who dealt with their own issues all the same. There was Natalie, who ran away from everything: her family, her past, even men. Kat, who embraced her mother’s life because it was all she knew. And Dani had never stopped to wonder where she fit, but looking at her life through Char’s eyes, she realized that as the baby of the family, she was also the only one who seemed to escape the sad legacy the Vis girls were doomed to accept. A successful business, a loving husband, surely children on the way. And now where was she? Broken, alone. Just another cog on the wheel of a family that was bound to cycle around, spinning toward ever more heartache.

  “It’s all right,” Dani said, reaching across the table. She took her mother’s hand in her own, extracted the ruined paper napkin. There were a dozen things she could have said to ease Char’s distress. But they were lies, every one of them. The truth was, Dani didn’t know if it would ever be okay; if there would come a day in some far-flung future when she could think of her life with anything other than regret. And yet, it was her job to smooth the way. To brew coffee and make eggs, to clean up the messes her sister made and make sure her mother didn’t miss physical therapy when the stilettos she wore aggravated the slipped disk in her back. They needed her. They needed her to live a charmed life. So Dani said the only thing she could force out. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  It tasted like a lie on her tongue.

  Danica

  When I was nine, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Emmi was the biggest liar I had ever met.

  I had spent most of my childhood taking care of myself, or being half watched by my older sisters. But when Natalie let me burn my hand trying to boil milk for hot chocolate, Char mustered up a little motherly responsibility and secured the services of our elderly next-door neighbor. The first time I went to Emmi’s house, my hand was bound too tightly in an Ace bandage, and the throbbing was so intense I was sure I was seeing double—double chins drooping beneath Emmi’s crepe-paper cheeks. Double folds of powder-soft skin when she reached out trembling arms to take me from my mother. She looked as if her skin had been loosely draped over a frame too tiny to bear it—as if a stiff wind could fill her up and pull all the wrinkles tight like a breeze shaking out a sail.

  “We’ll have a lovely afternoon,” she said in a voice that sounded like it was a day or two away from wearing out completely. “I’ve made tea.”

  Char gave her a grateful smile and squeezed Emmi’s bony hand. Then she patted me on the head like I was a lapdog and scooted down the front steps before I could utter a single protest. Of course, this was the last place on earth I wanted to be—babysat by some woman who was old enough to remember the Flood. Though she lived next door, I had seen her only a handful of times, and the scarce sightings I had been afforded did not give me much hope for my new afternoon routine. Emmi used a walker when she left the confines of her run-down home—the only framed house in our little trailer community—and the prominent curve in her back put me in mind of a storybook hag, the sort of witch who haunted dark forests and preyed on unsuspecting little children.

  But I suspected. I suspected a lot. And I was careful to keep my eyes wide
and my coat on as Emmi closed the door behind us.

  The old woman led me wordlessly into her kitchen and offered me a seat at the table by pressing her hand on my shoulder until I dropped into a chair. It creaked beneath my weight and I couldn’t help but wonder how long it had been since someone besides Emmi had bellied up to her damask-covered table.

  The tablecloth had been recently starched and the curving folds that almost touched my lap were scratchy-stiff. From what I could see, her house was so clean it was almost sterile. The only thing that seemed even slightly out of order was a neat stack of mail in the middle of the round table—crisp, white envelopes addressed in the lovely, indecipherable scrawl of a foreign language and smudged in the very corner by a postage stamp that featured a tiny blue-and-white flag. Other than that, the table was empty save for a porcelain cup that held something dark and tepid.

  “Do you like tea?” Emmi asked, indicating the flowered cup. I gave it a sniff and was reminded of the scent my feet kicked up when I went thrashing through the undergrowth near the river.

  “Not so much?” There was a smile in her sandpaper voice.

  I hazarded a peek and found Emmi regarding me with warm, hazel eyes. They were pale and a little milky, like hot cocoa that needed a good stir. But the way they crinkled in the corners made me think for a moment that maybe my reclusive neighbor was not so frightening as I had first imagined.

  As it turned out, Emmi was a ninety-two-year-old sprite, a little girl trapped in a dying woman’s body. After the first time, when she met me at the door, Emmi merely hollered from the kitchen when I arrived. I could hear the faint, “Don’t just stand there—come in!” through the poorly sealed door. She was always waiting for me, queen of her cushioned chair as she presided over a pot of coffee so dark it was almost espresso. When she learned that I hated tea, she took to making me coffee so hot and stiff I could practically stand a spoon up in it. But she brought down the temperature with ice-cold cream she poured from a yellow-handled pot, and softened the bitter bite with as many sugar cubes as I wanted.

  As we drank our coffee, she regaled me with tales from the old country, stories of a childhood in Finland that I knew were far too spectacular to be real. Of Shrove Tuesday and the bonfires of Christmas trees that they would burn on sea ice just off the shore. And trading pussy willows for treats on Easter, partying all night during summer solstice.

  The most far-fetched stories were also my favorite, a deliciously inappropriate collection of tales that centered around the wood-fired sauna Emmi’s father made with his own hands. She tried to convince me that clothes weren’t allowed in the sauna. But I knew that couldn’t possibly be true. Nor was it likely that Emmi and her siblings ran from the steam of the little wooden hut to jump in snowbanks as high as my head. She raised her hand to show me how deep, and I took a sip of my coffee so I could hide my disbelief.

  For the most part, my afternoons with Emmi were quiet. Sometimes I read to her, but more often than not I did homework while she wrote letters that always began the same way: Rakas sisko . . .

  It wasn’t until I had been going to Emmi’s house for over a month that she finally opened more of her home to me. I slumped at the table one afternoon, tired and out of sorts because Char hadn’t come home the night before and I had stayed up with one ear pricked toward the door, listening for her. When Emmi put an extra sugar cube in my coffee and asked me what was wrong, I burst into uncharacteristic tears.

  “Oh, kultaseni,” she murmured. She never asked me what was wrong, or even why I was crying, but she fluttered her hands around me until I got to my feet. Then she herded me through the kitchen and down the hallway, past the bathroom to the dark paneled door at the farthest corner of her little house. When she reached past me and turned the knob, my tears dried up as quickly as they had come.

  Stepping into Emmi’s bedroom was like entering another world. The walls were covered with peeling paper, and the floor was an extension of the same gray carpet that stretched throughout the rest of the house, but I barely noticed those things. Instead, my eyes were riveted to Emmi’s bed—or what I assumed was her bed. In the very center of the room there was a piece of furniture the color of black walnuts that rose nearly to the ceiling. Two low steps led up to a high platform that was covered in rich cloth the color of crown jewels. There were side walls on the fairy-tale bed, and an arching top that was adorned with brocade curtains drawn back by knotted gold cords. On the arching frontispiece I could see beautiful curved whorls carved into the glossy wood. The whole thing reminded me of a puppet theater, a glorious, shining absurdity that had been snatched from some ancient dream.

  But I hardly had time to take any of this in, because Emmi ushered me across the floor and shooed me into the magnificent bed. She laid her palsied fingers on my cheek, pressing my head on a pillow that smelled of rosewater, then pulled a whisper-soft blanket over me. Her hand was light as a mother’s touch on my back, rubbing in a pattern that smoothed me to a deep and dreamless sleep before I could even realize how exhausted I was. I drowned in that bed, comforted in a sanctuary where I felt wholly protected, utterly safe. There was nothing to worry about in Emmi’s hiding place.

  When I woke, the curtains had been drawn around me and I was secreted away in a niche so magical, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if I peeled back the heavy drapes to find a unicorn nosing for clover in Emmi’s bedroom.

  “Thank you,” I told her when I emerged, bleary-eyed and still shaking off the soporific effect of the extraordinary slumber.

  Emmi smiled over her letter and motioned to the chair across from her with a flick of her fingers. “I brought that bed with me from Finland. I’ve been sleeping in it ever since I was a little girl.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “It’s a bed for a princess. Only a princess can see the carvings. Did you see them?”

  I thought of the swirls on the wood, the intricately worked twists and spirals that were cut in images of doughnuts and biscuits and fat loaves of dark bread.

  “Did a baker carve it?” I asked.

  “No.” She smiled. “No, prinsessa.”

  But that was probably the worst lie Emmi ever told. I was no princess.

  Etsell called me princess too, but he did it only in fun. “Buck up, princess,” when he thought I was being a wimp. Or “Don’t hurt yourself, princess,” if I did something unforgivably clumsy that nearly ended in an emergency room visit. But it never bothered me. What Emmi didn’t know about me was that I never wanted to be a princess.

  Emmi gifted me with nicknames, a love for coffee, and a safe place to land for almost two years of afternoons while Char was off working an assortment of dead-end jobs. But when Emmi died in her sleep just before I turned eleven, the greatest legacy she left me with was a deep love for her—and a deep love for the bed where she allowed me to find rest.

  On the afternoons when she could tell that I needed it, Emmi would take me to the bedroom and let me crawl into her bed. Sometimes I would sleep, but sometimes I would lie in the slanted light from her wooden blinds and watch the way it cast shadows on the smooth carvings in the wood. I thought about the hands that made it, the tools that he must have wielded as he translated pictures from his mind to the wood grain of the bed that he so obviously adored. Why else would he cut with such grace? Such tenderness?

  I wanted the bed, but I knew that I would never get it. Emmi had a sisko in Finland, and a niece who had moved to New York to go to college. A generation had passed, and now there were great-nieces and -nephews and even great-great relatives that polka-dotted a map of the United States. They had never come to visit Emmi in the time that I knew her, but someone came for her treasures all the same. It was a woman about Char’s age with creamy skin and eyes like Emmi’s, and she ignored me when I said hello.

  Of course I mourned Emmi. But I mourned her bed too. The comfort it was, and the history. The life that it encompassed, all the many things and places it had seen. I
thought of it often when I lay in my own bed at night, and sometimes when I caught my knee on the exposed metal corner, I would curse the machine that made my frame in a factory. It seemed wrong to me that something I lived so much life in could be made by a taciturn, impersonal piece of machinery.

  It was no wonder I fell in love with restoration, with old relics of forgotten furniture that other people resigned to the junkyard. I loved mending what was broken. Taking something that had been cast aside and making it new.

  I thought of Emmi when I finally worked up the courage to go back to the garage in the beginning of August. It had been almost three months, twelve weeks to the day, since my telephone had rung with the sound of my world falling apart. I still felt like it was lying in pieces around me, but the debris of my life was something I merely ignored. Something I trampled underfoot every single morning when I got up to go on as normal, to face the routine of my days with none of the passion I had known before.

  If left to my own devices, I would have never changed a thing. I would have kept doing exactly what I was doing—living a shadow life. But Char worried about me. She cried, which was something I had rarely seen her do in the quarter century I had known her as my mother. It was horrifying. Thankfully, Kat swung the opposite way in her concern and did her level best to regale me with stories and glitter that more often than not left me a little queasy for my sister. She was all punch and laughter, hard drinks and distraction.

  And my family members weren’t the only ones who took it upon themselves to make sure I did more than mope my life away. Benjamin came by once a week to drag me outside with his subtle implications and force me to put my hands in the earth while he mowed the lawn. Worst of all was Hazel. After she gave me the trestle table, she never mentioned it again. But whenever I saw her, whenever she stopped by my house or bumped into me around town, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was looking over my shoulder. That she expected something of me that I had not yet accomplished. Her disappointment was almost palpable.