What's Worth Keeping

by Kaya McLaren

  * * *

  Enough of a waxing moon lit her way that she didn’t need a flashlight as she walked along the ridge, its sharp edge just a few steps to her right as she passed through the saddles between small peaks. Eventually, she reached the top of Dege Peak, where she perched herself on a rock and dug into her backpack for a granola bar and a crisp apple.

  A sliver of green light over the eastern horizon hinted at the arrival of the sun. Slowly, it grew and grew until there was pink … until the pink and gold spread across the sky like a promise and lit up the mountain with alpenglow. She chose to believe the sky was hearkening a new day for her after her long night of the soul.

  * * *

  From farther down the trail, Amy watched an elk turn his head and work his antlers into an impossibly thick cluster of trees and then slip the rest of his body through it.

  Many, many years ago, she had watched the same thing with her dad. The next day, they had returned to the same spot and pushed their way between the trees and through the branches just as the elk had. What they discovered was a sanctuary inside a fortress.

  Her dad had explained that once there had been an old tree right in the middle where they were standing now. Subalpine firs could regenerate and reproduce asexually when their branches touched the soil, and all of the old tree’s branches had done just that, creating new trees in a circle around it. Then, the old tree died and decayed while the others matured, and that was how these circles of trees were formed.

  Not wanting to disturb the elk, she walked on farther. Further down the trail, she noticed another cluster of trees and wandered over to it. It appeared impenetrable, and as she stood there looking up at the wall of green branches, it felt like a metaphor for this very moment in her life, where she could not see a path forward or a way to the other side. Taking a big breath, she considered that both likely needed to be approached in the same way—one day at a time or one branch at a time … even when it seemed no progress was being made, even when she was only going on faith that the other side of this was a better place to be, even when it seemed impossible. Both would take some determination.

  Lifting a branch, she slid under it and then pushed her body through some smaller branches until it hit one that wouldn’t give. She slid under that one as well and found herself wedged between two tree trunks, spaced marginally farther apart than pickets on a picket fence. Her body protested. There were just so many parts that were tender after her two surgeries, and she realized this had probably been a stupid idea. But here she was. She could go forward or go back. So, despite the resistance of branches, she pushed one leg up and over, where the gap was a little larger, then pivoted and pulled the other leg through. Closing her eyes and covering her face and chest, she pushed her way through the rest of the branches.

  Inside the circle grew huckleberries, Indian paintbrush, and lupine. She found a spot to sit and listened to sparrow songs for a moment before lying back. The ground was soft from frost heaves, the process by which moisture in the ground expands with freezing temperatures and then melts, leaving the soil fluffy and ready for new life.

  She rolled over onto her side, curling up and holding her legs. It still wasn’t completely comfortable to lie like that, her chest squished together in a way that felt as if the skin could pucker and tear off the tissues below. The outside edges of her boob stumps felt bruised still. She hated how the region felt tingly, like a foot that had fallen asleep, and wondered to what degree the nerves would regenerate and to what degree they would not. Remembering the first times Paul had touched her breasts, or taken off her shirt and kissed them, she shut her eyes as if she could block out the grief. So many people thought breast reconstruction was the answer, but she didn’t want reconstructed boobs. She wanted her boobs—the ones she could feel. That was the loss. A nipple tattoo wasn’t going to do it. She wanted her real nipples, the ones she could feel. No, reconstructed boobs weren’t going to trick her into thinking nothing had been stolen from her. An erogenous zone had been stolen.

  She remembered the early days, before the bombing, before parenthood, when Paul used to bring a kitchen chair into the bathroom while she soaked in a candlelit bath and play his guitar for her. Eventually, he would set it down, take off his clothes, and slide in behind her. She leaned back on his chest, and his hands always found their way to her breasts. She would never have that again.

  Sitting up, filled with sadness, she surveyed her surroundings. What had seemed like a sanctuary now felt isolating, and she wanted to leave. Slowly, she stood, reaching out to a nearby branch for support. She missed having a body that didn’t feel fragile and unfamiliar. Then she began to pick her way out of the subalpine atoll.

  For a moment, inside the labyrinth of greenery, the back of her coat became hung up on a branch. Unable to reach it, she momentarily gave up and simply cried.

  When she was done, she pushed back just a little instead of forward and, with a twist, freed herself. She stepped over the place where two trunks touched, slipped through the gap, and climbed under or pushed her way through the rest of the branches back to the outside world.

  Paul

  He paused before he opened his truck door, stepped out, and walked across the parking lot and into the station … into the place where people were questioned—people who had been beaten and robbed or raped, people whose kids had run away or simply disappeared, people who appeared to have a mental illness and no treatment, people who had made the biggest mistake of their lives in some way … getting behind the wheel after too many and killing someone … getting mad and hitting someone over the head with a beer bottle the way they did in movies … playing with their dad’s gun. Yes, he sucked it up and walked into the hell where people suffered. But a voice inside of him, his heart, implored him not to.

  He had three more years until retirement. Just three sounded like so little, but two hundred fifty days times three was seven hundred and fifty days. It was an unthinkable number of days. And yes, if he stayed, he might get promoted and get a raise and that would factor into the amount of money he would receive from his pension for the rest of his life. The rest of his life. That seemed uncertain in this line of work.

  Years ago, he’d had something to prove to his dad. Now, he no longer did.

  He looked around the precinct, at his captain’s office, the office he thought might be his one day, and the things that had mattered and didn’t seem to now. He just wanted to go back to Chama and finish his house and make it nice for his wife. He wanted to be near his girl. He wanted to walk in the wilderness.

  However, just then Captain Lopez waved him over and so he walked back into that sad world as if he were walking down a slope into water that would eventually cover his head.

  * * *

  Later that week, Paul stood at the crime—a woman, eye blackened and swollen, boyfriend dead in the doorway, shot three times in the chest. In a back room, a baby cried. It was only the wee hours of Thursday morning.

  “My baby,” said the woman to Paul as two officers led her out to a car to take her to the station. He nodded to let her know he would take care of the baby. She had made the call to 911, saying only that she needed help. Two hours earlier, officers had responded to a concerned neighbor’s call to their home for possible domestic violence. At that time, she had insisted that everything was okay. Paul remembered a similar call at the beginning of his career. He responded to a neighbor’s complaint but could do nothing in the face of the woman’s insistence that everything was okay. He knew it wasn’t. The next morning, she was dead. Paul carried the weight of that to this day. He didn’t know what he could have done differently, but he knew that there had been a fork in the road there—an opportunity to intervene and save her life. She hadn’t chosen it. No one should have expected her to be brave enough to. It was an imperfect system for an imperfect world.

  Paul called CPS as he walked into the back room to pick up the crying child, leaving the detectives who had begun collecting evidenc
e. Her diaper was dirty, so Paul changed it and hoped a greater degree of comfort would help her stop crying, but she sensed that something was very wrong, and she wanted her mother, so all Paul could do was rock her, coo reassurances, and quietly sing. The room seemed like a normal baby’s room in a normal house, pink like the color of love and happiness. Her little brown curls tickled his jaw as he held her.

  He remembered coming home from the federal building and holding Carly like this, just holding her and holding her, marveling that she was alive when danger was ever present, wondering why he had ever thought bringing a child into this horrible world was a good idea or kind in any way, wondering how he was going to protect her from everything.

  In his arms, the baby began to give in to the exhaustion from crying so hard for so long. He sat in a rocking chair with her and wondered what would become of this little one.

  After the bombing, not wanting his supervisors to doubt his fitness for the job, he had gone to a therapist not provided by the department and paid not with insurance but with cash. He had been so desperate for respite from his nightly nightmares. She asked him to hold a doll, symbolic for his child-self, and to allow her to guide him through a meditation of sorts, a review of his life, where he would show his child-self significant scenes from his life and say to his child-self, “It’s okay, I’m here, I’m holding you, I won’t let anything happen to you, I love you unconditionally.” But Paul could not get over the doll. He held it for a moment, as he had held one of the dead children from the day care in the federal building, then stood up and gave it to the therapist. “This is making it worse,” he said simply, and walked out, certain that no one knew how to help him because it simply couldn’t be done. To the extent possible, he would have to help himself, and to the extent it wasn’t possible, he’d have to figure out how to simply live with it.

  Now, he held this baby and wanted to protect her from seeing anything tragic. She had likely already seen and heard too much. What he wanted to do was take her out of this house, out of the madness of this “civilized” world, out into nature. It was not possible to do that for this baby.

  He thought again of that therapy session and realized that if he held his baby-self the way he was holding this baby, he would also not show him tragedy and assure him that he would take care of him. As he would for this baby, he would get his baby-self out of here. It was a moment of pristine clarity. As of today, he had officially seen enough. He held the child in his arms, rocked her back and forth, and thought, Yes, I think I am done.

  Immediately he felt weight lifting off of his chest, weight he had once thought was Amy. He paused for a moment just to feel it continuing to lighten as his decision sank deeper and deeper into his consciousness. The baby in his arms stopped crying, sputtered a little bit, and then fell asleep. Paul kept rocking, lulling both of them into deeper levels of peace.

  After the social worker came and took the baby from him, Paul checked on his detectives. Then, instead of walking through the bloody crime scene, he walked through the house to the back door and stepped out and into the sunshine.

  Back at the office, he talked with Captain Lopez. At first, his captain wanted to talk about the stressors in Paul’s life—his wife’s cancer and cancer treatment, the accusation and investigation, seeing Robinson in the hospital, and he tried to caution Paul against making such an important decision that was a reaction to any of these things. But Paul explained that Robinson’s situation was an involuntary reaction to these things and that every day at work was a little like lead or mercury poisoning—slow, drop by drop, where a person could take it until the day it killed him, and the thing was, no one knew exactly which drop was the one that would put them over the limit. He wanted to leave with integrity, he explained, but he really had reached his limit. Still, the captain wanted him to consider all of his options—a leave of absence, light duty in the office for a time, transfer from homicide to a different department—parking, maybe … all the ways to try to hang on until his official retirement age. Paul closed his eyes to hide his distress. And then Captain Lopez looked at staffing and at the amount of Paul’s leave he had banked, and they determined Paul could use up his remaining leave to fulfill the courtesy of two weeks’ notice and remain in good standing.

  He put his firearm and his radio on the table. That was it. He was free.

  * * *

  Paul wasted no time returning to Chama. For almost three days, he felt good about his progress. He had repaired the roof, but not the ceiling. He needed to route new wires to the light fixtures first.

  He had even taken a guitar lesson from Mr. Martinez to begin learning scales.

  Since it was now Saturday, he left a note by Rae’s phone, thanking her and letting her know he was in town, then he left her house. It was no surprise, then, that later that day she stopped by on her way to the grocery store.

  “Wow! You accomplished a lot in just a few days!”

  “Thanks!” he said. “I hope Amy will love it.”

  “Oh.” Rae seemed surprised by that, which made no sense to him since that had always been the plan. “I wasn’t sure whether you were still thinking of moving here after you retired or whether you were thinking of selling.”

  He could tell there was something she wasn’t saying. “Why would I sell?”

  She deliberated and then spoke. “Well, Amy told me about the divorce papers.”

  “I didn’t give Amy any divorce papers.”

  “No, you didn’t.… She found them. She asked me not to say anything.”

  He looked at Rae, the gravity of the situation hitting him like a wrecking ball. “Oh God,” he said with his face in his hands. “When?”

  “On the day she learned she probably had cancer. She was looking for her insurance policy.”

  Paul shut his eyes and exhaled a deeply regretful, “Oh.” He shook his head in disbelief at how badly he had screwed up. “Oh my God.” How could a person possibly apologize for making the most horrifying moment of a person’s life exponentially worse?

  “Have you heard from her?”

  “No.” He rubbed his forehead. “I thought, well, surely she was out of reception … and she clearly needed space…”

  “Well, she calls me at seven my time, six hers, on Saturday nights, so you might want to try calling her around seven thirty … see what you can straighten out over the phone.…”

  He considered that and shook his head. “It’s a way too important conversation to have over the phone.” He thought for a moment and then asked, “Do I go up there uninvited and find her?”

  “Well, you know, tomorrow is her birthday, so you have an excuse. If you wait for her to come home, she might be the one with divorce papers.”

  “Do you really think she’d do that?”

  Rae shrugged. “She’s not quite herself. Anything is possible. Did you get her a good present?”

  “Uh…”

  “Oh, buddy,” said Rae, shaking her head, “get down to Antoinette’s store before it closes today and buy her a piece of jewelry.” She looked at her watch. “Go. Go right now. Then go to Albuquerque and get yourself a ticket for an early flight tomorrow. Go!”

  Carly

  The week’s guests had been two grown sisters with one daughter each. One of the sisters was married to a U.S. diplomat who had recently been transferred from Zimbabwe to Georgia—the country, not the state, which up until that week Carly had no idea existed. Her daughter, Isabella, was thirteen and loved being in nature with horses. The other grown sister was an attorney along with her husband in Florida. Her daughter, Sydney, was fifteen and went to a private boarding school for rich kids and was a competitive swimmer and horse jumper. She was competitive about everything else too.

  On days that Carly rode with them, Isabella liked to ride in the back and ask Carly questions about what a normal childhood was like, and Carly liked asking Isabella about hers. Isabella used to ride horses among zebras and giraffes in Zimbabwe—an experience that w
as nearly inconceivable to Carly.

  All of this made Sydney jealous and more competitive. She would talk about the fancy horses at the stables she rode, and her riding coach who had been in the Olympics, vacations all over Europe and the Caribbean her family had taken, and how it looked like she was going to get a swimming scholarship to some elite private college Carly had never heard of. It had been annoying, to say the least. But since Sydney was a guest, Carly politely asked questions about her life too so that she would feel important and have a good time.

  Sydney would then ask Carly questions intended to make her feel inadequate, but since no part of Carly wanted to be like Sydney, it didn’t get under her skin too much. After a couple of days, Carly began to give answers that would throw Sydney, like how she used to believe it was important to be excellent, but now it was more important to her to be kind and happy than excellent. Still, Sydney kept at it.

  “So, Oklahoma State, huh?” Sydney said, disdain evident in her voice.

  “Maybe,” Carly replied. “I don’t know. I’m reevaluating my life.”

  “Aren’t you a little young for that?” Sydney’s mom called back.

  “Yep,” Carly agreed. “It’s just … I used to care about my grades so much. I was at the top of my class. And then my mom got cancer and none of it mattered to me anymore. So, I’m just trying to figure out what does matter.”