After a brief discussion everyone left the table. My father and Charles and Ennis took the fishing boat to search the shores. My mother and the twins’ mother and Ardyce each walked a separate trail to our three nearest neighbors’ homes who had children of their own that Ophelia knew, and each came back with neighbors but without Ophelia and the adults all stood around in the yard, half-drunk and floating possibilities, she’ll turn up, she’ll turn up, the kids staring into the water and whispering, the roast and casserole cold in the kitchen.
“Where did Ophelia go after we came back from town?” said the twins’ mother, Anne. This was the first thing I heard her say about it. Two years prior Charles had moved her and the twins from Colorado Springs to nearby Lemmon so he could help Ennis run the family filling station. No one spoke of it, but Ennis had threatened him and made this a condition of his inheritance. Anne did not like this area, did not trust the lake, did not feel part of us, was terrified.
Anyone? Nobody knew.
“Ophelia didn’t come to town,” Patsy said.
“Sure she did,” my mother said.
Patsy shook her head. She was right. The two of them wore summer dresses their mother made two at a time, cut from the same piece of fabric, and because they had been quarrelling and spending more time away from each other, no one in the pandemonium of reunion, in the noise of stories and catching up and horseplay and all of it in two vehicles going back and forth to different ends of town—no one had noticed that there was only one twin, not two. No one except Patsy, and since then Patsy had all along been looking for Ophelia.
We took a breath together. The sun was going down. Ophelia was alone somewhere. The mothers filed into the house to call the police in Lemmon in case we’d left her there, and give a description of Ophelia, which was easy because it was a description of Patsy, standing right in front of them.
Then Walter, our favorite smartass fuck-up uncle and the only unmarried sibling, came out of the equipment shed carrying an old dive mask. He walked to the trail that led to the beach and the boat dock. My father went with him. The rest of us stood at the cliff’s edge and looked down on them as they navigated the trail in the draining light and walked to the end of the dock. Walter took off his shoes but did not remove any clothes. This scared me. My mother pulled us close. My grandmother began to pray. We had known all along what was coming, each one of us, and been unable to allow the thought of it. Walter wet the mask in the water and secured it over his long hair, then slipped into the lake and took a deep breath and dove straight down. His feet vanished through an audible ripple in the water. From where we stood we were blind to the subsurface, but my father could see. After a long silence he looked up at us standing in our solemn row and I know if he could he would have stopped time there, and we would still be standing on the edge of that cliff, in the last moment of our careless lives. He opened his mouth as if to speak. Moments later in a shuddering fit of amazement Walter came to shore with Ophelia’s pale, lovely body, and covered her poor unmade head with his T-shirt.
The next few hours are lapsed and folded, and I am not sorry that I cannot remember everything. In the few memories I have people move around with no purpose, from here to there and back, the screen door banging, people disappearing into darkness beyond the throw of porch lights. My cousin Jacob, thirteen years old, defecated in his pants and took them off then and there, half naked and sobbing in the yard. We pressed into our mothers’ bosoms but could not disappear. At some point I saw someone carrying Patsy’s limp body as if she too had been slain. Charles emerged with an axe and began cutting into the elm behind the cabin, a tree we loved, shouting obscenity and cursing Ennis to hell and disavowing his Catholic God. I found my sister Mary sitting in the corner of the utility closet on a pile of shoes and sat down with her and we tied all of the shoes and listened to flooded voices and noises and the shredding of family seams. Before any of us went to bed the sun came up.
My family and Dale’s family and Walter took rooms at Lemmon’s one motel and over the next three days we knocked on a lot of doors and tried to comfort each other, feed each other, say the right things. My mother spent most of her time with Anne and Patsy, shielding them from the clumsy sympathies of strangers and acquaintances. Anne had begun to faint periodically, almost on the hour, and was visited by a doctor who told her to eat something and drink more water. Patsy refused to change her clothes. We drove between their home and the motel, gathered at my grandparents’ house and stared. But my grandfather. Ennis. The police spoke to him that first early morning at the hospital in Hettinger. They were state police in plain clothes who knew him by name, tired men woken from their beds. They also spoke briefly to Anne, Charles, Walter, and my father, did more talking than listening, and then left us alone. I imagined secret maneuverings behind the closed door, some kind of legal vanishing. Afterward Ennis milled about our red-faced gatherings like a mute, as if he were also only a witness to tragedy, as if he had nothing to do with it. He did not speak a word of apology, did not ask forgiveness. This infuriated some of us and especially Charles, who wanted to kill him, and maybe always had. This was not the first time Ennis’ hubris and pride had ruined someone, and the brothers began unleashing their worst memories in a brotherly language, in storied code. Not the middle son, Dale, who held close to his own family, but young Walter and Charles, whose daughter was now killed. Hate and drink spilled from their mouths. Everything had come unthawed, and all at the wrong time. It was exactly what we did not need from these men. The morning of the funeral Charles approached Ennis for the first time, took off his own glasses and placed them on Ennis’ face. Ennis had refused glasses his entire life, refused dentures, resisted doctors and experts of any kind. He sat there behind the corrected lenses and looked at his eldest son.
“Can you see me now?” Charles said, and they did not speak again in their lives.
Anne did not want to bury her daughter in Lemmon, in a cemetery—as that one is—next to a gun range. She had very little family left herself, but wanted to take Ophelia home to their burial plots in Colorado Springs, where she had lived her entire life and where she and Charles had met and the twins had been born. All of us would have loved her for it, but Charles refused her, insisted Ophelia be buried in the same place he would one day be buried, and Anne was too weak and distant in that moment to resist him.
Ennis did not attend the church services, but when we arrived at the cemetery he was already there, and managed the courage to stand among us. My grandmother hooked her arm into his. It was my first funeral, and for someone I knew, someone in my family, someone my age, and I have nothing else to say about it. Nothing beyond what we all know about funerals. Ophelia, what can I say?
After she was covered in earth none of us went to the reception, a church affair organized by some do-gooding friend of my grandmother’s. Instead we all retreated to our quiet rooms, many of us with plans to leave the next day. We were tired and couldn’t sleep. We were malnourished and seeing food everywhere. We were alive.
That night my family went to bed at the first possible moment, fleeing the day. I lay awake next to Mary, who had never stopped crying but was now sleeping mercifully, when the phone rang in the room like a schoolbell. We all sat upright and my mother answered, the phone to her ear, one hand to her forehead. It was my grandmother, who told her Ennis wanted to stay at the cabin tonight, and it would be nice if she, my mother, would join him. He was coming to pick her up, she might as well wait downstairs so he doesn’t wake the kids. Too late for that, Mom.
Ennis believed in my mother, always wanted to kiss her first, give her the best education, save her the last piece of pie. Sylvia, he would say, is my favorite daughter. She’s your only daughter. Exactly.
She put on her jacket over her nightclothes and packed a pair of underwear and a toothbrush, my toothbrush, into her handbag.
“Would you like us to come along?” my father said.
“No, stay with the kids. I’ll be bac
k in the morning, it’s nothing.” She was whispering, which made us lean in, wake up.
“I love you,” my father said.
“Of course.”
Then she kissed all of us and turned the light off and pulled the door shut with a too-careful slip of the lock. We desperately needed a series of banal and meaningless moments, and she had tried to convince us this was one of them. But all of her soundless care made it seem otherwise, as if she believed each moment’s non-eventfulness balanced on a delicate wire of silence.
We lay there. The clock read eleven p.m. Half an hour went by.
Then I heard myself say my father’s name in the dark. I call him Dad, even to this day, but I did not say that. I said my father’s first name in the dark. “James,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “This isn’t right. Get your sister dressed.”
After the turn from Highway 12 my father didn’t know how to get there exactly, especially at night, and it took a long time. Our headlights swung up and down over the treeless hills, through sweeping bends, and we turned around at least three times.
Finally we found the cabin’s road and my father turned the headlights off well in advance, the moonlight more than enough for a drive. I wished he’d done it earlier because the bobbing headlights, among other things, had made me sick. The cabin was dark inside but the cabin itself looked white, and for a moment we were a little dazzled by the sight of it, unsure of our next move.
“Maybe I was wrong,” he said.
“I’m glad we came,” I said.
“Me too.”
My father would later tell me that he believed my sister and I had inherited my mother’s infallible heart, her ability to understand the needs of suffering people, which, he’d learned from her, is everyone, all the time. He said that in those few days he felt useless, like he was failing her, and whether he knew it at the time or not was looking to me for guidance. This was much later that he told me all this, after I was married with two children of my own. It sounded insane to me and I could not imagine it. At the time I was twelve years old.
I woke Mary and we walked hand-in-hand into the cabin, each carrying a canvas satchel, in mine clothes for everyone and in Mary’s some eggs and bread for the morning, food we’d taken from the cabin two days before.
One of the bedrooms was empty and my mother lay sleeping on a bottom bunk in the other. Mary and I climbed onto her. She started crying, and I don’t remember anything else. I was asleep.
When I awoke, I was alone. It was still night. At the foot of the bed lay a wrinkled letter addressed to my mother, written in my grandmother’s liquid script. Dear Sylvia. Even in a light so dim I knew her handwriting, because she sent me three letters every year, penned on two or three folded half-size pieces of paper and tucked perfectly into short envelopes. They were wonderful, artful things but hard to read. She sent a birthday letter, a summer letter, and a Christmas letter. I was always too slow in my reply. Later I would learn that this was a letter from my grandfather, in my grandmother’s handwriting. In her handwriting because my grandfather had grown up the son of an Irish immigrant on a struggling North Dakota farm, and never learned how to read. Ardyce took secret dictation from him, read him books, typed his correspondence, did his business, for fifty-three years. I did not know this. And this letter I did not try to read. It was not for me, and besides, Mary had appeared in the doorway. She wanted me to come with her. There was something going on in the cabin.
Everyone had arrived while I slept. Charles, Dale, Walter, Belle, Anne, my mother and father—all of the adults stood on the porch, in the dark, looking at the lake. Patsy, Jacob, and Dawn sat together on the sofa, drowsy and looking at the adults looking at the lake. Everyone was there except my grandmother.
“Grampa’s out on the boat,” Mary said. She was six. She stood on her toes and said that in my ear.
I somehow knew it already. I told Mary to wait with the others.
When I think back to this time I wonder if I’m not remembering other people’s experiences, seeing a moment the way someone described it to me later, when we finally began to speak of these things, rather than the way I saw it myself. My mother, for example, told me Charles had tried to cut down the tree; I may have seen him but I’m not sure. I did not witness Charles putting his glasses on Ennis’ face; Jacob told me about that, he cannot forget it. Our memories are no longer our own. They have become communal, inaccurate, and somehow more true. I say this because I now realize that my most comforting memory is of something I never saw: Ennis and Ardyce, after a long and eventful life together, drinking coffee into the night and drafting that letter, a final word Ennis had addressed only to my mother. Over the last few years both of my grandparents had become unimpressed with the thought of their own deaths and talked about them in casual conversation, though someone would always cut them short with common phrases like No, you’re going to live forever, and in my grandfather’s case might add, Unfortunately, and then laugh. But in the years to come when I was confronted with any kind of death, I would imagine the two of them facing it there in the kitchen as a matter of family business, putting the right words in order, tidying crumbs on the table.
When I opened the door everyone looked at me, but no one turned me away. Even then it felt too generous of them. I was tall for my age but I was not an adult. I wished they would force me back inside and relieve me of all maturity.
“This is tedious,” Charles said. Nobody had been replying to the things Charles said. Nobody felt they had the right. But we couldn’t have won him back. Ophelia’s mother and sister needed him and he would never again be there for them and years later they would leave him and he would go on to some other life, of which none of us would know a thing.
“Dad,” Jacob said. The other children had gathered in the doorway.
“Don’t speak, son,” Dale said.
Then none of us felt we could speak. We all tried to see, pick out a shape, find a flicker on the water. We weren’t sure what he had done, what he was going to do, if this was a watch or a vigil, if we were waiting or mourning. But we stood rigid and expectant.
“Fuck this. He’s either going to kill himself or he’s already done it or he’s too much of a coward,” Charles said, and with this his wife, Anne, the smallest of the women, took two quick steps from across the porch and sunk her hands into his hair and pulled with her entire body. This spun him sideways and they stumbled together and fell, my father and others reaching helplessly, Anne clawing at Charles’ face and reaching for his eyeballs and snarling until finally she rolled away and lay on the floor, frozen and soft, all these standing figures looking down on her and not knowing what to do.
Charles stood up bleeding from his cheeks and neck. Belle closed the other children inside the house. My mother kneeled, her long unbrushed hair covering Anne’s face, and in the short moment they were there said one thing to her. What it was I wish I knew. I like to believe it was something impossibly right. Then everyone was quiet.
Movement in the lake, a faint splashing sound. We all looked, drew into the yard. Someone was in the water. We hurried to the cliff’s edge and looked down at the dock, where a flowered dress lay empty, and then Anne, her voice like an electrocution, jarring our bodies with the name of her daughter, Patsy.
She was swimming into the lake. Now everyone was running. My father to the nearest neighbor and their dock, their boat. Walter and Charles and Anne sliding, bounding down the trail. Walter tripped and fell, recovered, ran full tilt to the end of the dock and dove in, followed by Charles, all of us calling to Patsy. Come back.
And then the most miraculous sight in all my life. In all that blackness, in the middle darkness of the lake, a light came on. It swung across the cliffs and banks, across the flat water, and found my cousin there, struggling in its direction, her limbs and her head less than a suggestion on the surface, dustings of light all around her. Patsy. Traveling into the dark, for my grandfather, who would be there waiting to p
ull her from the water.
ARIANA REINES
Dream House
FROM Ramayana chapbook
The pavilion has walls of rug when I’m a knight with blood
Foaming out my chainmail so I lie down on my cot in the cool
Darkness and when I close my eyes the falcons alight on my page’s
Glove. I’m fine to die in here, chill seeping into my bones, cold
Spring like a Carpaccio painting.
I fold my arms to compose myself like a coffinlid
Knight, a crypto knight I mean a dreamer. I mean a man
Who doesn’t exist with his rock-hard sword standing up up forever.
Foy porter honeur garder. Since I was seventeen I’ve been dreaming
I’m the maid in a house, a wide house in the mountains, and I’m
A Victorian maid, a domestic, I’m asthmatic I mean
Consumptive like Chopin or Proust and I’m honest
And servile not artistic or cruel and not clumsily
Dressed. I’m ugly in the simple way of having been made
So by my servitude and not in the unsimple way of having
Pursued what I pursued as a so to speak free woman. Do you remember
The days of slavery. I do.
I am wan and dowdy and I sleep on the floor.
Once in the dream the house belonged to my father
And a man said to me in his Schwizerdeutsch accent And Now
That You Have Entered The House Of Your Father.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 Page 25