“You didn’t see anything at all?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Well, nothing that might explain where the water’s going. I did see Holly the Turtle. She’s living beneath a stand of roots about an hour away from here.” He smiled and tousled my hair. “She sends her regards.”
Now and then, when I saw a turtle scuffing through the leaves, I had wondered about Holly in the idle way you wonder about those small things in your life that have disappeared. I wholly expected to see the little red signet of my name vanishing behind a log one day, or lolloping around the corner of the house. How likely is it that such a creature will circle back through the world to find you once again? I don’t know, but I have heard the same story in other shapes, and I never doubted my father.
Later that evening, he confessed his worries to me. While he could filter the dirt from the water and boil it free of any impurities, he wasn’t sure what we would do if the stream ran completely dry. What if we awoke one morning to find the streambed jigsawed with cracks? It sent a nervous flutter through his stomach. “I have an idea, though,” he said. “What I want to do is travel up-forest a few days and see if I can learn anything. If I go, though, Holly, I might be gone for as long as a week. Will you be okay if I’m gone that long? Do you think you can take care of yourself?”
“Couldn’t I go with you?”
My father hoisted me onto his lap. “I don’t think that would be a good idea. First of all, I don’t know what I’ll find. And then what would we do if you got hurt? How would we take care of you?” He jogged his leg, steadying me with his hand. “No, I don’t want to leave you here, but it’s the only way.”
I was unconvinced, though, and that night, as he filled his backpack with food and blankets and his first aid kit, I decided that I would follow him into the forest the next morning. After all, I had taken care of him when he broke his arm. What would happen if he got hurt, far from home, with no one who loved him?
My father woke me early in the morning, while the night was still dark. His eyes reflected two tiny threads of light from the lantern in his hands, which was burning dimly. “I’m leaving now, Holly. Don’t forget to check the traps when you wake up. Treat any scrapes you get with iodine. Don’t walk too far from home. The wood is stacked in the pantry. The tool chest is in the living room. I’ve left a lamp out for you. You can open a few extra cans if you want.” His eyes were wet with tears. “I guess that’s it. You’ll be just fine.” He kissed me on the cheek. “Bye, sweetness.”
I waited until I heard the front door click shut, and then I hurried outside. I was already dressed and had packed a small satchel for myself full of food and a change of clothing. As I stepped out into the predawn coolness, I was just able to spot the misty outline of my father vanishing into the trees. I knew that he would follow the course of the stream, and that I could pursue him without difficulty, but I did not want to lose sight of him. I walked as quickly as I could into the forest.
All morning I hid behind trees and boulders and nests of briar as I trailed behind him. A purple light spread across the forest floor, brightening as the sun climbed into the sky, and when I looked up, I noticed the tight yellow buds of leaves twitching on the tips of the tree branches. I tried to stay far enough behind my father so that he wouldn’t hear me, walking so that when I held my thumb at arm’s length it covered his body. Once, he stopped to pick the burrs from his socks: he carefully disengaged each one, flicking them out over the stream, and when he finished, he happened to glance up in my direction. My heart began to hammer in my chest, and I felt a needlelike frost dissolve though my fingers and toes. It was only by luck that he didn’t discover me.
It was not until noon that I gave myself away. The stream took an ell, and my father was concealed from me by a screen of poplars. When I rounded the corner, he was standing there wiping the sweat from his brow. He started when he saw me and then his mouth lengthened into a slow smile, which he tried to stifle. He shook his head and placed his hands on his hips.
“Well,” he said, “come on then.”
We traveled through the forest for two days and nights. The stream branched occasionally into separate channels, and we always followed the larger of the two.
One afternoon, I found a circle of clay-brown mushrooms in a field of grass. “It’s actually a single organism,” my father said. “The ring spreads underneath the soil, and the mushrooms you see are all part of that one circle. The largest living thing on earth is a fungus just like that. It spreads for miles beneath the ground, and its stalks perforate entire fields. You could build your house on top of it without even realizing it was there. The world is a big place, Holly.”
At night, we would clear an area in the brush and build a low fire, walling it in with rocks. I would dig at the embers with a stick and ask my father to tell me stories. “Tell me about my mother again,” I said to him one night.
“There’s not much to tell,” he said. “Your mother and I met when we were just kids. She was working in a grocery store, and she had the most sweet, painful smile I’d ever seen—as if every celebration she made was in the face of some greater sorrow. We talked about getting married. We moved away together. I thought we would never be separated. You were born just before the collapse, Holly. Your mother knew it was coming—we both knew—but she said that she wouldn’t run away. We had to leave her behind, the two of us.” He sighed. “She’s gone now, just like everybody else. Her name was Megan. Best not to think about it.”
Early on the morning of our third day in the forest, we climbed across a rain-eaten fence of barbed wire and emerged from the brush onto a stretch of concrete. The concrete extended for as far as I could see on the right, slicing through the trees in a gray ribbon, and on the left it disappeared over a small hill. Its surface was stained with the rust-colored prints of leaves, some of them as large as both my hands placed side to side, and I could see brown and orange and slate-blue pebbles embedded there.
As I turned to ask my father where we were, something came booming up over the hill. It glinted in the sun, and sounded its horn, and rolled by us on its many wheels. Behind it was a trailer carrying a stack of trees, stripped of their branches and lying flat on their sides. It moved as fast as anything I’d ever seen, splitting the air as it passed.
“I’ll be damned,” said my father.
A soft breeze came up. A dragonfly buzzed.
We stood for a long time watching the cars and trucks pass on the roadway.
When I was five years old, and living with my father, I would draw pictures of our house as an empty space in the trees: the carpet of leaves formed the floor, the branches the slope of the roof, two interlocking saplings the frame of the door. Sometimes I would draw myself inside, a small girl in a blue cotton dress, holding a broomstick or sitting in the doorway. We began to construct new dams along the gutter of the stream. The water was still flowing in a very thin trickle, and my father said that we should create what reservoirs we could while there was still time. At night I would hear him breathing in sleep from the room next door, and if I balanced my breathing to match his own, I would soon fall asleep myself. We would work together in the mornings and eat together in the evenings, and in the slowest hours of midday we would sit outside and listen to the grasses rustling in the wind. And then, when I was five years old, my mother came to take me away.
It was the beginning of spring, and while most of the trees had not yet blossomed, the magnolias were already flowering out. I was in the pantry retrieving a box of matches when I heard a loud banging at the front door. At first I thought it was my father—that he was carrying a load of wood, perhaps, and needed my help getting inside—but then his footsteps went tapping across the floor and I heard the door wheeling open on its hinges. What must he have thought as my mother’s face swung into view? Did his heart beat faster, his eyes mist over? Did he know why she was there? Did it seem to him at that moment that a ghost had risen to haunt him? Or had he come to suspect
(always known?) that my mother was still alive?
I don’t have the answers, and it’s too late to ask.
From my hiding place in the pantry I heard an unfamiliar voice. “Hello, Paul,” it said. “We’ve come for Holly.” There was a pause, during which the grain of the voice, which had been trembling, descended and took on certitude. “What have you done with her?”
My father said something then, but his own voice was faint, the words all but indistinguishable. I recognized only the occasional fragment: . . . can’t . . . why . . . I didn’t . . .
“Where’s Holly?” the first voice interrupted him.
It was followed by another, a rich male baritone that carried a slight humming sound. “Best that you tell us,” it said, and I imagined, because of the humming sound, that bees were rolling through it, bouncing from word to word. “We’ve had a hard day.”
My father did not answer. The population of my world had just doubled, and its new inhabitants knew me by name: this was an astonishing thing, and though I was frightened, I wanted to see the faces of these other people—people who were speaking and breathing and moving, and who were not dead—inside my own house.
“Sir, are you going to cooperate with us?” a third voice said.
“Look at this place,” the woman stabbed the words out. “First you run away with her: I come home, and you’re just gone. And then where do you take her? To a shack! In the middle of the woods! I want to see my daughter, and I want to see her now.”
I decided to step out from the pantry.
As I touched the living room floor, a great heaviness materialized in me. My father was standing in the middle of the room, clearly stunned. In the doorway was a woman with deep green eyes and short, honey-blond hair, flanked by two men, one in a crisp blue uniform, the other in rumpled blue jeans and a red sweater. They all looked silently at me for a moment. I looked back at them. Then the woman, my mother, came forward, bent to her knees, and folded her arms around me. She sank her head onto my shoulder and pressed a heavy kiss against the side of my neck. Her back began to shudder, and I could tell that she was going to cry.
“Oh, my baby,” she whispered.
I struggled away from her and ran and stood behind my father.
The woman rose to her feet. “Holly?” she said. She took a step closer and ventured her hand. “Do you remember me, Holly?”
I shook my head no, and there was a long silence.
“I’m your mother,” she said, and at that her face tied up and she gave a tiny smile.
I remembered the conversations my father and I had had about my mother—her love for him, her smile, her death in the great collapse.
And I remembered her name: “Megan.” I stated it as a fact.
She questioned me with her eyes. “Yes . . . ?”
I understood then that there was something I was expected to say, something that would make sense of everything, that would piece the three of us together like a puzzle, but I did not know what it was.
While I tried to think of what it might be, my father began to walk across the room. “I can’t believe it’s you,” he was saying. He reached toward my mother, walking slowly, as if in a dream. “I can’t believe you’re here. I thought you were gone.” He pressed her to his chest.
“No, Paul,” she said, twisting out from under his arms. “Paul,” she said again, pushing him away. “There’s someone you need to meet.” She took the arm of the bee-voiced man in the thick red sweater. “This is Nathan,” she said. She squeezed the man firmly, as if swearing a promise. “My husband.”
The man looked uncomfortable. He made an h-sound, the beginning of “Hello,” but cut himself short.
My father did not move, and I thought for a moment that he was going to fall over. He mouthed something under his breath. He stepped backward. I clung to his leg.
“And this,” said my mother, pointing to the man in the blue uniform, “is Officer Hyatt. Four and a half years we’ve been looking for you, Paul.”
It was not until much later that I learned the story of those years. This was the account that my mother told me, only once, when I was old enough to ask and she was not too old to answer. When she realized my father had taken me away from her, she had fallen into a great depression. Her recovery was slow, she said, and there were many things she did not remember about it, but when she regained herself, she was living in the care of her parents, who told her what the police had reported: that my father and I were very likely dead. “They’re gone,” her parents said. “You need to understand that, honey. No one’s been able to find them.” The police suggested she file the papers to have us declared deceased, but she would not. She returned to work, and met Nathan, and in time she married him, but she never accepted that I was lost to her.
She began her search for me shortly after my second birthday. She knew that my father had spoken of traveling north when it came time to flee the world, of taking refuge in the forests, and so she went to those places and hunted for us. She visited logging towns and trailer parks, dairy farms and lake resorts. She carried a photograph of the two of us, my round infant head held to my father’s cheek, and she showed it to everyone she met. This man—she would say—the one in this picture, was crazy and had stolen her daughter. Have you seen him? Do you know his face? Can you help me find him? No, the people would answer. No, they hadn’t. No, they couldn’t. But eventually she met a man who recognized our faces. He had watched my father venture into the forest many times, he said, carrying tools and boxes and silver cans, and once he had even loaned him a shovel and a wheelbarrow, which my father had never returned. “I hope you find him,” the man said. “That wheelbarrow cost me a pretty penny.” And he shook his head and tucked a plug of tobacco into his mouth.
The woods in those parts were wild and rough, mostly untraveled, but once my mother knew we were there, it was only a matter of time before she was able to find us. She bought a topographic map from the state forestry commission, and she traced the lines of the streams on that map, and she journeyed along those streams into the forest. She came with her husband and the man in the blue uniform to take me into a new life, the life of her family, and away from the life that I knew—from the pantry full of cans and the dam with the broken turbine, from the cave with the frozen pool and the oak tree with the mossy hollow, from the way my father would carry me through the woods when I was tired, from the love that he showed me when I was unhappy, from the house and the bed and the world which were mine.
That afternoon, though, I knew none of these things.
“We need to go now,” my mother said to me as I looked up at my father, who was blinking over and over again, staring into empty space. “Is there anything you want to take with you? Anything you need?” she asked. I shook my head, and when she reached down to touch me, I flinched. I understood nothing.
As we crossed the field that spread before our house, my father restrained by the man in the blue uniform, my mother walking beside me with her husband, I felt only a slight sense of dizziness, a weakness in my legs, as though my muscles and bones were coming loose from my body.
We traveled along the stream into the forest. My mother offered her help to me: “Are you doing okay? Can you make it past this puddle? Do you need me to lift you over? Here, take my hand.”
But I did not listen.
I was watching the ground, and stirring the leaves, and holding tight to my father’s hand, for no matter what they said to me, I would not let him go.
Acknowledgments
I owe thanks to my editor Jenny Minton, my agent Kyung Cho, the administrators of the James Michener–Paul Engle Fellowship for financial support, the friends and classmates who served as my first readers for these stories, and the long line of writing teachers who have helped me with my fiction: Judy Goss, Jan Donley, Michael Burns, Roland Sodowsky, Robert McLiam Wilson, Marilynne Robinson, James Alan McPherson, Judith Grossman, and Frank Conroy.
Permissions Acknowledgments
“These Hands” originally appeared in The Georgia Review and was published subsequently in Prize Stories 1997: The O. Henry Awards by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, 1997. “Things That Fall from the Sky” originally appeared in Crazyhorse. “Apples” originally appeared in The Chicago Tribune. “A Day in the Life of Half of Rumpelstiltskin” originally appeared in Writing on the Edge. “The Ceiling” originally appeared in McSweeney’s. “Space” originally appeared in The Georgia Review.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material. Bug Music, Inc.: Excerpts from “Katie Belle Blue,” written by Townes Van Zandt. Copyright © 1994 by Silver Dollar Music (ASCAP); Excerpt from “The Packard Company,” written by William Morrisey. Copyright © 1991 by Dry Fly Music (BMI). Administered by BUG. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Bug Music, Inc. Kevin Connolly, Inc.: Excerpt from “Goodnight” written by Kevin Connolly (www.kevinconnolly.com). Reprinted with permission of Kevin Connolly, Inc.
1 A direct translation would be: “A blueness resides in the monkey.”
2 Mark 14:51‒52: “And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: and he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked.” See also Mark 16:5.
3 Matthew 5:37: “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.”
4 J. recently showed me the story he himself composed in his thirty-third year. Every culture, he says, tells the tale of a man who finds himself lost in a fog in his home city, where the thickness in the air makes everything look unfamiliar. He takes shelter in a store he has never seen before, a store that is full of wonders, with a beautiful shopkeeper at the desk, and walks home after the fog has cleared. The next day, he returns to the same street to give the shopkeeper his thanks. But try as he might, he cannot locate the store. The neighbors tell him that it burned down years ago, or that it closed its doors when the shopkeeper died, or that it never existed at all. The man spends the rest of his days looking for it. According to J., the fact that this tale unraveling it. They show us new ways to imagine that most cherished of human events, the life of the Word made Flesh. Jesus himself, after all, spoke to us in parables.
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