“Blind.”
“Did something happen?”
“Born that way.” I turn my head to the left and then the right and my mother does the same. We study each other’s faces as though this is the last time we will ever see each other. I commit her face to memory; she does the same. From afar, we likely don’t look that similar—her long, straight brown hair; my wild white-blond curls. Her bony, delicate frame; my wrestler’s build. She wears maroon-and-white knitted mukluks pulled to the knee over pale-blue jeans, a navy button-up sweater that stops at her waist, the buttons done all the way up to her neck, even in this heat. It looks as though she is holding herself together with her tightly buttoned sweater. Her clothing hugs her body as if it is keeping her safe. Her eyes are deeply creased, but she is only eighteen years older than I am, hardly old at all.
Up close—this close—I can see that she and I have the same face shape. The same small forehead, heart-shaped face, deep-set eyes. We are cut from the same pattern; we are set from the same mold. Her hand is still covering her mouth, and I look at the way her fingers taper slightly, the pronounced half-moon on her thumbnail, the big knuckles, the blank space where her left pinky finger should be. These are my hands, just thinner, older. Neither one of us takes much care with them—both of us have dirt under our nails, the cuticles overgrown. Our skin is so different. Mine is so pale and puffy, soft against my bones, a layer of icing. Hers is drawn so tight it looks stretched. Her knuckles are deeply grooved and dry.
I wonder what she sees in me. This shock of blond hair, the color of butterscotch ripple ice cream just like my father’s, standing up every which way, curls so tight they’re practically clenched, these bullish shoulders, this chubby frame. The baggy jeans, old suspenders, my white tank top, sports bra showing through. My little round face, which seems to me to morph every day, so that every time I look in the mirror I feel as though I’m looking at someone new, someone else. I wonder when it will settle into itself. Other people look the same every day; I don’t know why I always look so different. Today I’m a bit puffy from lack of sleep. I can feel it in my eyelids and in my cheeks. It’s a pleasant, swollen feeling, and it also makes me look a lot younger than I am. What are you supposed to look like when you’re seventeen? The thought flickers in my mind as my mother considers me, this weird little stranger on her front porch in the heat of the afternoon. Weird little dog in my arms, her nose twitching, taking us both in.
“This is Winkie,” I tell my mother.
My mother looks past me at Miranda, Lydia-Rose, and Vaughn, standing in the tall grass in front of the big house. “And is that your family?”
I turn around and look at the three of them. “Yes.”
I take a step toward her. My mother. She smells just like me.
She reaches for my hand suddenly, and it startles us both. “I don’t know what your name is,” she says. “I’m looking at you and I don’t know your name.”
“It was Shandi at first. Then Samantha. It’s Shannon now. I’m thinking of changing it though.”
“I’m Yula.”
“I know. Could my dog have some water?”
My mother’s face softens, and she spins into the dark of the cabin, comes back moments later with a yellow plastic bowl filled with water, a single ice cube floating in its center.
“Winkie loves ice. Thanks.” I lower her to the ground and we watch her lap up the cold water, her head tilted to the side in concentration. Her little white tail twitches as she drinks.
Winkie finishes her water and looks up at us, and we both crouch and pat her head. Her tail wags and she smooshes her body against us, wiggles through my legs, then flops to the ground so we can rub her tummy.
“Hi, Winkie,” she says. She pats Winkie’s belly, fiddles with her ears. “She’s very geometric, isn’t she,” my mother says and points to Winkie’s square face, rectangular body, isosceles-triangle ears. “And bow-legged.”
“She’s old. She has trouble walking.”
“You’ve had her a long time?”
“Since I was five.” Winkie wiggles out from underneath our hands and sticks her paw in her water dish, something she does when it’s really hot.
“It’s your birthday today,” my mother says. Her eyes are watering, and I can see that it is taking everything she has to fight it.
“I’m not mad at you,” I say.
She looks past me, toward the mountain behind us, and covers her mouth with her hand again. For a while, there really isn’t anything to do but cry.
“Will you come and meet everyone?” I say to her. I pick up Winkie and start walking up the path toward Vaughn, Miranda, and Lydia-Rose. When I look back, Yula is sitting on the porch of the cabin. She pulls off her mukluks and slips on a pair of dark green gum boots. She walks toward us stiffly, and I can see how nervous she is. Her hand trembles as she holds it out to Miranda, who, bless her heart, takes it in both of her hands and doesn’t let go.
Quinn leads us through the great hall of his big windowed house and into the bright kitchen, where he hands me an elaborate silver frame with a picture of my mother in profile. She wears a red plaid shirt and a pair of baggy sweatpants, and her hair is dark brown and goes all the way down her back. She’s sitting in one of the rocking chairs on the porch of the cabin. She holds a pair of silver scissors and is pulling the strands of hair in front of her face, about to snip off the ends. She’s wearing slippers with smiling polar bear faces. Her stomach is round beneath the plaid shirt; she is pregnant.
“A month or so before you were born,” he says in his raspy voice. “She cut off all her hair.” I hand him back the picture. He has changed out of his bathrobe and wears a pair of paint-splattered khakis and a black T-shirt and has slicked his hair back with water. He smells like expensive cologne and mint. His cane wobbles in his feeble hands.
A suit wrapped in dry cleaner’s cellophane is hanging over one of the kitchen chairs, and a half-empty glass of scotch sits on the counter. He picks it up and takes a loud sip.
The kitchen is immaculate, the granite countertops gleaming. There’s a dishwasher and a silver washing machine that looks like it could beam me into space. Yula pulls out the chairs from the kitchen table and invites us all to sit down. The house is cool and pleasant to be in, and so, so clean. There isn’t a speck of dust on anything. A huge ceiling fan whirs above our heads. I look at Miranda, who is slightly wide-eyed. None of us has ever been in a house as sophisticated as this before. Miranda and I sit on one side, Yula and Lydia-Rose on the other, facing the windows. Quinn and Vaughn sit at either end. Winkie, as usual, sits on my feet. There is a huge peace lily on the table, and we all struggle for a minute, trying to figure out where to place ourselves so that we can see one another over the bright-green leaves. Finally, Yula lets out a little laugh and moves it to the counter behind her.
“How did you find us?” Quinn says suddenly, and I pause a moment, wondering how much to say.
“Harrison.”
“I wasn’t the biggest fan of your father,” Quinn says, and Yula grips his arm with a startling ferocity.
“For God’s sake.” She looks at me and Miranda apologetically, pleadingly. “He’s been drinking,” she says. “He’s sick.”
I look at his body and I look at his hands. He is an old, angry, dangerous thing, and I put my hand on his. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter to me if you liked him or not.”
Quinn takes my hand and studies my fingers, measures the thickness of my wrists. “Your arms look a little like your mother’s,” he says.
“I know that.”
“You’re short but long limbed,” he says. He swirls his scotch around and takes a long drink.
“It’s beautiful here,” says Vaughn. “I forgot how beautiful. I used to live around here.”
“We don’t forget. We’ve never been away.” Quinn lets my hand go and points at Yula’s face with his pinky finger. “She’s looked after me all these years. Have you seen my drawings of her? I
used to draw all of us, all of us with thought bubbles coming out of our heads, thinking silly things.” He points to the walls. There are drawings tacked up everywhere; I don’t know why I didn’t notice them before. The walls are covered in pen-and-ink. My favorite one is of a pointy-toed dress shoe, the laces spilling out over the sides. I look for a drawing of a person, but they’re all just things: shoes, a saltshaker, a pitcher of milk, a baseball, a peacock feather, a lawn chair, a rake.
Quinn looks at me with his wild gray eyes. He looks tired. “You’ve got bright eyes like your mother.”
“Like yours, too.”
Yula gets up from the table and slings a dish towel over her shoulder. “Will you stay awhile?” she says. “I’d like to make you something to eat.” She says she’s been to the farmers’ market recently and has two fresh chickens, which she’ll roast with carrots, red potatoes, fennel, and parsnips. She’ll even make me a birthday cake—yellow cake with chocolate frosting.
Vaughn looks at me, and Miranda reaches over and squeezes my hand. Do I want to do this? I do. I do.
But it’s early still, and Yula puts the kettle on, takes down some mugs, roots around until she finds some tea. The kitchen is warm from the sun streaming through the windows. Lydia-Rose squints in the sunlight. Yula has taken off her blue cardigan and wears a ribbed gray undershirt, her arms ropy and muscular. I hope I’ll have muscles in my arms someday.
None of us has any idea what to say to each other.
After the kettle boils and the tea has steeped, Yula puts a mug down in front of Miranda. She bends close to her and says, “Thank you for bringing her to me.”
We do, though—we find something to say. Quinn tells us the history of the property—it was Jo’s parents’ originally, passed down to her, inherited by Quinn when she died. Eventually it will be Yula’s. The strangeness of the house is Quinn’s. He put in the wooden beams, took out the exterior walls, and replaced them with the huge floor-to-ceiling windows. We admire his handiwork, and then he and Vaughn disappear outside for a while to look at the exterior. Both have the good sense to leave me with Yula and my family.
Once they’re gone, we reposition ourselves: Yula sits beside me, Miranda and Lydia-Rose across from us. We drink hot cups of bush tea with honey, and Yula puts out a plate of shortbread cookies. I take a bite of one and then give the rest to Winkie.
Miranda spends a long time telling Yula about me. She can tell I’m too nervous and in shock to speak clearly about myself. She tells her about the homes I lived in before she adopted me—stopping a minute when she gets to the part about Julian to check in with me that it’s okay to go on.
“You can tell her,” I say.
Yula’s face pales and she bites her cheek while Miranda speaks. There is a horrible moment when Yula starts apologizing and can’t stop and just looks at me and says I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry over and over again. But we get past it, and she recovers, and Miranda tells her about our first few years together, how I wouldn’t sleep, how she’d find me at all hours, wandering the house. Lydia-Rose talks for a time about what it was like at first to share her mom. It’s amazing to me that we can speak so frankly. None of these things has ever been said. But once they are, I realize I’m not holding on to any pain from the past anymore. I can hear Lydia-Rose talk about her initial jealousy and all I feel is grateful that I have a sister, no matter what it took to get us to this point.
“We had three cats, too,” Lydia-Rose says, and we tell my mother about Scratchie, Flipper, and Midnight, about burying them in the park. I have never developed the photographs from the day we took them to the vet’s. I tell Yula that I will now. I’ll develop them and bring them to her. I’ll show her our wonderful cats.
Miranda is honest about how I do in school—not well. She says I’m a drifter. And I’m still not a good sleeper, and I still fidget. I talk a lot sometimes or sometimes I say nothing at all. She says I have trouble staying in the same place or doing the same thing for very long. This is why, she thinks, my attendance is so bad. She says the school has called her countless times. I hang around downtown too much. I don’t have any close friends. But I know everybody. And everybody knows me and my hair.
“I like my life,” I say, a little defensively, while Miranda narrates. “It’s been a good life. I like my life!”
She tells Yula that I never said anything, not even once, about wanting to find my birth parents, even when she asked. She says I keep secrets, but she’s realized over the years that it’s a way of protecting myself from being hurt, that it’s not malicious, that I carry the special things in my heart, wrap them up deep inside so they’re never discovered, never taken. Physically, am I healthy? Yes. My arm hurts at night from Julian breaking it when I was a little kid. Tendonitis. Miranda says I’ve never said anything about the pain, but she sees me worrying my wrist at the dinner table, rubbing it when it rains. The blindness seems not to be a problem at all. It was at first; I walked into everything. Miranda was so scared they’d take me away from her because of all the bruises on my arms and shins. But now I seem to navigate the world just fine. She thinks I can probably even get my driver’s license, though I have no interest in it. I’m a bus person through and through. I haven’t menstruated yet. She’s worried about that. She’s not sure if it means anything. She tells Yula that she thinks I’m a special person, put on the earth for a reason. She says she’s never met anyone like me. She says she feels honored that she was given the opportunity to shepherd me through my life. I suppose it isn’t surprising that she thinks about me so much and with such depth and sensitivity, but it startles me all the same to hear it. I blush. I feel my legs start to kick together, that old familiar pattern of nervousness. Winkie unearths herself and begs to be lifted onto my lap, and we pause a minute to pat her, to give her all our attention.
“You and your daughter have such beautiful skin,” Yula says to Miranda. “Did you grow up here?”
“On the mainland.”
I look at Miranda. I barely know anything about her life before I came into it.
And then it’s Yula’s turn to speak.
“Just sit with me awhile,” she says to me, Miranda, and Lydia-Rose. “I’ll tell you everything.”
XXVI.
it is my seventeenth birthday, and in some ways, this is where the story—at least this part of it—ends. Yula says we should spend the afternoon exploring the property while she cooks. If we want to wander over to Joel and Edwin’s, she’ll call ahead so they don’t shoot. She laughs when she says this, but I can tell she’s at least partly serious. She says it’s really something to see all the rusted-out cars, tractors, bicycle parts, tires, old porcelain sinks, toilets, and stained-glass windows they’ve collected over the years. It’s like an outdoor junk museum.
Winkie will likely have a few ticks on her by the time we return; Yula says she’ll help me comb over her body, and if we find any, we’ll burn them off with a match. She assures me that Winkie won’t mind this, that it’s a painless experience. The tick will retreat when it feels the match on its backside, and we’ll pull it out with a pair of tweezers, flush it down the drain.
If we cross the street, we can visit a rescue farm. There are eight horses there right now, Yula says, two llamas, three goats, three pigs, and a bunch of chickens. Donkeys, too. No one will mind if we wander over and pet the animals.
Beyond that, the forest is always worth exploring. Some of the trees are over six hundred years old. Douglas fir, Western red cedar, hemlock. Bigleaf maple, arbutus, black cottonwood. Yula tells us all their names, points out the window. “Stand next to one of them and look up the trunk,” she says. “But make sure someone is standing behind you. You’ll fall over, you’ll just tumble back and fall.”
This is a rain forest. This is sacred land. “Go out into the woods,” Yula says.
We leave her in the kitchen and say good-bye to Quinn, half drunk, slumped on the porch in a rocking chair. No one is wearing proper shoes for a hik
e, and we gingerly make our way through the ferns and fallen needles and over the felled trees. Vaughn holds Winkie because my arms are tired. She takes in all the smells around her, her head over his shoulder, nose twitching. It’s so much colder, damper, in the shade of the forest. Something I managed to pick up in school: the human eye is more sensitive to green than to any other color. We see almost every shade of it.
We walk single file. There is only a narrow, tamped-down path; the rest of the forest is thick with trees, and we would be easily separated. Vaughn makes a little trumpeting sound, and we trumpet back. This is what we’ll do if we get lost: we’ll trumpet at one another until we’re all found. He leads us, Miranda next in line, the back of her denim shirt already wet with sweat. Lydia-Rose walks behind me, the slowest of us all in her heeled gladiator sandals. She has to stop and readjust the straps because the heat makes her feet swell. My jeans are too long and slip under my shoes and I have to keep yanking them up. But we press on anyway, peculiar party that we are, and every once in a while Vaughn reminds us to stop and look around. The path is so gnarly with roots that I realize this whole time I’ve only been looking down. Lydia-Rose steadies herself against me and looks up the trunk of a Douglas fir. Yula was right. She stumbles into me, then doubles over, suddenly dizzy. We all do this; we all get vertigo.
The forest floor crunches under our feet and the trees are loud with birds. There are banana slugs on the path, and Vaughn dares us to lick the underside of one. He says it will make our tongues go numb, but we have no interest.
Miranda and Vaughn walk ahead of us for a while, comparing their lives. They seem relaxed around each other, and I’m relieved. Then the forest thins out a bit, and we find ourselves in a sea of rusty automobiles, tall grass poking out the windows, tires sunk into the earth. Miranda and Lydia-Rose refuse to walk through it for fear of getting tetanus.
“You two go ahead,” Miranda calls out. “Meet us across the street. We’re going to go see the animals.”
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