“It’s the only one left,” I tell Dr. Osborne. “You can have it back. If you tell Seth you’re sorry.”
I can feel Seth staring at the side of my face, but I don’t turn my head. I hold Dr. Osborne’s gaze until he finally looks down at the picture, and when he looks up at me again, some of the coldness has drained out of his expression. And now suddenly I see more of him than I want to, just like with Seth. I see the boy who wanted to live at my father’s house instead of his own, who grew up into a man who tries too hard to help. In all the wrong ways. A man who has never known a woman, maybe never known anyone else at all. Not really. Not well enough. Loneliness is what’s in the gravity coming from the center of Dr. Osborne. I’m getting the idea that every person on earth is their own black hole, and if you get too close, you get sucked right in. Meanness can pull you close, just like love does, but once you’re there, once you see what’s inside, you’ve hit a point of no return and you’ve got to carry it all, dense as a brick, heavy on your heart. And it would be easier if what you saw was evil, pure and simple as a big evil brain in a book. But when you get to the point of no return, all the evil and all the meanness just turn sad. My father said I would know my calling when it happened, the calling I prayed for when I still believed in it. But I never thought a calling could be something like this, this sad, straight sight into what’s at the center of people. I never thought it would be something I had no idea what to do with.
“I’m not at my best tonight, Seth,” Dr. Osborne says finally. “I’m sorry.”
Seth takes off his glasses and rubs them on the hem of his shirt. He backs down from Dr. Osborne’s porch without looking at me, turns on his heel, and heads for the sidewalk. Kelly-Lynn follows him, but Tracy waits.
I hand the picture to Dr. Osborne like I said I would. “What happened to her?” I ask. I can’t help it.
“I don’t know,” he admits, holding the picture with one hand, fingering the cross of nails again with the other. Then, inexplicably, he hands the picture back to me. Almost gently, like an offering. “Nothing good.”
I put the picture back in my purse. The streetlamps have come on now, and Tracy and I step off the porch and join Seth and Kelly-Lynn in a soft circle of light.
“You’re not crying, are you?” Tracy says to Seth.
“No.”
“Creepy man,” says Kelly-Lynn, holding her watch up to the streetlamp. She holds the list up, too, then folds it into quarters and hands it to me. “Maybe we just blow this off?”
High above the last house on the street and over the field beyond, the cross on top of the water tower lights up with a low electric buzz that hits my ears like something much closer, an insect in my hair. Soon the whole Youth Group of First Community will gather on the hill for a brief reenactment of my grandfather’s Great Revival. We were supposed to bring people, and that’s what I did. I brought some people.
I catch myself planning how to report this evening to my father—whether I will write it to him or tell him in person—before I remember that he doesn’t even have a vision for the county anymore. That such a vision may only have been the sickness talking in the first place. Like so many other things that were supposed to have come from God.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s blow this off.” I slip the list of scavenger hunt items into the purse, next to the picture, and we all head up the street to wait under the water tower for everyone else.
Other places in town have openings in the barbed-wire fence that give access to the field and to the seminary’s softball diamond on the other side of the hill. But not here at the end of Elm. Seth uses both hands to pin down the top strand of the fence, and I go first, balancing my weight in the sway of the barbed wire. Then I hold my breath and launch myself over and into the field. The weeds have been recently mowed, the cuttings pushed into knee-high piles, and once everyone else is over the fence, we step carefully over the stiff, sharp stalks. “I never thought we’d be tramping through a field this way,” says Tracy. “Not for a church event. Not in town. We’re going to be full of ticks.”
“I hate ticks,” Kelly-Lynn says, lifting her knees high.
Seth is silent, lagging behind, looking down at his feet. Every once in a while he sniffs and wipes at his face, but we all pretend not to notice. As we approach the tower, I realize that even though I’ve seen it almost every day of my life, I’ve never been this close. The huge tank sits high atop six tall, slender pillars and one thick center post. It’s even higher than it seems from a distance. Between each set of pillars run crisscrossing diagonal cables, in four enormous Xs stacked one on top of another, each X at least four times as tall as I am.
Underneath the shadow of the tank, Seth sinks to the grass. He leans against one of the pillars and looks out toward town with a peeled-open expression, like the air on his face is something of a surprise. I still feel for him, but I want to get away from him, too. From the weight inside him that now I can’t help but sense, real as my own. The inside of one of the pillars has a series of U-shaped metal rungs, and before I know I’m going to do it, I drop my purse and grasp onto the highest rung I can reach.
“You have about ten minutes before people start showing up,” warns Kelly-Lynn, holding her watch outside the shadow of the tank.
I haul myself up and begin climbing fast, too fast to lose my nerve. Below me, Tracy steps onto the lowest rung and starts to climb, too. When I reach the top of the bottommost X, I stop and look out over East Winder. You can see the roofs of the houses on the tree streets, the steeples of the United Methodist Church and the Church of God. You can see the blinking yellow light at Main and Maple. Under my feet, Tracy’s face is worried.
“What’s wrong?”
“This is high,” she says in a small voice.
“Stay there,” I tell her, and I keep climbing. I don’t feel the height yet, just the satisfaction of pulling myself up rung by rung. The breathtaking way the space opens up beneath me, deep and cool. How it gets darker, quieter, halfway to the underbelly of the tank. I keep going. With each rung I can feel the twin pull of my breasts as they resettle more and more heavily, and a tiny dull stroke of pain in my womanhood, a signal that my period will soon return, as it will keep on returning month after month for a long, long time, whether I want it to or not.
I climb as if I could outclimb everything—my body, my family, all the things I wish I didn’t know and all the things I wish I couldn’t see. As if I could outclimb God or reach him, two equal impossibilities. When I finally make it to the tank, I give the enormous belly a few pats, like it’s a big sleeping animal. It’s the most solid sound I’ve ever heard. There are gallons and gallons of water inside, maybe tons, and you can’t hear a drop of it. My palm comes away coated with paint dust.
Tracy’s still halfway down, at the top of the second huge X, edging herself up slowly. Every so often she presses herself as hard as she can against the pillar, wedges her feet into the rungs, and clings there.
“Oh, what the hell,” I hear Kelly-Lynn say, just barely, from the ground. She grabs a rung, too, which makes a sound that echoes within the pillar all the way to the top. Then Seth gets to his feet and follows her. A breeze lifts my hair. It is longer now, and growing all the time. My crown in glory. From up here the streetlamps look very low, giving off their small pools of light, revealing patches of pavement and the occasional fender or hood of a parked car. You can see Dr. Osborne’s street and the intersection of Main and East, too, where I used to live, where Seth lives now, and even where his window, my window, should be. Toward the edge of town a car’s headlights wink in and out of the trees, heading south on Main Street to where it becomes the river road. From this high up, during the day, you might even be able to see Tate’s Bridge hovering over the distant palisades, emerging red and rusty from the trees.
Dark as it seems under the water tower, we are not hidden. From farther down Main Street comes the police cruiser—lights flashing, siren off, speeding in our direction. C
alled by Dr. Osborne, possibly, but who knows? Any of the people in town could have glanced out their window.
“We’re in for it,” Tracy yells from below. Kelly-Lynn and Seth clamber down and drop easily to the ground, then wave to us as if we don’t have our own view of the situation.
“Go ahead,” I call down to Tracy, but she has wrapped her arms tightly around the pillar, as far as they’ll go.
“I can’t,” she says. “I can’t move.”
The police cruiser makes quick work of Main Street, and now, trailing it, I see the flat box of Daze’s Buick, slipping in and out of the light from the streetlamps like a huge, silent fish. I don’t know how they reached her so quickly. I watch as Police Chief Ezra Burton parks over on Maple, where there’s a gate in the fence. Moments later I watch him make his way up the hill with Phoebe on his arm, struggling through the sharp weed stalks in her good pumps and squinting up toward my place just under the huge tank.
“That’s your mom,” Tracy calls up to me.
Before I know it, we’re both lit up from below by a huge police flashlight. I can’t see anything, and when I take a hand from the rung to cover my eyes, Phoebe screams.
It’s a small sound from this high up. “She’s going to fall,” she cries. “She’s going to fall.” The beam starts to swing wildly as Phoebe clutches at Chief Burton. Now others are making their way up the hill, kids from the scavenger hunt, and I wonder if this is what it looked like to my grandfather as the Great Revival accumulated person by person.
When Chief Burton fixes me again in his light, I squeeze the pillar between my knees and wave with both arms to show I’m okay, that I’m in no danger of falling. A gasp rises from the collection of people below.
“Your mom just got sick,” Tracy calls.
“I’m fine,” I yell into the light. But you can’t look into a light for long. I duck my head behind the pillar and let my eyes adjust to the field behind me, where the softer glow from the cross breaks over the shadow of the tank and spills down the backside of the hill. I can see everything from up here. I can see the future, even, with a certainty I never imagined. It is the only prophetic vision I will ever have, my whole life, and maybe it comes from God and maybe it comes from some part of my own mind, inside my own skull, some part I don’t even mean to use. Which maybe comes from God, too. This is an argument my father and I will have over the years, me saying that if all things come from God then it’s the same as nothing coming from God, and him saying no. That no matter what, those are not the same things.
Later in the night, after we’re done at the police station and barred from the lock-in, and Phoebe has deposited Kelly-Lynn and Tracy at their respective homes, with apologies to their respective mothers, I will wait for her to light into me. When she doesn’t, I will find myself trying to explain, to fill up the silence with details. Daze in the hospital bed calling me the wrong name, her name. The futility of ceaseless prayer. I will keep Cecil to myself, but I will tell her about Dr. Osborne and the pictures. I will show her the dead woman on the table and watch the complicated way her face changes as she makes room for whatever this information means to her. I am thirteen, and I have already begun to leave home. But tonight I have never wanted to hold my mother’s attention so close, on guard against the new possibility that, like my father has, anyone can say “no” to what’s been their life so far, and even “no more” to the people in it. I thought I understood the meaning of the word cleave, which can be “to sever” just as much as “to cling,” a perfect word that contains its opposite, but now I understand something else: that it can mean both of these things at the same time.
What Phoebe does, what she will keep doing for the rest of her life, is bring everything back to my father like a record stuck in a groove. She will blame herself, she will blame him. Late on this night, when we’re pulling into the driveway of the cabin and I finally fall quiet, she blames him. She says that worse, really, than any thoughts one might want to control—lust and the rest—are the actions, even the best-intended, most godly-seeming actions, that pull others into themselves. Vortex is the word she finds. A vortex of selfishness, and I look into the night sky, more aware than ever of all the hidden black holes.
As the years spread out and my father goes off his medication—once, twice, again, each time a little worse—the halfway houses won’t hold him, and it’s Phoebe, of course, who takes him back. First, with hope, as a husband. Then with resignation, and perhaps true Christianity. This goes on long after she’s had to sell the house in town. After she’s put in a phone line at the river and found full-time teaching. After Daze recovers for what she calls her “third act,” the shortest one yet. After I’ve left East Winder. When I come back to visit, I’ll sit across from Phoebe at the tiny fold-out table, and we’ll look out toward the river to where my father has pitched his tent. An arrangement they can both live with as long as the weather holds, as long as the bank contains the current, which it does for many years. Miraculously, my father says. She’ll give me a cup of tea to take to him, and if he’s manic, he’ll offer prophecy, which becomes more and more confused. If he’s low, and the lows get a lot lower, I can sometimes encourage him to remember old facts—the names of the trees, the length and history of the bridge, a rare species of river eel. Once in a while, spurred by the sound of his own voice, he remembers to ask me something about my life, and when I answer, he regards me with wonder. Not for my accomplishments, which are modest—a college degree I’ll work hard to pay for, a series of cast-around social-work jobs until one catches fire—but because any evidence of a life other than his own has become something of a shock. A welcome-enough shock, it seems, but a tiring one. “Whatever happened to that black cat of yours?” he asks then, as the clouds part for this old memory of something I loved.
“He never came back,” I say.
But before any of this happens, I am still right up under the belly of the water tank, convincing myself that it might be possible to stay there forever, or to jump or fall, to land softly or not land at all, to soar. It’s the thought of going back down the way I came that turns my legs to jelly. Then Tracy is there, close under my feet, pulling herself up rung by rung. Her face is clenched with fear. Her knuckles are as white as anything I’ve ever seen.
“Girl, what are you doing?” she says, looking down to the ground then pinching her eyes shut.
“What are you doing?” I say. But then I know. I’m close enough now to feel the pull of her heart, which, as it turns out, is deep and generous. We are blood kin, and she will not go down without me.
The light, the ground, the growing crowd all seem impossibly far below. The metal rungs now feel flimsy and manmade, smaller in every way, growing sharper through the soles of my sneakers.
“They won’t hold,” says Tracy, feeling it too.
“Yes,” I say, “they will.” From up here it’s not an easy thing to promise or to trust, but what choice do we have? We close our eyes and start to make our way down. One slow rung at a time. Believing, over and over, what we have to, as hard as we can.
Acknowledgments
For reading parts of this manuscript in one form or another along the way, many thanks to Vandana Khanna, Karri Offstein Rosenthal, Caroline Goodwin, Stephanie Harrell, Elisa Albert, Ryan Harty, Ann Packer, Ann Cummins, Cornelia Nixon, Sarah Stone, Ron Nyren, Vendela Vida, Steve Willis, Lisa Michaels, and, in memoriam, Nancy Johnson. Special thanks to Ed Schwarzschild, Jennifer Greiman, Lynne Tillman, and Tina Pohlman for their support from the book’s inception. Nina Pneuman, ZZ Packer, Carrie Herschman, Brad Levison, Christine Sneed, Regina Lutz, Charlie Eckstrom, Lisa Salazar, Lee Kaplan, Leona Christie, and Dan Orozco all helped me weather the doubtful times. Finally, big thanks to Eric Simonoff, Jenna Johnson, Nina Barnett, Kate Davis, and Michelle Blankenship for invaluable insight and expertise.
About the Author
ANGELA PNEUMAN, raised in Kentucky, is a former Stegner Fellow and teaches fiction writing at Stanford Uni
versity. Her work has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her widely praised story collection, Home Remedies, was hailed as “call[ing] to mind Alice Munro” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Chicago and in the Bay Area of California.
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