by Laura Bell
I go to her and place my hands on her shoulders and slowly turn her around and put my arms around her. She feels thin, even brittle, beneath my arms, a slim reed determined not to break. I am her second child to divorce, and I understand that it destroys something in her, but I’m drowning and cannot help.
I wait to hear her leave for work the next morning, then find my slippers. My father has the fireplace going in the den and coffee waiting for me. In his retirement, he’s been making trips to the Soviet Union to visit Russian Orthodox churches and taking classes in language, liturgy and now literature at the university.
He’s seated at the card table with his Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky scattered around him, his reading glasses perched on his nose. “Good morning, sunshine,” he says, pouring the coffee.
“Good morning, Dad.”
“How are you this morning?”
“Okay,” I settle on the couch with my cup and pull a blanket over my legs. Then, almost an afterthought: “I guess I’ve been better.”
My father watches me, silent for a long time. “This is hard for her. You know she loves you.”
“I do,” I say. “I know she does.”
The following morning I go with her to work. Helping Hands is a day-center for people suffering from Alzheimer’s, one she conceived and spearheaded. While her father was being ravaged by the disease, she’d gone back to school, gotten her master’s degree in social work, and was hired by the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, where she developed a program based on the concept that each person with Alzheimer’s should have a “best friend,” a volunteer who knows their history, can aid their memory and acknowledge them, helping them feel safe and cared for.
She leans over to greet an elderly woman who’s sitting at a table. She hugs her, then takes hold of her hand. “Rose,” she says, “I want to introduce my daughter to you. This is Laura. She’s a cowgirl out West. Isn’t that something? Rose has three daughters of her own—don’t you, Rose? They take such good care of you and must have given you this pretty sweater. Aren’t we proud of our daughters?”
Rose is smiling, beaming with love for her daughters.
“Rose, Laura’s going to be your best friend this morning. Laura, Rose will show you her favorite book, which has pictures of the town where she grew up.”
When I sit down next to Rose, she takes my hand and smiles into my eyes. “It’s very good to see you again,” she whispers, her social graces intact even if her memory is not.
We page through her book looking at the pictures, and she occasionally points at one and smiles at me as though it’s a memory we share, and I squeeze her hand and smile back, even though my heart’s in my throat.
I watch my mother make the rounds of all the tables, lingering over every one after a kiss on the cheek, her gaze full and open and adoring as she takes their hands in hers and their faces light with joy. I can’t take my eyes away from her, this person I’ve never seen, my mother, this stranger, and I feel tears gathering for want of her. I long to be the one in her gaze, in her arms, for her to love me as she loves these people who haven’t disappointed her, who haven’t let her down, whose messy lives are not her burden. I blink my eyes and wipe my tears and wish myself in a place far, far away from this mirror of my longing, in a place where I am all that I need.
LEAVING
In the night I wake to the sound of something that has just happened and cannot name it. In the moments that follow, my eyes open to the dark and I struggle to place myself, the bed, the room, the life I’m sunk into. A man’s voice coming through the wall. Something falling to the floor and shattering, glass. Laughter, dark and hollow. The hands on my bedside clock say 2:15. My eyes adjust and I see light seeping through the blinds from the street and make out the door to the bathroom, the door into the kitchen. Salt Lake, then, is where I am, and the pieces of my life stack back into a pile that has shape and form. There are no children sleeping upstairs, no horses in the shed, only my drunken recluse of a neighbor in the other half of this small bungalow duplex. I fall back into the covers and pull them up tight around me. Through the gap in the blinds, I watch the snow falling in swaths of light, constant and heavy, and search my mind for someone or something I should worry for in the storm, but there is no one, nothing. It seems a distant memory, breaking open bales of bright, clean straw and kicking it loose, charging through it like a kid in a puddle, to make deep piles from wall to wall in the tiny shed for a sick calf with droopy ears. Or on the winter feedground, with the skies falling dark around us, a gate thrown open to willow bottoms and the cattle stringing through it to tall grass, dried and rattling, that can rise up around the night’s slick calves like nests from the wind. Under the covers my hands grip each other, and I feel their hard, blunt strength. This is who I am. This is what I can do. I think of the girls breathing their dreams in and out from under soft down while the ice froze thick and vast and the world conspired for us a trail both treacherous and sublime. How are we to know? The question rises into the dark and hangs, a presence lingering over my wakefulness. How are we to know? These hands hovered over you and kept you warm, but it was never enough, not ever, and now I’m far and cannot do even that.
The Cliff Lodge sits at an elevation of nine thousand feet up in Little Cottonwood Canyon, just below Alta at the wide-open head of the valley. The road that winds up there is known to be the most avalanche-prone road of any in the lower forty-eight states. Some nights it closes in the heavy snows, and I camp in the spa, sleeping on my massage table.
One whole wall of the small room where I work on the ninth floor is glass, and I can look out into the top branches of Engelmann spruce and the steep mountain slopes beyond. I begin work at three in the afternoon and, when fully booked, do six sessions in as many hours. People arrive in robes, and leave in robes and while I work on them, the light gathers into alpenglow and dims to dusk, and the ski patrol makes last sweeps of the mountain. When it snows, I feel as though I’m working inside a Christmas snow globe, the flakes swirling around my head.
Two years after the divorce, I had rented a small storage space near the railroad tracks in Greybull and given away to friends anything that wouldn’t fit—bed frame, mattress, ironing board, charcoal grill. I left behind me a kind man, my two girls, and a permanent position with the forest service I’d always thought I wanted. Then, with car loaded, I drove south to Salt Lake to study massage. I wanted to ride the pendulum of experience in the opposite direction and to see who I might be if I left the country of my failures behind.
When the light begins to slant across the slopes, I prepare myself for work, bundling my clothes under the cupboard and pulling on black pants, a white shirt and an apron that ties around my waist, then clip my hair back, scrub my nails and wait for my first client. They arrive exhausted and elated from steep slopes and deep powder, from days spent in the thin air of altitude. Behind them in their lives they have left jobs, schedules, pressure. Behind them in their lockers they have left rings, diamonds, cell phones, designer clothes. They come to me naked and wrapped in a plain white robe, bringing with them only what is left—hope, regret or reflection. They crawl onto my table, compliant and empty, often leaving even their voices behind.
Silence. I know this territory like the back of my hand and can take people there. The world breathes in and breathes out; the wind shifts and stills. In my mind I’m under the night sky of solitude, immense and comforting in its shelter, the smell of sage a balm. It feels a risk to go there, but people follow me into this space and then they come back.
One night I work on a woman who is a neonatal cardiologist. It’s a wrap, not a massage, so I lead her into a dimly lit room lined with cedar and redwood. After she showers and scrubs, I wrap her in steaming hot towels and linens that have been steeped in an herbal brew of lavender and chamomile. She looks like a mummy lying there on her back on the table with an outer layer of heavy wool blanket that leaves only her face and the top of her head exposed. I wring washcloths from
a bucket of ice water at my feet and apply them to her face and the base of her neck as she sweats in her cocoon. I massage her scalp. I offer water through a straw and lean over her to apply compression to her shoulders, sternum, hip bones, knees and ankles to remind her that her body’s still there. I part the blanket at her feet and massage them with cool hands, then sit on the bench by her head in the near dark and complete silence. I hold my hands on either side of her head, sometimes shifting to put one on her crown and the other on her forehead. I pray for her silently, though I don’t know exactly what that means, only that this is the one place in my life where I can be unflinchingly tender.
The woman has been quiet but now begins to cry. “I work every day on tiny babies, on their hearts: I open them up. Every day I am responsible for so much. I’m sorry. I never expected this.” And then she’s quiet again.
Through the years, I work on many clients who ski several different weeks at Snowbird each season. They return six nights in a row, then once more in the spring and the same again the following years. I work on their spouses and friends and occasionally their children. Sessions are mostly spent in silence. I seldom speak except to ask about an injury or the pressure, but sometimes people want to talk. If they’re too chatty, I ask them to take a deep breath and then another to shut them up, though often what comes out is soulful and engaging.
One night the client’s a man I’ve worked on several years running. I ask how his year has been, and this otherwise delicate man says simply, “It sucked.”
“Excuse me?”
“It sucked,” he says again and explains that his wife had left him and then returned in the course of a torturous year. He asks how mine has been, and I flush immediately to tears, but he can’t see. “Is there someone special in your life?”
“No.”
After a long pause, he says, “I can’t believe that you don’t have a man in your life who wouldn’t leap at the chance to move heaven and earth for you.”
I ask him to take a deep breath and then another, and I keep on working.
My work is deep and slow, and after a few minutes he sinks into a quiet place, and all I can hear is the sound of his breathing. Early on I’d learned to drop my table low and lean my weight into it, stripping between the muscles to loosen them and using pressure points to release energy. Near the end of the session I rub his scalp vigorously to bring him back and then close my hands over the top of his skull, over his ears, my fingers tingling and sparking. I pull them ever so slightly away and imagine his skull expanding with my hands to make a bigger space inside. I imagine a flock of wild blackbirds rising in a spiral out of this space, up through my hands and arms and up out of the top of my own head, into the air above us.
Driving southwest out of Salt Lake, I head toward the small Mormon town of Tooele, pronounced “too-will-ah.” On the pickup seat next to me is the newspaper with an ad circled: Blue merle Australian shepherd female, six months, $250. I’ve never paid money for a dog and don’t intend to today, though I’ve been to all the pounds without finding a match. Next to the newspaper is a framed photograph of my old sheepdog, Louise, a head shot that captures her blue eye and imperious nature as she lords her position on top of the hay wagon over Handy, the ranch dog, trotting along on the road below. Louise was born in the winter of 1977 in a bed scratched out under a low-hanging evergreen in the town of Cowley. She herded sheep, punched cows on the Diamond Tail, and followed me horseback through my years with the forest service. By the time I divorced in 1992, she’d grown deaf and blind, wandering around the Beaver Creek house and yard by memory and feel. Knowing she couldn’t make the transition and that Joe would care for her better than anyone in the world, I entrusted her to him for the end of her days. One morning he called in tears to say he’d found her dead, curled up in her bed on the back porch and facing a mountain that she couldn’t see.
When I pull into the address from the ad, I find a neatly appointed double-wide with thick shrubbery and well-tended flowerbeds. Bird feeders hang from every tree. Irises and daffodils bloom profusely. When no one answers my knock, I start toward the barn and here comes a man with a dog over the small bridge that crosses the creek. She keeps close to his boots, stepping gingerly and checking his face as though ready to run to me but knowing she shouldn’t. The man is tall, thin and dark with a shock of gray hair. “Go ahead,” he says. “It’s okay.” And she races up to me and sits at my feet, looking up into my face with her blue and brown and yellow eyes, and there’s a crazy little snip of black running down her nose, and I know that of course I have come to take her home. Of course I have.
“I’d be really good to her. I’ve had an Australian shepherd before,” I say, turning the photograph of Louise over to show him.
“I’ve no doubt you two would get along famously.”
“She’ll have a good life. We’re headed back to Wyoming this summer, and she’ll have nothing but space, and we’ll be together every day.” I notice that his eyes are crinkled in amusement, but I can’t help myself and add, “I’m very responsible.”
“I’ve already said yes,” he laughs.
I realize that I don’t need to talk him into this. “Are you sure you can part with her?”
“To a good home, yes.”
I write him a check, and he walks with me back to my pickup. I open my door, uncertain as to how she’ll leave this man and the home she’s known, but when he says, “Load up,” she leaps inside. As I drive away, she sidles over against me and leans her weight into my shoulder, her front legs braced on the seat and her eyes, inches from mine, watching the road alongside me.
I wake early one Sunday morning when the spring snows are melting, make a thermos of coffee and a ham and cheese sandwich, and then drive east out of Salt Lake along Interstate 80. Grace is perched in the passenger seat with her head slightly ducked under the visor, studying the road and the country intently. I mean to drive to the Wyoming state line to sit and read for a while and have my coffee, but once there I find it isn’t far enough. I keep going, past Evanston, nearly a hundred miles in all, to the exit for Highway 189. Here there are no gas stations, no services of any kind, only a narrow two-lane road that heads north into the sagebrush toward the town of Kemmerer and the spring sheep ranges along the way. I pull over and park behind a gravel pile and turn the pickup off. It’s April and the meadowlarks are singing. Grace follows me out into the sage, where we squat and pee, and then follows me back. Propped against the wheel, I pour coffee and split a ham sandwich between us. She licks her lips and lays her head on my knees and stares deeply into my eyes, hoping for more. I read the morning through, enduring her devotion, and when the sun rises high in the sky and the air has warmed, I wad my jacket beneath my head and sprawl on the ground, sleeping the long, deep sleep of the protected.
THE STONE SCHOOL
In early May the Wyoming air holds a thin warmth that won’t survive the falling light. Returning for the summer, I pull the pickup off the empty Shell highway onto the gravel drive and stop to open the pole gate of the old Stone School. The sun hangs over the horizon and evening light casts long-branched shadows through the brush and coppers the rough-hewn limestone of this solitary building. From a nearby fence post, a meadowlark calls out its complicated flute notes. The hinges screech, and prairie dogs scatter to ground, popping back up to watch from a distance. I leave the gate propped open on a pine stump and drive into the yard of what will be my home for the next six months.
For many years I have passed it by, driving the highway between Greybull and Shell. It has always seemed lonesome and stark, but in 1903, with kids arriving horseback and afoot from the scattered farmsteads, it would have been the center, the logical place to build a one-room schoolhouse. The limestone blocks had been quarried from the eastern flanks of the Big Horns to form a room roughly twenty by forty feet, with solid wood double doors opening south to the road and a bell tower rising from the cedar-shaked roof. On either of the long sides to the east
and west are three tall, deep-silled windows. To the north, looking out over the cottonwood bottoms of Shell Creek, there had once been only a small door that opened to the outhouse, the woodpile, and the bluff’s edge.
My friend John McGough—nicknamed Roadkill for his penchant to retrieve and recycle dead animals along the highway—bought it in 1980 after years of vacancy and disrepair. He later engaged an architect to design an addition in the rear—including a cathedral-ceilinged living area, small sleeping loft, and an office with an oak spiral staircase—that maintained the roof line and the integrity of the old school. The tall windows continue around the new addition, and French doors open onto the deck that wraps around the east side toward the mountains. He replaced the solid front doors with tall glass ones that let in the southern light.
At the back door, I find a big rock holding down a note from Amy and Jenny: Welcome home, Chica. We’ll be by after play practice. I open the double doors and on the table see a potted red begonia blooming with a note from John: Something for your new camp. I wander through to the big front room, lit gold by the day’s last light. For the last few summers, the school has served as a bookstore and gallery for the locals and tourists en route to Yellowstone, and this year I’m here to manage it. The walls are hung with photographs of native rock art and scattered oils and Western prints. In the deep windowsills are collections of fossils, bones and shells, with rattlesnake skins curled and draped among them. Pine bookcases line the walls of the southeastern corner, and in the fading light I see shelf after shelf of Western history, natural history, geology and literature. The room smells of warm cedar, pine and woodsmoke from the cast-iron stove in the back.