Where is he? The boot tracks faintly rising. Deb scans the treetops for woodsmoke, hoping, but sees none. “Shit,” she mutters under her breath. “C’mon, Danny. Hurry.”
And Stephen: How can she describe to her mother her reasons for staying with him? The mornings when he used to go downstairs before her and bring her coffee in bed, brush the hair back from her face and wake her. The way he looked at her then—surprised, each time. The way he smells—of wood and earthy sweat and salt. The way, when they have sex—less and less often these days—he cries out at the last minute, a ripple of pain and joy and love into the dark loft of the cabin. How afterward he burrows his face into the folds of her body, strokes her bare skin, and whispers thank you. How can she tell her mother these things? How the hazy blue sorrow in his eyes is not something she feels like escaping but something that draws her closer. How when Danny was a baby Stephen would go to him in the night and pick him up, and rock and soothe him, so that Deb could keep sleeping. The way he has given her this world—this cabin, this hillside, this child, this chance at something other.
They’re closer now. Neither of them speaks. Deb reaches out and takes Danny’s ten-year-old hand in hers, and he accepts it, and they continue up the hill that way, side by side, mittened hand inside mittened hand. Sunlight glistens on the crackling snow. The air is clear, cold, dry. They reach, at last, the small hunting cabin at the top of the ridge. No woodsmoke. No goddamn woodsmoke. The door is closed. Deb pauses and feels her bowels swirl. The taste of nails floods her mouth. A blue jay screeches from the trees above them, and its cry riddles through her limbs until it stings the bottoms of her feet. She turns to Danny and takes his other hand in hers. “You stay here, okay, love?”
He doesn’t blink, just looks into her eyes and nods.
She goes to the door of the cabin and opens it. The room is dark; her eyes haven’t adjusted. But she can make out a shadow. A body across the floor. He lies on his side, an empty quart bottle beside him, piss soaking the pine beneath him. His eyes are closed and her first thought is how peaceful they look. How peaceful he looks. Those cheeks those arms those shoulders. Stephen. She steps into the cabin and picks up his heavy arm, his leaden hand, peels back his sweater, and feels his wrist, as cold as snow, no pulse beating, and then she opens her mouth and a sound comes out, a deep and anguished howl. And then she stands, and leaves the cabin, and starts down the path to where Danny waits, shaking in the deep snow. She kneels down in the snow before him and puts her arms around him, buries her face into his neck, says, “Come, Danny. Let’s go home. We’re going to build a fire.”
Vale
NOVEMBER 15, 2011
Vale lies in bed in the morning flipping through news stories on her phone.
There are flash floods across Europe. A story about a Filipino-born woman, Cecilia de Jesus, a hospice worker, who drowned in her basement flat on Parnell Road in Dublin. A blurry photo taken months ago of beautiful Cecilia, in her blue scrubs, a smile across her lips.
The victims will be many, Vale thinks, staring into Cecilia’s dark eyes.
SHE DRIVES TO TOWN AGAIN, STOPS AT THE SHELL STATION for gas, walks the fluorescent aisles gathering crackers, peanuts, sparkling water.
A swallow is trapped inside the shed behind the barn—it crashes against the one window, panicked by Vale’s presence.
“I’m sorry,” Vale says, ducking, the swallow crashing again against the glass windowpane before darting out the door past Vale’s shoulder.
The bird has shaken her. She can’t get the name, Cecilia de Jesus, out of her head. Vale goes to the bed and sits down, checks the pillow, finds: a thin gray hair, three inches long.
Vale picks up that hair and holds it in her hand.
Is Bonnie’s hair gray now? It’s possible. The waterlogged Bible still sits in the corner where Vale left it. Nothing else seems changed.
Vale drops the hair onto the floor, walks outside and looks around on the ground. She finds a gray stone, the size of her fist, riddled with quartz. Inside she lays the stone on the pillow, rips another scrap from the back of the Bible, writes down her phone number, and slips out the door.
On the car ride home she hears about ten thousand protestors surrounding the White House two weeks ago to protest the XL pipeline. Good and evil, Vale thinks. Duking it out. Everywhere.
VALE FILLS HER BACKPACK WITH WATER, WINE, CRACKERS, candles, matches, and kindling, and walks to Lena’s cabin. She sits at the little pine table, room for two. One seat for her. One for Bonnie. Time seems to have no grasp there in the cabin—the shadows lengthen. She thinks how if the world goes to hell, this would be a good place to camp out. A wine-loving prepper in the backwoods. She lights a fire in the old potbellied stove, adds sticks from outside, lies down on Lena’s mouse-chewed bed, and falls asleep. Her dream is a collage: Jack, Neko, Bonnie—young, body streaking with joy—stripping off her clothes and stepping into the river. River sleek and smiling. She calls out to seven-year-old Vale, sitting on the bank. “Join me, honey-pie!”
The Vale in the dream wears thick wool pants, a thick wool jacket, boots and mittens made of soft deer hide. Her clothes are wildly inappropriate for the weather: all protection. She rises. In her right hand is something small and warm. She opens her fingers to see what it is—a bird, dead, its left wing bleeding.
Vale wakes, heart pounding. She’s cold, her hair tangled with stray horsehair from the bedding, pine needles, leaves. That bird: the sparrow who was in the barn earlier.
“Goddamnit, Bonnie,” Vale says out loud, rising. “I’m so tired of this.”
Vale pulls the leaves out of her hair, brushes them off the sleeves of her sweater. As she stands up she glances upward and notices a box, tucked between the rafters, that she hasn’t seen before. Dark wood, two feet square. She climbs up onto the bed to reach it. Pulls it down and opens the lid. Vale takes a deep breath. There are books inside: A Field Guide to the Birds, A Field Guide to Ferns, A Field Guide to Mammals. And underneath them: a small notebook, black, leather-bound.
The edges of the pages are dust-speckled, rippled from water damage. The paper has that particular old-book smell, mingled with the smell of mouse and woodsmoke. She opens the book and finds, rivered throughout the pages, drawings made with pencil and black ink. Drawings of bobcats, coyotes, moose, bears. Drawings of birds. Drawings of plants—ferns and trees and wildflowers. Drawings of Otie from every angle. There are words scattered here and there as well, a loose and sprawling script: The smell of leaves . . . what kind of bird? . . . the broken saddled rib of leaves!
“Lena,” Vale whispers.
Outside it starts to rain.
Vale sits down and reads: Sunday, dawn, mist rising. Bird shit on stone step out door. Crow? Jay?
Vale flips the page.
Adele says: near the sickness also lies the cure. Under the words: drawings of grasses, roots, leaves, their names scrawled below them: purslane, bloodroot, burdock.
Who is Adele?
Vale closes her eyes and breathes in.
She thinks of Lena with her long braid and fedora. Mother to Bonnie for one week and one day. She opens her eyes and turns the page again: a sketch of a three-legged coyote, looking out from behind some pines. Eyes wild, feral, curious. In the margins, in Lena’s hand—Three-legged-friend! Eyes: Kerosene. Meteorite.
Vale thinks—vodka. Heroin. Are they that different? A desire for what lingers near the edge?
Vale puts the book down. Feels a flush across her neck and back and spine. She shuts down the stove, closes the book, and stuffs it into the pocket of her coat. It’s late, cold, wet out there, the woods shadows—no watch, no word for time, Vale thinks, walking downhill, skimming past dark trees.
Hazel
AUGUST 20, 1956
On the far side of the lake there is a canoe, rowing toward the shore. Two bodies, familiar yet strange, upright, bare-shouldered, bare-armed. Four arms, rowing. A man and a woman. The body in the bow stops for a moment and drops
a wrist into cool, dark water.
Hazel is by the lake with Stephen. It is afternoon and too late—she should be getting back to make dinner. Stephen is six years old, half-naked, brown-limbed. She doesn’t know where Lex is—he’s gone so often these days.
“Time to go, Stephen!” she calls out to where he is swimming, diving, but he doesn’t come.
The couple in the canoe paddle to the far side, pull the canoe up onto the shore. Strip off their clothes. Hazel cannot make out their faces or their ages from here, just the birch-white blanch of bare skin.
Leaping. They are leaping into the lake water, avoiding the muck and slime of the shore. They are swimming in loops, silently. They orbit each other, not speaking.
A sudden ache in Hazel’s chest. That silence. That swimming.
“Mother!” Stephen calls out, running toward her, lifting his fist up to her face. He opens his fingers, calling out, “Salamander!” and one squirms out of his fist and into her lap, crawls up her legs, near the hem of her dress, and then there is her hard palm across his cheek.
“Don’t,” she says, unable to stop her hand in time. “Put it back in the water.”
His eyes retreat. That stormy green, his cheek blossoming.
Oh, what treason, Hazel thinks, stomach sinking: a mother’s rage.
She wants to say she’s sorry, but her boy is walking back to the water, the salamander cupped once again in his hands.
The couple, swimming, launch themselves onto the bank, dry themselves off with their clothes, slip them back over their shoulders and hips and legs.
They climb back into the canoe. Push off. Drifting and paddling back toward where they came from, the far side of the lake she cannot see.
Hazel thinks of them, swimming in concentric circles. Thinks of Lex, no longer touching her. Rarely sleeping in her bed.
“Stephen,” she calls out, gently this time. “It’s time to go home. Get your things ready.” That wrist into dark water, those blanched bodies, birch white, unashamed of bare skin. And then her boy, her small child, running in her direction, gathering his things, walking beside her toward the car.
Lena
SEPTEMBER 19, 1956
Plum—
Two months into this madness, this forest fire we can’t put out. Lex comes every day. I hear his footsteps in leaves, in grass. That particular hesitant, rhythmic breath, then: “Lena? You here?” Beautiful cheek. Beautiful sunburnt neck. Beautiful moss-green eyes. Songster. Trickster. Coyote.
We don’t talk about Hazel. We don’t talk about the future. I make black coffee on the stove, fill the teacups for him and for me. We sit at the table, facing the window, facing the pines, talking, breathing, looking, sipping the black earth of coffee, full of grounds. He tells me about the Battle of Taejon, the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division, 3,602 dead and wounded. He tells me about stumbling, early one morning, across a ditch full of dead civilians in Yongsan—women and children. Flies in their wounds, flies in their still eyes.
He says, “I’ve never told anyone.”
I put my head against the pine table. Take both his hands in mine. Hold them there a long time.
I tell him about the animals I’ve seen of late: my friend the three-legged coyote. Its night song down by the creek.
Lex sings me his favorite songs: Elvis’s “Love Me Tender.” Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” Kitty Wells’s “Making Believe.” He closes his eyes, taps his feet on the cabin floor.
Sometimes I go to him, put my palm on the back of his neck, and he pulls my body to him, holds his face in the shallow hollow between my breasts. Sometimes we do not touch. Sometimes I say, “Here, look at this,” and show him something I have drawn—a mountain lion, a deer’s antler, an owl. Otie watches us, blinks, calls out when we do.
“You’re genuine, Lena-love,” Lex says, with a thin smile and sparking eyes.
Sometimes we walk: stone walls, cellar holes, the swamp at the back of the woods, where the trees part and open into marsh grass and open sky. The bank is covered in coyote trails, paw marks litter the damp mud.
“Treasures,” Lex says, fingering the ribs and hollows and gouges of the bones on my windowsill with his callused fingers and wide thumbs.
And then, a desperate hunger in his eyes, “Lena?”
We make our way to the bed. Undress each other. My sister’s face is at every window. Her eyes in every knothole in every board of pine. But we don’t stop. “Don’t stop,” I say, before he disappears back down the hill, “coming here.”
He kisses my forehead, where the hair meets the skin.
“Lena,” he says, helpless eyes, leaning his body into mine.
STEPHEN COMES, TOO; YOUNG LEGS, POUNDING, THE knock on my door, his voice calling out: “Lena!”
We hike to our favorite spot in the woods—an outcrop of ledge overlooking the house, the fields, the creek below. The rock surrounded by wood ferns, yellow dock, feverfew. “Lay your head back, Lena, and you can move with the clouds!”
I do. And I can! We float to the sky side by side, traveling over treetops. Stephen is laughing, his little body in blue jeans and flannel, his shorn hair and freckled nose and green-flecked eyes, like his dad’s. And then Stephen is quiet. “Lena,” he says. “Are you ever scared?”
I touch his hand. “Of course I am.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Everybody dies. And then we turn to light.”
He is quiet. We are quiet. We listen to the leaves quiver above our heads; we listen to a far-off tractor, to a bird in the branches above us.
“Common yellowthroat,” I say.
Stephen nods and puts his small, nail-chewed, callused hand in mine.
“But if I do die, Lena, I will turn into a butterfly. And it will be okay because I will fly around you and you will say, ‘Hey, who is this beautiful butterfly?’”
“Yes, I will,” I say. I take his hand and bring it to my chest.
“And I will be a magic butterfly. So I can talk to you.”
“I would love that, Stephen.”
“And I will be the most beautiful butterfly, covered in leaves and kings.”
“Yes, you will, Stephen.”
“And you can keep me with you everywhere you go.”
“Yes. I will. I would love that. I will keep you with me everywhere I go.”
And then he rolls toward me, puts his head and hair on my chest, and I kiss his beautiful boy brow.
Vale
NOVEMBER 16, 2011
She climbs the hill to Deb’s cabin, Lena’s notebook tucked in her pocket, and knocks on the door. Through the window she can see Deb rising from the table where she sits, a glass of wine and an open book in front of her.
Deb’s face softens when she sees Vale. “Come into my lair,” she says, moving a pile of books off a chair. “Tea? Water? Wine?”
“Water would be good,” Vale says, sitting.
“I was just reading Grace Paley,” Deb says, bringing Vale a glass, plopping down on the couch. She tucks her legs beneath her, takes a sip of her wine. “My radical poet hero. She keeps me company when the nights are long. Do you know her work?”
“No,” Vale says.
“Ah, you should! Writer of poetry and stories. War resister. Antinuclear activist. She moved to a farmhouse in Vermont in the 1970s and lived a life of poverty. Wrote beautiful things. She valorizes all of this,” Deb says, laughing, nodding toward her books and walls, the bucket under the sink. “Me and my hovel.”
Vale smiles. Pulls Lena’s notebook out of her pocket and hands it to Deb. “I found this. At Lena’s place up the hill.”
Deb takes the journal. Flips through the pages.
“My God. This is spectacular,” she says, fingering the drawings.
“Yes. I had to show someone.”
Deb turns the pages slowly. Takes a deep breath. “Your mother would love to see this, yes?”
“She would,” Vale says, emptying her glass. She stands up, goes to t
he wall where Deb has posted photographs of artists, writers, musicians. A kaleidoscope of voices keeping her company on this hill through the long haul.
“You know you can always stay here, Vale,” Deb says. “In Danny’s old room.”
“I know. Thank you,” Vale says, looking at a photo of Frida, a bouquet of pink roses atop her head. A photo of Marilyn Monroe in a straw hat and dark leather. “I’m happy where I am.”
VALE STAYS FOR DINNER—BEANS AND RICE, A SALAD OF kale and other late-garden greens—and a movie.
Deb pulls a fourteen-inch TV and a VCR out of the closet. “I still live in the dark ages,” she says, showing Vale the VHS. “The tapes are so cheap to buy online.” She puts in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, one she says she’s never seen before, and brings over two full glasses of wine. The film starts with slow pans over barren winter fields. Men and distant fires in the French vineyards. String quartet, cello, and suddenly—the discovery of a woman, frozen to death in the roadside drainage ditch.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Deb whispers. “Just what we don’t need. Do you want to turn it off?”
“No,” Vale whispers. She feels gutted. Bonnie in a ditch, tits up. She can’t pull her eyes away: wine stains in the frozen grass beside Mona. Mona’s hair tangled.
The film wanders back in time: Mona quits her job in Paris in order to wander. Along the way she meets a slew of other vagabonds—a Tunisian vineyard worker, a family of goat herders, a professor researching trees. These people who live at the quiet thresholds.
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