Heart Spring Mountain

by Robin MacArthur

  Lena

  APRIL 28, 1957

  B—

  My belly is big. Absurdly so. With you, B! With you. A girl, I’m sure. B for Bonnie. B for the bonnie month of May.

  Stephen comes and we walk. Late April’s sweet, warm woods—coltsfoot, trout lily, trillium. We are walking to see Adele, whom Stephen’s never met before, Otie on my shoulder. Then Otie on Stephen’s shoulder. “Really, me?” he says, laughing as Otie’s talons dig in. Otie finds the bones there, holds on tight. Stephen grimaces. Sets his jaw. Is brave.

  I tell Stephen, as we walk, about my grandmother Marie. Two braids down her shoulders. Dark eyes. Warm laughter. Of the ways I would go to her when I was young and we would sit, shelling peas, while she told me stories. About moons and animals and monsters and how the earth was made.

  “Though I was four when she died,” I say, winking. “So maybe my mind is telling lies.”

  “Indian?” Stephen says, eyes lit up, grinning, a boy in love with books about them, and I shrug, grin back, say, “You never know!”

  Who does know? Not me. Not Adele. Maybe my mother, Jessie, but she’s gone, too.

  The woods are damp, the shadows cool and deep, the earth springing. Stephen hums as he walks, melodies learned from his father’s fiddle—“Saint Anne’s Reel” and “Bill Hopkin’s Colt.” Otie starts clucking, and I take him back from Stephen, who runs ahead. Circles back. His legs and limbs bounding. Like a dog. Like a colt! Like a mountain lion.

  “Stephen! How dare you make me feel so old?” I grab him by the shoulders and squeeze him hard. He laughs. Frees himself. Skips ahead.

  ADELE’S MOUTH PEELS WIDE AT THE SIGHT OF HIM. “A child, Lena. You brought me a child! God’s holy creatures.”

  She brings us tea. Cracks open a package of cookies.

  We help Adele light a fire in the pit outside—throw pieces of fresh venison on, salt the rest thoroughly and put it in plastic bags on the shady north side of the house. Adele tells us she’ll smoke it later, hands us steaming, smoky ribs from the fire that taste like earth and nuts and beech leaves and spring.

  We devour the meat, this boy and I. Ravenous, we are! In love. We wipe our meat-greasy hands in the dirt and leaves.

  On the way home Stephen is quiet, taken with moss, stones, swamp pools, the bark of trees.

  “Lena,” he says, his voice soft.

  “Yeah?”

  “I like the woods.”

  I take his tiny hand in mine. Tiny hand, tiny bones. “Me, too,” I say.

  Stephen smiles and looks up at me. His green eyes that beautiful and bountiful—never-ending—color of moss and leaves. “Run?”

  Deb

  MARCH 20, 1987

  Deb goes to Ginny’s farm to borrow her TV and VCR. It’s been three months since Stephen died and she wants to show Danny there is a world larger and more capacious than the one they are living in. She wants to show him how art—poetry, film, visuals—can make meaning out of suffering, carve a pathway through one’s grief.

  It’s been a long time since she’s been back to Farther Heaven. Ginny’s the only one of the originals left there—she pays the mortgage with a slim inheritance; paints the walls with birds and vines and stingrays and bees.

  Ginny greets her at the door, leans toward Deb with a long hug, which Deb accepts. “Oh baby,” Ginny says. “I’m so sorry.” Old friends.

  They drink coffee in Ginny’s rambling kitchen and joke about Randy and his banjo. About that cold winter. About Deb fucking Bird in the attic at the top of the stairs.

  Ginny spits wine as she laughs. “Jesus. We’re growing old, Deb.”

  “Eccentric.”

  “Wild,” Ginny shouts out, cooing. “And broken,” she adds, her voice quieter.

  Burnt sienna, Deb thinks, perusing the artwork in Ginny’s studio. A horse’s body and a woman’s head. A woman’s body and a horse’s head. Oil on pine boards. Grays and blues and blacks—the color of smoke, the color of November.

  “I love these,” Deb says, brushing her finger along the dried ridges of the paint.

  So nonpolitical, these muted landscapes of white birches and rust-colored leaves. These conversations between darkness and light, color and space. Or maybe just quietly political. A way of saying: here.

  No matter, she loves them, gets lost in them—the texture of far-off ferns, the graceful necks of birches. The way light moves, radiates, reflects, dances. Cadmium yellow, alizarin crimson, sinopia, rose. A way to be less lonely amid the trees. A way of talking back to them. Beauty: she grows fonder of it every day. Keats: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. How wrong she thought he was when she was twenty-two! How right she now thinks he might be.

  Ginny shrugs. “They’re something. A reflection of light.”

  Deb nods. What is she doing to make her way through the days? Danny. She has given her life to Danny, her child, and to the house where they live. She splits kindling to get the stove going every morning, pores over seed catalogs, feeds and tends to her birds, works at the library. In the late afternoon she starts making dinner, does laundry, washes the dishes. She recalls reading Simone de Beauvoir in her college dorm room, a cigarette perched between her lips, furiously underlining: Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition.

  Is her life now radical in any way? Widowhood. Mothering and housewifery. No different from Hazel’s life down the hill. Not all that different from her mother’s, after all. She’d like to ask Helen Nearing: But what about feminism? How do you reckon with that, amid all your loaves of bread?

  Standing in Ginny’s studio she thinks maybe she should have stayed here, in the commune on the hill, and grown old with Ginny—artists in their refuge—yoga in the mornings and wine in the early afternoon. A diffused feminism. Art a way to at least feel engaged with the conversations of the world.

  But Danny. Her son. No way to regret the life that brought him to her: green eyes, long limbs, his blood and hers. And Stephen, too—the way when he walked in the door she wanted to go to him, every time, draw his body, in a thin T-shirt or thick wool, toward her. Put her nose in the crook of his neck and breathe in.

  ON HER WAY BACK FROM GINNY’S SHE GOES TO THE VIDEO store and scours the racks for something decent. Some Fellini, Godard, Bergman, or Tarkovsky; the directors she loved in college. A part of her that’s been shut down for too long. At last, in a far corner, she finds Fellini’s 81/2.

  She sets the TV and VCR up in the living room of the cabin. She makes popcorn, opens a bottle of red wine she’s picked up at the store, pops the movie in.

  Blue light projecting onto those dark pine walls. It will be the first movie Danny sees, and she can’t remember if it’s at all appropriate. She saw it in college sometime and has had Anouk Aimée’s face etched in her mind ever since, accompanied by Nino Rota’s buoyant and emotive score.

  The images light up the screen: Guido the tortured artist in dark-framed glasses, a cigarette drooping from his lips. Deb smiles at the pleasure of a good image. Drinks her wine, pours herself more.

  They watch Sandra Milo fling off her towel: “Guido, do you love me?”

  The sex scene turns to dream: his dead mother in the room. A steady stream of flashbacks and dreams interwoven with present time. “Is that you, Mama?” Guido the boy-child asks.

  “So many tears, my son,” she answers.

  Deb glances at Danny. He’s staring, transfixed. She puts her hand on his arm.

  The Italian actresses are glamorous and elegantly coy—coiffed hair and dark eyeliner.

  Look at me now, Deb thinks, nearly laughing out loud, glancing down at her legs and feet. Stephen’s old blue jeans and the plaid shirt—also once his—full of holes. Her hair, shoulder-length, which she cuts herself in front of the cracked mirror in the upstairs hallway. A form of feminism, yes. But does it bring her joy? Does one need to be desired in order to feel beautiful? Deb wonders, watching Anouk
walk though a crowd of admiring men. De Beauvoir: One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

  So many sex scenes! She should have known. Danny sits beside her not moving, not looking at Deb.

  “Don’t worry, kiddo, it’s just the movies,” Deb says quietly, and it is, just the movies. Nothing like real life. All of the unknowns that live between the sheets no matter how well you know each other.

  Sometimes when she was having sex with Stephen she would close her eyes and think of Bird. Not because she didn’t love Stephen’s body but because she was desperate, occasionally, for something other. For another life lived. To live out all the possibilities she has shut out in the night, in the dark, with his body beside her.

  Of course she never told him that.

  And who did he imagine while he was making love to her? She’ll never know that, either. That’s the thing about marriage, she thinks—all those dark places, untouched and unknown. How you share the laundry, and your dinners, and the bed you sleep in, and the child you make, and yet there can still be so many facts or secrets, shameful or mundane, left in shadow.

  Nino Rota plays on—spikes of humor, constant motion.

  The credits roll, and Danny rises, smiles at Deb briefly, climbs up the ladder to his room.

  “Night, love!” she calls out, overly cheerful, a half-drunk creature, and he nods and closes the door behind him.

  Deb sits in the dark and finishes her bottle of wine for a good hour or more. Her head is buzzing with images of Rome. Of bordellos and leather and quick one-night stands. Of the woman she might have been if she was elsewhere, if she had not married the man she married. A bear. The woman who married a bear. If she were to make a film about her life, that would be the title.

  Deb laughs. The woman who married a bear who watched Fellini films during the winter, got perversely drunk on red wine in the dark alone.

  What a film that would be! Choking on her wine. What a sad film that would be.

  That night, like many others, she wakes at three in the morning, cold, and finds herself reaching across the bed for Stephen’s warm body. After a while she becomes sure that 3 A.M. is the hour he froze to death, that her waking is some kind of spirit vigilance. Maybe even that his spirit is hovering. Her dead unhappy king of the woods. She hasn’t ever believed in spirits before, no matter what Hazel thinks of her. She wasn’t and isn’t that kind of hippie. But when she wakes in the night she feels closer to Stephen than she does any other time. Sometimes she cries, and sometimes she whispers things to him. Our son . . . , she says, quietly, toward the rafters and the window above their bed. Or, my life without you . . . And sometimes, and this she would never tell a soul, he answers back. He places his callused, warm hand on the small of her back. He rubs it, gently, says quietly: Hello in there. Hello.

  Deb

  NOVEMBER 29, 2011

  The darkest time of year. Isn’t some kind of light in order?

  Deb puts the TV and VCR in the back of her truck and brings them down the hill to Hazel’s kitchen. She’s rented The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a film she hasn’t seen in twenty years. She and Vale need something transporting, something sexy; she wants to go back in time and be Sabina with her artistic broodiness, bohemian and solitary by choice. She wants to watch films about hard times and remember the ways that people go on living in the face of tragedy. Art as blueprint.

  “You ever seen this before?” she asks when Vale arrives.

  Vale shakes her head.

  Deb dumps olives into bowls. Pours them each a glass of French wine.

  Vale picks up her glass. Sniffs it. Smiles. “Enlighten me.”

  They sit at the kitchen table to watch it, not wanting to wake Hazel. It’s set during the communist takeover of Prague in 1968. Sex and politics and people finding one another in the dark. Across the screen: Lena Olin as Sabina with her hat, undressing. A young Juliette Binoche snapping photographs of the occupation. 1968: Deb misses, in so many ways, the immediacy of that year. The way her purpose and direction felt so clear. The way the resistance—to war, to racism—brought her generation together in art, in academia, in action.

  The quiet beauty of the ending guts Deb now just like it did when she watched it the first time—the way Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche found light in each other. Happiness!

  Just before their car crashed on that rain-slick back road at night.

  “Harrowing,” Deb says, when the movie ends.

  Vale leans her head back. Closes her eyes. “I don’t want the dream to end,” she whispers.

  Deb smiles. “Me either. The return from that transportation is unbearable.”

  And not just transportation, Deb thinks; the film makes the stark wood of the kitchen cinematic, Vale’s autumnal beauty magnified, Hazel’s dying a harbinger of something greater.

  “I’ve met someone,” Vale says quietly, her eyes closed.

  Deb looks at her, eyebrows raised. “You have?”

  “Yes,” Vale says, eyes still closed. “Neko. A photographer.”

  “No shit.” Deb grins. “I’m happy for you, Vale.” She takes a sip of her wine. “And jealous.”

  “It’s terrifying,” Vale says. She stands and puts on her sweater. Her hat. Slips into her boots.

  “Yes,” Deb says. “I remember.”

  Vale stands in the doorway for a moment. “Is it worth it?”

  Deb laughs—her old-lady laugh. Half-crow. “Hell yes.”

  Vale smiles, tips her hat, steps out into the dark and wind.

  Vale

  NOVEMBER 30, 2011

  Vale drives to the fallen barn on Cedar Street.

  She walks toward the back shed. There are noises from within: plastic rustling, a clank: something more than swallows.

  “Hello?” Vale calls from the door, her breath quickening, uneven. That old familiar feeling of hope that Vale has come to dread.

  A man’s low voice: “What is it?”

  Vale steps through the doorway. There’s a homeless man she’s seen around town these last few months—gray beard, gray hair tied back in a ponytail—sitting on the bed, knees pulled up in front of him, his back against the wall.

  “Sorry,” Vale says, stepping back.

  “You looking for someone?” he says, eyeing her. Rheumy eyes. A large army-green backpack on the floor.

  How does he know? Vale wonders. But in his world, maybe people are always looking for someone.

  Vale reaches into her back pocket, pulls out the folded flyer with Bonnie’s face on it. “Have you seen her?”

  The man takes the photo. Looks at it for a long time.

  “Sure,” he says quietly.

  Vale look into his eyes—pale blue, surrounded by a sea of wrinkles. “You have?”

  “Months ago,” he says. “But since the storm? No. Just your posters.”

  Vale nods. Thinks of Bonnie in that footage. Idiotic. Sick. Complicit.

  “I’m persistent,” she says.

  “She looks like she was wonderful,” the man says.

  Vale takes a deep breath. “She was,” she says. “She loved dancing. She loved to swim.”

  The man nods. Reaches into his pocket for a cigarette. Offers one to Vale. She takes it, even though she hasn’t smoked in years. “Thank you.”

  He lights it for her. Lights his own. “Brutal,” he says, letting out a slow-moving ribbon of smoke from between cracked lips.

  “Yes,” Vale says, coughing. Why the fuck did you walk out onto that bridge, Bonnie?

  “And surprising,” he says, lying down, turning his back to Vale.

  “Yes,” Vale says. She looks at her words on the wall: MY BONNIE.

  “Thank you,” Vale says, turning and heading out the door.

  She stands outside for a moment sucking on that cigarette. Her lungs burn. Her eyes sting, take in: the railroad tracks, the ice-edged river, pigeons on the rooftop of the sheet-metal shop, their plump iridescent bodies backlit.

  SHE DRIVES TO NEKO’S. SHE K
NOCKS ON THE DOOR ABOVE the barn, opens it.

  “Fuck you,” Vale says, entering.

  He eyes her for a long minute from the table. Stands up and walks toward her.

  “Screw you, Neko,” Vale says, going toward him. “You have no clue. No clue what it’s like to have a mother like mine!” She pushes his body against the wall, slams her fists into his chest. “You know where she was on my sixteenth birthday? No. You do not. In the bathtub with a needle in her arm.”

  Vale slams her fists into Neko’s chest again. “In the bathtub with a needle in her arm!” she yells, collapsing onto the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, quietly.

  “No clue,” Vale says, looking up at him. She’s crying. Tears and snot dripping down her face. She wipes her face with her sleeve.

  “I know I don’t,” Neko says, standing still. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Neko,” Vale says, looking up.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m so tired. So goddamn tired. You know what I want? I want to find her body. I want to find my mother’s dead body.” Vale takes a deep breath. Collapses over her knees. Turns her head to look out the window. Gray sky. Gray trees.

  Neko bends down. He unties the laces of her boots. Pulls them off her feet. Puts his hands on her shins and looks into her eyes. “I’m so sorry, Vale,” he says.

  “When do you leave?” Vale asks, meeting his.

  “I’m not sure yet. Sometime after Christmas.”