Those movies carried them out of the silence of their life after Stephen. Danny saw himself in every single one; in every one there was a version of Danny, and in every one Danny found a pathway into the future, via a landscape or a train or a book or a body. Those movies told him that he, too, would make it through. That suffering makes you wiser. That those who don’t make it, the versions of his father who also lived within those screens, didn’t not make it because they were unworthy, or stupid, or cruel, but because their suffering was greater. That is all. Through those films he forgave his father. And loved his mother and her kind—the warm-blooded, surviving heroines.
Like Vale.
Danny shivers in the dark, looking through the window at his mother. He thinks his time of leaving the people he loves is done.
He knocks the snow off his boots and goes inside.
The dishes are washed, a kettle of water simmers on the wood stove. He places mint tea bags in two mugs, pours the hot water, brings one to Deb.
She opens her eyes on the couch, smiles. “Danny,” she says, patting the cushion beside her, taking the cup in her hands. “Thank you. What time is it?”
He sits down beside her. “Two A.M.”
She lays her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes again. “I’m so glad to have you home.”
“Glad to be here.”
“Really? It’s not terrible for you, this hillside?”
Danny looks at Hazel’s bone-thin body on the bed by the window. Breath rising. Falling. “Yes. Terrible. And terrifying.”
Deb nods. “So full of ghosts, eh? And so bloody solitary.”
Danny takes a sip of his tea. “Yes. Ghosts and solitary. Hey, Mama.”
She opens her eyes. Looks at him.
“Did you know about Lena and Lex?”
“Yes. Vale told me.”
“Unbelievable, right?” He tells her about Lena’s cabin: the stones and feathers and pictures pinned to the wall, the drawing of the fiddle player and his lover in braids. LW + LS.
“It kind of changes everything, doesn’t it?” she whispers. She looks at Hazel, dying there in that bed by the window.
“Yes,” Danny says. “And nothing.”
“Right. What power does a story have at this point?”
Danny pictures Vale spinning at the top of the barn rafters in moonlight and how that story might have made that spinning possible.
Deb squeezes her son’s hand. He squeezes hers back. She closes her eyes and he feels her drift back into sleep.
There was a night when he was, what—eight? Nine? Stephen climbing up to the loft in the middle of the night and shaking Danny’s shoulder, waking him. “The northern lights,” he whispered. “Come see.” He took Danny’s hand and led him downstairs, put a hat on his head, boots on his feet, a coat over his shoulders. Outside it was cold—ten, at least. Maybe colder.
And then Stephen pointed up. Said, “Look.”
Danny had never seen anything like it—the sky turned blue, purple, pink, and green. Unnatural colors, there amid the pointed tips of hemlock, spruce, and pine.
More beautiful than anything he’d imagined. Stranger.
Danny’s cheeks were cold; he curled his fingers inside his mittens, squeezed his body against his father’s legs, listened to his father’s breath rising in and out in that dark night.
“We should show Mama, don’t you think?” Danny said after a few minutes, and Stephen had nodded, and so Danny went back inside to wake her.
“Oh—wondrous,” she said when she came out, wrapped in Stephen’s down jacket, walking toward Stephen, and then Danny stood between their two bodies—these people he loved most in the world—a bridge made of his limbs—as they looked up in silence at that perplexing and astounding show made of gas and light.
He likes to think of them that way, always, his parents.
Danny leans his head against his mother’s shoulder. Closes his eyes. Lets his body give way to sleep there.
Vale
DECEMBER 20, 2011
Vale is alone in her camper when she gets the call from the police. A farmer’s dog has found a shoe. A white Reebok sneaker that matches the description of the one Bonnie was wearing. Dragged up from the farmer’s east field that runs along the river, a couple miles downstream from the bridge. An officer has gone there to look but found nothing. She tells Vale, “There’s no telling if it was hers. But it matches the descriptions. Not hard proof of course, but . . .”
Vale thinks of the bodies from Katrina she’s heard about from Moe and Monty: bloated and stinking.
Vale thinks of coyotes. Of what buzzards will eat. Of carrion crows.
“No. No telling,” she says over the phone. She thinks she might vomit. The field is quiet and still around her: frostbitten. The coffee mug burns her hands.
AT THE STATION THEY LET HER INTO THE SAME BACK room where she watched the video.
The shoe rests on a pile of newspaper.
Size 6½ like Bonnie’s. Waterlogged. Mud-caked. Growing algae.
Vale wants to fall onto her knees. She wants to grab the shoe and hurl it at the window—the quick satisfaction of shattering glass.
“Can I?” she asks, reaching her hand out toward the shoe, thinking of the weathered, gray-flecked bones lined up on Lena’s windowsill.
“Of course,” the officer says.
Cool. Dank. Wet. The length of her hand.
It hardly seems like a shoe at all. Vale feels like she is holding a damaged creature of some kind. That dream she had in Lena’s cabin: the dead barn swallow in her hands.
“Can I have it?”
The officer stares at the shoe for a moment, then glances at the office door. “Sure,” she says quietly, handing Vale a plastic bag.
Vale asks for the location of the farm where the shoe was found, and the officer tells her.
“Thank you,” Vale says, tucking the bag under her arm, heading to the door, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jacket to still them.
THE BRIDGE HER MOTHER STOOD ON HAS BEEN REBUILT out of thick concrete slabs and reinforced with steel I beams, but if you stand in the center of it, like Vale does now, on the narrow ledge of sidewalk, and look down, you can see the ruins of the first bridge—a monstrous tangle of cracked concrete piers and green iron. It’s snowing slightly, and Vale tucks her jacket collar up around her ears, pulls her jacket sleeves down over her hands. The snow falls on the still-raw banks. The snow falls on the green iron. The snow falls on the new concrete bridge beneath her. Cars pass slowly, windshield wipers flapping, headlights on.
Vale walks to the far end of the bridge and scrambles down the bank, slipping on frozen ground and snow-covered rocks. She walks past the tangle of green iron. Walks downstream for an hour or more, past the backsides of Victorian houses, past mill buildings and abandoned industrial spaces, looking into the pools of the flood’s detritus. When the creek joins the Connecticut, the mother river that will take the water south and east to the ocean, Vale turns south and keeps walking, for another quarter mile until she reaches the farmer’s field where the shoe was found.
Vale roots around at the water’s edge. Kicks at a pile of fallen leaves.
Snowflakes. Dead grass. Leaves drifting across the water.
She’s about to turn back when she finds the deer bones.
A tangle of bone and hair, lodged under a pile of downed trees and creosote-soaked railroad ties.
“No,” Vale whispers, going toward it, scraping away the branches and leaves with her frozen hands: a rack of ribs, sharp shinbones, skin that looks like dark, caramel-smoked leather, and then a skull appearing beneath her hands: deer-shaped.
“It’s not a human skull,” Vale says out loud, to no one, her heart racing.
She takes a deep breath. Looks at the carcass.
Not Bonnie. And yet: Bonnie.
Vale sits down there by the water’s edge, holds the deer skull in her frozen hands.
“My mother is dead,” she says ou
t loud.
“My mother is dead!” she screams.
There is no smell. No maggots, no swollen flesh. Vale picks up a vertebra, the shape of a miniature female pelvis, and holds it in front of her. Her hand is shaking. She thinks of wasps, worms, buzzards, crows, beetles, yellow jackets. The things that will feed off these bodies, live inside them, turn them back into earth.
Vale thinks of a body being washed downstream, downriver, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Bonnie bringing Vale cups of tea in the morning in bed when she was young. Soft lips on soft cheek. A smoker’s whisper, scented with coffee: “Love you.”
Bonnie’s body Jesus-loved, eyeballs picked out by ravens and crows. Skin melting into pools of grease and smoked leather.
Vale looks out toward the calm river, wide and graceful, almost holy, floating past.
“Bonnie,” she whispers.
She didn’t know such a pain was possible.
“SHE’S DEAD,” VALE SAYS, PUSHING OPEN THE DOOR TO Neko’s room. “And I won’t ever find her.” She’s shaking. Her clothes wet, snow-covered.
Vale goes to the bed and lies down on it. She closes her eyes and sees Bonnie on the bridge in white, her arms spread wide. Sees Bonnie’s body lodged twenty feet below a dam.
Neko brings her blankets. Brings her tea. Sits beside her, not speaking.
Her limbs won’t stop shuddering. She tells him about the shoe. Tells him about the deer bones. Her breath isn’t coming right. Too quick, shallow. “Damn you and your loving mother,” Vale whispers, her eyes closed, her body unable to still itself. “Damn you and your job you love.”
Neko puts his hand on her leg. Bends his head. Whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
“Damn you,” Vale whispers. Vale cries. Vale rages into the sheets. Vale sobs, Neko by her side.
She undresses him. He undresses her. Her mind tangles with the images of the deer’s decomposed body, the bodies of children in Iraq, and the body of Bonnie, washed out to sea: night swimming. He puts his lips on her nipple. Slips his fingers inside her and Vale gasps. A long ache shooting through.
“NEKO,” SHE WHISPERS LATER, HER BREATHING SLOWED, her body stilled.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you leaving?”
He takes a deep breath, looks toward the window—a few snowflakes still falling—says quietly, “The only hope we have of people understanding war is if they see it.” He tells her that there have been 45,000 Iraqi casualties, 3,900 of them children. He says that yes, the U.S. has formally withdrawn all combat troops, but that the violence is far from over. He says, “People need to know that.”
Vale picks Lena’s hat up off the floor and holds it over her eyes. “Yes, they do,” she whispers, throwing the hat across the room.
Neko goes to a pile of photographs lying on the table and brings one back to Vale. It’s a four-by-six print of the collapsed barn on Cedar Street, taken from the ground looking up at the web of fallen rafters, ribs launched against steel-gray sky.
The rafters look like a church.
Of the kind Vale might actually want to attend: light-filled, porous. “I took this a few days ago. For you,” Neko says.
“Bonnie’s barn,” Vale says, sitting up, taking it. How ironically beautiful wreckage can be, she thinks. The colors rust and burn, a flock of birds lifting off from the power lines. She thinks of Leonard Cohen’s bird on a wire, of his famous line about cracks being where the light gets in. Of Danny singing both those songs in the hayloft of the barn like they were gospel, eight years after his father died.
“Vale,” Neko says.
“Yeah?” Vale turns to look at him.
“I always come back.” He’s looking straight into her eyes. Doesn’t turn away. “I travel, yes, but I’m loyal as a fucking dog.”
He puts his face on her thighs. “I like you, Vale. I’m not fucking around,” he says quietly. “Are you?”
“No,” Vale says, putting her hands on his head. Putting her cheek against his hair. Turning her eyes to the window, the slow light that filters through. “I am not fucking around.”
Deb, Danny, Vale
DECEMBER 21, 2011
The rain turns to snow, then back to freezing rain, and the ice on the trees, windows, and roofs thickens.
Severe storm warning, the radio says, advising people, once again, to fill bathtubs, fill jugs, collect candles and batteries and flashlights. One-half to one inch of ice predicted. Widespread power outages, dangerous roadways, falling trees.
Of course, Vale thinks. The next storm. How bad will this one be? The apocalypse, or just another blip on the screen? How do we ever know? She was hoping to go see Neko tonight, to bring him here for dinner with Deb and Danny, but the roads are already too slick, the woods impassable.
She sends a text: ROADS BAD. STAY WARM.
She stares at her message for a long moment. Types: POUR A GLASS FOR ME, and hits Send again.
She wants to see him. She wants to hear him laugh. Cook steaks over a camp stove in his attic room. Touch his ribs. Kiss his chest. Find him.
Vale puts on Bonnie’s silk dress over her long underwear and jeans. “My dead mother’s dress,” she says to Lena’s photo on the wall, practicing the words, trying to wear out the sting. It’s a party, after all—the winter solstice. She wonders how they’re celebrating in the steamy streets of New Orleans; Vale misses Shante’s voice this darkest night of the year. She puts on Lena’s wool fedora and slips Bonnie’s rosary around her neck. “My dead mother’s jewels,” Vale says to Marie. She dabs her eyelids with glittering silver and blue—in honor of Hazel—and reds her lips. The darkest night of the year. An ice storm. A party! She puts on her warmest boots and coat, gathers the champagne she bought three days ago for this occasion. She’s about to leave when she sees the deer vertebra and her mother’s sneaker on the kitchen counter. An unbearable shrine. She places them in a paper bag, tucks it under her arm, and sets off up the hill to Hazel’s house.
She has to punch through the crust with the heel of her boot to not slide, barely makes it up the already ice-slicked field. But if there’s going to be an ice storm, the old house is the place to be. She wonders how many ice storms its bones have stood through. And isn’t this what people have always done—will continue to do—during dark times: gather?
AT THE BIG HOUSE DANNY HAS FILLED THE BATHTUB and old milk jugs from the woodshed with water, has collected flashlights and candles.
“Classic party favors,” Vale says, placing the champagne, the deer vertebra, and her mother’s shoe on the side table. “Happy solstice.”
“Happy solstice to you,” Danny says, looking at the items, touching Vale’s arm. She told him about the shoe earlier this morning.
She opens the bottle of champagne and fills three canning jars, adds sprigs of dried lavender from her jacket pocket, passes them around. Deb fills a plate with apples and cave-hardened cheeses from halfway across the world. Danny takes the glass, closes his eyes, breathes in. His face is beautiful, as always, Vale thinks, watching him. Radiant and tortured, her cousin—trying too hard to do well for the world.
“Cheers,” she says, and they raise their glasses.
They move to the table, eat the apples and cheese, sip their drinks. The radio is on, tuned to an old-time country music station. Danny tells them about the festivals of Guatemala, about all-night dancing in the zócalo. “People are so much more alone here,” he says. “The curse of puritan New England’s stubborn self-reliance. Stoicism.”
He looks at Vale. Raises his glass, says quietly: “To our heroine: Bonnie.”
“To Bonnie,” Vale whispers. The rain sounds like pellets on the roof and windows. The branches outside bend, lower themselves to the ground.
“To Bonnie,” Deb says, raising hers. “And Hazel.”
They can hear her sleeping breath from the next room. Slow and shallow. She hasn’t opened her eyes in twenty-four hours. Every three, Deb gives her more morphine and immediately her bod
y relaxes. Falls back into ease. How quickly one can go from all here to nothing, Vale thinks, watching her through the open doorway.
There’s a cracking sound from outside—a large branch breaking—and the power flickers once, then goes out. The radio goes silent.
“Here she comes,” Vale says. “The next great storm.”
Deb rises and lights the candles they have set out on the table, lights an old kerosene lantern and brings it to Hazel’s bedside.
“Of course,” Danny says, rolling a joint and slipping it between his lips, “with global warming will come extreme poverty. Maybe these woods are the best place to be. Go back to the old ways of survival.”
He passes the joint to Vale, who puts it between her lips and breathes in. Global warming: the unraveling future. The unraveling present. She exhales and tells them about No Word for Time, about a way of living in which the past is in the present and the future, too. About the words in Lena’s notebook: Near the sickness also lies the cure. The sickness: wars, addiction, these storms, Bonnie’s body washed downstream. And what, then, is the cure? She thinks of Marie’s and Adele’s ways of knowing and being: of seeing our human lives as part of a much wider and wilder whole.
She says, “We need Marie. We need to know what she knew.”
Danny nods. Closes his eyes.
They sit quietly: pieces of ice hitting the roof, Hazel’s ragged breathing from the next room, candlelight jumping across the walls.
Vale hands the joint to Deb, who holds it between her fingers, takes a deep breath, and shrugs her shoulders. “Why not,” she says, breathing in.
DEB’S NEVER BEEN A POT SMOKER. EVEN AT THE COMMUNE, and in college, that wasn’t her thing. She never liked the unhinging it brings on. But it seems like the thing to do here in Hazel’s kitchen next to the lit Stanley, here with the two people she has come to love most in the world—Danny and Vale, these survivors—on the darkest night of the year, while outside the world cracks and glistens. Danny and Vale. They are the future: the bloodline of this Heart Spring Mountain. New creatures—wise and feral and true-hearted. Have they failed their puritan ancestors or freed them? And Danny’s children and Vale’s children: Who will they be, and what world will they inherit? Will there be apples for her unborn grandchildren, here where the winters have been so unpredictable—no snow or too much? Warm Decembers and late freezes, destroying apple crops and peach crops. The dry springs and dryer summers. Will there be potable water? She thinks of refugees seeking shelter. Droughts. Famines. Wars. Bonnie floating downstream. The world will become something completely other after her lifetime, and she aches to think how she will not be here to save the ones she loves.
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