Unfurled

by Michelle Bailat-Jones

  I don’t look. And she blinks back to her notebook. Writing furiously.

  Maybe I could run to her. Grab her arm, shake her and make her look at me. Maybe I could find a policeman or another adult, someone who might help me keep her in one place until my dad can get to us. Maybe this would work. Maybe she will connect back to reality just long enough for the part of her that isn’t completely gone to remember, even for just a second.

  But I do none of those things. I watch her writing furiously and I revel in my own fury. I stand there hating her. After a few moments, she gets up from her chair and crosses to one of the exits in the direction that she pointed. I don’t look to see whether she goes left or right along the street, whether she takes a bus or a taxi. Instead, I envision the line of her back, the narrow of her shoulders as they melt away. I don’t imagine her disappearing into a crowd or raising her arm for a taxi. I see myself standing in the small terminal building, the water blue and flat in the windows to the outside, and I don’t want to think that’s she’s just walked away, not just outside, because I prefer to see her walking into the ocean, prefer to see her sinking into the waves, drowning, slipping deeper and deeper to finally settle on the bottom with all the other lost boats. In this way, I create my own secret. When my dad comes to get me I tell him how I failed, how I couldn’t find her. But I never tell him that I did see her that day, I never tell him how much I wanted her to go.

  32

  I WAKE THAT SECOND MORNING AT Friends’ Farm to someone pounding on the cabin door. Pounding hard. Urgent. I sit up in the bed, pulling the quilt up to my chin against the cold that will rush in from outside. Not just against the cold. I am pulling this quilt up like a kind of armor. I am expecting my mother. It seems only right that she might be coming to shoo me away from her home. That she might think I have no right to be here.

  But it’s Isaac. He’s rushed in and hovers in the doorway, breathing hard, the bottom cuffs of his jeans are all wet. Faced flushed, hands trembling. For a man with such controlled expressions, his emotional distress is shouting. His shoulders are hunched, his body tight with the desire for flight.

  “Isaac?” I say, sitting up. Snow has come in with him, spilling in from the porch. There is so much snow.

  “Help me,” he says. “I need your help.” There is blood on his sleeve. He reaches for my arm and practically lifts me from the bed, and my instinct is to pull myself away which only frightens him. I am gasping at the cold of the room. He retreats back to the door. I swing my legs from the bed while the dogs jump and race about my feet. I don’t even need to ask what has happened because of the way Isaac is staring at the dogs. He’s come to find me because I’m a vet. And in a few seconds I’m dressed and pulling my hair into a ponytail. In a few seconds I’m throwing on my coat and following him out the door.

  “Tell me,” I say. The snow is deep to my knees. Thick and heavy.

  “The goats,” he says. “The goats are too loud.”

  “Where are the goats?”

  The dogs catch up to me a few steps down the path. The snow is already balling up on Trapp’s long fur.

  “Where are the goats, Isaac?”

  But he’s stuttering now, his face tightened down. He’s walking fast. “We have eight goats. In four sheds. I built the sheds. They are strong sheds.”

  “We need my vet bag, Isaac,” and I rush as best I can while he follows to where I left my car last night. The car is nearly buried in snow, but Isaac helps me open the trunk without clearing it all, and I grab my supplies. He leads me toward a series of outbuildings beyond the main meeting hall. The sky is still only half-lit, more purple than blue. The snow is so thick on the ground and my running shoes not appropriate at all; my feet are frozen within a few minutes, my jeans stiff and wet. Isaac steps easily in his dark boots, and I try to step where he steps to keep from slipping. I want him to keep talking.

  “How long have you had the goats?”

  “Two years. I like goats. Good animals.”

  “Do you make cheese with the goats’ milk, or do you sell the milk fresh?”

  “Cheese only.” He steps over a fallen tree trunk like it’s a small stick. “It’s easier to store and a more popular product.” His voice is clearing, his shoulders less hunched.

  “Do they produce a lot of milk?” I ask, scaling the trunk myself.

  “About two quarts a day. Very sweet milk.”

  Now we can hear the goats and Isaac’s agitation returns. They are bleating, screaming really, in the way that a hurt goat sounds far too human.

  “It will be alright, Isaac. I’m here to help.”

  He nods at me. “You will know what to do. It’s your job.” He points a strong flashlight at a small building and I see what has happened. The heavy snow has collapsed the roof and that roof has pushed an inner wall inside the shed.

  “I must have miscalculated,” Isaac says, his voice choked. “I thought it was sturdy. This is all my fault.”

  But I’m already running toward the building and trying to get inside. Behind me I hear him say, “I am so angry at myself.” But he doesn’t sound angry. His words are weighted, but steady. Some commune members are here, too, and they nod at me with their drawn faces. Isaac reaches me and I ask him, “Can you help me, or do you need to stay outside?”

  He doesn’t answer, he pushes past me to get inside and once we are inside, I see that these are pygmy goats and this is such a relief. Pygmies are calm little creatures and their small size makes them easier to handle.

  He gets a light working and then we can see. Several of the goats are quite hurt. One has been killed, her small head crushed beneath a broken piece of wood. I can’t even move her out of the way yet. Isaac will help me if I give him clear instructions, and so I ask him to begin work on the roof. Already my hands are running along the scrapes and tears on a young goat’s foreleg, but I tell him to clear away as much debris as possible, to make sure the building won’t fall in on me or any of the other goats. He stares a moment at the dead doe but then gets to work. He’s amazingly fast, ripping back siding and displacing sheets of corrugated metal from what is left of the roof’s ceiling. Within minutes the shadowy dawn sky rushes in over my head.

  I sort the goats—basic first aid and very hurt. Only one goat seems completely unharmed. William, the woodworker and arborist, comes inside and offers to help. I point him toward the four goats with minor scratches. He works quietly, asking me questions if necessary, and I am grateful for the help.

  There are two goats I need to assess. The first goat cannot stand up; her front right leg has been badly injured. Without an x-ray I won’t know how much, but I feel around for a fracture and when I do, she lets loose an ear-splitting shriek and shivers in shock. Her lovely eyes roll backward. I rub her eyebrows and her ears. I speak quietly to her, soothing and explaining. William is doing the same in his corner of this half-broken shed. The goats begin to quiet.

  I ask William to bring me a tube, any kind of tube and some water. When he does I am able to set the bone, pack the cardboard tube with cotton and wrap the makeshift splint with plaster. I give her something for the pain and within a few minutes she is walking again. She leaves the shed on her own and I can hear the commune members greet her. William has already sent out two of his goats and the situation is improving.

  The next goat isn’t bleeding or doesn’t appear to have broken anything. She can walk but is shivering and rolling her eyes. Flecks of foam have gathered at the corners of her mouth. William finishes cleaning and bandaging his last goat and comes over.

  “She’s going into labor,” he says. “The scare must be too much.”

  I feel silly for not noticing the goat’s side distension. “How far along is she?”

  His eyes roll upward, he mouths something. And then, “It’s okay, she’s due next week.”

  “Still,” I say. “It’s going to be a traumatic birth.”

  He nods and we immediately work to calm the little doe down, talk
ing quietly and gently caressing her nose and ears. But she is still trembling and most likely in pain. If we can get her to calm further, she will probably deliver without any complications—although too quickly, and I’m worried about tearing and blood loss.

  “Is this her first kidding?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, runs his hand along the spots on her spine. “This will be her third. She knows what to do.”

  Isaac has gotten the shed nearly completely disassembled, except for a back wall. And now I can see that the entire commune has come out to watch and help. There is Lilah near a fence, cigarette between her fingers. There is Greta with her blonde hair in pigtails and a bandanna on her head, there is Hal and Anna and Isaac moving across in front of them. Their faces are frozen, a little stricken. They remain in a deep silence as they watch what is happening.

  William and I sit with the goat, petting and keeping her calm. The other goats, now mostly calm, have gathered where the shed’s broken wall used to stand, their rectangular pupils fully dilated in the bright beam of the overhanging lamp. I want to get the dead goat out of the shed as quickly as possible to get their living space back to normal again. But I have learned that it’s important the remaining goats stand a moment with the dead goat’s body.

  William considers the dead animal. “Isaac will take this hard. These are his goats. He’s spent the time to raise them and learn how to work with them.”

  Isaac enters the shed and kneels next to the body of the dead goat. He removes the beam from its head and takes the wood directly outside. He doesn’t come back for some time and a few of the other goats approach and stand over the dead goat’s body. One goat noses it again and again.

  Isaac comes back in with a blanket.

  “I can take her?”

  I nod, explain that he should leave her, if he likes, outside for a bit. Give all of the goats some access.

  Isaac covers the goat’s head and scoops the animal up. I can hardly see the small bundle in his large arms. He brings it over to me.

  “You see the stripes here,” he says, pointing to the goat’s flank. “You never know how a Nigerian dwarf will color. You cannot control anything about it, you can’t select for spots or stripes or pure tan.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You have to be prepared for anything. This one was born with miniature spots, all along this left side here. But they turned into stripes as she grew.”

  I caress the dead goat’s flank. “She’s lovely.”

  “And this one,” he points to the light tan goat between us, “our ram is pure white, but she gave birth last year to four kids, two perfectly black, one with stripes and one fawn.”

  I say nothing.

  “We’re all looking forward to see how the kids will be this year.”

  He lifts the bundle a little higher in his arms.

  “I’m sorry you lost her.”

  His face is calm now, his body no longer so taut with anxiety. “One day I won’t feel sad about it anymore.” He walks out, cradling the goat.

  Our pregnant goat is beginning to roll her eyes. She’s already lied down and stood up a few times, so there isn’t much time. She’s licking my hands now and nuzzling me with her head. We clear the floor and I ask William to bring me some blankets for her. At the same time, he says he will tell everyone what’s happening.

  “They’d like to come over,” he says when he comes back, and I see that several members have left their positions around the shed and moved in with the goats near where the wall used to stand.

  The sky is tilting toward lightness. In the distance, a thin line of sun fires along the outline of a mountain. This is when I see her. Next to Greta and in front of Hal. My mother. Walking straight toward me. I don’t have time to react, to stand up, to do anything. I can only watch her as she steps around Tom and around Lilah. She is limping, deeply—and then she is beside me.

  “A person has to make these kinds of choices,” she says. She’s looking at me, but her hand darts down to touch the goat’s muzzle.

  I look down to the goat but I’m really looking at her hands. The long slender fingers. The rounded knuckles and slightly wrinkled skin. I could be looking at my own hands. Just older. I take a breath. “What kind of choices?” I cannot seem to look at her directly.

  “I just knew it. I’ve always known it.” She kneels beside me. It takes her a long time but she doesn’t appear to need any help. There’s a pause and then, “Oh, neat,” she says brightly, pulling her hands away from the goat. “She’s started to talk.”

  “Yes,” I say. “For about twenty minutes now.”

  “Talking” is what goats do when they’re about to give birth. They keep their heads angled toward their flanks, make soft noises to their bellies, and nudge the skin.

  “She’s had quite a shock,” I say, just to have something to say.

  Her face tenses with the thought. “Isaac will have to rebuild everything. Someone must have sold him bad wood.”

  I think how this may be true, how it might not be true at all.

  The goat’s belly is completely still, so I know the kids are lining up to enter the birth canal. The goat lies down and it won’t be long now at all.

  “Look,” she says.

  So I look at my mother. I finally look up at her face.

  “I couldn’t keep you both safe. I told him. It would take too much of me.”

  “You couldn’t?”

  “I had to choose.” She’s shaking her head beneath a knitted wool cap. It’s the most exquisite shade of purple. The cap doesn’t cover her ears entirely, and I see it—the flesh-colored piece of plastic in her left ear. Her face is both familiar and wholly unknown. It has the same shape, but it’s her eyes. Her eyes are all wrong. I don’t remember that her eyes were anything like this.

  Her hands clutch at threads extending from the cuffs of her winter coat. “Something has happened,” she says. “Something has happened or you wouldn’t be here.”

  I nod, and I know as I do that from now on there is this one thing she has gotten perfectly right. Her farfetched conclusion at this instant is the right one.

  “That was our deal,” she says. “We agreed.” Her voice is very anxious. “I promised, you know. He made me promise to let you be. But now you’re here.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, I knew I couldn’t keep you both safe.”

  Eye to eye. We hold it. Our faces nearly touching. This is when I know for sure. I am not her. I will never be her.

  “I’m safe,” I tell her.

  She nods, lets out a breath. “It’s been a lot of hard work.”

  The doe shifts, cries out. I smooth the blanket we’ve placed under her. My mother reaches out and touches the top of my head. Just once.

  “Look,” I say, and this time she looks where I have pointed. “She’s nearly ready,” I say.

  “She is,” my mother says.

  And we watch the little doe as she bleats and pushes, and there in the bright morning light is the first crowning of her baby’s head, so perfect and soft and alive.

  33

  WHEN WAVES REACH A CERTAIN HEIGHT, the only thing to do is match the speed of the boat with the speed of the waves. This means slowing down, not speeding up.

  In other words, if I do what I’ve been taught to do, there’s a chance we won’t heel or broach. All these years I thought I was preventing a capsize risk, but really I was just risking a broach. On the upside, broaching feels at first like a wild ride, a sublime rollercoaster, until the boat speeds down the other side of the wave crest and slams into the base of the next one. No one can predict what the bow will do when it buries itself into that second wave. The whole boat veers. Tilts.

  She gave us gifts.

  I will have to go home from Friends’ Farm and give gifts, too. Maybe Neil will let me. Maybe they’ll be enough.

  The first will be a promise. “I got it all wrong,” I will have to say. “I forgot to look with my
own eyes, and so the danger wasn’t where I thought it was.”

  Maybe he’ll still be angry, which will mean he hasn’t given up. So maybe he will listen.

  “I would trade,” I will tell him. If I close my eyes we will be at the breakfast table. Two placemats, two plates, both napkins.

  “I would trade,” I will say again. “I will trade fear, this time, for honesty. I will listen and hope.”

  If I close my eyes, Neil’s gifts will still be somewhere in the house: the petrified wood, the snakeskin and seashells, those cedar pine cones, the agates and fossils.

  “I will answer all your questions,” I’ll have to say, and I will mean it this time.

  If I close my eyes, we will be in our house. We will be sad but growing less sad. We will both know how to furl the sails. And between us will sit the possibility of those long toes, that deep voice. Those little hands and smooth shoulders, the dip where the baby’s spine curves into a neck.

  I will say that I was wrong. That I mistook imagination for delusion, that I made bargains I didn’t understand, that I took myself for an owl and flew too often at night and alone. “I cannot really see in the dark,” I will say.

  And so maybe we could stand perfectly still. We could hold and we could breathe. We could try this all over again. Sail into the waters of our choice. And maybe Neil might listen to me when I explain and show him about the light that attaches to the top mast of a boat, the light that must be turned on when a boat is moored between sunset and sunrise. Because every sailor knows that once that vessel is successfully docked, once the anchor touches the seabed and holds with its weight, it’s the anchor light that prevents further collisions, that says here we are, we’re docked, we’re at home.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A first enormous and heartfelt thank you to my agent Katie Grimm for your tireless support, keen editorial eye, and well-timed pep talks. I appreciate the many hats you wear and your boundless expertise. I’m also very grateful to Robert Lasner and Elizabeth Clementson of Ig for your interest and support. It’s a pleasure to work with you and to be in such fine company in your catalog.