René grabbed a hot cookie, then turned on her heels and went to play a round of double solitaire with Jayne. But soon enough she was back in the kitchen with a napkin, taking three more.
“You put those down. I mean it,” Eve barked.
“Leave me alone. Stop it,” René shot back.
“Then why in the hell do you bother asking me in the first place?” Eve scolded, banging her hot baking sheet onto the stovetop. “That’s what I’d like to know.”
“What good are you anyway,” René pointed out, “making cookies just when I need you to help me? Thanks a lot for nothing.”
“You are the most ungrateful—”
“Never mind,” René interrupted, hurrying out of the kitchen. “Just forget it!”
“Then don’t ask me! Don’t you ever ask me again!”
René stomped outside, letting the screen door slam behind her. There were good reasons for going away, she told herself, plenty of them. She just had to keep that in mind.
* * *
—
The days passed quickly, and the night before René was supposed to depart for her new home in Phoenix, she went to sit with Eve in her sewing room in the basement. She scooted a chair close, and they sat silently side by side as Eve buzzed alterations through her machine.
Then René said quietly, “I don’t want to go.”
Eve didn’t miss a stitch.
“You can always change your mind, just stay home.”
There was silence, then buzzing, then silence.
“It’s your decision, René. You have to decide.”
There was more buzzing, then a long silence as Eve unpinned a new seam.
“Once you’re gone, I don’t imagine you’ll ever come back,” Eve said, a sudden wash of sadness draining her features. “If you leave, you’ll likely be gone for good.”
“I’ll come home. Of course I will.”
“For visits,” Eve said, “but not to stay.”
She got up from her sewing machine and went over to the washer to switch the loads. René stayed in her chair, watching Eve work as she’d watched her work since as far back as she could remember.
“There’s nothing to do about it,” Eve said. “Unless you just decide you want to stay home.”
“I do want to stay.”
“I can call Mr. Boyle. That’s easy enough.”
“No. I’m going.”
“I thought so,” Eve said. “Don’t worry. We’ll see you at Christmas, and you can call us collect. It’ll be expensive, so we can talk every other Sunday. Call person-to-person and ask for Mary. Since there’s no Mary here, they can’t charge you for that. Then we’ll know to call you back, so it won’t cost so much. Every other weekend,” she repeated, coming back to her sewing machine. “It’s going to be costly enough as it is.” She sighed. “God knows.”
“Okay,” René said. “Sure. I can ask for Mary.”
“We’re going to miss you, René.” Eve dropped her hands into her lap like a defeated boxer or someone who’d failed a test. “I can’t begin to tell you how much.”
“Me, too,” René said, tears beginning to well in her eyes.
She stood up.
Wasn’t there something she could say? Was this not her mother? Had René never been sick? Had her mother never stayed up late into the night to nurse her through a fever? Hadn’t she brought her warm broths and lozenges to ease a sore throat, rubbed Vicks on her neck and back, pinning her into a flannel to loosen a cough? Hadn’t she taught her to read, brushed and braided her hair, made her meals, washed her clothes, cleaned her dishes?
“Well,” René said, trying to laugh, trying to shake it off.
“Oh, my,” Eve said, picking up her sewing and blinking back the tears to see.
And René went up to her room, rearranged her suitcase one more time, then came downstairs and sat limp in a chair across from Al, joining him in staring blankly at a public television program about the Second World War, which the narrator kept calling “the good war.”
36
Coda: Wherever It Was
They All Needed to Go
The next morning they loaded René’s suitcase into the car and drove to the airport. After they’d checked her in for the flight, René and Jayne milled around the gift shop, quietly fingering plastic tomahawks, fake arrowheads, chunks of fool’s gold, while Eve and Al smoked in the café, looking out the windows at the single airplane that was sitting on the runway. When it came time to board, they all met up in the hallway.
René gave Al a silent hug. His cheeks were hollow, picking up the pale shadow of his white Stetson, his dress hat, and he seemed to be moving in slow motion, barely able to lift his arms to put them around her, then barely able to let her go. Then there was Jayne, now officially an only child. Tears rained down her cheeks. She was being left behind without anyone to share in whatever might happen from here on, and she seemed to know that she was losing something important, that whatever hole this left in her heart was never really going to heal. Then, Eve. René and Eve were almost the same height, but now there’d be no chance for René to grow up and out of the fighting and complaining and name-calling; there’d be no time to make amends or come to a new, heartfelt understanding. René was going. And Eve was right: she wouldn’t be coming back.
René handed in her boarding pass, carrying the afghan Eve had knitted as a surprise for her under her arm.
“You might not need it,” Eve had said that morning after breakfast when she’d handed René the gift, suddenly almost shy.
It was constructed in bands of vibrant pastels, like a rainbow, and had small braided tags of horseshoe decorations, like Lucky Charms, tacked to one side. René couldn’t imagine she’d use it. But if she’d only had a crystal ball, she’d have known that it was going to be cold at night in the desert, that over the years, she’d wear that delicate, loosely woven blanket to tatters.
René crossed the tarmac, climbed the stairs, and took her seat by the window. She could see the three of them back in the café—Al lighting a cigarette, Eve digging around in her purse, handing crumpled Kleenexes to Jayne. She waved and waved, then smiled, trying to see past her own reflection, as they spotted her and waved back.
And as the plane lifted off, up over the vastness of the prairie where she’d been born, over the ridges and outcroppings and gullies, over the flatlands and the rising Black Hills, up, up into the clouds, and she found herself on her own, hurtling through space with only the name of her new “family” scribbled on a piece of paper in her pocket, René suddenly understood that there were whole worlds, whole galaxies of unseen things ahead of her, things she couldn’t even begin to guess.
* * *
—
How could she have imagined that—starting that very night—she’d be sleeping in the far corner of a big room on a broken-down army cot with an old door leveled on its frame to keep the center from sinking to the floor? And how could she have conceived that for the foreseeable future her tender bones would be cushioned by only a blanket-thin pad, while the girl whose family she was trying her best to belong to all the more gleefully occupied her overstuffed mattress in the center of the room, piled high with snow-white pillows and a lofty down comforter? How could she have possibly known that, while she’d be lying on the floor beside her cot every night, doing strengthening and stretching exercises, the girl whose room she shared would be glancing down at her with pity and disdain? Or that, no matter what she did, her new “family” would never conquer their impulse to look at her out of the corners of their eyes and go silent whenever she came into a room?
How could she have predicted that she’d be sitting all alone in the library every day after school, browsing food magazines, reading carefully through the details of each recipe, trying to taste the flavors vividly enough with her imagination to sati
sfy her very real hunger? Or that, confining herself to starvation rations, she’d grow too weak to face a flight of stairs, yet, in spite of her frailty, would keep going, keep pushing herself?
And there was no way she could have anticipated that she’d be chosen to dance Swan Lake right along with the rest of Mr. Boyle’s Advanced class at the end of that first year, as a “full performing member” of the newly formed Arizona Ballet Theatre. So the idea that she’d be in a final dress rehearsal when the back doors of the auditorium opened, and that she’d instantly recognize her—silhouetted as she was against the light that was suddenly pouring into the darkness—simply didn’t occur to her. Her mother! Eve. It had been too many months to count since René had seen her last.
When they finished rehearsal, she’d want to run and fall into her arms but could only squat near the footlights, in costume and full makeup, and reach down to take her hands. They’d stay, the two of them, squeezing hands for just a moment before René would be called backstage. And that night, for the inaugural performance, there Eve would be, all by herself, in her highest beehive hairdo and nicest new Butterick outfit, watching in awe from the fourth row of the orchestra, trying in vain to pick René out from the line of unearthly swans.
And she couldn’t have even begun to hope that, before too long, she’d be living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a one-bedroom apartment with five other young dancers and an overly bold population of cockroaches, sharing the one mattress—which they’d hauled in from the curb—on a “first come, first served” basis, or that she’d be in morning class with her idols, dancing alongside Gelsey Kirkland, Leslie Browne, sometimes even Baryshnikov, going across the floor, blending in with the others, yet still striving, still pushing herself to make herself worthy, even if only to fill out the ranks of the royal court in Sleeping Beauty, or to someday bring a willowy shade to life in Giselle. She’d be ready; she’d be almost there.
And it never once crossed René’s mind that, even many years later—well after it seemed to her that, during her short visits home, Al had likely introduced her to every cattleman across the great state of South Dakota, each of whom had reached to shake her hand as though she were some kind of celebrity, telling her that her dad did nothing but talk about her, about how she was living in the “Big Apple,” about how rigorous and demanding her ballet regimen was—that all those many years later, Al would start to fall. And though she might have rightly predicted that it would be Eve who’d care for him, running through the house in her worn slippers, wearing herself out to keep him clean and comfortable, in a million years she never would have guessed that it would be Leon—once again living at home, trying to make yet another “brand-new start”—it would be Leon, of all people, who’d be there to lift Al up off the bathroom floor and settle him into his chair.
As a grown woman with children of her own, René would end up visiting Al in a hospital in Oklahoma, where he’d go in a fruitless, last-ditch effort to find treatment for his brain cancer. But she couldn’t have known—as she’d stand there behind him, having driven the occupational therapist from the room by suggesting that, perhaps, since Al was being belligerent and uncooperative this morning, he could practice combing his hair at a later time—that he’d ask her name, then look up to find her in the mirror and say, “That’s my name.”
“That’s not your name,” she’d tell him, amused. The tumor had made him sentimental. He’d been calling everyone in the family every day to profess his love. “Your name’s Al.”
“No. No. That’s my daughter’s name,” he’d correct himself. “That’s my daughter René’s name.”
“It’s me, Dad,” she’d say, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t recognized her.
In spite of two craniotomies, he would remain fairly lucid.
“It’s me,” she’d say again. “I’m right here.”
“Oh!” And he’d open his eyes wide and really look. “Is it you? Is it really you? How old are you now? Are you sixteen? Seventeen? Oh, René, where’ve you been? Where’ve you been all these years?”
And though she couldn’t have known it, she’d place her hands on his shoulders, let them fall around his neck as he’d go on, raising his sad eyes, tilting his sutured head to and fro in a great weight of heartache and yearning and loss. And tears, unannounced, would spring to her eyes, blinding her.
“No, Dad. I’m older now,” she’d manage.
“Oh, I’ve missed you, missed you, missed you. Just want to hold you,” he’d say, rocking himself side to side. “Just want to hold you again.”
And the hospital room would swim with sadness, and the therapist would come back with her supervisor, angry at having been interrupted in her duties and sent away.
And even years later, long after both Al and Leon had passed away, though the young hospice nurse would be happy that René had arrived ahead of schedule, Eve would already be unconscious, so René would miss the part where they got to say goodbye. She’d run her hand across Eve’s pale cheek, kiss her cool forehead, double the blankets around her icy feet, carefully, as though she might accidentally wake her.
The nurse would recap, telling her that Eve was “failing.” Then she’d take Eve by the shoulders. “Eve!” she’d call, as if across an alpine chasm. “René is here. Do you see René?”
And Eve would struggle up, heroically, blinking just once before her eyes rolled and she succumbed to the grip of the higher power, helplessly heaving and moaning and falling away again. Then suddenly her mouth would warp, her face contort into a classic bas-relief of crying, and a single tear, gathering weight, would quiver and fall from the corner of her eye. And though the click-and-gasp of her breathing continued, violent and steady as the beating of wings, she wouldn’t reach to take René’s hand but, instead, would unlock her crippled fist so that René could hold on to her this one last time.
And within just a few days, René and Jayne, the only ones remaining, would be driving the length of the state, watching out their windows at the passing golden hills, the lopsided barns, the clean black cattle, readying themselves to transfer accounts, sell off real estate, and finalize all the necessary arrangements.
* * *
—
But René couldn’t have foreseen any of this as she was climbing to thirty thousand feet, just barely fifteen, heading into the life that was waiting for her, the life she would, one way or the other, have to call her own.
“Don’t be afraid,” she told herself as the plane lifted higher and the hills and plains, the Badlands, the Needles, the great grasslands, even the wide Missouri River disappeared beneath her. “Don’t be afraid.”
She kept her eyes open. And she prayed that angels would come and fly beneath their wings, would lift and carry each one of them forward, delivering them safely to wherever it was they all needed to go.
For Elwood, Rosemary, and Mark, in memory;
and for Sara—dear sister, dear friend.
For George, Caitlin, and Alena,
who make this place my home.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my editor at Random House, Andrea Walker, for her consistently thoughtful and focused guidance, her kindness and generosity, and for always approaching this work—from the very beginning—with an ear to hear it. I’d also like to thank everyone there who helped this project along, including Susan Kamil, Evan Camfield, Bonnie Thompson, Chelsea Cardinal, Melanie DeNardo, Avideh Bashirrad, Jess Bonet, Leigh Marchant, Emma Caruso, Dana Leigh Blanchette, and especially the singular Andy Ward, whose early advice helped me find the book I wanted to write.
My heartfelt thanks, as well, to the best-ever agents, Esther Newberg and Zoe Sandler at ICM, for their kind and enthusiastic support. I love you guys.
I’d also like to extend my enduring gratitude to my teachers and mentors over the years, those who have helped me along the way: Helen Griffiths, K
elly Brown, David Howard, Tobias Wolff, Douglas Unger, and especially Toni Morrison, without whose support and encouragement this book would not exist. To each and every one, my deepest thanks.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAULA SAUNDERS grew up in Rapid City, South Dakota. She danced as an apprentice with the Harkness Ballet in New York City under the direction of David Howard. She is a graduate of Barnard College, as well as the Syracuse University creative writing program, and was awarded a postgraduate Albert Schweitzer Fellowship in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, under then-Schweitzer chair Toni Morrison. She lives in California with her husband. They have two grown daughters.
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