Autumn Imago

by Bryan Wiggins

  Kim stepped down from the pulpit. The worship leader stood at the lectern, but I was no longer listening. She buzzed on about God’s grace and gifts while the ushers carried plates past me down the aisle. I felt Aaron looking at me, then turned to see Mara and Aida doing the same. Their eyes were on my hands.

  I looked down at the mess they held. Every one of my fingers was stained by the pulpy red remains of the carnation I’d crushed between them.

  11

  Postlude

  I was glad I’d driven separately. My plan was to leave straight from church. After the sermon Kim delivered, I couldn’t wait to get out the door, but we were stuck in a long line of parishioners funneling to greet their minister in the narthex. It looked like it’d be awhile before I could gun my engine for Maine.

  I didn’t begrudge Kim her little epiphany about the fate of my sister and father. If she needed to package their deaths into a Sunday school story to deal with them, that was her business. I resented the fact that she shared it, broadcasting it from the pulpit to sheep too dumb to think for themselves. But mostly I resented that she did it while I was sitting among that flock.

  “Did you find Tommy?”

  I looked down to see my mother’s expectant face beaming up at me. Mara looked right at home in the church. The slightly unfocused look I’d come to recognize in her eyes during my stay at Kim’s seemed to be missing here. She was wearing a gray skirt, matching blazer, and a silly little pillbox hat that looked so old-fashioned it might have been back in style.

  Her question threw me; I assumed Kim had told her the results of my trip. Then I realized, Kim probably had told her. Mara had simply forgotten. I was caught trying to edit the details of my story while my mother waited for an answer.

  Aaron watched me too, while Aida thumbed away on her cell.

  “No, Mara,” I began slowly, “best I could do was find the place he used to live.”

  Her lower lip came out. “But you said you’d find him.”

  “I said I’d try. I spent two days running all over that godda—” I looked up and caught a nervous glance from an old guy ahead of us in line. I forced a smile, lowered my voice, and bent my head toward her.

  “I’ll send park reservations to the apartment where he used to live. I held up my end of the deal, Mara, and I expect you to do the same.” She didn’t look happy, but she kept her mouth shut.

  I looked back at the line. An old woman at the far end had Kim’s hand clasped between hers. She held it to her chest while she prattled on about God knew what. I turned back to the kids. “Listen, tell your mother goodbye,” I said as I eyed the door at the other end of the sanctuary. “I’ve got a long drive ahead of me. I’ll arrange what I can and hopefully see you guys in Maine.” Mara’s mouth popped open, but nothing came out. I touched her on the arm once before I left. It was the best I could do.

  I had almost made it to my truck when I heard my name called. I turned around to see Aida and Aaron running down the sidewalk behind me. “Can we get a ride?” Aida asked breathlessly when she caught up. It took Aaron another few seconds to join us, but Aida was wheezing worse than he was. I was about to reply when she held up a finger and began rummaging through her purse. A moment later she took out a small plastic inhaler and put it to her mouth. She triggered a puff of medication, sucked it in, and held her breath.

  “Asthma,” Aaron said. “It can get pretty severe. She had an attack a few months ago that put her in the ER.”

  Aida released her breath with a soft whoosh while her brother continued his story.

  “They had to give her intravenous corticosteroids to—”

  “Shut up, Aaron,” Aida said, slipping the inhaler back into her purse before turning to me. “Mom’ll be another hour shooing those old crows away. Can we have a ride or not?” she asked, drilling me with her bright green eyes. It really didn’t sound like a question.

  ***

  “Can we stop for ice cream?” Aaron asked as my truck sat idling at a light. “They make their own there.” I followed his finger to the stand a little way down the road.

  “I really need to get going, Aaron.”

  “I don’t blame you,” said Aida.

  The three of us were crammed onto the bench seat in my cab, Aaron wedged in the middle. I could feel Aida studying me as I waited for the light to change.

  “You must have had a ball the last couple of days, reconnecting with your family,” she continued. The way she said the word made it sound like a bad joke. I sat there trying to think of how to respond. The guy behind me honked, and I saw the light had turned green. I looked in my rearview mirror and gave him the glare I’d been tempted to turn on Aida.

  I pulled in and bought three cones, then led the kids to one of the picnic tables by the stand. We worked on our ice cream in silence for a minute before I spoke.

  “I really am glad I got to see you both again.”

  “Just not Mom and Gram,” Aida shot back.

  I ran my tongue around the edge of my cone. Aida was sharp. Aaron too. They would’ve smelled my bullshit the moment I tried to feed it to them. The truth was uncomfortable, but I was even more uncomfortable lying to them about it. I let my silence answer Aida’s retort. To her credit, she kept quiet too.

  We finished our ice cream and got back in the truck, riding in silence for a few miles before I heard Aida’s phone chirp. She glanced at it and uttered a soft “shit.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Dad texted. He’s gonna be gone an extra day.”

  “Mom won’t like that,” Aaron said quietly. “Especially after the fight they had before—”

  “Shut up, Aaron,” Aida snapped, clicking away again. “It’s normal for parents to argue now and then.”

  I was glad she was distracted with her cell when Aaron replied. I really didn’t want to hear her tell her brother to shut up for a third time that morning. He spoke so softly I almost missed his response myself.

  “It’s been a lot more now than then . . .”

  ***

  Our detour got us back home after Kim and Mara. Aida opened the door to my truck with her eyes glued to her phone, tossing a breezy “bye” over her shoulder without giving me a glance. Aaron shimmied across the seat after her but stopped before hopping out the door.

  “Are we really going to Maine?” he asked.

  “If I can arrange it. Don’t you want to go?”

  He studied his hands for a minute. “I looked Baxter State Park up online. The whole place sounds sort of—I don’t know—unpredictable.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing?”

  “I’m more comfortable with classical mechanics.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the way we understood the world before Einstein. Classical mechanics is deterministic. It says that if you know exactly the situation as it is now, you can predict what it will be like in the future. Baxter sounds more like quantum mechanics; it’s probabilistic. There’s no way to predict the future in that kind of world. Anything’s possible.”

  I was still trying to think of a response when Kim came out. Aaron and I traded goodbyes while she walked up to my window. She leaned in and pecked me on the cheek. I had the sense she was getting the difficult part of our goodbye—the physical one—out of the way first.

  “Thanks for bringing the kids home.”

  “No problem.”

  “So you’ll see about reservations? Mom was pretty upset you didn’t find Tommy, but she agreed the deal is still on.”

  “I’ll do what I can and let you know.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for church too, Paul. It meant a lot to me, having you hear me preach.”

  I could have been gracious. I could have told her, “Sure,” and driven off in peace. But the mention of her little lecture instantly fanned the flames I’d been trying to cool.

  “Was that sermon for me?” I asked. The words came out so sharply that Kim actually drew back from the window, her smile disap
pearing in a flash.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I found it interesting that you decided to deviate from the lectionary on the day I’m in the pew just to sell your sweet little story about Jordan and Dad singing with the angels.”

  “Is that what you think of my faith?” she asked, the tears coming so quickly to her eyes that I think they surprised both of us. “Is that what you think of me? That I’d share a story like that just to try to change your mind about God, or about our family for that matter?”

  “Can you honestly tell me you didn’t preach that sermon today because I was there?”

  “No,” she said quietly. “I did. But my sermon wasn’t for you, at least not more for you than everyone else. It was for our mother, Paul. She was the one I had in mind when I wrote it. Having you here has brought our past back to her. While you were in Pennsylvania, it was all she talked about. So many memories came out. It seems like the more she forgets things that have just happened, the more she remembers from years and years ago.”

  She grew quiet, and I looked down at my hands. I released them from the steering wheel and turned them over, staring at the dotted pattern the wheel’s leather cover had pressed into my palms.

  “I think the clearer the past becomes to Mom,” Kim said, “the more terrified she is of what lies ahead. I preached that sermon to give her the only thing I could to help her with that fear. That sermon wasn’t about trying to make you believe in anything—it was about trying to give our mother hope.”

  I don’t remember what the two of us said after that. But I remember how I felt about my sister’s words as I drove away. I believed them.

  12

  The Long Green Wall

  My mind mirrored the landscape during the six-hour drive from Dover to Kidney Pond. The suburban sprawl I sped past was as jumbled as the thoughts and emotions I carried from the last few days. After a few miles, my anger at Kim began to cool, but the heat of our argument hadn’t shed light on the person she’d become. I’d heard the story of how she found her faith and used it to reconcile herself to the tragedies that tore our family apart. But I was missing so many other chapters from her life that that one felt like fiction to me. Kim was a stranger. And I couldn’t quite trust that she believed her own story.

  Mara felt even more foreign. I didn’t know her well enough to tell if the changes I saw in her were caused by her history or her pathology. I only knew that my time with her at Kim’s felt like I was trapped in a house of mirrors—banging between my misperceptions and reflections of the woman who had raised me.

  The world behind me had lived up to my expectations, growing denser and darker with every mile south I’d traveled. Pennsylvania was the turning point in that journey, where I discovered that the home I had revisited so often in my mind had been completely erased. Even my memories of its past now seemed tarnished by what it had become. And the worst part of that dead end was the place that held the sad debris of my brother’s life. I now realized that Tommy was probably lost to me—to all of us—for good.

  Every mile I put behind me made me feel better, my spirits finally rising as I ascended the Piscataqua River Bridge. I performed my customary ritual at the top, drawing in a long, deep breath as I passed the state line sign, filling my lungs with the good, clean air of Maine.

  As I descended across the Piscataqua’s northern shore, my thoughts turned to Aida and Aaron. She was a teenage typhoon; he, an unsettling puzzle. But when I thought of the three of us together earlier that day—twirling cones under our tongues while trading sticky napkins on a rickety picnic table—I looked in the rearview mirror and caught myself in a smile.

  An hour later, I passed Portland; in the next, Augusta. The sinking sun illuminated the tops of the pines with a yellow-green light that blazed against an indigo sky. Then the hours rolled by with no change in that view. I took its constancy as a comfort.

  Aaron had called Baxter an unpredictable place. Katahdin funnels the wind in ways that can conjure thunderheads from a clear sky within an hour or frost wildflowers with snow on a summer afternoon. The broken clouds and trees and bones I’ve seen in the park are potent reminders of the volatile powers that rule that world. But nature’s wild swings of weather and fate have a rhythm. Maybe the diminuendos and crescendos of wilderness only sound strange to human ears—to short-lived listeners never afforded the eons needed to hear the full measure of that music’s refrain.

  The sun fell, and I drove on between the banks of pines, moving deeper and deeper through the long green wall that stood between the place I loved and the world of disappointment below. My hands rested easy on the wheel. I kept my eyes on the road that carried me north.

  13

  After Eden

  “Wrong tool.”

  Tyler whipped around so quickly that the hammer flew out of his hand, skittered across the half-floored porch, and disappeared into the shadows under the cabin. When he turned his wide blue eyes on me, I couldn’t help my reaction.

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to cut my laughter short. “Didn’t mean to spook you. Here, try this.”

  He took the pry bar from my hand and bent back to his task, working quickly now to pull the floorboards from the porch. There was nothing wrong with them; I had come back from Dover to find them nailed in place of the rotten ones I’d discovered earlier in the season on Loon’s Nest, the two-person cabin tucked at the end of the pond. But the slight sag in his work had made me suspicious. I had crawled under the cabin with a flashlight to inspect the painted pine log that served as the joist under the porch’s front edge. When I poked it, my finger sank straight into soft, mushy wood.

  Carpentry was another one of Tyler’s many undeveloped skills. But as usual, he was eager to learn, and when I told him we’d need to rip out his work to correct the problem underneath, he greeted the news with a shrug and a smile. Now I began collecting the boards he’d removed and pulling out the nails with the claw of my hammer. It was going to take quite a bit of time and toil to start over and do the job right. If my father had taught me anything, though, it was that covering up a problem only led to more of them in the end.

  My biggest problem today wouldn’t be found in Loon’s Nest. It would be arriving in cabin 6: Sentinel, the six-person lodge a few doors down.

  It had only been two weeks since my trip south. Shortly after my return, a last-minute cancellation made Mara’s crazy wish for a family reunion possible. If her crew could get here, the ten days she’d bargained for were there for the taking. I’d traded a string of calls and texts with Kim as she tried to arrange things. In the end, she said that though neither the kids’ teachers or Robert was happy about the trip, my family was coming.

  I worked the hammer claw back and forth to pop a nail, then reached for another board. Tyler was outpacing me, springing from target to target as he slid and rocked the bar to strip one board after another. As quick as he was, we wouldn’t have time to finish the job. It was a Friday, and we had a lot to do to get ready for the weekend’s incoming guests. We pulled a tarp over the half-stripped foundation, then crisscrossed yellow barricade tape around the perimeter.

  I was bushed. I’d been working overtime to make up for my trip down south and to get the time off I needed for my family’s stay. I had thought about pulling some shifts while they were here but finally decided against it. The kids’ teachers and Robert weren’t the only ones unhappy about our impromptu vacation. But I knew that if I had my uniform on, I’d spend more time tending to the campground’s other guests than being with my own family. The one concession I gave myself was my accommodation for the ten long days ahead. There would be a spare bunk in Sentinel, but I wasn’t about to take it. Loon’s Nest might be closed to the public, but it would suit me just fine, even without a porch.

  I spent the rest of that Friday with an ear trained on the gravel parking lot as I cleaned up the last of my to-do list. They might as well get here, I thought, sweeping the dirt out of a cabin its guests h
ad ignored. My family had been intruding on my thoughts so regularly for the past two weeks that it would be a relief to see them in person, just to get them out of my head.

  Tommy, Kim, and Mara were in three very different places, none of which felt accessible to me. I knew enough about addiction to realize that Tommy probably had a better chance of seeing Dad and Jordan before I’d see him again. Kim had secured herself a privileged life and a silly profession; it was easy to peddle fairy tales about a loving God when the fridge was full and the mortgage paid. And Mara drifted in some gray place between the past and her foggy future. Her present was a mystery. The lapses were still small, and she was sharp enough to cover them, but I had the sense that with every passing day she was accelerating more quickly toward that blank and distant place her own mother had disappeared into.

  I closed the door on the back porch I’d cleaned and shut my eyes against the glare off the pond, setting my mind to the uncertain days ahead. In that moment, I resolved to treat my family as I would any other guests I hosted here, doing my best to accommodate them. And when it was over, I’d look forward to finding the professionals who were trained to tend to my mother’s special needs.

  I walked down the back steps of the cabin, checked the grounds around it, and looked up to see my family coming across the field. It took me a second to see that Robert—as usual—was missing. They crossed the field in single file. Kim waved at me as she followed Mara, then turned past Aaron to call behind her. I saw the back door of her dark green Range Rover open a bit wider before a lean leg slipped out. A long moment later, Aida stepped out of the car.

  They were all loaded down with groceries and luggage except Aida, so I quickened my pace to help with their bags. As I got closer to my mother, my steps slowed. Her head was covered by a bright red bandana—the same headgear she’d reserved for our trips to Baxter when we were young. The bright midday sun had bleached the wrinkles from her face. With her white hair covered and a new bounce in her step, I saw the past clearly, and some distant day from my childhood was suddenly superimposed upon the moment I was moving though.