by Gin Phillips
The party idea was unappealing, whether or not her mother was there. Ren was not fond of conversation. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence—hers or someone else’s—she would drift off completely. She preferred reading alone in her room, with its light green walls like a forest. She could be sucked into her books, and time would stop completely. She had bought her own tapes, including some Dylan, and she could listen to them without feeling like she had stolen something of Scott’s. Sometimes she would close her eyes with the headphones over her ears, and when she opened her eyes, Scott would be sitting next to her, eyes closed, as if he were listening, too. Sometimes he would do ridiculous dances and make her laugh aloud. He was nicer to her now that he was dead.
She did not remind her parents. By the day before her birthday, she had convinced herself that she did not want them to remember. It would be much easier not to deal with a birthday.
She woke up on December 13, and when she stepped into the hall, she knew they had remembered. She could smell that they had remembered—her mother had made orange cinnamon rolls. Those orange rolls took hours to roll out and then let rise, and her mother had always teased Ren for liking them only because they forced Anna to wake up at five a.m. to make them. When Ren breathed in the sweetness from the top of the stairs, she felt so full of love for her mother that her skin felt tight, as though if someone squeezed her she would burst like fruit. She took the stairs two at a time and ran into the kitchen.
There was no one there.
She walked slowly into the pantry, anticipating a surprise. Once upon a time, her parents were fond of hiding behind corners and springing out loudly. But they were not in the pantry.
There was a note in her mother’s handwriting on the stove. “Happy Birthday, Rennie—Love, Mom and Dad.”
The orange rolls were browning in the oven, a shade past perfect, so Ren took out the pan and set it on the stove. She went looking for her mother and found her on the back porch swing.
“The birthday girl,” said her mother, smiling. She held out her arms, and Ren stepped into them. Her mother’s arms were loose around her shoulders.
“I hope you don’t mind that we didn’t do a party,” her mother said, looking out at the brown grass. “You didn’t mention wanting one. We thought maybe you were at the point where it wasn’t cool to have a party anymore.”
“It’s fine,” Ren said.
“Your dad wants to take you out for a nice dinner.”
“Great,” said Ren. She sat next to her mother, trying not to rock the swing. “Aren’t you coming?”
“We’ll see,” said her mother.
“Thanks for the orange rolls.”
Her mother nodded slowly. Ren shivered, wishing for a coat. She noticed that her mother was barefoot.
“We didn’t do anything for Scott’s birthday,” her mother said.
Ren didn’t know what to say. Her mother never said his name.
“June twentieth,” said her mother.
Ren wanted to say that she knew that, that she had known very well the day Scott’s birthday came and went, but she had not said anything, because she had thought she was not supposed to say anything.
“We should have done something,” said her mother. “I wanted to bake a cake, or maybe those strawberry cupcakes he liked, but your dad thought it was a bad idea. He said it would only remind us of things. You wouldn’t have minded, would you, if we had made cupcakes?”
Ren shook her head, but her mother wasn’t looking.
“Or maybe blackberry pie,” said Anna. “He liked blackberry pie.”
“He liked every kind of pie,” said Ren. She wrapped her arms around herself, twisting her fingers in the sleeves of her flannel pajamas. Her ears were burning from the cold.
Anna’s legs were bare, and her nightgown didn’t quite cover her knees. She held herself straight. Her hands were in her lap.
“I think we should make a tradition on his birthday,” she said. “Maybe plant something. Not that he liked gardening. But maybe we could plant something anyway.”
“Maybe,” said Ren. She scooted closer to her mother, who was much warmer than the wood of the swing.
Her mother looked over briefly, patting Ren’s knee with two cold fingertips.
“I didn’t have to do my homework in Mrs. Allen’s class,” said Ren. “You get a free homework night when it’s your birthday.”
Her mother nodded thoughtfully. “I need to get batteries for the radio.”
The wind blew suddenly, and Ren closed her eyes against the cold. The swing rocked with the wind, and her mother lifted her feet off the ground.
“I took the rolls out of the oven,” said Ren. “They were going to burn.”
“Good girl,” said her mother.
Ren went back into the house. She ate an orange roll, because they were not as good once they cooled. She got ready for school and went to catch the bus, and her mother was still on the porch. She wished her mother had picked another day to say Scott’s name. And she wished there had not been orange rolls. If she had walked downstairs without the smell of them, she thought it would have hurt less.
Her father was late that night, and they went to the Italian restaurant down the street for an efficient meal. Ren did not particularly like Italian. When they came back home and she went to pour herself a glass of water, she noticed the pan of rolls still sitting on the stove. The rolls were hard and cold, and only one was missing.
This was her worst memory.
They did not want her to leave for college, which surprised her, because she thought they had forgotten she lived with them. Her mother asked if she would stay in town, go to the small private college in the city.
Ren had cut her hair to chin length; she missed being able to lower it over her face as she read or studied. “I don’t want to go there,” she said.
“Why?” her mother asked. She had been working in an artsy gift shop, one with handblown glass, endless wine stoppers, and purses made from bottle caps. She had a sheer scarf around her shoulders with flecks of silver.
“I just don’t.”
“But why?”
“I’d like to see something other than Indiana.”
“You could always transfer. We’d love for you to stay around another year or two. You wouldn’t even have to live at home. But it would be nice to know you were close.”
“We’ll see,” Ren said. “I’ve got a list made up already. You’re supposed to apply to several.”
She thought her mother would ask her to name the other places, but she did not.
“Do you think you’ll go into medicine?”
At some stage in elementary school, Ren had wanted to be a pediatrician. “No,” she said. “I was thinking I might go into history. Or anthropology. Or psychology. Or sociology. I don’t know.”
“Like social work,” Anna said.
“Not that kind of sociology. But big schools like Arizona have a ton of stuff I’m interested in.”
“But why do you want to go so far away?”
Ren didn’t answer.
“Why?” repeated her mother. She was toying with her scarf.
Ren shrugged. She felt something shoving itself up her esophagus, threatening to make her gag. She desperately wanted her mother to stop asking her, not to make her say the words that were crowding into her throat, and she also desperately wanted her mother to ask again so that there would be no guilt in answering her. If her mother asked three times, then surely, surely, whatever Ren said would be justified as an answer she was forced into giving.
Her mother did not ask again.
A week later, maybe two weeks later, Ren did not know that the thoughts that had gagged her were still lodged in her throat. She did not know it until her father walked into the den while she was watching
Wheel of Fortune. Her father, who had taught her how to plant flowers and how to spread pine straw and how to jump in raked leaves. Her father, who had once let the pain in his shoulders flow into the ground and sky. Her father asked her the same question. He had obviously been talking to her mother, which surprised Ren. She didn’t think they had conversations.
He held a crystal tumbler in his hand. The alcohol was beautiful as it rolled in waves from side to side.
“Why do you want to go so far away, Rennie?” he asked.
His face was relaxed and kind, and she’d forgotten whether that was how he used to look or whether it was the whiskey. She watched as her mother drifted in from the kitchen, appearing just behind her father’s left shoulder. She couldn’t see her mother’s mouth, but her eyes seemed to be smiling.
“Because I feel like I might kill myself if I stay here with you,” Ren said.
Her mother’s eyes did not change. Her father did not say a word, but his entire expression shifted. He stared at her, and she thought of martial-arts movies where someone was beheaded in one stroke with a sword, but it took a moment for the head to fall off the neck. The look on his face was the look on one of those heads’ faces. Severed.
She turned back to the television. He left the room. A second later, so did her mother. They made no noise. She kept staring at the television. The puzzle was a PLACE, and it had a T, two M’s, and two O’s.
Vanna turned over one S. Then one N. There was no P.
She had not meant to hurt them. It hadn’t occurred to her that it was possible.
The tall red-headed guy asked to buy an A, which was ridiculous, because the answer was clearly Mount Rushmore. Ren considered that she hadn’t ever thought she would kill herself. That was wrong, and she shouldn’t have said it. What she had thought was that she might already be dead. That she had been in the car with Scott that day, and the reason her parents forgot about her was that she was a ghost, too. Or that she was somewhere in between living and dead, and that as long as she was in this house, she was stuck in limbo. She had to get out or she would fade into nothing like those dead or dying animals left in the middle of the road that somehow vanished from the asphalt after a day or two.
She and her parents never talked about what she’d said. She saw her father the next afternoon, pouring a glass of water, and he smiled and called her “my girl” and seemed to have forgotten about their conversation. They were all good at forgetting. It was in October of her sophomore year in college that her mother called her and said he had died suddenly. He had been driving home from work and crashed his truck into the side of a bridge. Her mother said he had had a heart attack while he was driving.
Ren wished she had told him she was sorry. She wished that she could have gone back to when she was six or seven and, as the girl she had been, talked to the father he had been. She had adored him once, and then he had disappeared—he disappeared so gently, while her mother disappeared so glaringly—and then he had been gone for good. He had been gone already, but she was surprised—inexplicably—by how different death felt.
Once she had gotten in an argument with a limp-haired little girl at school about whose parents were better. That girl’s parents, it turned out, were both doctors. And they could ski. Ren had come home and told Scott about the argument, and he had said, without looking up from a stack of cards he was shuffling, “Nobody’s parents are better than ours. Don’t tell them I said that.” Then he looked up and smiled, and they both knew this secret that was only theirs: That they loved their parents and were pleased by them but that it was not the sort of thing they would ever actually admit. And she knew Scott, and he knew her and she imagined she could actually see through his head into his giant-coiled-worm brain and it thumped like a heart and expanded in a great gray hello to her. That’s how well she knew Scott in that moment.
Ren went to her father’s funeral. It was her first funeral. After the ceremony was over, she and her mother and her grandmother and a preacher and two friends of her mother’s stood by the graveside and watched as the coffin was buried. It was a metallic gray-blue color, with black handles, and Ren watched it, wondering what Scott’s coffin had looked like. She also watched the buttons on her mother’s navy blue blouse, which were silver and shaped like small crescent moons. Her mother’s hand was on her shoulder, resting at first, and then leaning harder. Ren felt the weight increase, the pressure from her mother’s palm forcing her to slope to one side, and she wondered if the buttons had been polished, because they gleamed like mirrors in sunlight, and it was an overcast day. Her mother bowed her head, and Ren saw a drop land on her mother’s chest, right where Ren could see the outline of her mother’s bra through the fabric. Then another drop landed, soaking into the material and spreading. As her mother cried, Ren watched her blouse.
And then she looked toward the sky with its wispy clouds and the ground with its neat green grass. The dirt was rich and dark where the casket was being lowered inch by inch. The ground was damp under her feet, and she saw blades of grass stuck to her black heels. Her grandmother was leaning forward onto the balls of her feet, keeping her high heels from sinking like golf tees. Her shoes were beige with a white stripe across the toe, and her legs were remarkably attractive for a woman in her seventies. There was a sneeze and several discordant coughs and her mother’s soft crying.
Her mother used to call and call Ren at college to ask why she didn’t visit more, why she didn’t come by, why she had left. After the years of silence, all these words came pouring out over the phone. The same words, over and over again. Often Ren did not answer the phone. When she did, she would listen and nod and make agreeable sounds. She went home at Christmas only. She would not go home more often, and she would not answer her mother’s questions, because she remembered the severed look on her father’s face. No good came of talking.
Then one day, as Ren sat on her bed, listening to her mother’s questions, she looked down at the phone and took a tally of herself. She decided that she wasn’t angry, she wasn’t sad, and she didn’t feel anything at all.
So she told her mother, “You left first,” in a calm, kind voice.
And then her mother stopped calling.
eight
* * *
Anthropologists have glossed over the mechanisms through which knowledge comes to our awareness. That is, we have studied what the knowledge is, but not how it is received and processed. Although we know that humans experience their world through many ports.
—From “Perceptual Anthropology: The Cultural Salience of Symmetry” by Dorothy Washburn, American Anthropologist, September 1999
* * *
Driving made Silas think of his father, of road trips when his father would bark for the boys to be quiet in the backseat. His father loved to hear the sounds of the car. Silas, too, liked the hum of the engine, the clunk of ruts in the road. He liked the rhythm of it.
He and Ren had been on the road for more than an hour, headed back to the Crow Creek site. He was still mystified by the turn of events: Ren had gotten a phone call less than an hour after he’d asked to see her notes on the site. There’d been flash flooding, and a chunk of the cliffside along Crow Creek had washed away, exposing more walls. The owner had thought Ren might want to come take a look at the newly uncovered rooms. She did, of course, and so did Silas, no matter how bizarre the coincidence seemed. Ren had not acted surprised at all. She’d had another restless night, and he was beginning to think her insomnia was catching. His eyes were red and dry from lack of sleep.
His father believed strongly in keeping his hands at ten o’clock and two o’clock on the steering wheel, and Silas had his hands in those automatic positions. He looked away from the road and studied Ren, thinking that he enjoyed her face more now than he had that day he heard her speak in Albuquerque. Or the day she’d stepped out of her truck at the bunkhouse. He had a flash of
her at the Cañada Rosa, talking about lava flows, chewing her lip as she pointed to the streaks down the canyon walls. Just as she was chewing it now while she looked out the window. She had a small straight scar along the line of her cheekbone—from hitting the edge of a glass table when she was four, she said—that enamored him. The insides of her thighs were incredibly soft.
He cataloged this list of her virtues in hope of smothering his growing frustration with her. She had been edgy throughout the drive—really, he thought, she’d been edgy for the last day or two. Something had clearly rattled her. She kept watching him. It was a different kind of watching than usual. He liked her typical watchfulness, the warm weight of her attention as he worked or talked or slept. She let him know she enjoyed looking at him. But this new watchfulness wasn’t admiring. He felt like she was assessing him from a safe distance.
Now, as he drove, her eyes would flicker toward him, then away, slippery and unsettled. Her hand was steady on his leg, but he felt the energy running through her, crackling in the air around her.
“What is it?” he asked finally.
“Nothing.”
Her shoulders were tense, and her back was straight.
He ran his tongue over his teeth. A few breaths later, he reached over and brushed his thumb along her jaw before returning his hand to its two-o’clock position. It seemed as if he was perpetually reaching for her, always trying to close some distance while she stayed frozen in place. They both listened to the sounds of the truck for a while.
“Are you ever going to tell me what I said that bothered you so much?” he asked. “You can’t blame me for what I say when I’m asleep. It’s my subconscious working out issues.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“Come on. Tell me.”
“No,” she said.
That’s how it works, he thought: I ask you to talk to me, and you give me one syllable. One negative syllable. He didn’t like the bitterness of the thought. He reached for his half-full Dr Pepper, popped off the plastic lid and straw, and dumped soda and ice into his mouth. He swallowed the soda and began to crunch the ice. Loudly.