by E. L. Carter
The war is only over if you can believe it. Otherwise it goes on and on, until a time I cannot imagine.
I travel more weeks into the deep of winter, into the lap of the mountain and back out again. I travel until I am too tired, until I have eaten every morsel I can find, drunk snow for two weeks, until my bones once again jut out, until this time I think I really will fly. A meadow. Wan sun, a fresh sheet of snow from last night’s storm. The cows have gone to shelter in the barn.
In the distance I see two men, one young and one old, pulling a small wooden rectangle out of a car, like a child’s coffin, unfolding it, and pulling out chairs. The old man sits and stares into the field. The young one watches for a while, and then begins to walk in my direction. I reach into my pocket to clutch the little gold butterfly and whisper, “I’m sorry, Brother.” When I lie down in the snow, it greets me like the mother’s arms I remember from so long ago, the barely understood arms that have filtered through my dreams lifetime upon lifetime.
Peace.
NEW JERSEY—LATE SEPTEMBER 2005
It’s already been a month since I woke up in Isra’s house, and came out to find her serving tea to her younger sisters on a little broken plastic set. The set was decorated with an old-fashioned image of Holly Hobby in a bonnet, her big blue eyes fixated on the grass. Isra’s brown eyes fixed on Holly as she poured water into each little cup with its broken handle—one for each of her new sisters, one for herself, and one for the fourth guest: the butterfly, its wire wings bent into a rippled pattern and no sequins left at all.
It came as a revelation then—standing at the open arch of the doorway, in the blind spot where I could see perfectly but remained hidden—I saw that the butterfly would break. It would break into bits, and I would get her a new one. And she would tell me over the phone what she’s doing and what she dreams of. And I would listen and write songs for her. One day she would come visit me in America.
Isra looked up and saw me, then called out “Mama!” with a sidelong glance at A’idah. I bit my lip. Did she too want me to scoop her up and run?
I said, “You can call me auntie. One day when you’re older I’ll send you a plane ticket to come visit me.” A’idah blinked her eyes and stared at me. “I mean, if your Mama says it’s okay.”
Since that moment, and the long hug good-bye, the hug when Isra finally held my neck and buried her little face in my chest and we rocked each other back and forth—between the plane flight home, all that has followed, and now, I have talked with Isra once a week. We have a conference call with A’idah, who acts as translator. I have sent her a new tea set, porcelain this time, and a stuffed monarch butterfly, physiologically accurate enough to satisfy even Kris.
This isn’t really how I want it to be. I don’t want to be the one sending a check once a month and standing staring at the ocean waves between me and her while someone else gets to be Isra’s mother and healer. But it’s what I have, and I’ll make the best of it.
My apartment rented while I was away, and when I got back I moved into the little upstairs guest room at Mom and Dad’s, with the same old toys still cluttering the drawers. I was deciding where to go next. It almost didn’t matter anymore. Down the street, or to France—the only difference was the freight bill on my harp. I began picking up shifts at the Riverstone while I decided. Stella begged me to stay, told me I could rent a cheap condo on the other side of the interstate. But she couldn’t expect a waitress who was about to turn thirty to stay on until retirement here, half-asleep in the haze of Jersey.
Then Avi came in a couple of weeks ago. It was the morning after a storm, the kind that blows branches off the trees and leaves them strewn across the road in the morning like the bones of a kill picked clean and scattered. The street, a river for a day, still bore the eroded channels on either side, and my bike bumped over stray shreds of bark and stones.
I parked behind the restaurant, the kickstand lilting the bike off to one side in the thick gravel. I pushed my hair back, then fished out a hair tie and made a hasty ponytail. No one likes black hairs in their food. I skipped up the two stairs and in the back door, my mind full of a song that had come to me while I was biking down the hill in the wind and the whirring of tires. Stella gave me a funny smile, as if there were a secret joke, and I smiled back as if I got it. My secret is my song. What’s yours?
I grabbed my apron, my pen, and my booklet and tripped out into the dining area to set the tables.
Avi was there. 9:01. We had been open for exactly one minute. He had his half-read paper and a cup of coffee, like he’d spent the whole morning.
He smiled, then dropped my gaze.
“Can I get you a refill on that coffee?” I asked.
“No. Can I get you one?”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
He looked around at the empty tables. “Too busy?”
Actually I had tables to set, coffee to brew, salad to mix up, plates to stack, cups to dry. But instead I pulled up a chair and sat down. “I don’t drink coffee. But I’ll take a cup of English Breakfast tea. With cream, please.”
When he stood up, his chair squeaked against the floor in the empty room. I watched him walk away, his back that I now could recognize if I came up behind him on a crowded city street. He fiddled for a while at the coffee machine then turned, and I could see his face again. He crept toward me with the steaming cup in his hands and set it down in front of me on its little saucer, one hand on the handle to steady it. A little bit had spilled.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“What?”
“Click clack.” He picked up the cup and the saucer, and set it down again. I began to hum something else, something from my belly. The song of a woman with nothing left to lose.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” I took another sip.
“It goes over the clickety-clack really nice.”
“Yeah.”
“Listen. I realized something.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m a complete asshole.”
Now I smiled.
“Comments? Suggestions?”
I shook my head. “You pretty much said it.”
“You’re enjoying this.”
“Maybe a little.”
“Why?” He turned directly to me.
“Because it means you care.”
Avi’s eyes got big but he didn’t look away.
“Did you think I wanted to lord it over you?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t want to win some petty war. I just want to get on with my life.”
He looked down into his coffee. “And you will too.” He paused. “I can’t believe I accused you of being jealous of me. You know, it was me, I was so jealous when I read the pieces you wrote. And then, while I’m trying to rip to shreds the way you make me feel, you just up and run off into a war zone. Into the most dangerous place in the world.”
“Did you really think I was going to hang around New Jersey watching for you? Out the rearview mirror, as you say?”
“What was it like?”
“Not as bad as you’d think. Besides the car bombs.”
He gave me a look that could be admiring or scared, I couldn’t tell. Maybe a bit of both. He said, “Well, I was freaked out of my mind. I’m surprised CIIN didn’t put me on a no-call list for harassing them. I’m still deciding if you’re the bravest person I ever met or if I should have you involuntarily committed.”
“Wasn’t it your idea? Or did you mean the half-assed method? A check in the mail, the monthly guilt-reduction treatment?”
Avi looks into his coffee and I soften. “I’m sorry. My whole secret composer thing was the real cop-out. I stand guilty of trying to fuck with your head.”
“Because?”
“Because it’s safer than falling in love. So to speak.”
Avi looked at me for a long moment, then across the room. I needed something to look at too, lik
e a person coming out of solitary into the yard and the glare of the sun on the high walls. We both sat like that forever, shielding our eyes.
I hadn’t seen the couple who’d seated themselves across the room by the window. They sat across from each other, the man with one hand across the table in hers, and the other on his phone. Messaging her? Anyway, Avi and I should be the only ones in the room right now. The only ones in town, or in love, or out of things to say. The woman leaned back and looked around the room, as if searching for something missing.
Oh. I stood up, my napkin falling to the floor. “I need to go. Maybe we can—”
Avi lunged toward me and took my hand. He called out across the room, “Excuse me!” The couple turned their heads in unison. “Your waitress is falling in love. She’ll be with you shortly.”
They smiled. The woman turned toward the window and the man returned to his phone. I wanted to pick up the napkin from the floor, lay it over my head, and hide there. I could ride through Baghdad, but could I do this? Avi’s hand remained around mine, warm and firm and unrelenting. He looked straight at me. “I could freak out now too, but I’m not going to.”
I laughed out loud.
THE ATLANTIC Ocean at sunrise refuses to answer any questions but its own. It roars and spills over, spits up shells, milkfish egg cases, and broken bits of garbage. I’m standing at its edge looking out, trying to make sense of Isra across the waves from me, of Avi. But mostly I came to set Kris free.
I had to go back to the milkweed field for Kris’s note. The aluminum stash can was rusty and I could have punched a hole in it with my finger, but the note remained intact within the glass lining. When I left there I wandered over to Kris’s apartment. I looked up the stairs that I had already descended for the last time. I studied the blank white face of the door.
As I stood there, the door opened and a woman walked out.
Younger than I but probably half a foot taller, she sported high cheekbones and a coral pink blouse I would only wear for Halloween. She fit here in this doorframe. Not like me, not like Kris.
Had she given the white walls color? Maybe some impressionist prints, maybe striped sheets on the bed to match her shirt? I bet the closet was full of clothes, and maybe she’d tucked her flats into one of those hanging shoe bags on the door. It couldn’t be more than a quarter full. Room to grow. A bright future in shoes.
The woman closed the door, swung a bag on her shoulder, and turned to find me staring up at her. She hesitated on the top of the landing, uncertain.
I didn’t want her to know. She deserved to be just out of college and at home in her first new apartment, to go forward with her life and never know loss. To be privileged, full of good food, safe in her house with the door unlocked. I held Kris’s note tight in my hand and smiled up at her. Then, I turned and left her in the shelter of my silence.
I move down the beach. The lighthouse rears up before me on the park-like lawn, and the day is beginning raw and blustery. At some point the thousands of monarchs roosting in the trees around me will take flight again. Right now they are invisible in the dawn light, but they will soon continue their journey, as I will mine.
Last night I found Mom in the kitchen, her hands in a bowl of dough.
“Mrs. Bird knew where your mother was too,” I said into the quiet, still space.
She caught the too, and turned away from me, opening the fridge. She rummaged around in the meat drawer until the fridge clicked on and started to hum, like icy monks chanting.
“You know,” I continued, “she left you because Grand-mère told her to. Because she was convinced it was the best thing. She didn’t leave you for lack of love.”
Mom looked out from her hiding place in the fridge. Her eyes were shiny with tears. “Then why is there so little love?”
“Maybe there is so much love and so much pain all mixed together that none of us really knows what to do with ourselves.”
There are stories that hold you hostage in immeasurable sorrow, that keep changing and flowing into more sorrow. All the while they beg to be told—and we resist, we want to shut our ears against them, not come a step closer. Then one day, after years of fighting in chains, we give in, and the telling is the moment when the stories release us.
Mom’s conception happened in one unexpected weekend in a hotel. It happened after Grandma fell asleep in the snow, reached the end of her story—the end of all hope—and then rose again in the arms of the enemy. Somewhere in the process of resurrection, her eyes began to speak a new language Papa could translate, a new story as yet unwritten. It happened when Grandma clung to Papa, wrapped herself around him like rolled-up birch bark, when something in him met her in that instant, and the word gadjo did not matter, nor the word tsigane, when he could somehow reach beyond himself and find how much he loved her, and she could travel the great distance to the edge of herself, where Grandma met the world—and they touched, actually touched, hands in hands in the church where they said their vows with crinkled clothes and hair looking windblown, in the room with fresh white walls where the fresh white bed lay behind the white curtains, a room like a gessoed canvas that they themselves would paint, despite anything before or since.
Mom began to cry in earnest. Her face crumpled, a little girl’s face again. I gently closed the fridge. I put my arms around her. She stopped crying. We stood like that for a minute, both stiff, barely breathing, but neither one letting go. Then she turned and went back to her rummaging.
I kick the sand with my bare foot, the cold September sand. I don’t know where the story will go from here, now that it has been told, reimagined, told again in a different way. I do know that today I’m here on a beach with a note in my pocket.
A grey puff of clouds that rests on the horizon holds the rising sun back in layers of veils. I sit in the sand and begin to build a small fire out of bits of driftwood and dry leaves, the kind of fire that Kris prided himself in, the kind you need no paper to start. I draw the line at flint and steel. Pull a lighter out of my pocket and hold it to the curled leaves. They begin to glow at the edges. I blow gently, then harder, as twigs begin to crackle and light flares up against the grey of morning, a tiny beacon.
I reach into my pocket and hold my hand there. Two small objects touch my fingers. The first is the note, curled up on itself into something more solid than Kris ever meant it to be. The second thing still surprises me every time my fingers find it.
It was at Mrs. Bird’s house, only a week ago, but it feels like a different month, maybe even a different life. I came in out of the heat and sat on the cool cushion of the couch, took the iced tea offered to me. Mrs. Bird’s gaze pressed against me the way a friend in kindergarten used to press buttercups against my cheek—I wore the powdery stain as a proud scar to show I had been loved.
Mrs. Bird cleared her throat.
Stray hairs had come loose from her hair clip. The dissident white strands altered the composition just enough to drain the perfect comfort from the room, to slip some kind of unease behind her tender gaze.
“I don’t like to tell people what to do,” she said.
“You mean like unsolicited advice?” I laughed.
“It’s all wind. I don’t say what I really mean.”
“Like regrets? Advice regrets?”
“I want to end the war.” Mrs. Bird brushed her arm across the coffee table, a sudden attack, the enemy a stray crumb that dared to linger. She lifted her arm and looked at me. “This is about us. Not about who did what sixty years ago. Can you see your anger as it rises up and become its friend? Even if you’ve lost someone you love? What will be the legacy of your own actions? Anyone can stop their own war. They can love someone too much to resort to self-righteousness. Even for a moment.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Do you think I’m being self-righteous?”
“No, Madeline. It’s me. Blustering around without facing the most important battles.” Mrs. Bird fell quiet and looked out the window.
Then she said, “It’s so complicated. Sometimes history makes itself before we even know what happened.” With that, she reached toward me and took my hand. Her hand was bony and soft like a dead animal. I hadn’t realized how old she really is. She whispered, “You know, I could have been your great-aunt.”
She looked up at the paintings lining the walls, the flowers sparkling with some light hidden in the pigment. “Your Uncle Jack, look what he created after he lost to the war. I refused to let his memory go. But have I made anything better because of it? I don’t really know.”
Her stories suddenly made sense to me, the way she had always been there, in Grand-mère’s house caring for him. The way she knew Grandma’s story. She had been trying to tell me this. Or at least get me to ask. “Uncle Jack was—”
“Supposed to be my husband. Yes.”
“If he had lived, you would be my great-aunt.”
She shook her head. “I wanted to belong to your family. Anna was supposed to be my sister.”
I wished she were my aunt. I wanted history to be different. I said, “What do you think you could have done? None of it was up to you.”
“I ask myself every time I look at the garden if I did everything I could. For her, for Jack. All I know when I look back at my life is that things were lost, and things were gained. And both were a gift in their own strange way. Have I found peace? I guess I can’t really say.”
“Mrs. Bird,” I said. “Look at me. I play the harp again. Because of you. I have a performance already. And I play because of what you taught me. I play to my ancestors. Not for me anymore.”
I paused. Then, “When someone is gifted, it doesn’t mean they have something or that they are being given something special—it means they are giving. Your gift is what you give.”
Mrs. Bird smiled and let my hand go. Her smile changed her face, from something a little like regret to the look of a teacher to a pupil who’s been having a terrible time grasping an equation. It was a relief to see her like that again. She said, “That reminds me. I have something for you.”