When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

  It wasn't a song about something cheerful, or about being happy—it was those things. It was like the difference between someone telling you what it was like to get shocked and you yourself taking a hold of a piece of cowpuncher between your teeth. You didn't think about electricity then, you were electricity.

  He dipped into some old sad song. "No," I said. "No, come on. Play the other one again." He wouldn't stop. I kicked his shin.

  He pulled the horn away from his face. "I don't feel happy here, so I can't play happy songs," he said. "You can't, you know, control me. I am artist."

  "You're an artist?" Walter said. "Ha. You play the flugelhorn."

  Marko said, "Jesus, Stevo." He took ten dollars out of his wallet and put it in Stevo's coat pocket.

  Stevo shrugged. "I feel a happy feeling all of a sudden." And then it came out again, the good song.

  I walked back and forth along the building, looking up at all the windows. It seemed like everyone in the whole hospital came to see what was going on, except my mother. A nurse and a couple of guards and orderlies came running outside toward us. Red wasn't one of them.

  "What is going on out here?" the nurse said.

  Stevo stopped playing and kind of saluted her. "We're lost," he said. "Lost musicians."

  "What's wrong with you. You know where you are?"

  "We took some wrong turns, I think," Stevo said.

  The guard said, "We got people in here with real delicate situations. You better get out of here before I call the law."

  Stevo and the trumpet player walked ahead of me and Marko and Walter through the woods. Walter said, "I thought I saw her. I'm pretty sure I saw her."

  I shrugged. "I don't think so."

  Marko did something he'd never done before, but that my dad used to do every once in a while—he put his hand on my shoulder and planted a kiss in my hair.

  A few nights later, when Slats was looking through her magazines, breathing in a set of long sighs and every so often letting loose a short burst of crying, I said, "You know, we could live out there."

  "Out where?"

  "At the farm. It doesn't seem right it's empty. It's a big house."

  "I think that fever did some permanent damage."

  "We could work the farm, like Great-grandfather did, sharpen up the tools. You don't have to live right up against the Plate Glass just because you work there."

  "I don't have to live out there just because it's empty."

  "He left all kinds of things planted. Even though he's not around, it's like they can't help themselves, they're starting to grow anyway. Eli can show you."

  "We'd be in over our heads with that place."

  The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. "We should move out there."

  "If it'll inspire you to give up sleeping so much, maybe we can go out more often, check on those animals."

  "We could live there. We could start collecting dogs."

  Slats made me go to school for the last two weeks of it, even though the principal and Miss Staresina had decided that I'd missed so much of the year, I'd have to do the whole thing over again.

  After it was all through, on a morning of full-out summer, I went out to Bedford and stood at the fence where'd I'd smoked with Helen. It was too hot to move. I think the student nurses must have gone away already for the summer. I didn't see any of them. Everything felt quiet, like it does on those kinds of too-hot days. Finally, I saw one group of people come out of the building and go down to the barns. When they got closer, I saw it was all men with buckets.

  I thought of giving up. Don't come out here, even if it's for years and years, she'd said.

  There was another group of patients behind the men. I couldn't see them at first because the men blocked them out, but it was a group of women. One of them was walking at the edges, just a little away from the rest of them. I walked along the fence, closer to where they were. I couldn't be sure if it was her or not, but I started waving. A few of them waved back at me, but not her. Then they all disappeared into the barn.

  I decided to wait for them to come out. I fell asleep in the grass. When I woke up, I kept watch through the fence.

  When they finally did come back out, this time the women were in front. I'd been right. It was her. I jumped up and waved.

  It wouldn't be until much later in the summer that she would finally come home from Bedford, but there she was, carrying a bucket, wide awake, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She didn't wave to me, but going back up the hill to the building, she turned around and held out her hand; and she started walking backwards, until, I guess, she could fit me in the palm of her hand.

  Chapter 27

  There really is a place in the Allegheny Forest called Hearts Content—my father didn't invent it. I found it on an old map in Slats's basement. I still haven't been there, though one day I think I'll go and walk into the forest and keep walking until I'm surrounded by those old trees.

  Sometimes in the woods at Great-grandfather's farm, I think there still must be old patches of trees even around there, not just in Hearts Content, a hemlock or two that somehow managed to make it through. There might even be places where no one has ever walked, trees that haven't been brushed against, or leaned on for support or rest.

  I was able to convince Slats that we should stay at the farm at least on weekends in the summer. The weekends started to get longer, lasting into Tuesday and then Wednesday. By the time my mother left Bedford, we were pretty much living there.

  I wish I could say here that she came back to us cured of her grief, but she didn't. We found out, though, that she could sleep through the night there, and that she still liked the things she'd always liked about the place—climbing up the ladder on the side of the corn silo, swimming in the pond. I wouldn't go in that heavy brown water, but I would stay close while she and Walter swam. The vodianoi was down there after all, Greatgrandfather would have said, hoping to snatch them away from me. No matter how deep they went in that dark water, I could always see Walter's yellow hair, glowing like a light.

  Though it wasn't the kind of thing either of us were used to doing, or were very good at, my mother and I spent the summer mending the fence like Great-grandfather had shown me, and, with Eli, building a chicken coop.

  Sometimes when we're all in the house, sleeping and dreaming, I get out of bed, feel my feet on the wood floor, and walk, quiet as I can, downstairs and outside. I don't walk all of Banning like my mother and I used to do. I just walk out of the kitchen and stand on the hill that slopes down to the barn. I watch the pear tree and listen to the breeze knocking at the bottles. With my back to it some mornings in the sun, I'm sure it's no spirit that lives in the tree; it's just the tree itself, good and generous. Or I'll think it's no spirit, but is my father somehow, him thinking about me. Other times, when it's more perplexing—noisy one minute, quiet the next—I'll think it's Great-grandfather. Then I'll think that no, there's nothing in the tree, those ghosts live right in me, taking their turns, making their spaces in all the hollows of my chest.

  Sometimes, when I'm out there on those nights alone, I think about the land in the moments just before the very first miners came here poking in the ground, looking for which way the coal seam was headed. The hills rise up to meet them, ready, the trees shining, newly green. None of us have met yet; the people who came to live here and work the coal out of the seam are still scattered over the earth, living in our own countries, fighting in our own languages. All of the little houses that the companies threw down and that are slapped now with different-colored paints, they aren't here either. I think someday, soon probably, the brambles and trees will grow so thickly over all the mines that it will seem as if they were never there, and so the land might start to look again as it once did, but what it will never regain are those moments of perfect greenness, soft earth, hills ready to open at your feet.

  It's not grand now, maybe, but I think it was then, charged with promise, everywhere you looke
d, charged with promise. I think of Great-grandfather carrying Great-grandmother's name with him, whispering it as he walked, holding it in his mouth all the way across the sea. I think of all the things people carried here to Banning. Those songs in the jukebox at the club. Those notes and words on the music sheets, instruments, the songs in their heads, all their hopes of what it might mean to get here and what would happen to them after.

  "Will it be beautiful when we get to there, like the Hungarians says to me?" Great-grandfather asked me in his fever. I didn't answer him, but I should have. I should have said, it will be, Dedka. It'll be beautiful just like they told you. We won't be able to believe what our eyes see.

  Acknowledgments

  For believing in this book and making it happen, I'd like to thank my teacher John Edgar Wideman, my agent Jin Auh, and my editor Kathy Belden. Thank you to the Alaska Quarterly Review, which published an early version of the first chapter; St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., which gave me a year to write the chapters that followed; and Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, both of which gave me time and space to keep writing. Linda J. Ivanits's book, Russian Folk Belief, helped me make sense of some of the myths I'd heard over the years. For their help with earlier drafts, big thanks to Rilla Askew, Jim Foley, Noy Holland, Brian Jordan, Jacob Kornbluth, Emily Miller, Curtis Sittenfeld, Erin White, Leni Zumas, and my sister Jessica Priselac—who gave this book its title. I owe many thanks to Nadine Johnson and Mitchell Terk for their generosity and enthusiasm; to Brian O'Keefe for his high-quality friendship; to Alexander Chee and Laura Dave for years' worth of conversations about books and writing; to Josh Ditzion and my sister Sarah Priselac for putting a Harlem roof over my head; to Ralph Falbo and Dorothy Duffy for all their help and good stories; and to the wonderful, incomparable Elizabeth Powley for thousands of things and for reading everything (including these acknowledgments) a minimum of a thousand times. Thank you to all Sattlers and all Seliys, and their fearless leaders, Marge Sattler and Irene Seliy. For their support and all-around excellence, I am grateful to my sister Lindsey Seliy; my stepmother Laura Seliy; and my brother, David Priselac. Lastly, for being the best kind of parents a person could hope for, and for always teaching me it is important to take a shot, my deepest thanks go to Steve Seliy and Mimi Priselac.

  A Note on the Author

  Shauna Seliy grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lives in Washington, D.C. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. She is a former writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Other Voices, the New Orleans Review, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. This is her first novel.

  Copyright © 2007 by Shauna Seliy

  All rights reserved.

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  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Excerpt from Beautiful Signor, copyright © 1997 by Cyrus Cassells. Reprinted with permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Seliy, Shauna.

  When we get there : a novel / Shauna Seliy—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Disappeared persons—Fiction. 2. East Europeans—United States—Fiction. 3. Winter—Fiction. 4. Pennsylvania—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.E465W47 2007

  813'.6—dc22

  2007000196

  eISBN: 978-1-60819-000-3

  First U.S. Edition 2007

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