by Eisele, Kimi
They came to an overturned semitruck in the road, and Rosie pointed to a narrow passage. Carson turned off the road, and they bumped through the brush past the semi.
Carson told Rosie he was finally going to see his friend Beatrix, and when he said her name out loud, he felt warmth all over his body. Beatrix was an amazing woman, he told Rosie. She was feisty and intense, not unlike a coyote. He told Rosie that Beatrix’s hair was the color of the trunk of the ponderosa pine, and that many times along his journey he’d imagined holding it in his hands again. She was the one who had brought him back to life the first time and had kept him alive over all these miles. “You have that in common with her,” he said. “You both saved my life.”
He looked over at Rosie and saw that tears were streaming down her face. Oh dear. He’d been so careful with his words. He hadn’t told her about his trip to the Center, knowing it might be too much for her. But still had he said something wrong?
Rosie made a small sound. Laughter. Yes. She was laughing. Then she took his notebook and turned to a blank page and wrote the words that told him who she was.
A new kind of world required a new kind of funeral. Word got out easily, thanks to the radio and the PBB riders, many of whom had found a friend in Flash. On the day of the event, they came cycling across the highway, a migration of wheels moving north to the park. They’d built a bicycle out of cardboard and scrap wood, as a memorial. They stood it in the center of the park on a small knoll.
Some of the T-Rize kids were there, too, accompanied by adults. After that day at the Gold Mine, the T-Rize had surrendered. Some of the older kids, Diego among them, had scattered and disappeared. Many more, shaken by Flash’s death, had turned in their weapons.
“They need food and clothes,” Rog said. “And homes.” He and Finn had taken in two kids. A few other neighbors had as well, and together they were encouraging more to do the same.
Anita had invented a way for kids wanting to leave the T-Rize to identify houses where they could stay safely, provided they agreed to some rules. She’d made signs with a Red Raven symbol for people to hang on their front doors.
Now there was talk about starting up a school again, at the library. The tenacious school principal had already rounded up a handful of teachers.
“Flash was a dedicated pedaler,” Dragon said, addressing the crowd. “One of the fastest riders in our Cyclical, he was not only a speedster, but also an excellent mechanic and a true teacher, full of grace and patience. He taught anyone how to ride and how to change a tire, no matter if you were six or sixty-six. Flash was an idea man.”
As night fell, Dragon and the other PBB riders lit scraps of paper and kindling underneath the handcrafted memorial bike, and flames engulfed the effigy, smoke rising high into the sky.
“Goodbye, Flash,” Beatrix said. “Goodbye, friend.”
CHAPTER 20
Rosie and Carson drove into a landscape of rolling hills covered with drying grasses. The day was nearly over, and the sun made the hills look like the flesh of a breathing body. The yellow truck coughed and surged before coming to a halt. Carson tried to start it again, but the engine chugged and quit. “That’s it,” he said. “End of the road for Miss Daisy.”
Rosie recognized the road that snaked off the highway, the sign posted alongside it with a painted picture of a black-and-white cow.
“There’s a barn down that road,” she said. She paused for a moment, surprised by the sound of her voice, but then continued. “We slept there.”
Carson stared at her for a moment, then nodded and began to gather their things. With the black marker from the glove box, he drew his moniker on the side of the truck. He handed the marker to Rosie. “Everyone leaves their signature on Daisy,” he said.
Rosie wrote her name, dotting the i with flower petals.
Carson took the bike out of the truck, and they wheeled it past the cow sign down a thin road to the barn. He turned back once to look at Daisy, half expecting to see Felix in the driver’s seat, pulling away.
In the morning, they woke to a dull drizzle. Carson was grateful for the wool jacket he’d scavenged from a jungle camp. He dug his hands deep into the pockets to warm them, and found seeds in the pocket seams. Apple seeds, probably. He tossed them to the ground, scratching them into the soil with his boot. His friend Jimmy Weed would be proud.
Pushing the bike, they walked west across a wide, empty valley, once a vast array of irrigated agriculture but now a wasteland at the mercy of the rains. Sticky mud crept onto the edges of the road.
They came to a small square of emerald green, where crops rose up from the ground. Carson called out, “Hello,” and a farmer wearing a rain jacket and rubber boots walked toward them and sized them up.
“We mean no harm,” Carson said. “Just passing through.”
The man’s hand was large and rough, and when Carson shook it, his own felt weak and inferior. “This is the greenest patch for miles,” Carson said.
“We’re resurrecting the land by hand,” the man said, his beard damp with moisture. “No more mechanization. Cuba did it. We can, too. Started some years back, of course. Oxen don’t learn that overnight.” He pointed to the other side of the road, where a pair of hefty oxen pulled a plow. A woman in a poncho walked behind them, clucking encouragement.
“With good snowpack, we can divert stream water all spring and summer. Store some there,” he said, pointing to three large water tanks at the edge of the field. Then he pointed to a strip of leafy greens. “Beets,” he said. “Corn and beans there.
“But it’s not for the faint of heart,” the farmer said, pointing to a scar on his face. “Marauders,” he said. “When they want what you have, they’ll try to take it. They’ll hurt you for it. Watch yourselves.”
Carson nodded. He had been watching himself for months and miles. He was sure Rosie had, too.
The farmer pulled something resembling a white brain out of his wheelbarrow and handed it to Rosie. “You’re not a marauder. Have some cauliflower.”
“Thank you,” Carson said.
“You’re almost there, son,” the farmer said.
Almost there? They hadn’t said where they were going. And “son”? Carson felt more like a father now than a son.
They continued on. When the day warmed up, they pulled apart the cauliflower and ate it—a sweet and crunchy lunch.
“Look,” Carson said, pointing to the mountains from where they had come.
Rosie’s face lit up. “Snow!”
“I wish you could hear it,” Carson said. “It has a quiet hiss and makes everything seem soft.”
Watching Rosie’s delight, Carson felt something he had not felt for a long time: Joy?
He could summon sorrow easily, could feel its weight inside him. He’d lost the past, his wife, his work, his home, the city, a friend. A world had died. But not everything had gone with it. Wasn’t this the nature of grief? That within its darkness lay the strange shape of possibility? That somehow a slant light could come through the open windows of absence and clarify the most important and beautiful things?
He considered the miles he’d traveled. Persistence was indeed a kind of faith, he thought. He remembered the Pilgrims, picturing the cliffside in Rosie’s song. Had they been given the chance to discover that faith?
He put his hands to his face and thought again of Beatrix. She did not know this beard. She did not know his gaunt ribs, the now-visible knobs of his spine. But she knew Rosie. And now he knew Rosie, too, and if there was ever a sign from the universe or God or fate, or whoever dealt the cards or threw the chips to signal that he was on the right path, Rosie was it.
Late in the day, they came into a residential neighborhood. Carson knew they were close, because Rosie began to show signs of anticipation, nodding and bouncing. His heart quickened, and he clenched his hands into fists to calm his nerves. A bicyclist passed them. And then another. Rosie peered at each of them, as if searching for someone she knew.
Small signs had been posted on porch columns or in the front windows of some of the homes—sky-blue squares with something red in the center.
“Ravens,” Rosie said, smiling. “They’re red ravens!”
Carson turned up one walkway to look more closely.
An older man wearing suspenders opened the front door. “Can I help you?” He glanced at Rosie. “Does she need help?”
“We’re fine,” Carson said. “What is that?”
“The Red Raven,” the man said emphatically, as if Carson should have known. “It means help is here for the kids.”
“From the show?” Rosie said.
“Yes,” the man said.
Rosie turned to Carson and said, “It’s a radio show that Beatrix and my other friends started.”
Carson smiled and nodded.
Rosie moved on, pushing the bike. Above, a flock of pigeons lifted off from a telephone wire. The birds spiraled into the air and flew together, making a loop in the sky before landing again.
“Rosie, watch,” Carson said. The pigeons rose up again, this time flying in a different direction, but still together, their wings pulsing quickly as they circled and landed on the wire. Carson loved this circle dance that pigeons did. It cost them to fly that way; they had to flap their wings much faster to keep together. But they were safer as a group, and maybe, too, it helped them navigate. Or maybe, it was some kind of love. That’s what Beatrix had meant, wasn’t it? That day in the gallery so long ago, when they were looking at photos. That’s what she’d seen in that cluster of birds, blurry in flight.
They turned onto Halcyon Street.
From Alcyone, the Greek myth of the kingfisher, the bird that nested on the sea during a respite of calm from the storm. Carson took a deep breath. May this street offer me my own respite, he thought.
Rosie felt as though she had a strand of yarn inside her body—one end pulling her down, the other end tugging upward. The downward pull was sorrow: She was coming home without her abuela. They had walked this street together and had slept in the parked car that had been their home, and she would never be on this street, or anywhere, with her abuela again. When she closed her eyes, Rosie could still see the birds falling.
But as they neared the house, she felt the upward tug. She was returning to what remained of her family—Beatrix and Dragon and Flash and Anita and Rog and Finn and everyone else in the neighborhood. Her feet did a little skip on the sidewalk when she imagined seeing Beatrix, who now felt to her like a sister or an aunt, or maybe like a mother. She skipped again and thought that maybe what was happening was the validation of a dream.
Carson kept up with Rosie’s stride, feeling feral and full of purpose. Like a coyote. And yet no coyote had as many thoughts as he did. Was Beatrix really here? Would she recognize him? Welcome him? He was no longer the Carson she knew. He was changed. Everything was changed. There was no such thing as going back.
But the past wasn’t past at all. He could hear Felix’s voice clearly. He could instantly summon June’s small, smooth hands. He had been hearing Ayo’s advice for thousands of miles. Nothing was dead so long as there was memory, the only kind of history there was.
Beatrix. Her name came to his tongue again, and his stomach jittered. He looked down at the sidewalk, where someone had written in chalk, Halcyon Radio. It will change your life. It looked like her handwriting. Everything here looked like Beatrix had touched it.
The house was as she had described it—two stories, a front porch, fading green paint. He looked up to the second-floor windows, his heart ready to jump from his rib cage.
Rosie leaned the bike against the porch and leapt up the stairs just as a woman opened the door and stepped out—unmistakably Beatrix. Carson smiled as he stood absorbing her, his body awakening. He thought for a moment he might be hallucinating, but he glanced down and saw his boots, dusted with dried mud. He moved his toes around, rocked back on his heels. His feet were his reckoning. He was here. She was real.
When she saw Rosie, Beatrix made a funny squeal, which made Rosie laugh out loud. Beatrix hugged her and began to cry, but she was also laughing.
“You came back! You came home!” Beatrix said, her face flushing. She put her hands on Rosie’s face, then hugged her. “You came home.”
Beatrix saw that Rosie’s face had been changed by wherever she had been. She wanted to know everything: Where was Maria del Carmen? Where had they gone? Soon she would have to tell Rosie about Flash, and his death would break her heart, as it had her own. But she didn’t want to explain that right now. So she was relieved to see someone else there: a tall, thin man with a beard and a backpack, a stranger who nonetheless kept coming until he got to the bottom step, where he stopped and held out his hands to her.
Rosie was looking at the man and smiling, and then looking at Beatrix, still smiling. The man looked like he needed something. What did he want? Why were his hands empty?
“Beatrix,” he said, his voice choked, but with a clear pronunciation of the x.
As soon as he spoke, she knew who he was. She knew from the shape of his forehead, from his hands below his jacket sleeves, from his eyes, drinking her in. Light came through the holes in her heart, filling them. “You’re here.”
Carson started up the stairs, but Beatrix came to him instead, erasing the distance that remained between them in three swift steps. Inhaling, he smelled her: soil, sweat, sweetness, as if someone had just peeled an orange. Every day is a blessing. He reached for the quarter around her neck, then pressed his palm over her sternum, letting her heart beat into his hand.
All of history, it seemed, had conspired to bring him right here, to this place.
Beatrix leaned into him, into this moment, this once-impossible moment. She had no idea what came next in this undone world. The future wasn’t here yet, but Carson was, and it felt like morning. She slid her hand over his, nodding. Yes and yes and yes and yes.
Acknowledgments
Writing this novel was the equivalent of a coast-to-coast journey on foot (or maybe several). So many people gave me directions and resources, offered new trajectories, fed and sheltered me, or cheered me on.
Among them were friends who offered encouragement, useful conversation, or both: Lori Adkison, Maribel Alvarez, Jeff Banister, Lisa Bowden, Vicki Brown, Greg Colburn, Hannah Ensor, Katherine Ferrier, Annie Guthrie, Amanda Hamp, Jen Hoefle, Ben Johnson, Yarrow King, Sarge Levy, Jill Lorenzini, Leia Maahs, Michelle Marks, Amanda Morse, Rosie Perera, Paul Reimer, Robin Reineke, Eve Rifkin, Bob Rodriguez, Shuchi Saraswat, Josh Schachter, Barbara Seyda, Aisha Sloan, Kierán Suckling, Kephart Taiz, Suzanne Tershak, TC Tolbert, Lori VanBuggenum, and Robert Woolsey. And friends who read drafts, offered insight, and said, “Keep going”: Charlotte Adams, Darcy Alexandra, Beth Alvarado, James Bronzan, Nancy Hand, Laura Markowitz, Mary Martha Miles, Teena Jo Neal, Kristen Nelson, Ian Johnson, Claudine LoMonaco, Spring Ulmer, Kara Waite, Laura Wexler, and the BAABs book club women. Special gratitude to writer friends Charlie Buck, Shannon Cain, and Frankie Rollins, who helped shape the book into a novel, with both skill and love. Thank you also to Adam Jackaway, for consistent support and for teaching me the true meaning of perseverance.
Thank you to the young people I mentored at Voices, Inc. and in schools throughout Southern Arizona; the neighbors and friends who model how a neighborhood can become both refuge and micro-society, especially Brad Lancaster, Janet K. Miller, Shannon Scott, and David Wa
lker; community organizers I met in coastal Ecuador so many years ago; and dedicated school teachers and principals everywhere, especially Tim Glick, who left us too early. You all are the real-life Rosies and Beatrixes and Carsons.
While purely a work of fiction, this book leaned on what was possible and plausible. I’m grateful to those who answered research questions that helped my characters and plot to develop: Stefano Bloch, Chris Bushman, Carrie Brennan, David Forbes, Simone Gers, Samuel Kolawole, and the wonderfully responsive folks at Prometheus Radio—Jeremy Lansman, Pete Tridish, and Paul Bame. Thank you to the editors and contributors to the November/December 2004 issue of Adbusters, which sowed the first seeds of this story. French artist Sophie Calle’s “Exquisite Pain” exhibit gave me the notion of icons of grief. Krista Tippet’s On Being interview with Kevin Kelly on spiritual technologies and Teilhard de Chardin helped me shape some of Jonathan Blue’s teachings. Thank you.
Artist residencies gave me generous time, space, beauty, and validation. Thank you to Mesa Refuge, Blue Mountain Center, Djerassi, and the Island Institute / Rasmuson Artist Residency Program in Sitka, Alaska. Thank you to the Tucson Pima Arts Council (now the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona) and the Arizona Commission on the Arts for financial support.
I’m forever grateful to Dara Hyde, who took the book without a real pitch and edited with so much care and faith (and to then intern Hanna Bahedry, who urged her to keep reading). To my editor, Kathy Pories, for saying yes and for polishing all that was there and stripping away all that wasn’t needed. To copyeditor Elizabeth Johnson, designer Pete Garceau, and the whole team at Algonquin Books. You all made the process of ushering a book into the world a delight.
My deepest love and gratitude for Eddie Bear, Lalo, and Jazzmin, the most loyal canine companions a writer could ask for. To Julius Martinez, whose superb edits and well-placed tears helped me along the final stretch. To my parents, Fred and Tura, whose bottomless support and steady love meant I never stopped believing the journey was possible. Thank you thank you thank you.