“She took a trip,” he says. “For ten days.”
“Five days. Then they’ll be back.”
“Yes, she took a trip.”
She can’t help it, the desire to reach over and strangle him. It occurs to her now that one of her daughters was killed in an instant, bloody and terrible, in her own kitchen. The other could die slowly of a long disease, in the same kitchen.
She puts the idea out of her mind; she’s too close to panic and insanity to entertain any thoughts. Thinking of her daughters dying. Instead, she considers how tired she is. Maybe she should have her thyroid checked. Maybe she’s got cancer. She’s so tired of doing everything. She’s so tired of no one noticing.
Esme says that the memories that get saved are those that had strong emotional connection, which is why it hurts her that he never talks about their wedding day, or the birth of their children. He talks of water and cows and onions. He must never have loved her at all. What a waste of both their lives.
She’s going to try. She wants to say something about a new important thought she has had. How spirits go up, toward the sky, but souls go down, toward the earth and toward water. Water runs down because the earth pulls it that way. The soul wants to go down, too, and grow roots, run like a river. And that maybe death is like water running backward. Could that be?
She wonders, for the both of them, if they’ll be brave enough to face it. They’ll have no choice, of course, but it would be nice to know they could muster calm confidence and composure and a bit of spunk. Use death as your advisor, she heard once. In that way, you live well, and you die well. If you have practiced, you can relax into it, which is the way to go. Kicking and screaming and scared, that’s the worst way; it’s no good to try to avoid the unavoidable.
But how can she put words to that?
She can feel the heat from the truck blasting on her feet. It feels as if her feet are touching hell. She needs to find some sky, some kindness, some love.
BEN
Ben watches her place a sheaf or hay bale of flowers on the earth. He forgets what kind, but they are the best, and they’re the color of a girl’s soft cheeks. Skin-colored pink on the pure white snow, which will turn to water and be absorbed into the ground, into Rachel’s bones.
“Carolyn and Jess were here,” Renny says, and Ben sees that a little tear has come from the side of her eye. He knows why. Because he sees that someone has arranged river rocks in a wave pattern on top of the snow, as if the river rocks themselves were a river. Cairns have been made too. Beautiful rocks from the river at the ranch. It was Carolyn and Jess who came to do that, to make a river of stones and mountains of stones, and it’s these things that are making Renny cry.
He puts his arm on her shoulder and she says “Oh, Ben, today it’s too much,” and leans a little, but not completely, into him. Oh. He hasn’t felt her do that in so long.
What is the word that says so much?
She says, “Today I can’t . . . Today I need a . . .”
And he opens his mouth. What is the word? Maybe if he can singsong it?
“I just am all out . . .” And now she is sobbing, and it reminds him that she rarely cried in all their marriage, but when she did, it was loud horrible scenes, a sudden release of crashing energy.
He says, “I’m sorry I’m so sorry I am so sorry.”
That’s the word, that’s the word!
She looks at him. Has he said those words before? No? Why does she look so surprised? He says them over and over until his brain is cleared out. He holds her to him and says it. Renny is crying and crying and crying into his chest. The dust has been blown away. He knows it’s the right thing to say. The tip of his tongue grew back for just this one moment. To say he’s sorry that this daughter is dead, and that his brain is dying, and that he couldn’t stop either.
She stops crying and simply breathes into his coat jacket, right at the place it reads CARHARTT. He can feel the rise and fall of her lungs, how the breath calms and evens. She is nodding to herself, accepting his apology.
A bloom or gust of a feeling sweeps him. No words for it anyway. No words needed. Oh, Renny. He holds her closer to him. With a desire to be the one for her. Just like their first date. When they were young and giddy and had left a dance to drive up to see the lights from the top of the dam. How they got out of the pickup to look down at the town, the foothills all around them, and he pulled her suddenly to him, violent almost, not out of sexual desire but the other kind. To simply be perfect and whole together. The universe and love and these two particular souls named Ben and Renny. A fire burned up through their spines and was a huge energy that sprouted up and soaked the entire universe. For as long as the hug lasted. Everything made sense. Had a name and no name. The most complete moment of his life.
He rocks her back and forth, back and forth, and she holds him just as tight. But they cannot stay that way forever, and there’s something he wants to say before the dust comes back, so he says it: “Renny, there’s something to say before . . .” He pushes his lips into an O, so as to form a word. He can feel his body shaking, a small tremor, the tremor of age and effort, and he hates it. He wants to say: I think you are the only person on the earth who will understand what I am going to do. I think you will be proud of me. I think I’ll do right by everybody. I say good-bye to you. I say good-bye to the real you. The one that lives under your white hair and your familiar face. The real and true you that resides underneath the skin. The you I loved. On that night with the lights of the town and the lights of the stars. But none of those words will grow on his tongue. So he says, “Renny—” and then there is a long silence.
Renny finally hiccups again and touches his arm. “I think I know, Ben.”
“It’s all right?”
“It’s all right.”
“And so.”
“Yes.”
“It’s her birthday today.”
“Yes.”
“Well then. After lunch I need a nap.”
“Yes, Ben. You always take a nap.”
“They make me feel better.”
“I know it. Ben? Were you ever lonely?”
He pauses. “Maybe I quit thinking about it. Off my radar screen.”
“So it got better?”
When he doesn’t answer, she says to herself, “I never did. Learn to quit thinking about the lonely. But I did start to live more narrowly. Occupying myself with other things. Instead of the big things. Like living well. And deeply. And being passionate about something. And being vital. Ben? Ray wrote us a letter. Today. He wants to come visit.”
“I could use a bite—”
She bows her head. “Let’s go get a bite to eat, then.” She takes his hand—she’s holding his hand!—and they leave the pink flowers and the smooth river rocks and the snow in this garden of stones.
But the dust blows back in. The dust of the dead. So he says to himself: My name is Ben Cross and I am seventy-six and I have been a rancher all my life although now I own no cattle. Instead I have a disease in my brain. I own twelve hundred acres of pastureland below the Rocky Mountains and the snow remembers what it’s like to be water. One night I held this woman and it was love, and our lives on the ranch were heaven. There is a man who wrote a letter.
On the way back to the truck, Renny pauses, looks to the right, and points for him to see. It takes him a moment to find what she’s looking at. It’s a funeral up ahead at the other end of the cemetery. The sky is starting to spit snow on a group of people, on the far end, but even from here, he can see Anton step from the sheriff’s cruiser. But wait. It’s not Anton, it’s Ray. Maybe it is Ray? The man who wrote a letter? He stops, startled. Sees a dark head, sees the wide shoulders and thick stance of a man.
He finds that his voice is quiet but then rising and soon yelling. His own voice is saying, “OH YOU, YOU . . . YOU—” His hands clench and he wants to be a boxer. “TELL YOU WHAT I’M GONNA DO SEE.”
“Ben!” Renny touches his arm, l
ooks off in the distance at the faraway funeral. “What the— Who are you— Why are you—? Ben! Settle down right now! I don’t need you losing it.”
“YOU MONSTER,” he yells at Ray, across the cemetery, and starts to charge forward but trips and falls and stands back up. “I miss my—I miss my—my girl. My girl!”
“Knock it off, Ben. Now!” Renny stands in front of him and slaps him across the face. Even though it doesn’t hurt he falls to his knees, right there in the snow. “What’s wrong with you? They’re having a funeral over there.”
And still his voice is yelling, and still he is tumbling through the snow. “I’m sorry! You were never sorry. I’m sorry. You were never sorry!”
Renny is in front of him again, blocking him with her body. “Ben Cross!” She slaps him again, hard. “Stop!”
He sinks to his knees again. His voice says things on its own. “You put up a good front . . . all those letters . . . but underneath . . . in that place . . . what place this is . . . that place? . . . in the core, in the middle in the silo in the center you are something, you are . . . something . . . sick and rotten.”
“Oh, Ben. You’re talking about Ray? Ben, settle down. That’s not Ray over there. They’re trying to have a funeral. Get in the truck.” She is standing over him and she reaches down and grabs him under the armpit and pulls him up. She’s so strong. She pulls him along, then she opens the door.
He must yell it to the garden of stones. “YOU FAKE. YOU ARE NOT HUMAN. YOU LACK COURAGE! COWARD COWARD COWARD!”
“Ben, Ben—Stop right now!” Renny is handing him a bit of toilet paper, dusty, so dusty. She has unrolled some from the roll they keep in the back seat. He realizes there is water. Water everywhere. Water pouring from his brain, down his face. All the water from his brain is pouring down his face. Down and down. Into the snow. He’s losing his brain. He is leaking apart.
He remembers when the doctor said, You have dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, and the doctor said it was important that he do two things. One was to get his will in order. The second was to make a list of all those things you “were going to do someday,” and then put a star by the ones that made sense, that he could do, the ones that really mattered, like maybe a trip, or writing a letter, or making peace with a person, and to do them one by one, now, do them now, and it makes him weep because he didn’t have too many things to put on that list—only one or two—and he realized then that his life had been too empty, he had grown too lazy, he had let life just happen to him, but there were a few things he listed:
Heal family
Protect ranch
And one more thing he had put two stars next to:
Ray
So he screams and screams at the cemetery and he turns around the other direction so that in the far distance he sees a blotch of pink throbbing from the snow. Then Anton is there, panting from the jog, holding him, one hand on each of his shoulders and saying “Whoa there, whoa there, buddy,” as if Ben is a gone-crazy horse.
Anton and Renny are putting him in the truck. Bending his knees, making him sit. But his body has gone wooden and rigid and it takes a long time.
“I’m going to drive now,” Renny says finally. “Anton is going to follow us home. Help me get you inside. I’ll make you some eggs and toast. Oh, god,” and then she is sobbing. “They said this would happen. That you’d start to lose your temper. Your personality would . . . change. For the worse. We just—we just . . . I thought we just had a moment that mattered . . . Oh, Ben—” and she looks at him, sorrowful and startled. “It’s too late now?”
There are still screams in him that need to come out. But instead he cries with her. Even as he cries he knows Renny is driving and saying “Holy kamoly this is new oh no oh no I can’t do this, not this” over and over and he can see that Anton is in the rearview mirror.
When they pull up into the driveway of their home, he sits in the truck gazing at the white farmhouse and barn and chicken house. He sits until Renny talks to Anton, and Anton leaves, and then she comes back to sit with him in the truck.
Renny puts her hand on his leg. He can feel how bony he is. He used to be so strong. She says, “Oh Ben. I wasn’t aware that you . . . hated Ray so much—” Then she stops, tilts her head, says, “I think I know what you mean.” And she says, “It’s not that Ray was a monster, not outright evil. That’s why, in certain ways, it’s worse. Because he had the capacity to be a good man. People liked him. He had a certain charm. But deep inside, beneath those brown eyes, he was a fake and a bully. He didn’t love her. He didn’t love much of anything. And he was lazy and self-centered in about a hundred different ways.”
Ben starts crying again because she is right. He can understand her, and she is right.
“We should have talked about this sooner. Why only now?” Renny nods as she says this, agreeing with herself. She pats him on the leg. “Listen. We’re both worn out. I don’t want you doing that, ever again. I don’t know what’s in store for us now, but not that. I don’t know if you understand me. But it might be time—I’ll think about it tomorrow—to move to that assisted care place. I can’t . . . But for right now, I know what you mean, Ben. Rachel, for instance, saw enough in him to love. He had her fooled. With dreams of a piece of land. A future together. So it makes it worse, doesn’t it? That when you look inside this supposedly good man, if you look hard enough, into his marrow, you can see that he was a pretend show.”
“Pretend show.”
“Yes. You’re right, Ben. That’s what he was. The difference between a real man and a pretend show is courage. Courage. Deep down he didn’t have any. Isn’t that right, Ben? Some people on this earth aren’t even really human. And he was one of them. But he looked like the other kind—the good kind.”
And Ben nods and cries and whispers words like coward, go to hell, and all that.
“Yes, all that.” Later, she says, “It’s getting cold out here, Ben. Let’s go inside. Look at that snow. We’re going to freeze to death in here. It would have been easier if he was evil. But no. He was just a fake. Everything except the gun was a fake. We should have told each other this sooner.”
She leads him in the house, their footprints making new marks in a new snow.
On the way inside, she stops once. “Ben? If you were alive ten years from now, what would you want to be doing? Can you understand that question?”
He understands. Pauses to form the words of it. Only gets out, “Take care of you and the ranch.” Or, at least, he hopes he says it. He doesn’t look at her, though, to see her reaction. Instead he looks at the aspen trees standing in their winter silence, and the snow behind them is an octave whiter than the aspens themselves. Suddenly, he remembers how rain falls and the drops are held in the center of aspen leaves, how their circular perfection is held inside a cupped palm of leaf, and his heart snaps with the knowledge he won’t see spring again. “Oh,” he says, clutching at his heart. “It hurts. I’m scared.”
Renny doesn’t hear him, though, and once inside, she tells him to take a nap. But no, he says, he won’t. First, he says, she must dial the number to his daughter’s house.
Renny sighs but dials Carolyn’s number and says, “The answering machine will pick up. Or Jess will. Although she never does. They’re in Mexico. They’re trying to do what we failed at doing, for a while at least. Keeping love alive through the tough spots. When it beeps, leave a message. Tell her whatever it is that you want to tell her.” Her voice is kind, like the touches she used to give him. She holds the phone out and he holds it to his ear and waits for the beep.
Phones are difficult. He can’t see the person’s expression and so the words just smear around. But this will be okay, because it is his only choice. He hears his daughter’s voice, not the voice she was as a girl but something that sounds very close to it, and then he hears a pause, he hears a beep. “Tell ya what I’m gonna do, see,” he says into her answering machine. “I’m gonna tell you I love you. Good-bye, now. Carolyn. Jack
, Leanne, Billy, Jess, Del, Carolyn. Tell ya what I’m gonna do, see. Love to you all.” His voice gets very quiet, as if turned down on its own.
RENNY
The bravest thing she can do is to let him be. She wards off the fear by doing the chores herself and doing them early and well. She’ll stay out of the house as long as she can. She breaks the ice on the water tanks with a tamping bar, throws hay to the donkeys and horses, fills her pockets with the dried apple slices she made herself in the summer (she remembers the smell of her sweat and the way the bees and wasps buzzed around her as she sat outside cutting apples and putting them on cookie sheets to dry). The horses nuzzle them softly from her shaking hand, their eyes darkened with gratitude. The hens are all huddled in the chicken house early, and she sends the ice from their drinking pans shattering outside on the ground before refilling them. She wipes the tears streaming down her face continually, and something about this makes her think of her DNA, of how hers falls into trampled hay, or into dirt, or into snow, or onto an apple that gets eaten by a horse and how she is now a part of that horse literally, which somehow makes her less alone because she is binding with bits of the universe, and so is Ben, at this very moment.
She can see Jess has been there again. There’s a pile of fresh horse manure by the barn and tracks in the snow—her own horses could not have made those tracks, penned in as they are. Renny glances around, but there is no sign of her now. She could use Jess right about now. Funny, she decides, how important it is, simply having another breathing living human next to you during heart-slashing times. Even if you don’t talk.
Though she has not walked out back in months, despite the dropping temperature and spitting snow and lowering sun—despite all this—she takes a walk now. She is so cold. She is so tired. She must stay out of the house, because then the decision will have been made. It will be over. It’s an act of cowardice and bravery at the same time.
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