There was no one there, no reason. There was only a flash – a flash of sunset on a river, a flash from the muzzle of a gun. And then, too soon, gone.
It was raining.
We passed these places by.
**
Wheat plains and potato fields. Lava heaves, cracks in the yellow ground, black fissures. My dad used to tell me how, as a boy, he and his friends would take their BB guns out into the lava heaves and play war. All day long crouched down in the natural trenches and shouted insults at one another, and fired their guns at each other’s hiding places. “It’s a wonder we never put out any eyes,” he said. Those gangs of spindly boys with their sun-browned arms and the backs of their necks burned red, cutting their knees on the sharp bits of basalt littering the trenches. Generations of Rexburg boys down in the earth, shouting, bleeding, shooting pellets to ping off the rocks. If I had stayed put, if James and I had had our children, our boys might have done the same. Or they may have grown up like their Daddy, sweet and soft and intelligent. I couldn’t imagine James in the trenches, rough-housing with other boys. That was not him. The reader, the quiet, good boy, the one who went to seminary school every morning, bright and early – that was my James. Those were the boys we would never raise.
Like a body inhaling, the Bench lifted up out of the earth, rib cage expanding, slowly ascending from the horizon, and from the road I could already make out the temple, waiting, and the bright speck of the Teton peaks behind it, dreaming.
Except for the missionaries, I must have been the only one who had ever left Rexburg and come back again.
4.
Rexburg in the dark, the broad streets a flat gunmetal blue by night, checkerboarded by the orange glare of streetlights. Shade trees standing very still. My hands turned the steering wheel easily, smoothly, knowing the way though my mind had gone as blank as pavement. I crossed Main, passed beneath the shadow of the hospital, swung onto Ricks Avenue unthinking, rolled to a stop outside the white silence of my parents’ house. I had been all business at my own home, helping X to carry in our bags, lying down in the guest room at his insistence to get some rest, which evaded me as I stared at the ceiling, but X had told me to rest and I had given it my best effort. Composed and matter-of-fact, I moved about my empty house as I had moved about countless hotel rooms, doing what needed to be done, knowing I would not stay long. Now, though, as I sat looking at my childhood home from the quiet of X’s car, the familiarity of the place undid me. I trembled. The house was as I had always known it, its clean siding rising clear of the bare foundation, its two garage doors dozing and closed, the pots of flowers on the porch steps in full bloom as they always were, no matter the season.
I remembered sitting on the cool concrete of those steps in the summertime, reading my Book of Mormon. I would always remember. I would always be there, the feel of the cold steps delicious in the sun, with the book open in my lap. My name was embossed on the cover of that book – a baptism gift from my parents. Inside the book, Mom had affixed a single mustard seed with clear tape and she had hugged me and told me with pride in her voice, “Heavenly Father said, even if you have faith as tiny as a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” I remember standing in the hallway of our church with neighbors and friends moving all around me, congratulating me, squeezing my small shoulder with warm hands. My hair was still wet from the baptismal font. I felt the weight of the Scriptures in my hands, admired the clean new cover of the book, light purple to appeal to an eight-year-old. The gold script glimmered with my name. I felt how much they loved me then – my parents, and all the rest, everyone. I thought they must love me still, in spite of everything. I hoped they loved me still.
A dark figure approached the living room window, looked out at me. I knew from the shape and the briskness of movement that it was Marlee, my little sister. And the two cars in the driveway – my two older brothers, Cameron and Todd. Mitchell, the youngest, would not be here. He was in
Guatemala for another year, serving his mission, making new converts for the Church. He would have heard already. They would have given him the awful news. I felt a tremor of gratitude in my chest, that all of them were here, that even Mitchell was grieving with me. But it was Marlee I wanted to see most. She leaned her forehead against the window and I could make out the shadow of her face. She raised a finger and tapped a little rhythm on the glass, the secret knock we had always used to communicate, just us girls. I swallowed hard and went inside.
**
These are the times when a family draws together. I cried freely on my father’s shoulder, hiding my face in the flannel of his shirt, in the unchanging scent of him, sawdust and cheap aftershave and all the flavors of my mother’s cooking, and as I cried into him they all took turns holding onto me, too, my brothers, my sister, my rigid, torn mother who had been so proud of me, long ago when I was small. We tried to eat the dinner she’d fixed, all of us picking at it in silence, Marlee and I sitting so close together our shoulders touched. And when at last we gave up I excused myself and crept up the stairs to my old bedroom.
5.
It had been converted into a sewing room and my mother’s quilts in various stages of creation were everywhere, folded on her work table, stretched taut on a wooden rack. But my bed was still there, narrow, neatly made with my collection of stuffed rabbits gathered among the pillows. A book case still stood, too, and there among my mother’s sewing references and a scattering of advice books, no-nonsense for women, were the novels I had loved as a child and my old book of Scripture with its purple embossed cover. I pulled it out and sat on my bed, but I felt no desire to open it. I only held it, and squeezed the soft cover, felt how the pages compressed and heard their mild paper-on-paper groan.
The familiar rhythm tapped at the door. “Come in,” I said to Marlee.
She edged into the room shyly and stood looking at me, a sad, sympathetic half-smile on her face. “That was a horrible dinner,” she said.
“Mom tried.”
“Nobody can eat at a time like this.”
I looked at her, just twenty-three, pretty in that wholesome way we all had, the Rexburg girls, bright and funny and loving. When she was a baby I knew she would be mine forever, my little doll of a sister, and I loved her with a fierce, towering love. I remembered holding her tiny soft hands and gently flexing each finger in turn, comparing them to my own, how much bigger I was than she. Now there was a new ring on her finger, and she was probably already trying for babies of her own.
“Thank you for coming,” I told her. “I’m glad you’re here.”
She sat beside me on the bed. “I’m sorry this happened to you. I’m sorry for James, too. I’m sorry for all of it. I know you love him, and I love him; he was my brother. But I never understood why he married you.”
“He wanted to do the right thing.”
“He was never doing anything wrong.” She gave a small, rueful laugh. “Don’t tell anybody I said that. You know what they’d all think of me. I’d never be allowed to bring a casserole to Relief Society again.” I smiled, grateful for the humor, for her understanding. “James did love me,” I said. “I believe that. If he could have made the perfect life with anyone, it would have been me. I understood him better than anyone else in the Church could have.”
“I know.” She was sober now.
Perhaps it was her flip remark about casseroles, or her opinion of my husband. Or perhaps it was only because she was Marlee, and she was mine. All at once, I felt safe in telling her. “Mar, I don’t believe in God.”
“I guess not, at a time like this.”
“No. I haven’t for a long time.”
She thought about this for a while, gazing down at the Scriptures in my lap. “Will you ever again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“That makes me sad,” she said, simply.
“Why?”
“I worry what will happen to you. When you... when you die.”
I hugged her. Beneath
my hands I felt the seams of her temple garments, the insistent little ridges of them rising through her t-shirt. “Don’t worry about me. I’m not worried about me. I’m more worried about you.”
“Me?” She pulled away from me. Through the woman’s features I still saw the baby’s face, Marlee looking up at me with her sweet, solemn, dark eyes. Fragile as my emotions were, the great scouring flood of love I felt for her then rendered me nearly mute with its power.
“I’m going away after the funeral,” I said, my voice hardly more than a whisper. “I wish you wouldn’t stay in Rexburg, either. I wish you wouldn’t stay in the Church. I think you’re better than this place. I want more for you.”
“Sis-sis.” That special name, the one she’d given me when she was just a baby. “Leaving’s not for me. I love the Church. It’s got a few flaws, I know, but I love it. I believe in it. I wish you’d come back to it. But even if you never do, I still love you just as much as I ever did. And you’re always my sister. You’ll always be my best friend, no matter where you go.” She stood and kissed my forehead and left my room, casting one final look at me that was overflowing with love.
I flipped open the cover of my Scriptures. The mustard seed was still there, small and hard, held in place by the yellowing, brittle tape. I picked at the tape; it crumbled in my fingers. I held the seed up and examined it in the light. It had changed not at all since the day my mother had given me the book. I pinched it, felt its hardness dig into my fingertips until the skin blanched white, until the seed left small indentations in my flesh. Then I put it into my mouth, held it between my teeth, and finally swallowed it. The taste it left on my tongue was as dry as dust.
**
I wandered out into the garden. The air smelled fresh and green in the summer night, burdened with the presence of so many growing things. I held my breath as a car passed by, driving slowly. In the silence that followed I thought I could just hear the distant, endless watery hiss of the irrigation canals edging the fields north of town. There was a small gazebo in my parents’ garden, surrounded by hollyhocks taller than me. In the darkness the plants were as black as iron spikes. I crept into the gazebo. It had been our play house when we were children, all of us gathering there, launching our adventures out across the lawn. I sat on the gazebo’s rail and watched my brothers helping Mom with the dishes. Framed by the window, bathed in warm light, they moved together like the parts of a clock, precise and ordered, cooperative, useful. Cameron side-stepped as Mom turned with a stack of plates, avoiding a collision, and their mouths opened in brief laughter. Todd dried his hands and hugged Mom, kissed her on the cheek. I felt removed, observational, distant.
The back door opened, throwing out a long beam of the house’s warm inner light. My father came out into the yard, into my green-smelling outland. He shut the door quietly and peered into the darkness of the gazebo.
“Hey, Scamp.”
“Hey, Daddy.”
He made no move toward me, only put his hands into the pockets of his trousers and rocked on his heels. Did he not see me? Was he unsure where I was hiding? Out beyond the lawn, where my mother’s flowers grew in a tangle, an old wooden gate stood dispossessed of any fence. My father had told us, growing up, that the gate had been there since the pioneer days and was a genuine relic. We all chose to believe that. I left the black cave of the gazebo and made my way to the gate, stepping carefully among the clumps of petunias gone to seed, the dahlias propped upright against stakes, the fists of their infant blooms curled tight. Daddy followed me.
The gate was rickety and dry. It had been painted white once, long ago; fragments of paint still clung to it here and there and stuck to my hands as I climbed onto it, one foot on its lower rail, ribs leaning across the top, and swung on it gently as I had done many times before. Dad and I used to talk here, just the two of us, when dinner was finished and the evening was drawing in. What are they teaching you in that school of yours? I recalled him asking, teasing. Are they teaching you that the world is round? Hogwash. It’s flat.
“We’ve been hearing things about you,” he said. His hands were still in his pockets. “We heard you left town with another man.”
The hinge of the old gate squealed. I swung slowly toward him. I did not want to talk about X. This was not about X. It was about everything else, everything that had led to X, and to Brian, too. It was about camouflage and the shedding of garments like dry snake skin. It was about the way we all chased illusions, promises, eternity, lost lovers. It was about driving out into the sage flats on a quarter tank of gas. Everything but X.
“A long time ago,” I said, “I woke up in the middle of the night and found Mom crying. You weren’t anywhere in the house. Where were you that night?”
His head dropped, his eyes deeply shadowed in the darkness, searching for something down among the shot petunias. I swung backward into the rustling foliage.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s none of my business.”
We were both quiet for a time. I thought of all the ways he used to tease me, pulling quarters from behind my ears, making so many bad puns that all of us, even Mom, would groan and beg him for mercy. I wished he’d tease me now, but of course it was not the time for teasing.
“I’m sorry, Scamp,” he said. “I’m sorry about what’s happened. You’re always my girl.”
“Thank you, Daddy. Let’s go back inside.”
I held his hand as we crossed the lawn together. I saw how he looked into the house’s windows the same way I had, a distant spectator, a lone, longing audience.
Inside, I gathered my purse and the keys to X’s hybrid. “I need to get some sleep,” I told my family. “There’s a lot to do tomorrow.”
“I assumed you’d want to stay here,” Mom said, leaning against the archway that led into the kitchen. “You don’t want to stay all alone at your house. Not after what’s happened.”
I would not be alone, of course. X waited there for me, though how long he would wait I did not know. Surely I had proven myself a troublesome partner, with my poor dead husband and my uncut ties to my hometown. I was no Rebecca at all.
“I’ll be all right. I’d rather be in my own home tonight.”
Mom followed me out to the car. I did not look back at her as I walked stiffly down the drive to the curb, but I felt the weight of her angry presence pushing into my back, hurrying me along.
“Is that man at your house?” she said as I unlocked the car door. “Is that why you’re going back there?”
I did not answer.
“You have no respect at all. No respect for the dead.”
I turned to look at her. Her loathing for me twisted her face, filled her eyes with a cold rage that stabbed at my center.
“I always thought you were better than this,” she said. “I thought you would always do the right thing. You disappoint me. You disappoint God.”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Maybe it’s better that way. God doesn’t believe in you.”
I got inside and slammed the door, grateful for the barrier between us. As I hurried away down the street, I could see my mother in the rear-view mirror, standing immoveable in the street, staring after me. Her figure grew smaller and smaller until I turned the corner. And then she was gone.
6.
The next morning Katherine invited me to her place for tea and cookies and funeral planning. Her children were off with their father, off at the park or the library or the movie theater so that we could do what needed doing in peace. Before I left for Katherine’s I slipped the old tarnished CTR ring into the pocket of my jeans. It was my talisman, something concrete to touch when the world began to feel vaporous and shifty, as it did now so often. When I reached her home and felt wobbly from its familiar, pleasant smell, the remembered way the door creaked as it opened, I put my hand into my pocket and poked the tip of my little finger in and out of the ring.
Katherine was tearful and sympathetic. She hugged me. I clung t
o her and breathed deep, the smell of her clean hair and her tasteful perfume, so that I would not cry. I thought she would be too tactful and schooled to mention X. But straight away she asked the question that was surely on the lips of the entire town, and straight away my guts clenched and I knew I would find no peace here after all.
“Did you really leave town with some man?”
“It’s more complicated than that. It’s not really something I want to go into.”
Sweet Katherine with her distant eyes. She sat so carefully on her sofa and sipped so nicely at her tea. “Of course. I’m sorry. You’re so upset right now. We all are. It’s not the time to talk about it.” I picked up a brochure from a funeral home, one of the small handful Katherine had thoughtfully rounded up, doing the busy work so I wouldn’t have to. It was so like a good woman to think these things through, to ease the burden off her neighbors. I was grateful, truly; this simple gesture of her concern for me brought fresh tears to my eyes. I had never managed to make myself into what she was.
Katherine misunderstood my tears. She rushed in to comfort me. “It’s not your fault, you know. I hope you don’t think so.”
There was not enough conviction in her voice to assure even herself. I could see that when I looked up into her face. Pretty, pretty Katherine, with the lines of strain and motherhood already starting to show on her forehead, at the corners of her nose. I had never had many close friends in Rexburg, but Katherine was the closest. I had allowed her to know me better than anyone else, save for my husband. If she thought I was to blame for James’s death, then the whole town did, too. It was already hard enough that I suspected they were right. I could not face a funeral full of townspeople who thought I had, in effect anyhow, pulled the trigger.
“I’d better take these and do what I can do on my own,” I said, gathering up her papers and pamphlets. She protested weakly, but I showed myself out. Her relief at my going rushed out the door almost as fast as I did; I could feel it brush my skin. She had done her duty as my Visiting Teacher. She had offered what help she could stand to offer. She had honored our friendship, such as it was, enough to concern herself with an adulterer. That was more than plenty for both of us.
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