“We grew apart.”
“No, Mom. Really.”
Her mom’s nervous tic comes out. The quick head shake. She lets out a sigh.
There you go.
“Honey, do you remember when you were young, I mean really young? When you told me about the seven sisters in the sky? When you said that your other people told you that the earth started out as a turtle?”
“Yes.”
“You were about three then, and I wondered where did all these stories come from? You surprised us so much. Do you remember anything else?”
“I remember Eli and I thought we saw a face in the garage window pane, but I went to look and no one was there. We found a skeleton key when we tried to dig up Oreo.”
Her mom nods. “Anything else?”
Tessa shakes her head.
“You told me, as soon as you could talk, ‘You know I’m a girl inside, right?’ ”
“I don’t remember that. I just remember always being a girl.”
They ride in silence.
“Dad didn’t like it.”
“No.”
“He more than didn’t like it.”
“That’s why we traveled to your grandma and grandpa’s. Not just to take them food.”
“To bring them . . . me?”
“To receive their blessings and strength about you. Not only First Nation, but Athabascan. That’s why we know Josh. Navajo comes from Athabascan, and he was sent to be near you.”
“And we have both? Anishinaabe and Athabascan?”
“Yes. You, Eli, and me. We have both.”
“What about Aunt Sadie and Uncle Percy?”
“Oh, honey, that’s where it gets a bit different. Percy yes. Sadie, the rumor is, yes. She comes from the Crescent Side of North Manitou. She was adopted. And Percy is related to us by marriage.”
They drive a little further. “Did you love Dad?”
“Yes. I loved him. I loved the Gabe I knew in college.”
“What was he like, before you had us?”
“He was the most fun-loving man I had ever met. Always up for an adventure, smart, brilliant. Could build anything. He was the best father until . . .”
“I said I was a girl.”
“It troubled him, at first. But he didn’t focus on it. He thought it was a phase. He let it go until after his accident. Then, he became hateful about it, consumed by it. Perseverated about how we could cure you. He couldn’t seem to distract himself. It was the accident that changed him. Not you.”
“Mom,” Tessa’s voice catches, “I think I . . .”
“Don’t say any more.”
Her mom’s jaw tightens as she continues driving. “I saw your blackened eyes, your stomach split wide open. He took closed fists to you, Tessa. He tried to kill you. You protected Eli, like you’ve always done. That’s all that matters.”
“Except Eli had to go to prison, while I was in the hospital. And you. I’ve cost you so much.”
“You haven’t cost me anything. This is life. This is what we do. We love each other and we go through things together.”
“And Uncle Mark?”
“And Uncle Mark loves you as his own.”
“Is he? Is he Eli’s and my real Dad?”
“No, baby. He just wants to be, that’s all.”
IT’S IN HER dreams that her dad returns to her.
This time, mostly everything is all right. It’s their weekend to be up north with him. Eli is sleeping in, but her dad rousts her and she eagerly goes with him. She’s his pet.
Another adventure. They’re in their farm clothes and the dad she loves says, “We are on a special mission. Only you and I can do this.”
He seems so happy. It’s fall time, the earth, their earth has started its tilt away from the sun. Orion is up early in the sky. The hunter. She can barely make out the edges of daylight.
“That sun will come fast. We have to hurry.”
They get to the big farm where her dad sometimes works. They stop at the second silo.
“Slide over,” her dad says. “You’re going to follow me down.”
She obeys him. She’s driven his truck before, but not very often. Not for a mission.
He walks into the shed attached to the silo and the next thing she sees is him wheeling out a tractor with a big bucket on the front. A loader. He waves to her with a big smile and she follows. They return down the road they came from. They turn into a place where a small mobile home is parked.
He drives into a pasture with a pond behind it and shuts the tractor off. He motions for her to come. She shuts off the truck and slides out of the seat carefully. Her father’s truck is big. It’s hard for a ten year old to climb in and out. He comes to the door and holds it open. She doesn’t see him pick something up from behind the seat.
They walk through the tall dying meadow grass.
“The sun is coming quickly,” her dad says, again.
He opens a small dog gate and steps over an electric fence, about a foot off the ground.
“Careful,” he says as she steps over the electric fence.
The shed they are at has a door jammed open by kicked up soft black dirt and to the right there’s a spigot with gooey damp mud below it. It’s a small pen.
“Where are you, Albert?” her dad calls. “Wake up. Breakfast. Stay back behind the door,” he says to her as he goes in.
She hears a snorting and a rustling.
“C’mon, Albert,” her Dad says in a friendly, conversational tone.
Then a big sleepy-eyed pig rambles out.
“Pet him on the head for a moment,” her dad says, and she does.
He’s a big pig, but friendly, and his little pig tail wags. Her dad gets some feed in a black well-worn rubber pan, and Albert happily follows him over to snuff and eat in it. Suddenly her dad moves her behind him, and he draws the small 410 to his cheek and takes aim at Albert’s head.
Blam!
Albert falls and three-hundred pounds of pig trying to fight for his life levitates up and off the ground resoundingly three or four times. Like a whale breaching, slamming into the ground and the sound of him dying thumping up through the earth to her feet.
“Now the fun begins,” Gabe says, and out of nowhere he draws a sharp knife and steps expertly to Albert’s head, avoiding the pig’s thrashing hooves and body. He slices Albert’s jugular. The blood sprays and hits the wire fence, droplets in the rising sun. A blood rain.
Horrified and sickened, Tessa presses her back against the door that doesn’t move because of the jammed up earth. She isn’t breathing. She squeezes her eyes shut and her hands sink into the soft black dirt. She hears birds calling from the pond as they lift off. Later, she will learn these are the calls of the sandhill cranes, about ready to migrate for fall.
Even though her eyes are closed, she can still hear Albert’s breathing choking on his own blood as his massive fluttering body slows its huge drum thumping on the ground. The drum beats go down into the earth and the drum thumping comes up through her feet and into the space between her heart and her spine, all the way into her soul. Albert’s waving whapping motion on the earth, like a fish out of water flapping at the landing, catches up to the last of his life leaving his body. Ceasing entirely in a matter of moments.
Tessa grapples at fistfuls of black dirt.
“What are you doing?” Gabe asks, mystified. “Where do you think the bacon we ate last night came from? C’mon now, T. Get up,” he says, not unkindly, and pulls her to her feet.
“I have to have you run the loader so I can hook the chain to the bucket. Clean your hands off. Farmer White won’t like dirt on the steering wheel.”
Her mom holds her from this nightmare dream memory. She’s trembling and shivering but can’t feel the temperature. She can’t feel anything. Her heart is frozen and she realizes she is still not breathing. One, two, three, four.
And why, at the end she sees Dina’s face instead of her dad’s is a mystery to her.
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BETH WATCHES TESSA cry and is helpless. She strokes her head, as if petting Murphy. “It will pass, baby. I promise.”
Beth puts a blanket over Tessa and tucks her in. Then she makes hot cocoa the old-fashioned way, with heavy cream, a touch of homemade maple syrup, and some cinnamon. Just enough maple syrup, so the organic ground cacao beans aren’t bitter.
And after a time, Tessa sleeps. And when her daughter sleeps, all the wrinkled lines and puffy eyes relax, and Beth recognizes her baby girl once more, and is proud of the woman she’s becoming.
THEY STOP FOR the night at the same campground where Dina saw the bear. They’re still in British Columbia, making their way toward Idaho.
Tessa approaches her mom who is sitting at the picnic table on the edge of their campsite. They have a beautiful view of the mountain.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
Tessa puts the joint in front of her mom.
“Oh, my!” Beth’s eyes light up. Then she frowns. “Wait. Are you into drugs?”
Tessa cocks her head like Murphy does when he hears a strange sound. “Seriously, Mom? I like my lungs clear. I run. I found that.”
Her mom looks at her doubtfully.
“Yep. In the garbage, back there.” Tessa indicates one of the bear-proof bins. “Someone left it on a paper plate.” It did happen, once.
“Well, how odd.” Her mom picks it up and does a quick look around. They’re secluded enough. “Maybe we should put it back?”
“Maybe we should smoke it.”
“Tessa!”
“C’mon, you and Dad did it in college.”
“Have you ever done it?”
Tessa rolls her eyes.
“Oh, that’s right. I promised not to ask those kind of questions. This trip.”
“We could just do a little bit and then I could put it back.”
The campfire flickers. Beth picks up a thin stick and catches a flame on it.
“Well, I guess a little bit won’t hurt.”
“It’s kind of a good sleep aid . . . right?”
“Sometimes.” Beth inhales the first puff and passes Aunt Sadie’s stash to Tessa. “Depends if this is Sativa or Indica.”
Tessa inhales just a small amount and passes the joint back.
Beth takes a hefty inhale and then exhales. “In-dah-Coma.”
They giggle.
“Ohhhhh. You know more than I thought.”
Tessa inhales again and does a French curl, a technique where her exhale curls into her nose on a smooth inhale.
“Ooooooh, and I see you know a little more about inhaling then I thought.” Beth starts coughing after her third hit. “Oh. That’s enough for me.” She hands it off to Tessa, who takes one more.
“That’s enough for me too.”
She stubs it out and looks at her mom questioningly. “Garbage?”
“Well. Let’s wait and see if this works, okay?”
“Sure.”
Tessa stashes it under a rock on the outside of the campfire.
“Oh. I haven’t done that in a very long time. I’ve always loved the smell of it outdoors.”
“Me too.”
“You really don’t do this a lot, right?”
“Mom . . .”
“I know. I’m being a mom.”
“I hardly ever. But this is special. Our girls’ trip.”
“It is special.”
Tessa decides to come clean. “I actually found this in the rig, when a light wasn’t working. It’s Aunt Sadie’s.”
“How do you know it’s hers?”
“Because no one else would stash it there.”
“It didn’t taste old.”
“Aunt Sadie took that trip to Dauphin Island last year.”
“Oh yes. We were frantic, but she had a much younger friend with her . . . I can’t remember her name . . .” Her mom starts giggling. She’s almost hysterical, holding her chest. Then her eyes widen. “Oh, oh, oh . . .” She runs to the camper.
“Mom?” Tessa is right behind her.
“I just have to pee,” her mom says before she dissolves in laughter again and makes it into the camper.
Tessa is grinning.
Beth’s muffled voice comes through the bathroom door. “Oh, honey, I forgot how much fun that stuff is. Not that I’m condoning it.”
“Of course not.”
“I never would condone it.”
“Strictly medicinal,” Tessa says through the screen door.
“Yes. Medicinal.”
They laugh.
“Did we pick up any ice cream last stop?” Beth is out of the bathroom, zipping up her shorts. She opens the freezer and squeals like a little child. “Chocolate!”
Murphy watches from under the picnic table. He licks his lips and sighs heavily.
Tessa looks back at him. She goes to the table, crouches down, and pets him. “Don’t worry, you. We’ll have play time tomorrow.”
He picks up his head and wags his tail at the familiar words, play time. She reaches in her shorts pocket and finds a treat. “That’s only fair, right?”
He gobbles it up. Ever since Dina left he’s been back on his regular feeding schedule.
Tessa looks at him thoughtfully. “I need to listen to you better.”
As the evening comes on, Beth drags out a sheet from the camper and Tessa lies with her as they look at the stars. Murphy lies next to Beth. His warmth is calming. Beth and Tessa entwine hands. “It’s been so long, since I felt this young.”
“You should always feel young, you’re beautiful.”
“I feel young now, and beautiful.”
They both smile. A shooting star with a tail blaze of blue ignites the sky, searing an impression in the blackness.
“Wow!” they say in unison, then, “Aunt Sadie.”
They look at each other and grin. Tessa rolls her head to her mother’s shoulder. “You’re always there for me.”
“Always.”
“Love you,” Tessa murmurs, her eyes closing.
“Love you too.” Beth rolls her head toward Tessa’s, closing her eyes too. “Indica.”
They both chuckle and snort, giggle and laugh on their blanket they call home.
And then, they share the quiet intimacy of a campfire, wrapped in unconditional love.
Chapter 28
IN IDAHO, THEY walk to the top of a lake by the eagle’s nest and watch the eagle fish from the far shore.
Her mother stoops and exclaims, “Tessa, look!”
A magnificent long feather, black and white, flutters down onto the ground in front of them.
“She dropped one for us,” her mom says, turning to her with bright eyes. She picks up the feather.
They shift from the ridgeline and continue to watch the eagle. She catches a fish in her talons and flies up to the nest and pecks at it, her head and beak working jackhammer like, till she gets a bit of food. Her head arches up as she swallows the food. She holds it momentarily before regurgitating it to her babies.
Tessa and Beth watch from a respectful distance away, the nest in clear view, little heads bobbing up to take the food from mom.
“Tessa? I have a question.”
Tessa turns and searches her mom’s face. “You can ask me anything. You know that.”
“This one is hard. Before . . . you didn’t want to talk about it.” Her mom takes a deep breath. “The fact you are attracted to women.” She is looking at the feather. Tessa watches her stroke the feather. “Is that part of who you were, before the surgery?”
Tessa smiles. Something inside of her has shifted, and she’s unsure why, but now she can broach this topic and her mom, so fearful to ask, yet brave enough to ask anyway, deserves an answer.
“Mom, I’ve always been me.” And then she uses the words Prince gave her. “My sexual identity is who I go to bed as. My sexual orientation is who I go to bed with.”
Her mom looks into her eyes as the words sink in. “Then, I have one mor
e. Do you love women because I hate men?”
This truth surprises Tessa as much as it seems to surprise her mom. Her mom puts a hand to her mouth, as if this truth just slipped out.
“Do you really hate men?” Tessa asks.
“I hate what some men do. What most men, do. They are cruel and unthinking.” Her mom is looking down.
“Not all of ’em. Not Eli, not Josh. Not a lot of guys I’ve met.”
“Well, maybe the younger generation is different.”
“I love women, because . . . I love women. Truthfully? I’ve been with men. I’m just closer to women. It’s not about the sex. It’s about the connection.”
“Even though she broke your heart?”
“A friend of mine says sometimes people break your heart . . . wide open.”
“I just hate to see you in so much pain.”
“I’m okay for a while and then I think about what we could have had. I think about this.”
Tessa twists the ring off her finger and holds it out. It’s the first time she’s felt strong enough to remove it.
“It’s a beautiful ring,” Beth admits.
“And it was a beautiful promise. I thought she was my forever love.” Tessa feels Aunt Sadie near. “I probably will cry more. I’m grieving. But, it’s not every minute. It’s not even every hour. With you here,” she looks at her mom, “it hasn’t even been every day.”
The eagle skrees as she dives back toward the water for more food. They turn and watch her graceful, arcing flight as she hits the water and comes up empty, then flies up to a branch on a white pine tree near shore to watch diligently for her next catch.
“And pretty soon it won’t be every week.” She hugs her mom. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“So am I, darling one.”
THEY CONTINUE DRIVING Route 2 through Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. They arrive at the tip of the Keweenaw. They find a level site in the Fort campgrounds.
Tessa takes what is left of the ashes and divides them in two. She takes some of her cut hair to burn and float with the ashes.
“Let’s take it in the vase this time,” her mother suggests.
Tessa smiles. With her mother she needs to hide nothing.
They stroll along Lake Superior, right where Great Aunt Sadie and Percy had walked sixty years ago.
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