Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  Or the phone would ring and she would say, Oh my love, I didn’t mean it.

  Any minute. There would be her voice. The voice I knew. Any minute.

  Oh my love. I’m for you. Oh my love.

  That night was longer than all the nighttimes in my life put together. I was delusional, heartsick, crashing into things, shivering from fever, lost. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I had no place to go. All night long I thought, She will come, she will throw me a lifeline, she won’t leave me here in the wilderness. (Mine enemy’s dog, though he had bit me, should have stood that night against my fire.) I got up at some point to go to the bathroom, tried to look into the mirror over the sink, and didn’t recognize myself. (Was this a face?) I tried to pour a glass of water but my hands were shaking too hard and I fell over sideways, banging my hip hard on the toilet lid. I couldn’t see any point in moving, so I lay face planted on the bathroom mat for the rest of that long darkness. I could feel the pulse in my neck on the floor. It beat out words to me, tunelessly like robotic Morse code. Some diction exercises. Red leather yellow leather, for instance. Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat. But also, Make it stop, make it stop. And please please please please. And of course the permanent scalding one-two call and response of my heartbeat, I’m in love with her, You can’t be, I’m in love with her, You can’t be, I’m in love with her, You can’t be. Call and response, a game we liked to play.

  I was there all the rest of the next day until about 5 o’clock. I went out then, finally, in a haze, unwashed, stumbling around in the twilight. I wound up sitting on the steps of the town hall with the kids playing on their skateboards whisking along the middle of Main Street. They made me feel about a hundred years old. The town seemed deserted, filled with strangers, now that all the other actors had left for their own homes. I couldn’t face talking to Luke yet, or anyone who actually knew me, but I thought the darkness closing in again might swallow me whole. I was a little terrified. I was having some trouble breathing and my neck and hip hurt. Eventually, I found my way to Eddy, and he sat with me on the steps of the pier and smoked and listened.

  “She’s hustling,” Eddy said after I told him. He said this not meanly, but as though it was a known truth.

  “She says she’s in love,” I said. I was curled over like a sick field mouse, my head drooping pathetically between my knees.

  “Well, she’s not in love. Some people are like that,” he said. “Some people are parasites. Some people stand on their own two feet. But she doesn’t. She never has and she never will. She’s hustling.”

  “But she told me she’s in love.”

  “Everyone needs to survive,” Eddy said patiently.

  He ground out his cigarette on the concrete and looked at me kindly.

  “You too,” he said. “You too.”

  “And you,” I said, hopefully.

  He continued to look at me kindly, without wavering, but something—dismay, bleakness—crept in around the edges.

  Luke said I was welcome to stay as long as I liked. I didn’t go to find him, but five days after the phone call, I saw his shadow outside the screen door and I went over in my pajamas and stood on the other side of the screen, my head hanging down from something—the double-barreled weight of humiliation and sadness. I reeked of dried sweat, despair, unwashed cotton, and sticky grief. I could tell he knew. I hated that Sarah had told him. Then I thought for one wild surging hopeful minute that maybe he was checking up on me because she’d called to say she was worried if I was okay. That was not the case. It would never be the case. But I asked anyway, trembling like a fool, which made his sweet face crumple with reluctance. No, she didn’t ask about you. I could tell already that it would take me an ungodly long time to learn not to ask if she had, not to force people to disappoint me. I could not stop trying to find any opening to say her name, to plead for recognition, to beg for any scrap of her, to nose out any invisible crumb of hope on the floor. That morning Luke jammed his hands in his pockets helplessly and said, Look, why don’t you come on over for blueberry muffins. So I put on my jeans, carried my battered shamed heart next door, and took what I could get. They were good muffins.

  Three days later, after I had wobbled back to work and tried to act like a normal person, I came home to find that all of Sarah’s things were gone. When I walked in the door, I saw her old gardening hat had been taken off the hook on the wall. My breathing accelerated and I crisscrossed the apartment, hunting in every corner like a dog. I thought maybe she’d been there; I thought I could smell her in the air; I thought there would be a note; I thought there had to be something, some evidence, something other than even more absence and removal. Finally I dropped down on the kitchen chair, just slammed by dizziness and sadness. Her shirts were gone from the drawer, even her pillow from the bed. How could she look at the bed and not remember? Did she know I would be out? Could she have looked at me and still walked away? How could something and someone vanish so fast?

  But it was Luke who had come to collect her things—the very little she had left behind. Sarah had asked Luke to come pick up her things and send them to her. Out of some respect or embarrassment, he did this when I was at work so in that moment when I got home, I was sent reeling from a sensation of seismic shuddering deep underground, a tectonic and molecular rearrangement. Something was being taken, piece by piece, an edifice being demolished. There was so little to collect that anyone else walking in would not have seen the difference, but to me the sink had been wrenched out of the wall, the floorboards ripped up, the furniture overturned, the walls pulled down. Again.

  Every day that Sarah made no effort to reach me, to take back what she said, to take me back, even to hear my voice, to know if I was still alive or okay, every single one of those blank days opened my chest—a flap of skin that turns out to be as easy to push aside as a curtain—to reveal the wound, the cavity, the loss in red, like an angry stupid painful wet mouth throbbing gaping gaping in dumb astonishment that she has done this, is doing this. Every day, one after another, she made no effort.

  Every day I tried to lay a poultice around the edges, to smooth it and hold my heart in place, cup the cavity. I would actually lay my hands down on my chest on my bare skin and say, You are still here, your heart is still in your body there are so many things, maybe everything that she can’t take away from you. But I didn’t believe it. I would think only I want my heart back I want back everything she’s taken from me and just like that I would be shredded again, undone. Every day I tried to stitch this dumb wound up it would pop open, sometimes just leaking around the seams, sometimes totally ripped apart, running, squelchy, raw. These long, horrifying, gutted days kept piling up, one after another, a heap of days, flat as pancakes.

  I bet on the wrong horse. I put all my eggs in one basket. My grandmother couldn’t have said enough about what a bad idea that was. She couldn’t have said anything that would ever have persuaded me not to do it.

  When I was younger, starting right after my father left, I used to do a lot of checking to try and catch myself off guard, to test what the real state of things was, to see if I was okay, and to see if I was prepared for the unimaginable. For example, I had a game in which I’d be walking along a busy street and if a truck began lumbering up behind me and I could feel it bearing down on me, I’d pretend that it was going to swerve off the road and hit me boom and I’d be dead and then I’d ask myself urgently would that be okay? Would it be okay if right now right this instant with no warning I was run over? Was I ready? Did I have regrets? Were there things I wished I’d said or done before I died? And I’d wait to see what the response was that leapt up in my head as the truck went roaring by and the pins and needles in my feet settled. Usually I thought it was a bad idea to die and sometimes I’d even have jolted articulate feelings about why, but mostly my subconscious was unmoved and my brain became deliberately insultingly slow to respond. It was about as effective
as trying to hit yourself in the knee with one of those reflex hammers, or attempting to tickle yourself.

  What I didn’t know then was that the trick of conjuring the fear of impact from a truck was also about the fear of colliding with another person, someone who had mattered to me. For a long time I envisioned the scene of meeting my father again, inventing where and how that would happen. I pictured it when I was bored or sorry for myself. But this is different, and incalculably worse, because I know Sarah, I chose Sarah. The thing is, losing someone you love can be worse than having that person outright die because you always know—I will always know—she is out there, living, carrying on in her life, day to day, place to place, and I can’t believe that having collided once, with the force that we did, that we aren’t on a collision course even now, that in some magnetized way we won’t eventually have to be pulled together again. So my childhood make-believe has become thinking what will it be like when I see Sarah, when she crosses my path, when I accidentally turn a corner, boom, and there she is? Who will she be with and what will she look like? What will I do or say? Will I be ready? Is it possible for me to be ready, to suit up, for this moment? Is there enough armor in the world? That anticipation is the equivalent of trying to prepare for the trauma of being mowed down by a truck. Incomprehensibly, painfully, relentlessly, I can’t stop looking for the crash and dreading it all at once.

  All the while I can’t stop asking the same stupid question again and again, which amounts to this: how do you solve a problem like Sarah? I have asked anyone who would talk to me. I have asked people who didn’t know me. I have asked people who were sick of talking to me. I have particularly asked people who were sick of talking to me but would still talk to me. How do you solve a problem like Sarah? And as far as I can tell the answer is: you don’t. Eventually you drop it like a hot potato, like nothing you want to lug around for another ever-loving minute; you cut loose its gnawing tether and let it sink into the ocean abyss; you let it sail up over the rooftops like the red balloon until this time it pops and you watch it explode, satisfyingly; its wings of wax melt by the sun and you think loudly, Well, thank god for that! All I have wanted finally was to get that monkey off my back, that sand out of my craw, that stitch out of my side; to obliterate that stabbing migraine pain behind my left eye that brought me to my knees like a downed wrestler begging begging for some moment when everything wasn’t bubbling poison in the blood.

  I said out loud, under my breath, howling, in the car, in the pillow, in the bright sun, in the company of friends, alone, and even once horrifyingly in a crowded bagel shop, flat out loud: Make it stop, make it stop make it stop make it stop, please make it stop, like a mantra, as though saying it would make it true. As though all those people that day waiting in line to pay for their bags of bagels in Orleans—all frozen or turning to look at me so that I realized suddenly that I was crying out loud, that I was begging the very air for help, that I had crossed some line of containment, that I was out of bounds, out of line, out of control—as though all those regular people going about their regular days could do anything other than simply recoil, or feel grateful, deep in their bowels, that they were not at that moment in an uncontrolled grip of despair.

  It used to be that someone else’s misfortune was always an accident I was driving by on the highway too, something to stare at from behind the safety of sealed car windows, until the day that it’s you standing on the hard concrete with messy unreality in front of you, the cold wind, the curious uncaring eyes rolling past. Grief comes to us all, Mary Margaret.

  No one can do anything about this. Because there’s no comprehending this feeling, there’s no solving her, there’s only knowing that someday the claws of this will have to retract a little, and someday sometime long after that, sometime in my life, someday, she will finally finally be dead and gone, deadweight released.

  My mother sent me a second letter, and then a third. She did not know what had happened with Sarah. She did not mention my coming home or the beginning of the school year, but in the third letter she did mention that my grandmother had been to see her doctor. I picked up the phone and called.

  “Can I talk to her?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course, but she’s not going to be able to hear you.”

  “She’s not wearing her hearing aids?”

  “No. I bought her new ones and she stored them in the refrigerator. I think it’s safe to say that she doesn’t have any plans to wear them ever again.”

  “Well, would you put her on the phone for just a minute anyway?”

  There was short rustle and then I heard the wrenchingly lovely sound of my grandmother’s emphysema breathing.

  “Hello, Gamma,” I whispered. Since she couldn’t hear me anyway, whispering somehow seemed like the right thing to do. Besides it was all I was capable of suddenly. “It’s Nina. I just want you to know that I know running away never solved anything. Also, I miss you.” I paused. “Also, you were right about everything.”

  I stopped again for a moment, listening. “Also, Gamma, I promise I am going to come home to see you as soon as I can. I’m working on it.”

  There was no change in her breathing, but I felt better.

  Then my grandmother coughed and said, “Nina? Is that you, Nina?” Her voice was scratchy, but not weak. She coughed again.

  I shouted, “Yes! Yes, it’s me.”

  “It is I,” she corrected me.

  “It is I.”

  “Well. It’s a real pleasure to hear your voice, lambie. I’m going to hand you back to your mother now, alright?”

  “Okay!” I waited but couldn’t hear anything. “Mom?”

  “I’m here.”

  We were quiet.

  “Is she going to die?”

  “We’re all going to die,” my mother said. She heaved a short impatient sigh. “Doctor Mueller says she’s as strong as a horse. She didn’t say your grandmother is as stubborn as a mule, but that would have been an even more accurate assessment. So yes, she could live another twenty years or she could die tomorrow, like anyone. I think it’s going to be awhile.” There was a pause. “Either way, she could use your company.”

  “Sarah left,” I said. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”

  My mother breathed a very long slow even breath.

  “Well,” she said. There was another even longer pause, during which I steeled myself against her pity and desperately hoped for it at the same time.

  “Well,” she said again. “We could both use your company.”

  “How am I going to live my life?” I asked Luke once after Sarah was gone. He just smiled at me and shrugged. “How does anyone?” he asked. Which was not what I wanted to hear.

  About a month and a half after the last conversation with Sarah, on one overcast unseasonably cold late fall day, I went outside to empty the compost bowl, and all of a sudden the sun revealed itself. I closed my eyes hard, my face bathed in that warmth, until there were purple and black spiky crystals on the backs of my eyelids, and for a tiny, fleeting instant in the sunshine I wanted to stretch my toes in delight and my skin was warmed, alive. I thought about my mother, her worry and her anger, her finally being home and maybe even staying, and about my grandmother, her kind, gnarled hands, and about the farm, about the smells and sounds. That’s not where I went first though.

  CHAPTER 32

  When I pulled into Titch’s driveway, it was four o’clock in the afternoon. Her house looked the way it had always looked, with its modern shape, like three stacked wooden blocks, two on the bottom, one overhanging on top. Everything was misted over, dampness dripping from the hemlocks that draped over the gravel. I almost drove right around the circle in front and headed back out again, but I didn’t. I was so beaten, and tired and stiff from the driving, that I pretty much limped to her doorway. I saw her from the chest up through the window, moving about at the kitchen count
er, about three seconds before she saw me. She was feeding the golden retrievers, standing at the sink adding hot water to the kibble in their shiny metal dishes. My heart was sputtering with anxiety, my stomach a hard knob of despair. She blinked when she saw me, turned her back to put the dishes down, and disappeared.

  “Does anyone know you’re back?” Titch asked. She didn’t seem surprised to see me but she didn’t move toward me either, just stood there holding the door, her right foot drawn up slightly and pressed against her left calf, like a stork, or a ballerina at rest.

  “No.” We looked at each other and then at the same instant we squinted and looked away. “Can I come in?” I asked abruptly. My teeth felt gritty.

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at me.

  “How’s your mom?” I asked.

  There was a silence. She was staring stonily at the bridge of my nose. She looked skinnier even than usual, shrunken up in her clothes, her wrists spiny, her fingers all bone gripping the door. There were big purple loops under her eyes. The part in her hair, where a winding path of scalp showed, looked strangely vulnerable. Behind her in the hall I could see the outline of what might have been an oxygen tank, a looming metal canister on wheels, coils of plastic tubing, medical, forbidding.