“She was a strange child,” she said. “A tree. A houseboat. A cabin. A covered wagon. All of them. She was a”—she fumbled for the right word and began to whisper words in succession, shaking her head after each one, a No, no, that’s not right either kind of motion—“plains. Snow. Oxen. Blizzard. She was a blizzard. A blizzard girl.”
“Pioneer,” I whispered back. “She was a pioneer girl.”
She nodded. That was the word she was looking for. She could rest now. She looked at me patiently. “What’s your name?”
“Clara.”
“That was her name too!”
Her eyes lit up. It was a miraculous coincidence. These dark searching nights of following your mother meant that you had to follow her into a world that used to exist, one in which she called you her word girl and rolled her eyes at your dreams of being a pioneer girl who braved the winter blizzards, a world in which you used to make up fake books about winter so that you could write real book reports about them. A world that if you could, you’d do over. Do differently. Because this time around you’d know that it would end. That there would come a time when you and your mother would sit on a couch together, and she would lean toward you politely, asking your name.
“Ma, can I ask you about some things?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tear up my MVCC application? Was it because you were angry at me?”
She picked the pillow up again and placed it on her own lap, then back on mine. The pillow of dunceship. The pillow of distraction. Try again. Rephrase.
“You must have been so angry with me.”
“Why?”
“Because of the night I screamed at you. The awful things I said.”
“You were a, a . . .” Frustration wrinkled her face and her fingers came off the pillow and into the air, searching. “You were a, a . . .” She scribbled in the air. Letters? The alphabet? Words? Then it came to me.
“Word girl?” I said and she nodded in relief. Her fingers closed and made a fist and she pounded the pillow on her lap. Yes. I was a word girl and I had to go away. She sank back against the headboard, gone again into that parallel world. The word girl was gone too, spiraled away into the coiled shell of my mother’s mind, if that was where memory lived. Unless there was somewhere else that memory went, an invisible place where everything that ever happened to everyone on the planet was held safe, untouched and untouchable.
I wrapped my arms around themselves and against my body, wire holding me tight together.
* * *
How did they do it? How did Tamar Winter and Annabelle Lee, women unfamiliar with the ways of the elite, women who had not studied past high school, women well-schooled in the ways of the rural world, its byways and dirt roads and woods and hymns and milkshakes but schooled not at all in the ways of college and how to get into one early-decision with a full package of scholarships and grants and work study, manage to apply in my name and come up such massive winners?
When you hear about first-generation college students, how hard it is for them to navigate their way in a world so unfamiliar, maybe you inwardly roll your eyes, thinking, Oh, please, it’s not that hard. It is, though. It was only now, when I looked back, when I pictured myself in those New Hampshire mountains wearing my fake leather boots from Payless and the mittens that Crystal from the diner knitted me as a going-away present, that I saw just how hard it was.
So hard.
People like Sunshine and Brown and my other friends from college, they didn’t know what it was like for someone like me, someone from Sterns, who grew up surrounded by plenty of people who never considered college, who didn’t graduate high school and didn’t care, because life wasn’t about school and jobs didn’t need degrees and you learned how to work at the side of your mother and father: on the farm, in the trades, cleaning houses, waiting tables. But so few at my college were from lives like that. Most were from cities, or the rich suburbs just outside them. They had gone to prep schools, country day schools, which was a term, like poached eggs, I had never heard before I got to college.
It was bewildering. Overwhelming. Like learning a new language, one that used English words and English names and English terms but was a language parallel to the one I grew up in.
So how had my mother and Annabelle Lee learned that language?
“We faked it,” was all Annabelle would say. “And by we, I mean your mother. She was determined.”
“Why, though?”
“Because she knows you, Clara.”
She and Annabelle must have huddled over the college applications when I was out of the house. She let me go on for a long time, didn’t she, with my MVCC plan, until she knew for sure I had gotten into the college of her choice early-decision, the admissions committee particularly impressed with the power of my essay about someday traveling to Hong Kong, that the full aid package had come through. Then came the January day that she ripped up my MVCC application.
She drove me to New Hampshire and she came back alone.
* * *
“Time speeds up in a situation like this,” Sunshine said. “You just have to keep trying, Clara.”
How would you know, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Because they did know. Sunshine’s cancer had sped everything up for the two of them, just as early-onset was speeding everything up for me. Sunshine had had to figure everything out with her parents, get everything said, everything settled, in case there was no time.
“Keep talking to her.”
That was their advice to me about everything these days. Keep talking. Keep asking. Keep at it. Do it anyway, all of it, no matter if it scared you. Whatever you could find out, find out. When I was younger I believed that the stories I didn’t want to remember could be pushed so far down inside me that they would stay there forever. But I knew now that I had been wrong.
The memory of Asa kept coming back to me, the day we broke up. The way he stood there, the way he kept shaking his head. It was the day after the night that something had happened between my mother and Asa. Had she told him to break up with me? No, that wouldn’t be possible. He was a grown man, nineteen years old, with a full-time job driving truck. Sometimes I tried to convince myself that they hadn’t argued at all. That they had just been sitting at the table chatting, waiting for me to return home. But that wasn’t the case. The way Asa brushed past me when I got home, the way my mother wouldn’t meet my eyes, the way the next day everything fell apart. Something had happened. But no one would talk to me about it.
It was after that day that my mother must have set the college plan in motion.
Reckon your losses.
That was what the bartender told me to do, when I told him about Asa. How he had helped me find my earring, how he loved The Velveteen Rabbit, how his father, Eli, used to read it to him. How Eli had come driving through the woods to retrieve his son on the day that he broke up with me, the day that Asa’s car wouldn’t start, how he had put his hand on Asa’s shoulder and guided him into the truck and how the curtain that Tamar was watching behind had dropped back down over the window. How I had not spoken to Asa again, much as I wanted to, and not to his father either, even after Asa died in Afghanistan.
The bartender listened in silence.
“It comes back to me,” I said. “I keep seeing the two of them. That day. I keep hearing my voice.”
“You haven’t talked to his father since?”
“No. At this point it’s too late. Nothing can be done.”
My voice wanted to speak in exclamation marks —! ! !—but I would not let it. Nothing can be done! Nothing can be done! scrolled across the bottom of my brain.
“Something can always be done,” the bartender said.
Around and around and around the wineglass went the towel. He had been polishing that wineglass for ten minutes. Twenty minutes. A lifetime. Who was the bartender to tell me what to do? He had never known Asa and he didn’t know Eli and he could give me no advice because this was not hi
s situation to deal with. Protests rose up inside me but behind them was Eli, guiding his son into the truck on that awful day. Behind them was that old velveteen rabbit, loved and abandoned. Behind them was my mother, looking up from her Neil Diamond album and crying. Behind them was Blue Mountain at the museum, cross-legged on the floor with the other children, their faces turned up like cups. The skinless walked among us.
“What would you do?” I said.
“I’m not a word person like you. I’d carve something out of wood, probably. A talisman of some kind.”
“Like what?”
He shrugged. “Something that felt right.” He reached up and put the wineglass in its overhead rack, sliding it into place with both hands. It gleamed and sparkled and shone. Bright and clear, unlike the fairy lights at the cabin, glimmering in their shadowy ways.
“I used to make stories,” I said. “Stories were my talismans. But I can’t do that right now. If I wrote about everything that’s happening right now, with my mother, with the past and the present, she would be trapped forever in those words. A bug in amber. And then I’d have to live forever with her like that.”
He put his hands on mine. They were warm. They were always warm.
“We all have to live forever with the things we’ve done,” he said. “We all have to reckon with our losses.”
* * *
“Adirondack Mountains That Could Also Be Children’s Names for twelve hundred, please,” Brown said, and I slammed my hand down on the table. We were playing Jeopardy! and I was far in the lead.
“What is Blue Mountain?” I said.
“What is a terrible answer?” Brown said. “You’re slipping, Winter. If you and your boyfriend ever choose to name your future child after an Adirondack mountain, promise us you’ll do far better than Blue.”
“I agree,” Sunshine said. “Choose your mountain carefully. Not Bald. Not Haystack. Not Whiteface. Geez, especially not Whiteface.”
“Or Dix,” Brown said. “That would ruin your kid’s life. Think about it.”
“I’ve got a worse one,” Sunshine said. “Nippletop. Who in God’s name would name a mountain Nippletop, let alone a child?”
“Remember your nippletops?” Brown said. “They were the nippletops of the century.”
“They were pretty awesome, weren’t they?”
We all made prayer hands and bowed our heads in the direction of Sunshine’s sinewed chest. She had decided to go flat in the wake of her surgery.
“There are some good names in the high peaks,” I said. “Like Marshall. Or Phelps. Or Cliff. Esther. McKenzie.”
“What about Grace?” Sunshine said. “I like Grace.”
“Grace is a good name,” Brown said. “Can’t go wrong with Grace.”
“It’s settled then. Grace can come for sleepovers when Winter and the boyfriend get sick of being parents. We’ll make her cinnamon rolls for breakfast.”
“With extra frosting because Winter won’t be around to stop us.”
“We’ll play Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders with her. You know damn well Winter and the boyfriend won’t.”
They were off and running, configuring out loud how they could put a toddler bed into the corner of the study, next to the window. How they would have to move the cleaning supplies to a high shelf during the toddler years. How Winter and the boyfriend could list them on school emergency forms so they could pick her up if she had a fever. How they would be Grace’s cool aunt and uncle, which meant that Grace would, in a way, love them more than she would love Winter and the boyfriend. Maybe they should start collecting stuffed animals and picture books for Gracie now. What about a college fund? You were supposed to start those things early, right? Even fifty dollars a month would be a help to Gracie eighteen years from now.
“She’s already gone from Grace to Gracie?” I said, and they looked at me patiently.
“Of course she’s Gracie,” Brown said, and Sunshine nodded. “You can’t call a little baby Grace.”
There was a time, with Sunshine and Brown, a year after the second diagnosis and the second surgery, when they were hell-bent on adoption. The same conversations, about where the baby would sleep and what if there were more than one baby, sibling adoption maybe, or twins, two for one, and was Old Forge Elementary a good school, and what if their kiddo or kiddos—they had already progressed to “kiddo or kiddos”—were bullied on the school bus. Should they go straight to the principal or should they begin with the bus driver? Or maybe go straight to the bully, circumvent the authorities entirely? All that talk stopped after Sunshine’s third diagnosis, when they were told that people with certain recurrent health conditions were not adoption-eligible.
“Have a baby, Clara,” Sunshine said. “Have a baby so we can baby-proof the house and sing her lullabies and read her picture books.”
“And stop the bullies,” Brown said. “And make her great Halloween costumes.”
They were joking, except they weren’t.
“Just do it?” I said. “Like the Nike ad?”
“Yeah,” Sunshine said, and Brown said, “Yeah. Do it for us.”
A tall boy appeared in the doorway, dark hair obscuring his eyes, one arm around skinny little Blue Mountain. An imaginary visitor from the parallel world, not allowed over the doorsill. A look passed over Sunshine’s face, as if she saw something too. Maybe her own parallel-world children, growing up there without her.
* * *
The bartender was telling me about his early days in Rochester, about his grandmother and his too-young, too-drugged parents.
“So your grandmother raised you?” I said.
“She did. From three on, anyway. After the DSS stepped in.”
It was a freak-cold day in late fall, colder than cold, the kind of cold that sweeps in upon the Adirondacks on gale-force winds from the Arctic north or the stormy Atlantic, precursor to the months of winter that will follow. The bartender and I had met at Walt’s for breakfast and now we were wandering the streets of Old Forge, if wander was a word used to describe two people hunched deep into their collars, gloved hands shoved into their coat pockets, hatted heads bent low against the gale, winter-booted feet trudging forward, ever forward. My hat was one of Sunshine’s, her very first scallion, an experimental hat far too big for a baby’s head. Or even my own head.
“Are you cold?” the bartender said. I could barely hear his words against the wind, the scarf, the hunched-collarness of the conversation.
“Oh, no,” I said. “Not at all. Who could possibly be cold in this balmy weather.”
If you take the question mark off the end of the question, it transforms itself into a sarcastic statement. You can do this with your voice or on paper. Either way, it works.
“Sweet baby Jesus,” the bartender said, “can we please go inside.”
The bartender knew the power of an un-question-marked question too, apparently.
“Apparently we will have to,” I said. “It’s either that or face the certainty of death by Adirondacks-in-winter-ness.”
I was consciously using the word apparently inside and outside my head as much as possible in an attempt at the reverse of aversion therapy. The more the Life Care people said apparently, the more I too said apparently. In that way I would grow accustomed to it and stop wincing internally every time I heard it. In that way I would stop associating the word apparently with everything that my mother had lost and everything that she would keep losing. That was my hope.
Into Adirondack Hardware we went. My feet, even in fake-fur-lined boots, were numb with cold. I stepped on my left toes with my right foot and then my right toes with my left foot, but nary a toe could be felt.
“Now would be an excellent time to amputate one of my toes,” I said to the bartender. We were standing in one of the far back rooms, by a display of Swiss Army knives.
“And why would I want to do that,” he said.
He was still un-question-marking his questions. The un-question came out
slightly muffled, as if he had once had a speech impediment but long ago overcame it. I knew why he was talking that way, though. I was talking the same way. It was a form of winter speech impediment known to northerners the world over, the My lips are too cold to form words properly speech impediment.
“Because”—I was going to say, Because five toes are excessive, and who really needs that tiny one on the far end anyway, have you ever taken a serious look at a pinky toe—but instead I put my hands on his shoulders and leaned up, way up because the bartender was taller than me, and kissed him. It was a shadow kiss, a whisper of a kiss, a kiss that neither of us could feel because our lips were so cold from the cold Adirondack pre-winter. But maybe we could feel it, maybe we did feel it, maybe the bartender felt it the same way I felt it. As if an unseen someone had been collecting invisible tinder and invisible twigs and invisible small, perfect fireplace logs for years and years and years, and had built them into a perfect, invisible pre-fire. And our cold whisper of a kiss was a struck match, and now the fire was burning between us.
The bartender took off his mittens and put his hands on either side of my face. I could barely feel them because my cheeks were so cold and so were his hands, but I did feel them. I felt the bartender’s hands, holding my face steady.
“Don’t cry,” he said, because that was what his hands were doing to me, making me cry. “Or do cry. Do whatever the hell you want, Clara.”
I could have said, Apparently I am, or something else like it, and in that way be a smart-ass and also keep working on my reverse aversion therapy, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to be a smart-ass. What I wanted had nothing to do with words at all. What I wanted was for the bartender to keep his hands on my face, for me to feel the slow burn of his palms, warming from within. What I wanted was the sound of his voice behind the words he was whispering to me, softly and slowly and over and over: I got you.
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