* * *
I found the letter when I was restacking the books beneath the windowsill, creating order from chaos. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was missing, and the room looked wrong without it.
“I read it to her too sometimes, when she’s agitated,” Sylvia told me when I went looking for it. “Sometimes in the middle of the night, when she’s trying to find her daughter, I get it from her room and show it to her, and then we sit down and I start reading.”
Neither of us mentioned the fact that I was the daughter my mother was looking for. We were used to that by now. It was accepted between the two of us that the daughter was an entity, a not-me named not Clara but “my daughter.”
An aide brought it back as I was restacking the book pile for the third time. You had to get the proportions right. You had to make sure the ratio of fat book to thin book to tall book to short book was balanced; otherwise the woodpile would be unsteady and precarious. When you went to remove a piece of wood from one end, the entire pile might fall, and then where would you be? Standing in the middle of a mess of wood, trying not to cry.
“Here you go, Clara,” the aide said. “Sorry. I started reading it and forgot to bring it back. Strange book.”
I flipped it open and kept flipping, the way you did when you were nervous and you didn’t know what to say. Don’t take it out of her room again, were the words on my tongue, but they seemed so harsh, and why? Who cares if they take it out of the room, I said to myself, but I did. I cared. I nodded my thanks and the aide smiled and left.
The letter fell out. A plain small envelope, thin and white. On the back: a circle of yellowed tape that must have stuck it to one of the back pages and a sketch of the village green in front of the Twin Churches. On the front, in pencil gone over again with pen: Tamar Winter, Route 274, Sterns, NY 13354. No return address. Unopened.
The image of Eli Chamberlain, his head bent over Annabelle Lee’s kitchen table and his hand moving laboriously on a sheet of stationery, reared up in my mind. The address, penciled and then penned over the pencil, the way someone unsure of himself would do it. The way we had been taught in elementary school to write our book reports. “Write it in pencil, then read it over and check the spelling and your word choices and your grammar,” our teachers said. “Take your time. If you want extra credit, you can rewrite the whole thing in pen.”
Eli Chamberlain had not rewritten, he had traced.
That big man, hunched over the table. That big man, writing in pencil. That big man, making his last stand for my mother. I did not slit the seal. I put the envelope back in the book. All these years, she had kept it.
* * *
Next day the Subaru and I pointed ourselves south on Route 28. We were nearly at the junction of 28 and 12 when, instead of going left, I went straight across. Gravel road, cornstalk stubble on the right, Christmas tree farm on the left. Deeper into the countryside north of Sterns we went, past the water tower with the red dragon painted on it, past the old stone schoolhouse, past the one-room church. Left onto a dirt road, rumbling in the frozen ruts left by tractors and pickups. The closer we got to Asa’s house, the house where Eli lived alone, the more my heart hurt. The hurt was real, like a bruise inside my chest. I pressed my hand against it, the other gripped hard on the steering wheel. Tamar would not approve of one-handed driving.
“Nine and three,” she used to say. “Both hands on the clock.”
Her voice was quiet and even when she taught me to drive. I used to have a safety-belt system rigged up with the seat belt and bungees, a corsetlike system that kept me strapped in. It was a system I had come up with after the old man died, when everything seemed breakable, perishable, destroyable. All the bad –able words, and none of the good ones. Those were the days of Dog and the seat-belt safety system, of scrabbling monkey mind and scrolling words. Those were the days of fear.
“Put your foot on the gas and then on the brake. Smooth, now. Not jerky. Check the rearview mirror. Check the side mirrors.”
She wanted me to be safe. To stay on my toes. To pay attention. I knew that now.
The Subaru and I pulled into Eli’s driveway and parked. My heart thumped in its cage, strained against the ribs that held it tight. Fifteen years since I had been here, at this house and this barn, this place where I used to spend so much of my time. I took my hand off my heart and got out of the car.
Eli opened the door before I could knock. I started to say something but I couldn’t, because his arms were around me and I was crying so hard that nothing came out but snot and tears. He tightened his arms and I cried into his coat. He smelled the same, like himself, and the like-himself smell brought the smell of his son over me, rolling in like waves. Asa, Asa.
“I loved him,” I said. “And I loved you too.”
The words came choking out, a strangled scream wrapped inside them. Eli nodded.
“I know you did, baby girl. I know you did.”
Baby girl. He used to call me baby girl. The shock of hearing it again—no one in my life had ever called me baby girl but Eli Chamberlain, as if I were his beloved daughter, his girl who had never grown up—made me laugh and then cry harder. Because I had never talked to him. Never called him, never written anything, when Asa died over there.
“I’m sorry, Eli. I’m so sorry. I know all about it now.”
His arms were still around me. He was so much older now, a man in solid middle age, but half my life ago, when I was seventeen, he had been a young man. I could see that now, could picture his face and his big shoulders and his big laugh, back when I was a girl and his son and I used to go riding around with him. He had barely been in his forties then, a decade younger than my young mother was now.
“IshouldhavecalledIshouldhavecomeseeyouIshouldhavewritten.”
Words tumbled out of me, not enough space in between them to make any sense, but they must have made sense anyway, because he nodded, I felt him nodding. Then we were sitting on the old bench that was still on the little front porch. So many summer nights his son and I had snuck back late, sat on that same bench and held each other as dark smoothed into dawn.
“I feel so guilty,” I said. “I was so angry at her when things must have been so hard for her.”
“You couldn’t have been as angry at her as Asa was angry at me.”
“How did he find out?”
“Martha told him. She wanted him to know why she moved out. She blamed me. Which was justified.”
Martha Chamberlain, the tough nut.
“He broke up with you because he saw no way out,” Eli said. His hands were spread in front of him, as if he were trying to explain something puzzling, something almost incomprehensible. Theoretical physics. “He saw no way through Martha’s anger, no way that your mother and I could be together, no way that the two of you could ever be happy in the middle of it all.”
The sight of my mother and Asa across the kitchen table from each other, that night when the air was thick with words that had already been spoken, words that neither of them would ever recount to me, rose up in my mind. No way out. The words, little dark knives of hurt, severed by.
“And he knew how much you loved your mother, and he didn’t want to hurt you any more than he felt he had to. He didn’t want to say anything bad about her to you.”
“He didn’t have a lot of perspective,” I said. “Neither did I. I know that now.”
He turned his big hands palms up, then laced them together. They sat quietly on his lap, a giant lump of laced-up fingers.
“Perspective,” he said. “The gift of growing up.”
I hitched myself a little closer to him and laid my hands on top of his. A complicated Jenga tower rose up in my head. It began with four people who loved each other, me and Asa and Tamar and Eli, and it ended when Asa yanked the middle block from the stack and it all came tumbling down. We sat together in silence until Eli spoke.
“How’s your mother?”
“She’s okay.”
“Is she?”
I shook my head. No. She wasn’t. She was going away, faster and faster every week now, and he knew it as well as I did, because he didn’t say anything else. There was so much I wanted to say to Eli, so much I wanted to apologize for, but everything I wanted to say was translating itself into another language, a wordless one that he already understood.
* * *
The next time I went to Annabelle Lee’s house, dark had fallen. Early, the way it did in December. I drove up the driveway and parked next to the Impala. Her double-wide shone bright in the car headlights. It still looked brand-new and had looked that way for all the years I’d known her. It was lit up like a ship, and when the door opened, the smell of fresh bread wafted out. Annabelle Lee wore a Kiss My Blarney Stone apron and The Doors were belting out “Riders on the Storm” from the enormous speakers that doubled as a coffee table. I stood on the rickety stairs and breathed in the warmth.
“What?” she said, at what must have been a look on my face. “You think choir directors go home and listen to hymns all day? Let go of your preconceived notions, Clara. They’ll be the death of you.”
“I came to tell you I’m sorry,” I said.
“What are you sorry about?”
“For a lot of things, starting with my mother thinking I was a lonely child. She told you I was a lonely child, right?”
She nodded.
“I wasn’t,” I said. “I wasn’t lonely. I had the old man. I had some friends at school. Later I had Asa. And I had books.”
“Books you did have,” she said. “She always called you her word girl.”
I pushed my hand down in my pocket and held onto the silver earring. Yes. I had been a word girl. Her strange child, her word girl.
“But mostly?” I said. “I had her. I had my mother. I had Tamar Winter.”
Annabelle Lee nodded and I tipped my head back to keep from crying. An old white pine towered at the edge of her lawn, close to the road, just like the white pines at the cabin on Turnip Hill Road. Starlight filtered through the crown of the pine like lace against the navy December sky. Annabelle shut the door and leaned against the stair rail—it swayed—and looked up too. The two women who knew my mother best, standing together in the wintry air.
“I know you did,” Annabelle said. “She was always there.”
It was true. Tamar had been there, chopping wood outside the storage barn, anytime I looked out the kitchen window. She had been in the kitchen eating out of jars and cans with her cocktail fork. She had handed me book after hardcover book about a child facing the perils of the world and overcoming them on her own. Every step of the way, she had been there. None of those thoughts came out, though, because they were monkey-minded together in a clump in my brain. Messing up my words. Messing up my ability to talk.
“I wish I had told her how much I missed her when she made me go so far away,” I said.
“You can still tell her.”
I could hear Sylvia’s voice telling me the same thing. That there was power in the voice. That hearing remained when the other senses had faded.
“I wish I had told her a long time ago.”
“There are things I wish I’d told my mother,” Annabelle said. “And things Tamar wishes she’d said to hers.”
“How did my mother do, after I was gone?”
Annabelle shrugged. “You know your mother.”
What that meant was that she had toughed it out, the way she toughed out everything that came her way. My heart quickened and the look on Annabelle’s face softened.
“For what it’s worth, I think she knew how much you missed her.”
“You do?”
“You know how she always called you on Thursdays?” I nodded. “She used to be relieved when you’d get annoyed at that whole phone shtick she used to do. She took that as a good sign. ‘She’s making her own way in the world,’ she used to say. ‘That’s good.’”
Orion, the archer, and Cassiopeia were visible now. The Big Dipper, its arm obscured by the red pine. Constellations of the Northern Sky for $800, please. Annabelle Lee and my mother and I were all three of us northerners, all three of us familiar with the northern sky.
“She woke me up once when I was four years old,” I said, “and she brought me downstairs and onto the porch so I could see the northern lights.”
“Did she?”
“She did.”
“And? Were they beautiful?”
Yes. They were beautiful, in a strange and unearthly way.
* * *
The next time I went to visit Tamar I signed her copy of The Old Man.
To Tamar Winter, with admiration and love.
My full name I wrote out in careful script, the way a name deserved to be written. No slashes or curls or undulating waves standing in for multiple letters, the lazy way out. The forces of evil had to be fought with all the means at our disposal, and if you were a word girl, then names were distilled words and had to be treated with respect.
On the windowsill, the hammered-metal bookends that she called the iron claw held the one book that still mattered to her: Jonathan Livingston Seagull. All her other books were stacked beneath the window, the worn hardcover edges of each perpendicular to the one above and below. A pile of book-logs to see her through the winter. Jonathan Livingston Seagull was the only book in the whole room that hadn’t belonged to me first. It was the only book I ever saw my mother read, and she read it over and over, until the edges of her small blue paperback copy were worn nearly off.
“Ma! Why are you so obsessed with that stupid anthropomorphized-seagull book?”
Me as a high-schooler, badgering her. Embarrassed that she had chosen Jonathan Livingston Seagull, of all books. Anthropomorphized was one of my favorite new words and I used it frequently back then. I asked again—“What’s with you and that seagull?”—but she remained silent. So I stole the book from her nightstand one Wednesday night, when she was at choir practice, and I read it myself to see what the fuss was about. At first I was looking for a hint—a friendship, a romance, a mystery, something funny, something sad, something, anything—to see what kept her so riveted.
Now I thought, You were looking for her. You were trying to figure out your mother.
All I knew back then was that the book made no sense. It was about a seagull who could travel anywhere he wanted, at any time he wanted, by the sheer force of his mind. A seagull who believed that if he just thought hard enough and long enough, if he focused all his powers, he would transform.
I read it all that one Wednesday night, and then again the next Wednesday night, and a final time a week later. Searching for a clue. A trail of bread crumbs to follow.
Now I thought, She was looking for a way out.
She wouldn’t have expressed it like that. She would not have wanted me to think she longed for a way out of her life. She wouldn’t have wanted me to feel bad, as if I were holding her back. And I didn’t. I didn’t question my mother’s life. The life she was living must be the life she wanted to live, was what I assumed. Back then I didn’t think anything could stop a person from living any life he or she wanted. It was up to the individual, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it up to you and the power of your mind to focus your thoughts and make your life unfold the way you wanted?
Now I thought, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a beautiful, heartbreaking book.
Now I thought, What this book says is that there is a way out if only you work hard enough.
Now I thought, My mother worked so, so hard.
* * *
It was the day before the procedure and I got up early. One more day. Twenty-four hours. I placed the folder that held my will—all my money to the care of my mother, and all my earthly possessions to Sunshine and Brown, and my silver earring to Chris, and The Velveteen Rabbit to Eli Chamberlain—on the first rung of the ladder that led to the sleeping loft and my bed of books, and then I turned the key in the lock.
One last hike. Bald Mountain. The falle
n leaves were coated with frost that looked like dried salt. Half an hour on the trail and the feeling began to spread inside me, the same feeling that hiking always brought to my body, a flickering sensation that grew until it was me and I was it.
Climbing.
Leaving the world behind.
The sound of trucks and cars on Route 28 receded. The sound of the wind intensified. The bare limbs of oaks and poplars were leafless, and the higher I went, the stronger the wind blew.
Be fearless, Clara. From now on, be fearless.
Long ago I used to hike this mountain with Asa, back when we were teenagers. He used to run down the mountains we hiked up. I would watch him disappear ahead of me on the trail. He laughed when he ran. The way I made my way down was the way most people did, by bracing my knees a little with each step. Fearful, then and now, to run down mountains.
There was so much to fear in this world. Avalanches, sudden blizzards, car crashes, bridge collapses, tunnel cave-ins. Death by freezing, death by fire, death by madmen with assault rifles. Failure. Heartbreak. Gene mutations.
Once, when I was eleven and beginning to understand the world of fear and loss, I looked out the kitchen window of our house in Sterns to see a big black bird on the lawn. The word raven appeared in my mind, like a message from poor dead Poe, and fear swarmed up in me. Something bad was about to happen. Someone I loved was in great danger. Was it Tamar? All that day I waited, consumed with worry. Where was the danger, and how could I make it not happen; what were the signs I needed to look for, and where was I supposed to look for them?
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