Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  The Farmer’s Almanac says that thunderstorms after St. Bartholomew’s Day are more violent. Who makes these kinds of observations, I wonder?

  The day is fine, only a few clouds off to the southwest.

  Viney and L. are doing their mobile vaccine visits all week, injecting dilute inoculates of various viruses in a hundred-mile radius. It’s one of the few times when Llewellyn’s workday has a specific scheduled beginning and end.

  I called Viney first thing this A.M. while Llewellyn was taking his shower. Suggested that we all have dinner at the club tonight. Viney welcomed the idea, as I knew she would. She offered to have the children come to her after school—her daughter Haley will watch them—and then when she and Llewellyn are done with work, they’ll swing by here to get me, we’ll pick up the kids, and then all head to the country club for dinner.

  So that’s done.

  It’s all working out well.

  I do worry about Llewellyn. But Viney is so full of spunk and spirit. She grounds and at the same time leavens him in a way I’ve never been able to do. Or maybe I was once—I remember thinking long ago that we balanced each other. But my side of the teeter-totter is far too heavy now, my weight obscenely disproportionate. There’s not a human force in the world that could lift me.

  And yet, at this moment, I feel oddly light, even happy. I’ve heard of this. The weight of grappling with this decision for so long finally lifted.

  Closing her diary now, she brings out some stationery.

  In the first hour or so after the children leave, when the house is silent but still reverberating with their energy, she finds it easy to speak to them, even though she’s dreaded doing it in this context.

  She takes up her pen. Weeks ago she wrote letters to Llewellyn and Viney, but those she typed. She wants her last words to her children to arise from the efforts of her body, as they did.

  Dear ones, she writes, slowly, methodically, working hard to keep her penmanship legible. It has already started to mutate, deterioriate.

  There are so many ways to begin a letter like this. “If you are reading this, it means that …” is one of them. “Please don’t blame yourselves” is another.

  If there is anything I have learned in my life, it’s that so very little is within our control. Our passions arise to surprise us. Our loves jump out at us like boogeymen as we round a dark corner or open the closet. We try and we try to make things fit, to steer the events of our lives a certain way, to create boundaries of experience and feeling, to wall ourselves off from one another, to stop love—which should never be stopped, ever—and my dears, it simply cannot be done.

  The only thing I am certain of is this: Someday something will break your heart, something that reminds you of me.

  Maybe this will happen often. I hope not, but I don’t know and I cannot promise anything. I know nothing of who you will be in the future, or of how my absence from your lives will affect you.

  But this heartbreak thing, whatever it is—something seen or heard, something smelled or touched, or something even more out of reach, beyond your ability to articulate, on the fringes of your awareness, maybe even a half-remembered dream—this thing is two-sided. Think of it as a token, a coin.

  Viewed this way, heartbreak has a counterpart. Turn it over, and you will know that that which tells you I am gone can tell you just as convincingly that I am here.

  My darlings.

  Larken Myfanwy. Gaelan Llewellyn. Bonnie Ebrilla.

  Turn the coin over. After I am gone, find me on the other side of heartbreak. Look and see and know that you are my best beloved, and that I am here, still, and always.

  From the back of the locked desk drawer she pulls out the pills.

  She told him she would choose the day and not tell him. She didn’t tell him that it would be sooner rather than later.

  But maybe he knew anyway and that was why he gave her the gift of last night—their last night—in that sad and sanctified place where the spirits of all their losses and joys reside.

  One flesh with the man and the land that bred him.

  That was what she dreamed of, that is what she’s been given. Not everyone is blessed with such abundance.

  Mid-morning, during first grade language arts in Miss Greene’s class, Bonnie Jones suddenly feels ill. She raises her hand, is sent to the nurse’s office, and is found to be running a slight fever. A mother of one of Bonnie’s classmates who volunteers at the school offers to give her a ride home. Everyone knows that Hope Jones is house-bound, an invalid in a wheelchair, poor thing, so there’s no reason to phone first to make sure that someone’s home.

  By the time Mrs. McClure delivers Bonnie to her house, a few clouds have started moving in from the southwest.

  “You want me to walk you in, honey?” Mrs. McClure asks.

  “No, thank you. I’ll be fine,” Bonnie says. Such a serious little thing.

  “All right then. You give my best to your mom, okay? I hope you feel better.”

  A sudden wind kicks up, and as Bonnie makes her way up the driveway toward Mommy’s wheelchair ramp, she notices wisps of smoke arising from the chimney. This is odd. It’s still summer, far too warm for a fire in the fireplace.

  “Mom! Mommy!” she calls once she’s inside. “I’m home! I had a little fever …”

  Bonnie finds her mother on the sofa Daddy ordered from the Sears catalog and put in one corner of their big kitchen so that she can lie down in there whenever she gets tired and look out toward the fields. Mommy says she likes being here because she loves the view, but Bonnie suspects that her mother is really trying to catch a glimpse of the Farmer Elves.

  She’s sound asleep. It’s not unusual to find Mommy taking a nap, so Bonnie tiptoes around the kitchen, putting some saltines on a plate. They’ll help her tummy feel better. When her mother wakes up she’ll ask if she can fix herself some soup. In the meantime, she goes to the living room to lie down on the sofa in there.

  She’d already forgotten about seeing the smoke from the chimney, but right away she sees the dying fire in the fireplace. Stranger still, something’s in there. Mommy’s diaries. All of them. Their pages are blackening. Mommy’s words are escaping. Bonnie grabs one of the fireplace tools and starts to drag the diaries away from the glowing coals. Who would do this?

  Feeling a new afraid kind of feeling that she cannot name, Bonnie goes back into the kitchen and tries to wake her mother to ask why there’s a fire in the fireplace when it’s still summer, and about the burning diaries. And when she cannot wake her—not even when she yells, not even when she shakes Mommy as hard as she can—she knows that something is very wrong.

  Daddy’s office number is written next to the phone in the hall, but it would be silly to call there because Daddy and Viney are out in the van today, giving shots to people who need them and who aren’t lucky enough to have physicians in their towns.

  But Bonnie doesn’t panic. She knows just what to do.

  And even though what is left of Hope’s spirit is crying No with increasing desperation (for the birds are quieting and the color of the air is changing), Bonnie Ebrilla Jones goes outside, gets onto her bike, and starts making her way back to town.

  Hope is dying. But her dying body contains residual fetal tissue, a physical link that she still shares with this living child. It is this tissue that keeps her tethered to her own spirit, her daughter’s body, and to the danger that is fast approaching.

  No NO NO

  When it comes, the sound is something like a freight train, the way they say, but that doesn’t describe it because the noise of a freight train is directional, it is contained and external, whereas this sound seems physically impossible, a three-dimensional assault that is more like being inside the cavernous organ of some gigantic rampaging beast.

  Hope feels herself pulled up as if by enormously large and powerful arms. She knows that Bonnie is experiencing this feeling as well—how terrified she must be!—and Hope tries calling to her th
rough that tenuous link of fetal flesh and cells and spirit, like tissue paper but still substantive, a thread that connects them even as they are spun up and about along with the sofa cushions and Bonnie’s whirligig, Larken’s chair, Gaelan’s science experiments, the chickens, poor things, rousted from the henhouse, plucked and rendered as Hope and Bonnie rise higher and higher.

  A long-dead mother from Emlyn Springs comes to shepherd Hope to her death, but she is not ready. No! she cries, fending her off with whirling arms and insistent cries, NO! Not yet! NOT YET!

  Where will they land? Does Hope have the power to control this?

  She tries reaching for Bonnie but cannot; the elemental pull of the winds encasing them is too fierce, but not—will never be—fierce enough to extract surrender.

  This is her last act. Not the taking of pills and sacramental wine, the writing of letters and the reading of that poem she took with her as she settled down on the sofa facing the back door, so that her last view would be of the land and imagined elves and children in the sandbox and children in the earth, and laundry like prayer flags, the sanctity of the ordinary all around her. She could not stride out toward Death, but she could make her last act a choice of view. That was her plan and if she still had breath enough to laugh she would, knowing she has made God laugh.

  So no, her last act will be this: saving, if she can, this girl of her flesh.

  Can she affix that pair of wings to Bonnie’s shoulders? Peaseblossom! Cobweb! Moth! Mustardseed! Hope hears a voice intone. But the wings travel on and the question is moot.

  At times the base of the funnel opens up like an effacing cervix, revealing glimpses of the landscape where things have already come down: the eggs laid out like perfect pearls, white and brown and blue and speckled and entirely intact, an anecdote for future books on the inexplicable mysteries caused by tornadic behavior; the piano, whirling in space while it could, an elephantine ballerina doing a pirouette, finally dropped into a field miles from here; a red wagon; a nibbled pencil.

  Hope is starting to acquire the vision of the dead, and she can see far enough into what the living call the future to know that a photographer will take a picture of her ruined piano, it will appear in a story in National Geographic, the magazine that Gaelan likes so much. “Nebraska: The Good Life” the story will be called and there will be no mention of who the piano belonged to. By then it will only be emblematic, a symbol of what this good life takes as well as gives.

  She looks for other people within the vortex, but it is only them, only she and Bonnie, spinning as if they’re on a carnival ride but on opposite sides, always across from each other.

  A force of will allows Hope to catch something that is moving at a faster speed (Larken’s purple dress, the one she and Viney made); she hitches a ride on the train and gets closer, then grasps at other fast-moving objects as if they are rungs on a spiraling ladder, allowing herself to be pulled closer and closer.

  Bonnie Bonnie Bonnie Hope calls to her through the tissue, through the cells.

  They say that a mother’s voice will rouse a slumbering child more reliably than any fire alarm, and so Bonnie stays awake, even opens her eyes, or imagines doing so—

  Baby, Hope says, Stay awake, baby. No time to nap …

  —and sees whirling ribbons and spiraling bolts of fabric and fairy wings fluttering around her mother, and they speak to one another, make promises, and she starts to fade again but then the telephone careens by and Mommy’s voice says:

  Bonnie! Bon-Bon!

  And Bonnie stays with her mother, and then feels herself fading again, and then black discs like Paul Bunyan’s buttons cascade around them, all Mommy’s records, Rachmaninoff and Copland and Doris Day …

  QUE SERA SERA! Mommy sings, her voice loud, even louder than Doris Day. WHATEVER WILL BE, WILL BE!

  and shoes, too, and a hairbrush and a pair of dice and Mommy’s sewing machine, wheelchair, typewriter, her bike …

  That’s it! Hope cries, and snags herself, rendered like the poor chickens but still full of will because of that cellular link, that filament of spirit.

  HOLD, HOLD, HOLD! she cries, and when Bonnie lands in the tree, it is not the bicycle seat that saves her from being cleaved in two; it is that tough thin membrane of Hope’s last gift to her: a mother’s protective cushion, an umbilicus of spirit.

  Hope’s body, useless now, punches a hole in the vortex, escapes, flies on.

  The dead fathers—always in readiness for times such as these, arising with the swift efficiency of minutemen militia—interrupt their labors, gathering en mass to catch Hope in their arms and gentle her passage when she finally comes back to earth. Only the dead fathers know where she lands.

  Back in the tree, Hope’s spirit lingers and waits with Bonnie, until the storm abates, until her absence is noticed, until they all go looking.

  And at dusk, when she sees Mr. Armin Koester shuffling along Bridge Street with his walker, the only one to come anywhere near (dear old soul, feeling so useless in this crisis, a lonely widower with his hobbling gait, his cataract-covered eyes), she calls out to him through the voices of the birds.

  Mr. Koester looks up then—even an old man who’s all but blind can see an upside-down tree. “God in heaven!” he calls. “There she is!” And knowing that his voice must be employed in song if anyone is to hear him, he begins to sing.

  They come then, all her townsfolk summoned by song, swarming toward Bonnie in the tree, damaged, but alive, and blessed. They gather together and sing her to life.

  Poor Llewellyn and Viney (oh be true to one another, Hope longs to cry as the letters she wrote to each of them come down, pulpy, dissipating shreds, settling in streams and drainage ditches and fields, mingling with the ruined pages of her diaries): They will not know that she has forgiven all, that she is grateful. Those words she labored over will never find them, or her children, but she can stay with them for a time, and with Bonnie, and listen to the voices of the good people of Emlyn Springs, and watch Bethan Ellis ride off on her white mare in search of help, and notice on the fringes of the crowd a boy she doesn’t know whose name is Morgan. He will find her piano and when he grows up he will give Bonnie that which she wants more than anything.

  It will be all right. She sees it now, because she’s dead. The dead see everything because after all it is all there.

  That strong young fireman brings Bonnie down so tenderly (he’s dead now, too) and places her in Llewellyn’s arms.

  Hope’s work is done.

  They call her name for weeks after, looking and looking until finally they stop.

  Would it comfort them to know that her body slipped easily into a narrow slit in the earth—like a penny into a piggy bank—and from thence into a secret underground cave carved out by ancient springs that still trickle along the floor?

  They will never find her, though she is near. It is a perfectly fine place to be. She needs nothing more from them: only that they move on, see differently, find her elsewhere.

  If only they knew—for it might be a comfort—that on the day they sang Flying Girl to life, they sang Aneira Hope Jones to her death.

  Chapter 30

  Afterwinds

  The one-half of town that suffered the damage (and the tornado carved an eerily precise path, clean as a scalpel’s incision) is dark in the wrong places, illuminated not as it should be with the small lights of porches or fireflies, but with the taunting flashes of heat lightning in retreat, the flashing red lights of ambulances and police cars and fire trucks as they start to arrive.

  This is not their town.

  Cell phones come out. Calls are made; some go unanswered. Who is missing, who is here? Who is hurt?

  They set out from the Masonic Lodge, the lucky protected ones: Gaelen, Larken, Bethan, Blind Tom and Sergei, the mayor, musicians and caterers, the newly crowned Little Miss Emlyn Springs and her predecessor, the boys in their rented tuxes, the girls in their formals, kicking off foolish shoes if they’re wea
ring them, going barefoot if they must.

  Some carry flashlights, not remembering who put them in their hands, but they go in darkness if they have to because they know where to go, how to go, they could find home with their eyes closed if they had to and maybe that would be best, because their eyes must be lying, this cannot be happening, a person cannot walk up and away from music and food and laughter and into this.

  They go, wishing they could travel all ways at once, trying to make peace with having only this one slow and clumsy body that can only move in one direction, so that You and Morgan look for Bonnie, I’ll go to Viney’s is the way conversations go.

  Up and down the streets, names are called.

  Eli! Esmé! Bonnie! Viney!

  They scramble over rubble, debris—where is the street?—houses with roofs gone, or partially standing, the tornado’s mean mischievousness evident in the way some structures have been reduced to rubble while others could be featured on magazine covers, their doors flung open like astonished mouths, wondering how they’ve earned this luck, why they are still standing when across the street, only minutes ago and for a hundred years there was another door but now there is nothing but empty space.

  It’s getting dark and searching will be harder then.

  Gaelan runs to the Closs house.

  God no, Gaelan thinks. There’s a mountain of rubble, but a flight of stairs still stands, leading to what’s left of the second story. From this, and because Gaelan knows the contours of Viney’s house as if it were his own, he locates the approximate area of the steps leading downstairs.

  “Here!” he shouts to anyone able to hear and help. “Dig here!”

  With whoever else has gathered at his side, Gaelan hurls aside timbers, bricks, a sink, a door. He wrestles away a kitchen sink, furniture he’s never seen before, what’s left of Viney’s spinet, and then there they are, at the bottom of the basement steps.

  “Gaelan, honey,” Viney cries.

  A terrified Esmé, her face streaked with grime and tears, is encased in her father’s arms. “Jonafun!” she calls, pushing at him. “Da! Wake up!”