One Christmas Bob gave me a small ceramic wall sculpture, the work of a Gold Hill neighbor. About a foot tall, it depicted a section of tree trunk from which a woman’s face was emerging. Her eyes were shut, her lips parted as if she had been desperate for air and had finally found it. The entire thing was a steady medium blue tinged with gray. He told me it was called Breathe.
I hung it in our bedroom in the cabin. Two days after Bob died, after I had packed everything I had brought north for the year, I walked around the place, seizing anything I thought I might want or need. I made myself alert; I had to be thorough; I would not be returning here. I took the sculpture from the wall, wrapped it in newspaper, and laid it carefully at the top of a box of items I was taking away.
After I had been home a while and found the energy to unpack everything, I noticed the sculpture was missing. Damn, I thought, a box must have been left behind. Or maybe the sculpture was removed from the box by other hands, though that seemed very unlikely, and someone would have called by now. Now what? How could I retrieve it from a place I could barely think about? But I had to have it—breathing was not easy.
The cabin was on the market for two years before I got an offer, which I seized. I sold it at a stomach-turning loss at the height of the national recession, more like a depression in Michigan. The buyers wanted anything in the cabin that I was willing to leave—a huge relief, as I wouldn’t have to sell things, which would have required me to be there longer than a day. Bob’s son and his partner and I headed up one Saturday to clean the place and take what we wanted. Priority 1 for me was finding Breathe.
In the course of that long, grim day, I searched the cabin—every cupboard, drawer, closet, and box. The sculpture was nowhere.
But it has to be here.
I repeated the entire procedure, to no avail. It was getting late, Mike and Kris had already left, and I was exhausted in every part. I had worked nonstop, laser-focused, holding myself tight, and I needed to get out. Finally I gave up and left, locking the door behind me. Just as I began to pull away from the cabin, I spotted the wood-burned sign swinging over the front porch, the one I’d had made for Bob for our first Christmas here, when we felt so nervous about buying the place that we pledged to give each other only cabin-related items. The sign bore both our names, the cabin address, and a leaping trout. I couldn’t bear to leave it. Feeling sick, I got out, unhooked it, and tossed it into the back of the car. Allowing one thick wave of pain to surge over me and exit in a sob, I drove away. Later I would burn the sign in my fireplace.
Okay, then, the sculpture has to be at home. Has to be, I thought. I clearly remembered packing Breathe, and I remembered putting the box in my car, with the sculpture buffered carefully on top. The next day I searched my small house again, everywhere. I called Linda, the sister-in-law who had harbored me in the days immediately following Bob’s death, on the off chance I’d left a box at her house. No, she said, nothing.
I never found it.
It might seem easy for such a thing to vanish in the confusion following a disaster, with me in shock and family members and neighbors moving around the small space of the cabin, coming and going, moving and carrying and cleaning. But that process, though hurried, was not chaotic; in fact, it was remarkably orderly, even my part of it. The coil of my brain that can organize and execute like a bitch took over. I knew I would come back only once, to get the cabin ready to sell. Beyond that I never wanted to see the place again. So I was methodical about selecting things to take home. I carefully packed up the index cards and legal pads and books I was using for the book I was writing, with the cards grouped, rubber-banded by chapter and topic, and in order. I packed all my clothes except some socks I decided to abandon. I went through the kitchen cupboards and drawers and pulled whatever had meaning or might be useful at home. I took a lamp. I went through towels and linens. I surveyed the walls and took down everything I wanted, and that included Breathe. It was agonizing to lift it from its hook in the bedroom wall, but I knew it had to be with me.
Except it wasn’t.
I am not given to supernatural explanations, but when I think through this mystery, I always arrive at one conclusion, almost by default: the one who gave Breathe to me took it back.
The problem is that I can’t imagine why. I know he would want me to keep breathing, not to stop. In fact, when I was overwrought about something, he would say, simply, “Deep breathing . . .” When I realized the sculpture was gone, what it meant to me was that my breath was gone too—seized, as it were, by the river, as his was. Why would he inflict such a message?
Now the sculpture hangs in my mind, a constant, potent absence. I see it clearly: the rippling bark of the blue tree, the woman’s emergent blue face, lips soft and open to the air. I feel her relief, muscles relaxing as oxygen floods them. I ponder her relation to the tree: did it entrap her, and is she now breaking free of it? Is she “of” the tree, the breathing spirit of it? Or have I read it all wrong: is she not coming out of the tree but sinking into it? Is she Daphne, the river god’s daughter, turned by him into a tree so that she could escape the rapist Apollo? In the years since the sculpture vanished, the place it holds in my imagination has drawn other sorts of questions: Are you breaking free? Are you a growing thing? What are you running from? If breath is spirit, are you releasing yours? Are you holding it in? What are you turning into, daughter of the strong brown god?
Absence holds a power over presence. What is lost is insistent; it pulls at our attention more than the thing we hold securely (or so we think) in our hands. Even words themselves only name what isn’t here, something we are chasing that has fled, so that writing, as Margaret Atwood has it, amounts to “negotiating with the dead.” I keep missing the face in the tree, so I keep studying it in my memory. It is a kind of sphinx, refusing to give up its secrets. In a voice that is sometimes like his, absence whispers its name: “Breathe.” And so that is what I do.