SEPTEMBER 8, 2011
Eleven days and no sign.
The main roads still shot. The power still out.
Deb cracks an egg into a pan, throws in some greens from the garden. It’s the same twenty-four-inch-wide white propane stove—now rusted—Stephen put in thirty-seven years ago. Thirty-seven years. The number sounds like thunder in her head, somehow. Ridiculously heavy. Thirty-seven years of knife marks peppering the chopping block. Thirty-seven years of clutter everywhere she turns. Thirty-seven years of photographs tacked to her wall: Angela Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, Woody Guthrie, Nina Simone. Books of poetry scattered everywhere, too: Paley, Harjo, Neruda. Her wild-hearted late-life lovers, who somehow make joy out of their own suffering. Thoreau is still here, too, that dog-eared paperback she carried with her everywhere from age eighteen to twenty-two: As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty. Solitude will not be solitude? Poverty not poverty?
Deb laughs out loud thinking of her young idealism. Of Thoreau’s mother doing his laundry.
Deb still has a bucket under the sink. Her electricity still comes from a two-hundred-foot cord hooked up to Hazel’s barn below—cuts in and out every time the wind blows. Her son, Danny, the one person she truly loves in the world, the one person she pines for—is living in a village in Guatemala. Ever restless. My God, she misses him.
If thirty-seven is thunder, fifty-nine is a freight train, Deb thinks, sipping her wine, bringing her eggs to the table. She turns on the radio, and there is a story about the number of natural disasters in the past two years. In January of last year: the earthquake in Haiti that killed 150,000. This March: the earthquake in Japan with its thirty-foot-high tsunami, Fukushima’s leaked radiation, and 15,000 people dead. The ongoing droughts in East Africa that have killed an estimated 30,000 children. “Waking the beast,” the reporter says.
“Shit,” Deb says, turning off the radio. Thirty thousand children. She thinks: one town, hillside, island, coastal city, country, mountain at a time. Points on the map, scattered, until the points meld into one bright flame.
THE STORM UP HERE ON THE HILL HAD BEEN SO QUIET. Deceptively so. At some point midmorning the power blinked, then went out, but no hurricane after all, Deb thought, slipping on a raincoat and boots and stepping out into the deluge.
A half mile downstream she discovered the damage—trees downed, power lines down, the roads washed out in all directions. She’s never known a storm anything like this one. All that day: helicopters flying overhead—military and emergency crews—rescuing elders, dropping emergency supplies. And then the news of Bonnie.
Deb climbing in the rain, to the top of the field to call Vale: Your mother.
Yesterday Deb looked out her kitchen window and saw Vale walking across the field looking like a twentieth-century Tess of the D’Urbervilles: raven-dark hair in a tangled fray, brown eyes, crimson dress, a tattoo of an owl on her left shoulder. You never know who the victims will be, do you, Deb had thought in that moment, her heart in her knees.
It all leads to a near-crippling anxiety, which she deflects, most days, with her garden—raspberries, apples, peaches, pears, a quarter acre of vegetables, put up in jars—and her birds, one rooster and four hens. The rest of her time she fills with part-time and poorly paid jobs: housecleaning, gardening, elder care. All of it making her too eccentric, she knows, with her wine and books, her ceaseless solitude.
Deb pours herself another glass of the cheap but good Malbec from Argentina that smells of dirt and blackberries, the kind Deb combs these hillsides for throughout July and August. She bought a case of it in case they’re stranded here for weeks. Deb is two-thirds through the bottle, her head dizzy, her thoughts soft the way she likes them.
“Fuckin’-A, Thoreau,” she says out loud, lifting her glass of wine in the air and thinking of that berry of time when she was young and idealistic, how it had felt then like the perfect fruit—her life in the country—and how such a fruit can darken, age, ferment, become unfathomably complex.
Deb closes her eyes and sees Bonnie in a hard rain, Bonnie on a bridge, thin wrists, bruised bones. Will they find her? Helpless; that’s what Deb is up here on this hillside. Helpless, she thinks, humming Stephen’s favorite Neil Young song.