SEPTEMBER 19, 2011
A voice upstairs, calling. Bonnie? She goes that way. To the room at the top of the stairs, under the eaves, the room where her mother, Jessie, lay dying, and where, later, Bonnie slept.
She pushes the door open: drawn faded yellow curtains, a wool blanket the color of cream pulled tight across the bed. Hazel sits down on that blanket. She cleared out all of Bonnie’s things—threw them into plastic bags and took them to the dump—years ago. Hazel smooths down the creases below her. She looks around. Smell of dust and mothballs. Smell of old lath and plaster. Didn’t she hear a voice calling?
What was it Vale asked her yesterday afternoon?
“Hazel. What do you know about this photo?” she had said, coming down the stairs.
Hazel was at the kitchen sink, staring out the window. She turned and looked at Vale for a long moment. She was wearing a green fedora, a turkey feather tucked into its brim. “Lena,” Hazel said.
“What? No. I’m Vale. I’m Vale, wearing Lena’s hat. I found it in the attic. See? Me. Vale,” taking the hat off.
“Oh,” Hazel said, blinking.
And then Vale showed Hazel the photo. This house with fresh white paint, the family in dark suits, pale wool and cotton, standing before it.
“Oh yes,” Hazel said, a streak of warmth through her chest. “Look at that. Our people.”
“And this? Who’s this?”
“That’s my grandmother. Marie. She died when I was eleven or twelve.”
“Was she Abenaki?”
“What?” Hazel’s eyes flicked upward at Vale. “Of course not. We’re not Indian.”
“Okay. I see.”
And then Vale had left, taking the photo with her, and Hazel had returned her eyes to the field and its sunstruck view. Gypsy-nigger, her father called Buck, the man who lived back in the woods.
Hazel hasn’t thought of him in years.
“Mother?” Hazel says quietly, turning back toward the bed. “Are you here?”
But of course there is no one.
The house used to be so quiet without electricity. Lena in the corner with her barn kittens. Lena: eight years younger than Hazel. Deathly shy. She wouldn’t speak at school. Wouldn’t speak to strangers. Made a fuss every time their mother, or later, Hazel, tried to brush her hair or scrub the dirt behind her ears. She refused to wear dresses, wanted to go naked, or wear blue jeans. It was animals she loved: barn cats in boxes in the kitchen. A pet baby squirrel, tucked into the front of her shirt. Once, after their mother died, Hazel found Lena in the cellar. She had cracked open every last jar of canned peaches. Those peaches: their mother’s light—sweet and perfect—put up in jars, the top on every single one opened.
A quick slap across her face. Hazel had loved their mother, too. Had wanted to never touch those jars of summer, preserved.
Lena was nine when their mother died. Hazel was seventeen. Lena refused, after that, to go to school. Lena taking off into the woods. Truancy officers. A threat of her being taken away, and Hazel saying, with all her might: “No.”
“Don’t you think, Mother,” Hazel says out loud, toward the bed, where her mother lies sleeping, face serene and beautiful, “that we should fill the hot water bottles?”
Her mother nods.
She did her best, didn’t she? Their mother, for that year of darkness, breathing quietly in this room. These same yellow curtains. Lena would bring her jars of wildflowers, line them up on the bedside table, bright and faded and rotting in jars—Joe-Pye weed, buttercup, black-eyed Susan. Her father below: too quiet. Quiet footprints on soft pine.
Stop this. Hazel closes her eyes.
Hazel turns back to her mother, but she is not there. Empty sheets. The blanket pulled taut.
The taste of metal in the back of Hazel’s mouth.
What is wrong with her? Hazel brought her mother soups as she was dying. Cups of tea. Cups of water. Breeze through the open window. Of course her mother is not here. Ninety years old and her mind is parchment, filament. Hazel lurches up from the bed and goes to the window. She looks out at the backside of the field and at the woods, sloping upward behind it.
“No, we are not Indian,” Hazel says out loud. “Right, Mother?” Her mother’s face moon-colored. Glowing from within. Hazel goes to her and kisses her brow. Her mother puts her hand on Hazel’s shaking shoulder. Holds it there.