OCTOBER 2, 2011
She finds a job at a small inn a few miles away. It’s a place she can walk to—through the woods and along back roads. She makes the beds, washes the dishes, sets the tables for breakfast, makes ten dollars an hour.
She needs the job. It’s been a month of driving around the roads of Nelson, re-pasting her mother’s photo to every surface she can find. Why does she stay? Her legs won’t walk her to the bus station. Her hands won’t buy herself a ticket.
Her bank account is empty. She’s lost five pounds. She forgets most mornings to brush her hair.
“Do you know my mother?” she asks strangers.
They turn away quickly, and Vale realizes, in those instants, how Bonnie felt walking these same streets: a person whose pain is to be avoided.
She reads in No Word for Time: “There is no word for time in the Micmac language, nor in most Algonquin tongues . . . time is relative and elusive in nature, just as Einstein proved, and as quantum researchers are discovering.”
No word for time. No Bonnie. No bus ticket.
And so the inn; the inn is her salvation.
THE GUESTS COME FROM ALL OVER, SAY, “THE DAMAGE around here is phenomenal.”
Vale nods at them, these couples with their coiffed hair and bright eyes, sipping coffee and reading the New York Times. She considers sitting down and telling them about the Commission for Country Life with its institutionalizing, sterilizing, and corralling; its cutting up and clearing out what was unruly, nonwhite, native, wild, until it was just these white houses, these black and white cows, these sweet-smelling white pines these visitors have come for. But she does not.
They ask her why she’s here as she pours their coffee. Vale says, “Back for a spell,” turning.
They say: “So beautiful, despite the storm,” and Vale says, “Yes,” not mentioning Oxy, owls, bridges, heroin.
AFTER WORK VALE WALKS THE LONG WAY HOME—OVER Heart Spring Mountain, past the old Emerson cellar hole, the foundation sprouting ferns amid the shards of broken glass, chimney brick, and rusted metal. She kneels for a moment in a field of hay-scented ferns. Feels the cool ground below her body, the hot sun across her face.
She and Danny came here once. A week ago she got a postcard from him in Guatemala: “You’ve always been a star, Vale. I’m so very sorry. Sending you all my love. D.”
He used to sing Leonard Cohen songs in the hayloft of the barn that summer he was seventeen and Vale was eight.
“Hear this one,” he would say, a hand-rolled, unlit cigarette between his lips (not going to catch the barn on fire), a guitar in his hands, and she would close her eyes and listen, the words rushing over her, leaping into the dust-thick air. She liked the songs, yes, but also his voice—gravel and rust—and the sounds of the ticking of sunlight on the roof and of an airplane, somewhere, overhead. “Bird on the Wire,” he sang. And “Suzanne.”
“You like that one?” he asked, turning toward her, and she said, “Yes,” and he said, “Me, too. Here’s another.”
I’m in love, she thought then, at eight. Laughing. “Sisters of Mercy.” “So Long, Marianne.”
Vale rises from the ferns and grass and leaves. Keeps walking.
At the camper she pours herself a glass of gin. Downs it quickly. She wonders where Danny is now; pictures his sunburnt and dust-caked face in Guatemala. Vale pours herself another glass and steps outside. Imagines the dark-skinned or light-skinned, young or old woman he is with there.
“Danny,” she whispers into the night. She is half-drunk. No one can hear her.
She wants to tell him about Marie, their great-great-grandmother.
A line from No Word for Time pops into her head, something she read earlier this morning: “Anywhere you stand should be sacred because the entire earth is sacred.” Vale closes her eyes. Feels the solid and teeming ground below her feet, hears the soft rush of water over creek stones ringing in her ears.