OCTOBER 15, 2011
Three nights a week she works late; three nights a week he meets her at the bar; three nights a week she sleeps in Neko’s bed in the room above the garage. They find each other there between the sheets: lips on nipples, lips on ankles, lips on her inner thigh.
This night, afterward, they eat dinner at his table: a loaf of bread, chunks of cheese, a bottle of wine.
He tells her that he’s been taking pictures of the wreckage here. That photographing the damage of Irene is a quieter job than documenting war, but painful all the same. “It’s the connection that stings,” he says. “These wars fought over oil. These storms caused by the burning of that same oil. I want to show the thread.”
Vale nods, sips her wine. “Can I see them? Your photos?”
Neko pulls out his camera and shows her: a white house by the river with a wrecked foundation, a Trans Am wedged ten feet up in the trees, the mustard-colored trailer Vale saw when she arrived tipped on its side, its pink curtain blowing through a broken window.
Vale takes another sip from her glass. The photos make it hard for her to breathe. The way they capture the startling stillness that follows storms seems too accurate: everything still and nothing the same.
“You’re good at what you do,” she says.
“Thank you,” Neko says. “The challenge is to not make war or destruction too beautiful. Because they can be—aesthetic masterpieces.”
He closes his eyes. Tells her that in August he pulled a girl—nine or ten years old—out of a bombed building. A yellow dress, covered in blood. That he doesn’t know if she survived.
Vale looks out the window: orange trees, gray sky. Jesus. War: how little she knows of it. Her worst apocalyptic fears of the future, she realizes, are happening in many places in the world, right now. “I’m sorry,” Vale says, laying her head on Neko’s thigh.
LATER THAT NIGHT, NEKO SLEEPING, VALE CLIMBS OUT of bed, puts Lena’s green fedora on, goes to the window and looks out. She feels the moonlight on her bare breasts, bare stomach, bare thighs.
She thinks how good Neko is at what he does. The necessity of his work. What is it she brings to the world?
Vale pictures herself dancing to Shante’s music at a warehouse party. Shante singing, voice of liquid gold, ukulele strumming and the entire room lit by the heat of bodies, alcohol, rhythm. A circle parted around Vale as she danced in the center of them all. In that moment, sweat trickling down her spine, eyes all around her, she had felt powerful. As if she was doing what she was meant to do. Just for a moment—but that moment was there—amber-colored, the heat of it embedded in her bones and in her blood.
She wants to transport Neko to that room. Say: this is what I am. What I do.
She remembers a letter Danny wrote her years ago, quoting Faulkner: “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New Orleans—those cities where she found herself but didn’t find herself. Sleeping on couches and in closets and in windowless rooms the size of her camper. She missed the stars in those windowless rooms and in those cities. Stars in the Abenaki language, according to the book she checked out of the library: alakws. She missed the creek: sibosis. She missed the woods. She missed the fields and the creek and no—she did not miss her mother. She did not miss her mother.
Vale returns to the bed, picks up Neko’s camera, lying on the floor. She turns it on and flips through more photos: the flooded contents of a downtown Indian import store—bright-colored saris and tapestries hanging from tree branches to dry. A woman standing in front of her house, a wash of gravel where her front yard used to be. An old barn Vale recognizes from town, collapsed, its timber bones scattered along the ground, its rafters and roof flipped on its side.
In the background of that photo: a street Vale recognizes, a metal shop, and standing at the edge of the photo, back to the camera, a small woman in white, orange hunting hat pulled low, dark hair pooled around her neck, a large gray jacket wrapped around her shoulders.
“Shit,” Vale whispers. A shock of adrenaline in her chest.
She shakes Neko.
He opens his eyes, rolls toward her. “What?”
“Who is this?” Vale pulls on her underwear. Reaches for her bra. “Where did you take this photo?”
Neko sits up. Rubs his eyes. Glances at the camera.
“That one? In town. Cedar Street.”
“When?”
“A week ago, maybe. Why?”
Vale reaches for her pants. She can’t see the woman’s face, but she is Bonnie-sized. Bonnie’s thin shoulders. Bonnie’s thin, dark hair.
Vale slips on her T-shirt and sweater. Her socks and boots.
“Talk to me, Vale,” Neko says quietly, rising.
“I’ll see you later,” Vale says, lacing her boots, buttoning her sweater, heading toward the door.
“I’ll give you a ride,” Neko calls from the top of the stairs, slipping into blue jeans.
“No,” Vale calls back. Walking. “Thank you.” It’s not definitely Bonnie, but it might be, Vale thinks, looking up: the sky full of stars, their fluorescent, punctured holes.
IN THE MORNING VALE WAKES EARLY. SHE DOWNS A CUP of instant coffee, puts her mother’s blue rosary in her pocket. Rosaries and that evangelical church—you never got it right, Bonnie, Vale thinks, did you? Though maybe it’s that she never once settled for a simple answer.
Vale puts Lena’s green hat on and climbs the hill to Deb’s cabin, asks if she can borrow her truck again.
“Of course,” Deb says, eyeing Vale over her cup of dark coffee.
The pickup smells like mouse and sitting water; the Mexican blanket that lies across the bucket seat is ripped in various places.
Of course she’s alive, Vale thinks, putting the truck into gear. My resilient-as-hell mother. That golden streak of laughter. Vale waking in Bonnie’s arms for thirteen years in that sunlit bed above the river: morning breath, a smile. “You sleep in, baby. I’ll make tea and coffee.”
Vale drives to Cedar Street. The barn is easy to find—its timbers still scattered in all directions. She parks the truck and steps out into the damp and cold air, pulls her jacket collar around her neck, and walks the perimeter of the barn, looking for places one might make a temporary home—a nest amid the wreckage.
“Bonnie!” she calls out, shivering.
Vale walks toward the closed-up metal shop and around back.
At the far end there’s a small section of barn, a tacked-on wing, still standing. Vale steps inside the open doorway and waits for her eyes to adjust—an earthen floor, dark pine walls, one window filled with cobwebs. The room is filled with old furniture, some rusting machinery, and in the far corner a cot, on top of which lies a pile of blankets and an old pillow. Vale takes a deep breath. Steps closer. The blankets are matted, contain the hollowed-out shape, Vale thinks, of a body sleeping.
“Bonnie?” Vale calls out again, quietly, her voice bouncing off the pine walls.
Vale bends closer, puts her face into those blankets, and breathes in: dank wool, dust, a hint of cat piss.
It doesn’t smell like the Bonnie she knows, but what would Bonnie’s smell be, after a month and a half of sleeping out of doors?
A broken windowpane has been covered with plastic; straw and T-shirts and scraps of wool are stuffed into the cracks in the walls. There’s a postcard of California tacked above the flaking green paint dresser, a waterlogged Bible in the corner, a pen beside it. Vale rips out a blank page from the back of the Bible, picks up the pen, writes:
Bonnie? I am here. –V, with her phone number scratched below.
What does hope feel like in the body? Cool air moving through. An electric charge.
VALE DRIVES SLOWLY AROUND BACKSTREETS FOR TWO hours, checks her phone every few minutes. In the early afternoon she drives to the supermarket for crackers and cheese, a bottle of red wine. She rips open the packaging there in the parking lot—breaks chunks of cheese off with her fingers. She unscrews the bottle of wine and takes a sip, looks out across the sea of mothers with their shopping carts, full to the brim, their small children tagging along after.
My mother is not gone, Vale thinks, heart rattling, taking another drink of wine. She’s in a Shaw’s parking lot drinking in broad daylight. She doesn’t care. My mother is not gone.