OCTOBER 17, 2011
In the early evening Deb turns on the radio and hears about landslides throughout Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Heavy rains and flooding. Eighty dead, according to the BBC. “Shit,” Deb whispers, going to her computer to look for an e-mail from Danny. She hasn’t heard from him for a month. She sends him a message. The BBC reporter says thousands of families have lost homes and crops. That the UN has classified Central America as one of the parts of the world most affected by climate change.
DEB TURNS OFF THE RADIO, GOES OUT TO GIVE HER BIRDS fresh water. She holds still in the late sunlight, the leaves on the trees around her outrageous colors—red, orange, yellow—and forces herself to breathe.
An hour later she gets a response: Mamá. Ten villagers killed. Unbearable. Coming home for X-mas to see Hazel and Vale and you. Love—your Danny.
Deb sinks into the chair on her porch. Leans her head back. Breathes deep, tears in her eyes.
He’s alive, her boy.
It feels as if they need him on this hillside right now. Not as savior but as company.
Bonnie still missing. Vale: distant, quiet, refusing to crack.
And Hazel more and more off. Was it too much, Deb wonders, the shock of Bonnie’s disappearance, for her aging mind? This morning Deb found Hazel in her nightgown in the middle of the living room, staring at a crack in the plaster wall.
“Where is Lena?” Hazel asked, turning toward Deb, her blue eyes strangely blank.
“Lena died many years ago,” Deb said, going to Hazel and touching her arm.
Hazel pulled away quickly, then went to her chair by the window and looked out at the field. Snow flurries, the first, a dusting, across the old apple trees.
“Oh. I thought for a moment she was here.”
“That happens,” Deb said. “I’ll get you some tea.”
In the kitchen things were out of place—clean dishes to the right of the sink instead of in the dish rack. A half-eaten apple in the cabinet next to the plates. The milk sitting, warmed, in the cupboard next to refrigerator. Hazel, Deb thought, heart sinking, reaching for the apple and putting it into the compost bucket near the door, pouring the sour milk down the drain.
When she returned to the living room her mother-in-law was asleep, head tipped back on the blue armchair.
Deb spent the rest of the day cleaning houses in town—a doctor’s renovated farmhouse, the apartment of a divorced lawyer. She doesn’t mind the work—she takes strange comfort in the gratification of a scrubbed floor and glistening countertops. What a shock it would be if the people she cleans for saw her own home, Deb thinks—its spider webs and rough pine walls that never get clean. The organism her home is, separated from the woods around it by a thin scrim only, and how she loves it that way. She considers it a strange instinct so many people have—the tireless struggle to keep nature’s chaos at bay.
From the porch where Deb sits now, the relief of Danny’s well-being settled into her chest, she sees a light flick on in Vale’s camper. A Thoreau line rings in her head (how often they appear there): The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Of course. Be her friend.
“I BROUGHT US WINE,” DEB SAYS, HOLDING THE BOTTLE out, when Vale opens the camper door.
Vale smiles. “Nice. Thank you. Come in.” The place is tiny, sparse, clean. Smells like coffee, and alcohol, and mildew, but there Vale is, reaching for two glasses, pulling over a chair.
She looks better than she has of late. Not quite so starved. Some color in her cheeks.
“I’m sorry I don’t come more often,” Deb says, lifting her glass to Vale’s. “It’s easy to grow solitary.”
Vale shrugs. “I know. You want to take these outside?”
They take their glasses out to the field where they can hear the creek and watch the moon rise. It’s unusually warm for this late in October. Freak dry spells, warm spells, cold spells: erratic, unpredictable, Deb thinks. Still, cool enough for a fire. Vale has made a simple fire pit out of a circle of river stones. She gathers sticks from the woods, crumples newspaper, lights a match. They sit in the damp grass, watching the flames swell, warming their hands. Deb tells Vale about Hazel’s spottiness. About finding her in her nightgown in the middle of the room in the middle of the day, staring at a crack in the wall. About the apple on her shelf and the sour milk in the cupboard. “What do you suppose is going on?”
Vale shrugs. Takes a sip of her wine, stares into the fire. “Haunted by ghosts?”
Deb laughs. “Yes. Me, too. I suffer from the same disease. To our haunted hillside,” Deb says, reaching her glass toward Vale’s. Soft clink. Sparks from the fire.
“You know what I’ve been thinking these days?” Deb says, tipping her head back. “How hard it is to learn how to love within the span of one lifetime.” She’s thinking of Stephen and Hazel. Her own mother. Bonnie. Reverberations in creek water. “How easy to pass along our flaws—our anger, sorrow, reserve, withholding.”
Vale nods, takes a sip of her drink.
“We deny them, so fiercely, our ancestors,” Deb says. “But really they’re written deep in our bones. Do you know about epigenetics? New research that says we carry the trauma—grief—joys—of past generations in our DNA.” She tells Vale about her grandmother, Zina, growing up on the farm outside of Vitebsk. How she is the reason Deb is here—the reason she came north on that highway thirty-five years ago.
“I didn’t know any of that.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about everyone’s story, isn’t there?” Deb says, brushing a spark off her sweater. She thinks of Bonnie and Bonnie’s motherlessness, that trauma without stories to accompany it, to make sense of it, to take that poison and turn it into medicine, as only stories can do. Create maps of the past, which become maps for the future.
“And Bonnie had—has—her epigenetic trauma, too,” Deb says quietly.
“Yes,” Vale says, rising and throwing another stick on the fire. Raking the coals inward with her boot. “Hey, Deb.”
“Yeah?”
Vale stares into the fire and tells Deb about the photo of Marie tacked to her wall. Of what she has learned about the eugenics movement—the second wave of the destruction of a people and culture. The destruction of a way of living and knowing.
Deb hasn’t ever heard about the eugenics movement in Vermont. The complexity of place, she thinks: how long it can take to peel back the layers.
“My mother always said we were Native American,” Vale says. “I thought she was an appropriating asshole.” Vale laughs, staring into the fire.
“That is a powerful thing to know. Or half know,” Deb says. She closes her eyes and pictures Lena in her cabin. Pictures Stephen in his. If it’s true, it makes sense, epigenetically. This calling back to the land. Being drawn to woods, creeks, swamps.
“You cold?” Vale asks, passing Deb a scarf, and Deb nods, grateful, and wraps it around her shoulders. She leans back in the wet grass and watches sparks rise into the dark sky. Marie possibly Abenaki. Did Stephen know? She turns again to look at Vale. She’s gorgeous, this girl, lit by firelight, Deb thinks. As all girls are. If only they knew just how so.