AUGUST 29, 2011
Alabama. Tennessee. Virginia.
Factories. Strip mines. Blue mountains.
Billboards for Smoky Mountain Motor Lodge, billboards for Dollywood. “Damn, I could use me some tits like those!” Bonnie cooing from the couch as they watched Dolly sing on the Grand Ole Opry. “Beauteous fake babies. Not like your mama’s little knockers.” Laughing and kissing Vale’s head, sipping her Chardonnay. Vale is seven. She curls up on her mother’s lap—her favorite place to be: lavender and salt, always warm. “You and me, baby,” Bonnie whispers, reaching for Vale’s feet, pulling them onto her lap, brushing her fingers across them slowly.
Flicker of bus lights. Pounding wheels.
Deb called earlier to say the police and National Guard are still searching but have found nothing. Her broken-up voice, spotty reception.
“My mother is not dead,” Vale whispers.
Deb might sound doubtful, but eight years or no, Vale still feels her mother’s particulate matter in this world. Somewhere: a wet field. A cold barn. An empty house, window cracked open, next to a roaring fire.
Vale closes her eyes.
A story Bonnie used to tell, quoting Vale at four: Mama, you know how we get love?
How?
When you’re in the mama’s belly you hear the heart. And that makes your own heart. And then when you come out you have that love. The mama is a love factory.
Bonnie laughing, grinning, reaching for Vale, “The mama is the love factory!”
Bonnie, Vale writes in neon script across the dark sky of her mind, as the bus crosses the border into Vermont.
She’s shocked by the destruction: a garage collapsed, a pine uprooted, a black sedan wedged into the low branches of a large oak tree. Vale eyes it all slowly, looking for familiar limbs—five feet tall, dark hair, walking or sitting.
Vale checks the local headlines on her phone: 2,400 roads, 300 bridges, and 800 homes destroyed or damaged in the state. Some 117,000 people without power. Two dead. One missing.
One missing, Vale thinks, turning back toward the window, eyeing the streets of this town she left eight years ago swearing she’d never return: my own.
THE MAN AT THE BUS STATION IN NELSON LAUGHS WHEN VALE tells him where she’s trying to get: ten miles out of town, uphill.
He has one blue eye and one brown. Points, with eyebrows raised, toward Vale’s boots: thin soles, cracked leather.
Vale shrugs, throws her backpack over her shoulder, walks to the edge of the road, and sticks her thumb out.
Tomorrow she’ll go to her mother’s apartment, that place above the river where Dean will no doubt be, heating a nugget of smack on the stove, that sickly sweet, damp vinegar smell. Tomorrow she’ll go to the bridge where Bonnie was last seen.
Right now Vale needs food and a bed to sleep in. She needs to get uphill to Hazel’s old farmhouse, that place where Bonnie grew up. That house—cold white rooms, white pine painted clean again and again—where Vale’s ancestors have lived for two hundred years. Joyless in old photographs, their mouths thin lines. “How many years can you go without joy before the whole shit show crumbles?” Bonnie saying years ago, pinching Vale’s side, laughing.
SHE CATCHES A RIDE WITH AN ELDERLY MAN IN A RED pickup truck.
“You walking? Those roads are destroyed. No way in or out. I can only get halfway.”
Vale nods. “Halfway is good.” She looks at her phone. There’s a message from her boss at the bar, Freddie, to whom she told nothing. WHERE YOU AT, SUGAR CAKES?
“Crazy storm,” the man says. “A woman is missing. You hear that? They still haven’t found her.”
Vale says nothing, slips her hands under her thighs and holds them still there.
They pass the fire station, rain-wrecked cornfields where Vale used to lie down between the tall stalks and get stoned, the 7-Eleven where she’s stolen cigarettes, candy, bottles of wine. She was sixteen; she would stick them down the front of her shirt and flash a grin. Every piece of the landscape contains a memory; they attack her chest, claw there. Vale opens the neck of her sweater, seeking air.
They don’t pass the ruins of that green bridge or the apartment where Bonnie lives above the river, but Vale keeps her eyes peeled.
The last time Vale saw her mother was in that apartment. Plum-colored bruises up and down her arms. One hundred pounds, barely. Vale told Bonnie she was leaving and not coming back. She had a social worker then who said: Your mother’s life is not your own. Bonnie walked her to the door, handed her a plastic bag. Inside were two oranges and some photographs. She gripped Vale’s arm too long; when Vale finally pulled away, some strands of Bonnie’s hair came out in her hands.
The pickup passes a mustard-colored trailer tipped on its side fifty feet from the creek. There’s a pink curtain blowing through a broken window, a woman’s bra hanging from a tree branch.
Vale does a double take. Not Bonnie’s.
In New Orleans Vale tends bar three nights a week and works as a stripper the other two. Similar acts, in some ways: costume, makeup, performance, verve. Her drink specialties contain hints of sage, lavender, rose. Her dancing: strut, swing, coyness, refrain. She’s never told Bonnie about the strip club. About the way she can make four hundred dollars in a night.
Nor does Vale tell her friends in New Orleans about Bonnie. About needles or hardened veins or the love factory. Not Shante, not Freddie, not Jack. Not anyone at the club where Vale spins and dances, shakes her hips, reveals the dark orbs of her nipples one at a time.
Vale raps her knuckles on the glass window and points to the liquor store. “Here is fine,” she says.
The man pulls the truck over. Eyes her. “You sure?”
“Yes,” Vale says, hopping out.
Vale buys pretzels, instant coffee, gin, and wine, stuffs them into her backpack, and starts walking.
THE BACK ROADS ARE A MESS—DOWNED TREES, TWENTY-FOOT-WIDE gullies where culverts once lay—but by foot, passable. The creek bank that runs alongside her is lined with detritus—boulders, barrels, plastic toys, a washing machine: the things parked behind trailers and barns, all washed downstream. Vale sees a kid’s high chair crumpled against a ledge. A fur coat, snagged on a branch of a still-standing pine tree, six feet up in the air.
The higher in elevation she gets, the less damage there is, though the culverts are still washed out. Her legs ache. Her throat is parched. She stuffs pretzels into her mouth, keeps walking.
It’s late afternoon by the time she reaches the roadside spring. Clear water trickling out of a copper pipe by the side of the road three seasons of the year. The brass plaque says HEART SPRING, the name of Vale’s family mountain, the place Ezekial Wood and his wife, Zipporah, settled in 1803, when it was nothing but wild forest inhabited by Abenaki and bears and moose and mountain lions. Heart Spring, they named the mountain and this spring, ever running. How deeply unfitting, Vale thinks, bringing her lips to the copper pipe. But the water is clear and mineral rich and deliciously cold. She splashes it on her face and neck, wipes a wet hand across her chest.
Bonnie used to bring her here once a week to fill plastic jugs. “Clean water,” Bonnie would say, tipping her head back, putting her lips against that copper, laughing, drinking. “Love me the taste of some hillside spring water! Don’t give me any of that chlorinated town water, honey-cakes.”
Bonnie hated the hillside where she was born and grew up, but she was drawn to it, too. Deep trees, clean water, the trickling pools of Silver Creek. Vale bends to the water and fills her mouth, again and again.
For as long as she can remember, Bonnie cut the horoscopes out of the newspaper and taped them to the bathroom walls: The magic is yours, Gemini! You will be loved. Today is the start of something astonishing and new. Little flakes of white paper scattered, eventually, across the black pine floor, spewing good fortunes.
Vale wipes her mouth, turns, and continues walking, blisters crackling on her heels.
By the time she arrives at the bridge to Hazel’s house the shadows are long. It’s been forty-six hours since she’s slept; her legs ache, her shoulders ache, her eyes burn as she turns to face the view.
This high up you can hardly tell there’s been a storm at all. Hazel’s house at the top of the hill: a blaze of tin, traces of white paint lit by late-afternoon sun, ghost-gray clapboards fading into hillside. Behind the house stand the old chicken coop, the empty barn, empty storage sheds. All squares and rectangles, damp earth and shivering pines. Vale closes her eyes and thinks of New Orleans’s heat: of her sometimes-boyfriend, Jack, in his tree house overlooking the city, of the Gypsy fortune-tellers with their dark voodoo, of Shante with her ukulele, of the room in the ramshackle house (once hotel, once whorehouse) where Vale sleeps, camellias outside the open window.
“I don’t want to be here,” Vale says out loud.
Uphill of the farmhouse Vale can just barely make out the wooden walls of the cabin where Deb lives. Bonnie: “Beware of hippies, my love,” smiling and bringing a cigarette to her chapped lips. “They are slippery!” Turning David Bowie up on the stereo, closing her eyes and starting to dance, bare feet on cold linoleum.
Vale doesn’t want to go to Deb’s cabin, or to Hazel’s house. She doesn’t want to face their cold pity. She turns to her right and there is the teal-blue tow-along camper down by the creek where she lived for a summer when she was sixteen, butted up against the trees at the edge of the field.
She can’t believe it survived the storm, that it’s still here, creek-side. A miniature, pale-blue tin miracle.
The door pops open with a hard tug, and a pool of brown water runs out onto the ground in front of her feet.
The smell nearly makes her gag: mildew and mouse and creek water—but she’s slept in worse places before. The camper hasn’t changed much in ten years: a two-burner stove, a table, a bed in the corner. Water-stained yellow paper glued to the walls. Vale pulls open a kitchen drawer and finds mouse shit, a pipe, sugar packets, mildewed condoms. Detritus left over from when she was sixteen. On top of the shelves sit her collection of owls from that summer she lived here, ones she found at thrift stores. Plastic talismans. Purposeless idols.
She remembers Hazel once telling her back then, in a moment that surprised her: My mother always said owl sightings mean the death of something old and the start of something new.
Hazel had never said anything like that to her before.
“Hello, owls,” Vale whispers, pulling the bottle of gin out of her bag and unscrewing the top. She goes to the front step, takes off her boots and rubs her aching feet. Two blisters—bleeding—which she brings to the air.
The gin is cheap, but she feels it settle into every inch of her bones. She takes another sip. And another. Is grateful for its burn. She is just here for a day or two. Until she finds Bonnie.
Vale reaches for her backpack and pulls out a thick black journal, slips a photograph out from between its pages. It’s one Bonnie gave her before she left: a photo of Bonnie and Vale at the river. Full summer, July or August, Bonnie standing waist-high in the water, strands of dark hair blowing across her eyes, her arm across Vale’s shoulders, her lips planted on Vale’s seven-year-old plump cheek.
“Baby, come in the water with me!” Bonnie said, stripping, jumping, hooting, laughing.
Her love: intoxicating. They lived at the outskirts of town then, a room above the laundromat, and would sneak down the riverbank at night to cool down. Water, baby. Night swimming. Vale has never known who her father is. You don’t need a dad, honey-cakes. You’ve got me. Me! All yours. Laughing and reaching toward Vale. Putting her lips against Vale’s ear and singing the chorus of R.E.M.’s “Night Swimming.”
“Where are you,” Vale whispers. The night is so quiet: just the sound of the creek and the shuffle of pine needles across the camper’s pocked tin.