NOVEMBER 10, 2011
The trees go bare. The earth grays.
Vale drives to all the places her mother loved—Indian Love Call, the fireworks warehouses in New Hampshire, the ruins of a burnt mansion on the backside of Mount Wantastiquet across the river. Wantastiquet—an Abenaki word, Vale realizes for the first time. She thinks about a news story she heard on the radio a few days ago: an uprising of Bolivian indigenous peoples that led to a 375-mile march demanding compensation for the effects of global warming. It’s all connected, Vale thinks, listening to the description of an eight-year-old girl walking with her mother to La Paz, a city neither of them had ever seen before. The tides are rising. All of them.
The burnt mansion is named Madame Sherri’s after the eccentric New Yorker who built it in the twenties. Her story has echoed around these parts for years: a convertible, lovers, boas, gay strippers. Legendarily subversive for this town. The mansion burnt to the ground in the thirties, but the ruins are still there, home to generations of high school parties: the stone arches of the windows, some burnt piers, and a grand staircase, also made of stone, curving and reaching thirty feet up toward the sky.
Vale looks around: broken glass, trash, the rocks peppered with graffiti. TZ + NB. GUNS RULE. SCREW YOU CAPITALISM. Below the latter, in thick black ink: Find me.
A thin cold rain starts to fall. Vale closes her eyes and pictures Bonnie here, writing those words with her black Sharpie: Find me.
She is so tired of these clues that go nowhere. By the Bonnie who never appears, despite them all.
Vale goes to the staircase and starts to climb. It’s a stupid thing to do, reckless—the rocks loose beneath her feet, slick now in the rain that is falling and freezing to the stones. Black ice. She’s amazed they haven’t gated this place off or torn it down. How many beloved teenage haunts actually survive?
But Vale makes it to the top, a spit of stone barely wide enough for her two feet. She stands upright, looks around. The clearing is surrounded by trees, boulders, the faint reflection of a pond in the distance. The rain falls harder on Vale’s face and limbs. Find me, she thinks, taking off her hat and throwing it to the ground. She takes off her sweater. Lets it fall. Takes off her shirt, flings it over her head. Raises her arms, slowly, into the cold rain. All those eyes that watched her do this at the club, gazes unflinching, did any one of them see her? Vale reaches behind her back, unclasps her bra, pulls it off, lets it drop to the ground below. She closes her eyes. Her nipples raw in that cold air. Her old tricks, with no one to see. A line she read in No Word for Time yesterday: “In this world we are largely defined by the sum total of our relationships, to nature and to each other.” Vale hears Jake brakes on the highway. The shiver of wind in pines. The sum total of our relationships. Vale closes her eyes. Calls out, “Find me!” Guttural. Loud. She has spent her entire adult life learning how to be alone.
Vale lifts her leg, spinning once: a slow-motion pirouette on a funeral pyre.
SHE DRIVES TO NEKO’S. “FIND ME,” SHE SAYS, GOING TO HIM.
Neko takes off her wet coat. Wet sweater. Wet hat. Leads her to the bed. Unties her boots. Brings her a towel. She’s shaking, every inch of her stiff with cold. Neko pulls off her wet pants, covers her with warm blankets. He brings her tea in a fluorescent green mug, lies down beside her. Vale tells him about Lena’s cabin. About the marriage license, that barely legible word: Indian. She tells him about Madame Sherri’s, the words written on that rock. “You’ll tell me if you ever see anyone like that again, yes?” she says, her teeth still chattering. “You’ll go to her, and talk to her, and tell her I’m here, yes?”
“Of course,” Neko says, putting his warm hands on her cold chest.
“But you haven’t?” Vale asks. Her body warming. The chills subsiding.
“No,” Neko says, kissing her left rib. Kissing under her arm. Looking into Vale’s eyes. “But I’m always looking. I swear.”
Vale nods. Takes off his clothes. Pulls him inside her. She doesn’t want to wait. That streak of heat that runs from her head to her toes. Reverberates everywhere.