DECEMBER 13, 2011
Vale is outside Hazel’s door in a damp rain, midafternoon. “Did you know about Lena and Lex?” she says when Deb opens the door. “I don’t know why I’m shaking. I don’t know why I’m so cold.”
“Come in, honey,” Deb says, closing the door, bringing Vale a blanket.
She brings her niece a cup of coffee, sweetened with cream, and Vale tells her about the drawings on the wall. LW + LS. Those green eyes. The birth of a baby who never knew who her father was. Whose mother died before she could be told.
“Jesus,” Deb whispers, sitting down. “Who else knows? Hazel?” They both turn to look at her, sleeping in the living room.
Vale shrugs. Sips her coffee and closes her eyes.
“The secrets of a hillside. The goddamn damage silence can do,” Deb says, putting her arms around Vale.
She thinks of Bonnie, whom they cannot find to tell.
She wants to ask Hazel, to find out if she knows, but she can’t risk the possibility of breaking the news on her deathbed.
And then Vale rises, dumps the rest of her coffee down the sink, says she has to go, and heads out the door, and it is just Deb and Hazel again. This quiet old shell of a house. Lex and Lena’s ghosts filling the air.
HAZEL MAKES A SOUND FROM THE LIVING ROOM, AND Deb goes that way.
She’s been growing steadily worse. Is only managing to swallow broth and juice and water when they bring a cup to her with a straw, say, “Drink. You must.”
Her eyes are open now. Deb brings a cup of apple juice to her lips. Holds the straw still while Hazel sips. Her eyes glaze over again. She closes them. Turns away.
Deb goes to the couch. She is exhausted. She misses her solitude. Misses her cabin—she’s been spending nights here on the living room couch. She checks her phone and finds there’s an e-mail from Danny in Guatemala: See you in five days, he writes. She stares at the screen for far too long. Can barely breathe.
Five days. Can she stand it? Danny—Stephen’s limbs, Deb’s cheekbones, Stephen’s green eyes. The one she loves more than anything in this world and the one she has not been able to make happy despite it. That is the curse of motherhood, she thinks: they make us happy and yet we cannot make them happy. And so we suffer, doubly so. She laughs out loud. Had she done it wrong? Her quiet rage, her expectations. But enough of that. She is long done with guilt. Those thoughts are thirty years old now, and she is done having them—scraps in the wind she tosses.
IN THE EARLY EVENING A VISITING NURSE COMES TO RELIEVE Deb for a couple hours. She walks back to her cabin and throws logs onto the fire, turns on the light next to the kitchen sink. Lex and Lena. How long? How often? She thinks of Stephen as a boy, and what he knew, or didn’t know.
She goes up the loft stairs, the ones she so rarely climbs, and puts clean sheets onto Danny’s bed. Smooths down the wool blanket. The distance of all of their woods and fields and cities closing—Danny, Hazel, Deb, Vale. How tragic that it takes catastrophes, she thinks—storms and deaths and missing bodies—to do so.
“My birds, coming home to roost,” Hazel had said a few days ago, looking at Vale and Deb by the bed beside her, a glint of recognition in her eyes.
The hole-in-the-heart pattern repeating. The patterns always repeating. And yet Vale—Deb feels spikes of hope there. Vale unraveling these truths from the past, unspooling a revisionist history in which love existed, too. What does that mean for this hillside and this family and the future? she wonders. She thinks of Vale’s bright, fierce, solitary beauty. That poppy tattoo, petals strewing. Those owl wings in flight on her left shoulder.
Deb goes to the canvas—Ginny’s painting—hung from two nails on the wall. A rust-red field, wine-colored trees.
The canvas is almost the height of Deb—ridiculously large. “Really, you want something this grand in your living room?” Ginny had asked, grinning, carrying it to Deb’s truck a week ago. “Yes,” Deb said.
It still smells of Ginny’s turpentine. Deb scans her fingers across the thin lines, the scraped-away thicker chunks of paint. She loves this painting. Vermilion, burnt sienna, umber. A fine line of bright white in the center. Startling if you look at it for long enough. She needs this painting somehow. A writer friend of hers once said that you have to find the story that only you know how to tell.
This is the story Ginny knows how to tell: this painting.
And what is Deb’s story to tell? Deb can’t keep apocalyptic visions out of her head—images of what will happen when New York becomes submerged: bunkers, food scarcity, the hoarding of weapons.
But she turns that part of her mind off. Returns to the visions she chooses to let nest instead: community, resilience, coming together in small circles. Palliative care—maybe that is her thing. In the concrete and the abstract: wood stove, candlelight, straws in water, catheter bags, music, stew. Guiding one another through the dark times.
Deb goes to the record player and puts on Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues. Bird would tuck a plastic gardenia behind her ear, shimmy across the kitchen floor, the quote from Frantz Fanon she wrote across the wall: “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.”
Billie sings “I Must Have That Man,” and Deb closes her eyes. Wool socks on pine floor. A smile across her lips. Deb has faith that they will find their way back toward one another, the women of this mountain. Vale and Vale’s daughters. Danny’s daughters. Find some place—here or elsewhere—to call their own.
When the song ends Deb closes the damper on the stove, slips her coat over her shoulders, and heads back down the hill to relieve the nurse of the bedside burden of a woman dying. That is another asset of middle age, Deb thinks, pulling her scarf around her neck—a bitter wind picking up, tall grass tangling around her boots and knees and thighs—the willingness to care for others. The ego’s willingness to surrender time—much of it—for the sake of another. Even the ones who never loved you, Deb thinks, walking toward that farmhouse with its woodsmoke, its company, its single lightbulb hanging from the front porch ceiling.