SEPTEMBER 1, 2011
This girl walking up the driveway. Which one is she?
It seems a trick of her mind, this girl in gray, rising out of the mist. Something the storm dragged in. Hazel steps closer to the window and looks out. Disheveled dark hair, a red dress, tall boots, dark eyes. It all seems a trick of her mind these days. What is happening to it—her mind? The past slipping in and out. All that rain. The torn-up roads. And Bonnie missing.
“A bridge,” Deb said, knocking on her door in the early morning several days ago. “High water.” Tears in her oblique eyes. No word since then and the power still out, like it used to be when Hazel was a girl here, eighty-some years ago. How quiet the house is without electricity. How long the nights.
And now the knock on her front door, sturdy and real.
Hazel goes to the door and opens it.
The girl is standing there, dark hair in a braid down her right shoulder, dark makeup around dark eyes.
“Hello, Aunt Hazel,” she says, a thick gray sweater wrapped tight around her waist. “It’s Vale.”
Hazel’s mind spins. Fishes for that name. Oh! Vale. Bonnie’s daughter. It’s been so long. How long?
“Vale. Hello. Come in,” Hazel says, opening the door wide. The girl looks like a drowned cat. Like a ghost. Is she? Hazel wonders for a moment too long, standing there in the open doorway.
“Thank you,” the girl says, voice cool as silver, cool as the dark rooms in the back of the barn, where someone hid, years ago. Who was it? Hazel’s mind—a leaky ship, full of holes.
Hazel goes to the table, picks up her white teacup, carries it to the sink. The girl follows her inside.
“I’m staying in the camper,” Vale says. “For a few days. Can I have something to eat? And borrow some blankets?”
Hazel looks at the girl. “Oh, yes.” Yes, blankets. Yes, food.
But what does she have to offer? Three days since the storm, and there is so very little in her cabinets.
“Of course,” Hazel says, placing the cup in the sink. “Bread? Butter?”
“That sounds good. Thank you.”
The girl eats quickly. Does not talk or look up. When she’s finished she asks if she can go upstairs for some blankets, and Hazel nods, and so the girl disappears, the clunk of boot soles on pine.
Like Bonnie, when Bonnie was young. Coming home late, climbing the stairs to that room with low-hanging eaves at the top of the stairs. Hazel pretending to sleep but not sleeping; the radio flicking on until ungodly hours of the night. Awful music—full of rage. As if the house was not made of two-hundred-year-old thin bones. Hazel had no idea what to do with this girl—her sister’s daughter—not her own.
But she did her best, didn’t she? Food on the table. A warm bed.
Vale returns, arms loaded with wool blankets. She asks if she can take one of the jugs of rainwater lined up near the door, and Hazel says, “Oh, sure,” keeping her body turned toward the sink, and then the girl slips back out the door, calling over her shoulder, “Thank you.”
Hazel calls back, “You’re welcome,” though she doesn’t think Vale hears. What Hazel doesn’t say is: Wait. Come back. Nothing is right here. Not the roads, not the creek, not the weather. Not me. I’m so sorry about your mother. They will find her. Won’t they? Also: I think I am dying. I am sure of it. In every single bone.
The others don’t know—Deb or Danny or her doctor—but Hazel knows. It’s been happening for months, these spells of confusion, these potholes in her mind. Two days ago she rounded the corner of the house, expecting to see the barn, and instead found the well shed, unused for sixty years. This morning she went out the back door to use the outhouse, stood in the wet grass, barefoot in nothing but her threadbare nightgown, but the outhouse wasn’t there. She could see it perfectly when she closed her eyes—that building she used every morning for the first thirty years of her life—a quarter moon carved into the door. The smell of it—not a bad smell—human waste, sawdust, pine shavings, moss. But it was gone. For how many years? Just a patch of overly ripe green grass.
Hazel hasn’t told Deb, who comes every morning and every evening since the storm to check on her, that she is afraid. That she can feel death like a bear lurking at the edge of her fields.
She wants to chase that bear with her broom, her scythe, her tractor. She doesn’t want to die. What will happen to this house and this land when she dies? Who will care for this mountain, as she has? Heart Spring Mountain, the place her great-great-grandfather, Ezekial Wood, and his wife, Zipporah, settled in 1803, a man who walked for three days with a horse and an ox and a wagon from Cornwall, Connecticut, until he came to a place where no one else lived, a place no one had yet claimed: a piece of land with a brook running through it and a south-sloping hill, springs scattered throughout the bedrock, little white flowers called bloodroot. How do you choose a house site? The way one has always chosen a place to live: water, white pines, land you can dig with a shovel. Higher ground, above floodplain. He chose this slope and Hazel is happy for it. She has lived every one of her ninety years here and is sure Ezekial chose the perfect spot: the spot that catches sun earliest in the morning and sits downhill of the deepest spring. In August when her neighbors’ wells run dry, spring water still trickles through the pipes into Hazel’s basement and into the roadside spring down the hill, too. Eternal water: Heart Spring he named it.
Hazel looks out the window. She looks toward the barn and cannot help but think of those dark rooms in the back of it. And who was just here? Bonnie?
No, Bonnie is missing. Heart Spring, the headwaters of Silver Creek—is where those eleven inches of rain settled, grew, began. The headwaters that became the river where Bonnie was last seen. Heart Spring Mountain. Because the heart springs eternal here, she had told herself as a girl, and as a young woman, and in middle age. But was that true?
And Bonnie—where is she now? Hazel turns and calls out toward the living room: “Bonnie?”