DECEMBER 18, 2011
Danny,” Vale says after dinner. “Shall we go for a walk? It’s too quiet in here.”
“Yes,” Danny says, grabbing the half-empty bottle of wine from the table. They slip into jackets and scarves, hats and mittens, and head outside, the steam of their breath lit up by the light pooling from the kitchen windows.
Danny looks up at the sky. “Jesus. The stars in winter in the Northern Hemisphere. I’d forgotten.”
“A luminous sphere of plasma,” Vale says, quoting the definition she learned in fifth grade, a line that has reverberated there ever since. “Come. I want to show you something.”
She clicks on her flashlight, starts walking up the hillside, and Danny follows. It’s dark but there’s enough moon to see by, a dusting of new snow beneath their boots.
She doesn’t want him to know where she’s taking him, that cabin where his father died—near the sickness also lies the cure.
“You believe in ghosts, Danny?” Vale asks, breathing hard from the climb, the cold air sharp in her lungs.
He pauses to look out over the farmhouse below, nestled into its valley. “Of course. You?”
“I’m beginning to. My mother’s, Lena’s.”
Danny nods and looks up at the tree branches above them.
“And Hazel is half-ghost, too, at this point,” Vale continues. “Hey, Danny. Are the stars the same in Guatemala?”
And so he tells her about the stars near the equator. The different constellations. About watching them while smoking a joint on a rooftop in Quetzaltenango belonging to a woman named Luz.
“Luz, like light,” he says, and Vale does not allow herself to feel jealous of Danny’s lover. She takes that feeling from her chest and sends it out toward the stars now popped above them: Venus, Mars, Orion’s Sword.
She thinks of Neko, watching the stars from a rooftop in Iraq one month from now.
Vale starts walking. “Come.”
AS THEY APPROACH LENA’S CABIN, DANNY STOPS IN THE path behind her. “Why?” he says quietly, his voice a near whisper.
Vale says, “Trust me. Please.”
He looks her in the eyes, half-visible in this moonlight, and follows.
Vale pushes the door open with her shoulder, opens a box of matches, and lights the candles on the table.
Danny stands in the doorway breathing.
“Look,” Vale says, shining her flashlight on the two cups hanging from a nail above the sink: pink roses, tea stains.
“And here,” she says, lifting the flashlight to the feathers and stones and animal bones lined up on the windowsill, and farther up, to the photos tacked to the walls.
“Lena?” Danny says, moving toward the windowsill, reaching out and touching an animal’s skull with his fingers. “I never knew all this was in here.”
“Me either,” says Vale. “But she’s here. Her ghost is badass. Very much alive.”
Danny sits down in a chair in front of the cluster of lit candles. He looks at the floor, the place where his father died one winter night. He nods. “She’s here, your matriarch. Her life written in these things.”
“Yes,” Vale says, sitting down next to him. “Also: I’m pretty sure we’re part Abenaki.”
Danny raises his eyes to her. “Really?”
She tells him about Marie, their great-great-grandmother. About the photo from Lena’s attic. About that note scrawled in the town ledger: Indian.
“No shit,” Danny says, rubbing the pine of the table with his thumb.
“Not that it really matters,” Vale says. “But it matters to me. It seems important to know who you are. Bonnie never knew who she was.”
Danny reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of Vale’s.
“That’s the tragic part,” Vale says, her voice cracking. A branch breaks outside. “She had to get lost in order for me to—end up here. Get found.” Vale puts both hands on the pine table. She looks at the photos pinned to Lena’s wall.
“I’m so sorry, Vale,” Danny says quietly.
Vale puts her fingernail into the soft wax of the candle. “It happens all the time, to people everywhere, you know? They die. Get lost.”
“I do,” Danny says.
Vale takes the two teacups off the wall, cleans them out with the wool of her mittens, and fills each of them from the wine bottle Danny brought. She places one in front of Danny and brings the other to her lips.
“Maybe that’s why my dad came here, too,” Danny says. “Lena’s ghost here.” He closes his eyes and takes a sip of his wine. “He told me a story once.”
Vale looks at him. Doesn’t say a word. He’s never spoken about Stephen to her before.
Danny tells her the story of the woman who married an owl. Of the woman who chose that singing, that half-human world, over all else. Just as Lena did with Otie, Vale thinks. The woman who married an owl.
“Danny,” she says. She’s been waiting a long time to tell him. Her voice is shaking, a near whisper.
“Yeah?”
“Your grandfather came here, too.”
He eyes her from across the table. “What?”
Vale’s heart is loud in her chest. She fears it isn’t true, but there is the drawing on the rafters. There are Bonnie’s green eyes.
Vale moves the flashlight up the wall to her left and shows Danny the inked drawing above the bed. The naked lovers with their exaggerated proportions, the man with a fiddle in his left hand. Their ridiculous and goofy grins. LW + LS.
Danny looks from the drawing into Vale’s eyes. “Lex and Lena?” Danny says. To Vale the cabin walls suddenly feel too close, too dank, too dark.
Vale nods. “He disappeared just after my mother was born.”
Danny downs his teacup of wine and puts his face into his hands. “Jesus. It’s a landscape full of holes and half-truths.”
“I know,” Vale whispers. The candlelight throws their shadows across the wall.
Danny looks up from his hands. A dry laugh. “Well, shit, Vale. At least there was love.”
Vale smiles. Feels a streak of warmth shoot from her chest to her toes. “Yes, there was love.”
Vale pours Danny more wine. Touches the rim of her rose teacup to his. “To their fucking and their love.”
Danny shakes his head. Smiles at her. “To their fucking and their love.”
THEY WALK BACK IN THE DARK. AT HAZEL’S PORCH DANNY opens his arms and she falls against him, lets him hold her.
Danny heads back inside to find Deb, and Vale goes to Hazel’s car. She will drive to Neko’s room. She will climb those stairs and let herself in. She will undress while he is sleeping, and slip under his sheets and down comforter, wrap herself around his thin and war-familiar body. The warmth of another human body: how badly we all need it, she thinks as she drives, headlights rippling across the bare bodies of trees. How essential, that coupling in the dark of winter.
She reaches for her phone and puts on John Lennon’s “Love.” A song Bonnie loved. Reaching: her mother’s arms reaching on that bridge. She loves Danny. She thinks she might love Neko. No matter, it’s him she will reach for. That warmth, that touching. The way he looks into her eyes and says hello as if surprised every time. She parks her car. Climbs the stairs. Opens the door and lets herself inside. Finds his body in the darkness. Finds herself there, in that touching. In the morning the sun rises. Lights the room. Luz. If she has a daughter, she will name her Luz, Vale thinks, watching it come.