DECEMBER 19, 2011
The light is strange this evening, or nighttime, what is it?—candlelight flickering, firelight from the wood stove, the sounds unfamiliar, here in the front room where she lies on the hospital bed, facing the darkened view. Her father’s view, the one Ezekial Wood, her great-something-grandfather, chose two hundred years ago. The view the Indians saw, back when the trees were native. Those hills! Them stars. That was the song the lady came and sang: Them stars, how often I’ve laid on the prairie and watched them go spinning around. Hazel cannot move her head, but she can hear voices from the kitchen, occasional laughter. The women are here. They are always here. She calls out with what voice she has left: “Mother?”
And then her mother is by her side. Or not her mother but the girl who looks like her. Vale. Eyelids painted with a splash of silver or blue that somehow looks like moonlight.
“Hazel? Hello. I’m here.”
Hazel can’t take her eyes off those blue sparkling eyelids. Flecks of silver in there, and maybe purple, too. It must be the flickering light, making those colors blaze so. The blue of morning hoarfrost on the windows. Blue sky reflecting on ice in winter.
“Hazel?” the girl says, standing there looking down at her like a tall and unfamiliar bird. “You want something?” She blinks and the blue powder shimmers.
“Yes,” Hazel says.
The girl leans closer. Smiles. Touches Hazel’s hand. “Tell me,” she whispers.
The words are fibrous in her throat. They force their way out, slowly: “I want my eyes done.”
The girl looks at her for a moment like she hasn’t heard, or understood, and then she smiles. Steps backward. “You want your eyes done, like mine?”
“Yes.”
Just do it, Hazel thinks.
“Okay,” the girl says, going to the corner for her bag, returning with it and sitting down on the chair next to Hazel.
Hazel feels Vale’s fingers on her cheeks, then on the loose flesh below her eyes.
“Close your eyes,” the girl says, quiet, and Hazel does.
Like a baby. When was she ever touched like this? She can suddenly smell her mother: that combination of flour and egg whites and milk that hung on her for years. Her mother must have touched her like this, stroked her forehead, her cheeks, oh God, her temples like this.
Mother, Hazel thinks. What will happen to our house when I die? What will happen to the land? Heart Spring Mountain. Eternal water. The girl puts her hands on each of Hazel’s cheeks and rubs a cool cream into them. Ah! It is like fresh air, like breathing the quiet song of snow. Hazel can feel Stephen at her breast, his small fingers holding the heavy skin, his one visible green eye shocking her with its gaze. What did that eye want? Even then she couldn’t be sure. My baby, my one and only baby, she sang to him, in that rocking chair, in that house, that whole long winter.
She hears the clicking of jars, the unscrewing of a lid, and the girl reappears above her holding a jar of blue.
“Blue okay?” she whispers, and Hazel nods.
“It looks beautiful,” the girl says, dabbing the sparkling paint onto Hazel’s eyelids. Blending silver and blue so it looks, Hazel imagines, like moonlight over a snow-covered land. But for the first time in a long time Hazel isn’t thinking about the land. She’s thinking about those fingers, there on her cheeks, her eyelids, stroking the soft skin below her ears. She’s thinking about Stephen up there in the woods. My boy. She’s thinking of that morning she entered Lena’s room so many years ago. A tray of tea and hot oatmeal.
She entered and the tray fell to the floor by her feet. Her sister’s damp face. An unfamiliar hue.
“No,” she said. That’s all. That quick word—no.
Later, that afternoon—after the doctor, and the casket, and Lena’s body being carried away—Hazel walked into the nursery to check on Bonnie and found Lex there. Bonnie in his arms, his finger clenched in her miniature fist.
“You have to leave,” she said.
“Please, no,” he answered, his eyes bloodshot, his body stinking of sweat and alcohol. He put his lips on Bonnie’s brow, sang: My Bonnie lies over the ocean.
“Leave,” Hazel said, her voice cool and strong as granite, and he stared at her for a long minute, then turned and set Bonnie in her cradle. Placed his lips on her forehead, a deep breath, before leaving the room.
He did not write. He did not call. It was the last time Hazel saw him.
Hazel looks up into those eyes above her—what a beautiful child. Beautiful child! There are tears in her own eyes, and for a moment she worries that this girl will see them, and then she is not worrying about that at all. They come fast and silent, the tears, stream down her face and pool in the valleys of her cheeks. She is thinking about that translucent blue powdering her eyes, about light filling her veins, about the beauty of sunlight reflecting on snow. Why did she wait so long for this? Was it this easy, all along, simply lying down and letting herself be touched? Hazel thinks for a moment she is dying, that she will never be able to breathe again, that her heart has seized, but then she does breathe, and a sob erupts from her chest. A single one.
“It’s okay,” the girl whispers, love and terror in her eyes. “It’s okay.”