DECEMBER 19, 2011
Danny stands outside the door of the farmhouse where Hazel, his grandmother, lies dying, and where his mother—aged, beautiful, bent-shouldered—sits drinking her wine alone. He can see her through the glass windows of this house that has sheltered for two hundred years, will shelter still. This house that his great-great-grandmother Marie moved to while her culture went silent, became unknown, disappeared into the trees.
She looks beautiful, his mother does. Serene. Not yet finished with this life and its living. Her head tipped back. Her eyes closed. A fierceness there he’d forgotten. She would tell him anything. He thinks of the French and Russian and Italian and Scandinavian movies she showed him when he was young. Jean Seberg and Brigitte Bardot and Ingrid Bergman. Her uninhibited weeping. Her laughter and dancing. The sex scenes that made him cringe, turn away, embarrassed, and her laughter and bright voice: “Gah! Ridiculous. Also: deep pleasure, my son. Deep pleasure.”
Those movies carried them out of the silence of their life after Stephen. Danny saw himself in every single one; in every one there was a version of Danny, and in every one Danny found a pathway into the future, via a landscape or a train or a book or a body. Those movies told him that he, too, would make it through. That suffering makes you wiser. That those who don’t make it, the versions of his father who also lived within those screens, didn’t not make it because they were unworthy, or stupid, or cruel, but because their suffering was greater. That is all. Through those films he forgave his father. And loved his mother and her kind—the warm-blooded, surviving heroines.
Like Vale.
Danny shivers in the dark, looking through the window at his mother. He thinks his time of leaving the people he loves is done.
He knocks the snow off his boots and goes inside.
The dishes are washed, a kettle of water simmers on the wood stove. He places mint tea bags in two mugs, pours the hot water, brings one to Deb.
She opens her eyes on the couch, smiles. “Danny,” she says, patting the cushion beside her, taking the cup in her hands. “Thank you. What time is it?”
He sits down beside her. “Two A.M.”
She lays her head on his shoulder and closes her eyes again. “I’m so glad to have you home.”
“Glad to be here.”
“Really? It’s not terrible for you, this hillside?”
Danny looks at Hazel’s bone-thin body on the bed by the window. Breath rising. Falling. “Yes. Terrible. And terrifying.”
Deb nods. “So full of ghosts, eh? And so bloody solitary.”
Danny takes a sip of his tea. “Yes. Ghosts and solitary. Hey, Mama.”
She opens her eyes. Looks at him.
“Did you know about Lena and Lex?”
“Yes. Vale told me.”
“Unbelievable, right?” He tells her about Lena’s cabin: the stones and feathers and pictures pinned to the wall, the drawing of the fiddle player and his lover in braids. LW + LS.
“It kind of changes everything, doesn’t it?” she whispers. She looks at Hazel, dying there in that bed by the window.
“Yes,” Danny says. “And nothing.”
“Right. What power does a story have at this point?”
Danny pictures Vale spinning at the top of the barn rafters in moonlight and how that story might have made that spinning possible.
Deb squeezes her son’s hand. He squeezes hers back. She closes her eyes and he feels her drift back into sleep.
There was a night when he was, what—eight? Nine? Stephen climbing up to the loft in the middle of the night and shaking Danny’s shoulder, waking him. “The northern lights,” he whispered. “Come see.” He took Danny’s hand and led him downstairs, put a hat on his head, boots on his feet, a coat over his shoulders. Outside it was cold—ten, at least. Maybe colder.
And then Stephen pointed up. Said, “Look.”
Danny had never seen anything like it—the sky turned blue, purple, pink, and green. Unnatural colors, there amid the pointed tips of hemlock, spruce, and pine.
More beautiful than anything he’d imagined. Stranger.
Danny’s cheeks were cold; he curled his fingers inside his mittens, squeezed his body against his father’s legs, listened to his father’s breath rising in and out in that dark night.
“We should show Mama, don’t you think?” Danny said after a few minutes, and Stephen had nodded, and so Danny went back inside to wake her.
“Oh—wondrous,” she said when she came out, wrapped in Stephen’s down jacket, walking toward Stephen, and then Danny stood between their two bodies—these people he loved most in the world—a bridge made of his limbs—as they looked up in silence at that perplexing and astounding show made of gas and light.
He likes to think of them that way, always, his parents.
Danny leans his head against his mother’s shoulder. Closes his eyes. Lets his body give way to sleep there.