DECEMBER 20, 2011
Vale is alone in her camper when she gets the call from the police. A farmer’s dog has found a shoe. A white Reebok sneaker that matches the description of the one Bonnie was wearing. Dragged up from the farmer’s east field that runs along the river, a couple miles downstream from the bridge. An officer has gone there to look but found nothing. She tells Vale, “There’s no telling if it was hers. But it matches the descriptions. Not hard proof of course, but . . .”
Vale thinks of the bodies from Katrina she’s heard about from Moe and Monty: bloated and stinking.
Vale thinks of coyotes. Of what buzzards will eat. Of carrion crows.
“No. No telling,” she says over the phone. She thinks she might vomit. The field is quiet and still around her: frostbitten. The coffee mug burns her hands.
AT THE STATION THEY LET HER INTO THE SAME BACK room where she watched the video.
The shoe rests on a pile of newspaper.
Size 6½ like Bonnie’s. Waterlogged. Mud-caked. Growing algae.
Vale wants to fall onto her knees. She wants to grab the shoe and hurl it at the window—the quick satisfaction of shattering glass.
“Can I?” she asks, reaching her hand out toward the shoe, thinking of the weathered, gray-flecked bones lined up on Lena’s windowsill.
“Of course,” the officer says.
Cool. Dank. Wet. The length of her hand.
It hardly seems like a shoe at all. Vale feels like she is holding a damaged creature of some kind. That dream she had in Lena’s cabin: the dead barn swallow in her hands.
“Can I have it?”
The officer stares at the shoe for a moment, then glances at the office door. “Sure,” she says quietly, handing Vale a plastic bag.
Vale asks for the location of the farm where the shoe was found, and the officer tells her.
“Thank you,” Vale says, tucking the bag under her arm, heading to the door, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her jacket to still them.
THE BRIDGE HER MOTHER STOOD ON HAS BEEN REBUILT out of thick concrete slabs and reinforced with steel I beams, but if you stand in the center of it, like Vale does now, on the narrow ledge of sidewalk, and look down, you can see the ruins of the first bridge—a monstrous tangle of cracked concrete piers and green iron. It’s snowing slightly, and Vale tucks her jacket collar up around her ears, pulls her jacket sleeves down over her hands. The snow falls on the still-raw banks. The snow falls on the green iron. The snow falls on the new concrete bridge beneath her. Cars pass slowly, windshield wipers flapping, headlights on.
Vale walks to the far end of the bridge and scrambles down the bank, slipping on frozen ground and snow-covered rocks. She walks past the tangle of green iron. Walks downstream for an hour or more, past the backsides of Victorian houses, past mill buildings and abandoned industrial spaces, looking into the pools of the flood’s detritus. When the creek joins the Connecticut, the mother river that will take the water south and east to the ocean, Vale turns south and keeps walking, for another quarter mile until she reaches the farmer’s field where the shoe was found.
Vale roots around at the water’s edge. Kicks at a pile of fallen leaves.
Snowflakes. Dead grass. Leaves drifting across the water.
She’s about to turn back when she finds the deer bones.
A tangle of bone and hair, lodged under a pile of downed trees and creosote-soaked railroad ties.
“No,” Vale whispers, going toward it, scraping away the branches and leaves with her frozen hands: a rack of ribs, sharp shinbones, skin that looks like dark, caramel-smoked leather, and then a skull appearing beneath her hands: deer-shaped.
“It’s not a human skull,” Vale says out loud, to no one, her heart racing.
She takes a deep breath. Looks at the carcass.
Not Bonnie. And yet: Bonnie.
Vale sits down there by the water’s edge, holds the deer skull in her frozen hands.
“My mother is dead,” she says out loud.
“My mother is dead!” she screams.
There is no smell. No maggots, no swollen flesh. Vale picks up a vertebra, the shape of a miniature female pelvis, and holds it in front of her. Her hand is shaking. She thinks of wasps, worms, buzzards, crows, beetles, yellow jackets. The things that will feed off these bodies, live inside them, turn them back into earth.
Vale thinks of a body being washed downstream, downriver, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
Bonnie bringing Vale cups of tea in the morning in bed when she was young. Soft lips on soft cheek. A smoker’s whisper, scented with coffee: “Love you.”
Bonnie’s body Jesus-loved, eyeballs picked out by ravens and crows. Skin melting into pools of grease and smoked leather.
Vale looks out toward the calm river, wide and graceful, almost holy, floating past.
“Bonnie,” she whispers.
She didn’t know such a pain was possible.
“SHE’S DEAD,” VALE SAYS, PUSHING OPEN THE DOOR TO Neko’s room. “And I won’t ever find her.” She’s shaking. Her clothes wet, snow-covered.
Vale goes to the bed and lies down on it. She closes her eyes and sees Bonnie on the bridge in white, her arms spread wide. Sees Bonnie’s body lodged twenty feet below a dam.
Neko brings her blankets. Brings her tea. Sits beside her, not speaking.
Her limbs won’t stop shuddering. She tells him about the shoe. Tells him about the deer bones. Her breath isn’t coming right. Too quick, shallow. “Damn you and your loving mother,” Vale whispers, her eyes closed, her body unable to still itself. “Damn you and your job you love.”
Neko puts his hand on her leg. Bends his head. Whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
“Damn you,” Vale whispers. Vale cries. Vale rages into the sheets. Vale sobs, Neko by her side.
She undresses him. He undresses her. Her mind tangles with the images of the deer’s decomposed body, the bodies of children in Iraq, and the body of Bonnie, washed out to sea: night swimming. He puts his lips on her nipple. Slips his fingers inside her and Vale gasps. A long ache shooting through.
“NEKO,” SHE WHISPERS LATER, HER BREATHING SLOWED, her body stilled.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you leaving?”
He takes a deep breath, looks toward the window—a few snowflakes still falling—says quietly, “The only hope we have of people understanding war is if they see it.” He tells her that there have been 45,000 Iraqi casualties, 3,900 of them children. He says that yes, the U.S. has formally withdrawn all combat troops, but that the violence is far from over. He says, “People need to know that.”
Vale picks Lena’s hat up off the floor and holds it over her eyes. “Yes, they do,” she whispers, throwing the hat across the room.
Neko goes to a pile of photographs lying on the table and brings one back to Vale. It’s a four-by-six print of the collapsed barn on Cedar Street, taken from the ground looking up at the web of fallen rafters, ribs launched against steel-gray sky.
The rafters look like a church.
Of the kind Vale might actually want to attend: light-filled, porous. “I took this a few days ago. For you,” Neko says.
“Bonnie’s barn,” Vale says, sitting up, taking it. How ironically beautiful wreckage can be, she thinks. The colors rust and burn, a flock of birds lifting off from the power lines. She thinks of Leonard Cohen’s bird on a wire, of his famous line about cracks being where the light gets in. Of Danny singing both those songs in the hayloft of the barn like they were gospel, eight years after his father died.
“Vale,” Neko says.
“Yeah?” Vale turns to look at him.
“I always come back.” He’s looking straight into her eyes. Doesn’t turn away. “I travel, yes, but I’m loyal as a fucking dog.”
He puts his face on her thighs. “I like you, Vale. I’m not fucking around,” he says quietly. “Are you?”
“No,” Vale says, putting her hands on his head. Putting her cheek against his hair. Turning her eyes to the window, the slow light that filters through. “I am not fucking around.”