DECEMBER 21, 2011
The rain turns to snow, then back to freezing rain, and the ice on the trees, windows, and roofs thickens.
Severe storm warning, the radio says, advising people, once again, to fill bathtubs, fill jugs, collect candles and batteries and flashlights. One-half to one inch of ice predicted. Widespread power outages, dangerous roadways, falling trees.
Of course, Vale thinks. The next storm. How bad will this one be? The apocalypse, or just another blip on the screen? How do we ever know? She was hoping to go see Neko tonight, to bring him here for dinner with Deb and Danny, but the roads are already too slick, the woods impassable.
She sends a text: ROADS BAD. STAY WARM.
She stares at her message for a long moment. Types: POUR A GLASS FOR ME, and hits Send again.
She wants to see him. She wants to hear him laugh. Cook steaks over a camp stove in his attic room. Touch his ribs. Kiss his chest. Find him.
Vale puts on Bonnie’s silk dress over her long underwear and jeans. “My dead mother’s dress,” she says to Lena’s photo on the wall, practicing the words, trying to wear out the sting. It’s a party, after all—the winter solstice. She wonders how they’re celebrating in the steamy streets of New Orleans; Vale misses Shante’s voice this darkest night of the year. She puts on Lena’s wool fedora and slips Bonnie’s rosary around her neck. “My dead mother’s jewels,” Vale says to Marie. She dabs her eyelids with glittering silver and blue—in honor of Hazel—and reds her lips. The darkest night of the year. An ice storm. A party! She puts on her warmest boots and coat, gathers the champagne she bought three days ago for this occasion. She’s about to leave when she sees the deer vertebra and her mother’s sneaker on the kitchen counter. An unbearable shrine. She places them in a paper bag, tucks it under her arm, and sets off up the hill to Hazel’s house.
She has to punch through the crust with the heel of her boot to not slide, barely makes it up the already ice-slicked field. But if there’s going to be an ice storm, the old house is the place to be. She wonders how many ice storms its bones have stood through. And isn’t this what people have always done—will continue to do—during dark times: gather?
AT THE BIG HOUSE DANNY HAS FILLED THE BATHTUB and old milk jugs from the woodshed with water, has collected flashlights and candles.
“Classic party favors,” Vale says, placing the champagne, the deer vertebra, and her mother’s shoe on the side table. “Happy solstice.”
“Happy solstice to you,” Danny says, looking at the items, touching Vale’s arm. She told him about the shoe earlier this morning.
She opens the bottle of champagne and fills three canning jars, adds sprigs of dried lavender from her jacket pocket, passes them around. Deb fills a plate with apples and cave-hardened cheeses from halfway across the world. Danny takes the glass, closes his eyes, breathes in. His face is beautiful, as always, Vale thinks, watching him. Radiant and tortured, her cousin—trying too hard to do well for the world.
“Cheers,” she says, and they raise their glasses.
They move to the table, eat the apples and cheese, sip their drinks. The radio is on, tuned to an old-time country music station. Danny tells them about the festivals of Guatemala, about all-night dancing in the zócalo. “People are so much more alone here,” he says. “The curse of puritan New England’s stubborn self-reliance. Stoicism.”
He looks at Vale. Raises his glass, says quietly: “To our heroine: Bonnie.”
“To Bonnie,” Vale whispers. The rain sounds like pellets on the roof and windows. The branches outside bend, lower themselves to the ground.
“To Bonnie,” Deb says, raising hers. “And Hazel.”
They can hear her sleeping breath from the next room. Slow and shallow. She hasn’t opened her eyes in twenty-four hours. Every three, Deb gives her more morphine and immediately her body relaxes. Falls back into ease. How quickly one can go from all here to nothing, Vale thinks, watching her through the open doorway.
There’s a cracking sound from outside—a large branch breaking—and the power flickers once, then goes out. The radio goes silent.
“Here she comes,” Vale says. “The next great storm.”
Deb rises and lights the candles they have set out on the table, lights an old kerosene lantern and brings it to Hazel’s bedside.
“Of course,” Danny says, rolling a joint and slipping it between his lips, “with global warming will come extreme poverty. Maybe these woods are the best place to be. Go back to the old ways of survival.”
He passes the joint to Vale, who puts it between her lips and breathes in. Global warming: the unraveling future. The unraveling present. She exhales and tells them about No Word for Time, about a way of living in which the past is in the present and the future, too. About the words in Lena’s notebook: Near the sickness also lies the cure. The sickness: wars, addiction, these storms, Bonnie’s body washed downstream. And what, then, is the cure? She thinks of Marie’s and Adele’s ways of knowing and being: of seeing our human lives as part of a much wider and wilder whole.
She says, “We need Marie. We need to know what she knew.”
Danny nods. Closes his eyes.
They sit quietly: pieces of ice hitting the roof, Hazel’s ragged breathing from the next room, candlelight jumping across the walls.
Vale hands the joint to Deb, who holds it between her fingers, takes a deep breath, and shrugs her shoulders. “Why not,” she says, breathing in.
DEB’S NEVER BEEN A POT SMOKER. EVEN AT THE COMMUNE, and in college, that wasn’t her thing. She never liked the unhinging it brings on. But it seems like the thing to do here in Hazel’s kitchen next to the lit Stanley, here with the two people she has come to love most in the world—Danny and Vale, these survivors—on the darkest night of the year, while outside the world cracks and glistens. Danny and Vale. They are the future: the bloodline of this Heart Spring Mountain. New creatures—wise and feral and true-hearted. Have they failed their puritan ancestors or freed them? And Danny’s children and Vale’s children: Who will they be, and what world will they inherit? Will there be apples for her unborn grandchildren, here where the winters have been so unpredictable—no snow or too much? Warm Decembers and late freezes, destroying apple crops and peach crops. The dry springs and dryer summers. Will there be potable water? She thinks of refugees seeking shelter. Droughts. Famines. Wars. Bonnie floating downstream. The world will become something completely other after her lifetime, and she aches to think how she will not be here to save the ones she loves.
“Pass the joint, Mama,” Danny says with a smile, and Deb’s heart alights, grows warm again. Danny. Her son. His live face and green eyes like Stephen’s. Like Lex’s, the fiddle-playing grandpa none of them knew.
He takes another hit, gets up and grabs Vale’s phone off the counter. “We need music, my friends,” he says. He puts on Ruth Brown’s “5-10-15 Hours.” “Ruth!” he says, beginning a slow shuffle. Vale smiles, puts her glass down, and joins him.
“Dance with us, Mama,” Danny says, reaching out to her, pulling her up off the chair. And so Deb dances, too. She feels like a fool, here in this kitchen, her old white body in wool socks, dancing next to the wood stove on these creaking pine floors, surrounded by these many-paned windows, while Ruth sings. My God, music—isn’t there something to it? Deb thinks. A house that knows music—a house that fills with it, swells with it, is broken and made whole with it? She feels her grief for Bonnie and for Hazel flooding through her body, finding outlet in every crevice and every pore.
When the song ends, Vale goes to the phone and puts on Missy Elliott’s “Partytime.”
“Just what you might have heard in this very kitchen fifty years ago,” Danny says, grinning, moving his sun-kissed bare feet across the pine. Vale raises her arms above her head, closes her eyes, shimmies her hips back and forth to Missy’s syncopated thwack. Missy’s unapologetic presence in the world. Missy’s fury, sex, self-love.
Deb laughs, but there’s a deep pang in her chest. What glorious creatures, she thinks, pouring more wine, watching Vale and Danny bust their young and beautiful asses. Fierce and resilient, she thinks, as a large crack comes from outside, rattling the house, making the candlelight flicker.
The joint is passed to her one more time, and she sits down and takes another hit, at once sure that they are not alone in this kitchen. She is sure that Hazel is here, too, only a younger Hazel, in a flowered apron and loose cotton dress, pulling bread from the hot oven. And Lena is here, too—Vale’s grandma—with her long hair and one-eyed owl on her shoulder. Yes, she’s sitting in the corner, tapping her foot and singing along. The owl blinks, closes his one good eye.
And Lex is here, too, with his fiddle, playing along, his left foot making its own percussive rhythm. What a crowd!
But there’s another here, too, Deb is suddenly sure. Stephen, walking toward her. The Stephen Deb first loved—twenty-three years old. Blue jeans. Worn flannel. His too-soft heart. Not ever sure of itself. And then he is behind Deb. She smells him before anything. Warm heat. Wool. He bends and puts his hands around her waist. Puts his lips to her left ear, that particular tingle of wet lip, prickle of beard, whispers, “Hello.”
Deb closes her eyes. A deep breath she hasn’t allowed there for years.
But now Danny is calling her name and motioning for her to get up and start dancing again, and so she does. All of them do, across the pine floors: Danny, Deb, Vale, Stephen, Lena, Lex, Hazel. Their bright, best, young faces. Their fearlessness and inhibition. They are lighting up the night, moving their elbows, bending their knees, while the ice falls and the trees crash. While the world begins its great unraveling they are all there, dancing, their love and their joy on their shoulders. Their best-intentioned, misspent love. Oh, the impossibility of it. The sheer impossibility of doing it right!
“Don’t stop now, Mama,” Danny says, reaching his arms out to her, and so Deb two-steps across the floor with her son. They stumble into one of Hazel’s one-hundred-year-old wooden chairs and right themselves at the last minute; they trot back across the floor the other way and crash into the refrigerator. Deb is laughing so hard, she thinks she might piss her pants, might cry. They open their arms into a ring and slip them over Vale’s head—they circle around her, the outer petals of a flower—and Vale raises her arms toward the ceiling and closes her eyes and smiles, a beautiful spinning stamen, an unbearably gorgeous queen, and Deb thinks—this is it. This is how to face the end of the world. Like this: heads tipped back. Dancing. Laughing. Drunk and stoned in homage to the great beasts on their shoulders, on every shoulder, always—death and love. Death and love.
The song ends and Vale picks another. Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free.” Sweet Jesus. Deb’s all-time favorite. She stands still, heart pounding in her chest, breath slowing. She falls back into her chair. If there were a singular voice of God, Deb thinks, it would be Nina Simone’s. Danny pulls Vale to him and they slow dance, Vale’s face against his chest, a smile across her lips, momentarily happy, and Deb is surprised by the tears that fill her eyes.
How Vale deserves to be happy.
They pull apart, and Danny sits down in a chair next to Deb, and Vale dances alone in the middle of the room. Her eyes closed. A streak of pain across her brow, limbs in slow motion, intoxicating. She’s got something there, Deb thinks. Something being said with this body. Moving to Nina’s piano. Nina’s snaps. Nina’s drums. Moving to Nina’s voice right in her ear—singing, a near moan—a timbre that seems to set them all momentarily free.