Ruthie Mader sat up in bed, watched the sun push itself free of the earth like a giant hothouse flower. The tax debt had weighed on her mind for so long that she felt for it now out of habit, the way the tongue reaches for a notch in the gum, a sour, cracked tooth—but no. In July, the city had voted to purchase ninety acres for the Thomas Mader Recreational Area. The sale had left her with money enough to secure the house and barn, plus the remaining ten acres of land. God was good. And Lucy Kimmeldorf was a genius.
Two weeks after the sale, the Circle had sponsored a victory potluck in her honor. Ruthie placed an open invitation in the Ambient Weekly, expecting no more than a hundred people, but by five o’clock that afternoon, there were over four hundred—the line of parked cars stretched to the highway bridge—and most signed their names in the guest book Anna Grey Graf had thought to bring along. Her husband, Bill, had warmed up to the Circle; he even took shifts at the grills with Joe Kimmeldorf, Jeep Curry, and Fred Carpenter, flipping hamburgers and brats. Stan Pranke supervised from a lawn chair, Bill Graf, Sr., and old Pops Carpenter joined him with a six-pack, and every now and then all three of them disappeared in a blast of charcoal smoke. Women unfolded card tables, arranged platters of cold fried chicken and boiled ham and cold cuts, three-bean salads and carrot salads, coleslaw and sauerkraut and finger Jell-O, rolls and chips and sour cream dips, tray after tray of dessert bars. There was sweet lemonade in rented canisters, ice-filled tubs of soda and Pabst. Children raced through the orchard in packs, collecting apples for green-apple fights. Babies slept on blankets spread out in shady rows beside the house. Janey Fields and Danny Hope, just back from their honeymoon, sat beside the babies, and everybody teased them that they better watch it, those things might be contagious. Even Cherish came out of her shell, lifting her head to greet people, chatting with Lisa Marie Kirsch, running for extra serving spoons.
For the first time since that cold night in April—in some ways, it seemed to Ruthie, for the first time since Tom’s death—there was a sense of community again. A collective feeling of optimism. When night fell, everyone worked together building a giant bonfire. There were marshmallows and plenty of sticks, and in the restless, searching shadows of the flames, the talk turned quiet, reflective. Alone or in groups, people slipped away to the barn, where they stood before the white stone angel to marvel at what had happened. Some returned to the fire and told of a feeling, a presence, a peacefulness there. Some spoke of other experiences they’d had that ruffled the smooth grain of reason. As soon as the talk turned in this direction, Ruthie saw Cherish rise, make her way back to the house. Soon the light in her bedroom winked on. No doubt she was opening a book, losing herself in the ideas of a stranger. How eager she was to move away from Ambient, to live in a place where no one knew her story, to meet people who would look into her scarred face and accept it as it was, without recalling its former landscape.
And now that day had finally arrived; Ruthie couldn’t quite believe it. By noon, Cherish would be settling into a dormitory in Eau Claire, having conversations with people Ruthie would never meet, talking about things that Ruthie, with her outdated high school diploma, would never understand.
Ruthie pulled her knees to her chest, leaned back against the headboard, and closed her eyes to pray. She did not say any particular prayer; she no longer memorized Bible verses. Over the years, she had moved away from the sharp-cornered lines of her schoolgirl catechism, searching for warmer cadences, something more graceful, closer to love. Raising a child had taught her the purest sounds of devotion, how words are merely the residue meaning leaves in our mouths. Monks chanting Latin in brownrobed lines, parents singing nursery rhymes to drowsing children, even the comfort of a standard greeting—Hi. Hello. How are you? Fine—the message behind each was constant, unchanging, insistent as a heartbeat. I’m here. I’m here. The oldest prayer. Ruthie prayed until she felt herself growing visible, and at that moment she was raised up, becoming—for a brief, brilliant eye blink—larger than she knew herself to be. And that was Faith—the mind’s surrender to the stunned and terrified wonder of the heart. Like the moment after Cherish’s birth, when she’d reached out to touch that wet, furred skull. Like the moment of Tom’s death, when she was in the root cellar, innocently weeding soft apples from the bin, and suddenly felt him standing behind her, one hand in his pocket, and knew. Like the moment in the barn, when she’d first seen the boy bathed in light, smelled the sweetness of his skin. Each time the same whisper: I’m here, I’m here. Knowing God would be like such a moment, only stretched into all eternity.
She opened her eyes. Cherish was up; Ruthie could hear her moving around her room, thumping the last of her books into boxes. Since that night on the bridge, she’d suffered from terrible insomnia, which left her glassy-eyed and distracted. She prowled the house with her face tucked low, as if to hide the fading scribble of scars. Anything Ruthie said or did only made things worse. When she tried to explain that when God shuts a door, He opens a window, that even the worst of experiences had the potential for goodness if one only turned them over to the Lord, Cherish merely marked her place in her book with a finger and waited for Ruthie to finish.
“That’s one way to look at the world,” she’d say, or else, “That’s very interesting.”
That calm, rational tone. The same tone used by the priest whom the archdiocese sent to investigate the shrine, a plump, kindly man who had already made up his mind. They went over the details again and again. What had the angel looked like? How had Ruthie known what it was? And how much sleep had she had that night? (He apologized, shifted the focus of his inquiries.) The temperature of the boy’s skin—would she say it had been room temperature? A little cooler? Warm like a fresh cup of tea? And his coloration—flushed? As in bruised or feverish? As in raw chilled skin? When Ruthie described the odor that had surrounded the body, the priest shook his head in a good-natured way. “Wet hay might have such a smell,” he suggested, and then he checked his notes. “You mentioned the boy’s damp clothing.”
“I know what wet hay smells like,” Ruthie said, looking at his soft, city hands. She didn’t understand it, either. She still didn’t understand. Why had this happened, and why to her? What did it mean? Was she responsible? The same kind of thoughts she’d had after Tom’s death. Only then she’d carried those thoughts alone, for even old friends kept their distance—out of shame, perhaps, or else out of guilt. What had happened to Tom might have happened to one of their own loved ones, but it hadn’t, and every time they spoke with Ruthie Mader they were glad. And possibly one of them had done it, or known the person who had done it. Everyone was a bit uneasy when the topic snagged itself in the unsuspecting net of conversation. What would you do, if no one had seen? When done was done and there was no going back and changing things anyway? If it had been an accident, a terrible mistake that would cost you everything?
A rooster crowed in the distance, four broken notes like a sob, and the sound drifted in through the open window on a breath of air as warm and moist as her own. Ruthie swung her legs over the edge of the bed and saw Cherish standing in the doorway. “We need to leave by seven,” she said.
“It’s barely six o’clock.”
“It’s five after,” Cherish said. “I’m going to start loading the truck.”
At the potluck, countless people had taken Ruthie aside and told her how much they admired Cherish for getting her life together—some went so far as to say she had been blessed—but Ruthie knew she was more lost now than all those nights she’d sneaked out of the house. Adolescence, like any fever, would have run its course, and if Cherish had been wild, perhaps she couldn’t help it, taking after her grandmother the way she did. Gwendolyn had died of lung cancer long before Cherish’s birth, but whenever Ruthie looked into her daughter’s wide-set eyes, she saw her own mother looking back. That heart-shaped face. That hollowed cheek. That punishing mouth. Gwendolyn was seldom seen without a cigarette lilting from her lips. She spent nearly every weekend at the Hodag, drinking and dancing and flirting with men—there were nights she never came home. She wore low-cut shirts, jangly earrings, stiletto heels that Ruthie was forbidden to try on.
“Don’t call me Mom,” Gwendolyn had said when Ruthie was eight or nine. “It makes me feel old.”
But Cherish had been living a quiet life. She’d been working long hours at the library. She’d finished all the books on the Recommended Book List that UW-Eau Claire sent its incoming students. She’d stopped telling lies. If you asked, she would look you right in the face and admit she did not believe in God.
“As a society, we have to move beyond that,” she told Ruthie. It was, no doubt, an idea she’d gotten from her reading. “There is no reason to believe that the soul is anything more than what we call memory.”
“Then what happens to people when they die?”
“Mom, I don’t want to fight about this,” Cherish said. “I know religion is a comfort to you, but I just don’t believe it anymore.”
Ruthie didn’t know how to reach her. And now she was leaving, and she was happy to be leaving, and there was nothing to be done except to get up and shower, braid her hair, put on her good dress with the short, cuffed sleeves, even though Cherish had said not to dress up. Clip-on earrings shaped like daisies. Nice white sandals from Penney’s. Her Faith cross never left her throat—she would have felt uneasy without it, the way she would have felt had she removed her wedding ring. Suddenly she was hurrying. She wanted to help with the last of the boxes. She wanted to be there with Cherish when she stepped out of her room for the very last time. After today they’d see each other only once a month—perhaps less. And when the holidays arrived, Cherish might decide to go home with a friend. When summer came, she might just find a job in Eau Claire. Ruthie might never again have this opportunity to reach her daughter’s heart.
But she found Cherish’s room already empty. Bare hangers rang like chimes. The bed was stripped, the desk cleaned out, the shelves robbed of books and clutter. Cracks in the plaster marked the walls in lightning-bolt patterns, and water stains dappled the ceilings. There was a dark spot on the wall where burning wires had nearly started a fire; the light switch beside it was duct-taped into a permanent off position. Now that Ruthie had paid her back taxes, set aside tuition for Cherish, bought a used Ford pickup, a furnace, and a hot-water heater, and exterminated the huge bat colony in the attic, there was little cash left over for all the other things that needed to be done. Somehow the plumbing would have to be replaced. The peeling clapboards needed stripping and painting. The roof leaked; the front porch had rotted through. The kitchen needed appliances—the dishwasher had died years earlier, and only two burners on the stove still worked. Though what would one person need with more than two burners? It was hard to imagine—the small, silent meals. Mornings broken only by the chatter of TV. Life alone.
A book was lying facedown on the nightstand. Ruthie was certain that too much reading was causing Cherish’s sleeplessness, but Dr. Kemp said insomnia was a symptom of depression. He said it was important for Ruthie to give Cherish some distance. He said it was important for teens to understand it was OK to hold beliefs that were different from their parents’. Ruthie had nodded when he’d said that. But it wasn’t OK; in fact, it was intolerable. It was like being killed. What had ever happened to Honor thy father and mother? How else were beliefs to live on, if not through the lives of one’s children?
She picked up the book—Nietzsche? Night-zee? The biography on the back said that he’d died in an asylum. She tried to read a passage that Cherish had underlined: The content of our conscience is everything that was during the years of our childhoods regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honored or feared…. The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience; it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.
She flipped to another page.
…there is no longer for you any rewarder and recompenser, no final corrector—there is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what happens to you—there is no longer any resting place open to your heart where it has only to find and only to seek…. And then, at the bottom of the paragraph: Perhaps it is precisely that renunciation which will also lend us the strength by which the renunciation itself can be endured; perhaps man will rise higher and higher from that time when he no longer flows out into God.
She read it several times to be sure she’d understood. How could anybody live in the world, believing something like that?
Footsteps pounded up the stairs; Ruthie kicked the book under the bed just seconds before Cherish came into the room.
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Cherish said, looking around the nightstand. “I thought I left a book up here.”
Ruthie shook her head. For the first time in months, Cherish’s face was flushed with excitement, beautiful still in spite of the scars—perhaps even more beautiful. Ruthie wanted to hold her the way she had when Cherish was still small, feel those sturdy arms around her waist, see the upturned face, its absolute confidence. Nights, they’d said their bedtime prayers together, holding hands across the kitchen table between cooling cups of hot cocoa. There wasn’t a question Ruthie couldn’t answer. There wasn’t a problem Ruthie couldn’t solve. And God, like a grand, benevolent giant, was watching out for them both. Or so it had seemed, until now. Until Cherish turned her face away.
“I miss you already,” Ruthie said, knowing it was the wrong thing to say.
“I’m not even leaving the state.”
“But I worry—”
“I’ll be fine.” Cherish bounded down the stairs.
They ate a light breakfast before they left. Cherish had already unlocked the door to the shrine, put out the basket of angel pendants and a box of “What to Do in Ambient” brochures, which Lucy replenished from time to time. A raft of swallows glided out into the sunlight, bellies flashing rust. How Ruthie missed the smells and sounds of the sheep, the waxy feel of their fleece, their patient, placid eyes. But she’d sold them to the Farbs, along with the goats, to meet her co-payments on Cherish’s medical bills. The chickens had died, one by one, or wandered off. Old Mule had disappeared abruptly—she hated to think he’d been stolen, but clearly there was no sense in keeping animals with so many people coming through. Last weekend alone, there had been sixty-five pilgrims.
“Mom?” Cherish called. She was already sitting in the truck. “If my roommate gets there first, I’ll be stuck with the top bunk.”
And so that was it. As Ruthie drove down the driveway, toward the J road, she waited for Cherish to look back or, at least, sneak a glance in the rearview mirror. But she didn’t, and when they got on the highway, she turned on the radio as if this were any other day, as if they were just going into town to pick up groceries at the Piggly Wiggly. Ruthie sneaked a sideways glance at her daughter. How could a child you had carried inside your own body grow up to become a mystery? They passed the new billboard that marked the edge of the Carpenters’ land: I BELIEVE! REMEMBER GABRIEL AT THE RIVER ANGEL SHRINE. They passed what had once been the Faith house. It hadn’t taken Roland more than a week to rent it out to an auto parts dealer, and of course they’d whitewashed Cherish and Maya’s mural from the walls. It was a shame they’d never finished it. It was a shame that Cherish didn’t paint or draw anymore. What would she do with an English degree if, as she claimed, she didn’t want to teach? How Ruthie envied Margaret Kirsch, whose daughter was already an assistant manager at the Wal-Mart. Lisa Marie was learning real skills, a life trade. Lisa Marie was staying close to home. Close to her mother.
They turned onto County O, passing the spot where Tom’s body had been found, the white cross weathered to the color of sorrow itself, gray as bone. The fields were scorched the color of honey; the horizon shivered with heat. There is no longer any reason in what happens, no longer any love in what happens to you. The sentence had stuck in Ruthie’s mind like a terrible song, going round and round. “No wonder that poor man went insane,” she said, more to herself than to Cherish.
“Which man?”
“The one who wrote that book.”
“Nietzsche.” Cherish looked annoyed. “What did you do with it, Mom?” Then she shrugged. “I’ll get another copy at the library.”
“How can anyone think there’s no reason for all that we see?” Ruthie gestured at the brittle fields, at the dust boiling over the highway and the shocked blue heart of the sky. “Somebody did this, somebody made this, just like somebody made us all. If you found a watch lying on the sidewalk, would you think all those intricate pieces had assembled themselves on their own?”
“The world isn’t a watch, Mom.”
“The things you believe,” Ruthie said. “It simply breaks my heart. I wish we could talk about this, sweetheart.” They were coming up on I-90/94; she exited onto the cloverleaf and headed west. A highway sign urged people to give themselves a hug-buckle up, and stuck beneath the seat-belt graphic was a river angel bumper sticker: HONK IF YOU BELIEVE! Ruthie truly hated those things, but there wasn’t anything she could do about them. People sold them in town along with T-shirts and mugs and pins. Maya Paluski was in Seattle visiting friends for the summer, and she’d sent Ruthie a photo she’d taken of a Jaguar with California tags and THIS CAR PROTECTED BY THE RIVER ANGEL plastered across the bumper.
“Fine,” Cherish said. “Let’s talk.”
“Good,” Ruthie said, surprised.
“I’ll start,” Cherish said. “You say what I believe breaks your heart. But if you believe in what you say you believe in, then isn’t what I believe in simply part of God’s will?”
“Oh, honey,” Ruthie said. The first sign for Eau Claire appeared: 185 miles. Two crosses stood tall in the mown grass of the easement, fresh pink carnations braided around their necks. “There must have been an accident,” she said, trying to change the subject. Talking now would be a mistake; she could see that. They’d only spend the morning fighting. But Cherish wouldn’t let it go. She said, “I thought you didn’t believe in accidents.”
Ruthie looked at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean,” Cherish said, “you believe that everything is God’s will, right? So nothing can be an accident. People die, people live—but either way, it really doesn’t matter. So what if two people lost their lives back there. So what if some poor family is grieving. Give thanks in all circumstances. How many times in my life have you told me that?” The hot wind rippled through her hair.
“You’re twisting my words, and you know it.”
“Am I? All right. Let’s talk about the carnations, then. What a waste of money!” Ruthie winced; Cherish was mimicking her. “Dead people live with God; they have everything they need. If you’re going to give flowers, give them to the living.” She dropped back into her regular voice. “You told me that too, remember? Come on, Mom, you wanted to talk. We visited Dad’s grave every single Sunday for years, and we never once left flowers or pictures or anything. Anything. Didn’t you care about him? Didn’t you love him? Don’t you ever miss him?”
Ruthie was stunned. “How can you ask me that?”
“You’ve never acted like it. You never talk about him. You never even cried, not even at the funeral. And whenever I cried, you’d tell me that he’d only been on loan to us anyway and that he really belonged to God, and it was selfish to be unhappy when he was so very, very happy in heaven. Fine, OK, that’s what you believe. I guess I can deal with that. But then you get after me for reading Nietzsche. Mom, your ideas are more depressing than anything Nietzsche ever wrote. More fucked up too, if you want to know the truth.”
Ruthie gripped the steering wheel. She said very softly, “Don’t you ever, ever say that word to me.”
“Fucked up,” Cherish said, and she turned up the radio.
One hundred miles to Eau Claire. Gradually, the flat fields rolled themselves into wooded hills, rock formations rising between them, unexpected, ungainly as dinosaurs. The highway cut between granite walls; pink flecks ran through the veins. Seventy-five miles. Another white cross by the roadside: wildflowers dead in a clouded jelly jar, snapshots wrapped in plastic, a pale blue ribbon the color of ice. Someone’s life flashed past and was gone, was resurrected as Ruthie imagined the hands which had tied that ribbon, a woman’s hands, rough and shaking like her own. And the long weekly drive with the children to place the flowers at the site, and then the longer ride back, tempered with the promise of McDonald’s or Dairy Queen, salt and fat and sweetness that fooled nobody’s hunger. Where is Daddy and why has he gone? The woman’s tears brighter than her wedding diamond. The stares of the people in the restaurant. The children hushing themselves after spills. The same scene, week after week.
Ruthie hadn’t wanted Cherish to grow up in a house defined by grief. Death was a natural part of God’s plan; she didn’t want Cherish to fear. If Ruthie needed to cry, she went to her room and shut the door, sobbed into Tom’s bathrobe, which still hung from its wobbling hook, feeding the worn flannel into her mouth until she choked on its dust, gagged, spat it out. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes at most, and then it was over, her hair freshly combed, her throat and tongue raw with Listerine. Sundays after Mass, they walked from the church to the cemetery unburdened. No flowers. No photographs. Nothing but a small American flag, which blew away between their visits. Cherish always hunted it down in the ditch that ran alongside the gravestones, returning with the mementos and memorials of others: cards and letters, plastic flowers, angels, saints, and pinwheels. None of that was necessary, Ruthie explained, for Daddy had absolutely everything he needed. “Doesn’t he miss us?” Cherish said once, and before the tears could spill over, priming the wetness behind Ruthie’s eyes, she replied, “Of course not—he knows we’ll join him soon.” And yes, she had said it: “It’s selfish for us to cry.”
Selfish—also human, she realized now. Yet if one weren’t careful, grief could take over completely. The way Ruthie had nearly allowed it to do during those terrible months just after Tom’s death, a time she’d always hoped Cherish wouldn’t remember, would never discover on her own. Dear Lord, Ruthie prayed, tell me what to do. Forty-six miles. “Cherish,” she began, and she turned off the radio. And at last she felt the grace of God assembling the words she needed, placing them one by one, like mints, upon her tongue.
“A week or so after your father’s funeral,” she said, “I was driving down County O when I saw a car pull up by your father’s marker. A little red sporty thing. Something about it made me look twice. When it pulled away, I chased it in that old Ford we had—you remember it? But I couldn’t keep up. I turned around and came back home.” It had been a long time since Ruthie had talked about that red sports car. Lorna and Jolena and Shelley knew the story. And Maya. The founding members of the Circle of Faith. “But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. During the day, while you were in school, I’d bike out to the Neumillers’. I made myself a blind beneath a stand of hickory trees—the cows would gather round, and I’d flap my arms to scare them off—and I waited. The more I thought about it, the more I was absolutely certain that the driver of that sports car was responsible for your father’s death. I’d only caught a glimpse of him, but as time passed I began to see him clearly. He was handsome, in his late thirties, with blond hair turning silver and a gold ring on his hand. He had blue eyes and creases starting around his mouth. A thick neck. A leather watchband. And he was thinking he’d gotten away with something. Maybe even laughing about it—I knew there were people in the world who didn’t care what they did. Your grandmother was that way. Once, when I was a kid, she clipped a dog that was crossing the road. It had a silver collar, and I saw it spinning with its jaw smashed open—alive and everything, just badly hurt. But Gwendolyn told me, ‘Hang on, baby,’ and she shot right out of there, and when we got out to where the Badger State Mall is now, which is where we lived back then, she turned to me and said, ‘Looks like we got away with that one.’”
The little dog tumbling end over end. Like a punctured football. Like a knotted-up, worthless rag.
“And if you don’t think what goes around comes around,” Ruthie said, “let me tell you those words haunted me after Tom’s death. It got so I could hear that man’s voice in my ear. Got away with that one, he’d say. That’s when I took Tom’s thirty-eight from the attic. You think I’m making this up? I wrapped it in plastic and stashed it in the blind. By then school was out, and I sent you into town every chance I got: summer school, swimming lessons, sleep-overs, church camp. Do you remember?”
Cherish nodded. For once, she seemed to be listening. “I thought you didn’t want me around.”
“I didn’t. All I could think about was that man, how I’d be ready for him the day he came back, and when Stan Pranke stopped by the house one morning, I told him I’d found the suspect, I’d identified him by his little red sports car. And do you know what Stan said? The paint they found on your father’s car, on his body—it wasn’t red. It was white. From an older-model sedan. It had been in all the papers. And then Stan said he had Tom’s thirty-eight and he was going to hang on to it for me, until I felt better, and he hoped that would be soon. That’s when I started the Circle of Faith. That’s when I turned my anger over to God. And it was like my life was given back to me again.”
“I wish you’d told me,” Cherish said.
“How could I tell you something like that?” Ruthie said. “I didn’t want you feeling like you couldn’t have a normal life, like you had to think about him every minute of the day.”
“But when you don’t talk about someone, you lose the memory. That’s when a person is really dead. I can barely remember Dad anymore….”
For a long time, she looked out the window, and Ruthie was afraid she wouldn’t say anything more, that their last morning together would be spent in a silence as thick as gauze pressed over a wound. But then she said, “I never told you this, but that night on the bridge? I thought I saw him.”
“You saw Tom?” Ruthie’s voice rattled over his name.
“He was running toward me like he wanted to save me, and I was so glad to see him because it meant that I was wrong and there was a purpose to everything, we’d go on living forever, just like you’d always said. Something told me, OK, you’ve seen, now close your eyes. But I had to be certain. I kept my eyes open. Everything was spinning, but I didn’t shut my eyes.”
“What happened?”
Cherish laughed, a short, bitter sound. “It was only Paul,” she said. “That’s all I remember—except for you, in the hospital. And I remember thinking, Well, good. She finally knows the truth about me. And I finally know the truth about Dad.”
“No,” Ruthie said. “Give it another chance.”
“I should have closed my eyes,” Cherish said. “I can’t stop telling myself that—if only I’d closed my eyes. Then I could believe in everything you do. I’d think Dad was in heaven. I’d think some angel rescued Gabriel and that there was a God who could forgive us for what we did.”
Gwendolyn’s cheekbones. Gwendolyn’s face. But Ruthie had never once seen her mother cry. She gripped her daughter’s hand, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I was there.” They were coming into Eau Claire. “Mom, I just want to start over again. I want to get everything right.”
“We all want that,” Ruthie finally said. “It isn’t only you.”
They followed the general flow of traffic to the campus, where thousands of parents were already unloading their children in front of a series of box-shaped dorms. “Mine’s further down the circle,” Cherish said, but there wasn’t any way to pull closer, and already they were parked in, people springing from their cars, cutting bicycles and lamps from roof racks. So much commotion—radios blaring, returning students shrieking at the sight of old friends, dorm counselors shouting instructions on bullhorns, and above it all, thousands of parents arguing over the best way to unpack, unload, register. After so many months of dreading the moment of separation from Cherish, Ruthie actually found herself eager to leave. Instead she waited at the car for nearly two hours—“Do not leave your vehicle unattended!” the counselors bellowed—while Cherish got her keys, carried her suitcases up the steps into the building and then, as it turned out, up another four flights of stairs. The roommate was already present—actually, Cherish had two roommates. A counselor had promised a third bed was on the way.
“I don’t know where we’ll put it,” Cherish said. Already she looked at home here, on this campus, with these people—all of them waving hasty goodbyes to crestfallen families, setting off with newfound groups of friends. Even as Cherish checked the truck to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything, someone was hollering, “Hey, Cher? When you’re finished, we’re going to check out the union!”
“I guess you’re all set, then,” Ruthie said.
“I guess,” Cherish said. “Should I call you tonight?”
“No,” Ruthie said, surprising herself. “Take your time, settle in. Call me when you’re ready.”
“OK.” Cherish gave her a quick, tentative hug, and Ruthie smelled the sweet shampoo in her hair.
“I wish I had something I could give you,” she said. “A goodbye present.”
“Cash?” Cherish said, smiling.
“How about this?” Ruthie said, and she reached up and unhooked the Faith cross that had hung from her neck since the Circle’s first meeting. Cherish took it, watched it dangle from her hand. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “but it isn’t for me. I’m sorry, Mom, I really am.”
“I’ll wear it for you, then,” Ruthie said, and Cherish bent to fasten it back in its place. Then she straightened up, turned around, and walked away.
Driving home, Ruthie forced herself not to think about the empty house. It would be late afternoon by the time she arrived, shadows leaking over the courtyard from the barn. She tried to make plans: She’d have a fried egg sandwich, homemade applesauce for dessert. Maybe she’d go down to the cellar, open one of the few bottles of dandelion wine that remained from before Tom’s death. She’d call a few Faith members, ask them over to join her. They’d been talking about refurbishing the milk house for their meetings—this might be the time to sketch out some plans. But she kept thinking about Cherish on the bridge, the question Cherish could not stop asking: What if I’d only closed my eyes? It was the same question Ruthie had asked herself so many times since that morning in the barn. What if I’d simply shaken my head, dismissed what I’d seen as exhaustion? What if I’d simply called 911, said only, “I found him, come quickly”? But the fact was, she had seen. The fact was, she believed. She’d been called to bear witness—to what, she did not know. Perhaps that was what Cherish was trying to do: bear witness to something Ruthie could not see. Maybe the act, in itself, was its own salvation. Hadn’t Cherish’s book said something like that? Ruthie couldn’t remember. She told herself she could always look it up when she got home. But she knew that she wouldn’t, at least not now, the way she’d known that Cherish wouldn’t accept the cross she’d offered her.
A fried egg sandwich. A glass of Tom’s wine. Maybe she wouldn’t call anybody. Maybe she’d pull the curtains and sip her wine, and it would be as if Tom were still alive and she was just waiting for him to come home. Cherish would be in the barn, starting chores; there’d be fresh peach ice cream chilling in the freezer. As soon as the Bobcat rattled into the courtyard, she’d stick a stuffed summer squash in the oven, a tray of corn muffins to go with it. She’d greet Tom with a kiss, and they’d put on their boots and smocks and go out to the barn together, dreaming even then of the time when he could finally quit the post office and work the farm full time. How happy he would have been to see the land preserved for others to enjoy in his name. How proud he would have been to see Cherish on this day, and how unfair—Ruthie caught herself, tried, but could not block the thought—how wrong, dear Lord, that he couldn’t have been there, just this once, to see her walk away so steadily, to wave along with the other parents shouting, “Goodbye! Goodbye!”