My job at Turkey Hill consists of many jobs: running the information kiosk, preparing the displays, mowing the small front lawn in summer, helping to clear the nature trails of debris each spring. Today has been a quiet day, but as I’m getting ready to close the kiosk for the night, the bells on the front door jingle merrily and two women come inside. They’re wearing identical neat black coats, boots trimmed with stiff fake fur, and they stand beside the winter mammal display as if they are posing for a photograph already labeled and pasted in an imaginary scrap-book. Gloves bulge from their pockets, and the mouths of the purses they carry are sealed with scalloped clasps. One of the women is holding something; the other tugs off her kerchief, and the ripple of fabric, the blue and green and gold diamond pattern, reminds me of the sheer scarves my grandmother used to wear.
“We close in five minutes,” I say, and I continue sweeping the floor around the pellet dispensers, where, for a quarter, you can purchase a handful of food for the Canada geese outside. “Our winter hours started this week.” But I know I’ll let them poke around for a while. It’s my favorite time of day, no longer afternoon, not yet twilight, the feeling like the moment between wakefulness and sleep. Overhead, beyond the skylights, the dull shapes of clouds pass like coils of smoke, making the bird skeletons suspended from the high ceiling beams appear to be moving through the air. Only the golden eagle, posed on the ledge above the winter mammal display, keeps perfectly still. Its glass eyes shine the color of cracked corn, watching the small dry mice and slender quail, watching my progress with the broom, watching the women, who, I realize, haven’t moved since they first came inside. “Lottie thinks it’s her fault,” the woman with the kerchief calls to me, and as I cross the room, I see that her companion is cradling a great horned owl. Blood drools from its nares. “I told her maybe someone here could fix it.”
I reach for the owl, but a slight shift in Lottie’s weight lets me know she will not release it. One magnificent wing stretches away from its limp body, pulled long by its own weight, longer still, until the tip brushes the floor. There is no response when I press my index finger to the cornea. “I’m afraid it’s already gone,” I say. I can smell the women’s coats, that stale church smell of hair spray and liniment and sweet, sweet perfume. “Sometimes we work with a vet in Binghamton, but there’d be no point calling her now.”
“Fool thing flew up off the road, straight at us. Cracked the windshield,” the woman says. “Could have killed us both.” Her kerchief flutters beside her. “Oh, Lottie!” she says. “You got bugs all over you!”
Lice are streaming over Lottie’s hands and wrists, disappearing underneath the sleeves of her coat. “Bird lice,” I explain, my own skin itching in sympathy. “You can shower them off with regular soap. This kind of lice doesn’t like people.”
Again, I try to take the owl, but Lottie is staring into its crushed face, those liquid yellow eyes. I remember the time Auntie Thil hit a doe, driving us home from an ice-skating lesson—me and Sam, Monica and Harv. The doe was winter thin, ribs heaving, the tendons in her legs taut as string. She lay on the side of the highway and kicked, her body spinning around and around. We were in the back seat, looking and not looking as Auntie Thil got out of the car, hands outstretched in front of her the way you do when you’ve just said something unforgivable, when you just want to take it all back.
“Let me find something to put it in,” I say, and by the time I return with a plastic trash bag, Lottie is ready to let go. In a low, rough voice, she asks if she can wash her hands, and I point her toward the rest rooms. As she walks, the bottoms of her boots skim the floor as if the weight of them is almost too much to carry. The owl is a large specimen, probably a female. I turn to carry her over to the gift shop counter, and my ankle pops. I wince, catch my balance. “Are you all right?” Lottie’s companion says, and then, without waiting for my answer, “When’s your baby due? Christmas?”
“January,” I say, bracing myself; lately, I’ve found myself trapped in gruesome conversations about induced labor, cesarean sections, crib death. But this woman does not say anything more about it. She picks up one of our promotional mugs, on sale at $5.95. “Wild turkeys,” she says, examining the Turkey Hill logo. “They certainly are foolish-looking things.”
Lottie comes out of the bathroom, her mouth bright with fresh lipstick. She wanders over to the winter mammal display and stares out the big glass windows at the sun setting over the heated pond. Canada geese form a tight raft at the center; others walk in slow, proud pairs across the frozen lawn. There is snow in the clouds, in the softness of the light that deepens the sadness in Lottie’s thin face. She’s been crying, and I can see that this owl is just one more thing to be added to a long list of small, private sadnesses. On her way out the door, she stops at the donation box and slips something into it with the furtive look of the perennial almsgiver, one who knows she can never give enough. A person like Harv, who has taken vows of chastity, humility, poverty, believing that somehow he can suffer for us all.
I carry the owl down the narrow wooden steps to the basement. The walls are lined with snowshoes and cross-country skis, flashlights, NO TRESPASSING signs, an assortment of aging tools. On the back table, pinned to a piece of Styrofoam, is the Cooper’s hawk—found electrocuted on a fence—I finished preparing earlier today. People often bring us birds: a blue jay, a grosbeak, a waxwing. They open the shoe box, the paper bag, their own cupped hands, and it seems so wrong that even in death, the plumage is that same vivid blue or rust or ocher, soft to the touch, lifelike. Over the past few years, I’ve taught myself the fundamentals of taxidermy, keeping records of stomach contents and parasites, healed-over bones and half-formed eggs, reconstructing whatever moments I can from these small lost lives.
“How can you handle dead things like that?” my mother asks. But I’m fascinated by the way we live beyond ourselves, how our very bones can tell our stories. I lug the owl to the freezer, stacking and restacking the other, smaller birds like so many bundles of kindling, making room. Already, death is filling its body with a heaviness that doesn’t register on any scale. Poor Lottie, I think. How awful to drive home peering through that cracked windshield, wondering, What if I’d swerved, what if I’d gone a different route? What if. I unsnag my coat from its hook, dig a pocket’s worth of pellets from the storage barrel, and begin the long climb back up the stairs. My mother believes, the way my grandmother believed, that each tragic thing we suffer is a spiritual lesson, something we bring upon ourselves, something we deserve. My refusal to baptize the baby terrifies her, and it’s this last, blasphemous straw that has broken her determination to see the past decade of my life as simply a temporary lapse of faith. Our most recent fight was a week ago; we have not spoken since.
I lock the front doors, and the geese, hearing the chime of my keys, begin their slow migration out of the water. Their white cheeks shine like double moons. I spill the pellets from my pockets and they eat—snapping, hissing. The clouds descend, snuffing a sunset that looks like fire running wild along the horizon, and I remember the cannery fire, the same dark, cold November day that my grandmother remembered whenever she saw a rosy winter sky. “That’s just what it looked like in the distance,” she’d say, “like the sun going down at noon, like the end of the world had come.” She’d told me over and over how she’d known all along that the cannery was no place for girls. The dusty air gave them coughs that lasted through the summer; the noise left them cocking their heads—What did you say?; there were rumors that the foremen used bad language. But my grandmother wanted money to buy sugar and seed, cloth and fertilizer, all the things that had run low since my grandfather’s death, and so, each day, she sent Mary and Elise to meet the cannery truck that lurched from farm to farm at dawn, collecting workers.
The morning of the fire, the wind froze the air in people’s noses and sealed the eyes of the cattle, grinding its way through scarves and cloaks and wool stockings, speaking in the white voice of static, making it hard to hear. There was half a foot of hard-crusted snow on the ground. Zero degrees in November! the mothers cried, hurrying their daughters off to work. Zero degrees in November! the fathers cursed, out in the barns already, hands so cold they’d become weak. Zero degrees! the girls crowed as they greeted one another at the cannery, hurrying toward the hum of the machines.
The first oily belch of smoke was torn into loose ribbons, wavering on the horizon like the shadows of large birds. Children pressed up against windows to stare; mothers and fathers finishing chores, crossing at a run from barn to shed, from shed to house, from house to henhouse, now paused and danced in place, refusing to understand. Then they dropped the eggs, the bales of straw, the tins of milk, hollering against the wind, running for trucks and cars. The smoke was thickening, funneling into the clouds, a slanted black arrow with a blazing root. People came from Oneisha and Farbenplatz, Ooston, Horton, Holly’s Field, and by the time the fire truck arrived from Fall Creek, a line had formed to pass buckets of snow, which liquefied in midair. Men and women flung off their coats, rolled up their sleeves as if preparing to fight, danced forward with their buckets until their faces browned like pork and the hair on their arms turned to ash and blew away. But the heat forced them back, the water splashed short. The wind roared, feeding the fire, snatching the words out of people’s throats, though behind the sound of the wind were the other cries, fierce at first, then fading like smoke. My grandmother never stopped believing my young aunts’ deaths had been her fault, the result of her lack of faith that God Himself would provide.
“Watch out what you want or you’ll get it,” she’d say whenever I began a sentence with I wish or I want or Wouldn’t it be nice. To want was to take the reins from God’s hand. To want was to suggest that you yourself presumed to know what was best. When she started to work outside the home, my mother began to want, to wish and dream. A career woman, people said, and when Sam disappeared and never came back, they consoled her with the cruel, fevered look of the righteous. When I went away to college and then stayed away for good, it was clear my mother had gotten what she had been foolish enough to ask for. Watch out what you want. I toss the last handful of pellets to the geese, and the wind unwinds the scarf from my neck. The air smells faintly of wood smoke; the trees are scorched black and bare. How much longer will I find myself remembering pain that is not my own, raw and undigested hurts belonging to the communities of Oneisha, Ooston, Farbenplatz, Horton, Holly’s Field? Stories told again and again until they belong to us all. My grandmother’s grief becomes my mother’s. My mother’s fear becomes my own.
“Harv called,” Adam says as he lets me into the house. It’s good to find him here, warm cooking smells wafting in from the kitchen. “He said he’d call back later.”
“What did he want?”
“He wouldn’t say, but I can guess.” Adam’s voice holds the same weariness I feel. “What will your mother try next? A call from the Pope? Crusades?”
“Harv wouldn’t get involved in this,” I say, but Harv doesn’t call without a reason. Our relationship has been cautious ever since I left the Church. The last time we talked, I was still in Baltimore, living in sin with Adam; he’d been nervous, awkward, reluctant to speak. “Your mother,” he finally said, “wants me to let you know that I’m here in case you ever want to talk about your faith.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Well,” Harv said, “I told her I’d say that, even though I knew you’d just tell me to mind my own business.”
“Mind your own business,” I said, but I had started laughing because he sounded so foolish and shy.
“And it’s another success for the good father,” he said in his dry, self-deprecating way. “Another lost sheep returned safely to the fold. My God, they should have me canonized.”
I was still laughing. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Promise you’ll tell your mother I argued with you for hours. Tell her I quoted Scripture. Tell her I threatened to have God strike you dead.”
“I’ll tell her,” I said, and then we both relaxed and talked about other things. But before we hung up, he said, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose my faith.”
I didn’t say anything. Was he going to make some sort of religious pitch after all?
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“What’s it like? I mean, as a kid you were just as devout as I was. You were even praying for a vocation for a while.”
I told him the truth. “It’s lonely.”
There was a pause as he thought this over; I could almost see him shaking his head. “I can’t imagine,” he said again.
As I wash my hands for supper, I tell Adam about the ranch house where Harv and Monica grew up, the pond in the back, which Olaf decorated with floating plastic ducks. How, in winter, he set the temperature to sixty before locking the thermostat controls back inside their plexiglass box. How even the toilet paper was rationed: one square for number 1, two squares for number 2. Adam listens to me with the expression of someone who’s waiting for the punch line. “I’ve told you all this before,” I insist, but he shakes his head.
“You never talk about your family.”
“Well, now you see why.”
We are laughing as we sit down to the supper he has made: meat loaf and green beans, potatoes with gravy. “Watch him call again right now,” Adam says, and with that the phone starts to ring.
“Let me get it,” he says. “I’ll tell him you’ll call back when we’re done eating.”
He goes down the hall and picks up the phone. I play connect the dots with his responses, and the picture I come up with isn’t a friendly one. Steam rises from the meat loaf, and I hear Adam say, “Look, you can just tell me. Did Therese ask you to call?”
“Adam, don’t! Let me talk to him,” I yell, but before I can get up, Adam’s standing in the doorway.
“Great,” I say. “All I need is a fight with Harv too.”
I push past him to the phone. “Harv?” I say. “Hi, Harvard. Look—”
“When have I ever pushed my beliefs on you?” It takes me a moment to recognize Harv’s voice; I can’t remember ever hear ing him angry. Adam is standing beside me, too close. “Your mother asked me to call you,” Harv says, “because they found the remains of your brother in a dry well on the Luchterhand’s old property. The ID came back positive this morning.”
For over ten years, I have imagined this phone call, expected it, dreaded it, wished for it. But what Harv has just said cannot be true. I shrug Adam’s hand off my shoulder; I’m so relieved I start to laugh. “That’s crazy,” I say, almost smugly.
“The developers found him. They were digging a foundation for those condos going in. There must have been an old home-stead along the bluff. Even the Luchterhands didn’t know about it.”
“Mom told me about that subdivision,” I say. “She says the Luchterhands made out like bandits when they sold that land. She’s thinking she could sell our place for some serious bucks.”
“Did you hear what I just told you?”
A strange thought is occurring to me: This is real.
“Abby,” Harv says. “Listen. They also found the knife Geena Baumbach described, which means Sam was one of those boys who…” I pass the phone to Adam and go back into the kitchen. Everything looks delicious. Should I wait for Adam, or should I eat now? I can hear him asking questions about Sam, and it annoys me to hear him speak my brother’s name. You never even met him, I want to say. I help myself to a slice of the meat loaf. He’s mixed the meat with chopped sweet onions, the way I like it best, then baked it with bread and egg and dried tomatoes from our garden. I spread my slice with mashed potatoes, thick as sour cream, and drizzle gravy on top. It’s hot, but I’m greedy, I swallow it down. Next I ladle green beans onto my plate; I pop them into my mouth with my fingers.
“Did he fall down there by accident or did someone…” I can’t hear the rest. Then, “How can they know what really happened?”
I cut another slice of meat loaf, cover it with ketchup. Adam hates it when I do this; ketchup, he says, is an insult to meat. I fill my glass with milk and drink it down in long, aching gulps. I’ve drifted through this pregnancy on a shallow wave of nausea that leaves everything around me dull, unappealing. But tonight the food has color again; I taste salt, sweet, the richness of beef. Adam comes back into the kitchen, stops, stares at the collage of food on my plate.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have waited. I was just so hungry.”
“It’s OK,” Adam says. “Harv says you should call him back when you can. Your mother is staying with his mother, and she doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
“I think I’d like dessert,” I say. “Do we have anything sweet in the house?”
“We’ll come up with something,” Adam says. He himself doesn’t seem to have much of an appetite, but he sits with me as I finish my meal, and afterward he makes baked apples for dessert. When I start to get up to clear the dishes, he puts his hand on mine, holding me in place. Then he tells me everything he’s learned about my brother—tells me over and over until I hear him, until I understand.
Sam wouldn’t do a think like that. My mother’s voice, a fragment of a dream I can’t remember, awakens me in the gray hour before true dawn. I get up to go to the bathroom, marveling at the way familiar things look unfamiliar at this time of day: the toothbrush, the soap, the long, limp slope of the bath towels. The sound of my mother’s voice winds around me like the refrain of a simple-minded song. A thing like that—her euphemism. I put on my bathrobe and creep to the kitchen, the cold floorboards biting the balls of my feet, and I sit in the rocking chair beside the French doors as light spills over the tops of the trees like a slow, persistent leak. The baby awakens, and for the first time I feel its conscious presence. It knows me, I think with amazement. And I don’t know whether to feel comforted or afraid.
A thing like that. My mother and I heard Geena Baumbach’s story from my grandmother, and it’s not hard to imagine how it was. What woman hasn’t awakened in the night to a noise that shapes itself into a man’s heavy footstep? What woman cannot hear of a break-in and see that same shadow fall across her own bed? Mrs. Baumbach remembered it had been a long day of tornado warnings, the sky above the swollen lake purple as the underside of a tongue. Twice, a peculiar twisting finger bled through the cloud cover to touch the fields the way a child might slip a sly finger into a bowl of cake batter—just to taste. Late in the afternoon, Father Van Dan came over at a run. The wind flapped his black skirts into a frenzy, and when he leapt up onto her porch, his hair was standing on end. “Don’t go taking chances, Geena,” he said. Lightning shattered the sky like an omen. “Come on over with the rest of us.” But Mrs. Baumbach was unwilling to spend a day in the basement of the church, making small talk, playing cards, drinking lukewarm coffee with the group of nervous parishioners who lived in the trailer park west of Oneisha. She had work to do: a sinkful of dishes humming with flies, that tacky kitchen floor she’d been meaning to wash for days, the set of matching pot holders she wanted to finish on time for her niece’s wedding shower. She showed Father the pattern—two pale yellow geese, their long lovers’ necks entwined, a sprinkle of daisies beneath them.
“I still got some git left in me,” she told him. “I can run over quick as a rabbit if I must.”
“You think a rabbit won’t get blown away?”
“Not this rabbit.”
Father Van Dan studied her face to see how firmly she’d made up her mind. “Suit yourself,” he finally said, and she watched him dash back to the church, a wayward crow fighting the wind. For a while, she thought she might go on over to the church basement after all. There’d be plenty to do helping Sister Mary Andrew and Sister Mary Gabriel with the clutter of coffee and Kool-Aid and Styrofoam cups, the tangle of children forced to share toys, the anxious parents worrying over fallen trees and flying glass. But now the worst of the storm seemed to be blowing out over Lake Michigan, and her kitchen was finally clean. She was happy she’d stayed at home. She hung a fresh strip of flypaper from the light fixture and made herself a cold supper: sardines and soda crackers, a can of diet cola, and—a treat—two butter cookies from the Christmas tin in the closet. She relished those cookies, allowing each one to melt into velvety slush between her teeth. The heat didn’t bother her much. The lightning was far away, delicate as thread. Harmless.
A thick fish smell from the lake drifted in through the open windows, ruffling the homemade curtains with their embroidered heart borders, shivering through the leaves of the plants suspended by macraméd hangers, shuffling through the pile of letters and bills and advertisements on the coffee table. The storm was spinning itself into the lake; tomorrow night after work, she might drive to Herringbone Beach to look for the interesting pieces of driftwood and polished glass she used to make Christmas tree ornaments. She settled down on the sofa to finish her niece’s pot holders. The portable radio beside her crackled with bursts of static like laughter. Ninety-two degrees. Humidity ninety percent. Tornado warnings in effect throughout Wisconsin until midnight. She pictured the families in the basement of the church, unfolding the cots, passing out pillows and sheets, snacking on peanut butter and jelly. There was no need for all that; this was clear. You just had to smell the air. She hummed to herself as she worked. The twilight passed into evening.
What woman hasn’t had the uneasy feeling that she’s being watched, stripped bare of potential and promise, broken down into muscle and sinew, bone and flesh? Mrs. Baumbach was seventy-six years old, a widow, an innovative cook, Father Van Dan’s closest friend outside the clergy. She made toys for the parish children out of toilet paper rolls and egg cartons and glitter; she was admired for her watercolor paintings of lakefront scenes. She kept the books at the rectory, something she’d taught herself to do. Oneisha was a town of less than seven hundred people, a place where people proudly announced that no one ever locked doors. Of course, there were incidents now and then: teenage boys speeding up the Fox Ranch Road; drunkenness; rabid animals; family disagreements; the occasional suicide.
Now Mrs. Baumbach was finding it difficult to concentrate. She got up to pull the shades, the fish smell oiling the back of her throat, and then—an odd impulse—she walked around the tiny house, latching screens. Perhaps the weather had unnerved her. Perhaps the butter cookies had been too rich. The wind whispered in the bushes as she sat back down to her work. It was after nine by the time the last puckered daisy was sewn into place. She thought about all the years she’d lived alone, how feelings like these had come and gone, leaving nothing in their wake but a vague sense of foolishness. She peeked between the curtains. The town was dark. There were no stars. She got into bed, tugged her white cotton nightgown over her knees, and pulled the sheet up to her lips.
She would never be able to remember their faces. She would never be able to say, exactly, how many boys there were. Five or six, she thought. Maybe two. She was certain the time was after midnight—or was it? No, she had just gone to bed. It took several days before she could weave a ragged story from the scraps, the false cuts, the oddly shaped pieces: faces like white moons hanging too close; the rough talk; the forced walk to the kitchen as they took turns stepping on the back of her nightgown. Certainly local boys wouldn’t do such a thing. Certainly they must be boys nobody knew. She sat at the table with her head in her hands as one of them opened the refrigerator, pulled the pickle relish and mustard and cherry Jell-O onto the clean linoleum floor. The juice pitcher shattered, and the boys kicked at the pieces, grinding them under the heels of their combat boots. Bitch. We’re hungry. Cook us something. Cook us some eggs. And there was the knife, its question-mark tip: Won’t you do as I ask? She got up and walked on her bare feet through the glass. She collected, eggs, margarine, milk. She turned on a burner, reached for a pan.
The smell of the margarine melting too fast. The smell of the boys, their sweet cologne, and the cigarettes they smoked as they waited for her to feed them. Sweat. The smell of her lilac talc rising from the folds of her nightgown. The pop and hiss of the eggs in the fat. The scold of the bacon, its irritable writhing. The angry burn of toast left too long in the broiler. The boys’ mouths opening and closing over their laughter. Her own mother’s voice like a faraway dream: The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. They found her Christmas tin of butter cookies and swallowed them, one by one.
What woman cannot recognize hunger? What woman can live for long in this world without being seen as merely a body, nourishment, egg and margarine, breast and belly, mouth and hip? Sam loved eggs—scrambled, poached, fried, hard-boiled, slathered with ketchup or mayonnaise. His favorite meal was a fried egg sandwich, which my mother often made on weekends, and as children we’d compete to see who could avoid rupturing the yolk, as my father intoned, Don’t play with your food. I was allowed to make soft-boiled eggs for our after-school snacks; I served them in metal egg cups, so we could knock off their heads with a spoon, scoop up the salty yolk with the buttered tip of a piece of toast. Mrs. Baumbach could not remember how many eggs she prepared. She could not remember the boys’ hungry faces. She could not remember how many boys there were. Maybe there were five boys. Maybe there were three. The only thing she was certain of was the knife—its unusual tip, its dark leather grip.
It was the parishioners coming up out of the church basement, heading home after the all clear had sounded on the radio, who saw the light in Mrs. Baumbach’s kitchen window. Someone noticed a torn window screen flapping like an injured wing. Someone called, “Hello-oh! Geena, are you still up?” while someone else, stepping through the wet lawn toward the back of the house, caught the last rush of a man’s shape disappearing into the tall field of corn. The parishioners gave chase, but corn swallows everything: raccoons, skunks, foxes, dogs, unmindful children. Don’t go into the corn, we were warned every year, but there was always another story of a child who disobeyed, wandering miles into the corn before he or she was found, dehydrated, exhausted, even dead. While the men searched the fields, the women cleaned up the mess in the kitchen and did the dishes and wiped the counters and straightened the house and swept the porch clear of last year’s leaves—whatever they could do to help out, to put things right. The police, arriving from Horton, would find no footprints, fingerprints, no physical evidence of any kind. And the next day, a medical exam revealed that Mrs. Baumbach had not been hurt, though she required twenty stitches in her feet. Surely there had been at least four boys. Surely they were boys nobody knew.
The sun is coming up now; the tips of the bare trees quiver like the warning hairs along a dog’s curved back. It should not take long for the police to reconstruct the ghost of my brother’s last hours. I called Harv back for the facts, and here, at last, is the evidence I’ve needed. The ruptured well cover. The broken bones: left tibia, right femur, a shattered ankle, three cracked ribs. The knife, by now encased in plastic, labeled along with the other samples: teeth, hair, bits of rotted denim. For the rest of my life, I’ll see Sam walking through the fields, through narrow strips of woods, following the lakefront toward the house where we are sleeping. Coming home. And I’ll wonder, What if he’d made it back?
Adam comes into the kitchen, stands behind me, presses his lips to my hair, and I cry harder because this feels so insincere, these tears that he thinks he understands. Last night, after talking to Harv, I called my mother at Auntie Thil’s, wincing at the cheery message on her answering machine: Hi, it’s Mathilde! So sorry to have missed you!
“Mom?” I said. “Are you there? Pick up. Please, pick up.”
But no one did.
“Mom, please,” I said. “I’ll try again later. Call me as soon as you can.” How I want to tell her that Sam was lost long before he disappeared. How I want to tell her what I could not tell my grandmother: It was not your fault.
How badly my mother wanted to work at the cannery with her sisters, but she was young, always too young. Watch out what you want or you’ll get it, my grandmother said, but my mother stared after them longingly when they left the house, laughing and swinging their lunch pails. Summers they spent sorting vegetables, picking bad beans and stray leaves and dead field mice from a conveyor belt; in winter, they bottled the company’s sweet fruit pop: cherry, orange, grape, lime. Mary, seventeen and known for her capable nature, supervised Elise and the other girls, warning them whenever the man they called The Company was coming by tugging her kerchief low on her forehead. It was noisy work, hot in the summer, cold in the winter, sticky with sugar and dust. The day of the fire, they went to work with scarves wrapped around their noses and hot potatoes tucked in their pockets to warm their hands. It had snowed six inches the day before, and another six inches stretched the faces of the clouds. Keep warm, the mothers murmured as they sent their daughters out to board the company pickup, which went from farm to farm, and because it was a Saturday, the bed of the truck was filled with teenage girls and women, huddled into the straw.
Keep warm, mothers told their husbands and sons and younger daughters as they split up at the barns to do chores. The mothers milked, pressing their foreheads into the cows’ warm sides, wondering about their daughters who must be standing on those awful wet concrete floors by now, shivering under those high fans, which blew chill air across their shoulders. The mothers calculated again how much the family needed that little bit of money. The mothers worried over frostbitten toes and misshapen ears, poor circulation, wool. The mothers planned what they would fix that night for supper—thick meat stew over mashed potatoes, pepper-and-flour gravy, buttered beans, steaming tea laced with honey and a splash of lemon extract. Lord God, the mothers prayed, keep them warm.
Sam’s burial must be delayed until after the ground thaws, and so it’s May by the time I fly back to Wisconsin, my first trip home in more than ten years. Adam cannot come with me; spring is his busy time. For the past three weeks he’s been working on an apartment complex going up south of Cobblestone. When the sun sets, the crew works by artificial light, and there are nights when he doesn’t get home until midnight. Sometimes I’m up feeding the baby, and Adam stretches out on the floor beside the rocking chair, still wearing his dirty clothes. “I feel like we’re the subjects of a sleep deprivation experiment,” he says. By seven-thirty, he’ll be on his way back to the site; I’ll have fed Joe at least once more before he goes. For me, the days and nights have blurred: the baby cries and I feed him; I sleep and the baby cries. He has colick, and there are times when nothing will comfort him. Then, I leave him wailing in his crib and walk out onto the deck, and I’ll stand there for a long minute, breathing in the piney scent of the woods, before going back inside. And yet, when I drop him off at the sister’s to go to Turkey Hill, it’s everything I can do to leave him behind.
He screams all the way from Albany to Chicago, but by the time we board the plane to Milwaukee, he gives up and sleeps until our descent. In the airport lobby, I see my mother first and though, of course, I’m expecting to see she has aged, I’m not prepared for how much she is starting to resemble my grandmother. Her hair is permed tight to her head and rinsed a uniform steely gray. She’s eating an ice cream cone with the same unself-conscious enjoyment that used to annoy my father, embarrass Sam and me. “Mm!” she’d say, biting a piece of fruit, chewing a slice of meat, her eyes rolling blissfully, reverently. When she sees me, she extends the ice cream like a bouquet. “Try this,” she says—her first words to me, in person, since her visit to New York—and what can I do but take a big sloppy bite? Before I can object, she’s given Joe some on the tip of her pinkie finger. “He won’t know why,” she tells me, “but years from now, when he thinks of his grandma, he’ll always remember something sweet.”
Driving home from the airport, she tells me she’s putting the house on the market, she’s found an apartment near her office in Sheboygan. “I guess I should be more nostalgic,” she says, “but now that I’ve made up my mind, I’m eager to get rid of it.” As we pull into the driveway, I see the exterior has been freshly painted, and all the old car parts and broken appliances are gone, leaving bald patches in the grass. Inside, I admire the new linoleum in the kitchen, the bright fixtures, the wood banister polished to a rich, glowing warmth. But the water still runs yellow in the bathrooms. The fruit trees have grown too old to bear; the barn finally collapsed last year. Sam’s bedroom in the basement smells of mildew, and though my mother has replaced the carpet, it’s already dark along the edges, slick with wet.
I feed Joe in the living room, sitting in the white wicker rocking chair that used to be in my bedroom. Half-packed boxes are scattered everywhere, and the walls are bare of photographs. Elise’s piano occupies the space where the couch once was; the couch itself is gone. “The new place will be much smaller than this,” my mother says when I ask, and she shows me a picture of the complex she’ll be living in, her unit circled with red pen. “If you want any furniture, let me know.”
She glances at the piano. At various times, she’s suggested moving it to New York, but I always say she should keep it. My grandmother gave it to me as an instrument, not an ornament, and I don’t want to see it sitting in my house, day after day, a silent reproach. “Why not offer it to Monica?” I say.
“I promised your grandmother I’d keep it until you were ready to have it.”
“You did? When was this?”
“Oh, way back. Before you got married.”
“It’s been longer than that since I’ve played. I’ve probably forgotten everything.”
I shift Joe to my other breast, and my mother watches, suddenly shy.
“You were the only one I breast-fed,” she says. “By the time Sam was born, the doctors had decided formula was better. Now they’ve changed their minds again. You can’t imagine.” She shakes her head. “There I was, taking pills to dry up my milk, and Sam would be screaming his head off because he had to wait while I warmed the formula. It didn’t make sense, that mother’s milk wasn’t good for babies. But I went along with it anyway.”
“Why?”
My mother sighs. “That’s just how it was back then. When Doctor told you something, you did it. It was a different generation. We didn’t question things the way you do today.”
I tense, waiting; it’s the closest she’s come to bringing up the baptism since Sam was found. But she says nothing more. Later, after supper, we play cards at the kitchen table, discussing everyone and everything but ourselves. It occurs to me that tomorrow is Sam’s burial, and yet neither one of us is mentioning it. It’s like something that happened years ago, distant as my father’s leaving or my grandmother’s death. We talk about the rising price of real estate, people moving in from as far away as Chicago, eager for a country setting. “The broker says I can get one seventy-five for this place,” my mother says. “Can you believe it?”
“You’re rich,” I say. “What are you going to do with all that money?”
“Some of it’s your father’s,” she says. “The rest—I don’t know. I guess you’ll inherit it at some point.”
“You should take a vacation. Go on a cruise.”
My mother makes a face.
“Or buy a sports car. Something red and sexy.”
She laughs. “Maybe I’ll ship you that piano,” she says. “Whether you want it or not.”
“Not.”
“You might use it if you had it. Especially now, with Joe. It’s nice for a child to grow up with music in the house.” We’ve drifted away from our card game, and now my mother turns her hand faceup on the table. “Well,” she says, and she stands, yawning. “Think about it. I’m going to turn in; how about you?”
I’ll be sleeping in my old bedroom; my mother has set up the same bassinet that Sam and I once slept in. She brings me extra blankets, a glass of water for the nightstand. “Sleep well,” she says, but I don’t. I’m restless with half-dreams, unable to get comfortable. The wind picks up. A tree branch thumps the side of the house like an irregular heartbeat. When Joe starts crying around midnight, I’m almost grateful. I change him, prop myself uncomfortably against the headboard to feed him. He’s fussy; he won’t take much. He cries off and on for an hour or so before, at last, he closes his eyes. I ease him back into the bassinet, lie down, and will myself to fall asleep. I’m almost there when I hear the floor creak beside my bed. Old houses, I tell myself. Wind. The floor creaks again. I think of Sam’s friend sitting beside me on this very bed. The gleam of the knife. I open my eyes, and a low sound escapes from my mouth before I can stop it.
“Shh, it’s all right,” my mother says.
I sit up. I’m shaking so hard the bed shakes too.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep. I just wanted to look in on the baby.”
“It’s OK,” I manage to say. The tree branch thumps the side of the house.
She sits on the bed. “Listen to the wind. I hope the weather’s good for tomorrow.”
“Could you pass me that water?” I say, and I take the glass, drink, water dribbling down my chin.
“I must have really frightened you,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m all right.”
“He’s such a beautiful baby,” she says. “he looks a lot like Adam, don’t you think?”
“Sometimes.”
She pats my hand. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
But in the morning, I find a note in the kitchen; my mother has gone in to her office for a couple of hours. I fix myself toast and eat it, wandering from room to room with Joe balanced on my hip. I’s an overcast, windy day, and the house seems smaller, darker than I remember it. In the living room, I notice my mother has pulled the blanket off the piano, opened the cover to reveal the keys. Sly move, I think, but I finish my toast and sit down at the bench. My left hand is occupied with Joe; I attempt a C-major arpeggio with my right. I miss. Joe stiffens at the dissonant sound. I get his blanket from the kitchen, spread it out for him on the floor. He kicks happily and I go back to the piano, try the arpeggio again. I execute a chromatic scale. I feel my way through the beginning of a Chopin Prelude. Suddenly it’s almost noon, and my mother is standing in the doorway, listening.
“That’s how you always were,” she says. “The world could have fallen down around you, and you wouldn’t even have noticed.”
“How was work?” I say, trying to change the subject.
“Busy,” she says. “Cindy Pace will be at the service.”
“That’s nice.”
“Look how the baby’s listening,” my mother says. And it’s true: Joe is wide-eyed, jerking the way he does when he’s excited. “Maybe he’s got your good ear.”
“Or Sam’s,” I say, surprising myself.
My mother sighs. “It doesn’t make any difference now to think of everything I’d do differently. But I wish I’d stood up to your father more when it came to Sam’s interest in things like this.” She lifts Joe into her arms, brushes her lips against the top of his head. “You could always escape if you had to. But Sam had nowhere to go.”
“Neither did you.”
“I had my work,” she says. Then, correcting herself, “Have it. And my faith, of course. That’s a comfort.” She hands Joe to me before I can say anything. “We better get ready for the service.”
“Mom,” I say. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I’d like the piano after all.”
She looks at me curiously. “Really?”
“Don’t give me a chance to change my mind.”
“You know, I almost broke down and gave it away last year.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I told you,” she says. “I promised your grandmother I’d keep it for you.”
Sam will be buried at Saint Ignatius Cemetery; the service is set for two o’clock. Harv is driving down from his parish in Peshtigo to perform the ceremony. My mother and I arrive hopelessly early, but Auntie Thil is already there. She hugs me long and hard, exclaims over Joe, helps me negotiate him into his harness. The sky promises rain, and I button my jacket around us both. “It must feel strange to be back,” Auntie Thil says, but what’s strange is that it doesn’t. Looking past the stubble of the graves, I see the flat fields stretching mile after mile, and it occurs to me that this is the landscape of dreams, of nightmares in which you run as fast and as far as you can, only to discover you haven’t left the place you started from.
“I sure hope the rain holds off,” my mother says as we start down the dirt service road that bisects the cemetery.
“They had hail to the north,” Auntie Thil says.
“That’s unusual for spring.”
“Doesn’t it seem like the weather gets crazier every year?”
“Along with the rest of the world.”
They continue talking about the weather, seemingly oblivious to the gravestones all around us, and I remind myself that they come here all the time to tend the family plot. But when they stop to admire the wildflowers growing in the ditch, I walk on ahead. Already, I can see the new rectangular stone that belongs to Uncle Olaf. Auntie Thil’s name is etched beneath his, a blank space left for the date of her own death. And beside it is Sam’s wide-open grave, shadowed by a pile of rust-colored dirt. Coming closer, I see his coffin has already been lowered inside, white with gold trim, an other world star in that odd dirt sky. My eyes burn with sudden tears; I blink, look away. To the left are the spring flower beds around my aunts’ graves, and here is my grandfather’s plot, the only decoration a tiny American flag. My grandmother shares his headstone, of course, and I touch her name: Gretchen Anna Grussen, 1910-1994. I want to believe that she sees me, that she’s with Sam in the heaven she always described with absolute certainty. I wish her angels blowing trumpets, streets paved in gold. I wish her the faces of Mary and Elise, forever young and whole.
Thunderheads hang on the horizon, and the light has that peculiar glassy quality that intensifies color, making the sky seem close enough to touch. When I look back down the service road, I see that my mother and Auntie Thil have started picking wild-flower bouquets. The irregular peaks of their conversation come to me on the damp gusts of wind. I wave, and they wave back, but they don’t make any move to join me. Other people are arriving now—mostly members of my mother’s prayer group, I suspect, plus a few people from A-1 Advertising. They carry umbrellas, glance nervously at the clouds. I recognize Cindy Pace; she smiles and nods to me, and I nod back. When I overhear one woman ask another, “So is Gordon going to be here?” I deliberately focus all my attention on Joe, making sure he’s warm enough, adjusting his harness. I’m not sure what my mother has told people; I don’t want to be the one they ask. My father wanted to come to the funeral, but he just isn’t able to travel anymore. Each year he grows more locked into routine, more terrified of crowds, sickness, disease. Yet, in a strange way, he’s grown closer to my mother and me. When we call, he picks up the phone, keeps us talking for hours. After Joe was born, I sent him a whole roll of pictures, and he actually wrote back, a letter filled with advice about electrical outlets and swallowed coins.
When I look up again, Harv is walking briskly down the service road. He sees me and breaks into a clumsy run, his long robe tangling around his legs. “Careful,” I say as he bends down to hug me, and then I feel his body freeze, as he realizes the baby is between us.
“Can I see?” he asks, and I unbutton my coat, trying to reveal as much of Joe’s face as I can. The bags beneath Harv’s eyes are the color of strong tea. I’ve heard from my mother how busy he has been, serving a combined parish of six hundred people, driving hundreds of miles each week throughout the rural townships north of Peshtigo.
“My goodness, he’s a tiny thing,” Harv says, using the baby voice people adopt without even realizing it, and I love him for it. “How old is he?”
“Three months, three weeks,” I say. “Mom was hoping he’d be born on Sam’s birthday, but he held out till the middle of January.”
“Good for him,” Harv says. “It’s rotten to share a birthday.” He stares at me fondly, and I stare back. “So what’s it like?” he asks. “Having a baby, I mean. Being a parent and all that,” and I remember him asking me, long ago, So what is it like to lose your faith? His voice had been incredulous, almost reverent, eager for my answer. The way it is now.
“It’s hard,” I say. “You never really know if you’re doing things right.”
“Like serving God,” Harv says.
“Not that bad,” I say. “Babies give you more concrete feedback.”
But Harv doesn’t smile. “I envy you,” he says. “I think I would have been good with kids. I sure would have been better at it than my dad was.”
“Or mine,” I say.
It’s almost two o’clock. Monica and Ray are walking toward us across the grass, towing children and assorted stuffed animals. “I guess I better let you mingle,” Harv says, and he kisses my cheek. “See you after the service, OK?” While he greets people, I intercept Monica, who introduces me to her boys, David and Donovan. Ray is carrying their third child, four-year-old Daisy, in his arms; she struggles to be put down. By now there are about two dozen people waiting by Sam’s grave, and when Harv takes his place beside it, everybody steps into a loose half-circle. Donovan asks me if he can hold Joe.
“Later,” I tell him. “He’s sleeping now, OK?” The rush of disappointment sharpening his face makes me want to cry.
“Don’t worry about it,” Monica tells me as Donovan hides against her hips. “He’s at that age when they take everything personally.”
“And some never outgrow it, believe me,” says a woman standing with a teenage girl who has to be her daughter. The girl blushes, and I remember the exquisite embarrassment I felt at that age, pinned in the spotlight of this cruel, kindly laughter. My mother and Auntie Thil are finally coming to join us, and I desperately want them to hurry, I want this to be over, I can’t imagine waiting one moment longer. My mother has a handful of wild irises. She passes them to me; the stems are wet and pungent. I lift the flowers to my face, but the blossoms themselves have no scent.
“Are you sure that baby’s warm enough?” Auntie Thil asks.
“He’s fine.”
“It’s a long day for such a small baby,” my mother says.
“For kids too,” Auntie Thil says. David is hanging on Monica’s purse in the deliberate, dead-weight pose of a very bored child. Donovan has started to cry. Daisy has managed to slip off one shoe, and she stands, sock-footed, in the wet grass. “This isn’t going to work,” Ray says to Monica. “I’m taking them inside. We’ll meet you afterwards, OK?” She nods, wiping her hand across her forehead in an exaggerated gesture of relief, and he leads the children across the street toward the entrance to the church basement, where, already, volunteers from Ladies of the Altar have set up chairs, spread tables with paper tablecloths, counted scoops of Folgers into tall metal percolators.
“It’s a long day for us all,” my mother says to no one in particular, and for the first time she looks down at Sam’s grave, at the bright white coffin, which I realize she must have chosen by herself. She removes her glasses, puts them back on. She frowns at the grass, frowns at the sky, fighting tears. Harv has been trying to catch her eye; now, at last, she looks at him, and he clears his throat, hushing us, begins. And still it doesn’t seem real, it doesn’t seem possible that Sam is really inside this clean white casket. Perhaps there’s been a mistake. Perhaps it’s somebody else inside, and the real Sam will reappear someday, as happy to see us as my mother always promised, eager to explain. Even now I want more answers than the concrete facts can offer. I want each door of my life to close behind me with a perfect, resonant click.
I drop the irises into Sam’s grave and walk away from Harv’s words, passing between the rows of gravestones until I reach the edge of the fields. The long furrows are straight as an index finger, pointing at me, urgent, accusing. I lower myself down onto the damp grass and rock Joe to and fro. Gulls flutter like moths in the distance, fighting the wind, settling down to hunker close against the land. A white cat follows a fence line toward a secret distant point.
After the service, we all walk over to the church and descend the echoing stairwell to the basement. The painted concrete floors have cracked from years of changing seasons. My mother and I stand at the base of the stairs, and a line of mourners forms around us. Suddenly I’m shaking hands with them all. They tell me that I’m looking like my mother. They ask if I still play the piano, and what’s my young one’s name? Joe wakes up, so I turn him around in his harness. People examine his hands, proclaim that he’s inherited my own long fingers.
Eventually, everybody forms a new line in front of the percolators. They sweep my mother along with them, patting her shoulder, pressing her arm. Two long tables are laden with cakes and kuchens and tortes, as if these small, sweet things can somehow erase the bitter aftertaste of grief. Someone hands me a Hello Dolly, still warm from the pan, and when I bite into it obediently, I find that I am strangely comforted, a child slipped a lollipop after a fall. Licking my fingers, I take Joe over to the community playpen that’s been set up in the same corner since I was a little girl. Beside it there’s a new wicker stand for changing diapers, a sealed bucket marked WASTE, and a few battered toys in a cardboard box. I change him into one of the diapers I stuffed into my coat pocket before we left the house and powder him with cornstarch from a Ziploc Bag. There’s already one baby in the playpen, a little girl older than Joe. She chews on a pacifier, widens her eyes in a worried way when I lower him onto his back beside her. “Who’s your mother?” I say to her, wanting Joe to hear my voice and relax.
“Jessica Blaunt,” Monica says, sitting down on the floor beside me. She balances a plate filled with brightly colored things: angel food cake with blue frosting, green finger Jell-O, fudge with rainbow sprinkles.
“Jessica Blaunt?”
“She used to be Jessica Hardy.”
“Oh,” I say, but I don’t remember anyone by that name either.
“So.” Monica tugs on one of Joe’s feet, then looks at me expectantly.
“What?”
“Inquiring minds want to know.”
“Know what?”
Monica rolls her eyes, then makes an exaggerated sign of the cross over Joe. “Are you going to baptize the little heathen or what?”
“His parents are heathens,” I say, rubbing his firm, round stomach. “He comes from good heathen stock. Besides, Mom doesn’t care anymore. She hasn’t brought it up since they found Sam.”
“She’s probably planning to baptize him herself. Or whisk him away to Father Van Dan on the sly, like my mom did with David. Didn’t you hear about that?”
“No,” I say, scanning the room for my mother, but she’s out of earshot, helping Ray and Auntie Thil with the kids.
“Well,” Monica says, lowering her voice, “Ray and me, we started going to this Bible church for a while, and when David was born, we decided we’d have him baptized at this big summer ceremony they have at the Waubedon River. My mom kept trying to talk us out of it, but then all of a sudden she seemed to accept it, and I thought it was great that she was respecting my beliefs. But things at the church started getting real intense—people speaking tongues, that kind of stuff—and we thought, no way, and came back to Saint Ignatius. It’s dull,” Monica says, “but at least you can understand what people are saying.” I laugh, and she laughs too. “Anyway, we called up Father Van Dan and asked if he would baptize David. What? he says. Once wasn’t good enough for you? And that’s when we find out that Mom took him to the church the first time she baby-sat.”
“Well, my mom won’t be baby-sitting Joe,” I say.
“You always did take this stuff too seriously,” Monica says. “You and Harv. Me, I’d just go ahead and do it. What’s the harm? Make your mother happy.”
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
“You and Harv,” she says again. “His principles get him in trouble, too. Did you know he got reprimanded by the archbishop? They say he’s too liberal, he should straighten out. He’s like you, he thinks women should be priests. He thinks gay people should get married”—she whispers the rest of her sentence—“and women should have a choice on abortion.”
“What are you girls so hush-hush about?” my mother says, sitting down beside us. She has a plateful of food to share: more Hello Dollys, fruit cocktail torte, cookies, finger Jell-O. Her plaintive face says, Take this, and though I’m not hungry, I eat because I have to, because it would be wrong to say no. The afternoon is passing, and now people are starting to leave. Harv touches Joe’s hair, hugs me goodbye; we both promise to be better about keeping in touch. Auntie Thil accepts a ride up the street from Monica and Ray. My mother and I wave them off before going back downstairs to help the volunteers clean up. We fold the paper tablecloths, wipe down the tables, sweep the vast expanse of floor, empty the percolators into the unisex toilet off the hall. When I return the trays and utensils to the kitchen, I see that nothing has changed here since I helped prepare and serve church suppers fifteen years ago. The trays are still kept on the shelving unit behind the door; the utensils go in the row of drawers along the sink. I feel as if I’ve become my own ghost, moving through the kitchen—bending, opening, stacking, straightening—trapped within this particular memory, destined to repeat myself forever.
And then comes the awkward moment when every last thing has been cleaned and put away. The volunteers are tucked into their jackets. Joe senses the emptiness in the air and begins to fuss, a rasping, breathless sound. Still, my mother isn’t ready to go home. I walk him from one side of the basement to the other, while she chats too eagerly with the last volunteer, a woman in her early forties who listens and nods even as her feet take her backward, step by step, toward the stairwell. I offer Joe his pacifier; he spits it out so suddenly that it falls to the floor. “Shit,” I say beneath my breath, trying to pick it up without losing my balance, wishing I’d put him back in his harness so I wouldn’t have to worry about dropping him. Suddenly I’m missing Adam, who is strong enough to swing Joe high above his head, who will say, “Give me the baby,” at moments like these, when I’m not sure what to try next. I take Joe with me into the kitchen to wash off the pacifier, and the abrupt, familiar sound of running water temporarily calms him. This time, when I give him the pacifier, he takes it, keeps it, works his mouth over it. I am overwhelmed by an unreasonable sense of accomplishment. I do not want to leave this kitchen. I do not want to face my mother, to watch her return home yet again without my brother, this time without even a miracle to hope for. But when I come back out of the kitchen, she is standing in the middle of the concrete floor. Waiting. “Let’s go,” she says, briskly collecting her purse, her sweater. She wears her most private face.
Her car is the last one parked in front of the church. Joe sucks his pacifier; he’s overtired, and I’m eager to get him home. The sun has been lost to a glaze of clouds, and there’s a strange heavy feeling in the air. My mother drives out of town at her usual quick pace and crosses the railroad tracks into the countryside, heading for Horton, passing feral farmland, rickety corncribs, old clapboard houses. Laundry trembles on drooping wash lines—corsets, undershirts, yellowing slips—the undergarments of widows who are the last living members of farm families that could once sit down to a noon dinner of fried chicken, potatoes, squash, bread and butter, sauerkraut, and rhubarb pie. Now a single light shines in each window, and it is easy to imagine the meager supper laid out on the table before it gets dark, to save the few cents on electric. Hot cereal, overripe bananas. Day-old bakery from Becker’s Foodmart. I see an old dog moving arthritically up the steps of a porch. I see a swaybacked horse grazing a slow circle around two derelict trucks in a pasture gone wild. As we approach the site of the cannery fire, I turn my face away just like my mother always did, thinking about getting Joe fed and bathed and put down to sleep for the night. Thinking about Adam and how good it will be to get back to New York. Thinking about how sorrow is like a vaguely familiar scent, dissipating if you try too hard to identify it, reappearing to return you to places and people you thought you’d left for good. The car slows, and the unexpected motion tugs me forward in my seat.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
My mother has turned down the service road leading to the cannery. She parks behind the burned-out foundation. In the distance, the dark line of the freight tracks follows the highway, playfully, dipping close, curving away. “I used to come here sometimes,” she says. “When you and Sam were kids. I’d stop on my way home from work and sit for a while, think about things. I always worried that someone would drive by and see me.” She opens her door. “Do you want to walk around? There’s something I want to tell you.” The wind comes in gusts that rock the car like a cradle.
She waits while I lift Joe out of the car seat, and then we follow her into the scorched foundation of the cannery, stepping over crumbling cinder blocks, charred pieces of wood, broken glass. It’s hard not to imagine the snap and snuffle of flames in our footsteps. It’s hard not to imagine we are walking on the remnants of bones. Perhaps what we hear are not the close cries of gulls blown in off the lake but the ghost voices of the cannery girls, high and shrill, filled with pain. The air tastes of ash. My mother stops beside a pile of blackened metal doors, stacked like outdated magazines.
“This is from the investigation still,” she says. “These doors were supposed to be the exits, but the company kept them locked. There used to be one door where you could see, here”—she touches the bald, scarred face of the top door—“where they’d scratched and beat at it, trying to get out, but that one disappeared years ago. Everything else is here, though, the way that it was. People come,” she says, gesturing at the scattering of crushed beer cans, fast-food wrappers, bottle caps, “but they don’t seem to take anything with them. I guess by now there’s nothing left to take.”
The rolling clouds absorb the daylight. I imagine dropping to my knees, crawling blindly beneath the dusky layer of smoke. The press of bodies in front of me. The push of bodies behind.
“All these years, I was certain we’d find Sam back somehow,” my mother says. “But I thought that when he was found, there’d be a way to make sense of everything, maybe even put things right. All day I’ve been waiting for a revelation, a sign, I don’t know—” The wind whisks her words into the fields, scatters them as easily as cinders. “I have this strange feeling that none of this is really happening. Like I’m standing far away from myself. Like nothing’s quite real. Have you ever had a feeling like that?”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer.
“They say that’s how a person feels during a violent attack. I keep thinking that maybe I’m feeling what Geena Baumbach felt. Like all of this is happening outside myself. I wonder if I’ll feel this way for the rest of my life. Like nothing matters. Like it doesn’t not matter either. Like it just…is.”
What did my aunts and the other girls do when they first realized they would not be rescued? Did they continue to beat and pound and scratch and sob against the doors? Did they fall into each other’s arms, wait in silence for their lives to flicker out? There’s a low groan of thunder, then another, and I see the high walls of the cannery collapse, hear the explosions of the machinery, the roof buckling, slapping everything beneath it to the ground.
“Mom,” I say. “I lied to the detectives. I knew Sam had that knife.”
“I knew it too,” my mother says. “It was your father’s. It came from the war. He gave it to Sam when he was eleven or so, and it looked like such a dangerous thing that I hid it in my dresser drawer. I figured I’d give it back when Sam was older, but he must have found it, snooping—or maybe Gordon did. Anyway, one day it was gone.
“For years, I’ve prayed for forgiveness. Each night, I asked God, What else can I do? How can I atone? And then, last night, after we went to bed, I understood what I had to do. It came to me as clearly as if it had been spoken. Baptize the baby. I got out of bed and I heard it again. Baptize the baby. It began to make sense: This was the test I’d been waiting for, and if I did what God asked, He’d forgive me everything. He’d give me the reasons I needed so that all of this would finally make sense. I got the holy water from my nightstand and went into your room. I could see everything as clearly as if it was day. It was like God was helping me see.”
“You baptized Joe?” I say. I’m so angry I can barely speak. “You sneaked in and baptized my baby?”
“You don’t understand,” my mother says. “There were times when faith was the one thing I could give you, the only thing your father couldn’t control. Nobody could, not even the priests, not even the Pope or any of those men—and God knows they do try. But I gave it to you, and it’s there if you need it, and don’t get mad at me for saying that, sweetheart, because I don’t mean the Catholic Church, or even God, I mean”—she pauses, searching for the right words—“faith. The ability to believe. The ability to see beyond the place where you are. Do you understand how important that is? Because Sam couldn’t do that. And neither could your father. You could, and now you’re the only one I have left.”
My mother flinches as if something has struck her, and now I feel a rap on my head, my shoulder, the back of my hand. Hail is falling, the size of buttons, pennies, the sterling-silver charms the girls in my high school wore for luck. Shielding Joe with my body, I run back toward the car; my mother gets there first, opens my door so I can get him safely inside. Hailstones bounce off the roof, the windshield, and the world around us disappears beneath a flurry of pounding white fists. Will the glass break? I glance at my mother; she’s wide-eyed, pressed back in her seat. I cup Joe’s head with my hand, twisting to shield him, and it occurs to me how fragile all our lives are, how at any moment the sky can open and drown us, the earth can open and swallow us. I think of all the intricate ways our bodies can betray us, the accidents and atrocities, the missteps and misunderstandings. Joe hiccups, a sure sign he’s ready to cry, and I feel him tensing up, the slow burn of rage balling his fists. What will happen the first time he looks beyond the concrete hungers of the body? What if he sees nothing but this frail shelter, bones and breath and skin, without the comfort of imagination, transcendence, hope? The hailstorm passes over us as suddenly as it came, and in the silence, I hear my mother take a deep, ragged breath. She turns on the engine, starts the windshield wipers. We watch the cloud move across the fields, the long shadow fluid beneath it, and a part of myself I realize I will never leave behind—the teenage girl singing for the congregation, the child still praying to be chosen—wants to see more than what’s actually there: a message, a confirmation. Perhaps I’m only seeing a reflection of myself when I search for possibility in everyday things. But it’s better self, a bigger self. I turn to face my mother. I’m not angry anymore.
“I just want so much for Joe to grow up with faith in something,” she says. “To have what you had when you went to the church, or sat down at the piano. All the things Sam didn’t.”
“You want him to grow up with—grace,” I say. “So do I. But you have to trust I can find my own way to give him that. And I will. I promise.” I reach for her arm, but she shrugs my hand away.
“No, don’t,” she says quietly. “People have been touching me all day, and it doesn’t help a bit. In fact, I think it makes it worse.”
“I won’t touch you, then.”
“We’ll never know anything more about Sam than we do right now, will we?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I feel like God has let me go. It’s like I’m falling from His hand. It’s like one of those dreams where you just fall and fall, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
Joe begins to cry, and my mother turns the car around, pulls back onto the highway. All the way home and long into the evening, he cries and cries, sleeps fitfully, wakes up and cries again, as if he’s crying for us all. My mother and I take turns walking him. I offer him my breast, the pacifier, my finger. We sing to him, rock him. None of it is enough. When he finally abandons himself to sleep, it’s more a result of his own exhaustion than anything we have done. We make hot chocolate and sit at the table, sipping that sweetness, too tired to speak. I can’t stop hearing the sound of his crying; I’m raw with it. When my mother finally stands up, the scrape of her chair makes me jump. Hot chocolate sloshes across the tablecloth.
“Sorry,” I say automatically, but my mother nods, understanding.
“Such a terrible sound,” she says, and I know she’s seeing my brother’s face, “when you hear your child crying and you don’t know what to do.”