Fly high above the earth or crawl deep beneath its surface like a lowly worm. Be high and low. All in one breath. It’s possible. No one knows but me. But it’s possible. Maybe Poppy knows, but he’s beneath the ground now. He can’t get out into the wind, the air. I’d free him if I could. Open the ground up and lift that coffin lid with my bare hands and let him out into the world.
The day after Poppy was buried I stayed for hours in the cellar beneath the house, rocking back and forth in the dark. Earthworms and cellar bugs crawled through the ground. I could hear them making their way toward me. The smell of damp earth choked off my air. I wanted to scream, to jump up and run away. But I needed to feel that same misery of being underground, knowing that Poppy was feeling it too.
“What the hell did you do all day long?” Cliff demanded when he came home to find no supper waiting for him.
“What do you think I did? I picked my nose. I picked my frigging nose!”
Cliff stomped off to the pantry and reached for a loaf of bread. I saw the knife he was using to cut the bread running across the pink flesh of his left hand as he held the loaf toward himself to cut off a slice. It stabbed him in the chest, carved patterns deep into his body. I sat by the table, dazed by what I’d seen, until I saw the knife in my own hand, stabbing again and again. I ran screaming from the house.
I went as far as I could, like a deer running free in the wild, not knowing which way to turn. Wanting to turn each way…every way…all ways. Perhaps explode into a million pieces. Nothing I did, nothing I thought of, would stop the thoughts racing through my mind.
“I can’t stay here,” I told Cliff days later, hoping I could make him understand. “It’s not safe for me to be here. It’s just not safe.”
“You’re not making any sense, Lizabeth. What are you talking about?” He snapped out the question like a teamster’s whip.
“I just can’t stay here anymore. I just can’t stay.”
“Then you’ll be dead, Lizabeth. You’ll be dead to me, to the children. And you can’t ever come back from the dead, no matter what…I won’t let you.”
Better for me to die than Jacob and Jewel, I wanted to scream. It had already happened in my dreams. The house had been engulfed in flames. They called out to me and I did nothing. Worst of all, I watched it happen—calmly, as if it meant nothing at all. Who knew what dreams would one day come true? And you need to be sure. When it’s your own children, you need to be sure. I tried explaining what Poppy’s death had done to me.
Cliff said, “People die every day, and the rest of us have to go on. Do you think you’re special?”
I had no answer, because there was no answer; no rhyme nor reason for any of it. Poppy should have had more time, the way that man enjoyed life. If anyone in this world was ever cheated out of life, it most surely was Poppy. He deserved more. Better. Cliff couldn’t see that.
“Things happen the way they’re meant to. Everett lived out his life. His time was up,” Cliff went on to say. People say things like that all the time to pretend that everything in life has some purpose. I saw no purpose in my misery.
And I believe in nothing.
Life is a stew pot, boiled and stirred, each of us jiggling about like turnips and carrots. Pieces of meat and potatoes. Onions. Seasoned with salt, peppered with lies. I should have told Cliff all those things the day he declared my death.
“Pepper, Cliff,” I should have said. “Our marriage is pepper.”
I knew what Cliff meant when he said I’d be dead, but then Cliff should have known. I was already dead. Teetering on the edge, at least, and then Poppy dying like that. Something he had no right to do, not when we had more words to say, more time to spend, more secrets to unravel.
I wondered then how many deaths we are allowed in a single lifetime. Certainly more than one—two? Much more than that.
I thought of Jacob, his plump fingers reaching down into my dough dish. Those little fingers I must have slapped a thousand times over the years. And the day by the shore, when he nearly fell into the sea, slipped from the rocks like a greased eel. I thought for sure he would drown, but I reached the beach in time to save him.
Three or four seems a minute number.
That seemingly ordinary day that Jewel went off to school all on her own. Grown up. She had no use for me that day. Then the end of the day came and instead of coming straight home she stopped off at Donalee’s pasture to look at the cattle through the pole fence. I knew in my heart that something had jumped out at her along the way and dragged her into the woods, her body never to be found. Chewed. Devoured. I knew that to be the truth.
And Poppy, you must have died at least a hundred times. I know. I’ve seen it every time. At night when the house is dark and silent, before the dawn brings daylight into the window, when I sweep the floor and hang the clothes out to dry, when I go to the outhouse out back. Those are some of the times I’ve seen you die.
Then there was the money Poppy told me about years ago. Our secret, Poppy’s and mine, hidden upstairs in his bedroom, beneath the floorboards. Of course, Poppy would have had no idea, no inkling what the money would end up being used for.
Mad money, Poppy called it at the time. Mad.
“Spend it on something you don’t need. We get so caught up on our neediness, Elizabeth, that we lose all the fun in life.”
So that was where I walked off to that day, out across the field to get the money out of Poppy’s house. It wasn’t a fortune, but it would be enough. There were plenty of things I didn’t need, but I could put the money to good use. I’d take myself away from the children, as far away as I could get. Keep them safe. That was the important part. It all made perfect sense.
I stayed at Poppy’s house longer than I’d planned, an entire week perhaps—I can’t remember—pawing through his things, sleeping in his bed, on the same sheets he died on. The smell of his pipe tobacco brought me comfort. At night I stood by the window looking out at the stars, trying to remember all the stories he once told, the sound of his voice, the twinkle in his eye, the soft thumping of his heart. And not once did I think about the mistakes of the past. Not once.
We all make mistakes, Poppy, but yours followed you to the grave. I made sure of that. I kept your secret safe.
I don’t know why I left Poppy’s house, but there must have been a reason. I only know the money that should have been in my pocket was not there. My mad money. Look at me. I’ve lost it and now I’m mad. But I don’t think that was what Poppy meant about mad money. He meant: use it to do something crazy.
Someone found me in the woods, someone with strong arms who picked me clear off the ground despite my arms flailing, scratching and tearing the air.
“Lizabeth,” he said. “It’s me. Cliff.”
I looked closely at his face, inches from mine. I heard myself laugh. Jagged and rough like a cat’s claw on a doorframe. And then I couldn’t stop laughing. He looked so ridiculous standing there with my mad money in his hand. He must have found it. But where?
Ssh. I won’t ask if you don’t tell. He’d only lie. Whoever he is. Even though he thinks he knows my name, I’ve never seen him before. I don’t know anyone who’d steal my money from me—Poppy’s mad money.
There was a car that day too, and I watched the trees from the back seat whirring past like hummingbirds. Bizz…bizz…bizz. We were trying to catch the trees, but we weren’t fast enough. I sat with my face resting against the cool glass, watching the world from a linear place, one that I surmised would let me enter if I could only ease myself in. The car was going much too fast for that. Something else was taking me away. I felt so small inside my body, like a child standing on tiptoes to see out a window.
I touched the glass and looked at my bare hand. My wedding ring. I thought suddenly of my wedding ring. But no. I’d thrown it away the day I left. It wouldn’t come back on its own.
“Who are you?” I yelled to the people in the front seat of the car.
One of them turned around. Not the one who was driving, but the other one who’d earlier asked me if I knew who he was. When he looked around, I suddenly recognized Cliff.
“I’m supposed to be dead. You said I’d be dead. Now where’s my mad money?” I knew he had stolen it, and to steal from the dead was a crime in itself.
“You must have lost it,” he said, staring at me with hollowed-out eyes that looked like two piss holes in the snow.
“I did no such thing!”
Who did he think he was fooling?
I ordered them to stop the car. I had to go back, back to the beginning where it all started. Back to that place before the dream ever happened. Before the house burned to the ground. This was all wrong.
“What’s the matter, Lizabeth?” someone asked. Cliff. I could make out his voice even though much of that day was cloudy, even though the world was trying to collapse in on me. I had to keep the things in the outside world from finding a warm spot in my body to hide. The trees, the sky, the green, green grass were all vying for a place among my organs and blood vessels, and there was no room left. I had used up all the room myself. I had stacked the events of my life on top of themselves, pushed and squeezed them down so that they would all fit. I had no more room. Even Cliff should have been aware of that.
“I have to go back, back to the beginning. I have to go back for Poppy’s sake—for Jewel and Jacob, too.”
I might have pleaded, although I was never one to plead for anything in my life. Never and always are such superficial, lie-making words. One seldom always or rarely never does a thing in this life. What silly words.
“Aren’t they silly?” I said to Cliff.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered.
Of course he knew what I meant. I don’t know why he was pretending otherwise. But then I suddenly knew why. He was trying to distract me, trying to take my mind off wanting to go back. I knew the truth of what was happening that day, with the trees, and clouds, and the green, green grass all trying to wiggle their way inside me. I was going somewhere far, far away, and I would never come back. Never see those trees or grass or clouds again. And it was the never part of that thinking that kept me from crying out. Cold glass against my cheek, as fast as we were moving I knew we would not be able to catch up to those illusive trees. I would never go back. Never see that burning house again. Never walk across the hayfield. Never see my Jakey or Jewel.
How I loved that word, never. How it filled me with excitement.
I could hardly wait.