Our mother had been sitting on the letter for two days, unsure whether to publish it or not, when Grace called. She wanted us to come to her house to talk.
“Let’s get this over with,” my mother said to Link and me. “I’m not an idiot, Almy,” she added when she saw my face. “Grace is mad because she knows about the letter, and she knows about the letter because of you.”
I was certain my father hadn’t told anyone about the letter. I was sure my mother hadn’t either. She’d refused to notify the state police or the state fire marshal’s office. She’d refused to even tell Cal Hayes, the Walineyayo County sheriff, and a family friend. I, on the other hand, had immediately told Wren. Suffering too under the weight of the letter, Wren undoubtedly had confided in her mother.
“You’re using us,” I said.
“You’re coming.”
“You think Grace will go easier if we’re there.”
“I don’t need Grace to go easy,” she said. “I’ve known Grace and how to handle her my whole life. And I gave birth to you, which means I get to use you, especially when you act like an idiot.”
“Which is often,” my brother added with a grin. Link, in his defense, had done nothing. Still, he went across the room and grabbed his coat. Then he stood watching our mother in the same way he looked at Simon or me or our father when he didn’t think we were paying attention, as if he were memorizing everything about us. Though I thought Link obsessively collected all this information out of boredom, a kind of analytical game to pass the time, as I got older, I realized it was something much deeper. When we were little kids and our parents went somewhere without us, Link would spend hours drawing pictures of where they were and what he thought they were up to. The inside of the grocery store. The inside of the movie theater. The inside of the car as it moved down the highway between Portland or Bangor and home. Whenever Simon asked him why he was drawing these pictures, he would look up and coolly say, “Because I need to be there too. To protect them.”
We made the long walk through the forest in silence. Eventually we reached a stone wall nearly five feet high. An acre or so of land had been cleared, and the wall formed a perfect circle around the clearing. A driveway ran up to the circle’s edge and then stopped. The most curious thing was that there was no break, opening, or gate anywhere in the wall. There was just a spot where the stones had been tapered into steps so you could climb over and back down the other side. The impracticality of a wall without a door had always puzzled and excited me.
Stacks of lobster traps and coils of rope and crudely built sawhorses were stacked outside the stone wall. Homemade lean-tos had been raised to protect fishing gear and engine parts. Inside the wall, however, there was only the Creel family’s small house and a neat grid of vegetable gardens, mulched with straw. The effect was one of overpowering refuge: in here, inside this wall, we will not abide grease and grime and disorder. In here, we will be clean and pure. Where the Creels’ space was neat and ordered, ours was often a disaster. Just that morning I’d come downstairs and found Link lying on the floor in front of the TV in the living room, watching an old black-and-white zombie movie. Our father had dragged the TV home after the other one, a big wooden console that had belonged to my grandparents, stopped working. Now the working one was stacked on top of the broken one, and I wondered if we’d put another one on top when this one quit. That’s how things seemed to go at our house on the river. An old rusting car with a hood that wouldn’t fully close, parked beside a new and running car. A spent barbecue grill, a moldy cover still fixed over it with a bungee cord, resting beside a new grill, which was never really new, but bought used off some friend. Sheds were filled with broken rakes waiting for mending leaned up beside whole rakes. Shelves held working lawn mower parts and burned-up ones as well. Things could be fixed, reused. Worst case: even scrap metal was worth a few cents. I thought clean yards were for people with time and money. The Creels had no more of either than us, yet somehow it seemed they’d cheated the system.
Link stopped at the wall and said, “I’ll stay.”
“What for?” our mother asked.
“I’ll just stay,” he said.
The trees about us were too dark, black almost. They kept shifting as if alive. Then I remembered the ravens that Lyman raised, and slowly, magically, I began to see wings in the branches. “It’s cold,” I said, looking up for the birds.
Link shrugged, lifted his hand into the air, and extended his fingers.
“What’s that about?” I asked.
“Quiet. I’m concentrating. Gotta find the wind.”
After a moment, Link lowered his hand and licked his finger. “Tastes off,” he muttered.
I shook my head, embarrassed for my brother, who was full of strange tips and tricks about feeling the world out. Our mother, who somehow seemed secretly proud of his principled stance, turned and climbed the stone steps as I followed.
Grace, Galen, and Wren were all waiting for us in the kitchen.
“Let’s start the bullshit, then,” my mother immediately announced.
“It isn’t like that, Falon,” Grace said. “I know you’re going to print that letter. Fine. I can’t stop you. What I want to talk about is the aftermath.”
My mother seemed genuinely surprised Grace wasn’t putting up a fight. “When the truth is out there,” she said.
“Something like that.”
Notebooks, pens, and vinyl records were stacked on the kitchen table. Dark feathers peeked out from books of poems and cooking magazines. Piles of laundry were neatly folded in chairs. Heavy hemlock beams spanned the house’s ceilings. Bundles of pungent drying herbs hung all around the room, tied and looped over rough nails driven into the timbers. Grace Creel was wearing a red bandanna knotted around her wrist, and a black bandanna tied over her head. I had always loved her voice, which seemed to arrive in a hiss or a whisper, but never with anger. It forced you to really listen for the words, which were often tough like my mother’s, but usually infused with a soft love I often found lacking in our own house. “When everything is out there.” Grace crossed her arms. “You know this place, Falon. Someone is going to find her eventually. It’s going to be ugly.”
My mother started to respond and then stopped. Her face reddened, and she dropped her gaze to the floor. She didn’t seem to know what to say.
Wren and Galen were across the room, watching things unfold. Wren flashed a peace sign in the air. She was wearing one of her father’s old green army jackets, the sleeves folded over at the cuffs. A piece of black duct tape was stuck on the chest, underlining her father’s name. It made the name stand out more clearly, and I thought about how other kids might put the tape over their parents’ names to hide or erase them. I had never seen a single photo, garment, memento, or scrap of evidence from my father’s military years. Galen was sitting at the table, thumbing crumbs around the surface. He was tall, at least six feet already, and possessed a stunning wideness. Everything about him was broad, from his shoulders to his chest to his face. He even had unnaturally wide spaces between his teeth, and I remembered Wren telling me how she used to try to slip quarters between them when he was sleeping.
“This wasn’t some accident,” Grace said. “After that letter comes out, whoever finds that girl might kill her.”
“Or hug her.” My mother’s voice was as soft as I’d ever heard it. “Or hold her up.”
“That isn’t this world, Falon.”
Wren and I looked at each other. We both knew we were at the heart of this exchange in some way. Together we slipped out of the kitchen. Wren led me around the house, displaying various curiosities: a marble-size knot of shrapnel that had been inside her great grandfather’s thigh for fifty years. Six round blue rocks her father had given her from the sea. A fox skull she found in the woods, which she and Galen had sent back and forth between each other’s rooms when they were younger, the fox living with her in the winter and summer and with him in the spring and fall. A journal about palmistry that had been her grandmother’s. I moved back over to the rocks. They were perfectly round, not a blemish on them. In their color I felt like I could see the ocean moving.
“They’d be bluebird eggs and hatch for us if the world were a better place,” Wren said, and rested her chin on my shoulder. I could feel her breath against my neck.
I sighed. “But all we have are blue rocks.”
“And the curse of living goes on.” She moved away from my body, finishing our pointless comedy act as all the weight of what was brewing in the bay pushed back in from the next room, where we could still hear our mothers’ voices.
I looked around. Though the house was a little dank around its corners, overpowering signs of love filled it as well. Every shelf and windowsill held a sepia photo of either a person or a homestead or a pasture, and to read the stories stitched together by the frames was to see a stunning act of preservation, to understand the lives and landscapes of at least three generations. Boots and slippers were neatly lined up along one wall. Names and dates marking people’s heights over the years were penciled on a doorjamb in a vertical totem.
Outside I heard the crunch of tires on gravel and then saw a truck bending through the woods. Lyman Creel was coming home from his day at sea. The sky had turned dark and green, the air taking on the heavy electricity of a storm. I could see my brother still holding his position along the wall.
“He can’t make up his mind,” Wren said.
“About what?”
“Which is more dangerous. Us or the storm coming in.”
In the kitchen, the voices had paused, and I imagined them watching Lyman’s homecoming as well. I jerked my head toward the kitchen. “We should go back to them, shouldn’t we?”
Wren shrugged. “Probably. The thing about parents is, they need you more than they let on.”
My mother and Grace Creel were still standing across from each other, neither willing to sit. Galen, with all his stunning wideness, was nonchalantly reading a comic book. Link had come inside and was standing beside our mother.
“I’m interested in the truth, too,” Grace was saying. “But not at the expense of people’s lives. So we need to figure out what we can do to help her, not just use her.”
“Use her? She sent in a letter. She asked to be heard. I’m not going to swallow it and censor another marginalized kid.”
“She’s a child, Falon. You’re not.”
I glanced up at the window. Lyman was sitting on the rock wall with his legs dangling over, as carefree as a child, pulling off his yellow hip waders, which he set in a pile with the rest of his gear. No one else seemed to notice him out there. I, however, could not stop looking. Just then the wind ceased. Rain started falling in thick sheets, kissing the trees, sizzling against the roof. The pine canopies swelled and thrashed, and five ravens filled the sky. Within seconds the birds had surrounded Lyman, turning him into a pocket of rippling darkness, and I thought it strange and a bit lonely, to see a man greeted by his birds before his family.
Grace turned to watch the ravens joyously dance about her husband as well. She smiled for a moment, and then her face darkened. “There’s too much history stacked on this for it to go softly.”
“That’s the social worker in you talking,” my mother said. “Maybe not everything is supposed to be soft, Grace.” My mother was looking out at the rain as well. She seemed for the first time to register Lyman’s presence. “I should go,” she whispered.
“Don’t be like that,” Grace started, though I could see in her face that she was hurt.
Our mother was already across the room, pulling the door open on the storm. “Stay,” she called back to us as we hesitated. “Wait for the rain to break. What Grace has to say is important. But I’m not the one to hear it.” She seemed so small, framed in the open doorway with the rain cutting down around her as she turned to her friend. “What I do isn’t easy. And it’s even harder to do as a woman. So the truth is, I’m the thing that can’t be soft, Grace.”
Grace was looking down at the floor. “I know, Falon.”
In the yard my mother and Lyman didn’t acknowledge each other. I’d never seen two adults trying so hard to act like the other didn’t exist. Lyman reached into a little canvas sack and drew out chunks of fish and began tearing them into pieces for the ravens. He stroked their heads as they snapped up the bits of meat. I couldn’t make sense of this man. Here was a father who had built a wall around his family. Here was a man who loved his family. Here was a man who loved those magical black birds. And here was a man who had once loved our mother. He didn’t seem at all capable of the ugly things I’d been told he had done. The largest of the birds spread its wings and rose high into the air then. I had to duck to follow its flight through the window. When I’d almost lost it in the storm clouds, the bird paused, pinned its wings to its side, rolled over, and fell in a free dive. I gasped, and Wren, who was watching as well, shrugged like the performance was normal. When the plummeting raven was only feet from the earth, it suddenly shot its wings back out, loosed a playful series of croaks, and rose powerfully into the air. Lyman was smiling at the aerial display, and I felt something passing between us. The back of my neck began to sizzle. I felt a sudden urge to flee. Lyman raised his head just a bit and cocked his ear, as if he too had felt the bizarre exchange.
“Why does he hate us?” I said to Grace, relieved to get away from the grip of the window.
“He doesn’t hate you. He’s bitter. Thinks something was taken from him.”
“I’ll bite,” Link said. “What?”
Grace took her time with the question. “I don’t know exactly.” She seemed genuinely perplexed. “The idea of a life, I guess. Lyman saw a life with your mom when he was a kid. Losing something like that can haunt you for a long time. I love Lyman, but I also know he never really got over that night with your mother and Billy.”
I watched Grace smile at the shock on all our faces. That night was not something anyone ever talked about. “Hide the truth,” she said, “and watch the same mistakes get made.”
Link nodded. I did as well. It sounded like something our mother would have said.
“Like rotten mills getting reopened,” said Wren.
“Maybe,” Grace said. “But people need rotten mills too. Rotten mills pay for houses and food. Rotten mills make hard lives a little less hard.” Grace crossed the room and hugged Wren. Then she went to the table and kissed Galen on the forehead before turning to us. “Lyman isn’t what you think. You see him and see just one thing. But you can’t be human and be just one thing.”
Between our house and the Creels’ house a network of deer trails wound up to a bluff overlooking the spot where the river emptied into the sea. Here the outrushing waters gathered in a black whirlpool. My brothers and I would often stand atop the bluff and toss driftwood and cans and firecrackers down into the dark water. Sometimes the debris emerged back up the river; other times, we imagined it surfacing far out at sea. Oftentimes, though, the water never released its grip, and we wondered where the disappeared things went. A single apple tree that seemed impervious to time sat atop the bluff. Its trunk was a soft pink all year long, and crisp red fruit hung from its branches even in February, when ice encased the apples.
Ghost apples, my father called them. Fruit that will not die. That stays eternally lit like a beacon all year long. That tree became a talisman to us. Passing each other in the halls at school we whispered, “Meet me at the ghost apples.” We told our friends. We told our teenage lovers. But never our enemies. No mention of that tree was ever made to any who carried threat. Though we made regular pilgrimages to the bluff, we never touched the tree or its apples.
Link and I waited out the rain and then began the walk home. When we didn’t find our mother at the house, we backtracked through the woods, out to the bluff overlooking the ocean. We found her there beside the ghost apples, staring at the sea. She was soaking wet and shaking with cold as dark came swiftly on.
“Let’s go home, Mom,” Link said. “It’s been a weird afternoon.”
“Speak for yourselves,” she said, all toughness still. “I’ve had a fine day.” Then she sighed. “But, yes, home. I think I’m ready.”
My father and Simon were working down at the harbor still, and the house was empty. My mother sat at the table and folded her hands, twisted with cold, in her lap. Link put a kettle of water on to boil, and we all turned to watch the pines become black notches against the graying sky.
“I think that all went quite well,” our mother tried to joke, “with Grace.” When we said nothing, she shrugged.
I took my mother’s hands and began slowly rubbing them between my own. At first she pulled away, and then she relented. “Why were you out on the bluff, Mom?”
“I needed advice,” she said.
When the kettle began to hiss, Link rose and poured the steaming water into a large clay mug. He set the warm crock before our mother. “From the apples?” he asked.
“From her,” she corrected.
The her was Nigawes, and while her story, a creation tale of sorts that I was never really sure whether my parents invented or stole, had been a constant of our youths, it was years since our mother had talked about Nigawes or Sanoba or their story.
“You’re going to print the letter,” I said.
“I have to,” she said.
Suddenly I remembered being seven or eight years old, and my mother coming home from working as a volunteer escort for Planned Parenthood in Bangor. She would walk into the house and drop the bulletproof vest they made her wear under her coat on the kitchen table. It sounded like hate, and fear, that Kevlar striking our table. I remembered my mother sitting on the living room floor and holding the swollen face of a woman who one summer lived with us after escaping her abusive husband, a man who would have killed her had she stayed. I must have been ten or eleven. I remembered my mother holding that woman’s hand and quietly singing to her for what seemed like days. Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always, cause the sun’s gonna shine in my backdoor someday. When I asked my father why my mother volunteered at a place where she had to wear a bulletproof vest, he said, “Because other people won’t.” When I asked my uncle why my mother wore the vest, he said, in typical grand Reggie style, “Because your mother is a hero, because your mother is a lioness.”
All the anger had faded from Link’s eyes. He smiled at her and shrugged a little. “We know, Mom,” he said. “We’ll stand with you.”
“My noble, foolish boys,” she said and reached out to touch both of our faces as we sat down with her at the table.
I tried to push from my mind all that had happened that day. I was tired and simply wanted the day to be done. “Sanoba and Nigawes,” I said. “It’s been a long time since you told us about them.”
“Too long,” our mother said. As we drew near to her in the wood heat of the kitchen and darkness fell over the river woods, she began.
The two humans were strange figures. Their bodies seemed made of clay and stone. They were rigid and cold and full of icy reflected light during the winters. Then slowly they filled up with warmth and color in the spring. Over time, they found they could move. Then they found they could think and feel. Still they didn’t know what they were. Years earlier they had risen from the earth at two separate spots along the granite banks of the great river that rose in the northern mountains and emptied into the sea. For a time each was happy, living alone, moving through the world, becoming less like stone and river water and sea wind and more like a man and a woman. They lived along the mouth of a great river. There they had searched the coastline and found many plants and animals to care for and admire, but never anything quite like themselves. Over time, they grew lonely.
The man was called Sanoba. The woman, Nigawes. One winter, both Sanoba and Nigawes became possessed by the same belief: if they traveled to the river’s heart in the mountains to the north and told the waters their troubles, the waters might soothe them. So, traveling separately, unaware still of each other’s existence, the man and the woman left the coast and went up the river in search of something they could only vaguely define: relief, purpose, joy.
In the mountains, each stood atop a separate snow-capped peak and sang to the river of their sadness at being alone. Slowly, the river answered. The waters intensified and grew, rushing through the land more forcefully. Over time the river carved a valley between the two mountains. It was then that the two figures saw each other.
Together Sanoba and Nigawes traveled back down the river to the sea, where they made a life. What began was a great love that filled the land with children. Eventually Sanoba grew tired. He couldn’t keep all his people straight. He couldn’t provide for all their needs. He longed for that old freedom of standing atop a mountain and being angry or sad or relieved to be alone. What bothered him most was that he felt deceived. He had wanted love, not servitude. Had he known it would fall to them alone to fill the entire earth, he might have chosen a different life.
“If you don’t stop making these children,” he told Nigawes. “I will go.”
“Stop making them?” she said. “You can’t put a life on one person, Sanoba.”
The two lovers were standing on a bluff high above the sea. Sanoba walked to the edge and hung his feet out into the wind.
“I will do it,” he growled.
Years had passed since they first saw each other across the sky. Nigawes knew her husband, knew his contradictions, too. She knew he was full of bitterness and fear and courage but that he was a cowardly man as well, and there, standing at the edge of the sea, she called his bluff. “You may leave us,” she said. “But you will never fully go away from us.”
Sanoba was furious at her stubbornness. He had unleashed an actual threat, and what did she have to say in return? Some self-righteous warning that meant nothing. He believed it had finally come to this: she no longer respected him enough to even say anything of actual substance.
Of course it was not that at all. Nigawes was scared of the change she had observed in her husband. She alone seemed able to see it—their children approached Sanoba just as they always had—and that frightened her even more. Sanoba sounded the same. When he went through the woods, he left the same footprints. Walking the hills, he reached out to touch the same birches. The change had to do with color. She noticed it first in his eyes, where every so often a scarlet tendril would flicker for a moment. Then, slowly, he began to redden. His fingertips turned hot and crimson. At night she uncovered her husband and watched his chest. When it rose, a faint scarlet blush lifted to the surface of his skin. To her Sanoba had always seemed blue and green, built from the sky and grasses. Now it was as if he had swallowed the sun and it was battling to get free. What madness could steal a man’s color, fill a body with fire? The scarlet glow beneath his skin grew so fierce that when he turned to look at her or reached to hold her, she had to look away. No one else seemed to see it as he went about putting a pot of water on the fire to boil or returned from the river with a carved stone toy for the children, and that scared her even more. Listening now to Sanoba’s rage, Nigawes understood that her husband had been infected by something truly cunning that would go to great efforts to keep itself hidden: resentment.
One morning Sanoba was gone. For a year after that, Nigawes lived alone with her children. Sanoba returned the next spring, after the last snows had melted and the trees were beginning to bud green. He believed he had made a point. He imagined that his family would not be able to survive another winter without him. He wanted to know that he was needed. More than that, he was lonely and ashamed of his abandonment.
But what he returned to was a land that had been neatly harvested in the fall, maintained through the winter, and replanted in the spring. Sanoba watched his wife and children continue to live the way they had in his absence. They harvested and replanted the earth and filled the valleys with trees and swept the meadows with grasses and wildflowers. They called down rain. They brought ravens to the skies. Deer and bear to the woods. During the day Nigawes ignored him. At night their lovemaking was ferocious, desperate. They crashed against the land, rage-filled and weeping. When Nigawes didn’t take with another child, Sanoba grew suspicious. When she didn’t let him help clear and turn and tend and grow the world with her and their children, he grew despondent. His punishment was not unjustified, nor was her lack of trust in his dependability. He had vanished, but he had come back, and he thought that should mean something. Although she kept using his body for her pleasure, howling and clawing against his chest and back deep into the night, she never looked into his eyes or touched his face. Sanoba understood he was on the outside of something now—that perhaps he was no longer needed at all. Of course this rejection was his fault. Unable to face that truth, he took to the easy responses of blame and fury.
For one thousand days Sanoba tried to kill his wife. Every night Nigawes evaded, outsmarted, and thwarted her husband’s murderous impulses. When he went to the mountains to confess his guilt, he found they had grown so tall with old secrets and slights that they could hold no more.
Nigawes grew tired. Trying to survive would eventually kill you, she knew. The red that had overtaken her husband years ago had turned black. This, as much as her sadness over his abandonment, was why she couldn’t look at him at night. It wasn’t even blackness, so much as a void of light. When he passed in front of a tree or a boulder, an absence of color overtook the world, and Nigawes gasped, gripping her hands so her children wouldn’t see them shaking. Satisfied that what she had once loved no longer existed, she acted.
When Nigawes had cracked the trunk that was her husband’s spine and torn out the rocks that were his eyes and shaved the grasses that were his hair and let run the rivers that were his blood, when she had carved his body into a hundred pieces, hoping that whatever small bits of blue and green he still held might slip free and live on in the world, she stood atop the bluff where he had made his threat and she had taken her stand and cast her husband, piece by piece, into the whirlpool at the mouth of the river. Fate would decide whether to take his bones out to sea or up the river. She blamed the waters for his death. An accident while he was fishing. Her children did not challenge her story. They pretended to forget the thousand days prior, to forget the great, quarrelsome love that had brought them into the world. It was easy to accept the danger of the sea. But Nigawes understood that her lie was an awful one. Whether justified or not, she had killed her husband, killed the father of her children, killed her lover. And she had blamed her deed on the world.
After that the waters began to return pieces of Sanoba. Every year a new bit washed ashore: the stones that had been his eyes, the sea grasses that had been his hair, the gnarled driftwood trunks that had been his legs. Unable to bear touching the wreckage herself, Nigawes sent her children up and down the coast to recover their father as she watched up on the bluff above the ocean. She grew old waiting. At night she dreamed of her husband’s hands—sliding around her waist, cradling their youngest son to his chest, stroking the back of her neck, gripping her thighs. When she woke, she found she could not move. Her feet had rooted into the earth. Fruit had begun to grow from the branches that had once been her arms. She closed her eyes. She lit the hanging fruit like red lanterns. She hoped her children would someday find their father and together come home.