FROM NEW HAVEN to Wyndham Falls is sixty-one miles, a distance that for two years has represented a protective and largely metaphorical moat separating her Gothic Ivy League fortress from her mother’s creepy cottage in the dark northern forest. So very Hansel and Gretel: her mother the old crone who boils kids for supper, and she the silly frightened girl who, following her brother, will never more than half believe in the power of breadcrumbs to lead her back to safety. That there’s no brother anymore just makes the journey that much more pathetic.
She takes Route 8, her mother’s old Volvo wagon with 134,000 miles carrying her and the sum of her college belongings north through Waterbury, past the Mattatuck State Forest, through Torrington to Winsted. Not for the most part the glossy verdant Connecticut of second homes and country clubs and famous writers and movie stars but the working-class state that’s produced, all by itself, some of the most unappealing cities in the country, among them Hartford and New Haven.
She drives, imagining turning west and not stopping; imagining being like that. All spring for American Studies she’s been reading firsthand accounts of women—pioneers, freed slaves, Native Americans, line cooks, horse breakers, prostitutes, factory workers, Civil War nurses, even a midget in an early American circus—who for one reason or another set out westward into the American unknown. And in most cases it was only after this radical displacement that they found voices with which to speak of what had happened to them. And the difference, the enormous gulf in meaning and actuality, between these voices and the historical silence that they otherwise inhabited is what moves her most keenly; how what made their lives bearable lay not so much in their surviving their literal experiences, however brutal or good, or in the stories they eventually came to tell (if they were lucky), as in their somehow learning to navigate the terrible isolation before and after the telling, the unspeakable, ingrown silence. It’s so easy to get swallowed up by the life you never expected to have. To just disappear. To live inside this great white whale of yourself and never have a vision of where you might be going, or where you’ve already been, or why.
She comes back to reality just as the car is entering Winsted. Not a long journey after all, not as she hoped it would be. A Chevy dealership and a Sunoco station and a diner with a HELP WANTED sign posted on the glass door. A mother with dark-red hair and pale unhealthy skin pushing her baby in a stroller with a loose front wheel: the stroller wobbles and swerves, wobbles and swerves, and the mother does not stop.
A streetlight, and Emma turns northwest, onto Route 44. Soon enough, on the left, a sign for Rugg Brook Reservoir. Then the sign is a disappearing eye chart in her mirror and she’s driving on, her body but not her mind—her mind stuck back in a morning walking around that reservoir with her father and brother. Josh in the lead playing Indian scout, having discovered a deer floating on its side at the water’s edge, its abdomen a swallowed brown globe. Hideous and gross, but he was thrilled, his narrow shoulders quivering with fascination. He was poking the bloated carcass with a long sharp stick, probing and investigating, trying to make it bleed, when their father, roaring up from behind, tore the stick out of his hands, shouting, Don’t touch it! Leave the dead in peace!
A disturbingly uncontrolled reaction coming from an adult, a father, it strikes her now, something too desperate already there, adrift and fearful, excruciatingly prescient. Nothing she wants to remember, driving past the sign for Millbrook Road and pushing on, going inexorably home.
And the memory, and her failed attempt to escape it, leads to another recollection, as she continues along 44, seeing more and more signs of the familiar, the protective moat of distance between her and her mother good and breached now: walking into Josh’s room one afternoon and finding him cradling one of his most prized possessions, an antique bowl-shaped gold pan, the gift of an eccentric uncle. He used to keep it in a silk-lined box on the shelf above his bed. The bowl made not of metal, as one might have expected, but of some low-grade ceramic, with distinctive grooves and runnels to allow the gravel and silt to sluice off, leaving the gold nuggets and the dust behind. And Josh, thorough and secretive as ever, had done his homework. At the age of ten, he could tell you all about the gold rush and the lives of the prospectors and the harsh anarchic conditions in the mining towns of Northern California. He knew enough about that lost world to invent a future for himself in which one day, on a break while touring San Francisco with the New York Philharmonic, he would drive inland and visit one of the original mining ghost towns and, pulling his antique miner’s bowl out of his authentic turn-of-the-century miner’s rucksack, do a little panning himself. Because there was still gold to be found coming out of that earth, he was sure of it. You could not convince him otherwise.
And this, thinks Emma—entering now, slow as she can go, the town of Wyndham Falls and circling the green—is what happens when your life is taken before your eleventh birthday. No one can argue with you anymore, or prove you wrong, or celebrate your genius, or love your imagination more than you do, or make there be gold where there isn’t any, or discover that gold, or be with you as you look for it full of hope, on your knees, panning in that wide, rushing river that still runs out of the mountains.