Delta Girls (36 page)

“I saw your writing in the hotel.” She sat on the edge of my bed, patchouli wafting. “You can write, girl. You need to write your story.”

“But it almost doesn’t feel like mine,” I said. “It feels like it belongs to two different people.”

“Then write it that way,” she said, stroking my hair. “Write it as if it’s two different people.”

AS I SLIPPED
on my jeans, I wondered when I had really made the shift from Karen to Izzy. When I took on Isolde Jones’s ID, I still felt like Karen inside—the new name felt like a mask for quite a long time, like something to slip over the real me, something to hide behind. When Quinn was born, I definitely became
someone new, but it was a nameless newness, an ineffable change. Maybe it was when I took my first picking job, when I introduced myself as Izzy to the foreman at the broccoli farm in Mississippi, baby Quinn strapped to my chest. Maybe I became Izzy as I bent over those bumpy green plants, sun and exertion burning Karen out of my muscles; maybe I became Izzy when I realized this would become our life—the constant movement from crop to crop, state to state. When I thought if we kept moving forward, the past would never find a way to catch us.

BEFORE WE LEFT
the hospital, I took Quinn to Nathan’s room. I tried to hold her hand as we walked down the hallway, but she pulled her hand away. When we stepped into the room, I could feel her stiffen, could feel her start to reach for me, but then she steeled herself, arms straight down her sides, hands in fists. I had never been more scared for her, more proud of her, in my life.

Nathan was conscious, but drugged; his eyes were half shut, lids dark and puffy. My mother wore a pink blouse with a plunging neckline, the same ivory slacks and heels as the day before. Bringing Quinn near them felt like bringing her into the bar at Rogelio’s, someplace unsavory, someplace children should not go. Still, these were her people. She deserved to know them. Whether they deserved to know her remained to be seen.

“This is Quinn,” I said, and I could feel a tremor go through her. “Your granddaughter. Your daughter.”

My mother looked her up and down, a move I was all too familiar with. If she had said Quinn needed to lose weight, I would have throttled her, but she grew teary and said simply, softly, “You have your father’s eyes.”

Quinn walked up next to Nathan’s bed and peered at his face. Nathan looked terrified, bewildered, as if she had sprung from his chest like some sort of alien.

“You killed someone?” Quinn asked.

“Not on purpose.” He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.

Quinn turned to my mom and said, quite firmly, “I don’t have his eyes. I have my own.”

MY HEAD STILL
ached as Ben drove us back to the orchard. Everyone had checked out of Rogelio’s and moved back into the house, Abcde and Quinn sharing the guest room.

“I wore nightclothes, don’t worry,” Abcde assured me.

“You can stay here as long as you need to recover,” Ben told me when we were inside his kitchen. His parents nodded. All charges had been dropped against Mr. Vieira, too. It appeared that he and Roberts had patched things up quite nicely since the levee break, even though the flooding had short-circuited Roberts’s robot and destroyed a large swath of his orchard. Mr. Vieira had even vowed to help Roberts with the cleanup; Roberts had told Mr. Vieira he was sure he would have been a goner if my fellow workers Tomas and Vincent hadn’t fished him from the water. The fact that he had used their names was a major improvement. I wasn’t happy with how I had let all the workers at my various farm jobs blur together in my own eyes—I had ignored their individual stories, their essential someone-ness. Maybe now that I no longer needed to hide my own story, I could start to pay more attention to others’.

FOUR PEOPLE DIED
in the levee break: three spectators—Carrie Angstrom, a forty-two-year-old hairdresser from Guerneville, Timothy Hu, a twenty-eight-year-old math teacher from Sacramento, and Maxine Bayliss, a seventy-three-year-old retiree from Oregon—plus Miguel Lopez, a thirty-five-year-old worker from Oaxaca, one of Roberts’s men. I wanted to attend the public memorial service for all of them at the community center where the
festa
had been held, but didn’t want to be a distraction; I wanted any press coverage of the event to focus on those who had lost their lives, not on me. I was receiving enough coverage
as it was, even though I hadn’t agreed to talk to any reporters yet. Ben tried to show me some of the articles, but I wasn’t ready to read them. I sent lengthy condolences to the families of the victims. I knew I hadn’t done anything to harm the four who died, but I hadn’t saved them, either, and this gnawed at my gut. When I thought about the whale, I just about doubled over.

Bartlett had been carried away on a cargo freighter. Biologists determined she had died from a heart condition, not the wound from the houseboat, which, despite the copious amounts of blood, had turned out to be fairly superficial. Still, I couldn’t help but feel responsible. I wasn’t sure if it made me feel better or worse to imagine she may have died of a broken heart as her baby swam farther and farther away. Seckel had last been spotted gliding under the Golden Gate Bridge, headed out to sea.

OUR OWN NEXT
move was a big question mark. Ben had started to field offers for me from magazines, talk shows, cable networks, publishing houses, even ice shows, people wanting to pay me obscene amounts of money to give them the rights to my story. Ben joked that I should hold off and join the celebrity boxing circuit, like Tonya Harding. My mom offered to be my agent, but I told her no thank you; I was going to do this on my own, on my own terms.

“It’s your story,” said Abcde before she left for her workshop in Squaw Valley. “Make sure you find the right venue. Don’t let anyone sell you out.”

“Maybe you can come back when you’re done.” Quinn was inconsolable. She had started talking to me again, but still hadn’t forgiven me entirely.

“I’m going back to Perth, love,” said Abcde. “Going to try to see my boys. But we’ll see each other again, I know it.” Abcde gave Quinn a huge hug. “Always be cheerful, dig?”

“Dig.” Quinn smiled through her tears. “Exactly.”

———

I TOOK ABCDE’S
advice and started to write my story, Karen’s story, dedicating it to Lance’s memory. I held off selling the book until I knew I could actually write the whole thing, myself—I didn’t want any ghost writers, didn’t want anyone to shape my life to their liking. The Vieiras were kind, letting us stay in the guest room as I recuperated and wrote, though I tried to help out as much as I could around the house, around the orchard. The future of the orchard was still uncertain—the Vieiras had taken a real loss, but they had some insurance to tide them over, and talked about replacing part of the orchard with corn to keep up with the growing need for ethanol.

“Not that it’s the best renewable fuel source,” said Ben, “and not that I want to be part of the whole corn industrial complex, but it could help us get over the hump.” He talked about setting up some sort of subscription service so green-leaning yuppies could buy a share in the orchard, get bushels of pears when they were in season, maybe come help pick with their families. He talked about joining with other farmers in the Sacramento area to create a community-supported agriculture co-op, assembling weekly boxes of produce for people who wanted to eat local and organic. I knew that once I was ready to sell my story, I’d be able to help Vieira Pears, too.

In the meantime, Ben stayed home to do whatever he could to get the farm back on its feet. I moved into his room with him a few months later, giving Quinn her own room for the first time ever, enrolling her in the local school. She was so thrilled to have a lunch box, a backpack, a school bus to step onto each morning. We visited my mom and Nathan, who had moved to Los Angeles, a couple of times; it was awkward, and Nathan was frustrated with his rehabilitation, but Quinn seemed grateful to know she had more family in the world than me.

I started to long for my own roots, as well, my muscles aching for movement, for speed. I could hear the ice calling me.
It wanted my blades to scratch its long smooth back. It wanted to feather into soft clumps under the sideways swish of my hockey stop, break into snowflakes that melt quickly against the steel. My beautiful masochist, the ice, open as a heart, willing to give itself over again and again. It forgave me, it forgives all of us, the Zamboni sealing up the wounds, smoothing over the abrasions, restoring its placid dignity.

I did some searching and found a rink in Stockton, just half an hour away.

“I can’t wait to see you skate, Eema,” Quinn said as Ben drove us past one cornfield after another, past one marina after another. I had shown her a couple of competition videos online; she could barely believe I was the person on the screen.

“I won’t be able to do what I used to,” I warned her. “Especially not on rental skates.”

When we walked into the small rink, the clean, sharp, unmistakable smell brought tears stinging into my eyes. The ice was blindingly white, only a few kids lurching around its surface. I was glad there wasn’t a big audience for my comeback.

“We don’t have to do this,” Ben said.

“No, it’s okay.” I blinked the tears away, felt the give of the rubber floor beneath me, the chilled air against my skin. “This is home.”

WE TIED UP
our brown floppy-ankled rental skates, my fingers thrilling at the familiar rub of the laces. I knelt before Quinn to make sure her skates were tight enough. As soon as I was done cinching her up, she saw a friend from school. “Can I go skate with her, Eema?” Quinn asked.

“Of course,” I said, and Quinn took off, stumbling a bit, ankles bowed, but managing to stay upright. My sweet Delta girl.

“You ready to do this thing?” Ben asked, and I suddenly had a flash of Nathan asking the same question before Nationals.
Nathan, when his legs were still strong. Nathan, who was slowly learning to walk again, slowly learning how to be a father.

I let out a long breath, a breath I must have been holding for years. This time, the decision to skate was my own. This time, I had chosen my partner, my pairing. Even with dull blades, flimsy boots, I felt more ready than ever.

I smiled and grabbed Ben’s hand and we stepped, together, out onto the ice.

H
UGE HEARTFELT THANK-YOUS:

To Stephan Silveira for telling me about growing up on a pear farm in the Sacramento Delta; I never would have known about the area if it hadn’t been for you.

To Tim and Laura Neuharth for so generously sharing the ins and outs of running an organic pear farm—my time with you at Steamboat Acres helped bring Vieira Pears to life.

To Colin Page for mentioning his mom had a student named Abcde and sparking a whole character. To Cati Porter for letting Abcde borrow part of her amazing double abecedarian poem, “A Feline Fine, Oh Kitty Kitty Mine” (from her equally amazing collection
Seven Floors Up)
.

To Brian Henne, for all the great houseboat information.

To Elizabeth Brandeis and Laraine Herring for giving such helpful feedback on early drafts of the novel. This book has your lovely, wise fingerprints all over it!

To Anika Streitfeld for being such a fabulous editor in the early stages of the novel. To Lea Beresford for being such a fabulous editor for the next leg of the journey. I am grateful to both of you and your thoughtful, enthusiastic, whip-smart notes. Everyone at Ballantine has been wonderful. (I need to give a special shout-out to Kerri Buckley for swooping in like a superhero toward the end of the process!)

To Arielle Eckstut for first bringing me to Ballantine. You rock (and not just socks)! To Ellen Geiger for being in my corner now—I am very lucky indeed.

To all my friends, family, students, and colleagues who have given me so much love and support over the years, with special thanks to my parents, Buzz and Arlene Brandeis, for always encouraging me, never pushing me (and for giving me a lifetime love of skating, writing, food, and whales); to my kids, Arin and Hannah Brandeis-McGunigle, for being patient with their flighty writer mom; to my husband, Michael Brandeis, for all our Pear Fair memories and all our memories to come. And to Asher Brandeis, the brand-new fruit of our love.

Gayle at 13:
So you actually became a writer.

Gayle at 41:
I did, indeed. Are you surprised?

Gayle at 13:
Not really. Do you remember when our second-grade teacher, Mrs. Koch, told our parents that I would be a writer when I grew up? They came home from the parent-teacher conference and shared what she’d said, and I was, like, “No duh.” I mean, I’ve been writing poems and stories since I was four years old. It’s cool that it really happened, though.