Evergreen (36 page)

“I’m beyond all of that now,” her dad had said.

“You can’t be beyond love. It isn’t healthy.”

“Then I’m on death’s door,” her dad had said.

As far as Racina could tell, her dad wasn’t beyond love; he was still stuck in it, which was why she’d stopped asking about her mother. Every time she did, he’d look like the buck’s head on the wall above the woodstove. That was why she didn’t tell him about the baby book or the cross, and that was why she
wouldn’t tell him about the picture of him and her mother in the corn either. But she wanted to, and she wanted him to tell her things, too.

After they ate dinner that night and listened to the radio awhile, Racina got ready for bed, and her dad came to tuck her in. She knew she was getting too old to be tucked in, but she didn’t want to be the one to say so. Her dad pulled the covers back and sat on the bed next to her. He always started with stories and ended with a song. Tonight Racina asked for a shadow story because she knew how much her dad liked to tell them. He’d cup his hands and release them and suddenly there would be an alligator on the wall. Or a bear. Or a wolverine, because of how rare they were.

Tonight her dad told about a woman, walking through a forest, who had a special sense about the outdoors, so much so that animals and birds would come up to her instead of the other way around. Even the trees would lean toward her as she walked by.

As he spoke, Racina watched her dad as much as she watched the shadows on the wall. Her night-light was on in case she got sick in the middle of the night, and it illuminated his face enough that she could see this story, or at least this part of it, made him sad. He said the lady was a wood angel and that nobody knew it until they took her out of the woods, and she wilted like a plucked flower. He said by the time people realized what was happening to her, she had only one little petal left.

“She didn’t die, did she?” Racina said.

“No,” her dad said. “She found her way outside again.”

“Did the people leave her alone?”

Racina’s dad moved his hand in a sweeping motion in front of the wall as if he were erasing the wood angel lady.

“She left them,” he said.

After the story was over, he pulled the covers up to her chin like he always did. The moment he left, she’d free herself from the covers, pull off her socks, and sprawl across the bed with just the sheet over her. If he didn’t come in to check on her, she would have slept
au naturel
—her new favorite French word. She liked being a little cold. A little nude.

Her dad smoothed the hair back from her face and kissed her cheek. “Sleep tight.”

“Don’t let the wolf spiders bite,” Racina said. She always slept well knowing he was just on the other side of the wall and that a little bit of her mother was right underneath her.

At the door, her dad paused. “Which one do you want tonight?”

“You choose,” Racina said, wondering what her dad was going to do between now and when he went to bed, which was still hours away. One night, when her throat felt prickly, she’d wandered out to the kitchen for water and a cough drop. Her father had fallen asleep on the couch, which he was too big for. He was curled up around the pillow that looked like a candy cane. Even though it wasn’t cold that night, Racina covered him with a warm wool blanket before she got a cough drop from the tin on the counter and went back to her room. She understood then how much love was behind him doing the same for her.

Tonight, her dad chose a song he’d been singing to her forever.

Go to sleep my darling, close your weary eyes
.

The lady moon is watching from out the starry skies
.

The little stars are peeping, to see if you are sleeping
.

Go to sleep, my darling, go to sleep, good night
.

35

Phee thought purple cowboy boots sounded like a lot more fun than the boots they made when she was Racina’s age. Like Racina’s dad, she wanted to go to town and get them for her right away. When Racina explained about wanting to earn them, Phee offered her ten dollars to help her organize her books, which was what the boots cost. When Racina tried to bargain her down like she did with her dad, Phee said there were two kinds of people in the world: the kind who overestimated how much they were worth and the kind who underestimated how much they were worth. She said it was much better to be the first kind.

“Why?” Racina said. Her dad had just dropped her off at Phee’s cabin and had gone on to chop wood with Uncle Hux. Racina was going to spend the morning here and the afternoon at Dr. Beller’s office in Green River so Dr. Beller could run some tests.

“The second kind of people aren’t usually very happy,” Phee said. “They think they don’t deserve to be. They’re a glum group, frankly.”

“Okay,” Racina said.

“Smart girl,” Phee said. She handed Racina a crisp ten-dollar bill, which her cat, Liddy, tried to bat away with her paw. “Stop that. You’re a mean old thing, aren’t you?”

“Why does she only like me when I’m sick?” Racina said, putting the money in her pocket. The only times Liddy ever let Racina pet her without hissing or clamping down on her fingers was when she wasn’t feeling right. Then and only then would she lick Racina’s face. But the moment she was well again, Liddy would stop all that sweetness and turn sour.

“It’s a strange habit of hers, isn’t it?” Phee said, looking toward the bright yellow windowsill in the kitchen where Liddy had escaped. “The only time she doesn’t mind me is when I’m opening a tin of sardines for her.”

Before they got to the books, Phee poured a glass of juice for Racina and showed her a picture of a jacket she and Uncle Hux were thinking of getting her for next winter. According to the catalog, the jacket was made of goose down and weighed only thirteen ounces. It was waterproof, too. Uncle Hux was the one who picked out the color. Red onion. He thought it would look pretty with Racina’s dark hair.

“I love it,” Racina said.

“Then it’s yours,” Phee said. “Your current coat is so heavy it makes you hunch. This one’s supposed to be warmer, too.”

“Thank you so much,” Racina said. She was hopeful that this jacket—because the description said it had been tested to thirty-seven degrees below zero and wind chills even greater than that—would convince her father to let her go out and build a snowman or make an igloo next winter.

Racina put her juice glass in the sink, and the two of them started alphabetizing Phee’s books, which smelled a little rotten and a little sweet at the same time, like old leaves or wet
newspaper. Phee said she’d been meaning to do this for a while but her hands were too undependable. Some days she couldn’t even hold a pencil. She had special metal braces for both hands, but she didn’t like to wear them because she said they made her feel like a robot. She said her hair was the only thing about her she didn’t mind being silver.

“I wouldn’t mind silver hair either,” Racina said. “I think it’s neat.”

“You may be the only one in the world who thinks so,” Phee said. “Getting old doesn’t win most of us any beauty contests.”

“Aunt Leah puts green clay all over her face to keep it young,” Racina said. Last time Aunt Leah did it, she let Racina put some on, too.

“I’m afraid no amount of clay will fix me,” Phee said. “I’m dealing with deep and mighty ravines. Mountains. Deserts.”

Phee got out a stepladder for Racina to stand on, since she couldn’t reach the top row of books on her tiptoes. “What’s up there anyway?” she said.

“It looks like some books about gardening. There’s one about airplanes, too.”

“Can you bring those down yourself?”

“I think so,” Racina said, but Phee put her hands on Racina’s ankles anyway.

When Racina got all the gardening books down, she asked if she could look at the one about airplanes, and Phee said yes, of course.

“Have you ever been in one?” Racina said.

“Once,” Phee said. “A little crop duster.”

“What was it like?”

“Scary at first, but then I didn’t want to come down,” Phee said.

Racina looked at all the different airplanes in the book.
Some were small and sleek, and some were so large and bulky looking Racina wondered how they ever got off the ground. She wondered what it would feel like to fly through all that blue.

“Are people with immune disorders allowed to go on planes?” Racina said.

“I don’t see why not,” Phee said. “Where would you go?”

Racina went back up the ladder. “The Arctic Circle.”

Ever since she’d read about it in Uncle Hux’s book, she wanted to go there even though the author said there were only three things that far north—snow, ice, and regret. She wanted to see the sun at midnight.

“Where else would you fly?” Phee said.

“Wherever my mother lives,” Racina said.

Racina had dreamed about meeting her mother ever since she found out she had one. Sometimes when she and her dad were in Yellow Falls, she’d pretend the women who walked past them were her mother. Once, Racina blew one of them a kiss, and the woman gave her a lollipop that looked like a rainbow, and because her dad didn’t want to offend the woman, Racina got to eat it right there on the street.

Phee helped Racina down from the ladder even though Racina was standing steadily on the middle step and didn’t ask to come down.

“I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m tired of not telling you,” she said holding Racina’s hands, even though it clearly hurt her and to do it she had to concentrate very hard. Anymore, her hands nearly always shook. “Your mother lives in Wisconsin, honey. I still talk to her. So does your Uncle Hux.”

Ever since Racina had learned about verb tenses, she thought maybe that was true, because both Uncle Hux and Phee mostly talked about her in the present tense.

“Is she still sick?” Racina said.

“No, she’s much better now.”

Then why doesn’t she come home?
Racina thought, even though she knew the real story of her mother was much more complicated than the one her dad had told her. She knew the words “she had a very hard life that made her sick” were supposed to explain everything that had happened while her mother was in Evergreen without explaining it at all. They were like Racina’s great big coat; they were supposed to keep her safe.

“She lives on a dairy farm with an old friend of hers,” Phee said.

Before they finished organizing her books and Racina’s dad picked her up, Phee said one last thing about her mother. “Don’t be afraid to tell him you want to see her. He’s stronger than you think. He’ll be all right.”

On the way to Dr. Beller’s office, Racina was quiet. Usually she liked the drive to Green River, especially when everything was starting to bloom again like it was now, and the fields and grass and trees were such a pretty shade of green. Today, all Racina wanted to do was be at home with the folder under her bed. She wanted to write down
Wisconsin, dairy farm
, and
old friend
. She wanted to write down
she would want to see me
.

Her dad was quiet, too, but the fishing rods he was going to drop off at the Hunting Emporium on the way back were tapping against the window in the back of the truck like fingers. Racina didn’t like to fish that much, but she loved to watch her dad make the rods. Each one involved splitting sheaths of wood, sanding, and lacquering them over and over again, which her dad said took a kind of patience he wasn’t born
with. He said he broke a lot of rods when he was first learning. He said he started making them because when Racina had learned how to stand at the edge of the river without almost falling in—when she was about three—he wanted to get her a pink rod and a pink tackle box, but nobody made them in the Northwoods. Even though it was too small for her now, the pink rod was hanging on the wall above her bed. She used the tackle box to hold her art supplies.

“How much did Phee give you?” her dad said.

“Ten dollars,” Racina said, showing him the bill.

“How come you took it from her and not me?” Even though the cab was getting warm from the sun and he was still sweating from chopping wood with Uncle Hux, Racina knew he wouldn’t roll down the window because of the draft it would cause. He kept eyeing the sleeves of her shirt, which she’d rolled up when she was sorting books for Phee.

“I don’t want to be the kind of person who underestimates my worth,” Racina said.

Her dad looked at her, but he didn’t say anything.

“She let me look at a book about airplanes,” Racina said. “I hope I get to go up in one someday. The big ones go hundreds of miles per hour.”

“I like you being on the ground,” her dad said.

“Dad?” Racina started, but she already knew she couldn’t ask him to see her mother. She thought of her fishing rod. Her tackle box. She rolled down her sleeves.

“Yeah?” her dad said. A wood chip was stuck to his cheek.

Racina moved across the front seat until she was close enough to lean against him. “How was chopping wood with Uncle Hux?”