Fig (38 page)

It drowns out every other sound.

It's after midnight when I give up trying to fall asleep; I feel as if I might never sleep again. Not ever. When I go downstairs to make a cup of tea, I find the front door blown open by the wind. Flung outward, it reminds me of a wing, slightly fluttering but never shutting.

The electricity is still out, and the light from my candle leaps around, unreliable; I can only see my immediate surroundings. The rest of the world falls away, swallowed by the darkness and silenced by the sound of rain. Rainwater pools on the hardwood just inside the door where a welcome mat should be and reflects the candlelight in my hands. The orange light leaps across the glassy surface, repeating and dancing there. Fire on water: It is a mirage.

I stand barefoot in the open door, looking out at the night. Somewhere on the other side of the slanting black rain is the moon, and I know it's full, even though I can't see it. The space beside Mama's old Volvo where Daddy parks his truck is empty, which means he's still helping Old Man Fergeson. I close the door, and the motion blows my candle out and everything darkens.

The darkness sharpens the beam of flashlight still shining in the day porch where I left it for my mother. The squares of window pane in the French doors dissect and fragment the light; these frames throw the artificial light around like a Cubist painting. I walk toward the broken light, remembering my way around the furniture, and through the living room. I open the doors and step into the day porch, where the rain is loud against all the glass.

The flashlight has fallen over and no longer points at the ceiling like a makeshift lamp. Instead, the light pierces the window, turning the glass into a mirror and magnifying the light. I don't need Mama's lighter to relight my candle, because I can see in here without it.

Stretched along the arm of the recliner, Marmalade is sleeping; old and arthritic, the cat doesn't stir. The rest of the chair is empty. Mama is not here.

I look through the darkness of the living room to where I remember the front door to be. And I remember standing there. How I looked at the night before I closed the door on the storm. I even locked the door against the wind so it might not blow open anymore, but I should know better by now: Nothing on this farm ever opens on its own, especially when Mama is here.

Before I go to grab my coat and boots, I look to the flashlight again; this time, I follow the beam as it tunnels through the cold glass to penetrate the black orchard like a searchlight searching.

*  *  *  *

The lightning cracks the sky like an egg; the white veins of electricity reach across the black expanse, and in these short flashes of brilliant light I think I see my mother up ahead and running. She is running through the pasture, toward the orchard. I call out to her, but the thunder follows and I can't even hear myself, and the night goes back to black and I can't see again, so I run.

I run until the next bolt of lightning illuminates the farm, turning my mother into a silhouette running through the rows of silhouetted apple trees. I watch her disappear into the woods along the ditch, and I keep running.

Crossing the ditch, I slip and fall into the water. I grab the bridge just in time. Fed by weeks' worth of rain, the water is deep, cold, and fast. I can feel the pull, and I almost let go, but then I remember Mama. I cling to the board instead, and use it to pull myself to the other side. Grabbing tree roots and rocks, I scramble onto the bank, where I lie in the mud, trying to catch my breath. The lightning stops and in the absence of the thunder I hear the call of the rushing river. And then I hear whimpering.

I sit up, looking around and trying to place the sound. The darkness seeps into my eyes, and just when I think I've gone blind my eyes adjust and I can see the wild dog. First, I see her yellow eyes, but when she whimpers again the sound helps me to distinguish her outline from the surrounding shadows, which tingle against my eyes like static, only black. The dog keeps whimpering, and when she turns to look toward the river her eyes disappear. I retie my bootlaces and pull myself up. I straighten my wool overcoat, which is soaked and even heavier than it was before.

I follow the dog into the shadows and through the thick bramble and tangled branches. In the dark, it's hard to see and the foliage reaches out for me; it snags the long skirt of my nightgown, and the thorns scratch my face and draw blood. The dog runs ahead, only to stop—looking back as if to confirm I'm coming. And when I step forward, she proceeds again, and I hope I'm headed in the right direction. The rain has stopped and once I'm out of the woods, the sky opens again and I see the first signs of the moon above; the blue light edges the black clouds, which are thinning as they begin to disperse. The dog runs ahead, stopping to check on me as she did before.

I follow her toward the Silver River, but the tall prairie grass is slick, and I need to be more careful; I've already wasted so much time by rushing. I head for the property line dividing our farm from the McAlisters, and as I do a song my mother used to sing begins to loop inside my head.

“Take me down in the river to pray.”

*  *  *  *

By the time I make it to the river's edge, the dog has disappeared. I find Mama's worn-out tennis shoes on the shore by the top of the waterfall. Side by side, they are an inch apart and pointed toward the water.

The scuffed toes point forward to give way to the five footprints set deep into the mud. And in each impression, I see the shape of my mother's long naked toes: right, left, right, left, right into the cattails.

Right into the river.

As the storm rolls away the clouds drift apart. Sifting into long, thin wisps, the opal moon emerges and her light turns the river into a river of mercury as it hurries toward the falls. On the other side, the McAlisters have piled sandbags along the bank, where they stand like castle walls fortified against the wrath of the raging river. But despite the swell of rain, our side of the river flows as it always has—from the short falls, the water follows the channel of stone walls to collect in the shallow pool circling out from around the weeping willow, its surface as calm as a mirror.

The scene below is like a scene from a Japanese woodblock: The still and silver water works to contrast the inky black tree, but as I look I begin to see something unfamiliar—something that complicates the design. Through the sweep of willow, I see my mother lying in the water.

I want to run, but I can't. The steep path requires patience, and I have to sidestep the small slick stones embedded into the hill. And even though I take my time, I slip twice before I reach the shore below. When I brace my last fall, I scrape my wrist on a rock and the blood blooms red. I suck it clean and pull myself back up and walk toward the tree. I part the curtain of willow and step inside its shelter, where I am now close enough to touch her.

Mama's face is the one smooth stone along the wall of rock, and her pale hair spreads across the water like a halo, the blond streaked black with blood. I see bits and pieces of my nightgown reflected in the water, tangled amid the rotting hyacinth and floating around her body like white flowers. My mother stares upward, through a veil of river, and her head appears to be on backward. Where her chest should be I see instead the shape of her shoulder blades.

I want to pull her out, but I can't—the river, the falls, and the rocks have broken her, and I can't bear to break her even more.

But I must touch her face. This is not a painting or a story. This is Mama. I once lived inside her body. And this is her face before she was born.

I step into the water and kneel beside her; first, I touch her cheeks, then her lips. I can't stand to see her eyes open, her pupils fixed and dilated, but when I try to close them they just reopen. She is looking ahead. She is still looking at a place I can't see, only this time I know her eyes are fixed on a place where she will be happy. I am shaking. Her skin is colder than the water, and I know I must get dry again, and warm, and soon. It's almost like she is the one who is telling me this.

On the horizon, I see the violet line of morning, but before I can go and get my father, I must first build a dome around my mother as she used to build for me. I build it from memory. I build the dome to keep away the monsters. I build the dome so I will never forget, not ever. I build a dome around my mother to protect the world she sought—a place like heaven.

The willow branches already form a wall to protect my mother, but there are gaps in the places where there are no boughs. Like a conductor conducting an orchestra, I use my hands like wands. I stand at the edge of the pool, inside the shelter of the tree, spinning air into patches. I stitch the negative space to the water and the willow. I tuck the invisible edges under rocks, and I make the dome from love, and love is hard and so is the dome; nothing will get through in the time it takes to find my father.

When I am done, the sun has risen and the horizon is on fire and I feel warmer, although I'm trembling and my hands are now the same blue-white as my mother's skin. I stand inside the willow and I do the weeping. My tears are hot and the salt water turns the morning light into a constellation of rainbow stars refracted by the see-through surface of the dome. Just like the domes she used to build for me, this one will keep her safe until my father comes to carry her home.

Only he will know the ways to lift a broken body without further breaking it, and this he will need to do alone.

And it is time for me to go. I step out of the willow to find I'm not alone. In the morning light, her eyes are no longer yellow; one is periwinkle, and the other full of clouds. Sitting by the steps at the bottom of the hill, my feral friend appears to be waiting. When I approach, she does not shy away, nor does she leap ahead to run and stop and look back, or to run away and disappear again. This time, she follows me. She follows me up the hill, and she stays close while we venture through the woods and over the water. She walks inside my shadow and never strays.

She follows me through the paddock and the maze of apple trees, and all the way into the house, and just like that, she is tame.

*  *  *  *

October 7, 1992

Sissy Baxter sends a bouquet of twenty-four dark crimson roses and a generous gift certificate to The Flower Lady. This time Sissy does not leave it to me to decipher her message; this time she uses words and she signs her name.

I chose the color of the rose to symbolize your mourning,
Sissy wrote.
And the number twenty-four is to let you know that you are in my thoughts every hour of the day.
According to the postscript, the gift certificate is from the Flower Lady herself.

Mama is cremated and given back to us in a small white gift bag, like she's a present we just bought. Daddy writes the mortician a check, leaning over so I can't see the cost. He continues to treat me like I'm a little girl.

Inside the white gift bag, the ashes are inside a plastic bag, which is inside a black box with a white label on the top where the weight of my mother's remains is recorded next to her name. Daddy sees this equation and begins to cry, which I haven't seen him do since Mama's accident.

“That's what she weighed at birth,” he says, and then he explains how I, too, weighed this amount—nine pounds and three ounces—and I remember my mother telling me, “There is no such thing as an accident.” The mortician said my mother must have had strong bones for this to be the weight of her remains.

As we drive home snowflakes flutter from the gray October sky, but they are few and far between, and the first real snow won't come until after I've turned seventeen; like grief, the winter to come will be cold and all encompassing.

*  *  *  *

April 3, 1993

We wait for spring to bury Mama's ashes, and I wonder what it was like for my mother when she had nothing left of her parents to memorialize. I wonder if she chose cremation to be closer to them in death. When we bury her cremains, we don't invite Gran or Uncle Billy; it is enough for them to come to my graduation next month, it is enough for me to graduate at all.

The Flower Lady has expanded, and attached to the back of the shop is a small nursery; the Flower Lady has merged with Baxter Lumber. Daddy takes me there, and I use the gift certificate to buy the rosebush I want to plant over Mama. The eglantine rose, also known as sweetbriar, blooms pink; each flower has five heart-shaped petals, and in the center burns a yellow stamen heart. According to the language of flowers, this flowers means a wound to heal.

I am still healing, and it hasn't always been easy to leave my skin alone. Especially right after I lost Mama forever and I was all scratched up from the thorns and bramble—nature's fingernails—and I proved that I'm not perfect. I perpetuated all these marks on my arms and on my face; I slipped into a relapse of self-harm, and Billy had to tell Daddy, and Daddy had to send me to a therapist, and just as my rosary and flowers help, so does hypnosis. Like schizophrenia, there is no definitive cure; like a garden, I will have to tend to this habit, forever weeding out the urges.

Around the sweetbriar I planted Little Red Riding Hood tulips to represent my undying love, and forget-me-nots and rosemary for remembrance, and last of all a carpet of snowdrops to give me hope. The location of this grave and garden was chosen long ago by my mother, even though she intended it for something else. Daddy redigs the hole as I clear away the debris and plant the other flowers. Where once I tried to burn the smallest nesting doll, we scatter what remains of my mother. The ash and bone turn the black soil white, and then we cover Mama.

We tuck her in.

When I do show Gran, I can feel her looking at the statue of the Mother Mary, and I wonder if it's blasphemous the way she's been left to the elements. Her long white skirts continue to turn into soil and she is sinking farther into the garden, to someday be entirely swallowed by the dirt.