The Blackberry Bush (7 page)

A
SHORT WHILE LATER
Nellie and Walter stand a few feet apart from each other at a construction site on the river dike. They face slightly away from each other and look out at the water.

Nellie is standing next to her bike and looking left. Her knee is skinned badly. Walter stands in military posture with both hands crossed behind him, looking right. The buttons on his gray dress uniform shine in the summer sun.

Heavy machinery moves tons of wet mud, and men climb up and down on massive concrete forms, tightening the rebar with huge rusty pliers. Walter is clearly in charge, but only over the men. Nellie is making an invitation that will change their lives and could, she believes, end hers. And he will accept.

The industrial noise is such that no one can hear what the couple is saying to each other.

Without daring to face one another, Nellie rides off, back upstream along the river dike.

Walter remains with the men, but his heart has left to go off with her, never to return.

1943
World War II
Oberwinter am Rhein, Germany
Just south of Bonn

B
ACK IN
G
ERMANY
, eight-year-old Harald looks down the hill at the village on the same river, hours upstream from what just happened, and a chill goes over his back.
How can that be?
he thinks.
It’s high summer
.

He seems to hear words in the wind—some words that he understands (his father’s?), and a woman’s voice speaking in a strange language.

“
Verabredet
(meeting agreed)!” he thinks he hears his father say with a formal tone. Harald calls out for his father but hears nothing. Only silence.

His heart darkens. Somehow Harald knows this is a bad thing. A very bad thing.

For whatever reason, Harald turns around and runs home to check on his mother....

10 September 2001
Zarzamora, California

Josh

I
T’S A CLEAR EVENING
. I’m staring out my window at the crumbly brick wall that borders the abandoned orchard behind my house when I feel the earth give a little wobble. I don’t give it a second thought, though, because the ground never truly stays still along the Pacific Rim—the Ring of Fire. Mini-quakes happen all the time. An understated, subtle, rolling aftershock waves past me as I sit back down at my drafting table.

I’m drawing another stop sign with my T square. So simple. Just need 45-degree angles to make it perfect. How many of these have I drawn over the years? Dozens? Hundreds? And I don’t even know why.

My left hand leads the sketching, and I ask myself a silly question.
Are thumbs fingers?
Of course not. We have eight fingers.

Something is wrong this particular Monday evening, and I don’t know what. I’m unsettled somehow. Drawing always calms me down.

It’s been a coolish, sunny day. On these hinges between the seasons, when the change comes, you know the old weather patterns of the past season are not going to reassert themselves. Change is going to stick. Autumn is on its way.

You can do so many things with an octagon. Sevens and eights are really the same amount, in a way. Dad (and all the Germans) say there are eight days in a week, and they’re right because they count both of the bookends of the week—for instance, Monday and Monday—and all the days in between.

My life is simple and balanced here in Zarzamora. But change is in the air. Dad keeps talking about going back home to Europe. A home that’s not home to me at all; it’s just where my mom’s mother, Oma Adri, lives.

My chessboard, as I glance over to my left, has sixty-four squares—eight by eight. My grandmother, Oma Adri, sent it to me last year. It has marble chess pieces.

The only great thing about going back to Europe would be Oma Adri. I always smile when I think about her. She’s so intense—more like a high-strung cat than a person—that she wears me out. She’s also really short. At twelve, I’m already a lot taller than she is.

The marble chess pieces she gave me have Spaniards, portraying figures from around the year 1600, in Catholic white, and Dutch freedom fighters in Protestant black. The border of the board is in patriotic Dutch orange, and the whole chess set is a continuous reenactment of the Eighty-Years’ War, which gave birth to the Holland we all know.

Dad loves to play chess with me, and he’s really competitive. We also have a drawer full of German games like Rummikub.

Oma Adri tells me the most important thing in a game is not winning. It’s also not about having fun or making sure you are “doing your best.” It’s
mooi spelen
(playing beautifully).

Dad believes and lives the opposite. For him, it’s all about calculation and winning—even if it’s winning ugly, with brute force. He yells when he coaches kids’ teams. That embarrasses me.

Nothing against Dad’s winning focus, but my whole day, every day, is an attempt at
mooi spelen
. I practice smoothness every day. In every step. In every gesture.

For instance, how you look on your skateboard is everything. It ruins the best trick if you feel awkward while doing it, even if you can land it. Here in Cali, we call it
steezy
. It’s a combo of stylin’ and easy.

Even when I ride my bike, it’s not just about getting there fast. It’s about how it feels and looks when you ride. Oma Adri so “gets” me when I talk like this. I especially like throwing in carves, when you swoop left and right on your bike as if you’re making big bottom turns with your surfboard.

It doesn’t matter if there is anyone around or not, I want every motion (and I love motion) to look and feel good.
Steezy. Mooi.

Life is like a dance…every single move.

They want to get snowboard racing going up at Gold Mine. How dumb. Riding is so
not
about racing. Nothing is about racing.

I hate it when they turn Olympic skating, one of the most graceful things humans can do, into a competition and nine-point-whatever.
Mooi
has nothing to do with judging; it is about
doing
.

Maybe Dad didn’t make it in the NBA with his basketball because he never understood all this. I’ll try to walk down the hall to breakfast tomorrow as smooth as a panther, without making a sound. Every motion can be
steezy.
I can sneak up on anyone, even on wild animals that live on the other side of the wall. Coyotes live back there, and someday I’m going be able to stalk them without their knowing it. I’m working on it.

While I’ve been thinking and telling you this, I’ve drawn all kinds of connections between the points of the octagon. It looks like an umbrella. Or a compass. Or the steering wheel of a ship. The baptismal font at the Catholic church here in town has eight sides.

I look up from my drafting board at the most remarkable thing in my room. A big print of my favorite painting hangs in my room—Vermeer’s
Vrouw met Weegschaal.
^*
Oma Adri gave it to me for Christmas last year.

The woman in the pic is so totally
steezy
and balanced. When I’m about to go skate my brains out, I look at the picture and listen to funk legends Earth, Wind, and Fire (I “borrowed” the CD from Mom) as loud as my speakers will go, until I feel the balance the woman in the painting is holding in her hands. She’s standing alone, just like Oma Adri, who never married and refused to tell her parents how she got pregnant with my mom.

When we first put the framed Vermeer painting up on my wall, Oma Adri and I turned all the lights off and shined my desk lamp onto the reproduction and talked about it for almost an hour. She tells me that Vermeer, also from Delft, Holland, may be related to her father Ruud’s family.

The more you look at this painting, the more you see. Do you see the tension in her left hand? I understand that. Maintaining balance.

The old picture behind her on the wall feels like the vibe I get when I’m sitting in the empty Catholic church here in town, drawing.

The light coming in the window is the coolest part of the painting. The woman’s face is so beautiful and balanced—not like the pale girl in my dreams, who is always agitated. I believe the blue robe in the painting belongs to Jesus somehow, and I can’t stop thinking about the three gold coins.

The woman has turned her back on the past stories (the picture behind her) and is focusing perfectly on the present. She and I totally get the “in the moment” thing.

And she’s pregnant. I’ve never seen my mom pregnant.

Oma Adri says that the light coming into the window is like God’s grace. When you enjoy it, it doesn’t mean that someone else gets less of it. God is lavish.

It’s the best painting there ever was.

Something inside me says I could walk across water if I could balance perfectly. I sometimes practice trying it in my dreams. The woman in the painting has nothing in the balancing scales. She is just “balancing balance.” I think that might be the key to everything. If you could balance balance, you could walk on water.

The pale skinny girl has been showing up in my dreams again. Last night she was wobbling across a balance beam in our high school gym. I quietly walked up behind her on the hardwood floor and grabbed her right wrist to steady her. She wasn’t startled. She breathed in and found balance. She’s like my dad. She doesn’t have balance on the inside, so it’s hard for her body to balance on the outside. Some people are falling over inside, 24/7.

I grab my ThornHeart ink stamp and push it down hard into the squishy red ink pad and “sign” my octagon. Too sleepy to draw anymore…

I awake…I think…to a nightmare.

Are Mom and Dad okay?

The ground is shaking back and forth. Glass is breaking.

Everyone is losing balance.

Are Mom and Dad okay?

I’m not just misplacing balance. I’m losing it. My childhood is slipping out of my grip. I am being pulled out of my room into the dark night sky, high above Zarzamora.

There’s a sudden scene change in the dream.

I get transposed in the nightmare. I find myself out surfing in the Santa Barbara lineup at night. A rogue wave the size of a sideways semitruck starts to jack up. I desperately try to paddle and claw up the face to top the crest. No go.

I fall backward, the only true sensation of zero gravity on this earth, and the wave crashes down on me.

In the turbulence, I am drawn deep underwater by the leash attached to my ankle and surfboard. I claw upward toward the blurry light but am pulled downward.

My leash breaks, and I get rag-dolled in the turbulence. The board is my flotation device, and it is gone.

Another twelve-foot wave hits, and the vicious turbulence is repeated before I am able to get a lungful of air between poundings.

But this time the water is hot and smoky. In dreams, some things make sense that don’t make sense in the real world.

All of a sudden I find myself facedown on a carpeted office suite floor that is quaking and heaving. I hold my balance. The roar of what sounds and feels like the concussion of an extended train wreck continues to make laps around my ears. I look up and see, through the strangling smoke, broken window glass and sky off to the side.

I run for the opening as the floor heaves and snaps.

Leaping through the broken window into what turns out to be midair, I grasp for any kind of hold, which isn’t there.

Looking down, I see an urban landscape one hundred floors below my flailing feet....

Screaming, I sit straight up in bed.

Are Mom and Dad okay?

The R
OTTERDAM
S
PARTA
soccer shirt I’m sleeping in is soaked. I have to pull it off....

At last the nightmares evaporate, and morning comes.

I’m standing in the living room with my school book bag and my skateboard, staring at the TV news. The World Trade Center towers are crumbling over and over in rerun after rerun.

Dad peered up into the sky when he went out the front door to meet with the community leaders to assess risk to the town of Zarzamora. He looked worried.

Mom left for work at the winery a few minutes ago.