All Rivers Flow to the Sea Page 10

  And my sister’s voice. It’s happening again, isn’t it, Rosie? Come on — let’s walk.

  Volcanic ash. Would it have a sound?

  “You look up from checking the bread, which is almost finished baking,” I pretend-read. “You know that something is wrong. Your first instinct is to look in the corner and make sure the baby is all right. The baby is all right. The baby is sleeping. But still, something is wrong. You can sense it.”

  “That Pompeii book is strange,” William T. says. “It’s not written like a typical history book.”

  Was the baby in the rush basket scooped up by his mother when the ash first began to flutter down? Did his mother tilt her head and listen to a faraway sound that she didn’t understand? Did the baby wake? Did he begin to cry? Did his mother try to soothe him as she hurried from the house?

  Or maybe there was no time. Maybe it all happened so fast that there was only a single moment of confusion — she looked at the oven where the bread was baking; she looked at the bed, which was still unmade; she found herself running to the corner where the baby lay sleeping in his rush basket — and then it was all over.

  Ivy has the hair she’s always wanted now. Long and soft, softer than she could have imagined.

  “It’s finer than baby hair,” Angel said. “It’s a marvel of hair. Look at it.”

  She held up a strand. Light from the window behind her poured in and illuminated my sister’s hair. Who would have known that each individual strand could contain within it so many colors, could glisten in the rays of the sun as if it were made of the sun itself?

  “‘Before going on to Chapter Six,’” I say, “‘make sure you can answer these questions. What is the hand signal for a stop? A right turn? If two drivers enter an intersection from opposite directions at the same time, one going straight, the other turning left, which must yield the right of way? If you enter an intersection to make a left turn but oncoming traffic prevents you from making the turn right away, what should you do? If you reach an uncontrolled intersection at the same time as a driver on your right and both of you are going to go straight, who has the right of way? What must you do if you are entering a road from a driveway? You are facing a green light, but traffic on the other side of the intersection would keep you from going all the way through the intersection. May you enter the intersection? Does a vehicle about to enter a traffic circle or rotary have the right of way over vehicles already in the circle?’”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” William T. says. “The hell if I know the answer to half those questions.”

  “See?” I say. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. It’s not that easy.”

  Then I hear the sound of my mother’s voice.

  “Ivy?”

  She carries a big cardboard box. Her cranes, her hundreds and hundreds of cranes. There she stands, at the foot of Ivy’s bed. The ventilator: wishhh, wishhh, wishhh.

  “Connie,” William T. says. “Connie.”

  She looks over at him. There’s a look in her eyes. The box of cranes looks so heavy, cradled in her arms like that. She looks at William T. and her head begins to shake. No, her head says. No.

  “Connie.”

  William T. gets up from the blue chair. He takes the big box of cranes from my mother and sets it on the floor. Then he picks up the hairbrush from the nightstand, Ivy’s hairbrush, and puts it into my mother’s hand. He folds her hand around it, as if she’s a toddler and he is her parent, trying to show her how to hold a spoon.

  “Here you go,” he says. “Sit down now. Younger, give your mother a seat, will you?”

  I stand up and William T. guides my mother into the green chair.

  “There you go,” he says. “Brush now. Brush her hair.”

  He puts his hand over my mother’s hand and guides her hand to Ivy’s head, and down he brushes, down they brush, down the brush glides over my sister’s hair. My mother’s other hand comes hesitating up and follows the path of the brush. After a while Angel is there, turning Ivy’s chart around and around in her hands.

  “Angel,” William T. says, “I’d like you to meet Connie.”

  “Nice to meet you, Connie.”

  “She’s the mother. Elder and Younger’s mother.”

  “Of course she is,” Angel agrees.

  We all stand there, watching my mother brush Ivy’s hair. One hand strokes the brush through Ivy’s hair, and the other hand follows in the path of the brush, smoothing and smoothing. It’s a rhythm, and my mother falls into it. Strands fly up in the air to meet the brush.

  The night of the accident, my mother stood in the hallway with the doctors and the nurses around her. She was the lone tree in the middle of supplicant trees. Her hands covered her ears. Her eyes were closed. “I cannot lose my daughter,” she said. She kept on saying it. “I cannot lose my daughter.”

  “Too late,” the young doctor said. “Your daughter is already dead. In every meaningful way, your daughter is already gone.”

  “You don’t know,” my mother said. “You don’t know! You have no fucking idea of what my daughter will or will not be able to do!”

  The young doctor shook his head. He was angry; he was impatient with my mother. Crazy woman, he was thinking — I could tell.

  “You! Don’t! Know!” my mother said. She started pushing at him, at his white coat, his chest. “You have No! Fucking! Idea!”

  And the doctor turned and walked away down the hall and disappeared.

  Later, William T. held my mother against his truck. He and Crystal and Spooner and Tom had brought us home from the hospital. Tom and I stood on the porch, and the three of them stood around my mother there in the chill March air, closed ranks around her, and William T.’s arms circled themselves around my mother and she leaned into his arms, and her head was on his shoulder, and his arms were wrapped around her. Tom and I watched from the porch. My mother leaned against William T., and William T.’s arms were wrapped around her, and William T. and Crystal leaned against each other, and of the three of them, none either moved or spoke until my mother’s shoulders started to shake and I knew she was crying.

  “It’s okay,” William T. whispered to her. “It’s okay.”

  My mother’s shoulders aren’t narrow, but her rib cage is the narrowest of rib cages. Turn her sideways and there is not much there. Ivy too. When they stood together, their bodies were the same, Ivy’s smaller, but the bones were put together in precisely the same way. When Ivy walked, I could feel my mother walking.

  William T.’s hands came up and touched my mother’s hair. She didn’t move.

  The hand that was touching my mother’s hair began to stroke her hair. Down it went, from the crown of her head to where her hair brushed against her shoulders. And up again, and down. Smoothing, and stroking, and smoothing, and stroking. Never changing its rhythm. William T.’s eyes gazed at Crystal, who was crying silently, and his hand moved as if it were its own self, as if it knew what to do independent of any thought, as if it were stroking my mother’s hair out of instinct alone: Yes. This is what must be done.

  My mother couldn’t lose her daughter. She couldn’t say the words that would let them disconnect the ventilator from Ivy’s body, let Ivy’s body gradually cease to take in air, let her heart gradually stop its squeezing, its squeezing, its squeezing.

  “So she’s not brain-dead?” she said.

  The young doctor looked away.

  “She tried to take a breath, so that means she’s not brain-dead, right?”

  He looked away, kept looking away, shook his head.

  “Not officially,” is what he finally said. “Not legally.”

  My mother keeps brushing Ivy’s hair, and then she puts the brush down. She pulls Ivy’s hair to one side and plaits it. Unplaits it. Strokes her fingers through its long softness. Finger-combs it. Bends her cheek to the long strands and breathes in. Breathes out. She turns to me and William T.

  “I wish I had let her go right in the beginning,” she whispers.
“I wish that I had let her go.”

  The day comes when I am sitting in the green chair by my sister’s bed. No more Pompeii. No more baby in his rush basket, baby who will never wake up. Goodbye, baby. Goodbye, mother who couldn’t save him.

  I read from the driver’s manual. Getting ready for my road test, three days hence.

  “It’s time, Younger,” William T. says. “You can’t just sit in that goddamned chair reading from that manual forever.”

  “That’s a quarter.”

  He ignores me. Maybe he thinks I’m old enough now that curses will not adversely affect my growth. Maybe he figures I’m tall enough now to be safe.

  “There comes a time, Younger,” he says, “when the book must be put aside, and the pedal put to the metal. And that time, by God, has come.”

  He turns in his blue chair and points his index finger out the window, at the gray thread of pavement winding its way beyond the Rosewood Convalescent Home driveway.

  “Road ho!” he says, and turns to Ivy in her bed. “What do you think, Elder? Is it time that Younger got off her butt and into the driver’s seat?”

  Ivy says nothing. Wishhh, wishhh, wishhh. My sister, beautiful sister with the softest hair in the world, sister whose hair was never so soft when she was alive.

  And what I never wanted to happen has just happened. I thought the words when she was alive.

  I didn’t mean it, Ivy! Ivy, I didn’t mean it! Ivy, I am not letting you go!

  She doesn’t open her eyes and look at me and say, I know you didn’t mean it.

  She doesn’t say, But, Rosie, what you said is true. I used to be alive, but I’m not anymore.

  She doesn’t say, Please, Rosie, let me go.

  It’s me who is alive. I can walk through that door over there. I can shove it open with both hands and stride down that hall. I can turn the corner and disappear. I can walk all the way back up to the Adirondacks if I want to, because I am alive. I am alive, and my body pumps itself full of oxygen and my blood runs free and I’m alive, alive, alive.

  A bird alights on the windowsill and looks around, looks into the room where I sit in the green chair and William T. sits in the blue chair and Ivy lies in the bed with her hands folded. The bird sees that our room is a small place with high walls. No way to see the wide world from in there, the world that the bird has hovered in all its life. And with one beat of its wings, the bird is up and out, spreading its wings to the world. Goodbye, sad windowsill to a sad room.

  My heart that’s been cracking and cracking and cracking cracks open. Pieces lie in shards around me, tiny pieces of the blue sky shattered and fallen to earth. I stand up.

  “Let’s go,” I say to William T.

  And William T., surprised but silent, stands up too.

  Tom Miller comes to my house late that evening, walks into the kitchen when I don’t answer the door, walks through the living room and finds my mother, working on her thousand paper cranes. He tells me later that he followed her finger, pointing silently to the haymow where I am hiding, a refugee from the water that is again flooding its banks, threatening to drown me.

  Silence. With my eyes closed, the world swirls around me and dizziness comes creeping. Am I standing? Lying down? Where is the paneless window? The dark air of the haymow, still and heavy, presses against me and it’s hard to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. I open my eyes. Tom stands before me.

  I reach my hand out to him.

  “Tom.”

  We stand in the darkness of the haymow, and he wraps his arms around me. I pull my arms out from under his and put them around his neck. I bury my face in his shoulder. He smells of sun, and of hay, and of sweat and soap. He smells of himself. We stand and rock back and forth, a tiny movement, a pendulum made of the two of us. Back. And forth. And back. And forth.

  “Come here,” he says.

  He whispers, “Come here.”

  He lays me down in the hay. Our arms wrap around each other. He kisses the top of my head.

  “Don’t hurt yourself any more,” he says.

  I close my eyes and picture myself at the gorge. A bird’s-eye view, as if I’m a bird hovering over my own self, my own self with Jimmy, with Warren, with Todd. If I move they might think I like it. They might think I’m with them, part of what’s happening, instead of hovering above, watching and hoping: Is this a way to get away? To be moving water instead of trapped within myself and overflowing? I don’t move. Beside me the water of the gorge tumbles in its rushing way, scurrying over the rocks, on the way to its temporary resting place, Hinckley Reservoir.

  “Do you walk around with a stone in your shoe?” I whisper to Tom. “A stone that’s your father?”

  He laughs. “That’s one way to look at it,” he says.

  Does the water of the Sterns Gorge know where it’s going? Does it know that soon it will stop rushing, soon it will stop moving, soon it will be part of an immense body of still water? Viewed from space, the ocean appears as a giant body of still water. There is no way out.

  “This hurts so much.”

  Tom tightens his arms.

  “I want it to go away,” I say.

  “I know you do.”

  I close my eyes again, there in the haymow. It’s a summer night in the Adirondacks, and the hay is new and the scent of cut grass, which is what hay is, rises around us. The hay is new and not as scratchy as it will be later. It still holds the scent of life lived outdoors, life lived in the sun and the rain and the wind. I love the smell of hay. We rock together in the haymow, Tom and I. I feel him against me. How different this is, from the boys at the gorge. A fluttering begins in my stomach and creeps through my body, down to my center, where I hollow out, and feel myself warm and soften.

  “Tom?”

  He shakes his head, there in the darkness.

  “No,” he says. I lay there, wrapped in his arms, and listen to his words echo in my mind.

  “No?”

  “That’s right,” he says. “We’re just going to lie here.”

  I ease onto my back and look up into the cavernous space of the barn above us. Somewhere above the peaked tin roof, bats wheel and swoop in the darkness. A barred owl calls from the woods down the dirt road. I listen for an answer, and in a minute it comes, from the pine woods across the road. Who, who, who are you? Who, who, who are you?

  Tom turns on his side and rocks me in his arms. We don’t kiss. At some point in the night, the owls cease to call and the whippoorwill halts his lament. The paneless window appears as a blur of lighter darkness that turns into a rectangle of indigo, turns into the blue of my mother’s winter sweater, turns into aqua, turns into the pink-white of a dawn sky.

  Tom sleeps. He lies on his stomach with his arms pillowing his head. I prop myself on my arm and look at him. He sleeps, not moving.

  I watch his back through the T-shirt to see how he breathes in his sleep. No motion. No motion. No motion. Is he alive? — and then, motion. The slight lift of worn cotton, and then the slight drift downward. No motion. No motion. No motion. Then: the slight lift. The slight drift.

  Breathe in the smell of his hair. It curves over his head, following the shape of his skull. Maybe he cuts it himself. It’s the kind of haircut that needs no instructions to the barber.

  “Just do something different,” I’ve heard women say at the hairdresser’s. “I’m so damned sick of the way I look.”

  Not Tom Miller. I watch him sleeping. His T-shirt, his jeans, his running shoes that sometime in the middle of the night he must have taken off because they lie next to us. His hair. The no-motion, no-motion, no-motion, slight-lift, slight-drift, of his back. His lungs inside, doing their work. His heart, pumping, pumping, pumping. His blood, flowing its way through all the passages and curves of his body. Is he dreaming?

  I shiver and Tom wakes. It’s light enough to see his eyes open.

  “Are you cold?” he says. “Baby, are you cold?”

  He turns so that his arms are around me aga
in.

  Baby, are you cold? — and the ball of hurt inside me swells. How much it hurts. Every day it hurts all over again, waking up in that dreamy half-moment when you have no strength in your body and you’re still limp from a night of sleep. In that half-moment, my long strong fingers — fingers that can pull up any weed, that can push and pull at dough, fingers that can shuck an ear of sweet corn in three firm tugs — can’t clench. Helpless. Baby fingers.

  Every morning it comes over me again, that Ivy’s not in our house. It comes to me in a wave, another wave, another wave, engulfing me. Every morning I lie in bed until my muscles can move. And then I get up. And go into the kitchen. Bare feet. Splintery floor. And I make the coffee. And when the coffee is made, I stand at the bottom of the stairs and call up:

  “Coffee, Mom!”

  Every morning I say it in the same tone of voice. I tried to make it a routine, right after the accident. See, I was trying to say to my mother, back in March. See? This is a life that still has coffee in it, coffee in the morning. Every morning I open the cupboard and take out her favorite mug, the one with the daffodils on it, and set it on the counter next to the pot of coffee. Take the half-and-half out of the refrigerator. Pour it into the daffodil mug. Measure in the sugar.

  “Coffee, Mom!”

  And down she comes.

  “Thanks, Rose.”

  That’s it. That’s our morning routine now. Coffee, Mom. Thanks, Rose.

  Coffeemomthanksrose, Coffeemomthanksrose, Coffeemomthanksrose, Coffeemomthanksrose, Coffeemomthanksrose. Soon it will be time to go into the house and make the coffee, so that the routine can be followed. But why follow the routine? What’s the point? I bury my head in Tom’s shoulder, and his hand strokes down my hair, down and down, and I feel his lips on the top of my head. He kisses the top of my head and says nothing. My hair is electric, softened, calmed, all at once, by the stroking of Tom’s hand. All the mornings since March are running through me — Coffeemomthanksrose — flooding over me, and there in the haymow I know how much they have cost me.