All Rivers Flow to the Sea Page 11

  “Every morning I make her coffee,” I whisper into Tom’s shoulder. “Every morning I get down her mug.”

  I shake my head against his shoulder. He pulls my head up and puts both hands on the sides of my face.

  “Hey,” he says. He whispers it against my ear. I breathe him in, his Tom Miller smell of warm skin and sun and soap and sweat. He smells like himself. He smells like life.

  “They’re never going to look at her and know who she was,” I say. “They’re never going to know who Ivy was.”

  He doesn’t ask who they are, all the theys out there, all the people who will ever push their way through the door of the room where Ivy sleeps and walk up to her bed, pick up the chart that hangs for all eternity at the foot of the bed, and study it. Look at her, I want to scream to all the imaginary people pushing their way through that door — Look at her! Can’t you even say hello to her before you pick up that chart, that goddamned chart?

  Quarter, please. Another quarter. Clink. The flowered ceramic jar is filling up. Almost time to take it to the bank, turn it into real money.

  What else would I give up?

  What would they want, what would appease them, those who want me to give things up so that my sister can come back?

  Would I give up my father, down there in his park in New Orleans, the jazz band playing softly around him, tourists with their hot beignets strolling past where he lies sleeping? My father, who I used to pray to God to love me. Please, God, make my father love me.

  Yes. I would give up my father.

  Take it all, you gods. Take whatever you want, you who have it within your power to bring my sister back and yet aren’t doing it.

  Years of your life. We want years of your life.

  Okay. Take some, then.

  As many as we want.

  Go ahead. Take whatever the hell you want. Just bring my sister back to me.

  How many years of life do I have left?

  I see myself as an old, old lady. Sitting in a rocking chair covered with sweaters and blankets. My hair is gray — no, my hair is not gray because I’m hairless. I gave up my hair to try to get my sister back, back when I was a child. Remember? I’m drinking sugarless tea that someone else made for me because I’m too weak and old to move from my rocking chair. Every night someone carries me to bed and tucks me in with an electric blanket, because I’m always cold the way all old ladies are always cold. Poor circulation.

  How many years do I have left?

  Six.

  Take them. You can have them. All six of them.

  No. Those aren’t the years we want. We want some of the other years. The years in which you can move, years when you are not wearing nine sweaters one on top of the other, years when everyone you love is still alive and you can still climb a mountain in the Adirondacks and sit on top and look out at those fall colors, flame on flame on flame. Those, those are the years we want.

  If there is nothing I will not give up to bring back my sister, does that mean my own life? Would I give up my own life?

  There comes a point at which you stop giving things up. That is what I won’t give up. None of it will I give up, for my beautiful sister Ivy who lies in the bed. Ivy who used to be alive. Ivy who used to be. Ivy who used. Ivy who.

  Ivy-who-is-not-me.

  Not me. Not me. Not me.

  “What about the Miller boy?”

  “Tom Miller? What about him?”

  My mother gazes at me. Her fingers are busy with her cranes. She left the big box of them down in Ivy’s room, but the big box wasn’t enough, she said. “There’s only eight hundred there,” she said. “I need one thousand.” She can do them without looking now. She makes them out of anything. Newspaper. The Sunday comics. Cartoon faces of people with big noses, cats and small birds and dogs with enormous sad eyes peek from the graceful finished cranes, the nearly thousand cranes made by my mother.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  She nods. Once. A brief, businesslike nod.

  “He’s a good boy.”

  So much is left out of Do you love him? and Yes. So much is left out, such as what it felt like that night in the haymow. I want to tell someone about Tom Miller, and how his arms felt around me, and how I remember him sitting at his desk by the window last fall, the way all the colors of the world were caught and held in the leaves that spun and floated down to the earth. About the night we sat at his father’s stone in the village green, that night when the air was soft and the crickets were chirping and the moon hung round and full, so many million miles away. I wanted to tell Tom about Pompeii, about the baby in its rush basket in the corner, the baby who never knew what was coming. How when the ash came to cover the town, it did not spin and drift gently from a blue, blue sky. Ash came in a fury, a fury of black and gray that blotted out all sound, all air, all life.

  My mother works on her paper cranes. No more questions about Tom Miller. She doesn’t know how he circled his arms around my ribs.

  “Feel how tight my arms are around you?” he said. “This is how tight I’ll be holding you. No matter where you go, or where I go, remember how tight I’m holding you.”

  Memory doesn’t fade. You don’t forget. When you conjure something that happened, float it back up through time and space, it will happen again. When I am eighty years old and looking back on my life, I will be back in the haymow with Tom Miller, that night when he held me so tight.

  Cranes hang now from the ceiling of Ivy’s room. One after another my mother kept on making them. She sat in the blue chair while William T. sat in an orange chair on wheels that Angel the nurse moved in for him. She took all kinds of paper: newspaper, pages from a magazine, Christmas wrappings, a page from the Utica phone book. She turned the paper into a square by folding it against itself and then folding and ripping off the excess. She paid no attention to dimension. The cranes were of all shapes and sizes.

  “Do you ever measure, Connie?” Angel asked. They were on a first-name basis. Connie and Angel.

  “No, Angel, I don’t.”

  Now Angel looks up at the cranes dangling from the ceiling. My mother strings them on thread and separates each with a piece of straw cut from the drinking straws you get at fast-food places. Sometimes, when I’m in the truck with her on the way to visit Ivy, I drive through a drive-thru.

  “Order?”

  “Three straws.”

  “Excuse me?” the microphone voice squawks.

  “Three straws.”

  Pause.

  “And what else?”

  “Nothing.”

  Pause.

  “Drive up to window number one.”

  We drive up to window number one. “Three straws.” “Thank you.” “You’re welcome, come again.”

  My road test has come and gone. When the day came, William T. and Tom drove me down to it in the Datsun, so that I could take the test in the rusting red Datsun, the truck I learned to drive in, the truck with the stick shift that, according to William T., is like butter. “Damn, those Japanese know how to make a shift,” William T. said. “Beats Detroit all hollow.”

  The man who gave me the road test had a clipboard like the clipboard that hung at the end of Ivy’s bed. I was calm throughout my test, and so was he. When it came time to parallel park, I did so perfectly. I followed the man’s instructions through downtown Utica, and every five seconds I glanced in my rearview mirror. I braked. I pressed the gas appropriately. I made sure my seat belt was buckled securely.

  “Well?” I said at the end, when the man told me to pull over to the curb.

  You’re not supposed to ask anything about your performance on the road test. You’re not supposed to ask if you passed or if you failed, but I asked anyway. What the hell, as William T. would have said.

  “Well, what?” the man said. He didn’t smile.

  “Did I pass?”

  He regarded me. He gave me an appraising look, and I looked right back at him. Maybe he could tell I
was older than my years. Maybe he could tell that I am a seventeen-year-old girl who has been through war, and that I don’t have a lot of time for nonsense.

  “All I can tell you, Miss Latham,” he said, “is that I will never see you again.”

  Good enough.

  The first night I had my license, I got in the Datsun and drove up to Jimmy Wilson’s house. Knock. Knock. Jimmy came to the door and froze when he saw it was me. I knew he didn’t want to talk to me, but he was too polite just to slam it and walk away.

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry,” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “I wanted something that would take it away,” I said. “Make me forget.”

  He kept looking at me.

  “It didn’t have anything to do with you,” I said. “I wanted to feel something, I guess. I know that sounds weird. I was hurting so much.”

  He looked at me for a long time.

  “I would never want to hurt you, Rose,” he said. “Ever.”

  There was a lump in my throat, at the sound of his voice, so quiet and hesitant. I nodded. I didn’t want to hurt you, either, Jimmy, but I did. Turned around and got back into the Datsun.

  Cranes hang from the window frames of Ivy’s room, from the light switch, the lamps, the bed rail, the overhead light. Cranes hang from strings attached to unbent paper clips, threaded through cup hooks screwed into the ceiling. William T.’s work, all of it.

  “Be careful,” I said when he stood on his blue chair.

  “Mmm.”

  When they were all hooked, he dusted off his hands. A job well done. Origami cranes sway slightly, fluttering in the air of the room. The closest we come to cranes in the Adirondacks are herons. I saw a great blue heron once. It stood by the shore of Deeper Lake, one leg up, one leg down. It bent and dipped its long beak toward the cool dark water.

  My mother, my not-normal mother, made the cranes for her daughter. Don’t underestimate your mother, William T. says. She does the best she can. A thousand cranes hang above Ivy, trembling in the air that displaces itself whenever the door to her room opens and someone slips in. My mother, me, William T., Angel, or the doctor.

  We all slip in.

  We slip in because we don’t want Ivy to be startled, there on her bed, where she lies in her long silent prayer. We don’t want any more crashing, startling, loud noises that end in pain. Hasn’t Ivy had enough of that? Haven’t we all?

  William T. held my mother against his truck, the day of the accident, and stroked her hair while his girlfriend, Crystal, stood next to them and wept.

  Tom Miller drives in the dark to the stone that bears his father’s name.

  Spooner sits in the sun and canes.

  My mother spends her days righting tipped bottles and her nights working on her cranes. I watched her the other day rip a sheet of paper from Ivy’s clipboard and make a crane out of it, out of that torn written-on chart.

  And what do I do? How do I get away from that light blue truck, sliding and sliding — it will slide forever — into and onto and through my beautiful Ivy, whose arm was flung out against my chest to protect me?

  We all walk around with a stone in our shoe.

  “So, the Miller boy,” my mother says. “Do you love him?”

  “Yes.”

  My mother regards me from the rocking chair. I feel the full force of her gaze. I say nothing. She regards me awhile longer, and I say nothing for that while.

  You are most powerful when you are most silent. People never expect silence. They expect words, motion, defense, offense, back and forth. They expect to leap into the fray. They are ready, fists up, words leaping forth from their mouths. Silence? No.

  My mother knows the power of silence too. She rarely uses it, but she has the power. She uses her power now. She stills her body. She almost never stills her body, and it takes her some time. First, she stops the motion of the rocking chair. Then she draws her legs up and crosses them on the chair. Then she places each hand on one knee and spreads her fingers so not one touches another. Then she closes her eyes. She calms her breathing. She becomes as motionless as is possible for my mother to become. She draws herself inward.

  “Sometimes we go to the haymow,” I say, when enough time has gone by so that she knows I can be as silent as her.

  She doesn’t move.

  “And sometimes we go down to the village green,” I say. “His father’s stone is there. He likes to sit by it at night.”

  And that’s all I say. Then I wait. My turn.

  “I remember Chase Miller,” my mother says after a long time of waiting. “He went to the war when I was a little girl.” And after a longer time, my mother says, “Are you safe?”

  “No.”

  It’s the only thing to say. Are any of us safe? How do we make it through? How, when you know you are going to leave this life whether you want to or not — when you know that you and everyone you love will leave this life — do we make it? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.

  My mother sits silently in her rocking chair. I go out on the porch and watch the sky turn plum like a days-old bruise. Tilt my head back and gaze up to where the pale moon hangs silent, a curved white hook. It’s only August but already I can feel the longing of winter for itself, how the air and ground wait for ice, the snow that falls so deep in upstate New York and turns all living things to stone.

  I sit on the porch steps and watch as bats pour out of the hole in the upper screened window of the old barn. They swoop and twirl and head off, singly and in small groups, diving and wheeling for bugs in the gathering dusk. When it’s fully dark, I slip off the steps and into the night.

  Some nights it’s William T.’s corn field across the road, with its stalks feet taller than I am tall, silky brown tassels at the top of each ear. Cow corn, big-kerneled, hard and dry. I feel my way toes first, arms out to keep my balance.

  Tonight it’s the pine woods down from the corn field. Everyone is sleeping: my mother in her dreamless sleep, Ivy in Utica in whatever sleep comes to her now. I sit and draw my knees up and circle them with my arms, fold myself into the shape of an egg. I still my body to the stillness of the trees.

  Owls call.

  Small animals nose their way through the pines.

  Bats flap and swoop overhead.

  After a while my breathing slows and my skin becomes the same temperature as the summer night air. I sit patiently and wait. For what, I don’t know.

  Sometimes I walk the three miles that connect Route 274 with Sterns Valley Road with the packed dirt of Williams Road. Sometimes Tom comes with me. Sometimes I’m by myself. I walk through waves of warm air and waves of cold, their variation caused by something I don’t understand, something that, had I asked Mr. Carmichael back in science, he would have been able to explain to me.

  The starry night holds things I can’t yet see: trees waiting for light, lakes ringed by pines, birds that sing only in the absence of sun. I’m used to the darkness, used to biding my time. A whippoorwill calls, keening in the distance once, twice, three times. On the other side of me, another returns the call.

  Or is it an echo? Back and forth comes the call, birds mourning in their harsh language. That first night we were together, in the haymow, Tom Miller and I whispered back and forth, our mouths so close that I could feel the faint intake of his breath. I breathed in rhythm with him. His hand was light on my head, stroking my hair back, and back, and back.

  The slender moon floats above the white pines like a buoy in the darkness. I lie on my back in the dew-wet grass and look up at the stars, glittering. One blinks out as I gaze at it. If it doesn’t reappear, have I been witness to its death?

  Ivy didn’t care about the stars.

  “Planet Earth is my sole terrain,” she said.

  “What about all the other worlds out there?” I said. “Pompeii. Hinckley Reservoir. String theory and the Higgs boson and all those millions and millions of stars?”
>
  “Nope.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  “For God’s sake, Rosie. I’m not like you. This one world right here is enough for me.”

  Ivy is going now. She will be gone soon. Ivy and I had an accident. It was dusk in the Adirondacks that night, and a light blue truck came sliding around the curve, and now time is turning for my Ivy, curving upon its own axis, plucking her up and setting her down somewhere else, a somewhere I can’t imagine.

  I read to her for the last time today from the manual, and then I closed it. I’m a driver now. No more need to study up on the rules of the road. I put my hands over my sister’s.

  “William T.,” I said. “Are there things worse than dying?”

  William T. was sitting in the blue chair. He had completed his entire book of birds. “Just when you think you’re done,” he had said, “along come a thousand new cranes of indeterminate breed.” His hands were quiet in his lap, and he stared up at the paper cranes fluttering in the breeze from the window, the paper cranes dancing above my sister.

  “Living without love is worse than dying, Younger.”

  “But would you give up love if you could have your son back?”

  “Not possible,” he said. “My son was my love.”

  Love is my mother, her restless hands turning paper into birds. Love is William T., standing at his stove stirring me eggs soft and slow with plenty of butter. Love is Ivy, silhouetted for one moment in the dark outline of the paneless window. Still water, flow within me, flow through me; no one can love my world as I do.

  “Yes,” my mother said. “Let her go.”

  And they nodded. Cranes fluttered around us like ribbons, like streams, like white balloons drifting skyward, and William T.’s hands came out and covered my mother’s hands.

  There was a dark night when I sat in a circle in the haymow. Forbidden cigarettes, forbidden beer, forbidden time, and we were so alive, and our world was limitless.