Never Coming Back(84)
The door opened and the blue-scrubs people herded in with their clipboards and their instruments and their needles and IV pole and their smile-crinkled eyes above masks. The nurse jotted something down on the form. They tucked a blanket around me. “We’ll take good care of her,” they said to Chris. “You can see her as soon as she’s in recovery.” And then they wheeled me out.
There were things I wanted to say on that speak-now-or-forever-hold-your-peace ride down the hall to the operating room, things that I would talk to Jack about if it were me and him sitting on the porch, the way we kept doing, even though it was truly cold now. There were things I wanted to say to Asa, and to Eli, and to my mother. To Blue Mountain and to the others who walked among us, their hearts beating outside their bodies. But the drug was trickling through me and the words formed themselves in the air above my head and did not get spoken. It’s short, I was thinking. It goes fast. Do everything you can while you can, because it’ll be gone before you know it. The lights overhead, fluorescent tubes of lights, flash-flash-flashed above my eyes as they pushed me along. I thought of the night the bartender dragged the chairs over and lay down so that we could look at photos of Sunshine and Brown together. If I were Blue Mountain’s mother I would be proud of him. If I had a baby girl I would name her Grace. If Jack were let out of his bottle he might turn into a genie who held inside him all the secret thoughts I had told him. My thoughts would be big and free then. They would be in the world. They would float from cloud to cloud in a high-white-pine sky. The last thing I remembered was a girl in the trees who looked the way I used to look, and she was looking down at me.
* * *
There were things I couldn’t forget.
Like the feeling in me when I looked up from The Depths and there was Asa at the concession stand, watching me, and even though I didn’t know anything that was about to happen, the loneliness started melting out of me.
I went back to that feeling sometimes. That memory. When someone like Blue Mountain appeared, one of the skinless, with his unanswerable question and his shadowed eyes, I conjured up that memory of Asa and I sent it out into the world. There will be someone for you in this life, was the message I sent, someone who will look at you and know you and love you.
Other things, if only. If only they could disappear.
Like the way Asa still appeared to me, his face contorted the way it was when he told me it was over, we were over. The way he shook his head and just kept shaking his head and telling me he was sorry.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Is it because of college? Because we can make it work, Asa.”
“I’m sorry.”
Asa, who I had never seen cry until that day, stood there before me, crying. It was unbearable, what was happening. I turned my head to the left, toward the edge of the house, where something caught my eye. A curtain, moving. Pulled aside and then let drop. My mother.
“Asa. Why are you doing this?”
“I’m sorry.”
Minutes passed, him shaking his head and me crying. “Is there someone else?”
“No.”
“So you just don’t love me anymore? Is that it? You stopped loving me?”
His head kept shaking back and forth and it was bewildering. He turned and got into the beater he used to drive around in, that we used to drive around in. How he kept it going nobody but he knew, but he knew that piece-of-crap car like a mother knew her baby, what it needed and how to soothe it, and somehow, always, he could make it work. Except for that day. I could still see him, grim-faced behind the wheel, fingers turning the key and the engine moaning like it was in pain, over and over, quieter each time until it was silent. And there he sat, me standing there, him sitting there, the air between us strange and distant, air that lived in two separate countries.
Then there was the sound of a truck coming through the woods, the shortcut road that only locals knew about, which meant that it was someone I knew, and it was. Eli Chamberlain in his truck. He drove into the driveway and threw it into park before it was ready. He walked up to Asa’s dead car and opened the driver’s door.
“Come on, son,” he said.
Asa got out and Eli put his arm around him and walked him back to the truck and opened the passenger door for him and kept his hand on Asa’s shoulder as he put one leg and then the other onto the step and disappeared inside. Eli shut the door and looked at me. What was in his eyes? On his face? Sadness. That was what I remembered.
“Goodbye, Clara,” he said, and then they were both gone.
It wasn’t true that Asa had stopped loving me. I had felt it then and I felt it now. But the thing I hadn’t known when I was young and lacked perspective was that his love would always be with me. It was part of me forever. A room inside a room inside a room, a room that was always warm and bright. I could go and sit in that warmth whenever I wanted.
I hoped it was like that for my mother too.
* * *
A talisman was waiting for me when I came home after the surgery. She stood on the window ledge where Jack usually kept vigil, a slender, wood-chopping woman carved out of red pine. A tiny ax was gripped between both hands, held high above her head. A pile of miniature split firewood logs was scattered around her, and she wore a lumber jacket painted in a checkerboard pattern of orange and red and black. The carver who had posed her like that, who had taken a pocketknife and drawn the lines of her body so that the grain of the wood became sinew and muscle and bone, who had raised up my mother’s arms in the sky, ax clenched between her hands, the master carver of this miniature scene was someone who had seen through to the essence of my mother. Tamar Winter, queen of the northland, in her prime. And off to the side, cradled between the boughs of a miniature white pine, was a girl, watching.