True Places(104)
Suzanne turned from the graves and the trees standing tall above them and headed back to the house. She hoped Iris would return soon, not because she worried about her, but because she missed her. Suzanne had her family, her project, her dream, all of it a work in progress, including herself. Iris was a bonus—a messenger of the gods, so the myth went. Sun breaking through clouds and illuminating a mist-filled sky was wondrous. A rainbow was a godsend.
CHAPTER 47
Iris worked her way among the blackberry bushes. It was late in the season, so she had to hunt for the few berries that were still plump and sweet. Suzanne had packed too much food for her already, but Iris could not pass up them up, because once the last berries were gone, Iris would have to acknowledge that summer was winding down. The signs of it were everywhere. The trees sighed under the weight of their limbs, and the goldenrod and asters had appeared in the meadows. Even the birds had grown quiet, carelessly leaving molted feathers behind like sleepy people shedding clothes on their way to bed, except for the blue jays, who only got noisier, and the doves, who mourned each dawn as plaintively as the last.
When the berries ran out, Iris started back to the cabin, taking the higher route. She walked through the forest and across the streams using memories that didn’t benefit from her direct attention. Her mind was somewhere else, with her father, not that she could think about her family too long or too deeply. It hurt: Ash’s tragedy, their mother’s, both Daddy’s pain and hers. Suzanne said time would ease the pain, like working through a sore muscle. Iris hoped Suzanne was right, but sometimes Daddy reminded her only of what she no longer had, and as guilty as it made her feel, she wished he had stayed lost. At least then she could attach whatever she wanted to the mystery of his disappearance, or forget him altogether. But she didn’t have that option, because once he had been found, she couldn’t lose him again even if she wanted to. He was locked inside her heart.
Iris had questions for her father that she kept stacked in her mind. The last time she saw him, a little more than a week ago, she had asked about her mother’s family. He told her the Coltons had scratched out a living deep in the Ozarks. Iris’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, had died when Mary Colton was fourteen. Iris’s father had never met any of them, and Iris understood from his tone that distance had nothing to do with it.
“Your mother didn’t like to talk about it, but your grandfather was a hard, hard man,” Iris’s father told her. “When your grandmother died, he got even harder. Your mother was the youngest of six and the only girl. Too much fell on her, and it didn’t seem anyone was looking out for her. She didn’t say exactly what went on, but as soon as she could, she left and never went back. I met her near Asheville a few years later.” He paused, shaking his head as if the memory of her were too fine to belong to him. “She was pretty and strong, just like you, but terrified of people, shied away from everyone. Everyone except me, for some reason.” He smiled at Iris. She recognized this part of the story. She had always known her parents trusted and loved each other. Whatever else had happened to her family, they always had this one true, straight, incorruptible thing.
Iris’s reverie dissolved as she arrived at the place where the wake-robin grew in the spring. It was just an ordinary patch of woods now, except for the giant boulder and, of course, Ash’s marker. She accepted that what remained of her mother and brother was buried by the old brick house, but in her mind, Ash would always be here. Iris knelt in front of the marker and pulled at the plants crowding its edges.
“Can’t stop things from growing, Ash. You just can’t.”
Or from changing. Her own life was a handy example. How she had fought to keep things the same, to stay in the woods, live the only life she knew, the one that had shaped her. Her cradle and her crucible.
Growing and changing. Iris had been afraid of both, and she still was, but Suzanne had shown her what courage could do, how you could alter the shape of a life without breaking it. Iris wasn’t sure about who she might become, what shape she might take, but she wouldn’t live her mother’s life, molded by fear. Mary Colton Smith had loved these woods as she loved her family, but she had been hiding. Iris would not hide.
Suzanne wanted her to study and work at the center after she finished high school. Iris said she might. Plants and medicine were her legacy, after all, passed down to her from the grandmother she would never know. Suzanne knew Iris better than anyone, which gave Iris comfort. But Reid had been talking to her and sending her articles on meditation and global warming. The way Iris thought about it, her own mind was the smallest place to learn, make changes and make a difference, and the Earth was the biggest. Iris didn’t know which intrigued her more. Maybe both, or something in between. She had time to decide. She could even change her mind. Sometimes she became swamped by the possibilities and felt she had been launched into a wide-open space and could fall forever, as in a dream. Being in the woods helped her to find her feet again.
She finished clearing the plants away and squatted on her heels with one hand on the top of the marker, listening. The wind sighed through the tops of the trees, shifting the pattern of light falling to the forest floor. A pair of dusky-blue butterflies, no bigger than her thumbnail, danced in a shifting column of light, then alighted, first one, then the other, on the damp ground, violet blue against brown, before twirling upward once more. Beyond the clearing, in the undergrowth, a bird kicked through the leaf litter. A towhee.