All Rivers Flow to the Sea (14 page)

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 again.

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.

“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.