The Queen of Everything (35 page)

"Exactly how is a mystery. Life is full of
mysteries, isn't it? We just get used to them," she said. That's how Big Mama
talked. She caught Jackson's eye and winked.

"Right," he said. They'd had this talk before.
My heart felt full knowing that Jackson and Big Mama saw things the same
way.

"I tend to think it's the same way you'd know
your own mama's kitchen," she said.

We watched the salmon for a while. They were
ugly and wonderful. I was proud of them.

"Okay?" Big Mama said, breaking the silence.
Back at the cabin, Big Mama showed us the barrels that in a month or two would
hold almost fifty thousand eggs taken from twenty-five wild chums. The barrels
would roll about in their home waters, a protected nursery, and be checked every
day until almost April.

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"The eggs," Big Mama said. "They're all eye
when you look at them. All sight. At least all the sight they need. Thousands of
years of memories."

When it was time to leave, we waved goodbye to
Tom, whose five minutes of counting were up, but who was eating lunch out of a
brown bag on the rickety platform above the river. I looked over this peaceful
place. The entire time I was there, I thought not once of my father or Gayle
D'Angelo or the scary tatters of my life that were waiting for me back on
Parrish.

"I want to stay here forever," I said. "I'll
come and work for you, Big Mama. I'll count fish."

Big Mama caught Jackson's eye. They exchanged a
look. Big Mama sighed.

"What?" I asked.

"Oh, Jordan," she said.

It rained on the way home. All three of us
clutched the stems of our bubble umbrellas as they lifted and fought the
wind.

We stayed four more days. We went back to the
hatchery with Big Mama, and Jackson and I walked the length of the creek from
one end of Nine Mile Falls to the other. We bought some old paperbacks from Tom
Stone at the used book-and-record place. In the mornings I would
sleep

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late and wake to find Jackson and Big Mama at
the kitchen table. At night we ate dinner, and Big Mama tried to teach us to
play hearts.

That particular night Jackson had cooked. A
frittata all yellowy brown, and biscuits with butter and honey. The smell of
onions and peppers and frying butter still hung in the air as Jackson washed
dishes at the sink with his sleeves rolled up to the elbow, darkness coming
earlier than it had been to the small kitchen window where he stood. I waited
for Big Mama to get the pack of cards out of her junk drawer, but instead she
went to the living room and opened the lid of an old chest with a doily on top.
She bent over the chest, moved around a couple of afghans as she kept the heavy
wooden top propped open with one hand.

"What are you looking for?" I asked.

"Something I want to show you," she said. "Ah."
She pulled out a photo album and held it in the air. "Here it is. Sit down," she
said.

I sat cross-legged on the couch, and Big Mama
eased down beside me, placing the book with one cover on each of our thighs. I
wondered what she was going to show me. I was expecting to see baby pictures of
her kids maybe, but when she opened the cover I was surprised to see a picture
of my parents. They were standing with their arms around each other's waists in
front of a small yellow house.

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Below that was another picture of my mother and
father, this time with Big Mama and Clyde Belle and Angela when she was about
ten. This photo was all shoulders and heads, sloping downhill at such an angle
that they looked like they should have rolled off the page years ago.

"Whoa," I said. "Hang on."

"We let Burke take that one," Big Mama
said.

I leaned in for a closer look. The strange
thing was, my parents looked in love. The strange thing was, Clyde Belle looked
happy. It gave me the creeps to look at his picture, knowing what came after. It
occurred to me that people would feel the same when they saw photos of my
father. They would look and try to find in his face the seed of what he'd
done.

"They came to visit us once when we were still
in Chicago. Your mother was seeing her folks, I think. Before you were even
born. Do you notice what I notice?"

"I don't know," I said. I didn't want to hurt
her feelings and say what I noticed about Clyde Belle, in case that wasn't
it.

"She looks just like you," Big Mama
said.

"Who?" I said.

Big Mama laughed. Her huge chest heaved up and
down, She poked the picture with her finger. "What other female in this picture
could possibly look like you?"

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"Oh, please," I said. "She does not. I've
always looked just like Dad."

"You think so," she said. Big Mama flipped
through pages. Burke blowing out candles on a cake. Big Mama graduating from
college. Angela with one arm around Big Mama in her black gown, Clyde wearing
the mortarboard on his head and a goofy smile on his face.

"Burke took a good one that time," I said. "You
don't even have to turn your head sideways."

"Everything with practice," Big Mama said. She
flipped through more pages, came back to the front again. She stopped at a photo
of my dad, with sideburns and a young face, and my mother with her long brown
hair, looking pretty. "I've known your mother a long time," Big Mama said. "You
know that story?"

I nodded. "She met Clyde when she worked at the
post office."

"She met Clyde when they worked at the post
office," Big Mama repeated. "And after we were introduced, well, Clyde was
barely part of the scene. Poor old Clyde." She shook her head.

"When we got the chance to move here, I thought
I'd have the chance to see a lot of Claire, but it didn't work out that way
until I got that job on Parrish."

Big Mama heaved herself up from the soft couch.
She brought the album back to the chest

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and dug around inside again, unearthing another
one. She sat back on the couch again. "Who'd have thought I'd have wanted
pictures of that time in my life? But your mother, she knows how to take care,
that woman. She sent them to me later. She said it'd help me remember how much I
was loved."

These I recognized. A younger me with Big Mama,
our cheeks together as if we were dancing. Big Mama sitting in our living-room
chair, one of Miss Poe's needlepoint pillows at her back and Nathan standing
next to her, wearing an apron that said kiss the chef . Big Mama and my mother
in their pajamas at the kitchen table, Nathan serving them a plate of muffins
with a flourish. Big Mama and Hugh Prince sitting in a pair of slatted wood
chairs out in the front yard, Hugh Prince with a pair of binoculars in his lap
from a bout of whale watching. The yard, I noticed, looked bare and wide. This
was before Nathan and Mom were married, before his sculptures hung from the
trees. And then there was a picture of all of us, standing in front of Asher
House. Big Mama had a suitcase at her feet. We had our arms around her. She held
a pillow that Miss Poe had made for her: he who laughs, lasts.

"Look at that," I said. I flipped through the
pages. "Nathan's got an apron on in every one of those pictures. Sometimes I
swear my mother treats him like a slave."

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"Oh, hogwash," Big Mama said. "And what's that
boy doing in there for you, huh?" She nodded her head toward the kitchen where
the clinking of dishes against one another sounded suddenly very loud. "You can
give love, you can give labor. Someone who gives both ..." She raised her
eyebrows to say,
Now
that
is something.
"Your mother gives both
too. I know it. She helped me through the hardest point in my life so
far."

"I'm very different from my mother," I
said.

"Oh, you are, are you? Do you realize how much
time you spend pointing out those differences? Too different is what people say
when they are too alike and it makes them uneasy."

"No." I laughed. "I've always been more like
Dad.
He
used to be the normal one."

"Normal?" she said. "Is that how you see
yourself?" She took my chin in her hands. "You are not
normal.
You are
not
conventional,
girl. You are
unique.
And a little scared to be
who you really are."

I laughed. Took my chin back.

"You'll see," she said.

That same night I woke up again. I couldn't go
back to sleep. I was thinking about my parents in the picture in Big Mama's
album. It made me miss them. I was thinking about the things Big Mama had said
about my mother and me. I went to the window and saw that the moon
was

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out, the stars too, which meant that the nice
weather would be returning for a little more attention.

I got back in bed again and put my face against
the soft sheets, but I was too awake. I tiptoed through the house, turned the
back doorknob slowly so that no one would hear. I sat in one of the lawn chairs
Big Mama had in the backyard, one of those aluminum ones with the squishy
cushions in alarming floral patterns. The kind that, after a rain, collect pools
of water in the gathered dips of each button, as I discovered when I sat. I
pulled the nightshirt Big Mama had given me over my knees and rested my head
against the chair, just looking up. The night smelled of wet earth, and the moon
gave the grass a white glow. There were no coyotes that night, but I could hear
the jingle of the tags of the cat next door again. I was getting used to the
night sounds at Big Mama's house. Even the refrigerator and the furnace when
they came on in the night.

His presence, walking along the grass in his
bare feet, startled me. He sat in the lawn chair beside mine, circled his arms
around legs that looked skinny in his jeans. He wore his jean jacket over the
plain white T-shirt I now knew he slept in. His jacket was faded and soft,
through wear, you could tell, and not bought that way. Earned
softness.

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He looked up at the sky, too, the way I did.
"In the woods, when I was lost? When I first heard the noise, I thought a
festival was going on," Jackson said. I knew this about Jackson by now, that he
often began speaking as if the time since we last spoke was only one long pause.
Jackson was someone you had to think with, be aware with. What he said might be
a question about what you wanted to eat or the description of the most important
experience of his life.

I said nothing. Just looked at the
stars.

"I was sure when I got to the source of the
sound there would be guys in plaid skirts and knee socks and little kids with
balloons and booths selling cheap T-shirts. Some Scottish thing. One of those
corny festivals."

"But it wasn't," I said.

"No," he said. "It wasn't."

"What then?"

"I was saved by some kind of spirit. I know it.
I don't care how crazy it sounds. It's the truth. And you know what the
newspaper said? This park ranger was quoted saying 'When people are lost and
without food they frequently see and hear things.' They called what happened a
hallucination. Said I was delirious. What a load of crap. I
heard
it."

"I believe you," I said.

"I knew you would. I could tell that right
away."

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I smiled. I hoped I could be all of the things
he seemed to see in me.

"After I saw that article, I went to the
library," Jackson said. "I thought, okay, maybe this
does
happen all the
time. I mean, I almost
died.
I had a couple of tortillas in my pack, some
cheese. After that, only water from streams, drunk from my hand. I could
actually feel myself getting weaker. Like I was fading."

His voice wobbled. He took a large gulp of
night air. "Oh, man," he breathed. "This is not stuff I talk about."

I didn't say anything. I had learned that too.
I just sat and looked at the stars some more and waited. I wondered if Big Mama
was right about all the stuff she said about God. I wondered if Grandpa Eugene
was looking down at us with his halo. Except that Grandpa wouldn't have a halo.
He'd refuse it. Maybe he'd compromise with some glowing baseball cap. There were
things in my life now, I realized, that even Grandpa Eugene couldn't fix if he
were alive.

I surprised myself. I leaned over the arm of my
chair and took Jackson's hand. It was cold from the night air. I put it near my
mouth and blew warm air on it. He smiled.

"You," he said.

And then, "I went to the library. I looked up
every hiking accident, every disappearance until the place closed down. There
was nothing. No

361

one else hearing music that led right to a
ranger station. I didn't know what to do with this, this information. This
absence
of information. I kept playing the situation over and over in my
head. Had I heard it? But I knew I had. I followed it once, even passed out from
exhaustion, and when I woke, it was there again."